Why The Right Relationship Makes You More Independent, Not Less

Just because you couple up doesn’t mean you’re not your own person anymore. You can be head over heels in love with a guy and still do your own thing. After all, independence and relationships aren’t mutually exclusive, and if you’re with the right guy, you won’t be stifled or shut down — you’ll be freer than ever.

  1. You focus more on your own stuff when you have alone time. When you’re single long-term, you do tend to be extremely motivated because your own life is all you have. However, you also have endless amounts of free time (too much, actually), so you sometimes start to take it for granted. When you’ve found a steady relationship, it takes up a lot of your time, which makes you work even harder to get stuff done when you’re on your own.
  2. You bust your ass to maintain self-sufficiency. When you’re in a solid relationship, you know that you can depend on your significant other to fall back on, but you don’t want to because you want his life to be as stress-free as possible. Rather than becoming a crutch, your relationship becomes a motivation to excel at everything you attempt. You want him to see you’re a grown woman capable of handling her crap, not someone he has to baby.
  3. You think more clearly about the future and make actual plans for it. When you were single, you made a lot of plans for the future, but they were much more ambiguous. You were always thinking that you may meet someone at any time and that would inevitably change things. After you find love, your future plans become so much more real because now you have someone to imagine a future with, and that allows you to consider more permanent plans — and to actually put them into action.
  4. You make sure to get your “me time” to recharge. When you’re single, it’s easy to get lonely and fill up your time with endless social events just because being alone gets old. Once you’ve entered into a committed relationship, alone time isn’t as readily available, so you have to make more of an effort to ensure that you get time and space to do your own thing. Prioritizing yourself never goes out of style, and it’s a trademark of independence.
  5. You’re living in the moment, but still keeping a backup plan in place. When you’ve finally bridged the gap from forever alone to happily paired up, it’s really exciting. You can’t help but live in the moment and dream of what this could become. At the same time, however, you know that nothing in life is guaranteed, so you keep your backup plan in place just in case (AKA Plan Independent Chick 2.0).
  6. You’re over trying to impress people. Even if you’re not the crowd-pleasing type, looking for love sometimes requires more effort than we’d like to put out. It’s much more enjoyable to just be yourself regardless of what anyone else thinks, and it’s also empowering. Once you’ve found love, you don’t need to overexert yourself in a desperate attempt to capture someone’s attention because you already have someone’s full attention, and that frees you up to enjoy your life more.
Anna Martin Yonk is a freelance writer and blogger in sunny North Carolina. She loves hanging out with her goofy husband and two rescue dogs and can be found at the beach with a drink in hand whenever possible. You can find her on Instagram @mrsyonkdogmom or on her Facebook page.
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