How to Lose a Person in 10 Days (Without Losing Yourself)

28 AUGUST 2024 GIGI GALASSO

A twisted love story we’ve all seen in the rom-coms: girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, girl contorts herself into a human pretzel to keep boy around. There’s a tragic irony to it, isn’t there? For years, we’ve been marinated in the broth of patriarchy, steeped in the notion that love means losing yourself—shaving off the bits that are too sharp, too loud, too you in order to fit into someone else’s life. But here’s a wild idea: what if the secret to finding real love is actually about staying true to who you are, even if it means losing someone else along the way?

Allow me to introduce you to a person of mine, their name is Alex.

Now, Alex wasn’t just anyone; they were the kind of person who could make you laugh until you snorted soda out of your nose, who had a smile that could melt glaciers, and who somehow always smelled like freshly baked cookies. So naturally, I was into them. Deeply, madly, borderline obsessively. For the first few dates, everything was wonderful. Alex was attentive, fun, and curious. But then something strange happened. I found myself questioning every decision I made—like whether my favorite black coffee was a sign of my boring personality, or if my habit of oversharing made me look desperate. It was like I’d been thrust into a strange, self-inflicted game of Twister, where I was doing all the bending and twisting, and Alex just stood there, sipping their artisanal matcha latte, enjoying the show.

The more I tried to mold myself into someone Alex would adore, the more I felt myself fading. I was becoming a ghost of the woman I once was, haunted by the idea that I had to be more likable, more agreeable, more something to keep Alex interested. My conversations became watered-down, my opinions softened, and my laughter measured.

The harder I worked to keep Alex in my life, the further I drifted from my own. Then one day, as I was knee-deep in another complicated mental yoga pose—analyzing if my last text was too enthusiastic, too indifferent, too whatever—it hit me like a ton of existential bricks: I was losing myself. And worse, I was doing it for someone who, in the grand scheme of things, was just a passerby in my life. Alex was great, sure, but were they worth sacrificing the loud, quirky, weirdly wonderful version of me? The one who unapologetically double-texts, who laughs at her own jokes, and who dances in her pajamas to ‘80s pop? Absolutely not. So I did the unthinkable. I stopped trying. I let Alex see the real me—unfiltered, uncensored, a little messy, and a lot authentic. And, surprise surprise, Alex stuck around for a while. But, as these stories often go, they eventually drifted away, like a boomerang that just didn’t come back. And you know what? That was okay.

Here’s the thing: we’ve been taught to think that compromise means giving up chunks of ourselves, but real compromise doesn’t involve erasing who you are. It means meeting in the middle without losing sight of the person you’re meeting halfway. Relationships, romantic or otherwise, should feel like two complete beings coming together, not like a jigsaw puzzle where you have to cut off your edges to fit. The moral of this story is that it’s so damn hard to stay true to yourself, especially when the world keeps throwing you subtle hints that you need to change to be loved.

But the truth is, you can lose people and still be whole. In fact, sometimes you should lose people—those who find you too much, too little, too loud, too quiet, too anything. Because every person who passes through your life is like a mirror, reflecting back a piece of yourself you need to see. 

And in the meantime, live your life in the sexiest, most intimate way possible: as yourself.