Has grief made me into a people pleaser?

How has your grief impacted your relationships?

Jul 15, 2024

“There are no forever people, only now people.”

These words have been circling my head, flip-flopping through and tumbling around ever since I read them, on my small, blue-lit screen, right before bed last night. They make my heart thump in a way that I can’t identify. Do I find them comforting? Or uncomfortable? What I do know is: I feel like I need them, right now, at this stage of my life, but I can’t figure out why, or how I am going to use them.

“There are no forever people, only now people.”

Is this true? I think it is true. But I also think, no, I don’t like it. It’s not true.

When I stood under a floral arch, the last of summer’s wasps buzzing around my bouquet, I didn’t vow to my husband ‘forever.’ I don’t think we should, particularly when it comes to marriage, be telling people that forever is the only mark of a successful relationship. I think you’re successful if you recognise that someone isn’t making you happy anymore, I think you’re successful if you let someone be who they want to be, and if that involves letting them go, then sometimes that’s what’s right. Even when that decision stings, even when it scalds.

I think knowing this is why - 19 years after I first laid eyes on him, bantering behind the bar – we are still happy together. I don’t push him to be someone he’s not, and he doesn’t push me to be someone I’m not. We allow each other to change, rather than clinging onto the ‘forever’ of who we once were.

“There are no forever people, only now people.”

It was given as advice: Jemima Kirke, on one of her Instagram Ask-Me-Anythings, said it to a reader who was questioning whether their current boyfriend would be forever. I think it’s good advice, in this instance, we shouldn’t tie ourselves in knots wondering what the future lies, when we have no idea. We can only trust in the now, and how people make us feel in the now. Do they make us feel good now? Then lean into that. If they don’t then lean back, let them drift away.

It is, however, not advice I necessarily follow.

Lately, when I meet new people, I find myself analysing how long they might stay in my life. I want them to know everything about me, from the trip I took to Tokyo last year, all the way back to where the scar on my right knee came from, how I can still remember the pattern the blood and the gravel made across it, as I, 11-years-old, skidded across the ground. I have this craving to turn everyone into stone, to make everyone surrounding me, forever. I figure if they get to know all of me, fast, then I can almost fast-forward a connection that will last a lifetime.

I’ve also noticed that I contort myself into the mirror-image of what I expect another person wants from me. I can switch masks, stories, reactions depending on who I am with, and what I predict they need in that very moment.

This is, I believe, a skill. But it’s not necessarily one that I am proud of. How is it that I can feel so strongly, so rationally, that the concept of ‘forever’ is a damaging one to relationships, while, at the same time, wanting to cling, so soapy-fingered, onto people I have only just met? People for whom I know very little about? People who have not shown themselves to me? Who I don’t know yet are going to be worthy of my time, of my attention?

I shouldn’t have to contort myself to be liked… and yet, I do, all the time. I feel panicky if I can feel someone’s attention pulling itself away from me, if I can feel that they don’t like me as much as I wish they would.

It’s something I’m working on; this need to not just be liked but loved. I would list some examples, of times I’ve been proud of myself for not doing that, for not pouring energy into those who don’t deserve it, but I fear it would be me trying to prove something, to make you reward me some sort of gold-star sticker when, really, the only person I should be trying to get that sticker off is myself.

What I can reflect on, as part of this self-examination, is where it all comes from. I have come, over time, to accept that losing someone close to you, suddenly*, rocks your foundations. It turns what was once solid, into jelly. Each step forward is now like walking across a bouncy castle, it’s unstable and untrustworthy.

For so long, I used to stick my fingers in my ears and yell la-la-la to this concept. To the fact that my mum’s death, happening when I was 19, could or would impact all of the years that stretched before me. No, I’d learn from it. I’d move on. I’d feel the sadness. I’d let go of the sadness.

But that’s now how it worked. That’s not how it works. It’s just that the impact of loss has impacted my relationships in a way that I didn’t expect and that I couldn’t recognise.

“There are no forever people, only now people.”

I was (and I still am), terrified of feeling pain that raw. Of having something happen that will take over my very-being, with such an insurmountable force, that I will still feel its reverberations for decades to come.

Yet, I also know, that it’s inevitable. That everyone we have in our lives, we will, at some point, lose. Or… they will lose us. I thought, though, that my fear was only to do with death. My frantic health anxiety, and the way I would search news clippings, for stabbings in Soho, London cyclists under lorries or transphobic attacks in Edinburgh, whenever my phone went silent.

I can see now, I’ve also been terrified of losing people to the other inevitabilities. To the fork roads of life; when they choose one path and you choose another, but even, with more random acquaintances, the passing of time: how you can meet someone who would be a perfect friend (or in other circumstances) lover, but your clocks simply don’t line up. Often it’s not that people don’t want to like, or love us, it’s just that, in that very moment in time, they can’t… or we can’t. Yet I try to thwart this by pushing a performance of a person onto them, forcing a friendship that fate has decided shouldn’t exist.

There is another reaction, to this terror. I’ve just come off a call with someone (a celebrity) for a project I am currently working on. One of the questions I asked her was: “how do you identify who you let into your life? How do you identify if someone is going to be good for you?”

She began to speak about how she’s very cautious when it comes to letting new people into her life, but has, recently begun to recognise that may be a response to what has happened to her in the past. That, in an effort to protect herself, she is actually harming herself.

I knew that this happened, that people, so as to avoid the hurt of loss again, will shut themselves off. Say no to love, say no to flinging themselves in, say no to allowing anyone to get close to them. Because I wasn’t doing this, in fact, because I was doing the very opposite, I reasoned that I had successfully avoided the reverberations of my very own tragedy. I had worked out just fine.

But this manic collection of people, even though it has brought such joy into my life, I can now recognise is my very own form of protection. If the whole world loves me, if I make everyone into a forever person then, when I do lose someone I love, then I won’t feel the pain as much. The others will cushion the blow.

They won’t.

As I approach the end of my 30s, this inevitability, that we lose the ones we love, is gaining more focus. It is both common, but also very unusual, to lose someone young, like I did. It was a gruesome practice for what lies ahead. I am now witnessing, at a frequency I have never felt before, just how fragile life and relationships are. Not just deaths, but also fall-outs, divorces, the splintering of lives… it all contributes to this reality that the people you thought were forever… may not be.

And, the more this reality becomes clearer, the more I can recognise that this ‘failsafe’ technique of mine won’t work. Love and friendship isn’t a collectors game, you can’t just slot out one person and replace them with another. If you could, the relationships we had wouldn’t be so valuable. I may want to turn the random people I meet, at festivals, in beer gardens, into forever people instantly for insurance, but I can’t. I don’t feel terror at the thought of losing them because unlike my husband and my best friends, we aren’t tied tightly together, by our experiences, by the fact we grew together.

“There are no forever people, only now people.”

I worry if I leant into this too much, the idea of the now people, would overtake my need to nurture the people who have been in my life for almost forever. I have friendships that span over three decades and, in the past, my pursuit for all things shiny and new has led me to neglect that. If I focus too much on the now, I might not build on, if not the forever, but the lengthy, the nourishing.

Yet, I have also made new friends over the past few years who I hold so close, who I’d hate to lose. I don’t want to turn away from that side of me, the side that can see how full this world is of wonderful people, and how enriching it would be to know them. Even if some of that desire is also a false protection mechanism.

A child on the street below, just pulled me from my thoughts, singing, squeakily, “you, you, you, you’ll stay in my heart forever.” But, perhaps that child hasn’t pulled me from my thoughts, but clarified them…

Because maybe the key to it all is recognising that yes, not everyone I meet will be in my life forever. But they will be (and sorry this is cheesy, the song made me this way) in my heart forever.

I have lost so much love in my life. There are those who I have lost through drifting apart, and from circumstance, times when either fate, or ourselves, recognised that now wasn’t the right time for our friendship to flourish. But when I think of them, I do still smile. They do remain in my heart forever, floating in and out, when a memory surfaces or a childhood scent floats in the wind.

Then there are the people like mum, who didn’t drift from me, but were pulled, violently away. When I think of them, the smile will always be tinged with pain, the mark they made too deep to ever repair. But that pain is an indicator of our joy together, of how much they meant to me.

There are past people, there are now people and yes, there are forever people. Those who will always remain within us, whether they’re physically here or not.

I just need to learn, amidst all the pain of the past, who to hold onto, and who it’s OK to let slip away. But, in an uncertain world, with no real answers to be found, that’s a lot easier said than done.

As I continued to flick through Jemima’s AMA, she answered another question, simply and honestly…

“If you could find out the answer to one unsolved mystery, what would it be?”

“What is going to happen.”

If only…

Thank you so much for reading! I’d absolutely love to know your thoughts on this, how has your past influenced how you behave in your present day relationships?

Crocuses in the snow

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