on the selves we choose

i’ve been thinking about the school of life: an emotional education, a book i read years ago, likely mangled in memory. (i’d still recommend the book, by the way, which manages to be both comforting and mildly existential in that very british kind of way.)

i may be misremembering, but i do recall a section on work—something about how the industrial revolution and the rise of hyper-specialized labor fractured us. the man who once built entire chairs now only turns screws; the woman who once tended whole gardens now only sorts seeds; farmers, cobblers, and blacksmiths are now lead conversion rate optimization analysts. with jobs becoming more compartmentalized, we’ve been reduced to using only slivers of ourselves at work, leaving the rest to atrophy in the dark. we’ve become specialists in our own diminishment, swiss army knives used only as bottle openers. this, the book suggests, is why work in the modern age leaves us perpetually dissatisfied: it engages us in pieces, never as wholes.

i’m sure most of us already know this to be true; career malaise has become something of a national epidemic. but what we rarely consider is how love, too, leaves entire parts of us untouched, while sharpening others into focus. because even in love, we’re hired for the parts that fit the job.

i think of s, who made me realize i could be a person who plans. before, my life existed in impulse and aftermath. i prided myself on spontaneity, on being the person who could book a flight at midnight or make dinner plans while eating breakfast. but s moved through the world like weather—beautiful in their changes but occasionally prone to storms—and loving them made me want to build something steady. so i emerged as the keeper of itineraries, the guardian of logistics; i opened google calendar for the first time. something in that relationship unlocked a part of me i didn’t know was there until it became necessary, the part of me that wanted to build scaffolding around the foundation of us.

this is the part we rarely talk about: we think we’re choosing our partners solely for who they are, but we’re also choosing who we become in their presence—the version of ourselves that surfaces in their particular light.

sometimes the person who emerges is a stranger. in certain relationships, i have been the one who holds grudges, though i believed i let things go. in others, i have become the needy one, though i always saw myself as self-sufficient. at times, i have found myself patient beyond my own recognition and petty in ways i didn’t know i was capable of.

after her breakup, my friend taylor said to me, “i didn’t like who i was with him, but i couldn’t tell if that was because he was wrong for me or because he showed me something about myself i hated.” maybe that’s what being wrong for someone is. maybe it’s not either/or, but rather, because/and. maybe every relationship is an act of revelation and creation—and the ones that don’t work are the ones that reveal or create selves we’d rather not meet.

yes, we contain multitudes, but perhaps not all at once. perhaps we contain possibilities, and our partners are the conditions under which certain possibilities crystallize into being. this may be why love is such a radical act of faith. we aren’t just saying yes to who someone is; we’re saying yes to who we might become in the presence of their becoming. we are agreeing to be changed by the very act of changing them.

so maybe the more important question isn’t “who is this person?” but “who am i around them?”

what do they call forward in me? presence or performance? curiosity or caution? joy or jealousy?

is this the version of me i’d like to be? the self i want to live with?

when i think about choosing love again, i think about the self i might become, the rooms that might be built, the possibilities that might take root. maybe that’s the miracle of love: that two people can come together not to complete each other, but to construct themselves—one version at a time, one key turning the lock after another, opening a door we did not know to exist.

and stepping into a life that feels like it might finally fit.