Erotic Decisions
Desire, disobedience and the art of becoming
Life starts with erotic decisions.
Life doesn’t begin at birth. Nor at conception. Nor at some abstract marker of consciousness or legality. It begins, in earnest, at the moment of trembling recognition. When something stirs beneath reason. When you want something – or someone – without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision. The moment that cracks open the script you have been given and offers you, terrifyingly, an alternative. Not necessarily better, certainly not safer…. but alive. And that is where life begins.
Not because we are conscious of desire at the moment of birth, but because existence itself begins in the shudder of longing, the archetypal pull between opposites, the tension that erupts into creation. Before language, before identity, there is yearning: the infant cries not only for sustenance but for touch, for warmth, for presence. In that primal reaching, there is already a choice, not a rational one, but a visceral alignment with life, with connection, with being with rather than apart. Eros, in its ancient, Platonic sense, is the force that binds the soul to the world, that moves us toward beauty, mystery, and becoming. It is not reducible to sex, though it may include it. It is a metaphysical orientation: the decision, over and over again, to seek intensity over numbness, expansion over contraction, intimacy over control. And that decision (sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar) is how life begins, and how it deepens.
To choose an erotic life is not simply to chase pleasure or gratification; that would be to mistake Eros for Hedone. Rather, it is to say “yes” to the kind of friction that transforms. It is the decision to let yourself be undone by what draws you in. Consider the artist who gives herself over to a vision she cannot explain, or the thinker who risks intellectual exile to defend an idea no one else yet believes. These are not logical paths. They are not chosen for stability or acclaim. They are chosen because something inexplicable stirs… a vibration, a recognition, a hunger that refuses to be ignored. The erotic decision is the one that defies linearity and invites metamorphosis. Is it a transaction? Of course not, it is transfiguration. And while it may bring ecstasy, it also invites vulnerability, risk, and loss. That is its sacred cost.
Eros, the Greek god from whom we take the word, is older than sex. In Plato’s Symposium, Eros is described not simply as a god of physical love, but as a cosmic force – a pull toward beauty, transcendence, creation. Diotima, the priestess of love, teaches Socrates that erotic desire is the ladder by which the soul ascends, from the love of one body to the love of all beauty, to the love of truth itself. Therefore, the erotic, in its original conception, is not confined to bodies. It is the fire that propels the soul out of dormancy. It is the throb of longing for something more.
And longing, unlike craving, is unruly. It cannot be scheduled, monetised, or disciplined into productivity. That is what makes erotic decisions so destabilising: they can’t be managed. They don’t respond to logic. Think of Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers herself, or Mrs Ramsay offering a silent moment of peace across a dinner table, or Anna Karenina stepping onto the train platform. These are not erotic moments in the Hollywood sense, they are decisions made in response to a tremor beneath the skin of the day, the silent sense that something inside must be honoured. Even if it disrupts everything else.
Eroticism, then, is about gravity, not about gratification, the pull toward something that reorients the self. And this gravity manifests not only in romantic or sexual relationships, but in every domain where desire dares to disrupt duty. A woman leaves a secure career to pursue sculpture because it makes her pulse quicken, not because it makes sense. A man moves across the world for a language he barely speaks. A reader becomes a writer because a single sentence broke them open. These are erotic decisions: driven not by logic, but by the magnetic logic of the soul. They often look like madness to the outside world – irresponsible, inexplicable, dramatic – but they are the precise moments where life, real life, begins to throb. These are the moments where one’s biography is no longer dictated by inheritance, but by invocation.
To live erotically is to reclaim the authority of feeling as intelligence, not as whim – the intelligence of the body, the psyche, the imagination. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote, “We are never as naked as when we are in pursuit of our desires”. To make an erotic decision is to be willing to lose the self you were, for the self that might be born in the act of choosing.
And one of the great tragedies of our time is how thoroughly we are trained to distrust this kind of knowing. From a young age, we are encouraged to prioritise strategy over spontaneity, prudence over passion. We are told to plan our lives, manage our time, brand our personalities. Desire, in this framework, is a liability… too wild, too messy, too inefficient. But what use is a life composed entirely of safe decisions, if none of them ever stir the soul? The tragedy of many lives is that they were never felt, not that they were too short. They were never chosen, only followed.
It is no accident that the most meaningful art, literature, and philosophy arise from erotic decision-making. Kafka’s night-writings, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness, James Baldwin’s exiled clarity – none of these emerged from comfort or compliance. They were forged in the crucible of longing. Each was an answer to an unanswerable call. Even theory, when it is most alive, is erotic: it seeks to seduce the mind into new shapes, to unravel certainties, to draw the thinker beyond the boundaries of what has already been thought. This is why true creativity always involves risk, not only the risk of failure, but of becoming someone unrecognisable to the self you were. The erotic decision changes your circumstances and rearranges your coordinates. It creates new desires, new questions, new problems worth having.
This same libidinal energy animates the way we engage intellectually: the books we love, the ideas that haunt us, the thinkers who disrupt and delight us. One does not choose to love Nietzsche or Barthes out of duty. Their words seduce. They enter like lightning. Reading, too, can be an erotic act, in consequence, of course, not in content. It leaves you altered.
Even aesthetics (our taste in art, clothes, music, furniture) is guided by erotic decision-making. Why do you wear that coat, hang that painting, play that song on repeat? Because something in it stirs you, it says: this is me or the me I’m becoming. The erotic is not decoration; it is design. It builds the architecture of the life we secretly want.
And yet, despite its radical charge, the erotic often hides in plain sight. In the way we choose a poem over a PowerPoint, a walk over a workout, a silence over a speech. In the subtle, almost imperceptible moments where we veer off-script, cancel a meeting, stay a little longer, speak a little truer. These are micro-erotic decisions: not overtly dramatic, but deeply subversive. They signal to the self that aliveness matters more than efficiency, that presence outweighs performance. Over time, these small decisions shape a life that is beautiful, not just bearable; inhabited, not just lived. And that is the real measure of an erotic life: not how much you get, but how deeply you feel, how honestly you inhabit your own pulse.
To suppress the erotic is to forgo passion, but also to forfeit independence. For what else is autonomy, if not the freedom to choose according to one’s own rhythm, one’s own longing, one’s felt truth? Systems of control (political, religious, familial) have always sought to neutralise the erotic, because it cannot be domesticated. Eros threatens order. It whispers: you are more than this. You could leave. You could want something else.And that, to the status quo, is heresy.
Which is why reclaiming erotic decision-making is political, not personal. It is the refusal to live in ways that anaesthetise the soul. It is the revolt of wanting, not as consumption, but as awakening. To choose the erotic is to orient the compass of your life by what makes your soul turn toward the light, not by what is expected or endorsed. And that can be excruciating. Because the erotic does not offer guarantees. Sometimes it leads us to joy. Sometimes to heartbreak. Often to both, simultaneously. But it always leads us somewhere real.
The erotic is not always kind. It can devastate. Think of the myth of Psyche and Eros: her desire to see him breaks the spell. He disappears. She must undergo impossible trials to find him again. The erotic seduces, vanishes, demands devotion. It does not say, “Indulge me”. It says, “Become worthy of me”. Sometimes it asks us to be alone. Sometimes to begin again. Always, to feel more deeply. And that is no small ask.
Therefore, what does it mean to live erotically in a world designed to suppress the erotic? It means making decisions that align with your aliveness, even if they offend your ego, your upbringing, your pay check. It means walking away from a job that kills your soul. Reading poetry instead of productivity manuals. Saying “yes” to a conversation that scares you. Saying “no” to a relationship that drains you. Writing the damn book. Taking the long way home. Saying “I love you” before it’s safe. Listening to the small voice that says: this – right here – matters!
And so, life begins, not once, but again and again, in the moment we allow ourselves to want what might ruin us, to risk what might remake us, to trust what we cannot name but must follow. The erotic decision is never tidy. It doesn’t come with a map, only a murmur. But if we listen, if we dare to follow it, even once, we are no longer asleep in our own stories. We become authors again. And with every sentence, every surrender, every sacred mess we choose to enter, life begins anew.
From the fault lines where meaning begins, in pursuit of what unravels and reassembles, for the story that begins where certainty ends, in disobedience to the dull, and devotion to the pulse, to the ruin that remakes us,
Tamara
This is an arrestingly composed essay, Tamara, articulate, precise, and charged with a kind of restrained voltage that’s rare. I admire you chose not to write about the erotic in its classical sense; you chose to reframe it as a principle of orientation — toward vitality, not indulgence, instead. That distinction alone gives this piece real weight.
What resonates most, from a masculine perspective, is the framing of erotic decision-making not as indulgence but as risk-laden agency—the inner authority men are rarely taught to trust. We’re conditioned to optimize, not feel; to achieve, not be moved. The erotic, in this sense, threatens the scaffolding of identity built on control and predictability. And yet, as you argue, it is exactly this unruly pull—to act without guarantees, to desire without justification—that distinguishes a life lived from one endured.
A nuance to add, for men especially, the erotic decision is often buried beneath functionality. We confuse decisiveness with clarity, performance with purpose. But the erotic isn't reactive, it's intuitive, directional. It says, “not this, maybe that, even if it breaks you.” And when a man listens to that, in work, in art, in love, he reclaims freedom and authorship.
So yes, I agree with you, Tamara, life begins in desire. But it matures in the discipline of listening to what desire dares to ask of us.
Your essay is a slow, elegant detonation, it begins in the soft language of philosophy and ends in fire. From the very first line “Life starts with erotic decisions” it invites, almost provocatively, a discussion of sex or sensuality. But what unfolds instead is an incredible manifesto on aliveness, certainly not in the biological sense, but in the soul-stirring, pulse-quickening sense. That shift is what stunned me. It’s like walking into a room expecting a candle and finding a bonfire. Tamara, no one can write the way you do!
What I admire most is how you restore dignity to desire as sacred intelligence. You portray the “want” as a compass. It challenges the spreadsheet life we’re taught to build and instead insists that tremors of longing are not distractions from life but its actual starting points. That’s a shift in worldview, a tectonic movement.
Personally, I’ve felt those erotic decisions, the ones that make no sense on paper but crack you open from the inside. A sentence I couldn’t unread. A person I shouldn’t have called. A creative project that came uninvited but refused to leave. And yes, they brought risk, even ruin. But they also brought pulse. And once you’ve felt that, the idea of living without it feels like death by small degrees.
Tamara, you don’t write about Eros as force, you enact it in the writing itself. Your prose seduces, with risk. And I think that’s the heart of it, eroticism, as you present it, isn’t decoration. It’s danger. And it’s the only danger worth walking into with your eyes open.
Thank you so much for having written this.