Venture Beyond

Last February I had what I can only describe as the wedding rush of my life. My two oldest kids got married twenty days apart. Twenty days! Both were destination weddings, and both were in Mexico (don't ask why, it's a long story). So I packed, flew, danced (a lot), and cried (also a lot). Then I flew home, came down with COVID and bronchitis, pumped my body with every medicine available so I'd be ready for the second wedding, miraculously recovered, and did the whole thing again. The energy in our family that month was through the roof. I ran on deep, deep joy and very little sleep, and I wouldn't trade a single minute of it.

The whole time we were planning, and all through the celebrating, I knew deep in my heart what my real gift to them was. It wasn't the wedding, and it wasn't anything on the registry. It was the actual tools for loving someone well: how to repair after a fight, how to say what you need without it landing as an accusation, and how to stay connected when life gets heavy. I raised them with so much love (I want to be very clear about that, mostly for their sake). But I never taught them these things while they were growing up in our home, because back then I honestly didn't know they could be taught. When they got engaged, I pressed hard on the accelerator. I wanted it ready before they walked down the aisle.

We don't learn how to love in a classroom, as part of our curriculum. We learn it by watching our parents at the dinner table, seeing how they handled a disagreement (or didn't) and how affection was shown (or wasn't). Then we carry all of it into our own relationships as if that's simply the way things are.

School made very sure I knew the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. What I could not have told you at twenty-five was how to come back to someone after a hard conversation.

I'm a learner by nature, so even while I was married, I studied this. I learned, but not enough to save my marriage. I was married for twenty-five years to someone I loved very much, and there was real goodness between us. We still couldn't hold the relationship through the seasons that asked for more than feeling. After the divorce, the learning went much deeper, all the way to formal training in relationship coaching and grief coaching. Meanwhile, my conversations with friends, married and divorced alike, kept landing in the same place: none of us had been taught any of this. These are smart, capable people, and every one of us was improvising in the relationship that shaped our lives the most. (Improvising with a lot of confidence, I might add. Confidence was never our problem.)

Today I work with people in life transitions, which means I sit with so many people going through divorce. The grief of watching something you loved come apart because nobody gave you the tools is genuinely unbearable to witness. More times than I can count, I've thought: if they'd only had this earlier, maybe they could have saved all of it.

Our generation grew up with almost no information about any of this, and I'm not sure this one is doing much better. What you get depends on what your algorithm decides to serve you. Even when you get lucky, it's a sixty-second clip with zero depth, squeezed between a recipe and a puppy video. How to communicate, how to handle conflict, how to repair, and how to regulate yourself when your partner says the one thing that sends you straight back to being eight years old: none of it is required curriculum. If we learned it the way we learn to read, kids would grow up watching something different at the dinner table. They'd see two people who actually know how to find their way back to each other.

That's why I made Becoming Us. It's ten lessons on what conscious love actually requires, covering childhood patterns, conflict, nervous system regulation, rituals, intimacy, and the conversations most couples never have. Think of it as the bare minimum curriculum. By no means does it cover everything, but it gives you the foundational pieces for all of it. The lessons are long enough to go deep, and they're completely free. They're in English for now, and the Spanish version is coming very soon.

The funny thing is that the retreat actually came first, and I've led it several times already. The series puts the foundation somewhere anyone can reach it.

So this October, let's explore this together here in Seekers Circle. Watch the lessons at your own pace, alone or with your partner, and bring what comes up to the forum. Bring the pattern you suddenly recognized from your parents' kitchen, the conversation you've been avoiding for years, or the thing you wish someone had told you at your own wedding.

Becoming Us Series

And if you and your partner want to live these and integrate these lessons rather than just watch them, the month ends with the Becoming Us retreat on October 31st and November 1st. Yes, that's Halloween weekend. Costumes are optional, but honesty is not.

Becoming Us Retreat

My kids got these tools at the start of their marriages, and it's one of the best gifts I've ever been able to give them. Wherever you are in your own relationship, whether it's the beginning, deep in the middle, or somewhere after, you get them now. I'm so glad you're here.