I want to tell you about a woman I know.
She is thirty-seven. Smart, warm, genuinely beautiful. She wants children. She wants a relationship. She has wanted these things for a long time.
Twice in her life she met a man and felt it immediately. Not a vague interest. The real thing. Butterflies, certainty, the pull that goes all the way through you. Twice she knew, in her body, that this was someone worth knowing.
Both times, she did nothing.
She told herself: he has to come to me. That is how it works. The man makes the move.
Both men walked away, never knowing she was interested. She never found out what could have been. She still thinks about them.
She is not a bad person. She is not stupid. She genuinely believes she is being wise. She has built a set of rules about how love is supposed to work, and she follows them carefully, and she is completely alone.
She has never been with a man she loves.
At thirty-seven, she still has no kids, no relationship, no real intimacy. Not because men are not interested in her. Because she has arranged things so perfectly that the men she actually wants never get the chance to know it.
I know what she would say if she read this. She would say: "Well, he should have made the effort. My grandfather would get slapped by my grandmother and still not give up. What is wrong with men today?"
And I understand why she thinks that. It is a comforting story. It puts the responsibility somewhere else. It lets her keep her rules intact.
But here is the thing she cannot see from inside that story: the world has changed. Men have been trained, over the last twenty years, to back off when a woman does not show clear interest. They have absorbed the message that persistence is pressure, that trying again after a no is harassment, that the respectful thing to do is to take her at her word and leave.
The good men listened. The good men backed off.
The ones who still push past a no, who still try again after being rejected, who still show up uninvited? Those are not the good ones. Those are the ones who do not respect boundaries. And those are the ones she keeps meeting, because they are the only ones who survive her filter.
Her rules are not selecting for quality. They are selecting for men who ignore what she says.
Recently, she sent me a message warning me about "fleeting pleasures." She said that the mind and soul must meet before the bodies do. She said I should be careful about losing myself.
I thought about that for a while.
She has never experienced love. She has never experienced real intimacy with a man she chose. She has never taken the risk. And she is warning me, a man who has opened his heart fully to every woman he has been with, who has had his heart broken many times and never once regretted it, about the dangers of feeling too much.
She is standing on the sidelines of her own life, watching other people dance, and telling them they are doing it wrong.
I knew another woman who had a different approach.
Every time she felt a genuine crush, she acted on it. She walked up to the man and asked, directly: do you like me too?
If he said no, she was heartbroken for a week. Then she moved on. With clarity. Without years of wondering.
If he said yes, she had something real.
She was rejected many times. It never destroyed her. It freed her. Because a week of heartbreak is better than years of wondering. And she always knew, afterward, that she had been honest. That she had not stood on the sidelines waiting for something to happen to her.
When she found the right one, she recognised it. She acted on it. She waited a year and a half. They had nearly ten years together.
The difference between these two women is not luck. It is not beauty. It is not that one met better men.
The difference is that one of them was willing to feel a week of pain in exchange for a real answer. And the other arranged her entire life to avoid ever hearing the answer at all.
One of them is in her late thirties, alone, still thinking about the two men she let walk away.
The other had nearly a decade of real love.
If you have ever felt it and done nothing, I am not here to judge you. I understand the fear. The man whose opinion matters is the one whose rejection would be devastating. That is exactly why it feels safer to never find out.
But safe is not free. Safe has a price. And the price is paid slowly, quietly, in the currency of a life unlived.
You do not have to throw yourself at every man. You have to be honest about what you feel with the men you actually feel it for. That is not recklessness. That is courage. And it is the only thing that actually leads somewhere.