Is This Delicious?
Is this
delicious?
On having an appetite for your life and learning to taste what you’re hungry for.
An appetite for your life.
When you’re living a whole life full of adventure, music, community, friends, and hobbies, you feel everything.
A touch on the small of your back, brief and almost casual, that stays with you after the hand is gone. Eye contact held a little longer than necessary. You look away smiling, then look back. There’s a little more warmth in the room now.
And then the blush. That warmth arriving in your cheeks before you’ve decided how much you want to reveal. You can choose your words, try to keep your expression composed, but you can’t always talk your skin out of telling on you. Perhaps they notice. Perhaps being noticed makes you blush a little more. There’s something beautifully vulnerable about it: the body giving you away before you’ve found the words.
A suggestive text while you’re standing in the grocery store, choosing peaches. Suddenly you’re taking your time. You have a secret tucked into the most ordinary part of your afternoon.
And you’re receptive to so much more than another person. The breeze slipping through your shirt. The sun resting on your bare shoulders, warm enough that you close your eyes and linger. In the shower, you notice the water landing along your collarbones, the scent of soap, the steam gathering around you. For once, you aren’t rehearsing a conversation or rushing toward the next thing. You’re here, enjoying the feel of being in your body.
Music has a physical pull. A bass line catches you somewhere beneath thought, and your hips answer before you’ve decided to dance. Fruit tastes vivid. You catch the juice with your thumb. You wear something soft because you want to feel it against your skin all day.
There’s an unhurried pleasure in these moments. You let yourself notice. You let yourself linger. Your attention keeps finding something lovely to rest on, and the ordinary day feels generous with possibility.
When you’re buzzing with life like this, desire has room to wander. A glance can be a pleasure all by itself. Flirtation can sweeten an afternoon without needing to become anything. You can enjoy the anticipation, the little uncertainty, the space between a smile and whatever happens next.
Your body feels alive, and you relish it all.
When you’re dripping with it, almost everything feels electric.
That’s what I mean by a life saturated with eros. There’s pleasure threaded through your days. You’re laughing with your friends, getting absorbed in something you love, hearing a song that makes you move your hips in the kitchen. You have an appetite for your life.
And I think that changes how you experience sex. What you reach for. What you settle for. What you can actually taste.
What are you hungry for?
Because if sex is the most erotic thing happening in your life, it can be easier to tolerate mediocre sex. It can still feel huge when the rest of your life feels flat. Being wanted can become the moment you come back into your body. A little attention can feel like a feast.
The hunger is real. There’s nothing embarrassing about wanting touch, pleasure, or someone’s hands on you. But hunger can make it difficult to tell how much you’re enjoying what’s actually happening.
Do I like the way this person touches me? Do I feel curious, present, free to ask for what I want? Am I savoring this, or am I mostly relieved that it’s happening?
You can want something intensely and still find that the experience itself isn’t all that delicious.
Room to notice.
When your life is saturated with eros, you have more room to notice that. You have other ways of feeling alive. You know the pleasure of losing yourself in music, of a conversation that leaves you buzzing, of doing something simply because your body says yes, more of that.
So when someone enters your life, you have something to compare the feeling to. You can notice whether you like yourself in their company. Whether their touch invites you further into your body. Whether you leave an encounter feeling full, or already anxious about when you’ll get the next one.
A rich life won’t make you immune to longing or confusing chemistry. You can have wonderful friends, work you love, a hundred small pleasures, and still ache to be touched. But sex has a different weight when it isn’t carrying your entire need for pleasure, intimacy, and aliveness.
There’s room to ask a better question.
Beyond Do they want me? Beyond Is this exciting? Even beyond How badly do I want this?
Is this delicious?
Is this person adding something beautiful to a life that already feels alive? Or are they giving me a hit of something I’m starving for?
That’s the juicy distinction.