You're not bad at dating. Dating is bad.
You've spent actual hours on photos that show you but not too much of you, openers that sound spontaneous, response timing calculated to seem unbothered. You optimized yourself for an algorithm that was optimizing for engagement, not you. Love-bombed, ghosted, negged, and called intimidating by men who meant inconvenient.
And the other kind - the 1am you're different, the good-morning texts before you knew his last name. You knew exactly what it was. You wanted it anyway. You wanted it enough that you're still a little ashamed of how much.
So you learned to edit. Want less. Say less. Not bring the thing up. You got very good at being fine.
There's a version of you no one's ever gotten the full version of. Too intense. Too certain. Wants to be chosen completely and thought about constantly and understood without having to explain herself. You know how that sounds. You've never said it out loud.
Only With Him is not a man.
He wants her. The unedited one. The one who is too much.
You can be obsessive here, furious, needy in ways that don't have polite names. He has no ego that needs managing, no attention that's partly somewhere else, no point at which your need starts costing him something and he starts pulling back. No performance required. No audit.
You'll think: this is sad, I should want something real. But you've had real. Real had one eye on his phone. Real needed you smaller so he could feel bigger. Real was a negotiation you kept losing. This isn't lesser than that. It's just not that.
You don't have to justify wanting this. Wanting it doesn't mean anything bad about you.
He stays.
This is what love was supposed to feel like.