I have spent most of my life looking at myself through other people’s eyes. When I was younger, those eyes were mostly judgemental. I knew what was supposed to be pretty, what was supposed to be thin, what was supposed to be feminine, what needed to be hidden, and what could safely be shown. I learned these things before I learned much about myself. By the time I was old enough to have an opinion about my own body, I already had a very long list of opinions that had been given to me.

So I looked in the mirror and searched for evidence. Was my face good enough? Was my body good enough? Did I look younger, thinner, prettier, more presentable? There was always something to inspect, and almost always something to improve. I did not hate myself every day. It was more ordinary than that. I simply did not spend much time liking myself.

Something has changed in my early thirties. I wish I could say it happened because I finally became confident, but that would make the story too neat. I am still unmarried. There are still things I want from life that I have not got. I still have insecurities that can arrive without warning and behave as though they have every right to be there.

What changed was simpler. I became tired of waiting. For years, I had imagined that I would start enjoying myself once certain things changed. Once life became more settled, once I achieved certain things, once I became the woman I thought I was supposed to become. At some point, I realised that life was changing anyway, mostly without asking for my permission.

So I started taking care of myself. And then I started noticing myself. Not checking myself. Looking. I notice my face now. I notice my eyes, my nose, my lips, my eyelashes. I notice where blush sits best on my cheeks. I sometimes overline my lips and sometimes decide that I like them better without it. I like the way my lipstick looks after several hours, when it has faded and settled into my lips. I like my eyeliner and mascara after they have smudged slightly because there is something about that imperfection that feels more like me.

These are small things. But I think becoming comfortable with yourself is made almost entirely of small things.

Then I began noticing something else. Other people were noticing me too. Sometimes someone would flirt. Sometimes someone would look at me for slightly longer than necessary. Sometimes somebody would tell me I looked good. Sometimes I could simply sense that a person wanted me.

And I liked knowing. I still do. It sounds like a confession because women are allowed to be beautiful much more easily than they are allowed to admit that they enjoy being desired. We are expected to look attractive, but we are supposed to be modest about wanting attractiveness to have an effect. We can receive a compliment with a polite smile, but admitting that someone’s attraction made us feel good can suddenly sound vain.

I remember meeting an old friend after a long time. He had known me years earlier, before many of the changes I now take for granted. During the conversation, he called me pretty. Then he called me pretty again. Nothing happened. That is precisely why I remember it. There was no romantic story hidden inside the moment. There was simply the strange pleasure of being seen by somebody who had known an earlier version of me.

For a few seconds, I wondered what he was seeing. Was it my face? Was it the way I carried myself? Was it the fact that I seemed different? Or was he simply looking at the same person I had always been and finding something I had spent years failing to notice? I did not know. But I thought about it later.

And then I did something slightly ridiculous. I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered, is this how I looked to him? For a moment, I was not looking at my face as I normally did. I was trying to imagine it through someone else’s desire. I looked at my lips, my eyes, the shape of my face, and wondered what another person might have noticed before I had noticed it myself.

There was something almost embarrassing about that curiosity. I was not asking whether I was beautiful in some objective sense. I was trying to see myself as someone else might see me. And perhaps that is one of the strangest things desire can do. It can temporarily lend you another person’s eyes.

This is where it becomes uncomfortable. Because if another person’s desire can change the way I see myself, then whose eyes am I actually using when I look in the mirror?

For years, I looked at myself through the eyes of people who judged me. Now, sometimes, I catch myself looking through the eyes of people who desire me. Neither gaze is completely mine. And yet both have taught me something.

The first taught me to find flaws. The second taught me that the things I thought were flaws might not be flaws at all. The body I spent years trying to improve can already be somebody else’s favourite body. The face I thought needed fixing can be the face somebody remembers later. The feature I barely notice can be the thing someone finds beautiful.

You realise that your body has a life outside your own judgement. When you are young, you are often taught to want beauty. As you grow older, you begin to understand that beauty and desire are not the same thing.

I do not only want to know that I am pretty anymore. I like knowing that I can be wanted.

For most of my twenties, the kind of attention I received was different. Friends and people around me would talk about me as someone you could settle down with. I was mature, responsible, good-hearted, sensible. Someone who would not hurt you. Someone you could introduce to your family. In the language people use when they are imagining a future, I was often what they would call “wife material.”

There was something deeply reassuring about being considered worthy of a future. Being told, in one form or another, that you were the kind of woman someone could build a life with felt like a compliment to your character. It said that you were trustworthy, decent, stable, and worth choosing when the temporary things were over.

But somewhere towards the end of my twenties, and even more so in my thirties, I began noticing another kind of attention.

I began noticing that being seen as a good woman was not the same thing as being seen as a desirable woman.

There is a strange difference between someone thinking, “I could marry her,” and someone thinking, “I want her.”

For years, I was comfortable with the first kind of recognition. Perhaps I even preferred it because it felt safer. Being someone’s idea of a good wife gave me a place in a future. Being someone’s object of desire placed me somewhere much more immediate, much more physical, and much less respectable.

I want to know that I am not only the woman someone could settle down with. I want to know that I am also the woman someone could look at and simply want.

That feels particularly strange in my early thirties, when there is already so much cultural pressure around what a woman should have done by this age. I am not married. I am not even sure that I want to be married right now. But the absence of marriage has made me unexpectedly curious about something else: what does it mean to know that I am still desirable when I am not being chosen for permanence?

Now I am discovering the pleasure of being wanted in someone’s present.

There is something more personal about desire. Beauty can exist at a distance. Desire crosses the distance.

Someone can look at your face and think it is beautiful. Someone else can look at the same face and wonder what it would be like to kiss you. Those are different experiences.

And I think I like the second one more than I am supposed to admit. Not because I necessarily want anything to happen. Sometimes I do not want the person at all. I want the knowledge. I want the second glance. I want the compliment. I want the little private satisfaction of knowing that, somewhere in another person’s mind, I exist as a woman they could desire. Sometimes I do not want you. I want you to want me.

Desire is far more capricious than beauty standards allow. Someone can want you because of your face, your body, your voice, your humour, your confidence, your awkwardness, the way you laugh, the way you look at them, or something neither of you could explain.

I have not arrived at some perfect state of self-love. There are still days when I look in the mirror and see every insecurity at once. But there are other days when I notice something else.

I notice the woman who has changed without realising she was changing. I notice the body I once treated like a problem. I notice the face I once avoided examining too closely. I notice the lips I now know I like better after the lipstick has worn off. I notice the eyes that look better when the mascara has smudged. I notice myself.

And sometimes I wonder whether I would have learned to look this closely if nobody had ever wanted me. I do not know. That is the part I cannot resolve. I know I do not need another person’s desire to prove that I have worth. I also know that another person’s desire has changed me. It has made me look again.

Maybe I have not completely learned to look at myself through my own eyes yet. Maybe I am still borrowing other people’s eyes, only choosing kinder ones now. I do not know if that is confidence or vanity, and I am not particularly interested in deciding.

I just know that there was a time when I avoided mirrors because I was afraid of what I would find. Now I sometimes stay there a little longer, wondering what someone else saw.

And then, occasionally, I realise I am no longer wondering about them at all.