This and kaberett's post are my favorites from this week. I love the poems you chose, and how you talk about the different kinds of intimacies involved. I'm reminded of posts by sex educator Emily of The Dirty Normal about "wanting" vs "liking" here and here. According to Emily,
“Desire” as it seems to be understood popularly is nearly 100% WANTING. There is a thing out there that you don’t currently have, and it’s appealing and attractive, it draws your attention, it excites you… you desire it. That’s wanting. It’s smelling Local Burger as you walk down Main Street and spending the whole day fantasizing about it, and then you get there and bite into it and it’s AWESOME.
Boy skippy can it be enjoyable.
(What happens next, inevitably, is habituation tied to satiety, and it gets less awesome with every bite.)
But there are other things to enjoy, beyond the experience of wanting.
Imagine you’re a gloriously long-term couple, and it’s Friday night. The two of you have this thing you do every Friday night, where you cook a glorious dinner together – you drink the wine that was meant for the sauce, you end up feeding each other half the strawberries that were intended for dessert (if you’re honest with yourself, those berries were never destined to make it that far), you sit down to a meal you made together, for the thousandth Friday night in a row, and you look into your partner’s eyes, and what you see there makes your heart flip over.
That’s liking. Enjoying. No “desire.” Just pleasure.
(What happens next is that every bite is as glorious as the last, you go slowly… and yeah, you eat less.)
Which is better? Neither. It’s not about better. They’re DIFFERENT.
Our culture seems to emphasize and pedestalize desire, and I think maybe people who lean more in the direction of pleasure than desire have to make some choices, untangle some cultural knots, make some individual choices about how they want to experience and express sexuality. But they’re different ways to enjoy.
(Sorry, I just couldn't not post ALLL the smart blogging about wanting vs. liking.)
It seems to me that the kind of intimacy these poems talk about (and perhaps that you gravitate towards?) is a lot of pleasure/liking. Old, familiar knowing-of-each-other. I am having a hard time untangling my view point from these concepts, because me default is "of course intimacy = pleasure/liking, rather than desire/wanting! Desire/wanting is about something you don't have that draws your attention and attracts you! Whereas pleasure/liking is about appreciating the something you have that is familiar and good!" But maybe someone else can see/experience ways that desire/wanting can be intimate.
On the other hand, I disagree with your comment:
Years and age may remove sexual passion from the relationship, assuming it was there in the first place. What does that do to intimacy? I think you can guess my answer: nothing.
I am not sure if it is a "different strokes for different folks" thing, as ysabetwordsmith said upthread, or a matter of cultural expectations, or both...actually, that's not true, for me it is definitely both. When my partner and I haven't had sex for over about a week, there is a little voice in my head that says, "YOUR RELATIONSHIP IS GOING TO FALL APART. YOU ARE NOT BEING INTIMATE ENOUGH! YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH AT THIS!" And that is a combination of societal conditioning that Sex Is All-Important and my own anxiety disorder. But there are also times when we haven't had sex for a while that I just feel disconnected from my partner, and physical intimacy helps restore emotional intimacy. (And there are times when we haven't had sex for a while that I am aggravated on a purely physical, "But I want skin-to-skin contact!" level.)
So I think for some people the loss of desire/wanting and/or sexual intimacy over time is not a big deal, and for others it is, and that's okay. (Although, good lord, culture, stop it with the DESIRE IS EVERYTHING, because freaking out about not having enough sex according to "cultural standards" is good for no one's actual relationship.
If you're in a romantic relationship, I'd love to hear more "negatives that equal love" from people's experiences romantic intimacy, if they feel like sharing.
For my relationship, love exists in fighting without defaulting to thinking "we're breaking up." It exists in having more free time to spend with other people, because I know I'll come home to my partner at the end of the day. For us, it's not asking each other most of the time before making plans with other people, because we know we are committed to strengthening our non-romantic friendships. It's T. not having to drive unless I ask him to, because he hates driving and mostly I don't mind. It's me not having to cook.
Interestingly, though, this is reminding me that relationships are work, and that some of love is "I will let T. know when I've posted a large check, because we both tend to assume that the other isn't spending money out of our joint account and then we go into overdraft." Or "even though I don't ask before making plans, I do let T. know what those plans are in advance." There are a lot of scripts in our relationship for day-to-day things so that we no longer have to talk about them, but there are also a lot of things that need to be communicated, and I think that's romantic too, but unconventionally so. "We both will always ask 'May I kiss you?' instead of just leaning in or making a 'kiss me!' face" as a house rule doesn't sound romantic, but man, it makes me feel loved.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-06-26 12:33 am (UTC)“Desire” as it seems to be understood popularly is nearly 100% WANTING. There is a thing out there that you don’t currently have, and it’s appealing and attractive, it draws your attention, it excites you… you desire it. That’s wanting. It’s smelling Local Burger as you walk down Main Street and spending the whole day fantasizing about it, and then you get there and bite into it and it’s AWESOME.
Boy skippy can it be enjoyable.
(What happens next, inevitably, is habituation tied to satiety, and it gets less awesome with every bite.)
But there are other things to enjoy, beyond the experience of wanting.
Imagine you’re a gloriously long-term couple, and it’s Friday night. The two of you have this thing you do every Friday night, where you cook a glorious dinner together – you drink the wine that was meant for the sauce, you end up feeding each other half the strawberries that were intended for dessert (if you’re honest with yourself, those berries were never destined to make it that far), you sit down to a meal you made together, for the thousandth Friday night in a row, and you look into your partner’s eyes, and what you see there makes your heart flip over.
That’s liking. Enjoying. No “desire.” Just pleasure.
(What happens next is that every bite is as glorious as the last, you go slowly… and yeah, you eat less.)
Which is better? Neither. It’s not about better. They’re DIFFERENT.
Our culture seems to emphasize and pedestalize desire, and I think maybe people who lean more in the direction of pleasure than desire have to make some choices, untangle some cultural knots, make some individual choices about how they want to experience and express sexuality. But they’re different ways to enjoy.
(Sorry, I just couldn't not post ALLL the smart blogging about wanting vs. liking.)
It seems to me that the kind of intimacy these poems talk about (and perhaps that you gravitate towards?) is a lot of pleasure/liking. Old, familiar knowing-of-each-other. I am having a hard time untangling my view point from these concepts, because me default is "of course intimacy = pleasure/liking, rather than desire/wanting! Desire/wanting is about something you don't have that draws your attention and attracts you! Whereas pleasure/liking is about appreciating the something you have that is familiar and good!" But maybe someone else can see/experience ways that desire/wanting can be intimate.
On the other hand, I disagree with your comment:
Years and age may remove sexual passion from the relationship, assuming it was there in the first place. What does that do to intimacy? I think you can guess my answer: nothing.
I am not sure if it is a "different strokes for different folks" thing, as
So I think for some people the loss of desire/wanting and/or sexual intimacy over time is not a big deal, and for others it is, and that's okay. (Although, good lord, culture, stop it with the DESIRE IS EVERYTHING, because freaking out about not having enough sex according to "cultural standards" is good for no one's actual relationship.
If you're in a romantic relationship, I'd love to hear more "negatives that equal love" from people's experiences romantic intimacy, if they feel like sharing.
For my relationship, love exists in fighting without defaulting to thinking "we're breaking up." It exists in having more free time to spend with other people, because I know I'll come home to my partner at the end of the day. For us, it's not asking each other most of the time before making plans with other people, because we know we are committed to strengthening our non-romantic friendships. It's T. not having to drive unless I ask him to, because he hates driving and mostly I don't mind. It's me not having to cook.
Interestingly, though, this is reminding me that relationships are work, and that some of love is "I will let T. know when I've posted a large check, because we both tend to assume that the other isn't spending money out of our joint account and then we go into overdraft." Or "even though I don't ask before making plans, I do let T. know what those plans are in advance." There are a lot of scripts in our relationship for day-to-day things so that we no longer have to talk about them, but there are also a lot of things that need to be communicated, and I think that's romantic too, but unconventionally so. "We both will always ask 'May I kiss you?' instead of just leaning in or making a 'kiss me!' face" as a house rule doesn't sound romantic, but man, it makes me feel loved.