Does Being In A Relationship Make Me A Traitor To Myself?

I left the suburbs when I was 18. Fresh out of high school, I tried university for six months and decided to go to Italy instead. I’d had enough of the small town aesthetics and gossip. Sick of always finding out I’d pashed someone’s ex — or current — boyfriend.  Done with being labelled behind my back. Ready to move on from feeling somehow both claustrophobic and isolated. But a few months ago, I moved back. Not to the small city I grew up in, but to the outer suburbs of the big city I live in now. I moved to be with my current boyfriend. 

The suburbs have always made me feel hollow. I can’t pin down exactly why. Maybe it’s the streets — empty of people but crammed with cars. Maybe it’s the distance between everything, where cute cafes and restaurants are out of sight (and unfortunately, out of mind). Maybe it’s the rows of near-identical houses; a uniquely depressing display of just how little imagination many allow themselves. All I know is that away from the lively bustle of well-dressed city folk, pop-up events and the promise of spontaneity — I feel a little piece of myself wilt. It’s not the suburbs’ fault. They’re just not for me. Sometimes I’m not sure Western society is, either. Growing up in Australia with Italian and Egyptian parents, I always felt out of place. Western culture wanted me to be nonchalant. Quiet unless spoken to. Thin, agreeable, and definitely not horny. Straight. Comfortable with labels. 

Perhaps it’s just that I don’t like living inside confines. Not suburbia. Nor capitalism. Or religion. Not a neatly mapped-out career. I want freedom and spontaneity — to explore, to create, to discover new parts of myself. And I guess the suburbs, with their well-manicured predictability, are the antithesis of that. It explains why I’m struggling to be back. People roll their eyes at me as if to say, “this day was always coming”. As though every woman in love eventually ends up here. But what if I don’t need to get married? What if I don’t want kids of my own? What if I’d rather splurge on a European summer than sign a mortgage on an overpriced apartment?

It’s a strange place to be: in a loving, healthy, long-term relationship, yet resisting everything society thinks should come with it. I know this is what “most” people do. But is it what they want? I think a lot of love stories revolve around a desire for companionship, stability, and the promise of building something — a house, a family, a legacy. Ours hasn’t been like that. Both of us came out of long-term relationships that made us question who we were. Neither of us wanted to settle down in the same way again. We fell in love how I’d always dreamt about: instinctively, with a calm knowing that it would work. Despite our nine-year age gap, our different life phases, our pasts — I just knew. And I haven’t questioned it once since our first coffee date.

And I love being in a relationship for the same reasons many of us do. I love having someone who asks about my day every day. I love cooking dinner together at home, having a couple of friends to go on double dates with, and sitting on the couch to watch a movie that makes us both cry. I love that I always have someone to hug me at night. Or to fetch me a hot water bottle when I have my period. The cosy reassurance of having someone who loves you is really goddamn nice. 

But in this new life phase — because I guess that’s what it is? — I find myself caught in an in-between. I’m no longer the single party girl making out with strangers in cocktail bar bathrooms, and I’m okay with that. But I’m also pretty adverse to the concept of “settling down”... in the typical sense. I like the life I’ve built as an independent woman, and I want to keep that part of me alive, because I feel far from done discovering myself.

It’s like this: I’ve found my person, but I don’t want him or our relationship to define my life. We’re told, as women, that our success depends on someone falling in love with us and promising us forever. And people seem to think it’s normal that when we do find that person and form that relationship, it becomes our whole world. But I don’t. He is his own whole person and so am I. Despite building a life together, I still want to feel — and live! — like me. He wants that too. And in my opinion, that’s a healthy romantic relationship. A friend said something recently that stuck with me: “We’re expected to be just one thing. A working woman. A wife. Single, and therefore wild. But why can’t we be more than one thing at a time?”

It made me ask myself: is this identity crisis I’m wrestling with actually just a symptom of a culture that doesn’t allow us to be more than one thing at a time? Two people in a long-term, monogamous relationship living independent lives isn’t a model I’ve seen often. It certainly wasn’t modelled for me. My mum gave up work to be a full-time parent for over two decades. That was her choice, and she says she doesn’t regret it. Maybe it felt like an inherent part of who she is — just like traipsing around the world and following my creative instincts is for me.

But maybe I’ve been giving the suburbs too much airtime. They don’t define me. No one thing does — not my postcode, not my relationship, not my work. Maybe I can still be the woman who sits in wine bars until 2am on a weeknight, who takes the overseas contract job of her dreams, who lives at the centre of it all. And I can also be a loving, committed girlfriend who wears her boyfriend’s t-shirt and snuggles into bed with him in the suburbs. Maybe some days I can be settled and others, I can be wild. I don’t need to completely identify with every single part of my life for it to belong to me.

There’s this unspoken expectation that once you find your person, you can stop searching. As if love is the finish line. And if you’re still curious and independent… people question whether you’re really in love at all. As women, we’ve been fed two opposing narratives: that independence is the ultimate feminine achievement, and that true love is about surrender. But what happens when you want both?

Well, I think you can have it. I’m writing this from one of my best friends’ apartments in London. It feels like my early days in Melbourne — living in a squashy sharehouse, sending messages about after-work wine in the park, swapping photo updates of our days. I just got off the phone with my boyfriend, who I miss immensely and who’s thriving in his business back home. He’s flying over for my birthday soon. I feel more in love and creative than ever. And I think that’s what this piece is really about: finding the people who let you be all of yourself. Even if that doesn’t look like the mainstream version of love or success.