There is a particular sort of person — and perhaps you know one, or perhaps, more inwardly, you are one — who has a gift for making rooms come alive in their presence. They make the bartender feel briefly clever; they make the colleague at the work party feel, for a few minutes, properly chosen; they have, by the time the evening has wound itself to a close, made approximately seventeen people feel a little more alive than they were when they walked in. And then they go home — quite often alone — and lie awake in the dark with a feeling they cannot quite place, which is neither dramatic loneliness nor specific sorrow, but something quieter and more puzzling: the suspicion that none of the warmth they dispensed in the course of the evening was, in any really meaningful sense, received in return.

What is the feeling, when one finally sits with it? It is, I think, the dawning awareness that a great deal of love went out — generously, expertly, with all the practised artistry of someone who has been doing this for decades — and that what came back, while perfectly pleasant, was something else entirely. "Admiration", in fact; and admiration, however nourishing it can feel for an hour or two, is not at all the same currency as love. It is the difference, perhaps, between being applauded and being seen — and one can subsist on the first for a remarkably long time before noticing that one has been deficient in the second all along.

Why might a person make their entire emotional living, year after year, in admiration rather than in love? Because admiration is, in the end, safe; admiration is given at a tactful distance; admiration does not require one to remove one's makeup at the close of the evening and be looked at, unmade, by someone who is staying for breakfast. Admiration is something one can collect and then leave; love, by contrast, is something one has to remain inside, day after ordinary day, and that is — even when one wants it desperately — a far more frightening proposition than it at first appears. Have you noticed, perhaps, how very exhausting it would be to be loved properly? It is, I rather think, one of the most exhausting things in the world; for to be loved properly is to be "seen" — not the version of you who flirts so charmingly with the bartender, but the version of you who is anxious in the morning, who is sometimes graceless, who loses her temper at the printer at four in the afternoon, who holds, quietly, an opinion of herself she has never voiced to anyone alive. To be loved properly is to be known in all these registers, and to remain in the room — without bolting, without performing, without rearranging oneself into a more presentable shape — while the loving continues.

Is this, do you think, what you have been avoiding? It will not, I expect, feel like avoidance on the surface; it will feel, in fact, like an active and exciting life — many dates, many flirtations, many evenings in which one is briefly the centre of someone's delighted attention. And yet, underneath, there is so very often a faint and persistent dissatisfaction; for the flirtatious heart, in my long observation, is almost never quite a happy one — it is doing a great deal of work to feel "almost" felt, which is, on the long view, an exhausting business.

Where does such a heart come from, in the first place? It comes, very often, from a childhood in which one was rewarded for charm — a clever child, a funny child, a child whose performance of charm could distract a difficult parent, or earn the approval of a hard-to-please grandparent, or smooth over the room when the room was tense and adult and frightening. The child learnt — and learnt well — that charm was a survival skill; and the survival skill worked, repeatedly, and the entire architecture of the adult was eventually built around the workability of it. But charm, you may have begun to notice, is not the same thing as intimacy; charm is what you offer to the room, while intimacy is what you give to a single person — and charm rewards the performer, while intimacy requires the performer to set the performance down.

Have you ever, in your adult life, set the performance down? In front of anyone? Even alone, in front of yourself? For many of the most charming people I have known, it is almost intolerable even to attempt — because the unperformed self does not, at first, feel quite like a self at all; it feels naked, it feels insufficient, and it feels — and this, I suspect, is the secret of it all — unlovable in some essential and unspoken way that the charm has been covering over, very efficiently, for decades.

What if the charm is, after all, a kind of uniform you have forgotten how to take off? You can, of course, continue to wear it for the rest of your life — many people do, with considerable elegance — and it is not, on its own, a moral failing; the world is generally improved by the presence of charm, and bartenders and dinner parties and slightly tired evenings are all the better for it. The cost is paid privately, by the wearer, in a particular shade of loneliness that few outsiders ever guess at: the loneliness of always being the most fun person in the room and never the most known one; the loneliness of being celebrated for an aspect of yourself which is, in fact, only a small fraction of you; the loneliness of returning home, after another evening of mild adulation, to a self who has not been visited.

How does one begin, then, to put down the uniform? Slowly — not, I suspect, at the party, where charm is at its most thoroughly rehearsed, but in the quieter spaces between parties, and with one person at a time. A friend, perhaps, who has known you long enough to have seen past the charm anyway; and on a Wednesday afternoon, over coffee, you might try the small experiment of saying a true thing rather than a clever one. You might tell them, in honesty, what is actually happening for you, not in the witty edited version, but in the duller and more accurate one. And you might watch their face soften, as faces tend to do when someone has stopped performing and started, at last, speaking. Did the world end? Did they think rather less of you for it? Or did something else happen — something that felt, briefly, like being properly met?

Connection without commitment is, in the end, a kind of survival; it keeps you alive; but it does not, in the long final reckoning, quite nourish you. You can subsist on it for many years — many people do — but there comes a point, usually somewhere in the late thirties or the early forties, when the diet begins to show. The charm becomes a slightly tired version of itself; the evenings out feel a fraction more hollow than they used to; and you begin to wonder, in the quiet between obligations, whether the next twenty years of this are really going to feel rather identical to the last twenty. Could they? Could the rest of your life genuinely consist of charming evenings and lonely mornings, indefinitely? It could; there is no law against it; many people accept it as the bargain they have struck. But there is also, perhaps, another path — a less glittering one, and certainly a more frightening one — in which you allow one person, eventually, to see the self underneath the charm; and the exposure may, at first, feel like a loss, for the audience shrinks, and the applause quietens, and you are no longer everyone's favourite person in the room. You are, instead, one person's favourite person — and that person is staying. Would you, do you think, trade the room for the staying? It is, in the end, the only question the flirtatious heart must eventually ask itself — not loudly, and not on a stage, but quietly, when there is no one watching, and there is only you, and the question, and the long slow possibility of a rather different kind of life.