Finding Love After Survival
For a long time, I believed love was something you endured rather than something that held you.
After spending nearly twenty years in a narcissistic marriage, love became tangled with fear, silence, self-doubt, and constant self-sacrifice. I learned how to walk on eggshells, how to shrink myself to keep the peace, how to survive instead of feel. Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that love could feel safe—or that I deserved it to.
When you live that way for so long, it changes you. It convinces you that your needs are “too much,” that your feelings are inconvenient, and that being loved means being controlled. And when you finally leave, there’s a quiet grief that follows—the fear that maybe this was the only kind of love you were ever meant to have.
Then Ryan came into my life.
And slowly, gently, everything I thought I knew about love began to unravel.
Being with Ryan doesn’t feel like survival. It feels like peace. There is no fear of saying the wrong thing, no punishment for having emotions, no tension hanging in the air waiting to explode. He listens—really listens. He doesn’t dismiss my past or minimize my healing. He honors it. He understands that love after trauma isn’t loud or rushed—it’s patient, consistent, and kind.
The biggest difference is that Ryan never tries to control me. He doesn’t compete with my independence or feel threatened by my strength. Instead, he supports it. He encourages my growth, my creativity, my healing, and my role as a mother. He sees me—not just what I can give, but who I am.
With him, I don’t feel like I have to earn love by sacrificing myself. I don’t have to explain my worth. I don’t have to beg to be treated gently. Love isn’t conditional or withheld. It’s steady. It’s safe. It’s warm.
Loving Ryan has shown me that healthy love doesn’t confuse you. It doesn’t make you question your reality or silence your voice. It doesn’t leave you feeling small. Healthy love brings clarity, not chaos. It feels like being able to breathe again after holding your breath for years.
If you’re coming out of an abusive or narcissistic relationship and you believe love has passed you by, I want you to know this: it hasn’t. Healing changes what you tolerate. It changes what you recognize as love. And when you least expect it, someone can come into your life and show you that love was never supposed to hurt the way it did before.
Ryan reminds me every day that love can be gentle. That partnership can feel safe. That being cherished doesn’t require suffering.
And that alone has changed everything.
