Then don’t. It doesn’t matter.

But keep in mind that the desire to be wanted as just as real a phenomenon as the desire to have. You have the latter, and you’re writing it off as invalid on the basis of self-interest (really, if you’re honest with yourself, probably just to avoid the anxiety of risking rejection, but that’s a different matter).

You fail to realize that there’s another side to nature’s coin, and it’s the symbiosis of the two that makes it work. Think of a blueberry—doesn’t it look good? But it’s not just there to look good for no reason, it looks good to make the bear hungry. You are like a bear looking at the tasty blueberry, feeling a hunger in your belly, and then chastising yourself for wanting to eat it. But if every bear did that, they’d starve, and there’d be no more blueberries.

She got dressed up for a reason, and if nobody approached her by the end of the night, she’d feel like the blueberry, wilting on the stem. How do you think that would feel? “What did I do wrong? Maybe I wasn’t a good enough blueberry.” No, she was a great blueberry, the bear just got too much in his own head. Is that selfish?