I’m going to risk starting another thread because I really do want my previous ‘Anguish’ thread to fade into the crowded annals of amorous oblivion. A lot of my previous “problems” (and, if I’m not wrong, a lot of other Forumosans’s problems) may be more understandable (n the abstract anyway) when we try to distinguish between someone who wishes to Excite (and be excited by) Desire; and on the other hand, someone who wishes to Master their own and/or the Other’s (the partner’s) Desire (i.e. Someone who wishes, in Tash’s immortal words, to have “the upper hand at all times”.)
Briefly, if I find myself attracted to some girl then she has (willfully, playfully, unconsciously, or just for no reason at all through the miracle of Love) excited my Desire. What I then want to do is to excite her Desire. If I succeed then we have two excited desires exciting each other. When that happens we have the possibility of passionate love: everything is ‘up in the air’, we become hyper-attentive to each other and to ourselves, all our senses are on alert, all out thinking revolves around something unpredictable….and so on, and so on. The two Desires CAN drive each other into the outer limits of passion and Love. That’s what we want (even if ambivalently). We want the feeling that ‘this could be something’… The problem is that the unpredictability creates anxiety: What if I really succeed in exciting her/his desire? What then? What if I cannot satisfy his/her Desire? What will happen when she/he finds out that I am, at bottom, lazy and stupid? The temptation for Mastery then becomes an option…
If one partner is only interested in Mastering the Desire of the Other (or even his own or her own Desire) then, I really believe, we have potentially grave problems which I have been reading about nearly ad infinitum here in this ‘Dating and Relationships’ forum. If all one wants is to Master a woman’s/man’s Desire, then one does not care about one’s own Desire or even one’s own pleasure. Those things are incidental. One simply wants the Other (her/him) in one’s power. One wishes to be (in an almost quasi-religious way) adored. The Master then keeps the Other’s excitement alive in the extreme—caring not at all about the Other’s pleasure or pain (except insofar as these may further the process of Mastery). In this case we are dealing with someone who, basically, cannot tolerate Desire precisely because it is (ultimately) the outside of power and Mastery, because it is essentially unpredictable. Many, many people—for all kinds of reasons (and this has nothing necessarily to do with ethics)—fear Desire (their own, and Other’s). Those people are sad, difficult, enticing, challenging, possibly tragic—but, ultimately (and I hate to say it) not at all LOVEABLE. They may excite every other emotion but they are immune to Love.
This may be a question we can all at times ask ourselves when something seems just fundamentally WRONG with a current relationship. In real life, the two may get complicated, mixed up, overlap, whatever. But even if that’s true they are still two distinct ways of being in a relationship and can be sorted out to some extent.
Now, should you decide that she/he is really trying to Master your desire and so ‘two can play at that game’, consider the end results: Either you lose and become a slave and ultimately dispensable; or you win and she/he becomes your slave and is ultimately dispensable. Either way—no Love.
