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.
I had to do many hard things before I met my husband. They helped me rebuild my relationship with myself and learn a new blueprint for love. So, when I met my husband, even though his interest, consistency, and stability were not the most familiar, it felt right and I knew it was what I wanted and needed. In fact, I wouldn’t have settled for anything else.
Here are things I’ve learned from loving my emotionally secure husband:
1. Love is safe and patient.
My past relationships brought me so much anxiety that I associated love with danger. I would walk on eggshells and worry if I said or did something wrong, I’d be left alone. Even when I felt anxious, I was ashamed and afraid to show it.
When I met my husband, I’d done enough self-work that I was able to express my anxiety freely, accepting it might drive him away. When it happened though, my husband showed me, again and again, that it was okay to feel what I felt and he gave me even more…
