Wanting Vs. Being Wanted

My first, core desires, sexual self-awareness

Photo by Matheus Bertelli

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The morning after my first night of penetrative sex, my then-roommate stood next to me in our tiny Milan bathroom, the one whose hot water took roughly a week to reach our desired temperature, and forced me to look in the mirror.

“My friend Tolly is a badass. Say it.”

“I…this is stupid.”

“SAY IT.”

I wasn’t going to get out of this round of anti-slut-shaming affirmations. For one, my roommate was blocking the door. But two: she was clearly so happy for me, her innocent Texan friend. Exotic in my Christianity, my abject lack of porn-viewing, and yes – my virginity. Look at me now! Fresh off the morning metro, humid hair asunder. Back home we’d call this the walk of shame, here in Italy we called it Sunday.

“I am a badass,” I muttered.

“My friend Tolly,” she continued, like a charismatic defense attorney romancing the jury, “lost her virginity in fucking Milan like a fucking badass. To one hell of a guy!”

“Josh on our program,” I clarified, who, ok – sure – hell of a guy, but who’d have been a hell lot more of a guy had he moved his snoring roommate out of their shared bedroom before we did the thing. Hey Daniel, if you’re out there: sorry about that.

“My stomach hurts,” I said to our reflections, her eyes sparkling, mine scowling over a half-eaten croissant. “Do you think I’m pregnant?”

“You’re on your period!” she gestured to my box of tampons on the counter, then putting on her TV trial voice: “and you’re on birth control! You did this exactly right!”

My exactly right self shrugged, and shuffled off to our bedroom.

I took out my phone, a very pre-smart device rectangle with both calling and texting functions – the height of advanced telecommunications back then – and flipped it open.

MESSAGES: 0

CALLS: 0

“Got home safe,” I typed to Josh, before immediately erasing it. My feminine training knew mystery was better.

Had to keep him interested, after all.

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For years, I thought sexual pleasure as a woman came solely from being wanted.

Instead of acting as its own directional laser beam, my sexuality often felt, from basically puberty on, like a lightbulb that occasionally attracted bugs. And this felt successful, when it worked. Proof I was doing a good job being attractive. Because the demure bulb doesn’t point – it glows. (Lol at this anthropomorphic metaphor.)

So at age 20, a newly-hatched chick roaming the streets of urban Italy, I thought a lot about how other people (men) might receive me.

I woke up each day and made myself hot, an elaborate routine of plugging an adapter into the wall, a hair curler into the adapter, running freshly blow-dried hair into artful waves, all before moving on to full makeup and wardrobe. Just typing this is exhausting – how early was I waking up back then? Maybe I failed art history due to rising at 5:30 for my daily HMU. Underslept and under-Caravaggio-studied, but camera fucking ready.

All of this was blessedly before the age of Instagram, but it’s an object-lesson in female hyper-awareness of other people’s perceptions. People like strangers.

Also, people like Josh.

And I’ll admit, Josh On Our Program was charming. A tall, Midwest athlete who’d go on to become a restaurateur in Lake Tahoe. But, my interest only sparked after he paid attention to me. (Thanks curling iron.)

It’s funny to remember how little game I had back then. Like a lot of 20 year-olds, I drank to flirt. I was fundamentally not smooth, but you know what is? Italian liquor.

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“How about I put you to bed?” Josh asked politely one night, the second or third sentence he spoke directly to me.

I was laid out on a beach in Cinque Terre during our first free weekend, actively experiencing my first drunk/stoned combo (Italy: Land of Firsts), with my new friends on the IES study abroad program. I’d just asked them to take me to a local hospital, because “I think I might throw up you guys,” but Josh had a less dramatic idea.

“Let’s get you upstairs, yeah?”

Well, ok.

Liquid courage turned me into a horny Lazarus. Gone was my nausea, replaced now by lust. When he laid me down and turned to leave, I reached up and kissed him.

“Night Tolly,” he laughed.

That wasn’t the night we had sex (thank God), but it was the night I decided I liked him. This boy I couldn’t see all that well – one too many mojitos on the beach – but, he was being nice to me. The attention made me feel excited, desirable. Like somebody someone might want to have sex with.

“Buona notte,” I called, his footsteps already in the hostel corridor.

Drifting off to sleep, I started to imagine him imagining me, a once-removed style of sexual fantasy I was very adept at.

The camera always clicked to the other person’s point of view in moments like these. Him taking in my body, my face, whatever else I had to offer.

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“We go to sex to feel something – whether it is powerful, adored, competent, etc,” write Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel in Coming Together: Embracing your Core Desires for Sexual Fulfillment and Long-Term Compatibility.

The “etc.” is doing a lot of heavy-lifting there, meant to imply a whole range of core desires we unconsciously chase, each and every time we fantasize. Or, have sex.

Core desires are the emotional underpinning of the behaviors you crave in bed. More vibes than acts. So often, we focus on certain behaviors when we’re trying to improve our sex lives – “maybe better oral will help? How about this crazy new position? Let’s tie each other up!” because behaviors are easiest to package and sell.

And behaviors can go a long way, for sure. But vibes are way more effective at getting your deep sexual needs met, because when successfully summoned, they touch on your core desires. Vibes are the difference between mentally checking out during sex (because boredom, resentment, emotional estrangement) and electric, authentic presence, because getting your core desires met is just that compelling.

“Women come into our office complaining of low desire,” Celeste and Danielle write in their book. Do they really?! I rolled my eyes when I first read that line, the open secret of so many hetero women in long-term relationships.

I worked at a sex podcast when I discovered Coming Together (which really is very good), and email after email we got from women spiraled into self-blame. They felt so bad over their lacking sexual interest.

“I want to want my husband, but I don’t. What’s the matter with me?”

“We’re roommates. We’ve tried toys, lingerie, new positions, but still no spark. What’s the matter with me?”

“We have mismatched sex drives, my husband wants it all the time and I’d rather do anything else. What’s the matter with me?”

It’s likely that nothing, actually, is the matter with them.

But, maybe the sex they’re having isn’t meeting their core desires.

Especially because – and I find this fascinating – you don’t choose your core desires. Rather, they point to formative moments in your life where you encountered both attraction and obstacle simultaneously. Unique as a fingerprint, we’ve all got them. Sex is just one way to revisit.

I felt for these women though, because if they were anything like me, being desired, being wanted, was a curriculum we were all familiar with. When Josh walked away that night, it felt instinctive to play the movie from his angle.

What would my movie even look like?

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Before Celeste and Danielle, I read about Marta Meana – a clinical psychologist who researches female desire – a few years ago. There’s a passage with her in Wednesday Martin’s book Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free, and it’s always stuck with me.

Marta and Wednesday are at a conference talking about this tendency, the seeing-yourself-through-the-eyes-of-another thing. Apparently, tons of women do this.

“[Meana] asked a group of men and women, “Would you want to sleep with you?” Hell yes, many women basically said, in a way that suggested to Meana that in some sense they already had. Men, on the other hand, mostly didn’t know what she was talking about.”

–Untrue, p. 50

Marta went on to write a paper titled “It’s Not You, It’s Me” (snaps) with the results. But when Wednesday asked her about it, Marta did NOT say women eroticize themselves because they’ve been objectified so much and so often.

In fact, to call this tendency false consciousness or even narcissism is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to Marta:

“I don’t really care what we call it. But the minute you try to put ideology on sex – whether it’s progressive ideology or conservative ideology – sex rebels! Sex is by its very nature transgressive.” Meana doesn’t want women to be judged or pressured from either direction. What matters to her is the finding: that to a certain extent heterosexual women are their own erotic targets, and that their arousal emanates to some significant degree from their erotic relationship with themselves. …Meana urged the clinicians in the audience to help women not only have realistic expectations but feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for their own sexual excitement.”

–Untrue, p. 51-52

I devoured this book. But feeling a sense of ownership over one’s sexual excitement is the kind of thing that sounds very wise, and also, very vague.

Did Marta mean…masturbation? Cultivating a rich fantasy life? What specifically does “ownership over one’s sexual excitement” look like?

This is why I feel like sex stuff is a path to self-awareness. Because hetero women are trained to mediate sexuality through a partner, I feel like one step to ownership could look like reframing the desire question altogether. Instead of asking “why is my desire low,” the new question could be, “where is my desire hiding?”

Your fantasies are one way to find them, even if you do the seeing-yourself-through-the-eyes-of-another. Because underneath every visual is a feeling, a heat map for the emotions you’re after in bed.

A way to gear-shift from being wanted, to experiencing one’s own glorious, greedy, laser-beam want.

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As the theory goes (from Celeste, Danielle, and the researcher they draw from, The Erotic Mind author Jack Morin), we all have unresolved issues from our early lives. Sex is one way we seek resolve. To revisit those feelings, but now – hopefully! – with a positive outcome.

Feelings like…(examples from my own life):

Disobedience: Other people might call this submission or being a bratty sub. Ever the rule-follower, I have craved a bit of rebellion my entire good girl life. Plenty of women do. So while this one may be cliche, it’s also legit (for me) in that I feel a zing of something when I’m told “no” or “not yet” or having to push against an object, like bed restraints. It’s the feeling! Not the behavior, which is why both people have to really commit to the bit here.

Separate-yet-merged: I looove hearing about a partner’s sexual experiences that have nothing to do with me (so much that I’ve annoyed people, “I’m running out of stories Tolly!”). Their history means they’re different from me, and that distinction is super important – sexy because it defamiliarizes them. I feel like a little koala wrapped around a tree trunk, thrilled to be there but the leaves still belong to the tree, you know?

Cared for: Sometimes, not always but particularly when I’m stressed, I dig a caretaker vibe from my partner. I’m a mom, I work, I juggle a lot of shit: I want the sexual equivalent of someone making me my favorite meal (“eggplant parmesan, how did you know!”) and serving it to me bite by bite. Seconds please.

I’ve been wanting to write about this topic for a while now, core desires.

Mainstream sex discourse – and really, all of us – get so caught up in the what of sex, we forget about the why.

Why do you have sex? Seriously. Aside from orgasm, which you can likely achieve yourself, why do you want to have sex?

It’s an interesting question. Figuring out your core desires can provide clues, a trail of breadcrumbs to even more interesting answers.

I Want to Feel Free

“I loved the secrecy; I loved the fucking someone I wasn’t ‘supposed to be,’ I loved that I felt like I was breaking a rule,” says my friend Ash of

Unfucking Midlife

when I ask her about this topic. She tells me about a sunlit afternoon of sex with a new partner, someone who had no plans of taking their relationship beyond the bed. Neither did she.

“It went up against my Catholic girl moral coding, who got in trouble for chasing the boys on the playground.”

Shout-out Catholicism for providing so many of our collective kinks, no? But Ash is so eloquent about it. Pain mixed in with her pleasure.

“It spoke to a little girl in me who, when I asked a caregiver what it meant if I was dreaming about boys in the third grade, told me I was a slut. It revealed at a core level the truth that I can experience as much pleasure as I want, how I want, when I want, and with who I want.”

We all have sedimentary layers of story inside of us. A third grader getting slut-shamed. A grown woman getting naked with another person, just because she can.

Using the lens of core desires, Ash did find a resolve in that moment: freedom from feeling bad, just for wanting. And a more radical freedom, from the notion that anyone is in charge of her body and pleasure but her.

I Want to Feel Transgressive

“Growing up in an ultra-conservative church, I’m also turned on by the taboo,” says Sarah Ward of

Sex and Style

. She and I DM about this one, and knowing that she – like Ash, and a little like me – have some Christianity baggage, I wondered if religion might play a role for her.

“Public sex, sex with someone I “shouldn’t” be having sex with, multiple sets of hands on my body, which was a delectable one to live out,” she says. Every time I get scared about Christian Nationalism or Project 2025 or whatever the fuck zealous bullshit, I chuckle to myself remembering how these things typically go. After the dust settles, all that sexual repression can – often does! – squeeze the coal of sexual shame into a kinky diamond.

“My kinky side feels like an unexpected gift from religion,” she tells me. “One that keeps on giving.” All praise.

Another topic for another day, but most modern Christianity (IMO) reflects Romanness so much more than anything Jesus ever said. The pageantry, the colosseum-like seating, the notable absence of female leadership. But even that gave Sarah a turn-on.

“When I realized that through sex, I could level a man — bend him to my will — I was astonished,” she says. “It felt like an epiphany. This is why the church doesn’t want us to know our eros. This is where our power lies.”

Not to make light of those who’d go full Handmaid’s Tale in five minutes, but Sarah correctly points out the elephant in the room of church, and a lot of organized religion. Sex is shamed because it’s powerful. Once you exfoliate the shame, sex can be empowering, a profound connection to your own body. And perhaps a consensual connection to other people’s bodies, too.

I Want to Feel Confident

“I’ve now had multiple experiences with two different couples, and through them, I’ve learned so much about myself,” says Kate, a non-monogamous mom who wrote me recently via my submission form. She explains how, after adjusting the rules of her marriage and having outside sexual experiences with men, she found herself more drawn to sex with couples.

“I know I’m good at this,” she writes. “My ability to read a room, my confidence, my natural sexuality. It all makes me a perfect fit for these kinds of experiences.”

Kate’s a beautiful writer – I tucked myself into her email completely when I got it – but beneath the words, I’m struck by something else. Her sense of directorial competence, her instinct for telling others what to do. And, watching them love it.

“The first couple, who had been with many partners before me, told me what they loved most about me. How I not only give them equal attention but also let them play as a couple while enhancing their connection.”

I put myself in the room reading that, imagining Kate calling the shots for this pair of lovers. Encouraging their interaction, creating a safe structure for them to explore.

“I love who I am in these moments,” she wrote. “I love that I can leave when it’s over. The dynamic is hot, open, and exploratory, and I excel at managing it.”

At its best, sex is self-esteem building, and not just for things like body image. It can mirror back your natural gifts like Kate’s, and it can be an experiential discovery process, penetrating all those story layers to find the emotional resonances.

“We kinda all take turns but we encourage each other's pleasure for sure and vocally observe and confirm it,” she tells me later, and I joke that I’m sure there are lots of confirmations going on.

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I visited Josh On Our Program exactly one time after Italy, in Lake Tahoe. It wasn’t a successful visit by any measure. We were over each other, him more than I, and when the last day rolled around he drove me to the airport several hours before my flight. Turns out attention alone was a cheap aphrodisiac, for both of us.

But sometimes, the sexiest thing you do with a person isn’t the sex itself.

During one of our many club stops back in Milan, he, I, and a group of friends found ourselves in the middle of a packed outdoor dance floor. Twinkly lights wound through tree branches like a wedding, drinks sloshed from people’s hands onto our shoes, and a few miles away Jesus himself presided over The Last Supper. I’d seen it with my own eyes just the other day.

“Wanna get out of here?” he said in my ear after a few songs, leaning down because I was so much shorter than him.

“Yeah! But how?” I asked. Crowds never part for those of us 5’2” and under, and this crowd was tight – one gyrating ball of flesh and Campari.

In one swift motion, I was up on his shoulders. Was that the Duomo, off in the distance? I could see everything.

I giggled and waved to my friends, carried off to a taxi by Josh, EDM throbbing in the background. He smiled mischievously in the backseat before kissing me, the girl he was always picking up and getting out of tight spots. I wasn’t a pick-me-up kind of person, really – still not – but the way he did it felt caring. And more annoyingly: helpful.

I made out with Josh in the backseat to wherever it was we were going, pausing only to smile back at him, this freckled Indiana jock I had nothing in common with except English and paltry Italian. But I remember his face so much more in this memory – more than the time we had sex, more than in my 20 year-old imaginings – I think because I sort of let go. Finally comfortable enough to stop comporting myself.

The alcohol might have helped. So did the fact that I had just been dancing, in my body more than my mind, in those trees shot through with pink club lights, in a bass line wrapped with synth. I remember his eyebrows, endearingly bushy and boy-like. I remember his cockeyed grin before he kissed me, smiling eyes turned half-moons under the real one in the sky.

Separate, but merged.

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What do you think your core desires might be? What’s the feeling you want during sex, underneath the behaviors? Leave a comment if you like, I’d love to hear.