The Look, and Why We Hide
There’s a moment most people recognize but don’t articulate. You’re with someone you love, or might love, and they’re just watching you. Not staring, not analyzing, just… looking. In response, something in you shifts. You suddenly become aware of your hands, the way you’re sitting, the face you’re making. You feel, briefly, like an object being examined rather than a person existing. Sartre would say: yes, exactly. That’s the point.
May 1, 2026
The Dizziness of Freedom
There’s a moment, if you’ve ever really fallen for someone, where you feel it before you can name it. It’s not quite excitement and it’s not quite dread. It sits somewhere between the two, vibrating. You’re texting back too fast and then deleting the draft. You’re rehearsing conversations in the shower. You’re doing the thing where you’re happy and miserable at the same time and somehow that feels completely rational.
Søren Kierkegaard had a word for this. Several, actually, but the one that keeps coming back to me is Angest which is typically translated as anxiety, though he meant something more specific than our contemporary clinical application.
April 28, 2026
The Beautiful Risk: Desire Discrepancy and the Fragility of Goodness
In the economy of modern relationships, we often treat desire like a currency. We speak of “high drive” and “low drive” as if they are fixed assets, and a discrepancy between partners is framed as a simple accounting error. Yet if we look through the lens of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, desire isn’t a commodity; it is the ultimate expression of our human finitude.
March 25, 2026
The Desire That Was Never Yours
Diotima offered us a strange consolation: desire discrepancy is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. Eros is structurally unsatisfied because it reaches, through the particular, toward something the particular cannot hold. The ladder was always there. Simone de Beauvoir would have found this interesting and insufficient.
For Beauvoir, the problem with desire is not metaphysical. It is political. The question is not only what lies at the top of the ladder of longing, it is who built the ladder, who is allowed to climb it, and whose desire was quietly edited out of the picture before she even knew she had it.
March 22, 2026
What We Reach For
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from wanting too much, but from wanting the wrong things, or rather, from discovering that what you want and what you are supposed to want are not the same thing at all.
Desire discrepancy is not limited to relationship with other, it also pertains to the gap between the desire you have and the desire you are expected to perform. It shows up in bedrooms and boardrooms alike. It is the person who craves solitude but stays at the party. The one who wants intimacy but has learned, with great precision, to suppress the ask. The one who desires intellectual recognition but has been told, in a hundred subtle ways, that this particular hunger is unbecoming.
March 18, 2026