We spend a lot of time teaching women how to recognize danger. Learn the red flags. Watch for controlling behavior. Notice manipulation. Pay attention
We spend a lot of time teaching women how to recognize danger. Learn the red flags. Watch for controlling behavior. Notice manipulation. Pay attention when someone refuses to respect your boundaries. All of that is important. But there is another part of safety education that deserves just as much attention: we have to learn what safety feels like, too.
Photo by Ben Iwara
That can be difficult when you have spent years moving from one relationship into another, or when every season alone feels like an uncomfortable waiting room until the next person arrives. There is nothing wrong with wanting love, partnership or companionship. But time without a romantic partner does not have to be empty time. It can become some of the most informative time of your life.
In that space, you begin discovering your own baseline. What do you choose when nobody is waiting for a particular answer? How do you spend your evenings when nobody is disappointed by your plans? What do you wear, eat, watch, believe, create and dream about when you aren’t calculating somebody else’s response? You may discover preferences you never knew were yours because you were so accustomed to adjusting.
This is one reason freely chosen solitude should not automatically be treated as loneliness or failure. Isolation that someone imposes upon you is different from having enough protected space to hear yourself think. A woman can have friends, family, community, purpose and a beautiful full life while also learning to enjoy her own company. She doesn’t have to spend that season miserable, staring down the road waiting for somebody to pull up.
And something important can happen during that time: peace becomes familiar.
You learn what it feels like to say no without spending the evening preparing for retaliation. You make a decision without rehearsing how you will defend it. You change your mind without being punished. You make an ordinary mistake without somebody turning it into evidence against your character. You have privacy without being accused of hiding something. Slowly, your nervous system and your mind receive another reference point for living.
Then, when someone enters your life, you have something to compare the relationship to.
The question is no longer only, Does this person want me? You can also ask, What happens to me when this person is around? Do I still hear my own thoughts? Am I making choices, or managing reactions? Am I becoming more fully myself, or slowly arranging my life around keeping somebody else satisfied?
Wanting companionship is human. But companionship does not have to rescue you from your own company. There is strength in building a life that already contains peace, relationships, interests, privacy, purpose and room to breathe.
We should keep teaching each other how to recognize abuse. We should teach warning signs and patterns of control. But we should also give one another permission to become deeply acquainted with something beautiful and protective: the ordinary feeling of being safe enough to belong to yourself.