in the absence of spectacle
celebrating independence day
Lately, I’ve been pondering the distinction between independence, interdependence, and a topic I know all too well, codependence. I’ve been thinking about the fine line between being fully responsible for your own life and how in partnership there is sometimes a tendency to slowly merge your identity with another person. Somewhere between those two extremes I want to believe there is a healthier middle, where the individuals who are part of the relationship remain whole unto themselves while also creating something meaningful together. That middle is harder to find than I once believed.
Over the years, I’ve been pretty diligent about working through many of the codependent tendencies I learned early in childhood and carried well into adulthood. Therapy, recovery spaces, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, the journey of being single taught me more about myself than I ever anticipated. They helped me develop reverence for the life I’ve built and for the person I’ve become. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that being single for the last few years has fortified a sense of independence that has been incredibly empowering as a woman. In learning to value my own time and prioritize my own needs, I adopted ways of relating that may be considered unconventional, largely because of the freedom and autonomy this season of life has afforded me.
Of course, that hasn’t come without questions from those closest to me. Some partnered friends and family members have struggled to understand my choices, as though choosing a different path somehow suggests a lack of maturity or certainty. Some of my single friends haven’t fully understood them either, perhaps because they still hold hope that one day they’ll meet their person and ride off into the sunset. I understand that hope because I still believe partnership can be one of life’s greatest teachers. I also know that every lasting relationship, no matter how beautiful, eventually asks something of us. Love in relationship is not sustained by chemistry alone, but by honesty, vulnerability, and the willingness to keep choosing one another long after all the feel good hormones have worn off and novelty fades.
Having married young and become a mother before I truly knew who I was, much of my identity was built around the roles I occupied: wife, mother, career woman… After my divorce, nearing forty, I experienced the strange disorientation of discovering myself for what felt like the first time. There was tremendous freedom in laying down some of the identities I had accumulated and beginning to build a healthier relationship with myself. Ironically, only a couple of years later, I found myself completely merging my identity with someone I loved immensely, someone who struggled with addiction. By the time I realized I was never going to be able to save them, nearly seven years had passed. There I was, single again, but this time fully aware that I had spent much of my forties trying to rescue another person while completely abandoning myself in the process.
Eventually I came to understand that I could no longer where a mask. Not for a relationship. Not for my friends or family. Not even for the version of myself I had convinced myself I was supposed to be. I made a promise that I would never again abandon the woman I had worked so hard to discover. That promise changed the way I move through the world now.
There are still days when I romanticize what partnership might look like with someone who has done, and continues to do, their share of inner work. Someone who values solitude as much as togetherness, who has cultivated a healthy relationship with work, friendship, adventure, and themselves. I still believe that kind of partnership exists. However, I’ve also come to realize that the grass has a way of appearing greener on whichever side we’re not standing.
I’ve met single people who seem profoundly alive and others who seem deeply lonely. I’ve met partnered people whose relationships inspire me, and others who seem to have lost themselves and each other somewhere along the way. None of this is a judgment. If anything, it’s a reminder of how human we all are. Regardless of our relationship status, most of us are still learning how to be honest, how to be vulnerable, how to loosen our grip on control, and how to have the difficult conversations intimacy inevitably requires. Myself included. Which is why I find myself returning to the same questions: What happens when we begin examining the places within ourselves where we hide, control, rescue, or project? What happens when we stop asking whether singleness or partnership is the better life and instead ask whether we’re living honestly and authentically within whichever life we’ve chosen?
Maybe that is what these past several years have been teaching me. What my entire life, up until this point, has been teaching me. If I’m fortunate, I may have twenty-five or thirty summers left, and I don’t want to spend them inauthentically, shrinking, or abandoning myself for the comfort or approval of others. I want to spend them honoring this one precious life I’ve been given.
It has taken me nearly two decades to realize that my life, and certainly my worth, are not predicated on being partnered. That being single doesn’t somehow make me unlovable, nor does being in a relationship make someone whole. What I’ve come to value most is not my relationship status, but my willingness to stay connected to what is honest and true, even when doing so asks me to disappoint expectations, release old identities, or walk a different path than the one I imagined.
We’ve all been conditioned in countless ways to minimize our experience, dismiss what genuinely brings us alive, and accept the love we think we deserve instead of the love that allows us to become more fully ourselves. Maybe “the work” isn’t simply finding someone to share our lives with. Maybe it’s growing into someone we never again have to abandon in order to love or be loved.
These are the questions I find myself pondering as I reflect on independence. I’m learning that the answers to life’s questions rarely arrive all at once, or in the ways we imagine they will. More often, they reveal themselves incrementally, over time. What I’m also discovering, as I continue making my way through this human journey, is that I have not figured it out. I probably never will. What does feel true is that life continually asks me, in any given moment, to remain present long enough to let it teach me what I need to learn. And I have become much better at paying attention and listening. Perhaps that is the kind of independence worth celebrating.
© Alana Foy 2026
