Why strangers felt safer than the person I loved

This is the hardest piece I’ve written so far.

My chest feels heavy.

My throat feels constricted.

Like my body is trying to stop the words before I type them.

A few weeks ago, someone left a comment asking why I never mention significant others in my writing.

The comment stopped me immediately.

It landed on the one subject I’d been carefully walking around. I’ve been publishing for months, but somehow managed to leave out the person who witnessed most of it.

Maybe because it’s easier to write about the people who hurt me than the people who loved me.

The people who hurt me gave me something to push against.

The people who loved me left harder questions.

I moved to California with my ex-partner after years together in London.

Then the world cracked open.

The pandemic.

The near-death experience.

Memories I had spent decades outrunning.

At the time, I believed I was the broken one.

He thought so too.

It was a tidy story.

I had trauma. I needed therapy. I needed healing.

He just needed to be patient while I figured myself out.

My first therapist came through his workplace.

I’d ask for forty-five minutes of privacy for my sessions and feel guilty every time, like I was inconveniencing him by trying to get better.

After sessions, I’d cry alone.

He’d come home and ask what was wrong.

I’d tell him nothing.

Months later, I’d tell him pieces.

Small pieces.

Carefully measured pieces.

Enough to explain my behaviour.

Not enough to let him see me.

One night I was curled up on the floor in front of a cabinet in our living room.

Folded over myself, crying into the carpet.

I finally told him about the abuse.

The next morning, he asked me for a blowjob.

I remember the shock of it. The whiplash.

Years of silence. Years of shame. Years of carrying it alone.

And this was the first thing he asked for.

At the time, that moment became the whole story.

I held onto it like evidence.

Proof that he didn’t understand.

Proof that I wasn’t safe.

Proof that I was alone in this.

Even now, part of me wants to keep that story.

If that moment explains everything, I don’t have to look at the moments that don’t.

Somewhere in all of that, I betrayed him.

For years, I explained it through trauma. Through self-destruction. Through coping mechanisms. Through all the language I learned in therapy.

Some of it was true.

Maybe all of it was.

But it never fully explained why strangers felt safer than someone who loved me.

I could sleep with strangers.

I could tell strangers things I couldn’t tell the person sharing my bed.

A stranger couldn’t get close enough to see me.

A stranger couldn’t disappoint me.

Or be disappointed by me.

Love could.

But there were other truths too.

He probably saved me.

I refused help whenever I could, but he was persistent.

He found the sex therapist.

He found the EMDR therapist.

He supported us financially while I wasn’t working and dragged me out for walks when all I wanted was to disappear.

He tried in the ways he knew how.

And that complicates everything.

I keep trying to choose one version.

The truth keeps insisting on both.

I thought healing would save our relationship.

Instead, it kept exposing things neither of us knew how to hold.

Two people carrying wounds that looked different.

Two people loving each other differently.

But love couldn’t do the healing for us.

And maybe that’s the hardest part.

Not that I was unlovable.

Not that he didn’t love me.

But that being loved and receiving love are not the same thing.

And I spent years mistaking one for the other.