Learning to Trust Healthy Love

When you grow up without many examples of what healthy love looks like, it becomes very easy to mistake familiarity for safety.

Very easy to confuse being chosen with being cherished.

Very easy to believe that if you can just become the version of yourself someone else wants…

Then maybe you will finally understand what love is.

So that is what I did.

In relationship after relationship, I became whatever I thought my partner needed me to be.

More agreeable. More accommodating. More understanding. More patient. More forgiving.

I thought if I could just be the perfect partner…

Then maybe I would finally be loved the way I had always longed to be.

But over and over again…

I found myself trying to fit into relationships that were never truly made for me.

Some of those relationships were abusive.

Some were not. But many were built on imbalance. On complacency. On being needed… but not truly seen. On being admired… but not truly understood.

As I moved deeper into my own healing, I began to realize something difficult:

Sometimes love is not toxic…

It is simply unmatched.

Different values. Different vision. Different capacity. Different understanding of what partnership is meant to be.

I am on my third marriage.

My second husband did not physically harm me. But what hurt just as deeply was feeling unseen. He loved the version of me he placed on a pedestal. The version that looked good to other people. The version that made us appear like we had the perfect life. But behind closed doors, I was begging to be heard. Begging to be met. Begging for partnership that ran deeper than appearances.

I needed someone with drive. With ambition. With kindness. With emotional depth.

Someone who wanted to build something meaningful.

Someone who wanted more from life than comfort.

And then…

I met Alvin.

And for the first time in my life…

I discovered what healthy love actually feels like.

When healthy love first found me, it felt almost like loving myself.

What I mean by that is this:

The way he loved me felt like the way a person should love themselves.

With care. With respect. With consistency. With protection. With honesty.

There were moments in our relationship when my trauma still showed up.

Moments when he would raise his voice—not out of cruelty, but out of his own anxiety—and I would find myself crying.

My body remembered things my heart was still learning to trust.

So I told him.

I told him that those moments did not make me feel safe.

And then something happened that had never truly happened for me before:

He listened.

He really listened.

I did not have to beg. I did not have to explain it over and over. I did not have to shrink myself to make my needs easier to hold.

He heard me…

And he changed what needed changing.

Not because I forced him.

Not because he wanted to appear like a good partner.

But because he cared.

What changed me was not grand gestures.

It was his care.

His consistency. His steadiness. His willingness to see me—not for who he imagined me to be…

But for who I actually am.

At my core.

And every day since…

He has continued to love me that way.

Without condition. Without performance. Without pretending.

He is my husband.

My best friend.

My safest place.

My closest confidant.

And somehow, even in the simplest moments…

He still brings me joy.

If I could say anything to survivors who wonder if healthy love exists, I would say this:

Find someone who loves you the way you should love yourself.

Not someone who asks you to disappear.

Not someone who needs you to perform.

Not someone who only loves the version of you that is easy.

Find someone who sees you.

Hears you.

Chooses you.

And reminds you, every single day…

That love should feel like coming home.

— Jennifer Rene Wallace