On a rainy morning, a young person sits across from an acquaintance, stirring their coffee, preoccupied. They ask, “How does one know if they REALLY want something, or someone?” To think about desire often seems dangerous, uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels like we cannot find the ‘right’ words for it. It is easier to think about attraction or preference; we have so many examples of it, it can often feel ‘external’ to us. But what about desire? What does it mean to know? Is it something innate? Is it conditioned by the culture around us? In this act of molding, we are often also taught to control/regulate or even deny desires. As adults with ‘freedom’, facing the weight of it all can make us realise that we don’t have a language for all of it.
This uncertainty is not unusual. In many societies, especially in cultures where sexuality is policed and concealed, the ability to articulate one’s own ‘wants’ is sometimes not learned. Shame – social and internalised – creates a barrier that makes it difficult to see desire as a legitimate force. Sexuality framed in extremes sounds either like a moral danger or a liberatory force, either as something that must be curbed or must be used as a tool for performance sans hesitation. The nuance of ambivalence or invitation of uncertainty rarely finds space.
The word “consent” originates from the Latin, consentire, meaning “to feel together.” This etymology provides an interesting lens to examine this tension. Consentire suggests an act of mutual recognition, a shared experience, something created together and not a simple transaction. But in contemporary discourses, consent has largely been reduced to a framework of permission – one person grants it, the other receives it. The mutual, affective dimension of consentire is lost in the procedural nature of modern consent discourse, which often treats it as a checkbox to be marked rather than as an evolving dialogue.
Sex requires human depth. When sexuality is primarily framed in terminologies of control (and power), whether through strict moral codes or rigid legal structures, sex ceases to be a site of exploration and vulnerability. It becomes an act of duty or a performance of autonomy. It makes us (temporarily) forget the human-ness of it all. This detachment is not just theoretical, but it shapes how we navigate our own desires. This gap deepens the disconnect between what we do feel and what we should feel. In such a landscape, true sexual agency – the ability to recognise, articulate, and act on one’s desires – becomes one of the most difficult things to cultivate.
Sex as Duty, Love as Risk
If we look at the legal framework surrounding marital rape in India – where it is still decriminalised by omission – it reinforces the idea that sex within marriage does not originate from mutual desire but out of a sense of duty. In this way, consent is assumed and not given; it reduces sexual intimacy to an expectation instead of an experience. This legal silence not only impacts survivors but it also shapes an unconscious cultural attitude towards sex. If sex is an institutional obligation, then sexuality becomes a role-fulfilling act instead of something pleasurable or done for connection. This absence of criminalisation also reveals an implicit belief that sex, in some contexts, is not about people choosing each other but about the maintenance of a social/relational order.
This mechanisation of sex/desire is often seen in contemporary dating culture too. Dating apps, AI partners, and virtual relationships have transformed intimacy into a curated, algorithmic (and distanced) game. In a world where tech promises efficiency, love and desire (which are messy, chaotic, unpredictable, and human) become a liability. AI companions that are (constantly) emotionally available take away the demands of a real relationship, where one might have to deal with occasional unavailability and create a space for mutuality. Dating apps create an illusion of “more” or “best possible” options. The innovations that (supposedly) make connections more accessible also aid our tendencies for avoidance – they give us ways to engage with our desires without ever confronting the vulnerability that true intimacy requires.
Think about the rise of situationships – without definition that hover between casual and committed – as the seemingly modern and progressive alternative to ‘outdated’ romantic arrangements. Beneath the surface, maybe they reflect a cultural reluctance to engage with the full spectrum of human connection and emotion. They provide us with the pleasure of company without the risk of true attachment. Love, hate, passion, conflict, devotion, and rejection that serve as natural elements of intimacy are circumvented to find something safer and easier to walk away from. Situationships are not just personal choices but cultural products of a society that wants customisable, disposable experiences.
This shift towards a more detached and mechanical approach does not surgically remove the desire for intimacy. It reflects a deeper cultural anxiety: the fear of needing someone, of exposing the self to the unknown, of loving in a way that cannot be controlled. When we mediate connections with these modern tools, laws, or social norms, the act of “feeling together” becomes the greatest risk of all.
Moving towards Reclaiming Intimacy
If sexuality today oscillates between avoidance and obligation, where does that leave us? Both traditional and modern frameworks offer fulfillment that ultimately feels hollow. Marriage, stripped of mutual desire, makes sex a duty. Modern dating, which emphasises efficiency and detachment, makes love a temporary arrangement. Neither of them satisfies or acknowledges what makes intimacy meaningful: the risk of true engagement, the will to be vulnerable, and the acceptance that desire is not clean or manageable.
To reclaim sexuality as a deeply human experience, we need to move beyond the binary of sex as obligation or a performance. This means to reject the idea that desire needs to be controlled. Intimacy can never thrive in an environment of rigid certainty. Intimacy requires surrender – not in the sense of submission – but in the willingness to be with another person without detachment or defences.
One of the reasons why true intimacy feels so risky is also our cultural discomfort with ambivalence. We want desire to be clear, love to be stable, and therefore, relationships to be predictable. But intimacy, by its very nature, is uncertain. Real relationships contain contradictions – love and hate, passion and resentment, connection and fear of abandonment. What happens when we embrace this ambivalence as a welcome guest in our relationships? Instead of controlling desires with rules, we allow for some space for the unknown. We create space for the messiness of emotions and fluidity of connections.
This brings me back to consentire – to feel together. If consent is more than permission, then what does it mean to practise it in the fullest sense? It means moving beyond a transactional understanding of sex and seeing it as an act of shared presence. It means we acknowledge that consensual relationships are not just about physicality but also about emotional and psychological presence. Most importantly, it means to let go of the need for absolute certainty and trust the process of feeling together.
Choosing intimacy is an act of quiet defiance in a world that fears vulnerability. It is a reminder that sex is not just something we do but something we experience, with and through each other. In an attempt to understand desire, sometimes we swing between the two extremes of either analysing and intellectualising it till it feels dangerous or refusing to think at all, making the other person into an object to discard, avoid, or use. We ghost, we detach, we perform consent like a bureaucratic formality (have you heard about consent agreements for relationships? BARF), not because we do not care, but because to fully recognise another person’s consciousness – acknowledge their desires, hesitations, and contradictions – feels like a loss of control. In our fear of ambivalence, we pay the psychic cost of avoidance – of choosing power as a poor substitute for love. Control has never been a cure for loneliness.
Consent is not just a moment of permission but an ongoing practise of attunement – one that requires us to listen, to risk uncertainty, and to meet the other as a subject, not an object to be controlled or avoided.
Cover Image by Designecologist on Pexels
