💙 When Soft meets Strong
He carries the world differently than I do.
Where I absorb, he endures. Where I feel, he functions. Where I see energy, he sees evidence.
Being married to a police officer means living alongside a kind of strength most people never fully see. It’s the strength and courage people can imagine it takes to face the unknown for others, to show up when most run, to hold the line between order and uncertainty. But there is also the strengthening of the walls that protect him from his experiences.
And then there’s me — the empath.
I feel everything. The energy in a room. The sorrow behind a stranger’s eyes. The division his walls create and his reactions to the pain I feel for the people in his stories.
For a long time, I thought being his “person” meant carrying all of it with him — listening, absorbing, holding space for every story, every ache, every image he brought home and worrying about him. But I learned he doesn’t need me to take that burden from him. He has learned to process and doesn’t feel the details like I do. Love, especially in a life like ours, means learning to be both open and anchored and I am open and he is anchored.
When he talks about his day, I remind myself: I’m here to listen, not to take on.
That’s harder than it sounds for someone like me. My instinct is to feel, to absorb, to want to heal the unhealable or not listen at all. But empathy without boundaries becomes erosion — and I’ve learned that I can’t pour from a soul that’s always leaking.
Sometimes I try to explain to him what it’s like — how I can walk into a room and feel tension before words are spoken, how my chest tightens when someone’s grieving, how I pick up the weight he doesn’t even realize he’s still carrying. He doesn’t always understand — not because he doesn’t want to, but because he lives in a world where he can’t afford his feelings to run wild. His survival depends on focus and function. Mine depends on feeling and flow.
Although we speak in different languages, our love translates what is important.
He teaches me how to stay grounded when the world feels too heavy.
I teach him that soft doesn’t mean weak — it means human.
Some nights, when the world is heavy, I need to be reminded that there isn’t always fixing, do not absorb — just breath. In those moments, I realize that love isn’t about feeling everything for him; it’s about feeling with him. Side by side. Soul and shield.
This middle space — between empathy and endurance, between feeling and functioning — is where our marriage lives.
And maybe that’s the lesson of the middle soul: to love deeply, but not drown. To listen fully, but stay whole. To walk beside, not beneath.
Because even when empathy meets armor, love still finds its language.