It’s one of those late nights in the kitchen—the kind where truth slips out between sips of brown liquor, good cheese, and broken pieces of dark chocolate that melt slowly on the tongue, making for bittersweet confessions. It’s the kind of night when vulnerability creeps past our usual guards, carried on the backs of half-finished sentences and averted glances.
This woman, whom I’d just met, is telling me about her marriage. Twenty-three years. Two solid careers. Three kids — all grown. Empty nest. Great house. It’s the kind of relationship others point to and say, “They made it.” But the way she’s twisting her wedding band, around and around like she’s trying to decode a message hidden in the metal, tells me that’s not how she feels.
“I have never wondered if he’d leave me,” she said, staring at her bejeweled left finger. “But I’ve always wondered when he’d explode.”
Then she offered a half-smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes before excusing herself. The chocolate shavings on her abandoned plate left dark smudges like tiny punctuation marks ending the sentence she hadn’t finished.
Before that night, I didn’t have words for this phenomenon—the gap between feeling solid in a relationship and knowing you don’t have to hold your breath when you’re with your person; the difference between feeling secure and feeling safe.
It’s in the small things, isn’t it? Mindless microscopic adjustments.
Before that night, I didn’t have words for this phenomenon—the gap between feeling solid in a relationship and knowing you don’t have to hold your breath when you’re with your person; the difference between feeling secure and feeling safe.
It’s in the small things, isn’t it? Mindless, microscopic adjustments.
Chilly Pear, 2024, by Stacey Herrera
A woman I used to work with did this thing where she’d read the room before speaking. She honed this talent from years of tracking her husband’s face for storm alerts. Their life looked positively dreamy on IG—date nights and anniversary posts. But the camera shutter never captured how much time she spent measuring her words like ingredients, afraid she’d spoil the meal.
Security might look like shared addresses and joint bank accounts. Safety might feel like an unclenched jaw and shoulders that remember how to soften.
Once upon another time, I witnessed a similar story. Different kitchen, actual friend. She’d invited me over for dinner, eager to introduce me to her husband. We met for coffee the next day, and she asked, “What did you think?”
I swallowed before looking her square in the eye. “It felt like y’all were strangers.” Their marriage ended half a decade later after their daughter left for college. She was tired of being invisible, and he was tired of pretending he was straight. In all the years they’d been married, neither felt safe enough to be real.
I think about all the rooms we inhabit throughout our lifetime: childhood bedrooms, where we learned to read emotional weather patterns; college dorms, where we shed the skin of our parents’ expectations; and first apartments, where we try on relationships like borrowed clothes.
The emotional architecture tells stories our words often can’t. How having a roof over your head means nothing if you can’t stand up straight beneath it. How we learn to mistake endurance for contentment, and silence for peace.
I spend half the week at my partner’s place and the other half at home. People ask me why we don’t just move in together full-time, their voices carrying unspoken judgments about commitment and stability. They never say the quiet part out loud — living together spells commitment with a capital “C.”
They don’t see how I’ve learned to prioritize emotional safety over conventional security. Watching those kitchen-table confessions and living-room revelations taught me that proximity doesn’t equal presence. In our together-apartness, we’ve cultivated the ability to miss each other without fearing absence. We’re able to speak without first testing the air.
I see it now in every space I enter – the invisible measurements we take of rooms and relationships. The calculated distance between what we need and what we’ve settled for. The space between security and safety, mapped in footsteps and held breaths.
That’s what I wish I could tell that woman from the kitchen, watching her twist that diamond circle like a prayer wheel. That security isn’t always measured in mortgages and merged finances. That safety speaks through our bodies before our words catch up – through muscles that remember their natural state, through breath that finds its rhythm. Thoughts flow freely instead of being filtered through the sieve of potential reactions.
Safety isn’t the absence of conflict – it’s the presence of truth.
Safety isn’t the absence of conflict – it’s the presence of truth.
It lives in small moments—in comfortable silence, disagreements where no one reaches for emotional armor, and the simple act of speaking without being an emotional meteorologist. Tears fall unjudged in rooms where laughter reaches the corners and hearts needn’t shutter.
Perhaps most importantly, it is in the courage to recognize when we’ve been calling security by the wrong name and in the strength to believe we deserve both—the solid ground and the air to breathe, the certainty and the freedom to be, the consistency and the space to grow.
In the end, the most profound safety might be knowing we can trust ourselves to recognize the difference.
xo,
P.S. What’s your relationship with safety versus security? I’d love to hear your story. Leave me a message below, and let’s continue this conversation.
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