When the question becomes: can this relationship hold who I’m becoming?
I remember the day I looked at my husband and realized I was asking a different question. Not, Do I love him? Not, Do I want to be here? It was quieter than that, and honestly, more unsettling. Can I keep becoming who I’m becoming in this relationship?
We had been together over two decades. He knew me before I had language for myself. Before I understood my patterns. Before I started questioning how I moved through the world, how I showed up, how I led, how I loved. And at some point, that started to matter. Because the version of me he knew wasn’t the version of me I was becoming.
That was a hard season. Not because there was a lack of love, and not because something went wrong, but because something was changing and neither of us knew what to do with that. There were arguments. Big ones. Honest ones. The kind where you can feel both people trying, but still missing each other. The kind where you realize you’re not actually fighting each other, you’re both trying to make sense of something that doesn’t have language yet.
Eventually, the arguments slowed down and became conversations. Slower ones. More thoughtful. But getting there required something that felt almost harder than conflict. We had to stop defending who we had been and start telling the truth about who we were becoming.
I’m sharing this because this experience is far more common than we talk about. As humans it is more the norm to long for connection a partner to navigate this world with and when you find that it can feel like a relief. But over the years I’ve sat with too many women in this exact space to pretend it’s rare. The details change. The feeling and the questions underneath doesn’t.
There is the woman who won’t even say the question out loud yet because she knows once she does, she can’t pretend she didn’t ask it. She has built a life, a home, a reputation, a sense of stability, and the thought of that shifting feels like too much to even touch. There is the woman who is already overwhelmed, carrying so much that this question just gets pushed to the side. She tells herself she’ll deal with it later, but later keeps coming and the question doesn’t go anywhere. And then there is the woman who is sitting with it quietly, turning it over in the middle of the night, in the car, in between meetings, asking herself, Would I choose this again? and feeling immediate guilt for even going there. Because she loves her partner. Because she chose them. Because nothing is technically wrong. And still, something doesn’t fit the same way anymore.
If you see yourself anywhere in this stay with me.