I’ve been in a relationship with the same boy for almost two and a half years.
Gross, right?
I mean, he and I started dating when I was just wrapping up my sophomore year of high school. Sophomore year. Let’s do a quick poll: How many of you could swap personalities with your sophomore year self right now and remain pretty much unchanged?
Yeah. That’s what I thought. It was a dark time for all of us. I mean, shit, I think I still thought memes were funny back then.
But somehow, one of the very few things that hasn’t managed to change about me in the past few years is this boyfriend–this mysterious external force that I seem to have no control over. People who know about our relationship’s relative longevity LOVE to comment on it. Some of them are really sweet about it. They say we must really be compatible, we might be soul mates, our love is stronger than the test of time, yadda yadda yadda. But some people–a surprising amount, actually–can be total assholes about it, especially to me, perhaps because I’m the younger and more female half of the relationship. Women and men alike tell me (although not in such blunt terms) that I changed myself for him, that I sacrificed my own interests for a relationship, that I made this boy a priority over other, more important parts of my life.
And you know what? The assholes have it.
I had never picked up a Nerf gun in my life before meeting my boyfriend. Now? Well, a date isn’t really a date if I don’t leave his house with at least one dart stuck in my hair and a couple bruises from diving behind the couch in self-defense.
As a high school freshman just starting to think about college, I had always dreamed of going abroad for school, maybe studying in Rome or London for all four years, or spending even just a semester traversing across all of Europe. But here I am, firmly planted on U.S. soil only 167.8 miles away from him, afraid to even take an internship with a three-day retreat for fear of wasting some of the short summer we’ll have together.
Even just yesterday I found myself procrastinating and procrastinating and procrastinating on homework that really should have been easy to do because I knew that if I worked on it right then, I’d miss my only chance to video chat with him before bed.
He has changed me and my priorities a lot, for sure, but the assholes and I disagree on one point: I don’t think that this is a bad thing.
The idea that people in relationships shouldn’t change for each other is founded in something that I do think is important: the thought that, especially for women, no other person should be able to tell you what you can and can’t do. I fully believe that the choice to occasionally prioritize my boyfriend (and/or blast him with a Nerf dart) was wholly mine. In fact, if he had ever tried to tell me to stay in the U.S. for school or to avoid my homework just to listen to him talk about his dinner, my decisions may have been very different. Not to mention the self-sacrificing conundrum is far from one-sided. People say my boyfriend is “whipped” because he’s hooked on my favorite web comics and TV shows, but that’s just because I have great fucking taste and he thinks they’re just as hilarious.
Keep changing for your partners and friends and parents and pet fish if it sounds fun to you, people! After all, trying one of your loved one’s favorite foods or movies or hobbies and finding out it’s something you can enjoy together can make it better for the both of you. And that doesn’t mean I can’t firmly believe that you should never, ever, ever listen to whatever anyone ever orders you to do, ever.
Unless I’m giving you advice, of course.
So don’t buy it when your girlfriend says you ABSOLUTELY HAVE to do jiu-jitsu with her, but also, don’t let it phase you when other people tell you to de-prioritize a relationship. In the words of the almighty Rocko… “You just do you, and I’mma do me.”
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