And most of us are using it wrong in one of two directions. Either we are not using it enough - swallowing, shrinking, going mute in the exact moments God is asking us to open our mouths and speak the TRUTH. Orrrrrr we are using it far,FAR too much. 🥲

I have lived in both but it is the second one that almost cost me my whole relationship with the most extraordinary man God Himself put me together with.

Proverbs 18:21 “The tongue has the power of life and death.”

not to be dramatic but uhm - life AND death.

with nothing but the small wet muscle in our mouths, we can build an entire kingdom. A home a man can’t wait to come back to at the end of a brutal day. A place where he can exhale. Where he is safe, respected, adored, wanted, believed in.

and with that exact same muscle, we can start pulling that kingdom down brick by brick - so convinced we are helping that we don’t even hear the stones falling behind us.

I have done both.

he is not ignoring you, he speaks a different language

we can speak and speak and speak and speak but into ears that are not open, it is oil in water. It never mixes. It just sits on the surface, separate, going absolutely nowhere, no matter how much of it you pour.

and we pour.God, do we pour. 🙂

because we are outward creatures. We think by speaking. We discover what we actually feel somewhere around sentence forty - which is precisely WHY we need to get to sentence forty. Talking is not how we report our processing,talking is the processing. Every woman reading this knows the specific relief of hearing herself say something out loud and going: “ohhhh,so THAT’S what was wrong…”

In most cases, he is the exact opposite. He goes in. He goes down. He takes it into a room inside himself, shuts the door, turns it over in his hands for as long as it needs and comes back out only when he has something finished to hand you. (🧠result-driven masculine brain)

So when we pour more words into a man who has already gone inward, we are knocking on the door of a house he is not currently standing in. And the harder we knock, the longer he stays in the back room.

This is why the more we speak, the further away they seem to drift.

God is not going to shout over you

You want him to lead. You want him rooted. You want him on his knees before God, hearing directly from his Father, carrying his mission, becoming the man you have been praying about.

And yet, you have not stopped talking.

like, ever.

Where, exactly, is the silence for the Holy Spirit to reach him? Where is the room? God does not compete for airtime. He does not raise His voice to be heard over yours. If the only voice in that man’s ear from 6am until his head hits the pillow is yours, correcting, reminding, suggesting, worrying, improving, helping, then you have filled the exact space God was trying to occupy.

1 Peter 3:1-2 “They may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives.”

Without words. Somebody put that on a billboard.

I used to read that verse and feel personally attacked, which is usually how you know a verse is for you.🥰

Of everything Holy Spirit has given me, and He has given me so much, so undeservedly may God bless, the sharpest, most useful union-saving gift is this:

I (now) know when and how to shut my mouth

Oh my.

I can physically feel it. The heat rising in my chest. The sentence already fully formed and armed on my tongue, edited to perfection, aimed at exactly the soft spot I know is there. And He goes: “No.”

Let me be very-VERY clear, because this is where women get it twisted and go build resentment palaces in silence: this is not suppression. I am not swallowing it. I am not being a good little quiet wife with a smile painted on and a war going on behind my teeth.

what I AM doing is:

I talk to God BEFORE I talk to my man

ALWAYS. Before I make any next moves.

He gets the full unedited version of me , as raw, honest, transparent and vulnerable as possible . He gets my pain, my rage, my hurt, my anger, my pettiness, my accusations. He gets my good and my bad, my beauty and my ugly. because He can handle it. ALL of it. ALL of me. in fact He is the only one who can handle it.

My man is not built to be my emotional dumping ground or vomiting bag BUT !! My Father is designed to be my everything.

and who am I to decide what needs to be said or done?! who am I to take this into my own hands?! who am I to be sure this is even real and not the enemy stirring the pot just to get us to fight with each other?!

Nuh-uh. You are not getting me. I am bringing this to my Father FIRST and THEN HE decides what happens next. Amen.

And I am telling you, with my whole chest: 100% !!! (not 80% or 90% - 100%!!) of the time, one of three things always happens:

1. He handles it Himself, without me having to say a word or do a thing. My prayer was enough. Me taking my whole vulnerable heart to Him was enough. It either dissolves, stops existing or will be solved without me moving a finger. There have been SO many times where I am crying out to God about a specific pain that stings my heart and few days later my man (without having a single conversation about it) brings it up himself or suddenly handles it without my intervention. Goosebumps as I’m writing this.

2. He gives me wisdom WHEN and HOW to open my mouth and bring it up. Not just permission (and obligation) to speak - but also instructions. Which words specifically. What tone. Sometimes He tells me to wait until next week. Sometimes He tells me to say one sentence and then be quiet. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy, most of the times I still want to puke my guts out BUT when I speak from that place,it ALWAYS lands. It lands in a way that changes me, changes him and changes our union all-together. Because it was not my wisdom that guided me. He knew better. As He always does.

3. He turns the mirror around and shows me where I am in the wrong. He changes my heart, my ways. He opens my eyes. He brings light to where I was blind, still in the darkness. He rebukes the enemy and realigns something crooked in me that I had been about to project all over an innocent man that was never about him at all.

that is not some learned hack. that is not a simple “relationship technique”….

it is a covenant, sealed and affirmed by Christ. and it has saved me, my life, my man and our union.

it has taken us to depths and intimacy not one practice / conversation ever could. it has realigned us back into our biological Christ-made polarity. it has deepened our connection to God.

it brought down heaven to earth and all I needed to do was shut up.

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what else I do:

1. I ask. And then I shut up and wait.

I ask him a question and I STOP. Completely. I do not repeat myself. I do not rephrase it, I do not ask it a second time thirty seconds later. I do not stack a new question on top of the old. I do not say “hello?? 🙂”

I wait.

sometimes that wait is genuinely several minutes. even longer. I have asked something and watched an ENTIRE kettle boil before he answered.

Oh I have taken it as a personal attack. How disrespectful can you be?! We are in the SAME room, I’m asking you a QUESTION, trying to have a CONVERSATION with you and you just blatantly ignore me.

Jesus woman.

the other side of this dramatic coin was this: his train of thought just runs on a completely different track to mine.

that’s it.

and He always answers. Every single time. He has never once not answered. It just never arrives on my preferred or controlled schedule.

same rule when he is telling me something. When he opens up, when he shares a story - I do not barge in. I do not finish his sentence. I do not jump in with my similar-but-better story the millisecond he pauses.

I wait until he is truly finished. There is almost always a second half or another sentence coming.

2. I say nothing about how he did it.

He loaded the dishwasher differently. You will not hear my mouth. He took the longer route. Silent. He folded the towels into shapes previously unknown to science. Zipped. He packed the car in a way that I, personally, would not have - is the car is packed, and we are moving?? Halleluujah “thank you so much” and my mouth is closed. 🙃

at this point my brain is constantly and actively scanning for everything he is doing right, everything he is providing, handling, managing, planning. I search for every opportunity to thank or praise him. The win? I don’t even notice where he “lacks” and he is continuously looking for ways to make me happy again.

nobody in the history of men has ever been inspired into leadership by a nagging and degrading woman standing behind him narrating and micromanaging his errors and whole existence.

what it all did to us

I see him with new eyes. I mean that physically - I look at him and see a man, my beautiful, handsome, ambitious, capable, extraordinary, incredibly masculine, God-created man. MY MAN.

not a project with a deadline.

I trust him more, because I have watched God handle things through him that I would have wrecked with my own two hands.

I do not vomit every worry and insecurity onto him the instant it crosses my mind. He does not have to be my God. He does not have the job of regulating me, reassuring me hourly, answering questions that only Heaven can answer. That is not his weight to carry.He was never built for it and watching a good man try to carry it anyway will break your heart in a way you will never forget.

I have a Father for that. MY Father.

And he FEELS all of it. Men are not oblivious. Far FARRRR from it.they can read the temperature of a woman within four seconds of walking through the door - every one of them can, including yours.

He can sense and FEEL when you are rooted in God, when your confidence, when your femininity is is all from Christ Himself.

Instead of a woman who never shuts up. Where there is always something wrong, something done incorrectly, something that still needs doing, something that should have been handled last week….blabber blabber blabber…

He feels a woman of God in front of him. woman who is aligned, rooted, happy. surrendered. playful. who smiles more, trusts more, says thank you more, touches him more, laughs at his jokes more. who sees him clearly. who believes in him. wants him. recognizes him. accepts him.

yet who is also using the painful sword of truth wisely - but to build her kingdom, not to wreck it down.

a woman he would do ANYTHING for.

we have to stop playing God over our men

when you correct him constantly, when you manage his choices, when you monitor his growth against your private timeline, when you deliver the lesson before God ever gets the chance to - you are not being a “supportive partner”,you are killing him.

it is killing his masculinity. It is killing the intimate, private, unbelievably sacred thing God is trying to build directly with him, one-on-one, in a room you were never meant to enter. It is killing you, because you are exhausted and you are lonely and you are doing a job that has no salary, no purpose,no result and no end.

And it is killing your relationship, slowly and VERY surely from the inside.

let him be his own person. let him breathe. let him learn things at his own pace and discover things you already know and be wrong about things you could have corrected in one sentence.

Let him fall. I know. I know how that feels -everything in you rises to catch him, to warn him, to smooth the road, to say I told you. Let him fall anyway.

there are lessons God is holding for that man that your intervention will only postpone.

And a man who has fallen and gotten back up on his own strength becomes something a managed man NEVER will. They NEED to fall, they NEED to fail, they NEED to get hurt, they NEED to make mistake, they NEED to go through tribulations and initiations. its the most important part of their journey of becoming a man. a king. a leader.

let God correct him. Not you.

Psalm 141:3 “Set a guard over my mouth, Lord; keep watch over the door of my lips.”

the door. Not a wall. Not a lock. a door - something with hinges. Something built to open,and built to close.Pray for discernment to learn which one it is, and when.

THAT is the whole kingdom.

-Lauret 🤍

You are NOT lazy enough as a woman.

You SAY you want to work less and rest more. You SAY you want to be taken care of, to have things handled and organized for you, to turn your brain off and float away into la-la land for a while.

but if I followed you around for 24 hours - what would I actually see that supports any of that?

I’d see your brain running the to-do list the very second your eyes even opened. I’d see you answering messages with one hand and making coffee with the other. Wiping the counter on the way past. Starting a load of laundry while listening to a 10-minute voice message from your co-worker. Booking the appointment, moving the appointment, apologizing for moving the appointment. Ordering Emily’s birthday present between emails. Googling what to make for dinner while eating a handful of nuts, which you have decided counts as lunch. Saying yes to a coffee you don’t want to go to. Taking out the trash because it’s faster than asking or WAITING for it to be taken out. Falling into bed at midnight with your jaw clenched, scrolling videos about nervous system regulation.

And somewhere in there, telling anyone who will listen (your man for example) how exhausted you are.

We are chronically overworked, overwhelmed, overstressed, overthinking, completely tense and underpleasured.

And so we dream. We dream that a saviour would come and FORCE us to bed. That he would take the reins and with the blink of an eye release us from every burden we’re carrying. That he would look at the list, take it out of our hands, and say “I’ve got this, go lie down.”

It sounds beautiful on paper. But I need to tell you something, even with the most perfect man on this earth, the odds of that scene arriving on its own are close to zero. Not because he doesn’t want to. Because you have never ONCE let him see that you actually want it.💣

words might be YOUR love language, they’re not his though

Whether we like it or not, the responsibility for our own well-being sits in our hands.

Horrifying, I know. 🥲

You say you want a man who handles things for you. Yet he has never in his life witnessed you actually wanting that - because everything you DO says the opposite.

1. You handle everything yourself. You overwork, you push, you do, you organize, you plan, you carry, you manage.

2. AND you also don’t give up any of it - because otherwise it wouldn’t get done at all, or it would get done wrong, or it would take too long, or you’d have to watch someone do it “badly”.

in other words: you constantly have a stick up your butt and nobody besides you can take it out

Here’s the thing about men.

Words don’t carry the weight for them that they carry for us. We can speak and speak and speak and speak - and 90% of the time it seems to sail straight past the mark. We think we’ve delivered a message. He thinks he’s heard a mood.

What lands for them are actions. That is their language. That is the frequency they receive on. 🎯

So if you SAY you want more rest, with your WORDS, but never once demonstrate it with your body, your calendar, your embodiment, he is not going to put two and two together.

he is going to look at a woman who is very obviously choosing this, complaining about it, and choosing it again tomorrow

Instead of announcing that you’re overworked, overstressed and pushed to your very last limit and then continuing with the fully booked schedule, the cleaning, the trash, the cinema tickets, Emily’s present, and “babe, did you remember your doctor’s appointment?” - you are going to say you LOVE to rest as a woman. And then you are going to prove it.

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let him SEE it

Let him SEE you actually rest. Taking days off. Napping in the middle of the afternoon like it’s a completely normal thing a grown woman does. Not organizing or planning anything for an entire weekend. Spending your free time in a bath. Reading a book curled up under a blanket. Swirling around the kitchen baking cinnamon rolls with absolutely no idea what time it is.

Let him SEE that your capacity has a limit, and that when it’s full, you stop adding to the list. Not with an announcement, not with a martyr’s sigh, not with a passive-aggressive slam of the dishwasher. Just you, STOP.

Let him SEE that he is NEEDED and WANTED. Give him more to carry, and then (this is the part that will kill you) do not sit on top of his neck controlling when and how it gets done.

And I mean it. Because most of us hand over a task the way a supervisor hands over a task. We delegate and then hover. We ask for help and then correct the help. We say “can you handle dinner?” and then stand in the doorway suggesting a better pan.

• He handles it. You don’t ask when. You don’t ask how. You don’t check the app to see if it’s been booked. If it’s late, it’s late, if it’s done wrong, it’s done wrong - the world keeps spinning and you’ll live another day.

• The trash sits there overnight and you go to bed anyway. I promise you, it will still be there in the morning, and so will you.

• He does something for you and your entire response is “thank you, that was so helpful.” Full stop. No “you missed a spot.” No “next time could you-”. Nothing. Let the sentence end and shut up.

• You say no to something you don’t want to do and you do not give a five-part explanation for why. “Sorry, I can’t this week” is a complete answer.

• You drive somewhere with no podcast, no music, no phone. Just yo, the road and God.

• You do one thing this week that produces absolutely nothing besides bringing you joy.

• You get in the bath before the kitchen is clean. On purpose.

“So I have to show him that I’m lazy?” In that sense - yes. Absolutely yes.

whose voice is actually calling it laziness?

If taking more time off as a woman and prioritizing your God-given nature registers in your body as “laziness,” then it’s time for a painful look in the mirror. Where exactly does your worth as a woman live?

do you think God would ever say to you: “how much I love you is measured by how much you can achieve”?

As His daughter, you were anointed and loved from the very second He placed you in your mother’s womb. Before you had done one single thing. Before you were productive, useful, impressive, efficient, or helpful to anybody. You did not earn your way in and you cannot work your way further in.

Most of us grew up with fathers who were absent, or emotionally closed off, or who raised us like their sons. And that is perfect soil for the enemy to plant the pattern that has been running you ever since: “you are never enough, but maybe, if you work hard enough, you can be worth something.”

That’s the web of lies told by the enemy, that we have to untangle ourselves from. Lies he wants you to believe to keep you close.

Your Father will never-ever-ever speak to you like that. ❤️

and no - we’re not going to the other extreme

The other end of the pendulum is throwing your legs up on a wall and never doing anything again. Calling apathy “softness.” Calling avoidance “surrender.” Calling a life with no purpose, no service, no gifts being used, no mission, a “feminine season.”

That’s the opposite of anything feminine.

That’s not where we’re going either. Where we ARE going is unstacking. Unstacking your calendar. Your to-do list. Your mental load. Your invisible second job of remembering everything for everybody.

And then replacing it, with Him.

With getting closer to our Father. With actually opening His word instead of listening to a 40-second reel about His word. With sitting in His presence long enough that your body stops vibrating. With silence, real silence, the kind that is uncomfortable, unbearable for the first 30 days and then becomes the most nourishing part in your every day that you can’t and don’t want to live without.

With remembering that you are His daughter, and He does not want or need you moving like that. He has His sons for that.

Luke 10:41–42 — “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed — or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

There’s a beautiful story in the bible about two women. I really suggest you reading it with open-mind.

There were two women in the house. One was doing absolutely everything - serving, preparing, running, making sure it all got done properly. The other one was sitting on the floor at His feet doing “nothing” whatsoever.

And Martha did what we all do. She didn’t just resent it - she went and told Him about it. “Do you not care that I’m doing this alone? Tell her to help me”. The exact sentence you have said to your man fourteen or twenty-four different times.

And Jesus defended the woman who was sitting down.

He didn’t praise the productivity. He didn’t reward the effort. He looked at the one who was busy and told her, with enormous tenderness, that she was worried about many things - and that almost none of them mattered.

The woman doing “nothing” is written into His word, into the very design of creation itself.

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the less you do, the more room there is for him / and for God 🤍

Nothing fills a space that is already full.

Every single thing you handle before he has the chance to handle it is a place where he never got to be your man. Every problem you solve before it reaches him is a moment he never got to lead. Every time you carry it, you also carry away his opportunity to be needed - and men do not stay awake in a life where they are never needed.

You cannot ask a man to step forward while standing in the exact same spot where you want him to stand.

And it is precisely, exactly the same with God.

We BEG Him to move in our lives and then don’t leave a millimetre of room for Him to move in.

We pray about it at 7am and take it back into our own hands by 7:20. We ask for provision, guidance, direction and then grip the wheel of control so tightly our knuckles go white, and call it faith. Your clenched fists are not devotion.

How you are with your man is how you are with Christ. In almost every article I reach this same point, and I’ll keep reaching it.

“but if I do less, I’ll have less”

Most of us believe, somewhere very deep, that we only get out of life exactly as much as we “put in.” Effort in, results out. Hours in, money out. Struggle in, blessing out. It’s the equation we were handed and never once questioned, and it means that “do less” translates instantly in your body to “receive less.”

Less money. Less security. Less love. Less of everything you’re terrified of losing.

So you keep going because you’re convinced that the moment you stop pushing, everything you have built will collapse into a void.

I need you to look straight at that belief, because this is the opposite of how God created you.

That is a blatant lie, an assumption that provision is something you extract from the world by force, and that if you loosen your grip it will be taken from you. Living inside that belief is living on the enemy’s territory.

This is where you come back to remembrance.

You are the daughter of a God who feeds birds that have never worked a day in their lives. Who fed an entire nation with bread that appeared on the ground overnight and told them not to store extra, because there would be more tomorrow. Who multiplied five loaves into a feast while everybody stood there holding nothing.

You are not being provided for in proportion to your doing / or exhaustion.

And the opposite of what you fear is what’s actually true: the striving is what’s been blocking it. You’ve been so busy building your own supply line that you’ve made yourself unavailable to His. It’s very difficult to receive with both hands full.

Will you let Him rewrite that belief? Because He can. But not while you’re still holding the pen.

“but then they’ll call me lazy.”

Oh, the terror of being perceived as lazy.

My terror comes from having mini panic-attacks whenever my mom was approaching my room. Lying down, taking a nap or just “chilling” wasn’t an option so every time I would jump up from bed and pretend I was doing something useful, just to avoid the lecture.

But there’s nothing but compassion or forgiveness, my mom has NEVER in her life seen a woman who is resting or NOT working, neither has my grandmother or great-grandmother and probably 100 other women before them. That’s all they know. Being independent, strong-willed, hard-wired and restless. That’s how they survived, they had no other option.

But you have, you have the grace of God, the power to change that. To show your daughters a different side of being a woman.

That’s why the verdict you’re bracing for from them is actually a verdict you have already handed down on yourself.

You’re not actually afraid they’ll call you lazy. You’re afraid they’ll be right. Some part of you already believes that a resting woman is a worthless woman and you’re just waiting for the world to confirm it.

That’s why you over-explain when you take a day off. That’s why you list what you accomplished before you’re allowed to sit down. That’s why when someone asks how you are, “busy” comes out of your mouth like a credential.

Do you know what happens when you root that belief in God instead: the environment around you starts responding differently. A woman whose worth is settled in Christ, in her all-providing God does not get defensive when someone raises an eyebrow at her NAP.

There is nothing magnetic about a woman with her shoulders around her ears, three tabs open in her mind, checking the time while you’re talking to her.

But a woman who is unhurried? A woman who takes her time? Who moves slowly because there is nowhere she urgently has to be, who laughs without checking whether it was appropriate, who eats her food actually tasting it, who touches your arm and lingers half a second longer than necessary, whose body is soft because it hasn’t been braced for impact for the last 10 years?

That woman is a natural force.

And you cannot fake it with a silk dress and a slow blink. Your nervous system tells the truth about you before your mouth opens. He can feel the difference between a woman who is being and a woman who is performing being from across a room.

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who actually benefits from you being well-rested? the whole world maybe?

We frame rest as selfish and yet it is the single most generous thing you can do for everyone else around you, the irony.

Imagine her for a second.

A woman who is well rested. Full of joy and whimsy. Fully taken care of, filled up with pleasure, completely rooted in the care of her Father.

How does SHE show up?

She has patience and gentleness for the seventh time her child asks the same question. She has softness and playfulness in her voice at the end of the day, not just at the beginning. She swirls around the kitchen to her favourite song. She smiles. She has room to receive her man. She notices things. She’s fun. She’s warm. She’s actually there when she’s in the room.

She has something to give, because she’s not running on empty, her cups are all overflowing and there’s nothing more she would want to do, than GIVE. with pure JOY.

And now imagine the other one.

Burnt out. Snapping at people she adores over nothing. Physically present, mentally elsewhere. Resentful and unable to say why, because on paper nothing is wrong. Everyone gets the leftovers of her. Her man gets the version of her that has already spent everything on everyone else. God gets a rushed prayer at midnight, if He gets one at all.

Nobody is winning there. Not her. Not him. Not her family. Not her friends. Not her community. Nobody.

A lifeless shell cannot pour into anyone.

Start smaller than you think. One thing this week that you hand over completely and do not supervise. One afternoon with nothing on it. One walk with no podcast. One prayer where you don’t ask for anything, you just sit there. One “no” without a reason attached.

And when the guilt comes and it will come, you don’t fight it. Just notice whose voice is it. Because I promise you it isn’t His. and you come back. to Him.

You were never called to be the strongest woman in the room.

You were called to be His daughter.

Now go be gloriously, unapologetically, holy LAZY about it. 🤍

- Lauret

It’s what we chant together, in unison, like some ancient feminine liturgy. It’s what we watched in the movies. What we underlined in the books. What our friends nod along to over wine. And half the time we couldn’t even tell you what it actually means, but it sounds masculine, it sounds safe, it sounds hot, and so we want it.

At least we think we do.

Right up until the moment he plants his feet, looks you dead in the eye, and says no. Not a soft no. Not a negotiable no. A no so rooted, so final, so utterly immovable that there is no argument in your arsenal, no tone you could sharpen, no tear you could summon that would bend it even an inch.

And every red light in your body starts to scream.

Anger. Betrayal. Hurt. Humiliation. “He said no? To who? To ME?! But I’m always right. Who does he think he is? Does he think he’s stronger than me, more powerful than me? Doesn’t he love me?!”

We say we want a man who leads, and yet not a single cell in our body is prepared for what leading actually looks like when it arrives. Because it’s uncomfortable. It’s inconvenient. It stings in a place we don’t like to admit we can be stung. To a nervous system that never learned safety, no doesn’t land as a decision. It lands as a verdict: “you are not chosen. You are wrong. You are stupid. You are, once again, not getting the thing that would have finally made you feel okay.”

So we run. Straight into the arms of the easier man.

The “yes” man.

The one who agrees with everything you say and hands you everything you want. And oh, at first - it’s intoxicating. It feels like being adored. It feels like a man who yearns for you so completely he physically cannot deny you a single thing. A man who has truly, finally chosen you. 🥵 And being chosen, after all, is the whole ache underneath it all. The thing we’ve been reaching for since we were little girls, yearning for our fathers love.

But there is a price with what it comes with, and it is expensive.

Because the drug of never hearing no curdles fast. “Whatever you want” starts to sound less like devotion and more like abdication. “You decide, babe” becomes you deciding - for you, AND for him. You planning. You picking. You organizing, calculating, carrying. “Okay, if that’s what you want.” “Sure, we can, if that’s what you’d like.” Every choice, small and large, smootlhy sliding back onto your plate until you’re buried under the weight of a life you’re supposedly sharing.

A spineless, boneless drift. A man-shaped current with no direction of its own, pooling everything at your feet and calling it love.

The other cost?

You forfeit polarity, your biological dynamic, your God-created nature as man and a woman. You forfeit that low, electric hum of eros moving through your body. You forfeit the thing where you look at your man like a lion surveying his territory - unbothered, certain, sovereign - and everything in you wants to be devoured by him. You cannot burn for a man you can push over with one finger. Desire does not grow in soil that soft.

And you forfeit something even more foundational…

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Some days it feels like a lifetime - “HOW did we even get this far?!” Other days it feels like almost nothing, a humble beginning compared to the incredible couples who have woven 15, 20, 30 years of their lives together. I pray to God we are blessed enough to get there. That one day I can come back to you and tell you what the difference actually feels like between 6 years and 26.

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But for now - here is what these six beautiful years have taught me.

There is one question people ask me with surprising frequency.

“You seem to have such a good relationship. Don’t you ever fight? Doesn’t he ever piss you off?”

And I always laugh. With genuine, wide-eyed curiosity.

Is this the standard we have set? To find a relationship so “perfect” that two human beings never irritate, disappoint, or misunderstand each other? If that is your criteria, I would gently suggest that long-term love might not be the right fit for you. 🤣

No matter how extraordinary the man. No matter how beautiful the love between you. You are still two completely different, imperfect, complex human beings - each carrying their own history, their own wounds, their own deeply rooted beliefs, their own way of seeing the world - choosing to collide lives every single day. It is like taking two entirely different instruments and deciding they will play the same song, in the same key, for the rest of their lives. The music can be extraordinary. It is also going to require a lot of tuning.

The question was never does it still happen. The question is - how do two people choose to deal with it when it does?

So what actually makes a relationship “good”?

Is it money? The apartment, the car, the companies, investments, big rose bouquets, the monthly holidays that look incredible from the outside?

Is it his status, his achievements, his LinkedIn title or the number of zeros in his account?

Is it a fit body that never changes, a face that never ages, health that never falters?

Is it daily passion - white-hot, breathless, can’t-keep-your-hands-off-each-other desire that never once dips below a ten?

Is it the matching aesthetic, the coordinated outfits, the couple photos that get 40,000 likes?

These things all can have their place, but they cannot be the foundation - because every single one of them is shakable. Movable. Completely outside of your control at any given moment. A business collapses. A body gets sick. A career ends. Life rearranges itself without asking for your permission.

If any of those things was the pedestal your love was built on - what happens when it cracks?

This is why 1) falling in love with a person’s genuine character 2) rooting your relationship in God as your base is the only thing that lasts.

Who they are right now, in this moment, when the rose-coloured glasses have long since come off and you have seen each other in every unflattering light life offers. Because if everything around you crumbles - the money, the health, the plans, the version of the future you had both agreed on - you can still look at the person standing in front of you and recognize the same beautiful human being with a good heart you chose. And from that place, you can rebuild anything. Absolutely anything.

We have been through every season. The season when one of us or neither of us had any money. The season when intimacy between us had gone completely quiet. The season of genuinely frightening health worries. The seasons where we were barely recognizable to each other and barely recognizable to ourselves.

And in the middle of all of it, I always found my way back to his eyes. Back to who he was, underneath all of it. That man - his character, his values, his specific and irreplaceable way of moving through the world, through life - held us together through every single storm.

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What these six years have actually taught me:

1. What you see in the beginning is usually a preview, not an exception.

Around three to six months in, when the intoxicating newness settles and real life moves in - that is when you start to see the actual person. And what you see then is almost always what amplifies over time.

He may not have much right now, but he is genuinely good-hearted. Loyal. Honest. Caring. Committed. Loving. Attentive. Ambitious in the non-performative way that actually produces results. With real love and the right conditions? That will only grow. It will become more of itself.

The opposite is equally, ruthlessly true.

If there is consistent lying, scheming, chronic instability, addiction, laziness with excuses - there is a very high probability that this too will only amplify. Yes, people can 100% change. Genuinely. Profoundly. But there are almost always clear, visible, already happening signs of that change being in motion. (!!) The version of the story that usually ends in devastation is the one where you saw the flags early, chose to focus on the made-up potential instead of the reality, and decided to wait for the man he could be to show up and replace the one who was actually there.

Choose the man in front of you. Not the project. Not the vision board. The man you SEE.

2. Long-term love and constant fireworks are not the same thing.

The pattern for most relationships that fall apart looks remarkably similar: an electric beginning, all-consuming and overwhelming. Then, as the intensity naturally settles, one of two things happens.

Either the lower flame feels like failure - so one or both partners go looking for another hit of that first-rush feeling, chasing the dopamine like a drug. Some couples even recreate the intensity artificially, through constant conflict, because at least when they are fighting they are feeling something - and the brain, confused and hungry, registers that as aliveness, as love.

Or - they simply stop tending the fire. They stop choosing each other deliberately, actively, with effort. And a fire that is not fed will eventually go out. This is not a sign that love is over. It is a sign that love has moved out of the effortless beginning stage and into something that requires you to actually show up for it.

Love has fireworks, passion, ecstasy, all-consuming high of closeness, connection unforgettable moments, memories, laughter, pleasure, adventure, joy, ease…

But this is not how life looks like 24/7. This is why you also have to fall in love with the ordinary aswell. With boring evenings, with the routine, the mundane, the moments or seasons where nothing is happening and nothing needs to. That is love too. That is, in fact, where most of love actually lives.

And it is a fire you can, and in fact absolutely must - both nurture and tend. Add logs. Keep it alive. A flame that is consistently fed by both, does NOT fizzle. I can assure you that.

3. Your partner cannot be your entire world. Full stop.

Making one human being responsible for filling every empty cup you carry into a relationship is a weight no human being can hold. And it is one of the primary reasons that the same fire we just talked about goes out - because one person is being slowly suffocated by the other’s unspoken, unending need to be completed.

You need your own life. A relationship with God. Your own friendships that have nothing to do with him. Your own passions, your own creative space, your own interests, hobbies, mission, pleasure and play. You need to be a whole, specific, curious, turned-on-by-life person who moves through the world with energy that belongs entirely to you.

And part of that- a part that long-term relationships have a very particular way of eroding - is taking care of yourself. Your body. Your mind. Your appearance. A woman who takes care of herself moves through the world differently. She feels different inside her own skin. She brings something alive into a room, including the room she shares with the person she loves.

Work out, move your body. Give it healthy fuel. Sleep. Tend to your mental health with the same seriousness you would give a physical wound. Dress up more often. Wear your hair down. Wear the dress that is usually reserved for “special occasions”.

A committed relationship is not a finish line after which the effort stops. It is not an arrival point where you can finally relax into invisibility. The comfort of being truly known by someone is one of the greatest gifts of long-term love - but comfort and complacency are not the same thing. One deepens love. The other slowly drains it.

The secret, if there even is one, is not two halves finding each other. It is two whole people choosing each other and making each other even more of what they already are.

4. Pointing fingers has to become looking in the mirror. For both of you.

A beautiful union requires stepping down from the “me-me-me high horse”, the story where everyone else was the villain and you were simply, perpetually, the innocent one done wrong. It requires the humility to face your own wrongs. Your own patterns. Your own contribution to the dynamic you are living inside of.

Own them. Take responsibility. Heal them.

Otherwise the price is this: finding the right person, and dismantling them word by word, season by season, with your own unexamined blindness - until the day they leave and do not come back.

I have written about this before.

It changed my life to look at it honestly. And it will change yours.

5. If you want a man who leads, you need to be able to receive it when he actually does.

Two things I wanted most in a relationship: a man who would be emotionally open with me, and a man who would genuinely lead.

Yet, it was war when both of those things actually happened. 🙃

The first time he vulnerably opened up to share something that had genuinely hurt him, I got offended. I spun it. I made it about myself and turned it into a fight. And in the middle of it, he looked at me and said: “This is why it’s often easier to say nothing at all. Because even when I do say it, it’s still somehow all my fault. So what’s the point?”

You have to have the actual capacity to receive him, genuinely LISTEN when he opens up. That does not mean swallowing your own feelings. It means having discernment - the ability to feel something and still choose when and how to say it.

And if you want a man who leads - you need to become genuinely comfortable with being corrected, with not knowing everything. The unknown becomes your companion, your best friend. Because there will be plans made without your full picture or input. Decisions that would not have been yours to make, or that you don’t agree with. Things you will not know yet, or will only know when the time is right.

This is where trust has to be rock solid. Complete trust is e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g in a relationship. Not naive. Not blind. But rooted (+in God first).

Regards to trust if we are already speaking about it: if there is consistent lying, snooping, controlling, testing, sneaking - that deserves a long and deeply honest conversation. Where and why was the trust broken? What would it actually take to repair it?

A relationship without trust is a wound that needs to be addressed.

6. Honesty, transparency and vulnerability are the oxygen of a long-term relationship.

The more you conceal - the small things you do not say because you are afraid of the reaction, the micro-disappointments you swallow, the tiny resentments you let accumulate - the further you drift from each other over time. Slowly. Barely noticeably. Until one day you look across the table at the person who knows you most intimately and feel strangely, inexplicably alone.

There is a concept I love from @sexcoachagneskangur on Instagram - micro-truths. The small, real, honest things we can share with each other regularly, before they harden into the monsters we have been concealing for months, years even. Before they become the conversation we are too afraid to have.

Difficult and uncomfortable conversations are not a sign that something is wrong, they are very important PART of a healthy and well-working relationship. They keep you both on the same team, moving in the same direction, keeping the air cleared, aligned and in tune between you two.

It’s also what creates intimacy, closeness, connection. If we have the courage to step in front of each other completely naked, in our full truth, without any shields, masks, protective / performative layers and STILL decide to choose each other with all that we see, is a feeling that you understand only if you have experienced it yourself.

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7. The ability to forgive fast, often and repeatedly is not optional.

Holding onto one mistake and keeping it as a weapon, taking it out whenever you need leverage or ammunition - who does this actually serve?

The question I keep coming back to is simple: are we on the same team, or aren’t we? Because you cannot play on the same team while keeping score against your own player. Grudges poke holes. Slow leaks. And eventually, even the strongest vessel empties from the inside out.

Forgiveness is not pretending it did not hurt. It is not excusing what was inexcusable. It is not erasing the conversation that needs to happen. It is the decision - made in full awareness of the pain - to not let this become the thing that defines everything that comes after. To not give this moment more power over your union than God has.

8. You must know 1) which battles are worth fighting 2) how to regulate your emotions before blowing up everything around you. 💣 3) how to speak with him.

How you speak to him - and how you manage what's raging inside you - matters more than almost anything else.

You think the sharp, nagging tone (the one you call being honest) is just how you communicate. You think the jokes at his expense are harmless. You think staying on his back about everything, constantly, is somehow helping. That the relentless commentary is a form of care. That if you just say it one more time, in exactly the right way, it will finally land.

It is not helping. It is not care. And it is not landing the way you think it is. It is doing the exact opposite.

Every time you speak to your man with contempt, with disrespect - with that hawk-like, relentless, critical energy - you are humiliating him. Killing the only essence, that is the most important to him - his honour. You are chipping away at something in him that, once it is gone far enough, does not simply return because you softened your voice one afternoon or bought him something nice or had a good week. That is not how erosion works. The water does not un-carve the stone.

If you are lucky, he will set a boundary. He will tell you plainly and clearly that he will not be spoken to that way. That is a gift, even if it does not feel like one in the moment. That is him fighting for what you have, letting you know he cares, he is in pain, and this can be fixed.

If you are not lucky - one day, without announcement, he will simply stop. Everything, including his effort. He will tune out. Go still. Go numb, distant, uninterested. Often not even with a speech, expression or conversation. Just in the way a man slowly, permanently withdraws when the place that was supposed to be his refuge has become the place he dreads coming home to.

And then there is the other side of this - using your man as your first emotional landing pad. The place you go the second something ignites in you - before you have breathed, before you have thought, before you have given yourself even thirty seconds to locate what is actually happening inside you. Unloading. Vomiting every unprocessed feeling directly onto him the instant it surfaces, at full volume, with full force. Every trigger. Every bad day. Every slow-burning resentment that finally found its opening.

If you blow up uncontrollably like a bomb every time something sets you off - you burn down everything around you. Very-very fast. And the people who love you most are always closest to the blast.

He left his socks on the floor. Again. You have mentioned it. Twice. And you can feel the fire rising - that pulsating, particular rage that has nothing to do with socks and everything to do with feeling unseen, unheard, not prioritized. The “why can he not just remember this one small thing????????!!!!!!!” that is really asking something much deeper.

You take a breath. Maybe five. You pick up the socks. Three seconds is what it took. You look at him and remember: he worked 11 hours yesterday. He is fighting battles you cannot even imagine. Because of everything he carries there is a roof above your head and food in your fridge and someone who comes home to you every night.

Is this the battle worth picking? Or a moment to regulate yourself and deciding to give him a hug instead?

The ability to regulate your nervous system - your emotions, your reactions, your internal storms - is the single most important skill you have as a woman in a relationship.

Not as a concession to anyone. Not to make yourself smaller. Not to perform calm while dying inside. For the quality of the life you actually get to live. For the love you want to keep.

And I am not talking about becoming a perfectly composed, emotionally sealed little robot who never shows anything difficult. Your feelings are not the problem. Your vulnerability is not the problem. Your man seeing your pain, your fear, your grief, your need, your feelings, your emotions - that is essential, crucial. Men need to see us fully.

It is the when and the how and the from what place that matters.

Are you sharing from a regulated, honest, open, rooted-in God place - inviting him in? Or are you detonating in his direction because he was simply the nearest thing when the explosion finally came? Is this actually about him - said with care and intention and at a moment when both of you can actually hear each other? Or is this about something you have been carrying for three weeks that finally has an exit?

We are extraordinarily emotional beings. It is one of the most powerful and most beautiful things about us. We feel everything, deeply, completely, in full colour. The world would be impoverished without it.

But we are not at the mercy of our feelings. We are their stewards. We get to choose what we do with them, when, with whom, and how. That discernment - that slight pause between what you feel and what you do with what you feel - is sovereignty. It is the foundation. It is the difference between a love that lasts and one that burns itself alive.

What I always say: speak to God before you speak to him. Works every time.

9. Physical intimacy and intentional time together cannot be left to chance.

Life will fill every single gap you leave. It is extraordinarily efficient at this. If your connection time is not protected - deliberately, non-negotiably, scheduled - it will be the first thing that disappears under the weight of everything else.

Undisturbed date nights. Days. Lunches. Intentional time together with no pressure, no agenda, no expectations. Physical touch. Eye contact. Conversations that have nothing to do with schedules or errands or what needs to get done. Laughter.

These are not luxuries for when things are going well. They are the maintenance that keeps things going well.

Make them a tradition so consistent and so normal they become as natural as anything else in your week. To the point where you both know when it happens. You both know it is coming. And you both know it is non-negotiable, no excuses, no exceptions. On the weeks when all you have is twenty minutes? Then twenty minutes it is.

Also get out of your comfort zone together!! Take a class / course / workshop together. Discover new places. Attend something neither of you has tried. Learn a skill, go somewhere unfamiliar, do something that puts you both in the position of figuring something out side by side. Have FUN.

And while we are here - physical intimacy that is genuinely pleasurable and deeply enjoyable to both of you is more important to the health of your relationship than most women want to admit. I hoped and prayed for a long time that maybe if everything else is good in a relationship, this topic is not so important or doesn’t need much focus. I was just deeply disconnected from my own body / pleasure and equaling intimacy as = performance.

When both of you are truly fulfilled in that area - the unnecessary bickering quiets. The micromanaging loosens. The picking at small things dissolves. A well-satisfied person usually does not need to go looking for friction where there is none.

But that kind of intimacy does not happen by accident. ESPECIALLY for women. It requires things most of us were never taught to cultivate.

Knowing your own body - actually knowing it. Exploring and discovering what you like, what you don’t, what works and what doesn’t. Not performing. Not guessing. Knowing.

It requires slowing down, trust, safety, curiosity, space, complete, undefended honesty, dropping off any masks and acts of performance.

And playfulness - the ability to actually have fun, getting it wrong, without shame, without a script, without an end goal or expectation.

This is exactly why that protected weekly time matters so much. Not because every moment of it needs to lead somewhere specific (and expectations overall are the main enemy of a relationship / connection!!). But because consistent closeness, presence, unhurried attention, is the soil that everything else grows from.

10. Appreciation, admiration and respect are oxygen for a man in a relationship.

There is something most women are never told about men - something that sits at the very core of how they are built and what they need to survive in a relationship.

Men are wired around one of the deepest, most primal fears a human being can carry: the fear of not being enough. Of failing. Of being seen and found insufficient. Across generations, a man’s identity, his very sense of being a person of worth, has been tied to what he carries, what he builds, what he provides and protects. Not to who he simply is - but to what he does.

And here is what this means for you, practically, in your everyday life:

He will almost never walk up to you and say “I need you to admire me more. My cup is empty.” Because admitting that need feels, to most men, like the ultimate exposure. The final unraveling of the only identity he has been permitted.

So instead, he signals it the way men signal everything: through action. He works longer. He fixes the thing. He carries more. He provides more. He stays even when he is exhausted. He is trying to say “please look at what I’m doing. Does it matter to you? Am I enough for you?”

And most women - through no fault of their own - are simply not tuned to receive that frequency.

We tend to keep a running mental list of everything he did not do. Did not remember. Did not notice. Did not fix. And with every addition to that list, something between us cools a little more.

The list needs to flip.

Start noticing what he does. Start saying it out loud, very often - specifically, genuinely, not as a management tool, not as a strategy to get something back. His efforts. His loyalty. His specific way of showing love, which will not look identical to yours and was never supposed to. Every man loves differently, shaped by what he saw and heard and learned about what love is supposed to look like. The way he expresses care is his own language. Learn it.

Your genuine admiration, respect, trust, appreciation and praise is fuel, pure, raw, primal FUEL. It is the thing that makes a man feel like himself - fully, completely, without apology - and from that place, he gives you everything he has.

11. Neverrrrrrrrrrrr, under any circumstances, put your relationship on trial by holding it up to what you see on social media.

I would genuinely bet that limiting your social media consumption would improve your relationship by sixty percent within a month. 🥲 Please try it.

And if you do go into it - go with protective glasses fully on. Almost everything you are consuming is curated, filtered, timed, and strategically presented.

The same applies to where you take your relationship advice. Cultivate expert-level discernment. There are genuinely extraordinary voices out there - people and couples who offer real, grounded, honest, sustaining wisdom about love. Find them.

And your inner circle? Same standard. If the person whose advice you are about to absorb is living something that genuinely moves and inspires you - welcome it in. If not, your relationship deserves a boundary there too.

12. How you speak about your partner outside of your relationship will follow you home.

This is not about pretending everything is perfect. It is not about suffering alone or never seeking counsel and support. Sharing your pain with one or two people you trust completely, wholly, without reservation, is deeply human and absolutely 1000% necessary.

BUT the habit of gathering together to systematically dismantle your partners, cataloguing their failings, performing exasperation, competing for who has the worst story, that is a slow and very dangerous poison. And it does not stay at the table. It comes home with you. It colours how you see him before he has said a single word. And it often happens without you noticing a single thing. We can’t underestimate what our subconscious mind picks up.

Your partner deserves your highest support and respect in every room you enter without him. Everything that is difficult between you belongs to the two of you to handle privately, with God, and with each other.

13. Half-in is not in.

So often, even inside committed relationships, we are operating with one foot still positioned toward the exit. “I can always leave if this goes wrong. If he makes a mistake. If this stops feeling the way I need it to feel.”

And yes - there are absolutely circumstances where leaving is not only right but necessary. Real discernment, real wisdom, real love for yourself requires that option to exist. This is not about staying where you should not stay.

This is about something else entirely.

It is about the women who are in a relationship, chosen, committed, good, and still cannot fully arrive. Still holding something back. Still keeping one layer of armour active, just in case. The emergency exit mentally mapped. The escape route already prepared. Every significant fight becoming, in the back of the mind, “is this the one where it ends? Should I leave?”

And it is understandable. We have been hurt. Some of us catastrophically. The people who were supposed to be safe were not safe, and our nervous systems learned the lesson and never forgot it. So we protect ourselves the only way we know how - by never fully crossing over. Never giving the last portion. Never letting ourselves fall so completely that the landing would be unsurvivable again.

But you cannot half-give yourself to love and receive the full depth of it.

It does not work that way. Intimacy - real intimacy, the kind that reaches the parts of you that have never been touched - requires the door to be fully open. And you cannot open the door while simultaneously holding the handle from the other side.

When you are half-in, he feels it. Even if he cannot name it. Even if neither of you ever speaks of it directly. There is a ceiling in the relationship neither of you can see but both of you keep brushing against - a place the closeness never quite gets past. A depth you approach and then, almost imperceptibly, retreat from. And over time, that ceiling becomes the whole shape of what you have together.

Full commitment does not mean certainty that nothing will ever go wrong. It means deciding that this person, this union, gets all of me - not the performance of all of me, not the version with the exits still mapped, but the actual, unguarded, unheld thing. It means reaching the point where you do not think about leaving every time things get hard, because you have so deeply and deliberately chosen this person that difficulty becomes something you move through together rather than evidence that you should have never fully arrived.

That depth is only reachable from one direction. You have to go all the way in to find it.

Love that is rooted in Christ does not operate from fear of what might happen. It operates from knowing. The knowing that you chose this person with God, that you are in this union with God, that the Spirit guides and holds what you surrender to it.

You are anchored. And from that place - fully in, fully open, fully chosen - love becomes something neither of you could have built from the hallway.

If we approach relationships as a system for filling our own empty cups, we are moving toward collapse the moment we walk in.

Our cups need to be filled by God first. From that place - from that overflow, that rootedness, that knowing - we can give generously, genuinely, without the desperate arithmetic of keeping score.

And the most important part?

Take your relationship to God. All of it.

The desire you are not sure you are allowed to want. The frustration that has been sitting in your chest. The good, the bad, the in between - all of it belongs to God. All of it.

Pray over your man. Specifically, deliberately, regularly. Ask God to heal him - the wounds he carries that you can see and the ones buried so deep neither of you knows they are there. Ask God to guide him, to deliver him, to protect him, to lead him into the fullest and most alive version of himself. Ask God to open your eyes - to soften your vision, to help you see his best qualities with clarity on the days your frustration is loudest. Ask for discernment in the moments you do not know what is yours to say and what is yours to release. Ask for guidance when you cannot see the next step. Ask for blessing over what you are building together.

Bring your pain to God before you bring it to him. Bring your fears. Your wishes. Your longing. Your gratitude - especially your gratitude, because there is something that happens when you begin to thank God specifically and out loud for the relationship in your life. Something in you softens and opens. Something in the way you see him shifts.

I cannot count the number of times a wound that felt urgent, a conversation I was certain needed to happen tonight - dissolved completely after I took it to God first. He either changed my heart entirely, or resolved the thing before I ever had to open my mouth. The battles I tried to fight through pressure and perfectly timed arguments? They happened through prayer. Through surrender. Through trusting that God cares about this union more than I do, and is more capable of tending to it than I will ever be.

Your relationship is not just between you and him. It never was. It was always meant to be three.

Relationships are received through giving. But you have to understand what is yours to give and what is yours to receive.

He gives: safety, provision, structure, frame, direction, vision, decisions. Stability. The feeling of being held.

You give: nurture, passion, playfulness, trust, admiration, respect. The making of home. The capacity to fully, openly, gratefully receive everything that is wanted to give to you - from him, and from God.

Relationships at their deepest are where you see God’s hand most clearly. Where the mystery of two people becoming something neither of them could have been alone becomes, over time, completely undeniable.

I pray we find our way back to this. Back to harmony. Back to polarity. Back to the divine design of what love was always meant to be. I pray we lose the “I need no one, no one deserves me” armour and step back into humility, service, surrender, God’s kingdom, and the kind of love that actually lasts.

Amen. 🤍

— Lauret

So maybe this is also exactly what you need.

There are men who, at this particular point in their journey, are genuinely not yet ready. Not ready to step into the role God designed for them - to lead themselves, to lead their family, to be rooted deeply enough in Christ himself, that they can hold the weight of their mission. Yes.

But…

There are also men who, with one woman, are laid-back. Passive. Indifferent. Wandering through life without fire, without mission, without even the faintest sense of direction - stuck in bad habits, unmotivated, apathetic in a way that breaks your heart the longer you look at it.

And with a different woman - the exact same man wakes up and becomes a king.

Suddenly he has insatiable hunger for his purpose. He is so deeply committed that mountains move for him. His spine is straight, rooted in God. He faces his fears daily. He provides. He protects. He leads. He becomes the living, breathing opposite of everything nonchalant - and you could not move his values, his boundaries, his goals, what is important to him, with the sharpest sword in existence.

Same man. Two completely different women. Two completely different outcomes.

I have been both of those women.

I wanted him to lead more. Decide more. Take initiative, make plans, step forward - carry the weight of us instead of leaving it all on my shoulders. The same exhausting, bone-deep story so many of us know: “if I don’t do it, it simply won’t get done.”

And then, DRAGGED in front of a mirror I had been avoiding for years, I came face to face with the most dreadful realization of my life:

It was humanly impossible to lead me.

I was operating like a terrorist 24/7 - and you cannot have two commanding officers, two MEN under the same roof. It doesn’t work. It will never work.

And I was actively doing it. Every single day.

I was worrying not just about my own life, but about every corner of his aswell. His schedule, his decisions, his battles, his mistakes - all of it had somehow become mine to manage, mine to fix, mine to carry, mine to worry.

Like my life wasn’t already stressful enough.

When he had to be somewhere in the morning and slept through his alarm, I was already up - panicking, furious, pacing. “How could you be so irresponsible? Just set your alarm. Why is this so difficult?” On his every nerve with my nagging piercing before he had even opened his eyes properly.

When he stumbled in his work or made a mistake in his business - I lost it. I was completely rattled. “what are you going to do? How are you going to solve this? Have you thought of something yet?” Every single day. As though my anxiety orbiting his problem would somehow help him solve it faster.

When he made a plan, any plan, my very first reaction was “but the weather’s terrible for this. Laura said it’s not a good place at all. Why did you leave this to the last minute?”

When he opened up and told me something that had hurt him, something real and vulnerable - I took it personally. Turned it into a fight. Made myself the victim of his honesty and left him standing there, regretting he had ever said a word.

When he made a decision, I laughed it off. “are you for real. That’s not a good idea. Let’s think of something better.” In other words: your instincts don’t matter here. I am the one who thinks clearly.

I handled everything before he ever had the chance to handle it himself, and then told myself I had no choice - because he just doesn’t step up. I created an elaborate, detailed version of him in my head and micromanaged the gap between the man in front of me and the man I had invented and wanted him to become. I monitored his growth against my personal timeline, silently keeping score.

These are just few real-life examples to deliver the point. There are so many almost unnoticeable details we do this with.

Jealousy. Control. The way you track, check, double-check, test, provoke. The way you make him prove himself over and over, never letting him actually land anywhere safe with you, never letting trust settle long enough to take root.

I was everywhere in his life, and I had left him absolutely no room.

Most of us were not handed a template for safety as little girls. We were handed chaos - and told that was love. We learned to hyper-vigilate, to scan every room, to stay two steps ahead of whatever disaster was coming next, because if we didn’t see it coming, nobody would.

An unregulated nervous system does not suddenly switch off the moment you fall in love. It brings all of its survival strategies with it - the need to control outcomes, the terror of the unknown, the compulsion to manage what cannot be managed - and it runs them on the person closest to you, the one you have decided is safe enough to actually let in.

We also learned to find our security in other people. In his reassurance. In his consistency. In whether he was doing the right things, making the right moves, developing at the right pace, becoming the version of himself we had decided he should be. We attached our sense of safety to him - and then wondered why we could never actually rest, calm down and let go.

When your peace depends on another human being’s performance, you are always one bad morning away from complete destabilization. You have no ground. You are extraordinarily shakable.

We think we are helping. We believe with our whole hearts that we are loving them better by pushing, steering, correcting, improving.

What we are actually doing is dismantling them, piece by piece, with our own hands, with our own actions, with our own words, with our own thoughts.

Here is what hit me the hardest:

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To fit in. To be accepted. To be chosen. To be loved. To be prettier, thinner, softer, louder, quieter, more desirable, more palatable, more perfect. To stand out - but not too much. To shrink - but not too small.

The list is endless, and the world keeps adding to it.

Clean girl aesthetic. Pilates princess. Curvy and healthy. No, skinny and toned. Soft life. Dark feminine. Mob wife. Boss babe. No, stay at home wife. Blonde, brunette. Full glam, natural glow…

One after another after another, an infinite conveyor belt of identities handed to you, pre-packaged, pre-approved - just step inside and become her. Easy!!! Just keep up!!!

🥲

You would think performance is something innocent you only switch on for a job interview to be a little more charming, little more confident. That it’s a costume you put on in specific rooms, for specific people, on specific occasions - then just simply peel off when you get home.

But that is not what happened to most of us.

Performance became the air we breathe. So constant, so automatic, so completely fused with who we are -s that the mask stopped feeling like a mask at all. It became the face. And somewhere underneath it, buried so deep you forgot she existed, the woman God actually made.

But what is it costing you?

Everything.

Absolutely everything.

And for most of us, it didn’t even begin as a conscious choice. We are wired for belonging - our nervous systems, our ancient primal brain, our survival instinct - all of it screams: fit in or be cast out and die. So we adapt. We read the room. We read the culture. We read the comments. We adapt to what is liked, what is rewarded, what is called beautiful, what is called worthy.

Over time, we become chameleons so skilled at changing colours we have forgotten what our original one even was.

I don’t know many women who grew up in a home where someone looked at them and said: you are enough, exactly as you are, right now. Most of us watched our mothers stand at mirrors and criticize themselves in ways they would never speak to an enemy. We sat at kitchen tables where the conversations about other women - her weight, her choices in life, her body, her marriage - were the background noise of our entire childhood.

Then we got a phone.

And we saw what got attention. What got the likes. What got chosen.

We had our first encounter with a boy and learned in real time what made him look - and what made him look away.

And so the journey away from yourself begins.

My journey started with makeup.

In the beginning, genuinely, it was pure joy. Colour and creativity and something that was entirely mine - a space where I could experiment, play, build something with my own two hands. I loved it. It was the space for me, where I could turn my brain off and float in for hours.

But slowly, without me ever deciding to let it happen - it became a hiding place.

The bare face in the mirror felt like exposure. Dangerous. Unfinished. Unworthy. Bare. Vulnerable.

So I covered it. And the more I covered it, the more compliments I received. And compliments felt like oxygen.

The 15-minute routine became an hour. The hour became two and a half. I was waking up at five in the morning before school, just to be done by eight. I couldn’t walk out the door without it. Because without it, I didn’t know who she was - the girl underneath.

Then came my hair.

Flat, light brown, too Estonian, too boring. Boys talked about blondes and brunettes, never about whatever I was. So I bought my first store box dye. Dark brown. Locked myself in the bathroom and watched myself transform. And at the time I absolutely loved it, I told myself. “I was just born with the wrong hair colour. This is the real me!”.

A whole decade of colouring every few weeks. All glory to God I am not bald at this point. 😆

Then came the clothes.

I wasn’t grossly overweight. But I was heavier than my friends. And so the logic went: if you can’t be the thinnest/fittest in the room, be the boldest. Show what you have. Tight, short, transparent, extremely revealing - the kind of attention that made you feel seen even when it made you feel hollow.

And it escalated from there. Piercings - my nose, tongue, ears, belly, nipples. Chunky statement jewellery. Layer after layer after layer of look at me, please want me, please choose me, please….love me.

Until there was nothing left to edit on the outside.

And I was still empty. Completely empty.

So I reached for the next numbing agent. Alcohol first, drugs followed soon after. Because when I drank, the thoughts finally went quiet. I felt untouchable. Confident. Sexy. Desirable. Unbeatable. On top of the world. Beautiful.

All until the mornings came. And with them came the anxiety - the ugly kind that crawls under your skin with it’s 100 scraping nails, and stays there - and the only thing that soothed it was food. And so the cycle locked itself in. Drink to silence the thoughts. Eat to survive the aftermath. Repeat.

So my body started to speak the only language it had left.

Cystic, deeply inflamed hormonal acne. Gut health completely destroyed. Hair coming out in bulk whenever I showered. Overweight and bloated and so, extremely profoundly tired and exhausted - and not the kind of tired that sleep could ever fix.

Until God entered.

When Christ came and dragged me out of myself and saved me from what I was becoming, from where I was drowning.

And it was only then - with His eyes, not mine - that I could finally see.

So I began to peel back the layers.

I grew out my natural hair. Removed the piercings, every single one. Left the lash extensions, the acrylic nails, the filled brows. I started dressing in a way that let me breathe, move, feel feminine, elegant and present in my own body instead of performing it.

I started seeing my body as what it actually is - God’s holy temple.

So I got fully sober. I started moving it with intention. I became careful about what I allowed into it.

Piece by piece, I climbed out from under the stones I had buried myself beneath for a decade.

My skin cleared. The acne that had ravaged me for years - gone. My gut healed. The excessive weight released. My hair came back, thick and glowing, as though it too had been waiting for permission to exist.

And underneath all of it was me.

Lauret. The one God himself created, before the world got its hands on her.

But that was only the first layer.

Because I thought it was just my appearance.

I thought if I peeled that back, I would finally be free.

But relying on Gods eyes, for the first time I saw how the performance had never been only about how I looked.

It had been everywhere.

e-v-e-r-w-h-e-re.

In my relationships - people pleasing so deep and automatic that I would contort myself into whatever shape someone needed me to be, even people who were very actively bad for me, just so they would like me, accept me, choose me. Just so I wouldn’t lose them or get into conflicts.

In the way I calculated every word before I said it. How I laughed - was this the right moment? Too loud? Not enough? In how I stood, how I moved, what I let people see of me.

In my work. In my social media, in my business. In every public space. In the curated performance of a version of myself I had decided was more acceptable than the original.

And into my relationship - the most intimate space I had. Into pleasure, into honesty, into transparency, into actual connection. All of it filtered through performance. All of it a careful presentation of a character I had scripted, because God forbid my own man saw what was actually underneath. God forbid he saw her.

And then, most devastating of all - in my relationship with God.

….

The way I came to Him only with my polished prayers. The careful, edited versions of myself I brought to His feet. The constant, suffocating anxiety: am I worthy enough? Have I done enough? Will He still accept me if He sees all of this?

It eats you alive.

It consumes you completely.

Until there is nothing left.

And so - enough.

Let me say something clearly before I go further, because this is not some judgmental sermon against makeup or beautiful clothes.

The opposite.

We should take care of ourselves. We should feel beautiful. We should put care and intention into how we show up in the world and present ourselves as women. There is nothing holy about neglect.

But the question - the only question that matters - is from where?

Does it come from a place of desperate concealment? From the need to paper over your anxiety, your wounds, your fear of being seen? Does it come from the compulsion to perform a more acceptable version of yourself because the real one feels too exposed, too raw, too much - or not enough?

Or does it come from knowing.

Knowing that you are the daughter of Christ. Of a all-knowing-all-loving God who made you - you specifically, not a revised edition of you - with intention and love and complete deliberateness.

Does it come from walking through the world with your spine straight and your heart soft with grace? Your eyes clear and calm. Your body in trust. Your whole self rooted in the one thing that can never be taken, never be shaken, never be cancelled or unfollowed or outgrown?

God.

There is nothing - nothing - that heals this world more than a woman who has taken back what God gave her.

Because the world is actively trying to produce the opposite. It wants identical, interchangeable, anxious, performative robots, identical humanoids, numb sack of bland potatoes, who are too busy editing themselves to notice who actually created them, what they actually carry. Who are too distracted by what is trending to remember who they are. Who are too afraid to be seen to ever become who they were made to be.

I cannot overstate how staggeringly unique you are as God’s most incredible, most phenomenal, most holy creation.

But receiving that - living, accepting, receiving that - requires courage.

The courage to drop the mask. To stop performing. To start the long, disorienting, deeply beautiful walk back to yourself, to God.

In your appearance and how you care for your body. In your boundaries and what you will no longer bend around. In your relationships - in what you give, what you receive, what you allow, where you draw the line. In your pleasure, your honesty, your willingness to be fully known. In your purpose. Your unique gifts. The specific, irreplaceable thing only you were made to do. In your faith - not the performance of it, but the living reality of it. In your prayers, brought to Him whole, raw and unfiltered and honest.

Romans 8:1 — “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

No condemnation. Not for who you were. Not for what you hid behind. Not for how long it took you to find your way back.

God’s kingdom is not something you earn by accumulating enough good behaviour. It is not waiting at the end of a long enough performance. It is not reserved for the polished version of you.

It is yours the moment you accept it.

The world - and often religion / society itself - has tried to convince you otherwise. That grace must be deserved. That love must be earned. Through doing, through acts. That you must first become worthy before God will receive you. That the door only opens once you have fixed enough of yourself, done enough to be worthy of His kingdom, His grace, His forgiveness, His blessings.

That is a lie. And it has cost women everything.

Our acts, or DOING, do not take us there.

We are daughters of Christ.

What we are called to do is simply accept Christ in our hearts. That is it. That is the door. And the moment we walk through it - we have stepped into His kingdom. Not one day. Not once we are better. Now.

By KNOWING we are already there. By KNOWING we are ALREADY forgiven. By KNOWING we are already fully, completely, wholeheartedly accepted by Him. Loved by Him. Seen by Him. Taken care of by Him - not the edited version of us, not the performing version, not the version we decided was finally presentable enough to bring to His feet.

All of us. As we are. Right now.

Whatever you do after that - every act of generosity, obedience, service, sacrifice - it comes from the overflow of a heart that is finally in Him. You don’t do it to become worthy of His presence. You do it because you know you already have it.

Because when you truly receive His love, the desire to live inside His mission becomes as natural as breathing. There’s no other way. You become His instrument, He changes your heart, your desires. He guides your exact steps.

Yes, we need to be humble. We need to be obedient.

But, BUT we also need to roar.

To take back what God gave us - what the world, what toxic & suppressive religion, what society spent years trying to strip away. To stop performing for an audience that was never worth performing for. To stop shrinking ourselves into shapes that were never ours to begin with.

That is how we lose the performance and come back to Christ. That is how we inherit the Kingdom of God on earth.

thy kingdom come;
thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven…

— Lauret 🤍

Where is the line between staying and making it work - and leaving?

Probably the hardest and most asked question, and also, somehow, the one that everyone around you seems to have a very confident opinion on - except you. 🙃

“Did I give up too easily? Did I leave too soon? What if I could have done it differently? Maybe he needed more time, more patience, to grow into the man he could be? Have I stayed too long? Should I leave? What if this is all wrong and I’m just wasting my time?”

All valid questions. All almost impossible to answer correctly.

And here is the one thing I can say without a single doubt - the guilt, the spiral, the million different what if’s will be present no matter what you decide. Whether you made the “right” call or the “wrong” one. Whether you stayed too long or left too soon.

There is no decision you could have made that was going to protect you from the grief of having to make it.

And ultimately - there is no truly wrong decision. Because if it were a decision you genuinely should not have made, you would not have made it. Every path you chose was the path you had to choose.

You have probably seen or even experienced both sides.

Leaving something good too soon, too early, too impulsively - and regretting that choice years down the line. Wondering what would have happened if you had just stayed a little longer, gone a little deeper, had a little more patience, little more trust.

Staying in something for too, too long - and losing yourself with every passing second, watching yourself become empty inside until the reflection from a mirror is foreign, shallow, completely empty and…grey.

Why do we do either of that?

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This one is going to hurt.

Not for you - for me. Because not once have I made something this vulnerable public. Not about my private life. Not about my relationship. Not about the parts of myself I am not proud of.

I take immense pride in what we have built together, that for a reason. Our relationship, our beautiful union is the sole reason I started speaking about love, about polarity, about what it actually means to be a woman with a man, what it actually means to love and be loved. It has been the greatest teacher of my entire life.

But there is a side to healthy love that nobody warned me about. A side I was completely unprepared for.

Healthy love, real, steady, unconditional love, will hold up a mirror to your face, and it will not look away until you do.

And that’s brutal.

I came from a relatively complicated and difficult childhood. A young and broke single mother with no support system or family, no proper father figure, alcoholism. No real examples of what love was supposed to look like. A string of messy, toxic relationships that taught me that chaos was intimacy and intensity was love. That was my normal. That was everything I knew.

So I dreamed. God, how I dreamed. Of a forever love. Of what they showed you in moves. A prince (preferably with a sixpack, a nice car and proper income obv) who had no flaws and would rescue me, carry me in his arms and ride off into the sunset with me until our very last breath.

He wasn’t a prince. Heck he didn’t have much of an income, long from even talking about a car. But from day one he loved me in ways that were completely unknown to my entire existence. He chose me. Every single day, over and over and over again. Yes we have had our fair share of difficult seasons, hardships, fights, tears and heartbreak - but not once did I have to question or wonder whether he loved me, whether he wanted to be with me, whether he wanted us to work. His actions ALWAYS showed that before I ever had to ask.

And that is exactly what cracked me open.

What nobody tells you about being loved properly is this: it will reveal every single broken, ugly, unhealed part of you. It will bring up everything you buried. Everything you normalized. Everything you told yourself was someone else’s fault.

Going from “I am that girl, I deserve everything I want, all men are just reckless sh*theads” - to realizing that maybe, just maybeeeeeeee, I had been attracting red flags because….I myself was one?!

I was going to puke. That was a shocker I absolutely did NOT want to know.

So what happened?

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Why Substack? Because Instagram, as much as I love her - and I do love her, she’s gorgeous, she lets me be poetic and visual and sensual in a way that feels like genuine art . Yet Instagram is also deeply, painfully, SO awfully fragile.🥲 You say one real thing, one unfiltered truth about men, or love, or faith, or the body, or desire, and suddenly you’re restricted and treated like a criminal who just promoted drugs to underage kids.🙃

When we talk about what it means to be a woman - really means - we cannot sanitize it. When we talk about what the ffffff is going on inside the brain of a man, we cannot soften every single edge. When we talk about love, about faith, about the hunger of our unspoken desires we don’t name out loud, about the prayers we whisper in the dark that no one hears - we cannot censor it. We lose the whole point when we do that. We lose connection, we lose meaning, we lose our primal human nature. We lose the ✨juice✨.

So this is where the juice lives now.🧃😌

Writing is my oxygen. It has been since I was in kindergarten. I can sit and write for eight hours straight . without eating, without drinking, without breathing - and feel more alive than I do anywhere else.

This is where Lauret without the masks comes out. Without the performance, without the careful curation, without the calculated caption. I am relatively private by nature. It takes genuine, hard working effort for me to share things even with my closest friends. So you can imagine what it costs to do it here. But some (most) things cannot be taught without the real example. You cannot speak about something without showing where you learned it. And I am done keeping the most interesting parts of my life locked away from people who actually want them.

So consider this your invitation into the inner world. The unhinged, feminine, unfiltered, deeply personal, and always honest inner world.

What to expect? Paid subscribers, you get 1-3 letters a week - proper, full, juicyyyy pieces. Free subscribers will get occasional public shares when I feel something needs to reach further. Either way - welcome. I’m genuinely glad you’re here.🤍

Subscribe now

Now. For this first letter, let’s talk about asking.

I saw a reel recently - a creator (@pdxruvim) talking about his little brother who had just gotten his first Cash App account. The brother was so excited, so nervous, so big about it, and he asked -“could you please send me $5?” And the creator thought: of course, immediately, without a second thought, and watched how those five dollars made his little brother’s entire day. Later, sitting with it, he realized - “I could have sent so much more. I would have been happy to. But he asked for five, so five is what I gave” To the creator, five dollars was nothing. To his brother, it was a grandiose moment he will probably remember for a long time.

Isn’t this what we always do? In our lives, with God, with our partner, friends, co-workers, family….

We think things so loudly inside our own heads that we start to believe the world can hear us. It cannot. It never will.

How many times have I done this? Wanted something deeply, absolutely ached for it - and then decided on behalf of God that the answer would be no anyways. Decided for someone else what they were willing to give. Sat in my own silence and called it dignity, called it strength, when really it was just fear. Fear of asking. Fear of being told no. Fear of wanting something. Fear of rejection.

If the answer is no, what actually happens? Nothing. Literally nothing. N O T H I N G. The result is either win, win, or win.

A) Not getting it will redirect you in the right direction.

B) You gained more courage to actually voice your desires out loud.

C) You will get what you wanted.

With everything our first instinct is to ask “what if?…” and then imagine the worst possible outcome. “what if I ask….and DIE?” thank you brain.🧠

But what IF the answer is yes? And all it took was to…ASK?

I spent a longgggg time wrestling with asking God for things. There was something in me that felt so wrong about it - presumptuous, ungrateful, spoiled, arrogant, too much.He is our omnipotent, all-loving and all-knowing Creator, our LORD and I am here, this small creature who has already granted the blessing to exist - to breathe and be alive. Who am I to want more? To ask for more?!?? I should shut up and be humble.

But that is not the relationship He offered us. He gave us free will. He is a Father. We are His children. He wants His children to be happy, to be safe, to be protected, to be provided for. And He wants His children to have a relationship with Him, that also means opening up, showing up as transparent and honest as humanly possible, ASKING for things your heart is yearning. ASKING Him to redirect you, ASKING Him to change your heart if what you ask is wrong.

He knows best. If what you are asking for is not meant for you, you can be sure He will NOT give it - but He will redirect. He will change the desire. He will close that door so quickly you will stop knocking. But if you never knock, if you never speak it - you have made the choice for both of you.

My man’s love language is physical touch. He is brilliant at it in bed, in intimacy - his hands know things, we don’t need to discuss that further. But for a long time, outside of those moments, the casual non-sexual touches were just...absent. The random kiss on the forehead. The hand on the back in the kitchen. The stroke of hair. The gentle caress on my cheek. The massages that were only to calm my nervous system, that led nowhere.

I missed it so much it started to become a story inside me. “I’m not attractive enough. He only wants me in one context. He is just a man. He doesn’t think of me that way when the lights are on.” And the story spun bigger and bigger and bigger inside of me.

I carried this for TOO, toooooo long. Letting it calcify into something it was not. Yet absolutely terrified to voice it out loud.

And then one day, I the verge of thinking we are going to break up - I asked. Almost died doing it.

He looked at me with the most genuinely surprised eyes I have ever seen on a man and said: “I had no idea this was important to you. I would love to do that.”

Since then, not a single day has gone by when he doesn’t come to me - randomly, unexpectedly, in the middle of nothing - to kiss me softly, stroke my hair, touch my cheek, or pull me into his arms just to hold me. It makes me melt like a butter cookie every single time. Every time.

All of that missing, all of that grief, the story I created how he doesn’t love me - and it was sitting one sentence away from me the entire time.

We make the decision for everyone. We decide what God will give. We decide what our person will offer. We decide what we ourselves are capable of - all before we ever ask the question.

Your desires are not too much. Your wishes, your dreams, your wants - they are not a burden. Look at the world God created. The abundance of nature, the oceans, the mountains, the impossible detail of every living thing. Do you really think the desires of your heart are suddenly too much for Him? That He ran out of capacity somewhere between the coral reefs and you?

Give it to Him. All of it. With a prayer as simple and honest as this - “Lord, this is what my heart desires. If it is your will and if it is good for me, in the name of Jesus please make it happen. If it is not - remove the desire and redirect me to the right path.”

That’s it. That’s the whole prayer. No performance, no perfect words. Just the unfiltered truth between you and Him, of what you want, placed in the only pair of hands that are big enough to hold it.

This is what this space will be. Letters about the real things. The things that live under the polished surface of everything we show each other. The love and the longing and the faith and the fury and the questions that don’t have clean answers but deserve to be asked out loud anyway.

I am so glad you are here. I have been waiting to let you in.

With everything I have,

Lauret🤍