Identity
The experience of being someone's option has a specific texture: warmth when it is convenient, withdrawal when it is not; presence when your company is desired, absence when other things take precedence; investment in the moments that benefit the other person, disinvestment when the benefit is primarily yours.
It is a particular form of relational diminishment — the more painful because it is not dramatic, not obviously cruel, and because the warmth, when it arrives, is often genuine enough to sustain hope through the periods of absence.
You are consistently the one who adjusts. Your schedule, your needs, and your preferences are the flexible ones. Theirs are the constants around which the arrangement is organised.
The warm and the withdrawn are both real. This is part of what makes the dynamic confusing. The person who treats you as an option is not always cold — they are warm when the circumstances suit them. The warmth is not fabricated. It is just not unconditional.
Your needs are peripheral to the primary concern. Not explicitly dismissed — simply consistently secondary. The arrangement centres around their needs, their availability, their preferences. Yours are accommodated when it is easy to accommodate them.
You find yourself waiting more than you are engaged. Time and attention that is owed to you — but consistently not delivered — is one of the clearest signals that you are not actually a priority.
The intermittent warmth is compelling. As with other forms of intermittent reinforcement, the inconsistency is neurologically binding. The relief and warmth of the moments when you are prioritised make the periods of being an option more bearable — and more sustaining of hope.
The explanation feels necessary. The woman who has been told (implicitly or explicitly) that the other person is simply busy, dealing with difficulty, going through something — the explanation makes tolerance seem like compassion rather than self-abandonment.
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The fear of the alternative. Removing yourself from the arrangement means the loss of even the intermittent warmth. For the woman who has been waiting for the priority to arrive, this loss can feel worse than the continued option status.
The primary thing that changes is internal: you begin to treat yourself as a priority — in the practical sense of giving your time, energy, and presence to situations that consistently warrant them. The external changes (the departure from the arrangement) follow.
What becomes available, in the space created by that departure, is the possibility of a different kind of engagement: one in which you are the point, not the option.
Related: How to Stop Accepting Less Than You Deserve · Self-Respect Is Not a Mood · On Knowing When to Walk Away
You deserve to be chosen consistently, not occasionally. The Good Girl Delusion is the work of building the self-respect to require it.
Nancy GLO
Reflective storyteller & style curator for women becoming
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