I am obsessed with the new real estate craze – tiny houses. As someone who loved living, to my own amazement, in a tiny studio apartment for a year, there is something beautifully simple about a space you can simplify, organize, and contain enough to clean in under an hour. 
Apparently, I’m not alone in this fascination, as HGTV has a show specifically aimed at us-organization, simple living obsessed – Tiny House Hunters.
I’ve been thinking about my old studio apartment lately, and trying to understand my sentimentality around it. Am I romanticizing what it was like to live alone? To be single? For being responsible for less than 500 square feet? After some time, it occurred to me that what has me remembering my apartment with such fondness is neither romanticizing the past or stressing over the present. What I loved the most about that tiny apartment is that in its smallness I felt safe. I felt like I could manage and control what happened, where things went, how things looked, and the overall energy of that space. It was exactly what I needed at the time – after a period of two rather chaotic, stressful years came to an abrupt ending with a punch in the arm, I cozied up in that tiny apartment and did what all the king’s horsemen and all the king’s men couldn’t do – I found me again and put me back together.
This gets me thinking about dating and the ways I tried to make myself safe in love. The ways I played small in order to try to manage some situation that was only 50% mine.
How, by losing myself, and not speaking up on my own behalf I did in fact become smaller and smaller, until one day I didn’t recognize myself. And then was surprised when I was small to whoever I was dating as well. Part of what my safe, cozy little studio allowed me to do was to begin to understand why I ever thought I had to make myself small in dating in the first place, and I began practicing dating while hanging onto me. I wrote about this process and about lessons I learned in my book, Girls’ Guide to Healthy Dating: Between the Breakup and the Next U-Haul.
After 20 years of dating in cycles of getting lost then putting Humpty back together again, I have learned that while love may never feel as controllable as that tiny studio apartment, I realized that with one phrase I could find some safety in the knowing I don’t have to play small ever again. The biggest lesson of all became the very last line in my book.
Stop looking for her. Look for you.
How have you played small in relationships? How did you learn to hang onto you in dating? I would love to hear from you.