Authenticity

Pretending to be someone you’re not is exhausting and straight-up unattractive.

I know because I did it for years. The funny bloke at the bar. The one who agreed with whatever she said. The one whose job title was a size bigger than the job.

None of it worked. Not for long.

Two things happen when you drop the act.

• You stop paying for it.

• The right people start finding you.

Most of this post is about why those two are the same thing.

He wrote that from prison. It still stings.

Holding a mask up is work. Nobody sees the work, which is the point of a mask, but your arm knows.

Every opinion you fake has to be remembered. Every laugh at a joke you didn’t find funny has to be repeated next time. You’re running two people on one set of batteries.

The people who study this call it surface acting. Ute Hülsheger and Anna Schewe at Maastricht pulled together three decades of it in 2011, ninety-odd studies of people paid to smile, and the pattern held across the lot: the more you fake the face, the worse you feel, and it shows in your work too.

That’s customer service. Now do it on a date. Or every day of a relationship.

Drop it and you get that energy back. Spend it on something that matters.

Everyone can tell when you’re not being real. They might not be able to say what’s off, but they know.

The too-quick agreement. The laugh that arrives a beat late. The story that sounds rehearsed because it is.

Fake doesn’t attract. It doesn’t even go unnoticed. It just quietly moves people a step back.

The real version of you, boring bits included, is something a person can actually connect with. The act isn’t.

Start small if you have to. Say the thing you actually think, in a conversation where it costs nothing. Watch what it does.

When you’re true to yourself, you stop needing other people’s approval to feel alright.

That’s where confidence comes from. Not from being liked. From not needing to be.

If your confidence depends on the room agreeing with you, every room is a referendum. Lose one and you’re gone.

If you know what you value and you live by it, the room can think what it likes.

I wrote about the other side of this, the man who needs the vote, in Neediness. That man was me.

Being yourself filters people. That’s not a side effect, it’s the job.

Some people won’t like the real you. Good. Better at week one than year three, when you finally stop performing and they find out who they’ve been sleeping with.

The ones who stay like what’s actually there. You can relax around them, because there’s nothing to keep up.

Same with mates, same at work. Be clear about who you are and what you want and you attract people who want that. Be vague and you get vague people.

Being real means being a bit exposed. I covered that in Vulnerability. The short version is that the exposure is the point.

On a date, stop trying to impress. Share the actual interests and the actual quirks. The one who works out is the one who likes them.

In a relationship, say what you feel and what you need. Not the version that keeps the peace. Peace built on that doesn’t last anyway.

With your mates, have the opinion. If it’s different from the crowd, it’s still yours.

At work, bring the real you. People follow someone they can read. Nobody follows a mask.

With family, be straight about what you want. They either accept it, or you’ve learned something about them.

It isn’t complicated.

Stop f*cking around and embrace who you really are. You’ll get the people you deserve, and a life that feels like yours.

That’s it.