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 I could talk about it, but I wouldn't necessarily feel it.
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It's physical.
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It's visceral.
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It's like you described the chest.
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For me, it's the gut.
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It says, right.
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But when the pandemic arrives, it's a trigger that is strong enough to bring back that sense of dread.
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And at that time, I wasn't aware of my dread.
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I was feeling my dread.
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That's very different.
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 That's what I mean by the external versus the internal.
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Now, what do people struggle with?
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People have struggled with prolonged uncertainty.
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Here are the five things of the pandemic that have affected relationships the most.
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One is a prolonged sense of uncertainty.
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It's not just that you're not sure when this is going to end, but you're not sure about you're not being sure.
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 This thing keeps coming and going all the time.
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One minute you say it's gone, the next minute you realize it's not gone at all.
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Then it's the notion of what we experienced was a collapse of all the boundaries.
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Here I am.
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 I'm at home, I'm on my chair, at my kitchen table, and I am a therapist, and a supervisor, and a podcaster, and a mother, and a friend, and a wife, and, and, and, and I haven't left the chair, and I'm still just in sweatpants with the, you know, and I'm like, where is work, where is life, where is morning, where is night, where it's just like, all the roles have collapsed.
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 And we are not made like this.
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We are physical people and we are spatially oriented and we change location for our activities.
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We change clothes for our activities and they help us enter the role.
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Now I'm going to work.
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Now I'm going to play sports.
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Now I'm going to the club.
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Now I'm going out.
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Now I'm going to visit my mother.
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 And I look, I feel different, I look different, I wear different, I have rituals, I have things, a different bag, a different racket.
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None of this.
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Do you know what it means when your entire arsenal of rituals that give meaning and frame your parts dissolves?
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You get exhausted.
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So that was the collapse of boundaries.
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Then there was the sense of ambiguous loss.
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 You know, we lost spontaneity, we lost plans, we lost the weddings, the graduations, the parties, the promotions, everything.
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Sports, games, everything, yeah.
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It's not, there is the loss of death, but there is that other loss, the buildings that are standing, but they're empty.
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They're physically present, but emotionally vacated.
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 We have the grandparents and the parents that are physically gone but emotionally present.
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We call that ambiguous loss when you are either physically present and psychologically gone or psychologically present and physically gone.
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That ambiguous loss became a part of what then Adam Grant began to describe in the languishing.
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Languishing is you're not depressed, you're just like, eh.
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 lifeless, flat, listless, nothing is really giving you the sense of meaning and purpose and joy that you generally want.
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That has happened in your relationship.
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And what happens when you are in a period of liminality like this, where the big dilemmas are not getting answered, is that all the unknowns are filtering onto your relationships.
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 And the relationship becomes the holder of all that stress.
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And that is part of the divorce rate at the moment and the weight that has felt on the relationship.
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It's not just people didn't get along.
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It's that people needed in the relationships to deal from the political polarization to the racial reckoning, to the economic insecurity, to the ambiguous loss, to the prolonged uncertainty.
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All of that fell on relationships.
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 This is the story of the last two years, that people know, they feel it, but they don't necessarily articulate it.
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 It's hard to make a relationship last if you don't have the tools and you're not willing to work through it.
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How do you stay grounded when the ground itself is moving?
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It's quicksand.
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It's the great adaptation of this moment.
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And so relationships began to see the cracks inside their relationship and people also began to see the light that shines through the cracks, both ends.
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 What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome?
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Was it conflict resolution?
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Was it boundaries?
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Was it not abandoning yourself?
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Was it communication skills?
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What was the... Fear.
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Fear of what?
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Fear of failure.
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Like a relationship not working?
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Relationship not working.
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When you have been through, as you date, and you go through relationships, and you've been through betrayal and heartbreak,
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 and hurt and pain, you can become pretty cynical about love.
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And if you're not careful, that cynicism
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 can really be a hindrance for you because you cannot be a cynic about love and expect to attract it at the same time.
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Ooh, snap.
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That's true.
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Yeah.
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So how did you keep your heart open after going through breakups and maybe after, you know, challenging things happening in relationships where that hurt you?
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How did you stay open to love?
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I had to reframe.
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 my thoughts and ideas and my perspective about the past.
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What did you think about them then?
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I had to learn to allow the past to stay in the past.
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I didn't want someone to come into my life and I make them pay for something they had nothing to do with.
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Yeah, that's tough.
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In my past.
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Yeah, that's tough.
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And when I got married, who did I want my husband to meet?
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 this bitter, broken down woman who had been through the ringer in all these years and all these relationships?
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Or did I want him to meet someone who, because we're all, we're always in the process of healing.
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We're always in the process of growth and our emotional health.
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But did I want him to meet someone who was committed to that growth and that process and
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 going forward being committed to the same commitment, which is what really success in marriage boils down to, being committed to the same commitment.
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Because when I was younger, I thought it was about this involuntary feeling of love.
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And then as I got older, I realized it was a conscious decision to love.
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 It's not just, oh, I have this attraction to this person.
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I feel love towards them.
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It's a conscious decision.
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Because you're not always going to feel love.
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You're going to go through ups and downs and peaks and valleys.
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And if it were about a feeling, you'd be all over the place emotionally.
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Up and down, yeah.
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It's about a decision.
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And so when I talk about earlier, when I talked about separating your feelings from the facts,
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 That's what I mean.
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You're gonna have a range of emotions, but the fact is, this is a person that I've committed my life to.
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This is a person that I've committed to grow with.
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So I made all of these commitments to this person.
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And then you go forward with that in mind.
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Did you have fears around getting married?
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I had a fear of the unknown.
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What is marriage really like?
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 You know, I see other people who are married, some of them happy, some of them not.
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Obviously, I see a lot of people getting divorced.
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So what is it about marriage?
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What makes it work?
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Do I know what makes it work?
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Do I have what it takes to make it work?
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So it was the fear of the unknown because I hadn't done it before.
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Marriage by nature,
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 Changes you it's the closest relationship.
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You'll ever have it's very different from the parent-child relationship every other relation friends everything Yeah, I wonder how it would change me from being in a relationship and dating to them being married What have been the biggest differences and changes?
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Allowing someone to see me at my most vulnerable state.
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Did you allow that and during the dating process?
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I
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 I allowed it to a certain extent, but I didn't live with my husband before we got married.
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That was a choice that we made.
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We did not want to live together.
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And so when we got married and we moved in together, I had not lived with anyone since I was in college for 20 years.
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So again, it's that adjustment in life.
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 Sharing my space with another human being every day you got married Yeah, and you got married a week before the pandemic 2020.
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Yes, March 8th 2020 you said so what was that?
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I mean
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 That takes a lot of guts to not live with someone beforehand in the modern world, to not fully see the person who they are.
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So I commend you on that.
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So what did you learn going through a pandemic for the last two years, getting married a week before, and then moving in together and sharing a life during arguably one of the scariest uncertain times in the last 20, 30 years?
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Everything changed in the blink of an eye.
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We got married on March 8th.
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 in Los Angeles, big wedding, all of our family, all of our friends, hugging, high-fiving, kissing, had no idea what was about to happen a week later.
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And I do look back on that day because I thought, when we were talking about our wedding, do we wanna do something small, do we wanna, and we ended up just inviting our people, and everyone came out.
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And now I look back on that day and I cherish it so much.
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Yeah, because people haven't been able to do that for a couple years.
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 Right.
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And I haven't seen a lot of those people since.
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So it just made those memories even more special to us.
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But also, yes, a week later, the world shut down.
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So we decided to take a mini moon.
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We were going to do a big honeymoon over the summer.
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 So we just went to Newport Beach, and we were there for a few days, and we were in a bubble.
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We didn't know a lot about everything that was happening in the world until we came out of this bubble.
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So we came back to LA, and I mean, there was no toilet tissue on the shelves, the grocery store.
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I mean, it was just empty.
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Everything was empty.
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I'd never seen anything like it before.
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And I was like, so you mean to tell me I waited all this time to get married?
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 And the world is about to end.
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Wow.
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It was crazy.
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So what did you guys create?
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Did you guys come together and say, let's build a strong foundation during this time?
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Yes.
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Do you feel like it's made the relationship stronger?
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Absolutely.
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Has it been stressful living with someone for the first time in 20 years?
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How have you navigated it all?
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 Uh, we adapted really well.
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And during that time we had every day and all that time to spend time together and the pandemic, you know, it challenged all of us in different ways, but it also presented us with an opportunity.
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 And for us, it was noise cancellation headphones through the first few months of our marriage because we got to really sit and be together and be still and be quiet.
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You know, my husband is an R&B singer.
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He travels all over the world.
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And he was leaving a week after we got married to start traveling again.
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 Not anymore.
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Of course, that didn't happen.
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And so we got to spend a lot of quality time together.
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And I will tell you what I learned about him.
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Yes.
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What I talked about earlier, about when you see the true measure of a person and how they handle adversity and how they handle difficult circumstances.
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And because all of his live music was impacted greatly.
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That's how you make most of your money, yeah.
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 And I never heard him complain, not even once.
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And I saw him be a source of encouragement to a lot of other of his artists and musician friends.
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And I mean, I was even shocked.
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I was like, OK, we're all about positivity and wake up happy every day.
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But really?
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You really wake up this happy every day?
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Sure.
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And it was inspiring to see.
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And I knew in those first few months
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 that because you always, you know, love is about taking a risk.
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You know, we talk about that fear because it's a risk.
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There's a fear of being hurt again.
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There's a fear of those triggers being exposed again.
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And in that moment, I knew and I believed that I had made a right decision.
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But in those months after the pandemic, I saw it for myself very early on in my marriage, who my husband was.
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 stressful times and difficult circumstances and how he was a source of inspiration and strength for a lot of people including me.
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So were you, was each day kind of a confirmation that this was a great decision?
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Yes.
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I leaned into this and that's beautiful.
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Yes.
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It's been two years of just this amazing time in my life because I used to get asked a lot why I was still single for so long.
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And I started to feel pressure.
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 from people.
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I never put the pressure on myself, and I know a lot of people perhaps do, but if you're not careful when you're single.
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 and people are asking you, well, I don't understand why aren't you married or what's going on?
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You can start to internalize it and feel that there's something wrong with you or that there's something off within you.
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And it can almost be something that you become embarrassed by because people are asking you as if you've missed some mark in your life, some milestone that you should have achieved by now.
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 Not asking me if it was a desire of mine, by the way, if I wanted to, but just asking me, why wasn't I?
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Why do you think people care so much about other people being in a relationship or being single?
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Well, the question, I think, speaks more to who they are than it ever did to who I was.
1
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 Because I was okay.
1
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You know, there were lessons that I had to learn to get to the place where I could go into a successful marriage.
1
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I needed to learn those lessons.
1
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There are almost 8 billion people on this planet.
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We can't all be doing the same things at the same time, and we're not supposed to be.
1
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 We're all supposed to be living our individual life paths and our individual life journeys.
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There are some people who don't think that.
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They think you need to be married by a certain age, you need to have children by a certain age, or you're not living the right path.
1
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It's just not true.
1
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This is not a race.
1
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Why is it not a race?
1
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Because we're not all running in the same direction.
1
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 So I learned very early on, and I think living in New York actually helped with that because I was around so many other young professionals who were at the top of their games and their careers.
1
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And we were, you know, Saturday night we're here, Wednesday night we're at a show and the live music and everything and just embracing our full lives and accepting
1
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 that being single was not a rest stop for me until I met my husband and really got to live.
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Well, if I had done that, I wouldn't have lived until I was 42 years old.
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So what would I have done with all those years in my 20s and 30s?
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So it wasn't a rest stop.
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And I embraced that time and just did so many, I traveled across
1
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 all around the world by myself, solo.
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Went to all the restaurants that I wanted to go to, watching Sex and the City.
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Sometimes I would go by myself.
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You know, I had this vibrant group of friends.
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I was not waiting to live my life.
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And I think that people, they project their own view of what they think life should be onto you.
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 I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links.
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And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel
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 exclusively on Apple Podcasts.
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Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well.
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Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review.
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I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward.
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And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now it's time to go out there and do something great.