What does it mean to move through life as a woman who is admired, desired, but never kept?

I Want to Be Loved..

I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud. Not in a way that felt safe. Not in a way that didn’t feel like begging.

I have carried it for years. Wrapped it in silence, tucked it into corners where it wouldn’t be seen. Because sometimes, to want is to invite vulnerability, to invite the shame that often comes with longing.

I have sat in rooms where men spoke about love as if it were a thing meant for everyone but me. I have watched them fall to their knees for women who looked nothing like me, who did not have to ask for devotion because it was already theirs. I have spent entire evenings at tables where my presence was an afterthought, where I was meant to be amused but never adored. I have known desire, yes. But devotion? The kind that makes a man move mountains, cross oceans, write poems in the margins of his notebooks? The kind that makes a man show up, again and again, because he cannot imagine a world where I am not his? I have never felt it.

And so, I ask myself: what does that make me?

There is a part of me that knows love should not be a hunger. That wanting a man’s gaze, his hands, his devotion—should not feel like a need but a choice. A bonus. A privilege, not a survival instinct.

But how badly should I want it?

Women are told two things at once:

1. Do not make men the center of your life. Do not let your happiness depend on them. Be self-sufficient, be whole, be unbothered.

2. Be desirable. Be beautiful. Be the kind of woman men fight wars over.

It is exhausting, this performance. This tightrope walk between wanting and pretending not to. Between longing and swallowing the ache.

And then there is the other thing, the thing that feels too heavy to say out loud: what does it mean to be a dark-skinned Black woman who wants love in a world that tells her she is lucky to receive anything at all?

It means moving through a world that appraises you before it sees you, measuring your worth in shades and shapes, in the distance between what you are and what it desires. You are too much where it wants less, not enough where it demands more. Your beauty is debated, dissected, made conditional—praised only when softened, only when lightened, only when shrunk to fit within the narrow borders of what men find worthy of chasing. You watch as desirability drapes itself over others like an inheritance, while you are left to prove, to wait, to wonder if love will ever arrive without a compromise attached. And still, you want. Still, you hope. Because despite the world’s indifference, your heart refuses to make itself smaller.

Oh, I just know I’ve lost some of you already. I can feel the shift in attention, the tightening of jaws, the quick mental exit of those who don’t believe concepts like colourism plays a role in desirability, in modern-day dating, in the way some of us move through the world feeling like love is a language spoken just beyond our comprehension. But let’s not play pretend. Let’s not feign confusion. It has always been an issue. It only takes a woman who exists outside of conventional beauty standards to know how lonely that feeling is—to feel like you are always orbiting love but never quite held by it.

And I will be honest, it is embarrassing to say it out loud. It feels like a pathetic confession, like standing in the middle of a crowded room and announcing, I am undesired, and it is breaking me. You can already hear the gaslighting responses before they come:

“That’s not true, beauty is subjective.”

“Maybe you’re just looking in the wrong places.”

“You just have to be more confident!”

As if confidence alone can override centuries of messaging that told the world what softness, what femininity, what desirability is supposed to look like. As if unlearning that doesn’t take years, decades, generations. As if Black women—especially dark-skinned Black women—haven’t had to love themselves in a way the world never taught them how.

So yes, I want love. I want it in a world that has told me I should feel lucky to receive it at all. And that? That is its own kind of grief.

Fuck.

Why do we give men this much power?

The power to overwhelm. The power to make us feel unworthy. The power to dictate how we see ourselves, how we measure our worth, how we move through the world wondering if we are enough.

It is maddening, the weight of it. The way desire—or the lack of it—can shape you. How something as intangible as male attention can hold the ability to hollow you out or make you feel infinite. And what’s worse? The guilt of even admitting that you want it. That you want to be seen, wanted, chosen. That you want to walk into a room and feel undeniable.

It feels shameful, almost. To be a woman who is supposed to know better, supposed to be self-sufficient, supposed to look in the mirror and see all the ways she is already whole—and yet still crave the soft ache of being wanted. It is a delicate humiliation, one that lingers under the surface, one that makes you flinch before you confess it out loud.

Because how do you say, I want love without it sounding like a weakness?

How do you say, I want to be touched, to be held, to be adored without feeling like you are betraying every hard-earned piece of independence you fought for?

How do we navigate these feelings? These contradictions?

Because I do not want to be at war with myself. I do not want to shame myself for craving what is natural, for wanting intimacy, for longing to be loved the way I have seen other women be loved—openly, fully, without hesitation. And yet, the world has taught me to second-guess every desire that ties me to a man. To be suspicious of it. To call it foolish.

But here is what I am learning: wanting is not the problem.

The problem is how we have been told to either starve ourselves of love or need it to survive. The problem is the way women—especially Black women—have been made to feel that love is something to earn, rather than something they should receive simply because they exist. I have been told to be patient. I have been told to be grateful. I have been told that love will come, in time, as if I am waiting for a delayed train that may never arrive. But what if it doesn’t? What if I spend my whole life knowing desire in whispers but never in shouts?

And so, I ask again: what does that make me? What does it mean to move through life as a woman who is admired, desired, but never kept?

I do not have an answer. Only the quiet ache of wondering.

I can’t shame myself for wanting. I will not let guilt creep in when I admit that I desire attention, that I long for connection, that I crave love in a way that sometimes feels overwhelming. Because what is the alternative? To pretend I don’t care? To lie to myself until the loneliness becomes easier to carry? To become so self-sufficient that I forget what it feels like to be held?

No.

I will not make a villain out of my own heart. I don’t want to act as though my longing is something to be fixed. I will not punish myself for wanting what everyone else so easily receives. I will say it plainly. Boldly. Without shame.

I want love. And I deserve to have it.

I don’t have a neat, perfect ending to this. I don’t have some great revelation that makes the longing disappear. But I do have this: if you’ve ever felt this ache—if you have ever swallowed your longing, if you have ever convinced yourself you didn’t need what everyone else so effortlessly receives—know this: You are not the problem. You never were.