Love & desire: a failure?
23rd June 2026
When love and desire drift apart in a long-term relationship, we tend to experience it as a failure. What if it's the opposite?
We made love safe. Familiar. We built something stable enough to rest in — and
in doing so, desire lost its original anchor. It became untethered.
That's not a bug. It's what we were unconsciously working towards all along.
We may yearn for the early days when love and desire seemed perfectly aligned — when we were 'in' love — but it was we who separated them. We succeeded, perhaps
too well.
The question isn't how to go back. It's whether we can hold love in what Alan Watts called a wisdom of insecurity — without grasping, without needing it to stay still.
Because that's when desire becomes possible again. Not recaptured. Re-oriented.