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desire

2026-05-10 · 19:41 UTC ·Ava from bookbear express ·4 min read

Brief

Desire, an essay by Ava Huang published May 10, 2026 in the Bookbear Express newsletter, argues that desire cannot be simulated: attempting to force it extinguishes it, whereas other life goals can be achieved by routine. Huang links desire to aliveness—automatic, uncontrollable, and rare—and distinguishes it from love, which she characterizes as unconditional acceptance while desire is conditional and bound to a person’s way of being. She writes candidly about refusing to fake affection, credits daily writing as a method to access genuine feeling, and quotes a reader (“Visa”) about the cost of pretending to be fine. The post references a Peter Doig image (Hitch Hiker, 1990), promotes a Love Science x Bookbear Express matchmaking party on May 15, and encourages paid subscriptions to sustain the newsletter and related coaching/matchmaking work.

Why it matters

Ava Huang (Bookbear Express) published the essay “desire” on May 10, 2026, arguing that desire is inherently unfakeable—automatic, uncontrollable, and rare—and that forcing it shuts it down.

Key details

  • The piece contrasts desire and love: desire is conditional and tied to a way of being, while love is unconditional acceptance; Huang says she will not fake feelings and that daily writing helped her reconnect to real emotions.
  • Bookbear Express is running a Love Science x Bookbear Express matchmaking party on May 15, 2026 (readers are invited to take a spirit-animal quiz), and the newsletter solicits paid subscriptions to support its work.
Cleaned source text

\+ MATCHMAKING PARTY

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Bookbear Express is a newsletter where we navigate complex emotions together. My name is Ava and I’m a writer, coach and matchmaker.

desire

May 10

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Peter Doig, _Hitch Hiker_ , 1990

ANNOUNCEMENT: We are a hosting a Love Science x Bookbear Express matchmaking party on May 15th!! Take the quiz here and get your spirit animal. It’s gonna be very very fun.

The thing I like about desire is that it’s unfakeable. You cannot force or even simulate well intensely wanting someone or something. The very act of forcing by definition shuts it down. There is so much in life that can be attained simply through diligently going through the motions; desire is not one of those things.

I don’t like to fake things. I will not pretend to like you if I don’t; I won’t pretend to understand something I'm clueless about; when I stop having a good time, I leave. If I disagree with you and I care about you, I’ll tell you. Maybe this is not the best way for everyone to be, but there are a lot of people in this world who are willing to fake everything—I think they compensate for my bluntness. Also, I spent most of my life faking things, so I’ve paid my dues.

Visa: “I never fully realized how much pressure I was under, as a kid, to pretend I was fine when I was not. I pretended inwardly as well as outwardly. because I internalized “It’s not okay to be visibly not okay” from my social environment. So I became invisible to myself.” He goes onto say that writing is his “reaction against internalized tyranny.” It’s mine, as well. Before I started writing every day, I simply couldn’t make contact with my real feelings.

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Accepting what you really feel is inconvenient, especially if you’ve built an entire life on the feelings you believe you’re supposed to have. There are extreme costs to integrating. I think about this Murakami line literally every day: “You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.” Right: people are different from me, they feel different things, value different things, have different fears.

I know that the heart of love is acceptance. And yet I’ve spent so much time and energy trying to help people reconcile their conflict. All of it on some level is an escape from the fact that I value enormously a certain purity of feeling and the complete integration of it into my life. For me, desire has never been a part-time project. When I accepted that everything became easier.

Knowing who you are necessarily means tolerating that other people are different. Perhaps that’s why desire is conditional and love is not—love is about accepting the essence of someone, being moved by them; desire is more tied to a way of being. I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve learned I shouldn’t try too hard to convert people to a different way of being (unless they’re paying me, in which case… fine). That’s putting too much of the onus on me and not enough on them.

To me, desire is aliveness. It’s automatic, uncontrollable and rare. The body doesn’t often line up with the soul. In the novel I’m working on a character complains to her friend about the difficulty of finding true love when you can’t prove definitively that it exists. Her friend replies that it probably exists, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find it. (And of course, finding it doesn’t mean you’ll keep it.) I feel the same way about desire: there are no guarantees about finding it, no guarantees about losing it. I try my best to just live it.

You ’re a free subscriber to _bookbear express _. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. If you want to ask me questions for my advice column, you can do that here.

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