I always told myself I was independent, that I didn’t need a relationship to be happy, and now I’m in my 30s trying to untangle how much of that was strength and how much of it was learning not to expect something I wasn’t sure I’d ever get.

There are two versions of how I became independent.

In the first one, I figured myself out early.

I decided, deliberately, that I didn’t need external validation to feel okay.

I built a life organized around my own priorities and found that it fit—precisely, satisfyingly—because I was the only person it had to fit.

I moved when I wanted to move. Took the jobs I wanted to take. Built routines that worked for one, and called that freedom, and mostly meant it.

In the second one, I learned, early and quietly, that expecting something you’re not sure you’ll get is a particular kind of pain.

And the most effective way to avoid that pain is to stop expecting it.

So I stopped. And then I built a story around the stopping that made it sound like a choice rather than an adaptation.

Both versions are true.

I’m in my thirties now, and I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to figure out which parts of my independence belong to which story—what I actually chose, and what I chose because choosing seemed easier than wanting something that might not come.

I don’t have a clean answer. What I have is the willingness to finally ask the question.

For a long time, it felt like exactly what I wanted

It felt like freedom. For a long time, it genuinely felt like freedom.

Not needing a relationship meant not waiting for one. Not organizing my decisions around the presence or absence of another person. Not holding my life in some kind of provisional state while I waited for circumstances to become complete.

I made plans without checking with anyone. Moved cities when it made sense. Took the job, rearranged the apartment, built the routines that worked for one. My life fit me precisely because I was the only person it had to fit. That’s not nothing. That’s actually a lot.

And the relationships I did have—the ones that came and went over my twenties—I approached with a particular kind of self-possession. I was never the one who needed more. Never the one adjusting herself past the point of recognition to make something work. I held my own shape. I thought that was the healthy version of being in a relationship.

Maybe it was. Maybe it also meant I never fully let anything land. I’m still not sure how to answer that.

The question that lodged itself and wouldn’t leave

It wasn’t one moment. It was a series of small recognitions that I kept filing away without quite assembling into a conclusion.

A therapist who asked, gently, whether my self-sufficiency had always felt like a choice or whether, at some point, it had started to feel like the only available option. A conversation with a friend who had known me since my twenties and said, equally gently, that she’d always wondered whether the independence was something I wanted or something I’d decided to want because wanting something you might not get is harder.

I deflected both times. I’m good at deflecting.

But the question lodged itself somewhere and started doing the slow work of questions that lodge themselves. Not demanding an answer—just sitting there, occasionally surfacing, waiting for me to be ready to look at it directly.

What I eventually had to admit was this: somewhere early on, the connection felt unreliable. Not in a dramatic way—not in a way I could point to as a clear wound. Just unreliable enough, often enough, that my nervous system made a quiet calculation. If this is uncertain, want less of it. If less of it means less pain, want less of it.

The independence didn’t come from nowhere. It came from that calculation. And the calculation made sense at the time. I’m just not sure it was ever supposed to be permanent.

The part that’s genuinely mine

I want to be careful here, because I think the opposite overcorrection is equally dishonest.

Not all of the independence was protective.

Some of it was—is—genuinely mine. I like my own company in a way that isn’t compensatory. I’m good at being alone in a way that doesn’t feel like settling. I have a relationship with solitude that actually works, that gives me something real, that isn’t just the absence of other people but its own kind of fullness.

That part I’m not willing to give back. That part I would choose again, knowing everything I know now.

The question I’m sitting with is what’s underneath it. Whether the genuine preference for solitude and the learned avoidance of wanting too much have gotten so tangled over the years that I can’t fully separate them anymore. Whether I’d know the difference between choosing to be alone and being someone who chose that because she’d gotten very good at not wanting what felt unavailable.

I think I would. Most days. But some days the answer is less clear than I’d like it to be.

What the untangling actually looks like

It looks less dramatic than I expected.

It’s more like an audit—going through the rooms of the self and asking, for each thing: did I want this, or did I decide to want it because the alternative seemed too costly?

Some things pass the audit easily. I wanted the work, the friendships, the particular texture of my daily life. Those choices feel clean.

Others are murkier. The ways I’ve kept people at a comfortable distance. The speed with which I’ve made myself okay when something didn’t work out—sometimes so quickly that I’m not sure I fully felt it first. The specific skill I have at closing the file on things, which has been useful, and might also have been a way of never sitting with the weight of what I was closing.

The untangling doesn’t mean opening everything back up. It just means being honest about what I was closing off.

I’m not dismantling anything, I’m just being honest about what it all costs

I still live alone. I still like it. Most days, that feels like the right sentence, and I mean it when I say it.

I’m also, for the first time in a while, letting myself notice when I want something different. Not as a project—not organizing my life around finding it—but just noticing. Letting the wanting be there without immediately managing it back down to something more acceptable.

That’s new. It feels small from the outside and is not small from the inside.

I don’t know what the next few years look like.

I don’t know whether the untangling will produce something or just clarity.

I’m trying to be okay with not knowing, which is, if I’m being honest, a skill I’m better at applying to everything except this.

I’m still figuring out how to hold both versions of independence.

Some days I’m better at it than others.

Some days the two versions of the story feel like they’re pointing at the same person—a person who found her own shape and is now, slowly, learning to make a little room in it. Some days they don’t.

I’m trying to let that be okay, too. It’s the most honest thing I know how to do right now.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.