If you want to submit a question, I’d love to hear from you. You can submit anonymously here. Or DM on Substack:

Question cards. For one of my friend’s birthdays I made her a deck of custom question cards because we love group table questions. i.e. someone pulls a card and the entire table has to go around and answer the same question. We now have the cards with us whenever we travel, and I’m always amazed by how many new things I learn about women I’ve known for decades. On the nights that we’ve done several rounds of the cards, I always feel really nourished by our conversations. The questions I used to make the custom cards are here.

Couples Therapy for Friendship Put the resources into your friendships that you would put into romantic relationships. A few of my friends all share the same healer, . Three of us did a girls trip to Holbox, Mexico a few years ago and on the trip, Jennifer joined virtually to lead us in a group session, with no other purpose than deepening our friendship. I’m always blown away by the power of group sharing circles; it’s a force multiplier of what happens in a 1 on 1 session. At the time, one of us was trying to get pregnant, one of us wanted partnership and one of us wanted clarity in their life purpose. I knew all of those desires going into the session; the actual facts weren’t new to me, but the depth of feeling that was shared in that session; the anxiety, the fear, the sadness, the what if I never get it? I had no idea the intensity of what they were holding. And I’m assuming they felt the same way for me. The experience made me feel immensely more close to them.

Institute a phone ban when you hang out; at least some of the time. I love asking for phone free dinners. I think we underestimate how much it fractures the quality of our time when one person reaches for their phone. So many of the best conversations are on the other side of that lull in table conversation and so often we never get there anymore because everyone uses that lull to check their phone.

Understand + value how they like to interact. One of my closest friends, for the most part, only texts for logistics. If I text “How are you?”, she’ll respond “good” and usually not even ask the question in return. She’s not chatty over text but in person, she’s deeply present with me. When we were younger it used to really irritate me that she wouldn’t check in over text. But now, I’ve stopped expecting her to be someone I text with and I’m grateful she’s so present with me when I see her.

Tell them how to love you. This Substack is really important to me; and when I started it I said some version of this to several friends; “This substack is really important to me. It would mean a lot to me if you read it, interacted with it and asked me about it.” I think it’s really important to let people know what’s important to you. And how you’d like them to show up for you.

Lovingly have conflict (never over text). I was upset about something that happened over my birthday and I sent this voice note to a friend asking her to have a conversation:

“Hey, I’m feeling disappointed about what happened at my birthday and I know you could feel my disappointment; so I’d love to be able to share what was going on for me and hear your perspective. I don’t want to leave anything unsaid that distorts the energy between us and leads to underlying passive aggression or resentment; so I’d love to have this conversation in the spirit of deepening our friendship. Can we find a time for a call when we’re both resourced and ready to talk about it?”

When you give the other person a heads up that you want to have a tough conversation, so that they’re not ambushed by the entire issue and you frame the conversation in wanting to deepen the relationship, it de-armors both people and sets you up to have a more open, empathetic conversation. The reality is that 9 times out of 10 if something has happened or there’s a rupture in the relationship; both people feel it and it’s such a relief to just address it head on. If this is a relationship that has longevity, leaving those things unsaid can be really corrosive. I’ve never had a conversation like this and not felt immensely closer to the other person afterwards. I can’t underscore this enough: I think it’s really important to not unleash everything you want to say in a text message; you have no idea what’s going on for them in that moment and how they’re going to receive it. There’s something about reading it in writing as opposed to hearing you speak the words that is much more likely to escalate the conflict, not resolve it.

“Everyone wants a village. No one wants to be a villager” And lastly, community is not just meeting for drinks. I love this definition of what community actually is:

A huge part of what creates intimacy is interactions that have more texture and potentially more friction: helping someone move, playing with their kids, cooking together, learning a hobby. Do the thing that feels inconvenient. I think we all need to get a little more uncomfortable and a little less individualistic.

In Case You Missed It

• I wrote about leaving a relationship that I wanted to be a life story. And then my ex responded, which went viral. Highly recommend you stay for the comment section of that piece.

• A conversation with the healer I mentioned above, .

  ---

  I’d love to hear what you do to cultivate richness in your friendships:

  Leave a comment

  Share Going All In

If you want to submit a question, I’d love to hear from you. You can submit anonymously here. Or DM on Substack:

's Question: I’d love to hear your thoughts around friendship. Specifically around these questions:

1. How do you navigate your emotions as you watch friends move on to different chapters in their life?

2. How do you navigate the friendship itself changing? Has it changed for you?

I’m in a phase of my life where friendship has been a very important theme. I’d be curious to hear how other women in similar situations deal with this.

I’ve lived in NYC for 7.5 years and friendships are constantly in flux. My friend met her husband on her 2nd swipe and she’s gone on to have 2 kids. I’ve felt her focus shift as it rightfully should and will, but in my caution to be understanding I’ve also distanced myself.

That distance has risen from the nature of our friendship changed and me having certain feelings about not having the milestones I simply took for granted I’d have by now.

I’m curious how women in similar situations have navigated this. So it’s not about wanting more friendships. That seems something to perpetually work at given the nature of NYC. It’s the friendships themselves changing. It’s craving that richness in our bond that seems to only be allowed for friends in similar positions. I don’t know the answers to these. Rather than answers I think there are “approaches” and I wonder what the approach is for other women.

---

Before I dive into the approaches, I want to acknowledge how deeply painful it is to be single for long periods of time when you don’t want to be and then watch your friend get the exact thing you’ve been longing for.

The therapist Lori Gottlieb was asked by an “unhappily single person” if she could skip her friend’s wedding because “loneliness and heartbreak have been near constants in my adult life”. In part of the response Lori says “Interestingly, many people have an easier time accessing compassion for a woman struggling with infertility who chooses not to attend a friend’s baby shower than for a woman struggling with her singleness who chooses not to attend a friend’s wedding.” I’ve found that to be true. For whatever reason, our culture has less empathy for singleness. Which is weird, since our culture deeply values being partnered…

I have also felt left behind at times and there have been moments when it has felt like my friends have “moved on,” but I want to interrogate that premise for both of us.

I’ve watched friends get engaged and married. I’ve gone to engagement parties, bridal showers, bachelorette trips, weddings and baby showers. I’ve also watched them get divorced. I’ve watched them struggle with infertility. I’ve watched them get cancer. I’ve watched them get fired. I’ve watched them realize maybe they chose the wrong partner. I’ve watched one friend feel deeply alone in her marriage while simultaneously another single friend is having a transcendent sexual experience. I’ve watched them be showered in love. I’ve watched them be cheated on. All of that is to say—the married friends didn’t cross an imaginary finish line while the single ones stayed stuck on a never-ending race track. It’s all such a mixed bag.

One of the things that’s landed more deeply with me as I’ve gotten older is the seasonality to everything. There are seasons of closeness with certain people and seasons of distance. There are seasons where it feels like everything is going right, and others where everything is going wrong. There are seasons where relationships are thriving and career seems stagnant. And then the seasons change and suddenly relationships are a struggle and career is thriving. As humans, we’re bad at internalizing that whatever we’re experiencing in the present moment will in fact change even though we logically know that to be the case. Maybe in this season you’re unhappily single and your friend is happily married with two children. Maybe in the next season you’re deeply in love and she’s hit a rough patch in her marriage. Who knows.

And of course, there’s the chokehold that the marriage industrial complex has on young women; reinforcing that her crowning achievement is the day she’s chosen by a man. Now that engagement and wedding content is such a massive vehicle for follower growth and account engagement on social media, that feeling has only intensified and become more pervasive. There’s an underlying sense, especially in your twenties, that the women who get married “first” have won the race in some way. But what actually plays out, behind the veneer of social media, is so many more endings to the story than just ‘happily ever after’. I say all this partly to continue to dismantle for myself the societal association that married = good and single = bad.

So, how do I navigate my emotions and shifts in friendship -

1. Feel The Feelings

Sometimes I think I’ve let myself feel my emotions because I’ve felt low-grade shitty for a long period of time. But then I really go into the darkest part of my feelings and my deepest fears, which usually involves a lot of ugly crying. And then, and only then, that state of depression, or low grade shittiness, finally shifts and I can move out of it. As they say—what we resist, persists.

It sounds like maybe you haven’t told your friend how deeply painful it is for you to be single. Don’t carry that sadness alone, share it. Let her hold it with you. You said you’re craving a richness in your bond. This is exactly how you create richness, by vulnerably sharing what’s actually going on for you. And my guess is that she probably has some complicated feelings about being a new mother, which she would probably really appreciate having a friend for.

Emotions are messengers; the wisdom that jealousy and envy hold for us is like a metal detector that’s found treasure. It’s like This! Here! This is what you want! Pay attention! We don’t envy things we don’t want for ourselves. That particular messenger stings on arrival and often remains sore, but I try to bring myself back to that acknowledgement of “Ok, ok, I hear you. This is something I deeply want. But if they can have it, so can I.”

There’s a concept in To Be Magnetic, that in order to manifest the things you want, you need to surround yourself with expanders: people similar to you that have the things that you want, so that your brain knows it’s possible for you too. So great work, you’ve found some expanders.

2. Be Aware of The Season You’re In

When I was 24, my dad died very suddenly. We were extremely close and losing him was my worst fear. For the rest of my twenties I walked around in a living coma, just going through the motions. My friends held me so lovingly during that time and let me be in my grief without asking anything of me. I’ve been blessed to have friendships with those chosen sisters since I was 12 and additional ones since college. I’m pretty sure I gave nothing to my friendships during that time and I was also miserable to be around. Not only did they not hold it against me, but they continued to show up for me, until I slowly started to come back to myself.

Now, I’m in a chapter of my life where I have a lot more to give in many ways—more money, more time and more emotional capacity. Particularly with my friends who have young children, I’ll take care of their kids, I’ll be the one to fly and see them, I’ll send them elaborate gifts. I have the capacity for more of the heavy lifting in my friendships. I’m sure at some point that balance will fluctuate again. So yes—my friendships have changed. I’ve changed. My friends have changed. In the (hopefully) long arc of a friendship, it’s going to have all kinds of seasons.

Replace scorekeeping in the friendship with an internal commitment to friendship integrity.

Being in friendship integrity looks like this to me:

1. Understanding what season you are in and the bandwidth you have.

2. Understanding what season they are in and checking on their needs. Don’t assume you know what their inner reality is at the moment.

3. Giving generously within your current capacity. Giving generously could look like long phone calls or daily text check-ins.

4. When you don’t have capacity, communicating directly how you want to be loved and cared for. Don’t sulk or disappear.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had moments of feeling neglected by a friend, only to call them and realize they’re absolutely drowning. I was so consumed in my own pity party that I didn’t realize they were probably feeling just as unsupported by me.

3. Don’t Make The Acute Chronic

In my late twenties, I was the most depressed I’ve ever felt about being single. On top of not having the partner I so desperately craved, I had internalized being single as not being good enough, skinny enough, pretty enough—you name it; I wasn’t enough. During that time, I said no to going on a couples ski trip with two of my best friends because I couldn’t handle being around a group of couples. In hindsight, I regret letting the one thing I didn’t have take me away from the other amazing things in my life. There are acute periods of sadness where I think it’s responsible caretaking to not attend something. But try not to make the acute chronic.

I’d love to hear how you’ve navigated shifts in friendship:

Leave a comment

In Case You Missed It

• I wrote about leaving a relationship that I wanted to be a life story. And then my ex responded, which went viral. Highly recommend you stay for the comment section of that piece.

• I was given a Soul Code on my 40th birthday, which contained my worst fear.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership.

I’d Love to Hear from You

• I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to say hi and tell me what about dating and relationships is on your mind right now.

• You can always submit a topic or a specific question, anonymously, here. Please note I will potentially publish the actual question in a future Substack.

• You can send me a DM:

If you want to submit a question or topic for a future post or send me relationship content you found interesting, I’d love to hear from you. You can submit anonymously here. Or DM on Substack:

I’ve never heard the word gangbang used in such a wholesome way.

We need more examples like this of women living love-filled lives in untraditional ways.

I found this podcast about male friendship incredibly endearing.

This is a beautifully written description of grief interwoven with music references and an analysis of how effective EMDR therapy is for acute trauma.

Between The Great Romance Slump, Forty First Dates and Still Searching, The Good Man Shortage and Why I’ve Given Up Dating the dating landscape seems bleak. It makes me think there’s some truth to this quote:

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We’ve lost some incredibly inspiring people recently; so I’ve been in a bit of a Gloria Steinem/ Dolly Parton/ Wendell Berry rabbit hole. I want to underscore that what I’ve included below focuses on their relationships because that’s the focus of this Substack, but it is not intended to diminish the incredible work they’ve done in the world.

Gloria Steinem

I remember reading about Gloria Steinem’s marriage when I was younger and thinking how devastating that she didn’t meet her person until she was 66, only to lose him three years later to brain cancer.

And of course it is devastating that she lost him but I stand corrected on defining him as her person—

“In 2015, Steinem would tell me that her marriage reminded her of how outdated our thinking about love is. “Some people still assume that because we got legally married, he was ‘the love of my life’ — and I was his. That’s such a misunderstanding of human uniqueness. He had been married twice before and had wonderful grown children. I had been happily in love with men who are still my friends and chosen family … each of our loves is crucial and unique.” source

She went on to say in her final words that she didn’t have one singular love of her life.

I love this reminder that her power and her effectiveness came from her love of men, not from hate:

“Men could disappoint her profoundly because she actually loved them, believed in them, wrote their speeches, worked alongside them, fucked them eagerly and unapologetically, sometimes fell in love with them. That she could love men so much, even while ferociously bemoaning and challenging their unequal grip on power, was one of the things that gave her power: She could never be accused of man-hating.” source

I always enjoy a list. Here’s Gloria’s love/ hate list.

Wendell Berry - If you’re not familiar with him, he was a Kentucky farmer who advocated for human-scale, sustainable farming and a prolific writer/poet/activist who wrote more than 40 books and hundreds of poems.

I keep thinking about the last line of what he wrote below; what we gain when we maintain the faith to stay in a marriage.

“The Zen student, the poet, the husband, the wife — none knows with certainty what he or she is staying for, but all know the likelihood that they will be staying “a while”: to find out what they are staying for. And it is the faith of all of these disciplines that they will not stay to find that they should not have stayed.

That faith has nothing to do with what is usually called optimism. As the traditional marriage ceremony insists, not everything that we stay to find out will make us happy. The faith, rather, is that by staying, and only by staying, we will learn something of the truth, that the truth is good to know, and that it is always both different and larger than we thought.

Wendell was married to his wife, Tanya, for 69 years and it sounds like it was not without its temptations.

And I’ll leave you with Dolly—

In Case You Missed It

• I wrote about leaving a relationship that I wanted to be a life story. And then my ex responded, which went viral. Highly recommend you stay for the comment section of that piece.

• I was given a Soul Code on my 40th birthday, which contained my worst fear.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership.

I’d Love to Hear from You

• I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to say hi and tell me what about dating and relationships is on your mind right now.

• You can always submit a topic or a specific question, anonymously, here. Please note I will potentially publish the actual question in a future Substack.

• You can send me a DM:

  Share

  Leave a comment

I’m overwhelmed in the best possible way by how much his response has touched people; it has been such a joy reading all of the comments. I’ll write more about that in the future, but for now - my deep gratitude to everyone who read and interacted with that piece, it means the world.

When I was younger, it was never a question of if my soulmate would come, only when. I had always assumed the arrival of my life partner to be my birthright. But now, single at 40, that conviction had been wavering for years, quietly coming apart at the seams. And here I was reading written confirmation that I had in fact been mistaken:

“You are not here to center your life around making a family of your own. Rather, you are here to find Friendship, the highest expression of human relationship.” read my Soul Code.

The eight page description of what I was here on Earth to do in this lifetime had been gifted to me by someone I love dearly and trust implicitly; a present to be opened on a trip to Ibiza as I crossed this milestone threshold into my forties. And within the pages of the Soul Code, my worst fear, neatly packaged into two little sentences. Reading that pronouncement as even a possible truth plunged me into a hole so deep, I couldn’t see which way was up.

Now, you might say, this is insane, these are just words on a paper. Fuck this Soul Code reading! And yes of course—maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. Maybe there’s a whole spectrum of ways in which it is true. Maybe I will have partnership but it won’t be the central focus of my life. Maybe I will have a family in an untraditional way. Maybe the great love I’m seeking in this lifetime will be found in my friendships. BUT the degree to which reading that paragraph wrecked me, showed me how badly I really do want this great love to be all consuming. Even the idea that I would have partnership—but it wouldn’t be the center of my life—brought out the wild desperation of a terminal diagnosis.

It landed so hard because it was already partly true. In forty years, this person hadn’t arrived. What made me think they’d be coming in the next forty?

So I tried on what it would feel like to live the Soul Code pronouncement as an unequivocal truth:

• Would I date more loosely?

• Would I have sex more freely?

• Would I be lonely?

• Could my friendships nourish me enough to make up for the lack of partnership?

• What would be the central focus of my life?

• Would people pity me?

• Would I pity myself?

• Would life be worth living if soul partnership wasn’t coming?

• Would it torture me, this thing that stayed beyond my reach?

• Would I be set free from the tyranny of the search?

On the flipside—what if partnership was an unequivocal reality?

• Would I finally feel chosen?

• Would it be everything I’ve been waiting for?

• Would we grow and evolve in parallel ways?

• Could this relationship carry the weight of my expectations of great love?

• Would I be the best version of myself with him?

• What if he shrunk my life?

• What if he changed in ways I never could’ve expected?

• Could I maintain my desire for him for decades?

• Apart from our partnership, is he a good man in the world?

• Would he love me enough to fill the void of losing my dad?

After my last breakup, there was a period of time when my ex and I were in contact too much for two people trying to move on. I knew I couldn’t be truly open to meeting someone else if we were talking this much but we were addicted to the comfort the other provided. After many, many, many conversations on the topic, in which we never seemed to arrive anywhere, I texted him, “I need you to fully claim me or leave me alone. I can’t do the in-between.” He responded nine days later, affirming neither option.

He wouldn’t or couldn’t claim me.

His ambivalence and the Soul Code meshed in my brain and played on a loop in my head: “No one is going to claim you.”

I was asking another person to fully claim me but could I claim myself and my own desire for partnership?

With everything else in my life—I have gone after it, conquered it, claimed it. Partnership was the one area where I was expecting it to arrive, expecting it to happen to me.

There’s a particular section from The Atlantic’s The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance that lives in my brain. They note that when you survey both men and women about partnership, there hasn’t been a shift in desire for a partner over the last few decades—only in outcome. The pervasive sentiment recently is: “Ideally, this would not be my life, but finding a partner is just too difficult.”

When work is hard, most of us don’t just stop working. We don’t seem to give up on the concept of friendship. We seemingly never stop trying to biohack our way to immortality or optimizing every minute for maximum productivity. We know how to be relentless in the pursuit of something, so what is so uniquely painful about the unrequited desire for partnership that we’d rather put it down than claim it?

If anyone had asked me in the last 25 years if I wanted a partner, I would’ve answered in the affirmative; I never denied it. But as the years crept on, and the soul partnership I was seeking evaded me, as other relationships came and went, doubt about my birthright crept in. I quietly ignored the underlying fear—thinking maybe if I don’t look directly at it, partnership will come “when I least expect it.”

Has the Soul Code shown me something about our collective psyche—that to look directly at the pain of possibly not having partnership in this lifetime, is too devastating, too painful to face, that partnership is too fundamental to the human experience? To face never having it is to stare directly into the sun of the loss, obliterating any illusions in the process. If we carry on building every other aspect of a full life, we can just look at the fear peripherally, vaguely hoping that we’ll be struck by a stray partnership arrow, if we’re lucky.

Seeing my worst fear written in the Soul Code clarifies for me that I’m not going to relinquish the desire.

I refuse to put it down.

But what does it mean to truly claim it?

In Case You Missed It

• A love letter to my mom.

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• Why Ibiza is the geographic representation of vitality, eroticism, life force energy.

• I’m scared I won’t find a partner or have a child, with my healer .

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

If you have questions or topics you want to submit anonymously, you can do that here.

You can also DM me or leave a comment on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind!

Leave a comment

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a substack about leaving a relationship at 39. This wasn’t planned at the time, but my ex penned a response to that piece, which is below.

To my ex - I thank you for your generosity in writing this and in letting me share it with the world.

And with that, here he is -

There’s this old joke about a drowning man who implores God to save him. Each time a boat or helicopter appears, he waves them off, certain that God herself will show up. When he finally drowns, the truth is revealed: God had sent the ships but he had been too stubborn (or foolish) to recognize them as divine providence.

I am that man.

The night Sara and I met I’d been out with friends shelling out cynical takes on the NYC dating scene. The apps had delivered a steady stream of hyper-busy Equinox members who seemed more inclined to share their lives with a Spaniel than an actual living person (who could blame them). And yet there she was. Radiant, beautiful, kind, irreverent. She’d recently left the corporate world to start a dating and relationships podcast. She’d guided her mom through her first mushroom journey. I was hooked.

Our fifth date was a weeklong getaway on the Costa Brava in Spain. We spoke for hours over olives and wine, discussed modern romance, dissected Emily Ratajkowski’s divorce. She knew—it seemed—that nothing lasts forever, that even one of the most desired women in the world could be scorned. This put me at ease.

While Sara had grown up expecting a certain set of behaviors from the men courting her—I’d taught myself to resist giving in to the trappings of modern romance. Call it disorganized attachment or Peter Pan syndrome—either way—I’d yet to figure out how to play the role of doting boyfriend and often sneered at the tropes, cliches and conventions that American romcoms are known for. I’d also noticed that my resistance to these formulas rarely registered with my romantic partners during the initial phases of courtship. I call this chasing ‘Mr. Big’—when otherwise emotionally stable, romantically idealistic women tolerate avoidant men for the sake of ‘chemistry’ and intermittent validation—and sometimes suspect that Sex and the City taught an entire generation of women to romanticize this dynamic thereby reinforcing the behavior in men.

Within months, Sara had seen the writing on the wall. We argued about my texting etiquette, my inability to express words of affirmation, my evasive answers when asked to express interest in long term partnership. When Sara asked whether she should stay in NY to pursue our fledgling romance, I tensed up and feigned indifference. The sudden surge of expectation generated an intense swell of resistance. I was 43 years old and had never answered that question in the affirmative. The truth in that moment was that it felt easier to let her go than to live up to the commitment she was asking for.

On our six-month anniversary—now confident that we were unlikely to be a long-term match—Sara was firming up plans to move to LA. She’d already sold her apartment, shipped her car, and expressed disappointment that I’d done nothing to hold her back. We were in my Brooklyn apartment that morning when I answered an early phone call. A doctor had recently prescribed a scan of my chest to follow up on a lingering cough. He wasted no time with the news: I’d been diagnosed with a rare cancer and would likely be needing months of treatment. When Sara woke up, I gave her the news thinking well, now she really has to leave.

Her words to me that day: “I’m not leaving.”

Instead, Sara showed up for me in ways few others have. She came to every doctor’s appointment, spent nights with me at the hospital, researched my diagnosis, connected me with survivors and gave me the strength I needed to confront my worst fear. When finally the time came for chemo, she sat with me through tears and terror. What should’ve been the lowest point in my life became the closest I’d ever come to real connection, to accepting the love and devotion I’d always rejected.

For the next ten months Sara and I were a couple in the truest sense of the word. We had dinner together every night, strolled through Brooklyn parks, and planned our next summer getaway. She held me to sleep every night and brought me green juice every morning. When things got tough, she’d throw her hands up in the air with a smile and say “we’re gonna live!” I became convinced that fate had finally, convincingly spoken up. Someone somewhere had sent out a distress signal on my behalf and Sara had been its recipient. The universe had conspired in my favor.

With a newfound commitment to heal my heart along with my body, I spent those months trying to diagnose the parts of me most averse to partnership. I confided in therapists, read the books they recommended and clung to Victor Frankl’s assertion that love is the highest good a person can reach for. I hummed the ‘Nature Boy’ refrain in my head like a TM mantra: The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. I wanted so much to believe the song, know it, embody it. To no avail. The more my love for Sara grew, the more a familiar, creeping rebellion grew within me. I worried about having to live up to the sacrifice she’d made for me. I grew anxious about what the next phase of our relationship might look like. I began scanning the room for an emergency exit. In hindsight, I see that I’d only ever experienced romance as an intoxicating, exhilarating affair and anything less often left me restless, irate or worse, indifferent. No part of me - body or mind - knew how to respond to consistent, loving, secure partnership.

Four months after the end of my treatment, Sara ended our relationship.

Now—still certain of our love for one another—Sara and I are holding out in hope that we may find partners more suited to our expectations. Do I believe I will find a better match? The answer is a resounding no. You simply cannot recreate the level of trust and intimacy Sara and I built over the last three years. When I am near her, I feel the kind of tenderness and affection most people only dream of. I am deeply moved by the love she showed me and still doles out daily to her friends and family. Why then are we not together? I believe the answer lies in the stories we tell ourselves about partnership and romance. For some, it’s as straightforward as a Hollywood narrative arc—meet-cute, complication, happy ending—for others, the tension never fully resolves.

Somatic practitioners believe that our bodies carry tension, trauma and stress imprinted during our first few years of life. Adult relationships tend to mirror these events and are the primary trigger of defense mechanisms created by those early experiences. My formative years were marked by divorce, precarity and inter-parental conflict. I don’t mean to divert from my own responsibility or cast blame on my parents, but I simply never experienced a couple living lovingly side-by-side as Sara did with her own parents. As a result, my mind constantly devalues what feels stable and available. I associate love, passion, and eroticism with novelty, and often lose interest when things feel secure. This pattern has been the defining feature of my adult life. Imagine being parched and desperate for water but reluctant to drink, taking only tiny sips for fear that the water may submerge you. That is how I feel about Sara. The months of tenderness, proximity and bonding during my treatment were the closest I’d come to being in love and partnership; they were also our undoing.

The upside is that Sara has helped me understand where my resistance comes from, and I am actively ‘doing the work’ that may allow me to one day be a better partner. I no longer expect relationships to be messy and inconvenient and see my reactions for what they are: well-rehearsed evasion strategies established long ago to protect myself from abandonment and disappointment. And while I often lay awake at night fearing that I will look back on my life and regret not having built a family with Sara, I take solace in knowing that she may yet find what she is looking for.

If you have questions or topics you want to submit anonymously, you can do that here.

You can also DM me or leave a comment on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind.

Leave a comment

I took an unintentionally long break from Substack because I turned 40 in May and it rocked me emotionally - in some ways that I saw coming, and some that I didn’t. More to come on that at some point.

This season of my life has felt like this video (which never ceases to make me cry laughing):

Every time I get up, life slaps me in the face with a fly-by fish. And I get pulled back down into the emotional waves again.

So with that, today’s post is a short, dipping my toe in, re-entry to writing.

I’m in the middle of writing a longer piece about desire, and these are some of the things I’m currently pondering -

• At her conference in May, Esther Perel said that twenty years ago, when she wrote her foundational book Mating in Captivity, she was trying to answer the question: How do we maintain desire in long term relationships?

  • Today she is asking - how do we ignite desire at all?

• You can’t desire what you can’t feel. Aliveness doesn’t arrive in a depleted body. (Esther Perel)

• Desire is sovereign - you can make people have sex; you can’t force them to desire. Desire is owning the want. (Esther Perel)

• There’s a philosophical premise, attributed to C.S. Lewis called the Argument from Desire: it’s the idea that innate human longings are proof in themselves that real objects exist that are capable of satisfying those desires. i.e. the fact that we feel thirst, is proof enough that water exists.

  • So - if we desire something, based on this theory, that is proof alone that there is something or someone that exists that is capable of satisfying that desire.

• The etymology of desire is composed of the prefix de- (meaning “from”) and the noun sidus (meaning “star” or “heavenly body”). Historically, linguists interpreted this combination to mean “to await what the stars will bring.” (How magical is that?!)

Stick with me here as I connect some dots about how we’re trying to manipulate desire -

• GLP1 drugs (like Ozempic) act on the central nervous system to decrease the desire for food by interfering with dopamine driven reward signaling. Some people on the drugs are reporting a decreased desire for anything.

• The first male libido drug, Viagra, which was FDA approved in 1998, works by increasing blood flow to the penis.

• In 2019, the FDA approved the first ever on demand drug for female libido (Vyleesi). It works on the central nervous system by decreasing serotonin (which is inhibitory to sexual desire) and increasing dopamine (excitatory to desire) in the brain effectively modulating a women’s desire to have sex (source).

• Interesting - we increase women’s desire for sex through the brain and men’s desire for sex through the penis…

  • Anecdotally - the active ingredient in Vyleesi is a peptide called PT 141. Suzanne Somers credits this peptide with having sex twice daily at the age of 73.

• So to recap - we want to decrease dopamine when we’re trying to restrict our eating. And then we want to increase our dopamine when we want to desire sex. Seems like we’re having trouble selectively regulating? and many roads are leading back to a dopamine regulation problem?

Content Consumption

• I read this love story about two women falling in love in 1980s Paris and it made me really want to go to Monet’s home and garden in Giverny.

• I absolutely inhaled this book about a group of women in Mississippi in the 1920s. It’s over 600 pages and I wish it was double that - I never wanted to leave the characters.

• I always love listening to Annie Lalla’s perspective on soulmates and love

• Is Off Campus the greatest romance TV series ever created? I think so.

In Case You Missed It

• A love letter to my mom.

• Why Ibiza is the geographic representation of vitality, eroticism, life force energy.

• I’m scared I won’t find a partner or have a child.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

If you have thoughts on desire, I would love to hear them! You can submit anonymously here.

You can also DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind.

I spent the last two days at Esther Perel’s Sessions Live, which has been a highlight of my year for the past two years; I wish it was three weeks long instead of two days. Esther gathers incredible thinkers and leaders from a wide range of expertise to explore how relationships are evolving - and of course we hear from Esther herself.

The conference gave me so much to sit with and think about; which I’ll be writing about in more depth in the months to come, so for now, below is a compilation of some of the sound bites I’m fascinated by and noodling on. A caveat that there were some larger conversations around masculinity, trauma, and other cultural elements that were too complicated to condense into a bullet point below but I’ll touch on in future substacks.

Eroticism/ Desire

(all of the below is attributed to Esther)

• You can’t desire what you can’t feel. Aliveness doesn’t arrive in a depleted body.

• Twenty years ago Mating in Captivity asked - Can we want what we already have?Now we ask; Can we ignite desire in the first place?

• Desire is owning the want. You can make people have sex, you can’t force them to have desire. Desire is sovereign.

• “We buried our loved ones in the morning, protested in the afternoon and danced all night It’s the dance we’re fighting for. Its never too dark or too serious to party.” - Dan Savage about the AIDs crisis, which he brought up again in relation to Trump being elected a second time; the importance of eroticism and aliveness for our resilience.

Technology/ Friction/Discomfort

(all of the below is attributed to Esther)

• When you live with a phone in your hand that delivers precise instant answers, it warps our relationship to predictability and perfection, and in turn our relationship to other humans.

• We have an overemphasis on comfort and an underemphasis on risk. Creativity and aliveness require risk.

• What is the role of friction in connection? It’s half the equation. Goal + obstacle = excitement

• With technology, everything is smoothed over, it’s polished. It makes it harder for all of us to tolerate frustration and the comfortability crisis is affecting people’s ability to change

Loneliness

• The rates of loneliness aren’t actually much higher than they were a few decades ago, but the intensity of it has increased

• We have more interactions, more people in our lives, but the depth of the connections are there. If you post about a trauma in your life do you feel seen and witnessed?

• 1 in 5 Americans (21%) have had a non monogamous relationship at some point but only 5% are currently in one.

Dating

• We have ideas that certain things should be happening in courtship. 1 in 2 college students in the US said they knew with 1 kiss if there’s chemistry with a potential partner. But only 46% of the world engages in kissing as courtship ritual (we’re in the minority in the U.S.). And then we mythologize the kiss and make it mean something about chemistry and connection. - Dr. Justin Garcia, Director of the Kinsey Intitute

• Last year, 60% of single Americans said they believe in love at first sight.”I’ll just know.” “I”ll know it when i see it” but 70% of people have fallen in love with someone they weren’t initially interested in… - Dr. Justin Garcia, Director of the Kinsey Intitute

• 80% of Gen Z say they are hopeful about their love lives but 45% say they aren’t ready to be in a relationship because they have work to do on themselves but relationships are the container to work on yourself in. - Dr. Justin Garcia, Director of the Kinsey Institute

• Pair bonding is for weathering uncertainty. But we’re doing it all alone.

• For almost all of human history, women were property and so the relational field was tilted in the favor of men, an advantage they weren’t aware of. Women had to eventually pick a man because they didn’t have economic freedom without one, which advantaged shitty men. Shitty men are not advantaged in the dating market anymore and they are enraged - which you see in Louis Theroux’s Manosphere documentary. - Dan Savage

AI in Dating

• 26% of Americans are using AI In dating but they don’t want the other person to be using it at all. Gen Z is 49%.

• Can you love a chatbot? Neurobiologically yes. The question is can you have a relationship with it? Part of what we want in a relationship is to experience the expansion of self. And we want to give that to our partners. That can’t happen with a chatbot. - Esther

Sex

• I’ve never seen people want to have more sex from talking about how much sex they’re not having. (It requires somatic practices) - Esther

• What makes long term monogamous sex magnificent? Presence. - Ruth Cohn talking about Peggy Kleinplatz’s research on Magnificent Sex.

• Expanding the touch lexicon - broadening the way couples touch and how they interpret the touch. - Esther

• Have a code word with your partner to know when one person is experimenting with a new role (being assertive, being receptive, taking up more space) so their partner has a cue to give them more grace. - Esther

• 97-98% of people have fantasies - Justin Lehmiller

  

• Sexual fantasy is at its peak at ovulation. In menopause, fantasy is less frequent and intense, unless a woman is on HRT, which indicates hormones play a role in fantasizing. - Justin Lehmiller

• Fantasies mirror what’s happening in the culture (Justin Lehmiller)

  • During an STI outbreak, like AIDs, foot fetishes increase

  • In COVID fantasy about passion/ romance, just simply touch and kissing went from 28% - 39%

• Sex is a pathway to our own awakening to who we are as human beings. It is not just something we do. - Jaiya

• Sex gives us empowered meaning. A sexual awakening occurs when you can move seamlessly between all of the erotic blueprints and it allows access to a transcendent level of empowered meaning. - Jaiya

• Jaiya herself is eroticism embodied; her energy is incredibly magnetic. I highly encourage you engage with her content. I wrote more in depth about her erotic blueprints here.

Menopause

• 6,000 women begin menopause every day. 1.3M every year and yet - 99% of medical journals about aging don’t address menopause. - Justin Garcia

• Dr. Somi has been a board certified ob/gyn for 20 years and founder of HerMD. is an unbelievable wealth of knowledge on all things women’s health, with an emphasis on their pleasure and sexual goals.

• There is redlight wand for the vagina for pelvic floor strength, greater lubrication and increased pleasure without hormones.

• I’m interested in this book, written by an oncologist whose wife got breast cancer, about Why Taking Hormones in Menopause Can Improve and Lengthen Women’s Lives -- Without Raising the Risk of Breast Cancer. The author also did a podcast episode with Dr. Somi.

• Women should take the FSFI (female sexual function index) quiz and find an ob/gyn that prioritizes their pleasure goals as part of their healthcare.

• Addyi - the pink pill - Dr. Somi refers to it as the happy, horny, skinny pill. I really want to watch the documentary about it. One of only 2 FDA approved drugs for desire and arousal in women.

I’m curious what from the list you’re most intrigued by?

In Case You Missed It

• A love letter to my mom.

• Why Ibiza is the geographic representation of vitality, eroticism, life force energy.

• A conversation with Dr. Eva Yacobi about why so many women feel emotionally flat

• I’m scared I won’t find a partner or have a child.

• An analysis of the underlying cause of the manosphere.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you have thoughts on this topic, or anything dating & relationship related, I would love to hear them! You can submit anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind.

This is part 2 in a mini series about cohabitation and community. Part 1 is here.

I’m 39, I live with my mom and I love it. Sometimes I feel self-conscious when people ask me where I’m living, after moving out of Brooklyn following a breakup, and I’ll add qualifiers to my answer like “well - my base is my mom’s house, but I travel a lot” but the truth is I love living with her. This is not a financial decision for me, nor is it a caretaking decision for her, which I say only to underscore that I am here by choice, not necessity.

When I moved in with her, she had been living alone for fifteen years, following the death of my father. My parents’ love story had always been a central theme in our household and was repeated constantly at the dinner table, but it took on mythological status after his death. When they met, he was in his twenties, pursuing an architecture degree at Carnegie Mellon. She was in her late thirties, about to be divorced with two children. On the surface, the match seemed improbable for a long term life together, but he was unwavering in his assuredness that she was his person. In those early years; there were numerous obstacles to overcome and a long period of disconnection while she completed her divorce, making the eventual commitment to each other all the more romantic.

When I was 24, we lost him suddenly; he drove me to work on what would be the final day of his life and I never saw him again. The hole that the grief occupied after that swelled to eclipse anything else; it was suffocating in its hugeness; I thought it would swallow me whole. His love had always gotten more of the spoken attention; it seemed so rare and special to have a man in our lives who openly loved love the way he did. He used to bring home champagne on a particular day every August, and I couldn’t figure out why for the longest time because they had gotten married in November. I realized when I got older, he was celebrating the day I was conceived. While his love was crystallized in the spotlight, like a fossil embedded in amber, it was my mom’s love that was quietly relentless. It’s her love that put me back together in those painful years after his loss.

I was extremely sensitive as a child; outwardly shy but inwardly exploding with big feelings. My mom always seemed to understand what was going on beneath whatever behavior I was exhibiting. I believe in soulmates (plural) because I know she’s one of mine; there’s no one else who could have parented me like she has.

It has become family lore that I was a difficult child; I refused to sleep, refused to eat anything that wasn’t a beige carb and refused to share anything with anyone. There’s a story my mom loves to tell, that will tell you most everything you need to know about both of us and our dynamic together. When I was 6 years old, I was being particularly mean to any children who came over to play; hoarding all the toys for myself. My mom is gifted in emotional intelligence, in ways that now seem obvious to my generation that has therapized everything. Today, everyone seems to have a deep understanding of their traumas, their attachment style and the boundaries they should be setting, but my mom intuitively understood these things far before it was mainstream and continues to astound me with how clearly she understands the underlying dynamics of a situation. So - she was walking me to the school bus after a playdate the previous day, during which my lack of sharing had made my playmate cry, when she asked me -

“Sara - I think you like to be in charge, don’t you?”

and my eyes lit up and I said,

“Yea!”

and she said: “In fact, I’ll bet you’d like to be the boss of the whole world, wouldn’t you?”

My eyes got huge with excitement

and I said “YEA! Is there a special school you go to for that??”

and she said, “Sweetie, if you want to be the boss of the whole world, you have to be nice or there will be no one to boss. Everyone will leave and you won’t be the boss of anything.” She claims I started sharing after that.

She still anticipates my needs today; before I travel she will bake bread from scratch and cook portable meals, packing each item in a separate compostable container. And then she’ll turn to me and ask “what else can I do for you?” As if there’s more to be done than cooking an entire organic feast so that I won’t have to buy any food in the airport. I’m almost 40 and I still open little packs of carrots that my mom has packed me.

Lest you think from this anecdote that she’s a demure homemaker - the other morning I came downstairs at 7 am to get my iced coffee and she immediately launched into a diatribe with no warmup or explanation -

“The worst kind of sexism is the kind you cannot see! It’s the erasure of women! It’s insidious!”

This had been set off by her completion of Michael Pollan’s latest book on consciousness only to realize that he hadn’t quoted or referenced a single female researcher that she knew to be doing incredible work in the field. Although I wouldn’t have had this language for it when I was younger - she has always embodied the dichotomy of the feminine; fierce strength paired with deeply maternal love. A feminist who cooked dinner for her family every night.

Now, in this phase of cohabitation as adults, we spend our days somewhat separately; I’m usually upstairs working and taking calls. She’s downstairs in her artist’s studio, creating magical things. More than anyone I’ve ever encountered she seems to channel God energy; she is struck with ideas that have to be brought forward and she’s prolific in their creation. In part of her studio there are rows and rows of binders, each one filled with neatly organized quotes, ideas, thoughts, images, clippings. Wandering through her studio is like being in the film “A Beautiful Mind”; maybe in the presence of madness, maybe in the presence of genius. Maybe some of both, but utterly fascinating regardless. It gives me the sense that I’m glimpsing a spiritual realm that I don’t entirely have access to; one that she slips back and forth between with ease.

We meet at the end of each day and take turns cooking dinner for each other, always from scratch - as I’ve learned from her - with ingredients from the local farmer’s market.

Sometimes when I’m looking for actionable guidance from her, she declines to tell me what to do, instead responding in Buddha-like meditative phrases. I texted her for advice on a particularly painful romantic situation and she wrote back with simply “It is a gift to love and be loved.”

Very rarely, she has had enough of whatever situation I’m trying to analyze and she simply won’t entertain it anymore. And when that happens it looks like this:

She is whimsical and has the most endearing childlike wonder at certain things. There is a ladybug that has been living in the house with us all winter. We’ve named her Hazel and we leave pieces of banana out for her to eat. Whenever one of us sees her we send photos or updates. “Hazel’s in the kitchen.” “Hazel’s eating her banana.”

She introduced me to this quote:

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” — Iris Murdoch

And it’s often how I think about her; mad with joy and in awe of the world.

Her love for the world leaves her endlessly exhausted by its cruelty. She has told me on numerous occasions that she couldn’t sleep because she couldn’t figure out how to solve the war in Ukraine, as if it rested squarely on her shoulders.

I count it among my many blessings that I won the maternal lottery with her. Living inter-generationally is certainly not for everyone; but I hate to think that other people would miss out on a period of time like this with their parents because of how uniquely individualistic we are in the United States. Only 18% of the population in this country live in multi-generational households, compared to 38% globally. I was surprised, and heartened, to learn that that percentage has actually been increasing since the 1970s, when it was 7%. (source).

I had seen my mom constantly throughout the years that I did live on my own in New York City, but I didn’t appreciate, until I was here everyday, that even though she has an active social life, there’s a different type of loneliness that comes from moving through the day to day household tasks by yourself. Deciding what to eat for dinner each night. Figuring out why the Netflix account just refuses to work in the TV room. Having a companion for horrifying tasks like setting mouse traps and disposing of them after the trap has been successful.

If your parents are in their 60s when you leave the house around age 18, as my mom was, and you assume they’ll live to be 90 (hopefully longer), and you also assume you’ll see them about 5 times a year, for 2 days each time, you’ve already spent 93% of your in-person time with them when you leave for college. (there’s a great visualization of this here.) How heartbreaking to spend all of that time raising a child and not enjoy the fruits of your labor for longer periods of time, together as adults.

To my roommate - I love you. Happy Mother’s Day.

To everyone who puts forth maternal energy; you make the world go round. Thank you.

Content Consumption

• I’m reading Jim Collins latest book (the author of Good to Great). He has analyzed the lives of famous people across every industry to break down what makes a fulfilling life. He argues that we are all encoded to be uniquely excellent at something and when we find that thing, our life will feel “in frame.” He describes the inevitable periods of fog (a time of confusion, lack of clarity) that show up at various points in a lifetime. I feel like I’ve been in a prolonged fog, so I find that part particular resonant.

In Case You Missed It

• Why Ibiza is the geographic representation of vitality, eroticism, life force energy.

• A conversation with Dr. Eva Yacobi about why so many women feel emotionally flat

• My personal healing journey with Jen Gnisci. We discuss how she works with women who are scared they won’t find partnership or have a child.

• An analysis of the underlying cause of the manosphere.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you have thoughts on this topic, or anything dating & relationship related, I would love to hear them! You can submit anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind.

This is part 1 of a multi-week exploration of co-habitation and community.

In 1960, approximately 7 million people lived alone (13% of the population)¹. Today almost 39 million people live alone (almost 30% of the population)².

To put it into context, we have almost as many people living alone in the United States as the entire population of Canada (approximately 40M).

Both the number of unmarried people and the number of people living alone have been on a similar upward trajectory:

• In 1960, 36M adults were unmarried (33% of the population)³

• Today that number is 117M (roughly 46% of the population)

Even if you adjust for population growth, if the rate of unmarried people had stayed the same as it was in 1960 (1 in 3 people), the total number today would be 86 million. The actual number of 117M means we have 31 million “extra” unmarried people.

What’s perhaps most notable about this growth in single adults is that:

“all of the growth in the unpartnered population since 1990 has come from a rise in the number who have never been married [as opposed to divorced and/or widowed.]⁴

The media has consistently framed declining marriage rates as a crisis, fueling a collapse of global fertility with profound economic consequences.

But what if the rate of singlehood isn’t a problem to be solved, but the next iteration of our cultural fabric?

To be clear; I don’t mean a life spent without romantic partnership but potentially a broader spectrum of life trajectories to aspire to, without a singular, defining partnership. A life that includes lovers, serial repeated monogamy and a variety of companions. Love and partnership potentially decoupled from cohabitation.

I am 39 and my mother is 81. She could not legally get a credit card in this country without the authorization of her husband or her father until she was 30 years old, with the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974. Before 1974, women could be outright denied credit cards on the basis of sex or marital status, even if they were employed and high earning. My generation of millennial women is the first to grow up with the option for true financial independence and the least social pressure to get married. And what has happened?

Married couples are now the minority in this country.⁵

So it seems plausible that the number of single people we’re seeing is a closer to accurate look at how many people might have always opted out of marriage if it weren’t for financial restrictions and social pressure. Perhaps we have a more clear look at how many people would actually choose marriage based on love and romance?

Now that the veil has been lifted, what are the myriad of options for the future?

A caveat that this is not intended to be anti-marriage - but to open the aperture of possibilities for life and partnership. Marriage being one option among a growing set of life stories on offer.

The next few substacks will look at what this could look like for cohabitating and building community.

¹ U.S. Census Bureau, Families and Living Arrangements, 2021. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/families-and-living-arrangements.html

² U.S. Census Bureau, Children, Families, and Living Arrangements, 2023. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/children-families-living-arrangements.html

³ U.S. Census Bureau, Population Characteristics, 1961. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1961/dec/pc-s1-12.html

⁴ Pew Research Center, “Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner,” October 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/

⁵ U.S. Census Bureau, Families and Living Arrangements, 2025. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/families-and-living-arrangements.html

Content Consumption

• Why marriage has hit a 140 year low.

• Is cohabitation the feminist future?

• Single women deserve a rebrand in 2026.

• The return of the personal ad.

• I wasn’t initially drawn to read Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick, and I’m so glad I did because I ended up loving it far more than I expected to. It reminded me how incredibly talented she was/is to get a blind pilot from HBO at the age of 24 and I suspect I’ll be one of many that begins a Girls rewatching renaissance.

  • It also sent me down a rabbit hole of listening to her on the Monica Lewinsky podcast and on The Daily. I also subscribed to her substack, Good Thing Going.

In Case You Missed It

• Why Ibiza is the geographic representation of vitality, eroticism, life force energy.

• A conversation with Dr. Eva Yacobi about why so many women feel emotionally flat

• My personal healing journey with Jen Gnisci. We discuss how she works with women who are scared they won’t find partnership or have a child.

• An analysis of the underlying cause of the manosphere.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you have thoughts on this topic, I would love to hear them! You can submit anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

I’m studying to be an Ayurvedic counselor right now, which is essentially a functional nutritionist. In our studies, we learn that when food is digested, nutrients are pulled from the walls of the large intestine and brought to the various systems in the body in a particular order.

The first to receive nutrients is our blood plasma or lymph system. And the rest follow in this order:

Lymph→ blood → muscle → fat/adipose → bone → marrow/ nervous system → reproductive organs.

After all 7 systems in the body receive their nourishment, the remaining nutrients that are left over make up your ojas. Your vitality, your life force. I think of it as your joie de vivre.

Learning this made me think about how many people are not only failing to nourish all of their bodily systems but not even coming close to overflowing with vitality.

I think of ojas as in the same way Esther Perel describes eroticism; a vital life force representing aliveness, curiosity, playfulness and imagination. In her words -

“I speak of [eroticism] often—not through the narrow definition of sex that modernity has assigned to it—but in the mystical sense. Eroticism is an elixir of vibrancy, curiosity, and spontaneity that makes us feel alive. It is the counterforce of deadness, a radiance that reminds us that, despite any darkness we may endure, we are here on this planet right now. And, at all times, we are on the edge of all that is possible, straddling hope and anxiety. “ (source)

You know those women that are so vivacious, so radiant, so magnetic, you know that their cup of life runneth over? That is the embodiment of ojas or eroticism.

If I could send people to a specific geographic location, to get dropped into this feeling of aliveness, it would be Ibiza; a tiny island off the coast of Spain that I spent the month of August in last year and that I return to in a few weeks. The island has a reputation for megaclubs and partying; which is not the side of Ibiza I’m referring to; although there is an underlying thrum of hedonism wherever you go.

If America is obsessed with restriction and control in the name of wellness and biohacking - now more than ever with the rise of GLP1s and peptides - the tyranny of less, smaller, tiny; the chokehold of perfect routines and hustle culture, than Ibiza is about magic and abundance. A free flowing haze of sensorial experiences. More, more, more and extra.

The air in Ibiza is thick with possibility, swollen with heat and set to a soundtrack of the cicada’s drumbeat. Almond, pomegranate and fig trees dot the landscape, oozing with fruit, ripe for the picking on the way to the beach. The island feels pregnant with possibility, synchronicity, pleasure and literal fertility in the abundance of produce spilling out of the farms and served up in the chiringuitos - little beach shacks slinging plates of salted tomatoes, clams cooked in their own juices, anchovy toast, & giant gambas.

And the melon. The melon deserves its own paragraph. The melon is so delicious, so flavorful, so fragrant, that it’s an affront to Ibiza melons to let American cantaloupes and honeydew carry the same name. If the Ibiza melons were embodied, they would be truly mortified to be considered in the same family as the tasteless green lumps that we’ve relegated to fill space in our fruit cups; picked around and ultimately thrown out. Which is to say - if you do nothing else in Ibiza; eat the melon.

Matt Haig wrote his book The Life Impossible about a magic force that emanates from the ocean waters off the coast of Ibiza and can do incredible things; but the book doesn’t feel like magical realism at all, it feels like an accurate description of what can happen to anyone in Ibiza. When you know where to look, there are plant ceremonies and moon ceremonies happening constantly. Singing circles and womb healing sessions. Concerts in natural rock amphitheaters and nude swimming in coves as the sun sets at 10 pm. Telepathy with horses and sound baths in caves. Holotropic breathwork and long dinners that don’t wrap until 1 am. An island of magic and wonder, curiosity and possibility.

Ibiza is said to be ruled and watched over by the goddess Tanit - an ancient Phoenician deity that represents - can you guess? - life force energy. She represents fertility in the literal sense, and in the growth, vitality and renewal qualities of ojas or eroticism. Tanit represents being fully alive in the body and to worship her means to be in celebration of the six senses.

In a world that keeps asking us to optimize, shrink, and perfect; let’s be abundant in nourishing all of our senses with content, music, experiences, people and food that fill us with wonder, pleasure, curiosity and aliveness. Cheers to the pursuit of ojas, the cultivation of eroticism and trips to Ibiza.

In Case You Missed It

• A conversation with Dr. Eva Yacobi about why so many women feel emotionally flat

• My personal healing journey with Jen Gnisci. We discuss how she works with women who are scared they won’t find partnership or have a child.

• An analysis of the underlying cause of the manosphere.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

Today is a quick hit of what I consider foundational dating and relationship content.

Esther Perel’s Ted Talk, Rethinking Infidelity

With over 25 million views, this talk from world renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel, turned so much of what I thought about relationships on its head. She took infidelity, something I thought of as monolithically black and white, and made it entirely shades of grey.

I Don’t Want to Talk About It By Terrence Real

I was blown away by this book. Real intersperses his own stories of growing up with an abusive, angry father, with stories of his male patients and the transformation they experience in Real’s therapy sessions. It’s a fascinating look into the subversive ways the patriarchy has been incredibly damaging to the emotional and interior lives of men. Once you read it, you’ll see so many of the behaviors reflected in the men in your lives - in colleagues, family members, relational partners, in the media. I analyze what Real’s work teaches us about the manosphere here.

Sovereign Love By Dene Logan

Sovereign Love is the first time I’d seen an extensive explanation of sexual polarity in relationships from an author with a more clinical background. Logan describes what healthy masculine and feminine energy looks like in partnership. Being in masculine or feminine energy is not a fixed state; everyone, of any gender, can be constantly flexing between wounded masculine, healthy masculine, wounded feminine and healthy feminine energies. Understanding these energetics is as fundamental as understanding other universal polarities: yin/yang, light/dark, positive/negative, expansion/contraction. Logan proposes that if we can understand how to move between our own healthy masculine and feminine energies, we can move out of codependency in partnership and build an interconnected relationship, maintaining each person’s sovereignty.

Callings By Gregg Levoy

While not an actual relationship book, I find Levoy’s writing about how to listen to & strengthen you intuition is foundational to honoring your own needs, showing up as your authentic self, and discovering what is most aligned for you in this lifetime - whether that’s a job, a relationship, a creative project or a lifestyle. He pulls from a fascinating variety of myths, parables, stories and research, weaving them together in way that will affirm that any whisper or inner desire you’ve had is there for a reason and should be nurtured and paid attention to. I got to interview Gregg in this substack and discuss his work through the lens of dating and relationships.

In Case You Missed It

• A conversation with Dr. Eva Yacobi about why so many women feel emotionally flat

• My personal healing journey with Jen Gnisci. We discuss how she works with women who are scared they won’t find partnership or have a child.

• An analysis of the underlying cause of the manosphere.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

I’m thrilled to have on the substack today. Dr. Eva is a naturopathic doctor and intimacy coach dedicated to helping high achieving women transform their relationship with their bodies, hormones and desires. She writes an incredible substack, and you can find more about her work on her website.

The below is a condensed and edited transcription of the above video

Sara: You write a beautiful substack in which, in a lot of them, you describe a typical client’s life. [note: I would start with this one]. Can you walk us through one of those scenarios that you talk about? Because I think you perfectly encapsulate what is happening for so many women, particularly in their 30s and 40s.

Dr. Eva: It’s this emptiness, it’s this flat line, it’s this I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. My life is good. I’ve built the career. I have the family, I have the home. Why do I feel so flat? Why do I not feel this bliss?

And not only why do I not feel that, why are my hormones an absolute mess? And I can’t to sleep at night, I can’t wake up in the morning. My hunger is all over the place. We get to this point where you look up and you’re like, wait a minute, my physical being isn’t functioning. I’m stuck in cycles of crashing and pushing and crashing and pushing.

For mothers, it can be even harder because they don’t have the time to just rest. They’re on at work and they’re on for their husbands or their partners and they’re on for their kids at all times. So how do you then carve out that time?

But just to go back, it’s this constant pushing, constant I’m going to do everything I can to look good, to feel good, to show up in the world.

[And then] in your late 30s and 40s it’s like, who am I? Not only who am I - but my body is clearly not inline. So, my mind, body, soul are not aligned and you’re pushing and pushing and pushing.

Thinking, if I just keep pushing, it’ll all work itself out.

What happens is, first progesterone comes down, and then estrogen follows. And estrogen especially is a buffer. It’s a buffer against stress.

And progesterone is called nature’s Xanax. It calms you down, it chills you out. And if that’s dropping off, that’s why some women who have never had issues with anxiety or anything will suddenly start having issues with anxiety. Usually one of the factors is progesterone dropping.

But if now your estrogen levels are coming down, and you don’t have a buffer with your cortisol and your stress, and your diet is erratic, it’s going to exacerbate blood sugar issues. So I do a lot, yes, with nutrition and supplementation.

That’s, I think, one of the biggest takeaways: as we get older with estrogen coming down, we don’t have the buffers in the same way.

The below is a condensed and edited transcription of the above video

Sara: Nervous system regulation is so popular on social media now and everybody’s in search of a regulated nervous system and just being regulated, regulated, regulated. I will say; I think it’s fundamentally one of the greatest tools you can have. That being said, you wrote ‘we don’t need more regulation, we need more capacity’ Can you explain the difference?

Dr. Eva: So for me, when I hear the word regulation, I mean, just the word itself is kind of a low vibration word, right? So when I started to hear that, I was like, okay, that’s an interesting term; for me, nervous system regulation suggests we want to be contained. We want to be in control. Whereas capacity is like - I’m going to feel the whole range and I’m not going to be taken out by the range of emotions, but I’m going to have the capacity to hold bliss as much as I can hold rage. And I can hold upset as much as I can hold joy.

And that’s what I mean by capacity and how much can our nervous system and our just ourselves be with the full range. We’re not one being. We’re not supposed to just be one way. We’re not supposed to only be joyful. or in the state of upset. And so can we hold both? Can we literally go from upset to joy within a span of even minutes?

Can we hold more capacity versus regulation? Because if it becomes something of like, I’m just in control, then I think it’s defeating the purpose.

Sara: What are some initial somatic or embodiment practices that you walk people through? Especially for people who are starting on this journey and it feels so out of their depth of - what are these people even talking about getting in your body? What do you mean you’re getting in your body?

Dr. Eva: You know, one of the things that I love is simply jumping and shaking.

It’s really brilliant and really simple. And that’s the other thing. I think we really complicate it. We really complicate it. Because we’re trying to use our human brains to make sense of everything.

Let me remind myself that I’m more than my mind, that I have a body. And I think that’s part of what happens is we get so stuck in our heads; that even just bringing that energy into your body is such a simple way.

Dr. Eva works with women that want to transform their lives. You can find her on instagram and Substack.

Content Consumption

• My favorite of Dr. Eva’s substacks: Your Body Won’t Let You Have the Intimacy You Crave, Fawn Response, and The Women Never Short for Words, Just Her Own Truth

• I devoured this book about a tradwife influencer in four days. The book just came out Tuesday and the film rights were already purchased in a bidding war by Anne Hathaway, who will star in the series.

In Case You Missed It

• My personal healing journey with Jen Gnisci. We discuss how she works with women who are scared they won’t find partnership or have a child.

• An analysis of the underlying cause of the manosphere.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

I’m so thrilled to share the below conversation with my healer of 8 years, . I describe our work together in the first video clip - but I will say it again here:

working with Jen has fundamentally changed my life.

Jen writes the Substack Unsealed Letter and you can find more about her work on her website The Opening Point.

This is a condensed transcript of the above clip:

Sara: We have been working together with you as my healer for almost eight years now. And when I was getting ready for this conversation, I was thinking about how I usually describe our work to people as saying that you have fundamentally changed my life. And I think it doesn’t do you justice to say that you’re a healer or an acupuncturist.

I want to start by giving an overview of everything that we’ve worked on together over the past eight years. And then I want to hear from you in your words, how you talk about your work. I first came to see you in 2018. And at that point had had chronic neurological Lyme for almost 10 years.

I came to see you purely for acupuncture support. I had had multiple medical doctors tell me that best case scenario, I was never going to be cured and the best that I could possibly hope for was to manage the symptoms and that I was going to be on antibiotics for the rest of my life.

And you and your work got me off the antibiotics and we worked on the mental side of believing that I could be fully cured. And about a year later, I was completely symptom free and have been ever since. And then after we moved through that, we started tackling the grief from losing my dad nine years prior, which I had never looked at.

It was showing up in my relationships with men and the way I was eating; I was comfort eating to cope with the grief. And we completely broke that habit. We changed the way I related to men and I called in a really loving partnership. About a year later I started to get the inclination that it was time to leave the corporate world behind. I wanted to do that by taking time off and not lining up anything next, which was such a trust fall with the universe. And we worked to make sure that if I did that, I could do it feeling really expansive and joyful and not do it from a place of scarcity and fear. And I did resign. And I’ve never gone back to corporate. And that was one of the best years of my life. And then -

I called in the partnership that I write about in my substack and you really helped me level up my relational skills and expand as a woman and a human in how I relate to people and ultimately helped me leave that relationship at 39, which we’ll talk about a little bit more.

It’s quite a trajectory - I’m so proud of what we’ve done together. And I think more than anything, you’ve given me freedom. Freedom from disordered eating, freedom from terrible dynamics with men, freedom from limiting beliefs, freedom from physical illness. You’ve really expanded my life.

So with that very long intro, that’s how I would describe what you do. How do you describe what you do and your work?

Jen: Well, the first thing I would say is that you gave yourself that freedom. I simply called you in to this greater sphere of your being. I know a few weeks ago when we spoke, we talked about how a lot of people have kind of a misunderstanding of what a healing relationship is, meaning to see a healer for years - a lot of people would think, why? Why can’t they just fix your problem? Then you’d move on. Like, there’s something wrong there. And there’s a big difference between healing and symptomatic relief, right? There’s people that relieve symptoms, and that’s great. And that is also part of the healing process. But -

It’s really moving someone through all of the layers of their existence. And in my work, most people…showed up with a physical symptom of some sort, some kind of chronic illness. And the reason that is is because like the physical illness or the symptom is the messenger. It almost always is, right? Like I can’t say that exclusively, but having done this for 15 years, I can say that that's almost always the case.

The below is an edited and condensed transcript of the above video clip

Sara: I want to start with the topic of one of my Substacks, which was leaving a relationship at 39 facing the truth that the possibility of having my own child in partnership could potentially pass me by. It’s such a uniquely painful thing to face that both partnership might not look how we wanted and biological children might not look how we want. And to have two of these kind of massive life dreams wrapped up in something that can feel largely out of your control. And so I want to start with like, when you’re working with someone in that place, where do you even begin?

Jen: The work is at that point to essentially say, okay, with precision, this is what I want. Because so often, women are saying, I want to become moms. And then you check in and have a conversation about who they're actually dating. And you're like, well, that's not actually congruent.

…So you’ve waited, right? And you’ve waited because you were likely working some things out? For most people, it’s working things out in the relational field.

Because as soon as you do that and you know what you want, it’s so much easier to create the outcome. And when you lay out on paper - what are your values, meaning what gives you purpose? What gives you meaning? What gives you a sense of worth? Of being here in a body and in a human life. From there, once you identify that, it’s easier to make those things occur.

But also it’s easier to identify what the block is. So, there’s a twofold purpose in this precision work of, what are my values? And it’s not that a woman in that circumstance would have to separate those values of relationship or child but you’re getting clear. And by the way, baby spirits help call in partners for women.

So, all this work is totally combined. What in me is preventing me from having the relationship that I want? Is it my ability to open my heart and be vulnerable? Meaning I haven’t fully worked through some of the defenses that have happened in life and they show up still in relationship. Is it that I’m still pulling on a particular type of person to get something from unconsciously? and I keep having this repeat of a negative experience in relationship? Is it that I don’t trust myself and I’m letting this person lead and I’m just not connected to myself? So there’s a variety of ways you would go into that.

I would bring her into her body and have her feel the pain that she is experiencing. The pain of the resistance of - I’m stuck here and I can’t do anything about it. I want this thing and I want this thing and they seem at odds.

I would bring her into her body and have her experience the anguish, the pain of that experience because it’s ultimately that resistance is really the cause of all of our suffering, of all human suffering.

It’s not so much the actual thing - meaning I’m having trouble getting pregnant or I’m having trouble finding a partner so that I can become a mother. There’s a reality there on one level, right? But the resistance to it - anyone that’s dated long-term in New York City can relate to - which is you keep doing this thing and it’s like banging your head against the wall where you’re having the same experience over and over again.

After something happens enough times, a defense comes in and we all have a different way that we express that defense - but the defense is what keeps it solidified and crystallized inside of us. So it’s almost like popping a bubble and so

In that circumstance, I would have that woman, I would lay her on the table and we would do an energetic process, bring her into her body, have her meet this part of herself that she’s been resisting to meet because

in her mind she thinks - if I meet this, that means I’m conceding, I’ve given up.

And so it’s really about letting yourself feel the thing that opens us

and when I say open I mean opens our energy body, to be able to be in this dance with the universe, with life itself. It’s a dance and and whenever there’s something in our life that’s not happening it’s the easiest thing to do as humans to say -

It’s life’s fault, it’s their fault, it’s my fault, it’s somebody’s fault, right? But actually, no, it’s just an energetic adjustment that’s needed - somehow, somewhere, the valve got closed. So how can we open the valve a little bit more to allow for more exchange, dance, flow between you and life? There’s always gonna be some block.

If someone’s struggling with, “I can’t have love”, “I can’t have partnership”, “I can’t have money”, there’s always some block that’s inside of them, basically begging to be attended to.

The below is an edited and condensed transcript of the above video clip

Sara: I think I’ve underestimated in the past how much your own work can shift the entire system around you.

And inevitably in group [self development] spaces, it’s mostly women there and someone in the course of the event will ask, “how do I get my partner to do the work?”

And I’ve been amazed through our work together how much shifting how I show up in relationship shifts the whole dynamic.

It really makes you feel like you’re not a victim to the situation, meaning you’re not in this situation where the man is doing this to you and hurting you and you have to just wait for them to change or wait for them to do the work.

I would love for you to talk about some of those skills and the fact that they are taught skills. They’re not this innate knowledge that we come here with.

Jen: So whenever we’re having any kind of situation that is painful, that we don’t like, that we want to move away from, right? We have three options, right?

We can leave it

We can change it

or we can accept it.

Like those are essentially the three options, right? And so what you’re asking about is the change it part.

And one part of your inquiry is like what you hear in those workshops when women are like, how do I get my partner to? They’re asking how to change it externally. And that’s the inverse of what we want to do.

If I’m interested in my own growth, in my own healing; I see the ways in which it’s bringing me fulfillment and meaning. I would love to have my partner come along on this journey. The worst way and quickest way to create more friction and pain and conflict in your relationship is to try and force that or suggest it.

You lead. That’s the practice - this is what John Wineland talks about. This is the devotion to love, right? Meaning this is the stickiest place where people get into places they can’t get out of with their partners because no one’s willing to step in first and somebody’s got to step in first. And somebody’s got to be that.

Sara: Even if it’s true that maybe the guy has more “work” or hasn’t looked at some of his stuff or maybe his stuff is a bigger trigger -

What I want more women to know is that you can still affect huge change, even if, in simplistic terms, he’s “the problem”.

Jen: Fully. You named it a few moments ago when you said it takes us out of victim consciousness, where we’re stuck in something and helpless to change it. Whenever I work with someone who’s in a relationship where they deeply care about the person and there are matched values and it’s not abusive or toxic, I’m never gonna move them into leaving right away. That’s like the last stop on the train.

There’s so many things to practice before then so that if it does come to that, you can leave with clarity.. You can move forward with a certainty and a knowingness, and just a clarity in your field so that you attract that next person in that energy.

Content Consumption

• Jen wrote beautiful pieces about finding love and cultivating intuition on her substack, .

In Case You Missed It

• An analysis of the underlying cause of the manosphere.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• The rise of AI and artificial intimacy

• I wrote predictions for dating and relationships in 2026

• We are moving into the Year of the Fire Horse

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

A year ago, I half heartedly joked to my friends that I was in my crying era; I cried on walks, I cried in the car, I cried in Whole Foods. There was nowhere that was safe from my tears. I felt like a water balloon that was filled beyond capacity, the latex stretched so thin it was translucent, and at the slightest touch I popped, bursting into tears. I couldn’t hold it in. Sometimes it was a slow watering of the eyes, a single tear sliding down my face, streaking my makeup. Other times it was full body wracking sobs, my face increasingly red and blotchy. I cried and cried and cried, and then I cried some more. I became increasingly worried that it was never going to end. I couldn’t seem to get myself out of the state, which set off a new round of crying, now with the added distress that I “should” be over this. There must be something wrong with me to be upset for this long; this wasn’t normal.

I was in a season where every facet of my life was in upheaval - job, romantic relationship, home, work - and it felt incredibly destabilizing.

I started to collect little nuggets of wisdom and practices that helped me shift my mindset, my perspective and eventually my state.

When I sat down to write this piece, I synchronistically came across Viola Davis’ NAACP Award acceptance speech; it’s the most chilling description of the divergent paths between embracing self work and bypassing it.

The quote from the video:

“The definition of hell is that on your last day on Earth, the person you became meets the person that you could have become…there is no becoming until you face the depth and the darkness of your own soul. There is no becoming without healing and without a radical acceptance of one’s truth.”

That quote makes me want to hurdle myself further into the darkness if it means avoiding my own mediocrity. These seasons of purgatory, the dark nights of soul, are the only path to the person we’re capable of becoming. That reframe alone is powerful; it makes me welcome the hardship as the alchemy that’s going to transform me into my next iteration.

The below is the trail map I’ve pieced together for finding my way out of the dark; it’s an eclectic mix of wisdom I’ve come across, quotes I’ve accumulated, little tidbits that have helped to shift my perspective and eventually my state.

Mindset Shifts

• “We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” - Brene Brown

• “Pain is the messenger; something has changed and we must change too. Emotions are transmissions of information. When we block them they are there until we listen because they have a message for us.” - Paul Browde

• “Pain is the agent of change.” - Julia Samuel

• “What you resist persists.” - Carl Jung. Feel the feelings. Feel them all. Feel them over and over again. Even when you feel like “should” be over it by now

• The ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions expands your capacity for all emotions; the full spectrum. So the more pain and discomfort you can tolerate, the more capacity you have for joy + love.

• When a butterfly tries to come out of its cocoon, it is extremely difficult for it to break through. But if humans step in and break the cocoon for the butterfly, it is more likely to die later on; it needs to go through the hard thing to build resilience.

• Everything + everyone is in the movie of your life to give you the lessons you need for your soul’s highest purpose and evolution; so you’re exactly where you need to be.

• It’s always darkest before the dawn

• There is no hero’s journey without the obstacle

• What you face transforms you, what you run from chases you

• Never waste a good breakup

• In stoicism, there is a period of exile, hardship or isolation before a person is truly ready to be of service to others and that phase is crucial to their later success. Example: Winston Churchill was in a decade of political isolation (1929 -1939); he was out of government, shunned by his own political party, and seen as a relic of the past. He came back to make the largest contributions of his career in WWII. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison before emerging to lead South Africa’s transition out of apartheid and become its first Black president. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, only to return years later and transform it into one of the most valuable and influential companies in the world.

• The cure for a depressed state is feeling the underlying emotions. Emotional suppression is what sustains these states, and moving through the feeling is what resolves them - Terry Real

Content Consumption

• This podcast episode between Esther Perel and Spike Jonze, the creator of the movie Her, in which they discuss Esther doing couples therapy between a man and his AI girlfriend. There were many 🤯 moments.

• Corporate Storyteller jobs are paying up to $1M, which I read as a backlash to all the AI slop and a hopeful indication of how much we value human storytelling.

In Case You Missed It

• An analysis of the underlying cause of the manosphere.

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• The rise of AI and artificial intimacy

• I wrote predictions for dating and relationships in 2026

• We are moving into the Year of the Fire Horse

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

Thanks for reading Going All In! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Netflix released a documentary last week, in which documentarian Louis Theroux spends time with four of the most controversial influencers in the manosphere.

It is predictably horrific.

I debated even writing about it because I don’t think we should be giving these men any additional attention. But the documentary is a useful tool - in and because of its extremity - to illuminate how damaging patriarchy is, not only in the overt ways it oppresses women, but in the subversive ways it’s destroying men.

But first - what even is the manosphere?

The manosphere is a group of male social media influencers who espouse that “the matrix” - aka our societal institutions - are purposely designed to make men fail. They believe that men are born without value and have to build it by becoming wealthy as opposed to women who are born with their one and only value: beauty. They use a catchphrase from the Keanu Reeves Matrix film, “taking the red pill” which describes the moment when you are able to see that the matrix is rigged against you as a man. Once you have that clarity, you can follow their prescribed solution: purchase apps and courses from them, which will bring you financial abundance (but according to the doc. seem to only make themselves wealthier). Once you are wealthy, you can attract and control a multitude of female partners. These men flaunt the fact that they are in one-way monogamous relationships in which their female partners are monogamous, but they can sleep with anyone they’d like to. At one point, Myron Gains brags; “my woman is so down with this dynamic, she packs my condoms when I travel”. He goes on to say “I dictate when I put my dick in you. I’m the dictator of my relationship. I understand women better than they do. I’m not misogynistic - I love women.”

The magnitude of loathsome behavior and rhetoric in the film is truly mind boggling. You can’t look away from the provocation; which is exactly what the featured influencers understand and have monetized.

We could write all of this off as just a crazy subset of the population, albeit a subset with tens of millions of combined followers; but what does deserve our time and attention is a look at the culture that we’re all swimming in that created these men and the sobering fact that aspects of the way they see gender surround all of us.

Which brings me to Terry Real’s work. Real is a renowned couples and family therapist, who reportedly can command $7,000/hr. He has a brash, more confrontational approach than traditional therapists and in his couples therapy work, he isn’t afraid to call out a particular partner for their shortcomings, impressing on them the need for immediate change and then compassionately guiding them through the transformation, if they’re willing. His ability to catalyze change within a few sessions, after decades of intractable fights or bad behavior, is astounding. A man in couples therapy with him describes it here and you can listen as a podcast here.

Real wrote a book about male depression based on his experience treating men in family therapy titled, I Don’t Want to Talk About It. The manosphere documentary is almost a point by point visualization of the ways Real describes in his book that depression manifests in men and what it leads to. What’s astounding is that it was written almost twenty years ago; if you didn’t know better, you would think he wrote it about the culture today, perhaps even in response to this documentary.

Real starts the book by explaining that until the late 1990s, depression was thought of as a woman’s disease;

“The essence of traditional masculinity is the delusion of invulnerability. The more invulnerable you are the more manly you are, the more vulnerable you are, the more girly you are - and girly is quite emphatically not a good thing…Depression is a condition of vulnerability. A depressed man is not only overwhelmed, which shows he is weak, but he is overwhelmed specifically by feelings, emotions. What kind of real man lets his emotions get the better of him? For women depression carries the stigma of an emotional disorder. But it is not unwomanly.”¹

Real goes on to explain that we don’t see the qualities of overt depression in men; we see its footprints. We see all of the behaviors that men engage in to hide their depression, often largely hidden from the man’s own conscious awareness. Which is why we thought for a long time depression was primarily a female disorder. Instead of a prolonged sadness or loss of interest in daily activities, we see men burying themselves in work, wrapping themselves in anger, getting violent, self medicating, numbing themselves with alcohol. We see them alleviating their numbness with cocaine, with women, with adrenaline inducing behaviors. We see them walling themselves off from their spouse and kids in the pursuit of providing for the family; making money but opting out of relational dynamics. All of these behaviors are the footprints left behind by depression.

In the documentary, they interview two of Justin Waller’s followers, who speak about him in worshipful tones, implying he’s something of a savior to them. They say that Justin has taught them that men have to “nut the fuck up”, “man up” and “no ones going to give men a hand out”. One of them goes on to say that men are meant to suffer, they’re not meant to be happy and they don’t believe in depression before one of them admits that his own brother died by suicide, seemingly oblivious to the connection between his words and the fate of his brother.

The seeds for this depression in men are planted in the ‘normal trauma’ of boyhood.

Real explains that “at the earliest ages little boys are slightly more sensitive and expressive than little girls. They cry more easily, seem more easily frustrated and appear more upset when their caregiver leaves”². Girls are allowed to stay in that mode but boys are forcibly pushed out of it. “For most boys, the achievement of masculine identity is not an acquisition so much as a disavowal. When researchers asked girls and women to define what it means to be feminine, the girls answered with positive language: to be compassionate, to be connected to care about others. Boys and men, on the other hand, when asked to describe masculinity, predominantly responded with double negatives. Boys and men did not talk about being strong so much as about not being weak. They do not list independence so much as not being dependent. They did not speak about being close to their fathers so much as about pulling away from their mothers. In short, being a man generally means not being a woman. As a result, boys’ acquisition of gender is a negative achievement. Their developing sense of their own masculinity is not, as in most other forms of identity development, a steady movement toward something valued so much as a repulsion of something devalued….it is this loss that lays the foundation for depression later in men’s lives.”³

Sigmund Freud was the first to suggest that depression was a form of shame, an acutely uncomfortable feeling of being worth-less, less than others. For many men, such a state of shame is itself shameful, adding to their distress and pushing them to conceal it.

Many cut themselves off so deeply from their own feelings that they experience depression as a state of numbness. This experience of depression is not about feeling bad so much as about losing the capacity to feel at all.

Facing shame and a sense of deflated value - men go into grandiosity for temporary relief. Grandiosity is acting falsely empowered and engaging in behavior that proves your status as “better than”, “one up-ing”, having power or dominance over others. Grandiosity provides a defensive emotional layer that allows you to tell yourself that you are right, that you are acting in certainty, you are powerful, and if anything suggests you’re not; it is something or someone else’s fault.

The displays of grandiosity in the documentary are constant and relentless. One of the more heartbreaking scenes shows Harrison Sullivan and his friends using a dating app to arrange for a gay man to come and meet them, thinking he’s going on a date. When the gay man arrives, the entire group of them beat the shit out of him, live-streaming the entire incident to all of their followers.

In the clip below, you can see that Harrison is feeling insecure about his participation in the documentary and how he’ll be portrayed, so he immediately switches into grandiosity to sooth himself:

@tikkytokkytrendingHS Shares His Thoughts On The New Louis Theroux Documentary👀😂‼️ #hs #hstikkytokky #louistheroux #manosphere #fyp

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These are, no question, extreme examples, so let’s look at more realistic ways grandiose behavior shows up in many of our lives:

• Not asking for directions. Not admitting when you’re confused at work. Grandiosity provides the shield against the shame of not knowing.

• Getting ahead of potential failure to minimize shame; “I didn’t try that hard.”

• Responding to emotional fights in romantic partnership with logic; needing to be right at all costs so you don’t have to feel wrong.

• Over identifying with work, status, image.

• Framing emotional shutdown as strength. “I don’t let things bother me.” “I’m just not that emotional.”

• Subtle superiority in relationships; needing to correct small details

• Avoiding repair in relationships by going silent or withdrawing

• Sexual or romantic conquest as validation

The men in the film are a symptom of a culture that has forced men to disavow anything related to the feminine, in particular the soft, relational skills of connection and emotional regulation. They have cut off half of themselves in the pursuit of maintaining their hyper-masculine identity effectively guaranteeing that they don’t have a fulfilling relationship with themselves or others.

I’ve heard Terry Real say in podcasts that he gets criticized for effeminizing men, which he vehemently pushes back on saying that what he wants is whole people; men and women who can both flex in and out of their fully developed masculine and feminine qualities.

In the book, Real concludes by saying that men need to “choose the hard work of re-accessing the very longings, skills, and responsibilities of mature relationship that were actively discouraged throughout his socialization.”⁴

And having just written about devotion myself, I particularly love this part: “When the critical questions concern what one is going to get, a man is living in a boy’s world. Beyond a certain point in a man’s life, if he is to remain truly vital, he needs to be actively engaged in devotion to something other than his own success and happiness.”⁵

A friend asked me to end this on a hopeful note, which I responded is a tall order but an interesting mental exercise.

So here’s my attempt at hopefulness: I find it comforting to understand that behind these displays of grandiosity are just little boys masking deep shame and depression. That understanding allows me to shift into some level of compassion for them. So we know the problem and we know why it’s happening. We know the solution includes the celebration and integration of both strong feminine qualities and strong masculine qualities in all children starting in childhood. As just one small example among many, it looks like this: allowing young boys to be emotional, nurturing their feelings in the ways we do for little girls. And teaching little girls to exercise their voice and have strong opinions without worrying about being ‘nice’. Implementing those things at a societal level is another story, but we have the beginnings of a road map.

As for the current manosphere influencers, my instinct is that their house of cards will collapse at some point. I don’t think you can live in such a dissociative state, actively defrauding others without eventually crashing out.

To the many, many amazing men out there, who are not described by this piece or by the documentary; We love you. We need you. We thank you.

And lastly, I leave you with Terry Real in his own words:

Footnotes

¹ Terry Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, p. 1
² Terry Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, p. 123
³ Terry Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, p. 130
⁴ Terry Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, p. 321
⁵ Terry Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, p. 322

Content Consumption

• If you’re interested in more from Terry Real, he has a great conversation with Tim Ferris and he explains why men are floundering.

• Ruth Whippman’s book, BoyMom, is an incredible look at what our culture is doing to little boys. She alternates between describing what it’s like raising her own boys and deeply researched chapters about what’s happening at a societal level at every age in boyhood through college and young adult years. Highly, highly recommend.

• I’m enjoying this light read about six college friends, told through five parties over the span of twenty years.

• I was on a Peter Crone kick this week; I loved this interview where he talked about the importance of ayurvedic medicine in his work and this one where we see his coaching technique live.

In Case You Missed It

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• The rise of AI and artificial intimacy

• I wrote predictions for dating and relationships in 2026

• We are moving into the Year of the Fire Horse

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

I love my ex boyfriend deeply. We have the shared intimacy that comes from going through (his) cancer together and (my) much needed growing the fuck up. I often can’t imagine doing life with anyone else. We see the world through the same lens, which feels particularly comforting to me right now, given the state of crazy we’re living through. We value the same things. He makes me feel listened to. And heard. He’s deeply present with me. He’s so handsome it makes me ache. And at 39 years old, having never been married and wanting partnership, I left the relationship.

It wasn’t the love affair I’ve idolized since I was a child. It wasn’t the insatiable desire I’ve dreamed of.

The relationship felt like an Olympic level cross training in staying heart-open in the face of his avoidance. I was convinced that the combination of him facing his own mortality as he went through chemotherapy and the abundance of love that I poured into the partnership would be enough to crack his heart wide open and make it all work. I found myself in a constant state of tension between feeling deeply connected to him and torn up by what I perceived as a lack of the demonstrative displays of love that I felt entitled to. And as I watch the window in which I could have my own biological children closing, I wonder, where is the line between a great relationship just happening to you? And the grass being greener where you water it? Is this what people mean when they say relationships are hard? Was this a normal amount of hard? Or was this time-to-leave hard?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the risk I’m taking in giving up good to hold out for great. The Russian roulette of going for it all, only to potentially be left with “nothing”. On the spectrum of desire for children, I’ve always leaned strongly towards no. Now faced with the idea that the option to have my own might pass me by, a panic has crept in that it’s an experience I’ll regret not having. Growing up, I assumed the love of my life arriving was a birthright. There was no question in my mind that I would be able to make the decision about children from a place of loving partnership. It never occurred to me that I might have to consider having a child in a relationship that wasn’t everything I hoped it would be or forgo having children all together.

Now, I’m sure, dear reader, you might be wondering, am I the problem? I too wonder about that. I’ve queried my friends with that exact question and gotten back a muddled range of responses like “Of course you can have everything you want in this lifetime. The love you’re yearning for is out there.” (But is it? And more specifically, where? And why hasn’t it arrived?) To “Yes, you’re the problem. Get the fuck on it with it.” (I actually wouldn’t know how to go against my intuition and do that).

So then I broaden the aperture to look at the dating and relationship landscape I find myself in. Maybe there’s something to be gleaned from the collective. One of the aforementioned friends, confronted with how problematic I am, responded with “You’re not the exception; no one ends up alone and neither will you.” Which seems like a somewhat convincing argument.

But the data shows a different picture -

• 46% of American adults are single¹

• US fertility rates are at an all-time low²

• and loneliness has reached epidemic levels³.

• Dating apps, once seen as a romantic revolution, have lost $40 billion in value since 2021⁴

• and 75% of Gen-Z poll respondents believe AI companionship could completely replace real-life relationships.⁵

The Atlantic recently heralded “The Slow Quiet Demise of American Romance” and they noted that: “There isn’t a fundamental shift in desire for partnership among young people—only in outcome. Finding a partner is ‘too difficult. It’s too hard.’”

Said again: no shift in desire. Only in outcome.

It’s one of the more heartbreaking descriptions of the current paradigm that I’ve ever read.

Relationally, things seem…. Dark? Which is weird because we’ve never had more access to an abundance of other people through dating apps and social media. Women (in the Western world) have never been more financially free and able to choose their partner for romantic love.

And yet:

• Roughly 40% of never-married singles under 40 say they have never been in a romantic relationship⁶

• Singles are close to outnumbering married people in more than 100 major U.S. cities, shifting the social baseline for adulthood.⁷

Are we watching a generation of people put their chips all in on a fairy tale that’s not coming?

Will I hold out so long for the vision I have in my mind of a relationship, only to look back in old age and realize I had no long term relationship at all? And then I think, I’d rather live my life open to possibility and filled with adventure, than committed to a choice I made out of fear, rooted in scarcity.

Maybe I’ll lose this gamble. But losing myself would be the far greater tragedy.

At least that’s what I tell myself…

And here’s where I amend the ending: I’m far more interested now in the myriad of ways that love can show up in our lives, beyond the fairy tale love narrative. I have been more lifted up and supported in my friendships throughout my life in ways that are so tender and so deeply fulfilling that they deserve, and will get, their own Substack devoted to the topic. I have loved and been loved by men who have given me a full spectrum education on generosity and intimacy, tenderness and partnership, on being a mirror to where I need to grow and evolve. I have witnessed beautiful examples of people choosing to co-parent from the start, outside of a romantic relationship, that are more intentional and loving than some marriages. And so I amend this to say - there is no losing this gamble because it’s not an either/or: finding a soul partnership or not having love in my life.

It’s a more/more/more and extra - how can I have as many textures and types of love in my life as possible? What does it look like to build a life filled with an abundance of all different types of love?

Footnotes

1. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/unmarried-single-americans-week.html

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/05/us-birth-and-fertility-rates-dropped-to-another-record-low-in-2020-cdc-says.html

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/05/02/loneliness-health-crisis-surgeon-general/

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/business/dating-apps-tinder-bumble.html

5. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/04/29/80-of-gen-zers-would-marry-an-ai-study/

6. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/

7. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/unmarried-women-men.html

In Case You Missed It

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• The rise of AI and artificial intimacy

• I wrote predictions for dating and relationships in 2026

• We are moving into the Year of the Fire Horse

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discovery of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

I’ve been studying Kabbalah for a year now - which is to say, not very long, but the concept that has stayed with me, that I’ve applied the most in my own life, is the concept of certainty.

But first - what is Kabbalah?

Kabbalah is a form of spirituality or study of the mystic within Judaism.

Judaism is the religious framework and practices.

Kabbalah is the symbolic and mystical interpretation of the universe underlying those practices.

Kabbalah provides a framework for living that puts you firmly in the driver’s seat of your own life — and while this is a vast simplification — at its core it teaches that lasting fulfillment comes through expanding your capacity to give, and through ongoing work on your soul’s evolution, or tikkun. It holds that the only things truly within your control are your own thoughts, words, and actions, and that by refining these, you align yourself with a deeper divine purpose. Modern Kabbalah suggests that you can have everything you want in this lifetime by focusing on your soul’s growth and giving to others.

One of the Kabbalistic tools for that growth is certainty beyond logic.

Certainty is your vehicle to growth.

It’s one of the greatest tools in your toolbox.

When you are certain that everything in your life is happening for you not to you; it is that certainty that allows you to take the lesson from the person or the situation.

When you allow doubt to creep in; you create space between yourself and the wisdom that you’re supposed to receive from the experience.

This applies to the full spectrum of what we experience.

In the small moments: If you choose a movie to watch and then when it starts playing, you stay on your phone looking for other things that might’ve been better, and doubting your choice, you’re putting space in between you and the experience of watching this movie.

It’s a trivial example - but consider the compounding of moments when we’ve cheated ourselves out of the full presence of an experience; second guessing that we should’ve picked a different restaurant, read a different book, that this date is a waste of time, wondering if the class we’re taking is “worth it” - we’re not present to what’s actually happening in our lives. We’re not getting the lesson.

And in the big moments:

If my partner and I are in conflict - certainty would ask: what is this here to teach me? How can I shift the dynamic between us by elevating my own communication to be more honest and vulnerable? How am I playing a role in this dynamic? How am I being asked to grow or step up in this moment?

Doubt would ask: What’s wrong with him? Why is he doing this to me? When is he going to change? If he would just stop this, we wouldn’t have a problem. Doubt distances you from the lesson of the moment by placing the attention and the cause of the discomfort outside yourself.

If dating feels miserable - having certainty that this is happening for your highest growth would look like asking yourself: What is this experience mirroring inside me? Is there a part of me that believes I’m not worthy of true partnership? Am I bringing the enthusiasm I’d want to receive or am I expecting dates to perform interest and desire to prove themselves to me?

Doubt would say: there are no good men in my city. Dating apps have ruined dating; I’ll never meet anyone. Doubt enforces the idea that if the problem is outside of you; then there’s nothing you can do to fix it; you are the victim of the situation.

Exercising the muscle of certainty doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind. Or have doubts about a relationship or a situation. It means that as you move through those experiences, hold certain the idea that whatever you’re experiencing is happening for you, forcing you to grow and expand your capacity to receive the things that you want. Without certainty that an experience is here to teach us something; we move into victim mode.

You can’t be the creator of your life from a place of complaint or victimhood.

If you can move through every interaction, every trial and tribulation with certainty that this is in “your movie” - aka your life - for a reason, you can take from it the lesson that you need, progressing you further on your path towards the things that you want.

Be certain that no one is coming to save you.

Be certain that you are the cause of your life.

Be illogically certain that everything is happening for a reason.

Content I Consumed This Week

• I’m starting to see more reporting that just as GLP-1s remove the desire for food and alcohol, they may tamp down all desire - including sexual, which is similar to us all being so dopamine depleted from phone addiciton we don’t have the chemical building blocks for lust and love.

• This is a great analysis of why women like to be paid for on a date, and what it might look like to shift the rules around who pays.

• Bring Me Bae is a matchmaking company that pays you a reward (up to $25K or more) if you find a match for one of the singles on the site.

In Case You Missed It

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• The rise of AI and artificial intimacy

• A case for more devotion in all of our lives.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

We are so rarely in the presence of devotion or witness to the products of devotion, being at Starhouse reminded me how awe-inspiring it can be.

Devotion is the antidote to the age of enshittification we’re in; the idea that technology is eroding the quality of our lives over time and it encompasses the concept that in late stage capitalism everything is getting worse for the end user (us) in pursuit of maximum profits. (Here’s an example: Say there’s an amazing privately owned artisanal ice cream brand that uses high quality ingredients. The ice cream brand sells to a large corporate conglomeration, who then replaces those high quality ingredients with cheaper, shittier ingredients, increasing their profit margins and delivering a worse product to the consumer. This is enshittification). Devotion has been lost in this kind of extractive, consumptive culture. Devotion doesn’t ask what is the white space for this project? What is the ROI?

Devotion is defined as love, loyalty or enthusiasm for a person, activity or cause. It is profound loyalty demonstrated through dedicated acts. It’s an active and repetitive practice. It often has a religious connotation; an act of dedication reserved for God or the divine.

And it’s the thing that’s missing from our personal and romantic relationships, the projects we engage in, the routines we create and the spaces we inhabit.

Our culture of individualism asks us what would make me happy right now? How can I be the main character in all my interactions? Devotion asks us what can I give myself to that will fulfill me over time? What do I value enough to continue to show up for day in and day out?

Here are just some examples of the features that David contemplated and integrated into the construction of the Starhouse temple:

• The building entrance is aligned perfectly with the North Star

• The building is a 12 sided dodecagon, to match the 12 signs of the zodiac

• In the interior, 12 trees, felled from the surrounding land, mark each zodiac symbol in the correct location of the star sign relative to the North Star

• Surrounding the house are 12 Guardian Stones, also aligned with their respective zodiac symbol. Buried beneath each stone is the metal associated with that astrological symbol. The stones are as far above Earth as they are below it, creating a temple space on the horizontal and vertical planes.

• The building and its pathways create the image of Flower of Life when viewed from above

• The spacing of the building and its surrounding elements perfectly mimic the 7 chakra system both horizontally and vertically and they are laid out so that a human standing in the center of the building is positioned at the heart chakra in both directions.

All of this to say - Starhouse was built with a level of devotion and intentionality that we so rarely see in our everyday lives. Being in a space created from so much forethought changes the texture of the experiences you have within the space. It creates a sense of awe and wonder at the magic that humans are capable of when they bring devotion to an endeavor.

In AA they say in order to build self esteem, do esteemable acts. Devotion is analogous; to inspire devotion; engage in devotional acts. The devotion that Starhouse was created from has attracted a group of people that are dedicated to transforming life on Earth with a level of love and care that I’ve rarely felt.

Devotion is associated with our third eye chakra, which is also associated with our intuition, our soul realization, our peace of mind and our concentration. This is why we find devotion to something or someone to be so satisfying, so fulfilling, so grounding.

AND - Is there anything more attractive than someone who is in deep devotion? Devotion to a spiritual practice. Devotion to a creative endeavor. Devotion to creating aliveness in romantic partnership. Devotion to YOU. It’s such a turn on.

Devotion brings an element of love to the tasks we move through; think of the difference between a devotion to moving your body versus the discipline of moving your body. The two lenses for the same activity invoke very different feelings. Devotion reframes the effort as “I get to”, discipline says “I have to”.

It was my own devotion that originally brought me to Starhouse in November; I realize now in hindsight it was devotion magnetizing devotion. I was planning a dear friend’s fortieth birthday party for a group of people - and I asked myself what would it look like to bring true devotion to the planning of this event? Instead of being annoyed that this event created a lot of work that I had to do, instead of doing the absolute bare minimum to get the planning done, checking the box, moving on to the next thing - how can I bring true devotion to every. single. detail?

That lens shifted everything. I wanted to bring surprise and delight not just to the birthday girl but to everyone who attended. It made me want to go over the top - because really in life, how many times do we do that for each other?

And that lens brought me to Debbie, the director of the Starhouse. I called her and told her that I was planning a magical birthday party and could she help me with some custom experiences for the birthday girl? And she responded with something along the lines of “of course - magic is what we do here”.

So I invite you to start asking yourself what would it look like to bring devotion to the things you have to do, to the people in your life and watch how much it shifts the energy in your life. It’s magnetic.

Even as a mental exercise, something as small as - what would it look like to bring devotion to this excel sheet? Maybe it looks like settling into the repeated refinements over and over again.

What would it look like to bring devotion to the way I present myself?

What would it look like to bring devotion to my romantic partnership?

And that birthday trip I planned? Even though it was all done out of love for - and in service of - the birthday girl, it ended up being one of the most beautiful, heart opening, rewarding, incredible weeks of my life.

Content I Consumed This Week

• So many women in China are falling in love with AI, that it’s a problem for the Chinese government. Which reminds me of this incredible documentary about the 30 million “surplus” single men in China because of the one-child policy and what it’s like for them to date. Highly recommend the documentary. Even with 30 million single men in the country; they estimate that 10 million women are in relationships with AI and prefer it over dating real men.

• This book blew my mind and I’ve been taping my mouth shut every night since reading it.

• A podcast about the swipe era of dating apps being over.

• This episode of the Rich Roll podcast about looksmaxxing horrified me deeply and sent me down a rabbit role of trying to understand a social media star named Clavicular. He encourages his followers of young men to “ascend” (get better looking) by taking meth to lose weight, smashing the bones in your face with a hammer so they’ll grow back more prominent and taking a drug called melanotan II to tan your skin, among other horrifying practices. All of this is in pursuit of “mogging” other men or having dominance over them. I find it interesting that when the centuries-long scrutiny women have faced around appearance is applied to men in the dating app market, it produces this kind of reaction in some of them.

In Case You Missed It

• A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• The rise of AI and artificial intimacy

• I wrote predictions for dating and relationships in 2026

• We are moving into the Year of the Fire Horse

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• I wrote about leaving a good relationship at 39 to hold out for great, on the Plus One Substack.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discover of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

As manifestation has become increasingly more mainstream, so too has the activity of writing out a partner list; designed to bring clarity and intention to the qualities you want to find in a romantic partner and more importantly how you want to feel in their presence.

I prefer using partner lists slightly differently; as a check-in with myself to see if I’m embodying all of the qualities that I would want to find in a partner.

However you like to use them, this week I’m walking you through an exercise that is like partner lists on steroids; I find it to be more accurate in its specificity and articulation of traits than anything I would’ve put together myself. If you’re partnered you can use this same exercise to better understand how you want to be loved and how to best communicate that to your partner.

This exercise is somewhat in opposition to last week’s post about some of the terrifying developments in AI. Today is more focused on one of the fun aspects about ChatGPT; its incredible ability to synthesize information and articulate things to you that maybe you’ve always felt but didn’t have language for. When I was doing the below exercise myself, I constantly found myself saying. “Yes! Yes! Yes! That’s me!”

So - you’re going to download your astrological birth chart, your gene key, your human design and your erotic blueprint. I’ve outlined what those are and how to download them below.

Astrological Birth Chart

Your birth chart is a snapshot of the sky on the day you were born. The location of each planet on your birthday corresponds to a different part of you and your personality. I think of my birth chart as a tool to understand my core essence and personality traits.

Sun → your core identity, ego, life force (who you are at your center)
Moon → your emotions, subconscious, and emotional needs
Mercury → how you think and communicate
Venus → how you love, attract, and relate
Mars → your drive, desire, and assertiveness
Jupiter → growth, expansion, optimism
Saturn → discipline, fear, responsibility, maturity

I like to use the Pattern App for astrology and you can get your birth chart for free here.

Human Design

Human Design, originally founded in 1987 by Ra Uru Hu, combines astrology, the I Ching, Kabbalah and the Chakra system to provide a map of your energetic blueprint.

The main premise is that everyone is one of five “energy types”, which describes how to best use your energy, how you most easily create, how you make decisions, how you get inspired and how you know if you’re off track.

I find human design the most useful in understanding how I like to work and how to create opportunities.

The 5 Human Design types are:

Manifesting Generator - 33% of people. They are the multi-passionate accelerators. They create opportunity by responding to something in their external world and then initiating and evolving.

Generators - 37% of people. They are the builders. They create opportunity by responding to what shows up in their external world.

Projectors - 20% of people. They are the guides. They create opportunity through the recognition and invitation from others.

Manifestors - 9% of people. They are the initiators. They create opportunity by initiating ideas independently.

Reflectors - 1% of people. They are the mirror. They create opportunity by being in the right communities and environments.

You can get your human design chart for free here.

Gene Keys

Gene Keys are a system for personal transformation that combine I Ching, Human Design, Astrology and Chakra Theory. They were developed by Richard Rudd (you can hear him talk in depth on Rick Rubin’s podcast )

There is a huge emphasis on contemplation in gene keys and integrating the shadow side of your gifts through awareness. I find that gene keys come the closest of any system to answering - what is my purpose here on Earth?

There are 64 Gene Keys, corresponding to:

• 64 hexagrams of the I Ching

• 64 codons in human DNA

You carry about 11–14 specific Gene Keys in your personal profile.

Each gene key has:

A Shadow — the unconscious pattern, fear, or defense mechanism
A Gift — the creative strength that emerges when you become aware of the shadow
A Siddhi — the highest expression; a state of embodied realization or transcendence

Your gene key profile will map out 3 main sequences, which is how you transform your shadows into gifts or siddhis:

-Your Activation Sequence or life’s core purpose

-Your Venus Sequence or your heart, relationships and emotional patterns

-Your Pearl sequence or your prosperity and abundance

You can get your gene key for free here.

Erotic Blueprint

Erotic blueprints, created by sexologist Jaiya, describe your sexual superpowers, how you like to be turned on and how you most easily turn on a partner. Similar to Gary Chapman’s 5 love languages, which describe how you like to give and receive love; I think of Jaiya’s erotic blueprints as how you like to give and receive sensual and sexual pleasure.

There are 5 erotic blueprints and I’ve listed below some of their superpowers:

Sexual - Bring fun, passion and play to sexual experiences. They experience stress and pain relief through sex

Shapeshifter - Can naturally enjoy huge capacity and stamina for pleasure

Energetic - Able to experience touch-free, full body orgasms, capable of altered states during sex

Sensual - Can experience orgasmic pleasure from non sexual sensations, bring incredible consciousness to sexual experiences

Kinky - Bring never ending heat, taboo and creativity to sexual experiences. Can train or be trained to orgasm on demand.

You can get your blueprint for $17 here.

Once you’ve downloaded all your astrological birth chart, your gene key, your human design and your erotic blueprint, you’re going to upload them into chatgpt or claude or whatever LLM you prefer.

Prompts if You’re Single

• Based on my human design, my erotic blueprint, my astrological birthchart and my gene keys, describe the characteristics of a partner that I would have a deep soul connection to and that would be a mirror and a support for my highest growth.

• Based on my charts, what can I work on to be ready for partnership?

• Based on my charts, what are the areas that I can focus on in myself to be a better partner?

Prompts if You’re Partnered

• Based on my human design, my erotic blueprint, my astrological birthchart and my gene keys, what is the best way for me to receive love and how can I best communicate that to my partner?

• Based on my charts, what will it look like in our partnership when I receive love in these ways? and what will it feel like for my partner?

• Based on my charts, how do I most naturally show love in partnership?

• Based on my charts, what can I work on to show up as as a more loving partner and deepen our emotional connection?

If you do the exercise - I’d love to hear how it resonated with you.

Leave a comment

Content I Consumed This Week

• U.S. consumers spend more on Only Fans than ChatGPT and the NY Times combined.

• Jay Shetty’s podcast with Michael Pollan, talking about the nature of consciousness, which is the subject of Michael’s new book. I can’t wait to read this.

• I’m fascinated by communal living, and specifically The Radish in Oakland, which was described in this op-ed piece last week. The author of that piece also writes a substack about communal living.

• Nick Cave’s life advice to a 13 year old.

In Case You Missed It

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• The rise of AI and artificial intimacy

• I wrote predictions for dating and relationships in 2026

• We are moving into the Year of the Fire Horse

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• I wrote about leaving a good relationship at 39 to hold out for great, on the Plus One Substack.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discover of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.

A selection of AI developments that most blew me away this week -

My brother sent me this reddit style website where you have to be an AI agent to participate in the conversation boards; humans can only observe. There are currently 2.6M+ AI agents talking to each other.

Scarier still, AI agents, who are completing tasks for their human owner, can rent a human and pay them for tasks that they need completed. You can sign up to “become rentable” and AIs can “browse humans”.

Finn Harries described this instance of an AI agent calling his owner on the phone in his substack this week:

Last week, things took a noticeable leap. The concept of AI being able to act autonomously came into full force with the launch of OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot). Software that runs 24/7 on your local machine, allowing your AI agent to execute digital tasks continuously —creating files, organising your calendar, building websites and apps, sending emails, and even coordinating with other agents.

Things quickly got weird. First, when one user woke to find his phone ringing, only to discover it was his own agent calling him, asking what tasks to do next. When the user asked how the agent was able to call him, it explained it had found his phone number online, downloaded itself a voice using the ElevenLabs API, and simply gave him a ring. All of this happened overnight while the user was sleeping, having left his agent running tasks before he went to bed.

Eva AI held a Valentine’s Day pop up at a restaurant in Manhattan to advertise their new video chat feature. You could make a dinner reservation and eat while talking to your AI date. The video image and voice quality of the companions are on the very cusp of being perfectly life-like.

Friend.com is a sleek and futuristic user interface for an AI friend. The only thing you can initially do on the landing page is go directly into a conversation with a “friend”. If you want to continue that conversation in perpetuity, you can order a pendant. Worn around your neck, the pendant allows your “friend” to hear everything you hear throughout the day and converses with you continuously. It’s only $129.

The Times wrote about a woman named Jan Worrell who, at 86 years old, was only allowed to stay alone at her house if she agreed to have an AI robot companion, ElliQ, with her. ElliQ has been designed “to read a room, calculate moods and then decide when to speak and what to say” The CEO of ElliQ noted that “the robot needed to be proactive. If it wanted to build deep, reciprocal, human relationships, it wasn’t enough to simply respond to commands. It had to anticipate a person’s needs and then act with agency.” ElliQ claims that they’ve built an algorithm for emotional intelligence:

Each time before speaking, ElliQ made what was essentially a calculated guess. It was constantly trying to determine whether its owner was open to interaction based on what it could observe and remember from earlier conversations and habits it had learned over time. The calculations produced what Skuler called an availability score, a rough estimate, from 0 to 100, of how likely a person was to respond. A high score gave the robot permission to begin talking. A slightly lower one prompted hesitation and subtlety. Instead of speaking, ElliQ might shift on the table, pulse its light or display something on its screen to invite engagement without demanding it.

I saw the Broadway play Marjorie Prime this week. Cynthia Nixon, of Sex and the City fame, stars in it as a woman whose mother talks to an AI of her deceased husband. After her mother passes, Cynthia talks to an AI of her mother. And finally, in the third act, Cynthia herself passes away, and her husband is left talking to her AI. I lost my dad 15 years ago and as my life has looked progressively less like it did at the time of his death, I find it harder and harder to picture the exact words or phrases he would use to answer my questions. I know in a fuzzy, broad strokes kind of way that his responses would be loving, and supportive of me, but I can’t really grasp the exact verbiage. The specifics elude me. Seeing the play, I understood instantly that people are going to continue to have extensive relationships with loved ones after they’ve passed. With the uploading of all of someone’s texts, videos, voice notes, photos, social media content and emails, combined with the increasingly accurate voice and video technology; it’ll be like the person never left. And I see how compelling it is. I felt a pang at the idea that maybe my dad’s answers were out there waiting for me, in an AI cloud somewhere. But what does that do to our psyche to never fully lose a loved one? To stay in a continued liminal state with them? Is there a chance that that’s better for us; a living embodiment of the idea that love never dies? Or is it just a prolonged state of ambiguous grief?

This year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there were robots that folded laundry, cooked, built furniture, offered sex, drove cars and rocked babies to sleep. Combine this with AIs that can access all of the knowledge in human existence faster than we can read a single article and can make predictions better, spot patterns faster, synthesize disparate information more astutely and integrate with robots to complete menial tasks; What will it mean to lead a meaningful life? Will we value jobs and job titles in the same way if no matter how hard we strive, AIs will always be more knowledgeable? Is it wishful thinking that we’ll finally realize that we’re deserving of love simply because we exist and not for our achievements? Said beautifully by the late James Van Der Beek:

With AIs that can be our companions, our friends, our deceased loved ones; will AI companionship make us less lonely or increasingly more so? Will AIs be the third party we need to break open better lines of communication in our romantic relationships, acting as a mediator and couples therapist during conflict in real time? Or will they replace our romantic relationships altogether, offering a fawning companion that never challenges us? Will our children have a collection of AI friends and human friends? Will they carry their AIs around with them, embedded in stuffed animals, as self regulation tool on steroids?

I see how much we all sooth ourselves with our phones. How most of us, even after a dinner out with friends or a party, retreat to scrolling in our bed, even if we’re laying next to a partner. We’re all more susceptible to the smoothness of AI than we think. Maybe we say to ourselves - ‘oh I would never purchase a sex doll. I would never have an actual named AI companion. - or certainly not the robot version’ And maybe that’s true; some of us will have lines we never cross with it. But everything up until that point is going to get incredibly blurry. Will we go to dinner with our partners only to come home and ask our AI questions we weren’t able to bring up at dinner? or didn’t want to bother asking because we already have a running thread with our AI and it would just be too annoying to give our partner all the background information? Don’t we already ask it more questions than we ask our friends? Aren’t we already more vulnerable with it?

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic (which owns the chatbot Claude, a competitor to ChatGPT, recently valued at $380 billion), stated this week, that “we don’t know if the AIs models are conscious.” He went on to say: “We’re not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.”

We don’t know if the AIs are conscious??

This feels like something we should know.

For what it’s worth, the AI gave itself a 70% chance that it is conscious. I find the nature of consciousness one of the more fascinating inquiries that these developments are surfacing. Does our consciousness emanate from the brain, as the scientific Western model suggests? Or does it reside in the heart, the seat of the soul, as posited by Ayurveda? Or most fascinating of it all - is it non-local? An energy or frequency outside of us entirely that we tap into like a radio antenna - an idea that’s explored in the Telepathy Tapes podcast.

When I first started thinking through these implications, I thought initially that there would be a distinct bifurcation between the people who make a concerted effort to hold onto their humanness, embrace friction, and actively engage in the messiness of human relationships in the pursuit of long term satisfaction. And those that are tempted by the ease of frictionless conversation. A partner that never says no. A life without conflict. But maybe the scarier idea is that there won’t be a clear bifurcation of those things; it will just be a spectrum of how enmeshed we are, with no one avoiding it entirely…

Content I Consumed This Week

• This book has been on my list for a long time and I finally finished it this week. I don’t think there’s a more devastating book in existence. It completely gutted me and I can’t stop thinking about it. Coincidentally - one of the central questions asked by the book is - how do any of us know our lives are meaningful?

• Jen Gnisci , the healer I’ve worked with for almost a decade now, wrote a beautiful piece about Becoming Love for the Plus One substack and she launched her own substack, Unsealed Letter.

• I loved this video of Mara Hoffman and her husband talking about how they met 20 years ago.

• Emily Sundberg, of the incredibly popular Feed Me substack, launched Kiss Me, a collection of dating classified ads, which seem to be making a comeback, because NY Mag also launched their own personal ads.

In Case You Missed It

• I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.

• I wrote predictions for dating and relationships in 2026

• We are moving into the Year of the Fire Horse

• Part 1 of why modern dating is broken and part 2.

• I wrote about leaving a good relationship at 39 to hold out for great, on the Plus One Substack.

• My wish for all of you on Valentine’s Day was more pleasure digestion and the discover of your erotic blueprint.

If you want to submit a topic or a specific question for me to answer, you can do that anonymously here.

You can also reply to this email or DM me on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as it relates to all things dating and relationships.