Today’s Question for your Uncommon Evolution: What is one thing you miss making time for?
Losing yourself in a relationship usually doesn’t happen because you wake up one morning and consciously decide that your partner’s needs, preferences, schedule, moods, friendships, hobbies, and opinions are all more important than your own.
It happens much more gradually than that.
You start making little adjustments because relationships require compromise, which of course they do. You spend more time doing the things your partner likes because you enjoy being with them anyway. You rearrange your schedule because theirs is less flexible. You stop going to a class because it conflicts with the only night they are free. You spend a little less time with a friend because she’s not partnered up as well and it’s harder to make time to see her.
None of those decisions necessarily means anything on its own.
Then one day you realize you haven’t something purely because you wanted to do it in a very long time.
This quickly snowballs: you might not even know exactly what you want anymore.
That is usually the part that scares people and starts a change in thinking.
And for millennial women of color in particular, there are some common reasons for losing yourself in a relationship that have very little to do with being weak, dependent, or somehow incapable of having healthy relationships.
Here’s one of the big ones: a lot of us have spent our entire lives learning how to adjust.
We learned how to read the room, how to understand what was expected of us, how to be successful without making people uncomfortable, and how to take other people’s needs seriously. We may have been praised for being mature, responsible, accommodating, loyal, emotionally intelligent, or easy to get along with.
Those are not bad qualities.
But there is a point where being flexible stops being flexibility and starts becoming self-erasure.
Losing Yourself In a Relationship Can Look Completely Normal
I think one reason losing yourself in a relationship can be so difficult to recognize is that it rarely looks dramatic from the outside.
You are still functioning. You go to work. You see your family. You may still exercise, travel, maintain friendships, and generally look like the exact same person you were before the relationship.
The changes may be much smaller.
You stop mentioning certain opinions because you have to consider your partner’s family and work relationships. You spend less time alone chasing your own creative pursuits. You start saying, “I don’t care, whatever you want,” because considering another human at all times is exhausting.
Maybe you don’t call that losing yourself in a relationship. Maybe you call it compromise. Maybe you call it maturity. Maybe you tell yourself that relationships require sacrifice.
The thing is, there is nothing inherently wrong with changing because you are in a relationship. Healthy relationships change us. We discover new interests, reconsider old assumptions, and sometimes become better versions of ourselves because another person introduces us to something we never would have chosen on our own.
The question is whether the changes feel expansive or diminishing. Are you becoming more yourself, or are you becoming easier to be with? Those are not always the same thing.
Why Millennial Women of Color Can Be Especially Good At Adjusting
This is where I think culture matters.
A lot of millennial women of color grew up receiving several different messages at the same time. Be strong. Be independent. Make something of yourself. Do not depend on a man.
But also…be nurturing, understanding, loyal, supportive, culturally respectful, family-oriented, and careful not to become so independent that nobody can live with you.
It is a fairly impossible assignment.
Many of us became very good at competence in the outside world and accommodation in our personal lives. We could negotiate salaries, lead meetings, manage enormous workloads, and handle complicated problems all day, then come home and become strangely uncertain about whether asking our partner to compromise was reasonable.
We may have learned to tolerate more emotional discomfort than we realize because endurance was considered a strength. We may also carry a very specific fear – conscious or unconscious – of being perceived as difficult.
Women of color do not always get the luxury of being messy, demanding, emotional, or uncompromising without being assigned some larger stereotype. Depending on your background, there may also be strong expectations around loyalty, marriage, gender roles, family, or what it means to be a “good” partner.
So being accommodating can feel not only relationally safer, but culturally familiar.
You already know how to do it. You know how to anticipate what people need. You know how to manage your tone. You know how to decide which things are worth bringing up and which things are easier to let go.
The problem is that you can become so good at letting things go that eventually you have let go of yourself.
It Starts With Love, Not Fear
I also think we should be careful about treating every version of this as pathology. And keep in mind that losing yourself in a relationship is common for everyone, not just women of color.
Sometimes you shrink because you are afraid of losing someone, but sometimes you shrink because you genuinely love them.
You want their life to be easier. You want the relationship to work. You are willing to compromise because you understand that your needs cannot always come first.
That can be beautiful.
The problem begins when love becomes a reason to stop requiring reciprocity.
You keep adjusting because you are more flexible. You take on more because you are better at handling it. You smooth things over because you hate conflict. You understand why your partner behaves a certain way, so you decide you should be able to tolerate it.
Before long, the relationship may be functioning extremely well for one person precisely because the other person is doing all of the adapting.
That is not sustainable.
And eventually, it tends to produce resentment.
Resentment Is Often Where Your Missing Self Shows Up
Resentment can be incredibly useful information.
If you find yourself irritated by things that seem small, angry that nobody appreciates everything you do, or secretly furious every time your partner asks for one more thing, it may be worth asking whether you have been saying yes to things you actually wanted to say no to.
Sometimes resentment is not evidence that your partner is terrible.
Sometimes it is evidence that you have not been honest.
You have been telling them you are fine with something while privately wishing they would somehow understand that you are not fine with it. You have been agreeing to plans and then feeling angry that your preferences were not considered. You have been making yourself easy to accommodate and then wondering why nobody is accommodating you.
This is not entirely fair to you or to your partner.
If you are constantly editing yourself, the other person may genuinely have no idea how much you are giving up.
Of course, there are also people who absolutely know and are very happy to benefit from your flexibility. That is a different problem.
But either way, resentment is often a sign that something needs to become more honest.
How To Stop Losing Yourself In a Relationship
The first step is probably much less dramatic than people expect.
You start noticing yourself again.
What do you actually want to eat tonight? What would you do Saturday if nobody else’s preferences were involved? Who do you miss? What did you used to do regularly that somehow disappeared? What opinions have you stopped expressing? What are you pretending not to care about because caring would require a conversation?
You do not have to immediately blow up the relationship over every answer. The point is simply to become aware of where you have gone. Then you begin practicing small acts of preference.
Pick the restaurant. Go to the class. See the friend. Say that you disagree. Keep the appointment you made with yourself instead of automatically moving it when your partner becomes available. Ask for what you need without presenting a fifteen-minute closing argument about why your need is reasonable.
That last one can be surprisingly difficult for women who are used to justifying everything.
You do not always need to establish that your request is objectively fair according to a panel of neutral judges.
Sometimes you simply want something.
That counts.
Pay Attention To What Happens When You Become More Visible
One of the most important parts of this process is noticing how your partner responds when you stop shrinking.
Healthy relationships can tolerate difference.
Your partner may not love every boundary, preference, or change you make. They may be disappointed. They may need time to adjust. You may have disagreements.
That’s normal.
The more important question is whether there is room for you to exist as a separate person without being punished for it.
Can you disagree without the relationship becoming unsafe? Can you have friends your partner would not personally choose? Can you spend time alone? Can you have ambitions that inconvenience the relationship sometimes? Can you change? Can you say no? Can you ask for more?
A relationship should not require you to become smaller in order to remain lovable.
And if the relationship becomes substantially worse the moment you begin taking up normal amounts of emotional and practical space, that is useful information.
Some Of This Is About Learning To Tolerate Someone Else’s Disappointment
I think this is one of the hardest parts. A lot of people pleasing is really discomfort with other people’s discomfort. You say yes because you don’t want to deal with the sigh, the silence, the argument, or the look on someone’s face when you say no.
So the skill you may actually need is not better boundary language.
It is the ability to survive the fact that someone you love is temporarily unhappy with you. That doesn’t feel great. It also doesn’t mean anything has gone terribly wrong.
You can make a reasonable choice and still disappoint someone. You can be a loving partner and occasionally be inconvenient. You can choose yourself sometimes without rejecting the relationship.
In a healthy partnership, both people will have moments when they don’t get what they want.
That’s not failure. That is two people existing at the same time.
You Are Allowed To Change Inside A Relationship
There is another version of losing yourself that happens when you become trapped by the person you were when the relationship began. And it’s going to come up in this process of rediscovering yourself.
The thing is – you’re allowed to change. Your partner is allowed to have feelings about the change, but they are not entitled to freeze you at the age you were when they met you.
This is particularly important in long relationships because people can quietly begin treating growth as disruption.
But you are not a contract whose terms were permanently fixed on the first date. You’re a person. And one of the basic realities of loving another person is that they will continue becoming someone and grow and change overtime.
The Goal Is Whatever You Want It To Be
None of this means that the ideal relationship consists of two completely independent people who never need each other.
I actually think that version of relationships can become just as strange.
We are supposed to influence each other. We are supposed to care what our partners think. We are supposed to compromise, depend on each other, make sacrifices, and build some kind of shared life.
The goal is not to avoid interdependence. It is to avoid disappearing inside it. There should still be an “I” inside the “we.”
You should be able to recognize your own desires, maintain relationships that matter to you, continue developing independently, and occasionally make decisions that are based primarily on what you need.
And your partner should be able to do the same.
That is not selfishness. It’s what allows a relationship to remain a relationship between two people instead of becoming one person’s life with another person folded neatly into it.
Losing yourself in a relationship can happen slowly enough that you do not notice it until you feel strangely disconnected from a life that technically belongs to you.
Finding yourself again usually happens slowly too.
You start saying what you think, you start noticing what you want, and you become a little less interested in being endlessly easy to love.
And eventually, you may realize that the goal was never to become less loving, less generous, or less committed.
It was simply to stop requiring yourself to disappear in order for the relationship to work.
I love working with millennial women of color as they reconnect with themselves and build lives that feel authentic, intentional, and fully their own. I also genuinely love connecting with people and hearing their stories. If you want to share what this essay brought up for you, or if you’re a millennial woman of color who would like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out through my Contact Page or email me directly at anjali@uncommonevolution.com.
