I Have No Idea What I Want

Finding a sense of self in relationships

Sep 01, 2024

Above: Mind the gap.

“So,” my therapist said, leaning forward into the camera. “What are you looking for in a partner?”

I had just finished telling her I needed to start dating. It was the middle of Covid and I’d started therapy via Zoom. I was trying to change circumstances in my life that had frustrated me for years, including an inability to move on from my divorce due to what I thought were intractable conditions. I’d been single for seven years. I knew the situation was getting ridiculous.

My mind went blank and I frowned, searching for a response. “Oh, I know,” I said as a thought came to me. “I want someone who’s really, really into me.”

This had been an issue in my marriage; I’d always suspected that my ex-husband wasn’t that into me. I’d felt as though I were some sort of second choice to him.

“Okay,” she nodded encouragingly. “What else?”

The silence stretched on for a minute as my mind cast about, trying to come up with something, anything I might value in a partner aside from the obvious. Everyone wants someone who is honest, trustworthy, and so on. I knew she was asking for something specific to me.

I had no answer. No one had ever asked me what I wanted. And because they’d never asked, I never thought much about it.

When it came to personal relationships, I had almost no sense of self at all.

It wasn’t so easy to tell I thoroughly lacked a sense of self partly because I had a very strong one when it came to work. After all, school and work had been the primary focus of my attention for all of my teens, 20s, and 30s, when I simply added parenting alongside it. I was confident in my knowledge, skills, and abilities on the job. I knew how to set boundaries with an employer – when to compromise given the reality of resource constraints, and when to insist on a measure of professional respect. I negotiated hard for my salary and never worked for less than I thought I deserved. I assumed more responsibility over time and advanced to positions that demanded greater professional maturity.

On a personal level, however, that self-knowledge evaporated. Once, not long after I got married, my brother asked what had drawn me to my husband. I’d thought hard for a minute, then said, “Well, he’s a very good dancer. And I love his sense of style.” My brother rolled his eyes and laughed.

I guess that was my way of saying I was attracted to those qualities in my partner. I liked those things about him. I liked someone who was physical, because I’d always competed in sports. I liked someone with individual style, because I’d voraciously consumed fashion magazines as a teenager. To me, those qualities were desirable in someone else because they were familiar . . . and that’s about as far as my rationale went.

Clearly, I wasn’t familiar with my own self. I didn’t know enough about my own values, interests, and preferences to form an idea of how somebody else might either reflect or complement them within the context of a long-term relationship. I didn’t have a sense of what would be valuable in a relationship and how I could figure out if someone had these intangible qualities. I had no understanding of relationship dynamics wherein my issues interact with somebody else’s to yield magic, devastation, or something in between.

After all, I’d really only dated for a period of maybe half a year before meeting the man I went on to marry far too young, in my mid-20s. During that period, I dated men simply because they asked me. It wasn’t that I dated everyone who asked; if something about them bothered me, I turned them down. However, I certainly wasn’t saying yes because they aligned with what I was looking for in a partner. In fact, I saw myself as . . . open to possibility. Who can possibly know what someone else is like? Who can know if they’ll be ‘right’ for you? Date them, and eventually all will become clear!

Where had this absence of a sense of self come from? Why was in manifesting in my personal relationships?

Here’s one way you can have a poor sense of self, one that may not seem so obvious. Say you’re in a relationship with an addict or with someone who behaves much like an addict (often due to mental illness, in my experience). By this, I mean there’s a certain amount of chaos and unpredictability that’s entirely predictable. Say their behaviour causes you to feel an intense range of emotions: anger, fear, and frustration on top of a deep love for who they are. Now imagine swallowing those emotions when they arise because you have a crisis on hand or a mess to clean up instead. Maybe you’re never able to actually discuss your emotions because you’re forever discussing theirs. Whatever the case, you learn that your emotions don’t matter.

Suppressing your emotions is a denial of your experience of a relationship and ultimately of your self. How many times had I bitten back my anger as I listened to a parent recount a conflict with a sibling that had gotten out of hand? Expressing my anger led nowhere good with someone who didn’t understand or wasn’t receptive to it. How many times had I mentally shelved the complex grief I felt for siblings who were being emotionally harmed, at the very least, in a multitude of ways? How many times had I shut down my dismay or shock as a parent who loves to be the bearer of bad news eagerly announced some emotionally brutal event? “So-and-so tried to commit suicide last weekend!” Great. Just another Tuesday. Tell me something awful and see if I even blink.

I remember having a telephone conversation with one of my parents that didn’t revolve exclusively around their lives; in fact, it revolved mostly around mine. It was the first time this had happened in at least ten years. The novelty of the experience was disorienting and short-lived, as things promptly returned to the status quo. I thus naturally, implicitly, and without much awareness, drew the conclusion that my emotions and my needs aren’t of interest to the people closest to me.

Here’s what happens when you don’t have much of a sense of self in relationships: you make yourself very small. Sometimes, you even erase yourself completely. Your thoughts are consumed with someone else’s emotions, needs, and wants – not your own. Sure, you may have a bottom line, a dealbreaker, that you locate somewhere. You won’t let this relationship continue if it crosses that line. But your relationship still isn’t responsive to you; it’s all about you being responsive to others.

My therapist tells me to work on:

identifying my emotions
feeling my emotions in my body
following the impulse of the emotion (e.g. expression, action, taking a step back, etc.)

This will enlarge my sense of self, she says. By focusing on what I feel, I’ll uncover what I need and want.

These past few weeks, I’ve been practicing reaching within, fumbling around, and trying to find that nascent sense of who I am. What emotion am I feeling and why? How do I express it? I’ve been trying to create space to act on those emotions. Am I upset and do I feel an impulse to leave a space? So leave. Don’t stay and shove that feeling down. Am I angry or hurt? Is this feeling related to something I need or want?

This morning, just before I woke, I dreamed of an endless series of dislocations – homes I’d once lived in and could no longer return to. They stretched behind me and each was a sort of wound. I felt a sudden, intense sense of a need for healing and when I woke up, I started Googling healing retreats.1 Normally, I’d dismiss an emotion that appeared to derive from a dream, from some formless, opaque void in my cognition. So instead, I’m trying to respect it.

The flip side of this exercise is trusting that my relationships will survive me voicing my emotions and articulating my needs – that they’ll survive the expression of my self. I suppose here is where Al-Anon’s notion of a ‘higher power’ comes into play, invoking faith that some force will somehow shape and care for the contours of my life. It feels like tentatively dipping a toe into frigid waters from a moody shoreline bathed in fog that, until now, I’ve never dared to approach. A relationship takes two people meeting in the middle, each agreeing to carry on, to move forward. And it is hard, so hard, to trust that in this nascent expression of self, I will be met.

Unbelievably, incredibly, unexpectedly, I have been met thus far. So perhaps there is space for my emotions, for my whole self, after all.

For more newsletters on trying to connect to a sense of self, see: