For as long as I can remember, I have yearned for a partner. Even when I was too young to understand sex or romance, I pursued boys. With a relentless, aching need. I’m sure some of them could sense it radiating out of me. As a child, when a brand new boy would turn up in whatever context – playing with my siblings and I on holiday, or transferring into my class from another school – my whole being would suddenly snap into focus, laser-targeted on whether or not this one might be a possibility. As a teenager, I was obsessed with the idea of having a boyfriend, and although there was one boy I was wildly in love with, I knew deep in my heart that any boy would do. I just wanted to be loved. When I finally did secure a boyfriend – even though he was entirely unsuited to me – there was a powerful feeling of relief and accomplishment. I’ve done it! I’ve got one! I am wanted! Go me! I yearn for a partner, I always have done. I just really really want to be loved.
It feels weird and shameful to state this so bluntly. For the last couple of decades I think I’ve tried to suppress or hide this desire. Sometimes that’s easy, because I’m happily coupled-up, so the hankering for romantic love in the abstract can be neatly masked behind the specific love I feel for this person. I want to be loved, but when I am loved that craving is fulfilled, so I can wave away the broader desire or pretend to myself it isn’t really that strong.
When I am single, though, I have to face it.
Romantic love can be a powerful good
It’s easy to be cynical about love, I think. People are flawed, so falling in love with a person is pretty much a guarantee that they’ll disappoint you. But although on my dark days I sometimes want to throw out any belief that I’ll ever find healthy romance, I always end up drifting back to hope.
I know romantic love can be toxic and unhealthy, but I think it has the capacity to be incredible. There is something truly beautiful about teamwork and partnership. Finding someone who is your biggest fan, who supports you through difficult times and basks in your joy. Someone who you can support in turn, whose wins become your wins too. There are practical benefits, of course, like being able to split the cost of bills or the tedium of household chores if you’re living together. Ease the boredom on a cold winter’s night with some playful fucking or lazy mutual handjobs while watching porn. Sex with someone who knows your body and desires and depraved fantasies is beyond exquisite. Moreover hugs, conversation, running jokes… all that good stuff is enhanced by love, which grows stronger and richer in a longer relationship.
I think so, at any rate: your mileage may vary.
Love also takes work. It isn’t something that just magically drops into your lap, like a shining trophy. Personally I think the best love is built over time, by people who recognise each other’s brilliance and want to collaborate on creating something that gives space for both of them to flourish – as individuals and as a cooperative team. I do not see this work as a ‘down side’ to love. On the contrary, I think that working for something – having complex conversations and making compromises and listening and respecting boundaries – makes the end result even more beautiful. It’s not easy, obviously, but nothing in life is easy if you want to do it well. And when you love someone, doing the work is part and parcel of the fun. Each obstacle, each moment of tension, is an opportunity to learn more about your person. It’s a chance to introspect and find understanding inside yourself, acknowledge your own faults, or ask questions and explore together to find out why this particular thing is a challenge.
Then there’s the chance for make-up sex and reconnection, of course, hopefully a slightly deeper reconnection each time, as every problem throws up new knowledge about how each of you moves through the world.
What I want
I want to love. I find the act of loving someone genuinely enjoyable. It’s up there as one of my favourite things. I like spending time with somebody in bed, whispering to each other about what we want and who we are. I like idly daydreaming about what we might do together next – whether that’s our next date or a weekend break in the summer, or in ten year’s time when we own a ramshackle house that we’re haphazardly improving as and when we can scrape together the cash for MDF or carpets. I enjoy hearing what brings someone else pleasure, and being the person they turn to if they want to share that pleasure, as well as being there for support and love and reassurance when their pleasure runs low. As this blog will attest, I am obsessive about the people I love: I like to spend time cataloguing and detailing all the little things about them that make my heart sing.
I want to be loved too. I want to find someone on whom I can pour out all the joyful, loved-up energy that I have been blessed/cursed with, and I’d like them to respond with their own brand of love. I don’t expect anyone to express love in exactly the same way that I do, or even to the same extent. I appreciate that I am … for want of a better way to phrase this … a lot. But I would love to find someone who doesn’t think that ‘a lot’ is ‘too much’ – who loves how much I am, and sees that as incredible value for money. Someone who expresses delight that they get to be the lucky person about whom I write all these horny little blog posts. Be the grateful recipient of my endless well of curious questions and infinite supply of blow jobs and plans. Somebody who doesn’t see my successes as things to be envious of but things to bask in and lift up. I’d love a partner who valued honesty and openness as much as I do, and put in active work to make sure that they were presenting their truest self to me, with kindness and care for my feelings and needs.
In my head, the draft of this post included lots more little vignettes about what love looks like to me. Doing little favours for each other, like one of you going to the shop for Lemsip when the other is ill. Coming up with silly projects, like listening to the entire discography of a favourite band in one single evening – over wine and chat and fucking. Someone who’ll plan silly dates, or join me in quests like that time I took 25 different kinds of London transport in a day. More serious things too, like having someone to take with me to family events – weddings, parties, funerals – who’d make the effort to befriend my incredible siblings and impress my niblings as much as I try to. Someone who’d be up for me messaging occasionally with a link to a new sponsor website and asking whether they’d prefer to test out kink equipment, butt plugs, or something a little left field.
But as soon as I start writing this list of things I want to do with a partner, I realise that the list itself is meaningless. A few examples can give you a flavour of what I want from love, but you can never get a full picture because half the lines and colours are missing. I’d love to find someone who brings their own fun and creativity – who has plans and ideas that are bubbling away, just waiting to be shared with me. The unpredictability of love is part of the fun of it – the new things somebody brings to your life, the treasures they share with you that you’d never have been able to access on your own. These treasures might be as simple as silly in-jokes and fun kinks, or as involved as brand new hobbies that you can embark upon together.
If I had to sum up what the list is about though, it’s joy. Playfulness and joy. To love and be loved in the way I yearn for means finding someone who tackles life in a similar way to me. Who sees a partner as someone you can first and foremost play with. Underlying that, of course, are a lot of basic things: respect, trust, honesty, kindness, patience. But I’d ask for those from anyone. A romantic partner has to bring all of this, plus playful joy.
It’s OK to want to be loved
As I said at the start, for much of my life I think I’ve suppressed this desire, or at least tried to downplay it. The details of what I want haven’t changed much, but the ability to state this desire plainly and without shame is still something I’m working on. I have always been a bit dismissive of the idea that I might ‘need’ a partner (because I don’t), but in being so vociferous about that, I haven’t really let myself get comfortable with the fact that I want one.
I had some conversations with a therapist last year that helped clarify this for me. When I spoke with scorn about the idea of ‘needing’ a partner, he asked me why I was so scathing, nudging me to answer a question I’d not ever really interrogated:
“What’s wrong with wanting a partner?”
And … hmm … at the time I think my answer was ‘everything’. I felt like admitting that I desire romantic love was akin to admitting to weakness. As if by saying ‘I want to be loved’ I am saying ‘I’m not a full or valid person if I don’t have this’. That if I am not loved in this way, I will never achieve my full potential or consider myself a success. Tantamount to saying that I don’t think the life I have built for myself is good enough. That I am not good enough.
But I am.
Fundamentally, I am loved. I am lucky enough to be very very loved, and I’m incredibly grateful – every day – for the love that my friends and family show me. But I do still yearn for this extra thing. It’s something I’ve been seeking all my life. Something I have dedicated a significant portion of my life to chasing. I have worked hard to examine and interrogate and improve so many different aspects of myself in order to make me worthy of the kind of love I want. I’ve turned down opportunities to have children, or a lucrative career, or go traveling the world… because I’d rather go on an adventure with one other person. Investing time and effort and work and energy and playfulness into a relationship where we can build intimacy, sex and love without a whole bunch of external pressures.
I have arranged my life around my desire to be loved.
Admitting that – even to my therapist – made me feel disgusted. Like I’d failed.
It’s not failure to acknowledge a desire, though. Admitting that I want to be loved doesn’t mean I have failed. Nor is it failure to accept that I have some desires which – for whatever reason – might never be fulfilled.
The conversation I had with him didn’t sink in at the time, but I’ve thought on it a lot since and I realise now that wanting romantic love doesn’t make me weak or stupid, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to yearn for. The weird thing was just how much I despised myself for nurturing this desire, and how much self-hatred I was internalising as I tried to batter it out. Perhaps if I can articulate the desire a little better – avoid shaming myself for it or dismissing it as fantasy – then I’ll be able to pursue fulfilment in a way that doesn’t lead me into the arms of so many men who say they love me with words but do not treat me with love in practice. And even if I don’t end up meeting someone, maybe acknowledging this desire will help me make peace with who I am, rather than constantly berating myself for yearning after something that hasn’t yet turned up.
Lots of us want things we’ll never get, after all. It’s possible (and maybe even likely) that the kind of love I long for is not something I’ll find. Because although I am now comfortable with acknowledging that desire, I am no longer the teenage girl who was so desperate for a boyfriend she felt like any boy would do.
I want to be loved. I want it very much. And I hope you’ll see the massive ‘but’ that’s looming…
I do not want to be loved at any cost.
Part 2 next week.