Early in our relationship, my husband and I once told each other that we would have hated each other in high school.
It was said lightly, almost playfully, the way couples sometimes marvel at the unlikely timing of their meeting. How different versions of ourselves might have passed one another without recognition. How strange it is that the person you choose for life might have once felt completely incompatible.
At the time, though, I meant it.
He is the closest, most supportive, most emotionally available human in my orbit. The safest place I know. The one who has stood beside me while I dismantled my life and rebuilt it from the inside out.
So why wouldn’t my teenage self have adored him the way I do now?
It took me years to realize that the comment had nothing to do with him.
It was about me.
About who I was back then.
About what I thought love was supposed to look like.
About the kind of longing I mistook for connection.
As a teenager, I wasn’t searching for safety. I was searching for intensity. I wanted love that was loud and unpredictable. Passionate. Temperamental. I wanted someone brooding and tortured, someone who identified as an artist, a musician, a philosopher. Someone who asked big questions and suffered visibly. Someone whose pain spilled over into creation.
I believed love was a cyclone.
I believed anguish was depth.
That jealousy was devotion.
That emotional volatility meant something mattered.
And I didn’t arrive at that belief accidentally.
I was a child of the 90s. I grew up steeped in stories and music and cultural myths that romanticized the suffering artist. We elevated pain into proof. We taught each other that art didn’t come from peace, it came from torment. That love was supposed to hurt. That chaos was evidence of passion.
I devoured novels where love was obsessive and destructive and called it romance. I memorized lyrics that equated longing with despair. I watched artists self-destruct and learned to call it genius.
Somewhere along the way, I internalized the idea that healthy love was boring, and that if something felt calm, it couldn’t possibly be real.
So yes, the teenage version of me probably wouldn’t have known what to do with my husband.
Back then, he would have seemed too steady. Too open. Too willing to name his feelings. Too available. I might have mistaken his groundedness for a lack of depth, because I didn’t yet know how to recognize depth that wasn’t bleeding.
I caught myself imagining that same teenage version of me again, and this time, the image surprised me. Because the man my husband has become, the man who hugs openly, cries without shame, writes, meditates, reflects, speaks honestly about his inner world. That man would have absolutely undone me.
This version of him is exactly the kind of person I longed for. Not the tormented caricature I chased, but the real thing: someone emotionally alive, expressive, curious, and present.
And I want to take back what I said.
He isn’t just the man I choose now. He’s the man I would have chosen then, if I had known how.
That realization felt like evidence of something deeper. Something he once named for us with affection: that we are soul buddies. That somehow, across time and growth and shedding, we still arrive at one another.
At the same time, I can’t pretend I don’t still feel the pull of that old darkness. There’s a nostalgia there that is hard to untangle. I can feel it when I reread books that once cracked me open. When a familiar ache rises in my chest and I remember how intoxicating it felt to believe love had to be dangerous to be profound.
I know better now. Intellectually, emotionally, somatically. I know that romanticizing toxicity isn’t fantasy. It’s trauma repeating itself with prettier language. Stories like that aren’t about love at all; they’re about inherited wounds passed off as passion.
And still…
There’s a part of me that learned love through pain so early, so deeply, that the familiarity of it feels almost ancestral. As if I’m shedding not just one lifetime of conditioning, but many. Letting go of a comfort that was never safe, but always known.
This feels like the early stages of learning something radical.
That love does not have to hurt to be real.
That love does not have to be unpredictable in ways that destabilize you.
That love does not have to be jealousy, despair, fear, or abandonment.
That conflict can exist without cruelty.
That growth can happen without destruction.
That intensity can live inside safety.
What I want now, and what I’m practicing now, is a different kind of love. Not just with my husband, but with everyone in my life. A love that is spacious. Curious. Honest. One where conflict is not a threat, but an invitation to understand one another more deeply.
A love where I don’t run.
Where I lean in.
Where I tell the truth, even the dark parts, and am met with care instead of punishment.
A love where I don’t have to earn my place.
Where I don’t have to perform pain to be seen.
Where I don’t have to hide to belong.
I know that kind of love now. I feel it in my body. In the way my nervous system settles instead of braces. In the way joy feels playful instead of precarious. In the way intimacy no longer requires self-abandonment.
And yes, sometimes I grieve the old myths. The dramatic arcs. The beautiful suffering I once believed was necessary to create meaning. But I’m learning something better.
Love can be alive without being unhinged.
Art can be born from presence, not just pain.
Depth does not require destruction.
This isn’t the loss of passion. It’s the evolution of it, and it’s the first time love feels like somewhere I can stay.
