2023/ 09/ 16
post-New Moon in Virgo
the fact is: you will be more and less than what your lover desires. you will surprise them with joys and confusions they never anticipated in this life. you will startle them with your ordinariness. you will be more and less than their most fantastical, surreal desires. you will not embody their ideals because your full, fluid, lurid, perverse, wondrous, unutterable self evades fetishization and reductive idealisms — even when you aspire to be reduced.
besides, you can only name the desires you know and have words for. you can only claim desires you think you deserve. our lists of ideals are limited gauges of the lives we could have with other people. by meeting each other as we are, we expand what we each know and dare to desire.
and like all lovers, your lover and you can face and accept that a relationship fluctuates, waxing and waning in passion, channeling conflicting emotional currents that come, go, change.1 you can move together through passion, and mundanity, and boredom, and play. you can accept each other as a reflection of what life is — repetition with variation. you can learn to share a life between the two of you (a third space between your independent lives), not just ride its peaks and dips.
one can get addicted to emotion and dramatic tension. love is sustained by cultivating a taste for that middling space, where the relationship just is — there is little that must be done, and nothing of note happens. joy is small, simple, and plain there, resting in basic truths: you are alive, you are loved, breathing is a pleasure, not being in pain is a pleasure, you are here reading this, you can read, you can love.
life is. things are more and less than what you want. living is a slow dance through those desires and hopes towards acceptance. that life is good enough. you should aspire, and yet you should not become trapped by your aspirations. your life, more or less than what you think it has to be, is what it is. it is easy, it is hard, it will always change.
⊹₊。ꕤ˚₊⊹
— buy tickets for my poetry reading on 22 sep
— read two recent poems published in QLRS
— read another piece I wrote on desire:
“Ambivalence exists in every relational configuration, but we put a lot of pressure on romantic love, in particular, to rise above it. We are taught that love is unconditional, passion is absolute, and that finding “the one” should clear us of all doubt. But relationships are never black and white. We learn that romantic love is supposed to flood us with certainty and thus there is no room for ambivalence. But ambivalence is as intrinsic to relationships as love itself.” — Esther Perel [link]