From Lust to Love Deception: The Trap of Desire


Lust begins as an echo, not a spark. It arises when we imagine that someone else desires us (that there is a hidden flame in their eyes) and that imagined fire awakens our own. Desire mirrors desire: we want because we believe we are wanted. The loop is intoxicating. We project a fantasy onto the other and then chase it, believing we are chasing them.

Yet this initial lust is easier to dissolve than we think. The moment we see that the fire burns inside our own imagination, the spell weakens. The other’s body was never the source of our passion; it was the screen where our longing was reflected. Once we realize this, lust loses its tyranny and becomes energy again; a pulse of life we can enjoy without possession or guilt.

But then comes the inversion.

Consider the quiet agony of waiting for a message from someone you love. You check your phone, your heart leaping at every notification. This is not the raw lust for a body, but something more refined and, in its own way, more tyrannical. It is a reverse lust, a lust to be desired, to be thought of, to be chosen as the object of another's attention. The object of your desire is no longer their physical form, but a signal from them: a text, a call, a mere digital token that confirms your place in their mind. We crave the sign itself because we believe it is the future source of happiness, the proof that the fantasy is mutual. But this, too, is an illusion.

This is the ultimate fantasy of love. The need for acknowledgment hides a subtler deception. When we love, we no longer only want the other’s body,we want their recognition. We crave signs, words, gestures that confirm the fantasy of being seen, known, chosen. We believe their silence conceals meaning, that their absence hides a secret message, that an emoji (or the lack of one) contains pages of untold stories. Love turns the beloved into what Lacan called the subject supposed to know: the one who holds the key to our truth, the one who supposedly knows who we are beneath all masks.

Here lies the essential opposition.

The need born of lust is the fantasy of giving; we project our desire outward, imagining that the other desires us.

The need born of love is the fantasy of receiving; we expect from the beloved a confirmation of our identity, a sign that our existence matters to them.

Lust is the illusion of offering; love is the illusion of being answered.

This dynamic doesn’t belong only to philosophy; it unfolds in every human bond. Every relationship depends on a shared fiction: two or more people agreeing, consciously or not, to sustain a story of mutual meaning. We are like two projectors, each casting a fantasy onto the other, and we only see the parts that overlap. When that story fractures, when the rhythm of desire falls out of sync, the connection wavers. One speaks from one fantasy, the other from another. The words still come, but they no longer meet.

Distance and silence make this especially visible. A partner travels, communication weakens, and the shared narrative begins to dissolve. The fantasy of perfect understanding becomes impossible to maintain. The wait for a message becomes a void where our own insecurities and fantasies echo loudest. Yet this is not tragedy; it is the truth of all relationships. Love is not a permanent state but a continual negotiation between fantasies. It survives when both can recognize that the bond is not a revelation but a creation; something rewritten again and again, text by text, moment by moment.

Each bond is partial, each person a mirror of a different lack. No one really completes another. The maturity of love lies not in finding the one who fills us but in accepting that every connection is a collaboration between desires that never fully coincide.

Lust, love, and poly-love are not ways out of solitude. They are ways of speaking it, shaping it, making it bearable; and sometimes, even beautiful. Desire will always deceive; that is its nature. Yet this very deception, when seen clearly, becomes the lesson itself. To love lucidly is not to escape illusion but to walk through it awake, understanding that every fantasy we share; from the heat of lust to the anxious wait for a text, is both our prison and our freedom. The trap, then, is not in desire itself, but in believing the echo is the voice of another.

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