Shecoria | Essays on Becoming

Some people have their first experience life sharing as early as 14. Some people probably don’t have one until they’re in their 40s.

Now, for the sake of clarity, and because I’m sure most of you automatically thought of romance, I’ll share with you how I define life sharing.

Life sharing: The act of becoming intertwined with another person enough that you begin coordinating your days, interests, social calendar, routines and even your thoughts around each other. Eventually, you start operating as a “we.”

The “we” part is probably the weakest part of my definition, partially because of its ambiguity, but mainly because feeling like you share an identity with someone is sometimes harder for you to admit than it is for everyone else to see. There is also the fact that, in its simplest form, life sharing doesn’t necessarily come with enough commitment to frame it in a way that feels so serious. You may not think of yourselves as a unit. There might not be a title, promise or expectation that either of you will continue organizing your lives this way. You just do. Somewhere along the way, another person starts factoring into how you spend your time, where you go and what you decide to do. Whether or not you’re comfortable calling yourselves a “we,” your life has already started accounting for them.

Anyways, I was recently reminded of my first life sharing experience, and it made me think about how much my understanding of it has changed over the years.

I met this person at a party when I was a teenager, and then we spent what felt like an endless string of days together afterward. I couldn’t tell you exactly when this stranger became part of my daily routine because it happened so quickly. First, we started coordinating meals. Then it became easier to do our hobbies together. Eventually, I didn’t really want to go to social events without them.

This isn’t one of those horror stories where someone became jealous and possessive. Nobody developed romantic feelings. We just really, really liked being friends.

It was probably the first time in my life that I thought about another person that much.

Before then, I hadn’t even centered my WEEK around another person. So, as you could guess, I hadn’t developed the level of consideration that doing that requires. Luckily, we had the same music taste, the same humor, similar interests and pretty similar needs. There wasn’t much adapting required.

Being together was easy.

But easy isn’t necessarily the same thing as being good at sharing a life.

I pushed boundaries. Sometimes I forgot that they were a person outside of being my friend. Because we did everything together, I started treating their availability like something I could depend on rather than something they were choosing to give me.

Our friendship began to change when they got busier.

I am, by nature, a busy person, and I’ve always been accustomed to most of my relationships revolving around my schedule. Suddenly, that wasn’t happening anymore. We went two weeks without spending time together and, somehow, our friendship never recovered.

A person I had been life sharing with for a year and a half became an acquaintance after a measly two weeks of distance.

That sounds absurd until I think about what actually happened during those two weeks.

We weren’t just busy. We were prideful.

Neither of us wanted to be the person who cared more. We were both trying to figure out who had done what, who should reach out first and who was more justified in being upset. We started keeping score after spending a year and a half not keeping count at all.

And once you’ve replayed every grievance in your head enough times, it’s surprisingly easy to forget how much joy a relationship brings you.

For a long time, I think I interpreted that friendship ending as evidence that sometimes people just grow apart. I don’t really think that anymore. We had spent so much time being naturally good at being friends that neither of us had learned what to do when being friends required something from us.

My second life sharing experience was almost the polar opposite.

This was not someone I naturally clicked with.

We didn’t always communicate the same way. We didn’t have the same needs. There were things about them that genuinely confused me, and I’m sure there were plenty of things about me that made absolutely no sense to them. Things that felt obvious to me were not obvious to them. Things they considered completely normal sometimes required a full explanation before I could understand their perspective.

If my first experience taught me how easy it could be to build a life around someone, my second taught me how much work it could take to keep someone in it.

Oddly enough, this was the relationship that survived.

One of the biggest reasons was that this person was very adamant about the fact that our relationship wasn’t transactional.

There wasn’t an end goal. There wasn’t some eventual reward we were working toward. Neither of us had anything particularly useful to gain from the other. We had just decided to care about each other.

Apparently, that decision could be reason enough.

This was a surprisingly foreign concept to me.

I was used to thinking good relationships should feel natural. If we’re really compatible, shouldn’t we naturally understand each other? Shouldn’t compromise be relatively easy? Shouldn’t being close mostly just work?

My first life sharing experience felt natural.

My second felt real.

Not because I think difficulty makes a relationship more meaningful. I don’t believe struggling with someone is proof that you care about them more. It felt real because this was the first time I understood that caring about someone could be a decision you continued making even when the relationship wasn’t particularly convenient.

Sometimes I accommodated them more. Sometimes they accommodated me more. Sometimes one of us was difficult. Sometimes one of us needed more patience than the other had planned on giving that day. There wasn’t a constant need to make sure everything came out even.

There was no score.

That taught me what I now think is probably the biggest requirement of life sharing: you both have to care more about each other than you care about being right.

It also changed the way I think about compatibility.

For a long time, I confused compatibility with similarity. We do this all the time. We meet someone who likes the same things, communicates the same way, has the same social habits and sees the world similarly, and think, Oh, we’re so compatible.

Sometimes you are.

Sometimes you’ve just found someone who is easy for you to understand.

Having a lot in common definitely makes life sharing easier. Having the same strengths and joys is wonderful. But having the same weaknesses and lows can be devastating. Similarity can reduce the number of compromises you have to make. Compatibility is more about whether you’re capable of making them when you need to.

There’s a lot of value in pouring into relationships with people who challenge the way you think. You can share a life with someone and see the world differently. Not every disagreement reveals some giant conflict in morals or values. Sometimes another person simply has a brain that works differently than yours.

The difficult part is resisting the urge to “fix” them.

When another person’s life becomes intertwined with yours, their choices affect you more. Suddenly their weird habits aren’t just their weird habits. Their schedule affects your schedule. Their communication style affects your feelings. Their priorities affect your plans. It becomes incredibly tempting to think, If you would just do this the way I do it, everything would be easier.

Maybe it would.

But then you’re not really learning how to share a life with another person. You’re teaching someone how to fit seamlessly into yours.

And even if you resist that urge, there’s another problem: you can be empathetic and self-aware and still be completely wrong about another person’s point of view.

You can spend hours considering their feelings and still misunderstand them.

You can know someone incredibly well and still not know what they’re thinking.

In some ways, knowing someone deeply makes this harder because eventually you stop asking. You think you already know. You know how they usually react. You know what bothers them. You know what they meant by that look. You know why they haven’t called.

Except sometimes you don’t.

Most people aren’t constantly narrating their internal world. And, let’s be real, most of us aren’t completely honest about our feelings unless someone asks us a direct enough question that we can’t wiggle our way around answering it.

So part of sharing a life is remaining curious about someone you’ve already known for years.

I used to think knowing someone meant eventually reaching a point where there wasn’t much left to figure out. Now I think knowing someone means accepting that there will always be something left to ask.

And maybe this is why I’ve started using “life sharing” in the first place.

We have a lot of language for this when it happens romantically. People are building a life together. They’re becoming a unit. They’re merging their lives. We recognize that eventually a romantic relationship can become important enough that another person starts factoring into decisions that technically only belong to you.

We don’t talk about it quite the same way when it happens anywhere else.

Two friends can coordinate their weekends, meals, errands, holidays, hobbies and entire social calendars around each other, and we mostly just say they’re really close.

Obviously, different relationships come with different expectations. I’m not arguing that friendship and romance are interchangeable. I just don’t think the actual work of sharing your life changes as dramatically as the labels make it seem.

You still have to communicate. You still have to compromise. You still have to learn when to accommodate someone and when to let them do their own thing. You still have to figure out how to care about another person’s needs without assuming you understand them perfectly. You still have to decide whether being right is worth whatever distance proving your point might create.

Maybe romance just gives us better language for something people are capable of doing in all kinds of relationships.

And once I stopped thinking about life sharing as something reserved for a partner, I also stopped thinking constant proximity was the best evidence that it was happening.

In my first experience, the amount of time we spent together became evidence of how close we were. Life sharing is built through a million ordinary moments, so I understand why. Eating together. Running errands. Going to the same parties. Sitting in the same room doing completely different things. Eventually, someone’s presence becomes so normal that you stop thinking about how often they’re there.

So when that time disappeared, I thought the closeness had disappeared with it.

I don’t think that anymore.

Maybe one of the stranger parts of life sharing is that the better you get at it, the less you need to share everything.

You can have separate plans, separate friends, separate interests and entire stories the other person wasn’t there for. You can say, “I’m doing this, you can come if you want,” and genuinely be okay with either answer. You can miss each other. You can get busy. You can go two weeks without seeing each other and not spend those two weeks deciding what it means.

Sharing a life isn’t the same thing as sharing every part of it.

I used to measure closeness by how much of someone’s life included me. Now, I’m much more interested in what happens when it doesn’t.

Do we still care about the stories the other person comes back with? Can we spend time apart without turning distance into evidence that something is wrong? Can another person’s life keep expanding in directions that don’t include us without either of us feeling like the relationship has become less important?

I think that’s a much harder kind of closeness to build.

Maybe that’s also what I was missing when I originally defined life sharing as becoming a “we.”

The “we” isn’t really the interesting part.

You don’t have to do everything together, think the same way or even have a name for what you’ve built. I think life sharing starts much smaller than that. It’s just reaching a point where another person’s life matters enough to affect how you live yours.

And maybe doing it well means knowing that doesn’t require either of you to stop having a life the other person isn’t part of.