Love dangles on tenterhooks. How I crave you but do you crave me? We doubt, fret, search for reassurance. This anxiety is a misery, in my experience. Yes, I’m alive but too alive, sensitive to the least freshet. Dread chortles: Maybe you are not loved. Maybe, sucker, your love is a one-way street.

I’m susceptible to love. Smitten I plop like a plugged bird. My avidity threatens to overplay my hand. When I fell in love with Jane – and fall here is the apt verb – I couldn’t think of anything else. I stalked her in my thoughts. I knew she couldn’t be as obsessed as I (she wasn’t), but what did she really think? Did I stand a chance – or was she just being nice?

Some weeks ago, I announced in this space we were “going paid.” Necessity pushed me in this displeasing direction. My audience was growing rapidly, having quintupled in two months, and that growth entailed costs. I was happy to give away one daily missive a week, but for the other six I asked to be paid. None of the proceeds (if any!) were destined for my wallet; it gratifies me to make my words a gift. But to underwrite my publication felt embarrassingly like vanity. If nobody chose to pay for my words, it meant they weren’t worth paying for, right?

I love my readers with an intensity some might judge weird. You are the reason I exist, to brighten your day. Like nurse, cop, or waiter, I’m in the service industry, tending to your needs. The service I supply is solace. Companionship eases one’s way.

That I love you doesn’t mean you love me. Love is rarely proportionate. I am one of countless aspirants for your regard. Maybe you are only being nice. Yeh, I’m amusing enough, but so are lots of suitors.

By asking you for money, I put our relation to the test. Will you or won’t you subscribe, my heart is in my throat. A friend I thought dear said sorry, pal, you’re not worth it. I gulped: was our bond not worth this pittance! Others I’ll never meet in person melted me with their munificence.

“Don’t take it personally,” a friend counsels sagely. As if that were possible! I expose my entirety like a carcass at the butcher’s and shrug off shoppers’ disregard? I’m reminded of Yeats’ searing sob of vulnerability:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHad I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark clothsOf night and light and the half light,I would spread the cloths under your feet:But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Our consumer culture views merchandise as inert. If a dress doesn’t sell at full price, it proceeds to half-price, then clearance, then the charity bin, no big deal. But what art-makers sell isn’t stuff but soul. Of course, buyers must discriminate – we’ve only so much time or money – but gently, please. “I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

So far, I’m happy to report, the returns have been thrilling. Bless you! But the enthusiasm of some hardly compensates for the indifference of others. I wouldn’t mention this ache, except my deal with myself – and you – is to tell as much truth as I can bear. I take no joy in my neediness but neither can I deny it. Maybe you have felt the same.