Love + Connection in a Brave New World

There are few things more important in a human life than the lives it is shared with.

The quality of our connections — romantic, friendly, familial, interior — shape whether we thrive or merely endure. And right now, for a lot of us in midlife, that fact is smacking us in the face.

I'm a woman approaching fifty. I spent decades in service to others as I was trained — by my family, my religious community, my culture. I found an identity in it. And I lost myself in it.

That's not confession — it's an autopsy of prior selves.

Now, I understand the responsibility I have to myself in a way I never did before. You cannot give what you don't possess. For most of my life, I didn't possess myself.

This page — and the posts that will follow it — is home base to a body of thoughts on Love and Connection in this brave new world. My reflections. What others have regaled and recanted. Research I've accrued. Observations I've made from the passenger seat of a culture driving toward cliffs.

It's a curriculum of lived experience, taught in the ancient way of discourse and dispatch. Letters and conversations. Letters about conversations.

The guys I've dated, the women I lean over stemware and confide my experiences to, the friends and colleagues and community members I engage everyday, all share similar hopes. We're all little kids in grown up bodies, wondering if we're doing it right.

Is this how it's supposed to feel? This fear of being "left on read"? This boredom with the same questions and answers, the same activities and demands. This hum of discontent that begs for happy hour or microdoses or a weekend away (finally).

The people I know are more complicated than they let on. They're carrying invisible ledgers and secret griefs and the persistent hope that it's not too late for something more. But they're still using the relationship maps from the days of Rand McNally Road Atlas. The technology has changed, GPS updates in realtime, but we can't find our way out of the emotional neighborhood we were raised in.

This is a human conversation about love and connection. And also about the kind of world we want to live in.

The world we inherited isn't the one we were sold. The one we're warned about — where everyone is alone, swiping faces away, and incapable of commitment — isn't fated.

There is a world awaiting our collaboration.

A world where secure connection is possible. Where psychological exploration isn't navel-gazing or trigger warnings, but just part of being an adult. Where partnering can be profitable on the surface and in the depths.

Where pleasure, affection, laughter, tenderness, and all the treasures of human longing are universally accessible.

I've seen glimpses in good conversations. In tough choices. In the relationships that didn't turn out how I forecasted, but made me wealthier in wisdom.

I'm not a therapist. I'm not an activist.

I'm a woman who has felt it — the implosion of marriage mythology, the painstaking rescue of a little girl trapped in my subconscious, the feral freedom of abandoning timelines and milestones.

I've made a million mistakes that looked like common sense. I've wracked up catastrophic successes. I've hurt people and been hurt. I've invested myself to oblivion, and collected the dust to start again.

In all the drama, I've noticed things.

Exhaustion in women. Frustration in men.

My story — which felt like failure for so long — now feels like something far more dazzling. Wide open space awaiting fresh cartography.