I’ll never forget when I told my husband about some of my darkest moments — the ones NO ONE ELSE knew about. He cried.

A few years later, I mentioned one of those incidents and he acted like he wasn’t sure what I was talking about. I reminded him in detail and asked how he could have forgotten. He said, “That was something that happened to you, not who you are. I didn’t forget but I also don’t think of those incidents as being YOU. Each is a sentence in your life, not the whole story. I may not immediately bring to mind every sentence in your story but I know the story, and I know your story is much more than a few sentences.”

My greatest fear was that stories of my darkest moments would color how he saw me. They didn’t.

Loving someone is seeing them clearly through the shadows.