The Case for Choosing Yourself

Selfish is one of those words we have decided is almost entirely bad.

Nobody describes their ideal partner as selfish. We don't compliment someone on doing a great job prioritizing themselves. If someone tells you they are "finally choosing themselves," there is usually an entire backstory needed to make this admirable. Hopefully one involving a sufficiently terrible other person.

This feels odd, because I'm not sure why choosing yourself should always require someone else to have done something wrong.

This gets especially complicated in relationships.

We are told that relationships take work. That the grass is greener where you water it and that long-term love is a choice rather than a feeling. That people give up too easily and that nobody is perfect. That there will be hard seasons, and if you leave every time something gets difficult, you will spend your entire life leaving.

I think some of those things are true. But I also think there has to be a line somewhere between the sentiment that relationships take work, and the belief you should continue doing something that makes you unhappy because stopping would mean you haven't tried hard enough.

I think you can leave a relationship three months in because you don't want to be in it anymore.

Or a year in.

Or ten.

You don't need to stay until you've collected enough evidence to make a case for leaving. You don't need a betrayal or a diagnosis or a pattern of mistreatment. You don't need to prove that you tried everything. You don't need the other person to have failed badly enough that everyone agrees you had no choice.

You can have a choice. And you can choose yourself.

And for some reason we are weirdly uncomfortable with that.

We are feel more at ease when someone leaves because they had to. He cheated. She was controlling. They fought constantly. He wouldn't go to therapy. She wouldn't change. Something happened that made staying unreasonable, and now the person leaving can do so without really being selfish at all.

But the relationship might have been fine. The other person might have been good. They might have loved you completely. They might have been trying. The relationship might even have been saved if you had been willing to keep compromising.

And maybe you still didn't want to. You're allowed to not want to.

That's a truly selfish belief, and I don't want to sanitize it into something nicer. Sometimes you will make a decision because it is better for you, knowing it is going to be much worse for somebody else.

Unfortunately social media disagrees with me. For every person scrolling on Instagram being told, "He never deserved you," "She was the best thing that ever happened to him," "He's going to realize what he lost," or my personal favourite, "One day she's going to regret leaving someone who loved her like that," there is another person on the other side of that story who may have simply decided they didn't want the relationship anymore.

They might not regret it. Losing you might not have been the biggest mistake of their life. You might really have been wonderful. You might have loved them well. You might have done everything you reasonably could have done. And they still didn't want you.

That is a brutal thing to accept, which is probably why we have built an entire genre of inspirational content designed to help people avoid accepting it.

We tell people that someone leaving them says something about the other person's inability to appreciate them. We tell them the person will eventually realize what they lost. We tell them they were too good for someone who couldn't see their value.

Sometimes that's true. And sometimes it isn't.

A person can look at the relationship, look at you in your totality, understand what they're giving up and leave anyway because the life they want isn't the one they have with you. I don't know that helping someone turn that into a story about how badly they were treated is actually helping them.

There is a difference between supporting someone through pain and helping them build an identity around having been wronged. The more useful thing might be much less comforting. They chose themselves, that hurt you terribly, and yes, their decision may have been selfish.

But they were allowed to make it.

Which brings me back to the idea that maybe everyone isn't treating you badly.

Someone can make a choice that causes you enormous pain without having committed an offence against you. They can decide they don't want to marry you. They can decide they don't want to keep trying. They can decide that the relationship you would happily spend the rest of your life in is not the relationship they want to spend the rest of theirs in.

That decision can be devastating for you and still be theirs to make. And if we're going to allow ourselves that freedom, then we have to allow other people to have it too.

That's where this gets much less fun.

As someone with anxious attachment, I find that part especially terrifying. Because if people are allowed to leave simply because they decide something isn't right for them, there isn't actually a way to guarantee that someone won't leave me.

I can't earn that certainty by being good enough. I can't make myself indispensable enough. I can't follow the relationship rules closely enough that leaving becomes something the other person is no longer allowed to choose.

There is something much safer about believing relationships only end when somebody does something wrong. At least then there are rules. Be a good partner. Communicate. Compromise. Go to therapy. Water the grass. Do ALL THE THINGS correctly and you get to keep the relationship.

Accepting that people are allowed to choose themselves blows a fairly enormous hole in that theory.

You can do everything right and someone can still decide they don't want the life they're living with you. And if I want the freedom to make that decision for myself, I have to accept the terrifying possibility that someone I love has exactly the same freedom.

Sometimes I will be selfish. Sometimes someone else will be selfish. Sometimes their selfish decision will be the best thing they could possibly have done for themselves and one of the worst things that has ever happened to me.

Both things can be true at exactly the same time, and I think we do people a disservice when we refuse to acknowledge that.

We are very good at comforting people by assigning blame. If you've been left, betrayed, rejected or otherwise deeply hurt, there is an almost immediate instinct to establish that the person who hurt you was wrong. Your friends do it. Instagram does it. Therapists sometimes do it.

But I wonder whether some of that comfort keeps us stuck.

Because now recovery requires maintaining the belief that something unjust happened to us. We aren't simply grieving something we wanted and didn't get. We are recovering from what somebody did to us.

Sometimes that is exactly what happened. Other times, somebody just made a decision about their own life that we desperately wish they hadn't.

Those are different things.

I'm not arguing that wanting something makes everything we do to get it acceptable. I'm arguing that sometimes the selfish part itself is acceptable. The best thing for you will occasionally be the worst thing for someone else. There isn't always a compromise where everyone gets half of what they need. There isn't always enough watering in the world to make you want the grass you're standing on. Sometimes one person gets the freedom to leave and the other person gets their heart broken.

And helping people through that shouldn't always mean helping them prove that the person who left was wrong.

Sometimes it means helping them survive the much harder truth:

Someone was allowed to choose themselves.

They did.

And unfortunately, they didn't choose you.