The Love You're Longing For Starts Here

On emotions, feelings, and what's really keeping you from the connection your heart wants most

There's something I wish I had understood much earlier in my life, something that would have opened me to far more fulfilling, deeply connected relationships than I allowed myself to experience.

I used to move so quickly from what I was feeling to what I was concluding. Someone I loved would go quiet, or say something in a certain tone, or not respond the way I'd hoped and before they'd even finished speaking, my mind was already building a case. Deciding what they meant.

What I wish I'd had was the ability to pause in that moment. To stay open. To get curious instead of certain. To ask a question instead of arriving at an answer. Because more often than not, the conclusion I had reached was less about the person in front of me and more about a story I had been carrying long before they ever entered my life.

And sometimes I didn't underestimate people, I overestimated them. I would project my own open heart, my own good intentions, my own depth of feeling onto someone who simply didn't authentically reciprocate. I would read warmth, meaning and reciprocity that wasn’t there. I gave people the benefit of the doubt who did not deserve it. How we interpret someone depends on our lens and what may be influencing our ability to see clearly. Sometimes it makes the other person into something they never were - positive or negative.

And here's what makes it even more layered: most of those stories are old.

Joseph Nguyen writes in Don't Believe Everything You Think that our thinking is the beginning and end of our suffering. I'd take it a step further and say: it's not even our thinking, not really. It is the thinking of a younger version of us, a child, a teenager, a younger adult who encountered something painful and did the only thing they could do: made meaning of it. Created a story that helped them survive that moment.

The body sensed danger. The mind wrote the explanation. And that explanation got filed away as truth.

The trouble is, we never updated the file. So now, decades later, when someone we love goes quiet, or uses a certain tone, or doesn't respond the way we hoped or shows us the possibility of depth and caring - the body fires the same old signal, the mind pulls up the same old story, and suddenly we are not in this kitchen, in this relationship, in this decade. We are somewhere much younger, reacting from a wound that was never actually healed, only archived.

We look at the person in front of us through a lens that was shaped by someone entirely different. We assign them motives they don't have. We hear meanings that weren't spoken. We brace for betrayals that aren't coming or we open our hearts to people who haven't yet shown us they deserve that openness. And the tragedy is that we are usually completely convinced we are seeing clearly.

This is what quietly devastates intimacy.

Not the dramatic ruptures. Not the obvious betrayals. But this: two people sitting across from each other, both looking through their own distorted lenses, both absolutely certain they understand what's happening, neither of them actually seeing the other at all.

Dr. John Gottman spent more than four decades studying thousands of couples in what became famously known as the Love Lab and what he found was striking in its simplicity. The key to sustaining a happy relationship is having a strong friendship, and the first step in building that friendship is getting to know each other deeply and intimately. Not assuming you already do. Not filling in the blanks with your own projections. Actually asking. Actually listening. Actually staying curious about who this person is, not who your nervous system decided they were in the first five seconds of a charged moment.

Gottman's research shows that open-ended questions open doors that assumptions keep permanently closed—

they invite stories, layers, and meaning that help you understand the heart of who your partner actually is. This is what he calls building a Love Map — a detailed, living understanding of your partner's inner world: their memories, their fears, their values, their hopes, the things that matter to them right now. And the foundation of it is not assumption. It is curiosity. Ongoing, humble, open-hearted curiosity.

We react to the story, not the person. We defend against the wound, not what’s true in the moment. And the other person, who has their own original emotion, their own body sensation, their own ancient story firing simultaneously, responds to our reaction, and now we are in a loop that has almost nothing to do with what actually happened between us five minutes ago.

Hours get lost this way. Days. In some relationships, years.

And the exhausting, heartbreaking part is that underneath all of it, most people are simply trying to be understood. Trying to be seen. Trying to feel safe enough to be real with someone. But we can't get there by leading with our stories. Stories collide. They defend and accuse and circle. They never actually meet.

What meets is presence. What meets is the willingness to stay open and to ask rather than conclude, to wonder rather than decide and to offer curiosity, however tender or uncertain, to the person in front of you.

If you recognize yourself in these words, if you can feel the pull toward something deeper, truer, more connected than what you've known, this is exactly the work I do.

In 1:1 sessions, we go beneath the narrative together.