I know people who say they have been happily married for forty, fifty, or sixty years. They’ll tell you they have never quarreled or longed for a different life—or person. Their eyes say otherwise.

I grew up in a world that treated desire like a lit fuse—something to be snuffed before it reached the charge. The body was a problem to be managed. Sexuality was an explosive disposal unit’s full-time job. And if you felt something you weren’t supposed to feel, the prescribed solution was simple: deny it. Confess it. Snuff it out.

But… desire doesn’t snuff. It goes underground.

I have watched it happen in slow motion across decades, in the lives of people I loved. An artist friend who was brilliant, magnetic, and built an entire career on the foundation of Christian belief, spent years as a serial womanizer. Affairs plural. A hunger that kept breaking through every wall he built. When the career got big enough that the cost of honesty became too high, he locked the whole thing down. Married, respectable, untouchable.

He still flirts. Shamelessly. A wolf in a pressed shirt, to this day. But when I shared a series of nude watercolors—bodies painted in the tradition of Renoir and Klimt, flesh as light, shadow, and sensual—he went silent. Couldn’t touch it. Couldn’t admit he’d even looked. The man who will eye every woman in a room cannot acknowledge a painted figure without feeling the whole scaffolding of his public self begin to crack.

His wife had surgery. She refused reconstruction. She told people it was a personal choice. Maybe it was. But I watched that marriage, and I knew what was really happening. The desire they’d denied had curdled in them. And her body had become the weapon she had left. Fermentation, in both directions. What had once been passion between two people had become a decades-long, sustained mutual punishment.

Another couple I know: he spent years addicted to pornography, an addiction that wallows in shame and guilt. She found out. They stayed together—because what else do you do when your religious community tells you there is no door marked exit? She wears no makeup now. Shapeless clothes. A deliberate neutering of herself, as if beauty itself has become the enemy. He lives in the ruins of what denial built. She lives in the armor their hurt constructed. Neither of them, I suspect, remembers what the other one looked like when they were still trying. 

Then there are the ones whose fermentation surprised even me. I have former friends—women who have loved each other quietly, completely, intimately for years—living inside the evangelical bubble as strangers to themselves. What I didn’t expect was what happened to the desire they buried to the public. It didn’t just go private. It came back wearing a different costume. They are now among the most ultra-conservative people I know. Critical. Self-righteous. Their politics of exclusion target people with open lifestyles. Somewhere in the gap between who they are and who they perform being, the pressure needed a release valve—and hypocrisy became the outlet. I find this less surprising the older I get, and more heartbreaking.

I have gay friends—men who lived through the years when their desire was the unspeakable thing, who paid real prices to finally live openly — who now reserve their contempt for trans people, for non-binary people, for anyone who pluralizes their pronouns. It’s the same energy, redirected. They clawed their way to the table and pulled the ladder up behind them. Whatever they suffered to become legitimate, others must suffer too. The fermentation is identical—it just found a new vessel.

My last decade of life and the freedom of Barcelona have taught me something I couldn’t have learned in a church. Desire isn’t the problem. Our longings have never been the problem. The problem is what accumulates in the dark when you convince yourself that wanting is the same as sinning.

I’m not interested in judging any of these people. I spent thirty years inside that world myself. I know exactly what the walls feel like from the inside. But I’m done pretending I don’t see what denial costs. I’ve watched it cost people everything—their marriages, their health, their capacity for joy, their integrity, their ability to stand before a painting of the human form, naked and unashamed, and simply let themselves be moved.

They revel in their suffering and denial and call it holiness.

Sensual. Curious. Communal. Free.

Those four words aren’t a personality assessment. They are the path to enlightenment and enjoyment. The alternative—I’ve watched it. I know what it looks like by now. And it is not worth it.

Note: The title of this post is a quote from my new novel The Mysteries of Barcelona