Hello, everyone. I’m Xuemin.

This is the bonus feature for Episode 2 of Abnormal Relationships. Using the Japanese drama Tokyo Love Story, I discuss why a relationship between a confident person and an insecure one is often illusory love. What kind of illusion is it, and why does it arise?

First, let us review the love story of Rika and Kanji.

Tokyo-born Rika comes from a wealthy family and is independent, confident, and excellent at work. Open and passionate, she loves Kanji without reservation. Kanji comes from an ordinary small-town family and meets her after moving to Tokyo. He sometimes answers her love warmly but more often hesitates and retreats. He grows heavier and she more disappointed, until he cheats with Satomi, his hometown high-school crush, and Rika leaves with dignity.

Many viewers ache for Rika, but I see a love destined to split. One could even say they never loved each other, because confidence and inferiority rarely develop into true love.

 

Let us begin with insecurity.

Newly arrived from a small town, Kanji already lacks confidence. Surrounded by excellence and confronted with his limitations, he calls himself a “poor, second-rate fool.”

Psychological research agrees on insecurity’s negative effect on love.

Insecure people continually judge themselves as unworthy. They withdraw from intimacy, believing distance hides the awful self and prevents harm. Yet they may also appease excessively, believing that only satisfying a partner makes their existence worthy and safe. Appeasement then accumulates anxiety and resentment.

Once these feelings accumulate, they demand stronger proof of love—what is popularly called emotional value—through suspicion, silence, and quarrels that consume affection.

Worse, insecurity invents hostility in a partner. An ordinary remark feels like attack or criticism, creating conflict that further erodes love.

 

Now let us discuss confidence.

Why does bright, confident Rika like Kanji? Why are confident people readily attracted to insecure people? Strangeness and contrast produce fantasy.

To confident eyes, insecurity’s caution looks like care, hesitation like restrained prudence, initiative like intense love, and awkwardness like charming authenticity. They interpret insecurity entirely from confidence and therefore misread it.

The mismatch concerns not only viewpoint but environment and group.

In highly gender-unequal Japan, confident heterosexual men hold power but may appear arrogant and selfish. By comparison, an insecure man seems modest and sincere. This false halo created by his peers helps explain why excellent, confident women may be attracted to fragile, insecure men—not merely from a wish to protect.

 

Confidence and insecurity may initially attract: one thinks she found special love, the other that he is finally seen or has won a trophy. Continued intimacy soon exposes problems.

On Kanji’s birthday he wants to invite Rika to dinner, but before he asks she claims to have plans. She is lying to prompt a clearer expression of care. Insecure Kanji immediately retreats in disappointment without trying. Only after repeated effort from Rika does he speak. Though she instantly accepts, he feels defeated and hurt rather than happy.

With different centers, the same relationship feels entirely different. Confidence sees flirtation where insecurity sees danger; confidence regards expressing needs and asking for words of love as normal, while insecurity feels pressure. The insecure person resents attention no longer shining upon them and fears demands they may not meet; confidence can calmly face present inability and work to change it.

 

When confidence meets insecurity, their cognition and feeling of the same intimacy differ enormously.

The mismatch frustrates the confident person, who finds the other never initiates or expresses love and interprets this as lack of love. The insecure person grows dissatisfied and anxious because confidence cannot be controlled, and turns toward someone who admires and needs them, over whom they already hold a psychological advantage—for Kanji, his hometown friend Satomi.

Ultimately I do not think Rika and Kanji ever loved. She loved an imagined Kanji and would not even admire him if she could read his mind. He merely enjoyed the prestige of being loved. Their relationship was illusory love.

 

That is all for this bonus feature. I look forward to your thoughts on confidence meeting insecurity and other forms of illusory love, and to hearing what bonus topics you want next. Until next time.