Not Just a Childhood Game Most of us have run a three-legged race at least once in our lives. You stand hip to hip with a partner. Someone ties your adjacent legs together with a length of rope. A starting pistol fires, and suddenly you discover something humbling: you cannot move well by simply doing […]
Keeping the Doors of Love Open Does your relationship feel like a place where you can fully be yourself? Or do you find yourself editing who you are, choosing your words carefully, softening your reactions, bracing for what might come next? Do you walk on eggshells, not quite sure which version of you your partner […]
Know That You Have a Choice In the space between what happens to us and how we act, there is a quiet but profound power. And most of us don’t know it’s there. Most of us move through our days operating on a kind of emotional autopilot. Something happens, and almost before we know it, […]
When Love Meets Difference Most of us have been trained to see life through a very narrow lens. We live in a culture whose values, social norms, institutions, and systems have largely been shaped by a level of human consciousness that is binary in nature. In this way of seeing, we are taught to divide […]
Looking At “Good Enough” From a Different Angle We are all doing the best we can… and this is what it looks like. It looks like misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and moments we wish we could take back. It looks like people acting from fear when they long for love, closing off when they most need […]
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash The argument isn’t really about what you think it’s about. If you’ve been in a long-term relationship, you know the feeling. A familiar tension rises, words are exchanged, and somewhere in the middle of it, a quiet, exhausted part of you thinks we’ve been here before. Most couples find […]
There is a moment when life as you know it ends. It might come in a phone call. A diagnosis. A doctor walking into the room.One sentence, and everything changes. An email I received from a reader provoked this article. She wrote “I’m 50 years old, sitting in a hospital room with my 43-year-old husband, […]
What if the way we protect ourselves is also what keeps us from feeling fully alive? For many years, I found myself saying, “If I were queen…” whenever I felt frustrated with the way people behave and the way the world works. This was long before “No Kings” became a thing. I objected to so […]
Opening Story Living alone, I have often found it difficult to ask for help when I need it. After a knee replacement surgery, I called my friend June and asked if she could pick up lunch for me while she was out running errands. I expected an immediate “Yes, of course.” But, she hesitated, […]
The Hidden Cost of Perfectionism Perfectionism is one of the most socially rewarded forms of self-rejection. To the perfectionist, perfectionism looks responsible and disciplined. It even looks admirable. But underneath its polished surface, it is often driven not by excellence, but by fear. Fear of being judged. Fear of being inadequate. Fear of getting it […]