You know what actually scares me? Like, shake-me-to-my-core, want-to-peel-my-skin-off-in-existential-horror levels of fear? When people say they settled for their partner. Not in a jokey, “haha he’s not my type but he owns a NutriBullet” kind of way. I mean full-on serious, calm, cold truth. The kind that makes your stomach twist. The kind that sounds like resignation in a silk dress.
They say things like, “I don’t feel passionate about them, but it made sense,” or, “They’re good for me. I just don’t feel that much.” Like love is a houseplant they’ve agreed to water. Like desire is an optional extra. Like being chosen by someone who doesn’t feel lit up by you is still a win.
And I know people who’ve said it. I’ve sat across the table from women I admire, with sharp eyeliner and soft disappointment in their eyes, telling me how they stayed because it was calm. Because it was easy. Because it felt adult. One of them looked me dead in the face and said, “He doesn’t understand me, but he’s reliable.” I wanted to scream. I wanted to shake her and ask what part of her soul she had to bury to make that choice feel safe.
I know the world tells us that comfort is success, that intensity is unstable, that we should age out of wanting fire. But I cannot, and will not, spend my life with someone who looks at me and feels lukewarm. Because I am not a safe option. I am a storm disguised as a girl who reads too much. I am a walking litmus test for whether or not a man has done any inner work. I am made for deep feeling, for gut-level recognition, for connection so vivid it feels pre-verbal.
If I wanted to be tolerated, I’d go to a family reunion.
I want to be loved like bad timing and good poetry.
I can’t do surface. I can’t do vague. I can’t sleep beside someone who doesn’t understand how I speak, even when I’m silent. I need the kind of bond that feels like spiritual weather. And the idea that I could be someone’s backup plan? Someone’s “this will do”? That would ruin me in a way no heartbreak ever could. It terrifies me because I know how rare it is to be truly seen. To be met. To be wanted not because you’re good on paper, but because your presence rewires the air. I don’t want to be tolerated.
I don’t want to be chosen out of convenience. I want to be known. Intimately. Irrationally. I want someone to look at me like a poem they’re still trying to understand. I want craving, not complacency. I want to be someone’s risk, not their strategy. So no, I don’t care how healthy your communication is if there’s no pulse underneath it. I don’t care if you’re great on paper if you never make me feel like the plot twist. I don’t care how many boxes you tick if I still have to beg you to feel me in full colour.
I refuse to become the woman who silences herself into security. Who confuses stillness with safety. Who trades a spark for a spreadsheet and calls it love. If I am not haunting your mind a little bit, I am not your person. If I don’t make your voice falter slightly when you talk about me, I don’t want it. If I’m not a full-body yes, then let me go before I dilute myself trying to be palatable. I have spent too long learning how to feel this deeply to settle for being admired in beige.
I don’t want to be loved safely. I want to be loved correctly. With reverence. With hunger. With hands that tremble slightly when they touch me, not from fear, but from recognition. And if that kind of love makes me hard to keep, so be it. I would rather be too much than almost enough. I would rather die than be someone’s safe option.
For me, safety feels like the right word when it’s referring to how I feel in the relationship, but not about the man, if you get me. I don’t want to feel anxious, or like I need to be anyone different, I want to feel like I’m loved for who I am.
Now, before I got married last year I was absolutely concerned that my now husband was too safe. 😂I was terrified I was ‘settling’ because I saw so many people in marriages, where it felt like they just weren’t even bothered about each other. Or where they’d lost their entire identity as an individual.
But ultimately we’re fiery but also chill together and he excites me more than anyone I know. I frickin’ love how much joy growing together brings me! And I think he’d refer to me as a wildcard option rather than safe so that’s great 😂
This! All of this! 🖤