The Difference Between Being Chosen and Being Wanted
Lolly's Lemons: Women assuming commitment and desirability always go hand in hand.
A friend once told me she knew her marriage was ending after an attempt to spice up the bedroom went south. She had dressed up in lingerie, done her hair, and made her way to the bedroom hoping to be met with enthusiasm. Instead, her husband laughed. None of that was necessary, he told her. After all, she was the mother of his children.
The laughter confirmed a longstanding insecurity she had carried from the beginning of the relationship. All of his ex-girlfriends shared an uncanny resemblance: Amazonian, curvaceous women with thirty-inch lace front wigs in every colour except black. My friend on the other hand was a glaringly stark contrast; petite, athletic frame with locs.
Something wasn’t adding up. Naturally, she wondered what was “so special” about her that had inspired him to take such a dramatic detour. Whenever she raised it, he reassured her. “People are allowed to change their type!”
Months later, she found an email receipt for La Perla lingerie purchased for the woman with whom she would eventually discover he was having an affair. The woman looked exactly how she imagined she would. The pattern or, rather, his type, had unsurprisingly returned.
I’ve since encountered this same story in different fonts. The more women I spoke to, the more familiar the story became. The feeling that they had been selected for reasons that had very little to do with desire and the hyperfixation on their role as a relatable girlfriend, a suitable wife, and practical choice.
A woman can spend months, years, even decades, trying to understand why a relationship feels slightly off before she arrives at an inevitability she had been too afraid to internalize.
What if being chosen and being wanted aren’t always the same thing?
Sex and the City explored a version of this cognitive dissonance through Charlotte York. Her husband, Trey, insisted he had no interest in sex until she caught him alone with a Playboy magazine. When Charlotte responded by dressing up in lingerie and presented herself to him, he recoiled.
“It’s not you,“ he told her. For Trey, there was no version of Charlotte that could be both respectable and desirable at the same time.
Freud called this the Madonna-Whore Complex: the tendency for some men to separate love from desire, viewing women as either virtuous, respectable partners they love, commit to and build a life with, or as sexually desirable women they lust after but struggle to fully respect. The idea is more than a century old, yet versions of it continue to surface in surprisingly modern places.
