When Love Feels Like Safety
This year marks thirteen years of marriage, and sometimes I still can’t believe this is my life. Not because it’s perfect. Not because it’s easy. But because for a long time, I didn’t believe love like this was real. Growing up in a home filled with chaos on one side and emotional silence on the other, I honestly thought love was something adults pretended to feel but never actually experienced. I thought marriage meant putting on a smile, playing a role, and never saying the quiet things out loud.
I learned to survive, not to attach.
I learned to read the room, not lean on anyone.
I learned that affection didn’t come freely, and that emotional safety was something other people had.
By the time I reached adulthood, the idea of love felt made up. A story other people got to live. Not me. And then I met James.
He didn’t change my beliefs with grand gestures or words. He changed them by being steady. By being consistent. By showing up over and over again – long enough for my nervous system to believe him.
We both came from hard homes. We didn’t have models of healthy marriage. We didn’t have examples of what love was supposed to look like. So we created our own. Piece by piece. Little by little. Day by day. What healed me wasn’t romance. It was repetition. When our kids were little and I stayed home, he supported it. When I wanted to go back to school, he supported that too. When I wanted to work, he stood beside me again. There was no scorekeeping. Just presence. For years, he worked four ten-hour days fifteen hours away and still drove home every weekend (right after work) just to give us one full day together. Later, he worked stretches that barely allowed rest at all, and still walked through the door ready to cook, clean, hold our babies, and carry emotional weight I didn’t yet know how to set down. He showed up for my exhaustion. For my overwhelm. For the parts of me that didn’t yet know how to ask for help. We don’t take for granted how lucky we are now to have him home more days than he’s away. Because the second he walks through the door, my whole body responds before my mind does.
My shoulders drop. My breathing slows. Sometimes I need a nap – that’s how deeply my nervous system registers safety.
That is healing.
Whether or not it fits a textbook definition of the “healthiest” dynamic, this is our truth. James is the first place my body ever knew peace. And that peace has softened parts of me that once only knew how to stay alert. I believe with everything in me that God brought us together – not to fix each other, but to build something neither of us received growing up. A home where love doesn’t require performance. Where safety is real. Where repair is possible.
Thirteen years in, I’m still learning how to receive that kind of love.
Still becoming.
Still healing.
Still grateful.
And still choosing him – the same way he’s chosen me – day after day.
