The Love That Didn’t Ask Me to Become Smaller

I didn’t realize how much of myself I had been folding away until someone finally handed me space.

For most of my life, love felt like a performance.

Not the kind you admit out loud, but the kind you live inside of—quietly. Love was learning when to speak and when to stay silent. It was measuring my emotions before I let them escape. It was shrinking my needs into something easier to swallow.

I thought that was normal.

I thought love was supposed to come with conditions. With warnings. With unspoken rules.

Don’t be too much.

Don’t be too sensitive.

Don’t ask for reassurance again.

Don’t talk about the past.

Don’t cry like that.

So I became good at disappearing in small ways.

I laughed when something hurt. I apologized for feelings I hadn’t even finished feeling. I learned how to keep my voice soft, my expectations softer.

I mistook endurance for devotion.

And then, one day, I met someone who didn’t ask me to become smaller.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a movie moment with perfect lighting and swelling music. It was simple, almost unbearably so.

The first time I got quiet, waiting for the familiar shift—the impatience, the withdrawal, the look that said, Here we go again…

They didn’t react that way.

They just stayed.

No pressure. No demand. No frustration.

Just presence.

I remember sitting on the edge of my bed, knees pulled to my chest, staring at a spot on the floor as if it could hold me together. I wasn’t speaking because I didn’t know how to explain the heaviness inside me.

I expected them to ask, “What’s wrong with you?”

Instead, they asked, “Do you want company or quiet?”

That question cracked something open.

Because it wasn’t a question meant to solve me. It was a question meant to honor me.

I wasn’t used to that.

I was used to love that needed proof. Love that came with interrogation. Love that wanted me healed, polished, and easy.

But this love didn’t question my soul like it was a problem to fix.

It treated my soul like it was sacred.

Slowly, I began to notice the difference.

True love didn’t make me explain my sadness as if it needed a reason to be valid.

True love didn’t compete with my dreams.

True love didn’t flinch when I spoke honestly.

It didn’t ask me to be less intense, less emotional, less alive.

It let me be whole.

And maybe that’s the most radical thing love can do.

Not consume you.

Not control you.

Not reshape you into something more convenient.

But witness you.

There were moments I tested it without meaning to.

I spoke too much.

I cried too hard.

I admitted fears I thought would make me unlovable.

And every time, they met me with the same steadiness.

Not perfection.

Just care.

Life still hit me, hard in the face, just like Sarah Kay said it would. It still waited for me to stand back up so it could knock the wind out of me again.

But love?

Love became the place I could breathe afterward.

Love became the hand on my back, not the foot on my chest.

And in that gentleness, I learned something I wish I had known earlier:

The right kind of love will never ask you to abandon yourself to keep it.

It will never make you feel like your soul is too heavy to hold.

True love doesn’t question your worth.

True love reminds you of it.