So let’s recap my 30’s together, shall we?

• Quit my job as a single mom to a three-year-old, committed to never having a boss again, and became an entrepreneur

• Bought my first home—a run-down townhouse condo with brown rugs, dark green counters, and yellow linoleum floors that I would slowly flip by myself over the years

• Offered social media marketing and brand management to other entrepreneurs and businesses and could actually pay my new mortgage

• Got noticed for taking amazing photos and then opened a whole-ass photography business that thrived

• Learned about Human Design (it’s like astrology and science had a baby), which changed my life and understanding of my purpose in the world—yes, I am actually designed to NOT have a boss—and also became a certified teacher and coach

• Went 100% no contact with my abusive, alcoholic mother… even though I still get the occasional hate mail, like the one time she went through the contact page on my website but, like, A+ for effort… I guess?

• Speaking of, I changed my name over 7 years ago now after my mother told me she wished I was dead and had set up a court date to adopt another adult woman on my birthday (yes, she celebrates her “gotcha day” with her new daughter on my birthday every year too)

• Bought my first multi-unit that was put together with duct tape, bubble gum, and a prayer, but I learned how to flip this one too

• Traveled the world with not only my best friends, but my daughter, who has always been the easiest kiddo on planes and in new places

• Became a caretaker for my grandmother and then my grandfather (which I am still doing now, but thankfully I’ve hired people for the day-to-day things because my OCD was raginggg)

• Met new friends, had friend breakups, and nourished my decades-long friendships

• Wrote an email that got my daughter a scholarship for the most wonderful camp that costs $17,000 a summer, and she’s now enjoying her sixth year

• Dated some guys, broke up with some guys, decided I never wanted to date guys who had kids, and then changed my mind within the last four months

• Bought another multi-unit and hired the Contractor From Hell who stole $60K from me, which as the saying goes, “When they go low, we take it to hell.” Except I took it all the way to the AG’s office along with many other families that he had done this to, and now he has to pay all of us restitution, or go to jail #karma

• Flew to Portugal for my 38th birthday, where I got a phone call that my grandmother had died (yes, also on my birthday) and had to take an emergency flight home… but was cared for across the Atlantic Ocean because I knew the woman in the seat next to me—our daughters went to preschool together

• Went to so. much. therapy. where I learned how to heal my anxious attachment but then accidentally swung the pendulum too hard and am now working on healing my avoidant inclinations in this new decade 😅

• Got the feeling that it was time to move out of my condo and accidentally found Barbie Dreamhouse—a Victorian built in 1890 that was renovated into a two-unit—that I’ve been fixing up for the past two years

• And, about three years ago, I became a certified dating and relationship coach, but I haven’t had the time (see: grandparents) to really dedicate to this work in a meaningful way until NOW.

Enter: Date Like A Mother

I came up with this idea a long time ago when I began dating again after I had my daughter. Specifically, when I felt like the shame I had over being a single* mom was holding me back from not only being honest about, but also asking for, the love I truly desired.

Side note: I have an unrelenting hatred for the term single mom because not only is it a patriarchal stereotype that shames women for using government assistance like food stamps and Medicaid (I’ve had both, by the way)—designed to make women feel ashamed for needing help to raise their children, when the real problem is fuck-ass deadbeats who refuse to help and also a fuck-ass government that makes it nearly impossible to get ahead in this world—but it also creates the context for our motherhood being tied to our relationship status.

And respectfully? I. think. the. fuck. NOT.

So here’s my official petition to change our everyday language from single mom (along with divorced mom, soccer mom, stay-at-home mom, etc.) to MATRIARCH, because that’s what we are. Moms are MATRIARCHS. Full stop. And our relationship status is secondary, even tertiary, to the rest of our lives.

That said, it took me much longer than a decade to understand and practice a few things about love, like: becoming the woman I wanted to be in love, healing my picker to become attracted to men who were safe (healthy, secure) and not just familiar (addicted, avoidant), standing by the non-negotiables I set for myself about what I would and would not accept in a partner, and, maybe the hardest thing of all, learning to stop mothering grown-ass men.

It feels funny to write it out like that, but I know that so many of us can say that we’ve mothered or are currently mothering/enabling/coaching/pushing/encouraging/trying men who need to GROW THE FUCK UP… but honestly probably can’t grow up, because why would they if we’re doing everything for them, and also because we’re in the way, not letting them experience the consequences of their actions. Once I saw this in myself, it was over.

I decided right then and there that I would only date men who: 1) had done the work (gone to therapy, living a healthy lifestyle, aware of their own BS and patriarchal conditioning), 2) had their shit together (with a mattress on bed frames, good credit, solid friendships, big boy jobs, and would never dream of going 50/50), and 3) would want to take good care of ME (yes, you read that right—a man who feels honored, responsible, and HAPPY taking care of a woman who takes care of everything and everyone else).

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Fun fact: right after I publish this, I’m going to rush (whoops!) to get ready to go on a planned date with a man who has never let me touch a door handle, who surprises me with booked massages and gold jewelry and local flowers, who has biceps the size of Texas, who loves taking me on trips, who writes me the most thoughtful letters, who is incredibly gentle and fiercely protective, who I’ve never once seen drunk or out of control, who loves my daughter and is an incredibly present and loving dad to his own, who goes to therapy and communicates maybe even better than me, and who texted me this today as I was writing this post after we both realized we hadn’t eaten all day…

Now, while I absolutely share with you the exact steps I took to attract this level of MAN inside this dating guide, I want you to know that more than that, the way I had to unlearn who I thought I was in order to become the woman I wanted to be—a woman who could ACCEPT this kind of present, healthy, generous love is really what it’s all about.

(Another thing you’ll notice is that the dating guide is NOT called Date Like A Mother because that’s the name of this Substack, and because I am saving it for the book I am currently working on.)

This game-changing dating guide is called Mom to Muse and is *the* relationship roadmap for moms who are absolutely DONE with feeling like unpaid, under-valued therapists, roommates, and PARENTS in their relationships... instead of highly valued, totally adored, and deeply desired PARTNERS.

Inside these 75+ pages (that the guy I’m dating proofread!) you’ll get the frameworks, reframes, exercises, and tools that teach you how doing LESS gets you MORE when it comes to LOVE, along with giving you the secrets to shifting into feminine energy in relationships, having unfuckwithable, never-settling-again standards, and attracting grown-ass men who are GIVERS, not takers.

So if you want to date, or are thinking about dating, but want to make SURE that...

• You HEAL your patterns and man-picker so you don’t repeat the mistakes again

• You CREATE a magnetic dating profile that filters out the wrong ones as quickly as it calls in the right ones

• You TRUST your values, intuition, standards, and non-negotiables as your roadmap for safe, secure, healthy love

• You UNDERSTAND the science of sex, how men and women bond differently, and why WAITING works when it comes to having what you want

• You FEEL confident in attracting respectful, generous, provider men that WORK for you, INVEST in you, and want to COMMIT to you...

• And you take your time CHOOSING the best, most aligned man for YOU on your terms and your timeline?!

MOM to MUSE is for YOU ♡

DOWNLOAD THE DATING GUIDE

I’m also thinking that before I self-publish, I’ll make DLAM available via e-book because as an on-the-go lady myself, I think it’s always nice to have everything you’re reading in one singular spot. (Such a bummer that we can’t take the 7+ books sitting on our nightstands everywhere with us, right?!)

Either way, I cannot wait to finally bring this baby out of my head and into the world, and these three Do’s & Don’ts of dating and relationships are a sneak peek of a chapter that’s going to be in there, but I’m so excited you’re getting to read them here first!

Psst: I’m going to put my top two cover designs for Date Like A Mother at the bottom of this post, and I want YOU to help me decide the best one 👀🥰

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Before we dive in, I want to be clear that these 3 D’s are not rule-rules.

Personally, I hate rules and authority, and I hate the idea of piling more work onto women or giving you more ways to feel like you’re doing it all “wrong.” So please believe me when I say these aren’t a checklist you have to get “right” in order to find love, date smarter, or deepen your partnership.

Instead, I want you to think of these 3 D’s as feminine power principles designed to help women (help YOU!) stay secure in your standards, remain connected to your desires, deepen into your natural feminine energy, and feel more like yourself in dating and relationships than you ever have before.

Even though I wrote these Do’s & Don’ts primarily for women who date men—and yes, I can feel the collective “ughhhh” among us because wouldn’t it be sooooo much easier if we all woke up full-time gay?!—I want to reiterate something I said in my first post of this challenge: feminine and masculine energy are not gender specific. They are archetypes. Ways of being. And when these two energies work together symbiotically, that’s where polarity comes into play.

Polarity is how we bring these energies back into harmony and balance whether through ourselves, or within our partnerships. When polarity is activated through healthy masculine and feminine energy, this is when people and couples will find themselves pulled towards one another with attraction, alignment, and attunement.

“The positive and negative poles of a battery create an electrical flow. The masculine and feminine poles between people create a flow of sexual energy in motion.” — David Deida

How This Plays Out Between Women & Men

Now, for those of us who are healthy-ish i.e., go to therapy, work on ourselves, are sincere, playful, and thoughtful, and live with a deep sense of self-awareness, I believe that most of our interpersonal struggles can be narrowed down to energetic disharmony. Not incompatibility. Not bad timing. Not “we just grew apart.” Energetic disharmony.

What I’ve observed (and experienced) in modern dating and relationships is that most people are living in the opposite energy of what actually feels good, natural, and best to them… or at least what would be best to the highest version of themselves. I don’t believe this tension between men and women is a personal failing; I simply think it’s the design of the patriarchy. And this is exactly why men and women are at odds with one another instead of in cahoots.

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When this imbalance becomes the baseline, when both partners in their wounded masculine struggling for control, or when a woman who wants to be in her feminine but feels her partner has become more like a child she has to mother (EWWW) it absolutely kills attraction, desire, and intimacy. Think about where you’ve seen all of this with your parents, yourself, your friends, or even couples you see on reality shows…

In dating: The woman who shrinks herself so she doesn’t seem like “too much.” Who overanalyzes every three-second interaction because she was never taught to trust her intuition, or that she’s worthy of reciprocal care and attention. Or the man who breadcrumbs women with just enough attention to keep them around but never enough to actually show up with intention. The one who listens to red-pill podcasts, is lazy, and somehow believes in 50/50 and that women should be chasing him.

In relationships: The woman who stays too long, keeps giving more and more, develops mystery health problems and chronic anxiety, and loses herself and her spark completely. (Read about the sunk-cost fallacy.) The man who thinks he’s a “great” partner simply because he doesn’t cheat, but whose idea of emotional support is telling her to calm down. Or the one who thinks sex is a right of a relationship (it’s not) but doesn’t plan dates, doesn’t make her feel beautiful, and is completely letting himself go.

In marriage: The woman who works a full-time job and comes home to her other full-time job ending each day feeling completely unseen, exhausted, and lonely. And the man who leaves her with the kids on the weekends to go golfing for eight hours, or zones out at night playing video games instead of actually being present with his family. The one who, when she finally gets the courage to leave, is absolutely blindsided. Because “she never said anything was wrong.”

And we wonder why the ick is so strong, divorces are so high, and there’s a male loneliness epidemic?!

Read (or listen) more about how patriarchy hurts men here:

Let’s Heal Our Relationships

Now it’s time to get to the really good stuff! These are a few of the energetic principles I come back to again and again in my own life and relationships, with my clients inside our coaching containers, and within the soon-to-be Date Like A Mother guidebook.They are focused on feminine energy through a lens of polarity without patriarchy, but I have a masculine energy post coming soon too!

• The first D is the single most powerful thing you can “do” in dating or relationships to quit performing for other people and start choosing yourself.

• The second D is a life-changing truth that very few people talk about — and when you use it, it will bring you back into deep alignment with yourself and how you show up for the people in your life.

• The third D is one of the most important compasses for your life one we are often shamed for as women and it is a game-changing act of revolutionary self-love.

My intention with these real-world examples, specific language, and actions is that you finish reading this ready to start living these principles TODAY, not someday.

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If you read yesterday’s post in the Feminine Energy Challenge, you’ve already learned a bit about the Good Girl: the passive, people-pleasing, performative identity we were taught to be as women from a very young age, during today’s first draft I realized she wasn’t the only one who does that.

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Want to catch up? Read more (or listen!) about the Good Girl here…

After over 20 years of being in the Wild Wild West of the dating world myself, I can look back and see exactly how I was showing up with this other identity, and how, just like the Good Girl, she too was holding me back from becoming the woman I wanted to become for myself, and in partnership. In fact, for a really long time, I didn’t even realize there was a much more authentic, alive version of myself available to me. And sadly, given the dysfunctional environment I had grown up in, my shitty experiences with men, and witnessing other people’s relationships (and subsequently brutal divorces), there was a part of me that just believed this was how relationships were supposed to be—exhausting, hard, one-sided, mean, self-sacrificing, lonely, draining—and that this was just what “love” looked like.

This is also probably one of the reasons I became a certified dating and relationship coach five years ago… I needed to figure this out just as much as the women I was guiding in their own love lives 🙃

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Who Are You Showing Up As?

When you don’t know who you’re being and you can’t understand why certain patterns and people keep showing up (especially the ones you know aren’t good for you), it’s easy to bang your head against the wall feeling like you’re the very embodiment of the quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

I felt this same way too in my relationships until I started seeing everything through the lens of feminine and masculine energy. This is when it all finally clicked for me: when I unlocked a much deeper understanding of energetics, both personally and professionally. And once you have the language to name what’s actually going on, you will start to understand things like…

• Why certain underlying tensions keep bubbling to the surface

• Why your push-pull dynamics feel both toxic and intoxicating

• Why you keep attracting the “wrong one” even though you say you want something different

All of this will feel like putting on glasses for the very first time—after never even knowing you needed them—and saying “OH. OHHHH. SO THIS is what’s been going on…” Which is exactly why I want to talk about this first… before I get into my top three do’s and don’ts of dating tomorrow.

You have to understand WHO is running the show in your relationships. You have to see either whether it’s the Good Girl, or her, or some combo of the two of them. Because until you do, you will keep attracting the same patterns you want to heal instead of healthy, reciprocal love you truly desire. (And I know this because for a very long time, she was me.)

Similar to the Good Girl, this identity wasn’t meant to be ours. It wasn’t something we chose; we were simply conditioned to become her, or maybe we inherited her from our families, but either way, too often she becomes another survival strategy.

Because when the schtick of the Good Girl eventually stops working and we lose the energy to maintain her—as life gets harder and hearts get broken—we decide, consciously or not, that we are never going to be that naive, that vulnerable, or that open to allowing ourselves to be hurt again. That’s when we put on our armor. We get our shit “together.” We become someone who doesn’t need anyone. And that’s when we really meet her: the other woman.

Meet Miss Independent.

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Here’s how she shows up in our love lives…

Miss Independent and the Good Girl aren’t as different as they seem. In fact, they are just two sides of the same coin. Let’s look at exactly how she shows up…

• If the Good Girl wasn’t supposed to ask for help, Miss Independent doesn’t need it.

• Where the Good Girl people-pleased her way through relationships, Miss Independent became more “I’ve got it” than ever.

More examples below…

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A few years ago, I wrote out five practices for learning how to do this, and it’s been meaningful to see how relevant they still are today. They are sourced directly from my own lived experience, distilled from decades of undoing my own inner Good Girl—the one who grew up in Catholic school, who was the parentified eldest daughter of two addicts, and the one who spent years smiling through survival. (And this is one huge reason why I am so passionate about women abandoning who they thought they had to be in order to become the women they want to be.)

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These small but powerful ways of deconditioning are designed to help you learn how to trust yourself, take aligned action, and begin to truly prioritize your own dreams and desires. My hope is that through these daily practices, you’ll find yourself listening to your intuition more, speaking your truth more (especially to yourself), and really giving yourself back the things that you so freely give to everyone else.

Here’s an important part to remember too: the inner and outer work we do as women to break up with lifetimes of patriarchal conditioning is hard work, but as I’ve seen and experienced in myself, with the women I coach, and all of the women in my life, it’s so, so much more difficult for us to live disconnected from our most authentic selves. Also, when working with these practices, it’s best not to think of them as more stuff you have to do or see them as some sort of “reminder” that you are not yet where you want to be.

Feminine energy is a practice of becoming. It is cyclical, spiritual, deep, and never-ending. Write this down somewhere or tattoo it on yourself too because this process is the most perfect example of the importance of staying present and alive to the journey, not just forcing ourselves to get to the destination. Breaking up with our inner Good Girl is the right kind of hard work… and we CAN do hard things.

If you're ready to do this kind of work in life and love, I have a limited number of 1:1 coaching spots open right now. Your application includes a FREE Discovery Call too, so what do you have to lose?! 💖

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Tomorrow inside the Feminine Energy Challenge we’ll be talking more about DATING & RELATIONSHIPS (one of my favorite topics ever) and I’ll be sharing THREE very specific things that I need every woman to start doing with men immediately.

Okay now let’s get into these 5 powerful practices that you can start today…

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And if you’re having trouble remembering, it’s okay, that’s normal, but it’s not right. Personally I can only remember a few very specific times in my life when I was angry. That’s because most of us have been taught, from a very young age, very thoroughly, and very deliberately, across centuries of conditioning, that anger is not an option for girls and women. Sadness was acceptable. Anxiety was understandable. Disappointment was tolerable.

But anger? Anger was ugly. It was too much.

Being angry made you both unlikable and unlovable. Anger was an emotion reserved solely for men. And they made damn sure that we knew how society stereotypes the “angry” woman… We saw her villainized, lobotomized, gaslit, outcast, called crazy, and othered. So we learned to swallow down anger. We were taught to turn her off and turn on our tears. When we felt fury, we were supposed to medicate it. When we silenced our rage, we wondered why we felt so tired yet so ON all the time. Yet, have we had the chance to pause and think of all the reasons WHY the patriarchy, men, the people who raised us, and even other women would want us disconnected from our anger?

Have we ever even asked ourselves who it protects, who is harmed, and who benefits when our anger is silenced for so long?

The Women We Were Taught To Be

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I was talking with a dear friend this morning at brunch and she said something that made me want to do all three simultaneously. She said, “I’ve met men who have cared for me, loved me, encouraged me, supported me, but I still don’t trust them.”

Which to me, on a very basic and fundamental level, means she does not respect them. (Though she told me she’d have to get back to me on the respect thing because she had never thought of it like that before, so I’ll be sure to let you know what she says.) But isn’t this something that every single woman you know, including yourself, has felt before?

Like, we’ve all known men who say they love us and support us, but at the end of the day… have we ever really, truly respected or trusted them? Do we respect and trust them like we do our best friends, our girlfriends, and all the other women in our lives?! I know for sure what your answer is, and here’s why (besides the fact that most every woman on earth would rather choose the bear)…

In my experience, I have rarely, if ever, met or known men* including the boyfriends, husbands, friends, and family members of my closest ladies too, who are living and operating from a healthy, balanced, respectable, trustworthy place. But what I have seen is men who are deeply in their wounded, unhealthy feminine energy.

*I can think of one man who is like this and who is healthy, respectful, and who I trust with my entire soul, and it’s my grandfather, but we’re not even blood related… more to come on THAT.

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How This Shows Up For Men

Unlike what I shared in Day 1 about how this energy shows up for women, the way it expresses itself in men, especially inside patriarchy, is a little different. I see their unhealthy energy show up as:

• Calling themselves leaders of the home, but somehow they can’t figure out how to load a dishwasher and still need to be asked to do basic domestic duties… the same ones that they would have if they lived alone, or with roommates

• Saying they’re providers yet asking women to split the check (speaking of, nothing makes me angrier than men’s failure to realize how much more unsafe and expensive life is for women, so the least they could do is get dinner)

• Acting as though they want equal and loving partnerships with women, but then treat those same women as their unpaid mother, therapist, sex kitten, coach, and guru

• Showcasing themselves as “protectors,” yet are often 1.) doing nothing to prove this, 2.) increasing domestic violence rates and mass murder rates, 3.) voting somewhere against the very protections of women, children, and greater communities

Do you see what I am getting at here?!

Let’s Say What Others Won’t

Most men who are struggling in their lives in these ways are passive, bored, unhappy, strung-out, selfish, irresponsible, depressed, unclear, directionless, and then some. It’s also these very same men who blame their “loneliness epidemic” on everything except their own choices and actions.

The fact is, men are trained to be both shills and servants of the patriarchy. Which is why it’s so wild to me that they’re out here thinking everything is built for them instead of seeing how they’re actually pawns in a system that uses and harms them.

Now let me ask you a few questions to take this a bit further:

• Why do we see so many men on television portrayed as checked-out video gamers who weaponize incompetence against their wives?

• Why are porn, gambling, and drug and alcohol addiction so prevalent among men of every age?

• Why are men more likely to sign up for war—a place they could be killed where another man telling them what to do and controlling the outcome of their very existence?! (Also, hello, this is submissive AF)

• Why do men have the highest rates of suicide? And are least likely to go to therapy?

• Why are men more likely to fall into depression after divorce, while women—despite often losing security—report feeling relief?

• Why do men avoid the doctor, ignore their health, and die on average five to ten years earlier than women?

• Speaking of, why do men need other people to book their own dentist appointments?

• Why do men commit over 90% of all violent crimes worldwide?

• Why is mass shooting after mass shooting carried out by the same demographic?

• Why do men only know how to (barely) receive emotional intimacy from women — and then resent them for it?

Every single one of these answers is a crisis in disguise.

And if we just look at this through a matriarchal, feminine energy lens—one that’s designed to nurture, connect, feel, build, value, and protect—then doesn’t it make sense that men, who are starved of the permission to freely access these qualities in themselves are quite literally dying from the absence of them?! Because this is what happens when you sever an entire population from the fullness of their humanity and depth.

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How Patriarchy Made Men Its Perfect Weapon

Patriarchy is concerned with one thing: maintaining itself at all costs.

This happens through capitalism, greed, dominance, murder, colonialism, extraction of resources, and whatever else it takes. It’s also about keeping the people who “benefit” from these things exactly where they are but, more importantly, that means they also need support underneath them from people who are asleep. Because here’s what those guys figured out a long time ago: a compliant, coercive, addicted, abusive, ego-driven man who thinks he’s at the “top” is the perfect foot soldier. He not going to question. He was taught not to feel. He just obeys. And then he calls what he thinks he has “power” and “patriotism.”

(Psst: on a larger scale, these men the ones in the Epstein Files, in the White House, committing genocide in Palestine, and are *somehow* still walking free…)

And can you see now how raising men to be disconnected from life itself is part of this sick, pathological strategy?

If men don’t care for themselves or the world around them, if they don’t feel responsible or purposeful to something greater than themselves, and if they continue failing to see how hard this system works to keep them both controlled and checked-out. Then what happens is that the permission they DO get looks a lot like taking it out on everyone and everything else instead of putting their attention and anger where it actually belongs: against the patriarchy.

Here’s What We Women Have To Do…

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“A state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems.”

Even that sentence sounds patriarchal to me, and can you guess why? Because I don’t believe anarchy in its truest, most justified form creates disorder at all. To me, anarchy is simply the desire to dismantle the authority and control of patriarchal systems. And obviously, I am SO here for that.

Okay, nerd moment incoming…

The word anarchy comes from the Greek αναρχία (anarchia): “an” meaning without, and “archia” meaning ruler. So at its root, anarchy just means the absence of rulers. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. But of course, as most words do, the meaning shifted over time, and obviously for the benefit of whoever was holding the pen. Take the Middle Ages for example, when anarchia entered Latin, it was used to describe the eternal existence of the Christian God.

Umm. Excuse me?! Let’s sit with this for a second.

Here’s just ONE radical word with one seemingly small, but very loaded shift in meaning. Theologians of that era were deeply patriarchal and controlling, so it’s clear that shift was not an accident. The reason I’m sharing any of this at all is because this is exactly the kind of critical lens I want you carrying into this challenge, and into your relationships, your bookshelf, your podcast queue, your own inner dialogue. I want you to see HOW most everything has been stolen, reframed, or watered down when filtered through patriarchy. (This lens is going to seriously change how you see energy too.) Which brings me to something I’ve been sitting with for weeks now. I coined a new word: MatriANARCHY ❤️‍🔥

Here’s my working definition:

“A state of divine order due to the absence and nonrecognition of any authority or patriarchal systems other than LIFE itself.”

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Now, getting into Day 2 a bit more…

Matriarchy is not some new fad of performative feminism, and we must refuse to let it be co-opted, white-washed, or watered down by anyone who is not truly living with the intention of integrating matriarchy—the real and true kind—into the whole of their lives.

Here, again, I’m asking you to keep a critical eye, because I want us all to be aware of the many white “wellness and spiritual” influencers who will try to grift on the teachings of matriarchy while still fully identifying with and benefiting from the system of patriarchy. Yes, of course I also recognize that we currently live inside a patriarchy and we have to survive it as best we can. But what matters is looking at the IMPACT someone is making versus their INTENTION. “Good” intentions don’t cancel out real harm, and they never have.

This is exactly why we have to be clear on what we’re actually fighting for and what we’re protecting, as our girl Matriarchy herself is in her REBIRTH era. Because she has been here before, and we need to truly see her for what she is: ancient, indigenous, intentional, powerful, protective, and wise. And this part is equally important…

Matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy.

I want you to envision that patriarchy is a triangle, with men at the top and everything else scrambling below. But matriarchy is not simply reordering who-sits-where on the triangle, so that women are now dominating, controlling, and oppressing from above. Because that is still a hierarchy, especially in the patriarchal sense, and that kind of hierarchy, in any direction, has never worked and never will. In fact, Matriarchy isn’t a triangle at all. There’s no top, no bottom. And there’s certainly no greed, dominance, exploitation, or endless extraction. It’s just a space where everyone is held, everyone is connected, and everything is moving together.

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This post is free for everyone to read not only because I want to offer a glimpse of what this challenge will be like, but because I want every woman to feel what happens when you finally start to name the thing you've always felt but couldn't quite explain, and it all starts to click.

The remaining 6 days of this challenge will be for paid subscribers only. If you want access to ALL of it: the daily teachings, the journal prompts, the energetic cleanups, and the feminine frameworks that are going to change how you move through every single relationship in your life, become a subscriber here.

First things first: the internet is a liar.

I want to start here because in the many years I have spent studying, exploring, and teaching feminine and masculine energy, I have also (painfully, frustratingly) watched the internet take something ancient, powerful, and genuinely life-changing and reduce it into some Stepford-tradwife-submit-to-your-husband fuckery and some red-pill-alpha-bro-incel bullshit that have nothing—NOTHING!-t-o do with what these energies are at all.

Can you tell this is the hill I *will* die on?!

Because regardless of what anyone on the internet says, feminine and masculine energy have absolutely zero to do with traditional gender roles (or any gender at all), who cooks dinner, who initiates sex, who “leads” or who “submits,” or whether you prefer suits or sundresses. These energies are not roles, rules, or rituals you perform for yourself, or other people.

They are ancient archetypes and expressions of energy that every single person on this planet regardless of who you are, who you love, or how you identify carries within them.

What makes learning about these energies so fascinating is that most of us rarely feel like they’re actually balanced within us. And in my experience, it’s this very imbalance and lack of polarity that is so often the root of our pain and the patterns we work so hard to heal. So when we finally become aware of how these energies work within ourselves, our relationships, and our lives, they often reveal the answers we’ve been searching for. But they also require us to ask deeper, more honest questions.

Questions like:

• Which energy feels most natural to me in my relationships? In my career? Are they the same, or different?

• What chronic emotional, spiritual or physical symptoms keep showing up for me that I can’t quite explain? What do they want me to know?

• What would it feel like to express myself in a way that feels most true to me?

Giving a name to these energies can allow us to begin undoing the conditioning we didn’t ask for, help us understand ourselves and others more deeply, and start to heal the lifelong feeling of “I don’t know why I don’t like this, but I don’t” that so many of us have just accepted as the way it is.

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The elephant in the room…

From the time we were little girls, we were taught to be of service. To give, nurture, and put everyone else first and call it love. To be selfless and wear that selflessness like a badge of honor even as it taught us to self-abandon. We were rewarded for being agreeable, accommodating, and never too much. Our worth was taught as relational, tied to how much we give, and how good we could be.

Meanwhile boys and men were taught the exact opposite.

They were taught to take up space, ask for what they want, and have their needs met as a baseline expectation, not as a reward. Their worth is taught as individual, so of course being self-focused isn’t selfish for them. See the difference? The double standard?! That’s by design. This is not an accident. This is a system. It’s built this way to keep said system going; to keep us so busy managing everyone else’s lives that we never have the time, energy, or permission to tend to our own. Built to extract from us endlessly while offering just enough “love”, just enough “security”, just enough “validation” to keep us from walking away.

This system has a name. It’s called patriarchy.

This is not a political concept or a feminist talking point either. It is the cancerous water we have been drinking our entire lives. It is why we feel shame for saying no and speaking up. Why rest and burnout both feel like personal failures. It is a toxic hierarchy with dominance and greed at the top and everyone else surviving and scrambling at the bottom. It’s a system that rewards individualism, accumulation, oppression, silence and output.

But patriarchy has only ever brought into our world…

Destruction. War. Famine. Guns. Xenophobia. Genocide. Ecocide. Racism. Femicide. Hatred. Slavery. Abuse. Trafficking. And these are the “profits” of a system that has never once centered LIFE; that has always chosen power over people, accumulation over connection, and oppression over protection every single time. Yet most of us have been living inside it so long we’ve stopped calling it what it is. We’ve normalized it. We’ve been asleep to it. We’ve internalized it. We’ve passed it down without realizing. Until now.

Because we already have an ancient, wise, fiercely loving way that can change ALL OF THIS.

The 4 Expressions of Energy

Now that you understand a bit more about how the patriarchal system has shaped you, your relationships, and ways of being in the world, these archetypes will make a lot more sense. Many of us aren’t randomly stuck in unhealthy dynamics and patterns with ourselves and others… we are conditioned into them. And it’s my belief that once we can begin to name them, we can stop making everything mean something about who we are, and start recognizing them as something we have the power to change.

Now let’s look at these four energies in both healthy and unhealthy expressions:

Healthy feminine energy is the part of you that…

• Lives in your primal body, not just your logical head

• Makes choices from your own knowing, not from fear of what others think

• Lets good things land like help, love, rest, care without having to “earn” them first

• Trusts what you know before you can second-guess or explain it away

• Allows things to unfold in their own time

• Creates, plays, shares, and connects freely and openly

• Gives from overflow, not depletion and forcing

• Invites and observes rather than chases and absorbs

• Chooses alignment over attraction, always

• Finds sovereignty and wholeness who they are being, not what they do

Unhealthy feminine energy is the part of you that…

• Gives endlessly and builds resentment

• Over-explains, manipulates, and convinces

• Reads the temperature of everyone else in the room

• Keeps the “peace” at all costs to yourself

• Suffers, self-abandons, and sacrifices until there’s nothing left

• Shrinks to keep others comfortable

• Needs permission, approval, and justification for desires

• Doubts, compares, and measures worth

• Refuses to be clear, direct, and honest

• Hides behind uncertainty and scarcity

Healthy masculine energy is the part of you that…

• Makes a decision and stands behind it

• Knows what deserves your energy and protects it accordingly

• Commits, devotes, and takes time for what is important

• Takes action from clarity and desire, not fear or the need to control

• Holds values you actually live by in behavior and action

• Serves others from a sense of responsibility and strength

• Upholds integrity — your word means something, including to yourself

• Reaches out, offers, and holds space from a genuine, grounded place

• Structures life in ways that actually supports yourself, and others

Unhealthy masculine energy is the part of you that…

• Reacts before you’ve had a second to feel what’s actually true

• Does everything alone and calls it independence

• Lacks discipline, responsibility, discernment, and devotion

• Grips every outcome because letting go feels of control dangerous

• Pushes through when your body is begging you to stop

• Measures your worth entirely in output and production

• Distrusts, judges, blames, and scrutinizes themselves and others

• Dominates, controls, and demands

• Assumes authority without safety and trust

• Rejects help, inflexible to change, and afraid of what slowing down might reveal

And for my more visual learners, here are graphics for these energies…

Your journaling prompts for Day 1

Don’t overthink these. Write the first thing that comes to mind. The unedited version is always the most honest one. No fixing, no editing, no making it sound better than it actually is. Just flow with your thoughts and let your energy lead the way.

• The role I was taught to play in my family was…

• The message I received about what it meant to be a “good” woman was…

• The things I was praised for as a girl that I now realize were actually forms of self-abandonment are…

• When I think about receiving help, care, or love from someone else, I feel…

• The needs and desires I have consistently put on the back burner are…

• The version of me I’ve been performing for everyone else looks like…

• The version of me I think is actually underneath all of that looks like…

• If I stopped over-functioning and over-giving tomorrow, I’m afraid that…

• The one area of my life where I feel most disconnected from myself right now is…

What’s coming for Day 2

Tomorrow we start building the alternative and the antidote.

We’ll be talking about matriarchy as the practical, compassionate, loving, and REAL solution it is and one you can begin living immediately.

Don’t miss it.

xo Elle

Access The Feminine Energy Challenge

So much so that you’re not even sure WHO you actually are anymore…

And if you’re being really honest with yourself, you’ve maybe even felt this for a long time, but now it’s not-so-quietly showing up as…

• Physical symptoms like chronic pain, IBS, and systemic inflammation that don’t seem to always have a root cause

• Mental symptoms like anxiety, depression, and ennui (though to be fair, the current world we’re living in is quite the hellscape)

• Emotional symptoms like anger, frustration, resentment, burnout, imposter syndrome, and bitterness with ourselves, others, and the world

• Spiritual symptoms like lacking vitality, faith, trust, and creative energy

• Sexual symptoms like disconnection from desire, low libido, and chronic UTIs

There are so many reasons that any and more of these things are coming to the surface of our bodies, minds, and spirits, but at least one of those reasons, I believe, is that we as women are so painfully disconnected from our feminine energy—our deepest and most primal power.

Especially for those of us, like me, who are now over 35, and really starting to ask ourselves more meaningful, honest questions like “Who am I if I’m not wearing the title of partner, wife, mother, etc.?” “Is this the truest version of the life I want?” “What will happen, and who will I piss off, if I allow myself to want more?!”

And like so often happens to us elder millennial and Gen X ladies, I don’t think any of these thoughts or feelings should be summed up and signed away as just a mid-life crisis, or just (peri)menopause, or just a mental breakdown (breakthrough?!) either. Because I see so many of these symptoms and their root causes as an obvious, traumatic, and unacceptable outcome of living as women born, raised, and conditioned inside patriarchy.

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For those who are unaware (though I highly doubt you’d be reading my Substack if you were) patriarchy is a SYSTEM that is designed with men—white, rich, greedy, disgusting, perverted men mostly on top—and everyone else below. In my view, this is the worst, most vile hierarchy that has ever existed on this planet.

Patriarchy is also a system that rewards production over presence, competition over collaboration, the individual over the collective, and most of this, as far as energetic terms can take us, can be directly tied back to unhealthy masculine energy. Together, patriarchy and unhealthy masculine energy create harmful conditions for women. Ones that look like:

• Our worth being measured by how much we give and how little we ask for in return

• Our intuition, desires, and body’s signals being overridden so long that we’ve lost the ability to hear our own knowing

• Our health, autonomy, and lives being deprioritized by science, politics, and religion alike

Don’t believe me that it’s this bad? Go Google things like: who car crashes have been tested on and until when? When did women’s menstrual blood start being used in scientific research for tampons? How many Black women die in America during childbirth? What are the statistics of femicide and female genital mutilation in the world? Because while women are who I’m primarily speaking to, patriarchy harms a LOT more than just women…

As women, we have to be D-O-N-E living in a system that was never designed for anyone to thrive in. It’s time to reclaim what patriarchy spent centuries trying to bury: our intuition, our rage, our softness, our connections, our creativity, our children, our families, and yes, even our men. We are returning to the feminine and we are rebirthing matriarchy. Not just as a political movement, but as a personal one, with LIFE at the center of our story. This is how we come back to what actually matters, and how we come back to ourselves.

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Here’s what the 7 days of the Feminine Energy Challenge include:

• Daily teachings on what feminine energy looks like in your real everyday life — how you respond to that text, deepen into your true energetic essence, handle interpersonal conflict, and even how talk to yourself

• Embodiment practices because reading about this stuff isn’t enough — you have to practice feeling it in your body (and your life) for anything to change

• Journaling prompts that skip the fluff and go into the heart of what you need to look at in your life, relationships, and soul

• Energetic cleanups to help you identify exactly where you’re leaking your energy, where you’re imbalanced, and how to stop abandoning yourself for others

• Questions to sit with designed to move you out of your mind and into your intuition, where the real answers already live

Within ONE week you won’t just understand feminine energy. You’ll have practiced it every single day. And that’s what creates embodied change that actually stays.

When you become a paid subscriber, you get instant access to all 7 days of the Feminine Energy Challenge plus everything else inside this community — the posts, the archives, the ongoing conversation, more challenges, and everything that’s coming next. Sign up for $7 (!!!) by becoming a subscriber below.*

The 7-Day Feminine Energy Challenge brings you home to YOU.

✨Join The Challenge HERE✨

*Of course you can always cancel your subscription anytime, but obviously I hope you stick around because I plan on doing more of these fun, empowering challenges throughout the year!

This call has nothing to do with our age, our tax bracket, our bank account, whether we have children, or whether we choose not to. It has nothing to do with our zip code, the number of grays on our head, our skincare routine, how much “organic” we eat, or the labels we wear. It definitely has nothing to do with our current relationship status, but it does have everything to do with alignment.

This manifesto is not about the roles we play. It is a reorientation, a revolution, and a reckoning for all women.

For generations, living inside patriarchy, we have been conditioned into the Good Girl archetype: self-abandoning, self-sacrificing, and SELF-less. We have been taught that safety, status, and success come through our proximity to men, marriage, and motherhood. Through being chosen. Through being pleasing. Through being useful. Through being needed. Through becoming anything other than women deeply rooted in relationship with ourselves.

And yet, rarely do we have time to stop and ask: Why is it set up this way? Who does this benefit? What end does this serve? Especially when the very men we are supposed to orient our lives around are statistically the most likely to erase, exploit, and endanger us? Why is it that a woman is praised when she makes herself smaller? Her dreams, her voice, her desires, her needs, her appetite for more.

Why is she celebrated when she becomes less needy, less messy, less loud, less inconvenient? When she exhausts herself mentally, physically, and emotionally, never “needing” or “asking” for help, why is she called a giver, a saint, a superhero? And why, when a woman is asked to keep the peace at all costs to herself, by staying, martyring, enduring, softening, shrinking, forgiving, and betraying her own truth, well-being, and authenticity, is she called a lover, a fighter, a mother?

There are many answers to these questions, but the one that matters now is this: how will I choose to answer to myself and to life from now on?

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This is the moment we must name ourselves Matriarchs.

We must choose, consciously, to become women who are self-led instead of approval-led. Women who choose alignment over attachment, without apology. Women who trust our bodies, our instincts, our lived experience, and the quiet truth that rises before we have language for it.

Women who understand that love, intimacy, partnership, family, and devotion should only ever expand who we are, not require our erasure. A Matriarch is not a woman who has stopped believing in love. She is a woman who has stopped abandoning herself in order to receive it. She is not hardened. She is not closed. She is simply no longer willing to confuse self-sacrifice with goodness, self-betrayal with loyalty, or endurance with love.

Inside relationships, Matriarchs do not chase, convince, perform, plead, or cosign behavior that disconnects them from themselves. They do not place themselves above or below anyone. They stand beside, clear, sovereign, and whole. From that place, a Matriarch knows how to choose herself without making her softness disappear. She observes patterns, not promises. She notices intention over intensity. She believes reality over fantasy. She pays attention to how her body feels, how her peace responds, how her truth expands or contracts in someone’s presence. She knows that chemistry can be intoxicating, potential can be seductive, and attention can feel like love when you have been starving for tenderness, but she is no longer available to be led by hunger. She is learning to be led by wisdom.

The Matriarch is the woman who understands that standards are not walls. They are hard-won wisdom. They are the sacred evidence of everything she has lived through, learned from, survived, healed, and chosen not to repeat. Standards are how she protects the life she has worked so hard to build. Standards are how she honors the woman she is becoming. Standards are how she refuses to keep negotiating with patterns that have already cost her too much. She does not need to explain them into legitimacy. She does not need to soften them so they are easier for someone else to accept. She knows that the right people will not require her to abandon her own truth in order to stay close.

And this shift is not theoretical. It is happening now, individually, relationally, collectively, globally. It is happening in dating, where women are no longer mistaking inconsistency for mystery. It is happening in motherhood, where women are refusing to disappear inside the role of being needed. It is happening in leadership, where women are no longer shrinking their power to make others comfortable. It is happening in marriages, in divorces, in businesses, in friendships, in politics, in private conversations, in nervous systems, in bank accounts, in bedrooms, in group chats, and in the quiet moment when a woman finally tells herself the truth.

Around the world, women are waking up to themselves. Releasing the need for approval. Questioning the rules we inherited. Refusing to keep calling our own suppression “love.” Remembering that the life we want has always lived on the other side of being liked. Remembering that our joy matters. Our anger matters. Our desire matters. Our rest matters. Our standards matter. Our bodies matter. Our money matters. Our dreams matter. Our voices matter. And none of it becomes less sacred because someone else is uncomfortable with the fullness of it.

This manifesto is for any woman, anywhere, who is ready to return to herself.

Not as another set of rules to follow. Not as another performance of empowerment. Not as another way to be “good” at becoming free. But as a living, breathing remembrance of the woman you already are beneath the conditioning, the pleasing, the proving, the overexplaining, the waiting, the shrinking, and the fear. These are the new golden standards we can choose to live by this year, and forever. Not because someone gave us permission, but because we finally stopped waiting for it.

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The Matriarch Manifesto: 8 Ways to Center Life and Love As A Woman & Mother

1. Decondition From the Patriarchy

A Matriarch tells the truth about the systems that shaped her. She names the Good Girl conditioning that taught her to be pleasing, selfless, obedient, quiet, agreeable, and easy to love. She names the Independent Woman conditioning that taught her to need nothing, carry everything, and prove her worth through performative strength. She sees how both patriarchal archetypes kept her disconnected from her body, her softness, her receiving, her truth, and her power.

In life, deconditioning means choosing alignment over approval. It means no longer organizing your choices around being good, praised, understood, or chosen. In love, it means refusing to earn connection through self-sacrifice, silence, over-functioning, or self-abandonment. A Matriarch does not perform for love. She does not disappear for belonging. She does not betray herself to keep a role, a relationship, or a fantasy intact. She knows she is whole, worthy, valuable and highly favored for who she is, not what she does.

I am not here for approval. I am here to be aligned.

2. Practice Discernment

A Matriarch trusts what she observes and feels. She stops explaining away what her body already knows. She pays attention to patterns, energy, consistency, effort, tone, timing, follow-through, and how her nervous system responds in someone’s presence. She does not gaslight herself out of her own knowing just because something looks good on paper or feels familiar in her body.

In life, discernment means protecting your time, attention, energy, money, dreams, and peace from anything that drains your aliveness. In love, it means trusting behavior over potential, patterns over promises, and consistency over chemistry. A Matriarch knows that attraction is information, but it is not instruction. She lets reality lead.

I trust what I observe and feel.

3. Change the Dynamic

A Matriarch refuses dynamics that depend on her over-functioning. She does not anticipate, manage, mother, translate, soften, explain, absorb, or emotionally labor for grown adults in order to keep connection alive. She recognizes the moment love starts requiring too much of her life force, and she tells herself the truth.

In life, changing the dynamic means no longer being the automatic fixer, holder, planner, peacemaker, or emotional container for everyone around you. In love, it means choosing relationships where responsibility is shared, repair is mutual, effort is reciprocal, and connection does not cost you your energy, dignity, peace, or aliveness. A Matriarch does not shrink to preserve a dynamic that requires her disappearance.

I choose authenticity over approval.

4. Live in Devotion to Self

A Matriarch builds a life that feels rich, meaningful, and alive on its own. Her life is not a waiting room for love. Her days, dreams, identity, choices, and future do not orbit around being chosen. She chooses herself daily through her healing, her friendships, her work, her body, her creativity, her home, her pleasure, her purpose, and her joy.

In life, devotion to self means becoming deeply loyal to what sustains you. It means feeding the parts of you that were starved, listening to the desires you were taught to minimize, and building a world you actually want to live inside. In love, it means connection becomes an addition to your life, never the center holding it all together. A Matriarch can want love deeply without needing it to rescue her from herself.

I am already whole. True connection meets me here.

5. Refuse to Mother Everyone

A Matriarch is nurturing, but she is not available to be consumed. She can love deeply without becoming responsible for everyone else’s healing, growth, emotional regulation, or potential. She knows the difference between care and carrying. She knows the difference between compassion and collapse. She knows the difference between loving someone and raising them.

In life, refusing to mother everyone means returning responsibility to its rightful owner. It means allowing other adults to meet their own consequences, repair their own harm, and tend to their own becoming. In love, it means opting out of parenting partners, rescuing avoidance, enabling immaturity, and martyring yourself to keep a relationship intact. A Matriarch does not confuse being needed with being loved.

I am a mother to myself, the earth, my community, and its children only.

6. Detach With Devotion

A Matriarch stays anchored in herself while life reveals the truth. She does not chase, convince, control, improve, inspire, or wait someone into becoming who she needs them to be. She remains devoted to reality, not fantasy. She lets people rise, meet her, reveal themselves, or remove themselves without making their behavior a referendum on her worth.

In life, detachment means staying connected to your purpose, your body, your home, your work, your community, and your joy while everything around you moves. In love, it means letting consistency, behavior, and follow-through speak clearly. A Matriarch can care without clinging. She can desire without abandoning. She can stay open without handing her peace to the outcome.

I stay present to my own experience, not attached to any outcome.

7. Reclaim Desire

A Matriarch honors desire as sacred, embodied, and wise. She does not force it, fake it, perform it, rush it, or explain it into being. She understands that desire returns where there is safety, spaciousness, truth, rest, respect, and freedom. She listens when her body opens. She listens when her body closes. Both are holy.

In life, reclaiming desire means allowing yourself to want again. More beauty. More ease. More money. More pleasure. More rest. More support. More aliveness. More truth. In love, it means allowing desire to move at the speed of safety, without pressure, obligation, resentment, or demand. A Matriarch trusts her body’s yes, her body’s no, and the timing of both.

I trust my body’s wisdom, and I listen.

8. Choose Decisively

A Matriarch trusts herself to choose, and she trusts herself to leave. She no longer needs chaos, collapse, betrayal, or a final straw to honor what she knows. Her decisions are allowed to be calm. Her clarity is allowed to be quiet. Her standards are allowed to stand without being argued into legitimacy.

In life, choosing decisively means taking your own knowing seriously. It means making the move, having the conversation, changing the pattern, raising the standard, leaving the room, building the life, and becoming the woman you already know you are here to be. In love, it means honoring what feels steady, intentional, generous, honest, and clear. A Matriarch says yes when something is true for her and walks away when it is not, safely, calmly, and without self-betrayal.

I trust myself to choose, and I stand by my decisions.

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Book Coaching with Elle

I’ve been single since 2022. *Cue applause.*

By that, I mean I haven’t called anyone my boyfriend in years. I’ve dated, of course I have. A few dates here. A month or two there. I’ve even had my heart broken a little bit by a situationship which, to be fair, I didn’t know was a situationship until we ended things. A painful modern rite of passage, for sure.

But simply put, men have not been the center of my world since I was 36, and this matters to me because as a reformed Catholic School Good Girl, I was raised to believe that Being Chosen and Getting Married and Starting A Family was the ultimate proof of success.* Like most women in American patriarchal culture, I was constantly shown and told that my value as a woman hinged on crossing the finish line of a race I never had the opportunity to question, let alone consciously choose to enter.

*I can still hear my Grandma Louise, the woman who raised me, saying, “Could you just shut up long enough for a man to marry you? Why do you always have to say what you think?” There is, obviously, a lot to unpack here. The passing down of patriarchal beliefs. The obvious internalized misogyny. The inherited survival strategy disguised as marriage advice. But we’ll save that dissection for another essay.

At almost 40 now, in the years I have spent deconstructing my conditioning and de-centering men and relationships, I have had more time than ever to find myself. Of course, I also spent much of that time raising my daughter as a solo mama, spending time with my girlfriends, going on wonderful trips, building multiple creative businesses, finding new hobbies, investing in real estate, and, of course, lots of time healing in therapy.

In this, what I found when I chose to no longer orient my life around finding a man, or being someone’s partner, was that not only was I able to get clearer on who I am, but also who I want to become, what I want out of love, what I am done accepting and tolerating, what I want to attract, and, among other things, asking myself who would be a good partner for me. Wanting to do it different this time around has meant really making the conscious choice to not move forward with anyone who feels familiar, but instead going towards who feels different: safe, healthy, and peaceful.

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How Dating Works Best

For most of my online dating history, I have been painfully predictable. I download an app or two, put up my favorite photos, fill out my profile using my favorite vetting technique, decide who I should respond to based on my three-yes rule, maybe line up a few dates, and then delete the whole damn thing somewhere between twenty-four and seventy-two hours later. For this round, though, I’m choosing to do things differently.

This time, I am going to approach dating as both an experiment and a practice—and maybe you want to join me?

I made the decision to change how I approach dating based on two things. First, as a certified dating and relationship coach, I want to use myself as a guinea pig to figure out and test what will actually help women find safe, kind, protective, provider-type men* on the apps. And second, because I am ready for love. Like THAT kind of love. This is scary to even think, let alone write and share with the world.

Coming into this new decade, I feel truly ready for the kind of love I’ve never experienced but know, in my bones, is out there. Frankly, I want proof that it exists, so I can be certain I’m not just blowing smoke to myself, or to other women. And, most importantly, because I want to do it different this time, I really don’t mind waiting, taking my time, and having a great time through the process.

This is where I think dating can become exciting and joyful again.

When dating, if we consciously choose to decenter men themselves, being chosen, and the outcome of the dating experience, then dating can become an experiment in becoming as fully and wholly ourselves as possible. I believe dating is one of the best places to become the woman you actually want to be.

Dating gives you a new playground. A fresh start. A blank canvas. It gives you infinite moments to do things differently and choose differently in real time. It gives you opportunities to say what you mean. Share only the stories you choose. Leave sooner. Stay softer. Ask for and receive more. Observe. Quit overexplaining. Allow goodness in. Tolerate far less zero nonsense. And it’s where you can experiment with no longer being attracted to connections that feel familiar, connections that feel like patterns you already know, in favor of saying yes to what feels new, alive, safe, generous, and consistent.

And the practice, the real practice of dating, is in discernment. Not just discerning whether someone likes you versus whether you like them, or whether there’s chemistry and potential. But discerning what and who is actually good for your nervous system. Dating in this new way is the perfect place to practice noticing instead of managing, and observing rather than absorbing. To see whether you are more committed to trying to earn someone’s attention than noticing whether they are showing you how much they value and respect you inherently.

It’s a space where, if you’ve previously abandoned your own pace, standards, or intuition, you can practice not self-abandoning, or moving faster than you feel. It’s for learning what communication feels like when it’s consistent and clear, and refusing to engage further when it’s confusing and chaotic. It’s for discerning what kind of intimacy feels like an exhale, not a brace-for-impact. It’s about learning what kind of person helps you feel more like yourself, not less.

Using this mindset, dating has become way more fascinating to me. Now, every interaction reveals something about them, or me, my patterns, and how much I’ve changed, or all of the above. Using dating as both an experiment and practice in this way also shows how quickly someone sexualizes you. What they’re after and what their intentions are. Whether or not they’re a giver or a taker. If they ask questions about you, or not. If you align on politics and things that truly matter. Whether they can hold depth without trauma-bonding. Whether they’re emotionally available, emotionally intelligent, and emotionally honest. But also, it clearly shows you how intentionally you are staying connected to yourself, your truth, your boundaries, and, hopefully, how well you are continuing to center your own life, dreams, and joy. This, at least for me, is the part that matters the most.

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Now Let’s Talk About This Hinge Message I Got Recently

A few days ago, I received this message from a man on a dating app. It was the first message he sent me, and at first glance, the message was not overtly offensive. It was framed as playful. Maybe even flirtatious. But when I really observed it through that feminist/feminine lens I was speaking of earlier, I saw it for what it was.

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You know the ones: rereading texts until you could practically recite them or analyzing every interaction like you’re prepping for cross-examination; the way your nervous system spikes at the sight of a typing bubble, only to crash out when it disappears; or, of course, the hours we spend in the girls’ group chat, begging for reassurance that No, You Didn’t Sound Too Needy.

These moments of anxiety are not proof that you’re broken, unlovable, or crazy. They’re evidence that your mind is trying to protect you from what it believes is danger, abandonment, or loss. Anxiety’s frantic energy is never about being “too much.” It’s your nervous system raising the alarm… and while that alarm may have once served and protected you, it doesn’t have to define you anymore.

Relationship Coaching with Elle

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The Unpaid Labor of Anxiety

For many of us who know this feeling, anxiety isn’t just a fleeting mood. It’s a full-time, unpaid job with zero benefits. It’s one we didn’t sign up for, but somehow started clocking into in childhood. (Where my straight-A, horse-loving, eldest daughters at?! 🙋🏼‍♀️)

If you, like me, grew up learning that your safety depended on how well you read the room, how quickly you smoothed over tension, or how good you were at keeping the peace, then anxiety wasn’t random, it was your survival strategy. When I really began healing about five years ago, I realized that what I was calling “anxiety” was also me replaying an old role: the Good Girl.

She was the one who adjusted her tone, her posture, her personality to make everyone else comfortable. She was the one who took responsibility for other people’s moods. She was the one who blamed herself first, always. When that job follows you into adulthood, it shows up in sneaky ways that feel almost automatic and looks like:

• Over-apologizing, even when you’ve done nothing wrong, just to smooth over the slightest bit of tension

• Over-functioning in relationships through planning, fixing, anticipating needs before anyone asks, because you don’t trust you’ll be loved if you don’t

• Walking on eggshells around moods, believing it’s your responsibility to keep everyone else comfortable and regulated

• Shifting who you are depending on who’s in the room, because you learned early on that being fully yourself wasn’t safe

Hyper-vigilance like this is exhausting. It drains you minute by minute until you forget you’re living in management mode instead of leading your own life. It becomes like a second skin, and after years of carrying it, you start to confuse it with who you are. But the truth is: you never applied for that job. You can’t invoice for it. And you are absolutely allowed to resign. Seeing it this way, not as a flaw, but as unpaid labor you were conditioned and trained to perform as a woman, is a turning point, and once you see it clearly, you can finally put anxiety down and step back into your power.

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1:1 Relationship Coaching with Elle

The Shift That Changed Everything

My healing really began with one deceptively simple question that surfaced in a powerful moment of clarity. I asked myself: Am I observing, or am I absorbing?

That question cracked something open in me because up until then I thought being a “good” partner, friend, or daughter meant carrying the weight and burden of everyone else’s feelings, moods, and disappointments. My nervous system was on constant alert, always trying to manage what didn’t belong to me.

When you absorb, you take everything personally. A sigh becomes your fault. Silence feels like rejection. Someone’s bad mood seeps in until it feels like your own. Absorbing keeps you locked in survival mode, scrambling to fix, to prove, to manage. Observing, though, is power. Observing is standing firmly within Self and knowing: That sigh belongs to them. Their silence is their choice. Their bad day isn’t mine to carry. Observing creates space. Space between what belongs to you and what belongs to them, space between your nervous system’s old alarms and your present reality.

Observing doesn’t make you cold, uncaring, or detached either. It makes you clear. It allows you to love in a way that doesn’t cost you your peace. Observing says: I can witness you, I can even hold compassion for you, but I don’t have to merge with you to prove my love. That’s what boundaries actually are: clarity that connects, not walls built to keep people out. And that clarity, that interdependence, is where and how secure love grows.

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Dating & Love Coaching with Elle

From Reacting to Responding

One powerful thing that happens when you choose to observe instead of absorb is that you stop reacting, and you start responding as the woman you want to be. Reactions are fast, fiery, fear-driven. They come from the anxious part of you that’s terrified of rejection and desperate for safety. A reaction looks like firing off a text before you’ve had a chance to breathe. Or pulling away and rejecting them before they can reject you.

Responses are slow, grounded, chosen. A response looks like pausing, inhaling deeply, and deciding what aligns with the woman you want to be. It might mean silence. It might mean a boundary. It might mean compassion without self-abandonment. Choosing to respond instead of react isn’t about perfection or getting it right every time. It’s about presence. Every time you respond instead of react, you remind yourself: I am not powerless. I choose how I show up.

This is the power of sovereignty and stepping into your own authority.

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Coaching with Elle

The Math of Secure Love

I’ve always said I’m more of a money girlie than a math one, but when it comes to relationships, math gives me a language for love that makes sense of it all… and it’s simpler than we think.

The known variable is ME. I am the constant in every relationship I’ll ever have. I know I can trust myself. I know I can soothe and regulate myself. I know I can choose myself, again and again. I know I have control over my emotions, not the other way around. That’s where my power lives, and that’s the foundation of becoming a secure woman.

The unknown variable is anything outside of me. Other people—their moods, their behaviors, their willingness to show up (or not) are uncontrollable variables. And the moment I stop trying to solve for them, the moment I quit doing unnecessary algebra for someone else’s emotions, I reclaim my energy for the only variable I can truly manage: me.

That’s why, when it comes to relationships, the equation is this: 1 + 1 = 3.

One whole person plus another whole person equals the relationship itself—a third living, breathing entity that both people contribute to and nurture. The relationship isn’t meant to replace who you are; it’s meant to expand what’s possible when two sovereign, complete people choose each other.

What it is not is .5 + .5 = 1. That’s the math of codependency. That’s the logic of lack.

That’s the equation that keeps you chasing completion outside of yourself, believing you’re only valuable if someone else validates you. We’re taught to think we need to “find our other half,” but you’re not half a person. You’re already whole, and so are they. When you start to show up like this, you stop performing for love, and you certainly can settle down your anxiety. You are able to bring your full self—your light, your baggage, your desires, your boundaries—and invite them to do the same. That’s when the relationship itself becomes a sacred space, not a place where you lose yourself, but a place where both of you get to grow, expand, and experience love that is secure and alive.

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1:1 Relationship Coaching with Elle