There is a certain loneliness I only recently found the words for. It is not the loneliness of being alone. It is you, in a room with someone who wants you — he looks at you, focused, generous, present — and you know that what he wants is not entirely you.
What he wants is a version. The one that has been lit just right. The one who showed up dressed up, thoughtful, entertaining, at this dinner. He wants the person who is good at giving attention, at asking the right questions, at laughing out loud at the right moment. And you were that person, in the room, doing all of it. Yet at the same time you know: the fuller you — the one who is sometimes cruel, sometimes fretting over things that do not matter, sometimes so bored you can feel it yourself — was not in the room. She was out there somewhere, waiting.
I have been in relationships where the desire was absolutely real, and the ‘knowing’ was absolutely absent. He looked at me and saw something he genuinely wanted, and I looked back and understood that what he saw was what I was performing, not what I actually was. The performance was not exactly dishonest — those flashes of wit, that warmth, I do have them, and the me at the dinner table was not fiction. But she was not complete either. And to be wanted, continuously, for that version creates a particular experience: you feel, at once, seen and ignored.
He notices what you are wearing, and he compliments it. He remembers the schedule you mentioned. By every visible measure, he is attentive. Yet you know — you can feel it, somewhere between two courses, somewhere under the table — that if he knew the less-polished version, the whole equation might change. That wanting is conditional, and the condition is a you who is forever presentable.