When Keeping The Peace Means Losing Yourself

How far should you adapt to make a difficult relationship work?

Photo by Thiago Vale on Unsplash

There are relationships in which we learn to adapt so well that we eventually forget what we came to look for in the first place: trust, respect, and the freedom to simply be ourselves.

So we make an effort. We bite our tongues. We try to understand. We tell ourselves that things will eventually work out. And then, one day, we wonder just how far we are willing to go to keep the relationship alive.

You have every right to twist yourself into knots to make painful relationships bearable. But sometimes, we spend so much time adapting to others that we no longer know what posture to adopt just to be ourselves.

Around certain people, we learn to weigh every word, anticipate their reactions, and avoid difficult subjects. Sometimes, we even apologize for things we never did.

We put up with behavior that hurts us because we do not want to cause conflict, because we hope things will eventually change, or because we have learned to believe that some people are simply “like that.”

And so we keep adjusting. We make excuses, find mitigating circumstances, and come up with new reasons to be patient. We take one step sideways, then another, until we…