a theory of safe love

Valentine’s Day has a way of putting love on trial. As if it can be proven with reservations, roses & a carefully cropped photograph where no one looks too closely at the eyes. Every year it asks the same quiet, loaded question: So — where are you at with love?

I’ve been sitting with an answer that arrived without drama … just the steady weight of truth: I have never truly experienced safe, healthy queer love. Not the kind that settles your body instead of activating it. Not the kind that doesn’t demand constant interpretation or emotional vigilance. I’ve known desire. I’ve known intensity. I’ve known love that felt like gravity & disaster in equal measure. But safety? Consistency? A love that doesn’t ask me to translate myself or brace for impact? That is something I’ve had to imagine more than remember.

And when I go looking for mirrors … on screens, in books, in the cultural stories we circulate … it’s bleak. Queer love, especially lesbian love, is so often written as fleeting or doomed or chaotic or unfinished. We get passion, but not peace. We get yearning, but not longevity. We get the buildup, the ache, the stolen glances … and then the story cuts to black. Like maybe it’s for other people. More healed people. Luckier people. It starts to feel like healthy, long-lasting queer love exists as a theory more than a lived reality. Something we advocate for. Something we hope for — but not something we’re encouraged to expect. And if you’ve been hurt, if your history with love is complicated or sharp around the edges, it’s easy to internalize the idea that maybe this kind of love is reserved for people with cleaner pasts & calmer nervous systems. Fewer survival habits clutched too tightly.

And yet … despite all evidence to the contrary … there is a part of me that refuses to let go. She is stubborn. She is foolish in the best way. She believes without proof. She believes in a love that feels like relief. Not dull, not muted — but steady. A love that doesn’t confuse anxiety with passion or volatility with depth. A love that doesn’t require me to earn safety through endurance. A love that doesn’t feel like a test I’m always one misstep away from failing. I believe this love exists because I do not believe harm is the cost of intimacy. I do not believe chaos is a prerequisite for connection. I do not believe we are doomed to reenact what hurt us just because it’s familiar. Here’s the quiet truth that keeps me anchored … while I haven’t known that kind of romantic love yet, I have known love that saved my life.

Platonic love has been the great, unsung devotion of my existence.

Friends who became family. Not through obligation — through choice. Through staying. Through showing up when I was unrecognizable to myself. When my life cracked open. When survival became my only real ambition. This love met me in the aftermath. On the floor. In the long pauses between sentences. In the nights where being alone felt too dangerous. My friends didn’t ask me to hurry my healing. They didn’t disappear when I became inconvenient. They didn’t require me to be charming or productive or easy to love. They answered the phone. They sat in silence. They held space without trying to fix me into something more comfortable. They showed me what consistency looks like when it’s real. What care looks like when it isn’t transactional. What love feels like when it isn’t keeping score. These loves recalibrated me. They raised the bar. They taught my body that love can be grounding instead of destabilizing. That it can feel like home instead of exile. And maybe that’s why I still believe so fiercely in romantic love. Because I’ve already seen proof — real, embodied proof — that love does not have to hurt to be true.

This Valentine’s Day, I’m not interested in measuring my worth against coupledom. I’m not tallying absences. I’m not auditioning my life for legitimacy. I’m choosing to romanticize what is already here. The way morning light enters my room like it knows me. The playlists that feel like private confessions. The rituals that keep me tethered to joy. The people who know my history & love me anyway. I’m romanticizing the patience it has taken to stay. The courage it has taken to believe again. The quiet faith that I am not late to my own life. I don’t believe I’m behind. I don’t believe I’m asking for too much. And I don’t believe that wanting safe, lasting love makes me naïve. Some loves arrive later because they require you to be able to receive them. Some loves take their time because they are built to stay.

And when that love finds me — because I believe it will — I will be ready to meet it as someone who is already full. Already rooted. Already fluent in what love is supposed to feel like.

Until then, I will keep loving my life. My people. My becoming.

And I will keep making room.