Before the Right Person, There Was Everyone Else

Let me be honest with you before we go any further. I did not arrive at a healthy, grounded, anxiety-free relationship because I made all the right choices or because I had it figured out. I got here the long way. And by long way, I mean two decades of dating that would make a very entertaining and occasionally disturbing memoir.

There was the man I met at a bar who was charming and magnetic and mysterious in a way that felt exciting rather than alarming, which in hindsight is something I would like to discuss with my younger self. We started out casual, it escalated fast, and then one day he ended things with no explanation. No conversation but pure silence. A few months later he reappeared, introduced me to his friends and his family, and asked me to move in. I thought, okay, this is it, I can fully be myself with this person and let my guard down! No surprise he ended it again, this time with a handwritten letter and the key to his apartment and didn’t tell me where he moved to. He also instructed his secretary not to let my calls through. I am not making this up. When I eventually ran into him one night, he told me, completely calmly, that he worked for the CIA and I was simply not the right fit for that kind of life. I stood there and thought, you could not write this.

Then came the app era, which had its own very particular flavor. Most of the men I encountered were less interested in connection and more interested in auditioning me for something I had absolutely not signed up for. They were the ones who led with their fetishes before we had even met in person, who wanted to establish dominance before they had learned my last name. One invited me to meet him at a bar and made a very specific request about what I should wear. When I arrived wearing something other than what he had prescribed, he became visibly angry. Over an outfit? I finished my drink and left, which I should have left before my drink was poured. Another wanted to meet at his ex-wife’s house, which was a sentence I genuinely did not expect to be reading on a Tuesday afternoon, and when I politely declined that particular venue, he moved on and found my friend on Instagram and slept with her, probably at his ex-wife’s house! No surprise on her part and complete bewilderment toward him.

And then there was the one that I genuinely do not have enough space in this article to fully describe, except to say that I dated him not once but twice across a ten year period, had a child with him during the second chapter, and spent years afterward and thousands of dollars in legal fees protecting myself and my children from the fallout. He went to prison. I kept going.

I am telling you all of this not because it defines me, but because it proves a point. None of it disqualified me from the relationship I have now.

If you know me as a coach and a healer, you know that I am deeply committed to the idea that where you are vibrationally is what you attract. I believe that and I live that. I am not here to argue against accountability or the very real work of looking at your patterns and owning what is yours. But I also want to offer something alongside that truth, because I think it gets distorted in the wellness space in a way that quietly does a lot of damage. The distortion sounds like this: you have to be fully healed, sort out all your childhood wounds, and you’re unlovable until you have unturned every rock. And that is just not true.

You can arrive with debt and kids and a complicated history and a divorce and a long string of relationships that did not work, and the right person can arrive with their own version of all of that, and it can still be one of the most natural and honest things you have ever experienced. Not because the circumstances are simple but because you and another person are choosing to share life in a real way.

You do not need a spotless past. You do not need certain friends or the right family or no exes or a particular kind of origin story. You do not need to monitor how vulnerable you are or ration what you share or perform a curated version of yourself to earn someone’s presence. What you do need is the desire to be in a healthy, loving relationship, be willing to not be a victim to any other relationship, be willing to continue within a relationship to work through your shadows and love yourself, and be willing to become someone who can actually receive love when it shows up. Then more important then someone checking all your boxes is are they willing to do the work and be present. Because a relationship can only grow you both if both of you are willing to grow.

You need someone who is doing their own work. Someone motivated and self-accountable, someone willing to grow alongside you rather than expecting you to stay small so they can stay comfortable. Not someone who only wants to see you once a week and texts back when it is convenient and keeps the whole thing just vague enough that you are always hoping for more and never quite knowing where you stand. Someone who shows up. Someone who is genuinely investing in themselves so they are actually capable of investing in you.