Fear of Desire
As much as we live in a world where men are known for going after what they want, and having things their way, one thing that’s clear to me is how confusing desire still is to them. I’ve seen it up close with my clients. One, accustomed to handling multi-million dollar business deals, struggles with expressing his desire for an open relationship with his partner. Another, expressly confident to all those who know him, tentatively asks how to handle his lover’s desire. These are worldly, mature, privileged men in all regards. And the truth is that desire brings them to their knees.
You wouldn’t guess it from the outside. I mean, they hold it together well. They seem to get everything they “want” - admiration, money, status, relationship. They would be the last ones to reveal their distress publicly. But I’m in a fortunate position to see beyond the surface.
When I witness these men come face to face with the potency of desire, I see how it melts them. I believe each of these men can feel how desire could undo them. If not their own desire, then that of the women in their lives. Of course, undo in the most beautifully, soul revealing way. Undo all the surface fixings, until true vulnerability is revealed.
Desire has charge. It’s like a live electric wire. In this way you could almost say that it’s repellant. Not many people want to go near a hurricane. We like watching lightning storms… from a distance. No wonder we so often recoil from desire. To open to it in its raw form, to touch it directly, takes uncommon capacity.
If you’re a man living in a masculine world, performance is key. You want to know you can deliver. The pressure is intense. A student once told me that 3 years ago he had one encounter with a lover where he couldn’t get hard. And these years later he was still regulating his diet, exercise and sleep to ensure it never happened again. Another described how he needs to take breaks after intense nights with his partner. “She’s a lot to have”, was his first statement. But with some investigation we discovered that he was quickly trying to reassert his familiar inner homeostasis after being shaken by the power of their sex. What it stirred in him was disorienting. Stability seemed preferable. Like I said in my last post, men really do want to make women happy. And if it looks like they may not be able to deliver on desire, or they fear they’re going to lose the familiar ground from which they know they can perform, it’s going to be the most terrifying thing to go there. Terrifying enough to avoid, divert, deny or block out altogether.
So for these men, and really all of us who balk at the destabilizing power of desire, my answer is to become intimate with its electric force. To build the capacity to consciously touch something with such tremendous charge. (The fortunate by-product being that as they do that they may just become ready to touch the real force of a woman’s sexuality - the one hidden beneath layers of performance and pleasing).
There are at least three steps to getting intimate with desire - yours or another’s - in this way. And because I’m (unsuccessfully) trying to make these posts shorter, here they are in shorthand.
The first is to simply listen. To be willing to hear the whisper of desire. To give up obscuring, denying or negotiating, and instead to simply listen without agenda. What does desire want to say? What non rational, impractical, or forbidden desires are in there? Feel the pulse of them.
The second is to express. Not to ask, as there is a difference between desire and request. But to simply speak that voice of desire out into the world - to a lover or a stranger or guide or friend. Not all desires are ready to be spoken, but be willing to put words to the ones that are, giving them room to breathe and be seen without the armor of a strategic plan, the pressure of immediate translation into action.
The third, which will likely be for only a few of those original whispers, is to make the request. To ask for your desire. To stand in the groundless vulnerability of risking a yes or a no, and open the door for the desire to move from idea to reality, taking its place in the greater order of things.