Maybe Love Isn't Supposed to Feel Safe in the Way You Think

I was headed somewhere completely different with today’s musing until I opened social media this morning. A friend on Facebook had shared a post built around a line often attributed to Oscar Wilde: “A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.” The post went on to question whether deeply loving someone actually makes relationships harder. Love brings expectations, vulnerability, jealousy, fear of loss, disappointment, and the possibility of having your heart completely broken. If you don’t care quite as much, perhaps it’s easier to overlook someone’s flaws and enjoy the relationship without all that emotional weight.

Then came the question that got me: If avoiding love is what makes a relationship happy, is that really happiness, or is it emotional safety?

I sat with that for a minute because I understood exactly what the writer was getting at, but something about those words didn’t sit right with me. I’ve experienced versions of this myself, and I’ve watched it play out in the lives of people I’ve worked with for years. There are relationships where we can feel wonderfully calm because there simply isn’t enough emotional investment for much to threaten us. Nobody has gotten close enough to reach the tender places. Nothing precious enough has been placed on the table.

That isn’t necessarily emotional safety.

It may actually be emotional distance masquerading as safety.

There is a certain ease in caring less. If I enjoy you but haven’t woven you very deeply into my life, your silence doesn’t carry the same weight. A delayed text is just a delayed text. Your disappointment may sting, but it doesn’t shake anything foundational inside me. Even the possibility of losing you feels different when I haven’t imagined waking up beside you ten years from now.

Then someone comes along who matters.

Suddenly, stupid little things aren’t so stupid anymore. Their silence feels louder. The distance between two text messages somehow acquires meaning. A change in the way they kiss you goodbye registers in your body before your mind has consciously noticed anything different. The woman who has never considered herself jealous feels something tighten in her stomach when another woman gets a little too interested in the man she loves.

Maybe she sees a comment on Facebook. There is nothing particularly inappropriate about it, yet fifteen minutes later she is somehow three years deep into this woman’s vacation pictures wondering what in the hell she is doing.

Love will humble you like that.

It has an irritating way of revealing that some of the things we confidently announced we had healed were apparently only sleeping. Enlightenment is considerably easier when nobody is getting close enough to annoy your nervous system.

I have known what it feels like to believe I’m perfectly secure until something matters enough for fear to suddenly have something to work with. That doesn’t automatically mean the person standing in front of me created the fear. Sometimes another human being simply gets close enough to reach something casual relationships never could.

Deep attachment has a way of finding rooms casual relationships never enter.

Once we love someone, their presence matters differently. So does their absence. Their attention, affection, sexuality, responsiveness, withdrawal, and opinion of us begin carrying emotional weight because something valuable has formed between us. Love gives another person access to places strangers simply cannot reach.

Now add a history.

Maybe someone left when you were young. Perhaps love in your childhood was inconsistent, unpredictable, or attached to performance. Betrayal may have taught you to watch for tiny changes in behavior. An old relationship could have trained your body to recognize distance long before your conscious mind understood what was happening.

The present begins bumping into the past.

A person who has experienced abandonment may feel ordinary distance as the beginning of another loss. Someone betrayed before can become unusually alert to a partner’s changes in behavior. Another person learned early that needing anyone was dangerous, so the moment love becomes serious, something inside them begins looking for an exit.

One reaches while the other retreats, and both can become convinced the other person is the problem.

Jealousy belongs in this conversation too because I think we’ve done a terrible job of talking about it. We either romanticize jealousy as proof that someone really loves us or label the emotion itself as toxic. Neither approach is particularly useful.

At its most basic level, jealousy can simply tell us that something we value feels threatened. What we do with that feeling determines much of what happens next. There is a tremendous difference between noticing jealousy and becoming curious about it versus turning it into surveillance, accusation, testing, comparison, punishment, or control.

Sometimes the question needs to be, “Has something actually happened here that deserves my attention?” Other times, we have to be brave enough to ask, “Did this person do something to break trust, or did this moment touch a place in me where trust was already broken?”

Those are difficult questions because the answer is not always obvious.

Trauma makes things even messier. The nervous system doesn’t always neatly distinguish between this reminds me of danger and this is dangerous. A feeling can be completely real while the story we attach to it is wrong. At other times, we dismiss what our body is noticing as “just trauma” when something in the present relationship genuinely is off.

Healing doesn’t mean never feeling those things again. It means becoming more capable of staying with ourselves long enough to figure out what they are trying to tell us.

That brings me back to the word safe.

I hear people say some version of, “I’m so much more peaceful when I’m single,” and sometimes that is absolutely true. Solitude can be healing. There are seasons when being alone gives us room to remember ourselves, rebuild our lives, and breathe without constantly negotiating another person’s needs.

But I also think there is a question worth asking ourselves when that peace becomes part of our identity: Am I peaceful because I’ve healed, or am I peaceful because nothing currently has access to me?

There is no shame in discovering that the answer might be the second one.

Sometimes we choose people who cannot reach us very deeply. We become attached to the unavailable person, the complicated situation, the relationship that can never quite become real, or someone we genuinely like but never completely surrender our heart to. Strangely enough, we may feel incredibly secure there.

Being wanted can sometimes be more frightening than longing.

Longing leaves room for fantasy. Mutual love requires exposure. The person who remains just beyond our reach cannot fully know us, which also means they cannot fully reject the parts of us they never get close enough to see.

There is safety in that arrangement.

It just isn’t the kind of safety I want to confuse with intimacy.

Real emotional safety asks considerably more from us because it doesn’t promise we’ll never be hurt. No human being can make that promise. People disappoint each other. We misunderstand one another, change, fail, grieve, leave, and sometimes betray. Eventually, even death reminds us that loving another human being has always involved the possibility of loss.

Love gives us something worth losing.

Maybe that is why the spiritual side of this feels important to me too. Scripture doesn’t give us a picture of love as emotional insulation. Jesus loved people who disappointed Him. He grieved. He wept. He experienced betrayal and loss. The biblical picture of love is profoundly vulnerable.

When 1 John tells us that “perfect love casts out fear,” I don’t hear a promise that loving well means nothing frightening will ever happen. I hear something far more difficult: fear does not get to become the governing force of how we love.

Fear wants guarantees before vulnerability. It wants certainty before trust and control before surrender. Given the opportunity, fear will happily build walls around our hearts and then congratulate us on how peaceful everything has become.

Love asks something different.

It asks us to remain open without abandoning ourselves. Healthy love doesn’t require ignoring red flags, tolerating mistreatment, or handing another person responsibility for our emotional survival. If anything, loving deeply requires a stronger relationship with ourselves because we have to remain whole while allowing another person to matter tremendously.

I stared at that Facebook post longer than I expected to this morning. Maybe because I understood exactly why someone might mistake caring less for feeling safer. There really is a certain ease in having nothing precious enough to frighten you. I can understand why a person who has been hurt might eventually decide that this version of peace is good enough.

I just don’t think it’s the same thing as emotional safety.

The safety I want is the kind that allows something to matter. I want the kind that lets us love without gripping, care without controlling, become vulnerable without disappearing, and feel fear without immediately building our lives around avoiding it. That kind of safety will probably never feel as tidy as emotional distance does.

Maybe the cynical little line attributed to Wilde brushes against something painfully true after all. It probably is easier to remain unaffected by someone we do not deeply love. There is less at risk, fewer tender places exposed, and much less power given to another human being.

But unaffected isn’t the same as safe.

Sometimes what feels wonderfully safe is simply emotional distance masquerading as safety, and love is the thing brave enough to finally expose the difference.

→Are you emotionally safe, or have you simply become very good at keeping enough distance that no one can reach the places that still hurt?

There is a difference between peace and insulation. Between healthy independence and never needing anyone. Between loving without losing yourself and keeping one foot outside the relationship so you can never be devastated by it.

Maybe healing isn’t becoming so unaffected that nobody can hurt us anymore. Maybe it’s becoming secure enough within ourselves that we can allow another human being to matter deeply without letting fear control how we love them.

So I’m curious: Has love ever revealed something in you that you genuinely thought you had already healed?

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.