Can a person stay genuinely faithful to someone without occasionally wanting to be a completely different person's problem?

No one warns you about this part. The wanting arrives not as lust but as grief — the slow recognition that choosing one life means the slow death of every other version of yourself that might have existed. It will arrive on a Tuesday, in the particular weight of a hand you know too well, in the suffocating familiarity of someone who has seen you at your least constructed. And yet you will choose again — not because the math works out, not because you have proof, but because you are the kind of creature who makes choices without insurance and then has to live inside them. That choosing, made with full knowledge of what it costs, without the comfort of destiny or divine mandate, is the only faithfulness that was ever real. Everything else is just inertia wearing a ring.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

Arjuna, mid-battlefield, wanted exactly this — to be someone else's problem, anyone's, the charioteer's, the dead's. He called it conscience. It was the ego flinching from its own dissolution. The question you are asking assumes a self stable enough to be faithful or faithless, a person with continuous edges who stands at one door and glances at another. But who, precisely, is doing the wanting? Follow that thread back past the emotion, past the thought, past the story you have told about yourself and your commitment, and what you find is not a faithful person or a faithless one. You find awareness itself, briefly wearing the costume of longing, briefly convinced the costume is a soul. The wanting is real. The one who is worried about it is not.

“The self is not born, nor does it ever die; it has not come into being, nor will it ever cease to be.”

— Bhagavad Gita 2.20

The mystic does not trust the object of desire — the mystic trusts desire itself as a diagnostic instrument. When you stand at the edge of a wanting you cannot explain, the Sufi does not say suppress it, and does not say follow it. He says: look at it. That ache, that specific pull toward another threshold, another pair of hands, another story — it is thirst recognizing itself. The wine is always talking, and it is always talking about the same thing, which merely wears a new face to keep you from falling asleep inside the life you have already claimed. You were never entirely faithful in the way you imagine faithfulness to look. And that incompleteness, that restlessness, is precisely why the covenant holds — it is large enough to contain you.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.”

— Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks

It arrives at 2 a.m. in the particular silence of lying beside someone who is asleep and asking nothing of you — and in that silence something in you wants to be wanted differently, by someone who does not yet know your failures. Marcus Aurelius would recognize this. He would also refuse to call it a crisis. Desire is not a character verdict; it is an impression, and impressions arrive uninvited. The discipline is not to empty yourself of impressions but to refuse to mistake them for commands. What you do with your hands, your words, your morning — that is the territory philosophy actually governs. Faithfulness was never the absence of appetite. It was always the act of governing appetite with reason, without drama, without the romantic self-flattery of believing that wanting makes you dangerous.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The universe did not cosign your commitment. There is no cosmic record of what you chose or why, no guarantee it was the correct calculation, no mechanism by which staying is rewarded or leaving is punished in any register that matters. And yet here you are at 3 a.m., aware of the pull toward an unnamed door, aware of the specific weight of this particular sleeping body, choosing again — not because you have resolved the tension but because you have decided to live inside it. Camus did not say the absurd is comfortable. He said it is the truth, and that facing it honestly is the only form of dignity available. To stay without certainty, to choose without proof, to feel the full gravity of elsewhere and still put your hand back exactly where it was — that is not faithfulness struggling. That is faithfulness, stripped to its actual form.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus