Desire Needs A Home
The more you talk to people, the more time you spend on social media, the more you realise how easy it has become for people to stray outside their marriages. Or outside their long-term relationships. One might wonder what has happened to the world. Both genders are busy blaming each other instead of trying to understand what is actually going on.
People who have affairs usually offer a profound justification for them. A mistress, they claim, is good for the marriage because she draws the stress away from home. She absorbs all the strange urges they would rather not burden their wives with. The same holds for women these days. They have realised there are plenty of options out there, and they feel compelled to sample every one of them. But this is not a shopping spree. Both assume that a new affair won't arrive with its own baggage.
Then there are people who want an affair but are too afraid to have one. They dwell on the worst-case scenarios. What if somebody finds out? What if the relationship escalates into something they cannot handle? What if their partner discovers it and leaves? The thought frightens them so much that they refuse to indulge the impulse.
For such people, it is hard to imagine that the glory lies not in finding the best alternative to your partner, but in building the best family, the best home and the best life with your partner. Overcoming struggles together brings you closer. It gives you far deeper satisfaction than chasing strangers for physical gratification.
Physical urges are biological. They cannot be denied, but they can be understood. At the root of it all, we want to be desired. We want someone to want us, and in return we want to express our longing for them. The sheer passion of that dance of desire is too much for some to resist. People forget that desire is indifferent to stakes. It does not comprehend what is at risk. It is your mind's job to process those urges, or better yet, to redirect them towards your partner.
When we cannot find a home for our desire, or when we believe we are no longer desired in that way, we look elsewhere. Desire needs a home. But desire is fleeting by nature. It never stays fixed. It always craves novelty. That is why it wanders towards someone else. Once the mistress loses her novelty, it will drift to the next person. And when you are done with people, your desire will turn towards possessing things.
Being a slave to the whims of desire can lead you astray. A time will come when the urges subside and the same desire changes its shape. It will want stability. It will want a home. It will want a family. But those options will be gone, because when the time came to choose, you chose something else.
Desire needs a pathway for expression. You have to find different ways, creative ways, to fulfil your desires with your current partner. You have to have that conversation with them. You cannot be a slave to your impulses, lest they leave you somewhere from which there is no way back home.
Desire can transform your life. Which way depends entirely on where you direct it.