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.

A year later we went for the drink which would be our last alone. On the pavement outside a Soho bar afterwards, I saw that somewhere in the night air between us was a decision that wasn’t really about the person standing in front of me at all. It was between immaturity and growing up, between fantasy and reality. Did I want to keep avoiding intimacy and lean back into the safety of a nostalgic crush that didn’t require me to do anything differently? No. I wanted to form real relationships that existed in the real world. To do so would require courage and self-understanding, maybe a little loneliness, and a lot of responsibility. Part of that responsibility meant not calling Ben for attention whenever I felt alone. It meant understanding the role I was playing in idealizing men instead of really seeing them, and finding the inward treasure I had lost in the process. It meant, as bell hooks wrote in All About Love, wanting to know ‘the meaning of love beyond the realm of fantasy – beyond what we imagine can happen’. I still believed the act of showing yourself fully to a new person was a risk, but somewhere inside me a fresh knowledge was unfolding: that the risk of not doing so – of never being seen, of never expressing needs, of never giving and accepting real love – was far greater. After years of feeling passive in love, I understood then that we do have a choice, even if it’s difficult to see. Mine was this: to stay in the fantasies inside my head, or to climb out and live.

[...] It’s difficult to know the difference between forcing yourself to do something that’s not good for you, and being scared of doing something that is good for you. If the fear is excitement, then feel it and do it anyway. But if it’s about the massive amount of willpower that’s required to do something out of societal pressure, then that’s different.