In this episode of The Loving Truth podcast, I dive into the complexities of love and safety in relationships. I discuss how, despite our desire for security, love inherently involves risk. I share personal insights about how seeking “safe” partners can sometimes lead to boredom in long-term relationships and I explore why people choose predictable love for comfort, yet crave excitement and change later on. I encourage listeners to embrace the uncertainties of love, reflecting on how love, though never truly safe, is ultimately worth the risk for the deeper human experience it offers.

Listen to the Full Episode:
What You’ll Learn In This Episode:
02:00 Why choosing a partner for safety may not guarantee long-term fulfillment.
4:35 How the differences that attract us early in a relationship can become frustrating over time.
5:34 The role of life experiences in shaping relationship decisions and dynamics.
11:45 The reality that love, like life itself, carries inherent risks, but it’s still worth pursuing.
15:25 How to embrace love despite its unpredictability, and why seeking complete safety in a relationship is impossible.
Mentioned On Love Isn’t Safe. Now What?
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Struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you’re serious about finding that answer?
Book a Truth & Clarity Session with a member of my team. We’ll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there’s a fit for you and I to work together so you can make - and execute - the RIGHT decision for YOU and your marriage.
Welcome to the Loving Truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now, your host, relationship expert and certified master life coach, Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the loving truth. Today we're going to be talking about love, of course, but we're also going to be talking about safety, because as much as we don't like this answer, love.
Choosing to love is not safe. So if love is not safe, what do we do? So I will often have people tell me that they chose a partner to marry who was safe. And I know exactly what they mean to because I use that same language. When I would describe my first marriage is that I married the safe man. Now, what I meant by that was I knew that he wouldn't hurt me because I had been in a few relationships before where I had gotten hurt, or someone broke up with me or someone cheated on me, or someone treated me really poorly because my ex husband was a good, kind man, he wasn't going to do any of those things.
And so it is our life experiences that lead us to our choices. Like, my experience of being hurt led me to playing it a little bit more safe so that I wouldn't have to continually experience those negative feelings. Now, I want you to think about, though, when you are looking for a partner to spend your life with, the very things that make them safe are also the things that make them attractive to us.
All right? Because if you're going to spend your life with someone, well, then you want someone who has similar interests, same values, similar goals as you, right? So those similarities are what we're looking for. And that feels very known and it feels predictable, and therefore it feels safe. I mean, we don't go into relationships so that we can get hurt. None of us do. And yet it's only in our most intimate relationships where we hurt each other the most sometimes.
And marriage is a very serious decision because we say, at least, that we are going to spend forever with this person. So we want some degree of predictability. We don't want the person that's out on the edge that you never know what to expect day to day, where they're going to be there one day, gone the next. And you don't have shared values and you don't have shared goals like you want that.
But then at some point inside of our marriage, when that all becomes comfortable and we want a little bit more drama or a little bit more excitement because we've gotten kind of bored. And the desire in our lives is down. We sort of refer to our partners as safe, as though it's a negative thing when it's actually the very thing that we kind of went looking for when we were looking for a partner.
Right. So when we have more in common with the person, it becomes easier to love them. But what's interesting is that our differences often will attract us to our partner, but what keeps us together are the similarities, the commonalities will keep us together. So, for instance, let's say that you're kind of introverted and your partner is the life of the party, and you loved that about him when you were dating and when you had first gotten together.
It was one of the things, it helped pull you out of your shell a little bit, and it also helped make you feel safe in social situations because he sort of carried the weight by being the center of attention in the life of the party. And you could just ride his coattails and still have a good time and be social without needing to be the center of attention.
But maybe now, 20 years later, you look at him needing to be the center of attention, and you think it's pathetic and it irritates you. Right? So now you want him to be more like you so that you don't have to look at that. So it's turned from the thing that that really was attractive to you in the beginning is now frustrating to you today. Okay, so we're human beings.
Shocker. News flash. We are human beings. Here's the news flash. That means that we are deeply flawed. And it is in our most intimate relationships that we bring the best of ourselves in the worst of ourselves. Like at work, we bring our best most of the time. We usually don't bring childhood traumas and wounds and things that trigger us. We don't often bring that kind of stuff to our professional environment.
But in our intimate relationships, boy, do we. That's why I always say you don't just marry. You know the phrase, you marry the family of the person that you marry? No, no, no. You marry every single life experience they've ever had, and they marry every single life experience you've ever had. You bring all of it, your whole self, in every sense of the word, into your most intimate relationship.
Whether you want to or not. It's going to be there. And so that's why it's important to know about those things. Now, if we get back to the concept of safety. So as human beings, we like safety. We like what is known. It's why we avoid change, right? I have a mentor, Martha Beck. I one time heard her say, look, if you are resistant to change, you were born on the wrong planet.
And yet most of the world resists change. For some odd reason, I go out looking for it. Like every three to five years, I make big changes in my life. I don't know why that is exactly, but it is. But I know that that's not what most people do. You know, some people stay in the same job for many years. They stay in the same home for many years.
We like what is known and what is consistent because that feels safe and therefore comforting to us. There's nothing wrong with wanting to feel safe, except we were probably born on the wrong planet because life isn't terribly safe. So one of the examples that I heard that I love because it's just so, it brings it home for everybody, is that we drive. Let's say we're driving down a two lane road, and the only thing that is keeping us from colliding with a car going 60 miles an hour in the opposite direction from us and hitting head on is this painted yellow line.
And we trust that the person on the other side of the road is not going to cross that yellow line, and we're not going to cross that yellow line. And as long as we both do that, we're not going to get into an accident and die. Except sometimes that happens, right? Sometimes people aren't paying attention. Sometimes people are inebriated, sometimes, whatever. Maybe they have a stroke while they're driving.
There's a million things that could happen. So if you want to feel safe, you would never drive a car, get into a car, go anywhere, leave your house. You just wouldn't. But we do it every single day of our lives because it's part of being alive. It's part of living. If you're going to be out living your life, you're going to subject yourself to some, some degree of a lack of safety.
Now, likewise, love is not safe. Love and relationships not safe, even though we desperately want them to be. We are so desperate to make our relationships safe that we sort of put bubble wrap around them through our vows. From the beginning, right of when we come together in marriage, we say things like, till death do us part, or I will love and honor you all the days of my life, or what God has joined together, man must not divide.
Those are all phrases and commitments that we use in order to make us feel more safe, in order to calm our fears that our partner is going to leave or that our partner is going to hurt us. But words alone obviously do not protect us from our deepest fears, because inevitably our partner will hurt us and we will do something or say something that will hurt them, because we bring our whole selves into the relationship.
Now, it's not usually intentional, although sometimes it is, right? Sometimes when we feel hurt, we just want to hurt them back, because that's how we've learned how to deal with pain, because no one taught us a different way to deal with pain. So you get punched, you punch back, right? But most of the time, it's just unconscious. It's us reacting. It's us being in our ego and nothing engaging from more of a heart based perspective in our relationships.
And that's what causes the upset. But we're going to hurt each other. And my friends, your partner might leave you. Even though they said those words and they made those commitments in front of a whole bunch of people, they still might make a different choice, and you might, too. That's what makes it unsafe. That's the way of it. We choose one another. We actively choose one another until we don't.
Until we make a different choice. I'm choosing to be with you today, but next year, what if I choose to not be with you? That is the nature of having choice and of having free will. And the truth of it is, we can't have it both ways. We can't have both choice and safety, not in relationships, because there's a whole other person involved, and they have their choices inside the relationship, and we can't control their choices.
We can only control our choices. So therefore, it's never really going to feel safe. We might lie to ourselves, we might delude ourselves. We might turn our attention away from the reality of the situation and ignore that. But I want you to go into it with your eyes wide open and go, yeah, it's not safe. And I'm still going there. See, we can't have choice without some degree of risk, because if we want to feel 100% safe all the time in our marriages, then we have to go back to a time when marriage was like an institution that you could never get out of.
Once you got in it, you can't get out, right? So it's known. It's controlled, and not by you. It's controlled by some other entity outside of yourself. And therefore, once you enter into it, you are stuck. There are still many cultures that operate that way where divorce is not an option, at least for many women. But maybe in some cultures, it's also for men. Like, once you are married, you are married for life, and that is it.
That means that the state or the government or the church or something, someone else is in charge of that. That's the only way that you can feel safe. But even then, human beings, we crave choice. So that doesn't mean that you or your partner isn't going to go out and find another partner. They might still remain married, but they're having affairs, so it doesn't mean that you can't get hurt.
They may not be able to leave, but it doesn't prevent you from being hurt. So here we are again. Life isn't safe and love isn't safe. Now what? Now what? If you wanted pure safety, you'd never leave your home. You certainly wouldn't fall in love, and you wouldn't get married, right? So the question from all of this becomes, okay, it's not safe. Is it worth the risk? Like every day we make the choice that it's not safe to drive because I could get in an accident and die.
But is it worth the risk? Yes, because I want to be out. I want to be living my life. There are places I want to go. There are things I want to see, there are experiences I want to have. So it's worth the risk. We make that choice every day. And so the question becomes, if love isn't safe, do we still make that choice? And I am here to tell you that, yes, we do.
Yes, we do. Yes, we do. We do. And I don't think that that's ever going to change. You know, a lot of people will today because they look at the stats and they look at what's happening with marriages and they're like, well, that's a bad bet. Why would I ever get married? Or, you know, they see how people get hurt from inside of love and marriage and divorce, and they're like, oh, well, I'm just.
I'm never doing that again. That hurt too bad. I'm just never going to love again. That's a way to keep myself safe. That's a way for me to stay protected. So some of us go into it like we know the risk and we go there anyway because it's love. Because it's the thing that makes us feel fully alive even when it doesn't last. And love is what we're here for.
That's why we're in this life at this time. And I think that at the end of our days, on our deathbed, the only thing that will matter is, were we loved and did we love? That's it. No one's going to talk about your career. No one's going to talk about any of that stuff. What they're going to talk about is the connections and the love that you cultivated in your life.
That's what you're going to be thinking about. I know that's what I'm going to be thinking about. So I'm going to do all that I can right now, knowing that even though it's not safe, I'm still going to open my heart to as much love as my little heart can hold. So, yes, some people will shut down to it and say, no, no, no, I'm not doing that again.
That just hurt too bad. So I'm never going to do it. It's like saying I'm never going to get on an airplane because what if the plane goes down? Well, then you're also never going to see some really amazing places. You're going to see what is in driving distance. Unless, of course, you don't want to get in a car either. Then you're only going to see your own living room.
So there's always a trade off to this sense and this need for safety. I think as human beings, we are never really going to stop reaching for love, even though it's not safe and even though it's not guaranteed. So we've got to make peace with that. We've got to make peace with, yep, we say the words and we do the things and we still have a 50% to 73% divorce rate.
But if we can take some accountability for that and we can know that going into it, then we can both show up to that relationship. And my bet is, is that we will choose one another much more frequently and our relationships will start to feel much better than they do today, where we're taking it for granted and we're assuming that we can treat our partners any way and they'll never leave, this will never end, it'll never hurt because the stats and my clients might tell you otherwise.
Right? So it doesn't have to be safe for us to be able to say, yep, I'm still going to do it. I'm going to incur the risk so that I can have the experience. I'm going to incur the risk to get on the plane so that I can go see Italy. I'm going to incur the risk to get on the road so that I can spend an afternoon with my grandbabies.
And I'm going to incur the risk of falling in love and getting married and pledging to be a partner to someone for the entirety of my life, for the experience of witnessing someone else's life and having them witness mine. Right? So it's not safe. So what? We're still gonna do it? I hope that gives you something to think about. Until next time, please take really good care. If you're listening to this podcast, because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team.
On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage. Go to clarityformymarriage.com to fill out an application. Now that's clarityformymarriage.com.