Uzo Aduba 'Was So Sure' She Wouldn't Find Love Until She Met Robert Sweeting: 'He Made Me Feel Safe' (Exclusive)

The 'Orange Is the New Black' star tells PEOPLE she thought she "waited too long" for love "or didn't give it enough attention because I was career focused"

• Orange Is the New Black actress Uzo Aduba married filmmaker Robert Sweeting in September 2020

• “I never, and still never, doubted that he loved me,” the Emmy winner tells PEOPLE of Sweeting, who she met at a rooftop bar in N.Y.C.

• Aduba details her dating struggles before meeting her husband in her upcoming memoir The Road Is Good: How a Mother's Strength Became a Daughter's Purpose
  

Uzo Aduba likens dating in New York City in her 30s to Sex and the City.

“It's true, you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your one,” Aduba, 43, tells PEOPLE. “What was sometimes challenging is remembering some of these relationships that were just like, he wasn't great and I really thought this guy was the moon. He was the furthest thing from it.”

The Orange Is the New Black star details some of those unsuccessful relationships in her new memoir, The Road Is Good: How a Mother's Strength Became a Daughter's Purpose (out Sept. 24). In the book, Aduba shares how, at one point, she texted all of the men she dated except for one to tell them “they’d hurt me and I hadn’t deserved it.”

Related: Orange Is the New Black’s Uzo Aduba Recalls the Unexpected Person Who Taught Her to Love Her Tooth Gap (Exclusive)

“Every woman should do it,” the Emmy winner tells PEOPLE. “We let them get away with murder. I had allowed myself to be walked over and mistreated to some degree. I deserve more respect and it's okay to insist on it and highlight when it has been not received. I don't take all the responsibility, but what I was responsible for was nipping it in the bud and I didn't. I think a lot of guys know when they mistreat women, but they don't get called out on it.”

Aduba also realizes she hadn’t always been honest in relationships about what she wanted. “I sat down on a first date and the guy would ask me, ‘What are you looking for?’ And I'd be like, ‘Oh, nothing serious. Just want to hang out,’ which was not the truth,” she says.

The actress thought that being honest with a man about what she was looking for “would somehow run him off,” she says. “I was ready to accept half of what I deserved. I also thought, in enough months I'll show him how great I am and then win him over and he'll want the same thing. And that's a lie. And then, I'm surprised that he doesn't want to go the distance.”

Aduba admits she almost gave up on finding love.

“I was so sure that it just wasn't going to happen because it was hard out there on these streets,” the mom of 10-month-old daughter Adaiba says. “I had just accepted that that was my story, that I had waited too long or didn't give it enough attention because I was career-focused or all these other me-me things.”

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Eventually, Aduba met filmmaker Robert Sweeting at a rooftop bar in Midtown Manhattan.

“He made me feel safe,” she says. “I felt safe to be all of myself around him — not the best of myself, all of myself, my frailties, my vulnerabilities, my weak, ugly parts. I felt safe enough to show him that. And when he saw it, he still loved me. I never, and still never, doubted that he loved me.”

The two tied the knot in September 2020 in an intimate backyard ceremony at Aduba’s sister’s house so that her mom could see them say “I do” following her pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

“I was really sad initially of the wedding being what it was going to be,” Aduba says. “But the minute we started in my sister's backyard, it was perfect. It was more than enough.”

Now, as a happy family of three, Aduba realizes, “Things do happen in their own time as they're meant to.”

Related: Uzo Aduba on Losing Her Mother and Becoming a Mom Herself: From ‘Loss and Leaving’ to ‘Life and Receiving’ (Exclusive)

Her full Igbo first name, Uzoamaka, means “the road is good” in English, and looking back, she thinks it has been so far.

“Nothing about my journey is meant to be easy. It's meant to be somewhat fraught, but once you get to that arrival, it's such a delicious thing, even more than anything you could have expected,” Aduba says. “And that was absolutely true here. It doesn't even really matter what those other chapters [were] because it worked out in the end.”

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The Road Is Good: How a Mother's Strength Became a Daughter's Purpose will be released Tuesday, Sept. 24, from Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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