Risk

An essay on desire

Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (1607)

Welcome to the third instalment of Body Hunger, a relaunch of Looking at Porn.

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The man sitting opposite me was undeniably attractive. He had a broad, genial smile, a handlebar moustache, and large hands that were alternating between holding his drink and fidgeting nervously with the pens scattered across the table. He was a doctor, he told me, before leaning forward conspiratorially, his brown eyes fixed on mine, and stage-whispering that his main hobby, however, was learning about authoritarian regimes. I laughed in surprise, and he laughed, and I liked him. I thought about telling him this, and perhaps getting his number, but hesitated for a moment, afraid that I was misreading his friendliness as flirtation. As I was gathering my courage to ask, the girl behind us rang a bell, and I realised that I had missed my chance. I regretfully rose from my chair, and moved on to the person at the next table.

I was at a speed dating event in East London, my second speed dating event in a fortnight. It was October, and I was in the process of overhauling my life. I had just quit my job without much of a plan except to let myself figure out what I actually wanted, and to give myself the time and space to do so. When I was deliberating, I had begun to list reasons I should quit. I only wrote one down before making my decision and it read, quite simply: I am miserable.

This misery had swept over everything in my life, including my sexuality. Over the course of a few months, my sex drive had stalled and, drowned out by endless Teams notifications and project charts and just hopping on a call, it had finally completely died. As my life narrowed into the same day lived on repeat, I had become neutered: Get up, go to work, come home, think about work, go to sleep. Something had to give.

When I finally handed in my resignation, there was an uncanny sense of lightness about it: an immense risk, but one I was taking because I wanted something more, and was willing to do anything to get it. I was purposefully making myself vulnerable, and I did it anyway, and it was a thrill. I found myself happy for the first time in months. It is not often that the choice between the life you have and the life you want is so clear, and I have rarely made a habit of choosing the latter. It was a revelation that I could do so; it felt like getting away with some secret and wonderful trick.

I took this dizzying sense of freedom with me when, a week later, I went speed dating. I wanted to flirt, to charm people, and to be admired, and the tangible physicality of speed dating felt like it would be more fruitful than the sterility of a dating app. Primarily, I wanted to be someone who has sex and relationships again, rather than standing helplessly at the sidelines of the sexual milieu and hoping that I would one day be let back in. I had spent months as though behind glass, hearing other people talk about hook ups and dates while I lost myself in work, unable to see the distance between me and my sexuality until it had drifted out of sight, and now I wanted it back.

Despite this, when I walked into the bar hosting the queer speed dating event, I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake. My hands were clammy, and I fidgeted nervously with my bag, mindlessly zipping and unzipping it while looking around for the hosts and figuring out the formula: I was to sit down opposite another attendee for discussion, sketching, and, hopefully, flirting. After five minutes, a bell would ring, and we would be obliged to move onto the next partner, taking our sheets of sketch paper with us.

I sat down and began speaking to the person opposite me, who was perfectly pleasant but not someone I found particularly attractive. We had a friendly chat for five minutes, before I moved on to the next person, which went similarly. I spent the first half of the night having brief but polite small talk with strangers, and as my nerves faded, the disappointment set in. It was less a disappointment in the other people and more in myself for not feeling any attraction to them. I was not the flirtatious bon vivant I had pictured myself as, and the speed dating event was not a debutante ball for my re-entry into society. The gap between the life I wanted and the life I had seemed to widen again, forming a chasm that felt like failure.

That was, until I was seated opposite the doctor with the broad, genial smile, who had an unusual interest in the history of authoritarian regimes. He was charming, and I enjoyed being charmed. He had the unusual ability to make you feel like the only person he was interested in and that he looked for the best in you, sifting it to the surface like gold. My nerves came back, but with an edge of giddy delight that rose up through my stomach and into my chest, and I imagined dating him, and being with him, and I wanted it so much that I couldn’t ask him for it in case he couldn’t give it to me. But the bell rang, and I smiled and moved onto the next person. Later, I saw the doctor flirting with another man and I told myself that that man would be brave where I was cowardly, and he would certainly live a better life for it. At the end of the night, I couldn’t find the doctor again, so I cut my losses and left.

Sexuality exists in the midpoint between your own desire and being desired by others, in the frisson of risk and attraction. I had isolated myself for too long, and that sexual risk had begun to feel insurmountable: I had forgotten how to play the game of attraction and how to enjoy ceding control. I wanted the other party to take all the chances and to woo me, without putting myself at risk of rejection or humiliation. I drove an unfair bargain; genuine attraction occurs when you are both risking something to be with the other.

I quit my job in the knowledge that risk also brings opportunity, and so far that risk has gone in my favour because I have put in the effort to make it so. Sexual risk requires the same work - not waiting around to be desired, but seeking out desire and meeting it where it comes. It must be sought out and reckoned with, and the chance of rejection tolerated as the price you pay for wanting something beyond yourself.

It is an unfortunate truth that, as long as you avoid going after what you want, you can always pretend that you could have had it. The fantasy remains uninterrupted (“if only I had asked for that man’s number, he would have given it to me”), in exchange for staying exactly where you already are. Risk, at the end of the day, is just another form of desire, and it’s the only way to close the gap between who you are, and who you want to be.