7 Things I’ve Learned from Loving My Emotionally Secure Husband
My needs for intimacy and closeness are valid.
Growing up, I was taught many bad things about love by my absent (now-estranged) father: love is busy, love is distant, and love is coming second to his job.
Later on, with this blueprint of love and relationships, I got attached to unavailable, emotionally inept guys and learned worse things about love: love is waiting, love is justifying excuses, love is denying myself, love is violating my boundaries, love is struggling, love is pain, and on and on.
I knew something was seriously wrong when the romantic love I experienced was nothing like the love I had with my close friends and family — it was pushing me to rock bottom. It hit me that I’d come into a relationship with men hoping to find good love but kept getting shitty love and being told it was what it was. I felt like I’d been gaslit my whole life. I was done with it.
But the road to healing wasn’t short or easy. It took me months of therapy, deep self-work, and drastic lifestyle changes to stop expecting only bad things from love and step away when there was a sign that my past toxic relationship patterns were about to repeat.
