In a commencement speech at Douglass College in 1977, Adrienne Rich said that responsibility to yourself ‘means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” ’ When I looked up the original Jane Eyre line I found the one that precedes Rich’s quote: ‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me to do so.’ Reading both lines together, I realized I’d done the opposite to Jane. I’d lost sight of my inward treasure (and therefore my ability to walk away) and, as a result, had traded in my self-respect. And for what? Not for love, but for a gut feeling that told me the men I dated were extraordinary humans, always cleverer and more interesting than I was. (It was no coincidence that I often dated journalists, advertising creatives and writers – all careers I wanted but had not at that point been brave enough to pursue.) It wasn’t until I interviewed clinical psychologist Dr Frank Tallis years later that I understood how misleading that gut feeling could be. Because, as Tallis told me, we often ‘aggrandize our own confusion or lack of insight’ when we have no evidence of real intimacy. We reach for words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘gut feeling’ because we have nothing tangible to base a feeling on – no examples of kindness or care or connection, just a magnetic draw. Tallis said this lack of evidence ‘becomes fuel for romantic mysticism. You think, I can’t explain it, so therefore it must be fate, it must be profound. But that’s just one false inference feeding another, and each inference takes you further away from reality.’ As I listened to his explanation I winced with recognition, remembering all the times I felt mystically drawn to someone without any real knowledge of who they were. But I did not understand this at the time, and so I continued to erase pieces of myself to sustain relationships that had no roots in the real world.