Let’s talk about a grief almost nobody says out loud, because saying it feels a little silly: you only get to live the life you actually live.
All of us are complex. We have a lot of needs, a lot of desires, a lot of different parts pulling in different directions, and not all of them get to be fully expressed in the limited time we have here. Choosing one path means the other paths go unlived.
The part nobody says out loud
As a couples therapist, I get an interesting window into this one, because it’s almost entirely subconscious. I rarely hear anyone say it plainly. The most self-aware get close: I kind of want two things, and I can’t have them both. Mostly it shows up sideways, as restlessness, as a low hum of dissatisfaction, as a decision that never quite gets made.
What’s underneath is the discomfort of having to truly choose and not get to have it all. And the brain does not like that. So it bargains.
Every path is still a path
Take the way the idea of monogamy has come into question over the last decade or so: a whole generation asking whether that’s really the path they want. Sometimes what’s moving underneath that question is a hope of not having to choose at all.
But no matter what you choose, you’re still choosing. If you have an affair, you don’t also get the path where you didn’t have an affair. If you open your relationship, you’re choosing the life of an open relationship, even if it’s only for a season, rather than the path of one committed person for the rest of your life. Wherever your values land on that spectrum, the decision is still a decision.
Every one of those paths gives you something and costs you something, and picking one means not picking the other. Maybe what you give up is fitting neatly into a cultural norm. Maybe it’s being completely understood. Maybe it’s having your choices not be judged. Those may well be worth it to you. They’re still losses, and they still come with the thing you chose.
Choosing by not choosing
The sneakiest bargain is never making a conscious choice at all. We react out of the limbic brain, we end up in a set of circumstances, and then the circumstances quietly write the path for us. No grief required, because on paper nothing was ever chosen.
Regulating your nervous system is what makes the other option available. As that work goes on, you start to refine what you actually value most, and those values are what dictate the choices you make on purpose. Which also means they eliminate the rest. Sometimes the rest includes things you genuinely wanted.
Grief is not an identity story
There’s a difference between grieving something and building a story about yourself out of it. I’m the one who always sacrifices. I’m a bad person for choosing this. I’m a bad person for not choosing that. Those stories feel like processing, but they keep you busy instead of letting anything move.
Grief is simpler than that, and harder. It’s being able to sit with the lack, and the loss, and let it hurt and suck for a minute. Then get up and go live the life you’re choosing.
The corner of your mind where the other life stays alive
Fantasy is the other way we bargain. You make the real choice in real life, and then, in some corner of your mind, you keep living out the other version. It’s an adaptive way to cope.
But the body treats it as repression, because you’re keeping a reality alive without ever grieving it — a whole other life suspended, running quietly in the background. And as long as you keep it suspended, you keep the struggle around it alive too.
What changes things is letting your body actually process it. I don’t get to have this. And that sucks. That really is sad. Let that exist. It gets to exist. On the other side of it, you get to fully embrace and live, in every way, the reality you’re choosing, the one you wanted most.
Related reading
- Grieving a Relationship No One Called a Loss
- “My Childhood Was Stolen”
- Blending a Family Takes Longer Than Anyone Tells You
If you’ve been keeping another life on standby
If something in here landed, you’re not doing life wrong. You’re carrying a loss that never got named as one. Grief counseling is a good place to let the unlived version finally be grieved, so the life you actually have stops competing with it.
You’re allowed to want more than one life and only get one. Both are true at the same time.
Greater House Counseling, Arlington, TX and telehealth across Texas. Schedule an appointment.
