The card lay face-up on the pebbles in People’s Park, sealed in a plastic sleeve against the damp. At the top, in bold: New Shanghai Girl. Underneath it, her life.

Born 1992. An only daughter. 1m60, 50 kilos. Two master’s degrees. A Shanghai hukou (the household registration that decides which city you belong to) though her family came from Xi’an, which was what made her new. A post at one of the country’s elite universities, and not just a post but a permanent one, inside the state system, the kind that can’t easily be taken away. 300,000 yuan a year and up, comfortably above the Shanghai average. A flat in Minhang, bought outright, no mortgage. Father still working, mother retired, both from the state sector. A harmonious family, the card said. No financial burdens. She likes reading and the gym.

Then a second heading, criteria for choosing a spouse, and what she was hoping for in return. A man born 1987 or later. 1m75 or above. Steady work. Sunny, responsible. Where he’s registered doesn’t matter.

And then a line unlike the others printed on other cards. With or without property.

It would take me a while to understand how unusual that was.

Subscribe now

There were hundreds of cards. Pink, white, peach, laid flat on the paving or propped on little easels, running the length of the path in two long ribbons and turning the corner out of sight. Each one a person with specifications. Year of birth. Height to the centimetre. Weight to the kilo. Degree, and from where. Hukou. District. Job. Income, in units of ten thousand. Property: owned or not, mortgaged or not, car or no car. And then, on the second half of the card, the specification for whoever they were hoping to find.

Almost all of them wanted a flat. In Shanghai, owned outright or at least within reach, the wedding flat, without which, on that path, a man was not seriously a candidate. Which is why the woman born in 1992 stuck in my head. Two master’s degrees, a job for life, her own home in Minhang, and hers was one of the few cards I saw that asked for less than everyone else’s.

At the bottom, a phone number. It belonged to her parents. Her mother was standing a few feet away, and, when I asked, gave me a small nod to photograph her daughter’s card.

The daughter was not there. She doesn’t come here. Somewhere across the city she was at work, in a room she’d probably feel uncomfortable knowing I was picturing, while her life, her self, lay on the paving stones between a pink card and a peach one, waiting to be chosen. And I stood there, a stranger from the other side of the world, feeling something I struggled to access, much less name. It took me the rest of the trip, and even weeks afterwards once home again, to name it.

People who loved this woman had written her life down to the last kilo. As far as I knew, she had not written a word of it herself.

I have been to a lot of markets. This was the first one where the thing for sale was a marriage, and the sellers were mostly somebody’s parents.

I want to tell you about that market. But mostly I want to tell you about the young woman who stood next to me that morning translating the cards, because she is the one who, without ever quite meaning to, connected everything I’m about to try to explain.

I had pictured something ancient when I read about China’s marriage markets on the plane to a conference thousands of kilometres away from my life in France. A thousand-year-old rite, the old ways hanging on, I thought.

It is nothing of the kind.

When I returned home I looked it up, the way I look everything up, and the marriage market turns out to be the same age as Facebook. It began in 2004, when the retirees who fill Chinese parks at dawn, there for the tai chi and the dancing, got to talking the way parents everywhere do about their children who wouldn’t settle down, and out of that ordinary worry, one weekend at a time, built a marketplace.

Nothing about it feels new.

Everything about it is.

Every Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of people come. Not to sell and shop for themselves, but for their children, who are almost never there. They lay laminated cards along the paths and clip them to open umbrellas, and then they stand and wait, and read a stranger’s son the way one might read a listing for a used car. Mothers, mostly. But fathers too, in bucket hats, falling into conversation and beginning, gently, to bargain. Grandparents. An aunt sent to canvass on the family’s behalf. I watched a woman in a red cap work down a row, one card, then the next, then the next, her hands folded behind her back, taking all the time in the world.

I don’t want to make them sound cold, because they weren’t. They were anxious, and loving, and frightened in the particular way of parents who cannot see how their child’s life is going to turn out. Human worry over uncertain futures is understandable.

What I could not understand was the arithmetic.

Because last month, in the letter I sent you from this same trip, I told you about the men. Everywhere I looked in China, so many men and so few women that I kept doing a double take. When I got home, I looked that up too: there are around 35 million more men than women in China, the most lopsided sex ratio on earth, the long shadow of the one-child policy and a very old preference for sons.

So how, I kept asking myself in that park, was I standing in a sea of daughters? Row after row of them, educated, salaried, women with their own apartments, laid out for a country supposedly desperate for exactly them. There were sons on the ground too, but far fewer, and I later learned the matchmakers who work the park keep far more women than men on their books.

35 million spare men in the country. A shortage of men in the marriage market. What was I missing? I needed help.

The first person who helped me was a taxi driver, the one I told you about last time, who spoke into his phone in Mandarin so it could speak to me in English, and who messaged me after I’d flown home: “I noticed your flight has landed and you’ve made it home. Get some rest early.”

He was young, late 20s or early 30s, and single, and when we got to talking about dating (people speak spontaneously of these things with me, yes, even in taxis in China), his sigh needed no translation.

“It is almost impossible,” said the phone, in its pleasant, sing-song voice, “to get a date with a girl in China.”

Why, I asked.

“Too many boys! Too much competition.”

He smiled a mischievous smile, and he turned to me, suddenly cheerful again: “How old are you?”

I laughed out loud. Where I come from, I told him, a man is taught not to ask a woman her age.

His experience differed. “Here it is opposite,” the phone announced. “Women like me to ask them. They love when I guess them younger.”

We laughed at the two of us, each armed with exactly the wrong instinct for the other’s country, and I gave him what I hoped was decent advice for both hemispheres: never ask, but always tell a woman she has a youthful energy, a beauty that’s hers alone. He nodded and tucked it away like a man pocketing a tool he’d be needing soon. And we spent the rest of that drive swapping dating notes through a machine, two strangers and a phone, a 50-something French-American and a Shanghai driver half her age, both of us giggling like teens the whole way.

He is one of the 35 million. But he isn’t a number. He’s a warm, funny, employed young man in one of the richest cities on earth who cannot get a date, while across town, a mother cannot find him for her daughter.

I said all of this to the young woman standing next to me in the marriage market that morning. I can’t make it add up, I told her.

She wasn’t puzzled for a second. “Oh, that’s easy. Women marry up,” she said. “Men marry down. That’s how it is.”

She nodded at the rows of cards. The men with the least, she explained, poorer, rural, no flat, no Shanghai papers, are the ones the women step past on the way up. These men are left with no one, back in the villages the women have left. And the women collect at the top, competing for the thin band of men still above them.

“So the men with too few choices and the women with too many never actually meet,” I nodded.

She gave a small shrug. “There is no middle in the middle.”

I thought of my driver, somewhere in that middle, reaching up. And of the men at the very bottom, whom I never saw, because they are not in a Shanghai park. They are the harder, darker end of this story, the villages with almost no women, the men who buy what closeness they can, the brides brought and sometimes trafficked across the borders to fill the gap. That is a floor beneath the cardboard notices in a public park, and it deserves a better telling than a line in a letter.

I looked those men up too, when I got home. There is a demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University called Shuzhuo Li who has spent much of his working life counting them, and the numbers he and his colleagues have arrived at are worse than I expected. Seventeen million never-married men over 35 at the last census. Six in ten of the elderly ones in rural areas living alone, almost five in ten in cities. Dying, on average, some seven years before married men do.

And it doesn’t appear to be easing. The worst years for boys born instead of girls were the late nineties and early 2000s, when 118 boys arrived for every 100 girls, and those children are only now reaching the age at which they would marry. Li’s team expects the squeeze to keep tightening until around 2036. Whatever this is, China is not coming out the other side of it. It is walking into it.

The daughter on that first card, the one with the master’s degrees and the flat, if she reaches too high, or waits too long? There is a word for her. Sheng nü: leftover woman. The state’s own women’s federation helped put it into the language. The shelf life, apparently, runs out at age 27.

A woman with a master’s degree, her own home, her own money. Leftover.

My guide was in her 20s herself, the exact age on half the cards at our feet. So I asked her: do you think your parents come here?

She laughed, but not all the way. “Yes. I suspect so.”

Then she told me how the marriage market works. The parents do the first round themselves: reading, talking, bargaining, the way I’d been watching. When two sets of parents like a match, they trade their children’s phone numbers, right there on the path. Then each carries the number home and presses it on a son or a daughter, who is meant to take it from there. Her own mother had done exactly that: come back one day with a young man’s number and sent it to her daughter in a text. Suitable. Correct values. A flat. The number sits in her phone, undialled, untexted.

We had sat down to watch people move through the market. She leaned in, her voice lowered, “Women of my generation,” she said, “most of us, we don’t really want to marry. Not now. Some of us, not ever.”

I asked her why. She had several reasons. I was taken aback a bit when she talked about their bodies. “Do you know what pregnancy does to a woman’s body?” It wasn’t really a question. “And after, the child is everything. The money, the time. It all falls on the mother.” She looked down at a card a few metres away from us, a girl born in 1995, a list of everything she was worth. “Here, a baby is not a beautiful thing you dream about. It is something that happens to you. And then everyone calls it a gift.”

I told her that where I’m from, a great many women call pregnancy a privilege. Something longed for. Something beautiful.

She looked at me as though I’d told her the moon was made of rice. “That’s crazy,” she said. “Do you know what it does to your body?” That question again.

I laughed, and told her I had two grown children of my own. Look at me, I said. You’d never guess.

We kept walking, and the picture kept widening. Her generation, she told me, is stepping off the path laid out on the ground in front of us. Women her age living with partners their parents have never been told about, sometimes for years. No wedding. No baby. No announcement. Loving someone in plain sight of everyone but the two families who would most want to know.

Why all or nothing, I asked. Why not just marry and wait on the children?

“Because here they are one decision,” she said. “Not two. A baby born outside a marriage has no clear claim to a hukou, the household registration that unlocks school and hospitals and an ordinary life. It’s virtually illegal to have a child outside marriage. Not really. But it renders children born to unwed parents non-people, in a way.”

She took a breath and went on, “So if you get married, you’re basically signing up for a child, too, whether you want one or not. Not all of the time. But it’s expected. Our parents. Our families. Our friends. The system.”

A generation has looked at that bargain and, it appears, is increasingly walking away from the table. It isn’t a mood, or a handful of holdouts. Again, I looked it up when I got home. By 2024, marriages in China had halved from their 2013 peak, the lowest since records began. This is not one young woman being difficult in a park. It is a country changing its mind, one refusal at a time.

And the bargain itself has quietly begun to shift. The childcare subsidy the state announced in 2025 doesn’t ask whether a baby arrived inside a marriage at all. But that isn’t how it was explained to me in the park, and a rule that changes on paper doesn’t change what a generation believes it is living under. The policy moved. The script hasn’t.

So I asked her the harder question. Not what she was turning down. What she was reaching toward.

She went quiet for a while. What she wanted, she said at last, was a life that felt like her own. She wanted to travel, to be an agent of her own life. Freedom from responsibility, freedom from expectations. Freedom from stress; stress had been her middle name from a young age into her university years.

She knew it would soon be time to care for her ageing parents. She knew, too, what it costs to raise a child well in a city like this one, and that the sums didn’t work. She wanted her body to escape what she named, without drama, as a trauma.

Most of all, she wanted to be free to write her own story. She had told me, earlier that day, that the thing she wanted most in the world was to be free, or freer, and she’d said it lightly, the way you mention something you’ve stopped letting yourself expect.

I could see that this freedom was its own kind of weight. To love someone you cannot name to your mother, to your father. To build a life in a language your family doesn’t speak — not Mandarin, but the language of a woman choosing for herself, which where she comes from is still almost a foreign tongue.

Saying no to a script is a lonely thing when you don’t yet have another one to read from.

She hadn’t written hers yet. Hardly anyone her age had. For their grandmothers, marriage was mostly arranged, or at least approved. For their mothers, expected. Hers is perhaps the first generation with the education, the income and the distance from home to be able to put the pen down at all.

I wondered if anyone had helped her generation know how to pick it up as their own.

There was something else drilling a hole in my brain, and again it was my guide who explained it. I’d been scrolling Chinese social media at night, startled by how uniform the women looked: poreless, doll-like, impossibly slight, at every age.

“Ah, yes. Of course. Everyone is thin here. You probably know about the 50 kilos.” She looked down as she went on. “Here, that is a size Large. There is a saying: a good woman doesn’t pass 100. 100 jin, 50 kilos, about 110 pounds.”

And you can’t exercise your way under it, she said, because strength isn’t the point. I pointed to my calves, built over years of hiking and running. She shook her head. They were frankly too much. Better to simply eat less. Put butter in your coffee and drink it cold. Ah, yes, another thing I saw more of here than in Paris, women sipping cold drinks while walking the high street.

Body size. You can read it on the cards, once you know to look. The women list their weight beside their degree. 43 kilos at 1m58. 45. 49. 50, and never a gram more. The number is a bar to clear, and they are advertising that they clear it. Even the body is a card someone else is holding.

And that body is a full-time production. The photographs I’d been scrolling weren’t idle, my guide said. Women here, and couples, keep an online life running: what they ate, what they wore, how they looked doing it, sent out as proof of a life going well. Pass almost any shopfront and you’ll find a mirror angled just so, the shop’s name placed where the selfie will catch it.

I saw the other half everywhere. The woman posing, the man a step behind with his phone raised, again and again, at every age. A man who wouldn’t photograph his partner was, she said, almost unthinkable. A clear arrangement of who is looked at and who does the looking, so ordinary that only a stranger would notice.

Behind all of this, and by this, I mean human relating and reproduction in China, stands the government, which has changed its mind. For 35 years it told most families to stop at one child, and enforced it with fines, lost jobs, pressure to contracept, sterilise or abort. Now it wants three. The penalties are gone, the social maintenance fee abolished, and in their place the opposite: longer leave, a monthly tax deduction per child doubled to 2,000 yuan, a steady official message about building a society friendly to birth. And cash.

In July 2025, the State Council announced a national childcare subsidy, backdated to the first of January: 3,600 yuan a year for every child under three, tax-free, with 90 billion yuan set aside to pay for it. The National Health Commission called it the first large-scale, universal, direct cash payment to the public in the history of the People’s Republic. A state that spent three decades fining people for having babies has written its first universal cheque, and it wrote it to ask them to start.

3,600 yuan a year. The woman in the plastic sleeve earns 300,000 and up. The state is offering her a little over 1% of her salary to change her entire life.

And it isn’t working. Births fell again last year to the lowest rate the country has ever recorded, and the population has shrunk four years running. Chinese women are now having about one child each. A population holds steady at 2.1. The same state that once had the power to reach into a marriage and take a child out cannot now put the wish for one back in. You can lift a policy overnight. You cannot lift the longing to match it.

China is not the first country to find this out. Japan and Italy have been living versions of it for decades, and South Korea has fallen further still. But nowhere has run it at this size, or this speed, or with this much money and messaging thrown against it. That is what I was standing in the middle of, in a park, on a sunny day, without knowing it: the largest test yet of whether a society can talk its young people back into a script they are no longer sure they want.

I flew home thinking I’d been an observer at something safely foreign. A marriage market, in a faraway park, run by other people’s parents. And then, somewhere over Central Asia, the thought turned.

Because I made myself look again at what those cards actually asked for. Height. Income. Property. Education. The right family. A steady job. And then I thought about how we choose, where I live in the west, where we’d rather go quiet than laminate any of it. We don’t lay our children out on umbrellas. But the same list is there, only hidden: in the apps, in the friends who subtly (and not so subtly) approve or don’t, in the sums we run on a first date and then call a “type”.

I’d spent years on an app for research purposes, and the machinery is identical everywhere. Height. Money, by proxy: the watch, the trip, the postcode behind the photo. The polite little phrases that only ever mean earns well and owns things.

We print nothing on cardboard. We just hide the card, and call what’s left chemistry.

Becky Zhang walked the same rows for The Paris Review in December 2025. Her piece, “Love in a Fallen City: Shanghai’s Marriage Market,” ran in May and recorded one father sighing: “We used to stumble blindly into relationships, and it worked fine!”

Stumbling blindly, and it worked fine. I have never heard the default described more honestly, or more approvingly. And it “worked fine” as long as nobody thought to ask the people inside the marriages how it was working for them.

But honesty was never what was missing. Look one more time at who holds the pen in that park. The card says everything, and the woman whose life it is isn’t there. Her mother wrote it. Her mother holds the pen. The state is drafting her family from above. And the deepest rules, marry up, own the flat, stay under 50 kilos, be settled by 27, were written by no one in particular and obeyed by very nearly everyone. Three hands on the pen, and not one of them hers.

Until now.

It starts younger than any park, too. It starts in the raised eyebrow at the wrong friend, the warmth that arrives when we bring home the right one, the thousand small corrections by which a family teaches a child what will count. By the time you’re old enough to choose, you’re already holding a card you never watched anyone write. Those parents in Shanghai only do out loud, on cardboard, what nearly every family I have ever known does in a quieter voice, sometimes never saying anything aloud.

My daughter met her husband when they were both still teenagers. And then they took their time. Years before they married. More years still before children. No rush to the altar; no drift into it either. A long, deliberate walk toward a life they decided, slowly and together, that they wanted. Laid out on a card on the ground in People’s Park, her life would read as the plainest default there is: married, children, the full house. A stranger would file her under exactly the thing the young woman beside me was refusing.

And the stranger would be wrong about her. She wanted to be a mother, which is not at all the same thing as becoming one. She chose every part of it, the slow way, having looked hard and long at every other life she might have led. She read every line of her own card. Most of them, she wrote herself.

Which is the whole thing, and what I flew almost 10,000 kilometres and hired a stranger to be able to see. The women in that park are refusing a life that was written for them. My daughter is living one she wrote. From the outside they look like opposites: the ones walking away from marriage and motherhood, and the one who walked, slowly, toward both. But they are doing the same thing. It was never marriage or no marriage, children or none, the full house or the empty one.

It was never what you choose. It was only ever whether you chose.

And I keep thinking of the three of us. My mother, in her 80s now, of a generation that was handed a script and mostly followed it until she didn’t: the woman I wrote to in my last letter, because she would have understood every step of this one. My daughter, who was handed the same script and, instead of obeying it or tearing it up, read it slowly and decided, in her own hand, to keep it. And me in the middle, who reached the 20-year mark of my own marriage, pivoted it on purpose, and kept the man in it as a forever-friend: a life my mother could never have pictured and my daughter says is 100% mine. Three women. Three completely different lives. One question running underneath all of them, the only one that has ever mattered: whose hand is on the pen?

Whose life is this?

I hired a young woman to walk me through a city I couldn’t read, and she walked me back to my mother and forward to my daughter without ever knowing she’d done it. If she ever reads this, in a language her mother doesn’t speak:

Thank you. The pen is heavier than the script, and lonelier, and it is worth every ounce. Keep writing.

What do you think?

Somewhere, you have a card too. A set of specifications you filter by, a few of them yours, most of them inherited, from your family, your feeds, the water you grew up swimming in. I’d love to know what’s on yours, and more than that, who you think wrote it. Was there a marriage market in your own family, a look, a comment, a silence, a warmth that came and went depending on who you brought home, even if no one ever knelt in a park with a sign?

Have you ever declined a script the way the recent Chinese generation is declining theirs? And what did it cost you, and what did it buy?

And if you could take the pen yourself, clean sheet, no one else’s handwriting on it, what would you write?

I’m gathering these stories for my book, so comment below, or write to me directly.

Conscious Relationship Design is a body of research, writing and practice about designing our intimate, social and family lives with intention instead of defaulting into inherited scripts. I’m currently writing By Design, Not Default: Relationships Reimagined and Redesigned. New to CRD? Start here.

I also coach individuals and couples in Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to explore that, book a complimentary first session here.

Feel free to share this piece if it gave you something to think about.

Share

Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

On my last full day in China, I hired a friend.

The tidy version is that I booked a private guide for my final day in Shanghai. A sharp, generous young woman who walked the city with me for eight hours. The honest version is the one I led with. I paid someone to talk to me. To answer the questions that had been piling up in me for ten days, with nowhere to go. To explain what I was looking at, and to let me ask, and ask, and ask.

Subscribe now

Everyone keeps asking, “So what was it like?” There’s a dinner-party answer — the food, the robots, the trains that float. You came here for the other one.

I was in China for ten days, spontaneously and for work. Six on a hot, wet island in the south called Hainan, the rest in Shanghai. You cannot know 1.4 billion people in that time; I barely scratched the surface. This is a letter, not a verdict — how it felt to be one petite, blonde, solo, 50-something woman moving through the inside of it.

It felt, more than anything else, like being fully unplugged in an always-on alternative universe.

Hainan met me as a wall of heat the moment the airport doors opened. Wet, heavy, tropical heat, the kind that settles on your chest and stays. I had come to work; there was a conference, long days, the particular fatigue of concentrating in air conditioning while your whole body knows it has been set down somewhere it has never been. By evening, my brain was a wrung-out cloth. Ten-hour days, and then the strangeness of the place waiting for me on the far side of the conference-room doors.

I was not alone on the island. My colleagues were mostly Westerners, and we moved through Hainan in a small, familiar pod, the way you do on a work trip. But the country pressed in at the edges of the pod, and the things it pressed in with were the things I had been warned about before I left.

I’d been told, more than once, that everything in China would poison me. The air. The water. The food. So when I got home, I went looking, because an impression is not a fact.

The water, fair enough: even in Shanghai, you do not drink from the tap, though that owes more to the old pipes between the treatment plant and the water glass than to the treatment plant itself.

The air was the surprise. The choking, smog-grey city of the headlines mostly wasn’t there; China’s skies are far cleaner now than their reputation, even when a bad day still rolls through.

And the queasiness a few of us felt after several days was, I suspect, not poison at all. It was newness. Heat, unfamiliar food, a body meeting a world it did not recognise and complaining the only way it knew how.

One evening, my colleagues told me they had stood at the edge of a warm, flat, inviting sea and were sternly instructed that they could not go in. Strong currents in some places, pollution where the island faces the mainland, and a wider national habit of fencing swimming into small, patrolled squares. So they stood there in the heat and looked at water they were not allowed to touch. A warm sea you can see but not enter, turned out to be a fair sketch of a great deal of what those days felt like.

And then there was the thing my intuition clocked long before my mind could explain it.

The men.

Everywhere. So many men, and so few women, that I kept doing a double-take. In hotel lobbies. In restaurants. On the street. In every professional room I walked into. Down every alley I wandered. It was not subtle; it was the texture of the place. When I got home, I looked that up too. China has somewhere around 35 million more men than women, the most lopsided sex ratio on earth, the long shadow of the one-child policy and a centuries-old preference for sons.

But honesty needs its second sentence. I was at a nuclear conference. Put any nation’s nuclear engineers and policy makers in a single room, and you will get a room full of men; that is as true in Paris and Pittsburgh as anywhere.

So how much of what I felt was China, and how much was simply the field I was writing about, made suddenly, physically visible? I cannot fully separate the two, and I won’t pretend I can.

I only know the imbalance was real enough to feel everywhere I looked, every day, in a way I have never felt at home. It was in Hainan and even more striking in Shanghai. What 35 million surplus men (and 35 million fewer women) do to the way an entire society dates, marries and designs its private life is a post for next week.

Now, the unplugging.

I went in with a burner phone and an empty laptop. All personal devices left behind, including my watch. No personal accounts, nothing logged in, none of the apps and feeds and threads that are an embedded part of my life back home. No sleep data. No music. No socials. No email. The Great Firewall did the rest: the ordinary internet I live on simply wasn’t there, or arrived in fragments, or didn’t arrive at all.

I have given up my phone before. In fact, I do it every week for 24–36 hours, a practice of digital detox that resets me in my life in France. In India, a few years ago, I also gave up tech on purpose, and it gave me the peace I replicate in France.

But India’s digital detox was a door I chose to close. China’s was closed for me, and a closed door feels like a completely different object depending on whose hand is on the handle. Choosing to put the world down is a kind of rest. Having it lifted out of your grip is not.

And beneath all of it ran an uncanny loss I’d not seen coming. I could not look anything up. At home, I ask the air a few questions a day and it answers me: what is that character carved over the door, what is in this dish, why is no one allowed in the water, what is that tower for. Siri, a search bar, the AI I lean on from time to time like a second brain.

Here it was all blocked, or throttled to fragments, or simply gone. And on the rare occasion I could have forced a path through the wall, I found I did not want one. I had no appetite for leaving a trail of everything I had wondered. So I stopped asking out loud, and the questions only stacked higher, with nowhere to go. I had not realised how much of my curiosity I had quietly handed to a machine until the machine — the second brain — was taken away.

Bringing a clean phone, a temporary email address, several USB keys and an empty laptop — planning never to log onto anything that would compromise your private life or the private lives of your clients and friends and family — is itself a small confession.

You are assuming you will be hacked and unable to control what happens next. Whether I was hacked, I cannot tell you, and I am suspicious of anyone back from ten days in China who says they can. But you behave as though you might be hacked and tracked, and that behaviour does something to you.

People were warm and also careful. Now and then, a subject would close like a door, softly, without a sound, and you learned not to lean on it.

None of this is paranoia, though I know how it sounds. It is the standard advice now for anyone travelling on government or corporate business. Take a clean loaner phone. Leave your real life at home. Assume the device may be searched at the border or quietly turned over on a hotel network, and behave accordingly. When the British prime minister flew to Beijing, his whole delegation went in on burner phones; the world’s largest asset manager now forbids its staff from carrying company laptops into the country at all. I was only following the same script as everyone else in my line of work.

And you cannot disappear here, even as a visitor. I had bought my eSIM back in Europe, which spared me the counter where a camera now checks a live face against a passport for anyone buying a local SIM. But the country asked for my identity again and again, regardless. I scanned my passport for a Shanghai travel card, and the system could not read me; the card never worked. I was asked to scan it again for wifi, and again, and each time I declined.

Even my temporary WeChat account, run off the burner phone, would not come alive until a real, resident Chinese person vouched that I was who I said I was. Yes. I could not send a single message until someone who belonged here agreed to say that I did.

We are all watched now, in London and Paris as much as in Shanghai. The difference is the honesty of it: here, your identity is the price of entry, asked for openly and often, and what crosses WeChat once you are on it can be read, the Mandarin especially.

And here is the paradox I am still thinking about. I was cut off from the entire internet I know, while standing inside the most advanced place I have ever set foot.

I paid for everything by waving my phone at a small square of code; cash felt quaint, a thing for tourists who had not researched their trips ahead of time.

In one taxi, my driver and I held several real conversations without sharing a single word of language. He spoke into his phone in Mandarin, the phone spoke to me in English, I answered, and it turned my answer back into Mandarin for him. We talked the whole way across the city, two strangers and a machine in the middle, and it worked. It worked so well, he came back to get me a few days later to take me to the airport, and when I arrived in Marseille, I received a message from him, “I noticed your flight has landed and you’ve made it home. Get some rest early.”

A robot wandered in and out of the lifts in the hotel doing goodness knows what and another spoke to and played with a young girl in Mandarin and then chatted with me about the weather and things to do in Shanghai.

The future is already living there, in the ordinary furniture of a Tuesday afternoon. And yet none of it could reach the version of me that lives online — the whole dazzling machine ran on a network my digital self was locked out of.

Then Shanghai, and a different kind of alone.

On the island, I had a pod — more or less. People who shared my language and some of my knowledge base. In Shanghai, I had no one. My first full day, I walked for five or six hours by myself through a city of some 30 million people, and the arithmetic of those hours was strange and exact. I was constantly looked at and never approached.

The looking I half expected. Petite, fair, Western features, Paris clothes, alone. A novelty. But I think now it was not only how I looked. It was what I was doing. I walked for hours. I wanted the back alleys, not the boulevards. I explored the city, map open on my phone, ordered food with a little Mandarin and a lot of hand signals, delighted, when every signal around me suggested a woman like me should be in a car with a driver. I stopped and studied everything, because everything was worth studying, which I suspect made me the strange one on the street rather than the other way round.

The not-approaching is the part that got under my skin, and I want to hold two things apart that feel identical but are not. One silence is mechanical. With no shared language you simply cannot speak, and that I understood completely, and that is nobody’s fault. The other silence is harder. Even when I tried, and I did try, with my small, eager, hopeless Mandarin, the few phrases I had been practising like a child, no one came to sit with me. No one started the conversation. No one followed a first exchange with a second.

Only once in the whole trip did a stranger reach towards me unbidden, and it happened before the city had even begun: a man at the airport on my first day, who saw me defeated by a water fountain and stepped in to show me how it worked. One. I was beholden to him over a drinking fountain.

Why? I don’t know, and I am not going to insult a billion and a half people by pretending I cracked it in a week. Because I was foreign and unreadable? Because a woman travelling entirely alone reads as a question best left undisturbed rather than an invitation? Because approaching someone who so plainly could not understand might feel less like kindness than like an imposition? Because the easy warmth I am built on — the café habit of smiling at a stranger and asking where they’re from when they’re struggling to order a café crème — runs on a social script that nobody around me had ever signed? I have questions. I do not have answers. A letter, not a verdict.

What I do have is the memory of how it sat in my chest. Not danger. Not unkindness. Something quieter and more disorienting than either: the steady, low hum of being an observer of a place rather than a participant in it. A documentarian. A ghost with a notebook. By the end of that first Shanghai day, I missed belonging more than I missed my own language, and I had not truly considered until then that those were two different things.

Which is how, on day two in Shanghai, I came to hire a friend.

Understand first what a guide actually is in a country like this. Not a luxury. Infrastructure. In a place that is cashless, gated behind apps and walled off by language, my guide was the bridge between me and the most ordinary acts of being alive in public: ordering, paying, crossing the road towards the right door. She was also the answer to every question I had spent ten days unable to ask a machine. The thing I would once have typed into a search bar I now got to put to a person — and she answered, and then she asked me something back, which no search bar has ever done. Without her, I was literate in nothing. With her, I got my last day in Shanghai back.

But she became far more than a bridge, and that is the part I keep turning over. She was 29, and what she wanted, she told me, was a less stressful life. She had been made to work hard since she was small, ground through an education system that takes a childhood and hands back a set of results, and what she wanted now, more than anything, was to be free, or freer. She said it lightly, the way you mention a thing you have stopped expecting to get. But she carried it visibly, a weight set square across her shoulders, and there was nothing I could do to lift it.

For eight hours we walked. She took me down into the metro, which she found funny, and through the back streets I had been hungry for. And we kept moving. I felt the instinct before I understood it: the pull not to linger, to move on before a conversation could settle anywhere a camera or a microphone might be waiting. The phones in our own pockets were almost certainly listening regardless, which made the careful choreography faintly absurd.

Still, we moved. We ate the first and possibly what will always be the best hot pot of my life in a place I could never have found, named or enjoyed alone — two roiling pots, a table crowded with small dishes, the kind of meal you remember afterwards in your body — and across it she answered every question I asked with a generosity that nearly undid me, and asked her own back, and we built something the way two people do.

At one point she told me, plainly, that I was a different kind of guest. Her clients, mostly, want to be looked after: the famous view, the photograph, the comfortable car. They are not especially curious about the country they have crossed the world to see. A lone woman who wanted to walk for hours and eat in alleys and ride the metro and sit in People’s Square watching ordinary lives unfold: that, she said, was rare. She called me brave. I did not feel I’d earned it. Bravery is doing the very thing that frightens you, and none of this frightened me. I was only following my nose, the way I always do when I want to learn something.

And somewhere in the steam off that pot I caught the small, sharp point of the entire day. In a country where you can summon almost anything to your door with one tap of a screen, the one thing I wanted most — someone to be curious alongside — was the thing I had had to scan a QR code for.

Once, six days in, the thing I had been aching for walked up and happened on its own, for nothing.

Four of us fell into talk in the unglamorous way these things actually happen. A man from Nigeria. A man from Sudan. A man from China. And me. All of us at a nuclear conference, all of us a long way from the place we call home. For one hour, we talked the way I had been starving to talk since the airport: a real conversation, questions and answers and more questions, each of us building on what the last had said, the whole thing tipping into laughter more than once. I walked back through the wet heat afterwards, grinning like a fool, lighter than I had felt in days.

Now look again at who was at that table. A Chinese man, talking with me as easily as breathing. So whatever the wall had been those first few days, it was never what one may have assumed. It was never “Chinese people don’t.” The wall was never a people at all. It was the absence of a reason to be in the same room. Give human beings a shared reason — a field, a question, the plain fact of being far from home together — and the wall I had spent days pressing against was not there at all. It had never been a wall. It had been a missing doorway.

So. What was it like?

I keep reaching for the word lonely, and it isn’t quite the right one. I was lonely, certainly: the particular curse of being exotic, where people will not speak to you because you have become a curiosity rather than a person. But I don’t think that was China. I think it was simply being different: a Parisian set down where Parisians are few.

So it was less the loneliest I have ever felt than the least I have ever belonged.

The most dislocated.

Every reference point I use to know where I am and who I am had been removed at once, and I was left to work with what remained.

And I will not pretend it was only hard, because it was not. It was intense and genuine and real in the way that comfort never is. Quiet and loud at the same time. I would do it again tomorrow, because China did something for me that no comfortable, well-scaffolded trip ever could. It took away every single tool I use to belong, and made me stand in the middle of a city of 30 million and look at what was left.

My language. My phone, and the entire digital self that lives inside it. My cultural script, the unspoken rules I never knew I was running until none of them worked. Even the small, unearned privilege of looking like I fit. Gone, all of it, with one 12-hour flight.

Belonging, it turns out, is scaffolding. You don’t notice it until somebody takes it down, and then you’re standing in the most wired country on earth, unable to ask a stranger for the time.

And what was left when every last pole of the scaffolding had been pulled away? The oldest thing there is. A shared reason to sit at the same table. Not a language. Not a passport. Not a phone that works.

Just a reason to turn towards one another instead of away.

A few things I came home holding that I had not packed:

• That being a stranger somewhere that does not bend to meet you is one of the most clarifying things a person can do, and one of the hardest.

• That the future and the past live on the same Shanghai street, a robot dancing with a child, and that watching both at once will rearrange something in you.

• That I would rather feel like an outsider in a true place than a guest in a catered one.

My son’s friends are nearly all Asian (and many of them Chinese), and because we learned on the road as much as in any classroom, he already knows in his bones what took me ten days and a hired friend to feel my way towards.

And whether you are frightened of China or in love with the idea of it, I would say the same gentle thing to you both, because you are each holding a country that lives mostly in your head. The real one is bigger, stranger, kinder and more intriguing than the version you are carrying, all at once.

The only way to learn which parts are true is to go and stand at the edge of that warm, forbidden sea yourself.

If every bridge you lean on were taken away for ten days, what do you think would be left of you?

Leave a comment

My mother is in her 80s now, too old for the long flight, though she is more curious and more open than people half her age. She did not hand me my restlessness; that part was always mine. I started wandering young and didn’t stop, and I have spent a life learning the world by walking into it. But she would understand this letter better than almost anyone, and I think I have been writing it, in part, to her. Telling the woman who can no longer go that China was everything she would have pictured — and nothing like it. That the sea was warm and forbidden. That the future had already arrived and had nothing to say to me. That I was the least I have ever belonged, and then, at one table, for one hour, entirely at home.

So I have made the journey for her, and carried it home the only way I can — the heat, the silence, the robots, the warm forbidden sea, all of it pressed into these pages.

Every letter is addressed to someone. This one, it turns out, was always addressed to her.

Next week: the marriage market. What 35 million more men than women does to love, dating and the private architecture of a society.

Conscious Relationship Design is a body of research, writing and practice about designing our intimate, social and family lives with intention instead of defaulting into inherited scripts. I’m currently writing By Design, Not Default: Relationships Reimagined and Redesigned. New to CRD? Start here.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

In the 1960s, the British psychiatrist John Bowlby was studying how children formed bonds with their caregivers when he noticed something. The pattern of those early bonds, he proposed, wasn’t just about childhood. It became a kind of script we carry forward, reenacting it in every important relationship for the rest of our lives. He called it an internal working model. Most of us experience it more simply as the script we keep running.

The script isn’t necessarily accurate. It’s just familiar. And it runs on default until we open it up and read it.

This is one reason people sometimes leave a difficult relationship and find themselves, two or three years later, in another one having the same fight with someone new. The partner changes. The script doesn’t. The variable that needed updating wasn’t the person across the table. It was the script in their head.

Subscribe now

A friend texted me last week.

She asked, in response to my piece on quiet quitting, whether I had a relationship that could hold me. The kind I’d written about. The kind big enough to contain the person I want to become.

I said yes. Myself.

I didn’t pause before typing it. It felt solid. True. The kind of relationship that can hold me while I find myself.

Most people wouldn’t call that a relationship at all.

My friend knows I don’t have a romantic partnership that holds me in the way I describe. Was my answer a graceful workaround?

It isn’t. It’s the foundation.

She asked me to write about that.

Here’s what I mean by foundation.

Most of us have relationships in the way we usually mean the word. Partners. Friends. Family.

The thing we do with ourselves isn’t usually in that list. That’s called life. Self-care. Inner work. Who we are. “Relationship” rarely fits.

But Bowlby’s script has two halves. One is about other people: whether they’re reliable, responsive, safe. The other is about us: whether we deserve care, whether our needs are reasonable, whether our presence is welcome. The second half is the part most of us have never stopped to read.

That second half is the relationship.

Think about the agreements we have with our partners. The spoken ones: who cooks, who books the flights, what time we leave the party. And the unspoken ones: who’s allowed to be tired first, who’s the one who apologises, what doesn’t get discussed after 10pm.

Now try to list the agreements with ourselves.

Most of us can’t. Not because the agreements don’t exist. Because they’ve never been articulated.

What we’re allowed to want. What counts as enough. When we’re permitted to rest. How long we can sit with a feeling before we have to do something about it. What we owe people who haven’t asked anything of us. Whether our needs are a problem or a feature.

These are the lines of the script. We say them every day. And most of us didn’t write them. We absorbed them. From parents. From the woman in the magazine ad who looked tired but radiant. From the boss who praised us for being low maintenance, or strong, or easy. From the friend who told us, kindly, that we were too much, or not enough.

Inherited lines running in the background of our most important relationship. And most of us have never stopped to read them.

This is where Conscious Relationship Design starts. Not with the partner. Not with the friends. With us.

Every other CRD practice rests on this: self-awareness about our own needs, desires, limits and boundaries. We can’t negotiate with a partner what we haven’t first articulated to ourselves. We can’t ask to be held in ways we’ve never named. We can’t enforce a boundary we’ve never given ourselves permission to have.

The Northwestern researcher Eli Finkel has been making a related point about modern relationships for years. Over the last century, we’ve gradually asked our partnerships to carry work that used to be distributed across communities, extended families, neighbourhoods, faith. We now expect one person to be our lover, best friend, co-parent, therapist and the witness to who we’re becoming. It’s a tall ask. And when we haven’t told ourselves what we need, we end up asking partners to supply what we haven’t first supplied to ourselves. They usually can’t.

This is also why a new partner often delivers an old problem. The relationships we have with others tend to mirror the one we have with ourselves. Without a clear sense of what we will and won’t accept, we accept things we shouldn’t, again and again, with whoever happens to be there. People treat us in roughly the ways we treat ourselves. They overstep where we haven’t drawn a line. They mistake our silence for consent. The mistreatment we tolerate from others is often a mirror of what we’ve silently accepted from ourselves.

None of this absolves the people who behave badly. They own that. What’s true is that without a designed self-relationship, we may not notice mistreatment as it’s happening, or feel entitled to stop it once we do.

This isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design gap. Boundaries we haven’t designed are boundaries we can’t hold.

It can look like this.

A man has had a close friend for years. Lately, the friend has been disappearing for months at a time without explanation, then reappearing as if nothing has happened. Any question about it gets a vague non-answer. He keeps showing up. He tells himself this is just how the friendship works. The friend is busy. Brilliant. A bit complicated.

What eventually changes isn’t the friend. What changes is that he begins articulating to himself what he’s no longer willing to negotiate about. Transparency. Honesty when honesty is reasonable to expect. Basic respect for his time. None of it is complicated. But until he names it to himself, he can’t see how thoroughly it’s missing from this friendship.

Once he can see it, he says it out loud. Not in a long letter. Not in a fight. He tells the friend what he’s been noticing, and what he needs in a friendship now. The friend may rise to meet him there. The friend may not. Either way, the relationship is being held in the open instead of carried in silence.

He didn’t change the friend. He rewrote a line in his own script. And said it aloud.

So what does designing the relationship with ourselves actually look like?

The wellness industry treats the self-relationship as a feeling to cultivate. CRD treats it as a system to design. The feeling matters, but the feeling is downstream of the design.

In practice, it looks like noticing what our inherited lines are and asking, one by one, whether we’d still write them today.

It looks like naming what we need before anyone has to guess.

It looks like soothing ourselves when grief or fear or sadness arrives, the way we’d soothe a close friend, rather than rushing past it.

It looks like making time alone with ourselves that isn’t earned and isn’t a reward. It’s just ours because we said so.

It looks, sometimes, like holding ourselves where we are while we find out who we are.

This isn’t self-care. Self-care is a bath after a hard week. This is the slow construction of a relationship with the person we’ll spend more time with than anyone else on earth.

Here’s what the original question assumes, and what a lot of us assume: that the holding has to come from outside. That the right partner, the right friend, the right community will eventually appear and finally do the holding we’ve been waiting for.

Sometimes they do. That’s lovely. Worth designing for.

But the only relationship guaranteed to be in the room at 3am, on the bad days, at the end, is the one we have with ourselves. And from that relationship, solid and articulated and ongoing, everything else becomes possible. We can love. We can be loved. We can design and redesign.

Without it, we’re running a script we’ve never stopped to read, and wondering why the same scene keeps playing out in different rooms.

The second half of the question I asked in last week’s post was this:

Who would you become if you had a relationship that could hold you while you found out?

For anyone not currently partnered, or partnered and still feeling alone, here’s another version of the same question:

Who could you become if the relationship that held you was the one you built with yourself?

Leave a comment

Conscious Relationship Design is a body of research, writing and practice about designing our intimate, social and family lives with intention instead of defaulting into inherited scripts. I’m currently writing By Design, Not Default: Relationships Reimagined and Redesigned. New to CRD? Start here.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Subscribe now

DTMFA.

If you’ve spent any time around relationship advice in the last 20 years — read a column, listened to a podcast, watched a friend rant about their partner, ranted yourself — you have probably encountered those five letters. They stand for Dump The MF’er Already: the most famous breakup advice in the English-speaking world.

The phrase was coined 23 years ago by Dan Savage, the writer of Savage Love — America’s longest-running sex advice column — on holiday in Michigan, in a casual aside. It has since appeared in poetry, in songs, on T-shirts, on Reddit. Speedy Ortiz wrote a song about it. A whole generation of partnered people have absorbed it as a kind of default verdict.

The man who coined it has been with his husband Terry for 31 years.

Subscribe now

Savage Love has been published continuously since 1991. Savage has coined terms now sitting in the Oxford English Dictionary: pegging, monogamish, GGG. He founded the It Gets Better Project. He is, by any reasonable measure, the closest thing the English-speaking world has to a public intellectual on sex and relationships. And the letters in front of him today aren’t the letters that gave rise to DTMFA.

They’re from people in long marriages. Kids. Merged finances. Two decades of shared infrastructure. People who don’t want to leave but can’t keep going as they are — and who are writing in to ask what the alternative looks like.

And so the man who taught a generation to “dump” is doing something else with the letters. He’s sitting with each one. He’s walking each writer through the alternatives. He has been working his way toward this practice for years. In a recent interview with Slate magazine, he gave it a name. He calls it “the what else”.

Sometimes “the what else” is renegotiating expectations that have not been examined since the couple was in their twenties. Sometimes it’s working out which compromises are worth absorbing and which aren’t. Sometimes it’s facing the fact that the relationship you began no longer exists, and asking what shape the new one wants to take.

His own description of the work is plainer than mine. He calls himself a tinkerer. The image is of someone patient and unhurried, working out which parts of a relationship still serve and which need redrawing.

I read the Slate interview and felt the recognition you feel when someone describes, in their own words, the thing you’ve spent years trying to name. For the last few years, I’ve been writing about a framework I call Conscious Relationship Design — the practice of intentionally building relationships rather than slipping into the inherited scripts of monogamy, cohabitation, lifelong vows and the rest. Savage’s vocabulary is plainer than mine. Tinkering. “The what else.” But the work is the same. He has arrived at it from inside a 31-year marriage. I have arrived at it through more than 100 interviews with people across 10 countries. Same destination, different doors.

This is familiar territory in my own life. Twenty years ago, when I got married, I designed a re-evaluation clause into our vows — not forever, but twenty years, with the explicit understanding that we would examine the relationship at the end of it and decide what came next. When that date arrived, and our son was launched, my husband and I did exactly that. We talked honestly about what each of us needed now that the original brief had run its course. We chose to remain in each other’s lives in a different shape — closer in some ways, more autonomous in others. Not by leaving each other emotionally, and not by enduring. By doing what Savage has now started calling “the what else”.

What stands out about Savage’s posture is how out of step it is with the surrounding noise. For at least two decades, the cultural default for relationship trouble has been a binary. Endure or leave. Settle or dump. The internet has metabolised that binary into a sport. Strangers on Reddit and TikTok hand out DTMFA verdicts on the basis of tiny slivers of information. Whole comments sections exist to live vicariously through other people’s breakups. Savage notes, drily, that the people in his comments section most insistent that others should leave are often in relationships that wouldn’t survive the same examination.

The binary is what’s wrong. Not the dumping. Not the enduring. The binary itself.

Last week I wrote about quiet quitting — the slow disengagement that lets a relationship keep its shape while losing its substance. Quitting and quiet quitting are the binary’s two settings: one decisive, one delayed. Both keep you inside it.

The question almost nobody asks before they pick endure or leave is: did we ever consciously design this?

Most couples haven’t. They inherited a structure — usually monogamous, usually cohabiting, usually defined by an implicit set of expectations around fidelity, finances, sex, family and ambition — and slipped into it without ever sitting down to say: this is what we’re choosing, here is why, and here is when we’ll re-examine it. As Northwestern social psychology professor Eli Finkel has documented, the modern marriage now asks more of a single relationship than any version that has come before it. Best friend. Co-parent. Lover. Intellectual sparring partner. Financial partner. Emotional first responder. Spiritual companion. A few generations ago, these needs were spread across a village. Now they sit on the shoulders of two people who never agreed to be a village. The structure is straining under expectations no one named or chose.

The cost of staying inside the binary is hard to see while you’re inside it. You don’t notice the cumulative weight of years of quiet endurance. You don’t notice the slow erosion of who you thought you were. You don’t notice that the conversations have gotten thinner, the laughter shorter, the silences longer. You don’t notice it until something — someone, a question, a sentence in a Slate interview — makes it visible.

The binary at 58 is quit or quiet quit.

The binary at 28 is commit or keep looking.

A 28-year-old man I interviewed recently told me something that piqued my interest. His generation, he said, has more openness than any before it — more vocabulary, more permission, more cultural visibility for non-monogamy, queer relationships, kink, consent, intentional design. And yet, in his lived experience, his peers are not forming solid relationships. They are seeing many people without committing to anyone. They are in relationships and cheating — through DMs and dating apps, sometimes in real life. He believes his generation has been raised on porn and dating apps in a way that has made the work of actual commitment feel heavier, not lighter. The openness has produced more drift than design.

I think he may be onto something. The missing move at 28 is the same as the missing move at 58. It is stopping, asking what you actually want, and designing what you are building rather than waiting to see what default you slip into.

Share

None of this is to suggest that every relationship can or should be redesigned. Some can’t. Some shouldn’t.

The man who coined DTMFA still uses it. He keeps it dry, he says, for the situations that genuinely require it: the partner who refuses to engage, the partner who controls the money, the partner who hits, the partner whose contempt has calcified into something the relationship cannot survive. Redesign requires two people willing to do the work. When that condition fails, leaving is not the binary’s worst answer. It is sometimes the only honest one.

The harder cases are the middle ones. The relationship where one partner is ready and the other isn’t. The relationship where what you’d actually redesign — more space, more honesty, more sex, more autonomy — your partner cannot or will not give. The relationship where the redesign is happening between two people but is hidden, for now, from a third. In those cases, redesign can become an elegant name for staying when you should leave. Or for taking, in private, what you cannot yet ask for honestly.

There is no formula for telling these cases apart. What there is — what Savage seems to do in his letters, what the people in my interviews seem to do in their lives — is the work of asking the questions honestly. What do I actually want? What is actually on offer? Where are we, really? The redesign that follows might be ambitious. It might be modest. It might, sometimes, be the work of redesigning toward an exit the binary cannot help you reach gracefully.

In my research, the people who flourished in long relationships weren’t the ones who endured and weren’t the ones who left. They were the ones who, at some point, sat down with their partner and rebuilt the agreement. Take Jocelyne, a former quantum physicist I interviewed, who told her husband at year twenty-five what she actually wanted — instead of what she thought she should want. She didn’t leave. She suggested a redesign. Her husband, to her surprise, was relieved; he’d been carrying his own unspoken wishes for years. Two people who had been quietly enduring a structure neither had consciously chosen, until one of them dared to ask: what else?

The patterns repeat. Couples who renegotiated time apart. Couples who reconfigured what fidelity meant. Couples who redesigned their living arrangements, redrew their financial agreements, restructured their sexual lives. Some of the most striking redesigns are happening among women over forty, who are rewriting the partnership script with remarkable pragmatism. Sometimes the redesign is modest. Sometimes it overhauls almost everything.

There is another woman I have been interviewing.

She is in her forties. She has been in an open marriage for years. The person she has been seeing for the last few — also middle-aged, also married, also openly so — is a woman she originally met as a man.

Over the past year, her partner has begun to live, in private, as the woman she has always been. She cannot do this at home. She cannot do this at work. She cannot do this with most of her friends. The only place this becoming has begun to step forward — gradually, in safety, with care — is in the relationship she and my interviewee have spent several years building.

I asked my interviewee what this has done to the way she feels about her partner. She said she has fallen more in love, not less. They are both becoming more themselves, she told me. The container they had designed had turned out to hold a great deal more than they had originally imagined.

The inherited script would call my interviewee’s open relationship the secondary thing. Supplementary. Beneath the marriage in the ranking of real relationships. For these two people, the ranking has rearranged itself. The marriage is where life is performed. The open relationship is where life is being lived.

This is what consciously designed relationships can do, at their reach. They become spaces where two people get to find out who they actually are. Not in spite of the design. Because of it.

This is what the binary cannot do. Endure or leave can only ask what you’ll put up with, or what you’ll walk away from. Redesign asks something else entirely. What are you choosing to build? Who are you becoming inside it? What kind of space do you want around you while you find out?

The cultural shorthand hasn’t caught up yet. There is no quick acronym for let’s redesign this thing. There is no Speedy Ortiz song for we renegotiated our agreements about money and sex and time. The work has names — Savage calls it tinkering, I’ve been calling it Conscious Relationship Design — but the practice has been running ahead of the language for years. It is happening in long marriages renegotiating their second act. In secondary relationships becoming primary. In friendships taking on weight that used to belong to romantic partnerships. In couples finally saying the thing they had been carrying for a decade. In people in their twenties refusing to spend their thirties on autopilot.

The appetite is there. The letters are arriving. The 28-year-olds are noticing.

So the question I’d leave you with this week is the one Savage’s letter writers seem to be asking themselves before they start typing to Dan — and the one the 28-year-olds might want to start asking themselves before they even need to:

If quit-or-quiet-quit wasn’t the only choice, and commit-or-keep-looking wasn’t either — what would you (re)design?

And, more honestly: who would you become if you had a relationship that could hold you while you found out?

I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

This work is a piece from my current writing project on Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to read along and follow more, hit the “subscribe” button to get a notification when I publish new articles on this topic.

I also coach individuals and couples in Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to explore that, book a complimentary first session here.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Subscribe now

A few days before our wedding in a small French coastal town, I told the man I was about to marry that I couldn’t do this for life.

“I can commit fully to twenty years,” I said. “The time it takes for us to conceive, birth and raise a child into adulthood. After that, I’ll need a re-evaluation clause. If we’re still good to go, we’ll do that. If we need something else, we’ll do that. Would this work?”

He smiled. He agreed.

He didn’t believe me. (Who has a re-evaluation clause on their marriage?)

We married. At every anniversary, we’d joke about it. Him: “Only twelve years to go.” Me: “Look at how far we’ve come.” On the day we signed our divorce papers, he was still surprised. He had thought I was joking the whole time. He removed his ring, tears building behind his eyes. “Today I lose my wife. And today, I hope, I gain a friend.”

“Yes,” I said. “A forever friend.”

Subscribe now

But the part everyone misses is what happened in years twelve and thirteen and fourteen, long before the contract came due.

I stopped talking. Not all at once. Slowly, in the way these things happen. I told myself I was holding space for him. We talked about the weather and the news. We didn’t talk about the important, internal things. The more the relationship mattered, the less I said.

If quiet quitting has a definition, that’s it.

And here is the thing I want to tell you, against everything the conversation about quiet quitting is telling you right now:

I don’t think the quiet quitting itself was the failure. The silence was information.

Silence can hurt. But it can also tell the truth before language is ready.

The container was designed to hold it.

The conversation on quiet quitting, briefly

You may have seen the articles and comments on those articles this year. You may have commented. Or joined a group to talk about your own quiet quitting. You may have noticed how checked out you are, sitting beside someone you once told everything to, saying almost nothing.

• Monica Corcoran Harel went viral in The Cut for coining “subconsciously uncoupling” — quiet quitting reframed as a viable third way.

• Zawn Villines, with 35,000 subscribers on Liberating Motherhood, has been writing about quiet quitting since 2023 about quiet quitting specifically in abusive and unequal marriages — framing it as a survival strategy for women who can't yet leave.

• Celeste Yvonne, with another 8,400 subscribers at The Ultimate Mom Challenge, ran a series exploring whether the gray space can be a place to find “happy enough.”

• Therapist Colette Jane Fehr’s The Cost of Quiet came out from Penguin Random House in February; her answer is to speak up — better communication, secure attachment, and conflict you don’t avoid.

Four answers:

Endure. Divorce. Make peace. Speak up.

Useful answers. Incomplete answers.

The diagnosis dressed as a disease

What everyone is treating as the disease is, in fact, the diagnosis.

Quiet quitting is what relationships produce when their underlying design no longer fits the people in them — and no one in the relationship knows how, or believes they’re allowed, to redesign. It is the relationship trying to tell you something. The information is coming through the only channel left open. Not in words. In silence.

Once you start seeing quiet quitting as design feedback, you see the same pattern everywhere.

A man wrote to me this week. He and his wife are companionate; they have been married for decades. He has a girlfriend elsewhere; his wife knows and consents to the relationship. He loves his wife. He does not love the pain his love for another brings her.

“Us having other partners in the confines of our marriage was not on the table when we married,” he wrote. “This is so hard.”

The structure they signed up for didn’t anticipate the people they’d become. There was no built-in forum, no annual conversation, no permission slip. The desire surfaced where desire often does: inside the existing structure, with no container ready to receive it.

This is what default produces.

Eli Finkel calls it the suffocation model: modern marriage asks one person to be best friend, therapist, lover, co-parent and financial partner for life — while we have less time and fewer institutional supports than any previous generation. The best marriages today are better than ever before. The average is significantly worse. Most of the structures expected to deliver all of this were never designed for any of it.

In a default-mode relationship, the quiet quitting has nowhere to go. There is no scheduled moment for “is this still working?” There is no language for redesign that isn’t divorce. So it accumulates. It calcifies. It eventually has to be reframed as something else — happy enough, exit prep, a communication problem, a personal failure — because the structure itself can’t absorb it.

In a consciously designed relationship, the same silence lands somewhere different. It lands in the container. It becomes data for the next iteration.

I know because I designed in that container. I called it a re-evaluation clause. I might as well have called it a permission slip — for me, for him, for both of us — to drift, to stop talking, to feel done, to be wrong, to fall out of the marriage emotionally without falling out of the deal. The container held. We worked on things when we could. When I couldn’t, we stopped working on things, and the container still held. When the twenty years came up, we sat down with everything we hadn’t said, ended the marriage on purpose, and walked into the next form of the relationship.

My ex-husband, now my forever-friend, still moves back into the family home when our son comes back from college. We travelled to Italy together — all three of us — this past January. My ex-husband and forever-friend and I call each other when something matters — and even if we just saw something interesting somewhere. We run together. Sometimes we watch a series together. Laugh together.

The container changed. The bond didn’t.

You can pivot what you have consciously designed.

You design the pivot in.

Designing for change

This isn’t only about marriages. It’s about partnerships of every shape — the ones with no rings, the ones with more than two people, the ones that started as friendship, the ones in transition, the ones that don’t fit any name yet.

A year ago I researched and wrote a long piece on the midlife relationship revolution — the women in their 40s and 50s rewriting the rules. Coming out late. Choosing single life over second marriages. Negotiating open arrangements. Designing co-parenting structures with their exes. Building partnerships that look nothing like the ones their parents had. These women aren’t quietly quitting. They’re quietly redesigning.

I am not suggesting every couple sign a twenty-year contract. I am suggesting something both more modest and more demanding.

It’s the difference between two ways of living inside a relationship. One inherits a structure and hopes it holds. The other designs a structure with re-evaluation built in — a moment, scheduled or signalled, when it is allowed to ask “is this still the deal we want?” The first version makes quiet quitting catastrophic, because there is no legitimate way to surface what’s happening. The second version makes quiet quitting useful, because what’s happening has a destination.

A pressure cooker without a release valve eventually explodes. With a valve, the same pressure is heat doing useful work. Same pressure. Different containers.

Design something that can absorb the seasons in which one of you doesn’t know what to say. Then build in the moment when you’ll come back and look at the design.

This is the work I call Conscious Relationship Design. It isn’t couples therapy. It isn’t a communication tactic. It’s a design discipline applied to the structure of an intimate partnership — the explicit version of what most of us do implicitly, by default.

This is why, in my TEDx talk on desire, I left the audience with five lessons, ending not with desire itself, but with design.

1. Embrace the unfamiliar.

2. Question relationship scripts.

3. Trust that sharing desires builds bridges.

4. Normalise uncomfortable conversations.

5. Design and redesign relationships consciously.

The quiet quitting conversation is loud about the fourth and silent about the fifth. Speaking up is necessary. It is not sufficient. You can speak up inside a structure that no one ever designed and still find yourself, ten years later, with nothing left to say.

The fifth lesson is the one this conversation needs.

What do you think?

If you’ve designed something into a relationship — a re-evaluation moment, an exit clause, a permission slip of any kind — I’d love to hear about it. I’m collecting these for my book on Conscious Relationship Design. Comment below, or message me directly.

And if you’re not designing yet: what would you build in if you could?

Leave a comment

This work is a piece from my current writing project on Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to read along and follow more, hit the “subscribe” button to get a notification when I publish new articles on this topic.

I also coach individuals and couples in Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to explore that, book a complimentary first session here.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Subscribe now

Love on the Spectrum is a Netflix documentary series following adults with autism through the slow, often unglamorous work of finding love. Released in 2022, now in its fourth season, with a fifth commissioned, it has won seven Emmys and is widely regarded as a masterclass in respectful, unsensationalised storytelling about neurodivergent lives. Gentle, generous and unusually compelling television.

It has also, almost accidentally, become one of the clearest mainstream depictions of what Conscious Relationship Design can look like in practice. You don’t need to have watched the show to follow the argument that follows — the lessons travel whether you’ve seen Connor and Georgie navigate their first date or whether you’re meeting them for the first time on this page.

Subscribe now

A note before we go on: this piece discusses how Season 4 ended, drawing on interviews Connor and Georgie have given since. If you’re still mid-watch, return when you’ve seen the finale.

The most revealing moment of Season 4 wasn’t the part the cameras filmed.

Connor Tomlinson and Georgie Harris had been dating for about a year. They had become two of the show’s most-loved figures. Connor: a thoughtful, steady-gazed young man whose mother now hosts a podcast about parenting an autistic child. Georgie: warm, quietly attentive, the kind of person who listens before she speaks. By the end of Season 4 they were the couple viewers were rooting for.

In Season 4 the production took them to London together. They walked past Big Ben and Trafalgar Square. They met Connor’s family. They tried, for the first time, the kind of long, unbroken stretch of each other’s company that tests every couple.

By the end of the trip, Connor had realised something. They weren’t, as he later told Tudum, cut out for each other. Georgie hadn’t been as moved by London as he was. Smaller differences he’d been quietly registering for months had stopped feeling small. On the flight home, he knew. No other option. Ending it is the only way I’ll ever be happy.

About a week later, from Canada, where he’d flown to film a cameo on Brilliant Minds, he called Georgie to break it off. The words got caught in his throat. He texted her instead.

This is the part that should be slightly disappointing. A text breakup, from another country, after a year together. Not the storybook ending. But honest. And in the show’s finale, when he addressed the breakup directly on camera, Connor said: “We reached an understanding. We’re two wonderful people, but two very different people, and that’s okay.”

The breakup itself wasn’t filmed. At Connor and Georgie’s request, the producers stayed away. Connor’s mother, Lise, later explained on her podcast that the two of them had asked for the conversation to remain private. They wanted, she said, to be authentic and to tell the true story, but they also recognised there was a point at which a real moment between two people stops being television and starts being something that belongs only to them.

They still text. They wish each other well. Georgie has a new boyfriend now. Connor is taking acting lessons.

Most dating shows would frame this as a failure. A couple meets, falls for each other on camera, breaks up off-screen, and the viewer is denied the catharsis.

I’d argue the opposite reading is more interesting.

What Connor and Georgie actually did, almost without meaning to, looks a great deal like Conscious Relationship Design. They prototyped. They tested in the high-stakes environment of a foreign trip. They gathered data, including the data Connor couldn’t ignore by the time the plane was in the air.

They named what wasn’t working. They ended it imperfectly, the way real people do, but with care. They drew a line around the parts of the ending that didn’t belong to anyone else. And then they moved on — separately, intact, still fond of each other.

That isn’t failure. That’s what happens when two people don’t pretend everything is — or will be — okay.

What Connor and Georgie did privately, an entire community has been doing publicly for years. And the data is starting to show what comes of it.

Two parallel shifts have been reshaping the cultural backdrop.

The first is the rise in neurodivergence recognition — neurodivergent being the term for brains that work differently from the cultural default, including autism, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and related conditions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) autism surveillance data and parallel reporting on ADHD show diagnoses have risen roughly eightfold over the past two decades — driven primarily by expanded diagnostic criteria, better recognition in girls and women, and reduced stigma. Not by any sudden epidemic of neurological difference. The brains were always there. The language wasn’t.

A 2026 World Economic Forum analysis found that women with ADHD are now diagnosed at an average age of 28.96, almost five years later than men, despite symptoms appearing in childhood at the same rate. Most of us are surrounded by neurodivergent adults — partners, parents, ourselves — who have spent decades quietly managing without language for what they are.

The second shift is in how people imagine relationships. Ethical non-monogamy (ENM, the practice of openly having more than one romantic or sexual partner with everyone’s informed consent) has moved from fringe practice to cultural conversation. APA Division 44 surveys suggest that roughly 20% of adults have tried some form of ENM. But here’s the telling number: 34% of American adults now say their ideal relationship is non-monogamous to some degree (YouGov, 2023). That’s more than one in three people whose relationship aspirations don’t match the monogamous model we’re told is universal.

The trend is sharpening. The Independent opened 2026 by asking whether this is the year we all become relationship anarchists. Mashable, Dazed, Vice and Pink News have all run pieces in the past year arguing that relationship anarchy — the philosophy of designing each connection on its own terms, free of inherited scripts and hierarchies — is moving out of the polyamorous fringe and into mainstream conversation.

The data behind the coverage is Feeld’s State of Dating Vol. III report, published in June 2025 in partnership with sex educator Ruby Rare. Surveying more than 9,000 people across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Spain, with the non-Feeld sample administered by the third-party agency Censuswide, the report found that one in five non-Feeld users were already practising relationship anarchy without realising it. Among Feeld members, the figure jumped to one in two. Awareness was highest among Gen Z, LGBTQIA+ respondents and those already experienced with ENM.

The principles being described in 2026 mainstream press — no defaults, everything negotiated, every relationship shaped on its own terms — read like a translation of how neurodivergent adults have been doing things for decades. And what I have been writing about for years now in Conscious Relationship Design — most recently in Who Gets You? The Hidden Rankings in All Our Relationships on relational hierarchy, and in Single and Thriving: Exploring Solo Polyamory on designing relationships outside the couple-form default.

A note before this argument runs ahead of itself.

The point is not that neurodivergent people should be non-monogamous, or that monogamy fails them as a category. Many autistic and ADHD adults have done long, devoted, monogamous partnership for decades — sometimes with extraordinary creativity, often through trial and error, occasionally at real personal cost. The wider research on autistic adults in conventional marriages, taken as a whole, shows no clear satisfaction deficit. The variation within neurodivergent communities is at least as large as the variation between them and the neurotypical population.

The argument I’m making is not about which structure neurodivergent people choose. It is about how they get there. And about what the rest of us could learn from the route.

It’s also worth saying that several edge communities have contributed to this redesign — queer communities, kink and BDSM communities, the relationship-anarchy theorists who have been writing manifestos since the mid-2000s. Neurodivergent practice is one stream now converging with the others. What makes it worth singling out is that neurodivergent communities developed many of the same tools independently, out of a different kind of necessity.

One more honest note. What I’m describing is largely the Western experience of neurodivergent relationship design — the data, the cultural moment, the writers and clinicians I’m drawing on are mostly American, British, European and Australian. The script outside that frame is different. I haven’t done that research yet, and I’d welcome it from readers who have.

A note on where I’m writing from. I recognise more of myself in this piece than I expected to when I started writing it. I’ve always needed sensory order, always preferred explicit agreements to implicit ones (even if they were and are hard for me to voice), always found it easier to ask what someone wanted than to guess. Whether that makes me neurodivergent or just particular, I am genuinely not sure — and I’m increasingly persuaded that the line between the two is less interesting than the practice that follows from being honest about your own wiring. What I know is that the same instinct, years later, led me to develop Conscious Relationship Design — a framework, a vocabulary, a set of agreements. I have been deeply involved with several people on the spectrum, and the relationships have been hard. They have also been the ones in which the implicit became explicit fastest, because there was no other way. We couldn’t function without it. Looking back, I’m not sure we should ever have been trying to.

Here is what the wider data is showing.

While we lack comprehensive statistics on exactly how many neurodivergent individuals practise ENM, every piece of evidence points in the same direction. Studies find disproportionately higher rates of ENM identification and BDSM practice among neurodivergent individuals, particularly those who also identify as LGBTQ+ (Frontiers in Psychology, 2025).

Psychologist Ari Tuckman’s surveys of ADHD adults found significantly higher participation in non-monogamy of various kinds, plus greater interest in opening existing relationships (Psychology Today, 2023). And in August 2025, a peer-reviewed paper by Pinheiro Ramos and colleagues in European Psychiatry — Divergent Desires — added clinical weight to what the practitioner community had long been observing: autistic and ADHD adults approach romantic and sexual life with measurably different architecture.

This pattern isn’t coincidental. Neurodivergent adults aren’t doing this despite their neurodivergence. I — and others — would argue they’re doing it because of it.

What Connor and Georgie demonstrate isn’t “special needs” accommodation. It’s relationship innovation. And if current trends hold, they’re showing the rest of us where love — and relationship design — is heading.

How that happened is worth examining closely.

The early adopters theory

In the late 1990s, when most heterosexual adults still considered online dating slightly embarrassing, gay men were already meeting their boyfriends through chat rooms and personal ads. Long before the mainstream caught up, the gay community had built a sophisticated etiquette around digital intimacy — how to negotiate boundaries, how to disclose health status, how to translate text into trust. By the time straight people arrived on Match and, eventually, Tinder, queer users had been beta-testing the future of dating for nearly a decade.

This is how marginalised communities tend to work. Excluded from the centre, they build new infrastructure at the edge. That infrastructure — sometimes acknowledged, often quietly absorbed — ends up reshaping the centre that excluded them.

Neurodivergent adults are doing this now, in a different domain.

If you’re autistic, the social subtext that organises most relationships — the unspoken expectations, the hinting and hoping, the shouldn’t you just know what I want? — has never been a tool you could rely on. Verbal agreements get lost. Implicit rules don’t transmit.

So you do what designers do when the existing tool stops working. You build a new one.

You write things down because verbal agreements get lost. You schedule explicit check-ins because subtext doesn’t land. You design the sensory environment because overwhelm destroys connection. You build relationships that have rules because the alternative was relationships you couldn’t predict.

Justin Lehmiller, the Kinsey Institute researcher, put the question directly to ADHD-and-relationships specialist Ari Tuckman in 2019: did the data suggest people with ADHD were drawn to opening their relationships? Yes, Tuckman said. His practitioner surveys — large, but not nationally representative and not peer-reviewed — showed higher participation in non-monogamy among ADHD adults, plus greater interest in opening existing partnerships.

He was careful to add an honest qualifier: more partners means more time-management load, and ADHD brains struggle with time management. He was also careful to admit what hadn’t been studied. When Lehmiller asked whether ADHD might actually predict success in non-monogamous relationships, Tuckman said the comparison data didn’t yet exist. It still doesn’t. I am reading the early signals of a field still being built.

A different kind of brain. A different appetite for novelty, intensity and stimulation. A different relationship with the social default. None of this means neurodivergent people can’t sustain monogamy. It does mean that the script most cultures hand out wasn’t drafted with their nervous system in mind.

What looks, from the outside, like accommodation is often innovation. What looks like being too literal is a refusal to operate on guesswork. What gets dismissed as overthinking is, in design terms, prototyping.

This is the early adopters theory. Neurodivergent adults didn’t choose to question the relationship script. It simply never quite fit. And like any community whose tools don’t work as well as the dominant story claims, they had to build their own.

The rest of the culture is now starting to catch up — slowly, and often without realising they’re following.

Three innovations

If you watch carefully, three specific design moves keep recurring across neurodivergent relationships — across autism, ADHD, AuDHD (the co-occurrence of autism and ADHD, increasingly recognised as the more common pattern) and the broader spectrum of brains that don’t run on neurotypical defaults. These aren’t hacks. They’re architectural choices, made out of necessity, that have produced some of the most resilient relationship practice in modern life.

I want to name them, because the field has been observing them for years without giving them a shared vocabulary. And because each one is borrowable.

For decades, the assumption was that neurodivergent adults struggle in love because something in them is broken. The data is starting to suggest the opposite. They struggle because they are unwilling to pretend a broken script is working. That makes them not the population least equipped for lasting love, but the one most committed to the conditions under which it actually exists.

The first innovation: explicit consent architecture

In neurotypical relationships, consent is largely transmitted through subtext. A glance, a tone, a silence. The whole apparatus assumes both parties can read each other’s signals fluently and infer intentions from non-verbal cues.

For most autistic adults, and many ADHD ones, this assumption is a tax. A constant background effort of decoding that drains the very energy needed to be present with a partner.

So neurodivergent couples often do something the broader culture is only just starting to talk about: they make the implicit explicit. They agree, in advance and in language, what is wanted, what is off-limits, what needs renegotiating. They check in not because the relationship is in trouble, but because checking in is part of the design.

Some write it down. Some keep shared documents. Some have weekly conversations on a recurring slot in the diary. None of it is romantic in the conventional sense. All of it is romantic in the sense that matters.

In one couple I’ve spoken with — both AuDHD, together six years — Sunday mornings include a fifteen-minute capacity check. Not feelings. Capacity. How much social bandwidth do you have this week? What’s overloaded? What’s been quietly building up that we haven’t named yet?

They use a shared note on their phones, updated through the week, that lets either of them flag something without having to find the right moment to bring it up. The note isn’t a contract. It’s an instrument. It catches things that would otherwise dissolve into “I’m fine” and surface six weeks later as resentment.

What they’ve built is a low-cost version of what couples therapists try to teach to neurotypical couples in crisis. The neurodivergent version arrived earlier, costs nothing, and runs as routine maintenance rather than emergency repair.

What’s striking is how closely this resembles the gold-standard practice now being recommended in mainstream consent culture and BDSM communities — where explicit agreements, safe words, written negotiations, and aftercare have been refined for decades. The neurodivergent community didn’t borrow this from kink. Both communities arrived independently at the same conclusion: when you can’t rely on the default cultural script, you build a clearer one.

And clearer is, almost always, kinder.

The second innovation: sensory and stimulation compatibility

Neurotypical compatibility tends to be assessed in the language of personality. Are they kind? Do they make me laugh? Do we share values? These matter, of course. But they leave out something neurodivergent adults figured out long ago: relationships are also a sensory and stimulation contract.

Two people with very different sensory thresholds will struggle in the same room before they ever struggle in the same conversation. One needs noise; the other needs silence. One needs touch to feel connected; the other needs space before they can want touch. One needs frequent novelty to stay engaged; the other needs predictability to feel safe.

These are not incompatibilities of love. They are incompatibilities of architecture.

Neurodivergent couples, especially those who’ve done the work of late-diagnosis self-discovery, often start their relationships with a kind of sensory inventory. What lights drain you? What sounds restore you? What kind of touch feels regulating, what kind feels invasive? How much novelty do you need per week? How much routine? They design the environment as carefully as they design the conversation.

From the outside, this can look like fussiness. The dimmer switches, the noise-cancelling headphones, the agreed-on quiet hour after work, the meticulously planned holidays that build in recovery time. A sceptic might call it being precious about preferences.

It isn’t. What neurotypical couples treat as preferences, neurodivergent couples treat as engineering. Comfort is infrastructure. Get the infrastructure wrong and the conversations on top of it collapse no matter how skilled the communication. Get the infrastructure right and even hard conversations have somewhere stable to land.

For ADHD partners, this matters in a particular way. The ADHD brain runs on dopamine, and partnership has to feed that engine somehow. Through novelty. Through play. Through structured stimulation built into the relationship itself rather than imported from affairs or substance use or the next big purchase.

Polyamorous ADHD adults — those practising more than one openly committed romantic relationship at a time — who report thriving in their structures tend to have done this consciously. The multiple partners aren’t compensating for failure of a primary relationship. They’re meeting different stimulation needs that any single partnership would struggle to meet alone. Tuckman’s caveat about time management still applies.

So does the deeper insight: the design is doing real work.

The third innovation: the mask-off interval

For most of their lives, many neurodivergent adults have been performing neurotypicality — masking, in the language of the autism research. Studying social cues like a second language they’re never quite fluent in. Smoothing affect. Suppressing stims. Holding eye contact that costs them something the other person never has to spend. Modulating tone of voice. Editing speech in real time to remove the words that might land wrong. Rehearsing small talk on the drive over.

The cost of this performance is now well-documented in the late-diagnosis literature: exhaustion, identity loss, depression, burnout, sometimes suicidality. Researchers studying autistic women in particular have found that decades of masking can produce a specific kind of psychological collapse: a person who has so successfully impersonated the expected version of themselves that they no longer know who is underneath.

But the cost in relationships is its own particular grief.

Because if you have spent your life masking, the people who love you have been loving the mask. Not the actual you. The version that was easier to receive, easier to date, easier to marry. And every act of intimacy that should have closed the distance between you and your partner has, instead, quietly widened it.

What happens when a neurodivergent person stops masking inside a relationship?

Sometimes the relationship doesn’t survive it. The mask was the thing the other person had bonded with, and the actual person underneath turns out to be a stranger. This is one of the most painful patterns in the late-diagnosis literature — the marriages that end not because the autistic partner changed, but because they finally stopped pretending they hadn’t been autistic the whole time.

But sometimes the relationship deepens in a way that performance-based partnerships rarely match. Because the version of you the other person is loving is, finally, the actual you. There is no performance to maintain. No translation overhead. No fear that the mask will slip and the relationship will end. The exhaustion that has run as background processing for forty years quietly switches off, and the energy that used to go into impersonation goes into the partnership instead.

Couples who reach this point tend to describe it in similar language. I can finally rest. They see me. I don’t have to translate myself. It is, in the most precise sense, a re-architecture of what intimacy is for.

For neurodivergent readers, this is not news. Many of you have found, or hope to find, the one or two people with whom the mask comes off — and you know what that feels like compared with everything else. You know which friendships have given you that quality of rest, and which have demanded the most performance. You may already have a working theory of which partners belonged in which category.

For neurotypical readers, the unmasking effect points at something most relationships don’t quite manage. How much of yourself do you bring to your partnership, and how much is performance? Not autistic masking — most neurotypical adults aren’t doing that.

But there are softer versions of the same problem. The version of you that learned, around age fourteen, to seem less needy than you were. The version that learned not to bring up the things that would make you appear difficult. The version that decided, somewhere along the way, that being lovable required hiding the parts of yourself that were inconvenient to love.

How much of what your partner sees is you, and how much is the version of you that you long ago decided was easier to love? At what point did the editing start? And how much of the loneliness inside your relationship is a function of having edited yourself for so long that even your partner is now in a relationship with someone who isn’t entirely there?

These are not comfortable questions. They are not meant to be.

Neurodivergent couples didn’t invent the question. They were just forced to answer it earlier.

Share

What this means for those who are neurotypical

If you’re not neurodivergent, the first question is probably the obvious one. Can I actually borrow any of this?

Yes. With one important caveat I’ll come to.

Consider Mia and Tom*: a neurotypical couple, late thirties, two children, both in demanding careers. By their own description they were fine until they weren’t. The fights that used to be once a quarter became once a month, then once a week. They went to therapy. The therapist taught them communication techniques that worked in the room and dissolved by the time they got to the car park.

What changed things for them was a Sunday capacity check, borrowed secondhand from a friend’s autistic sister. Fifteen minutes on a Sunday morning, before either of them had touched their phones, in which they named the week’s bandwidth. What was loaded. What was depleted. What did the other one need to know going into the week.

It cost nothing. It took fifteen minutes. Within a month, the weekly fights had stopped — not because the underlying stresses had changed, but because the fights had been the system’s way of surfacing information that now had a designated place to go.

Five practices, drawn from neurodivergent relationship design, are particularly portable.

The capacity check, illustrated above. Not feelings — capacity. Run weekly, on a recurring slot, ideally when neither of you is already depleted. The point is not to solve anything in the meeting. The point is to surface what would otherwise emerge, six weeks later, as resentment.

The sensory inventory. A one-time conversation, sometimes longer than an hour. What lights, sounds, textures and rhythms restore each of you, and which drain you? Most neurotypical couples have never asked this question explicitly and discover their partner has been quietly tolerating something that could have been redesigned in a single conversation.

The dopamine audit, particularly for couples in which one or both partners runs on novelty. Long partnerships, by their nature, become predictable. That predictability is part of what makes them safe. But for an ADHD brain, or any brain that runs on stimulation, predictability without compensating novelty is corrosive.

The audit is the conversation in which a couple asks where the novelty in their life is coming from, whether they’re building it into the partnership or sourcing it elsewhere, and whether either of them has been quietly assuming the other will provide it. The question is uncomfortable in the productive sense. It tends to surface either a workable design problem or a difficult one — and either is better than the slow drift of a relationship that’s lost its dopamine without knowing it.

Mask-off intervals. Times, places or kinds of conversation in which both partners agree to drop the version of themselves they perform elsewhere. Some couples have a no-performance hour at the end of the day. Some have a designated weekly conversation in which nothing said counts as evidence in any future argument. The form matters less than the agreement.

And the post-mortem with care. The Connor-and-Georgie practice. Recognising when something isn’t working and ending it well. I’ve written about a longer-form version of this elsewhere: my 20-year marriage that ended not in failure but in deliberate redesign. Most relationships using these tools won’t end. But the knowledge that you could end well if you needed to changes what you tolerate and what you don’t.

Now the caveat.

Borrowing the tools is not the same as borrowing the experience that produced them.

What doesn’t transfer

Neurodivergent people built these practices because the alternative was a kind of constant relational injury. The exhaustion of masking. The loneliness of being misread. The corrosion of decades spent translating yourself into a language your partner could receive. The tools came out of that. Sharpened by necessity, refined by trial and error, paid for in real personal cost.

If you adopt the tools without acknowledging the cost, you’re doing something subtler than appropriation. You’re absorbing the fruit of someone else’s harder work and pretending it was always there.

A growing number of neurodivergent writers and clinicians have started pushing back, gently and not so gently, on the framing of neurodivergent people as the relational vanguard. Some find it tokenising. Being held up as exemplars while the same culture keeps failing to provide accommodations, support and basic recognition. Others find it instrumentalising. Their hard-won practices repackaged as wellness content for an audience that won’t ever face the underlying difficulties the practices were designed to solve.

Both criticisms are fair. Both should be taken seriously by anyone borrowing the tools.

The complexity caveat is also real. Not everything neurodivergent couples do translates outward. Some practices emerged from sensory needs that neurotypicals don’t have and won’t fully understand. Some require communities of practice that don’t yet exist outside the neurodivergent world. Some come bundled with experiences — late-diagnosis grief, decades of masking, the specific labour of being seen as a problem before being seen as a person — that aren’t transferable in any meaningful sense.

What is transferable is the principle. Make the implicit explicit. Treat comfort as infrastructure. Let people drop the performance. Design rather than default.

If you can carry those four sentences out of this piece, you have already started.

Share

Five years from now

I expect we’ll look back at the early 2020s the way we now look back at the early days of online dating. As the moment when a set of practices that had been confined to a particular community started quietly reshaping how everyone did things. Not by edict. Not through cultural revolution. By virtue of working better.

A few specific predictions. Explicit-consent vocabulary will become standard in mainstream relationship advice within the decade, with the BDSM and neurodivergent communities cited as the sources — sometimes. Capacity checks will become as ordinary in long partnerships as date nights. Therapy training will start including modules on neurodivergent-affirming relationship work, already happening at the edges and soon to be central. Dating apps will compete on how well they support explicit communication and how badly they punish performative profiles. Late-diagnosis couples renegotiating long marriages will become a recognised category in clinical literature, with its own playbooks and pitfalls.

This is what designing from the margin looks like when it reaches the centre.

Conscious Relationship Design sits at this convergence. Not because I designed it for neurodivergent readers, but because the principles that make any relationship work better turn out to be the principles that neurodivergent communities have been refining out of necessity for decades. Make the implicit explicit. Treat your partnership as something you build rather than something you fall into. Design for the brains and bodies you actually have, not the ones the script imagined. Iterate.

If something in this piece has named a thing you already half-knew, you have somewhere to start. Pick one practice. Try it for a month. Notice what changes.

The future of love is not being invented in Silicon Valley or by wellness influencers. It’s being road-tested by the brains the script didn’t fit.

The rest of the culture is simply running late.

What do you think?

I’m curious how this lands for you.

If you’re neurodivergent — autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, or in any of the other configurations that fall under that wide umbrella — I’d particularly like to hear whether any of this rings true to your own experience, or whether I’ve overstated something that is more complicated up close. The tools described here are yours. I’ve tried to honour them rather than repackage them, but you are the better judge of whether I’ve succeeded.

If you’re neurotypical, I’m wondering which of the three innovations — explicit consent architecture, sensory and stimulation compatibility, mask-off intervals — felt most relevant to your own relationships. And which felt least translatable. The post-mortem-with-care practice tends to provoke the strongest responses. So does the sensory inventory, often from couples who realise they’ve been quietly tolerating something for years.

If you’re somewhere in the middle of late-diagnosis territory yourself — whether your own or a partner’s — I’d love to hear how the conversation has gone. The marriages that come apart and the marriages that deepen often look identical from the outside until they don’t. There’s a piece of writing waiting in that distinction, and I haven’t yet decided whether I’m the right person to write it.

You can leave a comment below, share this with your own thoughts, or reach out directly. As always, your feedback shapes what comes next. The one question I’d most like to sit with is this: where in your own life have you been editing yourself for so long that even your closest people are now in a relationship with someone who isn’t entirely there?

That’s the question I keep coming back to. I suspect it isn’t only mine.

Leave a comment

*Some couple examples in this piece are composites drawn from interviews.

If anything in this piece has surfaced something difficult, the National Autistic Society in the United Kingdom and the Asperger / Autism Network in the United States offer adult resources, and the Samaritans (UK) and 988 (US) are available 24/7.

Sources and additional reading

Peer-reviewed and academic research

Practitioner research and journalism

Cultural reporting and trends

Public health and demographic data

Subscribe now

This work is a piece from my current writing project on Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to read along and follow more, hit the “subscribe” button to get a notification when I publish new articles on this topic.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Leave a comment

Last week, I got on a call with a man who’s built an app in the sexual pleasure space. He’s good at what he does. Smart, accomplished, professional, the kind of person you’d hire without hesitation for any other product. When he reaches out to potential clients, he uses a fake name.

Not because the app is illegal. Not because it’s harmful. Because he works in pleasure. And in 2026, that’s still enough to make you radioactive.

The week before, I connected with a woman developing an AI-powered vibrator. She has an MBA from one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. The institution has made its disapproval clear. Not because of poor business practice or ethical concerns. Because of the product category. Because she dared to apply her education to something the world pretends doesn’t exist and isn’t needed.

Subscribe now

These are not fringe characters. They are exactly the kind of people we celebrate in any other industry: entrepreneurs solving real problems with intelligence and care. But because the problems involve bodies and pleasure and desire, they operate in the shadows. One hides his name. The other gets punished by the institution that trained her.

It’s not that nobody talks about sex publicly. Dan Savage has been doing it for decades. Sexuality professors like Nicole McNichols have built careers on it. But they’re the exceptions who prove the rule. For every person with a platform and permission to speak, there are thousands doing the actual work of building products, services and tools for our intimate lives who can’t attach their real names to what they do. The public conversation is dominated by a handful of voices. The rest is silence.

And it’s not just the professionals. It’s all of us.

It’s the father whose teenage son walked in late one night and caught him masturbating. The boy saw the porn on his dad’s phone. In that moment, neither of them had a script. No one had taught them what to say. But they sat down the next day and had a conversation that cracked open every hard topic neither of them were sure how to raise before. That story could have ended in shame. Instead, it became a turning point. But only because one of them was brave enough to stay in the room.

How many of us would have that conversation? How many of us would just... never mention it again?

We can’t sit down at our own tables and say the words that need saying. Changing bodies. Fading desire. Consent that was negotiated 20 years ago and never revisited. Fantasies that don’t match the life we’re living.

We can’t talk about what porn is teaching our teenagers (and grown adults) about sex. What the Epstein files and MeToo revealed about power and what we still haven’t reckoned with. How to start an honest conversation with someone you’ve barely met on a dating app. How to restart one with someone you’ve been married to for decades.

The couple whose sex life quietly disappeared after menopause or medication have no language for what comes next. Maybe because no one gave them the language for what came before.

So where do people go with their questions? Not to each other. Not to friends. They go to the internet at midnight. They ask AI chatbots. They type what they can’t say, get their answer, and clear the history. Hide the phone. Delete the evidence.

The evidence of what, exactly? Curiosity about their own lives.

I’ve spent the past several years researching how people actually experience desire and intimacy, across more than a hundred interviews in ten countries. The pattern is always the same: the gap between what people want to ask and what they feel allowed to ask is where the damage accumulates. Not in the wanting. In the silence around it.

My first book, By Design, Not Default (working title), makes the case that our relationships deserve conscious, intentional design. It’s going out to literary agents now. But alongside it, I’ve been developing something that goes further into the territory most books won’t touch. It’s called Erotic by Design (working title), and it exists because I believe we shouldn’t have to change our names, clear our caches or hide our phones to learn about our intimate lives.

More soon. But I’m curious:

When was the last time you typed a question into a search bar or in Chat that you can’t ask a friend?

Leave a comment

If you appreciated this newsletter, please share it:

Share

If a friend sent this to you, you can subscribe here:

Subscribe now

Tell me what you think.

I want to know.

Julie

New here? I write about what happens when we stop defaulting into our relationships and start designing them. Start here for the foundations, or stay for whatever’s next:

Welcome. Pull up a chair.

If you’ve just arrived — maybe from the TEDx talk, maybe from a friend, maybe from a 2am search for “why does my relationship feel like this” — here’s where I’d point you first.

Most of us don’t realise there’s a whole smorgasbord of ways to do relationships. We just default into the one we inherited. This is what it looks like when you start designing on purpose.

Women over 40 are quietly rewriting their relationship scripts, and what they’re building is fascinating. My most-read piece, and the one that fills my inbox.

For decades, the assumption was that neurodivergent adults struggle in relationships because something in them is broken. The data suggest the opposite.

Yes, I really did this. The story of my own time-limited marriage — and what it taught me about commitment, honesty and designing the thing instead of enduring or blowing it up.

We have the logic of desire completely backwards. We think we need to feel safe before we can say what we want. The truth? Saying what we want is what creates the safety.

My TEDx talk — a TED Editors’ Pick — is here if you’d rather watch than read.

My About page has the longer version of who I am and what this place is. But honestly? Pick whichever title above made you curious, start there, and let me know what you think.

Julie

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In 2016, researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley published a study in Science that overturned decades of conventional wisdom about how people change their minds. The finding was this: a single conversation — 10 minutes, face to face, no script, no agenda — could durably reduce prejudice on deeply polarising issues. Not for a day. For months. The effect was roughly equivalent to 15 years of shifting social attitudes, compressed into one unhurried exchange at someone’s front door.

The technique was called deep canvassing. And it worked not because the canvassers presented better arguments or more compelling data. It worked because they listened. They asked open-ended questions. They invited people to reflect on their own experiences. They didn’t judge. They didn’t correct. They got curious.

I had read about deep canvassing and related experiences in several of the books that had shaped my thinking over the past decade — Adam Grant’s Think Again, Rutger Bregman’s Humankind, Zachary R. Wood’s Uncensored, Brené Brown’s Strong Ground — and I was fascinated. They all pointed to the same uncomfortable conclusion: you don’t change minds by being right. You change minds by being present. By listening so deeply that the other person begins to hear themselves.

I wanted to try it. Not as an academic exercise, but as a deeply personal one. I wanted to know if I could sit with people whose beliefs I found troubling and stay open — not performing openness, but genuinely open. And if I could, what would it take? What would I learn?

In late January 2026, I got my chance.

Subscribe now

He was grumpy this morning. Why hadn’t we left 30 minutes ago? What was taking me so long?

Time: 7:15 am, Tuesday morning.

“Ready, Dad?”

“Yep,” shoes and cap on. Backpack with his computer on his back, a lunch bag attached to the outside of his backpack. We were all set.

Suited up in black high-heeled boots, jeans, a light jacket, and a scarf — I clearly didn’t come from here; people could see it from three blocks away — I rubbed my eyes (jet lag from Paris was not helping) and bundled into the backseat. Off we went, Dad’s wife smiling as she buckled him in and backed out of the drive in one seamless move.

It was the first time in nearly four decades of going back that I really didn’t want to go back. Not this time. Not to this America. I loved this country. I grew up here. And I didn’t recognise it anymore.

But I came for him. You come for the people you love.

“Our Starbucks closed. You’ll see. We have to go to a new place.”

“Why’d it close, Dad?”

“Who knows. They messed up.”

We pulled into the shopping centre. He pointed to the old location, all closed up. The coffee shop I would accompany him to each time I came back over the years.

“We have to go over here,” he said, none too pleased.

The “over here” was a Starbucks counter wedged into the corner of a Bel Air or a Raley’s — I can’t remember which. We walked into the grocery store, and he shuffled over to the tables and uncomfortable chairs someone in management had decided should be installed.

Bright, overhead lighting that made everyone look like they were dying from a terminal disease, or worse, loneliness.

Popular, forgettable tunes reminded us this was a sprawling grocery store just like any other in the United States — tunes, I imagine, to make us feel at home.

He put down his things, and we walked over to the Starbucks counter to order coffee from two unsmiling, already tired, not-quite-baristas.

“We’ll be with you in a minute.”

We waited patiently, pretending to read the overhead menus. Surely a pistachio latte with a protein pump would do the trick.

“Two medium house blends, please,” I asked when given the go-ahead to order. Dad’s wife was staying just a minute — she had work to get to. It would be just the two of us.

And the pistachio latte? A ruse. Straight-up black was all we needed.

“Hey, here comes Tony,” my Dad brightened and sat up a little straighter. We’d been sitting there an hour, commenting that this place was a far cry from the good ole days.

Tony’s blue eyes seemed to glisten every time you looked at him. Tall, white-haired, a gentle unbroken smile. You wondered, when you looked at him, what hard things this gentle castaway hippie had known. You’d hear from his friends that he’d go down to Africa and volunteer every year, on his own, or with his church. He moved surely, with unspoken purpose. If you didn’t pay attention, you wouldn’t know he was there. The same man who served coffee to 3,000 people every Sunday.

“Hey Tony! It’s great to see you! How are you?” I smiled and beckoned him over.

He smiled even wider — his eyes brightened even more — how did he do that? How did this warm human get even warmer?

“Back from France? How are you doing?” he wanted to know.

“All the better to be here today,” I smiled.

“I’ll be right back. Gonna go get my coffee,” he said, placing a hand on my Dad’s shoulder.

Every time I visited my father, I would meet these men. Over the years, his morning coffee group had become a fixture — a rotating cast of regulars who gathered around tables, coffee in hand, to make sense of the world together. I knew some of their names. I knew some of their stories. But this time, I came with a different intention.

Then came Kyle.

Conspiracy Kyle, they called him. The pepper to Tony’s salt. Not calm. Animated. Not at peace or understated. Overstated and visibly both confused and confounded. In search of something Tony perhaps had already found.

Kyle looked particularly perplexed this morning, his shock of pepper-grey hair untamed and awry. Had he just thrown on his clothes and rushed here on an inexplicable impulse?

“Something’s just happened. I can’t tell you what it is. But it’s happened,” his eyes scanning the room for what — cameras? Mics? Standing in a state of agitation, he shifted from foot to foot, sliding his hands in and out of his pockets. The one eye that never moves and the one scanning the room and now the people in it would spook anyone who didn’t know him.

We hadn’t seen each other in over a year. And yet, something told me Kyle was still very much himself.

This was my father’s world. Tony, Kyle, and the men who would drift in over the course of each morning, pull up a chair, and hold court under the fluorescent lights of a grocery store, a downgrade from the previous open, airy and large coffee shop.

One of them believed Trump was actually a clone (“because he is actually very sick — what we’re seeing is a copy”). Another believed AI was a plot from the 4th dimension to make humans commit suicide (“and it’s working!”). A third believed Grace Kelly was in a cult and never really died (“and I have proof, but I can’t share it with you”). Most of them believed vaccines were dangerous (or not all effective — people still died after having the COVID shot), Davos was a conspiracy, and that the country was under siege from people who didn’t belong here. Some of them believed things about people of colour and homosexuals that made my throat tighten.

These were also men who cared fiercely about their communities. Men who volunteered. Men who checked in on each other every morning. Men who were struggling with fear and anger and a feeling that the world they’d known was disappearing — and who had found, in conspiracy and grievance, a story that made the fear bearable.

I would come to spend two to three hours every morning with them for five days that week, Tuesday through Saturday. Somewhere between 10 and 15 hours, sitting among men whose views on the world could not have been more different from my own.

But they didn’t know that. Not because I lied about who I was. I simply took myself out of the picture. It didn’t matter who I was. What mattered was who they were and what they wanted to share with me.

This was the experiment. Releasing my ego. Releasing everything I knew. Being open to not knowing. Unlearning what I thought I knew. Taking someone else’s view seriously — not as a performance, but as a practice.

I didn’t have anything to hide. What I did was lean in.

The first few mornings — Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday — unfolded the way you might expect. The men talked. I listened. I asked questions — real questions, not gotcha questions, not leading questions, just questions born from genuine curiosity about how a person arrives at what they believe.

That’s a very interesting position. Tell me more about why you think that.

Where did you hear that?

What would it look like if it were different?

I repeated back what I heard them saying. Not to challenge it, but to make sure I understood. And something happened: they softened. Not because I agreed with them. Because they felt heard.

They saw what they wanted to see. A French-American woman — a little bit lost (I hadn’t lived here for decades — how could I know how things work here?), a lot bit curious (who didn’t quite know how the world works). They were more than happy to explain it to me. And because they were explaining rather than defending, something opened up.

There were moments I had to work hard. When someone said something deeply racist about the actors in The Color Purple, I went very quiet. I didn’t argue. I didn’t correct. I sat in the discomfort. I’m still not sure if that was the right thing to do. But I knew that if I reacted, the door would close. And I wanted the door to stay open, because I had a feeling we weren’t done yet.

One morning, I pulled out my phone and showed them Gemini, Google’s AI. They’d asked me about it — could it really make images? I generated a few to show them. They asked for a photo of Zelensky sitting on Trump’s lap, like a puppet. They laughed, and then they looked at the image again.

“Wow,” one of them said. “We can’t trust anything these days.”

It was the first time I’d seen them question the reliability of the images and videos that fuelled so many of their beliefs. A small crack. But a real one.

It was Friday morning — day four — when the conversation turned to immigration.

A new member of our conversation circle was particularly animated. The border. The invasion. The people pouring in who were going to take everything from everyone.

Kyle turned to me. “So what do all the French think, with all the North Africans flowing over the border?”

“I have one rule when people ask me a question, and one clarification I need to make,” I smiled.

“Go on.”

“My rule is: don’t ask a question you don’t want the answer to.”

Kyle blinked.

“My clarification is that I cannot speak for all of France. I can only speak from my own experience living there. France has almost 67 million people, and I, unlike the press, cannot generalise for that many of them. That said — would you like me to answer your question?”

“I think I know your answer,” he said, “but yes, tell me.”

“We do have a lot of immigration in France,” I said.

He sat back, satisfied. Finally, someone from the outside world who agreed.

“Can I tell you something interesting about how it works, though?”

He nodded.

I had recently finished Hein de Haas’s How Migration Really Works, and I told them about France’s immigration patterns — how, when borders are open and movement is fluid, many migrants come temporarily: they work, they send money home, and they go back. It’s circular. But when you close the borders and make it harder to cross, something counterintuitive happens. The people who are already inside stop leaving. Why would they? If they go home, they may never get back in. So they stay. They send for their families. They put down roots. The very thing you were trying to prevent — permanent settlement — is what you create by closing the borders.

More than this, I explained, the French economy has historically needed these workers. Construction, agriculture, domestic care — the jobs needed filling, and the government opened its doors to fill them.

And those North Africans? They weren’t illegal immigrants. France colonised their countries. Algeria was considered part of France itself until 1962. People from French colonies had a legal right to move to the mainland. When France suspended labour immigration in 1974, it didn’t stop migration — it transformed it. Workers who had been coming and going now stayed permanently, and brought their families, because the door they’d always been able to walk back through had been shut.

How do the French feel about immigration today? The only honest answer is: it depends. It depends on who you ask, on where they live, on what they watch. There is no single French opinion on this, just as there is no single American one.

I watched their faces as I said all this. Kyle’s jaw was working. Tony was listening with that quiet intensity of his. The other men who had gathered that morning — there were five or six of us by now — had stopped talking.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Kyle said. But his voice had changed. He wasn’t dismissing me. He was processing.

“I know it sounds counterintuitive. But this is what the data show. France learned it the hard way.”

There was a long pause.

And then, one by one, the men started to get up. Not angrily. Not dramatically. They simply … left. As though the conversation had crossed some invisible line and they needed air.

Kyle stayed. He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “I need to think about that.”

Share

But the real breakthrough came on Saturday. Our last morning together, as it turned out.

I want to pause here and tell you what I think made it possible. Because it wasn’t the data. It wasn’t my arguments. It wasn’t that I knew more than they did about incarceration or immigration or anything else.

What made it possible was four days of sitting with these men without trying to change them. Four days of listening and reflecting back what I heard. Four days of taking their views seriously enough to ask real questions about them. By Saturday morning, we had built something between us — not agreement, but trust. And it was that trust that made them curious about what I thought.

They asked. I didn’t volunteer. That distinction matters.

The conversation had started with Kyle telling me how he advises young women about what to look for in men.

“I’m really curious to hear what that is. Please say more.”

“I always tell them to look for good character.”

“That sounds reasonable. Tell me, Kyle, are you telling them this because you are concerned they may not know what to look for in a man?”

“Oh, absolutely! It’s amazing how much they don’t know.”

“Really? I’d love to hear more. Would you have an example?”

“Why, yes. I know a young woman who ignored the fact that her partner was an alcoholic and jobless, and then she was surprised when the relationship was a mess.”

“Is it possible that he had a good character, though?”

“Why, no!”

“No?”

“He was Black.”

“Hmmm. And skin colour determines character? Please help me understand.”

“Well, of course it does. This is elementary. You grow up being hated by most of society, and of course, you’re going to have bad character.”

“Help me think this through. Having been discriminated against and marginalised and feared and judged by groups of white people due to one’s colour … that makes you a bad person?”

“Why, yes. I’m sorry I have to explain this to you. But if you are hated, of course, you are going to hate back, and you are going to do bad things.”

“Ah. So people of colour are not born with bad characters — this is something that happens due to systemic discrimination?”

“There is no such thing as systemic discrimination,” Kyle said, getting a little annoyed.

“Well, I think it’s possible, maybe there is. Are you familiar with the data on the percentage of Black individuals who are incarcerated compared to white individuals?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you curious?”

“Well, if you have the data, I’d be open to seeing it.”

I pulled up the numbers on my phone. Black Americans are incarcerated at roughly five times the rate of white Americans. He looked at the screen.

“Oh yes, I know these numbers. Of course I do.”

“Wonderful. Is that perhaps something we could think about in terms of systemic discrimination?”

“Julie, it’s not discrimination. If they’re in prison, it’s because they’re criminals. Like I keep saying, Black people commit far more crimes than white people. It’s just a fact. Look at the numbers.”

I could feel my whole body tense. This was the moment I had to decide who I was going to be in this conversation.

“I’m curious about that,” I said. “Where do those numbers come from?”

“It’s the incarceration rate. It’s all right there.”

“Do you know the difference between the incarceration rate and the crime rate?” I asked. Not aggressively. Genuinely, as though I were trying to understand alongside him.

He paused. “Aren’t they the same thing?”

“Well, the incarceration rate tells you who is in prison. But it doesn’t necessarily tell you who is committing crimes. It tells you who is being arrested, charged, tried and convicted. Those are all separate steps. And at each step, things can go wrong.”

I told them what I knew about wrongful convictions. About how Black men are disproportionately misidentified by eyewitnesses — especially across racial lines. About how the same crime can lead to vastly different sentences depending on the colour of your skin. About how plea bargaining — the system that resolves the vast majority of criminal cases in America — pressures innocent people into guilty pleas, and how that pressure falls unevenly. About how being too poor to afford a lawyer means relying on an overworked public defender who may have 15 minutes to review your case.

I told them about the men who had spent 20, 30 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, and were exonerated by DNA evidence. And about the ones who will never be exonerated, because there’s no DNA to test.

“So when someone tells you that Black men are in prison because they commit more crimes,” I said, “what they’re really telling you is that the system is working exactly as it’s designed to work. The question is whether that design is just.”

I pulled up one more number. “According to the National Registry of Exonerations, a Black American is seven times more likely to be falsely convicted of a serious crime than a white American. For murder specifically, it’s closer to seven and a half times. This study looked at more than 3,200 exonerations since 1989.”

The table was quiet.

Kyle leaned forward. “I’ve never heard anyone explain it like that.”

“You are a rare woman. You think,” he said. Which, in his world, was a compliment. I took it as one.

“We have to get you out more,” I said, with a grin and a twinkle in my eye.

My father, ever the provocateur, looked at Kyle and said, “Do you want to sleep with her?”

Two steps forward, one step back.

But then Kyle said something that mattered more than anything else that happened at that grocery-store table.

“I’m going to look into this. I’m going to look at these numbers. And I’m going to share what I find with my friends — the ones who always tell me Black people commit more crimes.”

A couple of other men were nodding. “Yeah. I want to look into it, too.”

Earlier that week, they had started to get curious about me. Who was this French-American woman who kept coming back every morning, who asked all these questions and never seemed to get angry?

“What do you do?” one of them finally asked.

“I’m in communications,” I said.

“What kind of communications?”

“One of the things I do is edit policy reports. I harmonise multi-author books on things like economics, governance, and innovation — I make books written by all kinds of people from all over the world make sense to world leaders, the public and the media.”

A pause.

“So you know a lot about a lot of things.”

“I know a few things about what some policy analysts think about some things,” I said. “But I don’t know what you think. I’d like to hear more about what you think.”

And they kept talking.

I’ve thought about this a lot since I got back to France. About what happened at that table, and what it means, and whether I should tell this story at all.

I know some people will read this and feel I was wrong to sit with these men and say nothing while they expressed racist, sexist, and homophobic views. That by staying, I was normalising what they believe. I understand this criticism, and I take it seriously. But I don’t think listening to someone is the same as agreeing with them. I think it is taking them seriously enough to remain in the room — which is the precondition for anything to change at all.

I know others will point out that I could do this because of who I am. A white woman. Someone who could pass as unthreatening. That’s true. Not everyone has the access I had, and I don’t pretend otherwise. But the research on deep canvassing shows that what matters most is not who the listener is, but the quality of presence they bring. Connection is a skill. It can be practised by anyone willing to learn it.

And I know some will feel that I took advantage of these men — that I sat with them under incomplete pretences and am now writing about them. I want to be honest about this. I didn’t tell them everything about myself. I took myself out of the picture so that who I was wouldn’t get in the way of who they were. Was that a form of concealment? Perhaps. But it was also a form of respect. I was not interested in performing my own identity. I was interested in understanding theirs. The connection that grew between us was real. I genuinely liked these men. I still do. And I have changed their names and identifying details because this story is not about exposing them. It is about what became possible between us.

I want to be careful not to reduce these men to their worst beliefs. Yes, they held views I find deeply troubling. But they were also men who showed up every morning to a grocery store because they needed human connection. Men who volunteered in their communities. Men who were struggling with fear and anger and who had, in the absence of anyone willing to sit with them and listen, found their explanations in conspiracy and grievance.

Adam Grant put it well recently:

“The cure for ignorance is not information. It’s humility and curiosity. Facts can be easily dismissed. What motivates people to gain insight is recognizing gaps in their understanding and wanting to find out more.”

That is exactly what I watched happen at that grocery-store table.

These men were not stupid. They were uninformed — by a media ecosystem, by algorithms, by social circles that had given them a narrow, distorted set of facts and told them it was the whole picture. When someone sat across from them and, without judgment, offered a different piece of the picture, they didn’t reject it. They leaned in. They got curious. They wanted to know more.

And this is not only about older men in grocery stores. The same polarisation exists in the younger generations — different platforms, different conspiracies, the same underlying fears, the same hunger to be heard. Perhaps my next conversations will be with them.

I spend much of my professional life thinking about how humans communicate — and, more specifically, how we fail to. In my work on Conscious Relationship Design, I’ve come to believe that the most transformative conversations are not the ones where we arrive with answers, but the ones where we arrive with space. Space for the other person to be who they are. Space for discomfort. Space for not knowing.

What I practised in that grocery store was something I try to bring to all of my work: the willingness to lean in rather than pull away. To unlearn what I think I know. To develop empathy not as a feeling but as a discipline — something you build, deliberately, through attention and presence and the conscious decision to stay when every part of you wants to leave.

The paradox is this: I could only connect with these men by taking myself out of the equation. By not insisting on being known, I made it possible to truly know them. And in knowing them — in hearing their fears, their confusion, their longing for a world that made sense — I found something I hadn’t expected.

Common ground.

Peter Block, the community-building thinker, puts it simply, as Daniel Coyle recounts it in Flourish:

“Seeking answers drives people apart. Questions bring people together.”

I asked a lot of questions that week. I didn’t have many answers. But something moved.

On Saturday morning, as we were getting up to leave, Kyle paused. He looked at me with the one eye that moves and the one that doesn’t, and for once they were both still.

“I had no idea,” he said, “that this many Black people were, or are likely to be, wrongfully convicted. That many of them. No one ever told me that. They told me the opposite. And I believed them.”

He picked up his coffee cup, looked down at the table for a moment, then back at me.

“Thank you for telling me.”

The researchers said 10 minutes could do it. I had 15 hours. And I think, maybe, it was enough.

Then he turned and walked across the fluorescent-lit grocery store and out through the automatic doors into the morning light. A conspiracy theorist, carrying a paper cup, stepping out of the fluorescence and into the sun.

I watched him go. And I thought about all the conversations that never happen. The ones we avoid because we’ve already decided what the other person thinks, or who they are, or what they’re worth. The ones we replace with outrage, or silence, or the comfortable certainty of people who agree with us.

Kyle didn’t agree with me. Not on most things. Maybe not on anything. But for one morning, in a grocery store, he got curious. And curiosity, it turns out, is where everything begins.

*Names and identifying details have been changed.

If you’ve had a conversation like this — or avoided one — I’d love to hear about it.

Leave a comment

Share

Additional reading

Subscribe now

So … the book.

I was walking a fellow writer — a published author, a white CIS male — through my book overview on Conscious Relationship Design. The premise. Who it’s for. What the chapters cover, including some rather personal details from a period of exploration and discovery, I haven’t shared publicly before. He’d been on this journey with me for months and was asking how the book was coming.

He stopped me mid-sentence.

He called it genius.

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking about that word — and whether it’s the right one. Another white CIS male has said what I’ve actually done is built a Trojan horse.

I’ve thought about that some more. And listening to my alpha readers (who are a broader group), I’m realising he was right — but it’s not just one Trojan horse. It’s several, nested inside each other.

This book, for:

• Men: grants permission to care about relationships at all. To read about intimacy and desire and emotions — topics they’ve grown up thinking aren’t for them. And then inside: practical answers to things they’re wondering about but have no idea how to ask.

• Women: grants permission to want what they want. To stop performing. To question the scripts they inherited. And then inside: validation that their “difficult” questions aren’t difficult at all — they’re design questions.

• People in traditional relationships: grants permission to question without blowing everything up. A framework for conversations they’ve been avoiding for years.

• People exploring alternative structures: establishes legitimacy. Science. A framework that makes their choices look like what they are — conscious design, not deviance.

The wrapping paper is systems design. The gift inside is permission.

On 15 November, I sent three sample chapters to 14 alpha readers. The chapter where I tell the story of my 20-year marriage — designed with a re-evaluation clause, pivoted with integrity. The chapter on why silence around desire is killing our relationships. And yes, the chapter on power exchange dynamics and what BDSM practitioners know about negotiation that the rest of us desperately need to learn.

I was going out on a ledge. Telling my story. Sharing my clients’ stories. Sharing interviews with hundreds of people from an alternative dating app. Weaving in science and research from sex and relationship experts. I wasn’t sure how any of it would land.

It landed.

What happens when you send your weird, vulnerable thing into the world

The responses started arriving almost immediately.

“This book needs to be written. You are doing something here no one else has done.”

“Never read anything like it. No book that compounds science and tools in ways that are normalising. The world needs this.”

“You make it [power exchange dynamics] sound really lovely, and I’ve never read anyone speak about it that way before.”

One reader — someone well-read on these topics — said they’d never encountered anything quite like it. Another said my writing had taken something “out of the shadows, out of confusing closets” and shone “light and logic” on it.

Several called me courageous.

I don’t feel courageous. I feel, strangely, compelled.

Several readers are discussing the chapters with their partners. Some have asked to share them. The work is already starting conversations that weren’t happening before.

And everyone — everyone — wants to know more about what I learned from talking to hundreds of people on an alternative dating app. The kinky ones, yes. The exploratory. But also the asexual. The living-together-alone. The humans asking the same questions every human on the planet asks about love, connection, trust and hope.

Turns out we’re all more similar than we think. We’re just not talking about it.

Yet.

Field notes

On 24 hours without screens

I’ve been doing weekly digital detoxes (or as I call them, my tech shabbats) since August. Sounds marvellous, doesn’t it? It is — and — it isn’t. If you don’t want to be alone with your feelings and thoughts, do not try this at home.

Last weekend I hiked solo for three hours through a forest, sun glinting through the trees. Gorgeous. I decided I wanted a half-day of solo hiking every week.

But was that decision born of genuine desire — or escape from the weekend before, when rain kept me indoors and an existential grief rose up to meet me?

Still figuring that out.

On the timing mismatch

Here’s something I keep encountering in my research: Men often discover their desires and kinks quite young. Women frequently don’t until their thirties. What happens when they marry and have children — when sex lessens, when men’s needs for belonging (which they often experience through physical intimacy) go unmet? What happens when women finally begin exploring what they want, and their partners respond with jealousy rather than curiosity?

The gap between these timelines is creating a lot of quiet pain. And most of it goes unspoken.

I’ve been paying closer attention to what’s happening in the silences — the pauses, the things left unsaid, the conversations that never quite happen. Sometimes noticing the silence changes more than asking, “Can we talk?”

Silence, though an absence of words, is not an absence of meaning.

On waiting for impulse

I’ve been reading Sanford Meisner on Acting, and there’s an exercise that has revolutionised my weekends: “Don’t do anything until something happens to make you do it.”

Allowing impulse to drive instead of our heads, our lists, other people’s expectations.

Unpremeditated. Genuine.

True.

Currently absorbing

Quiet divorcing

I’ve been corresponding with Eli Finkel (author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage) about something called “quiet divorcing” — the slow erosion of intimacy that ends relationships not with a bang but a whisper.

His insight:

We notice betrayals that happen. But the gradual withdrawal, the creeping disconnection, the silence where conversation used to live — these slip past our defences precisely because they require nothing of us except … nothing.

Chilling.

And worth sitting with.

My book of the year

If you read one book before the year ends, make it Think Again by Adam Grant. We needed it when it first came out. We need it now more than ever.

It’s about the courage to unlearn. To question our certainties. To hold our beliefs lightly enough that they can evolve.

What is one of your beliefs you’ve let evolve recently?

Leave a comment

Your monthly invitation

As the year closes and a new one hovers, I offer you Meisner’s exercise:

Try it for an hour. A morning. A whole day if you’re feeling brave.

What wants to emerge when you finally stop forcing it?

P.S. — Happy holidays! And what’s next

Thank you for being here. I am so happy you are. And I wish you the very best for the holidays. Stay warm (or cool), safe, close. Hold someone. Be.

On my end, when I am not BEing with my beautiful family, I’ll be integrating alpha reader feedback this month. Then I’ll be reaching out to acquisition editors in late January. If you’d like to join a second round of feedback on additional chapters for this book — By Design, Not Default — message me. I’d be honoured to have your eyes on this.

And if you want a powerful way to close the year, I do an end-of-year review every December/January that’s become something of a ritual. Drop me a line if you’d like my personalised template — I’d be more than happy to share it.

P.P.S. — On “difficult” women

I keep thinking about a piece by Ellen Scherr I read last week.

She writes about what happens to women as they age — when they become “difficult” or “changed” or less amenable. The neuroscience is fascinating: as we age, the brain undergoes synaptic pruning. Neural pathways that aren’t essential get trimmed. And all those pathways dedicated to hypervigilant people-pleasing? Often first on the chopping block.

What replaces it isn’t bitterness. It’s clarity.

Scherr’s conclusion: “When someone says you’ve changed, when they say you’re not the person you used to be, when they imply something’s wrong with you now? They’re right. You have changed. You’ve changed into someone who’s no longer available for performance. And that’s not difficult. That’s development.”

It’s time we stopped demonising women for the neurological process of pruning — for deciding what actually matters and cutting away the pretence that never served them. This is not a bad thing. It’s a very, very good thing. For everyone.

Read the full piece here.

See you in the new year!

Julie

Thank you

Thanks for reading. Each month, I share:

• One deep dive into Conscious Relationship Design

• Field notes from my research and life

• What’s currently influencing my thinking

• One question to spark your own exploration

Subscribe if you haven’t already. See you next month!

Subscribe now

Share

We talk a lot about communication in relationships. Talk more, we’re told. Be vulnerable. Share your feelings. Share your desires. And yes - all true. (I stood on a TEDx stage talking about exactly this last year, so I’m complicit in the obsession.)

But here’s what we don’t spend enough time talking about:

Most of us are severely underqualified listeners.

Not because we don’t hear the words, but because we’re not listening for what lives in the spaces between them.

The silence is where the truth hides.

Which is why I’ve been paying such close attention lately to a group of people who’ve been communicating something crucial in the spaces between conventional relationship scripts - something many of us have been missing.

Subscribe now

Love beyond the script: What neurodivergent relationships can teach us all

I’ve been researching something that keeps me up at night - in the best possible way. It’s called “love on the spectrum,” and no, I’m not talking about the Netflix show. I’m exploring what it means for neurodivergent people to navigate relationships: how we do it differently, what we need, and - here’s where it gets interesting - what our forms of relating might teach the neurotypical world.

The numbers gave me pause when I first encountered them.

• Studies consistently find disproportionately higher rates of ethical non-monogamy (ENM) identification and BDSM practice among neurodivergent individuals, particularly those who also identify as LGBTQ+.

• Autism researcher Walsh-Adams notes that in recent sexuality studies, autistic respondents were markedly more likely to report engaging in polyamorous relationships.

• Psychologist Ari Tuckman’s surveys of ADHD adults found significantly higher participation in both consensual and non-consensual non-monogamy, plus greater interest in opening existing relationships.

At first glance, you might think: “Well, that’s fascinating, but what does it tell us about neurodivergent people?”

But I’m asking a different question entirely.

What if neurodivergent relationship patterns weren’t outliers but trailers for where relationships are heading as we collectively question the scripts we inherited and start building from scratch?

Think about it. Neurodivergent people often struggle with - or simply reject - the unspoken rules that govern so much of neurotypical interaction. The relationship escalator (you know: date, become exclusive, move in together, marry, have children, stay together until death) isn’t just questioned by neurodivergent folk; it’s often completely invisible to us until someone points out we’re “doing it wrong”.

But are we doing it wrong? Or are we doing it differently - with a directness, a clarity of need, and a willingness to design rather than default that might actually be more conscious than the script everyone else is following?

The neurodivergent approach often involves:

• Explicit communication over implied understanding

• Negotiated needs rather than assumed compatibility

• Structure and clarity instead of “just knowing”

• Permission to be different rather than pressure to conform

Sound familiar? These are the same principles at the heart of Conscious Relationship Design.

Perhaps the real challenge to conventional wisdom isn’t that neurodivergent people are rewriting the rules. It’s that perhaps much of the world has been mistaking social scripts for genuine connection, confusing conformity with compatibility.

What if the future of conscious relating looks less like following an escalator and more like building a bespoke structure that actually fits the humans inside it?

I’m publishing the full exploration of this in the coming weeks. If you have thoughts, experiences, or questions that might help shape it, leave a comment now or send me a message - I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

This kind of conscious design - relationships built to actually fit the humans inside them rather than inherited templates - shows up in unexpected places in my research. Including some of the conversations that have most moved me this month.

Field notes

On sharing the unspeakable

Lately, I’ve been sitting across from people - sometimes virtually, sometimes in person - as they tell me things they’ve never told another living soul. Desires. Kinks. The secret architecture of their longings.

And I keep wondering: what happens in that moment of first speaking? When something moves from the locked room of your mind into the air between two humans?

Is it validation? Permission? Or something more primal - the body’s recognition that a truth, once voiced, can no longer hurt you in quite the same way?

One woman told me afterwards: “I thought if I said it out loud, I’d disappear.”

Instead, she felt more solid than she had in years.

On the art of being held

Shibari - a Japanese rope bondage art form. Do you know it? Have you ever considered it? I’ve been researching it, and I find myself wondering about the physiological needs it addresses in humans who weren’t held as small children - or aren’t held as adults.

There’s something profound about the body’s response to careful restraint, to being seen and tended to with such deliberate attention. Perhaps we’re all carrying an unfed hunger for this kind of presence.

Note to self: Sometimes what looks like kink is actually just radical care wearing an unexpected costume.

Leave a comment

Currently absorbing

Two seemingly unrelated sources have been quietly informing my thinking about what it means to design relationships consciously:

Philosophy: Happiness as absence

I’ve been listening to French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, wrestling with his conception of happiness - not as the pursuit of joy, but as what remains when we stop grasping for it. He doesn’t quite say “happiness is the absence of unhappiness,” but that’s the flavour of it: a profound contentment found not by adding more, but by releasing what makes us suffer.

His provocation? That desire and hope are often the problem. They fix our attention on a future that may never arrive, preventing us from inhabiting the present we already have. The wise person, he suggests, has nothing left to hope for - not because they’re defeated, but because they’re complete. They need nothing, so they are happy.

It’s an unsettling idea in our culture of endless striving. But there’s something quietly revolutionary in it: what if we stopped trying to acquire happiness and instead removed the obstacles to experiencing it? What if we acted without attachment to outcomes, appreciated the preciousness of this finite life, and cultivated presence over pursuit?

Perhaps this applies to relationship design too: not always adding more structure, more rules, more agreements - but sometimes simply removing what doesn’t serve, creating space for what already wants to exist.

Migration myths: How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas

I’m one of them - an immigrant. So when this book started systematically dismantling the myths we tell about people like me, I paid attention. Here’s one: immigrants bring crime. The data tell a different story entirely. Communities with new immigrants statistically have lower crime rates - community cohesion, social control, the drive to integrate are all factors contributing to this phenomenon. It’s the second generation, facing systemic discrimination and blocked opportunities, who sometimes stumble.

What’s this got to do with relationships? Everything. We’re all immigrants in our own stories, crossing borders between who we were and who we’re becoming. And the myths we tell about outsiders - whether immigrants or people who love differently - often say more about our fears than about reality.

The parallel strikes me: in relationships too, it’s often the second generation of inherited patterns - unexamined but rigidly enforced - that causes the most damage.

Leave a comment

Your monthly invitation

Throughout this month’s explorations - from neurodivergent relationship patterns to unspeakable longings to the scripts we inherit without questioning - there’s been an underlying current: the gap between what we actually want and what we believe we’re allowed to want.

So here’s where I’m going to ask you to listen to your own silence:

What desire, wish, need, or want do you have that you wish you didn’t have?

Sit with that for a moment. Notice what comes up. You don’t have to share it with anyone (though you’re welcome to share with me). Just acknowledge it exists.

Sometimes the desires we’re most ashamed of are simply pointing us toward parts of ourselves that need our attention.

Leave a comment

P.S. - A personal note

📝 Invitation to alpha readers

I’m putting together the first chapters of my book on Conscious Relationship Design - and I’m looking for a small group of alpha readers to join me at this formative stage.

More details coming soon, but if you already know you want in, message me now. Let’s design this chapter together.

Thank you

Thanks for reading. You can get more actionable ideas and links in this free newsletter by clicking “Subscribe now” below. Each month, I share:

• One deep dive into Conscious Relationship Design

• Field notes from my research and life

• What’s currently influencing my thinking

• One question to spark your own exploration

Join me by entering your email. See you next month!

Subscribe now

Share

I’m writing this from my quiet living space, still slightly unsteady after 8 days at sea, trying to process some rather extraordinary news: my TEDxMünster talk, “Why We Need to Talk About Sexual Desires,” has just been released on TED.com—and it’s currently the #1 Editors’ Pick. 🌊✨

The talk weaves together my own 20-year marriage and its pivot, along with stories from my research on conscious relationship design. It’s about how we can find deeper connection—not by pretending our desires don’t exist, but by talking openly about them and, sometimes, acting on them. Vulnerability, honesty, even the conversations we fear most—these can be the very things that transform our relationships.

Subscribe now

And the response has been incredible. People have written:

• “As a single parent, your talk inspired me—I’ve rebuilt a burned relationship, most importantly with my daughter.”

• “This reminded me that open communication about changing wishes is precisely what might have saved my marriage.”

• “Pioneering speech. Open communication is not easy but is key to a happier life.”

Not everyone agrees—some say, “Easier said than done.” And that, to me, is exactly the point: desire isn’t tidy, nor is the work of voicing it. But the conversations have begun—and that matters.

Here’s how you can help keep the talk in TED’s Top 3 Editors’ Picks (and help this conversation reach more people):

1. Watch the talk → Click here to watch on TED.com or YouTube

2. LIKE the video → those little thumbs-up clicks matter a lot for visibility.

3. Share it widely → with a friend, in a WhatsApp group, at the dinner table—anywhere people could use a reminder that voicing our desires changes lives.

4. Leave a comment → your reflections tell TED that this conversation matters.

This isn’t just about unconventional relationships or opening marriages (though those stories are in there). It’s about something universal: the human challenge of saying what we really want—and creating space for others to do the same.

Thank you for being part of this community, for reading these ideas when they were still seeds, and for encouraging me to keep pushing boundaries. Your support made this moment possible.

With gratitude (and slightly sea-wobbly legs),

Julie 💛

P.S. The irony isn’t lost on me: I spent 8 days in the middle of the Mediterranean, completely disconnected—only to return and discover I’d never been more connected to people around the world. Sometimes the best way to understand desire is to step away from everything familiar and see what you’re truly drawn to.

Share

Leave a comment

The sailboat I’m sailing away in … let the video take you away, too …

There's a Celtic concept of "thin places" – those liminal spaces where the veil between the ordinary and the sacred grows gossamer-light. Ancient monasteries. Mountain peaks at dawn. The moment when motorcycle wheels find perfect rhythm with winding road.

For me, it's the deck of a 40-foot sailboat, wind filling canvas, silence broken only by the hull cutting through endless blue.

Subscribe now

In less than an hour, I'll be stepping aboard with five other stagiaires (fellow learning sailors) for eight days of what I can only describe as voluntary beautiful chaos. We'll be sailing in French – I’ve been learning to sail in English up until now – through whatever weather the Med decides to serve us. Strangers becoming crew. Humans remembering we are, at our core, creatures shaped by wind and water.

Since May, I've been stealing weekends on the water, learning to read wind patterns like ancient texts, discovering muscles I'd forgotten I possessed. There's something profoundly humbling about being a beginner again at nearly six decades. About trusting rope and canvas and the steady hands of people who are sailors confirmed and sailors learning.

This follows my silent retreat in May – another experiment in stepping away from the constant hum of connectivity. Eight days ahead without screens, without notifications, without the illusion that being reachable makes us indispensable. Just sail and sea and the kind of silence that teaches you things about yourself you didn't know you needed to learn.

Malcolm Gladwell might call this a "desirable difficulty" – the counterintuitive idea that some challenges make us stronger precisely because they're hard. I call it Wednesday's homework in the school of staying alive.

I’ll return with stories, wind-tangled hair, and – if the sailing gods smile upon us – some rather exciting news to share. Something I've been quietly nurturing that's ready to meet the world.

But for now, I'm holding this space for those of us who refuse to accept that adventure has an expiration date. That learning requires youth. That comfort zones are anything more than beautifully decorated prisons.

If you've found your own thin places – on water, in mountains, astride machines, or in moments of profound stillness – I'd love to hear about them when I return.

The wind is calling.

See you on the other side of the horizon.

Julie

P.S. - If you have sailing stories, mishaps, or wisdom from your own ventures into the sacred unknown, drop them in the comments. I'll read them all when I'm back on dry land (and connected land) in a week's time. Bisous.

Leave a comment

Share

Most parents know this dance intimately. We love all our children equally, but we don’t — can’t — give them equal attention. Different needs demand different responses. It feels obvious, even necessary.

But here’s what we rarely talk about: how it feels to be the child who watches. The one who learns that love and attention aren’t the same thing. The one who grows up believing that fairness means everyone gets exactly the same, because they remember so clearly what it felt like to get less.

Subscribe now

Now imagine that child grows up and enters adult relationships carrying a profound desire for equality. Not just fairness — perfect, mathematical equality. Every partner at the table gets identical consideration. Every new person who joins the family receives the same rights as those who’ve been there for years.

This is where my story begins. Not with theory about attention allocation, but with a text message that landed like a small bomb in my relationship:

Had a drink with Sarah last night. Really clicked. I think she should have equal rights from the start. You and I have been discussing this for months. You down?

The problem is this: we might think that fair relationships mean equal attention — or equal rights to attention. But equal attention, it turns out, is not just difficult to achieve. It may be impossible. How so, you ask? We are fair, beautiful, well-meaning humans. Certainly we can make this work. We’re problem solvers, good folks, infinitely creative and deeply kind. All these things we may be. But it turns out it isn’t just our lives that are limited. Or our time. Our attention is too — which is why today, we hear again and again, it’s our most precious commodity.

I’ve been learning this the hard way. Over the past few months, I’ve been intensely immersed in practising Conscious Relationship Design (CRD) in my own life. The gap between expertise and experience has been closing inch by inch, and I’m discovering that “the canyon is the curriculum”. There’s no other way to bridge that gap than to walk the talk.

Walking the talk has been hard. Very hard.

You might think CRD sounds straightforward. Having practiced it in complex real-world situations, I needed to bust that myth. Relationships aren’t easy — whether we’re talking about CRD, ethical non-monogamy, polyamory, or traditional partnerships.

But here’s what I’ve discovered about one of the thorniest problems we all face: the question of who gets us. Whether you’re managing multiple romantic partners, juggling children of different ages, caring for ageing parents while raising teenagers, or simply trying to balance work colleagues, close friends and family members who all want pieces of you.

The solution isn’t learning to divide our attention more fairly. It’s understanding why our deepest desires for equality might be fundamentally mismatched with how our brains (and hearts) actually work — and designing our relationships around that limitation instead of fighting it.

The equal rights moment

The text message arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, casual as a weather update.

Had a drink with Sarah last night. Really clicked. I think she should have equal rights from the start. You and I have been discussing this for months. You down?

I stared at my phone, reading the words again. Equal rights. From the start. After one drink.

Nine months earlier, I had been the new person in this equation. My partner James had an existing relationship when we began dating, and I understood the mathematics of it perfectly well. She had legacy status — months of shared history, briefly living together, established rhythms, accumulated trust. I was the newcomer, fitting around their existing plans, grateful for whatever time was available. It made sense. It felt fair, even.

Then their relationship ended, and for several months, it was just us. I had become, quite unexpectedly, his only romantic partner. I grew comfortable in that space, began to think of our time as “ours” rather than “whatever’s left over.”

But now, after a single date with Sarah, James was proposing something that made my stomach lurch: complete equality. Her availability would matter as much as mine when making plans. Her needs would carry the same weight as mine. The near year we’d built together wouldn’t grant me a single extra consideration.

“Can you do this? We’ve been talking about equality for months. I’d like you to try,” James said quietly when we talked the next day.

It was a deceptively simple question that opened onto something vast and uncomfortable. Could I treat someone who’d known my partner for two or three hours the same way I treated myself — someone who knew his coffee preferences, his deep personal history, the particular way he needed comfort after a difficult day at work?

More unsettling still: if I couldn’t do this with romantic partners, what did that say about how I managed attention everywhere else in my life? When my best friend called during dinner with my partner, whose needs took priority? When work demanded extra hours, how did I decide which relationships got the leftover energy? When my elderly parents needed more support, who got less of me?

I realised I had stumbled into one of the most radical questions in modern relationships: In a world where attention is our most finite resource, is it possible — or even desirable — to give everyone equal claim to our time and consideration?

The answer, as I was about to discover, would challenge everything I thought I knew about love, loyalty and the hidden hierarchies that govern all our relationships.

The attention audit

James’s question lingered for days: “Can you do this?” But before I could answer whether I could treat all partners equally, I realised I needed to understand something more fundamental: how was I already distributing my attention?

Let me invite you into the same uncomfortable revelation I had. Stop reading for a moment and find a piece of paper and pen. Yes, actual paper — this won’t work on your phone.

First, write down everyone and everything that requires your attention. Not just your partner(s) and/or children — pets, devices, work, hobbies, your health, your ageing parents, that friend who always needs advice, your social media feeds. Everything that calls for a piece of you.

Now comes the revealing part: rank them numerically from most to least important. Go ahead, put numbers next to each item. #1 is most important, and so on down the list.

While you’re ranking, jot down your criteria in single words. What makes your partner more important than your best friend? What puts your children above your parents, or your health above your hobbies? Don’t overthink this — just capture the logic you’re using.

Finished? Now for the uncomfortable bit: circle the 3–5 people or things that actually get most of your attention on a typical day. If you have children, circle the one who gets the most time. Be honest about where your hours and mental energy actually go.

Look at your full list — and then at what your circled. Does reality match your stated values?

If you’re like most people, you’ve just discovered what researchers call the “attention gap” — the chasm between who we say matters most and who actually gets most of us. Perhaps you ranked your health as #2, but spend more time scrolling Instagram than exercising. Maybe your partner topped your list, but your phone gets more of your actual attention during dinner.

This gap isn’t limited to romantic relationships. Recent data show a growing movement among younger generations toward what researchers call “anti-hierarchical” relationship structures — rejecting traditional rankings not just in polyamory, but in how they approach friendships, family obligations and life priorities. They’re questioning why a romantic partner should automatically outrank a best friend, or why biological family should trump chosen family simply by virtue of genetics.

But here’s what your exercise has probably revealed: even when we intellectually embrace equality, our attention naturally creates hierarchies. The friend who texts gets a response; the one who calls gets ignored. The child who’s struggling gets more parental energy than the one who’s thriving. The parent who lives closer gets more visits than the one who doesn’t.

We are all, whether we admit it or not, constantly engaged in a complex calculus of attention allocation. Every yes to one person is an implicit no to others. Every hour spent here is an hour not spent there.

What James was asking — whether I could give his new date equal consideration to our near-on one-year relationship — was really asking whether I could disrupt this fundamental human tendency to rank and prioritise. He was proposing that I abandon the very system that most of us use, unconsciously, to navigate all our relationships.

The question isn’t just whether it’s possible to treat all romantic partners equally. It’s whether it’s possible to treat anyone equally, given the mathematical reality that attention — unlike love — truly is a zero-sum game.

The scientific proof that fairness is impossible

What I discovered next changed everything I thought I knew about the mathematics of love.

It turns out that what James was asking — whether I could support both of us fairly allocating time across multiple relationships — isn’t just emotionally challenging. It’s mathematically impossible.

In 2024, computer scientists tackled a question that polyamorous people have been wrestling with for decades: Is there an optimal way to schedule time across multiple romantic partners? Their conclusion was as definitive as it was devastating: polyamorous scheduling is “NP-hard” — a term that means the problem becomes computationally unsolvable as the number of relationships grows.

Here’s what that means in human terms, using my actual situation: I practice solo ethical non-monogamy with ten partners scattered globally — some I’ve known longer than James, others have come and gone over the last year. While I’m deeply connected to all of them, my commitment levels vary wildly. Some are intimate friendships with occasional physical connection; others are more structured, ongoing arrangements.

If you completed the attention audit honestly, you’ll recognise this pattern immediately. Just as your exercise revealed natural hierarchies in how you actually spend your time and energy — despite your best intentions toward equality — my relationships exist in a similarly complex web of competing priorities.

But here’s the crucial distinction: I intentionally prioritise James above all others because he is my poly partner — the one I’m romantically committed to. When he has a need or makes a request, it comes first. This isn’t unconscious hierarchy; it’s deliberate demonstration of my commitment to him. For me, there’s a meaningful difference between polyamory (romantic commitment) and ethical non-monogamy (intimate connection).

This hierarchy makes James deeply uncomfortable. He believes I should treat everyone equally — that’s relationship anarchy at its purest. He doesn’t distinguish between ENM and poly the way I do.

So when he asked me to give equal consideration to Sarah — someone he’d spent two to three hours with over a drink — he wasn’t just asking me to solve a mathematical problem involving millions of scheduling combinations across roughly 30 interconnected people in multiple time zones. He was asking me to abandon the very system I’d consciously designed to show him how much he mattered.

Research consistently shows that people in non-hierarchical relationships report higher satisfaction, with landmark studies by Flicker and colleagues finding greater relationship satisfaction and more secure attachment in egalitarian arrangements. A comprehensive 2024 review of 209 peer-reviewed studies confirms this pattern.

Yet the same research reveals that true non-hierarchy remains “largely aspirational rather than achievable” for most people.

James was asking me to dismantle not just my unconscious attention hierarchies, but my most intentional demonstration of love.

Why our brains can’t help but rank

But why do these hierarchies feel so automatic, so inevitable? Remember that attention audit you completed earlier? The one where your stated priorities weren’t fully aligned with your actual behaviour? That wasn’t a failure of willpower or evidence of hypocrisy. That was your brain doing exactly what evolution designed it to do.

We are, at our neurological core, ranking machines. Every millisecond of every day, our brains perform rapid-fire calculations about where to direct our precious, finite attention. This isn’t conscious deliberation — it’s automatic processing that happens faster than thought. The evolutionary logic is stark: in a world where resources are limited and threats are real, those who could quickly assess “friend or foe, important or trivial, urgent or optional” were the ones who survived long enough to pass on their genes.

This ranking impulse becomes particularly pronounced when it comes to attachment relationships. Anthropologist Helen Fisher’s research on brain chemistry reveals that romantic love activates the same neural pathways as addiction — specifically, the dopamine reward circuits that evolved to focus our attention on survival-critical resources. When early humans formed pair bonds, those who could maintain laser focus on their primary attachment figure were more likely to successfully reproduce and protect offspring.

But here’s where it gets complicated for modern relationship architects like James and me: these ancient programmes are still running in our contemporary brains, even when we consciously decide we want different outcomes.

Our brains can only process a limited amount of information simultaneously — what psychologist Daniel Kahneman famously described as our finite pool of mental resources. When we’re managing multiple relationships, each requiring emotional attunement, schedule co-ordination and conflict resolution, we quickly bump up against these cognitive limits. The research on polyamorous scheduling being “NP-hard” isn’t just an abstract mathematical curiosity — it reflects a genuine neurological constraint. Our brains, quite simply, aren’t designed to hold the complex emotional and logistical needs of numerous partners in perfect equilibrium.

This is why even the most ideologically committed egalitarian relationships tend to develop what the community calls “hierarchy creep”. Despite conscious intentions to treat all partners equally, practical hierarchies reassert themselves because our brains automatically look for shortcuts and defaults.

Consider these examples that emerge in even the most equality-focused relationships:

Proximity advantage: The partner you see every morning gets automatic priority in your mental processing. The relationship that shares your postcode receives more unconscious attention than the one requiring a two-hour commute.

Temporal privilege: The person who’s witnessed your daily routines for months or years develops what researchers call accumulated advantage — their needs feel more immediate and real because they’re more integrated into your cognitive map of everyday life.

Structural benefits: Legal marriage (in the United States) creates 1,138 federal rights and benefits that simply cannot be extended to multiple partners simultaneously. But couple privilege operates beyond legal structures: it’s the automatic invitation to family gatherings, the assumption that you’ll be the hospital emergency contact, the social recognition that makes your relationship “real” in ways that newer connections aren’t yet.

Decision-making defaults: Even in explicitly non-hierarchical polyamorous relationships, what Marianna Zelichenko documented in her candid essay “The Myth of Non-Hierarchical Polyamory” emerges: established couples making decisions about moving house without consulting newer partners, holiday plans defaulting to longest-standing relationships, and financial choices that benefit cohabiting partners while inadvertently excluding others.

This pattern extends far beyond polyamory into every corner of human connection:

• The friend who lives closer gets more visits than the one who doesn’t, not because you love them more, but because proximity creates practical advantage.

• The family member who texts gets more attention than the one who calls, not due to conscious preference, but because texts feel less intrusive.

• The child who struggles academically receives more parental focus than the one who thrives, not from favouritism, but because immediate needs demand immediate responses.

• The colleague who sits nearby gets more informal collaboration than the remote worker.

• The contact saved with both first and surname in your phone feels more “official” than those listed by first name only.

What makes hierarchy creep particularly insidious is its invisibility to those benefiting from it. The nesting partners making holiday plans together aren’t consciously excluding others — they’re simply following the path of least resistance.

This accumulated temporal advantage explains why James’s request felt so jarring. When he asked me to give Sarah “equal rights from the start,” he wasn’t just asking me to overcome personal jealousy or relationship insecurity. He was asking me to override millions of years of evolutionary programming that prioritises established bonds over novel ones. My brain had already created a detailed file for James — his emotional patterns, his needs, his place in my daily mental landscape. Sarah, after one evening, had the beginnings of a line drawing.

The neuroscience suggests this kind of cognitive override is extraordinarily difficult, requiring constant conscious effort and mental resources that quickly become exhausted. It’s like asking someone to breathe manually instead of automatically — technically possible, but cognitively expensive and ultimately unsustainable.

This doesn’t mean egalitarian relationships are impossible — but it does explain why they’re so much harder than they initially appear, and why even the most committed practitioners often find themselves reverting to familiar hierarchical patterns despite their best intentions. Our brains create rankings not out of malice, but out of efficiency.

The rare conditions where equality almost works

So when does relationship equality actually succeed? The research points to remarkably narrow circumstances: solo polyamory practitioners who start from scratch, avoid traditional relationship escalators entirely, and possess unusual amounts of privilege and flexibility.

Dr. Meg-John Barker, a relationship anarchist and psychology lecturer, documents successful cases like Mel Cassidy, who maintains multiple partners across different locations — “the boyfriend who lives nearby, the partner who’s a few hours away on Vancouver Island, the man in the U.S. who feels most like a soulmate” — while living with her best friend and ex-lover as her platonic life partner.

As one successful relationship anarchist explains:

Through solo polyamory, I find safety and security in myself without needing a partner to provide that for me.

These individuals maintain separate households, independent finances, and consciously reject the progression from dating through cohabitation to marriage that creates structural hierarchy. Without shared mortgages, children, or cohabitation agreements, the computational complexity of equal scheduling drops dramatically.

As journalist Jason Parham reports, “People are sick of the rules of society. Monogamy has become the default. Straight cis gender patriarchy is the default,” driving a growing segment of millennials and Gen Z toward anti-hierarchical relationship structures.

Yet even optimal conditions face limitations. Consider my own situation with James — we both practice solo polyamory, maintain completely separate households and finances, and explicitly reject traditional relationship escalation. But we still struggled with his request for Sarah to receive “equal rights from the start.” The challenge wasn’t structural privilege — it was temporal privilege. Nine months of shared history had created accumulated attention advantages that resisted conscious equalisation efforts.

Even successful practitioners acknowledge:

A natural hierarchy can emerge based on whom I enjoy spending time with, what activities we enjoy, and the time we have available to spend together.

The successful practitioners share uncommon characteristics: significant financial independence, flexible careers, metropolitan locations with alternative communities, and — crucially — they start from positions of genuine independence rather than retrofitting existing coupled relationships.

But even success stories come with caveats. The community has gradually shifted toward “ethical hierarchy” — acknowledging that some differences between relationships are inevitable, whether due to duration, practical involvement or personal chemistry. The focus has moved from eliminating inequalities to discussing and consensually agreeing upon them.

What emerges is that relationship equality works best as an ongoing negotiation rather than a fixed state. It requires people who can override fundamental cognitive biases, sustain complex logistical arrangements indefinitely, and treat newer connections as equivalent to established ones — demands that are extraordinary for most humans.

For most people, ethical hierarchy represents a more sustainable approach: honouring the impulse toward fairness without requiring the rare conditions and capabilities that true non-hierarchy demands.

Designing for attention equity: Three CRD tools

Here’s what I’ve learned from watching people navigate the attention equality puzzle: the ones who seem most satisfied aren’t the ones who’ve cracked some perfect formula. They’re the ones who’ve given up trying to solve it permanently and instead gotten really good at adjusting as they go along.

It’s a bit like learning to ride a bicycle. You don’t achieve perfect balance once and then coast forever — you’re constantly making tiny corrections, leaning this way and that, responding to bumps in the road.

The tools that follow aren’t proven methods backed by decades of research. They’re experimental approaches I’ve developed by adapting CRD’s core principles — empathy mapping, intentional design, and iterative refinement — specifically for the thorny problem of attention equity. Think of them as prototypes designed to work with your brain’s natural hierarchy-making tendencies rather than against them.

They won’t solve the mathematics of finite attention. But they might help you navigate the inequalities more consciously, which turns out to be almost as good as solving them — and infinitely more achievable.

Tool 1: The VIP Check

What you’ll discover: The hidden rankings already operating in your relationships

What you’ll need: A large sheet of paper, different coloured pens, and about 90 minutes of honest reflection.

Step 1: Map your invisible hierarchies.
Draw four columns across your paper and label them:

• Time and History (who gets priority based on how long you’ve known them?)

• Practical Perks (who benefits from living closer, shared accounts, being your emergency contact?)

• Emotional Labour (who gets your best listening, your comfort, your celebration?)

• Mental Real Estate (who occupies more of your headspace?)

Step 2: List everyone who matters.
Write down every important relationship — romantic partners, close friends, family members, even your most demanding work colleague. Don’t edit yourself.

Step 3: Plot the advantages.
For each person, mark which advantages they receive in each column. Use dots, stars, whatever works — but be brutally honest. Your mum might get “practical perks” because she has keys to your house. Your closest friend might dominate “mental real estate” because you process everything with them first.

Step 4: Find the privilege patterns.
Circle the names that appear most frequently across columns. These are your unconscious VIPs — the relationships that have accumulated multiple advantages without you explicitly choosing to prioritise them.

What you’ll learn: You can’t eliminate these hierarchies (your brain needs shortcuts), but you can make them visible and decide which ones you want to keep, counterbalance or actively change.

Tool 2: The Bandwidth Check

What you’ll discover: Your personal capacity for managing multiple relationships

What you’ll need: One week of paying attention to your attention, plus a simple tracking method (phone notes work fine).

Step 1: Track your relationship bandwidth.
For one week, notice:

• How many relationship conversations/interactions can you handle before feeling drained?

• How easily do you switch between different people’s needs and communication styles?

• When you’re stressed, which relationships get your patience and which get your irritation?

• Do you need consistent contact with certain people, or are you comfortable with sporadic connection?

Step 2: Identify your overflow signals.
Notice what happens when you hit your limit:

• Do you withdraw completely or become snappish?

• Which relationships get deprioritised when you’re overwhelmed?

• What restores your capacity to engage fully again?

Step 3: Map your seasonal patterns.
Think back over the past year:

• When was your relationship bandwidth highest and lowest?

• What life circumstances (work deadlines, health issues, family drama) shrink your capacity?

• How long does it typically take you to recover your full engagement?

Step 4: Design your overflow protocol.
Write down:

• Early warning signs that you’re approaching your limit

• Which relationships can handle temporary reduced attention and which can’t

• Specific ways you’ll communicate when you need to scale back

• How you’ll make up for reduced attention periods

What you’ll learn: Instead of feeling guilty about your natural limits, you can work with them consciously and communicate about them clearly.

Tool 3: The Fairness Check

What you’ll discover: How to create ongoing fairness rather than perfect equality

What you’ll need: Monthly 30-minute conversations (solo or with partners) and a simple tracking method.

Step 1: The monthly attention audit (10 minutes)
Each month, ask yourself:

• Who got more of my attention than they expected?

• Who got less of my attention than they needed?

• Where did I notice unfair advantages playing out?

• What inequalities accumulated that I didn’t address?

Write down specific examples, not general feelings. “Zeke got three emergency calls while Zia got none”, rather than “I think I favoured Zeke.”

Step 2: The rebalancing conversation (15 minutes)
For any significant imbalances you identified:

• Acknowledge them explicitly: “I realise you had to adapt around my schedule four times this month while Zia had that flexibility built in.”

• Identify specific ways to address them: “Next month, I’d like to plan something special just for us to balance that out.”

• Ask what would feel fair: “What would help even things out from your perspective?”

Step 3: The recalibration planning (5 minutes)
Look ahead to next month:

• What circumstances might create natural advantages for some relationships?

• How will you proactively address predictable imbalances?

• What agreements need adjusting based on what you learned?

The key insight: Perfect mathematical equality is impossible, but conscious attention to fairness makes relationships feel more equitable even when they’re not perfectly equal.

How often: Monthly works for most people, but adjust based on how complex your relationship network is. Some people need weekly check-ins, others find quarterly sufficient.

What you’ll learn: Fairness is something you actively create through ongoing attention, not something you achieve once and maintain automatically.

The process, not the destination

Here’s the thing about these tools: they’re not meant to fix the attention problem forever. They’re meant to help you get better at managing it as you go along.

The ongoing calibration isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. The monthly check-ins and regular adjustments aren’t signs that you’re failing at equality — they’re signs that you’re succeeding at something more realistic.

What I find most freeing about this approach is how it takes the pressure off. You don’t have to be the person who treats everyone identically. You don’t need superhuman attention capacity or the ability to override millions of years of evolutionary wiring. You just need to be conscious about your choices and willing to keep the conversation going.

When you stop trying to achieve perfect equality and start aiming for transparent inequality instead, something interesting happens. People often feel more fairly treated even when they’re not getting identical treatment. Turns out, being seen and acknowledged in your specific circumstances feels better than being treated exactly the same as everyone else.

That’s not just more realistic than perfect equality — for many people, it’s actually more satisfying.

What this reveals about love

If you’ve made it this far through our exploration of attention hierarchies, brain science and relationship mathematics, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with love itself.

Love, as it turns out, might be infinite — but attention decidedly is not. We can love countless people deeply and simultaneously without that love diminishing, but we cannot give our attention to countless people simultaneously without it becoming impossibly thin. This distinction between love and logistics explains why even the most committed relationship anarchists find themselves bumping up against practical limitations that have nothing to do with the size of their hearts.

The computer scientists who proved that polyamorous scheduling is “NP-hard” weren’t making a statement about the impossibility of loving multiple people. They were making a statement about the impossibility of perfectly managing finite resources across infinite combinations. The love isn’t the problem — the calendar is.

This reveals something uncomfortable but ultimately liberating about human relationships: the hierarchies we create aren’t evidence of limited love capacity, but evidence of limited everything-else capacity. When your brain automatically prioritises the partner who lives closer, that’s not your heart choosing favourites — that’s your cognitive processing system making efficient decisions about resource allocation.

Perhaps the most radical insight isn’t that we should eliminate all hierarchies, but that we should be honest about the ones that inevitably emerge. There’s something deeply compassionate about acknowledging that the friend who supported you through your divorce will always occupy different mental real estate than someone you met last week, regardless of your philosophical commitments to equality.

The vision of treating all relationships with perfect equity remains beautiful and worth striving toward. But the research suggests that those who come closest to achieving it aren’t the ones who deny their limitations — they’re the ones who work skillfully within them. They’ve made peace with the fact that conscious inequality might be more honest, and ultimately more satisfying, than the unconscious hierarchies most of us operate without ever examining.

What we’re left with is a different kind of radical vision: relationships designed not around the impossible mathematics of perfect fairness, but around the very human practice of making our inevitable unfairness visible, negotiable and kind. That’s not a compromise with our highest ideals about love — it might just be the most loving approach of all.

What do you think?

I’m curious about your own attention audit experience. If you tried the exercise earlier — ranking everyone and everything that demands your attention — what surprised you most? Did you discover gaps between your stated values and where your time actually goes?

Perhaps more uncomfortably: when you look at the hidden hierarchies operating in your relationships, which ones feel fair and which feel accidental? Have you ever been the person who benefits from structural advantages (the partner who lives closer, the friend whose schedule gets checked first), or have you found yourself consistently working around others’ inherited priorities?

The tools in this piece aren’t meant to solve the mathematics of finite attention — they’re meant to help you navigate the inequalities more consciously. But I’m curious whether this approach resonates with how you think about fairness in relationships. Does the idea of “ethical hierarchy” feel like a cop-out, or does it feel more honest than pretending perfect equality is achievable?

If you’re someone who’s tried to implement egalitarian relationships — whether polyamorous, friendship-based, or even in how you distribute attention among family members — what worked? What didn’t? Where did you find yourself reverting to unconscious patterns despite your best intentions?

I’d love to hear whether these ideas challenge how you think about love, attention and what we owe each other. Drop a comment, share this with someone who might find it thought-provoking, or bring it into your next difficult conversation about time and priorities. After all, if attention is truly our most finite resource, shouldn’t we be more conscious about how we allocate it?

Leave a comment

Additional reading

Wired, “Meet the ‘Relationship Anarchists’ Ditching Romantic Norms — 9 June 2025 — From Anarchist Agency

Conscious Relationship Design

Intentionally designing and co-creating relationships to nurture freedom, autonomy, security and growth. ✨ https://conscious-relationship-design.com/

By Julie Harris

This work is a piece from my current writing project on Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to read along and follow more, hit the “subscribe” button to get a notification when I publish new articles on this topic.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Leave a comment

Did you know 57% of women aged 50–70 do not want a relationship? This figure stands in stark contrast to what society might expect and the persistent stereotype of the “lonely older woman”. Do you know what else? These women aren’t settling or giving up — they’re consciously choosing a different path.

This finding comes from a comprehensive German study by Rheingold Institute, where “relationship” appears to refer to traditional committed romantic partnerships with conventional expectations of cohabitation, shared finances and integrated social lives. Importantly, this doesn’t necessarily mean these women reject all forms of connection or companionship — rather, they’re stepping away from the traditional relationship escalator that society has long prescribed.

The café was buzzing quietly on a late afternoon in Paris. Celine, 52, swirled her glass of red wine and laughed as she declared, “Now, I can do exactly what I want, when I want.” Newly divorced after 25 years of marriage, she spoke not of loneliness but of liberation. Instead of rushing to “get back out there,” Celine has crafted an unconventional romantic life: she maintains a loving relationship with a long-time friend–turned–companion, but they live apart on purpose. They spend weekends travelling together, yet each returns to their own flat come Monday. No shared bank accounts, no curfews, no compromises on personal routines.

For Celine and a growing number of women and nonbinary people in their 40s and 50s, the script of love and partnership has flipped. “Faire ce qu’on veut, quand on veut” — doing what you want, when you want — has become their motto, replacing the old mantra of sacrifice. Far from the tired trope of the “desperate middle-aged singleton,” Celine’s story is one of autonomy, joy, and a conscious redesign of what love looks like in midlife. And she’s far from alone.

Subscribe now

Breaking old moulds: What they’re doing differently in love and relationships

Midlife women and nonbinary individuals (from Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, and younger Boomers, born between 1955 and 1964) are increasingly breaking the old moulds of romance and commitment. Their relationships often look very different from the traditional path of meet→marry→merge lives. Here are some of the notable ways this cohort is redefining love.

Choosing independence over marriage

Many are opting not to remarry or partner up at all after a divorce or loss, instead embracing single life as a valid, fulfilling choice. As mentioned above, 57% of single women aged 50–70 in one survey said they do not want a relationship (significantly more than men in this age bracket [46%]). An analysis by a German institute dubbed this the rise of a “Me Now” generation — women fiercely protecting newfound freedom and “not wanting to fall back into the old role” of self-sacrificing wife.

It’s increasingly common (and socially acceptable) for a 45- or 55-year-old woman to simply opt out of coupledom, rather than “settling” again.

As British researcher Paul Dolan notes, the happiest and healthiest population subgroup is, in fact, unmarried, childless women. Traditional markers of success like a husband or kids “no longer apply” to their happiness. These women are proving that a life of one’s own — rich with friends, passions, and perhaps the occasional lover — can be deeply rewarding.

Living apart together (LAT)

Those who do pursue new relationships are often doing so on their own terms. One notable trend is “living apart together”. Instead of merging households, committed partners maintain separate homes and finances, carving out space for personal autonomy. For example, in the United Kingdom, a recent study found that older couples who choose to live apart experience mental well-being as high as married couples (and higher than lone singles), “while avoiding the friction of close quarters”.

Take Andy, 66, and Leigh, 68, who have been together 14 years but still live an hour apart:

“I can really love this person… but I no longer am driven by the need to do the conventional relationship and all that comes with it, like being a carer or sharing finances,” one of them explains.

They relish their Friday-to-Sunday weekends together and then return to their own routines midweek. “We don’t have to deal with a lot of the domestic argy-bargy,” Andy says, referring to petty household squabbles that cohabiting couples face. Their commitment is “not based on financial or real estate… or children,” Leigh adds, “[it’s] purely because we enjoy each other’s company”. This kind of arrangement, once rare, is becoming more popular among midlife and older couples who value both intimacy and independence.

Redefining commitment and monogamy

Many midlife women and non-binary individuals are also broadening the definitions of partnership beyond the monogamous nuclear norm. Some are exploring ethical non-monogamy, open marriages, or polyamorous relationships for the first time in midlife.

Kathy Labriola, author of Polyamorous Elders, notes a “huge growth in heterosexual women becoming polyamorous” in later life — often women who were previously strictly monogamous now connecting with partners who may already be married or cohabiting with someone else. Essentially, these women are saying “why not?” to arrangements that would have been unthinkable in their 20s. For them, polyamory provides companionship and excitement without the constraints of a full-time partnership — “men only as outpatients, no longer as inpatients,” as one German interviewee quipped.

Even those remaining monogamous are finding ways to refresh the script: some midlife couples negotiate flexible roles or explicitly agree to “reset” their marriage with new rules (for instance, scheduling regular personal retreats or renegotiating sexual expectations). The through-line is intentional choice. These individuals are no longer following the default relationship rules; they’re co-creating new ones.

Late-blooming queer relationships

Another striking way love is being reimagined is through midlife shifts in sexual orientation or gender identity. A number of women in their 40s and 50s — after years of heterosexual marriage — are coming out as queer and building relationships with other women (or with partners of new genders).

This isn’t just anecdotal; demographers have found that more than half of women in their 50s who are in same-sex relationships were previously married to men. High-profile examples include actress Meredith Baxter, who at 62 famously came out as a lesbian after three marriages to men. She and many others illustrate a phenomenon sometimes dubbed the “late-blooming lesbian” or “gay-and-gray” generation.

These women often describe finally prioritising their authentic desires over social expectations. Similarly, some people who come out as nonbinary or gender-nonconforming in midlife are restructuring their relationships in tandem — for example, shifting a hetero marriage into a queer partnership, or embracing non-traditional family structures that align with their true selves. The common thread is courage: it takes guts to upend your relationship paradigm at 45 or 50, but many are doing just that, driven by a newfound sense of self.

Putting autonomy first

Whether single, coupled, or “something in between,” women and nonbinary folks in this age group are prioritising personal autonomy and growth like never before. They’re unwilling to “shrink to fit” into roles. Passion projects, careers, friendships, and self-care aren’t taking a backseat to a partner’s needs; they’re riding shotgun.

In practical terms, this can mean anything from separate bank accounts and bedrooms to candid conversations about mental health, sex, and life goals. It can mean not compromising on relocating for a spouse’s job, or insisting on regular “me time” without guilt.

Psychologists note that by one’s 40s, identity and self-confidence tend to be stronger — people know what they want (and what they won’t tolerate). As Dr. Elisabeth Shaw, a relationship expert, observes, “people may have two or more significant relationships across the lifespan”, and there’s greater acceptance that a partnership might evolve or end if it stops serving both individuals. Midlife adults thus feel freer to design relationships that support their individual growth, not stifle it. The old notion of becoming “half of a whole” has given way to a desire to be “whole on my own, and in a relationship.”

Importantly, these changes aren’t confined to one culture or orientation. We see them across heterosexual and LGBTQI+ contexts, in the United States and abroad.

In France, for example, only about 57% of people born in 1965 were still married by age 50, compared to 75% in earlier generations — reflecting a diversification of life paths. And French women over 50 are far less likely than men to want to “re-form” a union; many simply don’t see the need.

In the United Kingdom, commentators have noted that Gen X women today talk openly about sex and refuse to fade into asexual “auntie” roles.

In fact, one analysis found Gen X women are reporting more active sex lives than both their Boomer parents and Millennial daughters — suggesting that freedom and experience might be a potent combination.

The bottom line is that this generation, entering its 40s and 50s, is collectively shaking up the landscape of love, sex, and partnership.

Why are they doing things differently?

Several interwoven factors explain why midlife women and nonbinary individuals are approaching relationships in bold new ways. It’s a perfect storm of generational mindset, cultural shifts and personal experience.

They’re a product of the sexual revolution and feminism

The 40s-and-50s cohort today came of age in the late 20th century, in the wake of women’s liberation, no-fault divorce laws and the sexual revolution.

As Elisabeth Shaw notes, since the 1970s, there’s been a “greater acceptance that relationships can break down,” and society no longer expects one unchanging marriage for life.

Many of these individuals saw their mothers fight for (or struggle without) autonomy; they grew up with Charlie’s Angels, punk rock, and “you can have it all” career messaging. Culturally, they were primed to question traditional roles. By the time they hit midlife, they have internalised the idea that a woman doesn’t need a husband for social or financial survival — she can support herself, and indeed many have been doing so.

This economic independence is crucial: it liberates choices. A woman with her own income and assets can leave an unhappy marriage at 45 without fear of destitution. Likewise, a nonbinary person can come out and live authentically, knowing they aren’t trapped by dependence on an intolerant spouse or employer.

In short, freedom (both sexual and financial) has been a defining value for this generation from the start, and now they are finally in a position to claim it in their personal lives.

Experience has bred self-knowledge

By midlife, people often carry a lot of relationship experience — marriages, breakups, raising children, caring for relatives, maybe therapy or coaching. All those chapters have taught them what works for them and what doesn’t.

Many women in this age group spent decades putting others first (children, husbands, ageing parents); now, an inner voice is saying it’s their turn to thrive. Past relationships may have shown them patterns they refuse to repeat.

For instance, Celine realised she often “lost” herself in her marriage, constantly compromising. She and others like her are determined not to make that mistake again. If that means remaining single or setting firmer boundaries, so be it.

There’s also a psychological shift that tends to occur around midlife: experts talk about individuation and reassessment in the early 40s — sometimes called a “midlife transition.” It’s when many ask: Who am I, and what do I really want for the rest of my life? For a lot of women and LGBTQI+ folks, the answer isn’t “a white picket fence and 2.5 kids” — especially if they already did that in their 20s and 30s. Instead, they might crave adventure, personal growth, or making up for lost time.

That sentiment — the intoxicating taste of freedom — is a huge motivator behind these new relationship choices.

Changing social norms and visibility

Another driver is the broader social climate. It’s simply more acceptable today to deviate from the heteronormative, monogamous script. Being a never-married woman at 50, or a divorced woman who chooses to live alone with her art and her dogs, or a 55-year-old nonbinary person who has two queer partners — these would have been harshly judged a generation ago. Now they’re increasingly visible and normalised. Media, literature, and pop culture have started to celebrate the idea that life doesn’t end at 40 — in fact, it might just begin.

For example, a recent New York Times feature titled “Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex” celebrates the sexual vibrancy and confidence of Gen X women, debunking the notion that ageing diminishes passion and intimacy.

Instead of being pitied, single women over 50 are often portrayed as empowered (think of characters like Samantha in Sex and the City hitting her stride in her 50s). Likewise, LGBTQI+ representation has exploded; it’s easier now for a 50-year-old questioning their sexuality to find stories of others who came out late and thrived.

There are support groups, memoirs, YouTube channels — a whole community saying “it’s never too late to be you.” Social media also plays a role: these women and nonbinary folks can connect across continents, reinforcing each other’s choices. A widow in London chatting on a forum with a divorcee in Sydney might both encourage each other not to settle for less than they deserve. This global conversation pushes norms forward.

Unmet needs and new frontiers

Many midlife relationship shake-ups are driven by the stark realisation of unmet needs. Take the rise in late-in-life lesbian and bisexual awakenings — often, these women were in decent heterosexual marriages, yet something was missing.

Studies on female sexuality (like those by psychologist Lisa Diamond and author Wednesday Martin) suggest women’s desires can be more fluid and responsive to context. The routine of a long marriage can dampen women’s sexual interest more than men’s, not because “women like sex less,” but because they may crave novelty and variety for desire to thrive.

In midlife, faced with potentially decades more to live, a woman might think: Why should I settle for a tepid status quo? This drive to feel alive and true to oneself is powerful. Some address it by opening their marriage or seeking new partners; others by leaving an unsatisfying situation entirely.

Nonbinary and trans individuals in midlife often speak of a similar urgency — a sense that time is too precious to continue living inauthentically, even if that means disrupting established relationships. Historical context matters here as well: the cohort currently in their 50s grew up in much less LGBTQI-accepting times. Many did what was expected (marrying opposite-sex partners) because they didn’t feel coming out was an option in their youth.

A UCLA analysis found 36% of women in their 40s with female partners had been previously married to men, and that jumps to over 50% for lesbians in their 50s.

Now that society has shifted, those who might have suppressed their true orientation are seizing the chance to finally fulfil those needs. The same goes for needs around independence, creativity, or any other aspect of life — if a relationship doesn’t accommodate them, these individuals are more likely to change the relationship than to squelch the need.

Longer, healthier lives

Finally, a practical but important reason: people are living longer and healthier. A 50-year-old today can easily have 30–40 more years ahead. That changes the calculus. In the past, someone might think “I’m 50, I’ll just stick it out in this marriage until the end.” Now, 50 can be a mid-point or even a second youth. There’s a sense of a whole second adulthood to be designed.

Women in particular often experience a renaissance after menopause — no longer bound by fertility concerns or young childrearing, many report a surge in personal growth, career focus or sexual exploration. It’s as if a weight lifts and they say, what do I want to do with myself? For nonbinary and trans folks, access to better healthcare and community in midlife also opens doors to change later in life that previously might have felt closed.

All in all, improved longevity and vitality give people the confidence to take risks in reimagining their relationships — they’re planning for decades of fulfilment, not just quietly fading into grandma/grandpa status. As one study put it, the 50+ generation is “much more free and uncompromising” in love than previous generations at that age. They believe it’s not only possible but probable to have multiple chapters of love in a lifetime.

Is it working?

With all these radical changes, a reasonable question is: Are people actually happier this way? The answer, so far, seems to be cautiously optimistic. While every individual’s story is different, emerging research suggests that these new approaches to midlife love are yielding positive outcomes on the whole.

From a happiness and health perspective, unmarried women in midlife are doing remarkably well. Paul Dolan’s analysis found that middle-aged married women had a higher risk of physical and mental conditions than their single counterparts. Women who never married or had kids turned out to be the healthiest and happiest subgroup of all. This flips the long-held assumption that marriage is a universal good for everyone. (Interestingly, the same research found marriage benefits men more — married men tend to live longer and be happier than single men, whereas for women it’s often the opposite.)

Single women in their 50s report high levels of contentment with their status. A French study by INED found that by ages 50–59, only 24% of women (versus 37% of men) were even interested in forming a new romantic union. As Esther and Charlotte, both in their early 50s and newly single, said, finding freedom from others’ expectations was a “revelation.”

For those forging new kinds of partnerships, the data is also encouraging. Studies out of the United Kingdom found that older adults in LAT arrangements enjoy mental well-being on par with married peers. These couples report high relationship satisfaction and often a kind of sustained “dating spark” since time together is special, not routine.

Similarly, a German survey noted that overall, people over 50 who are in relationships are largely happy with their partners — only 8% reported being dissatisfied — suggesting that those who do partner up later in life are doing so in ways that work for them.

There’s even evidence that sexual satisfaction can improve: one UK national survey found that many women in midlife, freed from the fear of pregnancy and kids underfoot, experience a new boost in sexual confidence and desire. Gen X women have been humorously dubbed the only generation “immune” to the so-called sex recession among younger people.

Qualitatively, therapists observe that midlife clients who consciously redefine their relationships often report reduced stress and increased self-esteem. Instead of feeling trapped in a role, they feel authentic.

Challenges remain — dating apps can be frustrating, and some newly single women encounter ageism or loneliness. But many say that even when they’re alone, it’s a peaceful alone rather than the lonely-in-a-crowd feeling of an unhappy marriage. As one woman put it, “I shed tears when a date goes wrong, sure. But I shed far more in the years when I was married and miserable.”

Of course, not every experiment works perfectly. The beauty of this new paradigm is its flexibility. Because these women and nonbinary folks have given themselves permission to do things differently, they also give themselves permission to pivot as needed. They’re more likely to seek therapy, read books or use frameworks to adjust course rather than grin and bear it in silence.

All signs indicate that a conscious, self-determined approach to love in midlife is at least as successful as the traditional approach — and by many measures, more so. The key seems to be that when individuals feel they have agency and can be true to themselves, their relationships (including the relationship with oneself) tend to flourish.

Conscious Relationship Design: A new blueprint for love

One concept gaining traction among those seeking to reshape their relationships is Conscious Relationship Design (CRD). This approach treats relationships as something we can intentionally design rather than passively fall into. CRD applies principles from design thinking — like empathy, creativity and iterative improvement — to our personal relationships. Instead of relying on default assumptions, partners co-create a customised relationship that works for them, regularly revisiting and revising those agreements as life evolves.

Imagine two people drafting a blueprint for how they want to be together — that’s CRD in action. It brings a sense of deliberate design to love, inspired by human-centred methodologies common in other fields.

In practice, CRD encourages couples (or polycules, or any relational unit) to articulate their desires and needs openly, to listen with empathy, and to be creative in finding solutions. Tools like the “Empathy Canvas” help map out each person’s feelings and fears, while techniques like “brainwriting” ensure all voices are heard. The goal is to surface assumptions and then design intentional agreements.

Crucially, CRD is iterative. Partners check in regularly — perhaps weekly with quick reflections, quarterly reviews, or annual “relationship summits” — to discuss what’s working and what might need adjustment. This prevents resentments from festering and allows the relationship to adapt to changes rather than break under pressure.

How does CRD differ from older models? Traditional marriage often comes with a pre-loaded template: “till death do us part,” implied sexual exclusivity, cohabitation, joint finances — a whole package defined by societal norms. CRD blows this open, treating these as options rather than requirements. A couple might choose some traditional elements and discard others based on what helps them thrive.

Another difference is that older relationship advice was often prescriptive, whereas CRD is process-oriented. It doesn’t give one-size-fits-all answers; it gives a framework to find your answers. It’s about designing for thriving, not just fixing problems.

Importantly, CRD isn’t just for romantic relationships. The design principles can be applied to friendships, family dynamics, even work relationships. But it has particular resonance for those questioning inherited relationship scripts.

CRD invites us to imagine “a world where every relationship is consciously designed with intention and care,” where traditional roles and expectations are replaced with possibilities that honour autonomy, growth, and intimacy for everyone involved.

Why CRD resonates with women and non-binary folks in their 40s–50s

It’s no coincidence that Conscious Relationship Design is catching on “like a quirky cult trend among an eclectic band of early adopters”. These early adopters often include the very demographic we’ve been discussing: independent-minded Gen X women, queer folks reimagining family and nonbinary people creating relationship models outside gender norms. Here’s why CRD is striking a chord with them:

• It aligns with their values of autonomy and equality: CRD is built on the values of independence and personal growth. It explicitly nurtures freedom within relationships rather than treating freedom as something sacrificed when you commit. For those who have felt unseen or overruled in traditional setups, CRD offers a more equitable path. No more silent resentments about who does the dishes or whose career takes priority — you design those choices together, consciously.

• It embraces diverse relationship forms: CRD works for everyone regardless of whether you’re monogamous, polyamorous, straight, gay, nonbinary, or anything else — because it starts with listening and tailoring. This inclusivity makes it very attractive to those who don’t see themselves in mainstream relationship advice. CRD offers tools to navigate uncharted relationship territory without relying on off-the-shelf assumptions, providing a compass for journeys into new forms of connection.

• It’s intellectually engaging: Let’s not underestimate the appeal of CRD’s intellectual approach for this demographic. The framework of iterative design, structured tools and strategic thinking resonates with Gen X/Y professionals accustomed to problem solving. Rather than seeing a relationship that ended as a “failure”, they can view it as a prototype that informed their next design. This paradigm shift is empowering and appeals to their curious, pattern-seeking mindsets. Many midlife women have had substantial careers; CRD allows them to bring those planning and leadership skills into their personal lives, treating relationships as joint ventures worthy of strategic attention.

• It addresses past pain points: Many CRD practices directly counter common relationship problems this demographic has experienced. Poor communication torpedoed many prior relationships; CRD emphasises radical open communication with structured approaches like scheduled check-ins. Feeling stifled was another common pain; CRD explicitly asks each person to voice their individual dreams and how the relationship can accommodate them. For someone like Celine, who felt she “shrank” in her first marriage, CRD ensures she never loses herself again.

• Its iterative nature is forgiving: Life in your 40s and 50s changes rapidly — kids leave home, parents fall ill, careers pivot. CRD builds in flexibility for these twists. You’re not locked into one rigid contract; you’re agreeing to evolve together. In traditional vows, changing your mind means breaking a promise. In CRD, changing needs are expected and the promise is to handle them together consciously. This takes immense pressure off and provides reassurance for those carrying fears from past relationship disappointments.

At its heart, CRD resonates because it embodies what they’re already doing: questioning conventions, prioritising authenticity and being intentional about who and how they love. It gives language and methodology to what was previously intuitive, validating their desire to rewrite the rules.

Real stories of redefined relationships

Let’s bring these ideas to life with a few real-world snapshots of women (and others) in their 40s–50s who are redefining love on their terms. Their stories illustrate the diverse paths and how conscious design plays a role.

Case Study 1: Living apart, loving together

Andy and Leigh’s Story

Andy, 66, and her partner Leigh, 68, live in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. They’ve been in a committed relationship for 14 years, yet they’ve never married and never moved in together. By choice, they practice a living-apart-together arrangement: Andy stays in the home she’s had for nearly four decades, while Leigh has his own place about an hour’s drive away. They typically spend weekends together (Fridays through Sundays at Andy’s place), and vacation together regularly, but Monday through Thursday they lead independent lives.

“We can afford to live separately and still enjoy our lifestyles,” Andy says, noting that both value their routines and local friends.

This setup wasn’t due to conflict — in fact, they adore each other. It was a conscious decision born from experience. Leigh, who is divorced, reflects that after his marriage ended, “I wanted my own space.” A keen fisherman, he likes the freedom to “pack up on a whim and go away, without negotiation or compromise”, something he couldn’t easily do in marriage.

Andy, for her part, never married and has a strong sense of self; she didn’t want to surrender her home or habits just to conform to expectations. “I just appreciate my own space,” she says simply.

Designing independence within commitment

Over the years, they have fine-tuned their arrangement: Fridays at Andy’s are sacred couple time, but Saturday mornings, she might go to yoga while he putters around — no hard feelings, because autonomy is baked in. They’ve nursed each other through surgeries (staying over when needed) and spend holidays with each other’s families, so there’s no lack of support or intimacy.

“Our commitment is not based on financial [ties] or children… [It’s] purely because we enjoy each other’s company,” Leigh explains, with Andy nodding.

The benefits of conscious separation

Both say the LAT lifestyle has kept their bond strong and free of the resentments they saw in more traditional marriages. They intentionally revisit the cohabitation question now and then — “we sometimes discuss the idea of moving in together,” Andy notes — but each time, they conclude that what they have is working beautifully.

Their story exemplifies how midlife couples are designing commitment à la carte: taking what they love (companionship, romance) and leaving what they don’t (merged households and constant togetherness). It’s a far cry from their parents’ generation, yet for them, it feels just right.

Case Study 2: Late-blooming and unapologetic

Meena’s Second Act

Meena was 49 and the mother of two grown children when she did something she once thought impossible: she came out as bisexual and started a relationship with a woman. Having married her high school sweetheart and stayed with him for nearly 30 years, Meena’s entire identity had been wrapped up in being a “good wife and mom.” But as the kids left home and her marriage amicably ended (they had simply grown apart), Meena finally allowed herself to explore feelings she had suppressed since youth.

“It was like waking up,” she says of falling in love with her now-partner, Alex. Navigating a queer relationship in midlife came with challenges — chiefly, deciding how to “redesign” her life post-divorce.

Crafting a unique partnership

Meena and Alex, also divorced (from a previous wife), took a conscious design approach from the start. Both had ex-spouses and kids in the picture, and they lived in different cities in the United Kingdom. Rather than follow any predetermined path, they talked openly about everything. Would they move in together or maintain two homes? What did commitment mean to them, since a legal marriage might not be in the cards? How would they integrate their families, if at all?

They ended up crafting a unique arrangement: Meena spends 3 weeks of each month in London with Alex, then 1 week back in Birmingham where she co-parents her youngest (university-aged) and checks in on her ex-mother-in-law whom she’s remained close with. Alex sometimes travels with her, but often uses that week apart for solo projects. They’ve agreed not to legally marry or merge finances; both are financially independent and prefer to keep it that way. However, they did hold a private commitment ceremony by a lake with close friends — “just to celebrate us,” as Meena says.

Evolution, not reinvention

The way Meena and Alex run their partnership might look unusual, but it works brilliantly for them and they designed it that way. Meena is quick to add that coming out later in life was not a failure of her first marriage: “I loved my husband — that was real. And this is real too. Life is fluid.”

Her story echoes that of countless women discovering new facets of love in midlife. Rather than seeing it as living a “lie” then finding “truth,” Meena frames it as evolution. And conscious relationship design has been key to making her new relationship thrive without erasing her past. She and Alex continue to adjust their setup as needed (recently, they added a shared calendar app to co-ordinate cross-city logistics — a mundane but helpful design tweak).

The result? At 53, Meena says she’s “never felt more alive or more myself.”

Case Study 3: Solo and satisfied

Esther’s liberation

Esther, 50, is single — and she intends to keep it that way, at least for now. After raising two children and weathering a difficult divorce in her 40s, Esther moved from a rural town to a city in France and set up a cozy one-bedroom flat filled with books, plants and her art supplies.

“I answer to no one now, and it’s wonderful,” she says with a grin.

In her marriage, Esther often felt stifled; her husband was not a bad man, but he expected a traditional wife who cooked, cleaned and sacrificed her career ambitions. Esther did so for years, but once the marriage ended, she vowed never to lose herself like that again.

Friends and family were initially full of well-meaning questions: “Do you think you’ll remarry? Aren’t you lonely? Have you tried dating apps?” Esther’s answer was a confident “non” — she wasn’t interested in looking for another husband. In fact, she felt relieved to be on her own.

As we’ve seen, this sentiment turns out to be extremely common. One study found that 57% of female singles in the 50 to 70 age group do not want a relationship (compared to about 46% of men). Many of these women, like Esther, report feeling “liberated from the obligation” to couple up; they enjoy the freedom to do what they want, when they want.

Designing a rich single life

Esther’s daily life is rich: she joined a photography class (something her partner did not share an interest in), she meets friends for long lunches, and she has taken up hiking on weekends.

Does she date? “Very occasionally,” she admits with a hint of amusement. “I might have a coffee with a gentleman acquaintance or enjoy a museum exhibition with someone interesting.” But these are fleeting interactions rather than relationships — she maintains strict boundaries around her independence and emotional investment. She doesn’t consider these casual encounters to be “relationships” in any traditional sense; they’re more akin to pleasant social interludes that complement, rather than define, her life.

She has consciously designed her social world to include occasional male companionship without entangling commitments. And she’s upfront with any men she meets that she’s not looking to marry or even to cohabit; some run for the hills, but others, often divorced men her age who also don’t want to remarry, appreciate the honesty.

Esther’s design for now is a deliberately partner-free primary life, focusing on herself. She’s left open the possibility that this could change — “if I meet someone who truly adds value to my life and respects my independence; never say never,” she laughs. But the crucial thing is, it’s her choice. Esther no longer feels like half a person seeking another half; she feels whole.

Interestingly, she’s noticed her health and stress levels have improved over the last two years. She sleeps better, exercises more and feels ten years younger. Her coupled friends sometimes express envy that she has no in-laws to visit, no compromises on how to spend her money or decorate her home.

“There are days I feel lonely,” Esther acknowledges, “but then I remind myself it’s a different, quieter loneliness — not the loneliness of being unseen in a marriage.” For her, that distinction makes all the difference.

The freedom of conscious singlehood

Esther’s story underlines that consciously choosing singlehood can be as much an act of relationship design as crafting a partnership. She designed a life where she is at the centre, and she’s flourishing within it.

Case Study 4: Embracing complete autonomy

Margaret’s contentment

Margaret, 56, represents perhaps the purest embodiment of that 57% statistic. After a 15-year marriage and a subsequent 8-year partnership, both of which ended amicably, Margaret made a deliberate decision 5 years ago: no more romantic or sexual relationships of any kind.

“I realised I was constantly adjusting myself to accommodate another person’s needs,” she explains from her book-lined study in Edinburgh. “Even in my best relationships, there was always this implicit expectation that we would prioritise the partnership above individual desires.”

Now, Margaret has constructed a life that revolves entirely around her passions and chosen connections. She has a close circle of friends, volunteers teaching literacy to new immigrants, tends to her allotment garden, and travels solo whenever the mood strikes her. Unlike Esther, she doesn’t even maintain casual dates or flirtations.

“People often assume I’m either heartbroken or haven’t found the right person,” she says with a laugh. “The truth is, I’ve found myself, and that’s quite enough.”

The freedom of complete relationship abstinence

Margaret’s robust social life contradicts stereotypes about solitary women. Her weekends are often fuller than those of her coupled friends — with community events, hiking groups, and dinners with her diverse friend circle. She maintains deep emotional intimacy through her friendships, particularly with two other women who have similarly opted out of the dating market.

“We support each other through illness, celebrate achievements, and share our innermost thoughts,” she explains. “I get everything I need emotionally from these connections, without the complications that romantic relationships introduced to my life.”

While Margaret acknowledges this path isn’t for everyone, she represents an important and growing demographic: women who have consciously designed lives completely independent of romantic partnership, finding fulfilment in autonomous self-determination and carefully chosen non-romantic bonds.

These diverse stories — from London to Los Angeles to Lagos — showcase a generation carving out new ways to love and live. Whether through innovative partnerships like Andy and Leigh’s, bold late-in-life transformations like Meena’s, empowered singlehood like Esther’s, or Margaret’s complete embrace of non-romantic fulfilment, the common thread is intentionality. Each person took stock of their life in midstream and said, let’s do this differently, then proceeded to design that difference into reality.

In many cases, they are using tools and mindsets akin to Conscious Relationship Design, even if they haven’t formally heard of it, simply by following the logic of what works best for them and their loved ones. They are, in effect, the architects of a new cultural norm — one where midlife and beyond is not a time of settling or social invisibility, but a time of growth, reinvention and relational freedom.

The spectrum of relationship rejection

The diverse stories we’ve explored — from Andy and Leigh’s LAT arrangement to Margaret’s complete abstention from romantic entanglements — highlight an important nuance in how we understand the statistic that 57% of women aged 50–70 “don’t want a relationship”.

This doesn’t represent a monolithic rejection of human connection. Rather, it encompasses a spectrum of choices:

• Some reject traditional relationship structures but embrace alternative designs (like LAT arrangements).

• Some step away from primary partnerships but maintain secondary or casual connections.

• Some, like Margaret, choose to channel their emotional and social energies entirely into non-romantic bonds.

What unites these varied approaches is conscious choice. These women aren’t “settling” for less — they’re actively designing lives that prioritise their autonomy, well-being and authentic desires over societal expectations.

The language we use around relationships often fails to capture this nuance. Our binary framing of “single” versus “in a relationship” obscures the rich diversity of connection patterns that exist, particularly among midlife women who have accumulated the wisdom to know exactly what they want — and don’t want — in their lives.

Perhaps what we’re witnessing isn’t women rejecting connection itself, but rather rejecting prescribed, constrained forms of connection that no longer serve their older selves. They’re pioneers creating new vocabularies and templates for how humans might relate to one another beyond the midpoint of life.

What do you think?

How does all of this resonate with you? If you’re in your 40s, 50s, or beyond, have you witnessed — or even embraced — this bold redefinition of relationships? Perhaps you’ve challenged the old rules yourself, choosing to remain happily single or forming an unconventional partnership that truly honours your autonomy. Do these stories mirror your own experiences or aspirations? I’d love to hear from you!

Maybe you’re younger and already inspired by the possibilities, or older and keenly aware of how much has evolved since your parents’ time. I invite you to experiment with your own relationship design: think about trying out a new way of connecting, set fresh boundaries, or simply frame (or reframe) what love means to you.

Join the conversation in the comments below and tell me: Are these new relationship models the future of love, a temporary trend, or something uniquely personal? How have you applied — or how might you apply — the principles of Conscious Relationship Design in your life?

Leave a comment

Additional resources and further reading

This work is a piece from my current writing project on Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to read along and follow more, hit the “subscribe” button to get a notification when I publish new articles on this topic.

Subscribe now

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Leave a comment

🤔 3 things I’m thinking

1. A teeny tiny woman in a teeny tiny house (Pause, Purpose)

There's something I've been wrestling with. A fear so fundamental that I've rarely dared to name it, even to myself.

I can stand before hundreds and unflinchingly use the word "anal" in a TEDx talk. I can write research-backed articles about power dynamics in BDSM relationships. I can conduct workshops where strangers reveal their most intimate desires while blindfolded.

Yet here, in the quiet of a Substack blank page – this space that should feel safest (because here, it is just me and me alone - right?) – I hide. I hide behind carefully structured sentences, behind other people's stories, behind the comfortable shield of "research shows."

Why? What am I protecting you from? Or rather, what am I protecting myself from?

Subscribe now

The truth is stark and terrifying: I'm afraid that if I strip away the academic framework, if I speak from the raw centre of my own experience and desire, you'll see nothing worth listening to. Worse still – you might not see what I’ve been working on … at all.

My deepest fear isn't rejection or judgment (though maybe, in the scope of things, it probably should be - and please do check back with me in a year on this).

No, my deepest fear is that none of it matters. That I'm speaking into a void. That Conscious Relationship Design – this framework I've built my life's work around – will help absolutely no one. That all of my research, writing, speaking, and creating spaces for exploring desire will amount to nothing but whispers in an empty forest (remember the tree that falls … if no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?). That I have wasted years of my life developing ideas that will touch no one, change nothing, help no one.

It's the possibility that I might pour everything I am into words that dissolve into air, unheard. That my voice might join the countless others lost in the cacophony of a world with too much to say and too little capacity to listen.

Do you know the old folktale of the teeny tiny woman? She finds a teeny tiny bone and takes it home, only to be haunted by a mysterious voice demanding its return. "GIVE ME MY BONE!" the voice grows louder each time, until finally, the teeny tiny woman, terrified but resolute, shouts back, "TAKE IT!"

I sometimes feel like that teeny tiny woman—holding a truth that seems insignificant to others but immensely valuable to me, haunted by a voice that grows louder with time. Except in my version, the voice isn't asking for its bone back. It's asking: "DOES YOUR WORK MATTER?" And I'm not yet brave enough to shout back.

There's a peculiar dissonance between the public Julie who confidently discusses the power of speaking our desires before an audience of hundreds and the private Julie who sits alone, unmoving, eyes fixed, wondering if her words matter at all. The woman who can facilitate group discussions about desire is the same woman who sometimes can't look her own reflection in the eye and say, "Your voice matters." My body knows this contradiction—the tightness in my chest when I hit "publish," the flutter in my stomach before I begin a workshop, as if my cells themselves doubt whether I deserve to be heard.

I wake sometimes at 3 a.m., laptop open but screen dark, wondering if I'm merely having an elaborate conversation with myself while the world continues, unaffected and unaware (and maybe the world should be unaffected and unaware - who am I to suggest that consciously choosing and designing our lives is something worth doing, of all people?). If the bridges I'm trying to build between hearts and minds might lead … nowhere at all.

Can I tell you something I've never admitted publicly? I sometimes wonder if I've chosen this territory – desire, sex, relationships – precisely because it's provocative enough that the content itself creates impact, meaning I don't have to reveal my own vulnerable core. Is discussing taboo topics my clever way of appearing brave while actually hiding? The contradiction sits in my body like a stone—the heat rising to my face even as I type these words, the slight tremble in my hands betraying the fear beneath my academic language.

And yet I continue. I research. I write. I speak. I create spaces for people to explore their deepest desires. Not because I've conquered this fear, but because something in me (though on most days, she is a teeny tiny woman living in a teeny tiny house learning from her teeny tiny bone) believes that meaning exists even in the absence of recognition. That truth matters even when whispered into emptiness. That perhaps the most courageous act isn't speaking to be heard, but speaking without any guarantee of being heard.

I'm sharing this not to be reassured, but because I suspect I'm not alone in this. Perhaps you, too, have felt it—this dread that your most authentic offerings might simply fall in a forest. No one will be there to hear or see you or what you have brought. Your existence will have been for nothing. Your gifts will lie on a forest floor, unreceived.

Perhaps we're all teeny tiny people, clutching our teeny tiny bones—truths we've discovered that feel simultaneously precious and insignificant—wondering if we dare to speak, to write, to create, even without guarantee of being heard. Maybe the voice haunting us will always ask, "DOES YOUR WORK MATTER?" And maybe, someday, we'll find the courage to shout back not, "TAKE IT - YOUR DAMN DOUBT!" but "I DON'T NEED YOU TO HEAR ME TO KNOW MY VOICE, MY WORK, MY GIFT, MY ME I’VE COME TO BE, MATTER."

I'm curious: Would you like me to share more of these personal reflections about my research and experiences? To bring you further behind the curtain of not just what I'm thinking, but what I'm feeling, wondering, desiring? I've created a quick poll below—I'd be deeply grateful to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment

2. Ripples in still water (Pause, Passion and Purpose)

All this said, the irony is not wasted on me. My focus on personal vulnerability seems trivial against the backdrop of global events. With wars raging, climate change accelerating, and democracies under threat, does it really matter if we speak our authentic truths? If we acknowledge our desires? If we design our relationships with greater consciousness?

Recently, I've been reflecting on the ripple effect of speaking out—how one person's courage can create concentric circles of change that extend far beyond what we can see.

After my TEDx talk on desire in November, a woman approached me with tears in her eyes. She took my hands in hers.

"I've spent my entire life hiding," she told me. "Never speaking about what I wanted. Never even admitting it to myself."

She described returning home from the talk and having the first honest conversation about desire with her partner of 42 years. "It wasn't just about sex," she said. "It was about being seen for the first time."

Two weeks later, she emailed me. The conversation had led to others. About dreams deferred. About regrets. About hopes for their remaining years together. "We're reconnecting with our children," she wrote. "Being more honest with them too. My daughter told me she's never seen me so alive."

The ripple effect of voicing authentic desires creates transformation that extends far beyond the initial conversation. When Benoit, a participant in my research, finally told his long-term partner that he wanted to explore ethical non-monogamy, he expected the conversation to end their relationship. Instead, it opened a dialogue that revealed his partner had been suppressing similar desires, afraid they would seem immoral or threatening.

"That conversation changed everything," Benoit told me. "Not because we immediately acted on these desires, but because for the first time in our relationship, we were talking about what we really wanted instead of what we thought we should want."

This pattern appears repeatedly in my research: one person's courage in expressing authentic desire creates permission for others to do the same.

And on it goes. One truth, honestly spoken, becomes permission for others to speak their own. One person living authentically becomes a lantern in the darkness, illuminating pathways for countless others.

I think of the woman in my research who, after learning about Conscious Relationship Design, finally acknowledged the coercive dynamics in her marriage. She didn't just start to rejigger her relationship with her partner —she’s thinking about starting a support group in her small community. That group has the potential to help dozens of women recognise and transform or leave controlling relationships.

These aren't just personal transformations. They're social ripples that extend outward, intersecting with larger movements for justice, equality and human dignity. Because how we relate to each other in our most intimate connections shapes how we show up in the broader world. The person who learns to speak honestly about desire often becomes the citizen who speaks truth to power. The partner who practices conscious consent becomes the colleague who recognises and challenges workplace harassment.

In this light, the personal isn't just political—it's foundational. Our intimate relationships are the laboratories where we practice being human together, where we learn what's possible between people who choose to see each other completely.

So when I find myself wondering if these conversations matter against the backdrop of global suffering, I remember the ripples. I remember that transformation rarely happens at the scale of systems without first happening at the scale of hearts. And I remember that even the mightiest rivers begin with a single drop of rain.

Leave a comment

3. Permission to rest and do what we want (Pause, Play, Passion and Pleasure)

These words came from a client in his early 20s last week, spoken with the kind of wonder usually reserved for profound spiritual revelations. And perhaps that's exactly what it was—the sudden, startling recognition that he wasn't required to be perpetually productive, constantly striving, forever reaching for the next achievement.

I've been thinking about this moment as I read Oliver Burkeman's Meditations for Mortals. Saturday's reflection focused on releasing the inner critic—that relentless voice that beats us up, pushes us around, and makes us feel terrible because we're not doing all the things. Or sometimes, anything at all.

You know this voice. It's the one that transforms a restful weekend into a guilt-ridden waste of precious time. It's the one that looks at a day spent in contemplation or gameplaying rather than production and clutter-clearing and labels it a failure. It's the voice that keeps a running tally of all we haven't accomplished and rarely acknowledges what we have.

This, by the way, is known as the Zeigarnik effect: the phenomenon where unfinished tasks or thoughts linger in our minds until the “loop” of an unfinished thing is closed. Once it is closed, it is promptly forgotten - which is also why we don’t often celebrate our finished projects; we move from one to the next, battling the unclosed loop, forgetting the closed ones.

What strikes me is how many of us live under the tyranny of this critic without ever questioning its authority. We assume its perspective is reality rather than recognising it as just one possible interpretation of our lives.

Burkeman suggests a radical alternative: What if we spent (some or more of) our time doing what we want to do, rather than what we feel obligated to do? What if, instead of battling against that endless scroll of "shoulds," we consciously chose activities that align with our authentic desires?

This isn't about mindless scrolling or procrastination—those are often just symptoms of resisting things we don't truly want to do. It's about deliberately creating space to follow our natural curiosities and impulses. What if we permitted ourselves, even for just half a day, everyone once in a while, to do precisely what we want?

I tested this theory this weekend (and truth be told, I can do this fairly often, as my life is in a later phase; I am cognisant that this might not always be possible for you). After weeks of intense work—editing two books, writing and publishing posts, running workshops, refining research— and intense play - training for a semi-marathon that meant I was running longer and harder than ever before (and then guess what! I came down with shingles for the first time in my life) - I gave myself a day without an agenda. No alarm clock. No editing. No email. No social media. (Okay, a quick 30-minute recovery run.) Just me and permission to follow my curiosity wherever it led.

I read for hours. Stared outside. Thought about all the things I want to write. Went to a book club meeting with my French friends and analysed the main character’s deeply avoidant behaviour and corrected the belief that rape is about power, not desire. (The book we read was Italian Shoes - check it out.) Drank red wine, had a sliver of a cheese tarte (these exist!) and basked in the fact that I have wonderful French friends who all show up for each other.

Here's what I discovered: The world didn't end. I didn’t die. My work didn't disappear. My value as a human didn't diminish. In fact, the next morning I woke with more clarity, more creativity, and more compassion than I've felt in weeks.

The inner critic will always have its say. But perhaps we can learn to hear it as just one voice among many—and not necessarily the wisest one. Perhaps we can learn to answer its accusations with gentle questions rather than defensive justifications.

"Should I be working right now?" it demands. "How would rest serve me?" we might ask in return.

"You're wasting time," it insists. "What if time spent in joy is never wasted?" we might wonder.

I'm not suggesting we'll silence this critic entirely. Just that we might learn to turn down its volume, to question its assumptions, to recognise its limitations.

Because here's what my client realised, what Burkeman articulates, what I'm learning myself: We don't have to earn our right to exist. We don't have to justify every moment of our lives. Sometimes, the most productive thing we can do is sit quietly, listen to the silence and look up.

💡 2 things that are inspiring me

1. 🎙️ "A Moment for Silence" on The Gray Area - This podcast episode features an insightful conversation with one of my favourite writers in the world, an essayist and travel writer, Pico Iyer. Sean Illing and Pico discuss the restorative power of silence and how embracing quietness can prepare us for an overstimulated world. His newest book, Aflame, is on my list to read soon. Given all that is around us, it may be one of my chosen balms in the weeks and months to come.

2. 🎧 2 songs - One was sent to me (thank you, and !), and it arrived at just the right time! The second I discovered while running and it made me run even faster. Of course, it did. I also think it might be my theme song when a certain TEDx talk gets released … 😉

Share Hit Pause, Then Play

🔥1 spark for you

How would you like to spend your time today?

Leave a comment

Anything else?

💌You might like one of my recent posts

🖐Work with me!

• Check out all the possibilities available to you in the field of Conscious Relationship Design! You can sign up for CRD sessions, retreats, coaching and even do self-paced (complimentary) learning. Find out more here:

  https://conscious-relationship-design.com/

• Support my book - If you’d like to be in the exclusive group of “first readers”, speak with me about your own conscious relationship design practices or have a conversation on some of my book’s more controversial topics, level up to a paid subscription.🎚️ I’d love to pick your brain!

• Also, please subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already and follow me on Medium. Big thanks in advance for your support … and if you have friends who might be curious about Conscious Relationship Design and/or anything else in this newsletter, spread the joy: share this newsletter!🫶

Subscribe now

Share Hit Pause, Then Play

🙏Thank you

Thanks for reading. You can get more actionable ideas and links in this free newsletter by clicking “Subscribe now” below. Each month, I share:

• 3 things I’m thinking

• 2 things that are inspiring me

• 1 question to spark you

Join me by entering your email. See you next month! 👋

Subscribe now

The first time I witnessed how desire shapes our world — a phenomenon I had been researching globally — was in an unexpected moment: a sunlit café in the Marais district of Paris. The bitter aroma of espresso mingled with the sweet scent of fresh pastries as conversations in rapid French swirled around us. Perrine, a client and former quantum physicist, stirred her cappuccino absently, the delicate clink of her spoon punctuating her words as she told me about the conversation that transformed her 25-year marriage.

“I finally told him what I wanted”, she said, stirring her cappuccino. “Not what I thought I should want, not what society said I should want, but what I actually desired”.

This might sound like the beginning of a story about divorce or infidelity. It’s not. It’s a story about what happens when we dare to voice our authentic desires — and how that single act of courage can ripple outward in ways we never expect.

Subscribe now

Perrine’s revelation wasn’t about leaving her marriage but about fundamentally reimagining it. Her husband’s response surprised her: not shock or rejection, but relief. “He’d been carrying his own unspoken desires,” she explained. “My honesty gave him permission to voice his own.”

The silence epidemic

Perrine’s experience isn’t unique. Research consistently shows that unspoken desires are far more common than we realise — carrying consequences far beyond individual relationships. Again and again in my research, I see a pattern: when one person dares to voice a desire, it creates space for others to do the same. I explore this dynamic further in my TEDx talk.

Even in long-term romantic relationships, partners report only knowing 62% of what their partners find sexually pleasing and 26% of what they find sexually displeasing (Byers, 2011). Discussing sex has been found to be one of the least discussed topics in observational studies of couples (e.g. Rehman et al., 2011).

The courage to express desire is rare not only in relationships but in nearly every sphere of life. In professional settings, Detert and colleagues (2010) found that 42% of employees reported withholding information when they felt they had nothing to gain by sharing it.

Why this matters now

Who profits from this silence? Beyond the obvious beneficiaries — industries built on prescribed desires and cultural narratives that maintain status quo — there’s a deeper cost to this collective suppression. When we can’t voice what we truly want, we become perfect consumers of what others tell us we should want.

The implications extend far beyond personal relationships. In our current political climate, where the expression or suppression of desires can reshape entire institutions, understanding how to voice and navigate authentic wants becomes increasingly crucial.

This conversation matters now because we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how people relate to what they really want — or don’t express, out of fear or shame. The old scripts aren’t working anymore. The prescribed paths feel increasingly hollow. People are hungry for authentic connection, meaningful work and relationships that honour who they truly are.

Perinne’s coffee shop revelation wasn’t just about her marriage — it was about daring to imagine a world where we all have permission to want what we really want. And that, as it turns out, changes everything.

The power dynamics of desire

Who gets to say “I want”

Desire is political. Who gets to express it freely — and who doesn’t — reveals deeper power structures at play. Advertising makes this painfully clear.

In January 2018, Lincoln launched their Navigator campaign featuring Matthew McConaughey. The American television spots portrayed the actor effortlessly commanding the luxury SUV, embodying what the campaign coverage described as “quiet confidence.” Without saying a word, McConaughey communicated volumes about who gets to express desire in our society. The cinematic visuals, the aesthetic control, the unapologetic luxury — all conveyed an unmistakable message: some people can simply want what they want (and get it) without explanation or justification.

What makes advertisements like this so revealing isn’t just their overt message about luxury and aspiration. It’s the unspoken assumption that certain people in our society — typically wealthy, white, heterosexual men — can express their desires without censure or consequence. For them, voicing wants is not merely acceptable; it’s expected, even celebrated as a mark of leadership and decisiveness.

But what happens when others attempt to voice their desires with the same directness?

Research by Williams and Tiedens (2016) reveals that women face significant social penalties for displaying dominant behaviour, with explicit dominance (direct expressions of wants and needs) being penalised more harshly than implicit dominance. Women who expressed anger in professional contexts were accorded lower status and lower wages, while angry men were accorded higher status for the same expressions (Brescoll and Uhlmann, 2008).

The profitable pattern of prescribed desires

But silence isn’t just personal — it’s also profoundly profitable. When we suppress authentic wants, we become easy targets for industries that sell us what we should want instead.

“The genius of modern marketing”, explains consumer psychologist Dr Tara Williams, “isn’t just selling products — it’s selling prescribed desires. It’s convincing us that we genuinely want things we never would have imagined wanting before seeing them advertised”.

These prescribed desires follow predictable scripts that maintain existing power structures. Women are taught to desire beauty products that make them appear younger, smaller, less threatening. Men are sold narratives about power, dominance and sexual conquest. Working-class consumers are fed aspirational brands that promise entry into higher social strata.

Take a minute to think about that. It happened to me just the other day. I was researching media coverage of attachment styles. After a bit of time, I began to wonder if I didn’t need a course or a book to “work on my own attachment style”. When I mentioned this to a friend, he pointed out that, no, I didn’t. I had just fallen into the marketing trap that had managed to convince me I had a “problem” and whichever account I was looking at had the “solution”.

Systems of silence

But it’s not just commerce that profits from this arrangement. Political and social systems depend on our inability to articulate what we truly want. Workplace hierarchies remain intact when employees can’t express desires for fair treatment or meaningful contribution. Family structures go unquestioned when we can’t voice desires that challenge traditional roles. Religious institutions maintain authority when adherents suppress desires that contradict doctrine.

Research on power dynamics shows that high-power individuals are more likely to express their desires and act on them, while low-power individuals tend to inhibit desire expression (Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson, 2003). One’s subjective sense of power predicts the expression of desires more strongly than objective power, with those feeling more powerful more likely to express wants directly (Anderson, John, and Keltner, 2012).

Think about this in simpler terms. My father has two huskies. One weighs over 100 pounds. The other weighs 65 pounds. Guess which one wields the most power. That’s right, the smaller husky — the alpha. The larger huskey is utterly dominated by his smaller brother and acquiesces at every turn.

The ethics of desire

Despite these powerful forces, a revolution in desire is underway. Across various spheres — intimate relationships, workplaces, public discourse — people are increasingly challenging the status quo by daring to voice what they really want. This raises crucial questions about the ethics of desire.

First, there’s the distinction between asserting and imposing desires. The former recognises others’ autonomy while the latter overrides it. Research shows that relationships where both partners support each other’s autonomy in expressing desires report higher relationship quality, compared to relationships characterised by control patterns (Hadden, Porter, and Rodriguez, 2013).

Then there’s the question of agency and negotiation. Satisfaction of autonomy needs (including the ability to express authentic desires without coercion) predicts relationship well-being and individual psychological health (La Guardia and Patrick, 2008). Voicing desire is only the first step. The real magic happens in the negotiation — the dance of wants between individuals with equal agency.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s the relationship between power, desire and consent. In any interaction where desires are expressed, power differentials influence whose wants take precedence. Traditional models assume that those with more social, economic or institutional power naturally get more of what they want. But emerging models suggest alternative approaches based on conscious awareness of power disparities.

Perrine, my client from the Paris café, discovered this firsthand. After expressing her desires to her husband, they began explicitly acknowledging the power dynamics in their relationship — who had more financial security, who had greater emotional leverage, whose career took priority. This awareness didn’t eliminate the power differences, but it allowed them to navigate desires with greater care and intentionality.

“Before, I thought expressing desire was selfish”, she told me during our follow-up session. “Now I understand that voicing what I want — and creating space for others to do the same — is actually the foundation of true generosity”.

As we navigate an increasingly complex world, learning to express authentic desires while respecting others’ agency may be one of the most radical skills we can develop. Not just for personal fulfilment, but for creating systems that allow everyone — regardless of gender, race, class or sexuality — the fundamental human right to voice what they truly want.

The liberation of want

Breaking free from prescribed desires

Perrine’s coffee shop revelation — that sharing her authentic desires could transform not just her marriage but her entire way of being in the world — points to something worth deeper exploration. When we dare to voice what we truly want, we don’t just change our individual circumstances. We challenge the very systems that profit from our silence.

This liberation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It emerges precisely at the intersection of the power dynamics and ethical frameworks we’ve explored. As Perrine discovered, breaking free from prescribed desires requires not just personal courage but a fundamental shift in how we understand the relationship between power, authenticity and connection.

“The most difficult thing”, Perrine told me later, “wasn’t figuring out what I wanted. It was giving myself permission to want it at all”.

Her struggle reflects a pattern I’ve seen over and over: the most insidious aspect of prescribed desires isn’t that they’re wrong — it’s that we mistake them for our own. We learn to want what we’re told to want so thoroughly that uncovering our true desires feels like an excavation, digging through layers of “should” to reach the bedrock of genuine longing.

My research has also compelled me to excavate my own desires. As a woman in her late 50s, navigating a society that has historically shamed women’s free expression of desire, the process of lifting the veil of shame has been transformative. Claiming my own hidden desires, speaking them aloud, and asking for what I want has catalysed a level of growth I never anticipated. This journey has brought moments of ecstatic liberation alongside periods of abject fear borne of raw vulnerability. More than anything, it has meant stepping into the fullness of being human — with all the messiness and magnificence that entails.

This excavation reveals startling patterns that contradict conventional wisdom about who wants what. When given safe spaces to express authentic desires — spaces where power dynamics are acknowledged and ethical frameworks support honest expression — people consistently defy the gendered, classed and racialised expectations society places on their wanting. As I explore in my TEDx talk, sometimes opening that box of desires — taking that risk to share what we really want — becomes the very thing that helps build or rebuild a relationship’s foundation. It’s like discovering a secret passageway — to deeper connection.

Hidden truths behind closed doors

In confidential settings where men feel safe from judgment, many express desires that directly contradict their public personas. The executive who projects unwavering confidence admits he longs to be held when afraid. The globe-trotting consultant whose deepest desire is to be made to submit. The stoic father reveals his desire for emotional intimacy with his children. These aren’t anomalies — they represent a consistent pattern of men whose authentic desires for tenderness, vulnerability and connection have been suppressed beneath prescribed wants for dominance, achievement and control.

As Thomas, a 47-year-old financial analyst I interviewed, put it, “I spent 20 years climbing a ladder I never wanted to climb, because I thought wanting anything else would make me less of a man.” His revelation came during a health crisis that forced him to confront the gap between his prescribed and authentic desires. “When I finally admitted what I really wanted — more time with my family, more creative expression, less status-seeking — it felt like meeting myself for the first time.”

Women’s reclaimed desires reveal equally striking contradictions to social expectations. Where marketing and media prescribe desires centred on beauty, nurturing and relationality, many women express authentic wants focused on power, pleasure and autonomy when given permission to voice them without consequence.

This pattern emerged vividly in my conversations with women across age groups and backgrounds. Claire, a 38-year-old teacher I interviewed in Paris, described her journey, “I spent my twenties wanting what women’s magazines, ad campaigns, my social groups told me to want — the slim appearance, the successful partner, the chic flat. It wasn’t until my late thirties that I allowed myself to acknowledge what I really desired — intellectual challenge, sexual agency, the freedom to prioritise my interests.”

These patterns extend beyond romantic relationships into professional contexts, where prescribed desires often centre on linear advancement, compensation and status. Yet when professionals of all genders are given space to express their authentic wants, different priorities emerge: meaningful contribution, flexibility, creative expression and ethical alignment with their work.

Stories of transformation through voiced desires

The act of voicing authentic desires creates transformation that extends far beyond the initial conversation. When Benoit, a participant in my research, finally told his long-term partner that he wanted to explore ethical non-monogamy, he expected the conversation to end their relationship. Instead, it opened a dialogue that revealed his partner had been suppressing similar desires, afraid they would seem immoral or threatening.

“That conversation changed everything,” Benoit told me. “Not because we immediately acted on these desires, but because for the first time in our relationship, we were talking about what we really wanted instead of what we thought we should want.”

This pattern appears repeatedly in my research: one person’s courage in expressing authentic desire creates permission for others to do the same. The ripple effects transform not just individual relationships but entire communities and systems.

A compelling example of this ripple effect emerged in my conversations with Dr. Martinez, who documented the transformation of a healthcare organisation where she previously worked. During a particularly difficult period of staff turnover and patient dissatisfaction, a senior physician broke ranks during a staff meeting. Rather than focusing on the efficiency metrics management had prioritised, she expressed what she truly wanted: “to practice medicine in a way that honours why we all became healers in the first place.”

According to Dr. Martinez, this moment of authentic desire expression shifted the entire conversation. Other staff members began voicing their own suppressed wants — more time with patients, more collaborative decision making, more focus on care quality over quantity. What began as one person’s moment of honesty eventually led to structural changes throughout the organisation.

Another powerful transformation emerged in my conversation with Maya and David, a couple in a conventional, monogamous marriage of 12 years. After their second child started school, Maya found herself increasingly restless and unfulfilled, yet struggled to articulate what was missing.

“I kept having these dreams about painting,” Maya told me. “But I dismissed them because they seemed so impractical. With two kids, a mortgage, and my part-time accounting work, pursuing art felt selfish and indulgent.”

When she finally expressed this desire to David, she braced for dismissal. Instead, he responded with genuine curiosity. “He asked me questions about what kind of painting I wanted to do, what it meant to me. No one had ever taken my creativity that seriously before — not even me.”

Their conversation expanded into a larger reimagining of their family schedule and finances. The ripple effects transformed their entire relationship. “Once we started really talking about our desires, everything changed. David shared his long-suppressed interest in distance running, which I fully supported. We both became more engaged parents because we were more fulfilled as individuals. And our intimacy deepened because we finally saw each other — really saw each other — as complete humans with complex desires beyond our roles as spouses and parents.”

The unexpected benefits of authentic expression

Perhaps most striking are the unexpected benefits that emerge when people express their authentic desires. Contrary to fears that voicing what we truly want will damage relationships or create chaos, my research consistently shows the opposite effect.

When Sean began openly discussing his desires within his marriage, including his interest in ethical non-monogamy, he and his wife didn’t grow apart as he had feared. Instead, their emotional and physical intimacy deepened. “Being fully seen — and accepted — for what I really want created a level of trust I never thought possible”, he explained. The honesty required to voice authentic desires creates psychological safety that strengthens rather than weakens connections. As I share in my TEDx talk, Sean and his wife had the courage to start talking about creating space for exploring their desires, demonstrating how vulnerability around our authentic wants creates bridges rather than barriers in relationships.

Moreover, expressing authentic desires appears to enhance our capacity for empathy and connection rather than diminishing it. When we’re not expending cognitive and emotional resources maintaining prescribed wants, we have greater capacity to truly hear and respond to others’ desires.

As Tris, a 68-year-old who reimagined her marriage (and her sex life) in her sixties, told me: “When I finally gave myself permission to acknowledge what I wanted sexually and emotionally, I suddenly had so much more energy to actually listen to what my partner wanted. It was like I’d been underwater my whole life, and finally came up for air.”

This liberation of authentic desire doesn’t just transform individual lives — it has the potential to reshape our collective experience. When we break the silence around what we truly want, we challenge systems that profit from prescribed desires and create spaces where authentic connection becomes possible. The rewards of this liberation extend far beyond personal satisfaction to create ripples of transformation that touch everything they encounter.

When desires collide

The inevitable clash of authentic wants

Voicing authentic desires isn’t always smooth. Sometimes, it brings us face-to-face with misalignment. What happens when one person’s liberated desire clashes with another’s?

Consider Molly Roden Winter’s journey, which she shares in her memoir More: A Memoir of Open Marriage. After a decade of marriage and motherhood had left her feeling drained and unfulfilled, an unexpected encounter reignited her capacity for desire. When she honestly discussed these feelings with her husband, he suggested opening their marriage to allow exploration outside their vows. What began as a response to Molly’s rediscovered desires evolved into a complex navigation of both partners’ wants and needs as they crafted a non-monogamous relationship that honoured their connection while creating space for growth.

This collision of desires isn’t a failure of the liberation process — it’s an inevitable and essential part of it. The expression of authentic desire doesn’t guarantee harmony. In fact, it often reveals fundamental incompatibilities that remain hidden beneath layers of prescribed wants and performative agreement.

The reality of misaligned wants

In my research, about 40% of people who start expressing authentic desires uncover major misalignments with their partners — ones they hadn’t seen before. These misalignments range from divergent sexual interests to fundamental differences in relationship structure preferences, life goals or values.

The discovery of misaligned desires often triggers fear. “When I realised what my partner truly wanted was fundamentally different from what I wanted,” Alex, a 34-year-old software developer told me, “my first thought was: this is the end of us.” This fear isn’t irrational — our cultural narratives suggest that relationship success means perfect alignment of desires and goals.

Yet what makes these misalignments particularly challenging isn’t merely their existence, but the weight of expectation that partners should want the same things. This expectation creates a binary framework where partners either agree (success) or disagree (failure). What’s missing is a sophisticated framework for navigating conflicting desires ethically and constructively.

Ethical frameworks for navigation

Managing rejection gracefully

The foundation of navigating conflicting desires is developing capacity to hear “no” without personalising it. When Axel shared his desire for a non-monogamous arrangement to explore sexual connections with trans women with his partner, her response was clear: “I don’t want that for myself.” Rather than interpreting this as rejection of him, Axel recognised it simply as information about her authentic desires.

“Learning to separate rejection of a specific desire from rejection of me as a person was transformative,” he explained. “It allowed us to stay connected even when our wants didn’t align.” This distinction — between the rejection of a desire and the rejection of the person — creates space for both parties to maintain dignity and connection despite misalignment.

Successful navigation also requires what psychologists call “rejection resilience” — the ability to hear no without abandoning your authentic desires or the relationship. This resilience comes from recognising that you can simultaneously honour your own wants while respecting another’s boundaries.

Honouring conflicting needs

Perhaps the most radical aspect of desire navigation is abandoning the belief that relationship success requires perfect alignment of wants. “We’ve been taught that good relationships mean wanting the same things,” said Rachel, a relationship coach I interviewed. “But what if success actually means creating enough safety that both people can want different things and still remain connected?”

This reframing — from alignment to coexistence of different desires — represents a profound shift. It suggests that the health of a relationship isn’t measured by how perfectly desires match, but by how skillfully partners navigate the inevitable mismatches.

The people in my research who successfully navigate conflicting desires embrace what I call “both/and thinking.” Rather than assuming an either/or approach (either we both want the same thing or the relationship fails), they ask: “How can we honour both sets of authentic desires, even when they conflict?”

This isn’t about compromise in the traditional sense of both parties getting less than they want. It’s about creative navigation that seeks to honour the core needs underlying each desire. When Tris and her husband discovered their mismatched desires around sexual exploration in their sixties, they didn’t compromise — they innovated, creating a relationship structure that allowed her to explore with other partners while maintaining their deep emotional connection and commitment.

Building consent culture

At the heart of ethical desire navigation lies consent culture — a framework that prioritises ongoing, enthusiastic agreement in all interactions. This goes beyond the basic concept of consent as permission; it involves creating conditions where everyone feels genuinely free to say yes or no without fear of consequence.

Xavier described how he and his partners establish consent: “Before any conversation about desires, we explicitly agree that ‘no’ is a completely acceptable answer that won’t result in punishment, withdrawal or guilt-tripping.” This agreement creates psychological safety that allows authentic responses rather than performative acquiescence.

Consent culture also recognises that consent exists on a spectrum from reluctant agreement to enthusiastic participation. Ethical navigation of desires aims for the enthusiastic end of this spectrum, where all parties actively want the outcome rather than merely accepting it.

Successful navigation in practice

The theory of desire navigation comes alive in the stories of those who’ve successfully traversed these waters. Their experiences offer practical insights into how misaligned desires can be addressed constructively.

Consider Sean and his wife of 29 years. When Sean expressed his invitation to her to join him in sexual experiences outside their marriage, his wife initially felt retiscent. Rather than either abandoning his invitation or pressuring her, Sean created space for exploration at her pace. “We spent six months just talking about it,” he told me. “Not with any expectation that she’d agree, but to understand each other’s fears and hopes more deeply.”

This patient exploration eventually revealed that her retiscence wasn’t to the concept of openness itself, but to specific fears about what it might mean for her own sexuality. By addressing these underlying concerns directly — creating clear agreements about emotional primacy, time management and sexual health — they developed a model that eventually worked for both of them.

Similarly, when Claire discovered her desire for intellectual stimulation conflicted with her partner’s preference for more relaxed, less cerebral interaction, they initially saw it as an irresolvable problem. “We thought one of us would always be unsatisfied,” she explained. Their breakthrough came when they stopped seeing the relationship as the sole container for meeting all desires.

“We realised we could maintain our loving connection while also creating space for me to find intellectual stimulation elsewhere — through friends, classes, and community groups,” Claire said. “The relationship didn’t have to provide everything.” This insight — that relationships can be successful without meeting every desire — represents a profound shift from the all-or-nothing thinking that often derails navigation.

Systems for honouring all desires

The most sophisticated navigators of desire collisions don’t just address conflicts as they arise — they proactively design systems that create space for ongoing desire expression and navigation. These systems share several key characteristics:

• First, they establish regular check-ins specifically focused on desire. Ramon and his partners have monthly “desire conversations” where each person shares evolving wants without expectation of immediate action. “Having a dedicated time means desires don’t build up unexpressed until they become emergencies,” Ramon explained.

• Second, these systems distinguish between sharing and requesting. “There’s a fundamental difference between expressing a desire and expecting your partner to fulfill it,” another relationship therapist told me. “Effective systems create space for expression without automatic expectation.”

• Third, successful navigators develop clear protocols for when desires conflict. These include guidelines for taking space when needed, bringing in outside perspectives like therapists or mediators, and regular reassessment of agreements to ensure they still work for everyone involved.

Perhaps most importantly, these systems recognise that desire navigation isn’t a one-time solution but an ongoing process. As Thomas put it, “Our desires keep evolving, so our navigation needs to evolve too. The system we created isn’t about finding perfect answers — it’s about having a reliable way to keep asking the questions.”

When desires collide, the test isn’t whether we can avoid conflict but whether we can maintain connection and respect through the collision. The right approaches, skills and systems can transform conflicting desires from relationship hazards into opportunities for deeper understanding and more authentic connection.

Designing for desire

How CRD transforms relationships and spaces

Okay, so we’ve begun to explore desire expression and collision. A crucial question remains: How do we create environments — in our relationships, workplaces and communities — that actively support authentic desire expression? This is where Conscious Relationship Design (CRD) offers practical pathways forward.

Conscious Relationship Design isn’t just a theoretical framework — it’s a set of practical tools for creating relationships and spaces where authentic desires can safely emerge. As Perrine discovered in her marriage, and as Dr. Martinez witnessed in her healthcare organisation, the deliberate design of relational containers can transform how desires are expressed and received.

Practical tools for self-discovery

Mapping your desire patterns

The foundation of designing for desire is self-awareness — the ability to recognise our authentic wants beneath layers of social conditioning. Pattern Mapping, a tool adapted from the CRD Empathy Canvas, helps individuals identify recurring themes in their desires and the situations that trigger them.

Thomas, the financial analyst who realised he’d spent decades climbing a ladder he never wanted, used Pattern Mapping to trace the origins of his prescribed desires. “I created a grid with my authentic desires on one axis and my prescribed ones on another,” he explained. “Then I noted when and where each type emerged. I discovered that my authentic desires surfaced most clearly during solo travel and creative activities, while my prescribed wants dominated in professional settings and family gatherings.”

This awareness helped Thomas create intentional spaces in his life where his authentic desires could emerge more consistently. He began scheduling regular creative retreats and prioritised activities that connected him to his authentic wants, gradually expanding these into areas previously dominated by prescribed desires.

Creating safety nets for exploration

Another powerful tool is the Safety Net Agreement, which establishes protocols for exploring desires with minimal risk. As Sean and his wife discovered, having clear agreements about how to pause exploration, express discomfort and revisit boundaries allowed them to venture into uncertain terrain with greater confidence.

“We designed a simple system using colours,” Sean explained. “Green meant full comfort with a conversation or exploration, yellow indicated caution and a need to slow down, and red signalled an immediate pause. Having this system in place meant neither of us feared runaway consequences from expressing a desire.”

Effective communication techniques

The Desire-Request Distinction

Self-awareness alone isn’t enough — we also need effective techniques for expressing desires ethically. The “Desire-Request Distinction” technique, which Xavier uses with his partners, creates clarity about the difference between sharing a desire and requesting its fulfilment.

“When I express a desire,” Xavier told me, “I make it clear whether I’m simply sharing information about myself or making a specific request. This gives my partners the freedom to receive my desires as self-disclosure rather than demands requiring action.”

Deep listening practices

Claire and her partner practice what they call “Desire Listening” — a structured approach where one person shares a desire without interruption, followed by the listener reflecting their understanding before responding. “The reflection step is crucial,” Claire emphasised. “It prevents knee-jerk reactions and creates space to truly hear each other’s wants without immediately problem-solving or shutting them down.”

These techniques transform how desires are communicated, creating environments where authentic expression becomes safer and more productive. Rather than treating desire conversations as potential minefields, they become opportunities for deeper connection and understanding.

Creating desire-positive environments

Beyond individual relationships, Conscious Relationship Design offers frameworks for creating broader environments that support authentic desire expression. These “desire-positive spaces” share common characteristics regardless of context.

First, they explicitly normalise the full spectrum of human desires, removing shame from the equation. As Tris found in reimagining her marriage in her sixties, environments that treat varied desires as normal rather than deviant create safety for authentic expression.

Second, desire-positive spaces separate actions from identity, reducing the stakes of desire expression. “In our community,” Ramon explained, “we practice distinguishing between what someone wants and who they are. This means people can express unconventional desires without fear of being permanently labelled or rejected.”

Third, these environments establish clear protocols for consent and boundaries, ensuring that desire expression never becomes coercive. The healthcare organisation Dr. Martinez described implemented regular “boundary check-ins” during meetings, where team members could easily indicate when conversations moved beyond their comfort zones.

Finally, desire-positive spaces celebrate the diversity of human wanting rather than prescribing uniform desires. They recognise, as Molly Roden Winter discovered in her journey with non-monogamy, that people can want wildly different things and still create meaningful connections.

The ripple effect of authentic expression

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of designing for desire is the ripple effect that occurs when one person breaks the silence. We’ve seen this throughout our exploration — Perrine’s honesty created space for her husband’s authentic desires, Xavier’s openness revealed his partner’s deeply buried wants, and a physician’s courage transformed an entire healthcare system.

This ripple effect isn’t accidental — it’s a predictable outcome of what sociologists call “pluralistic ignorance,” where individuals incorrectly assume they’re alone in their desires or concerns. When one person speaks up, others recognise that they aren’t alone, creating a cascade of authentic expression.

Thomas experienced this firsthand when he finally expressed his desire to leave his high-status career for something more creative and meaningful. “After I shared my decision, three colleagues privately told me they wanted the same thing but thought they were alone in feeling that way,” he recalled. “Two of them eventually made similar changes in their lives.”

This ripple effect explains why designing for desire extends beyond personal benefits to create broader social impact. Each authentic expression creates permission for others, gradually shifting our collective relationship with desire from suppression toward expression.

If the personal is political, then the way we express and navigate desire has the power to reshape entire systems. Imagine what would be possible if we designed our relationships, workplaces, and communities around authentic expression rather than suppression…

Vision for a desire-literate future

What might a truly desire-literate future look like? The stories and approaches we’ve explored suggest several possibilities:

• Imagine workplaces where expressing authentic professional desires becomes part of regular performance conversations, leading to roles that harness people’s genuine motivations rather than prescribed career paths. Dr. Martinez’s healthcare organisation offers a glimpse of this possibility, where aligning work with authentic desires improved both staff well-being and patient care.

• Envision educational systems that teach desire literacy alongside other crucial life skills, helping young people distinguish between their authentic wants and those prescribed by media, marketing and social expectations. Such education wouldn’t just benefit individual well-being — it would create generations less susceptible to manipulation through prescribed desires.

• Picture intimate relationships built on the foundation of Conscious Relationship Design, where partners regularly create space for desire expression and navigation as a normal part of their connection. As Sean and his wife, Tris and her husband, and Molly and her partner discovered, relationships designed with this awareness don’t just endure — they deepen through the honest sharing of authentic wants.

The path toward this future begins with individual courage — the willingness to break silence around our own authentic desires. But it continues through conscious design — creating environments where that courage is supported rather than punished, where desires can be expressed without coercion, and where the inevitable collisions of differing wants become opportunities for deeper connection rather than relationship failure.

Breaking the silence around desire isn’t just personal — it’s revolutionary. It’s about rewriting the scripts that have dictated our wants for generations. When we embrace desire literacy, we don’t just reclaim our own voices — we dismantle the systems that profit from our silence, creating a world where everyone is free to ask, to want, and to be heard.

What do you think?

We like to think desire is personal. But as we’ve seen, it’s anything but. Who gets to say “I want” without consequence? Who hesitates before speaking? And what happens when we start telling the truth about what we actually desire?

Maybe you’ve experienced this firsthand. Maybe you voiced a want — something small, something big — and watched as it changed your relationships, your work, even the way you moved through the world. Or maybe you’ve felt the opposite: a desire so deeply buried that even naming it felt impossible.

So, what’s your experience? Have you ever said what you really wanted and been surprised by the response? Have you noticed how desire — yours or someone else’s — has shaped a relationship, for better or for worse?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment, share this with someone who might find it interesting, or bring it into a conversation. Because breaking the silence isn’t just about speaking up — it’s about what happens next.

Leave a comment

Suggested reading — for fun

Research references

• Anderson, C., John, O. P., & Keltner, D. (2012). “The personal sense of power.” Journal of Personality, 80(2), 313–344.

• Brescoll, V. L., & Uhlmann, E. L. (2008). “Can an angry woman get ahead? Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace.” Psychological Science, 19(3), 268–275.

• Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). “Power, approach, and inhibition.” Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.

• Knee, C. R., Hadden, B. W., Porter, B., & Rodriguez, L. M. (2013). “Self-determination theory and romantic relationship processes.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(4), 307–324.

• Körner, R., & Schütz, A. (2021). “Power in romantic relationships: How positional and experienced power are associated with relationship quality.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 38(9), 2653–2677.

• La Guardia, J. G., & Patrick, H. (2008). “Self-determination theory as a fundamental theory of close relationships.” Canadian Psychology, 49(3), 201–209.

• Mallory AB (2022). “Dimensions of couples’ sexual communication, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction: A meta-analysis.” J Fam Psychol, 36(3), 358–371.

• Williams, M. J., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2016). “The subtle suspension of backlash: A meta-analysis of penalties for women’s implicit and explicit dominance behavior.” Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 165–197.

This work is a piece from my current writing project on Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to read along and follow more, hit the “subscribe” button to get a notification when I publish new articles on this topic.

Subscribe now

If you are interested in exploring consciously designing your relationships, join me in a free 1:1 online session.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Leave a comment

In a sunlit apartment in Berlin, Sophia is having three separate panic attacks in three different relationships. But unlike most people wrestling with past trauma, she’s not seeing this as a problem. She’s seeing it as data.

Subscribe now

“The first time it happened with Thomas, I thought I was broken”, she reflects, curled up in an oversized armchair, a rare winter light streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows. “When it happened with Marie six months later, I noticed the pattern. By the time it happened with Jun, I had a notebook out, mapping the triggers.”

Sophia’s approach might seem counterintuitive. Conventional wisdom suggests that managing trauma within one relationship is challenging enough — why complicate healing by involving multiple partners? Yet research increasingly suggests that different relationship structures might offer unique advantages for trauma recovery. For Sophia and a growing number of others, having multiple relationships isn’t compounding their trauma — it’s accelerating their healing.

This revelation challenges everything we think we know about trauma and relationships. It also raises an intriguing question: What if the structure of our relationships isn’t just a backdrop for healing, but a powerful tool we can consciously design to support it?

The counterintuitive truth

For decades, the conventional wisdom about trauma and relationships has been straightforward: trauma makes relationships harder. Therapists routinely advise caution. Support groups emphasise the importance of healing before pursuing intimate connections. Self-help books warn about the risks of entering relationships while carrying unresolved trauma. The message is clear: sort yourself out first, then — and only then — consider opening your heart to others.

The logic seems sound. Trauma creates deep grooves in our psyche — patterns of fear, mistrust and hypervigilance that can turn even the most promising relationship into a minefield. If you can barely manage your triggers with one partner, surely adding more relationships to the mix would be reckless, even irresponsible?

Yet emerging research tells a different story. Studies on limbic resonance — the way our nervous systems attune to those around us — suggest that safe relationships can help regulate our emotional responses to past trauma. Like a well-calibrated instrument, each supportive connection offers a unique opportunity for what scientists call “co-regulation”, where our brain literally rewires its stress responses through consistent, safe interactions.

Recent research has deepened our understanding of this phenomenon. A comprehensive review published in Psychiatric Quarterly reveals that social support isn’t just helpful — it’s a “major protective factor” in trauma recovery. However, the study emphasises that it’s not simply about having more relationships. The effectiveness of social support depends on its quality, timing and fit with a survivor’s needs. Different relationships can provide different types of support, creating a more complete healing environment than any single relationship might offer.

This is where Conscious Relationship Design becomes particularly relevant. Traditional relationship models often trap trauma survivors in singular patterns of trigger and response. But when we consciously design our relationships — whether monogamous or polyamorous or anywhere in between — we can create multiple pathways for healing. Each relationship becomes a unique laboratory for understanding our triggers, developing new responses and building emotional resilience.

Take people who tend toward anxious attachment. Conventional wisdom would suggest they’d find multiple relationships overwhelming. Yet some are intentionally drawn to polyamory precisely because it offers multiple sources of affection and reassurance. Rather than spreading themselves thin, they craft an emotional safety net — one that provides more opportunities to have their attachment needs met, not fewer. It’s like creating a diversified portfolio of emotional investment rather than putting all their attachment eggs in one basket.

Consider how this played out in Sophia’s case. Rather than each panic attack reinforcing a sense of brokenness, her multiple relationships provided diverse data points. Different partners triggered different aspects of her trauma, but also offered distinct forms of support. While Thomas’s steady presence helped her build basic trust, Marie’s emotional intelligence supported her in naming feelings, and Jun’s playfulness helped her rediscover joy after triggering events.

This multiplicity of healing pathways isn’t just about having more shoulders to cry on. The science of neuroplasticity suggests something more profound: our brains can create new neural pathways when given opportunities to respond differently to old triggers. But if healing is about disrupting old patterns, what happens when our relationships reinforce them instead?

This is where we encounter the Pattern Paradox — the surprising way trauma survivors often become stuck in relationship patterns, even as they try to heal.

The Pattern Paradox

The Pattern Paradox is a curious phenomenon in trauma recovery. Traditional wisdom suggests that trauma survivors need the stability of a single, consistent relationship to heal. Yet the opposite might be true.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s leading trauma experts, explains in The Body Keeps the Score how unresolved trauma often leads individuals to unconsciously recreate aspects of their past experiences in relationships. Like a needle stuck in a groove, survivors may find themselves replaying the same emotional scenarios, even with different partners.

But healing isn’t about reinforcing patterns — it’s about disrupting them. Neuroscience research, such as studies published in Brain Communications, shows that trauma recovery involves the brain actively reorganising its networks, forming new pathways that allow emotions and responses to flow in different directions. Just as a city might build new roads to ease congestion, the brain constructs alternative routes around entrenched emotional pain.

This is where multiple relationships offer something unexpected. When scientists studied people with multiple partners, they discovered each relationship operated as its own emotional ecosystem. If someone struggled with anxiety or avoidance in one relationship, it didn’t infect their other connections. Their attachments remained distinct and independent, like separate gardens flourishing under different conditions. This flies in the face of everything we thought we knew about attachment styles being fixed traits that we carry from relationship to relationship — and suggests new possibilities for healing.

And here lies the paradox: while each relationship can operate independently, placing all one’s emotional energy into a single relationship can still reinforce old relational habits, even when the relationship is healthy. Like practicing the same dance moves with the same partner, survivors may become proficient in a familiar rhythm but struggle to adapt beyond it. Stability alone does not necessarily create change; sometimes, it can keep us stuck in our well-worn patterns.

Diverse relationship structures, on the other hand, can serve as pattern disruptors. Each new relationship provides a different emotional landscape — offering fresh ways to experience trust, attachment and healing. It’s like dancing with multiple partners: each one introduces new steps, challenges ingrained habits and broadens emotional flexibility.

Sophia’s experience illustrates this in action. With Thomas, she learned to trust stability. With Marie, she practiced emotional vulnerability. With Jun, she discovered that joy could coexist with healing. Instead of reinforcing a single trauma loop, her relationships became parallel laboratories for growth, each offering distinct opportunities to rewire old patterns.

This isn’t about collecting partners to accelerate healing — it’s about intentionally designing relationships — whether in monogamous or non-monogamous contexts, with partners, friends or chosen family — to create multiple avenues for transformation. Healing is not just about stability; it’s about movement, disruption and the freedom to create new ways of relating to both others and ourselves.

The laboratory of love

When Sophia first began mapping her panic attacks in her notebook, she was doing more than collecting data — she was turning her relationships into laboratories for healing. Like a scientist running parallel experiments, she could observe how different relationship structures activated and soothed different aspects of her trauma.

Again, this laboratory approach to relationships isn’t just about having multiple partners. It’s about creating specialised environments for healing. Different relationship structures offer unique conditions for emotional growth, much like different types of scientific laboratories are designed for different kinds of research.

In polyamorous contexts, this laboratory effect becomes particularly evident. Research shows that having multiple relationships can provide a unique testing ground for attachment patterns. When individuals can form secure bonds with multiple partners, they often discover different aspects of their attachment style that might remain hidden in monogamous relationships. For instance, one partner might trigger old abandonment fears, while another helps build secure attachment through consistent presence.

Solo polyamory — where individuals maintain their independence while engaging in multiple relationships — offers its own distinct healing opportunities. “The solo approach allowed me to work on my attachment issues without getting overwhelmed,” explains Thomas, one of Sophia’s partners. “I could practice emotional intimacy while maintaining my sense of self.” This combination of connection and autonomy often provides a gentle way to heal attachment wounds, particularly for those who’ve experienced relationship trauma.

Monogamy, too, can play a vital role in this laboratory of love — not in isolation, but as part of a broader network of healing relationships. While a single romantic relationship alone might reinforce existing patterns, a monogamous partnership supported by deep friendships, family bonds and therapeutic relationships can create its own kind of healing environment. “The key isn’t the relationship structure,” one therapist explains, “but the variety of safe emotional connections available to us. Even in monogamy, we need multiple mirrors to see ourselves clearly.”

Sophia’s experience illustrates how these different configurations can work together. Her relationship with Thomas offered the stability of traditional partnership (even as Thomas practiced solo polyamory), while her connections with Marie and Jun provided different contexts for healing. “Each relationship is like a different kind of experiment,” she reflects. “Some test my ability to trust, others challenge my fear of abandonment, and some help me rediscover joy. Together, they create a complete laboratory for healing.”

The numbers tell an intriguing story. When researchers compared polyamorous individuals to those in monogamous relationships, they found a more complex picture of attachment than conventional wisdom might suggest. Polyamorous individuals showed higher rates of secure attachment and were notably less likely to avoid intimacy than their monogamous counterparts. Though they also showed somewhat higher levels of attachment anxiety, this makes sense — they were creating more opportunities to practice navigating emotional intimacy, like musicians who become more skilled by playing with different bands rather than limiting themselves to solo performances. They weren’t avoiding the challenging emotions — they were diving right into them.

Some CRD laboratory tools

While healing through multiple relationships sounds promising, putting it into practice requires careful design. Through Conscious Relationship Design, several tools have emerged that help navigate trauma recovery while building secure attachments across relationships.

Pattern Mapping, adapted from the Empathy Canvas, helps visualise how trauma and attachment responses manifest differently with different people. Like a personal weather map, it tracks both emotional storms and periods of security across relationships. The process involves creating a visual grid: on one axis, you list common triggers (like feeling dismissed or controlled), and on the other, you track your responses to the triggers with different people in your life. For example, Sophia discovered that while Thomas’s direct communication style sometimes triggered her fear of criticism, the same directness from Marie felt grounding. Understanding these distinct patterns helped Sophia observe and share them with her partners, who could choose to adapt their approaches — and/or simply be more aware of them.

Multi-Partner Support Networks formalise what many discover naturally — different people can provide distinct types of emotional security. This tool involves creating a clear map of who provides what kind of support. In a monogamous context, this might mean consciously designing roles for your partner, close friends and family members. Sarah, who is married, discovered that while her husband excels at providing physical comfort during anxiety attacks, her best friend is better at talking through the emotional aftermath. The key is designing these networks intentionally, with clear protocols for who steps in when and how.

Safety Net Agreements spell out how people support each other while maintaining healthy boundaries. These go beyond basic crisis management to include co-regulation strategies and attachment repair work. A typical agreement includes:

• Early warning signs to watch for

• Specific grounding techniques that work best

• Clear boundaries around physical touch during triggers

• Steps for both immediate response and aftercare

• Guidelines for when to seek professional help

For example, Sophia and her partners developed a color-coded system: “green” meant she felt emotionally regulated and could discuss difficult topics, “yellow” signaled she needed grounding support, and “red” indicated immediate distance and professional intervention were needed.

These tools aren’t meant to replace therapy — rather, they create consistent, trauma-informed practices in daily life that support secure attachment. Whether you’re working with multiple partners or building a stronger support network within monogamy, these tools can be adapted to fit your specific situation. The goal isn’t rigid rules but intentional practices that support healing while fostering secure connections for everyone involved.

The integration challenge

The process of integrating diverse relationship structures into trauma healing is not always smooth, nor is it free from setbacks. Even when multiple relationships create new neural pathways and disrupt old patterns, they introduce emotional complexity, boundary negotiation and the need for conscious communication.

The structures that offer opportunities for growth can also surface long-buried triggers. Trauma survivors may find that managing multiple intimate connections sometimes intensifies emotional responses rather than diffuses them. When faced with multiple sources of emotional input, some experience overwhelm or shutdown. Others, particularly those with avoidant attachment tendencies, may use additional relationships as a way to sidestep deeper work in one connection by leaning on another. Not all partners provide the same level of emotional security, which can lead to imbalances in support. While polyamory or consciously designed relationships can disrupt trauma patterns, they can also, if unexamined, become a new stage for replaying unhealthy dynamics.

For Sophia, integrating the insights from her relationships required active effort. Not all partners understood her triggers in the same way, and while some connections felt healing, others exposed vulnerabilities she wasn’t yet ready to confront. Instead of abandoning those experiences, she began refining her approach, identifying what worked, what didn’t, and where she needed additional support.

The strategies for navigating trauma in relationships vary depending on relationship structure. No single approach is inherently better — each presents different opportunities and challenges. Monogamous relationships offer depth and consistency but may limit opportunities for disrupting entrenched trauma patterns, as we’ve discussed. If one partner becomes the sole source of emotional regulation, it can create dependency that makes healing more difficult.

Polyamorous relationships provide multiple avenues for co-regulation and healing but require strong communication skills and emotional resilience. The presence of multiple attachments can be both a source of reassurance and, at times, an added challenge in terms of managing expectations and emotional needs. Solo polyamory or relationship anarchy offers self-sovereignty while allowing for intimacy, though it may challenge those who crave consistency and secure attachment. Healing does not have to be limited to romantic relationships. Intentional communities, friendships and chosen families can also play a vital role in creating stabilising relationships that provide emotional support.

No matter the relationship structure, integrating trauma healing into relational dynamics benefits from external support. Trauma-informed therapists, relationship coaches and polyamory-friendly counsellors can help individuals and partners navigate the complexities of relational healing. Targeted therapeutic interventions such as EMDR, somatic therapy, and Internal Family Systems therapy are particularly effective in processing trauma within relational contexts.

Sophia found that tracking her emotional responses across relationships helped her work with her therapist to recognise patterns faster. She also engaged in a support group for non-traditional relationships, which provided insight into how others balanced trauma recovery with multiple attachments.

To truly integrate trauma healing into relationships, intentional practices create sustainability. Pattern Mapping allows individuals to notice and map how different partners trigger or soothe trauma responses. Developing attachment awareness enables a deeper understanding of personal patterns and how they interact within relationships. Safety Net Agreements, which establish explicit support frameworks, help partners navigate emotional distress effectively.

Engaging in friendships, support groups or chosen families provides additional layers of stability, ensuring emotional support is not solely dependent on romantic relationships. Allowing relationships to evolve naturally in response to personal growth, rather than forcing rigid structures, makes healing more adaptable.

Sophia’s journey did not end with identifying trauma triggers — it continued through an ongoing process of redesigning, refining and reinforcing the relationships that best supported her healing. It was never about choosing the “right” structure, but rather about designing relationships that worked for her unique healing path. For many trauma survivors, that is the real challenge — and the greatest opportunity.

The future of healing

The way we think about trauma healing is shifting. For decades, the emphasis was on the individual — on working through pain in therapy, on self-reflection, on personal growth before stepping into relationships. But the emerging research on relationship structures and trauma healing suggests that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in connection. And not just in one relationship, but across a web of intimate, platonic and communal bonds.

Recent studies in neuroscience and psychology are challenging the idea that a single relationship should bear the full weight of emotional repair. Researchers are beginning to see healing as something that thrives in diversity — where different people, with different attachment styles and different ways of loving, create a multi-layered support system. Polyamorous networks, chosen families and consciously designed friendships are all proving to be valuable structures in trauma work, offering multiple mirrors through which individuals can see themselves more clearly, and multiple safety nets to catch them in moments of distress.

As Conscious Relationship Design evolves, its role in trauma healing is likely to become more refined. Right now, CRD provides a framework for intentionality in relationships, allowing people to shape connections that fit their unique emotional needs. But the next frontier is in integrating trauma-informed principles more explicitly — helping individuals not only identify their triggers but also design relational environments that foster nervous system regulation. Future iterations of CRD could involve more structured mapping of attachment patterns across relationships, collaborative agreements that support co-regulation, and community-based approaches that reduce the isolation trauma so often creates.

The implications go far beyond personal healing. If we rethink relationships as ecosystems of healing rather than as isolated dyads, we begin to see how society itself could be restructured to better support emotional well-being. Schools, workplaces and social institutions might take cues from these insights, fostering relational resilience not just in romantic partnerships but across all aspects of human connection. Healing, then, stops being an individual burden and starts becoming a collective, relational practice.

Sophia’s journey is just one example of this shift. What began as an experiment in mapping her panic attacks across multiple relationships became something much larger: a new way of thinking about intimacy, healing and the role of relationships in shaping who we become. The future of healing is not about going it alone. It’s about designing relationships that move with us, evolve with us, and ultimately, help us heal in ways we never imagined possible.

What do you think?

Healing isn’t just about going it alone or waiting for time to work its magic — it’s about connection. Not just any connection, but safe, consciously designed relationships that help us repair, rewire and live more fully.

Have you noticed patterns in your own relationships that have supported or challenged your healing? How have you intentionally shaped your relationships to create safety and connection? Have certain relationship structures supported your healing in unexpected ways?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment, share this with someone who might find it helpful, or bring it into a conversation with a partner or friend. Let’s keep the conversation going — because healing happens in connection.

Leave a comment

Additional resources

This work is a piece from my current writing project on Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to read along and follow more, hit the “subscribe” button to get a notification when I publish new articles on this topic.

Subscribe now

If you are interested in exploring consciously designing your relationships, join me in a free 1:1 online session.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Leave a comment

Eva sits at her kitchen table, fingers wrapped around a cooling mug of coffee, as her partner Marcus paces the room.

“I just don’t understand why you need to travel so much for work”, he says, voice tight with frustration. “Can’t you do more from home?”

The scene appears to be about travel, about work-life balance, about time spent apart. But peek beneath the surface, and you’ll find what really lies at the heart of their tension: power.

Subscribe now

Every day, in kitchens, bedrooms and boardrooms across the world, these small moments accumulate. Who speaks? Who stays silent? Who compromises? Who stands firm? Power moves through our relationships like an invisible current, shaping our lives in ways we rarely stop to examine.

Power dynamics — those invisible forces that determine who influences whom, who decides what and how, and controls ebbs and flows between people — shape our relationships in ways both subtle and profound.

We see this played out dramatically in Nicole Kidman’s “Babygirl”, where what appears to be a simple story of an older executive and younger intern becomes a masterclass in power’s fluidity. “I could get you fired with one phone call”, the intern tells his CEO lover, upending our assumptions about who truly holds control.

Beyond traditional power structures

While Eva and Marcus navigate power within their shared home, other couples are finding different ways to approach these dynamics. Consider Kai and Maya, who chose to live apart after five years of marriage.

“Everyone thought we were crazy,” Maya tells me over video chat from her city apartment, while Kai nods from their suburban home on a split screen. “But living apart actually forced us to be more intentional about power.” Their Living Apart Together (LAT) arrangement emerged from a series of honest conversations about autonomy, space and control — conversations that would reshape their understanding of relationship power entirely.

These dynamics manifest in our daily lives in countless ways — from who manages the shared digital calendar to who carries the mental load of remembering birthdays. They surface in whose career takes precedence, who initiates sex, even whose social media presence gets priority in couple photos.

But what happens when we bring these dynamics into the light? When we consciously examine and design for them, rather than letting them silently direct our relationships? To understand how power shapes our connections — and how we can shape it in return — we must first recognise its many forms.

The many faces of power

When we think about power in relationships, we tend to picture the obvious: who earns more, who owns the house, who has the more prestigious job.

But power is more complex than titles and paychecks - and it looks different across cultures and contexts. It exists on a spectrum, from the explicitly negotiated to the nearly invisible. In many East Asian relationships, for instance, power often flows through subtle expressions of respect and obligation rather than overt control.

Our relationship to power isn’t random. It’s shaped by past relationships, cultural messages and accumulated experiences. But while unconscious power dynamics often breed resentment, conscious power exchange — whether in unconventional or traditional relationships — creates space for authentic connection through awareness and consent.

Studies show that relationship satisfaction isn’t about the presence or absence of power differentials, but about how power is experienced. The healthiest relationships are not the ones without power dynamics but the ones that acknowledge and actively engage with them — across cultures, contexts and communication channels.

Power in the digital age

For Kai and Maya, their first power audit revealed surprising insights. “I thought living apart would automatically balance things,” Kai explains. “But then we realised I still had this invisible power over our social schedule because I managed our shared calendar. Maya was always waiting for my availability.” Maya adds, “And I controlled our narrative on social media — I was the one posting about our ‘unconventional but amazing’ arrangement. I was shaping how everyone saw us.”

Recent research suggests that power imbalances manifest differently in the digital age. Couples report new forms of control through read receipts, location sharing and social media boundaries. A partner who always keeps their location private while expecting transparency from the other. The person who takes hours to respond to messages while demanding immediate replies. These digital dynamics can be as impactful as traditional power plays.

Designing power consciously

Understanding power dynamics is one thing; consciously designing them is another entirely. In Conscious Relationship Design, we begin with a radical premise: relationships don’t just happen to us — we can craft them intentionally, power dynamics and all.

One of the most structured approaches to power awareness comes from the world of BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadism), where power is negotiated rather than assumed. Before a scene begins, partners set boundaries, establish safe words and agree on dynamics. This level of intentionality might seem extreme for everyday relationships, but it offers valuable lessons for all partnerships.

Tools for power-aware relationships

Maya and Kai’s journey illustrates how conscious tools can transform relationship dynamics.

“At first, we thought living apart would automatically solve our power struggles,” Maya reflects. “But distance just made them more subtle. We needed tools.”

They began with a simple Power Audit Framework, mapping their relationship’s power flows across three domains: practical decisions (who manages what), emotional labour (who carries which invisible burdens) and digital dynamics (who controls their shared online life).

When they applied the framework, it revealed patterns that went far beyond the obvious power differentials. They discovered power imbalances in their digital intimacy — Kai, they realised, almost always initiated video calls, while Maya controlled their text rhythm, often taking hours to respond while expecting quick replies.

Their meeting schedule followed subtle power lines too: Maya, with her more demanding job, implicitly determined their in-person visits by sharing her “available” weekends, which Kai then worked around. Even their social media dynamics carried hidden power implications — Maya curated their public story through carefully chosen photos and captions, while Kai maintained veto power over what could be shared.

“The framework helped us see patterns we’d been blind to,” Kai explains. “Like how I unconsciously deferred to Maya’s food preferences when we did meet up, or how she automatically took charge of maintaining our relationships with mutual friends. These weren’t conscious power plays — they were habits we’d fallen into without realising.”

Cultural and digital dimensions

A Cultural Power Assessment added another layer of understanding. Maya’s Chinese-American background meant she carried different expectations about family obligations and decision-making than Kai, whose British upbringing emphasised individual autonomy. These cultural differences shaped how they approached everything from financial decisions to family visits.

Digital Power Mapping proved equally revealing for them. Who had access to which passwords? Who managed shared subscriptions? Who archived their shared photos? In our connected age, these digital domains carry their own power currency. For Kai and Maya, creating a conscious digital power-sharing agreement became as important as their physical space arrangements.

The power of conscious design

Successful couples don’t avoid discussing power — they actively shape how it functions in their relationship. Instead of power settling into unconscious ruts, they conduct regular audits, have conversations and check in frequently: Who makes which decisions? How do we handle disagreements? What happens when one of us needs more autonomy or more support?

Power imbalances: Recognition and response

Power in relationships is rarely static — it shifts and evolves, often dramatically during life transitions. For Kai and Maya, this became clear when Maya received an unexpected promotion. “Suddenly, I was travelling more than ever,” Maya explains. “The power balance we’d carefully crafted around our LAT arrangement started to crumble.”

These power shifts often manifest in subtle ways. A partner who earns more might influence financial choices without explicit discussion — the hesitation before suggesting an expensive restaurant, the expectation that career sacrifices will always be made by the lower earner. Emotional power follows a different logic: The person less invested in the relationship often holds more control, dictating the terms of closeness and distance. Maya found herself unconsciously wielding both types of power after her promotion — financial through her increased salary, and emotional through her reduced availability.

Power is easier to feel than to articulate — often surfacing as a vague sense of unfairness, a quiet resentment or a growing reluctance to voice needs. These feelings become especially acute during life transitions, whether career changes, health challenges, or family expansions. A partner who becomes a caregiver might find their autonomy shrinking. A stay-at-home parent returning to work may upset long-established decision-making patterns. Even retirement can reshape power dynamics that have existed for decades.

The difference between conscious power exchange and unhealthy control is consent. When power is used as a tool for coercion rather than negotiation, it moves into abuse. The presence of fear, rather than trust, is the clearest indicator of an unhealthy dynamic.

Cultural backgrounds often determine how couples navigate these shifts. “In my Chinese-American family,” Maya notes, “career success comes with family obligations. My promotion meant I was suddenly expected to take a more active role in caring for my aging parents. Kai struggled to understand why this wasn’t negotiable.”

Generational differences add another layer of complexity. Millennials like Kai and Maya approach power differently than their Baby Boomer parents. While previous generations often accepted implicit power structures, younger couples tend to demand explicit negotiations. “My parents think it’s strange how much we talk about power,” Kai admits. “For them, some things were just understood.”

Research shows that couples who successfully navigate power shifts share three characteristics:

1. They recognise power dynamics as fluid rather than fixed.

2. They communicate about power changes before they become problematic.

3. They’re willing to redesign their relationship agreements as circumstances change.

Share

Practical tools for power navigation

Understanding power dynamics is essential; having concrete tools to recognise and navigate them is crucial. I always suggest starting with these diagnostic questions:

• Do I feel I can say no without consequences? If refusing a request leads to guilt, withdrawal or conflict, an imbalance may be at play.

• Who usually accommodates? Who makes sacrifices?

• Who feels responsible for keeping things running smoothly?

These questions helped Kai and Maya identify their power patterns before implementing more structured tools.

Relationship Agreements

Many couples begin their power-conscious journey with a relationship agreement — not a rigid contract, but a living conversation that evolves over time. These agreements can be as simple as:

• “We agree not to mix finances — we will both contribute to a joint account for living expenses.”

• “We agree to take turns planning date nights rather than defaulting to one person.”

• “We agree to alternate who makes social plans with friends and family.”

The Empathy Canvas

Tools like the Empathy Canvas help make invisible power dynamics visible by mapping out emotions, needs and expectations. It reveals essential patterns: Who carries the mental load? Who initiates affection? Who takes responsibility for social plans?

The Power Check-In Framework

Regular check-ins about power dynamics can start with simple observations and grow into more structured conversations. Here’s how to progress:

Starting the conversation

Begin with gentle observations about patterns you’ve noticed:

• “I’ve noticed I tend to make most of our plans — how do you feel about that?”

• “Lately, I’ve felt like my preferences don’t get as much weight. Can we check in about how we make decisions?”

Deepening the discussion

Move to more structured explorations:

• “Where do you feel you have less influence than you’d like?”

• “What decisions would you like to be more involved in?”

• “Are there areas where you feel your voice isn’t being heard?”

Regular maintenance

Schedule periodic power audits to discuss:

• Changes in relationship dynamics

• Shifts in responsibilities

• Evolution of decision-making patterns

• New areas needing attention

Maya explains how she and Kai use this framework: “We started with simple observations about our text response patterns. That opened the door to deeper conversations about digital boundaries, which eventually led to our comprehensive digital power-sharing agreement.”

Digital Power-Sharing Agreement

Create explicit agreements about:

• Response time expectations for messages

• Location sharing preferences

• Social media boundaries

• Password sharing and digital access

Cultural Adaptation Guidelines

• Identify cultural assumptions about power

• Discuss family expectations explicitly

• Create hybrid approaches that honour different backgrounds

The Transition Protocol

Before major life changes:

• Map current power dynamics

• Identify potential shifts

• Create contingency plans

• Schedule more frequent check-ins during transition periods

For example, when Maya’s promotion arrived, she and Kai implemented their transition protocol: “We sat down and literally mapped out how each aspect of our relationship might change,” Maya explains. “Who would initiate our video calls now? How would we handle the reduced flexibility in my schedule? Having these conversations before the change helped us navigate it more smoothly.”

Remember, tools should be adapted to your specific situation. A young couple balancing startup careers might need different approaches than empty nesters reimagining their relationship. The key is consistency in using whatever tools you choose.

Designing resilient power dynamics

Long-term power balance isn’t about achieving perfect equality — it’s about creating relationship structures — and power dynamics — flexible enough to bend without breaking. “It’s like building earthquake-resistant architecture,” Maya reflects. “You need a strong foundation, but also enough flexibility to move with the tremors.”

Some couples find this resilience through regular relationship rituals. A successful polyamorous triad in Seattle maintains power balance through monthly “state of the union” meetings, where each partner takes turns facilitating. A Malaysian-American couple combines traditional family councils with modern power-sharing agreements, creating a hybrid approach that honours both their cultural heritage and contemporary needs.

The key to resilience often lies in unexpected places. A lesbian couple in their sixties discovered that separately maintained passion projects — one’s community gardening, the other’s local politics — created natural power balance through mutual admiration and independence. An interfaith couple found that alternating which holidays take precedence each year helped them navigate cultural power dynamics.

For Kai and Maya, their breakthrough came six months after Maya’s promotion. “We realised we’d been trying to control everything,” Kai explains. “The schedule, the visits, the decisions. Once we accepted that some things could remain fluid, power became less of a struggle.” Maya adds, “Now we focus on what matters most — feeling secure in our connection, whether we’re together or apart.”

This insight — that power dynamics require both structure and flexibility — brings us back to Eva and Marcus in their kitchen. Their struggle over travel and work arrangements isn’t really about location or schedules. It’s about finding ways to share power that honour both their needs for autonomy and connection.

The most resilient relationships aren’t those without power differentials, but those that turn these struggles into opportunities for deeper understanding. They create what relationship scientists like myself call “power-conscious partnerships” — relationships where power is neither ignored nor fought over, but consciously designed and regularly reimagined.

As Maya puts it, “Power isn’t something to solve once and for all. It’s more like doubles tennis — you need to know when to step forward and when to give your partner space to make the play. The key is learning to move as a team.”

What do you think?

Power shows up in every relationship, whether we talk about it or not. So let’s talk about it.

As you reflect on your own relationships, I invite you to consider:

Power patterns

• Where do you see power flowing in your relationships?

• Which digital dynamics influence your connections most strongly?

• How do cultural backgrounds shape your power expectations?

Personal reflection

• What power patterns have you inherited from your family or culture?

• How do you typically respond when feeling powerless?

• Where might you be unconsciously wielding power?

Taking action

1. Choose one power dynamic to examine this week.

2. Try a simple power check-in with your partner.

3. Notice where cultural — or gender — expectations influence your relationships.

The question isn’t whether power exists in your relationships — it’s whether you’re consciously designing how it flows. As Kai and Maya discovered, bringing power into the light doesn’t diminish connection — it deepens it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you ever had an “aha” moment about power in your relationships? Have you tried renegotiating power dynamics with a partner? Let’s keep the conversation going — drop a comment or share your experience below.

Leave a comment

Additional resources

This work is a piece from my current writing project on Conscious Relationship Design. If you’d like to read along and follow more, hit the “subscribe” button to get a notification when I publish new articles on this topic.

Subscribe now

If you are interested in exploring consciously designing your relationships, join me in a free 1:1 online session.

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it. Comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Share

Leave a comment

Over the past few months, I've shared a series of letters exploring Conscious Relationship Design (CRD) through a different lens - a theological critique that challenged core assumptions about modern relationship structures.

As we conclude this series, the dialogue with my correspondent shifts from specific relationship structures to broader questions about how we maintain meaningful conversation across differences in times of social division.

Subscribe now

My correspondent shares candidly about struggling with cultural anxiety during a contentious election period. Their openness about personal vulnerability, even as our theoretical discussions wind down, demonstrates how authentic dialogue can build bridges of understanding despite differing viewpoints.

This exchange began with challenging questions about relationship design and traditional values. It concludes by illustrating something vital: that thoughtful engagement across different perspectives isn't just possible - it's essential for navigating complex social changes.

While keeping my correspondent's identity and words private, I'm sharing this final response because it captures how intellectual discourse can evolve into meaningful human connection. My correspondent’s willingness to engage openly with challenging ideas while maintaining both conviction and grace offers a model for dialogue that extends beyond relationship design to reveal our shared humanity and capacity for understanding across divides.

Dear X,

Your note resonates strongly with our current moment, and I appreciate you sharing both your reflections and personal thoughts. Your willingness to engage so openly these last few weeks has made our exchange particularly meaningful.

Our correspondence demonstrates something vital - that people with different perspectives can engage meaningfully with challenging ideas while maintaining respect and openness to understanding. Your personal insights have enriched this dialogue immensely.

I appreciate your candour about cultural anxiety. These are complex times that test everyone's capacity for balanced thinking and hopeful engagement. Please know that I'm thinking of you and yours and hoping you find moments of peace during this period at home and in the wider community.

Your questions and challenges have been invaluable, pushing me to examine CRD principles more rigorously and consider their implications from different angles. This kind of dialogue - where we can disagree thoughtfully while seeking to understand each other's perspectives - offers a model for navigating difficult conversations. In this case, it has been about relationship structures and societal change. I believe this kind of dialogue can be expanded outwards.

Please take the time you need to reflect. Whether our correspondence continues or not, it has contributed significantly to my thinking about how Conscious Relationship Design intersects with traditional values and societal well-being.

Thank you for engaging so thoughtfully with these ideas and for sharing parts of your own journey. Your willingness to explore challenging concepts while maintaining both conviction and openness exemplifies the kind of dialogue we need more of today.

Wishing you and yours peace and clarity,

Julie

P.S. With your kind permission, I have begun publishing my letters to you in my newsletter. Readers have written to tell me how much they appreciate your thoughtful questions. Thank you for allowing me to share these exchanges.

What do you think?

How do we maintain meaningful dialogue across deep differences? This exchange shows how conversations that begin with challenging disagreements can evolve into spaces of mutual understanding and respect.

In times of social division, what allows us to truly hear and engage with perspectives different from our own? What makes it possible to disagree thoughtfully while remaining open to connection?

I'd love to hear your reflections on building bridges across ideological divides. Whether you've experienced similar moments of unexpected understanding or are seeking ways to engage across differences, your thoughts will most certainly enrich my thinking - and quite possibly, the thinking of a few others.

Leave a comment

Feel free to share this article if you enjoyed it.

Share

Read the other letters in this series