10 September 2025

We are defined by our desires

It’s little wonder we are so confused by them.

Illustration by Benjamin Baxter / Ikon Images

Internally I am governed by systems of blood and hormones, but most of all desire. And yet, for a long time, I struggled to know my desire’s object, or its subject – maybe that’s a better way to put it. I had no idea how to transform its call from a plaintive “I want, I want, I want!” into a definitive “what I want is X”. I was too disconnected from my interior life to discover the form this “X” might take, and under the impression I had to uncover what I liked and what turned me on alone, treating it like homework. But if desire is relegated to private study, then what you’re discovering is not really desire at all but a solitary fantasy.

My relationship to desire began to shift three years ago, when I started dating women and people who do not fit into the category of heterosexual men. But I see that more as an outcome than the cause of my changing perspective. (This is not to say I was dispassionate until that point, only that I had been so repressed since adolescence that it felt like whole parts of myself were shut off and tuned out during romantic encounters.) I can’t explain what changed exactly. I guess I grew up a little. And I started to feel more embodied, more present in my own life. I fell in with a set of adventurous friends who spoke more openly about their sex lives – I think that might have been the most crucial shift.What I have since discovered is that desire, rather than being a fixed concept, is an ongoing process, never completed nor fully satisfied; a process that can only be worked out relationally, body to body, want squared up to want.

Recently, my therapist recommended a text that finally provided me with the language to articulate my developing relationship to desire: The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination by the American psychoanalyst and feminist Jessica Benjamin. I ran into a friend while I was reading it, who told me her friend had just been recommended the same book by their own therapist. Perhaps there’s something in the water.

In order to address the “problem of domination” in relationships – in which one person functions as “master” and the other submits, a historically gendered dynamic – Benjamin turns towards the concept of intersubjectivity, a theory brought into psychology from phenomenology by the child psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen in the mid-1970s.

Benjamin’s take can be seen partly as a challenge to classic Freudian-influenced psychoanalytic paradigms relating to child development, namely that a baby exists as one with its mother before gradually individuating and becoming a separate self. The intersubjective view, Benjamin writes, “maintains that the individual grows in and through the relationship to other subjects”; as we mature, we develop not only in terms of autonomy, but also in terms of relatedness to others.

Intersubjectivity reorients the bond between the self and the other from being “subject vs object” to being “subject in relationship with another subject”. In infancy, Benjamin writes, this is the awakening of a child’s ability to identify with their mother’s own subjective experience, to realise: “I know you could wish to have your own life, as I wish to have mine.” To this extent, the cornerstone of intersubjectivity is mutual recognition – the pleasure we feel in being with one another, in recognising we can share experiences and realities. Mutual recognition, she continues, “cannot be achieved through obedience, through identification with the other’s power, or through repression. It requires, finally, contact with the other.” The amazing (and terrifying) thing about healthy romantic bonds is recognising your dependence on another person who must be free to walk away from you.

Though published in 1988, The Bonds of Love feels contemporary. Benjamin explores how entrenched gender polarities can damage our relationship to erotic desire. For so long in Western culture, women were perceived as objects rather than subjects of desire. I grew up in the 2000s, but still managed to internalise the idea that I had no sexual agency outside of fulfilling someone else’s wants. I could not envisage sex as a reciprocal act, two selves coming together as equals.

Importantly, taking an intersubjective view within sexual dynamics doesn’t mean you can’t play around with domination and submission (tendencies Benjamin believes emerge and solidify with infancy), only that one’s agency must be retained – their role selected because they themselves desire it. In fact, Benjamin warns against the feminist argument, in vogue at the time, which went as far as to suggest the only way for women to avoid objectification in heterosexual sex was to give it up entirely.

Examining intersubjectivity leads Benjamin to suggest that gender boundaries ought to be destabilised: “Ideally, an individual’s relationship to desire should be formed through access to a range of experiences and identifications that are not restricted by rigid gender formulations.” Intersubjectivity can help us consider another person’s complexity, and thus allow us more room to discover our own capacity for fluidity – all that desire and strange chemistry roiling away inside each of us. Personally, how I live now is so far from how the younger me might have hoped I would be living at 30. Maybe she would be disappointed. If there was some way I could show her, though, how much more abundant and exciting her life would become, I reckon she’d come around.

[See also: My night dancing with Nigel Farage]