The Yes That Cost Me Intimacy

There’s a moment I keep returning to.

It’s never dramatic, and from the outside it looks completely reasonable. He says he’ll be a bit later, or that today isn’t actually a great day to meet up, or that he’ll make it up to me soon — and I hear myself say yes before I’ve even checked in with my body.

“Sure.”

“It’s okay.”

“We’ll find another time.”

And then, almost immediately, every fibre of my being is saying what the f*** just happened?

Because what I needed in those moments wasn’t a better explanation. I needed connection. I needed reassurance. I needed to feel chosen — to feel like I mattered as much as everything else that seemed to take priority.

But underneath the yes, there was already a quiet sentence running: 'don’t make this a thing'.

And another one close behind it: 'if you ask for more, you’ll lose him.'

So I softened. I accommodated. I told myself I was being mature, understanding, low maintenance. I told myself this is just how relationships work.

And nothing blew up.

That’s the part that makes it hard to name.

There wasn’t a single moment where I could point and say this is where it went wrong. There were just dozens of small yeses, offered in moments when my body was saying no. Sure, come a bit later. Sure, it’s fine if we don’t see each other today. Sure, I understand you’re busy. Sure, soon.

Each one felt harmless on its own. Together, they formed a way of being.

Over time, I stopped asking for what I needed. I stopped trusting the ache in my body. I stopped noticing how lonely I felt inside the relationship. The shame sentences did their job well — you’re too much, don’t push, don’t be dramatic — and I learned how to translate real needs into something easier to swallow.

The price I paid wasn’t a fight or a rupture.

It was intimacy.

Because intimacy can’t grow where one person is always postponing themselves. It can’t form where needs are endlessly deferred in the name of keeping things calm.

What hurts most isn’t that he was out there meeting everyone else’s needs. It’s that I learned, again and again, to meet mine with patience instead of honesty. By the time I realised what was happening, this pattern of saying yes had started to feel like who I was — easy to be with, low maintenance, quietly afraid that if I took up more space, I’d be left.

And the grief isn’t only for the relationship.

It’s for all the moments I felt the truth rise in my body and talked myself out of it, because I believed that was the price of staying loved.