Men don’t know why women without this feel… so different to be around, even when nothing obvious sets them apart.
Janice Holloway was sixty-five and had long since stopped trying to compensate for things she didn’t have. No dramatic curves. No sharp angles. Just a body that had lived a full life and no longer argued with itself. She stood five-foot-four, carried her weight evenly, and moved with an ease that came from not bracing for judgment.
People often described her as “comfortable.” Few understood how hard-won that comfort was.
Janice had spent years as a high school guidance counselor, absorbing other people’s anxieties until she finally learned where her responsibility ended. After retirement, she volunteered at a neighborhood mediation center, helping couples and families talk when they’d run out of words. Listening had become her craft.
That was where she met Robert Finch.
Robert was sixty-seven, a former insurance auditor with a sharp mind and a habit of overthinking. He noticed Janice not because she stood out, but because conversations settled when she entered a room. Voices softened. People breathed differently. It confused him.
She didn’t flirt. She didn’t perform warmth. She simply stayed present.
During a break between sessions, Robert found himself sitting beside her at a small table, coffee cooling between them.
“You make people relax,” he said, more puzzled than complimentary.
Janice smiled slightly. “Only when they let themselves.”
He watched her closely then. Her posture wasn’t guarded. Her hands rested openly on the table. There was no tension in her shoulders, no subtle shrinking. She wasn’t trying to hold herself together.
She already was.
Over the next few weeks, Robert began to notice a pattern. Women who constantly adjusted their clothes, posture, or expressions carried a low hum of strain. Janice didn’t. She moved without checking who was watching. When she laughed, it was uncontained. When she was quiet, it wasn’t apologetic.
One afternoon, as they walked out together, a gust of wind pushed against them. Robert instinctively reached out, then hesitated, unsure.
Janice noticed. She slowed her step, giving him time instead of pressure.
“It’s okay,” she said calmly.
He placed his hand lightly at her elbow. The contact felt grounding, not charged. That surprised him more than anything else.
Later, over dinner with friends, Robert tried to articulate what unsettled him. “She doesn’t seem… tense,” he said.
A friend laughed. “That’s rare.”
And that was the answer.
Men often assume confidence comes from having more—more beauty, more validation, more reassurance. But what many don’t realize is that women without constant self-monitoring, without the need to measure themselves moment by moment, move through the world differently.
Janice didn’t lack anything essential.
She lacked the habit of self-doubt.
And that absence—quiet, steady, deeply felt—was what people responded to without knowing why. It wasn’t about how she looked.
It was about how little she asked the world to approve of her existence.
That ease, once noticed, was impossible to forget.
