Dear Sophie:

You wrote: “My biggest test is thinking I’m missing out”- when you choose Travel, you will be missing out on something good about this relationship. You will miss out on anxiety in the relationship (good thing), but you will also miss out on some good moments. Thing is in the great majority of times, when you choose X you miss out on Y. This is the nature of making choices. If it wasn’t so, it would be easy to choose, every time.

Since you cannot change this fact, let it not paralyze you into inaction- then you miss out on X and Y. Comparing the two choices: Travel and Relationship, at this point, given your challenges with relationships and given the state of this relationship (not that advanced), I would say Travel sounds like the right choice.

Let’s say you have a choice between X: placing your hand in the fire in order to grab a hot potato so to eat it and using a tool to grab the potato and so, not burn our hand. That is a no-brainer easy choice. You miss nothing by using the tool. Let’s say you don’t have a tool- you don’t grab the potato with your hand, you don’t get to eat it. That is an easy choice too because having a burned hand will rain on your parade of eating the potato once you grabbed it. Most choices are not that easy because there is no burning of a hand involved, literally. And so, there will always be something you miss.

anita