I Wasn’t Afraid of Being Alone. I Was Afraid Nobody Better Would Choose Me.

I thought I stayed because I loved him. Looking back, I think a big part of me stayed because I didn’t believe I could do better.

Names and some identifying details have been changed for privacy.

My name is Amra.

That’s not my real name, but this is my story.

If there is one thing I understand now that I absolutely did not understand then, it is how quietly dating confidence can disappear.

You don’t wake up one morning and say, “I don’t think anybody else will want me.”

It happens slowly.

One bad relationship. One comment about how you look. One person making you feel lucky that they chose you. One rejection. One comparison. One more reason to stay where you already are.

Eventually, staying starts feeling safer than finding out what else is possible.

What I Learned About Love Growing Up

I grew up in Kolkata in what people politely call a broken family.

My parents fought a lot.

There were ego clashes, shouting and anger. Sometimes my father hit my mother.

As a child, I didn’t think of it as domestic violence or an unhealthy marriage. I didn’t even have those words.

It was just home.

And when something is normal inside your home, you can easily start believing it is normal everywhere.

I thought men were supposed to be the head of the family.

I thought women adjusted.

I thought men could be aggressive and women were somehow supposed to handle it better.

My mother was the person who took care of everything and everybody.

But toward the end of her life, something changed in her.

She kept pushing me to become independent.

Not gently either.

She wanted me to leave, study, earn and learn how to stand on my own feet.

I think she knew she might not always be there to protect me.

Eventually, I moved from Kolkata to Hyderabad to study a foreign language at a small institute around the Osmania University campus.

People thought I was brave.

I wasn’t brave.

I was scared and pretending not to be.

Sometimes Running Away Looks Like Starting Over

I also had another reason to leave Kolkata.

I had recently come out of a relationship with a boyfriend I had been with during eleventh and twelfth standard.

That relationship became physically abusive.

He constantly questioned my loyalty.

Who was I talking to?

Why did I speak to this guy?

Why did I take so long to reply?

At that age, I didn’t know the difference between someone caring about me and someone trying to control me.

I just knew I wanted to get away.

So when my mother pushed Hyderabad, I agreed faster than I probably would have otherwise.

I told everyone I was going there to build my future.

That was true.

But I was also running away.

Hyderabad felt exciting at first and then suddenly very lonely.

I didn’t know many people. I didn’t speak the local language well. I wanted friends around me more than I wanted to admit.

Then one day there was a regional movie shoot happening on the university campus.

I went to watch.

During a break, one of the crew members stepped away for a cigarette and asked me if I had a lighter.

I did.

That tiny moment basically changed the next few years of my life.

I’ll call him Pravin.

He was working as a cinematographer and was doing one of his first major projects after studying film abroad.

He was confident.

Very comfortable talking to people.

Good looking.

The exact opposite of how I felt about myself.

I joked that if they ever needed someone for a tiny role, I’d happily do it.

We exchanged numbers.

Then there was coffee.

Then another coffee.

Then more time together.

Eventually, because I was paying a lot in rent, he suggested I move in with him.

I did.

He Never Promised Me a Relationship

I want to be fair about this part.

Pravin never sat me down and promised me marriage.

He never even properly promised me a relationship.

He told me he wasn’t ready for commitment.

Eventually, we called what we had an open relationship.

At the time I told myself I was okay with it.

I don’t think I really was.

I think I accepted the arrangement because having some part of him felt better than losing him completely.

I told him about my ex.

I told him I had already been physically hurt in a relationship.

I told him how easily my mother had convinced me to move cities partly because I desperately wanted distance from my old life.

He listened.

And this is important: he wasn’t aggressive.

He didn’t frighten me.

He didn’t act like the men I had learned to be scared of.

To me, that felt safe.

My definition of a good relationship at that time was honestly that basic.

He doesn’t hurt me. He doesn’t control me. So maybe this is good.

I got used to him.

Very used to him.

Two years went by.

Was I in love with him?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

I still don’t know.

But I definitely had hope.

I thought one day he might wake up and realize that what we had was worth committing to.

He never told me that would happen.

I built that future by myself.

Then I Heard Someone in the Next Room

A few months ago, I was working from home.

I had my period and was in quite a bit of pain, so during my lunch break I took a painkiller and went to lie down.

Pravin was supposed to be out for a shoot.

At some point, I woke up hearing sounds from the other room.

For a few seconds, I honestly thought somebody had entered the house.

Then I realized what I was hearing.

Someone was moaning.

I remember getting up and walking toward his bedroom thinking, please, please, please don’t let this be what I think it is.

The door wasn’t fully closed.

I looked inside.

Pravin was there with a woman from his crew.

I knew her.

Not personally, but I knew who she was.

I just stood there.

And this is where things get complicated.

Did Pravin technically cheat on me?

No.

We had agreed we were open.

I knew that.

My brain knew that.

But whatever happened inside me in that moment did not care about the technical definition.

I felt humiliated.

Replaceable.

Stupid.

Mostly stupid.

I had spent two years secretly waiting for a relationship that he had never promised me.

Seeing him with someone else didn’t break our agreement.

It broke my hope.

My Dating Confidence Was the Real Problem

I went to work afterward and completely broke down in front of one of my colleagues.

I cried so much I could barely explain what had happened.

Eventually I moved into her place.

For a while, I didn’t want anybody.

I didn’t want another relationship.

I didn’t want dating apps.

I didn’t want advice.

I mostly wanted people to stop telling me that I would “find someone better.”

Because the problem was, I didn’t believe them.

That is when I started realizing that Pravin wasn’t actually the whole problem.

My dating confidence was almost nonexistent.

Pravin was attractive. Charming. Well spoken. Confident.

I compared myself to him constantly.

I questioned my appearance.

The way I dressed.

The way I spoke.

Whether I was interesting.

Whether men even noticed me.

And because I didn’t believe there were many options for me, I became emotionally attached to the option I already had.

Even when it wasn’t really giving me what I wanted.

That realization hurt almost more than the breakup.

I wasn’t just afraid of losing Pravin.

I was afraid nobody better would choose me.

Dating Apps Weren’t Solving My Problem

Of course I knew dating apps existed.

I knew Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and other apps could introduce me to hundreds of people.

I also knew matrimony platforms existed if I wanted to seriously search for marriage.

And social media gave me access to almost everyone I already knew.

But none of those options felt right for where I was.

I wasn’t ready to swipe through strangers.

My dating confidence was too low to turn myself into a profile and silently wonder who would reject me.

I definitely wasn’t ready to create a matrimony profile.

And approaching someone I already knew felt even worse.

Imagine liking someone from your workplace.

You tell them.

They don’t feel the same way.

And then Monday morning arrives.

You still have to sit in the same meeting.

You still see them at lunch.

You still pretend everything is normal.

That fear sounds small until you are the person who has to take the risk.

That was the gap I couldn’t find a good answer for.

I didn’t necessarily need another app showing me more strangers.

I wanted to know something much simpler:

Could somebody already around me possibly be interested in me too?

“You Never Know Who Is Crushing on You”

The colleague I was staying with eventually told me about wadaCrush.

I wasn’t excited.

I actually assumed it was just another dating app.

I told her I wasn’t interested.

She said, “You never know who is crushing on you around you.”

I remember thinking, very funny.

Who exactly is secretly crushing on me?

But I looked at the website anyway.

One thing caught my attention.

There was something called Join The Queue.

I didn’t have to immediately download the app, build a profile and start dating.

I could leave my contact details and apparently be notified if somebody expressed interest in me.

That felt less scary.

So I joined.

Then I mostly forgot about it.

A few days later, I received a message saying someone I knew had shown interest in me.

I thought it was spam.

I showed my friend.

She smiled.

“Just trust the process. What will happen?”

She was right.

What exactly did I have to lose?

I Picked Four People

Eventually curiosity got me.

I downloaded wadaCrush.

The part that made me comfortable was knowing that simply choosing someone would not automatically tell them I liked them.

If they weren’t interested, I wasn’t going to receive some embarrassing rejection and they weren’t going to know what I had done.

So I picked four people I already knew from work.

Not four people I was secretly madly in love with.

Just four men I thought were good people and who I could imagine seeing differently.

One was Mr. S.

He was an editor and one of the partners at the firm where I worked.

He had always been nice to me.

Actually, nice isn’t even the right word.

He was easy.

Easy to talk to.

Helpful without making a big deal out of helping.

The kind of person I felt comfortable around without ever seriously asking myself whether I liked him.

I sent my discreet vibes.

Then the app told me that Mr. S. had already shown interest in me too.

I genuinely thought I had misunderstood what I was seeing.

I checked it again.

Then again.

He liked me.

Someone I thought was kind, successful and genuinely nice to be around had looked at me and thought:

I like her.

I know that probably sounds like a very small thing.

For me, it wasn’t.

I had spent so much time thinking I was lucky to have Pravin that I had stopped considering that somebody else might feel lucky to have me.

That one moment didn’t suddenly turn me into a confident person.

But it put a crack in something I had believed about myself for years.

Sometimes Confidence Comes After You Take the Step

People love saying:

Love yourself first.

Know your worth.

Be confident before you date.

I understand what they mean.

But life didn’t work that neatly for me.

Sometimes I needed a little evidence before I could believe something better about myself.

Sometimes rebuilding dating confidence meant doing something small while I was still scared.

wadaCrush didn’t heal me.

An app cannot do that.

It didn’t fix my childhood.

It didn’t undo my old abusive relationship.

It didn’t erase what happened with Pravin.

And it definitely didn’t magically turn Mr. S. into my perfect partner.

It just gave me a way to ask one question without putting myself completely on the line:

Does someone I already know possibly like me too?

For me, the answer happened to be yes.

Last Week, I Got Married

The match was only the beginning.

After that came everything an app cannot do.

Conversations.

Actual dates.

Awkwardness.

Arguments.

Learning about each other.

Families.

Figuring out whether we actually wanted the same kind of life.

And eventually, marriage.

Last week, I became Mrs. S.

I still smile writing that.

Not because I think my story proves that everyone who uses an app is going to find a husband.

That would be ridiculous.

What changed my life was something more basic.

I finally stopped assuming the person I was already attached to was my only chance at being chosen.

Sometimes we stay in relationships because they are good.

Sometimes we stay because they are familiar.

And familiarity can feel a lot like safety when your confidence is already damaged.

I hope dating technology keeps moving beyond simply giving people more strangers to swipe through.

Because sometimes the person you could build something with isn’t a stranger.

It could be your friend.

Your colleague.

Someone from college.

Someone you’ve known for years but never looked at that way because neither of you wanted to risk going first.

Maybe they don’t like you.

And maybe that is perfectly okay.

But once in a while, two people are walking around carrying exactly the same secret.

Neither says anything.

Neither wants the embarrassment.

Neither realizes the feeling is mutual.

I spent years thinking I needed to find someone who would choose me.

What I really needed first was enough confidence to believe I was worth choosing.

And sometimes a completely different life begins with something much smaller than meeting somebody new.

Sometimes it begins when you finally realize somebody who already knows you has been noticing you all along.

If you are experiencing relationship abuse or feel unsafe, confidential support is available through the National Domestic Violence Hotline, Domestic Abuse Help in India.