1. I introduce to you: Mr. B. He likes me just the way I am, I know, because I haven’t been anything but myself around him.
2. This is unnerving. Because I’m not doing anything specifically to make him like me. I do nothing, and he likes me, and I feel like I have no control over the situation, and that makes anxious.
3. In the past, I’ve been able to pin point the things I’ve done that seemed to make a guy like me, because they were things I didn’t normally do. I was a slightly different person with everyone, and I could easily point out what made each person different.
But here I am, totally, vulnerably, myself. I don’t even know how that happened, it wasn’t like I have gone into all these relationships thinking “this is the person I’m going to be.” I just become someone, inadvertently, and end up keeping at it because I feel like I ought to be consistent. And then for some reason, this time, I just did the things that I would do, said the things that I would say, was quiet when I would be, and loud when I would be, and was unabashedly dorky and stupid, and lo and behold, I was not thrown from a great height in disgust.
4. It’s great to see, in black and white, how very little control I have over my actions.
5. The word “ought” should be used more often in US.
Disengaged Woman 