Week 3 · The Exit Season · Self-Worth vs Validation
There is a version of joy that isn’t really joy. It’s a relief wearing joy’s clothes. And for a long time, I couldn’t tell the difference.
I learned to tell the difference on a street in Turkey. On a night I used to think of as one of the best of my life until I understood what it actually was.
The Night on the Street
We’d had dinner at a beautiful restaurant. The kind of night that felt cinematic, good food, warm air, a city that had nothing to do with all the complicated history between us. It was maybe nine or ten at night when we stepped outside.
His phone had rung earlier that day. It was his mother.
She’d told him yes.
He came and found me afterwards and told me what she’d said that she’d agreed. That we could move forward. That after everything, me, a Taiwanese Christian who speaks Mandarin; him, an Arab Muslim who speaks Arabic; the two of us communicating entirely in English, a language that belonged to neither of us fully; a relationship his family had every cultural and religious reason to refuse after all of that, his mother had finally given her blessing.
I felt something crack open in my chest.
He picked me up right there on the street. A full princess carry spinning me around, both of us laughing, not caring who was watching, not caring about anything except that specific, overwhelming feeling of: finally. He held me, and I held him, and we laughed like people who had been waiting a very long time to breathe.
And I remember thinking: this is it. This is what we fought for.
But underneath that quiet, easy to miss beneath all that relief, something in me was still not fully settled. The cheating had happened months before. We’d moved past it, or I told myself we had. But even being carried down that street, even laughing that hard, there was a part of me that wasn’t entirely at rest.
I felt relieved. I felt surreal. I felt blessed.
I did not feel completely sure.
And I didn’t stop to ask myself why.
What I Did When We Got Home
When we flew back, life went back to normal. He returned to his routine. I returned to mine.
And I started looking up wedding ceremonies.
I researched venues, and I thought about what the day might look like. I was building quietly, privately, excitedly, an entire future in my imagination. The princess carry was still warm in my memory. His mother had said yes. We were moving toward something real.
But in the middle of all that planning, in moments I didn’t let myself sit with for too long, a question kept surfacing:
Is this actually the life I want?
Not him specifically. Bigger than that. The culture. The expectations. The version of myself I would have to become, or shrink into, to fit into that world. I loved him, I did. But was I building toward something I actually wanted, or toward something that finally felt like enough?
I didn’t answer that question. I went back to looking at venues.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you: when someone finally chooses you fully, publicly, with their family’s blessing after a season of uncertainty and pain, that feeling is so powerful it can drown out almost everything else. Including your own quiet doubts. Including the voice that was trying to tell you something important.
The Mirror
You might know this pattern.
The relationship has been difficult. There have been moments where you weren’t sure if you were wanted, where you felt like a question being considered rather than a person being loved. And then something shifts. He shows up. He chooses you. He does something that says: you matter. I pick you. You are worth it.
And in that moment, you feel a rush that you call love.
But I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it honestly:
Were you in love with him, or were you in love with finally being chosen by him?
Because those are two very different things. And they feel identical in the moment.
We don’t always fall for the person. We fall for what it means when they want us. We fall for the proof it gives us about our worth, our desirability, our value. When someone who has hurt us or withheld from us finally opens their arms, the relief of that moment can feel like the most intense love imaginable.
It isn’t always love. Sometimes it’s just hunger finally being fed.
The Hardest Insight
I was planning a wedding to a man I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to marry.
I want to say that again, clearly, because it took me a long time to let myself acknowledge it.
I wasn’t planning that wedding because I was certain. I was planning it because being chosen after everything, after the cheating, after the months of insecurity, after his family’s initial rejection felt like vindication. Like proof. Like: see, it was worth it. See, I wasn’t wrong to stay.
I needed him to choose me to feel like I hadn’t wasted myself.
That is not a reason to get married. That is not even a reason to stay.
And the anger I feel when I look back isn’t just at him, it’s at the version of me who had a quiet voice asking is this what I want? and kept talking over it. Because I was so focused on being chosen that I forgot to ask whether I was doing any choosing of my own.
You are not a prize to be won at the end of someone’s internal debate. You are not the reward for a man finally getting his life together. You are not vindicated by his eventual yes. You were always worth saying yes to and the fact that it took this long, this much pain, this many compromises to get there should have been the answer.
Something in me knew. I just wasn’t ready to listen.
This Week’s Action Step
Ask yourself this question and be ruthlessly honest:
If he had chosen me fully from the very beginning, no cheating, no family rejection, no months of uncertainty, would I have chosen him?
Sit with that. Don’t answer quickly. Don’t answer the way you think you should.
Because if the answer is I’m not sure that tells you something important. It tells you that what you were fighting for, what you were holding on to, what felt like love, may have been something else. The need to be seen. To be validated. To be proven worthy of choosing.
You were always worthy. The problem was never whether he’d choose you.
The problem was that you forgot to choose yourself.
Before You Go
I want to say something about that night in Turkey.
It was genuinely joyful. The laughter was real. The relief was real. The love in whatever form it existed between us was real.
I’m not here to tell you that none of it mattered, or that you were foolish for feeling what you felt. You weren’t. You were human, and you were hopeful, and hope is never something to be ashamed of.
But hope aimed at the wrong place will always eventually run out of road.
You deserve to be chosen. You deserve to be someone’s first answer, not their eventual compromise. You deserve a love that doesn’t require you to quiet the voice inside you that keeps asking: but is this what I actually want?
That voice is not fear. That voice is wisdom. And it was there the whole time.
Start listening.
Next week: Saying ‘No’ Doesn’t Mean You’re Strong; Holding It Does.