Reciprocal Desire

There's a way that a certain type of desire in women can set relationships up to fail.

The desire is reciprocal desire. It's the desire that I feel for someone because they desire me.

For women, this is particularly complicated by ancestral patterns and precedents for placing men's needs and desires ahead of their own. We might wonder whether some reciprocal desire isn't even true desire, but an embodiment of people-pleasing, abandoning her own body so it can function as an object to please another.

I muse on this today because my own desire has undergone such a transformation, such revelations, as I've refined my relational practices so that I am relentlessly safe and nourished.

I had to find a deeper and truer form of my own desire, I had to find her very engine, not in response to another, but what she wanted for herself.

That ancestral grief of pleasing men, it was in play for me when I was going to relationships in order to get safe. I didn't feel safe in my life, in my body, in my sovereignty, in my independence.

The only way my mothers and grandmothers knew, their template of access to the material world, was via men. Encoded in these templates is transacting sex for safety, babies for security, independence for some a twisted form of empowerment.

This model invites women to compromise on "small" threats to avoid "large" threats, and gave us patterns of tolerance, of bearing incompatibility or absence from men, of workshopping, trying to get him to change.

Of stoking our desire for him, of making our bodies the problem, of bypassing the glaring truth in our lack of interest in him.

It all comes back to resources being funneled through one type of person, one type of relationship.

There are butterflies that still migrate hundreds of miles out of their way to avoid a mountain which is no longer there.

Ancestral patterns run deep, and if we don't know they're in play, we never unpack these "desires." What makes me feel so thrilled by a man who shows interest in me? What makes me think I am to be selected, rather than selecting? Do I dim my own evaluation of him in the shine of the pride I feel in his desire for me?

What am I "trying" for, when I am "trying" to get partnership or "trying" to make partnership work? Is my model for partnership the thing that will serve me best in having what I REALLY want?

Since the sea-change in my desire, I do not make any attempt to give a man a chance or generate desire for him. I also don't rush toward a man simply because I feel desire for him.

I let my desire ripen to craving, and I release any desires which do not ripen to craving. I give no attention at all to what I don't desire. I give no attention to lack, either. What is my attention for in this moment? What experience would I most like to have? What would I have if I had that? What would that give me? Asking and asking and asking until I find the truth of my desire.

I speak to my desire until she talks back, and then I do what she says.

I built my life around my own empowerment, and I know what my attention is for. I'm not going to trade a man for anything, not going to coach him into right relationship with me, not going to coach myself into being interested in him because he fits some idea in my head.

I am already living into what I wanted from partnership with my closest friends. I let my commitment to how I wanted to live defy every template I was given for who to share a home with and how. There is no place for me to get to.

There's nothing that partnership could give me that I do not already HAVE every day of this life. There's nothing that partnership would do for my life except make it more glittering, intricate, exquisite, enjoyable, and sexy.