Many years ago, I was in a significant relationship in which the other person started doing things that surprised and hurt me. I’ll preserve privacy here so I won’t be concrete, but it was pretty intense. After going through the first wave of reactions – What?! How could you? Are you kidding me?! – I settled down a bit. I had a choice.

This relationship was important to me, and I could see that a lot of what was going through the mind over there was really about the other person and not about me. I began to realize that the freest, strongest, and the most self-respecting thing that I could do was both to tell the person that we were on very thin ice . . . and to choose to love meanwhile.