I knew very early that I didn’t want CJ to be secretly unhappy.

It would have been easy.

Give her the successful career, the beautiful apartment, the money and the independence, then reveal that underneath all of it she goes home every night desperately lonely and wondering what it was all for.

No.

CJ likes her life.

She worked bloody hard for it.

That changes the romance considerably.

There is a familiar idea that love arrives to fill a gap. Somebody is lonely, stuck, dissatisfied or simply waiting, and then another person appears and suddenly life begins moving in the right direction.

Sometimes that is exactly how life works.

But sometimes you are already happy.

Then somebody appears anyway.

I find that much more interesting.

Because what do you do with a person you don’t need?

CJ isn’t looking for somebody to solve anything.

She doesn’t need financial security. She doesn’t need social status. She doesn’t need somebody to introduce her to an exciting world beyond her own because her own world is already pretty exciting.

She has work she cares about.

She has close friends.

She travels.

She has music.

She has a home she loves.

She has the freedom to decide on a Friday afternoon that she wants to do something and simply do it.

There is a luxury in that which has nothing to do with money.

Nobody is waiting for an explanation.

Nobody else’s calendar needs checking.

Nobody has left wet towels somewhere inexplicable.

You become used to the ease of belonging entirely to yourself.

Then a relationship arrives and starts asking small questions.

Nothing dramatic at first.

What are you doing tonight?

When will I see you?

Where shall we go?

Do you want me to come?

Perfectly ordinary questions, unless you’ve spent years arranging your life without needing to answer them.

Suddenly another person’s time matters.

Their preferences matter.

Their absence matters.

That is where independence becomes interesting.

Not when somebody tries to take it away from you, but when you voluntarily begin giving another person consideration.

There is a world of difference between the two.

CJ would fight very hard against anybody attempting to control her life.

But what happens when nobody is asking her to surrender anything?

What happens when she simply starts wanting somebody there?

That is harder.

You can’t rebel against your own desire quite as effectively.

You can try.

CJ does quite a lot of trying.

But there is something disarming about discovering that another person has become important without asking permission first.

I think this becomes particularly interesting as we get older because we have more to protect.

Not necessarily emotionally. Practically.

There is more life already in place.

You have routines.

Friendships.

Career responsibilities.

Perhaps children, although CJ doesn’t.

Homes.

Habits.

You know how you like to spend Sunday morning.

You have become accustomed to the temperature of your own life.

A relationship isn’t entering an empty room.

It is walking into one that has already been furnished.

Where does it sit?

What gets moved?

What stays exactly where it is?

I like that negotiation.

And I wanted No Names, No Titles to respect the life CJ had before Chase rather than treating it as the waiting room for the romance.

Her friendships don’t become irrelevant when he appears.

Her career doesn’t suddenly seem cold or meaningless.

Her independence isn’t revealed to have been a defence against secretly wanting the traditional life she denied herself.

She genuinely values what she built.

Love has to exist alongside it.

The same is true for Chase.

He has his own life, his own friends, his own responsibilities and his own history. He isn’t sitting around waiting for CJ either.

That matters because neither of them can become the other’s entire world.

I wouldn’t want them to.

There is something suffocating about the idea that romantic love should swallow every other part of a person’s identity.

I don’t think the strongest relationships make the rest of life smaller.

They add to it.

The interesting question is whether you can let somebody become important without handing them ownership of everything else.

Can you love somebody and remain yourself?

Can you be independent without keeping them permanently at arm’s length?

Can you make room without moving out of your own life?

Those questions became part of CJ almost without me intending them to.

Perhaps because she would never tolerate the conventional answer.

She isn’t going to become softer, smaller or less ambitious so the relationship can work.

Chase wouldn’t want her to.

That was important too.

He isn’t attracted to an edited version of CJ. The qualities that make her difficult are often sitting right beside the qualities he likes most.

Her independence can frustrate him.

It’s also one of the reasons he finds her compelling.

Her privacy can drive him mad.

But the fact that she doesn’t hand herself indiscriminately to everybody is part of what makes gaining her trust matter.

You can’t ask somebody to remain the person you fell for while simultaneously removing all the inconvenient parts.

People don’t work that way.

Neither does love.

So No Names, No Titles isn’t really interested in whether CJ can learn to live without independence.

She shouldn’t.

The more interesting question is whether independence has enough room inside it for intimacy.

Whether a life can be complete and still have space to become larger.

And whether loving your life might actually make choosing another person more meaningful, not less.

Because if you are already happy, already secure and already capable of standing on your own, staying isn’t something you have to do.

It’s something you choose.