Today I was sitting on a bus, on my way to yet another routine hospital appointment, moving very slowly through London traffic, when I looked out of the window and saw two guys walking along the pavement. They were holding hands.

Nothing spectacular. Nothing dramatic. Just two people walking together. But there was something in the way they were holding each other’s hands that caught me completely. I don’t even know how to explain it properly. There was so much tenderness in such a small gesture. They weren’t doing anything extraordinary, and yet somehow, just by looking at them for a few seconds, I could see the affection between them.

And it made my heart explode.

I kept thinking about them after the bus moved on. Why had such a tiny, ordinary moment affected me so much?

Lately, I’ve been analysing myself a lot. Not only other people, not only what happened to me, but myself too. I’ve been trying to understand what makes me feel good, what doesn’t, what I actually want in my life, where I want to go, and also who I have become along the way.

And one of the biggest things I’ve discovered about myself in the last couple of months is how important tenderness is to me. I think I’ve missed it much more than I realised. And I don’t mean only receiving it. I miss giving it too.

That was probably the part I hadn’t understood before. Tenderness is not just something I want from another person. It’s something I need to be able to express myself. Holding someone’s hand. Hugging them because I’m happy to see them. Touching them gently for no particular reason. Being affectionate without having to wonder whether I’m being too much.

And then I started wondering why something that feels so important to me has had so little space in my life. I think part of the answer is that I learned very early how to fight. When your life constantly gives you something to solve, something to survive, something to fix, you become very good at being strong. Since childhood, so much of my life has felt like a battle of one kind or another. So I became a fighter. I learned how to stand up, how to solve problems, how to keep going, how to get back on my feet, even when all I wanted was to stop fighting for a while.

And I’m proud of that part of me. It got me here. But sometimes the qualities we develop because we need them become so loud that other parts of us barely get a chance to speak. I think my tenderness became one of those quiet parts.

Sometimes I wonder who I would have been if life hadn’t required me to fight so much. If I hadn’t spent so many years dealing with problems, trying to survive difficult situations and constantly finding the strength to start again. Maybe I would have been a much softer person. Maybe I would have had more opportunities to express my affection, to be vulnerable, to simply enjoy loving someone without feeling that I always had to be ready for the next battle.

Or maybe, and I think this is closer to the truth, I have always been that person too. I just didn’t always have the space to be her. And when that part of me has nowhere to go, I feel almost as if I’m walking around with one leg missing. I can still move, I can still live, I can still do everything, but something that belongs to me is not there. Something that is part of who I am, something that I want to express, something that makes me happy.

And during this journey of getting to know myself, I started looking back at my relationships too. Not simply to analyse what other people did or didn’t do, but to understand my own needs, the things that made me happy, the things that hurt me and the things I no longer want in my life. And I realised something that genuinely surprised me. The last time I experienced real tenderness in a relationship was in 2010. 2010. Sixteen years ago.

And when I say tenderness, I don’t mean someone being affectionate one day and suddenly becoming cold and distant the next. I don’t mean beautiful moments followed by unexplained silences, insults or the constant feeling that something might go wrong at any moment.

I mean tenderness that comes with emotional stability. The kind that allows you to relax, to be yourself, to give affection without being afraid of what might happen next. The kind where you don’t have to keep guessing whether the person who was holding your hand yesterday will still want to hold it tomorrow.

I mean being able to hug someone simply because you’re happy to see them. Being able to express your affection without having to measure every gesture, without wondering whether you’re being too affectionate, too emotional or simply too much.

And I realised that I haven’t experienced that for a very, very long time. Sixteen years is an incredibly long time to go without something that is such an important part of who you are.

Maybe that’s why those two strangers walking down the pavement affected me so deeply. Because, for a few seconds, through the window of a bus stuck in traffic, I saw something that I hadn’t experienced in sixteen years. Something so simple, so ordinary, and yet something that has been missing from my life for such a long time.

But there’s another thing I’ve been thinking about. I don’t believe that kind people have disappeared from the world. I don’t believe tenderness is something impossible to find. There are people out there who are naturally affectionate, who enjoy giving love, who don’t see kindness as a weakness and who can offer tenderness without making someone pay for it afterwards.

And perhaps, after all these years of fighting, surviving, solving problems and learning how to stand on my own two feet, it’s time to give myself another chance. Not because I need someone to complete me. I have a life full of things I love, things I want to create, places I want to discover and dreams I want to pursue. I love my independence, my curiosity, my creativity and the freedom to be exactly who I am.

But because I would love to share some of that life with someone who is genuinely happy to be part of it. Someone whose tenderness feels natural, someone who likes me exactly as I am, and someone with whom I can finally allow that softer part of myself to come out without being afraid.

Someone I can be sweet with. Someone I can hug for no reason. Someone whose hand I can reach for while we’re walking down the street, simply because I feel like holding it. Someone who doesn’t make me feel that I have to be a fighter all the time.

Because maybe that’s another thing I’ve learned about myself during these last couple of months. I’ve spent so much of my life learning how to survive that perhaps it’s time to give myself the opportunity to experience something different.

Maybe I deserve to experience what it’s like to be loved gently, too.

And maybe, one day, I’ll be walking down a pavement somewhere, holding someone’s hand, completely unaware that a woman sitting on a bus is looking out of the window, smiling at us, because for a few seconds we’ve reminded her how beautiful tenderness can be.