Prologue
There was a time when I thought being desired meant I was close to being loved.
I know better now.
Desire is easy. Men desire all kinds of things.
A face caught in good light. A body poured into a dress.
A woman with enough self-possession to make them feel like winning her might say something important about them.
A woman with good pussy. Desire has very little discipline.
It rises fast, reaches greedily, and calls itself truth before it has earned the right.
Anything worthy of being mistaken for love requires more than that.
It requires presence. Congruence. The courage to be the same person in daylight, online, in a crowded room, and in the dark when there is no audience left to impress.
That is the part people keep failing.
I had spent enough years being looked at to know beauty did not protect a woman from disappointment.
If anything, it sometimes hurried disappointment toward her.
Men saw the face first, the body second, and whatever softness or mystery they wanted to project onto her after that.
Some wanted to possess her. Some wanted to conquer her.
Some wanted to be seen beside her because a beautiful woman on your arm still functioned like a credential in certain circles.
Even the more thoughtful ones, the men who knew the right language and had learned how to package tenderness in full sentences, often arrived as polished representatives of themselves instead of whole human beings.
I had gotten tired of that.
Tired in the way women get tired when they are still moisturized, still well-dressed, still laughing, still carrying themselves beautifully, and quietly no longer impressed.
Tired in the way that does not show up as bitterness at first. It shows up as discernment.
A slower reply. A pause before hope. A refusal to build castles out of chemistry, nice teeth, and a man who knows how to say healing in the right tone.
And dammit, the internet only made that mess worse.
By then, we were all living in little windows.
Facebook. Twitter. Threads. Instagram. Group chats.
Stories. Comments. Replies. Faces became familiar before voices did.
Opinions arrived before touch. People learned each other’s angles, their captions, their politics, the flavor of their humor, the version of themselves they preferred to release into public hands.
We knew each other and did not know each other at all.
That is the trick of it.
A man can have all the right words online and none of the right energy in person.
He can know how to frame himself as thoughtful, cultured, emotionally aware, then open his mouth across from you at dinner and turn into a cautionary tale before the appetizer comes.
He can post books he never read, quote women he does not listen to, talk Black love in the comments, then sit in front of you hollow as a staged apartment.
I had seen enough of that to stop confusing easy familiarity with real intimacy.
So yes, I still liked men. I still liked sex.
I still liked the weight of attention when it came from the right kind of eyes.
I still liked looking beautiful. I liked perfume on my pulse points and gold at my ears and the way my own body looked when I took my time with it.
I liked being a woman. Liked all the ceremony of it.
The lotion. The silk. The hair appointments.
The white toes. The moment in the mirror when you know every piece of you has landed where it should.
But liking men and trusting them were never the same thing.
That was a lesson I had learned the expensive way.
What age gives a woman, more than anything else, is the difference between being admired and being held.
Admiration is loud. Immediate. Cheap sometimes, even when it comes dressed in luxury.
Being held is quieter. It shows up in follow-through.
In consistency. In whether a man listens after he gets access.
In whether the version of him that wants you is the same version that can care for you.
In whether he knows how to stand beside what he has chosen instead of only reaching for it in private.
By then, I had started acting like I had made peace with less.
That is another thing women do when life keeps teaching the same lesson in different outfits.
We begin to call our caution maturity. We call our narrowed expectations wisdom.
We dress our loneliness in nice fabric and tell ourselves we simply enjoy our own company more, which may even be true, but it is not the whole truth.
The whole truth was that I had begun to close certain doors in myself before life could slam them.
It felt safer that way.
More dignified.
Children, for instance.
There was a time the idea of them sat in me differently.
Softer. Closer. Then the years moved. My life filled in around itself.
My friends became wives, mothers, divorcées, wives again, or some complicated combination of all the above.
I loved my nieces and nephews. I loved being auntie.
Loved glossing little mouths, buying sparkly barrettes, teaching girls how to sit inside their beauty without apology.
Still, I had started telling myself maybe motherhood was not my road.
Maybe time had taken that decision out of my hands and made it easier to act like I had chosen the loss before it chose me.
That was one grief.
Not sharp enough to cry over every day.
Present enough to live around.
So no, I was not a woman waiting by the window for rescue. I was not unloved by the world. I was not starving for male attention. I was not naive enough to think one good date or one good comment section exchange meant fate had finally found my address.
I was a woman with a full life.
A good job. A beautiful home. A body I had learned how to keep with affection instead of punishment. Family who loved me noisily, friends who knew my face too well for lies, a city I understood, and a digital world I had learned how to navigate without drowning in everybody else’s projection.
And beneath all of that, if I was honest, I was still a woman who wanted.
I wanted sex that felt like truth. Intimacy that lived the same way online and off. A man who did not arrive as a curated version of himself and then collapse under the weight of reality.
I wanted something that could survive contact with air.
I wanted love.
That was the part I did not say out loud.
Not because I was ashamed of it. Because wanting, when you had already been disappointed enough, could make you feel foolish if you handed it too openly to the light.
So I kept that truth tucked behind my teeth and dressed myself beautifully around it.
Let it live in my body instead of my mouth.
In the way I still noticed a beautiful man when he entered a room.
In the way my skin still woke under the right voice.
In the way hope, though quieter now, had not died.
It had just become expensive—that was all. So I moved carefully.
I looked. I listened. I laughed when something was funny. I flirted when it felt harmless enough to enjoy.
I let the internet be what it was, a crowded room with better lighting and worse consequences. I told myself I knew the difference now between curiosity and connection, between attention and care, between a man being good in comments and being good where it counted.
Most days, I believed myself. Most days, that was enough.
And then there were the other days.
The quieter ones. The ones after the skincare and before sleep.
The ones when my home was beautiful and still.
The ones when I had already picked out tomorrow’s clothes, set my bag by the door, plugged in my phone, rubbed oil into my skin, and stood for one extra second at the bathroom mirror looking at my own face like maybe I was trying to read something there.
On those nights, I could admit the truth a little more honestly.
That I still wanted to be met. That I wanted to be chosen in a way that held up after the choosing. I wanted the kind of love that did not ask me to trade my discernment for softness or my softness for self-protection.
Wanted to stop feeling like romance had become a performance everybody knew how to imitate and nobody knew how to live.
I wanted something real.
Something warm. Something adult. Something that would not disappear the second it came into contact with ordinary life.
I would never have said it like that in public and probably not even to my friends. But there it was still alive in me.
And if I am telling the truth, maybe that is the most vulnerable thing of all.
Not that I had been disappointed. Not that I had grown careful.
Not even that I had learned how to move through the world with discernment and style and enough wisdom to keep my own heart from being mishandled too casually.
It is this:
After everything, I still have not stopped wanting love.