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This piece began with a single line from an article I stumbled across on X, and ended somewhere I did not expect. It is part personal reckoning, part psychology, and part love letter — to love itself, and to the quieter, more honest version of it I have been learning to choose.
If you have ever confused intensity with depth, or mistaken monitoring for intuition, I think you will find something of yourself in here.
I love love. And for as long as I can remember, I have loved love. A self-proclaimed Angel of Romance, I was primed by Disney’s magic of romantic realisations. Grand awakenings to a love that had been there all along. Bold declarations of undying adoration, followed naturally by true love’s first kiss. A love that endures blistering storms and scorching deserts, proving itself through every ordeal.
As I grew older, everything I consumed, from soapy romance flicks to hot and heavy young adult reads, seemed to suggest that women who were loved were worthy. They were admirable. Desired. Prioritised. I fancied those feelings. And when I began to feel attraction towards others, this desire sharpened, but only because I mistook being chosen for something far more consequential in the psyche: being worthy.
And while I no longer cling to the desperation of my youth where love is concerned, I still love love. I still value connection. Companionship remains deeply crucial to me. I thoroughly enjoy deconstructing my feelings, both past and present. This is why I am here today.
— smoothie (@shedrinkswater) February 6, 2026
A few days ago, I came across a brilliant article on X (formerly Twitter) from a user named @shedrinkswater. Succinct yet profound, it explores the intersection of social media perception, inherent hypervigilance, and how we approach romantic relationships. When I read the article, a statement that felt confronting as it was fulfilling struck me:
“A porous mind cannot sustain love, because love demands the capacity to hold ambiguity without converting it into accusation, to endure friction without outsourcing interpretation to strangers.”
In her words, I immediately recognised a part of myself I had only recently become aware of. For years, I had lived with what I believed to be intuition and emotional intelligence, when in fact, it was hypervigilance. I began to see rather clearly how love, when tethered to worthiness, curdles into monitoring. How the desire to be chosen becomes the impulse to track, interpret, and stay one step ahead of imagined loss.
Although social media didn’t invent this instinct of hypervigilance in me, it amplified it, validated it, and gave it permission to thrive. It trained me to interpret every pause, every shift in tone, and every silence as a threat to my worthiness. And by the time I realised what was happening, my peace, within and outside of romantic relationships, had paid the price severally.
Hypervigilance stripped me of the ability to trust my partners
As the writer earlier stated, “love demands the capacity to hold ambiguity without converting it into accusation”. This capacity to hold ambiguity is predicated on trust, which is rendered impossible through hypervigilance. Where trust should live, it installs suspicion. Where patience should settle, it inserts urgency. And in doing so, it corrodes the very safety love requires to survive.
Hypervigilance robbed me of two essential things: the ability to trust my partners, and the capacity to feel loved and worthy simply because I am a human being. My romantic partners became the arbiters of my emotional equilibrium, so much so that any silence, perceived withdrawal of affection, or subtle shift in tone triggered internal conflict. I would ask myself what I had done wrong repeatedly, unrelentingly, until “order” was restored. And by order, I mean feeling validated once again by the object of my affection. I was not grounded in my own sense of worth. wasn’t well simply because I believed I was. It felt like I was only well when I felt like I was being chosen.
Towards the end of the holiday, I registered my dissatisfaction at the lack of affection, in spite of his illness…
A relationship I had in 2021 allowed me to see, with striking clarity, the cost of living in a constant state of hypervigilance. My then-partner and I went on holiday together, and he was ill for most of it. He was genuinely unwell, with intermittent fevers, a general malaise, and a handful of medicines to ingest. Instead of responding with care or patience, I was consumed by something else entirely: the perceived absence of attention, and the disruption to the rhythm of reassurance I had grown accustomed to.
Towards the end of the holiday, I registered my dissatisfaction at the lack of affection, in spite of his illness. And I will never forget the look on his face as the words escaped my mouth, daggers cloaked in desperation. He looked broken. And in many ways, he was. What I experienced as distance, he experienced as pain.
Eventually, we stopped seeing each other. And while the end of that relationship cannot be reduced to a single moment, he did tell me, rather plainly, that this encounter had hurt him deeply. In a moment when he needed softness and care, he felt measured. Tested. And found wanting.
I may not accept all of the ways I was treated in this relationship, but I can hold two truths at once now. I can acknowledge the ways I was hurt, and still understand why my hypervigilance in that moment wounded him. That is part of what maturity has required of me.
It took some time for me to understand that what I was living with wasn’t just emotional or romantic sensitivity. Hypervigilance has a psychological architecture, rooted in threat perception, dopamine reward loops, and a nervous system trained to anticipate loss. When you begin to look at it this way, the behaviour becomes legible, and change becomes possible.
The science and psychology of hypervigilance
Hypervigilance is deeply rooted in threat perception because the human brain, first and foremost, is designed for survival. Long before it was tasked with sustaining intimacy or navigating romance, the human brain simply evolved to keep us alive.
The brain does not absorb reality passively; it filters it, one of such ways being through the reticular activating system (RAS). This network of neurons in the brainstem screens the overwhelming amount of information we encounter daily and highlights what it believes is relevant to our lives. Crucially, the system does not filter for truth; it filters for importance, based on what we are unconsciously primed to notice. What we fear. What we anticipate. And what we are scanning for.
In a world where we are no longer actively hunted by large, wild predators, the nervous system seeks to interpret danger elsewhere. And more often than not, this danger is perceived within our closest relationships. In these conditions, the primal brain is unable to thoroughly distinguish between being chased by a predator and being at risk of emotional abandonment. Both register as threats to survival.
Read also: How dating showed me the person I never knew I was
When our brains are conditioned to associate love with worthiness and withdrawal with danger, it begins to mark interpersonal cues as threats. A delayed reply. A message left on read. A shift in tone. A moment of emotional unavailability. These are no longer neutral data points; they are elevated, flagged, and interrogated. Hypervigilance is given fertile ground to thrive.
Hypervigilance is reinforced by dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with motivation, anticipation, and pursuit
Social media only intensifies this dynamic. We are inundated daily with relationship commentary that leaves little room for nuance. These declarations oscillate between what love should look like, how quickly someone should respond, how consistently they should perform affection, and how ease should feel at all times. There is scant allowance for friction, fatigue, illness, distraction, or the ordinary, somewhat gruelling demands of adult life.
And this is where dopamine enters the picture. Hypervigilance is reinforced by dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with motivation, anticipation, and pursuit. Historically, dopamine was released in response to behaviours that supported survival, such as finding food, forming bonds, and avoiding danger. Nowadays, those same reward pathways can be activated artificially. And a few things stimulate them as powerfully as romantic validation.
In my earlier years, I became thoroughly dependent on my partners for reassurance. Their attention and affection validated me. Made me feel worthy. Chosen. And over time, my nervous system began to rely on their feedback to regulate itself. And when their feedback felt ambiguous, I felt worthless. A message left on read for too long. A “hello” instead of a “hello love”. The slightest cooling of tone. Each would send me into a spiral. The reward had been delayed. And my hypervigilance flared.
This is the nature of dopamine: it is remarkably potent, not when a reward is guaranteed, but when it is intermittent. The uncertainty keeps the brain engaged. Alert. Seeking. And what began as connection slowly morphed into compulsion. Dr Helen Fisher, a brilliant biological anthropologist, documents this extensively in her work, which I came across in a very engaging lecture on YouTube.
The science of sex, love, and attachment | Dr. Helen Fisher: Full Interview
What love looks like when you stop bracing for impact
Breaking free from hypervigilance did not happen in one fell swoop. Instead, it began as a gradual awakening, a growing awareness of the patterns I kept repeating in my relationships. I began to notice how familiar each cycle felt; different actors, similar scripts. I moved from closeness to anxiety, reassurance to unease, and communion to avoidance in only a matter of weeks. In asking myself where these patterns were coming from, I arrived at a difficult but clarifying truth: I had been outsourcing my happiness and self-worth.
My happiness being my responsibility was not abandonment, but freedom. It meant it was no longer contingent on external circumstances…
At first, reckoning with the idea that my happiness was my responsibility felt oddly disheartening. So no one was going to care enough about my happiness to ensure it for me? Preposterous. But sitting with that discomfort led me to something quieter and far more radical: my happiness being my responsibility was not abandonment, but freedom. It meant it was no longer contingent on external circumstances. I could decide to be happy without the permission, context, or approval of anyone or anything around me, and that happiness would be truly, wholly mine.
Another thing I had to relearn, which was perhaps the most disarmingly simple, is that relationships do not need to feel high-strung to feel real. For the longest time, I had unconsciously equated intensity with depth. The anxiety, the monitoring, and the breathless need for reassurance had been mistaken for passion when in fact, it was something more… broken. If I wasn’t trembling ever-so-slightly at the edges, or yearning with every fibre of my being, was I even in love? Intensity, as I later learned, is not the measure of love’s sincerity. A love that does not leave you constantly bracing for impact is not a lesser love. It is, perhaps, even more true.
Read also: Post-Valentine’s comes the celebration of the love that matters most — your own
Learning to accept the radical ordinariness of the person I was in love with was another hurdle I had to overcome. I think the world of my partner. I genuinely do. But somewhere along the way, I had to learn to let him also just be a person — one with his own anxieties, his own bad days, and his own life that hums along quite separately from mine. Choosing to see my partner as a whole person is one of the most loving things I have ever done. Sometimes, silence is just tiredness, and distance is just distraction. Everything isn’t falling apart just because I spoke to him less today than I did yesterday… and why would it?
And this is where grace became my practice. Not the passive grace that enables or excuses mistreatment, but a deliberate, eyes-open grace that prioritises understanding over accusation. I want to be clear: this is not an argument for tolerating what should not be tolerated. Purposefully repeated bad behaviour is its own conversation, and grace is not the same as surrender. But there is a crucial and often overlooked distinction between a partner who is imperfect and a partner who is harmful.
Consistency, I have come to believe, is far more meaningful than perfection. The person who shows up for you, imperfectly but persistently, who stumbles but returns, who is human in all the ways that humanity sometimes disappoints — that person is offering you something real. And our ability to hold space for their humanity, in spite of our egos, in spite of our pride, in spite of friction, in spite of everything the prevailing internet discourse tells us we should require — that capacity might just be the truest measure of the love we feel.
Consistency, I have come to believe, is far more meaningful than perfection…
In an ideal world, every tension would be named, and every shift in mood would be communicated with care and precision. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world of long commutes and unprocessed grief, deadlines and mellow days when the words simply refuse to come. And love, real love, has to be capacious enough to hold all of that.
The internet told me who to love
I came to social media rather early. I had a Facebook account before most of my peers, and was posting selfies on Instagram by the time I was 14. In a way, I grew up inside these platforms; not as an adult arriving with a formed sense of self, but as a teenager still in the process of becoming. And that distinction matters enormously, because the self that was still becoming was also the self being shaped by everything the internet reflected back at me.
This is not a condemnation. It is simply the nature of social media. It was designed to engage, personalise, and mirror your interests and desires back to you in ways that felt intuitive and affirming. And when you are young and impressionable, your understanding of love still premature, the internet becomes one of the most powerful architects of that assembly. I did not choose to be influenced. I simply was, in the slow, structural way that sustained exposure always shapes us, before we are old enough to interrogate it.
To understand why that influence runs so deep, I think we need to go further back than the invention of the smartphone. We need to go back to something far more primal: the terror of being left behind.
Our need for frequent and enjoyable interactions with others is believed to have evolved
For most of human history, belonging to a group was not a preference. It was a prerequisite for survival. To be cast out — from the group, from the village, from the community — was not merely an inconvenience or an embarrassment. It was, in many cases, a death sentence. Psychologist Kipling D. Williams, whose extensive research on ostracism remains among the most cited in social psychology, documented how deeply this fear is embedded in us. Our need for frequent and enjoyable interactions with others is believed to have evolved precisely because inclusion in a group meant greater chances of survival and reproductive benefits for our ancestors in hostile environments. The need to belong, in other words, is not sentimental. It is biological. It is ancient. And it does not simply dissolve because the threats of the ancient world no longer apply to us.
What has changed is the arena. We no longer face physical exile, but the initial reactions to even the most minimal forms of ostracism remain painful and distressing. When our fundamental needs for belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence are threatened, sadness and anger increase. The nervous system, as we already established, is not particularly adept at distinguishing between categories of danger. And so, our wonderful human brain, primed over millennia to fear exclusion, now scans for it everywhere — including, and perhaps especially, on the internet.
Social media did not create the fear of rejection, but it has certainly industrialised it. It gave rejection an audience with metrics and hypervigilance, a daily feedback loop. Likes. Views. Follower counts. Comments. Reposts. Each one is a small, dopamine-laced signal of inclusion or exclusion. And over time, many of us — myself included — began to perform for that feedback without fully realising we were doing it. We curated, filtered, and crafted. We presented versions of ourselves and our lives that were optimised not for truth, but for approval.
And here is where it becomes interesting, as well as troubling, in romantic relationships specifically. The same performance logic began to seep into how I thought about love itself. Showing the right things, attracting the right responses, and maintaining the right image became an unconscious system of operation. The internet, with its confident, declarative language around relationships, had handed me a checklist I never asked for. What a good partner looks like. How quickly should they respond? What grand gestures should accompany significant occasions? How at ease should one feel at all times? And underneath all of it, a quiet, relentless implication: that a partner who wasn’t performing optimally was a partner who wasn’t trying. That love, to count, had to be visible. Legible. Consistently stageable.
Social media did not create the fear of rejection, but it has certainly industrialised it.
For a long time, I didn’t realise what was happening, partly because it was so well disguised. The hypervigilance dressed itself in the language of self-awareness. The auditing looked like discernment. The checklist looked like knowing my worth. And those are not bad things to have — the problem was that mine had been assembled by the internet, and calibrated not by my own experience, but by the loudest voices in my feed.
Reclaiming my own romantic instincts, then, meant something more than simply logging off. It meant asking, with real seriousness, what I actually wanted from love — not what I had been told to want. It meant sitting with the discomfort of not having an external verdict on my relationship, and learning to locate my own. And it meant, in the quietest and most personal sense, choosing presence over performance. Choosing to feel my love rather than display it. Choosing to know my partner rather than evaluate him.
Love is not the absence of friction — it is what survives it
There is a particular kind of cultural dishonesty at the heart of how we talk about love today. We speak about it as though it is something that, when found in its correct form, should feel effortless. Frictionless. Pre-solved. As though the right person will arrive and difficulty will simply cease to be a feature of your emotional life.
We do not speak about anything else this way. We know that a body worth caring for will ask things of you — not because suffering is the goal, but because growth requires resistance. Many understand that a career worth having will demand that you evolve, repeatedly and often uncomfortably, through uncertainty and failure and reinvention. We accept that a mind worth cultivating will be unsettled before it is expanded. In almost every domain of life, friction is understood not as a sign that something is wrong, but as the texture of something becoming. And yet we arrive at love, expecting it to be the one place where we are never asked to move through anything.
I don’t believe in struggle for its own sake. I don’t think love is meant to be a proving ground, or that difficulty is proof of depth. But I do believe that two people building something real together will encounter resistance — not because they are wrong for each other, but because they are human with each other. And there is a profound difference between the friction of evolution and the weight of something that is genuinely not working. One asks you to grow. The other asks you to leave. Learning to tell them apart, I think, is some of the most important work we can do.
Resist the impulse to outsource that discernment to strangers on the internet…
What concerns me is how thoroughly we have lost the appetite for the former. In a culture that has made performance a reflex and evaluation a habit, we have rebranded ordinary relational friction as a red flag. As settling. As a failure to know your worth. And so we exit. We audit. Scroll back to the checklist. Begin again, carrying the same unexamined patterns into a new situation, wondering why the cycle feels so familiar.
I am not asking you to endure what diminishes you. I’m asking something quieter than that. I’m asking you to consider whether the discomfort you are feeling might be the friction of something evolving, rather than the signal of something failing. To resist the impulse to outsource that discernment to strangers on the internet. To sit with your person long enough to know the difference.
I still love love. I loved it when it felt like a Disney awakening, and I love it now that I know it can also feel like choosing grace on a difficult Tuesday. If anything, I love it more. Because now I know what I am actually choosing. And perhaps the most radical act available to us right now, in an age of endless options, curated relationships, and algorithmic opinions about who and how to love, is simply to lean in. To feel it fully. To let it be imperfect and evolving and entirely, stubbornly ours.
Read more: From seeking fairy tales to finding real love: How four women’s views on love changed with age
React to this post!The post I used to be super hypervigilant in romantic relationships, and it almost cost me the ability to love well appeared first on Marie Claire Nigeria.
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