The Magic of Wanting to Be

The Magic of Wanting to Be is Sugar’s name for the effort to inhabit an aspired-to self while remaining honest about the uncertain, needy person one already is. In her reply to a sixty-four-year-old man afraid of dating after a long relationship ended, this idea turns self-fashioning away from deception: the point is not to erase loneliness, but to keep loneliness from standing in for the whole person. Cary Grant’s life supplies the vivid example, while Sugar’s own early relationship with Mr. Sugar gives the advice its intimate counterpoint.

The Idea and Its Immediate Context

The letter writer had been single for five years. His most recent relationship lasted ten years, eight of them happy; he had liked his former partner’s four adult children and loved her three grandchildren. The year after the relationship ended was, he told Sugar, the most painful of his life—even more painful than losing his father while in high school, spending a year in Vietnam, or watching another lover die of cancer. That history makes the advice more than a call to act confident. It addresses a man whose losses and longing could understandably dominate his sense of what he brings to a new relationship.

Sugar agrees with his counselor that beginning lightly and easily is a useful approach, even if it has to be practiced before it feels natural. She distinguishes that practice from pretending to be someone with no wounds or needs. The man should bring his neediness on a date, but not let it become the only thing he presents. Alongside it belong his strength, generosity, survival, and tenderness: the capacities formed through fatherlessness, war, bereavement, and the end of a decade-long partnership. The aspiration is to act from that fuller inventory until the performance no longer feels like a performance.

Cary Grant as an Example

Grant is introduced not as someone born effortlessly suave, but as a lonely child whose life began under painful uncertainty. When he was nine or ten, his depressed mother was sent to a madhouse without his knowledge. His father told him she had gone on an extended vacation, and Grant did not discover that she was still institutionalized but alive until he was well into his thirties. At fourteen he was expelled from school in England; by sixteen he was traveling across the United States as a stilt-walker, acrobat, and mime.

He eventually found his calling as an actor and changed his name from Archibald Leach to Cary Grant, the name associated with charisma and charm. Sugar does not use this transformation to suggest that the lonely boy simply disappeared. Her point is that the boy remained within the man who learned to embody a desired identity. Grant’s account of pretending to be the person he wanted to become—and of the boundary between that person and himself eventually dissolving—makes aspiration an active practice rather than a fixed quality bestowed at birth.

Applying the Example to Dating

Sugar adapts Grant’s story to the letter writer without asking him to become a movie star or imitate a particular style of masculinity. The work is more ordinary and more demanding: to inhabit the person he aspires to be while carrying the uncertain, hungry man he knows himself to be. His longing for love may feel enormous when he is alone or anticipating a first date, but it is only one part of him. If need becomes the only part on display, Sugar warns, it can frighten potential partners away and misrepresent what he has to offer.

This advice holds aspiration and vulnerability together rather than treating them as opposites. The man need not wait until he feels wholly secure before approaching someone; he can begin by practicing ease while still acknowledging his fear and desire. Nor should the practice become a bid to conceal his history. Sugar’s alternative is to bring all of himself to the encounter, including the self he is trying to grow into. The desired change is not a polished façade but a widening of what he allows others to see.

Sugar’s Counterpoint and the Expression’s Significance

As Sugar considers the letter, she recalls an afternoon in a café with Mr. Sugar, when they had been lovers for only a month. In the intense early stage of their relationship, she told him that the year before she had become pregnant by a heroin addict, had an abortion, and felt so angry, sad, and self-destructive that she intentionally made a shallow cut in her arm with a knife—a thing she had never done before. Mr. Sugar stopped her to say that she did not have to disclose the injury to earn his love. His response did not require Sugar to be unbroken; it let her understand that she could be loved as a whole person, including the parts that were hurt.

That memory clarifies what the expression does and does not ask of the letter writer. Wanting to become someone more generous, strong, or at ease is not a claim that pain must first be conquered, nor is suffering a credential that must be displayed to secure intimacy. Sugar’s own appeal, she explains, rested not on weakness or need alone but on everything she was and wanted to be. Cary Grant’s self-making and Mr. Sugar’s acceptance thus converge on a single counsel: aspiration can enlarge a person’s presence without disowning the person who began the effort. The magic lies in that gradual meeting between the self one hopes to inhabit and the self one has carried all along.