The Bulletproof Vest

A Love Story;

I'm Divine. And the most complicated thing I have ever lived through was not hatred. It was love; the wrong kind, from the wrong hands, in all the wrong ways.

I. How It Begins

He loved me. I want to say that first.

Because this is not a story about a villain. It is not a story about a man who was cruel or calculated or cold. It would almost be easier if it were. Easier to name, easier to leave, easier to file away under bad people and move forward cleanly.

But he loved me.

In his way. In the only way he knew. And that is precisely what made it so difficult; and so damaging, and so hard to explain to anyone who asked why I stayed as long as I did.

How do you explain to someone that you can be loved and still be hurt? That love, on its own, is not enough if it is not also careful?

I met him in a season when I was full.

Not searching, not desperate, not operating from that quiet ache that makes people accept less than they should. I was full of purpose, of faith, of my own becoming. I was reading, writing, praying, building. I was, for the first time in a long time, genuinely happy in my own company.

And he walked in.

He was warm. That was the first thing. The kind of warm that makes a room feel smaller and safer at the same time. He laughed easily and listened well and he looked at me; from the very beginning, like I was something worth looking at carefully.

He pursued me with intention. Showed up consistently. Said the right things and, for a while, did them too. He told me I was unlike anyone he had ever known. He said it like it was a discovery he was still getting used to.

I believed him.

I had no reason not to.

II. The Vest

I should tell you about the vest.

I came into this love carrying armor; the way most people do when they have lived long enough to know that feeling things fully comes with a cost. Not thick armor, not the bitter impenetrable kind. Just the quiet, sensible protection of someone who has learned to be careful. To watch. To wait until safety is established before offering the most tender parts of herself.

I watched him for a while.

And what I saw looked like safety.

So I made a choice; conscious, deliberate, not naive. I decided to love him without the armor. To stop calculating and simply feel. To take the bulletproof vest off and step into this thing with my whole chest and trust that what he was showing me was what he was.

I hugged him better without it.

For a while, it was the most beautiful thing.

There is a particular quality to love when it is new and whole and unafraid. Everything is vivid. Conversations that run until the sky changes color. The way his name in your phone makes something in your chest lift, reliably, like a reflex. Praying together and feeling, in those moments, that God is very near and very pleased.

I loved him in the specific, attentive way I love everything; completely, with my full attention, noticing the small things. The way he took his coffee. The particular silence he went into when he was thinking hard about something. The way he said my name differently when he was tired; softer, like something he was setting down gently.

I loved him the way I had always known I was capable of loving someone.

And he loved me back.

Just; not quite right.

III. The Wrong Way

It came slowly. The way these things always do.

Not in grand betrayals. Not in dramatic failures. In the small, accumulating moments that are easy to explain away individually but tell a different story when you lay them end to end.

He loved me, but he was careless with my words. Things I had told him in the dark, in the unguarded hours; he would let them slip in ways that made me feel exposed. Not maliciously. Carelessly. As though he had forgotten that I had handed him something fragile.

He loved me, but he could not hold space for my pain. When I was struggling, when I needed someone to simply sit with me in the hard thing, he would rush to fix it; not because he was unkind but because my pain made him uncomfortable and his discomfort came first. I learned to be smaller in my suffering. To edit my struggles before sharing them. To present only the versions of my pain that were easy to be around.

He loved me, but he took my consistency for granted. Because I showed up reliably; because I was steady, because I didn’t play games, because what he saw was always what he got, he stopped being careful. Stopped being intentional. Assumed I would always be there regardless of how little he tended to the thing between us. Love, for him, was a state. Not a practice.

He loved me, but he could not meet me where I was spiritually. My faith was the center of my life; the foundation, the filter, the source. He respected it the way you respect something you don’t fully understand. From a distance. Politely. It was never shared ground. And I felt that absence like a missing wall; the structure was there but something essential was open to the elements.

None of these things, alone, would have been enough to break something.

All of them together, over time, quietly did.

IV. The Shot

I didn’t leave the first time I should have.

I want to be honest about that. Because this is not a story about a woman who was simply wronged; it is a story about a woman who saw the signs and loved him anyway, who hoped that love would be enough to change what only willingness can change, who stayed in the almost long after the almost had shown her what it was.

I stayed because he loved me. Even the wrong way, even imperfectly, it was real and I could feel it and leaving something real is one of the hardest things a person can do.

I stayed because I believed in his potential. In who he could be if he tried, if he grew, if he chose differently. I am a woman of faith; I believe in transformation, in growth, in the capacity of people to become better than they are. I applied that faith here when I should have applied discernment.

I stayed because leaving felt like failure. Like I hadn’t loved well enough or been patient enough or prayed hard enough. Like if I just gave more, tried more, was more; it would become what I needed it to be.

It did not become what I needed it to be.

And one day; not dramatically, not with a grand confrontation or a final breaking moment, I simply understood. With the terrible clarity that comes when you have finally stopped arguing with the truth:

He loves me. And this love is hurting me. And those two things are both true at the same time.

And I cannot stay in something that is hurting me simply because the person doing the hurting also loves me.

V. After

I took the wound seriously.

I did not rush past it or perform recovery or tell myself I was fine before I was. I sat with it; the grief of losing someone who was still alive, which is its own particular kind of ache. The grief of a love that was real but not right. The grief of having to walk away from something warm because warm is not the same as good.

I cried. I prayed. I wrote. I talked to God about it with an honesty that surprised even me; not the polished kind of prayer, the messy kind. Lord, I am angry. Lord, I am confused. Lord, I loved him and it still wasn’t enough and I don’t know what to do with that.

God, as always, held it.

I began the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding my own sense of what love should feel like. Of recalibrating. Of unlearning the patterns I had adopted to survive loving someone who loved me wrong; the smallness, the editing, the endless adjusting of myself to fit a space that was never quite the right shape for me.

I gave myself permission to take up room again.

VI. What I Know Now

I know now that love is not enough on its own.

Love needs to be accompanied by care; the active, daily, specific care of someone who handles you like you matter. Love needs to be accompanied by safety; the kind where you never have to wonder if the most honest version of you is welcome. Love needs to be accompanied by growth; two people who make each other better not by demanding change but by inspiring it.

I know now that staying because someone loves you; even genuinely, even really is not always the faithful thing. Sometimes the faithful thing is to leave. To trust that God has something more aligned, more nourishing, more right. To believe that you deserve to be loved not just genuinely but well.

I know now that the vest comes off for the right person differently. Not recklessly, not in a rush; but in the steady, confident way of someone who has done the work of knowing herself. Who understands what she is offering and offers it deliberately to someone who has demonstrated they can hold it.

The right person will not make you feel like loving you is complicated.

The right person will make you feel like loving you is the easiest, most natural thing they have ever done.

I took my bulletproof vest off to hug him better.

He loved me; but he loved me the wrong way. And the wrong way, over time, felt like being shot by someone who never intended to pull the trigger.

The wound was real.

The healing was real.

And what came after; the woman standing on the other side of it, clearer and stronger and more fully herself than she had ever been; she is the most real thing of all.

I am Divine.

I loved and was loved in return; imperfectly, insufficiently, in all the ways that were almost right but not quite.

And I survived it.

Not because I am hard. But because I am rooted in something that does not move; a faith, a sense of self, a God who caught me every time the love of a man was not enough to hold me.

I am not bitter.

I am not broken.

I am not closed.

I am just a woman who knows, now, the difference between being loved and being loved well;

And who will never again settle for anything less than the second.

© S.B.Divine — All rights reserved.