How Do I Make My Partner Feel Safe? Advice from a Los Angeles Couples Therapist
Lately, there has been a lot of discussion over how we can create safety in our relationships or in dating. How do we make our partner feel safe in a marriage? How do we help our partner feel safe in a relationship? How do we make sure someone feels safe on a date? How can we use repair to make our partner feel safe again, especially after trauma or feeling unsafe?
There are a range of ways to help your partner feel safe, and to create a sense of safety and security in your relationship. Whether in long-term partnership or in dating, interrogating our own habits and perceptions around safety is an important first step. Scheduling sessions with a couples therapist is an ideal way to really take a close look at the role safety has played in our own pasts, and in our relationships. Often, we may unknowingly perpetuate patterns of behavior that may cause our partners to say “I do not feel safe with you.” While a comment like this may trigger us to be defensive, looking at the underlying choices we make in relationships with a couples therapist or a marriage counselor is imperative to working on creating safety – not only for our partners, but for ourselves too.
While most articles will tell you safety is built on trust, there are many factors that come into play. Here are a few ways in which you can help your partner feel secure in your relationship, or if you are dating, help your dates feel a sense of safety as well:
How do I make my partner feel safe? Let’s open with the positive. Consider asking your partner what behaviors they notice in you that cause them to feel a sense of safety – whether that be emotional, physical, spiritual, financial, or intellectual. Maybe they like that you wait up to receive their text that they are home safely. Maybe they appreciate that you listen intently and do not interrupt in conversation. Taking a look at your strengths in creating safety with a couples counselor is a great way to affirm where you have made choices that allow for security in your relationship.
How much do I understand what it means to create safety? Often, we narrow the definition of safety to “absence of threat” when, in fact, creating a secure bond with your partner falls into many categories. Let’s take a look at two of the predominant ways that we can create safety in partnership:
Physical safety – creating a sense of physical safety may be harder than it initially seems. One underlying factor plays a strong role: put yourself in your partner’s shoes, or see the environment from your partner’s perspective, and reflect on if you would feel safe in that situation. For example, a first date at a noisy, crowded bar is not going to create physical safety. Why? There won’t be a place for you both to sit, connect, and talk without interruption. You may not be able to hear or focus on each other because of the circumstances. Other patrons may lead to a lack of safety if they are rowdy or drinking too much. Additionally, a first date choice like this does not show an intentionality for getting to know your partner.
Even in a marriage, physical safety in an environment can play a substantial role. Let’s say your partner is scared of heights, but you love rooftop restaurants. You have asked your partner to go dancing at a rooftop bar and they have mentioned repeatedly that even though they love you and are aware that you want to go, they just cannot bring themselves to be in that environment without a sense of panic. Rather than accept your partner’s point of view with compassion, you may try to coerce them into going, make them feel guilty about not going, or trick them into situations hoping to manipulate them into not being fearful of heights – signing you both up for a ziplining class for example. Even though you both have not been in the physical environment together, your partner undoubtedly does not feel a sense of physical safety with you because you are not honoring that they feel a sense of panic in situations involving heights.
You will notice that these examples also look at our boundaries – what we are able to express, and what is not honored. In the first example, a boundary could be set to say “I do not do first dates at bars,” and the second, “I do not feel safe when you pressure me to spend time attempting to challenge my fear of heights.” Understanding verbal, emotional, and physical boundaries is an important way to create intimacy, and working with a marriage therapist to clarify your boundaries is a great way to be more attentive to understanding physical safety.
Emotional security – establishing relationship patterns that build on creating a sense of emotional safety is crucial to the health of your relationships and your dating life. But what does it mean to create emotional security? While trust plays a huge factor, part of establishing trust is consistency of behavior, a sense of calm and patience, a willingness to look at places where you have not felt emotional safety in your past, and both listening and learning to your partner when it comes to how they experience emotional safety. Working with a couples counselor can help you tease apart where lack of emotional safety has led you to states of disconnection in relationships, and may even provide illumination on why you have not felt – or created – a sense of emotional safety in dating. Let’s look at two examples:
How does emotional safety look on a date? Let’s start with how it doesn’t look. Let’s say you confess a niche interest to your date, maybe one that is a bit of a risk to share or that you are passionate about – say that you collect election pins, or that you went to a throat singing concert, or that you used to be a synchronized swimmer – and rather than meet you in curiosity or genuine interest, your date chooses to dismiss you, poke fun at what you love, or tell you that your interest does not have worth. Immediately, you are going to feel a sense of emotional insecurity – anything you share with your date from that point forward will lead you to not feeling seen or heard, or doubtful that you will be accepted with non-judgment. That is lack of emotional safety.
So what is emotional safety? Maybe your date has food intolerances, and you choose a restaurant that is known for being attentive to food preparation. On the night of your date, your partner’s dish arrives with an allergen, despite them telling their server to avoid it due to their allergies. This causes them to feel frustrated, concerned, and unsafe. Creating emotional safety means allowing them to share with you what is it like to have food intolerances, for you to listen without judgment, for you to ask attentive questions, and for you to offer the invitation that you all go to another restaurant where they will feel safer about how the kitchen prepares the menu.
How does emotional safety look in a marriage? In building a long-term relationship, emotional safety means listening from a place of non-judgement, not “keeping score” or bringing up past hurts as a means to punish or prove. It often means embracing and holding your partner in silence, not attempting to fix, or to invalidate their emotional experience. It means not interrupting, and instead asking engaged questions. It means working on conscious apologies, offering gratitude on a regular basis, and keeping your word. It also means creating boundaries and patterns that cause you to feel safe as a couple. Working with a marriage therapist to not only acknowledge which boundaries have been successful for you – but also to identify boundaries that are not effective – is a surefire way to create deeper intimacy and emotional safety between you.
While physical and emotional safety are imperative parts of creating security, intellectual safety, spiritual safety, and financial safety are all also areas to consider – and often they go hand-in-hand. For example, are you great at creating a sense of intellectual safety, but your spending habits cause your partner to feel a lack of safety in terms of how you manage finance and long-term planning? Does any discussion of finances lead to you shut down and create a space that is not emotionally safe for either of you - meaning that your partner feels they cannot broach the subject of spending, and you feel emotionally reactive if they do? In a situation like this, we are looking at multiple types of safety that are often intertwined. This is where a session with a couples therapist can help you better understand your relationship to safety as a couple.
Whether in dating or in marriage, looking at patterns that establish a sense of safety in relationships is an important part of growth, and one that is often influenced by how safe we have felt in the past, what kind of safety we experienced with family, and how attentive we are to creating greater safety with our partner. When we ask ourselves “How do I make my partner feel safe in our relationship?” we should also be able to have a defined sense of how we approach this as a couple, and if we are unsure, working with a couples therapist is a great way to get on track, or back on track. In the end, when we ask ourselves “Do I feel safe with my partner?” the answer should be a resounding yes.
