When Every Decision Feels Yours

She loved him for over a decade, grew through the twenties and into the thirties. Yet, she felt a bit different. More recently, she had come to wonder if she’d become less of a partner and more of a personal decision-making app for him.

And the questions came, day in and day out, to cover every detail of their lives: What should I wear? What time should we leave? What do you think I should eat? Whom shall I invite? But it was not the questions in themselves, but what they stood for: his unwillingness or inability to take responsibility for his own decisions.

She wouldn’t mind being supportive, helping out with a hard decision now and then. But this? This was relentless. She found herself growing mentally exhausted, longingly yearning for a partner who could carry his weight in the decision-making area.

It wasn’t the small decisions every day. It was the way he seemed contentedly to lean on her for everything, from his social life, what to wear, down to what to say in a simple text. At first, she thought this was just him. But the years have passed, and she finds herself yearning for a partner who will think for himself, decide things without asking her opinion, and have his own life.

When she would try to bring it up, the conversations didn’t go well. He would become defensive, claiming she was “making it weird,” or shut down entirely. She didn’t want to hurt him or make him feel inadequate, but she also couldn’t keep carrying this mental load alone.

The toughest part was indeed to truly realize how she had changed since they met: full of youthful optimism, eager to please at 19, she was learning now, with 30 years of maturity, what she valued in a relationship-independence, self-sufficiency, and mutual growth. And the truth was that she was not so convinced he could be, or would even want to be, that guy.

She knew she had to address it, but how do you tell someone you love that they need to step up, be their own person, without making them feel small? How do you encourage someone to take charge of their life while still holding space for the relationship?

These were some of the questions she grappled with in trying to navigate a love grown complicated and heavy.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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