Why We Fantasise About What We Shouldn’t
Something forbidden catches in the mind, like a match striking the side of its box.
It always begins with a small flicker. Something forbidden catches in the mind, like a match striking the side of its box. You don’t plan to want it. You only think about it for a moment, just long enough to feel the warmth. Then you tell yourself to stop. That’s when it grows teeth.
The more we resist a thought, the hungrier it becomes. Desire feeds on the word no like it’s sugar. Tell yourself not to imagine it, and suddenly it’s all you can picture. The man you shouldn’t touch. The woman who belongs to someone else. The friend who looks at you too long. The stranger whose hands stay in your head days later. We don’t fantasise about what’s easy or safe. We fantasise about what will cost us something.
There’s a part of the brain that loves the risk, the way it lifts boredom out of our bones. It isn’t really about breaking rules. It’s about being fully alive in a world that so often demands we be careful. When you want what you shouldn’t, your heart beats louder. The pulse in your wrist becomes a drum. You feel the edges of yourself. That is the secret draw of it, the reminder that you’re still here, still capable of ruin.
Sometimes fantasy is the body’s rebellion against good behaviour. We spend our lives tidying desire, keeping it polite, unthreatening, gendered correctly, morally sound. But the mind will wander back to the dark room. It wants to touch the edges of shame and see if it still burns. The forbidden becomes a mirror: what if I’m not the good person I pretend to be? What if I am, and I still want this?
And yet, fantasy is not a confession of intent. It’s the imagination stretching its muscles. Most of the time, it stays locked inside where it belongs, a private theatre where no one gets hurt. We can visit the danger without crossing the line. But pretending we don’t visit it at all only breeds more shame.
I’ve learned not to fear those thoughts when they arrive. They tell me something true about where my curiosity lives, about the parts of me that still ache to understand pleasure, control, surrender. They remind me that morality is a costume we can take off when the lights go down.
So, why do we fantasise about what we shouldn’t? Because it’s the one place where we get to be honest without consequence. Because wanting is human, and the mind knows no law. Because in that flicker of what might destroy us, we feel gloriously, dangerously alive.
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