The Things That Fell Off: The Need to Be Liked
So, for a long time, I believed that being liked was a quiet form of success.
Not popularity in the loud, obvious sense. I never needed to be the center of attention or the most admired person in the room. I honestly avoid being noticed at all costs. The stereotypical wallflower for sure. But I did want people to feel comfortable around me. I wanted to be someone who was easy to be with. Easy to talk to. Easy to trust.
And in many ways, that desire was rooted in good things.
Kindness.
Empathy.
A genuine interest in other people.
But over time, something subtle happened.
Without realizing it, I began to measure my safety by how comfortable people felt around me.
If someone liked me, things were stable.
If someone seemed distant, irritated, or uncomfortable, I assumed I had done something wrong.
So I paid attention. I learned how to read rooms quickly. I learned which parts of my personality landed well and which parts created tension. I learned when to lean in and when to pull back.
Most of all, I learned how to be agreeable.
Not dishonest.
Just agreeable enough to keep relationships smooth.
At the time, I believed this was a sign of maturity. I believed it was the mark of someone who knew how to get along with others. And in many situations, it probably was.
But underneath it all was a quiet fear I didn’t fully recognize.
The fear that if people didn’t like me, something about me must be flawed… wrong.
Divorce complicated that belief in ways I wasn’t prepared for.
Because when a marriage ends, there are inevitably people who stop liking you.
It’s just part of it. A really sucky part for sure.
And not necessarily because of something you did wrong. Not necessarily because they know the full story.
Sometimes it’s simply because your life no longer fits inside the narrative they were comfortable with.
And no matter how carefully you handle things, no matter how graciously you try to move forward, there will be people who decide they prefer a version of the story where you are easier to categorize.
At first, that realization felt deeply unsettling.
For someone who had spent years quietly managing relationships, the idea that some people might simply decide they didn’t like me anymore felt like a personal failure.
I wanted to fix it.
I wanted to explain things better. Clarify intentions. Restore whatever had shifted when it came to their perceptions of me.
But slowly, I began to understand something that changed the way I saw those moments.
Not every relationship is built to survive your growth.
Read that part again. Go on.
Some connections are quietly dependent on the version of you that existed before you began telling the truth about your life.
The version of you who kept the peace.
The version of you who softened your opinions.
The version of you who worked hard to remain agreeable.
When that version begins to change, the relationship sometimes changes with it.
And that doesn’t always mean someone has done something wrong.
It simply means the dynamic was built around a version of you that no longer exists.
Learning to live with that reality was uncomfortable at first.
Because when you stop organizing your life around being liked, you have to face a different question:
Who are you willing to be, even if it costs you approval?
Over time, the answer became clearer.
I still value kindness. I still care deeply about how my presence affects other people. I still believe relationships matter.
But I no longer believe that being liked by everyone is the measure of whether I am living honestly.
Sometimes honesty will cost you approval.
Sometimes growth will change how people see you.
And sometimes the relationships that remain after those shifts are the ones that were never dependent on your smallness to begin with.
The need to be liked was one of the quiet instincts that slowly fell away in the years after my divorce.
What replaced it wasn’t indifference.
It was something a lot steadier.
The freedom to be truly known - even if that means not being liked by everyone along the way.