Would you like to help me save the world?

### The disappearing partner

There is a specific failure mode where one person, often the more anxious or more historically accommodating one, slowly disappears inside the relationship. It happens by inches. You stop ordering what you wanted. You stop suggesting the movie. You learn their preferences so well that you preempt them. You become, in your own life, a kind of staff member to the bond. From the outside this looks like a good partner. From the inside it is a loss of contact with yourself, and eventually with them — because the person they are now with is a strategy, not a self. The exit from this is not a fight. It is the slower work of noticing, in real time, the small moments where you bury a preference, and choosing once a day to surface it instead. Not as confrontation. As data. "Actually, I'd rather the other place." That is the whole sentence.