I Let My Last Relationship Define How I Saw Myself for Years

My first serious relationship ended badly when I was 24. Not abusively, not dramatically, but badly in the specific way of being left by someone whose stated reason was a version of you are not quite enough - not enough fun, not enough easy to be with, too in my head, too much maintenance.

He said these things not cruelly but with a kind of factual weight that I found, in the absence of the relationship to counter-argue within, very easy to absorb as truth.

I was 24 and I did not have enough self-knowledge yet to sit with the feedback and decide for myself how much of it was accurate and how much of it was one person's experience of a relationship that had not been right for either of us.

So I swallowed it whole and it became the lens I looked at myself through for the next several years. In the relationships I entered at 25 and 26 I carried this story - that I was too much work, that my emotional depth was a burden, that the qualities I valued in myself were actually the things that made me difficult to love.

I dated accordingly, choosing people who confirmed the story by keeping emotional distance, and interpreting their distance as further evidence of the story's truth. I also worked extremely hard in those relationships to not be what he had said I was - to be easier, lighter, less emotionally present - which made me into someone I did not recognise and made both relationships eventually collapse under the weight of my self-suppression.

The work of untelling the story was something I did with a therapist at 27, who helped me see several things. First, that one person's experience of a relationship is not a clinical assessment of your worth or your capacity to be loved.

Second, that the qualities I had been told were problems were only problems in the context of a specific person's preferences and limitations, and were not objectively flawed.

Third, that I had given enormous authority to a narrative that had been handed to me by someone who himself did not have the emotional range to be in the relationship I was offering. None of this was instant or easy.

But at 30 I am in a relationship with someone who values exactly the depth I spent three years trying to erase. The story was never true. I just needed long enough to stop believing it.