For a long time, I believed something like this:
Once I can deliver myself properly — once I’m regulated enough, clear enough, grounded enough — then I’ll be ready for a relationship.
It sounds reasonable.
It sounds mature.
It even sounds healthy.
But I’m starting to see that it was also a way of staying safe.
When growth becomes a condition for love
I don’t struggle with self-worth in the way I once did.
I genuinely like who I am.
I trust my intentions.
I speak with care.
I show up thoughtfully.
And yet, there’s been a quieter belief running underneath all of that:
If I could just calibrate myself perfectly, then I’d be worthy of being chosen.
That belief isn’t rooted in shame.
It’s rooted in control.
It imagines that love arrives once risk is eliminated.
What my body has been teaching me instead
The relationships I’m forming now — friendships, training relationships, therapeutic spaces — are giving me something different.
Not certainty.
Not guarantees.
But a somatic sense of safety.
I’m learning, in real time, that:
- pace matters more than performance
- forcing closeness proves something, but not readiness
- safety grows through mutual regulation, not perfection
Overriding that pace doesn’t bring connection.
It brings control.
And control isn’t intimacy.
The fear underneath the polish
If I’m honest, what I’ve really been afraid of isn’t closeness.
It’s:
- choosing the wrong person
- staying too long
- losing myself
- repeating old relational traps
So I kept refining myself, hoping that one day I’d be ready enough to avoid those outcomes entirely.
But the truth is simpler — and harder:
There is no version of me that will be immune to being hurt.
A quieter realisation
Somewhere along the way, something shifted.
I realised:
I’m ready to be hurt again — not recklessly, but consciously.
I trust myself now.
I trust my ability to leave.
I trust my capacity to feel, to recover, to ask for help if I need it.
If a relationship isn’t better than being single, I won’t stay.
That isn’t avoidance.
That’s discernment.
Letting go of the “finished” self
There’s still a part of me that thinks:
- once I’m in perfect shape
- once my house is just right
- once my life feels completely settled
…then it will be time.
But life doesn’t work like that.
And love certainly doesn’t.
I don’t need to arrive whole.
I need to arrive honest.
Where I’m landing (for now)
I’m not trying to get a relationship anymore.
I’m learning how to enter one without abandoning myself.
That means:
- choosing pace over pressure
- presence over polish
- contact over control
I’m allowed to be in progress.
I’m allowed to be misjudged.
I’m allowed to learn in relationship, not before it.
That feels like the real threshold.
Not readiness.
But permission.