Emotional Safety in Relationships: What Men Miss
Struggles in a primary relationship often get filed under communication, compatibility or trauma. Those things matter. What often gets missed is the importance of creating safety in the relationship. Once safety is established and maintained consistently, a relationship often stops struggling with those other issues. Here is a breakdown of how to build emotional safety in your relationship.
When intimacy fades or conflict grows, many men assume the problem is communication, effort, or compatibility. What is often missing from that picture is something more basic: safety.
Scott Austin Martin
Devote yourself to your partner’s sense of safety and security and not simply to your idea about what that should be.
Stan Tatkin
What Is Emotional Safety?
A few years ago, an online survey on TikTok asked women whether, alone in the woods, they would rather run into a bear or a man. It was not scientific, so it is hard to know how accurate it was, but a high percentage of women chose the bear. The reason many gave was that the only thing a bear could do is kill them. One woman said that if a bear attacked her and she survived, people would believe her and sympathize with her. If a man attacked her, she said, she would have to defend herself for the rest of her life.
I point this out not because I believe men are more dangerous than bears, but to underline the deep fear many women have of men.
I’m not writing this to shame men for past transgressions or to make a big statement about how unsafe the male population is. This really is an invitation to understand the dynamics of creating safety in relationships.
When I talk about safety in a relationship, I’m talking less about physical safety and more about emotional safety. It is important to note, though, that for many women these are not easy to disentangle.
For me, safety is the ability to remain present in the intensity of your partner’s emotions. Being present doesn’t mean you agree with whatever is causing the intensity. It means you can handle it by staying in the moment. When we are present, we can also respond to what is happening with integrity rather than reacting out of our own defensiveness or shutting down.
Start With Your Nervous System
What does it mean to regulate your nervous system? There is a lot to it, and I can’t cover all of it here. The first part is being able to notice the activation or collapse happening in your body.
- Activation often feels chaotic: shaky, tingly, tense.
- Collapse often feels rigid: numb, frozen, paralyzed.
Regulating either response starts with noticing what is happening in your body, actually sensing the shakiness or the numbness. When you notice the sensation, you are telling your body, “Hey, I got the signal.” Once your nervous system knows the message landed, it can start to turn down the chaos, or turn the aliveness back on if you are going rigid.
Without the resilience to stay aware, we react toward our partners. That doesn’t necessarily mean yelling, or saying anything at all. We may just be sitting there in a collapsed state. Your partner won’t only notice the silence. They will notice the small micro expressions and feel your lack of vitality.
When it comes to creating safety, it is imperative to bring attention to what is happening inside of you, not just what is happening outside of you. This can feel counterintuitive, because the threat feels like it is out there. In practice, you are noticing your partner while also paying attention to your body’s reaction. I’m usually toggling back and forth between what is outside of me and what is inside of me.
Noticing the sensations in our bodies helps us move toward a more regulated space. Once we are regulated, we have more capacity to move into presence.
Presence Is the Key
Presence is what allows our partners to feel safe. Presence isn’t agreement or capitulation. It is the capacity to ground our energy so we feel fully engaged in the moment. When we are present, there is a sturdiness in our energy that helps our partner feel safe. They know their emotional expression is not going to push us off course or cause us to lose ourselves.
Presence also lets us stay open and available with our own emotions. That feels very different from defensiveness or shutting down.
From this place we have so much more capacity to deal with whatever is actually happening. Our partner may feel hurt, angry, irritated or even excited. When we are present, we can attune to them and start to understand what is going on.
It is important to note that presence is not the same as being calm. Calm can be a way of performing presence, and usually we are suppressing our emotions in order to act calm. Presence is not an act. It is holding space for another person and engaging with them in their distress.
How This Shows Up in My Life
I teach my clients about nervous system regulation and safety not from reading books, but from living it day to day with my wife and kids. Before I was able to ground into the moment, I was acting calm (all “bullshit Buddha,” as my wife would say), but I wasn’t present. I wasn’t really available to her. I was closed off and seething inside, and that made it really difficult for her to feel safe.
As I have worked on this over the years, I have realized how important my internal work is to keeping safety alive in our marriage. I have to lead our relationship to safety. It isn’t my wife’s job. Her job is to express herself with integrity and compassion. My job is to manage my internal activation with awareness and move back into presence.
Once I do that, we can resolve or repair whatever our relationship needs.
I don’t do this perfectly. I’m learning in real time how to do it poorly and how to do it well.
My intention is to keep prioritizing the safety of our relationship by noticing my sensations and moving back into presence. From there I can attune to my wife, listen to her experience and share mine. Eventually we move back into connection, and our lives feel a sense of harmony.
Build More Safety in Your Relationship
If you want to build more safety in your relationship, I can help. I work with men one on one through men’s counseling in Denver, with couples through couples counseling using the PACT approach, and in a virtual men’s group focused on relationships. The easiest first step is a free 30 minute phone consultation.
Wishing you the day you need to have!
References:
Martin, Scott Austin (2025). SAFE: The Minimum Standard for Intimacy. Being Here Now Publishing.
