You asked me once whether I have fantasies, and I remember taking a little too long to answer because it is a two-part question: one that feels very intimate, and the other, that feels like someone has just handed you a mic at a party and is waiting for you to share your dirty little secret, so let me give you the honest answer: yes, I do, and actually I think I have far too many, and they usually begin with a person catching my attention in an extraordinary way, and suddenly I have heart-shaped glasses installed over my eyes. Somebody says something in a particular way, or remembers a tiny thing I mentioned three conversations ago, or is nerdy in that passionate way where they can talk about something for far too long and still somehow make you want to hear the rest, and I am left wondering what they were like at sixteen, what they listen to when they cannot sleep, whether they are pursuing something because they genuinely love it or because they have built an identity around being good at it. I think I have always been more interested in fantasising about my crush than actually talking to them, which doesn\u2019t sound very mature coming from a person turning 23 in two months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I start imagining conversations before we have even had one. I imagine telling them things I would normally not share with anyone else, unless they are familiar with the trail of my thoughts and can circle me back to where we started. I imagine sitting beside them while we read something neither of us completely understands, both of us underlining the same sentence and coming to completely different conclusions. Intellectual compatibility turns me on in a way I don\u2019t think physical attraction ever can. I have always found somebody who is genuinely obsessed with an idea much sexier than somebody who is conventionally good-looking, although I reserve the right to appreciate good-looking people too; I am not writing this from a monastery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also do tend to get the ick very easily; it is almost scientific in its efficiency. I have had crushes disappear because somebody forgot something I thought they would remember, because they were self-obsessed, or they seemed to have no awareness of the effect they had on other people, or because I realised that what I had taken for mystery was just someone who was absent from life itself. And the unfair part is that the real person has usually done nothing wrong, they have just declined to be the person I had been writing for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which makes fantasy sound much less innocent than it is, but also much more complicated. Laplanche and Pontalis (1967\/1973, p. 314) describe fantasy as a scene, and I swear by that because I don\u2019t really fantasise about people so much as arrangements. I want the right music, the right sentence at the right moment; I want to be wearing something that makes me feel slightly more confident than usual, and I want them close enough that I notice their perfume but not so close that I have to decide what to do with my hands. A fantasy is a kind of performance; you don\u2019t just want someone, you create the conditions under which wanting them feels inevitable, until even the wanting itself starts to feel as though it was always going to happen. That is why the scene has to be perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe that is why sexting has always been so strange for me. I have had enough people insist that I am overthinking it to know that I am definitely overthinking it, but the problem isn\u2019t a lack of imagination, it is too much imagination, and all of it is mine. In my head, desire has its own atmosphere, its own pacing, its own little logic, and then someone else appears with their version of what is happening, and all of a sudden there are two separate imaginations trying to occupy the same room. All I can think is, I did not consent to a co-writer, so why are you messing with my story?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is ironic is that I am endlessly interested in other people\u2019s fantasies too. Porn itself doesn\u2019t do very much for me, but tell me what someone watches when they are alone and I am fascinated. I don\u2019t mean that somebody\u2019s fantasy is secretly their \u201ctrue self,\u201d because that would be a very convenient and very stupid conclusion to draw from a complex human being. Someone who is frighteningly competent all day may fantasise about surrender; someone who hates being looked at might want to be watched; someone who presents themselves as fiercely independent may want, just for a little while, to have someone else decide everything. Chivers and her colleagues\u2019 work on sexual arousal is particularly compelling for much the same reason: the body, the mind, and the categories people use to describe themselves do not always line up into one neat little category (Chivers et al., 2004). And I trust the misalignment; it feels real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Did you know there is a very famous kind of fantasy that couples have called a \u201cunicorn\u201d? I kept seeing the word on dating apps, and thinking, why does this sound less like meeting a person and more like ordering a very specific mythical creature? The ideal unicorn is a bisexual woman who is attracted to both partners, is comfortable with their arrangement and is open to what they already have going on, and I think that is the part that gets me, because she is being wanted and imagined at the same time, and those are not the same thing. I actually read Johnston\u2019s work on unicorn dynamics later and felt weirdly vindicated, because she writes about the way this imagined \u201cthird\u201d can already have a role waiting for her before she even enters the relationship (Johnston, 2024). Anyway, let’s talk about bisexuality while we\u2019re at it, because the moment people hear that I am bisexual, they suddenly become strangely invested in making sense of it. Which do you prefer, men or women? Who do you usually date? What\u2019s your type? Do you eventually settle down with one? Like, wait, let me just check the graph I\u2019ve been maintaining since forever, because what part of \u201cI like people\u201d is not considered sufficiently rigorous? Yoshino’s phrase, the \u201cepistemic contract of bisexual erasure,\u201d sounds terribly academic until you realise how often bisexuality is treated as something that needs to become legible before people will believe it (Yoshino, 2000, p. 353).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe that is also where waiting comes in, not waiting for a text, but that magical stretch between liking someone and actually wanting them, when you have noticed them but have not yet decided what they are going to mean. There is still room there, you can watch the way they go about their day, notice what they get excited about, wonder what they are like when nobody is looking and leave the rest alone for a while. Barthes (1977\/1978, pp. 37\u201340) writes about waiting as part of desire itself, and that feels closer to what I mean than the usual idea of waiting around for someone to finally give you what you want. The person is more lively when they are still capable of being several things at once, before one answer closes all the other possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That kind of uncertainty is specific because most other uncertainty makes me want to start a to-do list. I am the eldest daughter, you know, planning is practically muscle memory at this point. I have a PDF with my family\u2019s Aadhaar cards and what not, and \u201cwe’ll figure it out when we get there\u201d has never sounded adventurous to me; I need an itinerary weeks in advance, preferably with screenshots. There is comfort in knowing what happens next. Control is not power to me, it is survival, or at least something that feels like it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fantasy gets around that beautifully. It is a one-way road and I am the driver, and I am a terrible driver, genuinely, an atrocious one, but at least in my fantasy, we all get to stay alive. Nobody else is reaching over to grab the wheel, I can leave someone mysterious for as long as I want, make them softer when I need softness, more difficult when I want the chase, change the weather, change my mind. There is no awkward negotiation about where this is going, because, in my head, I already know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Barthes, R. (1978). A Lover\u2019s Discourse: Fragments<\/em> (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1977).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chivers, M. L., Rieger, G., Latty, E., & Bailey, J. M. (2004). A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal. Psychological Science<\/em>, 15(11), 736\u2013744. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/j.0956-7976.2004.00750.x<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Johnston, S. W. (2024). You enjoy being a second class citizen: Unicorn dynamics and identity negotiation on subreddit r\/polyamory. Sexualities<\/em>, 27(3), 577\u2013593. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/13634607221107821<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psycho-analysis <\/em>(D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1967).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yoshino, K. (2000). The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure. Stanford Law Review<\/em>, 52(2), 353\u2013461. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.2307\/1229482<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n