I used to be impatient, waiting for the moment I would feel completely steady in love and intimacy. I believed that if I worked hard enough, I would reach a kind of relational enlightenment. That I could heal my way out of misattunement. That perfection would protect me from ever feeling disconnected.

But in striving for that, I missed the point. The point is to be in our relationships. And to be in them, we have to stop performing. We have to put down the obsessive need to be perfect in exchange for the intimacy we yearn for, the intimacy that only exists when we’re human.

Perfection costs us closeness

There’s a truth I avoided for a long time: we will mess up in our relationships and dating. True intimacy asks us to put down performance. To show up authentically. To let hypervigilance soften. And when we do this, we will make mistakes, small ones, and sometimes big ones. We will say the wrong thing. Do the wrong thing. Act out of character. Step outside our values.

And our inner eldest‑daughter‑good‑girl will threaten to nose‑dive into shame. She’ll want to give up on the relationship entirely.

This summer, I dated a beautiful woman. I loved the fun of learning someone new, the curiosity, the sweetness. And at times, I felt like I was tightrope‑walking between giving up and holding space. I felt the exhaustion of perfection, the bubbling of emotion, and the yearning for that sweet potion of connection.

But if intimacy only survives when we’re perfect, it isn’t intimacy at all.

Mistakes give us an opportunity to go deeper. To be accountable. To get curious. To ask the hard questions. To tend to the relationship and to ourselves. To expand the capacity of the connection.

Dating, in this way, has been a gift a teacher of expression, of self, of others, of love. A mirror for my challenges. A clarifier of what I’m available for versus what I desire. A practice in choosing myself while holding space for another.

And when we make it to the other side of shame, we see that allowing ourselves to make mistakes, followed by repair, deepens our relationship with ourselves and others. It reminds us that our worth is not tied to our ability to show up infallibly.

Art by Jordan Schiffer

Sometimes love is the quietest thing in the room

We know this, and yet we forget. Sometimes love doesn’t need to be declared. Or maybe it’s that the volume of the declaration doesn’t represent its depth.

The online world is loud with comparison, blaring declarations of intimacy and connection. It reminds me of being young and proudly announcing, this is my best friend. There’s sweetness in wanting our love to be seen. But how much of it is subconsciously performative? How much is conditioning around how we’re supposed to communicate love?

Some of the sweetest moments of intimacy I’ve ever experienced have been the quietest: breaking into silent laughter; exchanging a glance with a friend and holdign a hug with a friend for just a little longer; one meaningful moment in community that no one else sees. Sometimes love is meant to be felt, not displayed. Sometimes the quietest thing in the room is the truest.

Otherness in relationship

How do you respond to otherness, to someone who is different from you in the smallest and biggest ways? For many of us, otherness can feel intrusive. It can make you question your beliefs, your patterns, your sense of right and wrong. It can trigger old wounds. Some of it is compatibility. Some of it is readiness. Some of it is simply: are you willing to adjust, to soften, to let another person into your life?

Everything I share above is shaped by personal learnings from life and work. While honouring their anonymity, I want to thank the wonderful human whose conversations have informed these reflections, and the love that made them possible.

This summer has been wild and sweet and full of intentionality, curiosity, swims, humour, togetherness, depth, and integration.

I open my messages from them, excited to reply, excited to receive theirs. But also unsure of what’s happening, how this is unfolding, who this person is becoming in my life.

This dating experience had me mulling over the relationship between dating and doubt. Is some doubt okay? How much is too much? When does doubt signal that something isn’t right? And what do we do with it?

Western culture, is obsessed with certainty. It’s the shrine we worship. Where we’ll invest our time, resources, and energy. And it makes sense. The illusion of certainty makes us feel safe.

We know exactly what we’re ordering before we sit down for a meal. We know the trip we’ll take next spring. The weather in fourteen days. Down to the minute, what time our groceries will be delivered. We’ve engineered doubt out of almost everything that we touch.

Yet so much of our existence is entangled with uncertainty. Love is, undeniably, predicated on doubt. When we first meet someone, we’re inherently (and protectively) filled with doubt.

Are they who they say they are? Am I attracted to them? Are they actually curious about me? Do we share a sense of humor? Do we have chemistry? Are we getting along? How do they handle conflict? What have their past relationships been like? Do we want the same things?

The Materialists (2025)

Doubt serves an important purpose; it encourages discernment. First, it’s protective. Then, it’s inquisitive. After our bodies have decided that we are safe (emotionally & physically), it gives way to curiosity. Uncertainty is what fuels us to keep discovering someone. To keep exploring the textures and curves of a connection.

But sometimes, we take the doubt itself to mean that this must be wrong. That the right person, date, connection would feel completely and totally “right”. Void of even a hint of doubt. We’re so frequently sold the idea of “I just knew when I met them” or “from the moment we decided to be together, I was certain,” but this isn’t typically how intimacy grows. When we’re immediately certain about someone, we’re most likely certain about our projection of them. Sometimes, that’s who they turn out to be. But sometimes it’s not. People are layered, and they unfold over time. We can’t know them all at once. We were never meant to.

And what we’re left with is uncertainty. I don’t know yet. I’m not sure what will happen. I don’t know if they’re the right fit for me. I can’t tell if what’s coming up is an old pattern of mine. I don’t know if I see a future. I just don’t know yet.

This very doubt fuels our curiosity. And curiosity fuels desire. A desire to see someone. To understand their world. To discover their quirks and what they’re afraid of. Doubt facilitates intimacy.

Which isn’t to say that all doubt is something to sit with. I’m not referring to the doubt that makes your nervous system yelp, that makes you feel unsafe, or that carries the residue of past unhealthy dynamics. Instead, I’m talking about the doubt that lacks clarity. That asks you to sit in the discomfort of the liminal space. The not knowing. Discovering. Reaching. Finding clarity. Stepping in or stepping back.

Doubt fuels the slowing of momentum. Should I message? Do they want space? Are they interested? Am I interested? Is there enough here to continue?

When we listen to doubt without naming it, the momentum begins to stall. And when the space between two people isn’t filled with communication, with asking for what we want, with the willingness to leap open‑hearted into the risk of losing, distance grows.

Intimacy is a risk. Love is a leap into the unknown. An embrace of all that uncertainty has to offer us. And you don’t have to know today. You just have to know if you want to keep finding out.

And honestly, I don’t think we were meant to do most of the things we do in our digital world. We weren’t built for eight‑hour screen days or for scrolling until our nervous systems buzz. We weren’t meant to order dinner with two taps or ask AI obscure questions instead of letting them simmer in our minds.

But dating apps this particular way of consuming people feels especially unnatural. Like we’ve turned humans into commodities. A mirage of someone, but not quite real. Six photos. Three prompts. Apparently, that’s all a person is.

We were never meant to be swallowed by a screen. Whittled down, flattened, fed into an algorithm, and presented to potential suitors as a glossy, surface‑level version of ourselves.

How we got here

In the 90s, online dating was whispered about like a dystopian secret. Meeting someone on the internet? Absolutely not. Then You’ve Got Mail arrived in 1998 and made AOL chat rooms look like the birthplace of true love.

Match.com launched in 1995. E‑Harmony followed in 2000 with its psychology‑based compatibility model. People were skeptical.

Then came 2012. Tinder. The year dating changed forever. Within two years, Tinder saw over a billion swipes a day. Bumble arrived in 2014 with female‑first messaging. Raya joined in 2015, the worst of the lot, but that’s a story for another day. Hinge relaunched in 2016 as “the dating app designed to be deleted.” and many more for all your dating needs and desires.

And here we are.

I don’t hate dating apps, I just hate what they turn us into

As a lover girl, I actually think dating apps are one of the main avenues for finding connection in modern love. They’re accessible. They’re convenient. They’re sometimes magical.

But they also amplify cultural patterns that existed long before apps: ghosting, situationships, superficiality, the lack of accountability. Dating apps didn’t invent these things, they just turned the volume up.

They subliminally teach us that there’s always someone else. Always someone better. Not realizing that “better” has nothing to do with compatibility.

People are meant to be experienced, not consumed.

The part that breaks my heart

My main gripe with dating apps is that we were never meant to be packaged. Reduced to a handful of photos and a few witty lines. It’s convenient, but it’s not working for us.

We’re meant to see the way someone holds a cup. The way our bodies respond when they walk into a room. The last song they were playing when we slide into the passenger seat. How their eyes crinkle when they smile. How they look down when they’re nervous.

We’re meant to learn someone slowly. To discover their favorite film by accident. To notice how they order food. To be surprised.

But modern dating gives us five dates’ worth of information before we even meet. We know their job, their hometown, their hobbies, their education, their religious affiliation, their desire for a family. And because we have their full names, we can find their social media.

And yes, some of this helps with safety. But it also muddies our intuition.

Biology doesn’t lie

We’re social creatures. We read nervous systems. And no one can read a nervous system through a profile.

Someone can be app‑perfect, but their voice might feel wrong in person.
You can have hilarious online banter and zero chemistry across a table.
Someone who seemed like a throwaway match might make you laugh so hard you nearly pee in a coffee shop.

I’ve had all three.

There was the person whose messages made me feel like I’d finally met someone who spoke my language, only for the in‑person energy to be so flat I felt like I was on a date with a LinkedIn profile.

There was the one who looked perfect on paper, perfect on Instagram, perfect in every curated way but the moment they said hello, something in my body whispered no. Not danger. Just misalignment.

And then there was the date I almost cancelled, the one I assumed would be nothing, who ended up making me laugh so hard I had to hold onto the table to stay upright. Someone I would’ve never chosen if I’d relied solely on the surface‑level information.

We’re meant to be experienced, not consumed.

So what do we do?

Dating apps aren’t going anywhere. And the third places where we once met people bookstores, cafés, community spaces are disappearing. So the fix isn’t to delete the apps. It’s too reductive. Too unrealistic.

Instead, we reclaim some autonomy.

What I’d do

Go on an info diet

Too much information muddies our perspective. We project. We fantasize. We pre‑judge. We close doors before they open.

We don’t need more information, we need less.
Or rather, we need information that comes from our bodies, our intuition, our moment‑to‑moment experience.

If you need to vet for safety, have a friend do it.

Personalize your profile

Ask yourself:
If there were no rules, what would my dating profile look and feel like?

Make it more you.
Screenshot your favorite book.
Share a list of Substacks you love.
Talk about something obscure you’re obsessed with.

And yes, I like the Hinge voice memo feature. It’s cringe. But love is cringe.

To stop performing for an app built on performance is risky. Vulnerable. But if someone only wants the shiny version of you, do you really want them?

Build your life and build your community

I know it sounds cliché but building your life is genuinely one of the quickest ways to find someone aligned with you. Not because it’s a strategy, but because it’s a slow, honest build. A way of living that naturally filters for people who share your values, your pace, your curiosities.

Being part of your own community is a way of keeping something sacred alive. You’re not just creating opportunities to meet someone; you’re maintaining the ecosystem that makes connection possible in the first place.

When you build your life, you’re also building:

• Platonic relationships that hold you through the chaos of dating

• Skills that make you a better partner and a better human

• A relationship with yourself that becomes the foundation for every other relationship

And who knows, you might meet a lover along the way. But even if you don’t, you will always gain love, you will have experienced others and not comsued them.

Dating becomes less about consumption and more about connection when your life is already full of people, places, and practices that nourish you.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how women learn self‑criticism. How early it starts. How quietly it embeds itself. How it follows us into adulthood like a persistent shadow. I’ve watched friends and women I love wrestle with the same internal voice, the one that demands perfection, the one that narrates every perceived flaw, the one that insists we should be doing more, being more, achieving more.

For many women, self‑perception becomes a battleground long before adulthood. Childhood photos, school portraits, early social media all of it becomes a mirror that feels more like a magnifying glass. By the time we reach our twenties, the pressure to curate ourselves is so normalised that altering our appearance, hiding our softness, or performing confidence feels almost expected.

And even when we outgrow the external performance deleting apps, stepping away from filters, reclaiming our cultural or physical identity the internal critic often remains. It simply changes shape. It moves from appearance to achievement. From body to behaviour. From how we look to how we show up in relationships, work, friendships, dating, creativity. It becomes a tired, old wound that keeps reopening.

We’ve been conditioned to regulate emotion, maintain harmony, anticipate needs, and avoid mistakes. We bend until we break. And when we break, we blame ourselves for breaking. We’re obsessed with being sold a better future, a better self, a better relationship, we taught to reject reality as it is.

Productivity culture teaches us to treat every moment as a test we’re either passing or failing but wisdom has been saying something different all along.

This is where self‑compassion becomes radical.

In Buddhist teachings, there is the concept of the second arrow. The first arrow is pain, rejection, grief, disappointment, failure. The second arrow is the shame we add on top. The internal commentary. The self‑blame. The voice that says you should have known better, you should have done more, you should be stronger than this. The first arrow hurts; the second arrow makes us suffer.

Self‑compassion interrupts the second arrow.

It’s not a quick fix. It’s not a soft slogan. It’s a practice, a slow, awkward, and deeply counter‑cultural. It asks us to speak to ourselves the way we would speak to someone we love. It asks us to soften the voice that has been sharpened by years of expectation.

Baby, baby steps

Self‑compassion often begins with language. Trying on phrases that feel foreign at first: You did your best. I’m proud of you. This is what growth feels like. Noticing how your body responds, even a small exhale counts.

Little you is so little

There’s a reason inner‑child work is everywhere. It’s not cliché; it’s vulnerable. The younger version of you is still listening. She hears every comment you mutter under your breath. If you knew you were speaking to her, what would you change?

Accountability is loving

Self‑compassion doesn’t mean avoiding accountability. It means having people in your life who can gently call you back when you slip into cruelty toward yourself. Someone who can say, “I’m noticing this pattern. You said you wanted to work on it. Let’s pause.” And then doing the work of not resenting them for caring.

Self‑compassion matters most when we feel least deserving of it, when we’re grieving, rejected, ashamed, or out of alignment with our values. It’s easy to be kind to ourselves when things are going well. The real practice begins in the moments we want to hide.

Self‑compassion is simply treating yourself the way you’d treat someone you love. Warmly. Gently. Humanly. It’s the quiet decision to soften, and accept instead of punish. It’s the slow, steady work of becoming someone you can live with, kindly.

The lover girl has the audacity to believe in romantic love despite modern culture’s obsession with avoidance and indifference. She prioritises emotional connection in all relationships, romance, in friendship and in community. It’s the lens through which she sees the world, and we need that lens.

We need to be reminded that intimacy is worth the risk. That vulnerability is the avenue for connection. That sensitivity is one of our greatest defenses against indifference, masking, and disconnection. I want exclamation marks everywhere here, but let’s continue.

Because it’s not naive.
We can be discerning about who gets access to us.
We can be soft and still be boundaried.
We can believe in love and maintain high expectations for what healthy connection looks and feels like.

Go ahead, indulge us in sentimentality.

Our culture is tainted with indifference. It would almost prefer we feel nothing at all, to numb out, to develop a thick skin, to detach from the sentiment of it all. But the lover girl refuses to dissociate from what makes us come alive, what makes us human.

And we’ve painted the lover girl as naive, a prey to the predator of modern dating. We’ve been told again and again that we feel too much, and eventually it wore us down. The sentimentality felt shameful. Too dangerous.

The decision to detach wasn’t conscious, it was protective. The risk of caring felt too great. Sensitivity started to seem like a weakness, something we had to mask and work around instead of work with.

But the detachment cost us more than our sensitivity ever could. It rendered us empty, divorced from the feeling that is part of our being. Numbing protects only if it prevents us from feeling anything at all. Our sensitivity was never a weakness, it was an armour against indifference.

Collectively, we’re tired of numbing out. We’re returning to romance, but this time differently: with self‑trust, with discernment, with intentionality about who gets access to us. With the realisation that our ability to feel is not a liability, it’s our humanity.

Without a doubt, the lover girl’s heart is more prone to wounding. It requires tending, processing, care. But it also guarantees more love, more aliveness, more connection, more co‑creation, more presence with the beating heart of the world. More of everything that makes life worth living.

The world needs sensitive hearts. Your art needs your capacity to feel. Your community needs your audacity to believe in love. And if to feel is to be alive, the lover girl chooses life every time.

We don’t talk about these moments enough, the ones where intimacy becomes less about performance and more about presence. Where the goal isn’t to impress or seduce or manage perception, but simply to be a wild human being in a human body, witnessed without judgement.

For many of us, the body has been a place we’ve learned to monitor, manage, or mute. We’ve been taught to prioritise how we appear over how we feel, to focus on performance rather than connection. We learn to stay in our heads because our bodies feel like dangerous places, too honest, too revealing, too unfiltered.

But intimacy asks something different of us. It asks us to return to ourselves.

It’s the moment you notice your breathing slow. The moment you stop worrying about how you’re being perceived. The moment you feel grounded enough to stay with your own sensations, emotions, and truth.

This kind of intimacy doesn’t demand perfection. It simply requires honesty and the willingness to show up as you are, without the performance.

I used to perform in intimacy, but I don’t want that anymore. Intimacy is messier now. It’s chaotic at times, it’s silly but it is also honest, liberating, sexy and alive in every experience.

And the healing isn’t just in the connection with another person. It’s in the connection with yourself. It’s in realising: I can be present in my body. I can feel what I feel. I can let myself be seen without abandoning myself.

Sometimes the most transformative part isn’t the moment itself, but the awareness that you didn’t shrink. You didn’t disappear. You didn’t betray yourself to be chosen. You stayed in your body, and the world didn’t end.

Intimacy becomes a reminder that you are not meant to live disconnected from yourself. That your body is not an obstacle to intimacy, key.

And when you experience intimacy that feels safe, attuned, and grounded, something inside you begins to trust again. Not just the other person, but yourself and your own instincts, your own desires, your own capacity to be present.

It brings you back to yourself.

We didn’t arrive here by accident. We live in a world where dating apps create the illusion of infinite options, where social media rewards irony over sincerity, where burnout leaves us too tired to feel deeply. Detachment has become a survival strategy, a way to stay in the game without ever truly entering it.

I think back on my own past. Being vulnerable, having feelings big, bright, overflowing feelings and the world’s rejection of that openness, the expectation to “play the game,” and “play it cool” the subtle pushback that labels vulnerability as “too much,” begins to create a fracture. A brief. A bruise. A moment where you learn to hold back what is most natural to you.

We don’t build walls for no reason. We built them because they once protected us. Because distance felt safer than exposure. And beyond safety, indifference gives us the illusion of power, a smoke screen of control. If we stay detached, we can’t be hurt. If we hold the upper hand, we can’t be abandoned. But love and control are incompatible. Intimacy cannot grow in a place where self‑protection is the priority.

And the cost of not caring is real. Every time we pretend not to care, we teach our nervous system that connection is dangerous. We shrink our emotional range. We become spectators in our own relationships.

Admitting you care feels like exposing my Achilles, saying, here is where I’m tender, here is where the scar tissue formed. (It’s terrifying). The scars don’t disappear but what changes is our capacity to hold them. Our ability to make room for sadness, disappointment, anger, and self‑doubt, not so they stop hurting, but so they stop keeping us from what we long for.

Caring is like opening a window in a room we’ve kept shut for years, the air rushes in, unsettling the dust, but reminding us we’re alive.

“The audacity to care” is the bold, unapologetic choice to remain emotionally awake in a culture that worships detachment. It’s the courage to drop your defenses, to ask for what you need, to hold space for someone else’s truth. It’s choosing sincerity in a world that finds sincerity suspicious.

It’s saying, I like you. I had a good time with you. I care. It’s making the first move. It’s being human in a culture that keeps telling us to be “cool”.

But the juice is worth the squeeze. Togetherness is every bit as nourishing as we imagine. It feels vulnerable, but that vulnerability is what makes it so potent. On the other side of fear is the connection we’ve been craving.

Being in community is imperfect. It’s the anti‑AI. In a world that’s more optimized and digitally manicured than ever, where everything melts into sameness, community is imperfect in a way that feels deeply human.

I think about my run community, how imperfect and human it is, and how much it’s held me. I’ve shown up on days when life felt impossibly heavy, when I was moving through the world like a half‑version of myself. I’ve arrived tired, quiet, not pretending to be anything other. They matched my pace, checked in without prying, and let me exist exactly as I was. I’ve also shown up on the better days, the ones where joy felt loud. That’s the thing about community: it holds the full spectrum. I’ve been witnessed in my mess and in my momentum, and both have been met with the same steady kind of care.

We show up mid‑process, sometimes exhausted, carrying whatever complicated truth exists in that moment. And the imperfection isn’t something to look past; it’s what creates the texture of truth.

No one has ever grown from pretending to be perfect. No one has ever felt connected by pretending to be perfect. We don’t build community by being polished, but by being human.

We don’t need more echo chambers. It’s easy to end up in one. Most platforms are built that way. Algorithms show us what we already think, over and over again, until imagining anything else feels ridiculous. But we need discourse. It’s how we practise discernment and feel our way toward our own version of truth.

Communication that builds psychological safety carves out space for discourse for disagreement, for fresh perspectives, not from disrespect, but from the delicate balance where nuanced growth lives.

It can’t be all or nothing. Just like everything else, we fall into all‑or‑absolutely‑nothing thinking, from how we take care of ourselves to how we show up in relationships. The “all” feels overwhelming, so we drop into the “nothing,” and then, when shame has its way with us, we slowly crawl back out. A pattern I know all too well.

But community can’t be all or nothing. If it is, it will never be sustainable. If it is, we’ll never connect. There is no perfect time to be in community, no perfect day, season, or year to show up. Some weeks we have the capacity; the next, we’re rolled by the waves of life.

When we show up when we can, over time we build connections that don’t require constant presence, connections that honour our humanity and welcome us back when we’re ready.

We don’t grow because others tell us what to do; we grow by witnessing and being witnessed, by that one sentence someone shared that we can’t stop thinking about.

By trading ideas and inching closer to our personal truths around love. By seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes of others and, for the first time in a long time, seeing clearly.

By being inspired by the courage of others to set boundaries, take risks, or shed an old pattern and in turn sourcing our own strength. By being celebrated fully and completely when our growth finally shows up in our lives.

Healing in community is clarity and the prescription lens we forgot we needed.

For a while, we were told we shouldn’t want that. Second‑wave feminism (which did a lot of good) pushed us away from anything that looked like dependence or desire for male attention. Wanting to be pursued was framed as regressive a symptom of patriarchy. Third‑wave feminism, thankfully, handed us our autonomy back. It stopped telling us what we should want and reminded us that empowerment is the freedom to choose our own desires.We’re allowed to want to be pursued.

The chase is about power. The pursuit is about connection.

The Anatomy of the Chase

If you’ve chased or been chased, you know the feeling. That intoxicating neurochemical cocktail. The push‑pull. The almost‑connection. The “come here, go away” dynamic that keeps you hooked.

I remember times when my stomach dropped at a delayed text, or when a sudden burst of attention felt like oxygen after holding my breath for days. That wasn’t chemistry, it was my nervous system in survival mode.

Psychologically, the chase thrives on intermittent reinforcement, on unpredictable bursts of attention that create an addictive loop. It’s the same mechanism that makes slot machines so compelling, you never know when the next hit is coming, so you stay invested far longer than you should.

And modern dating culture only intensifies it. Apps create abundance illusions. Ghosting normalises avoidance. Overstimulation makes consistency feel rare. I’ve had conversations that felt like interviews, matches that disappeared mid‑sentence, and connections that burned hot for 48 hours before evaporating. It’s no wonder the chase became the norm.

The chase is modern-day hunter vs. prey. It’s objectifying by nature. We’re trying to “get” someone, not get to know them. And while the rush feels incredible, the reality on the other side is stark, a loss of interest, a lack of connection or a nervous system in chaos.

When the chase ends or the attention fades, we strategise. We pull away. We become mysterious. We try to evoke jealousy. We claw our way back to that first hit of connection. It’s a cycle and it’s lethal to real intimacy.

The Pursuit

The pursuit may look similar from the outside one person often initiates more in the beginning but the intention, energy, and emotional impact are completely different.

The pursuit isn’t about “getting” someone. It’s about the communicated desire to get to know someone. The semantics matter.

The pursuit names the dynamic “I really enjoyed our time together, and I’d love to keep getting to know you.”

It honours mutual interest. If you communicate (verbally or through behaviour) that you’re not interested, the pursuit ends. No games. No strategising. No emotional gymnastics.

It’s steady. It’s consistent. It doesn’t leave you analysing texts or replaying dates line by line. And it’s present‑focused not trying to drag you into a future fantasy.

Mutuality is shared momentum not equal effort, but equal intention. One person may lead, but both move. Both respond. Both show up.

It looks like responsiveness, emotional availability, and a willingness to meet each other halfway. Mutuality is the quiet, steady “yes” that makes pursuit feel safe and makes the chase unnecessary.

I didn’t understand mutuality until I felt it. The first time someone matched my energy without me having to shrink or stretch myself, my whole body exhaled. It felt like, “Oh this is what it’s supposed to be.”

Your body knows. If you slow down and listen, your body will tell you everything.

Take Me to Dinner, Please

I’ve come to realise that being taken on dates feels healing. After years of feeling invisible in a relationship, the intention of someone planning a date felt reparative.

So I started telling men directly: “I’d love for you to plan our second date.”

And they did. Because I’d reconnected with my needs, I didn’t feel “too much” for asking.

I’ve had moments where asking for anything clarity, effort, intention felt like risking the whole connection. Like wanting to be pursued made me demanding. It took time to realise that wanting effort isn’t “too much.” It’s the bare minimum.

I remember the first time someone planned a date for me without asking what I wanted to do. It wasn’t extravagant just thoughtful. But it made me feel considered in a way I hadn’t realised I’d been missing.

For me, being pursued looks like someone planning a date. For you, it might be something different expressing feelings first, initiating plans, or moving the relationship forward. You get to decide. And communicating that desire is part of healthy pursuit.

It doesn’t make you a bad feminist. Or old‑fashioned. It makes you human. In a dating culture shaped by apps, abundance illusions, ghosting, and emotional avoidance, pursuit is romantic and grounding.

And sometimes we want to take fate into our own hands. I have.

I’ve been the pursuer. I can’t tell you exactly why but I just had a good feeling. He was curious, grounded, and aligned with my values. So I pursued him.

And then I had to confront the old wound, the fear that the pursuer cares more. That the pursuer is at a disadvantage. That the pursuer is the one who risks not being chosen.

But that wound was mine, not the relationship’s. And as the dynamic settled into reciprocity, I realised that pursuing wasn’t weakness, it was intuition. It was clarity. It was courage.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you’re the pursued or the pursuer. It matters only that the dynamic is mutual, intentional, and aligned with what you want.

When you look back, you don’t remember who texted first or who leaned in more. you remember the moments you both chose each other again and again, in small, steady ways.

Because that’s the thing about love in the end, who started it doesn’t matter.

The bone-deep yearning. The way your stomach drops when the person you want looks straight past you. The belief that if you could just have this one thing, this one person, you’d never ask for anything else again. And once you’ve felt that ache, it never fully leaves.

It was the corridor by the science block, the one with the steamed-up windows in winter. I was fourteen, pretending to study the noticeboard while really waiting for a glimpse of T. Not because he ever looked back, but because hope is stubborn at that age.

There was something about the way he laughed with everyone else, never me, that lodged itself under my skin. It wasn’t love not really but it was the closest thing my teenage self had to a compass. A quiet, persistent longing that followed me through GCSEs, college, and even into my early twenties.

And of course, it was never mutual. Not even close.

I’ve had my fair share of mismatched crushes and almost-relationships since then, but it’s that early ache that still catches me off guard sometimes. It reminds me of what it means to feel something fully before we learned to dilute ourselves, before we were taught to play it cool. Before we learned to armour up.

The beauty of this mindset comes down to something simple: feeling deeply means you are truly alive. It shifts the definition of success away from being chosen or avoiding heartbreak, and toward the bravery of being vulnerable.

Love isn’t coy

Modern dating feels like a performance half the time. Everyone pretending not to care, replying three hours late, curating messages like they’re submitting them for review. We’re told to be effortless, detached, unbothered as if indifference is attractive, as if vulnerability is a flaw.

But love has never been subtle. It doesn’t whisper; it doesn’t tiptoe. It wants to be felt. It wants to spill over the edges. And the truth is, anything built on strategy collapses the moment real emotion enters the room.

In a culture that rewards emotional rationing, choosing to care, openly, unapologetically, feels almost rebellious. A quiet refusal to participate in the performance.

Love isn’t a means to an end. It’s the end. Unrequited love often carries shame. That quiet belief, If I wasn’t chosen, I must not be enough. But the truth is, you dared to love and that alone is enough.

To feel is to be alive. To experience the richness of connection alongside the hollowness of loss is the essence of living. A life without emotional risk is also a life without emotional elation.

The truth is simple, we will never be chosen if we don’t allow ourselves the chance to not be chosen. Love without risk isn’t the kind of love we want.

And when I think about the version of reality I fear most, it isn’t endless heartbreak. It’s numbness. It’s looking at the nature, holding someone’s hand, laughing with friends, and feeling nothing.

I’m not afraid of grief. I’m afraid of indifference. Love isn’t the means to an end. It’s the end.

Tending to Unrequited Love

If you’re living through unrequited love, you’re not alone. And you’re not destined to stay in that holding pattern. Below are invitations to lay your pattern out on the table and look at it with clear eyes.

Giving our hearts on loan

Sometimes we have a type, not in appearance, but in feeling. The person who always seems just out of reach. Whose attention feels like sunlight on a cold day. Maybe you’ve handed this person your heart so many times you’ve stopped noticing you’re doing it.

A pattern of unrequited love doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It’s an invitation to get curious about what keeps pulling you back.

Who is safe to give your love to?

Our non-romantic relationships are often our clearest compass.

The friend who holds your heart with tenderness. The colleague who sees you without you having to perform. The sibling or parent who celebrates your complexities. The friend you can sit in silence with, your nervous system finally settled. These relationships outline what reciprocal love feels like.

The echoes of our worth

Looking back, I can trace a pattern through my teens and early adulthood — handing my heart to people who barely noticed they were holding it. I mistook attention for affection, crumbs for connection. And when someone finally did choose me, I clung to it like it was oxygen.

Being chosen felt like relief. Like finally exhaling after years of holding my breath. So I ignored the red flags, the inconsistencies, the way I shrank myself to fit what they wanted. It wasn’t unrequited love that time, but I still lost parts of myself along the way.

It took me a long time to realise that the love I was chasing needed to be rerouted inward first.

You are your centre of gravity

When someone else becomes your centre of gravity, you lose access to yourself, your needs, your boundaries, your preferences, even how you take your cuppa tea.

Finding your way back is quieter than you expect. It’s not a grand revelation. It’s more like walking home at dusk and noticing the street looks different when you’re paying attention.

I started doing small things for myself, buying daffodils or tulips from the shop, taking the long way home through the park, spending time with people who made me feel grounded rather than drained. Little rituals that reminded me I was allowed to be the centre of my own world.

It wasn’t a homecoming. It was a gentle return.

I never ended up with the boy from the corridor, and thank God for that. But the experience stayed with me and shaping the way I love, the way I write, the way I move through the world.

Our ability to feel deeply, to yearn, to want, to love is the fabric of who we are. Vulnerability isn’t an Achilles heel; it’s proof that we’re still awake to our own lives.

And honestly, that’s worth more than being chosen by anyone who can’t meet us there.

I remember it in my body more than in words. Even when it wasn’t meant to wound, it landed. I absorbed it quietly, long before I understood what I was internalising.

Many of us were taught that our sensitivity needed managing, that our emotions should be softened, contained, made smaller. Over time, we learned to hold ourselves in, not because the feelings disappeared, but because we didn’t want to be seen as fragile.

Many of us learned to quiet our curiosity, our eagerness, our natural impulse to fill a room. Not because those qualities were wrong, but because the subtle cues around us suggested they were unwelcome.

So I learned, protectively, how to self‑monitor. How to keep my voice down. How to take a deep breath. How to stay contained.

Some of that is regulation, and regulation matters. But somewhere along the way, we also turn down the volume on who we are. We become praised not for our fullness, but for our restraint. For our quiet. For our absence.

And just like that, we did. Just like we sometimes still do when we’re afraid we’re too much.

And the thing is, this isn’t just personal. It’s cultural. These messages don’t come from one voice; they come from a world that teaches many of us, especially women, to contract ourselves. We learn that our intensity is inconvenient. Our emotions, excessive. Our presence, something to be managed.

Too smart. Too sensitive. Too expressive. Too much, as if these qualities diminish us rather than define us. As if these qualities make us less than ourselves, rather than more of who we are.

Over time, the message settles into the bones. We start anticipating the criticism before it arrives.

And the question Was that too much? begins to hum beneath everything. It shapes how we speak, how we move, how we choose. Hypervigilance becomes familiar.

There is a loneliness in abandoning yourself. A quiet ache that doesn’t announce itself, but lingers in the places where authenticity used to live.

Once we learn to shrink, it follows us into every room. Even with the people who feel safest, the question still flickers: Was that too much?

But I’ve been wondering if it was ever really about us.

Maybe it had nothing to do with who we were, and everything to do with the people who needed us small or the systems that rewarded our compliance.

“Too much” was always someone else’s threshold. Someone else’s discomfort. Someone else’s inability to hold what was vibrant in us.

And yet, there are people who don’t flinch at our fullness. People who recognise intensity as a form of aliveness. People who meet it with steadiness rather than fear.

Being around them feels like exhaling. Like remembering something we didn’t realise we’d forgotten.

When we stop shrinking, we begin to attract the ones who never wanted us small in the first place. The ones who delight in our loud laughter, who honour our sensitivity, who help us return to ourselves.

Maybe we were never “too much.” Maybe we were simply ourselves and that was always enough.

My morning pages are littered with reflections on time. Fear, frustration, and hopefulness weave between the lines. Where is my time going? Why does there never seem to be enough of it? Each week, I tell myself I’ll get a handle on everything. I want to keep the clock on a tight leash, resisting the forever‑forward motion of its hands.

And yet, amid the scarcity of time, there’s romance quietly present in shapes small and unassuming. Not the kind you buy, or the once‑in‑a‑lifetime grand gesture. But a quieter romance, the kind that reveals itself only when we’re fully present to the right‑nowness of every passing second.

If I follow the thread, it strings together something like a poem: the curve of my favourite mug, a swarm of birds stitching sound into the sky, the dress I’d been saving and finally wore to the office, cooking a fresh meal, the flicker and scent of a candle, a slow still moment in nature, starting the day with sunrise, the drift of incense in the evening, the punch of a chilled pint, the chitter‑chatter of friends, music spilling into the garden, losing yourself in a new book, the smell of fresh pages.

These are what make life feel stable and meaningful. But space and time have collapsed so tightly that we rarely have room to reflect. We’re fed a constant supply of information (ideas, possibilities, tasks, to‑dos, goals) until we’re saturated.

Romance Expands Time

These tiny, seemingly insignificant moments imprint themselves on the flow of time. They slow things down. Micro‑moments of pleasure, of romance, pull us from our monotonous trance and whisper, Look. Look at your beautiful life. Romance isn’t an action; it’s an intention, a commitment not just to look, but to see.

Time compression, the feeling that time speeds up as we get older has been trailing me. Maybe it’s turning thirty, or maybe it’s just my algorithm, but the messaging is relentless: Make the most of your time! Fill your life with novelty! Break your routine!

Space and time have condensed so tightly that we no longer feel at home in our own lives.

At least for me, time feels like it’s always running out because there’s always something more I could or should be doing. The pressure is constant, quiet, and strangely familiar.

Time no longer feels like a coherent narrative of past, present, and future. Instead, it breaks into point‑like moments, scattered and sharp.

Part of this comes from the endless stream of information we’re fed. But part of it is internal. We’ve turned ourselves into achievement‑objects - always producing, always optimising and somewhere along the way, we started mistaking that for freedom.

In the constant rush, we lose the ability to contemplate. But I’m learning that I don’t need to fully understand something to be moved by it.

The logic of novelty makes sense (new experiences give our brain more to process, which shapes how we perceive time), but the message carries privilege. Most of life is routine: meeting basic needs, tending to relationships, and, if we’re lucky, pockets of adventure along the way. The constant depiction that life should be a thrilling conveyor belt of new experiences only intensifies the fear that we’re not living as we should.

Romance is a remedy. Because while it exists in the Italian villa, it also exists everywhere else, around unassuming corners and inside the rituals of our days: a quiet afternoon at the library, a glass of coca cola, pillow talk, crisp sheets, freshly baked loaf of bread. When our basic needs are met (a big if), life can be pulled apart and bookmarked by instances of romance, slowing everything almost to a halt.

Romance as a Rebellious Inconvenience

Capitalist romance is grounded in consumption, but the romance I’m talking about is rooted in resistance, not only resistance to acquiring more, but to doing more, being more, achieving more. When we take the long way home, handwrite our notes, make treats from scratch, wander along the river to nowhere, or whisper with a partner deep into the night, we swim upstream against the current of not enough.

We live in an era of frictionless ease. Instant delivery, instant answers, instant everything. Romance doesn’t fit neatly into that world. It’s slow. It’s effortful. It’s inconvenient. And that’s exactly what makes it meaningful. Oliver Burkeman captures this beautifully: “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort which is to say, the inconvenience.”

Wherever I go, I send postcards to friends. I could be doing a hundred other things, but instead I’m buying stamps and hunting for a postbox. I often wonder why I didn’t just call or send a message. But romance is inconvenient and that’s what makes it romantic.

Romance as a Personal Practice

When life picks up speed and time folds into itself, romance becomes a practice of returning. Returning to the moment.Returning to ourselves. Returning to each other. It’s an invitation back into connection with time, one small, intentional gesture at a time.

And the practice isn’t prescriptive. Our projections of romance only limit what romance might look like. It doesn’t have to be aesthetic; it just has to be yours.

Rituals have the power to change us. They offer space to linger, to mark beginnings and endings, to bring calm into the constant.

Time will keep moving, and the hands of the clock won’t stop. The finite nature of our lives (and the lives of those we love) is terrifying. And yet, nothing pulls us more sharply into the present.

The handwritten letters won’t come forever. The late‑night conversations won’t last forever. The people we love won’t be here forever. So do the inconvenient, effortful thing. Commit not just to looking, but to seeing.

Find romance wherever you find yourself, even, and especially, if it’s not the grand gestures. Tug at your routine until it softens enough to reveal the beauty inside your daily life. Because time won’t slow down on its own. But you can.

And I hope you find what you’re looking for, or at least, the small moments that help you remember you’re alive.

Reciprocity doesn’t disappear in a single moment. It erodes quietly.

It shifts when proximity shifts. When we no longer live together, or work together, or see each other in the small, unremarkable moments that used to stitch our lives together. Distance changes the rhythm. It changes what we reach for and who we reach toward.

And then there’s what happens when people settle into long-term relationships, new routines, new responsibilities. The shutters come down. Not abruptly, just gradually.

We stop talking about the parts of life that feel tender. The recurring arguments. The doubts. The loneliness that can exist even inside a partnership. The places where we feel stretched or uncertain.

We tell ourselves we’re protecting our relationships from judgment. We don’t want friends to misunderstand, to form opinions without context, to make assumptions about our partners or our choices. Long-term relationships feel more permanent, and because of that, more fragile. So we guard them. But in guarding them, we also guard ourselves.

And that’s where reciprocity begins to thin.

As a single friend, I notice the imbalance more clearly. It’s not that I’m unwilling to share, I do. I talk about dating, about the things that feel confusing or hopeful or raw. But the exchange often stops there.

I offer vulnerability, and it isn’t met with vulnerability in return.

When I ask about their relationships, I get the polished version “We’re fine. Everything’s fine.” “Life is good” A quick reassurance. A closed door.

My body feels the shift before my mind does, the slight tightening, the instinct to share less, the quiet awareness that the space between us has changed.

Without reciprocity, intimacy can’t survive. One-way sharing doesn’t build closeness; it builds distance. It can feel isolating for everyone involved.

It also widens the divide between our lives. Not intentionally, but inevitably. It sorts us into categories of who we can still reach emotionally, and who now feels slightly out of reach. The gap grows unless someone is willing to step forward with honesty, regardless of relationship status. Disconnection breeds more disconnection.

I’m not suggesting that the answer is to expose every detail or complain endlessly. Privacy matters. Boundaries matter. Every relationship has its own agreements about what is okay to share.

But I do wonder what stops us from reaching out for the same kind of support that carried us through younger years.

What is it about adulthood or long-term relationships, that makes us lock the door and toss the keys? And who does that really serve?

If we stop seeking support from friends entirely, both our friendships and our partnerships lose something.

Reciprocity isn’t about equal exchange, it’s about mutual availability.

A willingness to stay open to each other’s inner worlds, listen, even when life becomes more complex.

Ideally, we share with people who meet us with compassion and curiosity. People who want to understand rather than judge. When those conditions are present, reciprocity becomes a source of strength, not a threat.

I don’t know exactly what rebuilding reciprocity looks like, but I know I want to preserve some version of the closeness we once had. The kind that survives distance and time apart because the exchange is still mutual. The kind where vulnerability isn’t a performance, but a shared language.

Maybe reciprocity isn’t about keeping things equal. Maybe it’s about keeping things open. A willingness to meet each other where we are. A willingness to stay in the conversation. A willingness to be seen.

I think I’ll stain my friendships with reciprocity, and call it beautiful.

Dating apps have shaped so much of this confusion. We love to hate them, yet they quietly influence the culture we date in. They encourage a kind of hyper‑discernment, a belief that someone more aligned, more emotionally mature, more attractive, more everything is just a swipe away. And when we’re taught to expect endless possibilities, it becomes harder to invest in the person standing right in front of us. It normalises detachment. It normalises avoidance.

It’s not a personal failing. It’s psychology. But it’s also not the whole story.

Casual relationships are rising for reasons far beyond the apps. Fewer people see marriage as a necessary milestone. Most of us are questioning the narratives we inherited, the ones that told us partnership is the ultimate destination. We’re colouring outside the old lines, asking ourselves what we actually want, and whether long‑term commitment is truly part of that picture.

And yet, even as casual dating becomes more common, our bodies don’t always know how to stay casual.

The nervous system does not speak casual. We can tell ourselves it’s easy, it’s nothing serious, it’s just fun. But our nervous systems don’t understand labels. They understand patterns. They understand closeness. Intimacy without a label is still intimacy.

The way someone reaches for your hand without thinking, the comfort of cooking together in a messy kitchen, the inside jokes, the soft confessions, the shared laughter, the tiny details of our day. Something in us responds.

So if (like me) you’ve ever found yourself feeling more than you meant to, or confused by your own reactions, nothing is wrong with you. You’re not dramatic. You’re not “too much.” You’re simply human, responding to connection the way humans do. In the way your chest tightens when their name lights up your phone. The quiet disappointment when a message takes longer than usual. The warmth that spreads through you when they laugh at your jokes.

There is nothing inherently harmful about casual relationships. Sometimes they’re exactly what we have the capacity for. Sometimes they’re all we want. Maybe we’re healing. Maybe we’re focused on our children, our work, our own becoming. Maybe we crave companionship or physical intimacy without the investment of a long‑term commitment.

There are countless reasons to choose casual dating, and none of them require justification. We’re allowed to define our relational needs. But clarity matters. Ambiguity is where people get hurt.

This isn’t the same as “let’s see where it goes” or “I’m not looking for anything serious right now.” Those phrases sound clear, but they leave too much room for interpretation.

What I’ve learned is that if we call something casual without naming what that actually means, how often we talk, what intimacy looks like, what we’re available for, we create a space where assumptions grow. And assumptions are where heartbreak begins. Feelings can change. Boundaries can shift. Sometimes we fall in love without meaning to.

But more often, one person quietly hopes for more while the other stays exactly where they are. And the gap between those two realities becomes its own kind of ache.

Casual relationships don’t silence our attachment systems, they simply place them in a different landscape. For some, the looseness feels freeing. For others, it stirs something deeper, a longing, a fear, a familiar ache. Anxious attachment can make ambiguity feel like instability. Avoidant attachment can make closeness feel like pressure. Disorganised attachment can make both feel true at once.

You might notice it in the anxious ache when plans feel uncertain. The avoidant urge to pull back after a moment of closeness. The disorganised confusion of wanting to text and wanting to disappear at the same time.

None of this is a flaw. It’s simply the nervous system remembering what it learned long ago. Understanding our attachment patterns isn’t about labelling ourselves. It’s about noticing where we tighten, where we reach, where we pull away. Casual relationships can be beautiful, but only when we’re honest about what our bodies are whispering.

Casual relationships feel gentler when we’re held by something larger than the connection itself.

When we have friendships that ground us, routines that steady us, and spaces where we feel seen, we don’t place the weight of our unmet needs onto someone who was never meant to carry them. When we’re nourished elsewhere, we can meet casual relationships with openness rather than urgency. We can enjoy what they offer without asking them to be more than they are.

Maybe you’ve tried casual relationships, maybe you haven’t, or maybe you never want to. All of it is valid.

But I’ve found that when done with honesty and care, casual relationships can become a kind of self‑exploration. They can show us where our boundaries soften, where they hold firm, where our needs speak up, and where they stay quiet. They can reveal parts of us we didn’t know were there. Casual doesn’t have to mean meaningless. It can be tender, expansive, and quietly transformative.

Casual relationships aren’t lesser versions of “real” relationships. They’re simply a different shape of connection, one that asks us to stay present, to stay honest, and to stay anchored in ourselves. They invite us to notice what stirs in us, to listen to our nervous systems, to honour our boundaries, and to recognise the difference between longing and love.

Maybe casual relationships aren’t about staying detached, but about learning how to stay present. Feeling the shift in your body when a boundary is crossed or honoured. To see what opens in us, to see what needs tending and, of course, to have fun.

To be known like that is both heartbreak and joy. It’s the bravest, most human thing we do. We crave it at the most fundamental level, yet we fear it just as deeply, because intimacy can go wrong. There will be moments when we are misunderstood, abandoned, or betrayed, and the pain of that cuts as sharply as the joy of being seen. Two sides of the same coin.

But intimacy is why we’re here. It’s the balm that soothes our wounds, the story we keep returning to, the reason we place ourselves in the path of love again and again.

It builds slowly, over seasons. It begins quietly, almost imperceptibly, and then it compounds, the face someone makes when a joke lands a little too close to home, the tone of “I’m okay” when they’re anything but, the giggle that only appears when they feel completely safe, the messy, vulnerable parts almost no one else gets to witness.

It grows in layers. It’s not instant gratification. It’s earned, not freely given. And one day you realise you know them almost as well as you know yourself.

We all crave that irreplaceable sense of closeness, the reassurance that the battle isn’t ours alone to fight, that even in the darkest corners of our mind someone will come in and switch on the light.

And yet, while we crave it, we resist it. Intimacy asks us to surrender the version of ourselves we’ve carefully curated. It asks us to lower the walls we’ve spent years rebuilding, to question the narrative that we’re perfectly fine on our own. But we’re wired for connection. Pulled toward closeness. Drawn back to love, again and again.

When intimacy is present, it feels like safety. It’s permission to stop performing, to let our guard down, to be loved for who we truly are rather than who we think we should be. It’s the quiet acceptance that we are works in progress, that our minds are messy, that we have needs and that this is okay.

Being deeply known isn’t limited to romance. It’s a best friend, a mother, a sibling, a lover, a play partner, or that friend who feels more like a soulmate than anything else. This kind of intimacy is transcendent. It gives us a blueprint for the love we deserve. It returns us to a fundamental truth: we are worthy of being loved exactly as we are.

The intimacy of being deeply known is a homecoming, a courageous return to who we were long before the world told us who to be.

These micro‑moments are easy to overlook, but they’re where closeness actually lives. Drs. John and Julie Gottman call these moments bids for connection, any verbal or nonverbal attempt to gain another person’s attention, affection, or engagement. A comment, a question, a sigh, a touch. They’re the quiet acts of yearning and hoping to be seen. They hide in the everyday, but they mean everything.

There’s a tenderness to these bids that’s almost fragile. “Are you mad at me.” “Do you want to go for a walk.” “Would you like to meet for a coffee.” Every one of them is really asking, Do you see me, Are we okay, Do you want to know me. And it’s so easy to miss them, to be distracted, distant, or caught up in our own world but the person reaching out feels the absence of a response deeply.

We tend to respond in one of three ways, turning toward, turning away, or turning against. I’m guilty of all three. When we turn toward, we connect. When we turn away, connection slowly erodes. When we turn against, we lay the groundwork for resentment. Relationships rarely fall apart because of one big rupture; they fall apart because, over time, bids go unanswered. Connection fades, thins, and eventually slips quietly out the back door.

And when we feel insecure in our connections, our efforts often intensify. We search for reassurance. We might hide our longing beneath sarcasm, withdrawal, or criticism, and ironically, those behaviours create even more distance.

This is how cycles of misunderstanding and disconnection form. Finding our way back to intimacy requires curiosity, a softening, an unguarded question. A willingness to recognise that the person sitting across from you is asking, in their own way, Do you see me, Are we okay, Do you still want to know me.

Turning toward is sometimes it’s as simple as saying, “That’s a great idea,” or looking up when someone points out a bird. Other times it’s noticing the small invitations, a comment, a sigh, a smile and responding with interest. It’s pausing what you’re doing, making eye contact, putting the phone down, and being genuinely present. It can also be the small physical gestures: a hand on the back, holding hands, a six‑second kiss. It’s choosing “we” instead of “me versus you.”

Every relationship is a layered series of bids and responses, thousands of small moments quietly asking: do you see me, and what about now, what about when I’ve changed, what about when life is messy and complicated and nothing like we imagined.

In the beginning of a relationship, bids are even smaller, even more cautious “No worries if not,” “Let me know when you’re free,” “I’m down if you want to.” But beneath all of it is the same question of, Do you see me, Do you want to know me.

Intimacy is cultivated through responsiveness, not chemistry, through little moments of turning toward, following up, staying curious. And when someone repeatedly turns away, our nervous system protects us; we bid less, soften less, or avoid altogether.

Relationships aren’t about never missing a bid. We all miss them, how human of us. What matters is noticing the patterns, ours and theirs, and gently shifting back toward connection, again and again, in all the small ways that intimacy is built.

Intimacy isn’t about perfection. It never was. It’s the practice of turning toward when it would be easier to turn away. It’s noticing the quiet calls for connection. It’s responsiveness. And mostly, it’s the willingness to try again. Love doesn’t only appear in grand gestures. It appears in the small moments where we truly see each other.

It’s the kind of longing we’re taught to expect from films and love songs, slowly sharpens into something more intense. An involuntary pull. A romantic obsession, almost unbearable.

Confined by Dorothy Tennov in 1970s limerence is characterised by intrusive and obsessive thoughts about someone idealising emotional dependence on their response and a trade off between euphoria and despair and its vertigo for our nervous systems.

And we’ve all felt it or at least glimmers of it. That feeling when you would do anything for them, to show up on the glow of your screen for them to pay attention to notice you to ask about your day to say i want you.

And the obsessive nature of limerence is not a character flaw. Rather something has been hijacked. Limerence hooks into old wounds steering us towards someone who’s emotionally unavailable uninterrupted or unable to meet us with the emotional intimacy and safety we’re longing for

It’s a pattern caught on replay, not a part of who we are sifting through limerence means sifting through old wounds, feelings parts of us we’d rather not unearth and memories we’d do most anything not to revisit.

And this is where the work starts, tending to these parts asap. As slowly and safely as possible.

Limerence is an almost indescribable feeling euphoric highs bottomless despair the bedrock of emotional dependence an intensity that knocks the wind out of you.

I remember the feeling of intoxicating behaviour. I found myself thinking no one has ever made me feel like this, you might piece together breadcrumbs of connection trying to fill empty bellies. Creating stories of connection, you might feel entwined with them only to find that it’s a version of them that doesn’t quite exist.

Limerence is an altered state, a cocktail of intrusive thoughts, intense longing and a physiological craving for that next hit of connection. The up and down of it spikes dopamine. The ambiguity kicks our attachment systems into overdrive. So of course we mistake it for the rush of love.

But limerence rarely begins with a person. It’s the echo of an old attachment wound. A pattern finding its way back to us again and again and again and we pull towards what we know the relational dynamics that activate us in ways that feel familiar.

And not because we choose suffering but because our nervous system is attempting to solve unfinished business. A part of us thinks maybe this time the story will end differently. Maybe the old ache will fade maybe maybe maybe.

But what would it be like to approach limerence with a gentle curiosity rather than a weighted shame? What does this person represent? What will it mean if they choose you? How does this ambiguity keep us hungry but never quite satisfied what part of you needs tending to?

And slowly, but surely we untangle the roots. We leave the table. Catch our breath, there’s space, a kind of steadying. You start to notice yourself again. And in that slow return, see the distance between longing and love.

The couple who get engaged after three months. The glorified, sometimes televised, shotgun wedding. The moment they both just knew on the first date.

And when we see it, we want it, of course we do. How human of us. It promises certainty. It removes the discomfort, the hard conversations, the waiting. It soothes the anxiety that comes with putting our hearts on the line.

I’m not saying we can’t feel an instant connection or bond, I’ve felt that pull myself, we can. But that connection doesn’t mean this is forever. Sometimes attraction comes from old wounding. Sometimes it doesn’t. But we can’t untangle that right away.

The sugar rush of chemistry isn’t always a sign. Sometimes it’s familiarity, not fate. Instant connection can be an intoxicating pull toward a version of life we’re longing for. Not necessarily the person in front of us, but the story we hope they might fit. I’ve chased that story before, thinking it was love.

Sometimes attraction comes from wounding, not resonance. A void that wants to be filled. A relational dynamic that feels all too familiar. A subtle ping in your nervous system that says: we’ve been here before. We know how this works.

Intensity can look like connection. Anxiety can feel like butterflies. The rush can masquerade as deep knowing.

But are we falling for a person, or the idea of them? Are we truly connecting, or are we projecting? Is this rooted in new safety, or old wounds?

Love mostly reveals itself in hindsight, in the quiet gestures we almost missed. Safety rarely arrives as a lightning strike. Steadiness is rarely a head rush.

The slow unravelling of love doesn’t strike like lightning and thunder. It roots, and then it grows.

Maybe connection was never meant to be instant. Maybe it was always meant to be built.

Maybe you were taught that being self‑sufficient was the only acceptable way to exist. Maybe you learned, like I did, that growing up meant never leaning on anyone again. That needing help was weakness. That relying on others was dangerous.

But what if we don’t want to be all on our own anymore? What if hyper‑independence never delivered on its promises of safety, of belonging, of happiness? And what if we were never meant to go through any of this alone?

Learning, by nature, is experiential. Contrary to the academic model, learning isn’t a static process. If it were as simple as reading, absorbing, and applying, the self‑help industry would have saved the world by now. We learn through experience through practice, through fumbling, through falling and getting back up. Learning matters, but without practice it’s just theory.

And we practise better together. We learn from each other, ways of being, accountability, courage, the gentle push to keep going.

Healing relational wounds is relational work. We don’t heal in isolation, even though that would be easier. Yes, there is individual work we must do, but it only takes us so far. How can we practise regulation if we never allow ourselves to attach? How can we see ourselves clearly if no one reflects us back to ourselves? How can we learn to trust again if we never risk trusting anyone?

Feeling seen is a form of healing. In a world obsessed with instant gratification, we want to rush to fix, soothe, and resolve discomfort. But we can’t and we shouldn’t.

Sometimes the work is simply allowing ourselves to be witnessed. Sometimes the reminder that we are not alone, that we never were, is the only balm we need. When someone sits across from us and says me too. When someone names our pain almost as if they’ve lived inside it. When someone tells their story and we recognise pieces of ourselves. When someone holds our grief, our uncertainty, our humanity.

A village around your life, your our healing, your becoming matters. We were never meant to heal alone. But somewhere along the way, we started to believe that healing happens in isolation: silent battles in quiet rooms, just you and your wounds. And sometimes it does. But it doesn’t have to be the only way.

Collectively, we’re not buying the myth anymore. We know we need each other. We know we don’t want to fight silent battles in quiet rooms. We want to hear other people’s stories and share our own. We know that connection begets connection.

We’re done pretending we don’t need each other. We’re done fighting silent battles in quiet rooms. Connection heals in ways self‑reliance never could. And maybe the bravest thing we can do now is let ourselves be held by the village we’ve spent years pretending we didn’t need.

For me, it began as survival. I learned early that love seemed to depend on my silence, on the softening of my needs. When there’s no room for a child’s inner world, people‑pleasing becomes instinct. You learn to stay safe by shrinking, by making space for someone else’s preferences long before you learn to name your own.

And we’re often praised for it. We’re told we’re easy, agreeable, flexible. But flexibility becomes dangerous when it stretches into self‑erasure. It isn’t a conscious choice; it’s a pattern we inherit. We bend so the relationship doesn’t break. We stay quiet so no one can accuse us of being too much.

It works until the cost becames impossible to ignore. Eventually you feel the gap widening, the distance between the life you’re performing and the person you actually are.

Reclaiming yourself is slow, layered work. It’s not a single rupture but a thousand small decisions to stop disappearing. It’s the quiet rebuilding of a voice, the belief that you deserve to be met as you are. It’s a return, a coming home to the self you once learned to leave behind.

And when you arrive, the truth is simple: you were never too much. Whoever taught you that lacked the capacity to hold their own emotions, and they projected that limitation onto you. The work of returning to yourself is both a reclamation and a reckoning.

Any love that requires your disappearance was never love. Among all the connections we build, the most essential one is the one we build with ourselves.