Have you ever been in a relationship and felt your world getting smaller? You start missing things you used to do, wondering who you are outside of being someone’s partner. You think about all the lives you could be living, and somehow the person beside you becomes responsible for everything you’re missing.
I have a complicated relationship with relationships. My longest one lasted two and a half years, and it was eleven years ago. I’ve had a couple since then, but nothing lasted more than half a year. Take everything I am going to share with a pinch of salt. There is room to grow in this area of my life.
Throughout my twenties, I felt insecure about who I was, whether it was because of the receding hairline people kept making fun of or my inability to grasp what value I could possibly bring to someone’s life.
Combine this with a lifestyle of switching places every 6–12 weeks, and there wasn’t even room for something to emerge. Whenever I felt attracted to someone, I felt the need to rush through the process. I did not have time, as my flight was taking off in a few weeks.
The impatience would lead me to focus all my attention on her. I would try to engineer every moment as a chance for her to see me and for something to develop. I would often lose my authenticity in the process, giving up everything to get a piece of the love I was hungry for.
And when the interest was mutual? The fear of commitment crept in. I tried finding reasons to escape. I would find myself thinking of all the things I could be doing if it weren’t for her.
Chase when love felt out of reach, run the moment it was within reach. The thing I was hungry for was the thing that scared me most once it arrived.
The first relationship since university lasted about 6 weeks. When things started to become serious, the fear of losing my freedom came up. I tried to explain what I was feeling, hoping we could work through it together. The conversation did not go as I hoped, and I took that as confirmation that relationships were a cage.
I learned a lot about myself. I found out that sometimes people want to feel heard before looking for a solution. Surprise, hah? I discovered my boundaries. But most importantly, I realised I was trying to make up for my lack of community with romantic love.
The second lasted about 6 months. It was the first time I experienced receiving unconditional love, and boy, I had no idea what to do with it.
Instead of having hard conversations early on, I suppressed what I was feeling. Why am I complaining? She was everything I could ever ask for, and on the outside we were a perfect match. But the voice kept getting louder, and eventually burst out, causing lots of pain.
I realised how much I was blaming her for the things I had stopped doing since we started the relationship. I failed to take responsibility. It was so much easier to blame her for my inability to say what I needed. Even after we had the hard conversations and she showed she was willing to meet me where I was, I couldn’t say yes. It wasn’t a reason, just a gut feeling I couldn’t explain at the time.
It took me more than a year to get over her. I kept wondering whether I had made a mistake leaving behind something that looked so perfect.
I do not regret anything. With the information I had at the time, I did the best I could do. But I would behave differently if faced with a similar situation today. It is easy to outsource my problems to someone else — partner, government, weather. But taking responsibility for my part? Incredibly difficult, because that involves change.
My adult experience with romantic love comes down to those relationships and what I’ve seen of how people around me relate. When I imagined myself in those scenarios and considered my own experience, I started to feel hopeless. I thought I was failing at life because I was still single.
Relationships started to feel like an obligation. Something to be in just to silence the people around me and avoid being by myself. But outsourcing my insecurity to someone else felt wrong. Can I find the love I am craving for in myself first? And what about the love I could share with family, friends and a community? I had been asking a romantic relationship to fill so much of my life. Maybe there was more room for love than I had allowed myself to imagine.
I started working on this a couple of years ago. It was challenging to express my needs and risk abandonment. But the more I did it, the more I was coming back to myself. I slowly started to stop giving up who I was just to feel loved. In the process, I started to experience lots of love for myself, and it helped me to feel more secure in who I was.
I started imagining what I dream of from a romantic relationship. Two people walking together on the path of life, both of us shining our own lights even brighter. Holding each other's hand when life gets challenging. Both of us already feeling whole, with the relationship there as a safe haven while we grow together.
Choosing to build something together. Love as a verb, a continuous action. The quote below helped me put words to what I was beginning to envision.
“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb.” – bell hooks from All About Love: New Visions
It was a small flicker in the beginning, but life kept feeding it. I found people like Preston Rack, an incredible creator on love. I read Alain de Botton’s fascinating book ‘The Course of Love’. I met couples who embodied what I was reading in books. The flame started to get bigger. I realised I do not need to fit myself into a box drawn by society.
I recently got a glimpse of what it felt like to love someone from that place. It came in a way I hadn’t expected, at what seemed like the worst possible time, yet somehow at exactly the right time. Suddenly, something I had mostly understood intellectually became something I could actually feel.
For the first time in my life, I wanted to choose someone in all of her complexity, as she is today, without wanting her to become a different person. Could this feeling survive one year, five years, shared rent, conflict and repetition? I have absolutely no idea. But until now, I wasn’t even sure I was capable of feeling so sure about someone.
I’m still single. But through this experience, I felt a kind of love emerging I’d previously only understood intellectually. It helped me see parts of myself I had no idea existed. Maybe there is a way towards a relationship that feels expansive? Time will tell.
See you soon,
Robert.