You are your own person. And that is not something to apologise for.

Why do women lose themselves when they enter a relationship?

They do everything together. Same hobbies, same friends, same plans, same free time. And when they are apart, even briefly, there is a constant stream of calls and messages, as if being alone for an hour is something to survive rather than something to simply live. When they are in a room without their partner, they can only talk about their partner. Their entire world has quietly collapsed into one person.

And for a long time, I thought that was love.

When I was a teenager, and even into my early twenties, I looked at that kind of closeness and thought it was romantic. I did not yet have a word for what I was seeing. I did not yet know it had a name: enmeshment. And I did not yet know how much it would cost me.

How did you stop enmeshing yourself with your partner?

I want to share what I had to learn not through a book or a workshop, but through my own relationships, my own mistakes, and eventually, my own choosing of myself.

“You do not complete someone. And no one completes you. The work is learning to be whole on your own — and then choosing each other from that wholeness.”

I did not start out knowing what a strong sense of self felt like.

What I knew instead was how to make myself smaller. How to adjust, accommodate, and quietly disappear into whatever version of me I thought the other person needed. I had different relationships, different men, and in each one I found myself doing the same thing trying to be enough. Trying to please. Shaping myself around their preferences, their moods, their needs, hoping that if I gave enough, they would finally treat me the way I deserved to be treated.

They did not. I was giving everything and being taken for granted every time. And the painful part was not just how they treated me. It was that I kept staying. Because somewhere underneath all the effort, I was terrified of what would happen if I stopped.

That fear had a name too. It was scarcity. The quiet, suffocating belief that love was limited that if this relationship ended, another chance might not come. That I had to hold on to what I had, even when what I had was hurting me.

So I held on. And in holding on, I kept losing myself.

The turning point came slowly. I hit the the wall a lot of times before learning my lesson. So, I needed to be honest with myself about a question I had been avoiding: who am I, when I am not trying to be what someone else needs?

Enmeshment does not always look like weakness. Sometimes it looks like devotion. Sometimes it looks like love. But underneath it, what it really is, is a loss of self. A slow erosion of your own identity, your own needs, your own centre of gravity.

What I had to rebuild was not a romantic relationship. It was a relationship with myself. I had to learn what I actually liked, independent of whoever I was with. What I valued. What I was not willing to compromise. That is the internal self that enmeshment quietly takes from you.

I know now that I am capable of falling back on myself. That I have everything I need to stand on my own. And that knowledge, not arrogance, but quiet, steady self-trust changed how I moved through every relationship after that.

I also let go of the scarcity story entirely. There is no shortage of love in this world. I mean, we all know stories of people finding love in the most surprising places. Which means the question was never whether love exists for me. The question was whether I knew my own worth well enough to wait for the right kind.

Before we go further, I want to ask you something. In your closest relationships: romantic or otherwise, when did you last do something just for yourself, with no explanation needed? Not as an act of rebellion, but as a simple expression of who you are? Hold that question. Because what comes next is only useful if you bring your own honest answer to it.

What becoming your own person actually looks like

What I want to share are not steps. They are invitations to things I keep returning to when the pull to lose myself in someone else starts to feel familiar again.

Who are you when no one is watching and no one needs anything from you?

When your identity becomes dependent on a relationship, on being someone’s partner, someone’s other half, someone’s everything. You are building your foundation on something that can be taken away. Your interests, your values, your sense of what you want from life, these are not things to discover solely through someone else. They are things your find out through living your life.

What does the answer feel like right now? Easy to name, or harder than you expected?

What version of yourself have you been performing in your relationships?

I spent years in relationships trying to earn my place. Adjusting, softening, shrinking. And what I understood eventually is that the version of me those relationships were built on was not really me at all. It was sadly a performance of whoever I thought I needed to be to keep them.

When you stop performing and start showing up as yourself, the right people will stay.

But before that what is the performance you are most tired of giving?

What would you do differently if you genuinely believed love was not running out?

I used to believe that love was rare. That if something ended, it meant something had gone permanently wrong. But I have seen enough of life to know this is simply not true. There is no shortage of love in the world. There is only a shortage of people who know their own worth well enough to wait for the right kind.

If scarcity was not part of the story, what decision would you make differently right now?

What would it mean to leave not as an escape, but as an act of self-respect?

One of the most powerful shifts in how I enter relationships now is this: I know I am strong enough to leave. Not recklessly, not easily, but I know that if something is not right, I will not stay just because leaving feels hard. The ability to walk away from what is not for you is not coldness. It is the deepest form of self-honouring there is.

Is there somewhere in your life right now where staying is costing you more than leaving?

What are you building in your own life, for yourself, right now?

The time you spend alone, truly alone, building your own life, learning your own rhythms, investing in yourself is not empty time. It is not time to endure until someone arrives. It is the most important work you will ever do. Because the version of you that knows who she is, what she wants, and what she is worth? That is who shows up to love from a full place rather than an empty one.

What is one thing you are building right now that belongs entirely to you?

Be patient with yourself as you find your way back to you. It is not a straight line. There will be moments when the old pull returns, to shrink, to please, to stay somewhere past its time. That is not failure. That is just the work. And the work is worth it.

Because on the other side of it is someone you will be deeply glad to know: yourself.

You get to take up space. You get to have needs. You get to be the full version of you — in love, and out of it.

With love,

Fatmata

SheGetsTo