In Granada, I relearned what I keep forgetting: productivity isn’t about speed. Sometimes the most important work is waiting for the bill and getting lost on purpose.
Relationships
Navigating A Relationship Transition with Grace: Personal and Professional
I go crazy each holiday. I have multiple bins of Fourth of July, Valentines, Easter, Halloween and Christmas decor that would make Santa's workshop jealous. After each holiday, I carefully wrap each decoration like I'm tucking babies into bed, lovingly placing them...
Graceful Goodbyes: How to End Relationships and Jobs
Sometimes your future is written in your goodbyes. “Two days after she told me she loved me, she shouted that she couldn't stand me and so I kicked her out of my house and slammed the door. For good,” my friend Karl said, processing a heavy breakup. Do you have fiery...
What My Uber Driver Taught Me About Real Community
My phone was at 17%. I had 40 minutes until LAX. I could keep texting and drain the battery—or put it down and do something retro… like talk to another human. 📵 Pre-iPhone me used to do this all the time. I was a Chatty Cathy with every cab driver I met. I’ve heard...
Looking for True Love? Find Your Tribe
We can create our own family. And we can find romance with our friends. According to the Greeks, philia or tribal love is the highest form of love there is.
Is Passionate Love Worth Your Sanity?
I’ve been reading through my old writings, you know all the ones about passionate love and passionate love lost. They made me slightly famous, after all, back in the day. I wrote these essays and poems as a single woman living in San Francisco, passionately seeking...
I Asked 13 People Who Taught Them to Love; Their Answers Will Surprise You
How we love shapes who we are and how we relate to the world. It often dictates how we view ourselves and what we think we can achieve. So where did this start? Who or what taught us about love in the first place? Was it a romance that spun us out of control? Was it a...
Why You Can’t Find the One (and Why It’s Ok): Part 3
“And then like that, he was gone. Why is it so hard to keep the one, after we find them?” asked Katie. Katie had just experienced another heart wrenching breakup. She’s been chasing “the one” for 20 frantic years. Career, social life, and self identity were hastily...
2020 Destroyed My Life, So I’m Creating a New One
2020 Destroyed My Life as I Knew It. Before the 2020 pandemic, I had a committed partnership, a house in a beautiful neighborhood and a cush job in innovation where I was flown to New York to speak at conferences. As I walk out of the pandemic in Spring 2021,...
Please do this one thing for me …
Please tell me you see me. Please notice my breaths and efforts. Currently I feel invisible and alone. We all do. How can you see me, you ask? What exactly should you notice? Anything, as long as it’s specific. 1. Praise me for keeping the kids alive another day. One...
Releasing Unforgivable Hurts
“Every marriage suffers unforgivable hurts,” I remember my mother saying. I was young at the time and had no idea what she was referencing. Nor did I want to know. I preferred to think of my parent’s marriage as perfect. Hurts, sure, yes. But I imagined them fleeting...
How the 2020 End of Days is Slowly Killing Me
It was the end of 2020 end of days. Pantone Orange 9-2020. Images of the orange sky in California went viral. Looking at the sun confused my daughter. She thought the orb in the sky was a bleeding moon. She wanted to give it a band-aid. I didn’t know if the earth...
Three Signs You’re Too Lazy For Love
During my years of singledom I blamed San Francisco’ urbanity, technology, and Peter Pan inhabitants for my interminable alone state. Then it dawned on me…perhaps the the dating problem wasn’t external…perhaps the problem was ME. Lazy, egotistical, impetuous me. If...
‘Knocked Up’?! How I embraced a non-linear life…
“I’m hoping this is a false alarm.” I texted the positive test results to my cousin. “Holy Shit!” was her immediate response. But it wasn’t a false alarm. I was pregnant. I was pregnant, not married, in an uncertain relationship, and just started a demanding new job...
Women Need to Date Carpenters Like Men Date Yoga Instructors
Every woman I know in San Francisco says the same thing. “He has to be this much taller and make this much more money. I mean, I’m tall and successful, so he should be MORE tall and successful. I’m WORTH IT, right?” Worth what? Someone ‘better’ than you? Men never say...
Why You Can’t Find the One: Part 2
Find the one? No? Well neither has anyone else. Nine months ago I wrote a post that went more viral than a Trump Tweet. It was covered by four publications and seen by over a million readers, all interested in understanding one thing — “Why You Can’t Find the One.”...
How a Powder Day Threatened my Friendship
It was a powder day in Tahoe. For ski aficionados a dusting of fresh powder means you drop the rest of your life to get on the mountain. That day we had more than dust. It was four feet of white smoke. I left my Truckee house without making coffee, greedy for frosty...
Do We Do it For Love or Money?
I always wondered if the size of a woman’s diamond ring was inversely proportional to her marital happiness. Perhaps I’m jealous. Or perhaps I’ve finally decided a simple left hand leads to greater life satisfaction. But I wasn’t always this way… Manhattan 2004 A...
Why You Can’t Fall in Love Like You Want To
“I just want to fall in love,” he said. “Nothing beats holiday romance.” Charlie blasted ‘Baby it’s cold outside’ from his new Amazon Echo while sipping mulled wine. “I just hope love happens to me so I can Fa la la la with someone.” It was November 24th and Charlie...
How to Survive a Red-Blue Thanksgiving
This election isn’t just dividing the nation into red and blue color maps-it’s fracturing families along party lines, just in time for the holidays. Many of my friends in San Francisco are dreading Thanksgiving, usually a time of family merriment and togetherness....
The One Thing to Save Your Relationship
What is the one thing to save your relationship ? Communication. It is the most critical ingredient of any type of relationship. Yet today’s world has so much noise that we have all forgotten how to listen. “Yep, yep. Got it. Great. Yep. Yep,” he said. I was telling...