DESIRE

 Desire, ultimately from Latin desiderare, "to await what the stars will bring"; literally, "from the stars".

Oh, my stars.

The dictionary gives us the expected meaning of "to wish for, to want, to crave" and then explicitly gives another meaning: to have a strong sexual attraction.

Oh, my stars.

________

Of all the ways I'm weird, this is one of the biggest.

Many other men seem to experience desire constantly, and without discrimination. Make a dating site profile with the most objectively ugly picture of a woman you can find, give her a perfectly hideous fake history, and guys will swarm around like flies. DTF? DTF? (That's "down to fuck" if you're lucky enough to not know the acronym.) I can't help but think this kind of indiscriminate desire isn't for a woman at all, but just for a wet dick.

My desire is indiscriminate, too, but only in potential. 

I don't have a physical type. If I look at all the people to whom I have the potential to feel intimately attracted:

• there are a lot of them. Twenty, in fact
• they are all shapes and sizes: tall and willowy, pixie, morbidly obese, blonde, brunette, and redhead; hell, one of the people I love is pretty much bald
• they do tend to be within about ten years of my age. I haven't been attracted to high schoolers since I was in high school myself
• they all share a set of qualities I find attractive: intelligence (broadly defined), compassion, humour, self-awareness
• as such, the number could go higher.

So that's potential. What unlocks it?

I discovered the demisexual label in 2015 and seized on it eagerly: it's always nice to find out you're a perfectly normal zebra and not some kind of weird fucked up horse named Waldo. Demisexual: unable to experience desire without an emotional connection. 

But that's not actually true. I don't need as much of an emotional connection as I had thought, probably because I wasn't born this way, I made myself this way in grade nine.

 It turns out that the easiest way to unlock my desire is...to desire me. 

Seems obvious, doesn't it?  But while I have been grateful for an abundance of love in my life, comparatively little of it has led to horizontal refreshment. I don't say that to elicit pity: my body count is higher than I'd like it to be. 

It's possible I've missed a hint or two. There are times I'm fairly certain in the moment that okay, that felt like an invitation but what if I'm wrong? If I'm wrong and I've gotten so far as to disclose my own desire, the only thing to do is to find a hole and cover myself up with it. Eternally, for a start. 

And so I have slept with multiple women -- that's slept with, as in shared a bed and slumber -- without so much as kissing them. I've wanted to: if we're close enough to share a bed, we're close enough to do things together in it. But without a move from you, that want is easily suppressed. Kiss me with intent, though, and I'm apt to tumble in short order.

I've said this before and people still don't believe it, but I'm much more likely to want to love you in the morning than the evening. I don't want to go to bed with you near as much as I want to wake up with you: to see your face stripped of all its masks. Knowing you feel safe enough with me to grant me that vision is a very powerful aphrodisiac. And morning breath actually cancels out.

Love is "feeling vulnerable, safely". Desire is an invitation to love.