Hi, I'm Possums\_r\_people\_too — and this is how I knew it was love.

When I say love changed my life, I don’t mean it in the sweeping, cinematic kind of way. There were no grand declarations under pouring rain, no airport chases, no perfect timing. It came quietly. Almost clumsily. It showed up in a moment that felt more medical than magical — when the person I was dating decided to get a vaccine for a virus I’ve been carrying for over a decade.

I didn’t expect that to be the turning point. I didn’t expect that something so clinical could feel so personal, so piercing. But it did. It cracked something open in me — something I didn’t realize I had locked shut.

Because when he got vaccinated, just two and a half weeks into knowing me, it wasn’t just about protection from HPV. It was about care. About willingness. About choosing me, with full knowledge of my history. It forced me to reckon with the parts of myself I usually cushion or withhold when getting to know someone new. The parts I often soften to make others comfortable. My diagnosis. My trauma. My past.

And love — real love — didn’t turn away from any of that. It leaned in.

It asked me to be brave, not in the loud, heroic kind of way, but in the quiet courage it takes to tell someone: *this is what I’ve lived through.* It asked me to be honest, even when honesty felt like exposure. And when I was, love didn’t flinch. It stayed. And that’s when I knew.

I knew it wasn’t performative or fleeting. I knew this wasn’t someone seeking the easy parts of me. He wanted the whole picture. The real story. The hard truths and the soft ones too.

I never imagined love would enter my life through a conversation about immunity, past partners, and cancer risk. But maybe that’s how the truest kind of love arrives — through small, intentional actions that say: *I see you, I hear you, and I still want to be here.*

That’s where our story begins.

## **He Got Vaccinated for Me — and It Freaked Me Out**

Two and a half weeks into dating, he told me he was getting the HPV vaccine. Just like that — casually, like it was no big deal. But it was. To me, it was *huge*. I remember freezing for a second, my brain trying to make sense of this unexpected gesture. I thought: *Is this too much? Too fast? Is he trying to prove something?* I’d never had anyone do something so serious for me so early on — and definitely not something that intimate, that *adult*. Honestly, it scared me.

I told my mom about it, half-expecting her to validate my uncertainty. Instead, she surprised me. Calmly, she said her now-husband had done the exact same thing for her years ago. My mom also has HPV, and her story mirrored mine in a way that made me feel oddly comforted — like I wasn’t alone. Like maybe this wasn’t some over-the-top move, but something rooted in care. In maturity. In long-term thinking.

Suddenly, it didn’t feel like a red flag. It felt like a green one. A deep, thoughtful green.

Because this wasn’t performative — it wasn’t about trying to win me over or make some grand romantic statement. It was practical. It was considerate. It was grounded in *truth* — the truth of what it means to be with someone, fully and consciously. He wasn’t just thinking about how to get close to me physically. He was thinking about what closeness *requires*. Trust. Transparency. Health. Safety.

He was thinking about the people who came before him, the person I am now, and the possibility of a future — ours, and his beyond me, if that ever came to be. I sat with that thought and realized: no man had ever done something like that for me before.

It shifted something in me. I didn’t feel like a secret to be ignored or a risk to be glossed over. I felt *seen*. And more than that, I felt *respected*.

## **When Love Meets Vulnerability**

That one action — a simple vaccine appointment — opened a door neither of us expected to walk through so soon.

It wasn’t just about health anymore. It became about history. About honesty. About standing in the uncomfortable truth of who we were *before* each other.

His gesture brought up things I usually keep buried — the way I contracted HPV through sexual assault when I was 20, how my ex weaponized that trauma against me, accusing me of cheating, making me question myself, dragging me through a fog of paranoia and shame. The doctor visits. The tests. The money. The humiliation. I hadn’t talked about it in a long time, and suddenly I was sitting across from someone I barely knew, cracking open those old scars.

I was nervous. Not just about telling him, but about what would follow. Would he shrink away? Would he look at me differently? Would he take the truth of my past and quietly place it between us like a wall?

Instead, he leaned in.

He told me about his own past — a difficult relationship, a situation that mirrored some of my pain. He knew what it felt like to be accused, to be misunderstood, to carry the weight of someone else’s fear. It was surreal. We were just a few weeks in, and already we were knee-deep in conversations people avoid for years. But somehow, it didn’t feel too heavy. It felt like we were building something on real ground.

We could’ve run. Most people would. But we didn’t.

And the most surprising part? That early honesty didn’t scare me away from him — it made me feel closer. It didn’t expose weakness, it revealed strength.

There we were: two people with wounds, standing in the middle of a minefield of trauma and trust — not tiptoeing, but choosing to *navigate it together*.

And that’s when I realized… we weren’t drifting.

We were tethering.

## **It Wasn’t the Diagnosis That Hurt — It Was the Concern**

I’ve lived with HPV for over a decade. It’s not a headline in my life anymore — it’s just a quiet footnote. I’ve done the therapy. I’ve sat in the grief, the rage, the acceptance. I’ve practiced how to bring it up with potential partners, how to say it in a way that keeps their eyes from darting away. And when they *didn’t* react — when they brushed it off like it was just another awkward bump in modern dating — I told myself that was a good thing. That indifference meant progress.

But indifference, I’m learning, is not the same as care.

Because when I told *him*, it didn’t roll off his back. He didn’t shrug or crack a joke to ease the tension. He went quiet. Really quiet.

And then, the next day, he admitted he had spiraled a bit. He’d stayed up late, reading about the risks — throat cancer, transmission rates, studies he didn’t fully understand. It hit me then: this wasn’t just about me disclosing. This was about his own relationship to fear, control, and health. He had health anxiety — something I hadn’t known before — and I had unknowingly stepped on one of his deepest triggers.

So I found myself in a strange position — the one carrying the virus, but also the one doing the comforting. I explained what I knew. I sent him resources. I told him he wasn’t in danger, not really. That he was okay.

That week, he made an appointment with a specialist. He took his fear seriously, and then took steps to work through it. When he came back from that appointment, he was visibly calmer. Grounded.

And that’s when something shifted in me.

Because I realized it wasn’t his concern that hurt me — it was what it mirrored back to me. All the years I had worked to see myself as *not broken*, all the distance I had put between myself and the trauma of how I got HPV... it cracked open again. His fear brought back memories of my assault, the shame of feeling like damaged goods, the sting of being treated like a liability.

But here’s what made it different this time: he *stayed*.

He didn’t recoil. He didn’t run. He walked through that discomfort and confusion with curiosity and commitment. And not for the sake of optics or performative empathy — but because he cared. About me. About my body. About being responsible with his own.

And in that moment, I felt something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel before: like I was worth the risk.

## **Love Is Found in the Mundane**

There wasn’t a single, sweeping gesture that told me I was in love. No grand declarations. No dramatic realizations set to soft indie music under a rain-soaked sky.

Instead, love showed up in small, almost forgettable moments — the kind you might overlook unless you’re really paying attention.

It was in the way he absentmindedly traced circles on my back while we watched reruns of a show we both half-liked. The way his fridge always had my favorite oat milk, even though he didn’t drink it. The way we fell into our own rhythm — unhurried, uncomplicated, warm.

One day, we were lying tangled together on his couch, our limbs folded like origami, laughing at something neither of us would remember later. And then it just... landed. That feeling. That glowy, tingly, inexplicably *safe* feeling in my chest. Not butterflies. Not fireworks. Just this deep, molten calm.

And I thought: *This must be it.*

Not the kind of love that knocks you off your feet, but the kind that makes you want to stay standing. The kind that feels like a home you didn’t realize you were building, moment by moment, breath by breath.

There’s no anxiety in this love. No guessing games. No rehearsing conversations in the mirror. Just ease. Presence. And that subtle sense of being known — like he sees all the versions of me, and still chooses this one, over and over.

He’s told me he appreciates everything I do — the little things, the quiet things — and I believe him. Not just because he says it, but because of how he says it.

Or sometimes, even more powerfully, because of how he *doesn’t* say anything at all.

Just a glance. A smile. The way he looks at me like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be, even when we’re doing absolutely nothing.

And I think maybe that’s what love really is. Not the noise. Not the performance. But the quiet knowing that you’re safe in someone else’s ordinary.

## **This Is What Love Feels Like (Even When It Hurts)**

His acceptance didn’t magically erase my pain. It didn’t sweep in like some romantic cure-all, neatly resolving the years of hurt I had quietly learned to live with. If anything, it cracked me open.

Being loved this gently — this fully — forced me to look at the parts of myself I’d carefully buried. His concern about the virus stirred up grief I thought I’d already made peace with. It reminded me that the assault I went through wasn’t just something that happened once, a long time ago — it was something that still echoed. Still carried weight. Still lived in my body and, sometimes, in the room.

And yet — he stayed.

He didn’t try to fix me. He didn’t recoil. He didn’t rush past the discomfort. Instead, he *leaned in*. He asked questions. He read articles. He made doctor’s appointments. He got vaccinated. Not because I asked him to. Not as some grand romantic gesture. But because it mattered to *me* — so it mattered to him.

He chose me. Over fear. Over uncertainty. Over the easy option of walking away.

And in doing that, he taught me what love can really look like.

Not the polished kind we see in movies — all sweeping music and clean resolutions. But the kind that shows up in the hard places. The kind that holds your hand when your voice shakes, that doesn’t flinch when you share the hardest parts of your story. The kind that sits with you — no answers, no fixes — just presence.

Loving him has rewritten everything I thought I knew about love.

It’s not a performance. It’s not something I have to earn by being agreeable, or attractive, or endlessly “easy to be with.” I don’t have to shrink myself or smooth over my scars.

I can be messy. I can be triggered. I can be quiet or loud or weepy or defiant — and still be loved.

And maybe that’s the most surprising part of all. That the moments when I’ve felt the most unlovable — the most complicated, the most raw — are the ones where he’s held me closest.

I used to believe that love meant being *easy* to love. That I had to be the low-maintenance girl, the cool girl, the emotionally undemanding girl.

Now I know better.

Love is being real — and still being chosen.

## **To the me before all of this — I see you.**

I see the way you carried your softness like a secret. I see how you tried to shrink your needs, to laugh when things hurt, to make yourself easier to love in hopes someone might finally stay.

I remember how you clung to the wrong people, not because you didn’t know better, but because you were trying so hard to believe that *maybe this time* would be different. That *maybe this one* would finally choose you fully, without making you earn it.

I wish I could reach back and tell you: none of that pain was wasted. Every heartbreak that left you hollow, every betrayal that made you question your worth, every time you felt like too much or not enough — it was shaping you. Not hardening you. *Preparing* you.

For love that doesn’t demand a performance.

For the kind of connection that holds you, not just when you're glowing and confident and composed — but especially when you’re trembling, uncertain, undone.

For a partner who listens without defensiveness, who stays even when the story gets hard, who hears the messy parts and doesn’t look away.

You won’t have to fight for it. Or prove yourself worthy of it. It’ll come quietly, almost unremarkably — not with fireworks, but with presence. With steadiness. With a feeling in your chest like *peace*.

And no — love won’t save you. It won’t rewrite the past or erase the pain. But it will meet you exactly where you are. In your healing. In your fear. In your trying.

It will walk beside you, step by shaky step, and show you that being fully seen doesn’t have to be terrifying — it can be tender. And safe. And slow.

And that, I think, is everything.

Because once you stop trying to be easy to love — once you start being real — that’s when the right kind of love finally finds you.

**Also Read: 33-year-old male's** [**<u>personal herpes story</u>**](https://www.shamelesspath.com/blog/std-stories/navigating-prozac-and-herpes)

<p>I never thought love would look like a vaccine appointment, but there he was — quietly choosing care over romance, and it changed everything.</p>

He Didn’t Say “I Love You.” He Said, “I Got the Shot”

I never thought love would look like a vaccine appointment, but there he was — quietly choosing care over romance, and it changed everything.