I couldn’t have been older than 12 when I first became confused on what having a girlfriend meant. I remember crossing into the neighbors yard where an old, yellow, rusty, broken down SUV sat, and having this question. One of my conclusions was that a girlfriend was someone you kissed, and that nobody else was allowed to kiss them. With this in mind and when everyone in the house would be asleep, I would practice my kissing on a stuffed Tigger doll. My first kiss was actually pretty nice-it was snowing and our boots were making slushy sounds in the road. I asked if we could kiss, nervous and shaking, not from the cold, and knowing she had had a few boyfriends before, I was confident that she wouldn’t be shy. It was quick and I felt like a hummingbird, airless and rosy cheeked.
Who we desire and what we pine for is an interesting thought experiment. I believe desire is not exclusive to any particular gender, but someone more conservative than me would argue otherwise. Desire to some extent comes from the social environment, and our inherent will to mimic behavior. We imitate at an early age in order to learn, and it’s hard to deny we are influenced by fads in our early years. If we’re not influenced, we’re strongly moved to oppose the fad rather than ignore it. Does this commercial behavior apply to our desires for humans as well? If we’re not superficial in our designs on who becomes restricted to us, where do the list of qualifications arise from if not out of thin air?
In thinking about how curious it is to label someone as your partner, separating them from ‘friend’ if ever so slightly, and the role commercialism has in manipulating desire, Lacan has an interesting idea about desire which is interpreted by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen as: “Not being real, the ‘object’ of desire is not natural, either… The ‘object’ of human desire is neither the object that saturates a need… nor the fixed and preestablished object of instinct; it is, properly speaking, their negation.”(1) In other words, there’s a void in us that gets continually filled by our creation of desire. There’s no actual object that can fill this desire, otherwise there would be nothing left to want, so desire itself is a manifestation of our own fantasy or creation. Rather, it’s negating the object we choose to fill that void. My question as a young boy can be tied into this ‘object’ of desire. What I was questioning was how odd it seemed to basically own someone, because if they weren’t faithful to me, then they’d be breaking some sort of mutual partner contract. Thinking of having a lover in this context makes me less judgmental toward Swann and the narrator of Proust’s “Search,” because having a lover is in fact a mutual ownership, where sides take different stakes of levels of ownership. So, we place humans into this void, hoping to negate our need for desire to be filled, only to then realize it’s not what we thought it would be. We may be satiated, but true 100% bliss seems almost impossible to attain, for even if it’s reached, reality is waiting to swallow you back up and make you desire more.
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 201. Print.