Is the Common Denominator Me?

I do not think I am a lovable person, and I do not mean this in a self-deprecating way. I am, by all accounts, a very likable one. I am knowledgeable, well-spoken, attractive, and thoughtful. I am the sort of girl who seems to have struck a rather appealing balance between majoring in difficult STEM subjects and maintaining a personality without developing an attitude about it. I imagine the proposition sounds wonderful on paper. People approach me with the enthusiasm of those who think they have won the lottery, the luckiest people in the world to have stumbled upon someone like me. And then, inevitably, there is me beyond the idea of me.

There are the irregular emotions, the inconvenient insecurities, the overthinking, the days when I need a little more reassurance than usual, the moments when I cannot articulate what is wrong until I have spent three hours thinking about it, and the occasions when I feel so much that I do not know what to do with any of it. There is the person who exists outside the first impression, who cannot always be charming or composed or agreeable, who has opinions and expectations and a capacity for hurt that does not always correspond to the severity of the situation. And somewhere along the way, the person who once seemed so wonderful becomes someone who is not quite right for them. Or, perhaps, not right at all. As though the existence of difficult emotions invalidates everything that preceded them, and loving someone means enjoying every single thing about them.

This is not exclusive to romance or situationships, although those have certainly contributed their fair share to the hypothesis. It happens in friendships, too. There are friends who adore how well I remember the little things about them but grow quiet when I need them to remember something about me. People who trust me with their darkest secrets but grow uncomfortable when I share my own. People who call me their favourite person until we disagree, who appreciate my willingness to repair a friendship but never develop the same instinct, who assure me that I matter to them and then leave me to wonder why I am always the one making sure we still matter to each other.

And through years of losing people, in ways both spectacular and painfully ordinary, I seem to have developed a peculiar way of loving. I love with an almost embarrassing determination to be understood. I remember birthdays, buy great gifts, perform acts of service, write essays disguised as letters, and spend unreasonable amounts of time searching for the exact words that might communicate something as simple as you matter to me. I notice things. I turn the otherwise forgettable details of someone’s existence into evidence that they have been paid attention to.

Perhaps there is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Perhaps I am simply an earnest person who has never learnt to love in moderation. But I would be lying if I said there were no quiet calculations buried beneath the generosity. Somewhere in all this giving, I developed the idea that if I loved someone sufficiently, thoughtfully, and consistently, I might make myself impossible to leave.

It is a humiliating thing to admit that I sometimes treat affection like a transaction whose terms I have never explicitly agreed upon. I give, and I give, and I give, hoping that somewhere in the accumulation of all these little things, I have built a case compelling enough to convince someone to stay. And then they leave anyway.

They get to know me in full. They discover the parts that do not fit neatly into the picture they first admired, the person who can be difficult, emotional, unreasonable, insecure, or simply tired of explaining herself. And eventually, sometimes gently and sometimes not, they tell me that I am not what they want. That this is not going to work. That I will be fine. That I will find someone better.

I know I will be fine. I have been fine through every departure so far, at least in the sense that I have continued to wake up, attend classes, drink my coffee, write my little essays, and get on with the business of being alive. But I am beginning to resent how often my ability to survive is treated as permission to leave me with something to survive in the first place.

I do not think this is an immature rant. It is a realisation, or perhaps the beginning of one. I would love to collect data on every person who has actively stopped choosing me. I would love to write the academic paper: evidence, reasons, outcomes, all converted into numbers and arranged into a neat little equation I could solve for eternity. That is what is so fucking beautiful about mathematics. There are constants and variables, assumptions and conditions, and with the right definitions and a little patience there is usually a way to make the pieces fit. There is comfort in the idea that a problem can be understood, that the answer exists somewhere, that I can keep working until I find it. I would like to know what changed, when it changed, and where my brain chemistry failed to match theirs.

But can mathematics help me solve myself?

Can I isolate the variable responsible for the recurring outcome? Can I account for every failed friendship, every almost-relationship, every person who once seemed so certain about me and eventually became uncertain? Is there a constant beneath all these changing circumstances, a common denominator that explains why people seem to like the idea of me so much more than the reality?

Life is mathematics, or at least I would like to believe it is. Yet I am beginning to suspect I have made a fundamental error in my assumptions. I have been treating every person who leaves as another observation in a dataset about my own inadequacy, as though the people who decided not to stay were uniquely qualified to determine whether I am worth staying for.

And perhaps that is the part I need to reconsider.

Because I have noticed something about the people who leave: they often believe they are doing me a favour by making up their minds for both of us. They decide that we are incompatible, that I deserve better, that this is not worth pursuing, and they present their conclusions as though they are sparing me the trouble of arriving at them myself. Sometimes they do it when I am in a good mood, when I have no idea that anything is wrong, when I am still operating under the impression that whatever we have is something we are both willing to maintain. They ghost me. They disappear for months after making me feel truly understood. Or they end things over an email, or through a message so carefully worded that it feels less like a conversation than a statement issued by an institution. They tell me what is best for me without asking what I think is best for myself.

And God, I have opinions. I have thoughts and feelings and an entire internal world that does not cease to exist simply because someone else has decided they no longer wish to participate in it.

I can understand that a person might not want to be with me. I can understand that our personalities might not align, that my emotions might be difficult for them to navigate, that what I need might be something they cannot or do not want to give. I can even accept that leaving is sometimes the right decision. What I cannot accept is the assumption that their decision is also the final word on what the relationship was, what it meant, and whether it deserved an honest conversation.

I do not want to be kept out of pity. I do not want someone to stay because I have written enough letters to make leaving feel cruel, or bought enough gifts to make them feel indebted. I want to be allowed to decide, too. I want to hear what went wrong and determine whether I agree. I want to know whether there was something we could have worked through, whether we wanted fundamentally different things, or whether the relationship had simply reached the end of what it could be. I want the dignity of being treated as a person who participated in the relationship, not a problem someone else has finally figured out how to solve.

I know I can be too much sometimes. I know that being self-aware does not automatically make me easy to love, and that there are things about myself I need to work on. But that is no reason for you to be too little. It is no reason to offer me intimacy without accountability, affection without consideration, or promises without the willingness to have a conversation when keeping them becomes difficult.

Being likable has not reliably translated into being loved, and being loved has not reliably translated into being chosen. I would like to know if it ever will.