The Life I Made Smaller

I met two of my oldest friends for lunch recently, and for days before that, I had been imagining all the ways it could go wrong. I had not spoken to them properly in three or four years, and that distance was not something that had just happened to us. In many ways, I had created it. They had reached out to me more times than I deserved, and I had ignored them, most of the time deliberately and sometimes by allowing silence to become easier than explanation. These were people I had once called my best friends, people who had known me through school and through the ordinary and unremarkable years in which we were becoming adults together, and now i was going to sit across from them after years of absence and pretend that there was a natural way back into this friendship i had helped abandon. I was nervous about the akwardness, but more than that i was nervous about being confronted with the person i had been when i left.

The awkwardness lasted for perhaps two minutes.

Then something strange happened: nothing happened.

We started talking. We had years to catch up on, stories to tell, people to discuss, things that had happened in each of our lives while we had been elsewhere, becoming different versions of ourselves. And somehow, beneath all the changes, the old rhythm was still there. We fell back into the dynamic we had once had so easily that it almost felt ridiculous that I had been so frightened of returning. We were not exactly the same people we had been before, and I don't think friendship requires that we be. There were years between us now, and those years had changed all of us. But there was still something recognisable in the way we spoke to one another, in the jokes that came naturally, in the ease with which a conversation could move from something stupid to something serious and back again. Sitting there, I realised that what I had missed was not simply these two people. I had missed the version of myself that existed around them.

Around them, I felt curious again. I felt funny. I felt loud without wondering whether I was being too much. I could be contradictory, imperfect, opinionated and occasionally ridiculous without feeling that every disagreement needed to become a referendum on whether I was a good person or a good friend. I could talk about politics, philosophy, life, people, ideas and all the strange questions that I have always needed to talk about, not because I believe I am particularly intellectual, but because conversation is one of the ways I understand myself. I need to argue sometimes. I need to be challenged. I need to encounter an opinion that isn't mine and sit with the discomfort of it without immediately trying to decide who won. I need people around me who can tell me that I am wrong without making me feel that I have become less lovable for being wrong. Sitting with my friends again, I realised how much freedom there had been in that kind of relationship, and how little I had noticed it when I had it.

Before my relationship, I think I had a very simple idea of what love was supposed to look like. When you fall in love with someone, they become your person, and if they become your person, then naturally they become your whole world. You prioritise them. You cancel plans for them. You adjust your life around their feelings. You make sacrifices without keeping score. You learn what makes them uncomfortable and try not to do those things. You reassure them when they are insecure. You apologise when they are hurt. Somewhere along the way, I began to believe that the extent to which I was willing to give things up was evidence of how much I loved someone. I thought that if I could make my partner feel secure enough, happy enough, important enough, then I was doing what a good partner was supposed to do. I didn't experience these decisions as the gradual surrender of my individuality. I experienced them as love.

That is perhaps what makes self-abandonment so difficult to recognise while it is happening. It rarely arrives looking like abandonment. It arrives disguised as consideration. It asks you to make one small adjustment and tells you that it is not a big deal. It asks you to skip something tonight because your partner is uncomfortable, and you tell yourself that there will always be another night. It asks you to stop talking about something because the conversation might become an argument, and you tell yourself that not every disagreement is worth having. It asks you to apologise for something you are not entirely sure you did wrong, because ending the conflict feels more important than proving your point. It asks you to make someone else's emotional state the most important thing in the room, and because you love them, you do. None of these decisions, individually, feels catastrophic. But enough small decisions can eventually construct an entirely different life.

I don't want to pretend that I was a perfect partner. I wasn't. There were probably moments when I made the person I was with feel neglected, and there are things I could have communicated better and handled more maturely. I can recognise those things without turning the entire relationship into a story in which one person was innocent and the other was responsible for everything that went wrong. What I have struggled to understand, however, is how easily I began treating another person's insecurity as something I was obligated to solve. Their discomfort became my responsibility. Their unhappiness became something I had to investigate. Their approval became something I was constantly working towards. And because I was willing to keep adjusting myself, I started believing that if I just tried harder, apologised better, explained myself more carefully and gave up one more thing, eventually I would arrive at some version of myself that was finally easy enough to love.

But there was no arrival. There was always something else to explain, something else to apologise for, something else that needed to be made smaller. Peace slowly disappeared from the relationship, and I became less interested in being understood than in being approved of, I was no longer asking myself whether I agreed with something or whether something felt fair. I was asking whether it would cause another argument. I began confusing the absence of conflict with the presence of peace, when sometimes the only reason there was no conflict was that I had learned to remove myself from the conversation before it could begin.

One of the strangest things about looking back is realising how isolated I had become without anyone explicitly telling me that I was not allowed to have a life outside the relationship. I didn’t talk to my friends about what was happening because, to me, that felt like betrayal. I thought that telling someone I loved about the difficult parts of my relationship meant bad-mouthing the person I was with. I had convinced myself that loyalty meant protecting the relationship from other people’s opinions, even when I was struggling inside it. Meanwhile, I was losing the very people who might have helped me see what I could no longer see clearly from inside the relationship. My friends did not need to hate my partner for me to need them. They did not need to agree with every decision I made. They simply needed to remain people I could talk to.

Perhaps that is what I understand differently now about intimacy. A relationship should be important, but I don’t think it should become the only place where your emotional life is allowed to exist. Loving someone does not require you to become inaccessible to everyone else. A partner can be your person without becoming your entire world. There should still be room for friendships that have nothing to do with your relationship, conversations that don’t involve your partner, interests they don’t share, opinions they don’t understand, and parts of your personality that exist independently of being someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend. There should be room to be a person before you are a partner.

My friends reminded me of that without trying to. They didn’t sit me down and tell me that I had changed. They didn’t make a speech about the years I had been absent. They didn’t ask me to prove that I deserved to be their friend again. They simply sat across from me and talked, and somewhere in the middle of that conversation I noticed myself returning. I was curious. I was loud. I was funny. I was contradictory. I was imperfect. I was independent. I didn’t have to monitor every sentence before I said it. I didn’t have to wonder whether disagreeing with someone meant I had hurt them. I didn’t have to earn the right to occupy space.

We may never become exactly what we were to each other before. I don’t think we need to. There is something comforting about realising that friendship does not always demand a return to the past. Sometimes it asks whether there is enough tenderness in the present to begin again. I am still sorry for the years I disappeared. I am sorry that people who had repeatedly tried to remain in my life had to experience my silence as an answer. I cannot undo that, and I don’t want to romanticise the fact that they were generous enough to let me back in. But I can recognise what their presence has taught me now.

For a long time, I thought loving someone meant making them big enough to occupy my entire life. I thought being a good partner meant proving, again and again, that I could choose them over everything else. I thought boundaries were negotiable if someone I loved was uncomfortable enough. I thought compromise meant giving up the things that mattered to me until there was nothing left worth arguing about. I don’t believe that anymore. I think love should make room for a person rather than consume them. I think someone’s insecurity can be met with compassion without becoming a set of instructions for how another person should live. I think disagreement can exist without becoming disrespect, and that being loved should not require you to become less curious, less loud, less complicated, less independent or less yourself.

Maybe the strangest gift of finding my friends again is that they did not give me anything new. They gave me back something I had misplaced. They reminded me that I had a life before I was somebody’s partner, and that life did not disappear simply because I had stopped looking for it. I had spent years making things smaller and calling it compromise, making myself easier to accommodate and calling it love, giving pieces of my life away and telling myself that this was what devotion looked like. Sitting in that coffee shop, laughing with two people I had once been terrified to face, I realised that perhaps the work after a relationship is not always about finding someone better. Sometimes it is about becoming large enough to inhabit your own life again.

And perhaps that is the kind of love I want now: not a love that asks me to prove how much I can lose, but one that can look at the fullness of my life my friends, my contradictions, my opinions, my curiosity, my noise, my imperfections and still have enough room left for me to remain myself.