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Key points
- For human beings, attraction has more to do with being attractive than being attracted to another.
- We desire not the other person, but the other person’s desire. We want to be wanted.
- Desire is that which humanizes us by helping us to overcome our basic needs for the sake of love.
When seeking truth, wisdom, and self-understanding, one rarely thinks that pop music is the place to look. While the poets are liable to show us the grim image of a dead man “who was once handsome and tall as you” (The Waste Land), our radios blare songs about how we’re going to stay “Forever Young.” Philosophy says “know thyself”; pop music, “Lose Yourself.” Scripture chides us for our petty vanity (Ecclesiastes), while nine out of 10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 exalt it.
The lyrics found in pop music are notoriously vapid, offering little insight into the human condition but a clear window into our wishes and illusions. They show us what we think we want—easy money, cheap sex, fame, glamor, and, judging by some of today’s most popular tunes, a juvenile notion of romance—but rarely articulate our anguish, struggles, and deeper longings.
Every once in a while, however, a popular song will come along and say something profound about the plight of human existence. There are, of course, those that do so self-consciously—Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind,” Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” Afroman’s “Because I Got High”—and then there are those that seem to hit upon an insight by accident, almost in spite of themselves. A good example of the latter can be found in Cheap Trick’s 1977 rock anthem “I Want You to Want Me.” The tune is a catchy one, its lyrics too memorable to need rehearsing. It is iconic, one of those rare songs that so infiltrates the culture to the degree that even people who never seek it out know it by heart.
And yet what is interesting about “I Want You to Want Me” is not its notoriety but the fact that it perceives the nature of sexual desire more adroitly than some of the most renowned theorists. For human beings, it suggests, attraction has more to do with being attractive than being attracted to another. Our desire is predicated on the desire of our partner or crush, whose interest (whether real or simply hoped for) spurs our interest. Said differently, we desire not the other person, but the other person’s desire. We want to be wanted.
In order to understand why this is the case, we have first to grasp a distinction that few observers of the human condition seem to take into account. That is the distinction between need and desire. As (admittedly very strange) animals, human beings have some basic needs that are oriented toward survival. We need food. We need shelter. We need sleep. We need a means of perpetuating the species. All of these needs can be met fairly simply if one is content to meet and not exceed them. Animals, after all, find ways to survive on minimal food, shelter, and sleep, and don’t seem to have too much trouble reproducing themselves.
This is where human desire enters the frame and complicates things in a dramatic way. For human beings are not content with simply having our needs met—none of us aspires to mere survival. We want to thrive. We want food that tastes good, shelter that is spacious and aesthetically pleasing, sleep that is restful, plenty of time for leisure, and sex that is not simply for the sake of reproduction but for love, enjoyment, and pleasure. We want, that is, much more than we need. We desire the things that make us human and not merely animals.
Such desire affects all aspects of human life, from our higher loves of art and culture to our more commonplace activities like wearing make-up, getting our hair cut, and going for a stroll around the neighborhood. But, as with all human things, the desire to transcend our basic animal needs is nowhere more keenly expressed than in our sexuality. It is in sex, most of all, that need gives way to desire and the fight for survival is overcome.
Even when we eat lavish meals, still we feed our hunger. When we live in large, ornately decorated houses, still we shelter ourselves from the dangers of nature. One of the supreme pleasures of leisure is the feeling that our body has been given the rest it needs. But with sex, which compels us to seek a partner for the biological purpose of reproduction, we are capable of breaking the stranglehold of animal need and realizing the full potential of human desire. It is only human sexuality, broadly understood to include such things as the sublimation of the sex drive into art and religion, that can pursue desire for the sake of desire, unmooring itself from brute animal need.
To want to be wanted is to overcome the animal thrust for self-preservation. It is to forego one’s instincts for the sake of another’s desire. It is to realize one’s full humanity out of love rather than to force oneself out of need. Desiring to be desired is a recognition not only of one’s own humanity but of the humanity of another, someone who is also capable of desiring and not simply needing.
Sex, then, is never really about sex, but something deeper, more intimate, more human. Sex is about our ability to hold something more sacred than survival, to love another rather than satiate one’s needs. And so, even if “All You Need Is Love” turns out to be as false as it is trite—you need many things, but love is not one of them—the desire that inspired it isn’t. For such songs, like our humanity itself, are sung into being by a desire to desire one another, and that is more necessary than anything we need.
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