LAURA STASSI

I’m Laura Stassi, and this is Dating While Gray: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships. On this final episode of our first season, I’m sharing some advice I’ve found especially insightful since becoming single.

Last summer, my old friend Hope came to town and we met for drinks to catch up. In fact, when we met up for happy hour, she’d just gone through a very messy breakup with her first love post-marriage. So we talked about that for a while, and then Hope asked how I was doing. And that’s when I said aloud for the first time that I was worried I was attracted to someone who wasn’t really available, at least not by my definition. Hope looked at me and gently said, “If he can’t walk in through the front door, don’t let him in through a window.” Wow. A simple sentence that cut through the fog in my brain and painted a vivid picture of what I already knew to be true. I needed that.

And maybe it’s corny or cliché, but I think little sayings like this serve a good purpose. When I’m going through something really emotional, like a strong physical attraction or a painful heartbreak, I really don’t have the brain power to process advice that’s much more complex than that. So I can understand when people say things like “Time heals all wounds,” or, “If it’s meant to be, it’ll be,” or “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” And it can work! But now that I’ve regained my emotional equilibrium, it’s time to ponder some advice that’s a little deeper. In fact, sharing advice is one of the reasons why I really wanted to do this podcast in the first place. Clearly, not any one person has all the answers. I thought it would be really helpful to bring a lot of voices into the mix with the idea that maybe we’d each find something that resonates — that we’d want to explore further — so we can figure out next steps to make new romantic connections or get over those that for whatever reason, don’t work out.

You know, I call some of these voices “experts,” but that’s because advice giving is part of their profession. But I don’t think you need to be an expert to have valuable insights, especially when you’ve gained those insights the hard way: through personal experience. Sophy Burnham is a writer and her body of work is deep and wide. She’s written plays and novels, nonfiction books, exploring art and angels and intuition. And a recent piece was an essay for the New York Times’s Modern Love column on sensuality and aging. So I was really interested in talking with Sophy to get dating and relationship advice from her perspective. She’s in her early 80s, married and divorced once, and I figured she would have a lot of wisdom to share.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

So it was a surprise to me that I did not remarry because I thought that was what women did.

 LAURA STASSI

Right.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

In spite of being very independent and very much a rebel, I’m also a product of my own culture and my own culture said, “A woman is not herself sufficient. She must have a man.”

It’s taken me a long time to realize that this is one more of those unnecessary bits of information like “opportunity knocks but once” that they tell you and is completely wrong.

 LAURA STASSI

You’ve been in love. Did you ever come close to living with someone or being in another committed relationship?

 SOPHY BURNHAM

I’ve been in committed relationships. Mmhmm.

 LAURA STASSI

It just never got to the point where you wanted to…. Have you ever lived with somebody else?

 SOPHY BURNHAM

Well, each one has its own story. One man that I was in love with, deeply in love with, and he with me, was married and separated and after five years went back to his wife. That was, but I certainly expected to marry him. He said to me, “I will marry you and I want to marry you. I know I’m being difficult.” And then two weeks later, he ended up back with his wife because he couldn’t stand the pressure of a divorce and what it would do to the family and everything. I understood.

 LAURA STASSI

I’ve been talking to a lot of women who, it seems like men, there are a lot of men out there who are what I call “aspirationally separated,” that they, you know, they’re unhappy in their marriage, but they don’t necessarily want to get divorced.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

They can’t get out of it.

LAURA STASSI

Right. For whatever reasons. But…

 SOPHY BURNHAM

But dating is hell. Dating is really stupid. So don’t look for a date. Don’t look for a boyfriend. I know many, many people who have gone on Match.com and they search. My gift to you is this.

LAURA STASSI

OK.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

Find, don’t seek. The universe will bring you the right person.

 LAURA STASSI

I like that.

SOPHY BURNHAM

We spend much too much time wasting time trying to fill up something that we think we need. If you love life, life will love you back. And it will give you what you need. And friends are much better than boyfriends.

LAURA STASSI

Mmmm

SOPHY BURNHAM

And there’s a huge responsibility with boyfriends, right?[laughter]

 LAURA STASSI

So the boyfriend you have now, do you anticipate ever wanting to live together or to live with anyone?

 SOPHY BURNHAM

No, no. My idea of heaven is to have a long-term, perfect relationship with separate houses and especially separate bathrooms.

 LAURA STASSI

Oh, absolutely. Separate closets, too.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

Of course! I mean, could you imagine sharing your closet? No!

 LAURA STASSI

No. You know, I have spoken with married couples who don’t live in the same, under the same roof.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

I know it’s a perfect solution. The other perfect solution is a friend of mine. They have a completely open relationship in which they are free to have any sexual partners that they wish. And then they come back and tell each other about them. And they are madly in love with each other. And they have been in love and they have been married for 50 years.

 LAURA STASSI

Oh, interesting. Speaking personally, I think I would be too jealous to have an open relationship.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

You have to have confidence in yourself as a sexual and sensual being.

 LAURA STASSI

Oh!

 SOPHY BURNHAM

I think the point that I’m trying to make is that I know women even today who believe they are not enough without the protection of a man, without having a man not necessarily to live with, but a man on your arm, as it were. And if you don’t have a man now, enjoy this minute completely, because when you do, you won’t have this freedom.[laughter]

 LAURA STASSI

And you probably have seen people dating people that are probably not worthy of them. And their response is “Well, it’s better than being alone.”

 SOPHY BURNHAM

Yes that’s exactly it! How is it ever better than being alone?

 LAURA STASSI

Well, so that’s what I tell people. Better, being alone is…

SOPHY BURNHAM

I’d rather be alone with me!

 LAURA STASSI

Being alone is your ceiling, not your floor. For some people, being alone is their floor.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

Is terrifying.

 LAURA STASSI

Yes, yes.

SOPHY BURNHAM

It’s terrifying because they don’t know who they are.

LAURA STASSI

Right.

SOPHY BURNHAM

And they don’t like themselves enough to be their best friend.

LAURA STASSI

Right.

SOPHY BURNHAM

You want to be connected physically, spiritually, and emotionally. The age is not important, but you have to have at least two of those and preferably three. I have many young friends who don’t understand at all that things come and go, that there is a change, that there’s a rhythm to life. And they keep trying to hold on to the, hold onto this. So that they’re not allowing the fluidity of time to make any changes. And they’re the ones who are most unhappy.

LAURA STASSI

Yeah

SOPHY BURNHAM

You have to live it lightly. Make a friend of him. Like him, before you fall in love with him. And then be prepared to have a lot of tolerance and compassion and patience and forgiveness, because relationships are really about seeing who you yourself are and the other person is going to bring up before you aspects of yourself that you don’t know that you have. And sometimes these are really good aspects. And then you fall madly in love with him. Until you have acquired that, integrated it yourself, and don’t need him. And then you will find it sifting away. And others of these aspects are things, parts of you that you do not want to know at all.

LAURA STASSI

Wow.

 SOPHY BURNHAM

And your task in the relationship is to discover who you are.

LAURA STASSI

I can relate to what Sophy said about waiting for the universe to bring someone to you. It’s how I’ve approached it, for the most part. But I don’t think her advice is about being passive because she says so much about changing your outlook and loving yourself and your own company.

I checked in with Sophy recently, and I think the pandemic has added some urgency to her perspective. Sophy told me people need each other and we should strive to couple up because human touch is important and she misses it dreadfully. She says she can’t recommend online dating because she’s never done it herself and has heard too many bad stories from friends. But she did suggest looking into hiring a matchmaker. I think Sophy’s intrigued with how many people across time and cultures have used them. Speaking of, I’ll be talking with a matchmaker. That’s after the break.

Leora Hoffman is an attorney who decades ago made a big career switch. She became a matchmaker. And then while she was matchmaking for other people, she went through a divorce. She thought it might wreck her business, but it survived and even flourished. And eventually Leora got married again. She was in her mid-fifties when she walked down the aisle with a man friends introduced her to. Leora’s coupled up a lot of people. So I wanted to find out what she knows that the rest of us might not know. And why anyone would need to hire a professional instead of just, you know, doing it yourself. So before the shutdown, we met at Tysons Corner for lunch.

 LEORA HOFFMAN

Well, you know the expression, “Physician, heal thyself?” It’s hard! We don’t have the objectivity as human beings to be able to always know what’s in our own best interests. So it’s very helpful to have an objective third party make recommendations where people might not have thought of a particular type, for example. You know, people come to me, they tend to be a little bit stuck in some particular patterns. And part of my job is to help figure out what that pattern has been. And to encourage them to go beyond that pattern if I feel that there’s somebody well-worth meeting who’s a different type of person for them. Or offers them other qualities that they really hadn’t thought about. So part of the intake process is really about deciphering what people’s needs are, what’s negotiable and what’s non-negotiable.

 LAURA STASSI

So if somebody tells you, “Hey, I’m a tall woman and it’s non-negotiable, I do not want to date somebody shorter than I am.” How would you respond something like that?

 LEORA HOFFMAN

I respect people’s comfort levels and criteria, and I would tell that person, “I will note your strong preference, and do my best to find you people taller than you, if that’s your criteria. However, I might suggest somebody to you who’s two inches shorter, and I would hopet hat you would be open-minded enough to consider that person.” I myself in my single days dated a man — I’m 5 foot 5 — I dated a man 5’5”. I didn’t like the idea, but I liked him.

 LAURA STASSI

Right.

 LEORA HOFFMAN

And I was willing to tolerate that little bit of discomfort on my part. Because…

LAURA STASSI

As you got to know him…

LEORA HOFFMAN

As I got to know him, I was attracted to him, otherwise. I had a wonderful time with him and I decided that I’m just gonna let that go. And it didn’t work out for other reasons, but It had nothing to do with his height.

 LAURA STASSI

Right.

 LEORA HOFFMAN

People can sometimes make the mistake of thinking that after a first date, if I don’t think this is somebody I could marry, then well, then they’re not for me. Relationships are a continuum. They start with casual dating and hopefully if it’s the right person, deepen into something more substantive over time. But it takes time.

 LAURA STASSI

Yes. And dating is a lot of work!

 LEORA HOFFMAN

It is it is a full-time job, which is why there’s a need for someone like me, because not everyone has that time. Many people would rather hire me to vet candidates for them and make recommendations for qualified leads.

 LAURA STASSI

Are there certain mistakes people make?

 LEORA HOFFMAN

I can give you a list of mistakes that people make. People project. I think that can be a very self-sabotaging practice where somebody might meet someone on a date number one and think, “Well, I didn’t really feel as strong a connection as I would have liked, and therefore they’re not somebody I could ever see falling in love with. ”I’ve seen situations that evolve very slowly. It might be a while before a physical chemistry kicks in between people. It happens in so many different ways. Sometimes people meet right away and they’re off to the races and they know it. And that’s fabulous. Those homeruns do happen, but they’re rare.

 LAURA STASSI

Yeah.

 LEORA HOFFMAN

Most of the time it’s a process and I have a lot of respect for the process. And I think one of the other mistakes people often make is impatience, where they want to know. They want to know, is this going somewhere? Well, sometimes you can’t know until you’re in it and you spend the time and you invest the energy to figure out who this person is and whether you can really communicate with them effectively and whether they share the same values as you. That takes time!

 LAURA STASSI

Do you have any interesting stories you can tell whether it was a long-term relationship or just a, you know, a great-five-months-kind-of-a-thing?

LEORA HOFFMAN

Oh, I have so many stories. Beautiful woman, divorced, two grown children. She had met some everyone in her age group in her area, pretty much, had exhausted that pool.

 LAURA STASSI

[laughter]

 LEORA HOFFMAN

Or so she thought and decided that she wanted to look beyond her geographic area and because her children live here, in the Washington, D.C. area, she felt like if she met the right person, she could easily relocate here. So I introduced her to a local person and he drove up to Philadelphia for the first meeting. They hit it off beautifully. The first date was lunch and they spent almost six hours at lunch.

 LAURA STASSI

Oh, my gosh.

 LEORA HOFFMAN

And she came to this area. They seem to be smitten with one another.

 LAURA STASSI

Oh, how lovely.

 LEORA HOFFMAN

And he’s now invited her to his beachfront property in North Carolina for a long weekend. So we spent a lot of time talking about how to manage that and whether the timing was appropriate, whether it was too soon, what to look out for. Part of what my job is when I work with someone is really to coach them. I did tell her I would have waited a little longer to really take that step. But if you really feel it’s right, make sure you communicate your needs very clearly and make sure you don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with.

 LAURA STASSI

Is there anything else I need to know?

LEORA HOFFMAN

Well, just that love is a wonderful and, you know, challenging process to achieve. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes dedication. I’m a I’m an optimist. I feel that it’s possible at any age. And I think that as we get older, our needs are stronger for companionship and for connection.

 LAURA STASSI

Leora has been a matchmaker for a long time. No doubt she’s seen it all. So I think it’s especially valuable that she suggests considering people who are not our usual type and also giving someone a chance beyond the first date or two. People can grow on you. Another source of advice? Anyone who’s ever gone out on a date. Over the past few months, I’ve been asking you for your advice to share your stories. And here are some of my favorites.

 CALLER ONE

Hi, it’s Albert Kaufman from Portland, Oregon. I’ve been thinking about organizing something called “Speed Friending” where people can find friends in the neighborhood. I think really we all want more companionship. I think even just people are missing out on having more close friends in their lives. So thanks so much for your show. I’m really enjoying it. And good luck with love! Thanks again, Laura, bye bye.

 CALLER TWO

I heard some of your episode about you’re interviewing some other women and men and they’re saying, “I like this” and “I like that” and “I like this.” I thought that it’s a good idea to hang out with people who like doing things that you like doing. Because if you already like doing something, it’s not such a big step to do it with someone else.

 CALLER THREE

Hey, my name is Mary Pat Hinders. I am calling from Raleigh, North Carolina. I am in the position of 30 years of no dating after a very difficult marriage and trying to get back into the swing of it. I need to get some experience of having some dates. My counselor keeps encouraging me, “You just need practice. You need to practice, and to get practice, you’ve got to go on dates.” Thank you so much.

 CALLER FOUR

Hi. My name is Sharon and I live in San Antonio, Texas. My situation is such that, yeah, I am single now and I don’t really want anybody in my life because I’m healing from a past relationship I was in, that my heart got broken. Something that’s mending my little broken heart right now is I have a puppy and we’re figuring stuff out together. So I just have to wait and see and figure stuff out. All right. Thank you!

 CALLER FIVE

Hi. I’d love to be anonymous for this. I was divorced four years ago, spent that time very meticulously searching, but at the same time truly enjoying my life. And about seven months ago, found the next love of my life, no question about it. But it was very interesting, the process. I don’t know if I have anything specific to offer except that I made a plan. I stuck to it. And then after being on every dating app and working very hard at it, the love of my life ended up being practically across the street. Thank you.

 LAURA STASSI

Thank you, listeners. We are all in this together, and I hope as soon as the COVID-19coast is clear, we’re all going to put some of this advice into action. Finally, we’ll hear from a woman who’s made a career out of advising people not only how to make romantic connections, but how to peacefully end them. That’s next.

Are you following Dating While Gray on Facebook yet? I’m posting stuff to keep me going while working from home. You can get updates as soon as you log on to Facebook by searching for Dating While Gray and liking our page.

Remember when Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin announced they were getting a divorce, but they didn’t say divorce, they said they were conscious uncoupling? Raise your hands if you rolled your eyes. I know I did! But then I read the book, Conscious Uncoupling, by marriage and family therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas. It’s just a coincidence that when Gwyneth and Chris made their announcement, Katherine was writing her book. It was about her own divorce. Katherine had also written a book about finding the husband she then divorced. That book was titled Calling in the One: 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life. And it was a bestseller. Millions of people turned to Katherine for advice.

So was her husband not really the one? And did she have any second thoughts about the advice she was giving? I asked her about it, starting with the moment she decided to set an intention to find a partner.

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Well, I’d been single for decades. I was in my early 40s, so I was kind of a true-blue card-carrying member of one of the fastest growing demographics in America, which is the never-marrieds. And I was not happy to be in that group. I had wanted a family since I was really in my early 20s, but I had had a lot of relational trauma in my early life. And that followed me then into very unstable relational patterns. I knew my issues backwards and forwards, inside out. And still this really painful pattern of unavailable people were showing up for me.

 LAURA STASSI

Unavailable? How?

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Oh, married men were always coming on to me, you know, engaged men, alcoholic men, you know, any kind of impossible love, any size, shape or form. That was my throughline for all of it. And it felt like it was just happening to me against my will. It felt like my fate to just be alone, that no one would ever really be there for me. So what happened that changed the game for me, Laura, is that I started to understand the power of setting an intention and living into a future that was unpredictable and kind of unprecedented.

 LAURA STASSI

So you set this intention and then what did you do?

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

So I began to look at the places within myself where I was pushing love away or sabotaging love outside of, you know, outside of awareness. The parts of me that were not it in integrity with that future, not aligned with that future. So I’d started with the basic questions like, “Well, how is it working for me to be single?” and “What’s the part of me that doesn’t want to be in relationship? ”So you start asking questions like that and all of a sudden I started to see the parts of me that didn’t want to be dominated by someone else’s agenda or the parts of me that loved my freedom. And then I asked a series of questions: “What would I have to give up to manifest this future?” And I would sit with that question and really just listen to my gut. Next question: “What would I have to begin to cultivate? How would I need to grow myself in order to prepare myself for that future?” And then I’d listen to that for a while and contemplate on that question. And then I would ask the final question: “What’s my next step that I can take today?”

 LAURA STASSI

How did you actually meet the man who then became your husband?

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

So I was doing this very deep kind of internal work. A few months, or a few weeks in, in my meditation, I started thinking about this man I had dated six years earlier who I always had thought of as the one that got away.

 LAURA STASSI

Hmm

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Handsome, kind, educated, successful, you know, fun to be with. So about a couple of weeks after this started happening, I went to a church service. Now, I’d been going to this church for 10 years by this time, I’d never seen Mark there. And lo and behold, I’m in between services and there’s all these people milling about in the parking lot. And I look up and there is Mark…

 LAURA STASSI

Aww

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

…across the parking lot. And I had a shy attack! And I did not go speak to him! And by the time I gathered my courage, he had left. But one of the things my friend told me to do was to get online.

 LAURA STASSI

Online dating?

KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Online dating. Now we are going back, Laura, 21 years.

LAURA STASSI

[laughter] I didn’t know they had it back then!

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

It was just the beginning! But nobody had their picture up.

 LAURA STASSI

Oh!

KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Very few identifying characteristics. I, I gathered my courage again. I was coachable. I did what my friends suggested. And I found a quarter of a million people on this site. And I narrowed it down to about 80 just by putting in that I lived in L.A. and that I wanted children. And what my age group was and all that stuff. But again, no identifying characteristics. But I start reading through these profiles that these men had written about themselves. And one of them really captured me. I liked what he said. He sounded like a well-rounded, happy person. So I wrote to him completely anonymously, and he was the only one I wrote to. And the next day when he wrote me back, the technology back then was such that it came right into my email box. And his name was next to his email address and it was Mark!

LAURA STASSI

Oh, my gosh.

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

[laughter]

LAURA STASSI

Now, I would tend to think that you were meant to be together. So long story short, yo uend up dating him and getting married and you met your deadline. Correct?

KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

I came in two months ahead of deadline and then I had my first baby at the age of 43.

 LAURA STASSI

Oh, my goodness. So…

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

So I really was living happily ever after. And then I thought, “Wow, this can’t be a personal miracle. I have to share this with people. And that that was what my first book was Calling in the One.

 LAURA STASSI

You called in THE ONE. You wrote a book about it. And then?

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

The spoiler alert is that we ended up getting divorced after a decade.

 LAURA STASSI

Yeah

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

And I was able to do that in a beautiful way, even though I think it was, you know, it’s always devastating. It’s always a shock. None of us ever think when we’re walking down the aisle to pledge lifelong devotion to our one true love, that, you know, we will one day wind up on the wrong side of that divorce divide.

 LAURA STASSI

I’m wondering, you must have felt a little hesitation. You wrote about him as The One and he’s not The One. He was…

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Yeah. Well. Well, he was, though. There’s a point. There’s a point we get to where we say “I have to live an authentic life and let the chips fall where they may.” And if it means I lose my platform, I lose my audience, then then I will be sad for that. But I have to be true to myself. I have to be true to Mark. I have to be true to our relationship. So I did choose that. But I will tell you, on the day that we decided to, that this was really going to happen, that I went to the park where we’d go and just walk around and contemplate a lot. And I lay down on the grass. And I looked up at the sky. And I prayed the only prayer that made any sense to me at the time, which was, “You have got to be kidding me.”

 LAURA STASSI

I’m getting chill bumps. I think all of us…

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

[laughter]

 LAURA STASSI

…who have been in love relationships have kind of felt that. I mean, but the irony. The irony! Did you consciously decide that “We’re going to make this a loving process?” Or was it just in your nature to make this as pain-free and loving as a split can be?

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Our daughter was our biggest concern. So we were able to align. I remember sitting in the living room talking about that this was indeed going to happen. But pretty quickly, we aligned on a shared agreement that we were gonna make sure our daughter had a happy childhood.

LAURA STASSI

Did the fact that the marriage ended in divorce, did that change anything about Calling in the One?

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Well, I think, you know, for a while I went through a period where I wanted to not teach it. So I didn’t share it publicly right away, not because I was trying to, you know, salvage my brand or pull one over. But I had to really think about, I wanted to be through it myself so that I wasn’t coming into sharing with students things that I was still dealing with that weren’t complete for me. I never stopped believing in Calling in the One. What I did is I started to hold more complexity about it. And I started to research the happily ever after myth because Ir ealized that, you know, when we if when we end a relationship, most of us feel a sense of shame and failure about it. And so I realized, I asked myself one day, “Well, whose standard am I holding myself to?” Because if I really look at, you know, why we made the decision to separate, how we separated…there’s a lot of integrity in it! So the shame does it really make sense? So whose standard am I holding myself accountable to? And Ir ealized it was really the happily ever after myth. We just assume that a relationship should last a lifetime.

 LAURA STASSI

The thing that really, I guess, resonated with me is: I used to think I had to fix my ex-husband. Or, you know, why would he want to leave this marriage? This marriage is fine!Y ou know, why would he want to leave? I need to fix him, so that he doesn’t want to leave the marriage. And I realize after reading your book — thank you very much — that it is okay. It is okay that the love died. I mean, it’s hurtful, and it’s best to, when that happens, to end the marriage kindly and carefully, but that there’s no, what you said: that there’s no shame in being the one who wants to leave. And so I should not… I should forgive him and forgive myself for that. So, thank you.

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

Yeah. I tell people if they’re not sure if they want to stay or go. That they can do it, to uncouple from the dynamic as they’ve known it.

 LAURA STASSI

Ahhh

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

And recreate, really stand for re-creating a different kind of connection without being attached to whether they’re married or unmarried.

 LAURA STASSI

Do people sort of need to Conscious Uncouple from their past, whether they’re divorced or widowed, do we need to do that in order to call in the next one?

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

If we don’t want to carry the baggage of our unfinished business into the next relationship, that we would do well to really put things to bed and really do our deeper reflection work to be, to come to a place of total peace. And having learned our lessons and having grown so that we can trust ourselves to not make those same mistakes again with someone new.

 LAURA STASSI

Mmhmm. And…

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

I also say that our next relationship won’t begin when we meet our next partner, but with how we end with this one.

 LAURA STASSI

I’m hearing from some people who say, you know, they’re doing everything. And they just can’t connect with someone. They can’t find someone. Do you have, you know, some very quick advice, what might be going on that they’re not having success?

 KATHERINE WOODWARD THOMAS

If the complaint is “I’m not connecting with someone,” I might help someone to really deep into their own connection with themselves and then begin to speak more authentically from there. A lot of my work is about, you know, profound levels of self-responsibility in a way that really reveals how much power we have in a relation, in any relationship, in any given moment, to actually create that which we say is missing.

 LAURA STASSI

Katherine has a program. She trains therapists across the country how to help their clients Consciously Uncouple or Call in the One, maybe sometimes both. And Katherine has called someone new into her own life. She says she and her sweetheart have been sheltering in place together. I really found the book Conscious Uncoupling helpful. It led me to understand that the end of my marriage was not a failure, and that I needed to let go of the anger and resentment along with the romantic relationship so I could move forward in my own life. You know, I’ve learned so much in these past few years, but especially since I started doing this show. But I do understand I’m not done yet! I did buy a Calling in the One workbook. And let me tell you, it’s thick. It’ll take me a while to get through it. But I’m going to have some time on my hands now that we’re wrapping up the first season of Dating While Gray. You won’t be hearing from me for a little while, but you can stay in touch through the Dating While Gray Facebook page.

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