Where Did She Go? How Women Disappear Inside Good Relationships

On the back of a letter in the folder were four words: WHERE DID SHE GO? I spent a morning with old rental contracts and a city map looking for an address. By noon I had seventeen pencil circles and nothing.

Standing at the coffee machine, I understood the question. She wasn't asking where a woman went. She was asking where women go while everyone can still see them.

Sundays

A woman can stay in the same house, answer messages, turn up to birthdays and keep appearing in photographs while whole parts of her become unreachable, first to others and then to herself. Nobody files a missing-person report, because nobody is missing.

The note on one photograph said only: Ask her what she used to do on Sundays.

I'll call her Natalie. She's a physiotherapist at a rehabilitation clinic. For nine years she went to a contemporary dance class every Sunday morning, above a bicycle shop, with the same teacher and the same dozen regulars. Then she met James. He worked long weeks and had his children every other weekend, so the free Sundays were often their only full day together.

She skipped class occasionally. Then often. Then she cancelled the membership, about forty a month, because it seemed silly to pay for something she wasn't using. She meant to find an evening class and never did.

Whose money

When she said she cancelled it "because I was wasting money", I wrote whose money in my margin. James earned much more. "His salary made mine feel like pocket money," she said. "He never said that. I did." The smaller income reaches for the cheapest thing to lose, and a dance class is always the cheapest thing to lose.

Did James ask her to stop? No. Did he dislike it? No. "You're hoping for a man to blame," she told me. Then she said the sentence everything turned on: "I liked being with him more than I liked going to class." At first? "Yes." And later? "Later I forgot to compare."

My Thursday

I recognized it. I used to swim on Thursday evenings, beside an old man doing a very slow backstroke who hated my splashing. I hadn't been since March. No man took Thursday from me. A deadline, a bad week, a good week, and each time the pool quietly lost.

At the start of a relationship, ordinary life loses an election nobody knew was running. That's fine. Infatuation is allowed to be inefficient. The trouble starts when temporary rearrangements harden into how you live.

• What did you do on Sundays before this relationship?
• Which things did you stop because you stopped wanting them, and which did you just forget to compare?
• Did a smaller income decide what got cut?
• What would it take to go back once this month?

A related story, about a marriage where one person kept their hobbies and the other didn't, is in When "We" Eats "I". Natalie's story is chapter nineteen of Become My Papi.

Questions people ask

How do people lose themselves in relationships?

Usually through small, reasonable choices: a skipped class, a cancelled membership, a weekend given to a partner's schedule. Nobody forbids anything, and the habit simply fades.

Why do women often give up hobbies when they fall in love?

In Become My Papi, the lower earner cut the cheapest thing, a dance class, and later forgot to compare it with the time she spent instead.

Where is Natalie's story from?

It is chapter nineteen of Become My Papi by Nora Vellick.