A colleague and I were discussing a student who struggled with significant life challenges. We admired how the student was able to sense the kind of support she needed on a given day. When she needed help planning and moving forward, she showed up at my colleague’s door, tough and ready to forge ahead. When she was feeling misunderstood, unloved, and overwhelmed, she showed up in the chair in my office, box of Kleenex on her lap and tears rolling off her cheeks. “Why do you think I always get the crying version of her and never see the more proactive version that you see?” I asked. “Chris,” my colleague said, “It’s because you’re a soft place to land. You have the chocolate. You have the comfortable chair. You have the Kleenex. And you always know just when someone needs a good hug. You’re a soft place to land.” She paused. “You have a landing pad. I have a launching pad.”
I’ve thought about that conversation a great deal. I am a soft place to land. One of the things I value most in relationship is understanding—that “Really? Me, too!” moment when you realize you have a new friend. The person who responds to the thoughts you didn’t say out loud but were thinking. Empathy.
I will always be a soft place to land. I want this blog to be a soft and safe place for women. For years, I wanted my husband to understand me, to love the me I knew I was inside, to show that he cared for my heart more than my body, to cherish me, to pay attention and know what I needed, to see my heart and accept it anyway, to help me through struggles, to nurture my soul. I wanted my husband to be my safe place. When I realized how much I was hurting, I didn’t feel like I had a safe place, a soft place to know that I was understood.
So, sisters in refusal and gate-keeping, I invite you to sit with me for a while. Share your hurt here. This can be your soft place to land. Sitting in the soft place for a while is a good first step. . It is healing to feel understood. Many of us can relate to how hard it is to wrestle with memories from the past, words or actions from our husbands that have hurt, walls that are so thick that taking them down brick by brick is hard.
But…..
You can’t stay in the soft place forever. Sit for a while. Know that you’re understood. But if all you ever do is sit here, nothing will get better. You won’t grow. Your marriage won’t improve. After a bit, you really won’t feel much different than you did when you landed here.
Whether you brought hurt into your marriage or you married into it, you can’t let that define your life or your marriage. Your life may be exhausting and stressful as you juggle the many roles you play—but you need to make a decision to make your marriage a higher priority than the juggling act. You can’t just stay in the hurt and tired place forever. It serves no one—not your husband, not your marriage, not your family, not God, and not you.
My hurt and stress manifested in a sad marriage bed. My husband felt miserable and unloved. I hurt him deeply. I pushed him so far away that then I felt unloved as well. When I began to make changes in my sexual interactions with my husband, I had no idea that it would lead where it did. It took time, but as he came to trust me with his sexual desire and have his sexual needs met, most of the tension in our marriage faded away. (Okay, to be honest, having lots more orgasms helped with the tension, too.) As I felt less tension, I felt more loved, and it was easier to be physically affectionate and loving to him. Over time, the downward vicious circle we’d been in reversed into an upward spiral of a growing marriage. Our spiral continues to rise.
I still have plenty of work to do on myself. As I’ve opened my heart to my husband, I’ve opened my heart to God as well. I’ve invited Him in, and He is showing me how much I have to learn. I am doing some hard work within myself. But I can do it now, because my marriage has become a safe place for me to rest as I dig deep and work through some hard things.
I’m glad you’ve landed here, in what I pray is a soft place. Use this soft place to gather your courage and focus and move forward. Take steps, even if they’re small and your progress is slow. Learn to set aside some of your own problems and help your husband with his. Life is not about staying put. It is about growing and learning and being in relationship.
This is a soft place, a landing pad. Just make sure it is a launching pad a well.
It might be hard. It might hurt. You can’t just sit and stay in the soft place forever. But you can always come back to visit and have some chocolate and a few hugs.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
~Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, ESV
Image credit | Mat Brown at pexels.com
I've moved! While you can peruse the archives here, I am no longer posting at The Forgiven Wife.
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Ladies, if you're interested in joining me for a study of Juli Slattery's new book God, Sex, and Your Marriage, time is running out! Our study begins with introductions on February 26, 2023, but the study will be open to join until March 5.
An extremely valid point.
You are always welcome here, Effy.
Love this post. I so need a safe place and a launching pad. I can see the areas I need to work on yet I am struggling moving forward because my heart is not a place of desiring to see my marriage repaired. If I change it will improve but I still believe I will be in an unhappy marriage (for me). It’s a second marriage that both of us rushed into as a new believers. He brought a lot of anger and emotional abuse into the marriage and alienated my three children (and me!) through their teenage years. My heart breaks for the missed childhood and family years! Couple counseling has helped us resolve a lot of issues but my children don’t see our house as a home. They only want to spend time with me without my husband. They do not like when I act submissive (respectful) to my husband. As they say – they want better for me – they want to see me happy and cherished. So… I don’t feel like I have a safe place to express my emotions (can’t do it with my family, my husband, or friends). And I need a launching pad to get unstuck and believe that The Respect Dare can shape a new future in my marriage and family. Thanks for letting me express my thoughts.
“I am struggling moving forward because my heart is not a place of desiring to see my marriage repaired.” Yet you are doing the Respect Dare. That is an act of courage, my friend–a real leap of faith. My prayer for you is that as you work through the Respect Dare and grow in your relationship with God, your marriage will become a source of rest and joy for you. I want you to be happy and cherished, too.
I’m glad you’re here.
Tears…..thanks for the encouragement.
You have a beautiful writing style, it is easy to see God’s heart in your words. I think I’ll stay around.
I appreciate the comment. Thank you for dropping by and for sticking around.
Wow! What an amazing post! I’ve been healed by finding a safe person with whom I’ve been able to share my deepest secrets. One of my favorite sayings is: “A burden shared with a safe person in a safe place becomes less than half as heavy.” I’ve been able to take the strength found in that safety into other areas of my life.
Thx for putting my experience into words that make it easier to understand.
I’m glad you have a safe place for sharing secrets. Having an unshared secret sucks energy.
This is great!! I have always been a soft place to land and it is nice to have a soft place to land.
I don’t know if you’ll see this comment on an older post, but I hope you do. I’ve started reading through from the beginning and finding a lot of food for thought. I appreciate the soft place to think and consider. An earlier post on reasons for needing self-protection really struck me (planted seeds, you could say).
I wrote a long response responding to something else you said in this post, but it’s getting so detailed and personal I think I might send an email instead. In some ways I can identify with your struggles, and in other ways I have to wonder if I can learn what you already seem to have known from early on.
I’m always happy to hear from a reader, whether it’s a comment or an email.
So much of what I’ve learned has come long after the experience. The fact that I am now able to understand the how and why of something doesn’t mean I knew it all along. And there are things I think I understand now that I will probably see differently later. It’s hard to know what I really knew early on.
I need a soft place to land….I’m always everyone else’s soft place. I’m at a point where I can’t open up to my husband anymore, not because I don’t want to hut because he isn’t a safe place. We have sex, lots of it…he’s just rude. Today, he hurt my feelings by somethung he said, it probably shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did…so I was trying to discuss with him, wondering why I was soooo triggered. He cut me off and raised his voice and very authoritatively gave me his excuses for what he said ( which btw he’d already done before I spoke) ….it’s a pattern. I have no voice. It doesn’t matter….I have no so safe place
I’m very sorry you’re experiencing this. It is hard to open up sexually when we don’t feel emotionally safe. When there is a pattern of having your voice silenced and your words dismissed, it is unlikely that any woman will feel safe. Might I suggest that you try praying for your husband? Not praying for him to change, but for him to seek God’s presence and be open to God’s leading? And for yourself, it is worth looking for a trusted woman in the church who can be a sounding board for you when you are having a rough day. (((Hugs))) to you.