How to love without losing yourself

What happens when you wake up one morning and realise that you’ve lost your sense of self in a relationship? Elizabeth Day, 39, shares her cautionary tale

Learn to value yourself and your own needs, advises Elizabeth Day

In my mid-twenties, I never knew where I wanted to go for dinner. It’s not that I didn’t have strong opinions about food and restaurants – I did. It’s that during a two-year period, I was in a relationship with a more decisive man. He would ask me where I wanted to eat and I would find myself weirdly paralysed with indecision. “I don’t know. Maybe the pub or…” I’d say. “We always go there,” the boyfriend would reply. “Um. Well, there’s the French place on the corner.” “Mmm, don’t really fancy that.”

And so it would go on, until he made the final choice and we’d end up somewhere that served fried chicken in napkin-lined baskets spotted with grease. I would hate the food almost as much as I hated myself.

I couldn’t understand why I found it so difficult to express myself over something as inconsequential as where we should eat. With female friends, I never had the same issue – or, at least, my friends and I experienced a sort of mutual indecision that ended in compromise. Why was it different with a man?

It took me a long time (and the end of that relationship) to realise that instead of working out what I wanted,

I was trying to second-guess his own desires. I wanted to make the boyfriend happy, to the exclusion of my own contentment. And this man wasn’t manipulative or emotionally abusive. It was simply that I’d unwittingly colluded in establishing a power dynamic where my

partner was dominant. It didn’t matter what I wanted, the reasoning went, as long as he got what he wanted.

Sometimes, this would manifest itself in seemingly trivial ways, such as choosing a restaurant. But later, in different relationships, my people-pleasing urges would become more damaging. I would turn down jobs I wanted in order to save a relationship; I would lend money and never have it repaid; I would delay motherhood because I feared the inconvenience it would cause my other half – and I would do all this because I was scared of upsetting a fragile equilibrium. Ultimately, I suppose, I was scared of being alone.

I say this with a degree of embarrassment. I have always considered myself a feminist, and yet there I was, this confused twentysomething, contorting myself into uncomfortable shapes so that I fitted in with someone else’s narrative.

Where did that lack of self come from? I suppose I was insecure, still finding my own place in the world, and it was easy to get buffeted by the currents of someone else’s stronger tide. It was also that I’d grown up in a family where the sole male – my father – was solicitously tended to. He was a surgeon, working in highly pressurised environments, and we were all aware of the toll this took on him. When he came home, he wanted to be looked after and my mother, sister and I all obliged.

But when you carry those same obligations into adulthood, things tend to go awry. I’m not the only woman who’s ever lost herself in a relationship. It’s a dispiritingly familiar tale – you meet someone, you fall in love, you tell everyone who’ll listen how relaxed you feel in his company. But then, after a few months, something begins to change.

IT’S IMPERCEPTIBLE AT FIRST. IT STARTS WITH SOMETHING TINY:

the fact that you always do the grocery shopping even if you’re back late from work.

The way in which you will drop everything to socialise with his friends and family, yet he never repays the favour. Increasingly, decisions are made on his terms and subjugation begins to feel dangerously natural.

And then you wake up one morning with the shuddering realisation that you’ve lost yourself; that instead of being one half of a couple, you are subsuming all your own hopes and ambitions, and pretending it’s what you want. You try to communicate this and you find that you’ve forgotten the words and are frightened of what the outcome might be if you raise your voice.

Many of my friends have similar experiences. It’s partly why I wanted to explore the idea of a woman losing herself in a marriage in my new novel, The Party.

The character of Lucy starts out meek and unsure of herself, deferring to her more intellectual husband, Martin. By the end, she has grown in both stature and strength. It’s Lucy who emerges as the real hero of the story.

MY OWN JOURNEY WAS NOT QUITE AS SMOOTH.

It took me several long-term relationships and a failed marriage to work out what I’d been doing wrong. Emerging from the wreckage of marital breakdown, I found myself single for the first time in over 17 years. For a while, I thought the only way to survive was to fling myself into another relationship where a man would make my decisions for me. It wasn’t.

In my mid-thirties, I finally learned how to forge my own path. I had no home, no partner and no idea of where I was going, and it was in this space that I was able to breathe and work out what I actually wanted, rather than what I thought I should.

I’m in a new relationship now, with a truly lovely man, and I’m no longer scared to express what I actually want. That doesn’t mean I’m being selfish, just that I have got a bit better at valuing myself and my own needs. It’s also thanks to the fact that he’s incredibly thoughtful and wants to know how I’m feeling. (This kindness is not a flashy quality, but the older I get, the more I think it is the only thing that counts.) These days, I’m more likely to ask for something rather than hoping the other person will magically intuit what it is that I’m lacking. I know that sounds ludicrously obvious, but I honestly feel that women have been taught to suppress their natural instincts for centuries in order to make them easier to control in a male-dominated world.

We have been taught to be pliant rather than stubborn; good rather than naughty; pleasant rather than assertive. When, really, the most revolutionary act is to nurture the same respect for ourselves as we show to other people.

That has spread beyond my personal life. Professionally, too, I have started to ask myself whether I really want to do the thing that is being offered to me before saying yes. Previously, my default was to agree to everything in the vain hope that people would rate me more highly as a result. But all that led to was my feeling overworked and resentful. In work, as in love, the way you earn respect is knowing how and when to say no.

It’s been a revelation. It’s not so much that I’ve changed; rather that I feel more myself than ever before. And if you ask me where I want to go for dinner, it certainly won’t be the greasy fried-chicken place. The Party by Elizabeth Day (4th Estate, £12.99; out 13th July)

I was confused, CONTORTING myself into UNCOMFORTABLE shapes that fitted in with someone else’s narrative