Speaker B describes learning to see their partner as an "exclamation point" rather than the center of their life. They pursued friendships and activities for themselves, not to impress anyone, and found their happiness didn't depend on the relationship.
If I were to ask you.
For me, the entire first summer we started dating, I remember always saying to my coworkers and my friends and my family, like, who had seen pictures of us, and it was just like, I have a really great life right now. And he is just an exclamation point on that life. So if I take away that exclamation point, I still have a great life to fall back into. And I stopped, like, looking, like, stopped going out with the intention of, like, maybe someone's here. Maybe I started going out because I wanted to be hanging out with, like, my roommate. I wanted to hang out with my friends. I wanted to the experiences I had been always kind of like searching for a man with, like, started to become about me.
