You can hate things about a man and still want him
Desire: Part II — Dissonance | On cheeky cigs and self-delusion
On a rainy Tuesday evening in February, I found myself talking about smoking. We were inside a pub that resembled a shabby living room, chatting with the easy intensity that comes after the first drink.
L and I reasoned that if you only indulged a cheeky cigarette occasionally (socially or on holiday somewhere) then you weren’t really a smoker, and were therefore justified in selecting no beside the cigarette icon on your Hinge profile. To declare yourself a smoker, then, seemed to imply a host of inaccurate connotations: a lack of self-control, a compulsive desire, rather than the reality—that you might buy a pack once or twice a year, perhaps on a patio, perhaps in Paris, perhaps on one of those endless, dreamy summer nights. Besides, cigarettes in Europe don’t count.
S found our take amusing but categorically wrong. Obviously, I understood the logic was flimsy, but it made sense. She explained that, for her, if a man had sometimes or yes on his dating profile, it would be an immediate dealbreaker; she hated smoking for precisely the same associations we had just articulated. Crucially, she also hated the smell. “Before M, though,” said S, clocking the irony, “I dated loads of guys who smoked.” She had been speaking theoretically but her dating history told a different story.
What we want in theory rarely holds in practice. My mother has always said my father wasn’t her type, and yet she married him. Then they divorced. I’m not sure what to make of this sequence of events—what truths, if any, it reveals about desire. Stop at the wedding and she didn’t know what she wanted. Stop at the divorce and perhaps this is a cautionary tale—proof that desire is a fragile directive. Stop at the time of this writing and a verdict still eludes me.
There are many things about my father that my mother finds aggravating—baffling, even: his fashion sense; his incessant snacking (the evidence of which is always scattered as crumbs on the floor); the way he reflexively reaches for his e-cigarette several times an hour and, when he misplaces it, looks briefly panicked, patting down every pocket like someone who’s lost their wallet (she’s not a smoker, though you could have guessed that); his life choices. Yet she also finds him endearing, even charming on occasion—not in spite of those qualities, but because of them, and how completely they challenge her way of seeing the world. And although there have been periods when their dynamic was especially fraught, it has settled into a strange, definitive, enduring kind of love.
But back to S: Did she like these men in spite of their smoking, or was it that, in smoking, they embodied impulses she felt well-advised to suppress and was therefore subconsciously drawn to? Are we privately drawn to the things we publicly resist? Are attraction and aversion two sides of the same coin? Maybe her exes’ disregard, their tendency to indulge—to choose life-maximizing pleasures at the expense of longevity—was, on some level, strangely seductive.
We are not nearly as consistent as we delude ourselves into thinking. In the months I’ve spent working on this series—the more I think about desire and its complications—the more I see proof of dissonance everywhere.
A friend of a friend told me she had always envisioned herself marrying rich but was in a relationship with a fisherman (maybe lobsters are lucrative?). I don’t eat meat, but I find the smell of leather delicious. After a string of partners publicly deemed creative, introspective, emotionally complex types, Taylor Swift just married Travis Kelce. For years, Gwyneth Paltrow, a poster woman of modern wellness, famously allowed herself one cigarette a week.
Desire lays bare our dissonances and delusions. Even the most self-possessed among us are not entirely immune. “Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after or love,” says philosopher Amia Srinivasan. You can hate things about a man and still want him. I want so many things I am not supposed to want.
I told S and L about an essay on smoking I’d read and adored by John Phipps called “Quitting”:
“Schopenhauer says that money is prized above other goods because rather than satisfying a concrete need it represents in abstract the satisfaction of all human needs. Cigarettes were an almost inverse case, providing concrete satisfaction to an abstract need. They felt like they were satisfaction, satisfaction incarnate. . . I smoked because I thought it was cool, funny and doomed, and would therefore suit the cool funny doomed life I wanted.”
Romantic desire, then, is both money and cigarettes. Like money, it compresses abstract longings into a single object of attachment—the possibility of satisfying multiple desires for a life at once. But like cigarettes, it is also desire in its most incarnate form: emotional high, intensity, relief, thrill, distraction. Maybe the folks at Hinge should consider adding these as options under Dating Intentions.
A person can become a future, but more often they become a fix. Toxic substances, toxic relationships, nicotine, sex, love: desire is an intoxicating force—both physical and existential, essential to feeling alive. No wonder we are often powerless against it. No wonder it’s so hard to quit.
Looking back at everything I did this past week, time feels stretched. I had my cousin’s graduation, a trip to the Algarve where I spent my birthday, and after flying back yesterday, a quick turnaround to Leif Vollebekk’s BBC Orchestra show at the Barbican. The weather everywhere was so perfect—warm and breezy with minimal humidity—that it almost felt artificial. I take it as reparations for last week’s heatwave.
An art-schooler myself, people-watching at a business school graduation was a fun anthropological opportunity. The reception was basically a garden party where we ate canapés in the sunshine. There was even a magician who went around blowing everyone’s minds.
The next day, we flew to the Algarve where we indulged in all the holiday pleasures: an extra glass of Vinho Verde, open-air dining, poolside french fries. I remain convinced that the first head-to-toe dip in the water is one of life’s most revitalizing pleasures. I can’t stop thinking about the beach and its perfect colour palette: immaculate blue water bordered by sandstone in shades of terracotta, which glowed in the light of the setting sun.
Per sacred holiday rituals, after our swim-and-sunbathing circuit, we’d shower and lounge around before getting ready for dinner. Each night ended with us chatting and giggling, oscillating between silly topics and deeper ones. Votives flickered around us, and a full moon hung luminous in the vast navy sky. My cousin recruited us all to make this lip dub, which was honestly really fun.
We were cutting it close on time after getting back from the airport but managed to make it to the concert just as “Rock and Roll” was starting, which felt like divine timing since it’s my favourite and a regular opener. The song always makes me feel life’s grandeur—aliveness, vastness, fragility, beauty, and the orchestra amplified that feeling. I’m used to seeing him in grittier rock-and-roll venues, so this felt uniquely spectacular. I saw him for the first time years ago in Toronto and earlier this year in Paris, and we happened to run into him and his band at a bar afterward both times (weirdly, David Suzuki was also at the Toronto bar), which was a pretty funny coincidence. Last night, there were several standing ovations. I could hear people behind me crying. It was really magnificent.
After the show, people milled around the Barbican grounds. My cousin had an early morning flight, but I convinced her to walk home and get a quick nightcap because it was such a gorgeous night. I write this now feeling full (and a little tired) and wildly grateful to have experienced so much of summer’s best this week and to have spent it with people I love. Wishing you a July filled with all the same!
See you next Sunday for Desire: Part III.
You totally get me.
I savoured this read as a reward for clearing my work email inbox after an OOO period. Desire in itself?