Want to be Enjoyed

More than you enjoy being wanted.

Undertaking a fool’s errand: to try to explain to you a concept from a book that “does everything it can to exclude everyone:” Edward Teach/The Last Psychiatrist’s (hereafter: TLP) Sadly, Porn (hereafter: SP). There is a strong chance that the concept I want to explain is not in SP at all & arises from my own misunderstanding, which means that this substack post has a better-than-my-usual chance of being original.¹

A major obstacle to this task is that you probably haven’t read SP.² To overcome this obstacle, I will start by quoting a passage about The Faerie Queene, a book it’s even less likely you’ve read, from The Allegory of Love,³ which I think even fewer people have read than that:

We here approach a subject on which Spenser has been much misunderstood. He is full of pictures of virtuous and vicious love, and they are, in fact, exquisitely contrasted. Most readers seem to approach him with the vulgar expectation that his distinction between them is going to be a quantitative one; that the vicious loves are going to be warmly painted and the virtuous tepidly—the sacred draped and the profane nude. It must be stated at once that in so far as Spenser’s distinction is quantitative at all, the quantities are the other way round. […] For him, intensity of passion purifies […]

The good Venus is a picture of fruition: the bad Venus is a picture not of ‘lust in action’ but of lust suspended—lust turning into what would now be called skeptophilia. […] [Cymochles] has come [to the Bower of Bliss] for pleasure and he is surrounded by a flock of wanton nymphs. But the wretched creature does not approach one of them: instead, he lies in the grass (‘like an Adder lurking in the weedes’) and

Sometimes he falsely faines himselfe to sleepe
Whiles through their lids his wanton eies do peepe.[739]

The word ‘peepe’ is the danger signal, and once again we know where we are […] And when we have noticed this it ought to dawn upon us that the Bower of Bliss is not a place even of healthy animalism, or indeed of activity of any kind. Acrasia herself does nothing: she is merely ‘discovered’, posed on a sofa beside a sleeping young man, in suitably semi-transparent raiment. It is hardly necessary to add that her breast is ‘bare to ready spoyle of hungry eies’,^[741] for eyes, greedy eyes (‘which n’ote therewith be fild’) are the tyrants of that whole region. The Bower of Bliss is not a picture of lawless, that is, unwedded, love as opposed to lawful love. It is a picture, one of the most powerful ever painted, of the whole sexual nature in disease. There is not a kiss or an embrace in the island: only male prurience and female provocation.

Emphasis mine.

It’s tempting to read this as Spenser being a heterodox thinker who didn’t care about Christian sexual morality. Actually, Spenser was a heterodox thinker—the opposite way. The normal belief had been that marriage and love were incompatible, that (& Lewis paraphrasing Andreas Capellanus here sounds straight out of SP paraphrasing contemporary neurosis, there is nothing new under the sun) “[c]onjugal affection cannot be ‘love’ because there is in it an element of duty or necessity.” Spenser was a contrarian in that he believed in chastity⁴. And he was writing an allegory, which means that his virtues and vices were characters taking action, so let’s see what chastity does:

• Britomart(=chastity) looks into a magic mirror & (the opposite of Narcissus) instead of seeing her own face, sees another person. Then, like Narcissus, she becomes lovesick.

• Her nanny, unable to cure her, says, well, Merlin is wise and powerful, let’s ask him for help. As soon as they reach this wise man, the first thing the nanny does is lie to him. “We have no idea why she’s so sick.” Merlin sees through this instantly and prophesies Britomart’s future with the knight she’s seen in the mirror, Arthegall: their marriage, his early death when she is too pregnant to fight by his side, and the generations of their offspring to come. On the strength of this single session, Britomart becomes able to act,⁵ cementing my image of Merlin as a very good analyst.

• Britomart suits up in armor, and goes forth to find her knight, by fighting every knight she meets, looking for the one who can defeat her. “Clear desire, clear goal, clear actions, even if they are insane.”

The thing I notice here is that chastity is not waiting to be wanted. She has her helmet on, which does two things: lessens the desire that others have for her,⁶ and allows her to fight (act). It’s not that she doesn’t want him to want her, or wants him not to want her. But, for her, his desire is the means; he is the end. This is the opposite of the central neurosis we’re warned about in SP, where being wanted is the end, and other people are a means to get it.

Below is, I think, TLP’s central statement of the problem that he wrote SP to help with:

[S]ince the only thing you can enjoy is the deprivation of others, therefore none of your experiences are sufficiently satisfying.

I don’t quote this expecting that the quote alone will be enough to convince you of its truth, much less change anything. After all, I plucked it from a very long and complicated book, and I assume TLP wouldn’t have made it long or complicated if he didn’t think that was necessary.

What I do think is worth saying is that before want meant desire, it meant lack.

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This next bit is kind of weird to write, because, more so than usual, I really don’t want you to read what I’m saying with the idea that I have any authority to say it. The only thing that makes me feel kind of okay about writing all this stuff is that this is pseudonymous, which is to say, I am doing my best not to make it look like I have more authoritas than I actually have. Like: here are some words, take them or leave them, but don’t be under the impression I’m saying you should trust me.⁷

It is very difficult to maintain a romantic relationship if you enjoy being wanted more than you want to be enjoyed. This is not a problem with monogamy; it’s a problem with commitment, or even just a problem with any consummation or real reciprocal contact. If you want to be wanted, to some degree it is true that your actual partner(s) cannot give that to you, because they have you.

There are several possible copes for reconciling “wanting to be wanted” with “maintaining a relationship”:

1. Be a bad partner, in an addictive way. So your partner is never satisfied with you and keeps wanting you. The problem with this is that then you live in a hell of your own making. I put this one first because it’s the simplest.

2. Maintain awareness of how little it’s possible to fully know another person, how impossible it is for love to actually be satisfied. People usually use this as a justification for avoiding love/commitment but I think it’s vastly underrated as a cope for maintaining love/commitment: impossible to get bored with the pursuit if you can never fully reach someone, all the stability of commitment with all the keen desire of the continuing hunt. I shouldn’t be here to shill copes, but this one is currently priced at below market value.

So those are the copes that only require two players. Below are the copes that incorporate the outside attention/desire more directly instead of ignoring it.

3. Tell yourself that other people want you less than it seems like they do. “It seems” is kind of passive, let’s introduce some agency: less than you think they do, less than they are making it seem they do. This has the advantage of being directionally true. “I really want you” is like an all-timer classic lie men tell women, and “He really wants me” is an all-timer classic lie women tell themselves. However, sometimes people want you as much as it seems like they do, or more, and then your model of the world is wrong & also, this cope unravels. Hope you have a backup cope.

4. Actively enjoy the fact that people want you and cannot have you. Also not good for your actual relationships because it turns your partner into a tool for modulating your relationships with others.

5. Tell yourself that what people want you for doesn’t count for some reason.⁸ But again this doesn’t work forever. Eventually someone wants you for something that you can’t help being validated by being wanted for, and then you have to either lie to yourself about it (and lying to yourself will make you act not in accordance with the world, you’ll be wrong about your predictions of what will happen) or you will have to accept that finally someone wants you for something validating, and this particular defense fails. Again: hope you have a backup cope.

So, none of these copes really work, and they’re all complicated, but they are easy to do. Wanting to be enjoyed is very simple—you figure out what the other person likes, you do what you can & are willing to—and much harder, SP is a whole book about why, the copes largely require you to think about yourself but this requires you to do something for someone. You can be wanted just posing on a sofa, but to satisfy, you have to take some kind of action.

1. Although I think being original is overrated (itself not an original thought).

2. You are more likely to have read Scott Alexander’s review of it.

3. I’ll defend my use of a secondary source here: it didn’t make me think I didn’t have to read The Faerie Queene, it made me itch to read it, & then in fact read it, thank you, Lewis; & thank you, also, TLP, it was because of your book that I read The Bostonians, a fair bit of Freud, Lacan’s first seminar, Thucydides, at least.

4. which is to say, not celibacy but virtue

5. (Youth pastor voice) “Who else heard a prophecy that her son would cause her husband’s death? That’s right: Jocasta!” It’s always true that every marriage starts with a prophecy of death, and it’s always true that children replace their parents. Jocasta and Laius couldn’t stop either of those things, although they killed in the attempt. Britomart is a fascinating alternative, not passively accepting the prophecy but going for the prophecy full speed ahead, very Nietzschean, amor fati.

6. I want to be clear that for Britomart, hiding her face functions this way. It doesn’t work this way necessarily. One could certainly imagine someone hiding their face to enjoy depriving the other.

7. And if you do trust me—if you think you know something more about me than the words I have posted, & you don’t have a very good reason for thinking so—I’ve done enough to try to stop you that I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong with you that nothing I do could possibly help with, so I’m willing to call it your fault & write this for anyone else interested.

8. From SP:

The point isn't to make her think only he likes her, but to make her think there are only certain things she should be liked for.  Everything else doesn’t count.  […]  “He said I had pretty hair.” --He meant your breasts.  Breasts are not a threat because he knows she knows they're hers, they're not her.  For her they don’t count.  Her hair could be a threat, it is more her, it is something she might like being wanted for.  “Unfortunately it wasn’t my hair, he just saw a blonde in a bikini...”  But she’s been trained well.