He Was Afraid of Missing Out: How Fear of Life Passing By Can Destroy a Relationship

A reflective story about a relationship driven by fear of missing out, emotional imbalance, and the struggle between freedom and stability. Explore how the need to “catch up on life” can impact love and connection. In a relationship, we are sometimes “out there” and sometimes “in here,” and depending on what we are experiencing at a given moment, we try to find some kind of balance. We try to attract into our lives, in greater amounts, the things that were once taken away from us—or that we ourselves denied ourselves—and we try, in some way, to ease our hunger for life. – One of the great loves of my life had just come out of a seven-year relationship that had deeply affected him, and because of that he had an extraordinary longing for freedom, spontaneity, adventure, experiences—in short, for everything he had had very little of during his marriage – a friend of mine tells me. I understood, of course I understood what it was about, and I tried to be a good partner in it, but such a situation cannot be sustained indefinitely, especially not if you yourself have had a fundamentally good and happy life until then.

It was this insane pursuit of experiences that ended our relationship – she says – the fact that there was never any time to rest. We always had to go somewhere, chase pleasure, go from party to party, and make up for everything that had been missing in the past years. He was constantly afraid of missing out on something—that there would be a party he wouldn’t attend, a movie he wouldn’t see, or a social gathering he would be left out of. He was terrified that he would waste more years, months, or even a single minute of his precious life. And it was impossible to explain to him that in normal circumstances people do not have an urge to consume life at such an extreme pace—or if they do, they do so consciously and in moderation. Today I know—or at least I think I know—that he simply needed to go to the other extreme, just as he had done with his marriage, so that he could eventually find his center. But I couldn’t wait for that. In the end, he would say to me: be glad that you can be here with me, right now, and I cannot guarantee anything beyond that. I accepted it, and after a while I approached the relationship in the same way: I was relaxed, flexible, and as long as it felt good for me, I stayed; when it didn’t, I moved on. You might now think this was not the best relationship of my life, or not what a woman would fundamentally want—but you would be wrong – she says. It was good to experience all that madness with him! It was good, just for a year and no longer, to step out of the overly serious, rule-bound world of relationships, and then, filled with all those experiences I gained beside him, to move on and continue my life in a so-called classic, balanced relationship. If I’m honest, I also rested in that relationship—just in a different way. — Agatha Seymour