Learning to Feel Safe in Love
For anyone still learning how to feel safe in love... you are not alone. Here’s what secure attachment and feeling secure in yourself can feel like, from someone still finding their way.
For most of my life, I haven't known what secure love feels like. I lived in anxious attachment (and sometimes avoidance to protect myself)... people-pleasing, shrinking, bending myself into shapes that I thought would be chosen. I forgot about my own needs, or believed they didn’t matter. Boundaries...what were they? Somewhere deep down, I thought love was something I had to earn by giving others what they wanted, by abandoning parts of myself first, before they could. That if I wasn’t easy enough, selfless enough, accommodating enough… I would be abandoned.
I am still learning. Still re-mapping the old, tangled pathways inside me. But in the moments when I land in the safety of feeling secure in myself and relationships, when I feel it, it’s like stepping into a safe new world.
It’s the knowing that I can listen to my wants, desires, and needs. That I have autonomy, and still, I am loved. That love isn’t conditional on silencing myself.
Feeling secure and safe in love feels like safety to be soft and to be empowered. Safe to be seen. Safe to be me.
It’s knowing I don’t have to be suspicious about kindness, or brace for love to be taken away. It’s allowing my heart to stay open without fear. It feels like permission to need, to ask, to receive. It feels like tears being welcome, allowing myself to have boundaries and these being met.
In my mind, it’s the absence of that spinning, scrambling, desperate searching: "Did I say too much?" "Are they pulling away?" "Is it safe to rest here?"
Secure attachment doesn’t mean no misunderstandings in your relationships, no fears, no hard days. But it’s more resilient. It bends without breaking. It calls you closer, even when you feel messy or afraid. It says: "You don’t have to go through this alone."
Every time you choose openness and curiosity in your relationships over the armour of defensiveness or dismissal, you're weaving a new kind of belonging and deeper connection.
I’m not saying feeling secure is easy! We carry stories, wounds, and habits that can keep us looping. But it’s a goal worth working toward in our relationships, and something we all deserve to experience.
Photo credit: Vas Chakra Photography