Security Isn’t Certainty. Most of Us Have Been Confusing Them Our Whole Lives.

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The first time my partner went on a date after we opened up, I spent the evening doing something I’m a little embarrassed to describe. I wasn’t spiraling exactly. I was making a plan. What time they’d probably be home, what I’d ask when they got there, how much detail I’d want, which details I definitely wouldn’t want, what it would mean if they came back quiet versus what it would mean if they came back happy. I had mapped out every possible version of the next twelve hours, and I was trying to make sure that none of them would surprise me.

At the time, I would have told you I was trying to feel secure. Looking back, I was trying to feel certain. And it took me years to understand that those aren’t the same thing, and that confusing them had been shaping how I loved people for most of my life.

What We Usually Mean by Security

When most of us say we want to feel secure in a relationship, what we really mean is that we want to know what’s going to happen. We want to know they’ll still be there next year. We want to know they won’t fall for someone else, won’t change in ways we can’t follow, won’t decide to leave us one day. We want the future mapped out and signed off on, so we can stop worrying about it.

Monogamy, as it’s usually practiced, is built to offer exactly that. Exclusivity works as a kind of guarantee: as long as nobody else is in the picture, nothing can really threaten what we have. And because the guarantee feels so solid, it’s very easy to mistake it for security itself.

The problem is that it isn’t really a guarantee at all. People change, fall out of love, meet someone at work, grow in directions nobody saw coming. Every relationship, monogamous or not, is made of two people who are free to change. Certainty is a promise about the future that nobody is actually in a position to keep. So when your sense of safety rests on it, you end up needing constant evidence that it’s still intact. That isn’t security. It’s a type of vigilance that we’ve learned to call love.

What Happens When the Guarantee Disappears

Non-monogamy takes that guarantee away pretty much immediately. Your partner is going to meet people. Some of those people will matter to them. You can’t know in advance how much, or what it will feel like, or where it might lead. If your sense of security was resting on certainty, the floor falls out from under you.

That’s what was happening to me on that first evening. I was trying to rebuild the guarantee by force, gathering enough information and anticipating enough outcomes that nothing could catch me off guard. It didn’t work, of course. It never works. All it did was exhaust me, and if I’d kept going down that road, it would have turned me into someone who needed to monitor her partner’s life to feel okay in her own.

What eventually helped wasn’t more certainty. It was noticing what actually happened when things didn’t go to plan. My partner came home from dates and was still my partner. They had feelings for other people and kept showing up for me with the same care they always had.

When something shifted between us, we talked about it, and the honesty turned out to be what I could actually lean on. Not that nothing would change, but that when things changed, I’d be told, and I’d be treated well, and we’d figure it out together.

What Security Actually Is

I think real security has two parts, and neither of them is about the future.

The first is trust in how the other person treats you. Not trust that they’ll never want anyone else or never change, but trust that they’ll be honest with you, that they’ll consider you, that they won’t leave you in the dark about the things that affect your life. That kind of trust is built in the present, through what someone actually does, over and over. It doesn’t require a promise about next year. It just requires that they keep being who they’ve shown you they are.

The second part is trust in yourself. This is the one nobody talks about, and in my experience it’s the one that matters most. It’s the knowledge that if something did change, even something painful, you would survive it. That your life would still be yours, that you’d still be whole, and that you’re not standing on top of the relationship like it’s the only thing keeping you from falling. Once I started to believe that about myself, the need for certainty got a lot quieter, because I wasn’t relying on the relationship never changing to be okay.

Certainty asks the other person to guarantee you a future. Security asks them to be honest with you now, and asks you to trust yourself with whatever comes. One is about control. The other is about trust. And only one of them actually holds up when life does what life does.

This Isn’t Just an ENM Thing

I want to be clear that I don’t think this is only relevant to people who are non-monogamous. Monogamous relationships end too, sometimes after decades, sometimes with no warning at all. The guarantee is never really there for anyone. Non-monogamy just makes that impossible to ignore, because it removes the thing most people use to avoid looking at it.

So if you’re monogamous and reading this, the question is still worth asking. Is your sense of safety in your relationship coming from how you’re treated, or from the belief that nothing will change? Because one of those will carry you through hard times. The other tends to collapse the first time it’s tested.

I still have moments of wanting certainty. I think everyone does. But I’ve stopped confusing it with what actually makes me feel safe, which is being loved honestly by someone who keeps choosing me, and knowing I’ll be alright whatever happens next.

That turns out to be much sturdier than a guarantee ever was.

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Where does your sense of security come from? I’d love to hear in the comments.

_xx, Luna Rose
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