05/12/2025
💙Beautifully profound💙
"There is a woman out there who has had to be strong for so long that even her strength is tired, and if you are going to love her, understand that your first duty is not to impress her, but to stop being another reason she has to hold herself together. She has walked through nights where the silence was so loud it hurt, where her own thoughts were the only voices answering her cries. She has picked up pieces of herself off bedroom floors, car seats, bathroom tiles, whispering, “Get up, we have to keep going,” when nobody else even knew she had fallen. She has watched people drink from her kindness like it was endless, then leave her parched. If you arrive in her life with charming words but careless hands, know that you are not stepping into a blank page—you are stepping into the aftermath of every time love has promised her safety and delivered another wound.
She does not need another man who is excited by her light but intimidated by her shadow. She does not need someone who revels in her laughter yet vanishes when the tears start to fall. She has already loved people who adored the version of her that smiled on command and swallowed her hurt in silence. She has already learned how to fold herself into smaller shapes just to fit inside someone else’s comfort. What she needs now is someone who looks at all of her—the loud, the quiet, the healing, the scarred—and doesn’t flinch. Someone who doesn’t just say, “I’m here for you,” on the good days, but proves it when she can’t hide the exhaustion in her eyes, when her voice trembles as she says, “I’m not okay today.”
If you want to be her calm, understand that calm is not a word, it is a behavior. It is in how you answer her when she says she’s scared. It is in choosing not to make jokes out of the pain she finally trusts you enough to name. It is in resisting the urge to call her “overreacting” when a small thing triggers a big reaction, and instead asking gently, “What did that remind you of?” Calm is choosing not to raise your voice just because you feel unheard; it’s choosing to stay in the room when walking away would be easier. Calm is knowing that she has been punished before for having feelings, and deciding that with you, those same feelings will be met with patience instead of punishment.
And if you want to be her home, know that home is not a place where she has to earn her right to exist. Home is not conditional love, given only when she is easy to handle. Home does not slam doors, retreat into cold silence, or make her beg for basic kindness. Home is where she can put down the mask she wears for the world and still be wanted. It is where her imperfections are not ammunition in the next argument, but simply proof that she is human. If she has to study your moods like warnings, if she has to rehearse her sentences in her head to avoid upsetting you, if she has to keep shrinking her needs to keep your peace, then you are not her home—you are another battlefield, and her soul is already covered in scars from too many wars she never wanted to fight.
Do not become another battle she has to survive just to prove her own strength. She has been tested enough. She has loved people who said “I’ll never hurt you” while quietly dismantling her trust, piece by piece, with lies, neglect, and selfishness. She has stayed up at three in the morning arguing with herself, trying to decide whether to leave or stay, wondering if maybe the harm done to her is what she deserves. Every time someone chose their pride over her heart, she added another layer of armor just to make it through. If you come into her life only to tear at that armor and leave again, understand—you are not just breaking her heart; you are confirming the cruel story she keeps fighting in her mind that love will always cost her more than it gives.
If you choose her, choose her in the inconvenient moments, too. Choose her when she repeats a question because insecurity is louder than your reassurances. Choose her when her eyes fill with tears over something that looks small on the surface but reminds her of an old betrayal. Choose her when she stumbles over how to ask for comfort because she’s been made to feel “needy” for wanting to be held. In those moments, you can either build or destroy something sacred. You can either be the reason she learns that love can sit with discomfort and not run, or the reason she builds one more wall and promises never to let anyone that close again. Every small reaction from you writes a sentence in the story she is telling herself about whether her heart is safe in your hands.
Being her calm doesn’t mean you will never upset each other—it means when ruptures happen, you reach for repair instead of retreat. Instead of letting arguments turn into power struggles, you ask, “How can we understand each other better?” Instead of weaponizing her vulnerabilities in the heat of anger, you protect them even then. Instead of threatening to leave when she’s at her most raw, you stay and prove that your love can hold more than just the easy parts. She needs to learn, with you, that conflict does not always end in abandonment, that raised voices do not always precede slammed doors, that “I’m angry” can coexist with “I still choose you.”
Never forget: her tenderness is not a flaw; it is a miracle that exists despite everything that tried to harden her. After all the broken promises, the emotional bruises no one saw, the countless times she held others together while coming apart herself, she still has the courage to love. She still has the courage to hope. If you treat that tenderness as weakness, if you mock it, manipulate it, or use it to your advantage, you are not just “messing up”—you are doing real damage to the part of her that still believes in gentleness. But if you honor it—if you hold it with steady hands, protect it from your own ego, and never make her sorry for having a big heart—you will witness something rare: you will see her begin to relax into herself, to believe that she no longer has to be on guard at all times, to unfold layer by layer into the kind of love that is deep, loyal, and unlike anything you have known before.
In the end, this is what it comes down to: you have the choice to be either a safe chapter in her story or another wound she has to learn to heal from. One day, she will look back on the time she spent with you and decide what it meant. Will you be the memory that makes her bite her lip and swallow tears because she remembered how small she felt in your presence? Or will you be the memory that makes her close her eyes, soften her shoulders, and whisper, “That was the first time I truly felt safe with someone”? When she tells the story of you—to a friend, to a future love, or to herself in the quiet—let it be the story of the man who never turned her into a battlefield, but finally, finally, felt like peace. Be the one who showed her that love does not have to hurt to be real. Be the proof that her heart was always worthy of gentle hands. Be her calm. Be her home. Do not be another battle she has to fight."
-Steve De'lano Garcia
