who are you when you remove the need to be loved?

I went for a walk through Sydney Park the other afternoon, headphones in, pretending I was the kind of person who takes contemplative walks on purpose and not because she is trying to outrun her own thoughts.

I put on an episode of The Broski Report, which is my favourite thing to listen to when I want to laugh and then, without warning, feel like someone has gently but firmly cracked my ribcage open. There is something about Brittany Broski’s monologues that feels uncomfortably intimate, like she has reached into the collective female subconscious and pulled out the one thought we were all hoping no one would say out loud.

In this particular episode, she said,

“I am someone else entirely when you remove the need to be loved. Because so much of a woman’s existence, you can decenter men, but this shit is wired into our blood. If I am not desired and loved, who am I? Right? And of course I know who I am. But there is this monster, this monstrous part of me, that so deeply desires love that it’s almost like when I get it, I worry I won’t know how to hold it.”

I physically stopped walking when she said that, stopped in the middle of the path like a fool that gets in one’s way. It felt very Fleabag, that raw, self-aware confession that is funny and devastating at the same time, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

I wanted this to be a piece about decentering men. About stepping out of the orbit. About becoming the kind of woman who does not measure her life by who is texting her back. But if I am honest, there is a quieter, uglier question underneath that: am I trying to decenter men, or am I just tired of being a placeholder? A convenient choice. The girl who you can’t quite commit to but will keep on speed dial for your convenience. That question stings more than any feminist manifesto ever could. It forces me to confront the possibility that I may not have been unlucky in love. Still, instead, I have been complicit in accepting a role that kept me adjacent to something real without ever fully having it.

I promised myself at the beginning of this year that I would write two Substacks a month. January got one. February got none. I could say February is short, that work was consuming, that life was chaotic. But the truth is much less glamorous. I was distracted. Not by busyness, but by longing. By the subtle, constant preoccupation with who might want me, who might miss me, who might change their mind. I don’t know if there has been a stretch of my adult life, or even my childhood, where I wasn’t on some subconscious level searching for desire. Even when I say I’m not dating. Even when I say I’m focusing on myself. There is still a quiet scanning of rooms. A subtle check of my phone. A small, persistent hope that someone, somewhere, is thinking about me in that way.

So when Brittany asked, “If I am not desired and loved, who am I?” it did not feel philosophical. It felt like a threat. Who am I without that external affirmation to make me feel real? Who am I if I remove the pursuit? Until you realise how much of your identity has been built around being perceived. There is this ancient, cellular hunger to be desired, and I do not think that makes us weak. I think it makes us human. The problem is not that we crave love. It is that we have become fluent in accepting versions of it that do not nourish us.

I think, if I am honest, healthy love scares me more than chaotic love ever has. Because to hold healthy love, you have to believe you deserve it. You have to resist the urge to test it, to push it, to see if it will fracture the way others did. You have to let go of the narrative that love must be fought for to be valuable. That if it isn’t hard, it isn’t real. Holding love is not gripping it tightly so it doesn’t leave. It is not shrinking yourself to maintain it. It is not performing gratitude so intensely that you forget you are allowed to have needs. Holding love is standing still and allowing yourself to be seen fully, without the theatrics of pursuit. It is trusting that you do not have to earn what is already being freely given.

And maybe that is why so many of us stay tangled in “wrong person, wrong time” dynamics. It keeps us moving. It keeps us striving. Longing feels purposeful. There is something romantic about yearning, about almosts, about the idea that if circumstances were just slightly different, everything would align. But sometimes “wrong time” is just code for “I am not yet ready to receive something stable.” Sometimes “right person” just means they activated a wound in a way that felt intoxicating. We confuse familiarity with destiny. We confuse intensity with compatibility. And while we are busy decoding mixed signals, we are also seeking love in ways that have nothing to do with men at all.

We seek it in productivity. In praise from bosses. In the way our friends react to our stories. In social media engagement. In being perceived as interesting, attractive, competent, and worthy. Desire is not confined to romance. It lives in the way we hope someone notices our effort, our outfit, our humour. It lives in the way we apologise for taking up space because we are afraid being too much will make us unlovable.

To remove the need to be loved, even temporarily, would mean existing without that constant background hum of evaluation. It would mean doing things without imagining how they are being perceived. It would mean writing because I want to, not because I hope it makes me more compelling. And maybe that is the deeper failure of January and February. Not that I missed a numerical goal, but that I allowed my creativity to become entangled with how it might make me appear.

If I am not writing to be admired, what am I writing for?

Understanding that the hunger to be loved is tender and wired into us, but it cannot be the architect of our decisions. When Brittany said she worries she won’t know how to hold love when she gets it, I felt that in my bones. To hold the love you deserve, you must first loosen your grip on the belief that you are only valuable when someone wants you. You must build a self that exists independently of romantic attention so that when love arrives, it is not filling a void but joining something already whole.

I do not know if I have ever fully experienced a moment where I am not, in some way, searching for desire. But I am beginning to wonder who I might be if I stopped scanning the room. If I stopped making decisions with an invisible audience in mind. If I trusted that the love I deserve does not require inconsistency, does not require me to audition, does not require me to be a placeholder while someone decides. If I trusted that the love meant for me is coming, maybe I could finally have consistency in my own emotions. Maybe I could stop living in reaction to someone else’s uncertainty. Maybe then writing two substacks a month would not feel like a performance of discipline but a natural extension of a life that is not constantly oriented around being chosen. Maybe then love would feel less like a prize to win and more like something I can gently, confidently hold.

March, I promise to write to you twice. I promise to be present.

March music rotation below.

I hope you enjoyed this one. or not. I’m okay with that also.

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading my mind this month, I hope you enjoyed and felt a bit of love thrown your way. Remember, you are always worth the mess!

My social media is @imojenwilley / @imojenkatherine. Follow along for any updates or if you simply just want to chat! Save, share, and tell me your thoughts! I’ll be uploading every month and sometimes even as a treat on the side.

Forever & always,

Im’s Xx