I just finished watching Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s love story on Hulu. From the first episode, I was absolutely hooked, but it wasn’t the love story that struck me: it was Bessette. 

Bessette, who is portrayed by Sarah Pidgeon in Murphy’s “Love Story,” is immediately characterized as an assured, confident, intelligent and refreshingly independent young woman working in public relations at Calvin Klein. Her work is praised heavily by Klein, and the series synchronizes her with an effortless elegance that is intoxicating and palpable. It’s what Kennedy finds so enchanting about her. Her sense of self. 

Bessette and Kennedy start their relationship off slowly. She is hard to get, refusing her number and telling him that if he wants to reach her, he can try reception at Calvin Klein. When the son of President JFK is twenty minutes late to their first date, she starts to leave the restaurant until he begs her to stay and pleads for her company. She is sure of her worth, herself and her time. She is successful and fulfilled; Kennedy is simply an addition to an already fruitful life that she has cultivated for herself. 

But that’s when things begin to take a sharp turn. When her and Kennedy started being pressured and pestered by paparazzi to an alarming degree, Bessette allowed herself to throw herself entirely into her marriage with Kennedy, clinging to him and their loft as a chamber of anonymity that had been so largely and harshly stripped from her after being connected to Kennedy publicly. 

Bessette proceeded to leave her job at Calvin Klein, entered an interview with Ralph Lauren, which she had to let go of due to the paparazzi invading her privacy when arriving at the exit of her interview, and ended up jobless. Kennedy was the sun and she was the moon constantly orbiting around his legacy, fame and sense of importance. Not leaving their loft, seeing the blue sky and the beauty of connection. Rather, a nocturnal shell of her once vivacious self, subduing to society’s nasty and false analysis of her character.

This is not to say that Bessette was weak by any means. She, though lost, was always the same loving, independent, zestful woman. That doesn’t just go away when you start to lose track of it. It just needs to be nurtured and watered so it can bloom even more exquisitely. 

Today, I see this idea of a “homemaker” and “trad wife” surging on social media. I cannot wait to be a mother, to look into the eyes of my child and feel that first glimpse of animalistic, unconditional, maternal love. But I have dreams. I have aspirations and I have purpose. And so do you. 

This is not to say that your dreams of being a traditional wife and homemaker are less important, wrong or bad. Just because our dreams are different doesn’t mean either is any less important. But Bessette had a career she had built for herself at Calvin Klein. She was styling high-profile red-carpet looks in the middle of New York City, going out with her friends, dancing and lighting up rooms. Her hair was rarely kept or wrangled in, rather natural, her long blonde waves frizzing against the fabric of her oversized coat, her outfits minimal and effortless. She was not curated, calculated or catastrophically conscious of how she fit into the life of a man. She was concerned with how she cultivated the life she had already created. 

I think it is outrageously important for young women and young men to seize their lives while they are young. Travel with their friends to foreign countries and butcher the Duolingo phrases you have tried so hard to perfect before ordering at dinner. Take pictures in a photo booth and clumsily tape them into the journal that you’ve had since you were nineteen and your life was completely different. 

There is no need to bend yourself backwards, contorting your limbs to fit into a heart-shaped box of someone else’s expectations of you. Your authentic self is something that people fall in love with, so it is important to make time for what interests, inspires and drives you when you enter a romantic relationship. Sometimes, love can detrimentally haze our ideas of right and wrong, especially if we are not fulfilled in our worth before entering the relationship. 

This isn’t to say you should perfect yourself before entering a relationship. But, it is to say that you should accept yourself first. When you try to look for that acceptance, as well as your soul in a sole person, you lose the self that has cultivated that soul and morality. You are the only person who is guaranteed to spend your entire life with yourself. Don’t let that person dwindle. No person is guaranteed for your entire life, let alone for your happiness. 

Bessette never let herself go. She just lost herself. But what is lost can always be found if you look hard enough. We are not put on this earth to intertwine our individuality. We love and connect to appreciate and experience our partners, to invite them into what we have already accepted as worthy and singular. 

But remember, experience and connection are fleeting, as is everything on this earth. Humans are all we’ve got, so don’t let us lose ourselves inside of your contorted limbs. Be here, be authentically you and all else will follow suit. Love is not an intermeshing of souls, but rather an intertwinement. You can always unravel if it gets too heavy, but only if you are still following your own thread of life. 

So, you can love intensely and deeply. You can be a traditional homemaker. You can be a breadwinner. You can never settle down, or you could do so tomorrow. All I ask is that you accept that you must always live alongside yourself, even when in a relationship. Do not lose that soul.