Do I actually like him, or do I like the temporary relief from myself when he pays attention to me?

A man I like once reacted to my selfie with “you look very peaceful here” and I swear to God my brain processed that sentence with the emotional intensity of somebody being informed they were a compatible organ donor.

That is an objectively unwell reaction to six words typed by a man who was probably lying horizontally in bed scratching his stomach while sending them, and yet I spent the rest of the evening moving through my apartment differently, touching objects differently, existing differently. I folded clothes that had been sitting on a chair for nine business days. I washed my water bottle properly instead of doing the usual woman-in-her-twenties ritual of aggressively shaking water around inside it and calling that hygiene. I even looked at myself while removing makeup that night and, for maybe four consecutive minutes, did not feel the familiar urge to apologise to my own reflection for failing to become hotter, calmer, thinner, smarter, less emotionally erratic by this age.

Which is when I realised something deeply humiliating about myself that I suspect a lot of women experience privately while pretending they are simply “catching feelings.”

Sometimes a man’s attention does not just make you feel desired.

Sometimes it gives you temporary asylum from your own personality.

Because women are exhausted by themselves in ways I do not think people discuss honestly enough. By adulthood, most women I know have developed a second consciousness that permanently follows them around like an unpaid intern whose only responsibility is psychological damage. You could be laughing with friends, kissing someone you like, ordering coffee, speaking confidently in a meeting, and somewhere in the background another version of you is still monitoring the entire performance. Was that joke annoying? Did your face look strange while laughing? Did you reveal interest too early? Did your stomach look softer while sitting down? Did you sound emotionally stable enough? Did your excitement become visible before his did?

So yes, I think some women have not experienced one fully uninterrupted day inside their own mind since they were thirteen years old. Then suddenly a man likes you consistently enough and the surveillance weakens slightly.

Self-consciousness for women settles into ordinary life so thoroughly that most women eventually mistake it for personality. It follows you into first dates, birthday dinners, office elevators with mirrors on all four sides, trial rooms with bad lighting, random group photos somebody takes without warning, sleepovers, hook-ups, airport bathrooms at 2 AM and every moment where another human being might look at you for slightly too long. It sits beside you while you are speaking, laughing, flirting, eating, existing, transforming simple human interaction into low-level performance.

So when a man likes you consistently enough, you stop auditing yourself every five minutes. And because the relief feels physical, women confuse it with compatibility constantly.

That is why situationships become so psychologically catastrophic despite containing approximately four dates, one forehead kiss and a man who still follows his ex and several astrology meme accounts simultaneously. The attachment is not always forming around the actual person. Sometimes it forms around the strange emotional quietness that appears in their presence. You start associating them with softer thoughts, better sleep, less self-hatred, easier mornings. Their attention enters your life and suddenly your nervous system starts behaving like a stray dog that has accidentally wandered into a warm house and cannot believe this level of gentleness exists indoors.

And honestly, I think this is why the uncertainty after intimacy feels so fucking violent for women specifically.

The truly horrible stage begins after somebody has already seen enough of you to leave. Before that, attraction still feels playful because mystery protects everybody. You are still being perceived in fragments, in flattering lighting, in carefully timed conversations and edited photographs where you had thirty-seven opportunities to decide whether your face looked acceptable enough for temporary public viewing. Then slowly somebody starts seeing the unedited version. They hear the real laugh. They watch you become needy for four accidental seconds before trying to recover the dignity with “hahaha ignore me.” They see you tired, insecure, irrational, emotionally contradictory, visibly human.

That is when attraction stops feeling exciting and starts feeling like waiting for biopsy results. Because now the question changes entirely. Earlier you wondered whether they liked you. Now you are trying to determine whether they still do after proximity dissolved the fantasy version of you.

And I think many women carry the suspicion that they are only lovable in glimpses. Attractive before familiarity. Interesting before emotional maintenance enters the room. Desired before another person discovers how frightened, inconsistent, jealous, excessive and deeply ordinary they actually are underneath the polished version built for social survival.

Which is why losing attention can feel so disproportionately devastating. You are not only losing the person. You are losing the brief period during which your own mind stopped feeling like an emotionally unsafe neighbourhood to walk through alone.