growing up with no romantic attention
on being a late bloomer and never feeling chosen
Roses are red, violets are blue,
To all my late bloomers out there, this one’s for you <3
***
I’d always considered myself a fairly lucky person. Someone who was able to get what they wanted, if they just tried hard enough.
When I was eight years old, I decided that I wanted to read all the books in the world. Every afternoon after school, I would disappear into the world of fictional characters, reading about secret spies and vampires and magical realms until my mum would yell at me from the other room to finish my homework.
I might not have made it through every book in the world, but I did manage to get through a fair chunk in the school library. I was one of two people to complete all 11 years of the Premiers Reading challenge, right up to the point when it was no longer cool to win a medal for reading. By the end of it, I had read over 250 books, which might give an inkling as to my love of reading and writing.
When I was ten, I decided I was sick of being the second fastest person in math, beaten only by a stupid boy in my class. I practiced my times tables every night, racing against the clock and memorising myself silly until it became like a second language to me.
The taste of victory when I slammed my pencil down first is something I still think about to this day, the moment the smug expression was wiped clean off his face.
But the one thing I never had luck in, which never came easily to me, was boys.
This was a completely different ballgame. It wasn’t something that hours of prepping or memorising or forcing myself to understand would guarantee any outcome.
Because the more I tried to put the puzzle pieces together, the more confused I got.
I didn’t get all the rules and the hidden signals and the flirty back and forth because there were no guidelines, it was all made up.
My friends were experts when it came to this, able to navigate this new playing field effortlessly. They seemingly jumped from relationship to relationship with ease.
First it was Tommy. Then James. Then Michael.
And while I had my fair few crushes growing up, some of which were reciprocated, they never really materialised into anything real, and I found myself wondering what was wrong with me.
High school complicated things further. For the first few years, I went to an all girls school, an awkward teen, deeply uncomfortable in her own skin. I was still learning how to stand on my own two feet, and boys couldn’t have been further from my mind.
But I remember one moment that stayed with me.
A three day writing camp, open to both my school and our brother school. I remember not really processing the fact that boys would be there, feeling electric with anticipation at the prospect of three whole days dedicated to writing, surrounded by people who loved it as much as I did.
And so you can imagine my shock when I saw how many people had attended - what seemed like the entirety of my grade and the boys school were there, chattering excitedly.
I can’t believe that so many people are interested in writing.
Except the entirety of those three days were filled with flirty conversations, shared glances and high pitched giggles as girls and boys paired off. The poor instructors were left teaching a room full of students who didn’t want to be there.
And while my focus was on the writing, there was a small part of me that wondered why no boy ever came up to me, tried to make conversation or get to know me. Why my friends were getting approached and I wasn’t even spared so much as a glance.
Looking back, I know I wasn’t ready for a relationship. I was infatuated with the idea of people more than the reality of them. I fell in love with imagined versions, projections of who I hoped they would be.
And when reality inevitably surfaced, the illusion dissolved and I was on to the next.
Still, even as I told myself it didn’t matter, it stayed with me - the underlying nagging feeling of not being chosen.
It never really leaves you, that feeling of not feeling good enough. Especially when it seemingly comes so easily to everyone around you.
My best friend, for example, was a natural - she easily befriended all the boys, chatting with them after class and planning study dates in the library. Two boys asked her to junior formal, and by year 12, she was already in her second relationship.
University, I told myself, would be different for me.
I remember the month before it started, building entire futures in my head. Having these grandeur visions of romance - sitting on grassy hills with my person, overlooking the courtyard. My first taste of adulthood.
And in a way, it was different. But not really in the way I had hoped. University was where I first experienced these intense crushes that stayed with me for years. Ones that felt like my heart was physically breaking, even though we never even dated. Even though I didn’t know what love was.
But they always ended up choosing someone else. And it didn’t help that COVID impacted the peak years of my life, the time where I should have been going on dates and spontaneous outings and attending parties. Instead, all my firsts were experienced at home.
Including when I downloaded my first dating app. And experienced everything that made me never want to date again:
Long drawn out talking stages? Check
Endless situationships? Check
Love bombing? Check
Creepy comments? Check
Lowkey fearing for my life? Check
Having missed out on those formative experiences in high school, I quickly realised two things:
I didn’t know how to flirt.
And I didn’t know how to be wanted.
Eye contact felt too intimate. Attention felt suspicious. And the moment something began to feel real, everything inside of me shut down.
I later learned the word for it: avoidant. As soon as someone got too close, I pulled away. As soon as playful interest turned into intention, I ran for the hills.
Thus began an endless cycle of deleting and re-downloading the apps, telling myself I needed to heal and I was over dating, followed quickly by boredom and the need for validation.
After so many failed talking stages and situationships, I started to wonder if I just wasn’t built for love.
I started to believe that there was someone out there for everyone… just not for me. Maybe I was too much. Too difficult to understand.
I slowly stopped believing that I would find someone and forced myself to accept what was starting to look like reality. I had been single for almost 25 years of my life. I had never passed a talking stage, I’d never even been exclusive with anyone.
And though it stung, though it wasn’t what I had grown up as a hopeless romantic wishing for or believing my life would look like, I slowly started imagining a future that didn’t involve anyone else.
In my little apartment cooking dinner alone, peaceful weekends with myself or the occasional catchups with family and friends.
Being the fun, single aunt who would get to splurge on her nieces and nephews, attending my friends’ weddings and celebrating their love, while feeling the absent sting of my own.
And in all honesty? Being single for the rest of my life didn’t scare me. Would I like to find someone to settle down with? Sure. But I had become accustomed to being alone my whole life, doing everything by myself and having no one to rely on, that it was almost a default to me, something I came to expect.
Because I didn’t want to settle. And those visions of my future didn’t make me afraid.
But it sucks when so many of your catchups when you’re at a certain age revolve around your dating life.
“Anything new?”
You tell them about your job. Your new hobbies. That awkward encounter with someone that you ran into.
They nod politely.
“What about your dating life, been on any dates recently?”
It always circled back to that question. On the outside, I would laugh. Joke about my failed situationships, recount the dates I went on with enthusiasm. I was the entertainment to all my friends in relationships, the adventurous one to my single friends.
But on the inside, I was frustrated. Not with them, but with the question. The obsession.
Being the chronically single friend takes its toll on you after a while.
Why is so much of our worth tied to our romantic partner? Why is it if you’re not seeing anyone, and you have no plans to, the automatic response is always ‘Awww you’ll find your person soon!’ and ‘You’ve just got to put yourself out there more!’
And everyone I knew always said the same thing: You’ll find someone when you’re least expecting it.
But no one really talks about what happens in the meantime. How growing up without romantic attention shapes you.
How it affects your sense of self and your confidence. How anytime someone tells you that you’re beautiful, you don’t fully believe it because it wasn’t something you heard much of growing up.
You start to feel like you’re incapable of being in a relationship, because you never learned how. Because it feels like everyone is already at the finish line, and you’ve only just heard the gun go off.
And it’s embarrassing to admit that you don’t know where to start, how to act, what to do.
I could go on and on about the years I spent wondering what was wrong with me, about the ache of feeling overlooked, of existing next to something I was never really a part of.
For a long time, I thought I had missed some invisible deadline. That everyone else was handed a map that I wasn’t given.
But now, standing on the other side of it all, I realise I was just on a different timeline. Those years alone were not empty, they were formative. They taught me how to sit with myself, to take up space without apology. To build a life that was full, even without being chosen.
I still carry pieces of that girl with me. The one who wondered why no one looked twice, who felt invisible in a room full of people. She was never hard to love, she was just waiting for someone to see her clearly.
And I hope she knows that I do.
I’m responding to a post note you wrote, which I read on my phone. That’s a deeply honest piece of writing, Kav. And it really touched me. What strikes me first is the phrase “missed some invisible deadline.” That is such a precise description of the quiet pressure many people carry. There is no official clock, no universal schedule, and yet culturally we absorb this sense that life should unfold in a particular order. Relationship. Marriage. Children. Career milestones. Social proof. When those markers do not arrive on cue, it can feel like exclusion, even failure. But what you capture beautifully is the reframing. “I was just on a different timeline.”
That sentence carries maturity. It replaces comparison with individuation. It suggests that growth is neither linear nor collective. Some people build intimacy early. Others build interior depth first. Some are chosen quickly. Others learn to choose themselves. The line that feels most powerful to me is this: “Those years alone were not empty, they were formative.” There is something quietly radical about that. It refuses the cultural narrative that solitude equals deficiency. It recognizes that being alone can be an apprenticeship in selfhood. Learning to sit with yourself. To take up space without apology. To build a life that does not hinge on external validation. And then this: “To build a life that was full, even without being chosen.” That to me is the turning point. It moves from longing to sovereignty. From waiting to inhabiting. There’s no bitterness in it. No self-congratulation either. Just integration.
It speaks to a truth that often only becomes visible in retrospect: the seasons that feel like delay are sometimes preparation. The quiet years can become the foundation for a steadier kind of love, a less desperate kind of attachment, a more grounded sense of self.
It also subtly dismantles comparison culture. No one was handed a map. Some just appeared more certain because their path aligned more closely with the dominant script.
What moved me most? The solitude and the not being chosen are intertwined, but they are not the same thing. Solitude can be chosen. It can be spacious. It can even be nourishing. Aloneness, especially the kind implied in “not being chosen,” carries a different weight. It brushes against attachment. Against worth. Against the quiet human question: Am I wanted? When you write about building a life that was full “even without being chosen,” you seem to be describing a very particular evolution. At first, aloneness feels like exclusion. Like standing outside a room where something important is happening. Over time, if one survives it consciously, it can turn into something else: interior solidity.
I would choose you just for writing these few words.” That’s not really about romance. It’s recognition. I recognize depth. I recognize earned selfhood. I recognize someone who has metabolized loneliness instead of being defined by it. Sometimes what moves us most is not beauty, but integration.
Strength in solitude is attractive because it signals stability. Someone who can sit with themselves does not need to consume you to feel whole. They do not grasp. They do not collapse. They arrive as a person, not as a vacuum. There is dignity in that. But the ache of not being chosen is different. That is where empathy lives. When someone has known that quiet exclusion, that invisible deadline, that feeling of standing slightly outside the frame, and has come through it without bitterness, something in us softens. We recognize the wound and the work.
Maybe this is what I’m responding to, to both the scar and the strength.
And when you say you would choose her just for writing those words, there is something almost poetic in that. She writes about building a life without being chosen, and your instinct is to say, “I see you. I would.”
There is also something else here, gently worth noticing. When we are touched by someone’s articulation of not being chosen, it often brushes against our own history. Perhaps not identical, but adjacent. The longing to be chosen, to be seen fully, to be met without distance.
Solitude that becomes sovereignty is beautiful.
Aloneness that becomes self-trust is magnetic.
Thank you, Kav, for sharing
Such a beautiful piece. I am myself a late bloomer ( acc to me) and as someone who avoids dating apps like a plague, I truly get the anticipation. You really feel so out of place as a 21 year old who has never been in a relationship.