Relationships & Love
One of the most persistent obstacles to healthy love is the cultural training that equips women to recognise unhealthy love as romantic and misidentify healthy love as boring.
The rollercoaster — the intensity, the highs and lows, the uncertainty, the dramatic reconciliations — has been so thoroughly romanticised in film, music, and social narrative that many women have been trained to associate this specific texture with depth and passion. The calm, the steadiness, the quiet ease of genuine security — these register as insufficient, as not enough, as the absence of the real thing.
This confusion has real consequences.
It feels like urgency. The constant low-grade (and sometimes high-grade) anxiety of uncertain attachment — will he respond, does he mean what he says, is this still real?
It feels like earning. The sense that love is a resource that must be secured through the right behaviour, the right performance, the right version of yourself. That it can be lost through imperfection.
It feels like the exhilaration of the intermittent reward. When someone who is usually uncertain, usually somewhat withdrawn, usually slightly out of reach is suddenly warm and present — the relief and joy of that is intense precisely because of the preceding deprivation. This is not depth. It is the neurological response to an intermittent reinforcement schedule. And it is designed to keep you hooked, not to sustain you.
It feels like safety. Not the absence of challenge or difficulty, but the specific experience of being with someone in whose presence you can be genuinely yourself — can make mistakes, can be uncertain, can be imperfect — without it threatening the fundamental security of the relationship.
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It feels like ease. The conversations that flow. The silences that are comfortable. The sense of being at home in someone's presence. This ease is not the absence of passion; it is the presence of genuine comfort, which is different from and better than the intensity of anxious attachment.
It feels like being seen. The specific experience of being known — of having the actual, complex, imperfect person you are encountered and chosen rather than the performance of you.
It is calm, not flat. Healthy love has depth and warmth and genuine passion. But its tenor is fundamentally settled — not the rollercoaster, but the deep current of a river that runs strongly and reliably.
If what you have always experienced as love has felt like urgency and intensity, healthy love may feel strange initially — even, paradoxically, like something is missing.
This is the reorientation work. Learning to recognise safety as love. Learning to trust that calm is depth. Learning that the absence of anxiety is not the absence of passion, but the presence of something better.
Related: What a Secure Relationship Actually Feels Like · Chemistry vs. Compatibility · The Relationships and Love Guide
The calm you are looking for is real and available. The Good Girl Delusion explores the inner work that makes it possible to receive it.
Nancy GLO
Reflective storyteller & style curator for women becoming
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