There was no model for this marriage. So I became one.
First generation relationally affluent.
Fifteen years of training, board-certified, licensed in more states than I can keep straight. Twenty years of a front-row seat to the heartbreak and the comedy of love under pressure. The credentials proved I knew the material. They did not teach me to live it. That part I learned the way anyone learns anything that matters. By doing it, getting it wrong, and doing it again.
But, truth be told, I'd never seen an electric marriage and had no proof one existed. I believed it was possible and built one before I had any right to.
This work didn't start in an office. It started in a crater. One minute my life was full; the next it wasn't. Grief like that changes you. My first marriage didn't survive it, and the life we'd built no longer fit. I walked out of that fire with six kids and no map, and I was still standing. That's where this began.
When I made the wildly brave, and slightly unhinged, decision to love again, I knew I couldn't just hope for the best. Hope is essential, but it's not a strategy. So I got obsessive. I studied trauma systems, attachment, nervous system regulation, and the best relationship thinking on the planet. I needed to understand what makes love do more than survive.
Now I'm remarried, with a full house and two full careers. Eight kids between us, and logistics that would make an air traffic controller walk off the job. I'm crazy about every one of them, and at any given moment at least one is not so crazy about me. We are not the family reading by the fire, most nights we're just trying not to lose the scissors. And our marriage runs at full strength anyway, because we don't leave it to chance.
"This work changed everything. We live it on purpose."
From good to electric.
I'm a pattern-spotter and a bridge-builder. My superpower is seeing the invisible dynamics that run your relationship, I can spot the pattern, name the wiring with love, and hand you the practices to run it differently.
I work with couples who refuse to half-ass anything. The doctors, the founders, the executives. The ones who'd never accept a B-plus in anything, and just realized their marriage is the one place they've been tolerating "fine."
One thing, so we're clear: this website, my books, a reply to a comment, an exchange at an event, none of it makes me your therapist. It can't. Guidance sized to your exact life is custom, and it belongs with a professional who is yours. If that's what you need, go get it. People at your caliber deserve support at their caliber. What I offer is different. It's the practice, the language and the moves that take a good marriage and make it electric.
My one rule is that you own your part. My one promise is that I'll never shame you for it. I'll show you why you do the things you do, and hand you a better way to do it.
"I will not tell you how to live. I will make sure you know you are choosing it."