thinking abt "wanting to be wanted, desired, liked". its a weird class of desire. out of your control, but also, out of the *other person's* control. you cannot will yourself to desire or like someone. which makes someone else's desire to be wanted, liked a weird sort of imposition. at most someone can ask you to display signs which might convince them that you want/like them.
you can do things that make you more likable, wantable in general. you can sand off your more unpleasant habits. you can become hotter. its much more difficult (and see as more neurotic? because fruitless?) to do something like that with someone specific. but it also seems like when you do that to some extent youre trading off your actual goal, which is like wanting the particular you that you are to be wanted. of course, sometimes your ideal self-conception and the things you suspect will make people like you align, and then you dont get the tradeoff. but not in the general case
idk. my instinct is that we should try to like. discourage this kind of desire in ourself. a sort of radical emotional self sufficiency. but its hard to express it in a way that doesnt sound sort of mentally sick
the thing that's really cool about this type of desire is how it fuels an actually-prehistoric industry in fake silver bullets that will make people love you without you having to change or conceal who you are. there's this this beautiful line threading from ancient spells to love potions to aphrodisiac foods to off-label sex drugs to pheremone perfumes and cosmo listicles and PUA cognitive science. all trying to square this circle where being desperate to be loved for who you are means that other people need to change.
You are taking "desire to be desired" too literally. It is not (always) about simple aesthetic desire and beauty. It is more of a clumsy abbreviation for the deeper, and I think quite legitimate, human need to be accepted by another, and to be accepted for who you really are rather than for the performances you layer in in an attempt to conform to conventional standards.
Of course, it's a journey and not everyone has realized this. They may think they just want "desire" without realizing that they really want acceptance. But love potions and plastic surgery are not a response to this want, but the essence of it: they promise only the hollow kind of attraction that most people quickly grow unsatisfied with.
The way you close the loop isn't by eradicating the part of you that desires acceptance. That is a fundamental human need; to repress it is to hate the self. The solution is to first accept yourself with all the grace and patience that you yearn to have from another. And then you can develop clarity on whether another person accepts you, or merely desires some projection of you.
I don't think this is right.
"Desire to be desired" means many things, I'll concede, but while I chose one in particular to focus on above, what you're talking about is roughly the same thing, just weaker because "acceptance" is a lower bar. It isn't true that most people who want to be loved or desired want only acceptance, but insofar as that is what someone wants, they will run into the same issue: either they have to change -- not being accepted for who they are but altering who they are to be accepted -- or others have to change on their behalf. The latter is, admittedly, much easier to do with acceptance, because people have more conscious control over what they accept and you might be able to persuade them.
You sort of acknowledge this, I think -- what you frame as the "solution" involves changing your nature, and yet it isn't even a solution, only a prerequisite! You'll have to change much more than this if you hope to win acceptance without changing others, and when you're done, you will have left behind the version of yourself that wanted acceptance for who they were, even if you still think of yourself as the same person, and even if your new self is who you really are. And so, unsurprisingly, people look for silver bullets to change others; but because acceptance is milder and more conscious than desire, the silver bullets tend to be more social, like rhetorical devices and moral norms.
If you believe that acceptance is a lower bar than desire, or that self-acceptance is a form of changing your nature, then you have not yet grasped the essence of acceptance.
It isn't true that most people who want to be loved or desired want only acceptance
Delete the word "only" here and you have the insight. Acceptance is the greater ambition. Most people who want "love" or "desire" are experiencing a desire for a superficial thing that is just the shadow of acceptance on the cave wall.
This conversation reminds me of the passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance where the protagonist is developing his theory of Quality and the other philosophers object: "So Quality is just what you like?" The misunderstanding is packed into the word just: Quality is what you like, and that's what makes it such a profound and axiomatic concept in his theory!
Acceptance, or the lack thereof, sits upstream of all this theorizing about "desire" and "one's nature." Attaining self-acceptance doesn't change your nature. The unchanged nature is the thing you are accepting.
Nah!
When people authentically change themselves to be more like what others love or accept, they typically rationalize this process by positing an essential nature which is the “real” them, and which they’re just polishing into its ideal form. This is sort of what I think OP is alluding to in saying “sometimes your ideal self-conception and the things you suspect will make people like you align”. Similarly, when I say learning to accept yourself involves changing your nature and you say it doesn’t, well, it’s self-evidently a change in yourself, so we’re quibbling over what “nature” is, right? Of course if you want to be the kind of person who feels good about themselves, you might be willing to overlook the fact that this is a radical change in your character, that in fact the magnitude of that change is its selling point. But maybe it doesn’t bother you, if you’re changing into something you like better? And so on for, you know, “personal growth” or whatever.
There’s also some sort of semantic confusion in your thinking that acceptance isn’t a lower bar than desire. Of course, all of us accept far more people than we desire, and give acceptance more readily. My best guess at what’s going on here is that you’re using “acceptance” to mean a deep, holistic, intimate acceptance of your whole person, and “desire” to mean a superficial desire for your surface-level qualities, but these are not obvious or natural meanings of those words, nor necessarily how they were being used upthread!
The thing, look, you can always say “everyone just needs to learn to accept themselves”, defining that term in a deep spiritual way rather than in more conventional terms, but this is not that different from saying “everyone just needs to find Jesus.” It’s a perfectly fine way to understand life and psychology, but starting from that point makes it harder to contribute insights to a discussion, not easier.
