the cruelty of want
When you find someone in the world that you grow attached to, you fundamentally open up a door to your heart to them with that attachment. The vulnerability is what makes it possible for the flowers to bloom from your chest. Simultaneously, it’s what allows for the heart to ache, and twist up like it’s being wrung dry. It’s an endless labor of trying to smell enough roses so they may warrant their own thorns.
A common thorn many face is reciprocity. Specifically, when we feel like we give to others what we can’t seem to receive. This wells up inside of us and wrenches the gut and makes us feel nothing but harsh feelings. You get a lot of internal dialogue going when you start focusing on reciprocity. You may ask yourself why your friend never texts you first, or initiates with you to spend time together. You may ask why your husband won’t go to the farmers market with you on Sundays - or why your sister never tells you that she loves you unless you say it first. There’s a lot you might question once the mind tunes itself into reciprocity. Things that you wish you never noticed, so you could go back to feeling obliviously peaceful. The seeds of resentment take root, not because of unfairness, but because you end up feeding those with less appetite for you, while you yourself starve. It was minuscule at first. Now though, ravenous in its hunger, it eats at you instead. It grows off of your woe, so much so, that it no longer will go back into the box it came out of. It’s simply here with you now - Your self destructive curse of awareness.
I was thinking about this pattern of thought, and about that internal dialogue that comes up. I think what we say in that moment is only half of the story - where, the other half, is possibly too harsh to confront. In that moment, the illusion of potential is often more comforting than the possible confirmation of its absence.
We certainly do say things like “I wish my friend would ask me to hang out” or “I wish my sister would tell me she loves me” or “I wish my husband would go to the farmers market with me”, but many times, we won’t share that sentiment with them.
Why is that? Why not just tell them?
I believe that it’s easily due to a fear we have - a fear that if we expose our needs and wants like this, that they will be answered for mechanically. We will receive the outcome of our statement of need, which will feel like a treatment of a symptom, and leave us feeling about the same way we started.
It likely feels like only symptom treatment because the statement of need itself is merely a symptom. We don’t want them to call, to come, to say - We want their want. We want them to want to call us, like we so badly want to call them. We want them to want to come with us, like we so badly want to go with them. We want them to want to tell us they love us, the way we want to tell them. We want them to want us like we see them want others. We want to feel sought after, reached for, picked up. Chosen.
Chosen like we choose. Nothing could pierce you more deeply than to be both, entirely available in earnest, yet left feeling unchosen.
When we choose, when we want, it draws from us. It takes our blood and our energy, but it’s intuitive and without much thought that we spend it because we are driven by the connection, by the want. So when we see the ways that someone is not driven by us, the way they are driven by others, it breaks our hearts. It makes us believe we are not wanted. We can observe their capacity at play, but then see that it’s not engaged for us. We see instead, a limited supply. A limited set of functions. Limited reflexes, inclusion, and reach.
When someone doesn’t really want to, trying will feel like enough draw that it has to go wherever it can fit into the rest of the day, if at all. It doesn’t come naturally - that priority lane energy, or the excitement-based drive just isn't available for this kind of trying. On the other hand, trying doesn’t feel quite as much like trying when someone does want to, or it may not feel like trying at all. In that case, anyone would be inclined to their want. Trying for the want is the path of least resistance, and we are all drawn to that in one way or another. Still, aiming to protect that illusion of potential, a storm of envious grief begins to swirl within you.
We may take that and try to compensate for it, attempting to draw out more of their energy, their blood, so that we can feel in control of keeping our hearts from being shattered by the truth. We may perform or appeal, we may spend more blood in hopes of moving them. We may mold ourselves, change ourselves, hide ourselves. At its worst, we may become entirely compromised in the pursuit of a fragment of their genuine want, sometimes even trying to talk ourselves into settling for the mechanical symptom treatment. This is the desperation setting in, and it’s largely all in vain.
Try as you may, you can’t make someone want to, and you can’t make someone want you.
Acceptance is only made less bitter by, and not by much, the tragic liberation it carries with it - A person isn’t evil for what they do or don’t want. It’s just one of those horrible ways where life blatantly denies us a satisfying conclusion. When it happens, there’s typically no hero, villain, or lesson learned. There’s not even some undiscovered conflict you could resolve that would grant you a solution.
When we dig all the way to the bottom, the only change we get is to be done digging, and the only souvenir we take home is a single immovable phrase, hiding behind all of the rest of the internal dialogue, waiting for us.
“I wish you wanted to.”