And I don’t mean that because I’m shy, intimidated, or afraid of men in the way you might assume.

I mean that I’ve had so many experiences with women interpreting the most innocent interactions as a threat to their relationship that I’ve genuinely changed the way I behave in every area of my life.

I’ve laughed and chatted with strangers, who approached me, only to be yelled at by a girlfriend moments later.

I’ve had countless foul looks from women simply for looking in the direction of them and their partner.

And somewhere along the way, I started changing the way I walk down the street.

If I see a couple coming towards me, I look at the woman.

Even if the man is looking at me and smiling.

Even if he’s saying hello.

Even if the most natural thing in the world would be to smile back.

I look at her eyes because I have learned that sometimes, even the smallest acknowledgement of a man can be interpreted as an invitation, a challenge, or an attempt to take something that belongs to someone else.

Heck, i even smiled through tears at a married police officer once and he took that as an invitation that i wanted to f**k him… and subsequently showed up at my home hours later to try and make it happen.

And I honestly don’t know what to do with that.

Because I am, by every measure of the women who actually know me, the ultimate girl’s girl.

And yet, somehow, I’ve spent a significant portion of my life being treated like the very thing I would never want to be.

The woman who supposedly wants your man.

I’ve had fake accounts message me, abuse me, and accuse me of trying to steal their boyfriend.

Meanwhile, I’m over here emotionally invested in a situationship that doesn’t even love me, haven’t even noticed another man in years, and have absolutely no idea who the f**k they’re talking about.

I’ve had women who barely know me make up stories about me to men I’ve been seeing because they havent liked me or not wanted to loose their single male friends attention.

Stories that weren’t true. Stories that have apparently been convincing enough to make those men disappear from my life.

And the most maddening part of that experience, I’m often the last person to know about it.

I don’t get the opportunity to be seen and known for ME. I don’t get to ask what I’ve supposedly done. I don’t even know there’s a problem until the relationship has already been affected.

I’ve had friendships disappear the moment a woman gets a partner. No longer invited to group events when im the only single one left.

I’ve had male friends who promised they’d always be my friend disappear the moment they get into a relationship (and i get that now, as horrible as the repeated experience was for years).

I’ve watched people who were once part of my everyday life quietly remove me from theirs and I’ve had other experiences where the disappearance wasn’t quiet at all. It came with accusations, drama, projections, about a version of me that Im not acquainted with.

I can understand that relationships change. I can understand that priorities shift. I can understand that people have insecurities, boundaries, and experiences that shape how they see the world.

What I struggle to understand is how often I’ve been made responsible for feelings I didn’t create, situations I didn’t initiate, and stories I didn’t participate in. BY WOMEN.

Especially when the person on the receiving end of those accusations is someone who has spent her entire life trying to be a good woman to other women.

I am not the woman you’re looking for.

Anyone who knows me knows that I will go to extraordinary lengths to support a man and women in their relationship.

Because thats what i would want from my own friendships.

I’m the friend who’s going to encourage you to communicate with your partner when things get rough.

I’m going to help you understand your partner and overcome your own fears and insecurities.

I’m going to help you identify the patterns you’re bringing into the relationship, the things you’re struggling to say, and the ways you might be contributing to the problem.

I’m going to help you find the tools to navigate the hard conversations.

I’m not going to encourage you to throw away a relationship because you’ve had a difficult week and your exhaustion or fear is creating stories based on bad information.

I’m not going to tell you to leave your husband because he annoyed you.

I’m not going to convince you that every disagreement is a red flag or that every uncomfortable feeling is evidence that you’re with the wrong person.

Obviously, abuse is different. Your safety comes first.

But outside of that, I believe relationships are worth working on.

I have exes, former lovers, and situationships who have messaged me years later wanting to reconnect, some of them have been married, some of them have been in relationships and as much as i was lonely in these moments… I’ve cut those interactions off because I have no interest in participating in something that could hurt another woman.

I don’t need to know her. I don’t need to be friends with her. I don’t need her to know that I exist. I simply don’t want to be the reason another woman feels betrayed by the person she’s chosen to love. Even though many other women have not afforded me the same courtesy .

That is how I move through the world.

And yet, somehow, I’ve repeatedly found myself on the receiving end of the exact behaviour I would never want to inflict on another woman.

The price of being perceived as a threat…

I think the part that has affected me the most is that I don’t always know when it’s happening.

I don’t know when a woman has decided she doesn’t like me. I don’t know when someone has told a story about me that isn’t true thats starting to fester in relationships i care about. I don’t know when a friendship is about to disappear because being in a new relationship has changed the way they see me.

I don’t know when a man is going to interpret a completely innocent interaction as something more.

And I don’t know when a woman is going to decide that my existence is a problem. And this is standard female evolutionary psychology.

For much of human history, a woman’s ability to find and maintain a partnership could have significant implications for her safety, resources, social standing, and ability to raise children.

Those pressures have changed enormously in modern society, but the psychological patterns shaped by generations of competition, insecurity, and the need for belonging don’t necessarily disappear just because our circumstances have changed.

We still carry old fears into these new times and environments and I notice how often that plays out in the way women perceive one another: unconsciously, or sometimes quite consciously, treating other women as competition for a man’s attention, commitment, or protection.

We can find ourselves trying to secure our position by diminishing another woman, monitoring her behaviour, or making sure she knows she’s not welcome, rather than addressing the insecurity that makes her presence feel threatening in the first place.

Of course, evolutionary psychology doesn’t explain every woman’s behaviour, and it certainly doesn’t excuse it. But I think it’s worth asking whether some of what we call jealousy is an old survival strategy playing out in a world where women have far more options, independence, and agency than ever before.

We don’t have to compete for our survival in the same ways our ancestors might have. We can build our own financial security, our own communities, and our own lives. And perhaps part of our growth as women is learning that another woman’s existence doesn’t have to come at our expense.

So, Ive found myself doing things that feel completely unnatural to me.

I avoid eye contact.

I don’t smile back.

I don’t engage in conversations I would otherwise enjoy, i literally did this this morning 🫠

I actively think about how my behaviour might be interpreted by a woman I have never met.

I’ve been sitting in cafes in Bali recently, watching men on dates look over at me, smile at me, and sometimes even walk past me to say hello.

And I want to smile.

I want to be friendly.

I want to be the person I actually am.

But I don’t.

Because I know what it feels like to be the woman sitting across from a man who is paying attention to someone else.

And I don’t want to contribute to that.

Ive been asked so many times over the years (because i have been single so long) “surely there were men who wanted to be with you” and yes… there were a few.

But every time it was on old friends ex boyfriend. Or the ex of a girl i knew in the community. And i drew a line… and ive regretted that from time to time because those women wouldn’t have (and didn’t) draw that line for me.

But there’s a difference between choosing to respect someone’s relationship and feeling like you have to make yourself invisible to protect it and I think I’ve crossed into the latter more often than I’d like to admit.

What are we actually doing to each other?

We talk a lot about how men treat women…

We talk about emotional availability, commitment, respect, betrayal, infidelity, and the importance of healthy relationships.

We talk about how women deserve to feel safe.

We talk about how women should support one another.

And yet, I’ve had so many experiences where women have treated me in ways that I would never dream of treating them.

Not because I’ve pursued their partner.

Not because I’ve flirted with their boyfriend.

Not because I’ve done anything to interfere with their relationship.

But because I’ve existed in the same space as a man they happen to be with.

And I think we need to be willing to talk about that.

Because how can we expect men to treat us with respect if we’re not willing to extend that same respect to one another as women?

How can we expect to build secure relationships when we’re treating other women as competition simply for being attractive, friendly, or present?

How can we expect to feel safe in our relationships when we’re creating an environment where the most innocent interactions between people become something to fear?

And how can we expect to build genuine female friendships when so many of us are operating from the assumption that another woman is secretly trying to take something from us?

I don’t think every woman who has treated me this way is a bad person, I think insecurity can be incredibly powerful, I think past betrayal can make people hypervigilant.

I think some women have been taught that other women are competition for love, attention, and security. I think some people are so afraid of being hurt that they begin looking for threats everywhere.

And I think the internet has made it easier than ever to create a story about someone without ever having to speak to them.

But understanding where something comes from doesn’t mean we have to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

The women who have shown me something different:

I don’t want this to be an article that discounts the incredible women in my life.

Because I have them. And anytime i post about how incredible my female friendships are… how they legit save my life… people say they WISH they had that too.

The thing is, we built this together.

These women trust me… and they have partners.

I adore them, even when they cant always be available to hang out or they have family things i cant come it.

These women know that they can come to me when their relationships are struggling.

They know that I will support them, encourage them, and help them find a way forward - WITH their partner.

(Im not secretly dropping breadcrumbs of doubt so i can get my single friend back one day).

These are women who understand that I’m not their competition and those friendships mean everything to me.

But they’ve taken work.

They’ve taken patience.

They’ve taken trust.

They’ve taken some sacrifice and uncomfortable choices and conversations.

They’ve taken the willingness to get to know one another beyond whatever assumptions we might have initially made.

They’ve taken the willingness to have uncomfortable conversations, to ask questions, and to give one another the benefit of the doubt.

And I’ve had to accept that not everyone is going to be capable of that with me.

Some people will disappear.

Some will decide they don’t like me.

Some will create a story about me that has very little to do with who I actually am.

And I can’t control that.

What I can control is the kind of woman I choose to be.

I can continue to support women.

I can continue to respect relationships.

I can continue to be the friend who encourages people to work through the hard things.

And I can continue to build friendships with women who are willing to see me for who I am, rather than who they fear I might be.

The thing is, I don’t want to be afraid to smile at someone.

I don’t want to have to think about whether a simple hello could cause a problem in someone else’s relationship.

I don’t want to feel like I need to make myself smaller, less visible, or less friendly because someone might interpret my existence as a threat and try to hurt me.

I don’t want to be suspicious of women.

I don’t want to assume that every woman who looks at me negatively has a problem with me.

And I certainly don’t want to become the kind of woman who treats other women with the same suspicion that has been directed at me.

But I also can’t pretend that these experiences haven’t changed me.

They have.

And I think that’s the part that deserves to be talked about.

Because there are women out there who have spent years being genuinely supportive, respectful, and protective of other women’s relationships, only to find themselves navigating a world where they’re treated like a threat.

And I wonder how many of us have quietly changed the way we behave because of it.

How many of us have stopped smiling? How many of us have stopped making friends? How many of us have become more guarded, more cautious, and more hesitant to engage with people because of the way we’ve been treated?

How many of us have been made to feel like we need to apologise for simply existing?

I don’t have an answer.

I just know that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking at the ground when I walk past a couple.

I want to be able to smile at a man who smiles at me without worrying about what the potential woman around the corner that i havent seen yet, might think or do.

I want to be able to have friendships with men without loosing the friendship the moment they fall in love.

And I want to believe that we can build a world where women aren’t actively competing (even if its somewhat unconscious) with one another for the love, attention, or security that we ALL deserve.

Maybe that’s naive.

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky.

Maybe the experiences I’ve had are more common than we talk about.

Or maybe there’s something about the way we’ve been taught to view one another that needs to change.

Have you experienced this?

Men who lied to me. People who betrayed me. Women who made me feel like there was something wrong with the way I wanted to live, or who quietly removed me from their world when I stopped fitting into it.

Some have even wanted to work with me.

Which is an interesting moment, considering there was a time when I was using a considerable amount of my energy trying to understand what they’d done, why they’d done it and what it supposedly said about me.

And now they’re asking about the things I built while I was getting over it.

I sometimes joke that when you learn how to turn your heartbreak into money, you never stay hurt for long. Obviously, “long” is relative. There are things I’ve spent years recovering from, healing my mind and nervous system from and anyone who knows my story knows I didn’t just have a little cry, make a vision board and wake up with a business and better life.

But there’s something deeply reassuring about reaching a point where you trust that whatever happens, you’ll can find something useful to do with it. You’ve watched yourself turn enough difficult experiences into skills, decisions, work and opportunities that you start to recognise there’s a life available beyond understanding the person who hurt you.

And you get increasingly interested in building that.

I’ve been single for fifteen years, and I have given a frankly impressive amount of time to trying to understand people.

I’ve studied communication, relationships, unconscious patterns, the things we learn in childhood and then spend our adult lives acting out. I’ve trained in coaching, counselling, hypnotherapy and NLP, among many other things. I’ve invested more than $100,000 into education, training, prac, healing and tools over the years, and spent tens of thousands of hours putting what I learned into practice.

And most of that began… because I was hurting and wanted to know how to stop.

I wanted to understand how someone could make you feel so loved and then behave as though you barely existed. How you could be so sure you were building something together, while they were apparently having a completely different experience of the situation. How to trust yourself again when the version of someone you fell in love with turned out to be a presentation they couldn’t sustain.

There were also experiences of sexual assault and betrayal that changed how safe I felt in the world. Getting myself through those asked much more of me than finding an empowering perspective.

I would have loved to learn everything I know through gentler experiences. I don’t believe anyone needed to hurt me for me to become capable of building a beautiful life.

But those things happened, and somewhere in the process of recovering, I became interested in what else I could do with everything I was learning.

At first, I needed the knowledge for myself. Eventually, I could use some of it to help someone else. With training, practice and experience, that became work people were willing to pay me for.

And over time, that work changed my life.

I built a coaching business. I wrote four books. I sold out international retreats. I built an audience and earned multiple six figures through a business I could run part-time.

I created the ability to work from my laptop, travel and spend time with people I love while continuing to earn. I’ve supported women through changes in their own lives and businesses, using skills I might never have pursued so seriously if I hadn’t first needed them myself.

None of those things happened automatically because I’d been hurt. There was a lot of studying, practising, creating, offering something, discovering what didn’t work and having another go.

But the desire to feel different became a desire to live differently, and eventually there were very practical things I could do about that.

I found the world of yoga and mindset because the man i loved, would go to yoga sometimes.

I started to write because another man i loved told me i was an incredible writer and he thought i would be an important leader.. years before i could even see that in myself.

I was able to forge ahead as an entrepreneur after an incredible love affair lead to an incredible betrayal and discard… because that love inspired me to build a better life (when at the time i had all but lost hope in love)

I because obsessed with healing and learning and service after one of the earlier men came back in promising everything id been dreaming of, only to disappear in a wildly dramatic fashion.

I gained the confidence to coach and really take on supporting others after (probably the most) horrible false relationship.. that broke my mind apart for a time but drove me to do the deepest shadow work, which created a totally new me. One who was grounded and stable and so sure of my abilities.

And i was fuelled for a number of really tough years in business thanks to another love affair, that, while brief and not what it seemed to me, filled my heart with that feeling of what could be possible with the right person, one day,

That’s the part I wish we talked about more.

Because there’s a whole world available now for understanding what happened to you, whos to blame and how to watch out for that in the futurw. You can spend every evening learning another term for someone’s behaviour, recognising another warning sign, listening to another story that sounds almost exactly like yours.

And there can be enormous relief in that. Especially if you’ve spent years thinking you were the only person it happened to, or wondering whether you imagined how good it was.. or how bad it was.

Finding people who understand can give you enough steadiness to begin again.

But…

I’ve also had to check myself when I’m still learning something useful and when I’m going back for yet another explanation of something I already understand.

Getting stuck in an endless loop of ‘the work’

How much more information do I need about this person before I’m allowed to make my life about something else?

At what point have I learned enough about what I don’t want, to start giving some proper attention to what I do?

I can know all the terminology, recognise every pattern and explain the psychology beautifully, while my own incredible ideas and goals and potential innovations sit untouched. The offer I wanted to create still isn’t written. The book is still in my notes. The business I keep imagining still only exists in conversations about what I’ll do when I feel ready.

Meanwhile, I’ve given another evening to someone who isn’t even in the room, someone who perhaps never really was, even when we were tangled up together in love.

That’s an expensive arrangement. And I’m allowed to decide I’ve paid enough.

I’m not suggesting everyone needs to become a coach or turn their most painful experience into an Instagram account, i actually DO NOT recommend that. Its a great way to turn your life into a constant job of staying in that energy. You can keep every detail of what happened private and still let it change what you choose to build.

Maybe the experience makes you realise how much you want your own income, so you pursue learning financial literacy. Maybe it shows you that you’ve spent years accommodating someone else’s ambitions while treating your own as optional, so you start giving them your time instead of scrolling endless narcissism psychology. Maybe once you’ve had some space to grieve, you begin wondering what you could create with what happened.

Because hurt, fear, anger, grief… they feel awful, but they are an energy. That can be transformed into drive, motivation, inspiration, excitement.. even joy.

You might start a business that has absolutely nothing to do with relationships. You might finally put your existing skills into an offer, go after work you actually want, learn something that increases your earning capacity or let yourself be visible enough for people to know what you can help them with.

And the more money you create for yourself, the more you can pour that into what really matters. Your health, continued healing, service, time with loved ones, creating a totally new and improved version of you that you can feel all the way through your cells.

The heartbreak can be where the decision began, what you build gets to have a much bigger purpose.

And if you do want to use your experience to help other people, there’s work involved in becoming useful to them. Having been through something gives you a perspective; learning how to support someone else responsibly takes a fair bit more than that.

Which is why i took my time before i personally offered my coaching services. I wanted to know id been to the depths of my own work, so i could be confident in holding others very active situations and walking them through them.

For me, the education and the practice mattered. So did having enough distance from an experience that I could talk about it without needing the audience to take care of me afterwards.

I want someone reading my work to leave with something they can use in their own life. Sometimes that’s understanding. Sometimes it’s a question they haven’t asked themselves. Sometimes it’s a practical decision they’ve been putting off.

That’s where the experience starts becoming a contribution, one of the most important human needs we have.

And money can be part of that. I’m very comfortable saying so.

There’s something wonderful about realising that a skill you developed while rebuilding yourself now helps you pay your bills. Or that the business you finally took seriously allows you to book a flight to see your family, or make it to that friends destination wedding, or have lots of space in your schedule to help friends raising their babies or going through IVF or a breakup themselves. You can choose where you live, how you work, who you work with and how much access certain people get to you.

Financial breathing room has a very different feel to posting an empowering quote and hoping that particular person sees it.

I’ve done enough of the inner work to appreciate a good quote. I also really appreciate being able to close my laptop and go for a surf, or read a good book at a cafe, because I’ve built work that allows me to do that.

That freedom took decisions and structure as well as belief.

It took getting clear on what I could offer, learning how to explain it, letting people know it existed, charging appropriately for the time and attention i provide and doing the work well enough that they wanted to stay or tell someone else. It took learning about boundaries and delivery and money, including the many layers of that, that don’t look particularly exciting on social media.

There were days when building looked like one useful email or finishing something I’d been avoiding. I didn’t need to feel wildly inspired for those things to count.

And I’ve had to learn that a business can become another place to exhaust yourself if you’re still trying to prove you deserved better treatment. I want the success to feel good to live inside. I want health, friendships, rest and enough space to enjoy what I’ve worked for.

Otherwise I’ve just found a more socially celebrated way to keep myself under pressure.

I suppose there is something delicious about people coming back years later and noticing what you’ve created. I’m human enough to admit that.

But by the time it happens, there’s usually so much else going on in your life that their reaction has become a much smaller event than you once imagined it would be.

You have clients to look after, friends to see, pursuits you’re excited about. You’ve discovered abilities you didn’t know you had. You’ve made decisions you’re proud of, and you’ve lived whole chapters they know nothing about.

Their approval can be lovely or strange or quietly satisfying. It has very little to do with whether the life itself feels good.

That’s the kind of empowerment I’m interested in as a woman in this modern world.

I want to know I can be hurt and still trust myself to make choices that support me. I want to know I can take the desire I had for one particular future and give it somewhere meaningful to go instead, even while I’m grieving the version that didn’t happen.

Because underneath so much of that heartbreak was a desire to love, to build, to contribute and to have a beautiful life.

Those desires are still mine.

I can bring that care into my work, I can use that willingness to build in my own business, I can give my imagination something to do beyond replaying a conversation that ended years ago.

And I can begin with something small enough to finish today.

Write the offer. Tell someone what I do. Return to the project. Make the decision I’ve been circling. Give one hour of my attention to the future I keep saying I want, and see what becomes possible when I do that again tomorrow.

There are things in my past I will never be grateful happened and yet, there are also parts of my life now that I’m profoundly grateful I created in response. So many experiences and connections i now have because i used that pain as fuel to become the women who is surrounded by them.

I get to hold both.

When I look at the work I do, the women I’ve supported, the books I’ve written and the places I’ve been able to live, I can see how much of my life grew from moments when I had no idea what would happen next.

Moments of ugly crying on a kitchen floor, considering another way out.

Moments of scrolling through someones social media trying to makes sense of who they really were and what they were doing now.

Moments of sending texts to men who clearly didnt want me, just hoping the person i originally got to know would re-appear..

Yep, ive done all those things.

I just also knew I wanted something better than that or constantly consuming therapy culture content trying to become smart about it all, so it wouldnt happen again….. I, instead, saw those dark moments as opportunities to do things that gave a better life for me, a chance to exist.

So yes, I’ll keep making the joke about turning heartbreak into money, because these days, when something hurts, the part of me that remembers all the things I’ve already built out of those moments, is a louder voice than the one telling me to spend 6 months binging true crime or join all the ‘survivor’ groups on Facebook.

And once I’ve felt what I need to feel, had the conversations and given myself some care, that part of me starts getting curious…. excited even!

I wonder what I’ll make with this.

which is a wonderfully empowering concept until someone suggests you get back on a dating app and you suddenly have fifteen years of lived experience to present to the court.

Because you understand the concept. You understand that the stories you rehearse influence how you move through the world, what you notice, what you expect and what you’re willing to try.

You don’t particularly want to spend the rest of your life telling yourself that ‘men are emotionally unavailable’, that ‘dating is cooked’ and that ‘finding someone you actually want to build a life with is becoming increasingly unlikely’.

You would quite like to be deliciously delusional about the whole thing. You would like to believe that somewhere there’s a lovely man doing his own growing up, learning how to communicate and preparing to be absolutely obsessed with you in a healthy, reasonably well-adjusted way.

Unfortunately, you also have receipts. And some of us have done more than collect them through our own experiences.

I have always been obsessed with learning about human behaviour, to make sense of things and my experiences… no naturally, I spent years trying to understand what’s happening in the dating world, reading the research, listening to endless conversations and looking at what both men and women are being taught about each other.

I’ve paid attention to what men are absorbing, what women are absorbing, what we’re frightened of, what we’re rewarding and what we’re being encouraged to tolerate. And honestly… ive learnt so many things i WISH I NEVER HAD TO LEARN about the world.
There are corners of that world that make staying hopeful feel like an unimaginable undertaking…. and even more isolating when most people havent learnt the things you have, spent time on understanding it all like you have.

Sometimes you come across something that finally gives language to an experience you’ve spent years struggling to explain, and there’s an enormous relief in that. You weren’t imagining it. There was something happening, and someone else, experts even… have recognised it too.

Then comes the slightly maddening realisation that you now have even more evidence for a story you don’t actually want to live inside.

That’s the part I want to talk about, because there’s a particular kind of tug of war that happens when you know how much your outlook matters AND you can also explain, in considerable detail, how you ended up with this one.

You want to be open to a different experience, while something in you desperately wants someone to understand the experience you’ve already had. You want to stop telling the old story, but you’re still waiting for someone to properly know you in what you lived.

And when you’ve spent a long time single, that need to be seen, to be known, to be understood…..can run much deeper than the conversation about dating.

There are so many moments in your life that nobody witnesses.

Someone might get the update afterwards, or the funny version once you’ve managed to find something funny about it….. but they weren’t there while you were trying to make sense of why a married police officer showed up at your home at 2am thinking your smile at him had meant he now had access to sleep with you!!!???

Or the months (years) it took to make sense of all the wonderful things that situationship said about growing old together, being meant for one another, wanting to marry you and have babies with you….. were nothing but words said, to get attention and sex. While everyone around you just thought you had some unhealthy stalker/obsession with a guy who wasnt interested in you.

(you can get many of these juicy stories inside my latest book - Sleeping With The Guru)

They didn’t see you get yourself through the utter confusion, the disappointment, question your judgement, yoru sanity, spend years afriad to smile at a man, or wear anything other than oversized shirts…. recover your confidence and eventually find enough willingness to try again.

Even your close friends and family can love you enormously and still only know pieces of what it took to become the person sitting across from them.

I think thats probably the selfish side of why i wrote books on my experiences… wanting to be seen for some of it.

So when someone says, “You should just put yourself out there,” there can be this almost overwhelming need to explain just how many freaking times you have!

You want them to know that you’ve been brave, that you’ve been open, that you’ve done the things they’re suggesting and a number of things they haven’t thought of… not just once… but hundreds of times. Over years. In many ways and places. You want them to understand that the hesitation they’re seeing has a history.

Meanwhile, they’re telling you about their friend who met her husband on Tinder ten years ago, and you’re wondering how much of your personal archive you’ll need to open before they understand why that particular example isnt helpful anymore.

And almost without control you watch yourself making a very convincing argument for why the thing you want probably won’t happen…. Even when you dont want to make the argument. Maddening.

You can hear yourself doing it. Watch yourself doing it. You know you don’t want to strengthen that belief, but you also don’t want to abandon yourself in the conversation by smiling politely while someone reduces years of experiences, efforts, explanations… to something you apparently haven’t thought to try.

I think sometimes we keep explaining because we’re hoping that, once someone understands how we got here, we might finally be able to put some of it down.

There’s research suggesting that validation can help reduce emotional intensity, although its effects vary depending on the emotion and the person. Being heard doesn’t resolve everything, but it can change the experience of having to hold it, and repeat it.

I know how different a conversation feels when someone can say, “Of course you’re tired after that. I understand why you’re hesitant,” and actually stay with me there for a moment rather than jump to offer suggestions ive heard literally ten thousand times….. I have much more room to consider another perspective when I’m no longer using all my energy trying to establish that my own experience happened.

Which is also where I think we need to be careful with the idea that we ‘create our reality’.

I believe deeply in the power of the stories we tell ourselves. I’ve spent years working with them, personally and professionally. I even recently created another massive life transformation through my self hypnosis processes…..

AND….. I’m unwilling to turn that into another reason for a woman to endlessly blame herself for someone else’s behaviour, or to believe she’s still single because she hasn’t maintained a sufficiently positive attitude.

Other people have agency. Someone can lie to you so effectively, while you’re seeing things through hopeful and blissful rose coloured glasses. You can approach dating with an open heart and meet someone who handles it carelessly or has a terrible reference point for relationships. You can build a beautiful new story to override your fearful ones of the past… but someone might have been consuming tonnes of fear based content and brainwashed themselves with a story that will lead them to hurt you.

Your mindset influences your participation in YOUR life; it doesn’t mean those who enter your life have done the same kind of work or have the same view of the world or beliefs to match your best case scenario….

In everyday life, its about slowing down to notice the difference between noticing something and recruiting it into an argument about what is possible.

You see another disappointing dating story and it becomes further confirmation of what you already believe. An example of kindness might get much less attention, or you find yourself explaining why it doesn’t count. If you can recognise this pattern of collecting data and where your brain is wanting to stack it…. (the limiting belief or the possibilities one)… slow it down and question “is this data going to help me see the reality i want… or further hide it from me?”

I want to notice when I’ve started asking every piece of information to support the same limiting conclusion, especially when that conclusion makes my life feel smaller and more depressing.

Because even when a story has evidence behind it, I’m allowed to ask what happens to me when I rehearse it every day.

How do you feel after an hour in the comments of another gender-war post?

How much of your actual afternoon have you spent arguing with people you will never meet? (and may not even be real humans).

Do you feel more capable of recognising a healthy connection, or more frightened and suspicious of everyone because of the story youre choosing and the people and information youre surrounded by?

There’s a point where understanding a problem can become spending most of your time in its company. I want to be able to recognise that point without having to pretend the problem isn’t real. For me, choosing a different story has to begin with letting the existing one be heard. Sometimes that means a conversation with someone who can listen. Sometimes it means writing the whole thing down, including the parts I’m tired of explaining and the parts I worry people will judge (basically, my book).

I can let myself say that something hurt, that I wanted better, that I’m disappointed and that I understand why I’ve become protective. I don’t have to rush to a lesson before I’ve even acknowledged the loss.

Then I can look at where the experience ends and the prediction begins.

“That person was dishonest with me” describes something that happened.

“Nobody will ever be honest with me” reaches into a future I haven’t lived yet. Projects it onto people who havent been dishonest at all.

It makes sense that my mind might travel there, but I can bring it back without arguing with the truth of the original experience. Its a skill ive had to work on… for years. Though many evolutions of negative ‘proof’ and data being stacked onto beliefs i dont wish to keep.

That’s often where a new story becomes possible, I don’t have to leap straight from disappointment to certainty that my soulmate is approaching the arrivals gate.

I can begin with the possibility that I haven’t met everyone. I can believe that I’m learning to recognise consistency, that I can leave situations that aren’t good for me, with grace, and that there may be people I would enjoy knowing who haven’t crossed my path yet. I can admit I don’t know what happens next, and find safety in that, because i CREATE it.

There’s quite a lot of breathing room in that admission.

I have also spent years being ruthlessly deliberate about what I keep exposing myself to.
No gender war content. No ‘surviving narcissism’ groups or education podcasts. They seem helpful in the moment… but when you look closer its usually being lead by an unhealthy and miserable human i woudnt want to be like.

Once I’ve recognised a pattern and worked out what I want to do about it, I’m allowed to stop consuming material about it for the evening. I can go for a walk, call someone who makes me laugh or do something that reminds me I have a life beyond trying to understand why dating has been disappointing.

When I imagine a relationship, I can let the imagined experience be soothing rather than another deadline. I can picture what it might feel like to be relaxed around someone, to have an ordinary conversation without analysing it at every turn, to trust that we’ll both do what we said we would do. Then I can return to today and make choices that support those qualities in the relationships I already have.

And if I want to call that being a little deliciously delusional, I will.

All while keeping enough discernment to use the skills of learning all that data… to notice whether someone’s actual behaviour belongs in the life I’m imagining.

The same applies to the people who love us and occasionally deliver advice that makes us want to throw our phones into the sea.

I don’t think every annoying suggestion means someone doesn’t see me. Sometimes it means they love me, want something good for me and don’t know how to sit with the fact that they can’t arrange it. Sometimes their optimism is the only thing they know how to offer. Because they too cant make sense of how im ‘still single’ either 🫠 😂

If I know that person cares about me, could I hear some of that care underneath the delivery? Could “You never know who you might meet” become a reminder that someone I love still sees possibility for me, even if I’m hot off the heels of my unwanted algorithm serving me up men vs women content all morning.

I can receive that and still tell them what would help. I can say, “I know you want this for me. Can you hear why I’m finding it hard … before we talk about what I should do next?”

Being loved doesn’t mean every suggestion is useful, and I don’t have to follow it to appreciate the intention.

If you love someone who’s been single for a long time, giving them that moment of understanding can matter more than you realise, even if you dont understand it. Let them tell you why they’re tired without immediately reaching for a success story or a suggestion that they need to find a lesson. There may be more room for hope once they feel you understand what hoping has already asked of them.

And if you don’t have someone who can do that consistently, I know that can feel like another thing you have to get yourself through. You can start offering yourself some of that acknowledgement while continuing to seek people who are capable of meeting you there, being delulu with you! And not allowing you to fall into those limiting stories and spaces for long.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life proving that I have good reasons to be disappointed. I know I have reasons, solid reasons, that i could build a multimillion dollar empire off the back of if i wanted to lean into the victim story of it all 🙄 (but i dont).

I want there to be room for more than those reasons in the life I’m building.

I can imagine reaching the end of my life grateful that I allowed myself to enjoy people, receive care, feel curious and have a lovely time while the future was still unknown. I can imagine being glad I didn’t spend all those years preparing an argument for why nothing good could happen.

And what if being a more open with my story of better possibilities does connect me with better people? (it 100000% has)

Even if theres constant ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ that the ideal outcome is far away.

What if there are forms of love and belonging I can recognise more easily when I’m giving them some attention too?

I want to be able to hold both… gently.

To let what happened in the past, and all ive learnt and absorbed… inform my choices without asking it to write every chapter that comes next.

I want to feel seen in the life I’ve lived and still be curious about the life I haven’t.

I want to dance and bathe in the deliciousness of the delusional possible outcomes… without letting those other parts of my mind, argue with them. Even if they never fully manifest in my reality… they just feel so much more enjoyable in my body and my mind.

For today, even that might be enough of a new story to begin with?

“𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘺𝘦𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘢𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘱𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘥

𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘢 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, 𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦

𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘬𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩

𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵. 𝘐𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦.” - The Alchemist.

Hey lay on me, holding me, fully engulfing me… As I read a paragraph and then he read a paragraph of one of my favourite books.

Turn by turn we giggled as we overtook each others recital of the words

I dreamed of a moment like this.

As he nuzzled into my neck with a smile on his face, there was a smile all through my soul.

My whole body was dissolving into a cellular relaxation that I so rarely get to feel on this long journey alone.

I knew in that moment, that this might be the best moment we would get together. I knew that everything was about to change.

I memorised every second. I drank in every detail, every touch, every sound, so that no matter what came next, this feeling would be the thing I got to remember, more than anything else.

The soft light, the warm white sheets, laying here wearing his big t-shirt, his prescription glasses, that were magically the same as mine that id forgotten to bring.

Wearing him. Days filled with just me … and him.

Fresh warm air in my hair as I press into him, driving us to find morning coffee.

Sunrise shining through the trees as we ride through the open valley to the deserted surf beach, surrounded by mountains, my smile is so wide, I dreamed of moments like this……..”was this really real!?”

Of all the journeys and all the people Ive known, these moments, on the island, were like being on another planet.

The floaty floral dress, that a bought to wear for him, moving against my skin as we ride through green fields, to dinner dates together.

Singing me songs of my homeland, singing together, as we drive in embrace and laughter.

With one arm wrapped around him and one stretched up in the air, as the warm night wind swirled around me, leaning my head back in a total expression of the freedom I felt in that moment….

Before returning to rest my cheek against his warm back.

A gentle kiss between coffee sips, a passionate embrace on the sands surrounded by this place we both adore. Looking through the camera lens to capture his silhouette, and mine. That look of longing. Almost….. Perfect. Moments of lovers, captured in time.

Moments of love, Selalu milikku / Always mine.

Over the many years single… it became clear that ‘the next guy might not be THE GUY’ for me. I made a decision after so many ‘almosts’ that when I found myself in magical moments like these, moments I might wish could go on forever.. I wouldn’t allow myself to get caught up in fears of the past or anxiety or expectations for a future…

I would devote myself to soaking up the moment I was in.

To stay in my body. To feel it, see it, smell it, taste it, touch it! To anchor the good stuff in, so that anything bad that might follow.. wouldn’t be quite as hard.

This was one of those times and although what came to pass was hard and broke some massive patterns for myself (even though I had to break my own heart to do so) these memories are still so much clearer than the pain.

Memories that are mine forever in my heart to use as inspiration and excitement for the future with someone who can meet me in that feeling, and stay.

Because;

‘If it’s not that… it’s something better!’

And if it can be that amazing with someone who isn’t ready to be with me… imagine how amazing it will be with the person who IS!

- From ‘Sleeping With The Guru’ - available now on Amazon in digital and paperback.

I don’t know who gave me this job… but I would like to resign 😅

There’s only so much of it you can see and hear and go through…. before you start wondering what’s actually going on behind all the relationships you’ve been comparing your single life to. And then you have to keep reminding yourself that you’re seeing particular people, particular situations, that there are good men and beautiful relationships too. Which I do believe…… But there have been times when believing it has taken a fair amount of effort in conjunction with all of this other evidence for my mind.

After almost fifteen years of being single, I’ve become quite interested in what happens in that space between what we’ve experienced and what we start expecting. How a series of separate moments gradually becomes our understanding of men, relationships, ourselves and what’s likely to happen to us.

Because you can process an experience, understand why you left, feel completely at peace with your decision, and still carry a conclusion from it into the next part of your life. Sometimes without even realising you made one.

You know that particular man was dishonest. You know leaving was the right thing to do. You’re proud of yourself for recognising it and acting on it. But somewhere underneath all that, there might also be a little, I wonder how long it takes before they all do that….

And after enough experiences, that thought can start feeling like common sense. That wondering can become a belief, an expectation, that your brain is using to find evidence in your reality.

I’ve had to catch in myself over the years from falling into this so much i could go to the Olympics for it! The gradual accumulation of information, and the story my brain has been making out of it to keep me safe.

Some of it comes from the bigger things: betrayal, mistreatment, being rejected by someone you’d allowed yourself to feel hopeful about. Some of it comes from much smaller moments. A comment. A conversation. Finding out that someone you thought was a decent partner has been behaving very differently when his girlfriend isn’t around.

Then there’s the advice, which can be a whole experience in itself. People telling you what you should accept, how you should date, what you might need to change, while you know enough about their situation to wonder whether they’ve ever applied any of this to themselves. You’re trying to listen and stay open, but you’re also thinking, some of what you’re suggesting I tolerate is exactly what I worked so hard to leave.

And because you’re the single one, your choices seem to be permanently available for review.

I think that can get into your head more than we acknowledge. When you’ve repeatedly chosen to leave things that were unhealthy, you understand your own reasons. You were there. You know what it felt like, what you tried, the countless hours of analysing every possible avenue, the thousands of dollars consulting therapists, what staying was asking of you. But as the years pass, and people keep asking why you’re still single, you can find yourself revisiting decisions you were once very clear about.

Was I too hard on him? Did I expect too much? Is everyone else accepting something I’m unwilling to accept? Is that how this works?

You can have enough self-respect to walk away and still find yourself at home later, looking at your phone, wishing there was someone you wanted to tell about your day. I think people sometimes forget that part when they congratulate a woman for choosing herself. There is a whole evening after the empowered decision. There are weekends and birthdays and ordinary Tuesdays. You still have the desire for companionship that made you give people a chance in the first place.

And if you do that enough times, it can start getting tangled up with your sense of worth. You chose to leave, but you’re also wondering why you keep ending up in situations where leaving is the healthiest option. Why hasn’t someone met you with the same care when it feels so bare minimum….? Why does it look so straightforward for other women? What are they doing that you aren’t?

I’ve had moments of wondering whether my value to men extends much beyond my body and what they might want from me. When you’ve had interest from men who are already in relationships, that question can become particularly uncomfortable. You’re apparently desirable enough to pursue, but the way you’re being pursued leaves you feeling horribly unseen by people who weren’t even for you. There’s an entire person here, with values and feelings and a life of her own, and somehow she’s been reduced to an opportunity for attention or an ego boost.

Then you’re supposed to go back out into the world feeling open and excited about meeting someone. To entertain conversations and hope that, this time, the person is actually available. Sometimes I think, of course women are tired. Look at what they’re trying to remain hopeful through.

I still want romantic love. I still want to build a life, a family, an empire with someone. I want the depth and the attraction and the ordinary familiarity of knowing each other really well. I want to hear about his day and have him actually want to hear about mine. I want to be able to admire the person I’m with, including how he behaves when I’m nowhere near him.

I’m comfortable wanting those things. What’s been harder at times is holding the belief in THAT story…. alongside everything I’ve seen and the story its building in my mind with mounting evidence.

There have been periods where I could feel myself becoming less excited by the possibility. I was functioning well, working, looking after myself, making plans. If you’d asked me whether I was okay, I would have said yes and meant it. But if you’d asked me how I felt about meeting someone, there would have been a different answer. A kind of internal tiredness, a wondering if im going to have explain myself again to someone who doesnt actually have the space to get it.

That feeling interests me, both personally and through the work I do. Because we can become so familiar with an expectation that we stop recognising it as one. It feels like we’re simply ‘being realistic’. We’ve got an abundance of evidence, after all.

And thats before you jump online and see the never-ending gender war content.

And we do have evidence. That’s what makes it complicated. When someone has lived through repeated disappointment, when they have done a lot of healing and self awareness work and have pattern recognition from a mile away (thats always on the money) …… asking them to consider a different possibility needs to take that history seriously. Otherwise it can feel like one more person telling them that their response is the problem. After telling them for years they needed to learn how to have that response…. Maddening!

For me, the useful question has been: what, exactly, is this evidence of?

A man with a wife unsuccessfully trying to pursue me gives me information about him. Seeing someone’s partner on a dating app gives me information about that situation. My mind can take those experiences considerably further, into conclusions about whether fidelity exists at all, whether love is safe, whether I’ll ever find someone, whether there’s something about me that means this is all I’m going to encounter. This is what the brain is designed to do. Box things together for efficiency… when real life is, of course, so much more nuanced.

But those conclusions can feel just as factual as the event itself, especially when several experiences seem to support them - and the world aint in the greatest state these days either….. Lets be real.

But there’s a lot happening between what someone did and what I’ve decided it means about the rest of my life. That’s where I’ve found room to work with it.

In my own life, and in the work I do with beliefs, I keep coming back to the stories that follow the experience.

I want to know when those stories started feeling true. Whose behaviour Im using to assess my own value. Whether Im talking about something that happened last month or a conclusion Ive been carrying for ten years and adding to ever since.

There’s often so much pain inside those sentences, those stories, some of which ive even studied to the point of having peer reviewed data to support (i DO NOT recommend this hahaha). It makes sense that we’d want an explanation for what we’ve been through. An explanation can give us something to organise it around, even when the explanation itself is cruel to us.

There have been many times ive recognised that I’d ended up in that place again. Another run of experiences (and a lot of viral videos that had women sharing their stories with me and horrible comments from men being directed at me) have left me with a pretty dismal story about what was available, and Ive felt how much it can affect my ability to be excited. My spark expunged. Knowing how this all works didn’t make me immune to it. I still have to really stop and listen to what I was telling myself under the surface.

This year in a new effort to support this rewiring… i recorded a series of hypnosis and pep talk audios for myself, drawing on my work of building a better life…. and i began listening to them regularly. I wanted to spend some deliberate time building stories I actually wanted to live with, even if they are delusional. Even if i never see evidence of them.

I built stories again about how i can trust my judgement now. That I can enjoy meeting people and feeling safe. That being treated badly hadn’t made me less valuable, and what I transformed that pain into actually made me so valuable. That there were experiences available to me which I hadn’t had yet… incredible days i havent lived yet.

I think that last one mattered more than I realised, especially when ive already created so many incredible days in my life… despite the hard ones.

After a long time being single, you can start feeling as though you’ve seen everything. I’ve certainly said it. I’ve experienced it all, heard it all, watched it all happen with others too. But of course I also, haven’t.

I’ve had a lot of experiences, yes. Ive had a pretty big view of whats going on, yes. And some of that has been awful, yes. There are also many forms of love and care available as evidence EVERYWHERE in my reality - I still want to notice that.

I needed to prioritise building those stories again… just because thats something i CAN control .

For me, self-hypnosis has always been a powerful way to spend time with that possibility and let myself feel it, rather than only agreeing with it intellectually. I could say “there are good men” quite easily. Feeling relaxed and curious about actually meeting one…. all the way through my soul…. was a different thing.

Alongside that, I started paying attention to what happened in ordinary interactions. Could I enjoy a conversation for what it was? Could I notice kindness without immediately wondering what would follow it? Could I hear about a happy relationship and anchor that as meaningful information too?

I would ride around on my bike, noticing happy families and couples and moments of good life everywhere - instead of dropping into the automatic negative story thats always waiting in the wings… i would smile and put my hand to my heart and say '“thats for me” and continue on with my day.

I wanted to give those moments enough attention to register. I’d spent plenty of time thinking about the disappointing ones, trying to make sense of them, which only made me feel miserable.

Through practise, I felt lighter. I felt safer in myself. I started feeling excited about men and the possibility of love again. I was seeing and hearing about wonderful men, and I had more room to appreciate it.

I’m careful about what I make that mean, too. I can tell you how different I feel without pretending I know how the rest of my story turns out. I still get to have judgement, boundaries, preferences and days when something brings up an old feeling. I also get to enjoy being alive and interested in people while the future remains unknown.

That matters to me greatly, these are years of my life! I want to be able to flirt, laugh, feel desired safely, enjoy a beautiful conversation and let it be lovely. I want to feel excited when there’s something to be excited about. There’s so much living available in that, regardless of whether the person becomes my partner.

Sometimes I think about how much authority we accidentally give the people who’ve treated us badly or have behaved badly around us.

Years later, their behaviour can still be informing what we think someone else will do, what we allow ourselves to want or how believable a good experience feels.

I understand how that happens. I’ve had to work with it in myself enough times. And I want to keep noticing when I’m doing it, because I would like a say in the story i want for my future…. even if its delusional. Even if it never happens id rather live in that story.

I still want to fall in love. I still want to build something beautiful with someone. Even after everything I’ve seen, I’m pleased that desire is still there.

When I meet someone new, I want to be curious about who he actually is. I want to hear what he’s saying, notice how he behaves, and have enough trust in myself to find out.

So i build myself the story of a woman who’s open to being pleasantly surprised, and i hold the line for her.

Id been dating a man for months, first relationship in a decade. I thought we had very clearly talked about exclusivity to each other and we had seemed to be making plans for a future together and then all of a sudden, he was seeing someone else and was GONE. Overnight.. just gone.

I called on friends… who were not available to be there with me in the chaos of that feeling.

It felt like my mind was being pulled into a million directions trying to make sense of it, when I didn!t have any of the real data to do that, due to a plethora of lies muddled with my very clear intuition.After two days, mostly alone and driving myself insane I reached out to a past lover and long time friend. He immediately showed up for me.

He had started seeing someone new and was smitten over her, so sweet! He was very clear with me about that but he still showed up to support me….

Which I loved. I had always treasured him as a friend over anything else.

He also communicated with her that he was going to make sure I was ok but that nothing romantic was going to happen.

He sat with me as I tried to make sense of it. Offered some male perspective, that was super helpful (even though all the details we were working with were lies).

He could tell I was in survival mode. He could tell I was putting on a brave face to mask how exhausted I really was.

He looked at me and said, I’m going to hold you now and I want you to cry until you don!t need to anymore.

So he did. And I did. I remember feeling my whole nervous system dissolve and relax into his chest as he took long deep breaths to help me regulate my breathing, when the crying became too intense.

When I resurfaced he took a tear off my cheek and pressed it to my forehead as a reminder of my intuitive magic he had always recognised in me, before i had;

“You always KNOW. Trust it”

A reminder to trust my intuition, to this day. I wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t been there for me that evening.

Might I have lost all hope in men? Quite possibly. Might i have lost my mind in that house, my life? Highly probable.

Since that time, the WHOLE GAME CHANGED. Embodied healing happened. Real self awareness was discovered that year (alllll the deepest shadows were found, felt, changed) and Ive felt a phenomenal freedom since - knowing how to trust myself and work out all my own BS, so that I don!t project it onto others.

Here’s to the men who are brave enough to hold a woman through her feelings and wildness, without needing something in return! so she can feel safe to drop into her softness.

Who honour and are honest with the women they are with with loyalty and communication, even if they need to support an old friend.

Who do the very best they can with the awareness and programs they have at the time and choose to keep evolving and becoming radically better men, rather than worse.

All my love to ‘The Lion Man’. A dear lover, even dearer friend.

*From my book Sleeping With The Guru.

The embarrassment that can come with rebuilding again at an age when you thought you’d SURELY!!! have a husband, babies and a home. The feeling that you need to explain why your life looks this way, even when you feel clear about the decisions you’ve made.

Why you’re moving. Why you’re choosing a different path. Why you’re ‘still’ single.

And somewhere underneath all the practical explanations, this little plea: please understand me. Please keep trusting that I have a good head on my shoulders.

I know that feeling.

My dating life has been very quiet for a very long time. Since my long-term relationship, apart from a five-month experience with a man who was living a double life, and an endless amount of stand ups, ghostings, first dates who didnt even seem to want to be there and endless nights and mornings on my own…. almost everything has been limited to a conversation, a date, perhaps two.

Getting to a first date has been rare enough. Getting to a second has been rarer.

Often, very early on, I’m hearing enough to understand what someone is available for. How he talks about women. Whether he’s interested in getting to know me at all. Whether there’s any effort, any care for himself, any thought about the future he wants to build.

I’m interested in partnership and family and building a little empire together. Those things matter to me when I’m deciding who to spend more time with. I always have in the back of my mind, is this person showing even the base level of care that ill need when im home breastfeeding our child and hormonally healing - or when our parents pass - or if money gets stressful.

A conversation gives you a beginning. Sometimes there’s enough in that beginning to make the decision.

And most of the time, the decision means continuing alone.

That has been a much bigger part of my experience than spending months in relationships and trying to make them work (although ive done that too 🙈)

The apps brought experiences of being used, stood up and treated in ways that left me feeling unsafe or hurt. Eventually, I stepped away. I wanted to put my attention somewhere that felt worthwhile and nourishing.

So here I am, building a life, working, taking care of myself, loving my friends, making decisions about money and where to live. Still open to a relationship. Still wanting a family. But also grieving and accepting that i wont get many of the parts of that i dreamed of.. simply by virtue of the timeline.

And occasionally feeling as though I need to explain the whole thing so people can understand how I actually arrived here.

There’s something especially exposing about that, when you help other people.

I care about being honest about my life. When I talk about the embarrassment of rebuilding, I’m speaking from years of experience making a life through change. That process use to feel so chaotic and unstable and stressful… These days, I feel grounded and safe through that process.

The tenderness is real. So is the steadiness. I think that combination deserves more room in the conversation. I hope more women know that you CAN feel steady and seen and held and loved in that process.

You can trust yourself and still feel a little exposed when someone asks what happened to the plans you told them about a few months ago.

You can make a thoughtful financial decision and feel your cheeks warm with shame as you explain your living arrangements.

You can know exactly why you walked away from someone and still wish you were going home to a person who loved you.

For another woman, this might follow the end of a marriage, a relationship or months of hoping a situationship would become something more. There might be children involved, a shared home, money to untangle.

Our circumstances have their own details. That feeling of wanting people to understand, to see you, to really know you…. can be so familiar.

Please know what this decision took.

Please know what I was considering.

Please know that I’m learning to say no, even when it means being alone and taking a more unfamiliar path.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the embarrassment comes from the instructions we absorbed about how our lives were supposed to unfold.

We are the generation raised on birth control being ‘normal’ and ‘safe’. More choices for women. More encouragement to earn, travel, pursue careers and experience freedom.

There was so much emphasis on being “careful about having children too early”.

”Your life will end if you get pregnant”

Get established. Enjoy yourself. You have time. Be free.

Then there was the dating advice. Play it cool. Have fun. Keep things light. Never say you want a relationship, you will scare them off!

Yet, some of us wanted marriage and children throughout all of that. While also needing to find ways to fit in and belong IN that world becuase we had also been driven away from faith communities who (for all that is wrong in those spaces) still have those beautiful values in family.

Some followed a different dream for a while. We were all making decisions inside a culture that was teaching us what to value, what to worry about and what to keep quiet.

I value the choices women have gained. I also think we deserve an honest conversation about what it felt like to grow up with those messages, and what we’re learning from living them.

What happens when a woman learns to feel embarrassed about wanting commitment?

What happens when being sexually relaxed is presented as part of being free, but that leads to traumatic experiences that no one wants to hear about - or worse, tells you, “you must have been doing something to attract that”.

Where do we make room for the women and men who have been hurt in those experiences?

For me, having a choice includes being able to want care, commitment and a family, and to speak about those desires comfortably.

And then there’s the practical reality of building a life as one person. In a world designed to be more supportive to duel income households.

Sometimes you choose a different-looking path because it’s the best strategy available to you.

You look at your income, the cost of housing, the kind of work you can sustain, and where you might have some room to get ahead.

You make a plan around the life you’re actually living.

That can mean moving. Sharing a home. Creating income in a way that feels unfamiliar to the people around you. Choosing somewhere your money goes further, where there’s room to breathe and enjoy being alive.

There can be real wisdom in those decisions.

Still, I sometimes hear myself explaining them as though I need everyone to agree, before I can relax.

I’ll tell them another detail about the finances. Explain the timing. Make sure they know I’ve thought about the practicalities. Ive weighed the pros and cons. Ive actions so many other avenues to no avail.

And underneath that, I think, is the fear of being misunderstood by people whose love matters to me.

Will they start questioning my judgement? Will they see all these changes and make up a version of me that feels miles away from who I am?

Could I lose them somehow?

That feels vulnerable to admit, especially because I’ve built beautiful friendships with people who have my back. People who know me, care about me and respect the path I’m on.

I feel safe with them.

And I can still catch myself trying to make my life look easier for them to understand.

Sometimes the person in front of me has already accepted what I’m still explaining.

I’m learning to notice that. To relax and know that im seen, im known, im loved.

I’m also noticing how different rebuilding feels in my body now.

In earlier seasons, change could feel catastrophic. My mind would race through everything that might happen. I’d feel this urgency to solve the whole future, as though getting every answer quickly would finally let me settle.

These days, there’s a steadiness underneath the decisions. Theres a stability in the processing of all the moving parts and open timelines.

I feel safe in my body. I trust myself to respond, I ask for help, make adjustments and find my way. There can be nerves around a big change, and I can still eat my dinner, laugh with a friend and feel excited about what I’m creating.

That has come through years of caring for my health, understanding my patterns, building practical skills, organised finances and business structures and building my relationships carefully.

I’ve built with people in my life who I can be honest with. Some are friends, some i pay for their support to have them in my corner (as i am for my own clients)
I’ve learned to receive care as well as give it. I’ve become clearer about what I need around me to live well and do my best work.

Those are things I carry into each new chapter.

My home might change. My plans might change. The care, knowledge, friendships and self-trust I’ve built come with me.

That’s something I want for any woman who is rebuilding.

A sense of safety she can feel in her own body. People she can call. Support with the practical decisions. Somewhere to put down the brave face and say what she needs.

I want her to have room to feel disappointed and still enjoy an afternoon. To grieve what she wanted and feel curious about what she could create from here. To feel big emotion coursing through her body and KNOW that is an energy she can harness to create something incredible for herself.

Building the pillars that can hold a different kind of life changes so much. Health. Finances. Friendship. The way we speak to ourselves. The people we allow close. What we are willing to sacrifice and get uncomfortable to build for ourselves or with others. Each can give us something dependable while another part of life is changing.

And each takes care, time and whatever support we can access.

I still want the husband, the babies and the home. I’m also devoted to making this life feel beautiful and supported while I’m living it. To loving the path ive been given and using my love and care to nurture and support and ‘wife & mother’ in other ways.

There are mornings to enjoy. Friendships to deepen. Work I care about. So much of myself that I get to bring into the world today.

The next thing for me to practise is letting the people who love me see this chapter without giving a full explanation of how I got here.

“I’ve thought carefully about this. It feels like a good next step for me.”

Then letting the conversation continue. Asking about their day. Receiving the love that’s already there.

If you’re rebuilding too, I’d love to hear what’s helping you feel steady. Or if it doesn’t feel steady, whats the pillar that needs work?

And when you find yourself explaining your life, what are you hoping the person listening will understand?

After a while, drugs and alcohol became a regular part of his life, and so they had become a regular part of mine too. Over the years, he started getting physically sick all the time.

Me, with my family’s background in medical and natural health, tried to encourage him to quit partying, do healthier things, and eat better. And he would, for a while. He would start to feel better and then go out for a bender… partying for days, sometimes with me and sometimes he would just disappear, and I wouldn’t see him until he returned, a wasted mess. Until then, he never went out without me. He was so proud of me as his girlfriend who did so much for him… Little did I know I was being slowly but surely placed into the role of “mum” in his mind… mum over girlfriend.

He started going out with the boys for days on end… and a bunch of ‘promo girls’ from the party scene. And… I was no longer being invited.

Read more

I used to think that when two people said they wanted a relationship, they were talking about roughly the same thing.

You like each other. You choose each other. You figure things out together. Eventually, you build a life.

Seemed fairly straightforward to me 😂

I grew up watching my parents keep choosing each other through all sorts of seasons. There was work, money, children, stress, everyday life, even some betrayals… and they kept showing up for the family they were building.

So when I fell in love, that was the understanding I brought with me.

Of course we’d talk about things. Of course there would be uncomfortable moments. We were two whole people trying to bring our lives together.

I assumed the person sitting across from me understood that too.

It took me WAYYYY to many years to realise how much could be happening underneath those same words.

“I want a relationship”

Okay… what does that actually look like to you?

What happens when I’m upset with you? When you need space? When we disagree about something that matters?

What happens after the exciting beginning, when we start seeing the parts of each other that take a little more patience? When we start feeling feelings that scare us on some level, because of past hurts.

Because that’s where I kept finding myself confused.

We could have this beautiful connection. Laugh for hours. Be affectionate. Talk about things we wanted to do together.

Then something would get uncomfortable, and it would feel like we’d suddenly entered two completely different relationships.

I’d be trying to understand what had happened between us. Sometimes, the other person was already pulling away.

And I’d be left thinking… hang on. I thought this was the part we worked through together?

Learning about human behaviour helped me make sense of some of that.

We learn so much about relationships before we ever have one.

We watch what happens when someone cries. We notice who apologises. Who goes quiet. Whether people can disagree and still be kind to each other afterwards.

We pick up what seems to keep the peace, what gets us heard, what happens when we ask for more.

Then we grow up and bring all of that into someone else’s life.

Meanwhile, they’ve been learning their own version.

Imagine one person grew up seeing their parents take a little space after an argument, then come back and talk. Someone else experienced silence that went on for days, with everyone pretending everything was fine afterwards. Others experiences massive blow up fights.

“Let’s talk later” could feel very different to those two people.

That fascinates me.

Ive been in relationship (or at least thats what i thought we were doing) where ive said things that have been interpreted as something completely different. Where Ive easily granted space when someones needed it or ‘gotten busy’ … only to find out they made it mean i wasnt really interested in them, if i was ok giving them space. And then used that space and that story to go and find someone else…..

And be surprised when i was devastated by it.

Ive said things like ‘i dont want us to be connected on social media’ because i dont think a healthy relationship is built through a screen, i want to get to know a person IRL.. not wonder if they have seen my story or if they might have watched one of my videos (marketed to women) and read it the wrong way.

This person made that mean i was hiding him. And with that story went off and built a whole other relationship, while stringing me along like we were in one.

It fascinates me just how much can happen between us before we’ve even understood what the other person thinks is happening?

And our parents/upbringing are only part of it.

There are the friends we take advice from. The people we’ve dated. The things we’ve watched. The relationships we’ve admired from the outside and quietly decided we wanted for ourselves.

Then there’s the internet, which has approximately seventeen million opinions about what your love life says about you.

Be softer. Be more independent. Let him lead. Make the first move. Give him space. Tell him how you feel. Keep him guessing.

Honestly, you could spend the entire date trying to remember who you’re supposed to be. And i have!

I’ve been single long enough to have watched so much of this arrive.

The apps. The endless access to each other. The extensive therapy culture that seems to be making more single miserable people than anything. The ability to keep a little connection going with someone for months through a few messages and a reaction to their story.

And I’ve found myself wondering what all of it is teaching us to practise.

Are we getting better at being curious about someone?

How much time are we spending comparing them to whoever might appear next?

What happens when we spend an evening consuming content about how awful men are, then sit across from a man who’s trying to get to know us?

Or when a man has spent hours hearing that women are going to use him, and then a woman expresses a genuine need?

How much of the conversation is already happening before either person opens their mouth?

I think about my own part in this too.

Watching my parents build a life together gave me something beautiful to believe in. I still treasure that.

I also carried an assumption that love, effort and time would naturally move a relationship towards the future I wanted.

Sometimes I was so aware of what we could build that I needed to look more closely at what we were both choosing to build.

I could see someone’s goodness. Their tenderness. The version of them that came forward when they felt comfortable with me.

I wanted to understand what made it hard for them to stay connected to that part of themselves.

Over time, I became more interested in whether they were curious about that too.

Could we talk about it together? Could we both recognise something we wanted to do differently? Would anything change after the conversation?

That feels like such an important part of getting to know someone.

I still want the attraction. The playfulness. The man whose face makes me smile before he’s even said anything.

I also want to know how we’ll care for what happens between us.

Can we learn that one of us needs a little time to settle, and agree on when we’ll come back to the conversation?

Can we say, “That landed differently from how I meant it. Help me understand what you heard”?

Can we be honest about something while it’s still small enough to talk about gently?

Those things feel hopeful to me. They’re things we can practise. Even now, while single.

And then theres a grace period of having leanrt all this communication work… but not meeting others who have done the same. And having to have grace and patients for their process. And discernment to walk away if its clear they are not on a page of being willing to grow together.

We already have people around us showing us how.

The friend who checks in after a difficult conversation. The person who can apologise without making you comfort them. The couple who still seem interested in learning about each other after years together.

I want to pay attention to those people.

I want to keep the lovely things I learned about commitment, and keep becoming more aware of the assumptions I bring into it.

My work is also to not expect or (in some cases) insist that someone meet the expectations i have of their potential. Even if thats all they showed to me in the beginning. If they weren’t able or willing to hold it, and grow it as a team…. They cannot be ‘your person’.

Because the way we love someone becomes part of what they learn about love too.

I think there’s something really beautiful about taking care with that.

Who taught you what a relationship was supposed to look like?

And now that you’ve lived a little… what would you keep, and what would you do differently?

Read more

You can be perfectly capable of running your life and still have a man say something that makes you forget what you were doing five minutes ago.

Your chest warms with the release of hormones. Your stomach turns over. You catch yourself smiling at absolutely nothing while trying to answer an email.

Suddenly, a person has your attention in a way they simply hadn’t before, and one of the most helpful things I learnt along the way is how this is far more hormonal and chemical than just some magic ‘they are the one’ energy.

I’ve experienced this so strongly that I remember the physical sensation years later. On one occasion, a man who id only seen a a friend, spoke about how he would “happily put a baby in me” and I felt an extraordinary fluttering rush through my body.

We had been spending time together, and I had been holding the connection quite carefully, was loving learning about him and his business and goals… but wasnt sure the attraction was there. And then, those words landed somewhere much deeper than the conversation we were having.

I’ve wanted a family for most of my adult life. Hearing a man place himself inside that desire affected me physically, immediately. It was such an intense takeover of chemicals that I couldn’t think of anything else for days.

Id had this happen MANY times over the decade leading to that moment. Ive become obsessed with understanding the chemistry of connection. What actually happens when someone makes us feel wanted? How does their presence become something we look forward to with our whole body? How is it different for men vs women. And how do we stay present and mindful, when it feels that bloody good that we can forget about everything else?

There is research that helps explain part of this.

Two of my favourite researchers on the topic - Dr John Gray (of Men are from mars and women are from Venus fame) and Dr Tara Swart, speak about this so eloquently.

And the difference between how men are chemically and hormonally affected by connection IS SO WILDLY DIFFERENT to women. This explained SO MUCH of the experiences I was having.

Dr. Gray taught me about how to communicate as a woman, with men, with the awareness of what the floods of my hormones and doing to my brain… and the different reaction a man will be having in their brain.

Dr. Swart speaks into the hormonal/chemcial release and how it informs our decisions and behaviours that we might be attributing to other things. When really, it’s just our hormones making us feel more UP or more DOWN and the meaning we decide to attach to that.

So much of the time we THINK we are making rational and valid decisions from the conscious mind… when really, we are responding to the high or low we are feeling from the releases we are feeling. And unless we know this and can slow things down and really assess the situation… we could be either

• Sabotaging a good thing because we feel a bit low… or

• Giving to (or keep going back to) a bad thing because we feel a high

See my favorite chats with TARA SWART and JOHN GRAY

I find this fascinating because we often discuss relationships as though we’re calmly weighing up a person’s attributes while our bodies politely wait for the decision.

Meanwhile theres a whole autopilot process happening between our chemical releases and our brain building a story around it to ‘keep us safe’ in a familiar pattern…

And if our familiar patterns are not a healthy relationship or connection… we subconsciously keep creating those patterns… even with a new person, a good person.

For me, the combination of having been on my own for a LONG time and those words about a baby had particular meaning, released so many chemicals that it took over my critical thinking for a time, I didnt look at the reality, I didnt wanna consider that there was no real intention behind the words.

Someone else might feel that same rush when a person remembers a detail everyone else overlooks, proudly introduces them to friends, or says they want to build a home together.

When we can recognise the feeling of the hormone release, the different chemical sensations, it can make it easier to feel it, and slow down the body/brain autopilot - and make a rational decision (or gather more information to do so).

This is also why, so often, people will break up… last a few weeks and then find all the reasons why they should try again, “maybe it will be different” … even when NOTHING has changed.

It’s less about the reality and more about the withdrawal symptoms from the chemical hits of not being around the person. Its like an addition to the chemical and the brain just thinks - we need that chemical feeling again - we get that feeling with that person - therefore we need to make up a valid reason to try again (even though nothing has been communicated or worked on).

Or in many cases, how people can sabotage a good thing in front of them, because they have feeling a chemical trigger, the brain makes it mean ‘this person is gonna be just like the last time I felt this way’ and the through process is to ‘get out now’, instead of gather more information, communicate needs and actually build something healthy.

Our histories AND desires are there with us. They help explain why a particular moment can feel enormous (good or bad)

Learning about this has made me more respectful of intimacy and far more intentional with my general physical health - because I notice the healthier my immune system is, the calmer and more intentional my reactions become.

I also think we sometimes underestimate what we’re inviting when we speak about a future with someone. We can enjoy saying the words. Enjoy being the person who makes their face light up. Enjoy how close it makes us feel.

Then we have to live with the meaning we’ve helped create.

That asks something of both of us. I want to understand my own response and give myself time to get to know the person. I also want the person speaking to take care with what they’re offering.

I’ve learned to make room for questions while the feeling is still lovely. What does having a family mean to you? Is that a life you’re actively preparing for? What do you want us to explore together?

There can be so much warmth in those conversations. I find it beautiful when someone is willing to stay present and help you understand them, especially after saying something that has clearly moved you.

I also think we need room to enjoy attraction without turning every bodily sensation into a need to get physical or ‘get your needs met’ … or a conclusion about the future.

Oxytocin itself is more complicated than its nickname (the love drug) suggests. What ive found the most helpful is learning what that rush of oxytocin actually feels like in my body… so I can feel the rush and keep grounded and learning. Instead of allowing it to make my mind run WILD with all the stories of what it could mean about the person who just helped me feel that rush.

I can want him and keep my own life around me. I can be excited about what might unfold while paying attention to how we treat each other as it does. That has become part of what being intentional means to me. Having an actual awareness and strategy of the CHEMICAL aspect of connection.

(Especially when you spend long periods of time without touch… that rush can almost convince you that jumping of a cliff for someone you know nothing about, is the best next move hahaha).

There was a time when understanding all this felt urgent because I wanted to make sense of experiences that had overwhelmed me. Now it also helps me appreciate how extraordinary it is to be moved by another human being.

A look across a room. A flash of light from behind the eyes. A familiar warm voice. The weight of an arm around you, feeling the body dissolve from that love hormone release… and finally letting yourself relax, without your brain making it mean “this must be your husband!”

Lol (true story)

We get to experience those things. We also get to learn how to care for the person experiencing them with us.

I’d love to see that become a bigger part of how we talk about relationships: the responsibility of knowing that the person across from you has a body, a history and hopes that may be stirring as you speak.

And vice versa, they may have triggers into chemical lows (stress hormones) that you can never foresee, and must learn to communicate through, and not take so personally.

What has someone said or done that felt like a chemical explosion through your whole body? (Non sexual I mean haha)

Looking back, I wonder what you MADE IT MEAN?

Im walking through the park towards the apartment, knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, what I have to do. Im suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and the impending and unfamiliar challenge that lies ahead of me.

Two weeks ago, I was numb.

I was seemingly happy, in a long term relationship, with a man id spent all of my early adult years with. Id not looked at another man or thought of another man in all that time. Now this was no longer true.

I slid down to the ground against a tree and crouched there crying, in broad daylight. What was happening? What was this energy that was taking hold of me? Why would I now have to hurt someone I had spent so much of my life with?

But in the same breath, I knew … I was DONE.

I was completely done and had been for a while. I just now had the activation to admit it and face it. Id been rudely awoken from a pleasant dream, that wasn’t really that pleasant but comfortable enough to be passed as such, for so long. I was suddenly fully alive and there was no time to waste following this new thread of life.

I can still feel it like it were yesterday, that delicious feeling of dopamine and oxytocin coursing through my deprived shell of a body. My vision would become hazy with adrenaline, just remembering the kiss that had literally woken me from my slumber. His arms wrapped around me like I would never have to fear anything again. The smile, the look in his eyes and his words of affirmation of all the things I deserved, that I clearly wasn’t getting in my relationship.

A feeling of desire and passion I had forgotten or perhaps id never really felt before.

But this is not a story of me leaving a stale relationship to start a new passionate life, with my perfect match.

It’s a story of everything that happened instead. Of the decade that passed after this moment, without any relationship. Without so much as ONE man pursuing me for anything other than a quick hit.

It’s a story of all that I lost and all that I gained.

Of awful experiences, of years in a position to observe the world become more and more disconnected and distracted, with the introduction of online living and instant gratification.

Hard lessons in who to put my faith in. Heartbreaking realisations of what humans can be capable of, to avoid an uncomfortable conversation or facing off with their own souls.

A story of incredible awakenings, wild love affairs, horrible betrayals and leaning into the discomfort of healing, understanding and loving every muddy bloody part of who I was, who I am and allowing that to design and inform.. who I would become.

Navigating it all with the love and grace I devoted to keeping within me, surrendering to the path that was laid out before me, without a reference point, without a blueprint, completely unlike any other life I’d ever known.

Buckle up for an adventure through stories, the love, the lessons and a fair amount of sex…….. and then, a lot of NO sex at all…. and eventually, FINALLY……………………..

Well,

You’ll just have to read to find out.

“This is weird. It’s like they’ve all been pulled aside and taught to do and say the exact same thing.”

I was talking about men.

Specifically, the men who would come into my life, pursue me like they’d been sent here personally by God, spend all this time building something with me... and then suddenly seem very confused about where I’d got the idea that we were building a relationship.

And it kept happening.

Different men. Different circumstances. Enough in common with me that I thought, okay, there could actually be something here.

i worked on myself, i showed up differently, i got in better environments, and yet it kept playing out the EXACT same way.

We’d end up having almost the exact same conversation.

“I’m not ready for a relationship.”

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

“I never said we were together.”

And you’re standing there trying to work out what you’ve just been participating in, because until approximately five minutes ago, he seemed VERY involved.

He was pursuing you. He wanted to spend his time with you. There was affection, care, intimacy, talk of the future, introducing to friends, family sometimes even. Sometimes there were actual conversations about a much bigger future. Sometimes there were actual declarations of love and desire to be together forever or be official.

Then suddenly you’re being spoken to as though you’ve taken a casual hello and started booking a wedding venue.

I found this so confusing in my early single years.

I’d come out of a seven-year relationship at 24. My understanding of dating was pretty straightforward. If you liked someone, and they liked you, and you kept choosing to spend time together and become more involved in each other’s lives, you were seeing each other. There was a direction to it.

Obviously people could change their minds. Things could end. I knew that.

But this whole experience of someone creating that much closeness and then denying there had ever been any reason for you to believe it meant something... I had no idea what to do with that.

We weren’t sitting around using words like “love bombing” back then. At least, the people around me weren’t. I was trying to describe something I barely had language for, while also trying to recover from it.

And then I’d meet someone else.

Eventually I’d relax. There would be a connection. I’d start to feel something again and think, okay, I’m glad I stayed open. I’m glad I gave this a chance.

And then there it was. The same sudden retreat. The same lines used. Sometimes followed by complete disappearance.. and usually followed by finding out there was another woman.

You start going back over everything. What did he actually say? What did I say? At what point did we apparently start having two completely different experiences of the same thing?

Id turn to the people around me (because I felt like i was going a bit mad)

And instead of outrage that made me feel like they actually understood what had just happened….. Mostly, the conversation became about me.

What I must have missed. What I must have assumed. What I’d allowed. What I must be choosing. Something I needed to heal so I would stop ‘attracting this experience’.

And I took that seriously. I spent YEARS taking that seriously. I spend TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS taking that seriously.

When you’re the person who keeps getting hurt, and everyone keeps pointing you back towards yourself for the explanation, eventually you assume there must be something so wrong that you’re just too fucking blind to see and no one else can seem to see either…..

And before someone arrives with the “women are all chasing the top 1% of men” commentary... Thats definatley not who i was being connected to… some of these men were barefoot and didn’t have jobs. Most of them were not ‘my type’

I was choosing people who seemed to want similar things from life. Similar interests. Similar friends. People I could talk to and imagine sharing a life with. In plenty of cases, the physical attraction grew out of the connection. In others, I was giving someone a chance because I’d been told so many times to look beyond my usual type.

Then you have the same experience with someone you weren’t even particularly drawn to in the first place, and somehow you’re now heartbroken AND wondering why you stopped listening to yourself.

There was one man I loved who told me he loved me and wanted us to be together. Then he freaked out, disappeared, and went off into a period of sleeping with what seemed like pretty much anyone available to him.

Later, he explained something to me that I still struggle to get my head around.

He and his friends believed they were ‘doing women a favour’ by giving them passion, care and attention for a short period of time. They had this ‘gift to share’. They couldn’t just give it all to one woman.

I remember thinking... oh, wow….you’re serious?

Because I had been on the receiving end of that “gift”. I knew what it felt like when the man who’d told you he loved you disappeared. I knew the confusion and the grief and how much time and work it took to feel okay again.

And somewhere in a conversation between his likeminded friends, that had become a generous thing he was doing for women.

I wonder how many women were somewhere trying to heal whatever they’d been told was wrong with them, while these men were congratulating each other.

After almost a DECADE of doing this blindly…. Around 2020, I started seeing women tell their stories on TikTok, I began to realise just how many others were experiencing the SAME PATTERN.

Women in other countries. Different ages. Different lives. Describing conversations I could practically finish for them.

I remember the relief of that. And then the sadness. Because there were so fucking many of us.

Over time I learnt about pickup artistry, the manosphere, and books like Neil Strauss’s The Game, published in 2005. It documented a community of men learning and practising techniques for picking up women, including through organised bootcamps. This world existed well before I was trying to understand what was happening in my own dating life. Background on The Game.

Funny enough - that book was written and taught by a guy in his early 20s at the time… to pickup and discard women. That same man is now married with multiple children and speaks of those teachings being WELL in his past (as he lives on his vast estate)

That sentence I’d said years earlier came back to me.

“It’s like they’ve all been pulled aside and taught to do the same thing”

There really were men being taught techniques. There really were scripts and strategies and communities built around getting a particular response from women, and then how to get out of it when responsibility arrived.

I have no way of knowing which of the men I dated had read what. And I couldn’t honestly trace every painful experience back to one book. People were capable of dishonesty and disappearing long before 2005.

But learning that this whole world existed made me think differently about what I’d been experiencing.

I thought of the ripple effect.

I started wondering how much of it travelled through friendship groups. Advice from a mate. Something repeated often enough that it became normal. You can absorb an attitude without ever knowing where it came from. The man telling me about the gift he and his friends were sharing had already shown me how a group could make something hurtful sound completely reasonable to one another.

And I started to feel angry about how quickly all the responsibility had been handed back to me. I was angry for a LONG time after learning all this.

There had been another person there. Making choices. Saying things. Encouraging me to trust him.

I wanted someone to acknowledge that part too.

Because getting through it takes so much out of you. You’re trying to make sense of the ending, and then you’re having to question your understanding of everything that came before it. Even the beautiful parts become confusing. Were they even real? Have i EVER been loved in return?

And eventually, when someone new comes along, you’re trying to enjoy getting to know them with all of that sitting in the back of your mind.

I spent years studying relationships and human behaviour, and what people describe as the ‘mating crisis’. The things men are learning about women. The things women are learning about men. Our reference points for love, the messages we absorb about commitment, all the reasons people seem so frightened of the closeness they say they want.

I wanted to understand it for myself. And by then I had this whole community of women around me who were asking the same questions.

I really wanted to have something useful to tell them. I wanted to have the answer, the solution.

But the more I learnt, the more there was to consider. Fear of intimacy. Fear of marriage. Fear of having children. Fear of approaching someone. Fear of being used. Fear of choosing the wrong person and losing years of your life.

I hear so much fear in the way we talk about each other now. And so much loneliness. It makes me really sad.

I don’t have the answer to all of that.

That was hard for me to accept. I could spend years learning, have all this education, understand so much more than I used to... and still be here with my own unanswered questions.

At some point I had to think about how much more of my life I wanted to spend trying to figure it out.

Because I missed how I used to feel about people.

I missed meeting someone and feeling excited. I missed enjoying a connection without part of me already preparing to recover from it. I missed how easily I could imagine something lovely happening to me.

And I wanted to give some attention to that.

Choosing myself has involved a lot of things over the years. Building my work. Travelling. Taking care of my health. Spending time with family. Making friendships that have become some of the best love stories of my life. Doing things I wanted to do while I still had the time and energy to do them.

Right now it also means giving myself a bit of space from the constant analysis of why we’ve all ended up here.

I want to be in the ocean. I want to laugh with my friends. I want to have an interesting conversation with a man and enjoy it, without being in fear of what could happen. I want to feel attracted to someone I’m ACTUALLY attracted to, and see whether we like each other.

I want to have enough room in my life and in my mind for a lovely surprise.

I know there are good people. I’ve met them. I have people in my life who care for me so beautifully, and I want to keep letting those experiences matter too.

I’m still figuring out how to feel that open again. Some days it comes easily. Other days I can feel how much has happened.

But I remember the woman who was excited about what her life could become. Who loved people. Who thought meeting someone and falling in love would be the most natural and magical thing in the world.

So my current goal is to give her some more days that feel like that.

Can you relate?

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My best friend and I fell pregnant on the same day, mine was unexpected, hers planned.

The combination of this synchronicity and my guy being a man I’d loved for a

decade… It was like the things I had quietly prayed for over 10 years were

finally coming to fruition. All my hard work and all the confusing times over

the years were finally making sense.

The man I had loved for so long was telling me he had always loved me and

wanted me to have his child. Despite our efforts to prevent that from

happening anytime soon, I had fallen pregnant for the first time in my life.

Both he and I felt like it was crazy, scary, fate.

And this could mean I was going to get to live in the place I had dreamed of

living for so long, a part of the world that had felt like home to me since the

moment I arrived there.

I could see it all: I would be neighbours with my best friend, and we would

have and raise our babies together. He and I would get to have endless

Sundays, walking to early morning coffees and swims in the place where it all

began.

However, it wasn’t to be.

At the same time as the pregnancy confirmation, a “large mass” was

discovered in my uterus. Confusion, medical misinformation, and the need to

travel home for free medical care to check that it wasn’t cancer, ensued.

All of this putting a spanner in the works of any feeling of fate or excitement…

And then… fear, lies, shadows, and truths started coming to the surface.

Almost as fast as he had rushed back into my life, he was gone, tapped out,

on to other things, friends and addiction in his ear, poisoning him away from us.

I had to make a decision about the pregnancy that (while apparently right by medical recommendation) was the hardest thing I ever did, the most traumatising physical experience, and took me years to heal from emotionally - maybe i still am.

But on this particular day mentioned, I found myself at the home of my dear friend, having decided to remove myself from his home after a bout of his unconscious rage had been directed at me. Id never been yelled at before by anyone, so i calmly decided to ask my best friend to come and collect me. And now, here we were on her living room floor, in front of a big tv.

She was carrying her baby in her belly… while i was only left with a large benign tumour in my belly….

She was holding space for me in my moment of utter confusion and grief.

She made us a food platter, we binge-watched a cheesy TV show for hours, and she held my hand, encouraging me to keep crying, to keep letting it out.

To realise that all the potential timelines I’d been seeing for use that were not going to be in this lifetime. Realising I’d let myself be used, again, for my love, my body, compassion, and care, by a man who had no intention of being that person for me.

Since that day, I’ve had so many ups and downs in life, love, and business… that youll hear about here.

And SHE has been solid. In my corner, through the chaos. My supporter, and my sister. She is one of the main reasons I have had the strength to build a community to help women heal as I have.

Before her and a select few other women in my life, I had NO reference for women supporting women in an unconditional way. She could have watched me on this day and distanced herself, not wanting someone who ‘hasn’t got her stability sorted’ to be part of her life… or her family.

And I would have understood.

I’d always spent more time with ‘the boys’ because any vulnerability shared in spaces with women was so often turned against me or was the reason I was scapegoated, gossiped about, and lied about to make sense of their discomfort with me.

But she saw my soul and held me through that. She is my angel and one of the reasons we are all here today. And while this book is about the men of my life, I wanted to start with this story of the incredible women that we get to know, we get to CHOOSE TO BE, and how simple it can be to support a fellow woman when she is moving through a wildly uncomfortable ‘redirection experience’, such as i was.

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I was standing in the supermarket the other evening and it really hit me.

I think I might just be supposed to be alone.

And I don’t mean that in a sad, dramatic, “I’ve given up on love” way.

I just mean... maybe I am.

I’ve been single for almost 15 years.

FIFTEEN YEARS.

I left my last long-term relationship at 24 becuase i figured after 7 years we should be building a life… not engaging in his growing drug and p0rn additions.

I’m 38 now.

That’s 15 years of falling asleep alone and waking up alone, for the most part. Doing groceries alone. Driving myself to hospital alone. Navigating every muddle bloody emotion and experience… alone.

I’ve watched friends meet someone, get married, have kids, get divorced, meet someone else, get married again, have more kids... you name it.

And all the while, “Aunty Kat never has a boyfriend”.

I’ve had plenty of experiences with men in that time. BEAUTIFUL ONES! I wrote a whole book about it (which ill be dropping chapters from in this space.

I’ve fallen in love with false presentations of men. I call it the ‘self startling’ of someone who wants to ‘try on’ the experience of being the relatiponship and one person guy… without the reference point or tools to actually hold it.

I’ve been love bombed and then discarded so brutally that I had to spend years recovering, rebuilding the mental pathways of my mind and learning how to trust people again.

I’ve been ghosted and stood up more times than I can count.

I’ve been pursued as an object by men who seemingly had no interest in actually knowing me.

I’ve had completely unprompted advances from men in positions of authority that changed the way I moved through the world.

I’ve met a handful of men who I genuinely felt saw my soul... but they (admitted to me) weren’t ready to face their own in relationship.

And after years of hiding and protecting myself, I finally started doing what everyone tells single women to do.

I put myself out there.

Like REALLY put myself out there.

I approached men.

I messaged men.

I told men I was interested.

I went on countless dates.

I tried the apps.

I smiled. Made eye contact. Started conversations.

And I got rejected by almost everyone I braved approaching 😂

Which, honestly, you have to laugh at eventually.

And then there’s the endless commentary you get when you’ve been single for a long time.

“You need to heal something.”

“You’re choosing the wrong men.”

“You’re too independent.”

“You’re intimidating.”

“You’re too picky.”

“Your standards are too high.”

“You need to be more feminine.”

“You need to stop looking.”

“You need to put yourself out there.”

“You need to work on your attachment.”

“You need to be completely happy alone first.”

“You need to manifest differently.”

“You need to stop wanting it so much.”

At some point you’re like... okay, but what if this is just my fucking life? Becuase NO ONE who im seeing in relationships…. was following ANY of that advice.

What if there isn’t some secret unhealed wound buried in my subconscious that, once discovered, will finally unlock Husband? 🙄

What if I can be a healthy, loving, imperfect human being who would really fucking love a partner... and still not meet one?

One man I had a long-term situation with said something to me years ago that I’ve never forgotten.

“You’ve known what you wanted since you were 24 years old. That’s scares the shit out of someone who’s been hurt before or doesn’t know what they want.”

And he was right.

I’ve ALWAYS known.

I wanted a marriage. I wanted a family. I wanted to build a big, beautiful, adventurous life with someone. I wanted to raise babies with Bali nannies in the rice fields and teach our kids to surf on the shores of Australia. I wanted us both to have work we loved and build money and freedom and a beautiful home and a relationship that actually felt like a team.

I could see it so clearly. And I genuinely believed I could create it, because I’d already created ever other damn thing ive ever put on a vision board 😂

What I didn’t know at 24 was how much the world of dating was about to change.

Apps. Social media. Free Porn on their phones. Endless options. Endless access to validation. Sexual revolution messaging telling women to sleep around (and basically validate mens bad behaviour)

People being able to get attention, sex, connection and little dopamine hits without having to build actual intimacy with another person.

Women changing. Men changing. Gender roles changing. The worlds food and water and medication and everything being poisoned in a way that was going to mess with all of our important hormones and chemical balance.

The way we meet changing. Me too, highlighting something important and at the same time scaring men away from every approaching a woman.

The way we communicate changing. The way we relate to commitment changing. So many people coming from broken homes and therefore, having very negative reference points for what happens in relationship…

As opposed to my own ‘reverse daddy issues’ of having a great reference point for what relationship is and what it can build and create and become.

And I have watched all of this happen WHILE trying to find a partner inside it, with my old school expectations and values.

It’s been fucking WILD. Pardon my language but sometimes its needed.

And I don’t think the conversation is as simple as “men are shit” or “women’s standards are too high.”

I think both men and women are being deeply affected by so many things.

I think we’re lonely. I think we’re confused. I think a lot of us want intimacy while simultaneously living in a world that trains us to avoid discomfort, chase novelty and keep our options open.

I think there are really good men trying to figure this out too.

I think there are women who have built entire lives because they had to, and then get told the reason they’re single is because they’re “too independent.”

I think there are men who feel completely lost about what women want from them.

I think there are women who feel completely exhausted by all of it, while trying to survive and work when our bodies were not built to do all of it.

And I think there is SO much more to this conversation than most of what we get online.

Which is partly why I’m writing this.

Because somewhere along the way, while all of this was happening, I decided I was going to live anyway.

A PAST LOVER ONCE SAID TO ME: “If you never meet your person, never get to have kids, what would you want your life to have been about…?”
This constant focus on the lack of those things? Or the channelling of that desire energy into building incredible things, inside and out?

I wasn’t going to spend my entire life waiting for a man to arrive before I got started.

So I learned.

I created.

I built businesses.

I wrote books.

I travelled.

I made some of the best friendships of my life.

I worked on my body and my health.

I learned about communication and relationships and human behaviour.

I healed a LOT.

I failed a LOT.

I forgave myself.

I forgave other people.

I rebuilt myself more times than I can count.

I created my dream of being able to work from home and from anywhere in the world, because I still had that vision in my head of the kind of family life I wanted to create one day.

And I built a beautiful life.

I also made a lot of people uncomfortable along the way, just by being this way.

But there has definatley always been this little assumption underneath it all that eventually... he’d come.

Eventually I’d meet him. Eventually all of this would make sense. Eventually I’d look back and understand why I had to wait so long.

And standing in the supermarket the other night, I realised: Maybe I won’t. Maybe I will! I know enough about life at this point to know that absolutely anything can happen.

I could meet someone next month and laugh at myself for writing this.

But I also might not. Might never.

And for the first time, I think I’m genuinely allowing myself to consider that without making it mean my life went wrong.

Maybe being alone is my path.

Maybe it’s not. Because ive built a life that i never actually feel alone in.

I will always desire partnership.

I still want the love.

I still want the man to challenge me, hold me, build with me and know each other FULLY.

I still want the babies and the adventure and the person beside me who pressed his forehead to mine, even in the middle of a trigger and says, “We’re doing this together.”

I’m not going to pretend I don’t want those things just because I’ve learned how to live without them.

But I’m also not going to spend another 15 years treating the life I DO have like it’s some temporary holding pattern until somebody arrives.

And THAT is what I want to write about here.

Being a single woman in the world right now, ive learnt so much about WHY and thats helped me to make sense of so much.

And i wanna talk about it more at length, not just in 7 second reels.

Not how to get dates.

Not “five ways to attract your husband.”

Not telling women they’re single because they’re too masculine or unhealed or their standards are too high.

I wanna get into the nuances, the messy middle, the reality and the challenging stuff that really changed things for me, and so many other woman (and im sure, men too)

Men.

Women.

Dating.

Relationships.

Sex.

Apps.

Manosphere programming

Feminism Programming

Loneliness.

Friendship.

Health.

Money.

Ageing.

Fertility.

Communication.

Standards.

Attachment.

Heartbreak.

Independence.

The lives women are building without partners. What men are experiencing on the other side of this. What the dating market is actually doing to ALL of us. How to keep working on yourself without making your singleness proof that something is wrong with you. How to stay open to love without accidentally putting your entire life on hold waiting for it.

And I also have a whole BOOK of dating stories that I wrote years ago. Its called Sleeping With The Guru.

Some are hilarious.

Some are messed up.

Some are heartbreaking.

Some I look back on now with a completely different understanding of what was actually happening.

And its not even touching the surface of stories i could tell that i learnt so much from.

So I’m going to share those here too. The stories, what I learned, what I see differently now, and all the other stuff I’ve spent the last 15 years learning about relationships, people and myself.

I don’t know where my own story ends yet. Maybe that’s actually the point. I’m not writing this from the other side with a husband beside me, telling single women that I finally figured out the secret.

I’m still in it. I’m still learning. I’m still in faith. I still feel my person and future family in my field (or whatever we wanna call it).

I’m still occasionally exhausted by it.

And I’m still building a beautiful life regardless.

So this is SINGLE.

Let’s talk about it.