For a long time I confused wanting with qualification.
Someone wanted me hard enough — wanted to marry me, wanted to hand over his life, wanted to be seen as devoted — and I took the wanting as evidence of something. I organized around it.
I tried to help it become what it was promising to be.
This is what most of us do. We’re taught that being wanted is the thing to secure. So when someone wants us with enough force we start working — maintaining it, deserving it, not losing it. We build the ramp. We find the path in and then hand ourselves over.
This was my code.
I did this for lifetimes. With elegance.
I formed myself into the shape of a man’s desires.
Into the shape of the whole world’s desires.
Here is what I know now.
A man’s desire is information about him only.
It tells me almost nothing about whether he can be what I require.
A man can want you with his whole chest and still dissolve in the driveway on the day of your biopsy. He can write you letters of extraordinary beauty and be completely unreachable when you need someone to just talk to you about real life. He can want the version of you he’s constructed and flinch at the actual one.
Wanting me is the beginning of an audition.
Not the outcome of one.
The door is visible. I am not hiding.
What I am no longer doing is building a ramp to it, softening the threshold, making myself easier to reach so that someone who cannot actually hold me has a better chance of getting in.
The mountain doesn’t rearrange itself for the climber.
I spent a long time believing that withholding the ramp was cruelty. That making someone find their own way to me was a kind of coldness. I understand now that it is the opposite. The ramp is what’s cruel — it lets people arrive somewhere they were never equipped to stay.
Come through the door as what’s required. Or don’t come through.
I’ll be here either way.
Because I can no longer change.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.