'Even If I End Up in Shatters'
Can desire still somehow be good for you even when, on paper, it’s obviously bad?
Last month there was that thing on The Dirt, widely derided but which everyone secretly loved, about whether or not you would rather desire or be desired. The responses, many from well-known writers and journalists, were split about evenly, the same result my own Instagram poll arrived at. Yes, in a way it’s a dumb exercise, because the obvious correct answer is that they are best together as that rare, precious thing called mutual desire, and that either can be absolute torture without the other. As many of the respondents pointed out, it’s a maddening question because desiring someone you cannot have can literally make you go insane, while being the innocent object of someone else’s craziness can be weird, uncomfortable, even miserable.
But I liked the way that puzzling over the question tends to make you second-guess your own initial position. For me it came down to: if you must choose one or the other, and either is possibly an intense type of suffering, which way would you rather suffer? Like several of the respondents, I chose to desire, even though it is probably the more painful of the two, because it is the experience over which I am the author and therefore have narrative control, meaning I get to decide what it means to me. The person I love cannot stop me from loving them and deriving meaning from it even if they cut me out of their life. And also because the very fact that desiring is a more wretched type of suffering means that it is potentially more elevating, more transformative, than being the passive recipient of someone else’s desire.
Which is, I think, the question that puzzles, that the following essays address: is the craziness worth it? Can it add up to more than destruction? Can desire still somehow be good for you even when, on paper, it’s obviously bad?
Megan Nolan, “He Didn’t Love Me, But He Changed My Life,” Vogue
One of the reasons I loved Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation so much was its razor-sharp focus on this genre of question. (I have been promising a post about it, but have decided to save it for my review of her new novel, Ordinary Human Failings, for which this post will serve as a kind of notepad.) Even though it is supposed to read as a cautionary tale about hanging too much on romantic love, it never for a moment denies why it is so tempting to do so.1 Romantic love is, according to the nameless narrator of Acts of Desperation, a “hope that cannot be manufactured alone,” a “promise to something outside yourself,” a “transformation that is the nearest to actual magic I have ever come.”
Transformation is my subject here, and also Nolan’s in this essay about a relatively brief non-relationship that took her five years to get over, in which she was “in love in a way I had never been before and will never be again.” She meets and falls for a man who is confident in his identity as an artist, in a moment where she feels lost and is making excuses for not taking herself seriously as writer. He doesn’t love her back, but he, and the experience of getting her heart broken by him, push her to actually become a writer, to be something more than she was. Now, years later, she realizes they wouldn’t be together even if he had loved her back, and no longer feels the animosity toward him she once did. “I feel some embarrassment for the extremity of my responses—but not too much. Who could regret a love like that?”
Even if Acts of Desperation depicts a clearly (in retrospect) doomed, tragic, and toxic instance of mad desire, Nolan, speaking in her own voice, hesitates to condemn such flights of insanity. As she said in a recent Nylon interview: “In the most basic way, sex and crushes are really generative. … Sex is completely inspiring, not just to write about it, but because it makes your whole being feel different. You feel connected to a new person, or to yourself, in a new way.”
If it generates, if it transforms, who could regret?
Becca Rothfeld, “All Good Sex is Body Horror,” The New Yorker
My friend Becca Rothfeld would, I think, be happy to be described as belonging to the Party of Being Extra; much of her work is a defense of productive types of madness, including being insatiably horny. This essay is an excerpt from her forthcoming book of essays, the wonderfully titled All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Like Nolan, Rothfeld sees desire, sex, and love as sources of transformation, but here goes a step further: what if transformation and self-destruction are one and the same? What if the craziness is not just an unfortunate byproduct of transformative desire, but an essential ingredient?
Rothfeld intersperses a reading of David Cronenberg’s films, in which grotesque physical decomposition is often presented, despite its horror, as a positive disruption of the ordinary, with an account of her own desire for her now-husband. She describes falling for him as a “sick surrender,” an experience of being “in the grip of a carnality that was strange and implacable,” one in which her body “was a hungry animal that kept making mad demands.” Through Cronenberg, she argues that true eroticism cannot exist without a measure of openness to the grotesque, to the inherent madness and debasedness of surrender to desire, to the possibility of being undone, shattered, and remade.
The headline here should have actually been “all amazing sex is body horror,” since Rothfeld admits that most even most good, pleasurable sex is not erotic in this sense. It is rather a “polite volley of pleasantries” that is “no more disheveling than a game of tennis.” However:
To have sex erotically—and ethically—is to have it with someone else, and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy. It is not erotic to impose a ready-made desire onto someone pliant, or to slot her into a fetish that has little to do with her. Eroticism occurs only when someone rewrites us so completely that she rewrites even the quality and content of our appetites, and only when this radical rewriting is reciprocal.
I would strike the final clause from that paragraph, because even if reciprocity heightens the intensity, this “radical rewriting” is clearly possible without it. In Rothfeld’s case, surrendering to desire seems clearly “worth it” because it got her a happy relationship. But what about when someone rewrites you but you don’t rewrite them? What about when it is not so clearly worth it, when the self-destruction feels more like just destruction, not like redemptive transformation?
I think both Nolan and Rothfeld would argue that desiring is still worth it: that the fact that we cannot be sure it will be worth it, that it will not destroy us, is part of what gives it its power to shake us out of our complacency, to sharpen our senses, to bring our dead little world to life. I’ll give Rothfeld the last word here with this beautiful passage:
In fact, we are not impermeable packages of preformed desires, importing our likes and dislikes around with us from one encounter to the next like papers in a briefcase.2 An erotic craving is inextricable from the ferment that foams up when oneself is sluiced into another. Not only is it impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be. We can have no more success when it comes to divining how we will change our partners than we can have when it comes to divining how they will change us—or, following Cummings, how their changes will change us, and how our changes will change them, iteratively and indefinitely. Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies. All we can say with certainty is that sometimes, when it is working, sex carves out new bodies for our bodies, and these bodies can be both better and more brutal than the ones we could invent alone.
Freddie deBoer, “Nobody Walks Around Feeling ‘Valid’”
The constantly-vaunted, supposedly “healthy” alternative to self-destruction through desire, especially unrequited desire, is to “love yourself.” It seems fair to cite Freddie as one of the few consistent critics of this contemporary therapeutic religion. You can find this recommendation absolutely everywhere, especially on TikTok, especially from self-appointed “scientists of relationships” who dispense dating advice that is always, without fail, premised on your total self-sufficiency, on your absolute lack of need for that romantic partner who is making you crazy. Everywhere the message is that your own love for yourself is all that really matters, that you are Kenough.
This has always struck me as obvious horseshit, principally because we are constituted by our social relationships; we have no existence without other people. To not be loved is, in a very significant sense, to not exist. As Nolan and Rothfeld have shown in different ways, the love and desire of and for other people gives you something that simply cannot be manufactured by yourself. If your life is so full and you love yourself so much that you don’t need a relationship, the widely presumed ideal state from which to enter a relationship, then sorry, but you’re not going to get as much out of a relationship as would a person who feels empty without one. The whole point of a relationship is the needing of it, the need to be changed by it, improved by it, to become someone you could not have been without it.
The thrust of the love-yourself ideology is toward a denial of your own weakness and need, that is to say, a denial of your humanity. As Freddie puts it:
I don’t mean to be a bummer here. But it’s important to point out that we’re born in terror, we exist for no reason, we experience confusion and shame as children, we busily prepare ourselves for lives we don’t want or can’t have, we are forced to take on the burdens of adult responsibility, we compromise relentlessly on what life we’ll pursue, we settle and settle and settle, we fear death and ponder our meaninglessness, we experience the horrors of aging, and when we die the only comfort we have is that we aren’t conscious to learn that there was never any heaven or God to give it all meaning. This is the inevitable reality of human life and it can never change. That condition has a way of spilling out into our quotidian day-to-day concerns of being desirable or important.
The legitimate truth the love-yourself ideology is probably trying to get at, in its vaguely sociopathic way, is something more like: though you cannot necessarily love yourself, you still have to live in the head and body you were born with, to bear a burden that no one else, no matter how much they love you, can bear for you. Somehow you have to make peace with that struggle, that lifelong battle, and its inescapable solitude and loneliness, which will persist in some measure even if you are fortunate enough to be remade by others, to be connected and loved.
But surely, to experience love and desire, even if one-sided, insane, and doomed, is one of the grand ways to live with yourself: to give yourself new material, the potential of catalytic collision, of regeneration and transformation. It is the opposite of “loving yourself” in a protective, self-preserving, or even self-respecting way. It is knowingly, deliberately subjecting yourself to possible humiliation and destruction. But possibility is a one of the things we need most: a reason to wake up in the morning, and the thing about possibilities is that you can never be sure which way they’ll go.
This dialectical tendency is part of what makes Nolan a great writer: how vividly she makes two opposite perspectives seem true at the same time.
This is a good explanation of why I hate the banalization of kink into a flat, lifeless set of sex-act hashtags, or a set of prefab porn roles that people simply want to act out in some rote, imitative way. The way it gives people the false notion that they should have a bulleted list of what they’re into and inculcates resistance to experiment and surprise. In a way, even as technology has made sex easier to get, it has also made it more conservative, more anxious, more prone to cling to tight, technologically-mediated parameters.