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Why do we always want what we can't have?

Everyone is familiar with Dickens novel Great Expectations, which stars the evil Miss Havisham engineering a controversial relationship between the sweet orphan Pip and her adopted daughter Estella. In modern day terms, the dynamics of this relationship can be succulently termed the ‘treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen’ scenario (from now on TMKK). The question is then, would Pip have still been so utterly devoted to winning the affections of the arrogant Estella, had she immediately given in to his leanings? Was the admiration that he had for her, inexplicitly bound up with the denial of what he wanted? Or would he have quickly tired of her and moved on if there was no gaming aspect to his juvenile courtship with the prim little snob? Maybe yes, maybe no – I don’t know.

What I do know, however, is that the TMKK game is, and has for a long time, been prevalent amongst my courting friends. In fact, one of my longest suffering friends fought with the afflictions of the TMKK game for nearly three years. It took her that long to rinse the heart from her eyes and realise, he was not a prince in a frog outfit, he just wasn’t interested in her – and the only reason that he was occasionally bed-shared with her was, well, because he couldn’t help himself. She is, after all, one hell of a lady.

But, I am aware, that I am talking about this as if I am inoculated, which is of course, incorrect. About a year ago, I met a hot guy. He represented everything that I wanted in my life at that time. He was tidy (yes – this is high in my list of priorities, don’t ask), intelligent (he read books and was witty), he was stylish (wore a careful mix of smart and trendy, new and old) – and he had a job (a.k.a. he was – and very much still is – independent and had a sense of self worth).

Everything started perfectly; the first date was full laughs, looks and sparks. Excellent. A few like this followed and then a bizarre thing began happening. Rather than turning up with flowers, he started to arrive late. I chose, at the time, to ignore this and except his excuses (stuck in the office, traffic, my brother called…) as genuine because I am, after all, a reasonable person – I told myself.

I’ll spare both you and I the grim details of the events that followed other than to say that his phone number was, or should I say has been, deleted on numerous occasions, notably after either a booty call or a shameless drink dialling experience. With retrospect, this was the TMKK game at its finest: there was no punishment too great that this man could inflict on me that I would not tolerate In The Name of Love.
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Between a few friends of mine, the TMKK game is explainable by what we call the Rat Scenario (RS). Not because he was a rat (we are too big for name calling – and of course renaming A Love as a rat doesn’t change it in any other way but semantically. You can’t PR your heart, come on). And on this subject, I have to credit a friend (actually a friend of a friend), a psychologist, who first introduced me to this interpretation of the otherwise ridiculous love game. The RS, as we shall now refer to it, she tells us, can be explained by an experiment in which lab rats where fed through a tube into their cage.. Imagine this: three cages with three sets of rats and three tubes. Got that? Right, lady in white coat (could be a man, but in my imagination scientists are women) feeds the three cages every day BUT, she feeds cage A everyday through the tube at the same time. She feeds cage B at random through the tube and cage C through the tube, never. In my interpretation they don’t starve, the food just isn’t administered through the tube; it is put in another way.

Now, what is significant is that the rats in cage C never wait by the tube because they don’t associate it with their primary need (food). But the rats in BOTH cage A and in cage B ALWAYS wait by the bottom of the tube. This is interpreted to mean that even though the rats in B aren’t always fed through the tube they associate it with what they need (food) and so regardless of whether or not the tube provides them with that need, they wait.

Now, think back to my friend – OK, or to me – and you can think of us as a little bit like the rats in cage B. If the guys had never given us anything we would have been like the rats in cage C – we wouldn’t have associated them with what we need (substitute food with Love). If we had been like the rats in A, it would have made sense for us to wait by the tube because that was what provided us with what we needed. Thus, this can lead us to conclude that it was the intermittent provision of Love administered through the tube which kept us waiting, for what we believed to turn into something more like what was going on next door in cage A. But it wasn’t, we were stuck in the mother of all cages, cage B. The cage of the desperate hopefuls (but you have to give us credit for our optimism. The way I thought of it at the time, was like a telephone operator was keeping me on hold. I feared hanging up - despite the annoying music - in case the receiver did pick up the fucking phone. So, the longer I ‘held the bloody line’ the harder it became to hang up).

While the RS gives us something to dwell on, it doesn’t explain, not fully, why we always want what we can’t have. Pip’s adoration of Stella was also, lest we have forgotten, bound-up with his desire for social mobility. There was, an element of if only I could be with her, I could be like her too in it. We all know that Pip, as the name tells us, has Great Expectations and so what the novel is really about, is the way in which our desires are linked to our identity or sense of self.

It is either that our identity is shaped by what we want or what we want shapes our identity, I can’t quite work that out but take for example the ‘mine, yours’ game (for ease, M/Y). For those of you that don’t work with eight-year-old boys I’ll explain the rules. See if you can follow, it is tricky. The M/Y game involves walking down any street and identifying the cars you want as Mine and the ones you don’t want as Yours. Needless to say that, unless you have the mentality of an eight year old, the M/Y game is pretty tiresome but it serves to illustrate a point. What is remarkable, shall we say, about this game is that no one collaborates and everyone competes. It also lends itself rather easily to rows over exceptionally great cars. Blacked out BMW’s with alloy wheels provoke - amongst my little rebels at least - a particular sense of excitement. We can ascribe this to the probability that cars such as these might as well have ‘I’m a gangster’ splayed across their bonnet. The other significant aspect of this game is that the allocation of rusting tins on wheels to someone else is considered a sign of disrespect (“allow it man” is a standard means of expressing one’s disproval to another’s, albeit jovial, suggestion).

What I learn from my little cherubs/wannabe bad-boys then, is that identifying oneself with what you can’t have (i.e. a gangster-mobile) and cussing the other (through identifying them with poverty) is different to having desire stirred by intermittent offerings of our needs (food, I am going back to the rats – bare with me). This kind of desire for what we can’t have is about shaping our identities and embrocating what we are with what we want to be, in the hope of some osmosis. The material good is a symbol of the (social) status that we desire, much in the same way that a potential partner can represent the kind of person that we want to be.

Think back to when we were children though and how being ‘copied’ (by siblings or classmates) filled us with contempt, disgust even and how we were reassured that it was them expressing their approval and admiration, which was supposedly flattering but ultimately troubling. Why? Think about the well-recorded phenomenon of arriving at a party, and the horror of spying someone in matching attire. Is this ‘horror’ not owing to the way in which it reveals our lack of individualism, much in the same way that couples that dress the same are celebrating their unity? In other words, copying (sameness and difference) draws attention to the carefully sculptured nature of our identities.

So, let us retreat back to the question: why do we always want what we can’t have? I think that the answer lies in the old saying (that, no doubt some annoying fucker will remind you of next time you lose and find something): “it is always in the last place you look”. As we all know, the reason for this is that we aren’t bloody likely to continue looking for something we have already found. Similarly, and paradoxically differently, once we have found the prince (or princess) we aren’t going to continue looking for him or her. We won’t be the poor rats of cage B because we would have joined the cage A crew. However, when we get that dream blacked out BMW with super-duper wheels we might well keep looking at other cars (and for non-car people like me, cars can be substituted with other material things, like computers, clothes, houses, gardens, bikes, phones – you get my drift) that maintain, or strengthen even, the desire for acquisition. For it is through the acquisition of these objects that we shape what we want to be in the eyes of others and ourselves.

So, Pip might have been satisfied with Stella McBella, on the one hand, but equally if his cultural milieu reinforced the idea women are trophies, he might have felt obliged to knock up a few knots on his bedpost, in the hope that it would have provided him with what he felt he lacked (beauty, grace, charisma etc). From this I conclude that the reason we always want what we can’t have is that our wanting, our desires are our driving force, our fuel. From which we can deduce, that our desire for a certain job, a certain qualification and/or the perfection of a particular skill is what motivates us to get up and do what we do.

Our desire to be like certain people can be understood in a similar vein. They represent what we want to become, so we are drawn to them. I should not then be surprised to find that my most successful friends (i.e. the most interesting, not necessarily the richest) are also the hardest working. They are driven by what seems to be an inexplicable force that appears to involve a delicate mix of imagination and the setting of boundaries and targets, the latter of which, from the outside, can seem exhausting but from my own experiences I realise are perceived as their raison d'être.

To put it simply, if we get what we want we might be satisfied with what we have achieved but some of us aren’t because we enjoy our gains for a short while then think up new and exciting goals. It is the pursuit of these goals, which stirs the desire for more goals, for more dreams, for more wishes. Whether dreams are exhaustible or not is not something I have yet come to any solid conclusions about, so, in the meantime, I keep wishing, but not to be a rat in cage A or cage C. You see I have learnt, somewhere along the line it is important to love what you are equally to what you want to be but who that is (who I am) depends on precisely who I am with, so, who I am with is really what counts. Now we come to the all-important moral of the story (the bit that sounds like an opinion to make the rest of the article seem like it was built on facts): make friends with the rats in your cage – Love IS important (if not Everything) but where it comes from is not the lady in the white lab coat (that bit, you – ok, we - made up).

Nim Folb

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Tobias Green - Adventures of an Average Man - Part Two

Pitying pinkies adroitly acquainted with indulgence? A punted melon? A rain shield swirled with candour? Peepers pugnaciously pitted for pleasure? How does one best harm a man…

Tobias Green woke red and tender and horrible on a makeshift gurney in a nameless ward of what smelled like St. Ignatius’ General Hospital. He swiftly ascertained that as an average man he had to go through trauma of monolithic proportions at some point in his life, and he hoped - logarithms hard - that this was said solid point.
Perhaps this was hell?
Perhaps this was the afterlife?
Through scored sclerotic coats he could make out the hues of the lower classes, bedecked in tawdry mechanical materials, stained in vomit, ash and saturated fats. Through wet bandages that obfuscated his noggin rang musical monstrosities carried high in manky bludgeoning mitts.
Through tubular tributaries trumped a troublesome husk, sashaying behind the niggardly nurse. A capricious summer zephyr signalling certitude seized the stank. It was no longer his birthday and this was not the malodorous afterlife.

Being an average man and therefore able to utilise the faculties of an everyday person, Tobias’ brain clutched and lurched before slipping into a low gear suitable for conquering inclines.

‘One two three four five six seven…’

All fingers and thumbs were in place.

‘One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven…’

Toothy pegs present and correct.

‘One two three…’

Little piggies were at home.

All seemed well. The cacophonous peeling in his ears would pass in time. Time... Time had become disposable. The breeze alluded to too many turns of the kitty cat kitchen calendar for sense to prevail. As an average man, Tobias began to rationalise all that had taken place.
Hmm.
The strangest thing…
Rational had been re-accommodated.
Now sleep.

When Tobias woke he discovered two things: Number ONE - he was no longer prostrate. Number TWO - his anus was particularly cold. Subsequent superciliousness needed abating. Rational required recovery.
‘A gentle jolt to begin with…’

It was white and rounded and pleasing. Surely nothing white and rounded and pleasing could result in reticent ramifications? Marshmallows and cotton balls: White and rounded and pleasing. It would be the right thing to do. A restart. He arched his head back and wrenched it forward against the thing that promised to be white and rounded and pleasing…

Waking at some section of the future, maybe a near present, Tobias was delighted to discover reams of rational had returned. Lifting the remainder of his face from perhaps 11 percent of his oxygenated haemoglobin, he rose wearily to find a smashed Saibot surveying the damage. They instinctively looked down at what was no longer white and rounded and pleasing and twisted its taps for freshness. The Fuzzy Wuzzy brown and red water swirled and cajoled the plughole into a gregarious gurgle. The childish burps made the sore man smile.

“Mon, you! Hur’rup! Do’er biz’niz! Geddit done! Mon! Gee’shush fug! Been’ages! Fugkin Chreest! Fugkin 9 min-nuts! Gerrout th’shitter! Fugkin spaaaaa!”

Being an average man with Public School perspicacity, Tobias was mesmerised by the invisible ruffian’s attempt at the Queen’s English. He sounded like a Scotsman. A hard-handed, hard drinking, hard headed, hard healed Scotsman… or maybe some other sort of Celt. What did this malcontent’s mumblings mean? Tobias removed the crimson mulch bandage from its perch and brought sidekick Saibot in on the investigation.
Hmm.
The strangest thing…
A mark which could only be described as a…

BLATTER BLATTER BLATTER THUMP BANG

“Fugkin Chreest! Ne’ra shite! Fugk sake! Jeshush fugk! Spakka coont!”
Tobias rolled his shoulders as he laughed, getting high from the swirling and twirling of soft grey matter. The ostentatious mark pulsed and spewed a fetid yellowy puss, turning Tobias’ train to his pump. As an average man he thought about it every 4 minutes, and as he had been sedated for at least a day and maybe 20, Tobias summated that his warm stiff friend would be in desperate need of milking.

Being an average man with undeniably common arousal levels, the Celt’s crusade on the door was the suitable spark to drag Tobias’ mind through an Amsterdam gutter. He closed his eyes, thrust down his linens and waited for the inevitable explosion… The banging of fists became the reverberating firm naked buttocks of an averagely attractive woman. The horribly enunciated swears became the incoherent speech of ecstatic pleasure Tobias’ part provided her. The woman’s very nice breasts with normal nipples were rubbing against his battered face. She was licking and kissing and groaning and moaning and…

BLATTER BLATTER BLATTER THUMP BANG

Hmm.
The strangest thing…
Tobias returned to the light, tilted down and looked it in the eye. It was depressed and soft and cold. He blinked and looked to Saibot for help, but his backwards brother was similarly stumped. They flicked it in unison but to no response. It dangled low and shed a single tear, no more no less. This was far from average for this particular average man. Never before had he invented a more lurid sexual situation than that of the averagely attractive woman, breasts on display, being sired against a door.

“Check the ceiling…”

Often the private surges were so great the thick liquid clung to high objects beyond the reach of any average man and would require an extendable mop for cleansing. This expulsion was clearly so rapid as to render the speed-of-light an antiquated measurement of travel. Tobias breathed deeply, causing every rib in his body to shudder and wince, and smiled. As an average man, Tobias had played Hide and Seek for more than 1000 hours in his lifetime, so locating strands from his very own body in a confined space would be a mere formality.

BLATTER BLATTER BLATTER THUMP BANG

Hmm.
The strangest thing…
There were no self-made strands to be found, high or low. There was the globular crimson puddle on the floor. There was the soiled bandage. There was toilet paper. There was the…

SMASH

Oh dear.
The Celt had conquered the door.
The Celt was taller than average men and stronger than all but a few.
The Celt had no teeth in his smile.
The Celt was missing an entire eye.
The Celt wore boots so tough his toes were safe from elephants, be they Indian or African.
The Celt arced tangerine urine on Tobias’ wounds.
There was a lot for such an average man to consider…

Ray Kane

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