"The right person will never force you to compromise your friends"

In this solo episode, host Jemma Sbeg reflects on what she would tell her 21-year-old self after spending her entire twenties documenting her life on this podcast. Listening back to early episodes from 2021—when she was about to move to Sydney, heartbroken, unemployed, and directionless—she realized how much she wished she could offer that younger version some perspective. The result is a list of lessons learned through mistakes she mostly would repeat, but a few she would not.

The relationships that shrink you versus the ones that expand you

The first and most urgent message Sbeg would deliver to her younger self: the right person will never force you to compromise your friends. She describes past relationships that did the opposite of what psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron called "self-expansion theory"—the idea that love should incorporate the best aspects of another person into your own self-concept, resulting in deeper self-knowledge. Instead, those relationships "shrunk me, they made my world smaller, they made me hate myself." A partner who badmouths your friends, uses guilt or the silent treatment to make you prioritize them, or asks you to choose between them and your people is not someone worth staying with.