Loving Someone Without Losing Yourself

Relationships are a living, breathing, ever-evolving dynamic. It’s something we do, become, and create with another person. They are complex. No one can fall in love without being changed, but the trick is not changing in a way that you stop being yourself. It’s a constant negotiation between autonomy and connection. Relationships are learning to hold both closeness and freedom while simultaneously becoming a new version of yourself that the relationship is asking of you.

Freedom & Autonomy

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that the highest task of a relationship between two people is for each to stand guard over the solitude of the other. It’s a very different message from the mainstream narrative that says relationships look like merging. Like becoming each other’s everything. Like the kind of devotion that leaves no room for a self outside of it. But Rilke understood something that takes most of us years and often at least one heartbreak: that two people cannot truly meet if one of them has disappeared in the process of getting close.

Once we enter a relationship, while intoxicated by infatuation, it is easy to begin orbiting our life around another person. The pull is so strong that we sacrifice preferences, hobbies, friendships, and needs in order to be close. But for a relationship to work there must be two entities present. Once we forfeit our freedom to be ourselves, we take one of the people out of the equation. The relationship becomes a hall of mirrors rather than an encounter. And a hall of mirrors, however flattering, is a lonely place to live.