I’ll never know what it was like to be loved by me

I don’t spend much time wondering whether people loved me. Because I already know they did. Some did beautifully. Some badly. Some until they couldn’t anymore. The question that keeps me awake is the opposite one.

What was it like to be loved by me?

I’ve spent years experiencing love from one direction. I know what it feels like to keep unlocking my phone even though nothing has buzzed. To leave one side of the bed untouched because they’ll probably come over tomorrow. To instinctively buy two cinema tickets before remembering there isn’t another person to ask anymore. I know exactly what love did to my own habits. But I have absolutely no idea how somebody else’s body behaved when it loved me.

Did my name make somebody smile in the middle of a terrible meeting? Did they ever stand in the supermarket wondering whether I’d like this flavour of chips? Did they hear a joke and instinctively think, I have to tell her this tonight, before remembering we didn’t speak anymore? Did I ever become the first person someone wanted to call when something wonderful happened? Or the last person they wanted to disappoint?

Somewhere in the world, there are people who know the answers to these questions. I never will.

That’s one of the strangest limitations of being human. You will hear recordings of your own voice. You’ll learn what your laugh sounds like. You’ll catch yourself in mirrors, security cameras and accidental reflections in shop windows. You’ll spend your entire life collecting evidence of who you are. Yet the one version of yourself you’ll never meet is the person other people fell in love with. You’re permanently locked out of your own second-person perspective.

I sometimes imagine all the people who’ve loved me sitting around the same dinner table. I don’t think they’d recognise the woman they’re talking about. One would remember the nineteen-year-old who cried too easily and apologised before she’d even done anything wrong. Another would remember somebody louder, funnier, harder to impress. Someone else would insist I was impossible to read. Another would say I was incapable of hiding anything. None of them would be lying. Honestly, they simply loved different women who all happened to have my face.

We spend so much of our lives asking whether people loved us enough that we rarely ask the opposite question. What did my love do to another human being? Did it make them feel larger or smaller? Did they leave believing they deserved tenderness because of me, or despite me? Did they start saying “drive safely” to the next person because I always did? Did I accidentally become the reason someone apologises too much? Or trusts a little more? Love leaves fingerprints long after the hands themselves are gone. The terrifying part is that we almost never get to see the marks we’ve left behind.

Then relationships end, and something even stranger disappears with them. We lose the only witness qualified to answer the question we’ve been asking all along. Every breakup takes away the person who knew what loving that specific version of you felt like. And this is not the version your parents or your friends know. That exact combination of habits, fears, jokes, kisses, bad mornings, tiny kindnesses and impossible expectations that only existed inside one relationship. When they leave, that evidence leaves with them. You can ask friends what you were like after the breakup. You can ask your therapist why you behaved the way you did. You cannot ask anyone what it felt like to wake up loved by you every morning. That knowledge belongs to someone else’s memory now.

Maybe that’s why old relationships continue haunting us long after we’ve accepted they’re over. We think we’re grieving a person. Sometimes we’re grieving a perspective. Somewhere, somebody knows a version of you you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering about. They know whether your hugs slowed a racing heart. They know whether your silence felt comforting or frightening. They know if loving you felt like standing in sunlight or constantly checking the weather. Those are things I’ll spend my entire life wondering about.

Because no matter how many people I love, no matter how many times I begin again, there is one perspective I’ll never get to borrow.

I’ll never know what it was like to be loved by me.