On Love and Agency

Love asks us to make room for another person. It should not ask us to vacate ourselves.

And yet, I think the distance between those two things can be surprisingly small.

We rarely abandon ourselves all at once. There is usually no dramatic decision to stop being the person we were. It happens through ordinary choices that seem inconsequential at the time.

The workout we skip because we'd rather spend the evening together. The friend we keep meaning to call. The book that remains unopened on the nightstand. The project we will return to when life settles down. The afternoon spent waiting to see what someone else wants to do before deciding what we want to do with it.

None of these choices means very much on its own.

But a life is made of choices that don't seem to mean very much on their own.

I know this because I have disappeared inside a relationship before.

It didn't feel like disappearing while it was happening. It felt like compromise. Like love. Like adjusting to a shared life. Slowly, though, I stopped tending to the things that belonged only to me—my friendships, my interests, my ambitions, even my relationship with my own body. My attention became increasingly organized around someone else, and eventually I could barely recognize the life I had built around us as one I had consciously chosen for myself.

That experience taught me something I didn't fully understand until much later: losing yourself rarely begins with giving something enormous away.

It begins with forgetting that you are still choosing.

Recently, I've been thinking about this again because I'm in love again. And love, when it is good, naturally rearranges us.

Someone enters your life and suddenly there are dinners and conversations and Sunday mornings and plans for the future. Their needs begin to matter to you. Their happiness matters. You discover new places through them, adopt shared rituals, compromise, accommodate, imagine a life that no longer belongs exclusively to you.

I don't want to resist any of that.

I want intimacy. I want to lean in. I want to build something with another person.

But I also want to remain awake inside my own life.

A few days ago, I had planned to take a workout class by myself. There was nothing particularly consequential about going. Missing one class wouldn't have changed my health. No great act of independence was required.

But I went.

I came home afterward and cleaned my apartment. I picked up something I wanted to read. Then I sat down to write.

The day was almost comically ordinary. And perhaps that is precisely why it mattered. My life continued happening.

Not the life of the relationship. Not the life we are building together. Mine.

It made me wonder how much of agency is practiced this way—not through declarations of independence, but through hundreds of quiet decisions about where we place our attention.

Attention is one of the most valuable things we possess. Where we repeatedly place it eventually shapes our lives.

If I give my attention to my body, I strengthen my relationship with it. If I give it to a book, I cultivate my curiosity. If I sit down to write, I strengthen my voice. If I protect time for work that matters to me, I reinforce my ambition. If I call an old friend, I tend to a relationship that existed long before my romantic one. And when I choose to give my attention to the person I love, I cultivate intimacy.

The point isn't to choose myself every time. That isn't agency. It may simply be another form of rigidity.

Sometimes love should interrupt our plans. Sometimes another person's needs should come first. Sometimes the dinner matters more than the workout, the conversation more than the book, the person beside us more than whatever we intended to accomplish that evening.

Perhaps agency isn't getting our way.

Perhaps it is remaining conscious of what we are choosing.

There is a difference between saying, I'm moving this because being with you matters to me tonight, and allowing our own priorities to become perpetually negotiable simply because someone we love is available.

There is a difference between compromise and self-betrayal.

The difficult part is that nobody can draw that line for us.

We have to remain discerning about where we place our time, attention and energy. We have to remember what we're building. We have to know which parts of ourselves can bend and which need protecting.

And sometimes we have to remember who we were before there was a we.

The friendships that formed us. The interests that made us curious. The places where we felt most alive. The standards we developed. The ambitions we carried before anyone else was there to witness them. The things we survived that taught us what we value now.

A relationship should be allowed to change us. I think that's part of its beauty.

But perhaps it should add another root system to our lives rather than asking us to cut through our own.

This is where I've begun to think differently about self-reliance.

For a long time, I understood self-reliance as knowing that I could survive on my own. That I could take care of myself. That if someone left, I would eventually find my footing again.

But perhaps there is another kind of self-reliance that is harder to practice.

Knowing that I won't abandon myself when someone stays.

That I can love deeply without surrendering authorship of my life. That I can allow myself to need another person without making them responsible for my sense of direction. That I can give generously without giving away every available hour, thought or ounce of emotional energy. That I can build a shared future while continuing to cultivate a future I recognize as my own.

Maybe that's what agency inside love looks like.

Not distance.

Not withholding.

Not making sure we never need anyone.

Choice.

The practice of remembering that our lives remain ours to choose, even when we choose to share them with someone.

And perhaps that is why our smallest rituals matter so much.

This week, choose one thing that belongs to your relationship with yourself.

Take the class you said you would take. Read for an hour. Keep the dinner with your friend. Work on the idea that matters to you. Spend an afternoon alone. Return to something you loved before your life became intertwined with someone else's.

Not to prove that you don't need them.

Not to create distance.

Simply to keep your word to yourself.

Because every time we make a choice, we reinforce something. And over time, those choices become evidence of who we are.

Perhaps self-reliance isn't only knowing that you can survive without someone. Perhaps it's knowing you won't abandon yourself when you have someone.

Invisible Quality: Agency

What are you continuing to choose because it reminds you that your life is still yours?