Dating After Abuse: The Man I Almost Never Met Part Two

I thought the hard part would be finding a good man...

I was wrong.

The harder part was letting safe love get close enough to touch the places in me that still expected conflict to become punishment, distance, or the end of the relationship.

In this episode, I am sharing what happened after we finally met, why we moved slowly, what loving a safe man brought back to the surface, and how I learned the difference between harmful behavior and the discomfort of two people trying to understand each other.

On July 14th, I am teaching Dating After Abuse: How to Have Safe and Healthy Love live one time, and then it disappears.

Join the free training here

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Transcript

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There is a moment in conflict where my body still expects the relationship to end, even though I am with a man who has never made me feel unsafe, and we have spent a year building something slowly, intentionally, with a lot of care. In my past relationships, conflict did not mean two people trying to understand each other. It meant an argument that became an emotional blowup, silence used as punishment, abuse, or the relationship ending completely out of nowhere. There was no sense that two people could both be upset, both need something, and still remain connected after the conversation was over. So when something comes up between me and my boyfriend, I'm not always responding only to the man in front of me. I can still feel old experiences trying to enter the conversation. I still have some fear that I'm asking for too much, being too much, or making the relationship harder simply because I need something from the person that I love. The difference in this relationship is that I do not hide that part of myself. When something bothers me, I say it. We may not work through everything in that exact moment because sometimes one of us needs space before we can speak in a way that helps the relationship, but we return to the conversation shortly after. I do not let the issue sit there while I privately create a story about what he meant, what he feels, or what's going to happen next. We do talk about this together. Through this relationship, I have learned something I could not have learned while I was just single and alone. A trigger inside of a safe relationship is not automatic proof that something is wrong with the relationship itself. Sometimes it is a piece of your history coming forward because connections reached a place that feels vulnerable, and that piece of you needs attention, understanding, or repair. You can do an enormous amount of work by yourself. I did. I spent years alone, rebuilding my life, my identity, learning how to trust myself, and became someone who did not need a relationship to feel whole. And then I let somebody else in. I allowed myself to love him, started wanting a future with him, and suddenly the parts of me that felt safe, when nobody had access to my heart, had something real to lose again. Connection has showed me whether the work I had done could remain available once I deeply cared about another person. My boyfriend and I have had very hard conversations about what I need, what he needs, where we're going, how we want to show up for each other, and how two people with different histories can build one relationship without either person disappearing inside of it. There would be moments where staying in the conversation feels deeply uncomfortable because something came up against a boundary, a belief, a value, or an idea I had formed from everything I had lived before him. Instead of deciding that discomfort automatically meant the relationship had to end, I began learning how to pause long enough to understand what was actually happening. Was I looking at harmful behavior that was becoming a pattern, or were two people who loved each other trying to move through a difficult moment or a bad choice and trying to understand each other better? Those are two very different experiences. Staying through healthy discomfort does not mean tolerating ongoing behavior that harms you. It does not mean accepting an apology while nothing changes, and it does not mean leaving yourself behind in the name of commitment. For me, learning to stay has meant learning that I do not have to leave emotionally the moment something becomes uncomfortable. I can be present long enough to understand him while he remains present and long enough to understand me. We can both take responsibility, change behavior when something has hurt the other person, and still remain connected after the conversation ends. And I've never had that before. I never had an experience where there was a disagreement or an argument where two people remained in a relationship afterwards. I'm Megan, I'm an abuse recovery coach, a trauma-informed strategist, and the woman a narcissist hopes to never meet twice. This is the narcissist worst nightmare podcast where I'm telling you what happened after I finally met the man I had walked away from, how safe love still brought pieces of my past to the surface, and what I had to learn about conflict, repair, vulnerability, and choosing to remain. My boyfriend and I are celebrating one year together, and this is part two of our story. In part one, I told you how we met on Tinder, why I thought he was too nice, why I ended the conversation before we ever met, and how an amend I sent on his birthday became the day we now treat as our anniversary. In this episode, I want to tell you what happened when we finally met and what it felt like to allow someone kind into a life that was still painful, how parts of my past continued to appear inside of a safe relationship, and what this year has taught me about the difference between chemistry, commitment, conflict, and love. On July 14th, I am teaching a free training called Dating After Abuse, How to Have Safe and Healthy Love. I'm going to help you understand whether you are ready enough to date, what has to be built in your own life first, how to create standards without making connection impossible, what warning signs look like to you, and what to do if an old attachment or old fear appears around somebody new. I'm going to be teaching this live one time and then it completely disappears. The registration link is below. Our first date was coffee at my house, and selfishly, I have not found very great espresso places in New Brunswick, so it was partially my preference, but it also made no sense when you consider how many times I had delayed meeting him. He was no longer the man in the kayak with kind eyes. He was now a human inside of my house, and there was something between us that did not feel casual. There was always something that had felt different to me about him. Even during the months when we were not speaking, I did remember how he showed up in this world and how he cared and how he led with his heart. I often tell him that he is a rare man and it's not about being perfect. It's just his choice and how he shows up in this world. It's the way that he lives. You know, the offer to bring me medication before we ever met was not an isolated gesture. His kindness has continued throughout our relationship and we've really been inseparable ever since. Even though our connection felt intense, we did not rush. We've done an excellent job at allowing the relationship to move slowly because I really wanted our relationship to be in a good place before we ever opened the door to kids or parents or anything else. Hunter and my boyfriend had a FaceTime call first, and then we had dinner together, and a couple weeks later we spent a weekend together. It allowed it to happen in steps instead of trying to make instant closeness happen or try to make everyone move faster because we were excited about what the relationship was becoming. I recently met his son and we made pizza at their house. I watched part of a race with him and spent time doing things that he likes. I had no reservations about taking these next steps. We just did this in like our 11th month, and I was not worried about what this might look like, whether that was him meeting Hunter or me meeting his son. We had already spent almost a year building trust and moving intentionally and paying and paying attention to the way that we handled the relationship before bringing our kids into it. And for me, those introductions did represent the next level of a relationship. It was starting to plan to build together in a way that included the most important parts of our lives. Moving slowly can still feel difficult because we've been together for a year. And of course, like we want the things that come next. I want the shared life and the experience of waking up together more often and the other parts of what we're building. When people look at a relationship that's lasted a year and they see that the children are only beginning to meet or the couples are not living together, the outsiders can decide something is missing if they measure progress only by the visible milestones. There has been so much happening underneath that people can't see. We have both been looking after our relationship with our children and the other people in our lives. We have built trust between us without asking our children to carry any aspect of the relationship or adding any pressure to them. We did not jump over any important steps because we wanted the destination faster. There is a meaningful difference between moving slowly because somebody is uncertain about you and moving slowly because both people respect what we're building. I believe that our relationship has been intentional because we've not treated strong feelings as permission to merge everything into our lives completely. We've allowed ourselves to get to know each other through work and parenting and travel and ordinary weekends and conflict and repair. We allowed the relationship to become very real before asking anyone else to participate in it. When you've been in toxic, abusive, or narcissistic relationships before, you do not only worry about what the other person could do to you. As a mom, I had to think about what it would mean to allow someone to become visible in my son's world. And I wanted to deeply know that our relationship was in a good place and that the man who was in front of me continued to be who he was and that I was not repeating old patterns of getting swept into a relationship, moving too quickly, and trying to understand the person after our lives were already completely entangled. This time the order was different because we built the relationship first and only then began opening the next door. I think a lot of people underestimate how powerful that can feel because fast relationships can feel more romantic in the beginning. There's a rush of decisions or promises or access and conversations about forever before the other person has had enough time to know what forever really means. My past relationships moved quickly and with force. There was attention, affection, future promises, and moving into a shared life before I actually had enough information to know who I was building with. My current relationship gave me enough time to watch, to know, to be certain, to see that care was consistent and to experience him through moments that were not romantic. Moving slowly did not make the relationship feel less loving. It made love feel more real because neither of us had to rush into a future to prove the present actually meant something. One of the deepest fears that I carried, and this goes back to my parents, was that I have a belief that I'm going to be too much or ask for too much. And I still struggle at times to ask for what I need, but the difference between this relationship and my past relationships is that I don't actually hide that. When something bothers me, I'm very direct about it and we talk about it sometimes in the moment, sometimes in moments where we have it. And there are often times where one of us needs to understand what we were feeling before bringing it into the conversation, and we can return to it when it makes sense. I no longer leave things sitting there because I know what happens when two people start building completely separate versions of the relationship inside their own minds. The longer something remains unspoken, the more uncertainty and anxiety can enter the space between you. I do not want to show up that way with my person, and I do not want him wondering what I'm thinking or what I'm feeling or if I'm pulling away or whether something is wrong that I'm just not speaking about. I also do not want to create assumptions in my head when I could just speak to him and allow him to tell me what was happening for him. When you decide to let somebody wholly again to give them access to parts of you that have been mocked or hurt or used, there can be fear that even when that person has given you no reason to believe they intend to harm you, because you're not only loving the person, you are also taking on the risk of being known by them. You're allowing a person to see the softer parts, the parts that still feel fear, the parts that have needs, the parts that do not have to carry everything alone. And for me, the parts of me did not feel safe to show this before. I spent many years becoming silent and strong because strength was required. I drove everything, I planned everything, I organized everything, I paid for everything, and I carried all of the emotional weight. I learned not to need very much because needing something from another person is always being used against me. There was a day where I had a very difficult conversation with my ex-husband and his lawyer on a call in the morning, and I was depleted emotionally. It was our weekend together, my boyfriend and I, and he I think he asked what I wanted to do for dinner, and I told him, I don't know. I I don't have the capacity to make another decision, and he said something like, I've got this. He didn't ask me to explain what I meant or tell him what to do or to have me keep participating after I had already said I had nothing left. He didn't become irritated by my exhaustion, even though he had also worked all day. He didn't make me feel guilty for needing him to take over a small piece of the night. I spent so much of my life believing that if I stopped managing everything, something would get missed or somebody would be upset or I would eventually have to pay for needing help. Being able to say that I was done making decisions and have my boyfriend respond by taking care of it without making the moment moment heavier for me was something I had never really experienced. Yes, it was dinner, but it was also me learning that receiving care did not have to create another responsibility. Back in April, my boyfriend took me to the Bahamas and I brought up another version of that. He had invited me on the trip fairly early in our relationship, and I still remember he was sitting across the room not looking at me when he asked, and he seemed nervous because when you're newly dating, asking someone to commit something in the future that's not, you know, just like a dinner is kind of a it could feel like a lot. He had booked everything and looked after everything, which was very unfamiliar for me because I'd always been the person managing the the people, places, and the things, the timing, the money, the details, and whatever anybody else needed. And there was a huge part of me that felt uncomfortable because I kept thinking, like, well, I should be helping, I should be doing something. And I was so used to tying my value through what I carried instead of simply being invited, showing up, and allowing somebody else to take care of the details. It almost felt wrong. Nothing was being demanded of me. There was no hidden expectation that I needed to make myself useful enough to deserve to be there. He wanted me on that trip, he already had it handled. My only responsibility was allowing myself to receive. That trip showed me how difficult receiving can feel when you spent years believing your place in a relationship depends on how much you do. And with my boyfriend, I've been able to access softness and be in my feminine, which is something I've never experienced inside of a relationship before. Nobody has ever seen that part of me. And I knew that meant something about our relationship and our connection because I had never felt safe enough to exist inside of that love, and it was beginning to come forward. It did not hinder my interdependence. I was not becoming less capable, giving away my independence or becoming dependent on someone else to manage my life. I was learning that interdependence allows both people to have strength, but it also allows them to receive. I could still run my business and make decisions and be a parent and lead in all the ways that I want to lead, but I no longer had to remain in that energy every second of the day to prove that I didn't need anybody. There is something very different about receiving care when you know you could do it yourself, but you no longer believe you should have to do everything alone. That connects directly to the difference between need and want for me. I did not need him to make my life better or possible or worth it. I wanted to share my life with him because of who I am around him, what we enjoy doing together, what becomes available to me through this relationship, and those are things I deeply value. Even inside the safety, the past still appears for me. There are moments where I can feel myself waiting for something to change, or the part of me that is known kindness at the beginning before, wondering if this is the moment that this person becomes different. Sometimes I wonder how much of this is real because I have never had a relationship where care remained consistent. The work is not pretending that the fear doesn't exist or the thoughts don't happen. The real healing is recognizing the fear and bringing it into the relationship responsibly and refusing to make him pay for what somebody else did. He knows a lot about my past. We speak openly about my ex-husband and co-parenting in court and my mental health and my mom's dementia and the experiences that shaped me. I cannot think of much that's really been off the table with us, and my history is still my responsibility. He can be present and I can share as I move through something. He can care about what happened and understand why a moment affects me in a particular way, but he cannot heal it for me. And the same is true for him. We can heal together in the sense that we can be honest and transparent and build new experiences and support each other through what appears, but neither person is responsible for repairing the other from the inside. This is really important because one of my old patterns is believing love meant helping another person become who they could be. I took responsibility for people who refused to take responsibility for themselves, and I believe that if I understood them enough, I could somehow make their healing happen. I don't want that kind of relationship anymore. Healthy love does not require either person to become a project. It allows both people to bring their history into the relationship without it doing harm and without handing ownership of it to the other person. Learning to stay has been one of the biggest lessons in this relationship for me because my past relationships were toxic, abusive, or unwell, and there was a cycle of them. There would be a breakup, a reconnection, a high, a low, and then emotional intensity of coming back together again. Conflict usually meant that something was ending, or there'd be an emotional blow up or the silent treatment or abuse or it ending quickly. And when you've lived inside that abusive cycle, remaining inside of it can feel unfamiliar even when remaining is the healthier choice. And I want to be super clear here what I'm talking about. If you are being actively abused or mistreated, this is not a place that you should stay. I will never teach a woman to stay inside something that is ongoing, that has ongoing harmful behavior in the name of healing or the name of commitment. Learning to stay does not mean remaining where you are being abused, ignoring repeated behavior that harms you or your children, or allowing someone to use an apology as a way to reset the conversation while continuing to do the same thing. Healthy discomfort is different. It can involve two people having a conversation because something happened, one person is hurt, or each person understands the situation differently. It means realizing that your boundary, your need, your history, their history have all entered the same moment, and now both people need enough time to understand what is actually happening. There can be upset and space, and it doesn't have to be black and white. There can be upset and space along with a period where neither people knows exactly what to say yet, but responsibility, care, respect, and willingness to return to the conversation still remains present. I think my definition of commitment has also changed because of this relationship. I had been married before, I've said vows, but I never believed that a relationship was going to be my forever because I just felt captured. Commitment did not feel like two people choosing each other. It felt like I had entered something I could not safely leave. The word forever for me was not a romantic statement because it sounded like losing the right to change my mind even when the relationship was abusive. Today, commitment feels different. It is not a promise to tolerate anything. It is a choice to remain engaged when something is difficult enough that leaving emotionally would be easier. When conflict happens, the first fear that comes up for me is that I'm being too much or I'm asking too much, and I can get very protective of that part of myself that wants to shut down before I've even given him the opportunity to understand what I'm trying to say. That response is not me wanting to punish him or make him chase me. It is just the part of me that learned to protect myself by creating distance before another person could reject me, use my needs against me, or decide that loving me required more than they were willing to give. What changes the experience with my boyfriend is that he holds the space. He doesn't force the conversation before I'm ready, but he also does not disappear emotionally and leave me alone with the fear that the relationship is ending. He gives me room to work out what's happening inside me while remaining present enough to know that we're still connected. And I'm not going to share the details of our personal conflicts because those conversations belong to our relationship and our relationship only. What I can share is that being given space without being abandoned has allowed me to come back to the conversation instead of staying shut down. And I talked about this before in another podcast. My fear of abandonment isn't just that simple line. My fear of abandonment or abandoning people is that people put me in a position that I have to leave them. And that goes back to my parents and past relationships. I can take the time I need without using distance as an exit, and he can remain available without trying to control how quickly I move through something. Commitment for me today means I'm willing to hear something about myself or a situation that I may not enjoy hearing, but the relationship deserves two people who can take responsibility. It means I'm willing to understand his experience without deciding that understanding him requires me to abandon my own. And it also means we can have different needs in the same conversation. And I know that that sounds very simple, but I've never experienced it before. There are times where staying is meant emotionally checking in with myself before conflict or something more happens. Am I responding to what he actually said or did? Or am I responding to what the sentence could have meant in a past relationship? Am I upset about the current behavior, or is something from my history adding another storyline to it? There are moments where choosing to stay feels uncomfortable because I want to protect myself and decide that the conversation means something more before it's finished and move ahead of the pain so I'm not surprised by it. Remaining long enough to understand has allowed our relationship to grow. It's allowed us to have hard conversations about what we need, where we're going, and how we want the relationship to feel. Every time we work through something without one person disappearing, we build evidence that conflict does not automatically mean abandonment. I've never known what it's felt like to have two people remain present enough to understand what hurt, why it hurt, and what needs to change. Once you experience that, conflict begins creating a deeper understanding of who the other person is. And those types of things bring two people closer, but only if you're both willing to do the work. I believe today that an apology with action means nothing. You can have the best intentions in the world, but when your behavior hurts somebody, the behavior needs to change. That applies to anybody in my life beyond just me and my boyfriend. I used to believe that words were enough because I'm sorry sounded like the behavior would stop. I believe the apologies, the emotions, the promise, the explanation, and I stayed for another version of the same experience, but I do not live that way anymore. When somebody does something that hurts me and I tell them I pay attention to what happens next, I watch whether they make an effort to understand it and change it and become curious about the effect or the impact that it had on me, or maybe they become defensive because my pain makes them uncomfortable. When somebody understands what their behavior does to me and continues, I will pull away because I do not want relationships with people who expect me to absorb pain so they do not have to change. Real repair is not apology. It's what happens after the apology through change behavior, deeper understanding, and evidence that the conversation meant something. That does not mean a person never makes another mistake. It means they do not treat your pain as something they only need to speak over until you stop bringing it up. When real repair happens between my boyfriend and I, we do become closer because it's more of an understanding of our histories, our fears, and what each other's needs. That depth has allowed the relationship to become safer because we're not trying to figure out what a relationship is without conflict. We are learning how to have conflict without destroying the connection. A very strong belief I brought into this relationship very early was that the problems in the relationship should remain in the relationship. And I want to explain that because a lot of people are in harmful situations and need support, and I'm not talking about hiding abuse or isolating yourself. I'm talking about two adults and a Healthy relationship, going through ordinary conflict and choosing to bring the issue to their person before somebody else. A lot of people go to friends, parents, the internet, or whoever supports them before speaking to the person they're in a relationship with. Then they have your thoughts, feelings, and assumptions along everybody else's opinion. Now there's a committee behind you because people who love you are going to support you, and after hearing one version of the story while you're upset, they form opinions about your partner before your partner has an opportunity to speak. So when you return to the relationship, there's more voices in your head than the two people actually in it. I also told him that I wanted to be loved loudly. I did not want to hide in the relationship. I post on the internet for a living and I'm willing to talk about the beautiful pieces of what we have, but the private parts belong to us. When there is conflict, he is the first person that I talk to. If I needed outsiders to tell me how I felt about my own relationship constantly, I would truly ask myself why I was in it. There's a big difference for me between secrecy and privacy. Privacy has helped us build trust and safety because he knows I'm not taking our hardest moments to the internet or to other people for judgment, and I know I'm not doing the same. So we can be public about our love without turning our private conversations into content. So much of what I love about a relationship is our ordinary. Every other weekend we have no kids, and most of the time we get to spend that together, and it feels like an escape from the world. I love his extra long hugs. Even when they get a little bit uncomfortable because they last longer than I expect. I can feel his breathing slow down when we are together. And there's something about noticing that change that makes the moment feel bigger than a hug. I love his smirk when he's being playful, and every morning without fail, the first message I receive from him and the last message at night comes from him too. We can do almost anything and it becomes instantly better because we're doing it together. Grocery shopping, sitting beside each other, working on a Saturday morning, going for a walk. The activity doesn't need to be a big thing because the ordinary pieces of life with him feel like the relationship that I've always wanted. He supports my work and he owns a business as well. He understands what it looks like to look after people, manage responsibility, and be a large presence in others' lives. With him, I can be in my leadership and be soft at the same time. I can receive, remain powerful, and still allow somebody else to handle dinner or other plans when I cannot make a decision. I can arrive for a trip without needing to control every detail, build a business, raise my son, and still let somebody hold me long enough that I can feel something. That version of love was built through consistency and all the ordinary moments where someone continues to be the same. After one year, I can say something I never believed I would be able to stay honestly before. I can imagine forever because we're building something where both people are allowed to remain whole. A year ago, I sent an amends to a man I've never met. He thought I did not need to apologize. I did not know that it was his birthday. And when he asked me if I wanted to meet, I wondered if he was drinking because none of it made sense to me. I thought I was taking responsibility for how I had left. I did not know that I was opening the door to my first healthier relationship. Between our first coffee and the good morning and good night messages, the child-free weekends, the travel in the Saturday mornings that feel like a little piece of heaven, I've become a version of myself that no other person has seen before, and that's how I know that it's real love. A woman who can love somebody else wholly without believing the idea of love cost me myself. Our relationship is beautiful, but it's not because we never have conflict, misunderstand each other, or have difficult conversations. It's beautiful because we are learning to remain honest and transparent instead of moments, what each person needs in order to feel seen, heard, and understood, and how repair requires action. I have learned that safe love does not erase the past. In fact, healthy love will actually bring up more of your past than you're probably ready for. All that it's going to do for you is bring you to a place where your past can appear without being allowed to decide what happens next. If you have done a lot of work after abuse and you're beginning to wonder if you are ready to date again, I want you inside my free training and dating after abuse, how to have safe and healthy love on July 14th. We are going to talk about whether you're ready to date again, how to create standards without building walls, what commitments you need to make to yourself before you let somebody else close, and what to do when fear appears inside of a new connection. Those fears can appear when the person in front of you is kind. You can have strong communication and still become afraid that asking for what you need is going to be too much. You can spend years building a life alone and discover that allowing someone to love you touches parts of you that independence never could, that independence never reached. The answer is not to refuse love forever. The answer is to become the woman who is willing to enter into it without disappearing. I help women leave unhealthy, abusive, toxic relationships through the emotional exit. On July 14th, the training is part of the relational rebuild, and I will teach it one time before it disappears from the internet forever. The registration link is down below. At the end, I will be inviting women who are ready to do deeper relational work inside of the Black Cat Academy. It's for the woman who is out of the abusive relationship, feels stable, autonomous, and ready to stop allowing the relationship from her past to choose her relationships in the future. This is where we really work on discernment, standards, desire, feminine sovereignty, relational recalibration, and the ability to remain fully yourself inside of love. If this episode cracks something open in you good, that means you are waking up. Please share this with another woman who needs it. Send me a damn on Instagram to tell me what landed the heart is for you. And register for dating after abuse how to have safe and healthy love happening live on July 14th. I am teaching it once and then it disappears forever. This is the Narcissist Worst Nightmare podcast where safe love did not erase the woman I had to become alone. It gave her somewhere to be loved without having to disappear.