Divisions and Precisions

Yearning

I spend a lot of my time focusing on sex. Odd, I know, for someone who hasn't had it in four years. But I focus on it. Not just masturbation (although that's part of it), and not pornography or anything like that, just... passion. I think at times that I long for it desperately, and that I'm miserable without it.

I don't believe that's true anymore.

I went and saw "Possession" today. Lovely movie. I'm looking forward to reading the book. But when it ended, I was unbelievably sad and a little empty. Sitting watching the credits, I realized it's not sex that I want so badly. It's romance. Big, sweeping, irrational, unrealistic romance like what you see in the movies. I've written about these unrealistic expectations before.

What I want goes beyond just a relationship, beyond just someone to date. I want a true love, I suppose. Really, the sort of relationship I want doesn't exist anymore, if it ever really did. A part of me really wants that sort of lovely, tortured, Victorian sort of romance, where words mean more than what they seem, where every look has power.

A part of me wants to try writing something like this, but I know I can't. I can't write romance in any of my stories, not from a female perspective. Oddly, I've managed quite nicely from the male perspective (I think, at least). But to write from the female perspective seems too personal, too close. I'm afraid that it would, rather than seeming real, seem obviously autobiographical in a way that always makes me groan when I see other writers doing it. I've had some folks tell me that the main character of The Host seems very autobiographical in that way, and it makes me crazy, because it wasn't intentional, and I can't unmake what she is. (It's worth noting though, the romance I intended for her in the novel came out horribly, so badly I'm considering cutting it.)

I keep being reminded of a quote from Moulin Rouge, one that's stuck with me from the first time I saw the movie. Toulouse says, "Christian, you may see me only as a drunken, vice-ridden gnome whose friends are just pimps and girls from the brothels. But I know about love, if only because I long for it with every fiber of my being." I don't look like someone with an intensely romantic heart. Or maybe I do and I'm fooling myself, but I don't think I do. I tend to hide it from my friends, even, to put up a front of cynicism about all things romantic, or to hide it behind pure horniness.

I want to be yearned for. Particularly if 'yearned' sounds the way it only can when pronounced in an English accent. I don't necessarily mean I want to be the princess in the tower, waiting for rescue, or anything. In fact, I particularly don't want that. I don't know how to describe what I want. Saying that it's all sex is easy. If I really wanted to, even I could find someone to have sex with, if I just wanted a one-time thing, but that's not who I am.

And that's not what I really want.