I Don’t Just Want to Be Loved

I want… many things.

I want to be devoured by your gaze. For your desire for me to be so overwhelming it stops you on your way to work.

I want to be touched in ways that penetrate into my bones and deep enough it grazes my soul. I want to feel the shivers from your touch travel from my limbs to my spine, the nerves behind my neck constricting. I want to hear the deep, slow, pleasure sound of your breath near my ear as you gently kiss the delicate spot where my perfume lies.

I want to be the only one on your mind. In your heart, in your thoughts. A possessiveness so complete that anything daring to come close gets frightened away by the sheer intensity of us.

And I want to be the only one you love.

I've come to understand something I never thought about before, but now can't unsee: love without desire leaves the glass half empty. And desire without love leaves you just as hollow.

A relationship with only one of them cannot feel complete. I know this now. I know it in my body.

I told myself I could settle for just being loved. Being taken care of. Feeling safe, secure, protected by the person I love. And I convinced myself, for a while, that this was enough.

But desire?

Desire had been pushed into a corner, like dust quietly accumulating. Attended to every so often — a maintenance routine — a reminder to sweep the floor a couple of times a week. That's what it had become: a task to complete. No spark. No spontaneity. Just routine.

And that is when she started to appear.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. A slight edge in my voice, a coldness settling in. The version of me I am not proud of, but the version that makes complete sense once you understand what was starving underneath her.

Because when desire is absent, something builds. A gnawing rage. Doubts about your body you didn't know you still carried. A whisper that grows louder the longer the distance between you remains: maybe they're thinking of someone else. Someone prettier. Someone more. It glues itself to your skin. And the longer it stays, the harder it becomes to peel off, and the further apart you drift, until finding your way back to each other feels almost impossible.

I guess the only word that comes to mind is bitterness.

A heavy, gunky, cold, hard bitterness on the outside, and somewhere between your heart and your throat, a sadness you don't always have the words for. It costs you hours of focus. It costs you pieces of your confidence. As though the absence of being seen that way slowly, quietly eats away at something fundamental. As though without their desire, you start to disappear.

That, I believe, is what the absence of desire slowly does to a woman.

And what makes it even crueler is this: the love is usually still there. It was never the love that left. It was just never enough on its own. Life gets in the way, and somehow, that I must have you now pull from deep within slowly becomes secondary.

When someone separates their heart from their desire, you feel it immediately. It's the difference between making love… and having sex. One feels like union. The other is just the physical act — present in body, absent everywhere else.

We long for the union. All of us, in our own way.

When that connection is alive, it feels like what perfumers call an absolute—the purest extraction of a flower, so concentrated it barely needs to exist to fill an entire room. That is what love and desire together feel like. Not louder. Not more. Just distilled. The most potent form of what was always there.

That is what I want. This is what I mean when I say I don't just want to be loved.

I want it woven so deeply into the ordinary that I stop being able to tell where love ends and desire begins.

In the way you reach for my hand not because it's a gesture, but because you needed to touch me in that moment.

In the way you pull me close in the morning before either of us has spoken, not out of habit, but out of want.

In the way you kiss me like you mean it. Like you chose me again, just now, in this ordinary Tuesday.

That is what I want.

Not just love. Not just desire.

Both. Fully alive. At the same time.