Do not make yourself smaller for a partner.
Do not shrink the effusiveness or radius of your affections.
Do not restrain the exuberance of your passions.
Do not permit them to sever pieces of your social circle, not even if they imagine those people are “competition.”
Do not flatten your mind to make a softer landscape for their ego.
Do not regress your growth because they refuse their own.
Do not accept their conquest of what makes you, you.
You deserve better.
You deserve to live at your full size.
And if you would lay your fetters upon someone you claim to love,
If you would enclose their world in shells and walls
Or drain their verve with jeers and derision
If their success sets your fears racing
If you would blot out the other stars in their sky
Out of fear that they might smile at any light but yours
If you would dim their light until only you can see its glow
Then it shall be their quest
To snap your chains, break your walls
And ascend to the heights that you denied them
Because you thought that love could be possession
And will yet learn that it cannot be a cage
But must always be
A partnership.