Fluent at not needing anybody
You are fluent at not needing anybody, and it has served you. With the North Node in Libra in the 7th house, both ends of the axis point at the same thing: a partnership you are genuinely inside. You need one person whose absence would actually change your week.
The South Node sits in Aries in the 1st house, so your very sense of self was built out of self-sufficiency. A doubled assignment offers no side door: there is no other arena in which to practise this.
Build one thing that fails without them
Start structurally rather than emotionally: enter something — a project, a household arrangement, a shared commitment — that genuinely cannot proceed if the other person withdraws. Then resist building a private contingency for it. The exposure is the exercise, and a partnership with a hidden escape route is not one. Choose the smallest version you can bear.
The counterparts you have kept at working distance
There are people who have wanted a closer arrangement with you and been met with courteous self-sufficiency: the friend who offered to help, the colleague who wanted to build something, the partner who asked for more. Go back to one of them and take the offer up. Most are still open, and say plainly that you declined it before.
Interdependence is not dependence
You have been treating any structural reliance on another person as a step toward helplessness, which is why every arrangement has an exit built into it. They are different states. Dependence runs in one direction; interdependence runs in two, and it is what allows either of you to attempt anything larger than a single life.
Reverting to the solo version when it gets slow
The retreat has a familiar sound: it will be quicker if I just do it. Every time the shared thing gets difficult you quietly reabsorb it, and the partnership shrinks by one task. Notice the sentence as it arrives and stay in the slow version once. What you are practising is tolerance of another person's pace.
Let the relationship change your plans
Your life continues at full speed alongside a partner rather than around them: your schedule, your decisions, your direction, with company. Let one significant plan be altered by what they want, this year, and say that is why you changed it. Being visibly affected is what makes somebody feel married to you rather than adjacent.
A life that would look different without them
The long question here is whether anybody has genuinely altered your trajectory. Independence has kept the line straight and slightly narrow. Look at the last decade and mark the points where another person changed the direction. If there are none, that is not strength — it is a partnership that never actually took.
Find the person whose skills are the other half
Professionally you have been complete and therefore capped: everything you have built is the size of one competent person. Find somebody whose strengths are exactly what you lack and build one thing jointly, with a real split of the credit and the risk. It will be slower, more irritating, and larger than anything you have made alone.
Two households learning one set of rules
When you pair up, two family systems arrive with the arrangements each considers obvious — about money, holidays, how conflict is done, who is called first. You have handled this by keeping yours and tolerating theirs. Sit down and design a third set deliberately. Negotiated households hold up considerably better than inherited ones.
Nobody is watching your baseline
Living without anybody close enough to notice means the slow declines go unremarked: the sleep that got worse over a year, the drinking that crept up, the appointment never made. You are a poor observer of yourself over long periods. Let one person be close enough to comment, and take the comment seriously.