BBL

Beyond Bare Lust

Some poet somewhere said love is like a BBL you won’t really know if it’s real until you feel one. Ridiculous line, I know, but I really sat with it. I actually meditated on it, which probably says more about me than it does about the quote. Think about it! When people ask if a BBL is “real,” they’re talking about the shape, the silhouette, the work and I mean… fair enough, but the question hiding underneath that one is way more interesting to me: is the experience around the body real? Because a body can be completely real and still be loved badly. You can be touched without being felt, wanted without being valued. Someone can know every inch of your skin and know nothing about your soul.

That’s the paradox that gets me. We’ve turned into detectives about authenticity in appearance and become totally lazy about authenticity in intention. “Is her body natural?” “Is he on steroids? » Those we’ll ask all day, but “Is this affection actually genuine?” “Is this desire coming from love or just lust? » “Does this person love me, or do they just love how I make them feel about themselves?” those we tend to skip.

So the BBL kind of becomes a metaphor for the whole way we handle desire. We’re mesmerized by the visible and careless with whatever gives the visible any meaning in the first place. A body on its own is just a body. A body that’s loved well becomes a home.

Yeah, I’m reaching. I know this sounds ridiculous, but isn’t that how poetry works? Finding a universe hidden inside something everyone else dismissed? Lolol

While writing another article, I caught myself wondering why we’ve become so comfortable dividing ourselves in two. Body over here, soul over there, as if one had to apologize for the existence of the other. Some people spend their lives mastering the body while neglecting the soul. Others get so precious about the soul that they treat the body like a temptation to outgrow.

Growing up Christian, I heard “the flesh” thrown around constantly, and for years I just assumed it meant the body. I don’t think that anymore. I think “the flesh” is closer to the ego than to the skin. It’s not my hands but rather the part of me that wants things with no wisdom attached. The part that takes without gratitude, that keeps confusing owning someone with actually knowing them (shoutout Future). My body was never the enemy. Neither was desire.

People suppress desires instead of understanding them. Have you ever asked yourself why they return harder. Well now you do! Not because desire is evil because, but because neglected things have a habit of demanding attention. Lust isn’t dangerous because it exists. It’s dangerous when it’s the only language you speak. When every attraction becomes a transaction or when every relationship becomes centered around what someone can provide rather than who someone is. The problem is not that we see beauty, the problem is when beauty is the only thing we see. Desire is a messenger long before it ever becomes a master. It’s trying to tell you something about yourself what you long for, where you’re soft, what you need, sometimes where you got hurt. So the real question was never whether we desire. It’s whether we’ve bothered to learn how.

Body and soul were never in competition. One teaches me how to touch; the other teaches me what’s worth touching. One tells me what I feel; the other tells me what any of it actually means. Body without soul slides into consumption. Soul without body turns into abstraction. But put them together and you get intimacy which isn’t just two bodies close to each other. It’s two people letting themselves be seen. It’s saying: I trust you with my body because I trust you. Full stop.

Maybe that’s what lies beyond bare lust. Not the rejection of the body, not the worship of it, but its reconciliation with the soul.

Because love was never only about knowing how to touch someone. It’s about slowly becoming the kind of person who understands what deserves to be touched and why.

Which, I guess, is why love really is like a BBL. You won’t know if it’s real until you feel one. And not just with your hands but with every last thing that makes you human.