"The other side of the bed in Los Angeles was cold. I used to love sleeping alone but then again, that was before I learned the inevitable: to love someone is to lose a bit of yourself. Maybe that's just me. Maybe for others, letting a person in does not require that kind of sacrifice. But when I'm in love, next to isn't enough. I want to crawl under their skin, become one with them. Become the new me. The me that has them."
"It's a scary feeling that change. One that is exacerbated by the possibility of an even bigger one. On a walk with a friend, a few months after we had ended previous relationships, we discussed the mutual and persistent sensation we felt: those men were not the fathers of our children. On a cellular level we knew, to choose a person may mean never being able to extricate from them. It may mean a baby."
A person feels the other side of the bed cold and recognizes that loving someone requires losing parts of oneself. When love deepens, proximity is insufficient; desire arises to merge identities and become defined by the other. The possibility of parenthood intensifies this fear, presenting a permanent, inextricable bond that eliminates many alternative futures. The prospect of choosing a partner feels like a countdown, where selecting one life erases numerous others. An image of a fig tree captures branching, mutually exclusive paths: marriage and children, career achievements, travel, lovers, and countless other potential lives.
Read at Bustle
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