My Blog

We treat managing expectations as a work skill. Something for kickoff meetings and project briefs — set the scope, agree what "done" looks like, avoid nasty surprises in quarter three. Then we go home to the person we love most and skip the brief entirely. I've never been good at skipping it. I'm direct to a fault, and it's served me. When I re-entered dating after my divorce, I had one non-negotiable I wasn't willing to discover three dates in. So I'd ask about it almost imm

You know it when you see it. A couple walks into a room and something is beaming between them. Their radiance fills the space — and yet, if a stranger asked you to describe what these two are actually doing, you'd struggle to put it into words. They don't act like teenagers. But you are unmistakably witnessing an intimate connection (Gottman & Silver, 2018). Intimacy is the lifeblood of a profound relationship. It's a bond that runs beneath the superficial, into the place whe

Most of my clients find out eventually. Somewhere in the work, it comes up: the couples therapist sitting across from them has been divorced. Ten years, one marriage, and then the decision to stop. I don't hide it. But I used to wonder whether I should. The story of that marriage isn't the point here — maybe another time. What matters is that I came to this work already carrying it. At first it didn't weigh much. Divorce is common enough now that I assumed it was just a fact