You were told plenty of times. By the face that changed when you said what you do. By the man who said impressive and then changed the subject. By the one who called you intimidating. Nobody instructed you. You watched what happened when you were not smaller, and you are very good at reading a situation, so you only had to learn it once. And now you do it before anybody has to react at all.

You met a man and somewhere in the first ten minutes he asked what you do, and you gave him the small version of it. Not a lie. You left out the title, or how many people report to you, or what you built the whole thing from, because you already knew how the bigger version tends to land. You have one answer for a dinner party and a shorter one for a first date, and you have never once thought of that as a decision.

You called it modesty. You were managing him, and he had not done anything yet.

It did not feel like shrinking. It felt reasonable, it felt like reading the situation correctly, it felt like being a woman who does not need to make everything about herself, and every edit you made felt like maturity.

Editing is a real skill and you built it on purpose. It is why you are good with a difficult client and why you know what not to say in a meeting, and it has paid for your life.

Love is the only place where none of it has ever helped you.

The version of you that gets loved is the version that showed up, and if the one who showed up was the edited one, then the edit is what he fell for, and you have to keep performing it, which is why the thing that was supposed to feel like rest feels like a job.

You cannot find your own edits. You have been making them since you were young enough that they stopped being decisions, and something you have done ten thousand times does not announce itself, it just feels like you.

Tomorrow morning we write down the version that does not get edited.

Ninety minutes. I ask you a question, you write. I ask you the next one, you write. I talk you through each one while you are in it so you are never sitting there guessing what I mean, and you leave holding your Extraordinary Love Standard, your values, your non-negotiables and your desires, in your own handwriting, specific enough that you would catch a violation of it inside the first twenty minutes of a date.

You do not have to arrive knowing what you want. Almost nobody does. That part we do together.

Wednesday, August 26, 10:00 AM Pacific. Free.

Nobody is going to make you share anything out loud. You write, I talk you through it, and what you leave with is yours.

Save my seat

My client is paying a national matchmaking service. Her matchmaker lives on the East Coast, three thousand miles from her front door.

In her words:

"my matchmaker lived on the East coast. And so she thought 30 miles away was no big deal."

Thirty miles is nothing on a map. In the Bay Area on a weeknight it is not thirty minutes, and the woman assigning her these men had no way of knowing the difference, because nobody had told her.

Another match ghosted her. Her read was immediate.

"He’s not a good communicator. I wasn’t that interested in him anyway. And if he can’t even let the matchmaker know that he doesn’t want to follow up, then it’s definitely not someone I wanted."

Clean call. Her judgment is intact.

Then I asked her something simple. Had she ever sent the service the work we did together. Not a summary of it. The actual thing: who she is, what she wants, and the specific non-negotiables and desires we built in her own language.

"I did not."

She is paying a stranger on the other side of the country to select the most significant person in her life, and the one page that describes what she is looking for has never left her hands.

She is one of the most capable people I know, and what happened to her happens to almost every accomplished woman I meet.

She assembled a board of advisors.

Her girlfriends sit on that board. They have opinions about who is right for her and they deliver them at dinner with love and total confidence. The matchmaker she has never met in person sits on it. The app sits on it, sorting men by whatever it sorts men by. The universe holds a seat, which is how she ends up saying things like if it’s meant to be. Someone’s husband who knows a guy has a vote.

Every one of them gets a say in the most important decision of her life.

And not one of them knows what she wants. They can’t. She has never said it in specific terms to herself, let alone to them.

That is not a failing. Nobody has ever asked her that way. When you have never been taken into that kind of depth, you think you already know, and what comes out is I want someone kind, someone supportive, someone who has his life together. Those are categories, and a category will hand you the category every time.

She took herself off the committee.

Not dramatically. Her own read had been wrong before in the only place it mattered, and after that it felt like the least reliable input in the room. So she deferred. To the friend with strong opinions. To the professional. To the algorithm. To timing. Deferring looked like being open. It was the most reasonable-sounding way to hand over the pen.

She is tired. She calls it dating fatigue. She says she’s over it, she’s taking a break, she’s focusing on her business and her kids and her friends, which is all true and all good. But the tiredness is not from meeting men. Most of these women meet very few men. The tiredness comes from chairing a committee that has no criteria.

Every match arrives and she has to relitigate the whole thing from scratch. Is this a yes. Is my hesitation wisdom or fear. My friend says give him three dates. The matchmaker says I’m being difficult about geography. The app keeps showing me this same type of man, so maybe that’s the market. Maybe that’s what’s available. Maybe this is what wanting more looks like from here.

That is an exhausting job. Anyone would want to quit it.

So she quits. She deletes the apps, she cancels the service, she tells her friends to stop. And she explains it the way most of them explain it: there’s nobody good where I live.

She has diagnosed a supply problem. It’s a committee problem. The men in her county are not the variable. Neither is she. There is no standard in the room, so nothing is ever settled and no decision holds.

If you don’t know what you want, how is anybody else supposed to know?

The matchmaker didn’t fail my client. The matchmaker was given what almost everyone gives, a version of what she thinks she wants, general and agreeable and impossible to act on. Nobody can match against that.

Here is what’s on the other side of this. My client can now say who she is, what she wants, and what her actual non-negotiables and desires are. That’s it. The noise, the not trusting herself, the not really knowing. All of it goes. She runs the committee now, and there is one document in the room and it is hers.

Then we sent it. The whole thing, to the matchmaker.

Everything changed, because now there was clarity. The woman choosing for her had never met her and had no way to know that thirty minutes was the number and not thirty miles. Now she has it in writing, in my client’s own words, along with everything else. She is not guessing at a stranger three thousand miles away anymore.

And my client stops relitigating. A name comes in and there is one thing to check it against. She is not more decisive than she was. She has criteria.

We call it your Extraordinary Love Standard™, mapped in your own words.

Everything she is most afraid to want is on the wrong list.

A non-negotiable is the thing that, if it is not there, ends it. Not in a year, after you have already explained him to your sister. Now.

A desire is what you actually want, in full color. Not companionship, not chemistry, not comfortable, because comfortable is what she already has. Whose hand is on her back when she walks into a party where she knows no one. What he does when she tells him the one thing she has never told anybody.

One of my clients wrote out her non-negotiables and then added a line about herself. No more self-betrayal. When the feelings show up, she wants to be able to trust herself. Nothing on that list about him. Everything else on it depends on that one line.

Now watch where a woman files things. She will take something that is genuinely a non-negotiable, I will not be the one holding it all together again, he tells me the truth when it costs him something, and she will write it under desires. A nice-to-have. Something she would love.

She does that on purpose, and she does it out of fear. If she calls it non-negotiable, she has to believe a man like that is out there and available to her. And if he does not turn up, she has handed everybody the evidence. That she is too picky. That she is not realistic. That she did this to herself.

So she softens it. It costs her nothing today and it costs her every year after, because every man she meets gets measured against a list she has already agreed to lose.

One thing you can do today, at no cost, with nobody’s help.

Open your notes app. Write down the last three pieces of advice you got about your love life, and who gave each one. Then write, next to each one, what that person actually knows about what you want. Not what they know about you. What they know about what you want, in words you have said out loud to them.

Most women find the second column empty.

Then pick the person on that list whose opinion you actually value, and tell them one specific thing you want. Not the list. One. What a Sunday morning sounds like, or what you want somebody to do on the day you get bad news.

You’ll feel how different that conversation is. That’s the whole thing, scaled down to one person and one sentence.

Now, I’m hosting a live experience next week, and this is exactly why I want you there.

Wednesday, August 26. 10:00 AM Pacific. Ninety minutes, live. Everything But This. No cost, come as my guest.

Here is what we do together:

Who you are.
What you want.
Why you end up in the same relationships over and over again.
And why, after these ninety minutes, you never will again.

You do not have to arrive knowing what you want. Almost nobody does. We do that part together. That is what the ninety minutes are for.

COME AS MY GUEST

If this is the first piece of mine you’ve read, subscribe and the next one comes to you.

Eight people at a dinner table. Three couples, you, and somebody's husband telling the story of how the two of them met, again, and everyone laughs in the right place, including you. It is a good night. You mean it when you say so at the door.

Then the drive home.

You are driving home alone. You are driving home next to your husband, and it is the same drive.

You have built a life most people could not build. The business. The kids, who turned out. The friends who pick up at eleven at night. You have made calls this year that would have flattened somebody else.

Everything but this is fine.

Love is the only place where none of it has ever helped you.

EVERYTHING BUT THIS

Wednesday, August 26 · 10:00 AM Pacific · Ninety minutes, live with me

Ninety minutes together to get absolutely clear.

Who you are.
What you want.
Why you end up in the same relationships over and over again.
And why, after these ninety minutes, you never will again.

Come as my guest. My gift to you. There is no cost to attend.

JOIN ME ON THE 26TH

And this is why.

I grew up in a horse barn in southern Minnesota. My dad was hit and miss, here and there, never really a consistent part of my life.

When I went off to college he said, hey listen, I never helped you or your mom. I am going to take care of your room and board freshman year. Which was a tremendous relief.

Two months in I got the call. The bill had never been paid and I was maxed out on loans.

I could not have named it at the time. But that was the first time I had the conversation with myself that goes, "I am not important enough. I do not matter."

So I left the dorm. I got three jobs, rented a five bedroom house and filled the other four bedrooms. Then I got married at twenty-three, the ripe old age of twenty-three, because I was certain I was going to be alone forever and that nobody was ever going to love me.

It was a lonely marriage. We were too young. We had our miracle child, and when she was six, we separated.

I had one request. I asked him to give her that first year of the transition, that when she was with him, he would just be with her. He agreed. No problem.

The next day I called to see how she was doing. She had a little cold. She told me daddy's friend and her daughter were there and they were coloring Easter eggs.

Mama bear came out in me and I lost my shit.

The next two years were a nightmare out of a bad Lifetime movie. Volatile. Unsure. Uncertain. Fearful, fearing whether Madi was okay when she was not with me. Just the worst, with so much anger and sadness and rage, and a horrific amount of negative emotion.

During that time I did all the things we are told to do when we are in crisis, or dealing with something that feels like we have absolutely no idea how we are going to get to the other side of it. I talked about it in therapy. I talked about it with my girlfriends. I read the books. I journaled.

Those things are beneficial. There is real relief in naming a thing, in saying it out loud to someone, in finally understanding where it came from.

But having that knowledge did not heal anything at the core.

Fast forward three years. Madi and I were living in this fabulous little old farm cottage in a river town in Afton, Minnesota, with horses and chickens and a pond that we dyed blue every Sunday in the summer so it looked like the ocean.

My father came to visit. He said, hey, this is a great time, you guys should come take over this family business.

Everything inside of me was screaming that this was a terrible idea. I had years of evidence that he could not be trusted.

But knowing something and choosing differently are two very different things.

I moved my mom, my daughter, two horses and three cats across the country. The first few months were a fairy tale. Family dinners. Madi growing up in this beautiful little town at the base of Mount Tam, the beach every weekend.

Five months to the day, I was surrounded by federal agents with guns pointed at me and put in handcuffs. That is how I found out I was in the middle of a massive DEA investigation.

The aftermath was horrific. Every asset frozen, business and personal. Several hundred thousand dollars in debt. And the relationship with my father that I had wanted my whole life was over.

So I went back to therapy. Processing. Writing the letters that are never going to be sent. Swinging between rage and betrayal and sadness over losing the idea of ever having a father.

And underneath all of it, more evidence for the same two sentences. "I am not important enough. I do not matter." Who does that to their daughter. To their granddaughter.

Then I had the brilliant idea that this would be a great time to start dating for the first time.

I knew instantly it was wrong. And I argued, once again, with what I knew. I told myself it was probably me. That my expectations were too high. That the love I had dreamed about probably did not exist, and if it did, it was certainly too late for me.

It took me two years to get out of that relationship. It was abusive. Cruelty wrapped in humor. His full-time job was making sure I understood that I really was not that special.

It was my line in the sand. Never again.

I was going to focus on being the best mama to Madi. I had friends. I had my family. That is a good life.

And then I found something that became the basis of my life's work.

Because in a matter of weeks, there were parts of me I did not recognize. In all the best ways. The anger and the rage and the sadness were gone. And in their place was this clarity about going forward and building my life, and I was so present to it.

That was the moment I knew there was another way.

A way that does not take months and years of telling the story over and over again to get rid of the stuff keeping you from the life you have longed for.

I created this work. For me first.

And on the other side of it, I am married to the greatest love of my life, which I was certain would never happen for me. Without this work, it never would have.

Not hoping and coming up short. Not the midlife version where you tell yourself he is a great person and you cannot expect everything. I am loved in the way I dreamed about my entire life. We both are, and we get to be that for each other. It is the most incredible thing.

Now I get to do this work with women all over the world and create a future that could not have existed before.

Because it was never about knowing more. It was never about more insight.

SAVE MY SPOT

I got my love story. I want that for you too.

Here is what it has looked like for my clients.

My client came to me in the middle of a divorce that had already been going on for a year. He had been in another relationship and that had just ended. Two teenagers at home. She hated her ex-husband so much that he was basically the standing topic of her Friday night happy hour with her girlfriends.

Her son's graduation was coming up, and she said to me, with absolute certainty, there is absolutely no way he and I can be in the same room.

Three weeks into working together, her girlfriends stopped her at happy hour. They said, we need to ask you something. Are you on drugs?

She laughed and said no, why.

They said, well, you are calmer. You are nicer. And you have not been bitching and complaining and raging about your soon to be ex-husband. You have started talking about what you want instead, about finding that job working with adolescents, about what is next for you. It is kind of amazing.

She texted me afterward and said it was wild that other people could feel it.

Two weeks after that, she sat next to her soon to be ex-husband at their son's graduation, and the two of them had a family lunch afterward.

And all the rest of it went with it. Letting a man take over her whole calendar. The voice in her head saying that is not really a red flag, I will just give him another chance. All of that chatter, gone.

She is now in the healthiest, most incredible relationship of her life.

Another client had two first dates in one week. The second man was sweet, and he also posted videos of himself working out. Her words: "I feel like he's trying to prove something that doesn't really impress me and I don't care about." There was no third date, and there was no week of deciding.

What she said about herself in the same conversation was the bigger thing. "I don't want to put on the forced cheer. I hate it when I do that. I caught myself doing that at Thanksgiving."

Another woman came to an in-person event I hosted. A week later she told me this: "I really became consciously crystal clear of, you know what, I'm not going to shrink away from who I am anymore. I'm not going to be conformist or pulling back or kind of staying on the sidelines. And this week I've been doing that in subtle ways. And it feels nice."

One event. One week.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26

10:00 AM Pacific · Ninety minutes, live with me

Ninety minutes together to get absolutely clear.

Who you are.
What you want.
Why you end up in the same relationships over and over again.
And why, after these ninety minutes, you never will again.

What you leave with is not a written page. It is the anchor for the rest of your life and for every relationship going forward. Your values, your non-negotiables and your desires, named in specific words you have probably never said out loud.

And by the way, you do not have to arrive knowing what those are. Almost nobody does. We do that part together.

And here is what it does for you. Nothing goes back up for a vote again. You will never again spend days and weeks and months and years trying to work out whether this is right, or whether those were red flags, or whether you are being ridiculous.

The drama, the noise and the decision fatigue are gone.

Come as my guest. My gift to you. There is no cost to attend.

COME AS MY GUEST

I write here every Tuesday. If you want the next one, subscribe below.

She is in her late fifties. Two marriages behind her, a job she travels for, friends all over the world. She is dating again, and she wanted to know one thing.

“How do you even know if you’re in the right relationship?”

I hear that question all the time, and it is never really a question about the other person.

Let’s look at everything that happened on the way to the woman across from me asking me that question.

When you chose him, you were not careless. You were downright intentional. You were clear about what went wrong last time, and you were definitely not doing that again. You had the whole declaration ready. Exactly what you would not tolerate, would not allow, would not be at the mercy of, ever again.

You felt really good about that.

Obviously this was the one. This was the right relationship. You learned your lessons last time, and you are doing it differently.

And then it ended. Or it blew up. Or it just died slowly over four years, while you talked yourself into it being okay and talked yourself out of knowing that it wasn’t.

I don’t f**king know. I thought I knew. I was certain, and look how that turned out.

What you are left with is not heartbreak.

What you are left with is worse.

Broken trust...

Not in them. In yourself.

And once that has happened two or three times, you stop trusting your own read on anything. Not your judgment about him. Your judgment, full stop. You have collected the evidence against yourself, and it is compelling, and you are the one who gathered it.

So now you cannot tell anymore whether the thing you noticed on the second date is an actual red flag, or whether it is all the years of having been wrong, and of being told your expectations are not realistic, and that you are too picky, and that nobody is perfect.

A brilliant, emotionally intelligent, grown-ass woman, and you have no idea whether there is a real problem in front of you or whether the voice in your head is just loud.

So you wait. You gather more information. You give it another few months.

She looked at me and said:

“That’s absolutely true. I just don’t really trust myself. I never thought about it that way.”

Two hours later I was on a call with a woman twenty years younger. Thirty-eight, three children all under three, a serious job, in the middle of a divorce.

She told me the kind of man she picks. He arrives already in love with her. He says it out loud, constantly. He rearranges his life around her. He tells everyone she is the best thing that has ever happened to him, and he means it.

And then the first rush of that wears off, and she starts to see the rest of him.

That he is not actually her counterpart. That he cannot meet her where she lives. Less ambitious, or less driven, or wanting a life two sizes smaller than the one she is capable of.

And she does not leave. Not for years. She does not believe in giving up on things. In her work, she is the one who finds a way, and if you want something badly enough, you make it happen. So she tries harder. She adjusts. She takes up less room, so he does not have to feel her size.

Her words:

“I erased myself in the process, to fit in that smaller bucket.”

By the time she is done, she is a version of herself she does not recognize, exhausted, and it falls apart anyway.

Somewhere in that call she also said, flatly, the way you would mention the weather, that she does not think she is very lovable.

Twenty years apart. One at the far end of two marriages, one with a baby on her hip. Neither of them was describing a man.

There is a moment in almost every one of these conversations where I ask the same thing.

“On the other side of this work, what does that look like for you? What are you doing or not doing differently than you’re doing or not doing right now? What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel?”

That question brings a hell of a lot more tears than it does smiles, and not because it is sad.

Because a very accomplished woman will sit there, and eventually she will say: I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know what I want. And if I can’t even tell you that, how are you supposed to help me get it?

She is not being difficult. She is telling the truth.

You have been somebody’s wife. Somebody’s mother. The CEO. You have been the fill-in-the-blank for so long that the question of what you want has not been live in twenty years. You spent the last two decades taking care of everybody else’s needs and wants and lives.

And now the kids are grown and thriving and gone, which is exactly what you raised them to do. The marriage is over. And you are doing alone every single thing you assumed you would be doing with someone.

This was supposed to be the good part, wasn’t it. The golden years. The travel. Learning to play pickleball with people you love.

And here you sit, and your life looks nothing like the one you planned on, and someone asks you what you actually want, and you cannot answer.

You have fifty, sixty years of life behind you and a great many good decisions in it. One went wrong, badly wrong, and you let that one outvote all the rest.

You are not broken. You are not too old. You are not too late. You are not too much.

You have been waiting a long time to feel certain again.

And certainty, real trust in who you are and what you want, does not come from knowing more. Not from learning another thing, not from unpacking the same story for the fortieth time.

It comes from the place more knowing and more insight can’t reach.

So let me give you the first step back to yourself, and to your certainty.

It is called the Extraordinary Love Index™ (ELI).

Thirty questions, twelve minutes, and your Portrait comes back the moment you finish.

It measures three things. What you believe about love underneath what you would say out loud. How your body responds when love gets close. And how clearly you see what you actually want, and how you decide.

From those, it places you in one of four wirings. Each one costs a woman something different, and each one starts somewhere different, which is why two women with nearly identical histories end up nowhere near each other.

When people ask how it is different from what they have already done, this is the answer. Therapy explores the wound. This names the wiring. Self-awareness is where the work starts, and this is what comes after.

taketheeli.com

Take The Eli

xo,

Riana

So I recorded you a short hello.

▶ Watch the hello

There’s one thing I say in it that I really want you to hear, especially if you’ve ever thought, I did everything right, so why is love the one place that never came together for me?

It’s under two minutes.

I’m really glad you’re here, and I don’t take lightly that you let me into your inbox. I’ll see you in the next one.

xo, Riana

In case my handwriting is hard to read:

Well, I usually write this to you Sunday morning, and sometimes life happens and we have to adjust. So here I am, writing to you at 9:30 Sunday evening.

At church this morning, the conversation was about JOURNEYS. In life. In relationships. In faith. In all of it.

Then a question was posed.

“What Are You Rehearsing?”

Which made me smile. I talk about a version of this constantly. What are you focused on? What you want, or what you DON’T want? (Spoiler alert, it’s mostly the latter.)

It is all Rehearsal.

Are you rehearsing anxiety? Doubt? Fear? It never works out for me? OR rehearsing joy, love, abundance, peace, the love of yourself, the trip to Italy?

We are all rehearsing something.

This is a little uncomfortable for me to share. Last week I spoke at an incredible event in NY, and I wish I could go back and do it over. I got in my head. I didn’t trust my brilliance. I walked on stage with a piece of paper, and kept glancing at it. Every time I did, it took me out of the magic. Out of the focus. Out of being PRESENT in that room with people I had been given the honor and privilege to pour into.

The connection broke every single time I turned to the paper instead of my heart.

What was I rehearsing? It wasn’t the impact that I could leave and the lives I could touch. I was rehearsing not trusting myself and my Brilliance. And I had practiced that one well enough to carry it on stage.

So this brings me to you. “What are you Rehearsing?”

The story that you are too old, too much, not enough? The story that you should just be “grateful” and you have a great life? The reasons why it’ll never happen for you?

OR the other one. The one where it does. Where it is more amazing than you could’ve imagined?

We are always rehearsing, and you get what you focus on.

Choose.

I got my love story. Now… It’s your turn.

So now I want to hear from you. What are you rehearsing? Leave it in the comments, or hit reply and tell me privately. I read every single one, and I want to know.

xoxo,

Riana

If you want to know what you have actually been rehearsing when it comes to love, that is what the Extraordinary Love Index (ELI) is for. Thirty questions, about twelve minutes, and a written portrait naming the exact wiring that has been running your love life underneath everything you have already tried.

Take the ELI

It’s 11pm and you are still awake, phone lit up in the dark, telling yourself you will put it down after this one video. Except you don’t.

You are three dating coaches deep on YouTube, then an Instagram reel, then another one, a whole feed of well-meaning people explaining, again, what you are doing wrong. Communicate better. Be more emotionally available. Do the work.

You already know this. You could teach the class.

It is good advice, mostly. That is what makes it so confusing.

Because you have done it. You are, by any honest measure, one of the most self-aware women in any room you walk into. You have read the books. You can name your pattern out loud, in order, with dates and names attached. And you are still here, looking for the next thing to try.

I understand why the advice feels like the answer. You are analytical. You solved everything else in your life by learning more and doing more, so more communication, more self-work, more emotional availability looks like the obvious next lever. Of course it does. It is the move that has never once failed you anywhere else.

Here is what all of that advice has in common. It is addressed to your conscious mind. The part of you that reads, decides, plans, communicates better. That part is real. It is also not the part that is driving.

The part that is driving is underneath. Think of it as the navigation system. You put in an address once, a long time ago, and now it just takes you there. Every time. It does not check the destination against your values, your desires, your non-negotiables. It routes to the address that is already saved.

So watch what happens when a genuinely g

ood man shows up. Steady. Kind. Does what he says he will do. And something in you pulls back, and you let it drift. You will call it chemistry. You will tell your friends there was no spark.

What there actually was, was no recognition. He is not the saved address. So the system did what it always does. It kept driving. Past the steady man, back onto the road you have taken a hundred times, toward the turn that always ends in the same place. Different face. Different job. Different city. The same man in different clothes.

I am not going to tag anyone or name names. I am just going to tell you what I actually do.

My purpose is simple. I truly want everyone to live their version of their very best life. But you cannot just snap your fingers and go from all the past stuff, the childhood stuff, the failed relationships, straight to living your very best life.

You have to Clear to Create.

Clear the story to create the life.

Everyone tells me they want a different story. The first thing I will say to you is… stop telling the old one.

Clear the cycles to create the confidence.

Everything in life is cyclical. Jot down every seven or nine years backwards, however old you are now, till the time of your last point of childhood, and look at what was going on in your world. You might be shocked.

At this point in life, you have enough evidence that you cannot actually feel confident trusting your own decision-making. Because

you thought you knew, and look how that turned out.

Clear the resentment to create the results.

As high-functioning, high-achieving women, you often feel resistance and call it self-sabotage. The real question is what are you resenting, because that is really what it is. Clear the resentment to create the results, so you actually get to have the life and love that is meant for you, rather than spending between now and then wishing for it.

Clear the loss to create the love.

Regardless of whether you got out of a relationship you knew was not meant for you, there is still a loss. A loss around what you wanted. What your vision was for that relationship, for yourself, for your family.

Clear the patterns to create the partnerships.

This is the cornerstone. It is the navigation system I just told you about. The same saved address. The same man in different clothes.

You do not add the good relationship on top of the old wiring. You clear what is running underneath, at the source, so the system stops routing you back. Not the archaeology of walking back through every wound to catalogue where it came from. The saved address itself, changed.

Brenda came to me able to describe exactly what she did and why. She had spent years shrinking. Her words. “I felt like I had to shrink and make myself smaller. I lost myself. And I was resentful. I was unloved. I felt frustrated. And I also felt helpless.”

She could say all of that beautifully. Saying it had never once changed it. That is the entire trap. Insight this sharp feels like it should be enough, and it never is, because it is the passenger talking and the passenger does not steer.

What changed it was clearing the thing underneath, the old load that kept entering the same address, the belief that to be loved she had to be smaller. When that cleared, she did not get better at explaining herself. She became someone the old destination no longer fit.

“I’m claiming me,” she said.

This was never a communication problem, and it was never, at any point, your worth. It is an address. Addresses can be changed.

When you are ready to see the actual one you have saved, that is what the Extraordinary Love Index™ (ELI) is for. Not a quiz. A diagnostic that names the specific thing standing between you and the love you want, in plain language, by name.

Twelve minutes. Thirty questions. Your written portrait, the moment you finish.

PS. A woman I had never met took this at 10pm last night and sent me this text fifteen minutes later: “I’m sorry that it’s so late, but I had to tell you this. I just took the ELI, and I just spent 15 minutes reading through the report that you sent me, and I’m just completely blown away. This is more useful than my entire last year of therapy and makes so much sense to me in a way that really nothing else has.”

Take the ELI.

xo

Riana

One of my clients looked at me on a call last week and said, “I swore on December thirty-first that by March thirty-first it was going to be sorted. He was going to be out of my house.”

And here she sits. Four months later, no closer to it than the day she said it.

This is a woman who coaches other people through their lives. Who builds businesses. Who travels the world for her music, the kind of talent people buy a ticket to be in the room for. By every visible measure, a woman who makes things happen the moment she decides they will.

And she cannot get one man out of her house. A marriage that stopped being a marriage a long time ago, and she is still in it.

If you have ever lived inside that particular kind of alone, you already know it is not the same as being alone. I know it. I have been there. Being by yourself is a dry cold. You can dress for it. Being alone next to someone who is supposed to be yours is a damp cold, and it gets into your bones, and no coat you own touches it.

And you talk yourself out of it, because you are reasonable. You think, “This is not that bad. People have it so much worse. He is not cruel. There is not one thing I could even point to. So what is my problem.”

Until you are somewhere beautiful. A resort, water, sun, the whole thing you worked your entire life to afford. You are sitting beside him, and a few feet away another couple is in the pool, laughing about nothing, and he reaches over and tucks her hair behind her ear and kisses her, easy, like it is the most natural thing in the world to want to. And something in your chest caves, because you want that so badly it is embarrassing, and you are sitting right next to the person you were supposed to have it with, and you have never in your life been more alone.

That is where she was.

And then something happened.

She met someone. A man who, in her words, is “perfect for me in ninety-five percent of the ways.” She told me that when she stands next to him, “I breathe different.” She loves him. She loves who she is next to him. For the first time in longer than she can remember, she feels completely alive.

And here is what happened in her own head.

A voice said, “That’s not for me. That’s for someone else.” It even used her name. Stop thinking, it told her, that you somehow get to have that kind of love.

Not because there was anything wrong with him. There was nothing wrong with him. She adores him. The voice was never about him. It was about her, and whether she is allowed to have the thing she wants most in the world.

That is what I want to talk about, because the whole world is about to hit this exact wall.

We are living through the cheapest insight in human history. You can ask a machine at one in the morning why you keep abandoning yourself, and it will tell you, warmly, fluently, for free. She does not even need the machine. She has two therapists and years of every kind of work, and she can out-explain all of them.

And the voice still said, that’s not for you.

Understanding it was never the thing that was going to change it. You do not have an information problem.

I asked her where “that’s not for me” comes from. She did not pause. She said, “I was taught, very deliberately taught, that other people’s needs are more important than mine.” That sentence came out of her mother’s mouth, to a small girl, and it went in, and it stayed.

She knows all of this. She can explain it better than I can. And it still runs.

Here is why the knowing has never been enough.

Your unconscious mind has two jobs. The first is to keep you safe, and safe almost always means small, and familiar, and known. The second is to get resolution around the core needs that went unmet in your childhood and adolescence.

And it will get that resolution one way or another. So it keeps arranging your life. It keeps steering you back into the same kind of circumstances, the same kind of relationships, over and over, because the only place those old needs can finally be met is inside a human relationship. Even when the familiar is chaotic and painful, your unconscious knows it can survive that, every single day, because surviving that is exactly what it was built to do when you were young. It does not know how to survive anything else. So it keeps recreating what it knows, waiting for the day the ending finally comes out differently and the need finally gets met. That is resolution. That is what it is chasing, underneath all of it.

And here is the piece almost no one tells you.

Awareness is amazing. Truly. It is the aha, the naming, the understanding, the connecting of the dots. It is the foundation of any change, any healing, any transformation. But awareness is not the change. It is not the healing. It is not the transformation.

Because if you do not go back and replace the old thing underneath, the old ways of thinking and feeling and reacting, the old neurology, then the unconscious cannot fill in the blank. When the moment comes and life asks you to do the new thing, there is nothing there to run. So it reaches for the only thing it has ever had, and it goes back to what it knows.

That is why people do the work for years, for decades, and say, “I have done so much. I can tell you everything about myself backwards and upside down and in my sleep.” And then something happens, and just like that they are ten-years-ago them again. Not because the work was fake. Because the neurology was never replaced, and the unconscious cannot fill in a blank with something it does not have.

This is the trap. It is the therapy trap, and the smartest, most self-aware women fall into it hardest. Do not get me wrong, therapy is a gift, right up until it stops being the thing. You cannot out-talk this. You cannot read more, practice more, integrate more, do one more retreat. You have done all of that. And here we are.

Let me say something about that voice.

You know the one. The voice in your head. The one that, if I said “the voice in your head,” some part of you would go, “I don’t have a voice in my head.” That one. That is the one.

People confuse this voice with intuition all the time. It is not your intuition. It is not even you. You are the one listening to it. That voice is conditioning. It is every conclusion you ever drew about what is true and what you are allowed to have, built out of years of evidence, from childhood, from the relationships that fell apart, from the business, from all of it.

And when the thing you have wanted your whole life finally comes close, that voice does not celebrate. It panics. It goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Pipe down, sister. We know how to survive in this. We do not know the other thing. Do not go running off into the unknown, that is scary as hell. Stay here, where I can keep you alive.”

And it says it in your own voice, so you mistake it for wisdom.

That’s not for me. That’s for someone else.

It was never wisdom. It was a very old part of you, doing its job.

So what actually moves it. Not more understanding of you. A look at that part underneath, the one deciding before you ever get a say.

The Extraordinary Love Index™ (ELI) is not one more thing to add to the pile you already have. In about ten minutes, it answers the question you have been circling for months, for years, maybe for decades. What is the actual thing standing between you and the love you deserve and desire?

You have done all the things. If you could have reached this piece on your own, you already would have.

Take the ELI. Finally get your answer.

taketheeli.com

Take the ELI

xo Riana

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A client, fifty-three, sent me a note this week. She has the whole life. Two daughters thriving in the college years who actually adore each other. A career she loves in real estate. Girlfriends who show up, the kind you laugh with and cry with, the ones who feel like sisters. The dog. The yoga she does every single day.

And about the one thing she does not have, she wrote, “that’s a lost cause.”

Then she sent me a voice note. “I’m just not going to do it anymore.”

I believe her. I want to start there, because she is right about most of it.

She is right that the apps are brutal. She told me about the likes that come in, a man with a cigar in his mouth and no shirt on, and her looking at it thinking, “Really? Really?” She has been on maybe two real dates in longer than she wants to say. She met one man this spring who actually checked the boxes, seven good dates, including her birthday, and then he started to fade. She watched a friend go on four dates with a man who adored her all the way up to the trip they had planned to Napa, and who texted the morning of, “I just don’t feel a connection.”

She has a theory, and it is a good one. Too many options ruined dating. Everyone is one swipe from wondering if there is someone better, so no one stays long enough to find out. She is not making that up. Half the women I talk to are saying the same thing. Off the apps. BOY SOBER (that one was new to me). Then summer comes, they go back on, then off again.

So when she says she is done, I am not going to argue with her about the apps. The apps are real.

Here is what I said to her on the phone. It is one of the truest things I know.

Your unconscious mind will never make you a liar.

When she says it’s a lost cause. When she says all the men are horrible. When she says I’m just not going to do it anymore. That is not venting. That is an instruction. She is placing an order, and the universe is a very good waiter.

She actually reminded me of this herself. Something I said to her years ago. “I think about it all the time,” she told me. “You told me to place my order and trust that it’s coming.” And then, quietly, “but it’s hard.”

It is hard, because she keeps changing the order without noticing.

The first order is the loud one, the one you can hear coming. It’s a lost cause. I’m done. But there is a second order underneath it, and that one is so much harder to catch yourself saying. It is the one that goes, okay, but if I can’t really have what I want, then maybe this is enough. And that is where it starts. She makes herself a little smaller. A little quieter. She starts talking herself out of the things she once swore were non-negotiable.

She does it because somewhere along the way she got the message that the fullness is the problem. That a man takes one look at the whole life she built and decides there is no room in it for him. That her independence reads as a door already closed. That being fifty-three and in great shape and completely herself is somehow worth less than being twenty-five and unfinished, even while the very men who think she is too much expect to be wanted exactly as they are, at their age, with their own whole lives.

Here is what I want her to know.

She does not have to make herself smaller to be loved. Not quieter, not less, not younger, not more available. The men who need her to shrink were never going to be the one. They are not the exception to the old story. They are the proof it is still running. When she stops placing that quiet order, when she holds the non-negotiables instead of negotiating them away, she stops meeting those men at all. Not because she is trying harder. Because she is no longer available for it.

She already knows her person is coming. She said it to me, plainly: “I know being alone is not my story.”

She is right. It never was. The only thing left to do is make sure every word she says out loud is placing that order, and not the quiet one underneath it. Because she was never too much. She was only ever told she was, by men who wanted her smaller. And the day she stops believing them is the day they stop being the only ones who show up.

If love is the one thing that has never matched the life you have built, there is a reason, and it is not the apps, and it is not your age, and it is not that you are too much. The Extraordinary Love Index shows you the exact order you have been placing the whole time, without knowing it. In less than ten minutes, the answer to the question you have been asking for years: quiz.rianamalia.com

xo Riana

I understood myself completely. I had words for all of it.

From the time I was very young, all I wanted was to be chosen. To be wanted. That is the plainest way I can say it, and I would do almost anything to feel, even for a little while, like I had been.

And I want to be precise about this, because it is the whole thing. It was never that I thought I had not done enough. I was not the girl chasing straight A’s, sure that one more achievement would finally earn it. It lived underneath all of that. What I carried, long before I had any language for it, was the bone-deep sense that something about me, exactly as I was, was simply not the thing a person chooses. Not my effort. Me.

I was fifteen when I had my first relationship. My first love, my first everything. And then, the way teenagers sometimes are, he was not exactly faithful. I could not have told you a single thing about worth or wiring back then. What I knew was the ache. Lying awake certain he was somewhere he should not have been, with someone he should not have been with, turning the same question over and over. What does she have that I do not. I was not deciding anything about myself in those years, not in words. But something underneath me was already learning, and that exact ache, the certainty that the person I loved was off choosing someone else, would come back in every single relationship I had after.

That feeling would shape the next twenty years of my life.

In college there was a boy who wanted to marry me. He had the ring, the whole plan. I did not want to marry him. I was twenty, barely more than a baby. But the feeling of being wanted like that, fully, without having to earn it first, stayed with me. I did not know yet that this exact feeling, simply being wanted, would become the most expensive thing in my life.

Then came the man I would marry. We got engaged young, made the whole promise, and then he was the one who called it off. Here is what I did with that. I did not grieve it and move on. I went to work. Not on myself. On the outcome. I managed it, I softened, I became whatever I thought might change his mind, and eventually he did change it, and we married. I had gotten him to choose me. I would spend the marriage learning exactly what that was worth.

I often found myself feeling more alone inside my marriage than I ever felt on my own. What I lived with was the longing. The longing to be loved the way I had always dreamed of being loved. The longing for someone who actually wanted to take care of me, in the thoughtful ways, the sweet ways, the small making-sure ways that let a person feel looked after. That was not who he was. And because I could not understand why the wanting only ever ran in one direction, I did what I always did and made it a problem with me. So I did the thing I knew how to do. I filled it. When the emptiness got loud, I would start a project, and most often the project was a house. A new one to build, a different one to buy, rooms to design and fill from nothing. It gave me something to look forward to, something that felt like purpose, something that for a little while made the quiet bearable. What I actually wanted was for the person I was married to to look at me like I was the center of his world. I built houses instead.

When the marriage ended, I did not walk away healed. I walked away with the whole thing still running underneath, waiting. It was a few years before it found its next version. I met him at a work conference. He lived in California, I was in Minnesota, and the distance did something convenient for me. It let me fill all the space between us with hope. Maybe this was finally my person. He kept me close enough to keep wanting him and far enough that I was never actually chosen. He was out all the time with women he clearly had a thing for, and I knew that ache the moment I felt it. It was the one from when I was fifteen, the same certainty that the person I wanted was somewhere else, wanting someone else. It had been with me my whole life, and I settled into it, because almost-chosen still felt better than what I had decided was true about me. That one lasted about a year before it dissolved into nothing.

Some months later, my father came to town. He came in the spring, when it was forty below, the kind of cold that makes another life sound like rescue. He sat in my kitchen and told me it was time. Come to California. Take over the family business. Madi would grow up at the base of Mount Tam, at the beach, in the ocean, the childhood I could never have given her where we were. Bring the horses. Bring your mother. Build something that finally runs without the hustle and the grind.

I questioned it, because everything with him had always been “the next big thing” (that never quite became the thing, or, for that matter, never quite became anything). So he showed me. Here are the financials. Here is the proof. It is already set up for you. And I let myself believe it, because what he was really handing me was not a business. It was the father I had wanted my entire life, finally turning toward me, finally holding the door open. After a lifetime spent on the outside of that door, it felt like magic.

So I packed up my mama, my daughter, two horses, and three cats, and I drove all of us across the country.

What we drove into, at first, felt like the fairy tale. Family dinners. Weekends with the horses. A twenty-minute drive to the ocean. For a moment it was genuinely extraordinary. And then a few months in, I was standing in handcuffs, surrounded by men with their guns pointed at me, in the middle of a DEA investigation. Not a matter of legalities. My life, my daughter’s life, my mom’s life, all of it put at risk, because my father could paint a beautiful picture over anything, including real danger.

The decision came in that very moment, not somewhere down the line. I could take Madi back to where we had come from, or we could stay. If I was going to move her again, it had to be then, before she put down one more root in this place. I had promised her I would only ever move her once. I had moved quite a lot as a child, and I knew what it took out of a kid. So with no assets, no business, no income, and the dream of my father in pieces on the floor, I stayed, because that promise to her mattered more than all of it.

And here is what cut the deepest. My father had never really been a father. My parents divorced when I was about two and a half, and after that he was only ever crumbs. A visit maybe once a year. A phone call here and there. This move was the first time in my whole life he had offered me the real thing, an actual place in his life, and I had believed every word of it. It turned out to be the same con he had always run. Something that looked like love from across a room and was empty the second I got close, except this time the emptiness came with handcuffs and an investigation. The first relationship of my life, the one that was supposed to show me I was worth choosing, turned out to be one more that showed me I was not.

The mess of it went on and on. My nervous system was so fried that every sound in the night had me certain someone was coming for us. And during all of it, of course, I did everything I was told to do. Everything we are all told to do in the face of crisis and uncertainty and trauma. I went back to therapy. I journaled. I talked it through with my girlfriends. And yes, all of it is beneficial. To a point.

By the time a couple of years had passed since the raid, I had the brilliant idea that this was surely the perfect time to start dating. I went on a few. Underwhelmed does not begin to cover it. On the first date with the one I would enter a relationship with, I knew inside of twenty minutes. Not from any lack of warmth. There was plenty of it. He was enamored, told me how beautiful I was. But underneath the warmth I could already feel that all of it was on a dial, and that he was the one holding it. Kindness handed over and taken back. Early on, someone said, “Are you going to introduce me to your better half?” He looked dead at me and said, “Who says she’s the better half?”

We went to the beach not long after, my daughter, his daughter, my mom, all of us. I was struggling across the sand with my arms full of everyone’s things, and he walked ahead, carrying only his own, never once turning around. That was the whole of it, right there in the sand. There is a way of being loved where the person you are with wakes up and the first question they ask themselves is what they can do to make your day better. This was the exact opposite of that, and I felt it in my body every single day, and I ignored it, and I ignored it, because by then I had so much evidence that I was the broken one. I was getting older. Maybe this was simply what was left for me.

And he was cruel in a way that never left fingerprints. Never anything you could hold up and point to. Just a steady, careful managing of how good I was allowed to feel, followed by the suggestion that I was inventing all of it. Months of that had me convinced I was the problem.

By the second Fourth of July, most of my days went to predicting which version of him I was going to get. The warm, charming one, or the cold, punishing one. We had done the parade, my mom and my daughter, me, and his daughter, all of us, and come back to the house, and I should have been thinking about the evening ahead. I was not. The pit in my stomach was so bad that I needed proof I was not losing my mind, the kind of proof I only went looking for after months of being told that what I felt was not real. So I looked at his phone.

There was a message he had sent to another woman. It read, “I remember a certain Fourth of July and a trip to Tahoe not very long ago...”

I want to be clear about something. I understood my situation completely. I could have laid the whole thing out for you, the history, the origin, every reason it was happening, every piece of insight you could ask for.

Understanding it did not spare me a single day of living it.

When I finally left, I drew a line in the sand. Not a hopeful one. A done one. I would rather be alone and happy, my daughter’s mama, my work, my people, than spend one more morning trying to earn my way into a love that was never going to turn toward me. I meant it.

That was real. But I have to tell you what it was not.

It was not the thing that changed me.

Drawing the line was a decision, and decisions get made in the part of you that you can actually hear. The part that reads the books and makes the resolutions and swears that this time will be different. That part of me had always known. It knew at fifteen. It knew at twenty. It knew on the Fourth of July with his phone in my hand. Knowing was never what was running my life.

What was running my life lived underneath all of it, and it was far simpler than anything I could decide. Underneath, I did not believe I would be chosen. I never had. And that belief did not sit and wait for me to examine it. It chose for me.

A few months into that last relationship, when everything in me was screaming to get out, he said something almost engineered to test it. He told me he did not think he belonged in my world, that he did not really fit into my life. The true thing, the thing the brave part of me knew, was, “Yes. You’re fucking right.” What I actually said was, “That is not true. Of course you belong.” That is what the wiring does. It does not argue. It answered first, in my own voice, every single time, before the truer part of me could ever reach the surface.

Understanding is a flashlight. It shows you the room. It was never going to be the thing that gets you out.

Here is what was finally different. For the first time in my life, I stopped working on the man and turned toward myself. And I want to be honest about what working on the man had been. I wanted him to love me the way I had always dreamed of being loved, so I shape-shifted for it. Told I was too much, I tried to make myself smaller, quieter. Told in the very next breath that I was not enough, I tried to become something I was not. Too much and not enough at the same time, endlessly adjusting, so that someone might finally choose me and stay.

So I sat down and did the thing I had never once done. I wrote out what I actually wanted. The non-negotiables. The things that had to be present for me to call something love. Not who I would have to become to keep it. What it would have to be. I did not trust myself yet, not for a second, and I want to be honest about that too. But for the first time, I had something that did not require my trust. I had a north star. Something written down that was truer than the wiring and could not be talked out of me on a hard day.

And then I did the one thing the line in the sand could never do. For twenty years, I had been able to name exactly what was wrong. I could explain my father, my history, every reason I kept landing in the same place with the same kind of man. None of that naming ever changed where I landed, because the thing driving me was not in the part of me that knows and explains. It lived deeper than that, in the place that picks the man before I have even finished shaking his hand. So that is where I finally went. Not to talk about it again. Not to relive it, or feel it more deeply, or breathe my way through it. I went underneath all of it, cleared the old wiring out at the root, and put something new in its place.

And this is the part I wish I could hand to every woman who has ever quietly decided she is the broken one. When that old wiring was gone, I did not get better at choosing. The choosing changed on its own. The kind of man who used to pull me in, the one who kept me guessing, the one I had to win over, simply lost his grip on me. There was nothing to resist, because the wanting was no longer there. And a man who was steady and kind and actually wanted me stopped reading as boring and started reading as the most magnetic man in the room. I was not white-knuckling anything. I was not talking myself into or out of a single person. The pull itself had changed.

For the first time in my life, the thing that felt right and the thing that was right were finally the same thing.

That is the work I do now. Not the talking. Not the going back into the story one more time. I clear the thing that has been making the choice for her all along, so that being loved well stops feeling foreign, and the love she actually wants stops feeling like something meant for other women.

On the other side of that work, I have been married to the greatest love of my life for almost three years. Together almost seven. He is the one who loves me in every way I ever dreamed of and never once believed could be real for me. I did not earn him. I did not manage him into staying. We simply got to be, for each other, the thing neither of us was ever sure existed. Both of us loved all the way through, with nothing to prove and not one condition on it. He is not the prize at the end of the story. He is who I got to meet once the woman who would have abandoned herself to keep a man no longer existed.

I understood myself for damn near fifty years, and understanding was never what saved me.

And if you are still reading, it is probably because you understand yourself too. You have done the work. You know your history. You can explain every reason love has gone the way it has.

None of it is the thing standing between you and being loved. It never was.

The part of you that keeps choosing has never been touched by a single thing you understand about it. That is not your failing. It is the reason nothing has changed.

The question was never whether you understand it. You do.

The question is whether you are finally ready to change the one thing all that understanding was never going to reach.

If love is the one area that has never matched the life you have built, the Extraordinary Love Index™ (ELI) shows you what has been deciding that, the whole time. Written for you, personally: quiz.rianamalia.com

xo

Riana

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She found a dog the day before our call.

A shelter dog from the pound. Nothing wrong with her at all. She liked the dog. She wanted the dog.

And she could not pull the trigger.

Let me back up. I had a call this week with a woman I had met the weekend prior at the Brilliance Brunch. She has an amazing life, and I mean that without a single qualifier. She travels constantly, with three trips booked in the next five weeks. Her home is paid off. Her parents have passed, and she spent the last couple of years grieving, going through the boxes, the literal ones in the garage filled with their things, and the emotional ones that hold the grief, the memories, and this strange new fact of being nobody’s daughter anymore. She is coming up out of that season now. She was married once, a long time ago, and she has been on her own for more than two decades. And for the first time in years, the thought of partnership is, in her words, potentially a possibility.

Before we spoke, she had taken the Extraordinary Love Index™, the assessment I created that finally answers the question most of us have been sitting with for years: what is actually standing between you and the love that is meant for you? I had her results in front of me, and the through line in them was clear. She believed, all the way down, that people always leave her.

Which I felt deeply, because that was my story too.

So I asked her: “When was the last time you let yourself fully believe that someone would stay?”

And she said, “Huh. That is exactly what I was thinking about this morning on my walk. I have been thinking about getting a dog. Yesterday I found one, and I liked her, and I could not pull the trigger. I could not make the commitment. I was too afraid that something was going to happen to the dog.” (Aka, she would love the dog, and the dog would leave her.)

And there it was. The fear that loving something means you will lose it runs so deep that it reached a dog she had known for one day. That is not small. That is how it works, surfacing before she had time to think.

Hold onto that answer. It matters in a minute.

The conscious mind is our critical faculties. It is everything we know. It is our goal setter, and we use it all day long. It is about ten percent of the brain. The other ninety percent is the unconscious mind. If the conscious is the goal setter, the unconscious is the goal getter, the literal library of everything we have ever experienced in our entire life. It is the one running the show.

Now. Twenty minutes later, in the same conversation, the dog came back up. And this time she said, “Well, I travel all the time. I can’t get a dog. It’s not fair to the dog. She would have to be boarded; she would have to be with other people. That’s why I wouldn’t get a dog.”

I said, “That is so interesting. That is a completely different thing than you said at the beginning of this call.”

She said, “Really? What did I say?”

She had no memory of it. None. No recollection of the fear that something would happen to the dog. Twenty minutes earlier. Gone.

The second reason is true. She does travel all the time, and the dog really would have to be boarded. Those are real facts, and her mind reached for them the moment she needed them, the way your mind reaches for facts the moment you need them.

But the first answer came before all that. It came on her walk that morning, before she had time to think, before the part of her that explains things showed up to explain. And the first answer was the real one. She was afraid to love the dog and have something happen to her.

Two different reasons, twenty minutes apart. Both ended in the same place: no dog. The reason changed. The outcome never did. And when the reason keeps changing while the outcome stays exactly the same, the reason was never the thing making the decision.

You have your own dog. It might not be a dog. It might not look anything like hers. For a lot of you reading this, it looks like a conclusion you came to about love; quietly at first, then out loud: I’m done. And you did not land there lightly. You got there after doing all of the work. You are clearer than you have ever been about who you are and what you want, yet you still end up in the same place. The same kind of man. The same ending. So somewhere along the way, you decided, quietly, that maybe it is just not going to happen for you. And anyway, your life is full. Your friends are extraordinary. You are never lonely. You do not need a man, and you are finished being disappointed.

I am not going to argue with a word of that. You did do the work. You are clear. Your life really is full, and you really do not need anyone to complete it.

But here is the thing. Listen to the reasons underneath the decision, and notice they keep changing. One day it is that you have done everything and nothing ever changed. The next it is that your life is too full to bother. The next it is that you would be crazy to risk the peace you fought so hard to find. The reasons keep rotating. Underneath all of them sits one conclusion that never moves: it is never going to happen for me. I’m done is just the version you say out loud, because it sounds like a choice instead of a wound.

A conclusion you actually reached would change when the facts change. This one just absorbs them. That is the tell. The conclusion came first, a long time ago, made by a part of you that decided early what you were allowed to have. Everything since has been your very capable mind handing it reasons. And here is the truth underneath all of them: it is not that you stopped wanting it. It is that some part of you is certain, all the way down, that it will end the way it always has. So rather than stand in that kind of hope one more time and be wrong, you call it. Done does not hurt. Hoping does.

And please, before you make this one more thing that is wrong with you, hear me. You have done all the things. You have read the books, done the therapy, and had the realizations. If you could have figured this piece out, you would have already. You are not lazy, and you are not broken. This was never about effort.

Here is the part almost no one explains. All of that knowing, the books, the therapy, the years of insight, lands up top, in the conscious mind. But the thing actually running your love life is not stored up there. It is stored in the body. Memory is cellular. Every disappointment, every leaving, every time you decided it was safer not to want, is held in you at that level, and insight alone does not clear it.

Picture a pantry jam-packed with expired things. Old pasta, oil gone rancid, cans from years ago, you keep working around. You can understand completely that it is full of expired food. Understanding does not empty a single shelf. You have to actually take the old things out. Only then is there room for the good stuff, the things you actually want in there.

Your unconscious is that pantry. The expired beliefs, the old filter, the voice that decided long ago what you get to have, all of it is still in there, taking up the room. Here is the beautiful thing about this work. We are not reliving the story or unpacking it for the thousandth time. We carefully clear what is expired, without reinstalling the pain, and put something true in its place. And suddenly there is room for the thing that was always meant for you. The love that meets you in the life you built. The love that never asks you to make yourself smaller.

This is why I told you to hold onto her first answer. By the end of our call, she had heard it herself, the real fear underneath the dog, maybe for the first time. I do not know what she will do with it. But she cannot unhear it now, and that is where it starts.

Somewhere in this story, you see yourself. I know you do, because I saw myself in it first. “People always leave” was my story before it was hers. It is not my story anymore, which is precisely why I get to write about it from the other side.

So I will ask you what I asked her, and I want you to notice the first answer. The one that arrives before the logic does. Not the reasons. The first answer.

What is keeping you from the thing you want the most?

If you want to see your own first answers on paper, start where she did, with the Extraordinary Love Index. You answer honestly, and what comes back is written for you, personally: a clear read on what has been standing between you and the love meant for you. It is how I knew where to look before we ever said a word.

quiz.rianamalia.com

xo,

Riana

I wrote a note this week about catching myself being everywhere and somehow nowhere. A lot of output. A lot of words. But not much of me in any of it.

Now do not get me wrong. Of course it was me. My stories, my thoughts, my work. But there was an undercurrent running underneath all of it, this low hum of needing to be everywhere at once. Omnipresent. Like if I went quiet for a day the internet fairies would banish me from the algorithm and I would cease to exist.

I know how that sounds. But here is the thing.

The world has changed, and it is changing fast. Every single day there is some new level-up in AI, and in a lot of ways it is wonderful. The productivity, the admin, the hours a week I used to lose to things I now hand off in minutes. I am not mad about any of that.

But leveling the field of production did something else too. It took the richness out of a lot of communication.

And I love rich things. If I am going to have a cup of coffee, I want heavy cream in it. If I am going to have a little ice cream, I want the real thing, the full-fat Häagen-Dazs vanilla with caramel running all the way through it. Not coffee with water poured into it, which is basically what skim milk is. White water. Not the fat-free, sugar-free thing they call ice cream that is really just some compound built in a lab to look like the real thing.

I want the real thing.

And the pressure to be everywhere is real. Some of it is just keeping up with the social media Joneses, sure. But some of it is the actual world we live in now. The world is online. It is where we get our news. It is where we watch our best friend’s kid live her best college life. The world happens there, and if you want to reach people, change a life, run a business, you cannot not participate.

But to produce for every platform, an email every day, and keep the richness, the magic, the brilliance of the actual thought, the thought leadership? It is not possible. Not unless the only thing you do all day is that. And maybe you could. But not while you are also running a business and being a wife and a mama and an auntie and a friend and a daughter.

So someone near and dear to me, someone I love and respect, read my stuff recently and said, it is good, but I do not feel you in a lot of it.

Huh.

That was the wake-up. That was the moment I went, okay, this is a little crazy, let me pause. So I did. I handwrote a note. By hand. And I sent that handwritten note to my email list, and I put it on socials. Because AI can do a great many things, but one thing it cannot do is handwrite a note, from me to you.

What I wrote on it was the truth. That in all the chaos of having to be everywhere, I had not really been anywhere. Not my heart, not my essence, not my magic. Just a lot of words to fill posts and emails.

I am telling you all of this for a reason, because it is the exact same thing I watch happen with the women I work with. And it has nothing to do with content.

We are fixers. Doers. We see the problem and the solution in the same breath and we go, okay, I have got it, I will handle it. The career. The business. It is rare that there is a situation, a room, we cannot walk into and figure out exactly what needs to be handled and fixed.

And then there is the last piece. The one thing you want most and have never been able to engineer your way into. Love. Not a watered-down version you talk yourself into because at least it is something. Love that matches the richness of who you are and the life you have built.

And then the voice in your head starts in. Maybe you are too old. Maybe you are too much. Maybe you are not enough. How many times has that voice said those exact things to you? Here is the one thing I know about her. She is a liar.

Think about it like this. You go to dinner, and you order a drink, a salad, a protein, and a side. And the food comes, and it is exactly what you ordered. An iced tea. A Caesar salad. A roasted chicken. Some glazed carrots. Nothing wrong with any of it. You got precisely what you asked for.

Except what you actually wanted was a glass of champagne. An arugula salad with fresh figs and goat cheese. A rib eye, done perfectly. Roasted asparagus.

You did not get what you wanted. You got what you ordered. And those are not the same thing.

That is what we do with love. We order the safe version, the reasonable version, the one we have talked ourselves into, and then we sit there with exactly what we ordered, wondering why it tastes like nothing. You want the richness. The richness of the relationship. The richness of your life. The richness of who you actually are. And somewhere along the way, you reached for the heavy cream and ended up holding the skim milk instead. So let me ask you. Are skim milk and heavy cream at all the same thing? Not even close.

Because you can be everywhere and nowhere in love, too.

You can be in a relationship that is mediocre at best and call it settled. You can be on the apps, swiping, checking the box. You can go on the date with your girlfriend’s cousin’s dog walker’s friend, who is apparently perfect for you, because you are so tired of everyone asking how it is possible that you, of all people, are single, that you finally just say “fine”. And then you are sitting across from him, rolling your eyes at yourself, thinking, what is wrong with me? I cannot believe I said yes to this. Never again.

You are dating. You are putting yourself out there. You are everywhere.

And you are nowhere.

And then. Someone actually shows up. You meet someone and something in you goes, “oh.” That surprised me, in the best way.

And the noise gets loud.

The thing you were about to say, the real thing, the exact thought that was already forming, the heavy cream right at the lip of the pitcher about to pour, and you stop. Oh, shit. And you grab the water instead. You water it down before it can land.

Because you have watched yourself do this a hundred times. You shrink. You make yourself a little smaller, a little quieter, a little less. And you have evidence for why you should. It has been said to you, more than once, by more than one person, that you are a lot. That you should be more realistic. You light up about something, some big idea you cannot wait to go do, and the response you get is, in what universe do you think you are going to pull that off? Never celebrated. Just a steady undercurrent that you are being a little ridiculous. So you learned to bring less of yourself to the table.

So one part of you gets smaller. And another part of you decides it cannot just be me, I have to be a little more of something else, and you start to morph, to shape-shift into whatever you think will finally make this the time it works.

Or you do the other thing. You over-give. You handle all of it, because that is the gear you know, that is what you do, you handle everything everywhere. And somewhere in there, you realize you are not being adored or cherished in a partnership at all. You have just given yourself another job. One more thing to manage.

Here is the thing. I think you have had this backwards, and it is not your fault that you have. Let me tell you why.

Being everywhere is not the opposite of being absent in the one place that matters. It is how you survive being absent there. When there is a single room in your life you cannot manage your way through, you get very, very good at filling every other room. The output is real. The capability is real. And it quietly spares you from ever having to stand still in the one place you cannot control.

You already know this is not a knowledge problem. You can recite your whole history in your sleep, backwards, with the dates. The therapy, the books, the notes on the morning walk, the journals you filled and then shoved in a drawer in irritation. And still, the second it counts, you snap back to a woman you were sure you left behind ten years ago.

That is not weakness, and it is not for lack of trying. It is how the brain works. The reactions that take over the moment love gets real were wired in long before you had language for them, and they are still running because nothing ever replaced them. When the old wiring is removed and not rewired, the system goes back to what it knows. Every time. No matter how accomplished you have become everywhere else.

So insight is great. It is just not enough. Knowing something, even knowing it brilliantly, has almost nothing to do with whether it ever changes. You can name every hang-up, every issue, every place it has gone sideways before, and you can be the sharpest, most accomplished woman in any room, and still watch yourself end up exactly where you swore you never would again. Not at this point in your life. Maybe not ever. Because the knowing lives in one part of you, and the thing actually choosing for you lives somewhere the knowing has never reached. It is the operating system underneath, running the same inputs to the same outcome, no matter what you understand.

That is the part that nothing else has touched. Not the therapy, not the books, not the years of being your own wise counsel. And it is the part I work with.

I am not going to tell you to be more present, or braver, or to put yourself out there. You have heard all of that, and it lands like an insult, because you would if you could, and the not-being-able-to is the whole problem.

What I will tell you is this. The reason you can be everywhere and still water down the realest thing in you the moment it counts is not a flaw in you, and it is not too late. It was built. Which means it can be rebuilt. And rebuilding it does not require going back into the worst of your story. You do not have to relive any of it. You want a different story. You stop telling the old one.

You have spent a long time being everywhere, so you never had to notice the one place you are not. And I suspect some part of you is tired of how well that has worked.

That is where we start.

If you want to see exactly what has been running this, take the Extraordinary Love Index. Forty questions, about ten minutes, and a personalized read of the part that nothing else has reached.

quiz.rianamalia.com

xo, Riana

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I have a client named Julie. She turned 72 this year. On her birthday, sitting with a glass of wine and the particular kind of quiet that comes after the guests leave and the candles are out, she asked herself the question she'd been circling for a while.

Is it too late?

Not in a dramatic way. Not the kind of question that comes with tears or a spiral. More like a woman who has spent her life being honest with herself arriving at what she believed was the honest conclusion. She had friends who'd been looking for years and nobody reasonable had ever showed up. She had the data. She had the math. She wasn't being pessimistic. She was being practical.

And she was wrong.

Julie is a visual artist. Painter. But that's now. As a child, that was the dream, and in her family, that was not an acceptable one. You could be a doctor or a lawyer. So she became an appellate attorney in Los Angeles for many, many years.

After her second marriage ended and her kids were older, she left LA for Santa Fe. She stepped into the part of herself she'd been carrying since childhood, the part she was actually passionate about. And she finally became the artist she always was.

But she also married the same man a third time. Not literally. A different name, a different face. The same dynamics. The same disappointments. The same pattern playing out on repeat because she hadn't cleared what kept pulling her back into it.

Her third marriage lasted longer than it should have. And when it finally ended, she drew a line. Three strikes. Done. She was finished with love, finished with trying, finished with the story altogether.

She found me by listening to a random podcast. She reached out.

When she started working with me, she was still holding all of it. Not because she hadn't tried to let it go. She had. But the fuel for that fire was still burning somewhere underneath everything else. And while it burned, she wasn't available. Not for love. Not for receiving. Not for the thing she actually wanted.

So we did the work. Not the archaeology of going back through every wound and cataloguing where it came from. The neurological clearing. The expired identity, the old wiring, the version of her that was still gripping the story of what he did and what she lost and what she should have done differently. All of it had to go. Not by reliving it. Not by understanding it better. She already understood it. She could narrate her own patterns in her sleep. What she couldn't do was stop them. That's what we cleared.

Here's what happened next.

Julie went on Match.com. Not with urgency. Not with a strategy. Not with the frantic energy of a woman who has convinced herself this is her last chance. She described it to me like this: "I've been very detached from actually even doing it."

That's the part most people miss. She wasn't trying harder. She wasn't more motivated. She wasn't more optimistic. She was just different. The grip was gone. The charge around her ex was gone. The story about time running out was gone. And what was left was Julie. Just Julie. Without all the weight.

Within less than an hour of going live on her profile, she had a match. His name is Mark. He's a Jewish woodworking artist in Albuquerque. He was one of the few people who had actually written a thoughtful profile, actually considered what photos he put up, and, in Julie's words, "actually wasn't an idiot."

He matched her stated preferences almost exactly.

She called me after and said something I will never forget. "How did that even happen? Maybe because the universe was ready to give it to me."

I said, "How about you were ready to receive it?"

And she paused. And then: "Oh. There's that part, too. That's why we did all that work. Oh my God."

I want you to sit with that for a second.

She didn't get lucky. She didn't change her approach. She didn't lower her standards. She didn't compromise on who she is or pretend to be someone more easygoing or less accomplished or less particular. She was 72. She was a successful artist. She had opinions and edges and a life she wasn't willing to hand over.

And she found him.

Not because she got better at dating. Not because she did more work on herself or journaled harder or said her affirmations. The neurology that had been selecting for the wrong men, tolerating the wrong dynamic, staying too long in the wrong situation, it stopped running. Not because she decided it would. Because it was cleared at a level that willpower and insight and years of therapy never touch.

A couple of weeks in, Mark calls her when she travels. When she flew home from Florida, he asked if she wanted to grab dinner before she drove back up to Santa Fe. No negotiation. No complicated logistics of feelings. Just: you're back, I want to see you, let's go.

She told her ex to stop texting her 20 times a day. To stop texting her at night. That she had somebody now and the way they'd been interacting post-divorce was done. She was cleaning up the loose ends. All of them.

And she kept saying this one thing that stopped me every time. "Obviously, of course, this is happening for me."

Not "I can't believe this." Not "pinch me." Obviously. Of course. Like something she'd always known was true had finally caught up with her.

She said to me: "I'm too remarkable for a man who can't show up, or who is afraid to show up."

"I'm too remarkable for a man who shrinks from my success."

"I'm too remarkable to settle for emotionally unavailable."

This is not affirmation language. This is not something she read in a book and repeated until she believed it. This is a woman describing what she sees from where she stands now. She's not performing confidence. She's reporting.

And she followed it with this: "I don't need somebody. I have to want them. And they have to want me. And that's the whole thing."

And then last week, it got tested.

Mark sent her a text. Not once but twice. The kind of text that says this isn't going to work. The kind that, in every previous version of Julie's life, would have triggered one of two responses. Either "fine, I'm done" and the wall goes up. Or the quieter, more devastating one: the internalization. The evidence that she's not enough, that nobody is going to love her, that it was always going to end this way, that 72 is just too late.

She did neither.

She recognized what was underneath his words. Fear. The fear that he would disappoint her and she would leave. The fear of ending it himself before she could end it first. He was shattered by his divorce and he hasn't done the work she's done. And instead of reacting from her old pattern, she held space. Calm. Clear. Grace.

And then she set a boundary. Not from anger. Not from punishment. Not from the old defensive posture of "fine, I'm done too." She told him clearly: this does not happen again. He doesn't understand the level of dysregulation that kind of communication causes, and if it happens a third time, it's over. Clean. Loving. Final.

In a million years, she could not have delivered that 60 days ago.

I talked to her today. And it was extraordinary to walk through that experience with her, to witness her experiencing herself in a way she hasn't in seven decades. She has created space in this relationship for communication that is so clean it's almost unrecognizable from where she started. Not because she learned a script. Because the old reaction simply isn't there anymore.

I work with women who have built extraordinary lives. The career. The reputation. The friendships. The respect of everyone around them. They have built everything. Except this one thing.

And the quiet belief underneath all of it, the one they don't say out loud at dinner or in the group chat or to their therapist, is: it's too late. The window closed. The men who could match my life either don't exist or want someone younger with fewer opinions.

I understand why you believe that. You've been paying attention. You've watched friends search for years. You've been on the apps. You've seen what's out there. And your analytical mind, the same one that built everything else in your life, has come to what feels like a reasonable conclusion.

But you're looking at the results of the same neurology running the same pattern. The outcomes are the same because the wiring underneath them is the same. You keep choosing the same person in different packaging, not because you haven't tried hard enough or done enough work on yourself, but because the operating system generating those choices hasn't been touched.

Julie had the same conclusion. She was wrong.

Seventy-two.

Three marriages. Decades of carrying what wasn't hers. A birthday alone with a glass of wine and the honest belief that the window had closed. A woman who had done everything, tried everything, understood everything about her own patterns. A brilliant woman who was so tired of the story and so sick of being in it and telling it and living inside it. Done.

And in a matter of weeks, not months, not years, not a decade of twice-a-week sessions, the whole thing shifted. Not because she tried harder. Not because she learned more. Because the neurology that had been running the show for seven decades was finally, specifically, cleared.

I have a client right now who is 32. She is having the same experience. Forty years apart, completely different lives, the same transformation. Because this was never about age. It was never about how long you've been stuck or how many times you've tried. It was always about what's running underneath.

Julie is 72. She's in a relationship with a man who adores her, who misses her when she's gone, who says so first. She just bought a $525K art studio entirely on her own terms without consulting anyone. A therapist friend happened to be passing through Santa Fe and offered to do a communication session with her and Mark to set their foundation right from the start.

She keeps calling these coincidences. I keep telling her they're not.

When the receiving comes back online, everything shows up. Not just the relationship. The opportunities. The right people at the right time. The handyman who knocks on the wrong door and turns out to be the guy who can build your painting walls.

That is what happens when the old load clears and you become available for what was always trying to reach you.

If you've been reading this and the voice in your head just said "good for her, but that's not going to be me," I want you to know something about that voice.

It sounds like wisdom. It sounds like the mature conclusion of a woman who has looked at the evidence. But Julie had that same voice. On her 72nd birthday, sitting alone after the candles were out, it told her the same thing it's telling you right now.

And it was wrong.

That voice is not your clarity. That voice is the pattern talking. And the pattern is what I clear.

Julie didn't become someone new. She didn't do more work on herself. She didn't finally figure out the thing she'd been missing. What happened is that the wiring underneath everything, the part that no amount of understanding or insight or willpower ever reaches, was cleared. And what walked in after that was the life she'd been building toward for seven decades without knowing it.

Obviously. Of course.

Riana

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Every year around this time, the internet fills up with the same message. Declutter your closet. Purge. Get rid of what no longer serves you. Make room.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love a good closet, pantry, junk drawer purge more than most people. There is something about getting rid of stuff that just feels good. Energetically, it matters. The stuff sitting in your closet that doesn’t fit anymore, the things you’re holding onto “just in case,” they’re a drain. Even if you’re not consciously aware of it.

A couple of months ago, I took everything out of my pantry. Everything. I put it all in the kitchen and it literally covered the center island, the countertops. Some of it was on the floor. It was wild. Then I cleaned out the entire pantry, wiped it all down, and went through every single thing. Expired stuff? Gone. Half-open bags of pasta? Gone. Things that had been sitting there because “oh, someday I’ll use this” that I was clearly never going to use? Gone.

I took what was left and put it back. Organized. Neat. And guess what? All of a sudden there’s all this space. Space I didn’t even realize was missing.

It’s no different with the rest of our lives. Just like we have to get rid of the expired stuff in the pantry, we have to do the same with our expired ways of thinking. Our expired narratives. The expired voice in our head. The expired identity we’ve been attached to that is no longer who we actually are. The expired beliefs we’ve been carrying from the last however many decades you’ve been on this earth.

That is what actually needs to go this spring.Here’s the thing about this time of year. As cliche as it sounds, I start to feel more alive again. During the dark months of winter, when the sun disappears at five o’clock, I just want to put on my jammies and get in my bed. But as the days get longer, something shifts. When you look out the window at seven and it’s still light out, there’s something about that. It’s almost like getting more time back. More life. I am a completely different person in these months. I just feel so much more alive.

And I think that aliveness is about more than the weather.

Spring is the season of new birth. New growth. The flowers come up. Whether you think about spring in the sense of farming or faith, it’s all the same energy. It’s the same message. New life. New possibility. New access to transformation.

There’s a flicker. You feel it even if you can’t name it. A sense of excitement about what could be.

And this is where it gets to be a bit of a duality. Because you have created an incredible life. You’ve accomplished so much. You have a career you’re proud of. Great friendships. Maybe your kids have flown the nest. You love your morning walk or your yoga class. Your book club. Your girls trips. Your life is full. It’s amazing. And you’re super grateful for all of it.

And there’s still something underneath all of it that wants more.

You know what you don’t want. You can name every red flag. You can name what you’re done with. You could write that list in five minutes. You’ve been building it for years.

Now flip it.

Everything you want. For you. For your life. For your future. Magic wand. Fairy dust. No filtering. No “well I’m not going to put that on the list because I’m too old.” No “I’m too much.” No “I’m not enough.” No “that’s not realistic.” Whatever the narrative in your head is saying, ignore it. Everything you want goes on that list.

And most of the time? That list is significantly harder to write than the first one. There are typically three reasons why, and they are a through line in almost every conversation I have with the women I work with.

I don’t know what it looks like. I’ve never had it. I don’t even have a reference point. So how am I supposed to describe something I’ve never experienced?

I don’t know who I am anymore. I spent the last 30 years taking care of everybody else, putting everybody’s needs first, being a mom, being a wife, running a company, building a career. And now the question of this season of life, this transition, between now and dead. What do you really want? That is the question that, more often than not, brings tears. Not because something is wrong. Because there’s not an answer yet.

I don’t even want to write it down. Because if I name it and it doesn’t happen, that’s just more evidence. More proof that it doesn’t work out for me. It becomes another heavy thing, like the things I say I’m going to do and don’t finish. Another flashing neon sign that says I don’t get to have this. So it’s safer to not want it at all than to put it on the list and watch it not show up. Again.

Yeah. I know.

I think about it like going to a restaurant. You sit down. The server comes by and says, what can I bring you?

And you say, “I’d love something to drink, and I’d like to start with a salad and a protein and whatever your lovely in-season vegetables are.” Great. They bring you an iced tea, a Caesar salad, a nice piece of roasted chicken, and some rosemary potatoes.

One thousand percent you got exactly what you ordered.

The problem is what you wanted was a glass of champagne, an arugula salad with figs and goat cheese, a beautiful piece of halibut, and roasted asparagus.

Do you see the difference?

This is why most high-achieving, high-capacity, incredible women almost get what they want in life... but never quite get there. Not because they’re not capable of having it. Because the default wiring kicks in. Someone asks, “So what do you want?” And the answer sounds clear. “I want someone who’s kind. Healthy. Shares the same values. Wants the same things.” And that’s not wrong. But it’s the Caesar salad. And you will keep getting exactly what you ordered.And before you tell me this sounds like a mindset thing, let me stop you. It’s not. This is not about more affirmations. More vision boards. More journaling prompts about your future self.

If you take everything out of the pantry and just shove it all to one side, you still have a chaotic, cluttered, no-room-for-anything pantry. You didn’t clean it. You rearranged it. That is what most mindset work does. It rearranges. It reframes. It gives you a prettier way to describe the same mess.

The expired stuff has to actually go. Not reframed. Not repositioned. Not understood from a new angle. Gone. At the source. And the thing most people don’t realize is that clearing it at the source doesn’t require going back into the story, the drama, the archaeology of how it got there. It requires working at the layer underneath the thinking, the layer that’s actually running the pattern.

So this spring, before you clean out the closet, clean out what’s actually expired. The thinking. The wiring. The version of you that’s still ordering the Caesar salad.

And then want what you want. Out loud. By name.

That’s not spring cleaning. That’s spring wanting.

Riana

You are the one everyone goes to.

You’re the friend who knows a guy. You’re the one who remembered the reservation. You’re the one who handled the thing nobody else wanted to handle. You have been the most capable person in every room for so long it’s not a role anymore. It’s who you are.

And it works.

It’s why you have the career you have. The life you have. The friendships, the money, the health, the home. None of it happened by accident. You built it. You are good at building.

Except for this one thing.

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Here is what no one will tell you clearly. The patterns that built your extraordinary life are the exact patterns keeping love at a distance. The self-sufficiency. The anticipating. The over-functioning. The “I’ll just handle it.” The ability to make anything work.

These are not character flaws. They are the reason you’re here. They are also the reason he isn’t.

When a man who could actually meet you walks in, you don’t need him to. You don’t know how to let someone else be the most capable person in the room. You don’t know how to be the one who gets taken care of. You don’t know how to stop thinking three moves ahead long enough for someone else to plan the trip, book the restaurant, remember the cake.

So you end up with men who require managing. Men who show up half-built. Men you have to carry.

Because that you know how to do.

This is not a dating problem. It isn’t about what you’re attracting. It isn’t about your standards. It is not a mindset. It is not your wounded inner child.

It is a nervous system that learned, before you had language for it, that being the one in charge is how you stay safe. And every success in your life has reinforced it. You got rewarded for it. Everywhere except here

.

There’s a conversation you have with yourself that no one else hears.

Not at dinners. Not in the group texts. Not with the friend you tell everything to.

At 3 am. On a Sunday afternoon in the quiet. On the drive home from the thing you showed up to alone.

It sounds like this.

“I’ve done everything I know how to do. Why is this the one thing I can’t solve?”

“Everyone I know thinks I have it all together. Nobody knows.”

“I hate that I still want this. I hate that I can’t make myself stop wanting it.”

You’ve said these things to yourself so many times they don’t feel like sentences anymore. They feel like the truth.

Ten years in. The women who come to me look identical to you on paper.

The career. The home. The travel. The friendships. You built the life you always said you would. You like it.

And one thing hasn’t landed.

Everyone has a theory about why. The apps. The pool. The men. Your standards. The healing you haven’t done yet. You’ve heard them all. You’ve probably tried most of them.

None of them are right.

The answer is simpler than any of that, and harder.

The version of you who built your career is not the version of you who ends up with the partner you actually want.

The career version is self-sufficient. Strategic. She doesn’t need anyone. She plans ahead. She solves. She holds it together.

She’s who everyone hired. She’s who built the firm, the practice, the company, the life.

She’s also the one who keeps picking men who need her to run the same operation at home that she runs all day at work.

Not on purpose. It just feels familiar.

Here’s what almost nobody tells high-achieving women.

The thing you’re trying to resolve isn’t where you’ve been looking for it.

It isn’t in the story of your childhood. Your therapist has been there.

It isn’t in the mindset you bring to dating. Your coach has been there.

It isn’t in your worthiness. Your retreats have been there.

It’s in the level underneath all of those. The level where you know who you’re drawn to before you’ve thought about it.

That level doesn’t respond to understanding. You can’t think your way to it.

It responds to experience, not thought.

You don’t need more insight.

You can articulate your attachment style. You can tell me exactly what your wound is, what your mother did, what you’ve already tried. You’ve read the books. You’ve listened to the podcasts.

What you haven’t changed is the level underneath all of it.

Not for lack of trying. That level doesn’t change by trying.

So at 3 am, when this conversation runs, here’s what I want you to hear.

It’s not you.

It’s not that you want too much. It’s not that you want the wrong things. It’s not that you haven’t worked hard enough on yourself.

This isn’t something you can think more about. Or learn something new about. Or talk through one more time. You’ve done all of that.

It takes something different. And that something is closer, faster, and easier than you’d ever imagine.

~ Riana

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A client of mine received an unexpected email this week.

She had been seeing someone. Three dates in. Everything was different this time. The quiet kind of different. Where you sit across from someone at dinner, and the conversation just goes. Where nobody is performing. Nobody is trying to impress.

They made plans. Movies this weekend. A trip out of town in the summer. He wrote her a card after their last dinner that said he did not know what the future holds, but the path looks inviting.

Two days later, she woke up to an email. Subject line: Right woman, wrong time.

He told her he did not feel remarkable himself. That he could not meet her life. That she was too much of everything he admired, and he was not enough of anything he wanted to be.

I am not interested in his reasons. His wound, his fear, his 3 am ceiling stare where the voice in his head won. That is his story.

I am interested in what happened inside of her.

Because what happened in the 37 minutes between reading that email and picking up the phone is the part that never gets named. And it is what determines whether she spends the next six months recovering from three dates or whether she puts the phone down and goes about her day knowing exactly who she is.

First, the shock. Because it does not match. Everything was flowing. They had just been laughing over dinner. He had just mailed a card. He had just said he wanted to see her before she left on her trip. This does not compute. The brain goes into overdrive trying to reconcile what was happening 48 hours ago with what is happening right now.

Then the spiral.

What did I do? Was I too much? Was my home too nice? Was my life too put together? Did I intimidate him? Should I have dressed down? Should I have played it smaller? Should I have been less of exactly who I am so that he could feel more comfortable being next to me?

A woman who has built an extraordinary life is asking herself if she should have made herself less extraordinary so that a man would stay.

That is not a relationship problem. That is a neurological one.

Here is what is actually happening. Her brain stored a message about who she is in love a long time ago. It was probably written by someone who did not have her best interests in mind. A parent. An ex-husband. A partner who made it his project to make sure she never felt too special. And that message has been running quietly underneath everything since.

Every time something good shows up, the old message fires first. Before she can think. Before she can reason. Before her intelligence even gets a vote. The old message says: " This will not last. You are too much. Protect yourself. Get out before he does.” And she responds to the old message, not to the man sitting across from her.

That is why smart women keep ending up in the same place. It is not a thinking problem. It is a wiring problem. And you cannot think your way out of wiring.

This is also why years of therapy can help you understand exactly why you chose him and still not change who you choose next. Understanding is not the same as resolving. You can have perfect insight into your patterns and still be run by them. Because insight lives in one part of the brain and the pattern lives in another. And the part that holds the pattern does not read your books. Does not listen to your podcasts. Does not care how many years you have been talking about it. It only changes when something goes directly to where it lives and rewrites it.

That is a different kind of work than most women have ever been offered.

Here is what she did.

She did not chase him. She did not send a frantic text trying to convince him he was wrong. She did not shrink herself to make him more comfortable.

She said what she needed to say. She told him what she saw between them. She named the ease, the flow, the laughter, the plans, the fact that two people who had been through everything they had in their respective lives managed to sit across from each other and just be honest. She invited the conversation to stay open. And then she put the card in the mailbox, put on some jazz, and went about her life.

Not because she did not care. Because she does not need someone. She has to want them. And they have to want her. And if they do not, that is information. Not a verdict.

Six months ago, she could not have done that. Six months ago, she would have been on the floor. Replaying every word. Rewriting every text. Dissecting every moment, trying to find what she did wrong.

She did nothing wrong.

She showed up as exactly who she is. And a man who could not hold that told her so. Honestly. That is actually the best possible outcome. Because the alternative is a man who stays and quietly resents her for being too much. And she has already had that relationship. She is not going back.

“Right woman, wrong time” is the most common lie women are told in love. And the reason it lands so hard is because it feels generous. He is not saying you are wrong. He is saying you are right. Just not for him. Not now.

But here is what “right woman, wrong time” actually means in most cases: I can see how extraordinary you are, and I do not believe I can match it. So rather than risk you figuring it out, I am going to leave first.

That is not about her timing. That is about his capacity.

The woman who put on the jazz and went about her day did not do that because she read a book about boundaries. She did it because something in her had actually changed. Not her thinking. Not her mindset. Her wiring. The old message that used to fire first, the one that said “too much, not enough, shrink, chase, fix,” was no longer there. It had been replaced with something she did not have to rehearse or remind herself of. She just knew.

I know because I did that work with her.

And I know because I did that work on myself first, years ago, when I was the woman on the floor replaying every text from a man who made it his job to make sure I never felt too special.

The distance between the woman on the floor and the woman who puts on jazz is not time. It is not more therapy. It is not another book.

It is the moment the old message stops running. And you finally get to hear your own voice instead.

P.S. My gift to you…take the Extraordinary Love Index (ELI), and finally get the answer to the question of what is standing between you and extraordinary love.

Take The ELI Here

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