Are you living in a DESIRE VACUUM?

It’s not all about sex. The last year of lockdowns made it harder than ever to feel seen, › heard and wanted,

I look down at my outfit: a version of the same cerealstained big-jumperand-leggings combo I have been sporting for the last four weeks, and tell the easiest lie I will utter that day.

Interactions like this – with another faceless softboi on yet another mindless dating app – have become my drug of choice over the last year. Well, I’m not even sure it’s a choice any more. More like a form of habitual self-medication determined by market factors. A new batch of an old substance that has flooded the system, in the total absence of any other new highs.

I, like other single women across the land, used to get my hits from other places. A fleeting look on a train held for a little longer than usual. A deeper inhalation in a lift the day you’re wearing your new perfume. A flirtatious interaction with someone (anyone) at the gym. It doesn’t even have to be sexual in its intent. It could be a colleague commenting on your haircut, or a friend noticing the snugness of your new killer jeans, or that day you really just nailed your eyeliner flick. But what happens when you’re suddenly alone for 95% of your time, and those fleeting moments of casual desire, of being noticed by others, cease to build up?

Over the last year of lockdowns, people have assumed that the hardest thing about living alone and being single in this period is the loneliness, the lack of ability to date and have sex without rules or to travel freely at home and abroad. And that has been brutal. But for me, the void left where the usual quota of desire once sat has been worse. I don’t just mean my desire for others, although that is important. But almost more important are the opportunities to experience (or, at the very least, imagine) other people’s desire for me.

Because desire is about being intoxicated by how others see you. Seeing yourself reflected in their eyes as a sexual creature with the power to change their direction of travel with one movement. I don’t mean it in a narcissistic or arrogant way. That need is a basic human impulse. It is OK to want to be wanted, and equally as OK to suffer when you feel invisible in society, having once contributed so much to it.

You don’t just have to take my word for it. When I asked psychosexual therapist Lohani Noor about why this feeling is so important to us, she explained: “What humans actually crave is connection, be that sexual, loving, emotional [or] intellectual. What we are really seeking in many ways is a reflection of ourselves, a desire to be seen, heard and held, and the desire to do that for another being. How else do we know that we exist?”

It is that feeling of not existing, of total invisibility, that has been plaguing me, and the millions of others like me, since last March. Without us even trying, our normal lives provide myriad opportunities for us to be seen by others. To rack up a surplus of desire credits by going out to bars, going on dates, being hilarious with our friends, feeling useful and needed by our families, interacting with colleagues, enriching ourselves with travel, that we can then bank for quiet Sunday evenings alone on the sofa. But this new world is sensorily flat: no smell, touch, taste or sight that goes beyond a screen. It is 2-D in every sense, and every day is one long Sunday night.

In the first lockdown, I compensated for this drop-off in what I now like to call

“What are you wearing?” “Right now, every day is one long Sunday night”

“desire touchpoints” by amping up desireadjacent things: I wore too much make-up to the supermarket. I dug out a pair of tiny cut-off denim shorts that I’m 100% too old for and swanned around my local park eyefucking anything with a Y chromosome and a pulse. I messaged men I had zero intention of ever meeting a multitude of filth on dating apps. I wasn’t alone. Feeld, the dating app designed for couples and single people, saw a 50% increase in registrations during the first half of 2020, compared to the same period in 2019, and there was a 1,500% increase (no, that’s not a typo) in existing users indicating that they were interested in “sexting” on their profiles. I’m pretty sure that if you could have harnessed the power of the sexual energy that was pinging around single-cyberspace during spring 2020, you’d have enough to refrigerate the world’s supply of vaccines.

Then, as the year went on, like the drip-drip-drip of a leaking tap, the thump of my own desire became a banging thud at my pulse points. I needed louder, more dangerous, more daring things to satiate it. The world opened back up again, and suddenly we could date, go to bars and restaurants, travel, meet friends outdoors.

Living alone and not seeing any of my vulnerable older family members became a sort of blessing, meaning I could go about my life as much as the government restrictions would allow.

In those periods between lockdowns, when restrictions were temporarily relaxed in certain areas, I noticed an escalating pattern of sexual impulsivity in myself and my interactions with others. Normally oh-so risk-averse in my dating life, I became increasingly emotionally reckless. I stockpiled men the way other people bulk-bought loo roll, building collections of suitors I could go to when I needed that hit of dopamine. I tumbled into dates and fell hard for those whose names I now can’t remember. Looking back, I had nothing in common with any of them, but I convinced myself I did because at any moment, the brush of someone’s leg against mine under a table, the scent of their neck as they leaned in to kiss me hello, could be taken away. It didn’t matter that I liked them, it mattered that they liked me. That they saw me and validated my existence, if only for one night. When they ghosted me or “let me down gently” after three dates, it hurt more then it ever did in the before time, because it confirmed what I’d already suspected: I’d been invisible all along.

Noor likens human cravings for desire to those for food. “If you starve someone, they will react in a couple of predictable ways,” she explains. “They may decide to push down feelings of hunger and ‘shut down’. Others may scavenge food from others, taking risks to get the food they desire. When food becomes available again, some may be so shut down that they continue to starve themselves, or they may go absolutely crazy on a mad binge.”

So that is what I did. I binged men, and each feast left me feeling emptier and more alone than the last until, finally, the government yet again cut off my supply.

In the end, the lockdown that took hold in January was probably the cold turkey I needed. It gave me a much-needed opportunity to step away from the hamster wheel of dating and the hit-high-crash triumvirate the desire vacuum had created. I am still talking to men, I am still dating and I’m enjoying the odd frisson of desire it brings. But I am mindful that I no longer need them to see me, now that I can see myself so clearly.