the hunger to be chosen

There is something intoxicating about being chosen. This feeling of being wanted among all the possible people someone had the option of choosing. That moment when their attention settles on you, and you hear, in one form or another, “You are the one I want.”

We imagine that this feeling will bring certainty. That all the questions that we have quietly carried within ourselves will finally go silent. Am I attractive enough? Interesting enough? Loveable enough to make someone stay? Their desire appears to answer all of them at once. The wondering stops, and we mistake the silence for peace.

Perhaps this is why being chosen can feel so much like being loved. It offers this exquisite relief of no longer having to wonder. But selection is not intimacy. Someone can want your beauty, your tenderness, your devotion, or the comfort of your presence without ever learning how to care for the person beneath those offerings. And that is where the hunger becomes dangerous. When we are desperate to be chosen, we become enchanted by someone’s desire for us that we forget to ask how they intend to honor the access we have given them.

I think back to when I was fourteen years old; I had started high school, and around that age my attention had begun drifting towards boys. My father must have sensed that I had entered that particular stage of girlhood because one day, out of nowhere, he asked me this question.

“If a boy that you liked approached you and asked you out. What would you say?”

I studied his face, surprised that he was even asking me this because my father was very strict. Convinced it was a trick question, I answered, “No.”

He chuckled. “Well, you don’t want to say no if you like the boy. That’s not a true response.” And before I could change my answer to yes, he stopped me.

“You should ask him, “What are your intentions?”

At that age, I did not fully understand the importance of that question. I thought being asked was the important part. In my mind, if a boy likes you and you like him. Simple. He noticed you among all of the other girls and decided that you were the person that he wanted. What else is there to know?

But my father understood something that I would take years to learn: someone’s desire for you does not reveal their intentions toward you. And to be chosen is flattering. There is no denial there. It can make you feel beautiful, singular, and briefly protected from rejection, but before surrendering to the pleasure of being wanted, there is another question worth asking: What are you being chosen for?

Are you being chosen to be known, cherished, and built beside? Or are you being chosen because your beauty excites them, your attention and affection comforts them, your availability benefits or conveniences them, or your devotion makes their life easier? These are not the same offer. They may look the same but only in the dark.

Sometimes we do not hunger for the person as much as we hunger for what their desire will allow us to believe about ourselves.

There are people who can pick up that you are in need of this feeling of being chosen. It clings to you, and people sense when being chosen matters more to us than being treated well. Some will even use that knowledge to determine how little they offer without losing access to us.

When I first started dating, I believed that attention alone was enough. This was years after my father had asked me the question about intentions. He died only a few months after that conversation, and I did not know then that this would become one of the last pieces of wisdom he would leave me. For years, I carried the question without fully understanding it, and because he was no longer there, I could not ask what else he had meant. And maybe losing my father during that delicate stage of my life created this hunger in ways I had not yet named. Perhaps, this part of me began searching for the safety of being chosen because I had already learned how suddenly someone could disappear from your life. I eventually caught the gaze of someone who did not want me as much as he wanted ‘something in me’ that might quiet his own insecurities and fill a lack he had found in himself. I was too busy being flattered to understand that I was being used.

In my search for love and an honest bit of desperation, I waited around while he pursued other women. I waited. I watched. I wondered. I poured my free hours into thoughts of him, and I let my mind linger too long on where he was, what he was doing, who he was with instead of the important questions of who I was and what I would or would not tolerate. I was pulled close, pushed away, and pulled close again until I could no longer tell the two apart. We fell between the status of friends, lovers, then something like enemies, and underneath it all was this hunger that kept the fire lit. It is what hunger does. It makes you abandon yourself. Your values, your boundaries, and the particular, sweet things that make you who are you are become casualties of someone else’s emptiness. This someone convinces you that you are the one who is lacking, so you twist and turn yourself into the shape of their desire. And then, if you are unlucky, they only love you for the person you were never meant to become.

I spent so much time wondering whether they would choose me that I forgot to ask whether I still chose myself.

When the truth finally arrived, I internalized the results and developed this fear of rejection. I began to date to outrun this fear, which only fed the hunger more. For years I asked the same helpless question: Why am I never the one? It followed me into every relationship, even the long ones, where I would find myself lying beside someone who had seemingly chosen me but I could not shake the feeling of starving.

This feeling of hunger was the clue I had missed for many years. If being chosen could still not fill me, then being chosen was never the true hunger. The real hunger was older and quieter. I did not merely want to be chosen. I wanted to be seen. The intimacy of someone learning not only your heart but the soul beneath. Every person I believed I wanted became only a mirror I was hoping would reflect me at a flattering angle. I wanted proof that I existed, that I mattered, and that I was not nothing. I’ve since learned that no one can hand you that proof. It was never theirs to give.

Eventually, after years of arranging my life around the possibility of rejection, I began to understand that every hour spent monitoring, worrying about another person was an hour that was being taken away from my own becoming. Eventually, the exhaustion of abandoning myself became greater than the fear of being left. I stopped asking whether I was truly wanted and started asking what I wanted. I found joy in my own company, and I filled a once-hollow place of hunger with all of the things that made me happy and all of the things that kept me full. And at last, it was peace I found.

This is what I believe my father was trying to hand me at fourteen, long before I could hold it. Not Does he want you? — but more of what are their intentions? What do they intend to do with the access you are giving them? Life would eventually teach me the question that must follow: Are they worthy of the beautiful life you are building? You cannot ask that question until you make sure your own cup is full. So build the life first and become so full that a person is now a delicious addition rather than the whole event because the hunger does not quiet the day someone finally chooses you. It quiets the day you stop mistaking their choosing for your worth.

With love,

The Muse and the Melody

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