Why did becoming myself pull me away from the man I loved?

[From my diary]January, 18th 2023I remember how, two years or so after we started to date, I sat at our dining table, and a sudden realization crashed down on me: that I smiled forcedly. Any time we spoke. We were chatting about something completely innocent when I noticed how much I had been pretending, adjusting, imitating, and that for such a long time. My previous boyfriend once told me I had a “poker face”, and I was scared I’d look not friendly enough. … In the coming years, I was like a fruit being peeled off more and more layers, discovering myself, drifting away from my beloved one.This past relationship had quietly formed around a version of me that was performing — smiling on cue, adjusting, imitating — and the more I stopped performing, the less the fit held. Becoming yourself is not always an addition; sometimes it is a subtraction, a peeling away of the accommodations that once made closeness feel possible. I did not stop loving him. I stopped being the person the love had been arranged around, and there was no guarantee the two of us would still match underneath.The crashing and crushing realizationThe realization arrived suddenly, without any transition. I was sitting at our dining table, talking about nothing in particular, when I noticed that my own smile was effortful — that I was holding it up the way you hold up something heavy, and that I had been holding it up for a very long time.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerThe sociologist Arlie Hochschild gave this kind of effort a name in 1983: emotional labor. She distinguished surface acting, where you display a feeling you do not have, from deep acting, where you work yourself into actually feeling it. A forced smile is surface acting in its purest form, and Hochschild’s point was that it is work — real, depleting work, even when no one can see it. I had been doing that work any time we spoke, for years, and had not once registered it as labor. The body keeps the ledger the mind refuses to.Later I remembered doing the same with many other people. That was one of the moments that made me wonder how little I knew about myself.And surface acting does something quieter than tire you, though it tires you too. It stands between you and your own feelings. So much of my attention went into producing the right mood — pleasant, warm, faintly excited — that I lost the thread of whatever I actually felt beneath the production. The performance did not only drain me. It drowned out the very signal it was meant to be sending.Ghosts that order us to smileThe smile had an author, and it was not my ex husband. It was not even the boyfriend quoted in the entry. My previous boyfriend once told me I had a “poker face.” What the entry leaves out is that the line did not surprise me when he said it. It only confirmed something much older.My father used to tell me, when I was a girl, that my face had no expression. I do not know now what he was looking at — whether it was some quiet distress, or simply the face I was born with, or an ordinary child’s seriousness read through the expectation that girls are supposed to be smiley. I have decided not to litigate the face itself. The point was never the face; it was the verdict laid on it, and how early it was laid. So by the time a boyfriend handed me the same phrase years later — and he probably meant little by it; I notice I am quick to excuse the men I have left — he was not introducing an idea. He was reinstalling one.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerThe psychologist Dana Crowley Jack described this kind of internal monitor in her work on self-silencing. She called it the Over-Eye: an internalized, judging observer, usually assembled out of other people’s standards, that watches the authentic self and orders it to comply — to stay pleasant, to mute whatever might read as too much or not nice enough. Mine was assembled in childhood and reinforced by a man I trusted, and then it followed me, intact, to a third person’s table, still issuing its instructions: look softer, look friendlier, do not let the unguarded face show.Good girls are all smiley kidsThe instruction was not even idiosyncratic; it was the standard one handed to women. Marianne LaFrance’s meta-analysis of 162 studies (LaFrance, Hecht and Paluck, 2003) found that women do smile more than men, but that the gap widens sharply when people believe they are being watched and nearly vanishes when they think no one is. The smiling tracks social expectation, not inner weather. LaFrance called it emotion work. My father’s idea that a girl should be sunny was only the household version of a pressure that turns out to be everywhere.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerHere is the part that still unsettles me most. At some point in the marriage I said it out loud — that I thought I was forcing my face — and my husband told me, plainly, that I did not have to smile all the time, that it was all fine. He revoked the order. And it changed nothing. I went on smiling on cue, went on performing, because the Over-Eye does not take instructions from whoever happens to be in the room. The man who could have freed me was not the man who had installed the voice, and the one who installed it was long gone and could not be made to take it back.What a smile was never measuringThere is a deeper error folded into all of this,: a smile is not always a measure of affection. James Gross and Oliver John, studying what they called emotional expressivity in the late 1990s, established that how much feeling a person shows on the outside is a fairly stable trait, and only loosely coupled to how much they feel inside. Expression and experience are separate dials. A low expresser is not a low feeler. A forced smile, then, proves nothing about warmth, and a neutral face disproves nothing either. We assume the quiet, unsmiling person feels less; the research says only that less of it reaches the surface.Where affection actually lives, according to the communication scholar Kory Floyd and his affection exchange theory, is spread across at least three channels: words (I love you, praise, reassurance), direct nonverbal acts (touch, holding, closeness), and supportive behaviors (doing things for someone, showing up, getting involved in the practical work of a life). Relationship researchers reviewing the popular idea of “love languages” (Impett, Park and Muise, 2024) reached a compatible conclusion — that people value the whole range of these expressions rather than one true channel, and that love is less a single language to be matched than a balanced diet. None of those channels is the face. I had spent years guarding the one doorway affection does not actually use, terrified that a slack mouth would betray a cold heart, when the warmth — mine and his — was coming and going through entirely different doors.Me, the onionFunnily, my original family name (given to me by my father), sounds similar to the Russian word for “onion”, and “onion” was the one of the names I was teased by at school. That’s why the metaphor: a fruit being peeled off more and more layers, discovering myself, drifting away from my beloved one. And peeling onions always makes you cry …It is worth noticing that the metaphor is one of subtraction. I do not describe growing, or adding, or blooming. I describe layers coming off — and underneath them, both a self I was discovering and a distance I was opening.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerThe pediatrician and analyst Donald Winnicott drew a line, in 1960, between what he called the false self and the true self. The false self is a facade built early and maintained to meet the expectations of others; it is accommodating, watchful, good at being whatever a situation requires. The true self is the spontaneous, unmanaged one underneath. There is a small relief buried in the distinction: the accommodating self is not a freak’s invention. It is one of the most ordinary things a person builds, and most of us are running some version of it. Whatever I had been doing at that table, I had not been doing something strange. I had been doing something nearly universal, and only just catching myself at it.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerThe forced smile, the adjusting, the imitating — those were the false self doing its competent work. The peeling was the true self surfacing.Why a true self does not always seal the marriageThere is a version of this story in the research where it ends well. Stephen Drigotas and Caryl Rusbult, with their colleagues, named it the Michelangelo phenomenon in 1999, after the sculptor’s idea that the figure is already sleeping inside the stone and the artist only releases it. In a good relationship, they found, a partner perceives the self you are growing toward and behaves in ways that affirm it, and that affirmation actually helps you become it, while drawing the two of you closer. The chisel can be loving.But the theory has a sharper edge, and it fits my case better. The sculpting only affirms when the partner’s image of who you are becoming matches the self that is actually surfacing. When the figure emerging from the stone is not the one the partner had been carving toward — not the self they expected to release — the same devoted attention curdles into something else: surprise, resistance, a quiet failure to recognize you. He was not cruel with the chisel. He was carving faithfully toward a person I turned out not to be becoming. The bond had formed around the layers, not the core, and so the same uncovering that should, in the kinder version, have brought us closer was instead the thing that set us apart. I was not drifting because I had stopped loving him. I was drifting because the person the love had attached to was, layer by layer, ceasing to exist.When one of you becomes someone newThe drift was not only mine. In another entry I have written about how he changed inside the marriage — grew more social, gathered friends, turned outward — while I was moving the opposite way, growing quieter, performing less, especially with him, because I had begun to trust that he could take me unperformed. We were both peeling. We were simply peeling toward different rooms.To a certain extent, how couples weather this comes down to belief. C. R. Knee’s work on implicit theories of relationships (Knee, 1998) separates destiny believers — who hold that two people are either a match or they are not — from growth believers, who hold that a relationship is cultivated over time. When strain appears, destiny believers tend to read it as proof of a hidden mismatch and withdraw, while growth believers treat it as the next thing to work through. A new trait in a partner can land as evidence the whole thing was wrong, or as the next thing to grow around, depending on the belief the reader brings to it.The stakes of getting this right have risen, too. Eli Finkel’s suffocation model (Finkel and colleagues, 2015) traces how the expected purpose of marriage has climbed over generations from survival and safety toward self-expression and personal growth — near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. Marriages that do support a person’s becoming are more fulfilling than the best marriages of earlier eras; but more of them fall short, because help me become who I am is a far harder brief than help me survive the winter. Ours was a self-expression marriage, entered out of want rather than necessity — which is exactly the kind that asks the most and comes apart the most easily.Limitations of this reflectionAt a certain point, the academic literature goes honest and quiet. Researchers have established that disaffirmation and divergence predict a marriage’s decline, but not much about the drift itself — when it begins, how it moves, where it ends. The studies mostly follow couples who stayed; the ones who came apart leave less data behind. The repair this might have needed — tracing the verdict on my face back to whoever first issued it, and destroying it there — is the work couples do in therapy. I cannot do that work now. There is no couple left to bring into the room, only the diary entries, and the slow, dry papers I read in their place.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerThere is one more thing I have to be honest about. When I finally stopped performing, I think I expected it to bring us closer — that opening would invite opening, that he would meet my unguarded face with his own. Perhaps he even tried. But what I felt was not closeness; it was that I was disappointing him. Not as a verdict, and not cruelly — more as a surprise. Late in the relationship, shortly before we married, I had begun introducing him to a person he had never dated. The self he had chosen was being quietly retired, and the one stepping into the frame was someone he had not signed up for.What it doesn’t meanIt does not mean I betrayed him by changing. The entry calls it drifting away, which sounds like negligence, like something I simply let happen. But drift was the shadow side of arrival. I was not leaving him so much as I was finally going somewhere — toward a self that had been folded up for years — and he happened to be standing in the place I was leaving from. There is a contradiction worth sitting with here: the thing that ended the relationship, becoming myself, is the exact thing everyone is told to do. Nobody warns you that it comes with no guarantee the people you love will still fit you on the other side.Nor does it mean he had loved someone who was not real, or that he loved badly. He had loved me through the accommodations, and the accommodations were partly how I had learned to be loved at all. He may well have been offering affection the whole time, in the plainer channels — the touch, the showing up — while I was busy auditing my own face. A love can be entirely genuine, and competently given, and still be arranged around a version of a person that is quietly being set down. When that version goes, what is left is not a fraud exposed, but two people finding out, honestly and too late, whether they still match underneath.Perhaps the question the fruit leaves open is the one I still cannot answer: whether a relationship can survive one of its people quietly becoming someone new.I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS application for journaling through the moments when you realize you have been performing a fake version of yourself for longer than you knew.Thanks for reading Divorced me! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com