Before I met my husband, the men I had dated shared many commonalities.
They were successful in their careers, and they seemed to always be occupied with everything else but me. They were busy with work. They had too many hobbies. They were cool and casual and sociable and charming. They were everything the younger me believed she wasn’t.
Back then, I was on a work visa, struggling to find my place in the world as an immigrant woman in London. I had an office job at a bank which, if I’d told someone about it, wouldn’t have inspired any follow-up questions. It was what I considered a mediocre job, paying me enough money to rent a small room in a shared flat. My main hobby was writing, and I often wrote about the messy experience of being a human, of falling in love with the wrong people. I was an introverted homebody with an anxious attachment style. I felt uncool and small and too much and emotionally heavy.
The men I dated never read my writing. But it wasn’t a problem for me. I didn’t expect them to anyway. I didn’t expect them to enter my world and see the messiness inside it. Instead, I was ready to morph myself into the cool, casual, sociable, charming woman that I thought would appeal to them. It worked. They bought the facade. They wanted it to be true. So did I. I wanted to be the kind of woman a successful man would choose, because it would prove that I was worthy of the success I didn’t have. I went on a date and, for an evening, I stopped feeling uncool and small and too much and emotionally heavy. The first date was always the best - it was fun and light, as my anxious attachment was still asleep.
But you know how it goes. You can fool yourself, but you can’t fool your anxious attachment. In fact, it was extremely efficient at its job. It woke up fast. While I pretended to my dates that I had no needs, that I was happy with everything and always up for a good time, it could smell the bullshit immediately. My needs kept growing. They demanded acknowledgement. The wounds beneath my anxious attachment demanded tending. The girl inside me whom I had tried so hard to keep small demanded to be seen in full. In fact, the mission was never just to be seen as cool, casual, sociable, and charming; it was to get the very men who validated that aspirational self to look at the hidden self I was ashamed of and declare her worthy too.
So I turned to my dates like clockwork, and they didn’t know what to do with me. Of course they didn’t. They were typical city boys from Tinder who didn’t have the vocabulary for their emotions, who shamed and turned away from what they couldn’t understand, who had never met the real me in the first place. In the end, I engineered my own heartbreaks. Again and again. I watched myself become the clingy, needy, crazy woman I had feared was the real me all along. I couldn’t see that she was the dysregulated self this cycle was designed to produce. I sent walls of emotional texts, oscillating between being angry at them and being ashamed of myself. I was desperate for their acknowledgment, convincing myself I deserved closure. I couldn’t let go. I was only waiting to be abandoned.
The last boy I dated before my husband called himself a psychopath, and he wasn’t joking.
As usual, I kept messaging him, asking what he thought of me, desperate to find meaning to justify my spiraling, and what he said next shocked me: We’re not dating anymore; why do you care what I think of you? Yet, I still couldn’t stop. I would do things so far out of character that the shame became unbearable. Meanwhile, every time I reached out, he acted as if nothing had happened. Later, I realised it was because, to him, I wasn’t a person; I was just an object he could use - a source of supply he could exploit whenever I returned, and he knew I would.
With the men before him, there had always been something I could use to romanticise the cycle: affection, chemistry, the possibility that it meant more than it did. However dysfunctional it was, there had been a shared emotional reality. I pursued, they withdrew, and we both kept the cycle going. It was easy to interpret the cycle as a complicated, intense relationship rather than see the toxic mechanism and my own part in plain sight.
With him, there was nothing. He offered me no care, no hope, and no illusion of intimacy. Sometimes, he was deliberately cruel and made no effort to hide it. My spiralling was an attempt to make the man register my pain, recognise what had happened, and give me something that would resolve it, and it required him to see me as a whole person. He didn't. Each time I returned, he received it not as a communication of pain or a demand to see the hidden me, but as renewed availability. No amount of spiralling could ever produce the acknowledgement I was seeking. It had no endpoint.
For the first time, there was no emotional participation from the man to obscure my role in the cycle. I had to face the truth that the attachment wasn’t to him as a person or any great, twisted love; it was to the familiar act of abandoning myself to win recognition from someone withholding it. And so I ran out of excuses. I had spent years turning to these men for answers, and it had never taken me anywhere except back to the same wounds, cracked wider open each time. By then, holding on hurt so much - and I could feel my twenties passing me by - that I had to do something about it.
That excruciating experience finally put an end to that cycle.
I asked myself: How much further was I willing to abandon myself, and at what cost? What if the authority to decide who I was and what I was worth had belonged to me all along? What if I was already worthy and did not have to fight to be seen? Would I stop long enough to notice the people who already saw me? So I did. I stopped dating and pretending to be someone I was not. I stared straight at all my mistakes, failures, wounds, and scars and said, yes that’s all me. It also meant accepting the possibility of being wanted by no one, of having nothing, of amounting to nothing because I had never seen someone like me, unfiltered, in a position of love and success. But it was ok. It was the cost of no longer abandoning myself, and I was willing to pay it.
Instead of denying my deepest, loudest, messiest needs, I finally learned to recognise and meet them. I embraced my writing and everything that came with being me. I turned to the people who loved my writing, who embraced me even when I had nothing, whose acknowledgement of me required no struggle. I took back the value I had assigned to random strangers on dating apps and returned it to myself and the people who had been standing beside me all along. By valuing them, I was also affirming my own value. I learned to inhabit a new reality in which I was already loved and seen, without having to perform to earn it. It became my compass.
In the year I met my husband, I finally published my first book, a way to reclaim my power and step into the “too much” self, fully and without apology.
Through this act, I announced loudly to the world that I was proud of her and there was no me without her. I realised then my job was to build a world in which she could show up in full and feel accepted exactly as she was: from the job I picked, to the people I chose, and especially the one I married.
As a result, I changed my dating approach completely. The first thing my husband messaged me on Hinge about was my book. He bought a physical copy and read it. I didn’t have to leave my world to be chosen; he came into mine and made space for the whole of me in his. Together, we built a life in which I always felt at home. In the years that followed, I continued to grow and learn more about myself, and whenever I was in doubt, alignment was the answer.
Yesterday, I went to an overnight event for creators for the first time as a full-time business owner. I came in with high energy and excitement. Soon enough, I realised a mismatch in values. The day didn't do what I expected it to, and what it did do wasn't for me. By the afternoon, my headache hit. I skipped the wellness activities after the workshops to come back to my hotel room. By the evening, I booked a taxi to go home, never mind I’d already paid for the hotel and the full two days.
In the past, I might have forced myself to stay. I would have felt small. I would have blamed myself for being the different, difficult one and tried harder to fit in. Now, I trust my own judgement. I can decide that something isn’t for me without putting my worth on the line.
My husband messaged me throughout the day and told me to not worry and he would look after me. I rested, ate, talked to him about my experience, played with my cat, and I felt myself return. I’d built a life that holds all of me. I can go out there, visit other people’s worlds, let my own experience of them count, decide whether they are for me, and come home whenever I want. I no longer have to ask anyone to see me or abandon myself in the hope of being liked and accepted because I already feel seen and loved right where I am.
And it’s all mine.
This is the work I now teach through Insight to Action.
It’s an eight-week coaching programme for women who understand themselves but are still struggling to turn that insight into change.
Together, we build four foundations of a solid self: witnessing your own experience without needing anyone else to confirm it, parenting yourself through discomfort, making decisions by your own criteria, and trusting that your actions can change your future. You won’t leave with more insight to sit and think about. You’ll change the structures keeping old patterns alive, make clear judgements, take concrete action and build a life around the person you actually are. The programme will give you a forcing system, and I hold you to it week by week.
If you know a relationship isn’t right but still can’t get your mind and body to let go, Amy joined the programme in that exact position. One month after a breakup, she knew her ex wasn’t right for her, but anxiety still hit, and she couldn’t stop holding on to hope. By the end of the programme, she had deleted his contact, stopped checking his profile, and reached the point where WhatsApp notifications no longer triggered anxiety in her body. When painful memories surfaced, she could sit with them and comfort herself.
The same foundations extended into every part of the women’s lives in the cohort. For example, Millie learned to observe her self-critical thoughts without treating them as verdicts on who she was. Sara recognised how much people-pleasing and pursuing every opportunity available were costing her, and gave herself permission to decide what was worth pursuing by her own criteria; she took back hours to focus on her goals. Svitlana stopped relying on other people to validate her achievements and began trusting her own judgement, applying for jobs and reaching out to people which she previously didn’t think were possible. Different lives, different goals, but the same shift: they acted from their needs, took control of their lives, and saw concrete outcomes.