When it comes to the general luster of life, there is little that is more important than accurately reading our desire. Whenever there is a good match between our desire and the things - people, objects, and activities - we reach for, we feel more connected to the authenticity of our being. Yet desire is one of the most misunderstood elements of human life. Many people seem to operate under the assumption that our desire is something akin to the reproductive instinct of animals, so that we desire other people because we want to mate with them in order to produce children. Many relationship guides and self-help authors perpetuate this view, trying to convince us that the key to successful partnering resides in our biological constitution.
There may be a kernel of truth to this in those cases where people are actually trying to produce babies. But it's also an overly-simplistic way of looking at desire - one that completely misses what is most fascinating about it, namely that it is at once 1) incredibly malleable in the sense that it can be aimed at a variety of different things, and 2) incredibly specific in the sense that, among the things of the world, there are few that actually satisfy it. Our desire is not just aimed at other people, but also at a large number of object and activities so that we, unlike animals, come to hoard books, dishes, stamps, lamps, laptops, coffee breaks, walks on the beach, family dinners, summer vacations, and - just to emphasize how far our desire is from animal reproductive instinct - snowflake-filled glass globes featuring miniature ornaments (mermaids, Manhattan skylines, Eiffel towers, etc.). And when our desire is aimed at other people, it's simply not the case that we're willing to sleep with just anyone.
Some of us are less selective than others, but what is really striking about human desire is how discriminating it tends to be. We may like quite a few of the people we meet during our lives. But usually there are not that many we desire with any degree of urgency. Sometimes we can go for weeks, months, or ever years without meeting anyone who stirs our desire. Only those people who resonate on the right frequency manage to engage us, which is why no two people's desires are exactly alike. This specificity is the cause of a lot of human suffering because when we lack appropriate objects of desire, we can feel forlorn. Alternatively, it often happens that the person we fixate on doesn't return our desire so that we feel disappointed or rejected. And when we lose a person - through death or abandonment, for instance - who was a good match for our desire, our mourning can seem endless.
The specificity of our desire means that can be very difficult for us to shift our desire to a new person after a romantic loss. It can take us a long time to even begin to fathom the possibility of finding a suitable substitute for the lover we have lost, which is why during times of deep mourning our desire often seems dead or dormant. This is also why people are not nearly as replaceable as many light-hearted relationship guides seem to assume. It's simply not always the case that when one person rejects us, there are a dozen others to take his or her place. The specificity of our desire prevents this, which is one reason I believe that it's a huge mistake to approach romance as a "game." People are not pawns in a game. They possess the kind of integrity that exceeds all attempts to reduced them to generalized categories, such as "man" and "woman." A man is never just a man, and a woman is never just a woman. Our desire understands this, which is why it's only intrigued by SOME men or SOME women. The more we respect this, the less likely we are to lose the luster of our lives.
