envying people in love
an erotic advice column for those burning at the edge of love
One-on-one erotic mentoring with me can be booked here.
Dear Soft Moon Rose,
What does it mean when what makes us envious about someone else is them having a partner? I’d love to read your perspective on a desire for partnership, and what it means if the thing that feels like our burning desire / inspires our envy is to have love and a partner. –O.M.
Dear O.M.,
The conscious desire for erotic love, when unmet, can constellate a deep sense of archetypal abandonment. It activates the deepest layers of the psyche—the infant left alone, the forsaken lover, the cast-out orphan, even the God exiled from the temple. When someone else is loved and you are not, it can feel like banishment, like you were chosen not to be chosen. To envy someone who is loved is to stand outside the temple of intimacy and feel, in your bones, that the gods are feeding others while you starve. It evokes the most primal wound: not being seen and wanted. Beyond a question about partnership, this is often a confrontation with cosmic favoritism, the suspicion that some are chosen and some are not, and that you’re on the wrong side of the myth. It burns not only because love is what you want but because it’s what you believe would redeem you, placing you in a sacred lover’s storyline you know you’re destined to live.