No one hands you a document to sign, on your wedding day, agreeing to become less than you are.

It happens gradually, in a thousand small accommodations, each of which seems reasonable on its own.

You learn that your competence makes your mother-in-law prickly, so you stop demonstrating it.

You learn that your professional confidence reads, to your husband, as a challenge, so you soften it.

You learn which of your opinions cause friction and you begin, quietly, to stop having them out loud.

And one accommodation at a time, to keep a peace that turns out to have been a fiction all along, you file away the sharpest and most capable parts of yourself, until one day you look up and realize that the formidable professional who walked into the marriage has been almost entirely replaced by a careful, pleasant, diminished woman who exists mainly to not cause trouble.