All the Times You Said “I’m Cool With It” and Weren’t

He brings it up on a Sunday morning, still in bed, with the coffee between you. He says he's been reading about it, and he thinks you are both evolved enough to try an open relationship. He says it lightly, the way people say things they have practised in their head. You feel something drop in your stomach, and at the same time you hear yourself laugh and say, “Sure, why not. I’m cool with it.”

You were not cool with it. You were scared of looking uncool, which is a very different thing.

Maybe your story is not that one. Maybe it is the night your friend asked if you still liked him, and you said you didn’t care anymore, and two weeks later you watched her kiss him at a party and had to smile because you had given her permission. Maybe it is the Friday your boss asked who could take the extra project, and your hand went up before you had even looked at your calendar, because being the one who always says yes felt like the only way to be seen. Or maybe it is quieter than all of these. Maybe it is years of saying yes to being the perfect wife, the perfect mother and the perfect woman, while your own needs waited outside the door like a guest nobody remembered to invite in.

Every one of these moments has the same shape. Someone asks, and before we have checked with ourselves, the yes is already out of our mouth.

The yes that comes too fast

A few weeks ago I wrote about the woman who says “I don’t know what I want,” and about the voice inside her that explains everything so well that the voice that knows never gets a turn. This is where that explaining voice does its best work. It is fast. It knows what a good friend says, what a cool girlfriend says and what a reliable employee says. It answers for us so smoothly that we don’t notice we never really answered.

But the body always answers first, in the time it takes to breathe once. The stomach tightens, the jaw sets, the shoulders rise a little toward the ears, and the breath stops for a second. That is a no. We just learned to talk over it.

Here is the part nobody tells us. A yes that skips your body does not disappear. It is a no in disguise, and a no in disguise always finds its way out. It comes out as the headache on the day of the thing you agreed to, or as being twenty minutes late again. It comes out as the cold you catch the week of the big deadline, the sharp words about the dishes that are not really about the dishes, and the way you slowly stop answering her messages without knowing why. It comes out as that heavy Sunday night feeling you call tiredness because you have no better name for it.

The open relationship does not end the night he goes on his first date. It ends slowly, in all the small ways you punish him for a yes you gave him yourself. The friendship does not end with the kiss. It ends with the resentment you never said out loud.

Where we learned it

Most of us did not choose this. We inherited it. For many of the women before us, no was not a safe word to say. Yes kept the peace in the house, yes kept love close, and yes kept a roof over the children. Our grandmothers rarely had the luxury of checking how something felt before they agreed to it, and our mothers learned from them that a good woman answers before the question is even finished.

So we became very good at it. We were praised for being easy, for being low maintenance, for being the girl who goes with the flow. We learned that our value lived in how much we could carry without complaining. Nobody taught us that a yes can only be generous when it is true.

In my twenties, I put myself in situations that ended up hurting my feelings, just to play it cool, to be the “open-minded” girlfriend and to be liked by everyone. Later on, I learned that being cool has nothing to do with leaving your limits and vulnerabilities unspoken. Being cool is actually standing your ground with clarity and confidence.

Acceptance is not the same as allowance

There is a difference that changes the way we look at every yes. Acceptance means I can be at peace with who you are, what you believe and how you live, even when it is not my way. Allowance means I let what you do step on something that hurts me.

You can accept that your partner is curious about other people and still not allow an arrangement that makes you feel like you are disappearing. You can accept that your boss needs the project done and still not allow your weekends to become the price of being liked. You can accept your children, your partner and your mother completely, and still not allow your own needs to fall to the bottom of the list every single day.

A true no is not the opposite of love. It is what makes your yes believable. When the people in your life know you only say yes when you mean it, your yes becomes a gift instead of a debt.

A small practice for this week

Before you say yes to anything this week, big or small, give yourself one sentence of space: “Let me check and come back to you.” Then place one hand on your belly and take three slow breaths through your nose. Ask your body one simple question: does this open me or does it close me?

You will feel the difference. When the yes is true, there is space inside you, the breath comes easily and you feel a little lighter, maybe even excited. When it is not, something in you pulls back, like a door closing softly. Trust that. If you feel space, say yes with your whole heart. If you feel the door closing, maybe there is a smaller yes that is honest, like a walk instead of the whole afternoon or a coffee instead of the whole weekend. And sometimes the kindest answer is simply "no, thank you." A short no does not need a long explanation.

It will feel strange at first, and the people who are used to your fast yes might be surprised. The ones who truly love you will adjust. The ones who don’t were only in love with your availability.

Querida, your yes is sacred!

We spend so much of our lives trying to be the woman who is fine with everything. But the woman people feel safe with is not the one who agrees to everything. She is the one whose yes and no come from the same place.

The people who love you do not need more of your yes. They need the true one.

Which yes are you still paying for?

Tell me in the comments, or simply answer it for yourself tonight, with one hand on your belly.

Knowing your true yes is clarity. Having a body calm and steady enough to hold it, even when someone is disappointed, is capacity. We need both, and the order matters. In the next few weeks I will share more about a simple way I use to come back to both, which I call the Clarity Codes, and I would love for you to be part of it.

Start with clarity. Create with capacity.

Con cariño, Paula