Is This What You Wanted - Analysis

A love story told as a series of mismatches

This poem’s central claim is blunt and corrosive: the relationship has become a place where both people are trapped in the roles they assigned each other, and what remains is not love so much as a shared afterimage. The speaker builds this through a running pattern of paired identities: You were the promise at dawn while I was the morning after; You were Jesus Christ while I was the money lender. Each couplet doesn’t just say we were different—it says their differences were set up as a moral and emotional hierarchy, with the you cast as ideal, sacred, glamorous, or pure, and the I as compromise, contamination, or comic deflation.

What’s striking is how deliberately the speaker chooses comparisons that are both intimate and culturally loud: the sensitive woman versus the very reverend Freud, manual orgasm versus dirty little boy. Even desire is framed as an argument about control—who is tender, who is clinical, who is innocent, who is grubby. The poem’s voice sounds playful on the surface, but the play is serrated; it keeps scoring the relationship, as if humor is the only safe way to admit how much shame and resentment have accumulated.

The haunted house: living inside the relationship’s leftovers

The repeated question—is this what you wanted—lands like an accusation disguised as a check-in. The setting it imagines is domestic and claustrophobic: a house that is haunted not by strangers, but by the ghost of you and me. That phrase suggests the couple is still alive yet already turned into legend, replay, residue. The haunting isn’t memory at its sweetest; it’s the sense that every room contains old versions of them that keep interrupting whatever the present might be.

There’s a tension here the poem won’t resolve: the speaker talks as though the you chose this outcome (is this what you wanted), but the very insistence of the refrain implies the speaker can’t stop participating in the haunting. If the house is haunted by you and me, then both are responsible for keeping the ghosts fed. The question keeps returning because it can’t be answered in a way that would free either of them.

Pop icons and household products: intimacy reduced to brands

In the middle section, the poem swaps religious and psychological figures for pop masculinity and cleaning-aisle pairings: You were Marlon Brando / I was Steve McQueen; You were K-Y Jelly / I was Vaseline; the father of modern medicine versus Mr. Clean. These comparisons feel deliberately cheap, as if the relationship’s grand meanings have been reduced to substitutes. K-Y and Vaseline are both lubricants, but one is made for sex and the other is a workaround—so the pairing repeats the poem’s larger complaint: one partner is framed as the proper version, the other as the imitation.

The last couplet of this sequence is especially telling: You were the Whore and the Beast of Babylon, / I was Rin Tin Tin. The you is given apocalyptic erotic power—dangerous, biblical, uncontainable—while the I becomes a famous dog, loyal and a little ridiculous. It’s funny, but it’s also a confession of humiliation: the speaker feels domesticated next to the other’s theatrical intensity, reduced to something trained.

The turn: aging, jealousy, and a frozen self

The poem’s emotional pivot arrives when the comparisons stop being witty labels and become time itself: You got old and wrinkled / I stayed seventeen. This is less brag than pathology. To stay seventeen is to refuse change, to cling to an early version of desire and grievance. Meanwhile the you moves through life—aging, wanting, multiplying experiences: You lusted after so many. The speaker counters with devotion that sounds like an accusation: I lay here with one. Fidelity becomes a way to claim moral superiority, but it also sounds like stagnation—lay here is passive, almost entombed, fitting the haunted-house idea.

The next lines sharpen the contradiction: You defied your solitude / I came through alone. The you fights isolation by reaching outward; the I frames loneliness as an achievement, something survived rather than healed. Then the poem ends its narrative with a small, charged reversal: You said you could never love me / I undid your gown. The speaker can’t win love, but can still access the body. That act reads as both triumph and despair—physical closeness becomes a substitute for emotional acceptance, and the poem lets us feel how thin that substitute is.

What if the speaker needs the haunting?

The refrain keeps asking is this what you wanted, but the poem quietly suggests another possibility: the speaker’s identity depends on being the counter-image, the lesser twin, the one who is morning after to someone else’s dawn. If the relationship ended cleanly, the speaker might lose the role that organizes his self-understanding. In that light, the haunted house is not only punishment—it’s also a chosen shelter, a place where the old story keeps replaying because neither person knows who they are without it.

An ending that cuts off mid-room

The final refrain breaks off—To live in a house—as if the poem can’t finish furnishing the sentence. That truncation fits the larger mood: the speaker has endless names for what they were to each other, but no stable language for what they are now. What remains is the echo of the question and the sense of being stuck indoors with it, listening to two ghosts argue through the walls.