Insecure and confident - can both coexist? I’ve been dating this person twice now and am interested in them. My issue is they always take more than a day to answer.

I’m torn between having a logical analysis of the situation and deduct he might not be so interested in me and between thinking that he’s not meeting my expectations of what early dating should look like

But everyone is different so I’m sure you’ll tell me I should just ask but I feel like it’s early and don’t want to appear too in my feelings I can’t brush this feeling off though, but I’m a very confident person and love myself so I don’t get this feeling

From:

Why can’t they love me like I love myself??

Hi.

You’ve already written the punchline. It’s in the sign-off.

“Why can’t they love me like I love myself??”

Two question marks. I respect the audacity.

You knew I was going to say: just ask. You wrote it first, pre-emptively, before I could. So I won't say it. I’ll say something more worth your time.

You’re not torn between two analyses. You’re not actually asking whether he’s interested or whether you’ve set the wrong expectations. What you’re doing, in this letter, is spending a great deal of energy constructing a very tidy framework for a feeling you won’t name.

The feeling is: I like him. I want him to like me back.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You’ve turned it into a logic problem. Which is, I have to say, a very specific kind of armour.

Here’s the part worth pressing on. You describe yourself as confident, someone who loves herself. But you seem puzzled that this feeling got through. As if self-love was supposed to be a closed door, and wanting slipped under it anyway.

But self-love isn’t immunity. It doesn’t inoculate you against the low-grade disquiet of waiting on someone you actually like. Your nervous system and your self-esteem are not the same organ. They cannot deputise for each other.

There’s a version of self-love that has been quietly weaponised: somewhere between self-help culture and the way we talk about healing, into a performance. Where wanting something from another person becomes evidence of a deficit. Where needing reciprocity gets quietly renamed neediness.

I think you’ve absorbed that version.

Somewhere along the way, I love myself became I should therefore require nothing.

But wanting isn’t weakness. It’s just wanting.

The dissonance you’re feeling, the strangeness of being confident and rattled? That isn’t a contradiction. It’s what it feels like to like someone before you know whether they like you back. It has always felt like this. It will keep feeling like this. The self-work doesn’t make it not feel like this.

Unfortunately.

Someone took me on a first date to the Musée de l'Orangerie once. She performed in musicals, loved art like it cost her something; had a membership that got us both through the members' entrance, past a queue that stretched the length of the Tuileries, to see Monet's Water Lilies. I spent an embarrassing amount of time after that wondering what impression I'd made. She had made rather a good one on me. The kind that doesn't leave quietly.

I was not, at the time, short on self-love.

So. To your actual question.

Can insecurity and confidence coexist? Of course. They have been, the entire length of this letter. The more interesting question is whether what you’re calling insecurity is insecurity at all. Or whether it’s just wanting, and somewhere along the way the two collapsed into the same word.

The two question marks at the end of your sign-off, by the way. I think you already know.

still working out which feelings deserve names,

it’s michelle d.

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