When do you close a door that was only really ever ajar?

On waiting to be chosen and what keeps us stuck there

I still remember the first time I opened my door, and he was there. There was a strange exhale from deep inside my chest, as if my entire being had smiled with relief. He was here.

Right from the get-go, my body relaxed in his presence in a way I didn't let it relax with anyone else. I felt seen without being looked at. Held without being touched. Nourished in silence. Safe, for the first time with a man.

And, oh so turned on. Just thinking about him set my body on fire. His touch reassured me and broke down walls at the same time. The intensity rose, and that initial attraction, you know the “bubble” that usually only lasts weeks or months, never faded away.

We talk a lot about these feelings. We call it chemistry, alchemy, recognition... And because it feels significant, we assume it is significant. But what is that instant pull, really? Is it depth announcing itself, or is it something in us recognising an unmet need that this person seems built to answer? When your body exhales around a perfect stranger, is it telling you something about them, or something about yourself?

I didn't ask those questions that night. I just opened the door. And I would keep opening it for the next four years.

Let’s not use labels

From the beginning, we agreed it was nothing serious. We were free to stay in our own lives, see other people, no pressure, and certainly no commitment. His lifestyle was that of a nomad, really. On paper, there didn’t seem to be a path forward, so why look for one? We just met each other, again and again, in the moments our lives would briefly overlap.

And yet what grew there defied the casualness we'd “claimed”. Whether three weeks or eleven months had passed, it was as if no time had passed at all. Our bodies remembered each other, yearned for each other, even as our lives continued to move in completely different directions. He carved out time for me that his life didn't naturally offer, and my door remained open. Whatever it was we were doing, we kept it alive out of choice, not because it was convenient.

So, can you be deeply committed to someone without ever calling it that? We build private worlds with people that include rituals, patterns, unspoken understandings, all while insisting nothing is defined. The absence of a label feels like protection. It lets us stay close without feeling trapped, present without feeling owned. But at what point does the thing we refuse to name become the thing anyway?

There's also a difference between a world that's private and a person who's hidden. Privacy is something two people choose together. Being hidden is done to you, for someone else's benefit. From the inside, they look identical, until you realise the door only ever opened one way. If I only exist for you when we're alone together, in what sense do I exist for you at all?

Maybe that's the quiet irony of modern intimacy: we fear commitment while behaving in deeply committed ways. And maybe the running starts not when the bond goes wrong, but when we finally notice what it has become. Labels, “the conversation”, stepping into each other's IRL worlds, all make it real, and real is where our fears live.

So what was I getting out of it?

It would be easy to reduce it all to sex and ongoing companionship. But are things ever that simple?

We met not long after the end of respective long-term relationships. I had retreated into hyper-independence, and this felt like strength. I gravitated toward connections that asked very little of me, where I could be held without pressure, and desired without being needed. “They always leave anyway”, I said to myself, and his nomadic lifestyle meant he always had one foot out of the door. It was the perfect plan.

He was the first person who made that feel like freedom rather than self-protection. He never asked me to be anything I wasn’t. He appreciated my body in every state it lived in. He respected my walls without making me feel broken for having them. And through him I learned the difference between freedom from connection and freedom within it. I had always believed autonomy meant distance, that the safest place to stand was slightly out of reach. He showed me that closeness doesn't have to feel like confinement and that you can be entirely yourself beside another person and lose nothing.

For someone who grew up learning that love was conditional, his return over and over again, without obligation, felt like proof. Proof that I was worth coming back to. Proof I didn't have to change to be wanted.

And for a long time, that was enough. But when someone meets a need we've carried since childhood, do we love them, or do we love the relief? Is there even a difference? I'm not sure the body distinguishes between the two. Maybe that's why these connections take hold of us so firmly: they're not just about the person in front of us, but about every absence they temporarily fill.

When you put things in a container, eventually there’s no more room to grow

Once I'd felt what it was to be safe with someone, I began to want more of it. More of him, hell yes, but also, just more of this: being seen, held, valued... with a need to watch it go somewhere. Because connection without direction, I was beginning to understand, eventually becomes stagnation dressed as freedom.

I believe that this goes far beyond him and me. We're living in a time that celebrates staying single because you can, avoiding the complexity and hardship of building with another person. I understand the appeal. It's less painful, less complicated; you keep control. And I believe deeply that we need to be able to stand alone emotionally. Whole generations never got that chance, moving straight from their parents' homes into marriage without ever meeting themselves. But when self-sufficiency becomes an entire lifestyle, what are we left with? Quiet, yes. Peace, for a while. And then? What does all that protected space actually contain? At what point does independence stop being growth and start being a way to hide?

I'd spent enough years hiding. I'd learned to stand alone. What I wanted now was to learn to stand with someone. So I invited him in.

But evolution requires both people to grow. And while I think we were both outgrowing the container in our own ways, he didn't want to outgrow it with me. He would have kept climbing back into it, comfortable, until the next container appeared.

The story did not end there

So I chose myself, walked away, and wrote it up (in my head) as growth.

But I wasn’t ready to grow yet. This article could not be written. I was unbelievably blocked.

Three months later, I brought him back in. I told him plainly that I didn't like him not being in my life. That was the whole of it. And we didn't change anything. We simply dove back into that same container, as though the ending just before had been a weather event rather than a decision. I knew, going back in, that he meant more to me than I meant to him. I wasn't guessing at that or hoping I'd got it wrong. But I’d decided I was willing to own that imbalance, because I wasn't ready to let go.

We talk about unequal love as though it's a failure of information, something that gets corrected the moment the person with less power in the exchange finally sees clearly. But I chose it anyway, with my eyes open, as an adult who could articulate every mechanism at work. So what are we really choosing in those moments? Is it the person, or is it the refusal to be the one who ends something? There is a particular kind of pride in being the one who asks for nothing and therefore never gets refused.

And then came misfortune

It happened. The kind of test in life that nobody consents to taking. And finally, I saw more clearly.

Sympathy is cheap and easy to perform, and there is real loneliness in receiving the right words and feeling absolutely nothing alongside them. It tells you, more accurately than any conversation ever could, how much room you actually occupy in another person's inner life. It also reveals what their limits are made of.

For such a long time I had held his limits as a philosophical curiosity, real but abstract. As long as someone's incapacity costs you nothing, you can admire it as complexity, treat it as interesting, write essays around it. But limits stop being abstract the moment they cost something you can't reason your way around. And that's when understanding a person stops being enough, and the harder questions come.

I can name every mechanism at work here. I can trace it through my history, explain the pull, describe the exact dimensions of the container and my exact position inside it. I have all the insight a person could reasonably gather. And still I continuted to check my phone.

So, if it doesn't free us, what is insight actually for? We tell ourselves that awareness is the path out, but perhaps awareness is merely the first step.

Part of me still doesn't want it to end. But wanting something to continue is not the same as it being the right thing to keep. What I want now is empty, uncomfortable space, for whatever might come next. Because the door marked “change” only opens inward, and you can't walk through it while you're holding onto something awkwardly shaped that gets in the way.

The questions I'm left with

I used to think this essay would end with a sense of resolution: either a triumphant walking-away or the peaceful acceptance of a limited connection. I've drafted both endings in my mind. Neither is true, not even for a moment. You can't mourn a relationship that was never given the chance to be one. You can't ask for closure from someone who never acknowledged there was anything to close. Ultimately, you're left holding on to what it meant to you alone, wondering whether you invented it.

So whose story is true? Does a connection need to be mutually deep to be real? What I felt was real for me, whatever it was for him. Here's what I believe, for today at least:

• Some people show us what we're capable of feeling, and we take that and offer it back to them, assuming they are ready to receive it.

• Sometimes the person who awakens us is also the person we can't let go of. We're drawn back by the connection itself as well as by the needs we had long before we met them.

• There's also the loyalty that comes from guarding space in your life in hope. If you never allow anything to compete with them, you cannot lose the possibility of it working out. There is a strange safety in a comparison you've rigged in advance.

As humans, we have always completed something of ourselves when connecting to other people. Which brings me to a contradiction I'm starting to resolve in myself. How can someone with such a yearning to be loved deeply accept so little of it, from almost everyone, and for as long as she can remember?

I'm still working that one out. But what I do know is that he'll come back at some point, because he always has done. He stays without staying. The question I'm grappling with now is not why he does it.

It's: why do I?