For the two weeks that we were on vacation, my friend Parnika and I had an exhausting nighttime routine. Right before we went to sleep, I would turn to her with a pout and declare, “He hates me.” Sitting up with a sigh, she would list all the logical reasons why the man I liked did not, in fact, hate me. For one, he had just called me a few hours ago, and we’d been texting all day. Some days, he’d informed me he would be busy with work; on other nights, he’d fallen asleep early. Even if, three hours ago, he had told me he liked me, I would find myself convinced his feelings had since changed. Surely he loathed me by now; maybe he’d realised I was annoyingly clingy or found out I was secretly a terrible person. No matter how irrational my thoughts were, I was convinced they were true.
Unbeknownst to me, there was a term for the insecurity I was feeling. Emotional impermanence, as a tweet told me a few days later, is when “you don’t believe that the feelings of others…