You can't.

Four years later and he still has this fear... that one day, I'll turn on him, that one day, I'll start yelling and never stop. And my assurances that I don't even understand the concept or point of "being in the dog house" aren't getting through. According to him, he spent 3 years in said dog house, once upon a time, so he's come to expect it. And with each difficult moment we encounter together, there is still this look of amazement and puzzlement when I don't start yelling, when my ring stays on my finger and he doesn't have to scramble to his feet, attempting to earn his way back into my heart again.

Maybe it's from seeing so many of our friends break up. Maybe it's from wondering if suddenly, one day, everything would change and there wouldn't be anything left to hold on to.

But we each have our obstacles.

Mine involved shutting my ears to the cynics, the wonderful people in my life who claimed to know all about relationships. For months, they told me we were doomed, that our love wouldn't last, that it wasn't real love anyway. They told me that you couldn't settle down with your first supposed "true" love, that everyone must have at least 2 or 3 serious relationships behind them for any of it work.

And so I was lectured on the statistics of love. And it worried me. They told me I was fated to cheat on him, that I would wake up one morning and suddenly feel the urge to fuck an entire football team (or some such exaggerated garbage), that no one could possibly be satisfied with their First. Meanwhile, they clearly appeared dissatisfied with their own paths, their own choices, their own lovers.

But maybe some of it is true, if only on an utterly superficial level.

But I've always trusted myself. I know who I am and I know who I'm not. And shouldn't that be enough, enough to understand that when I tell him "I'm not like that", I'm telling him more than the truth... I'm swearing it on everything I know about myself and about him.