A reader question :

I’m just starting to see someone new, and I really like him. He’s funny and kind, and we can talk for hours. We align on important values. But, I’m not that physically drawn to him — he’s not my usual physical type. (He’s not bad-looking at all! But when I look at him, I don’t exactly want to tear his clothes off.) I just don’t feel the spark like I have in the past with others. We do have some intense, non-sexual chemistry, like intellectual chemistry and emotional chemistry. But I want to want him.

My question is: Can sexual desire and attraction grow when it’s not there from the start? If so, how? And if not, what should I do here? I don’t want to lose him, but I don’t want to lose that part of myself, either.

Can attraction grow for someone you are not immediately physically into?

The short answer is yes. But there is a whole conversation that needs to happen around that yes before you just decide to white-knuckle your way through a relationship hoping your body eventually gets on board.

Let’s get into it.

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I will never forget reading a post on Threads. A woman was days away from her wedding when she discovered that her fiancé had been having an affair and had gotten another woman pregnant. Desperate and devastated, she turned to strangers on the internet and asked the question that was consuming her. Should I still marry him? He was remorseful. He promised therapy. So much had already been planned, so much money spent, and she had dreamed about this day her entire life. She loved him. Could they work through it?

Most of the replies told her to run. To cancel the wedding immediately. To never look back.

I decided to comment too.

What I said was this. Who you decide to marry is the most important decision you will ever make in your life. Do not marry him.

I rarely give strong, directional advice about leaving a serious long-term relationship on the internet because most situations are nuanced and have far more sides than a single post can reveal. But this was different. The answer was clear.

And yet it was not clear to her. Because when we love someone, when we have built a future with them in our minds and in our plans and in our hearts, leaving them can feel nearly impossible even when leaving is the only real option. Which made me think of something that has become one of the most important principles I share with anyone thinking about marriage:

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I wrote a new book!

It’s called Rewrite Your Story, and I honestly can’t wait to share it with you.

While my first book, It Begins With You, was about transforming your relationships by transforming yourself, Rewrite Your Story goes even deeper. It explores the stories we inherit in childhood, how attachment wounds and unresolved trauma shape the way we see ourselves, how we love, and what’s possible for our lives. Most importantly, it gives you a practical roadmap for changing your narratives and healing.

You do not have to read It Begins With You first. This book stands entirely on its own. Whether you’re new to my work or you’ve been with me for years, Rewrite Your Story will help you understand why you think, feel, and love the way you do - and show you how to step into your power and get the love you deserve.

I wrote this book so that everyone — whether they’re coupled, single, or heartbroken — can find, build, and sustain a healthy, exciting, and deeply fulfilling relationship. I wrote this book to change lives, and I’m so excited for you to read it.

I can’t wait to share the book with you in January, and until then, you can pre-order it!

Learn more & pre-order your copy today!

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continued support.

Love,
Jillian

Hi there,

Some of the worst emotional pain can come from a situationship (an undefined, intense relationship) ending. It’s a complicated kind of grief — and one that can reveal deeper wounds within us. Intense, short-lived relationships can leave us utterly devastated, just as much or sometimes, even more so than the ending of a marriage or a long partnership.

I want to talk today about the specific type of heartbreak that comes from ending a situationship, or any short-term and very intense connection. And, of course, I want to dive into the deep healing we need to do to move on.

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Hi there,

We’re taught to look for the “good ones.” The ones who are kind, ethical, and emotionally safe. We’re told that’s the foundation, the baseline — and it’s true. Partnering with a good person is non-negotiable.

But here’s what nobody tells you: Just because someone is a good person doesn’t mean they’re the right partner for you.

This is the part that’s tricky. Because when someone is a good person with several good attributes, it’s much harder to justify why it’s not working. If they’re cruel, neglectful, dishonest — it’s obvious. But what if they’re caring, principled, and well-intentioned, and still, something in you knows this isn’t it?

Years ago, that’s exactly where I found myself.

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I want to talk directly to the people who are exhausted. The ones who are discouraged, defeated, and quietly starting to wonder if this is just never going to happen for them. The ones who cannot stop thinking about it, but also cannot figure out what to actually do about it. The ones who’ve had one disappointing experience after another and are running on empty.

First of all, of course you feel this way. Dating is hard, and I’m not going to minimize that. But I want to give you something more useful than validation: two real options.
Two very different paths you can take. You might try one and eventually move to the other, but you’re going to need to get honest with yourself about which one is actually right for you at this moment.

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I’m wishing you a restful holiday weekend, and I wanted to leave you with this:

Try this for a week straight, every single day.

Start your morning in silence. Close your eyes (I like to do this just as I’m waking up before I do anything else). Picture the people you love and are grateful for. Your family, friends, colleagues, and whoever else you’re grateful for. One by one, send them love, compassion, kindness, and forgiveness. Include yourself. You can do this lying down or sitting up - it doesn’t matter. What matters is the consistency. Then let me know what happens for you!

I have some exciting announcements coming this summer, and I can’t wait to share them with you. I’ll be back next week, and in the meantime, you can catch up on some of my favorite posts.

Love,
Jillian

Summer has always been the season of romance. The slower pace, the time outdoors, and the natural increase in social connection all create conditions in which the nervous system relaxes. And when we’re more open, we become more available for play, and for love. But summer love doesn’t have to be fleeting. It can be the beginning of something real if you show up to dating differently than you have before.

So here are five ways to date differently this summer.

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People often ask me how much healing is enough before they’re ready for a healthy relationship.

What they’re really asking is whether they need to become a completely evolved person before they can love and be loved well.

The answer is no.

You do not need to resolve every wound, overcome every insecurity, or reach some permanent state of emotional mastery before you can have a healthy relationship.

Love is not reserved for people who have perfectly healed.

At the same time, there are certain forms of healing that matter. If you consistently abandon yourself, tolerate poor treatment, struggle to take accountability, or rely on relationships to give you a sense of worth, those patterns will follow you wherever you go.

After more than twenty years of working with people through heartbreak, divorce, betrayal, and relationship struggles, I’ve come to believe that healing is less about fixing yourself and more about making your relationship with yourself more durable.

Here are seven ways to begin.

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Before I get into the difference between your intuition and anxiety, I want to say something that doesn’t get talked about enough:

Relationships can be hard. Dating can mess with your head.

One minute you’re feeling confident and grounded. The next you’re staring at your phone, overthinking a text, questioning your instincts, wondering if you’re asking for too much, saying too much, or not enough. Or you’re in a relationship that looks fine on the outside but feels disconnected on the inside.

The truth is that most people don’t feel nearly as confident in love as they do in other areas of their lives. Love isn’t always logical. Attraction isn’t always a reliable guide. And too many people spend years repeating the same painful patterns without understanding why.

That’s exactly why I created The Conscious Woman.

The Conscious Woman is my private membership for women who want to build secure relationships, strengthen their self-worth, communicate with confidence, and stop abandoning themselves in the pursuit of love. Through live coaching, coursework, community, and ongoing support, you’ll learn how to become the kind of woman who trusts herself, chooses better, and creates healthier relationships.

Enrollment only opens twice a year, and this is the final enrollment of 2026!

Only those on the waitlist will receive access to join.

Join the waitlist

Is it your gut or your anxiety? This is one of the questions I get asked most. And I wanted to revisit this today because learning to distinguish between intuition and anxiety will change your life.

Let’s get into it.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of human intelligence is the quiet voice we call intuition. It’s easy to confuse it with anxiety — the restless hum of anticipation, the fear of making the wrong move, the sense that danger lurks somewhere we can’t yet see.

Both sensations live in our bodies. Both can feel urgent and can make us feel like we have to act right now. But one emerges from calm awareness, and the other from a survival alarm.

There’s danger in getting these two signals confused.

Anxiety is the body’s alarm system — not a truth teller.

Anxiety originates in the amygdala, our brain’s ancient alarm center. When it senses uncertainty, it triggers a cascade: the heart races, muscles tense, breath shortens. Blood flow shifts away from the prefrontal cortex — the area responsible for reasoning, empathy, and long-term perspective — and rushes toward regions primed for fight or flight.

When you’re in this state, your body is not interested in truth. It is interested in safety. Its messages are loud, repetitive, and fear-based: Don’t go. Don’t trust. Don’t move.

If intuition is a whisper, anxiety is an alarm bell. It shouts until you do something to make the discomfort stop.

But anxiety’s job is to protect you, not to guide you. And if you confuse that anxiety for intuition, it will guide you toward safety, not growth. Not your true needs.

Today, I want to help you learn to tell these two signals apart. I’m going to break down the exact difference between intuition and anxiety inside our nervous systems and walk you through three simple, everyday exercises to help foster your sense of intuition, so you can let it guide you forward without fear.

True intuition arises when the nervous system is regulated — when your body feels safe.

Neurologically, intuition is associated with activity in the insula (which monitors internal sensations) and a quieting of the prefrontal cortex. That’s why intuitive insights often arrive when you’re not actively trying to solve anything, like during a shower, a walk, meditation, just as you’re waking up, or when you’re on the edge of sleep.

In those moments, your analytical mind relaxes. The ego loosens its grip. The brain’s default mode network, responsible for self-referential thought, becomes less dominant, allowing deeper associative networks to surface. You experience a glimmer: a felt sense that something is right or wrong, often before you can explain why.

Intuition is subtle. It doesn’t flood the nervous system with cortisol. It lands softly, like a pebble dropped into still water, creating gentle ripples that expand outward.

The difference is the state, not the thought.

Most people think intuition is a kind of thought. It isn’t. It’s a movement of energy that arises when the mind is still, and the heart is open. Anxiety, on the other hand, is also a movement of energy, but one that comes from fear. It rushes, tightens, contracts, and tries to move out.

The difference between the two isn’t in what they say. It’s in the state of consciousness from which they arise.

So how can you tell if this feeling is intuition or anxiety? The most reliable answer lies in your body, not your logic.

When it’s anxiety, the signal feels charged: your heart races, your chest tightens, your stomach knots. The body is preparing to act. When it’s intuition, the body is quiet. There may be a momentary flutter, but underneath it is steadiness. The information feels clean.

Remember, you can’t access intuition from a dysregulated state. The nervous system must first return to balance. Only then does our deeper intelligence reveal itself.

You can’t force intuition any more than you can force sleep. But you can create the conditions for it to arise.

Here are three simple, tried-and-true ways to make space for your intuition. I swear by these exercises.

1. Practice Savasana.

In yoga, Savasana — or “corpse pose” — is the final posture of complete surrender. You lie on your back, palms open, breath relaxed, eyes closed. When I commit to practicing 15–20 minutes every day, it melts stress away from my mind and body. It is incredible. The truth is, Savasana is a powerful regulator of the nervous system. When practiced, it tells the body: You are safe. You can release vigilance.

Here’s what to do:

• Lie face up and flat on a mat or soft surface.

• Let your feet fall outward, and your shoulders drop heavy.

• Close your eyes. Breathe slowly in and out through your nose. Imagine gravity pulling you gently into the earth.

• Stay for at least ten minutes, perhaps longer if you need more time to let go.

You may notice small waves of emotion or thought. Allow them. Your only task is to remain present to what arises. In this stillness, the prefrontal cortex quiets. The parasympathetic nervous system activates. Often, after Savasana, one’s intuition is strong. Listen.

2. Engage your vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is the highway of the parasympathetic system, the body’s “rest and digest” network. When stimulated, it slows the heart rate and calms inflammation.

You can activate it through simple techniques:

• Long exhalations (inhale for 4-8 counts, exhale for 8)

• Gentle humming or chanting

• Splashing cold water on your face

• Placing a hand over your heart and breathing slowly into your hand

Each of these signals safety to your body. Over time, you strengthen what neuroscientists call vagal tone, which improves your ability to move out of anxiety and into grounded awareness.

3. Cultivate spacious attention.

In a world that rewards reactivity, intuition requires spaciousness. I make sure to take regular pauses in my day, what I call micro-moments of mindfulness. When you feel the impulse to check your phone, take one conscious breath instead. When you notice tension in your jaw, unclench.

Spacious attention is not about zoning out; it’s about tuning in. When you slow down enough to sense your inner world, you begin to differentiate between the noise of fear and the signal of truth.

Einstein once said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant.” Most of us have built our lives around the servant. We analyze, measure, and quantify, which of course are all useful and important skills. But the intuitive mind operates on a different frequency: relaxation and detachment from outcome.

When you cultivate nervous system balance, you strengthen your intuition. You notice how it often arrives when you’re doing something ordinary: tying your shoes, stirring tea, walking the dog. It is not grand or mystical. It is available in every moment you are present enough to hear it.

If you are seeking intuition, your task is not to hunt for answers. It is to create space for your deeper awareness to emerge.

Practice stillness, breathe deeply, rest in Savasana. Let the noise settle.

And remember: Your intuition is not hiding from you. It’s simply waiting for your nervous system to remember what safety feels like.

Love,
Jillian

There is a distinction I want to make that I believe is one of the most important things I have ever come to understand about love, friendship, and the unfolding of a life lived in alignment with your deepest self. It is the distinction between chasing and pursuing. Between grasping and moving toward. Between the frantic energy of someone who does not believe they are enough and the grounded confidence of someone who knows exactly who they are, and what they have to offer.

Chasing comes from fear. Pursuing comes from purpose. And they feel entirely different in the body.

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If you’re in a long-term relationship — with kids and a shared life — ending a relationship is infinitely more complicated. And I almost always recommend people work together in counseling before deciding to separate. So, I’m talking today to those of us anywhere between the first date and the first year.

Who we choose to be in a relationship with — especially after the age of 30 — is one of the most important choices we’ll ever make in our entire lives. In fact, I believe that if we take all the important decisions we have ever made, they will never add up to be as important as who we decide to spend our lives with. And yet, people — including my younger self — don’t take this decision as seriously as they should. They leave it up to the “spark.” What’s more, so many of us don’t listen to our intuition and push that inner voice to the side.

Today’s message is about what to do when you’ve tried to make something work, and it’s just not right. It’s an action plan for understanding where things are going wrong. And it’s a set of questions to help you build your discernment about when to stay and when to just call it already.

Let’s get into it.

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A few years ago, I went on a date. He was a friend of a friend’s brother. Not a stranger from the internet, which already felt like a point in his favor. And when I met him, I was very pleasantly surprised. He was incredibly good-looking, super smart, successful, and I even loved the way he was dressed. He was warm, attentive, and even funny. He asked good questions and actually listened to the answers. Over dinner, he was nothing but a gentleman.

On paper, it was a perfect date.

And yet when I got home, something was off, and I could not tell you what it was or where it was coming from. Nothing had gone wrong. Just this feeling sitting somewhere in my body that would not resolve itself, no matter how many times I replayed the evening looking for an explanation.

I called my friends. I did what women do, which is convene an informal tribunal to analyze the evidence.

“Maybe he’s too nice,” one of them said.

“I love nice,” I said. “And he’s not boring. He has a real personality.”

'“Maybe he’s too hot?”

“Too hot?” I laughed.

“Chemistry is mysterious,” another friend offered. “Maybe it’s something unconscious. Maybe you don’t like his smell.”

I laughed again. “He smelled really good, actually.”

We went around like this for a while and arrived nowhere conclusive. So I decided to keep seeing him and pay attention.

He called the next day just to say hi. Like an adult. Which I appreciated. He asked me out again. We went to dinner, then a show, and then we walked through the streets of New York for what felt like hours, talking about music and film and psychology and everything in between. It was a good night.

Yet I still felt that off feeling.

By the third date, I decided the only remaining variable I had not tested was physical. So I kissed him. And, it was a good one.

I went home, sat on my couch, and called my best friend.

“I can’t see him again,” I said.

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. I genuinely do not know. But something is off, and I’m done.”

She thought I was making a mistake. I thought I might be making a mistake. He was smart, kind, attractive, and interested. He had a good relationship with his parents and knew how to date like a grown-up without playing games. The case against ending it was substantial, and the case for ending it was essentially just a feeling I could not explain.

I called him the next day and told him, and luckily, he was gracious about it. But then I spent the better part of the following week interrogating myself. Did I make a mistake? Am I simply not ready for something real? What is actually wrong with me?

But every time I asked those questions, I came back to the same answer. I am going to trust myself. I do not need to understand it to honor it. I am going to trust myself.

About a year later, I found out he had physically assaulted his girlfriend.

My body knew something my brain had not caught up to yet. That feeling I just couldn’t identify, that low hum that made no rational sense given everything I knew about this person. And if I had talked myself out of it, which I nearly did, which a lot of us do because we have been taught to distrust our instincts and defer to logic and give people the benefit of the doubt even when something in us is saying no, I would have walked directly into harm.

I’m not telling you this story to frighten you. I’m telling it to remind you of something.

Your body is not dramatic. It’s not irrational. It is not too sensitive, too cautious, or too quick to judge. It is paying attention to things your conscious mind has not yet caught up to. And it is worth listening to. Even when you can’t explain it. Even when everything on paper says you should feel differently.

Trust yourself anyway.

Love,
Jillian

There is a particular kind of pain that comes from being involved with someone who clearly enjoys your presence, your attention, your body, your emotional support, maybe even your love, yet still cannot fully commit.

It is one of the most psychologically destabilizing experiences in modern dating because nothing is concrete enough to justify the depth of your feelings, and yet everything feels emotionally significant enough that walking away feels almost impossible.

Situationships – or undefined “relationships” where one person wants more, and the other is happy to keep it casual - thrive in ambiguity. They often begin with intensity. There is chemistry, constant texting, emotional intimacy, physical closeness, and the illusion of momentum. You spend hours talking. You learn each other’s histories. You start integrating one another into your routines. There are moments that feel deeply relational. Moments that make you believe this is naturally evolving toward commitment.

And then, almost without realizing it, you find yourself emotionally attached to someone who still speaks about the relationship in conditional language.

They say they are “figuring things out.” Or “there’s too much going on in their life”, or they “don’t want to do labels right now.”

They say they “really care about you,” while simultaneously remaining emotionally noncommittal.

Let’s get into it.

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The most important relationship you will ever have is the one you have with yourself, because it determines every choice you make, every boundary you set, and every relationship you stay in or walk away from.

Most relationship pain doesn’t begin with someone else. It begins in the way you see yourself. It shows up in what you believe you deserve, what you tolerate, and how easily you override your own needs to keep a connection. When self-worth is low, we don’t just feel it internally, we live it out in our patterns.

Self-worth is not something you either have or don’t have. It is something you build through awareness, dedication, and new choices. And for many people, this is a lifelong process of unlearning what was normalized and replacing it with something healthier and more aligned.

This is the work that changes everything.

Today I’m sharing the 27 most life-changing lessons I’ve learned about self-worth and what will make yours unshakeable.

If you’re ready to relate to yourself differently, to stop repeating the same dynamics, and to build a sense of worth that is not dependent on anyone else, this is for you. May these lessons remind you of who you are, what you deserve, and remind you that the love you’re seeking starts with how you show up for yourself.

Let’s get into the 27 most important lessons:

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This week, I did something a little different.

I wanted to send you my answers to your questions - like your own mini podcast.

These were juicy ones. The kind of questions that get to the heart of your patterns, your relationships, and the choices you’re making. And, I answer them directly.

Take your time with this one. You’re going to get a lot out of it.

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Before we get into today’s post, a quick note:

Next week, I’m doing something new - an exclusive audio session where I’ll be answering your questions. If you’re a paid subscriber, drop your question in the comments below. I’ll personally select a handful to respond to!

And if you’re not a paid subscriber yet, this is your invitation to join us for something a little more personal.

We have become extraordinarily fluent in the language of red flags.

We have made an art form of the early exit, the protective withdrawal, the preemptive strike against potential disappointment. And while that vigilance has its place, I think we’ve overcorrected.

We’ve forgotten how to recognize what is actually good.

I want to talk about green flags. And they boil down to two things: how you feel in your own skin when you’re with them - and their character.

Here’s a list of “green” flags that are non-negotiable.

You feel like yourself.

Fully, comfortably yourself. Your humor. Your contradictions. Your weirdness. Your opinions that not everyone will agree with. You enjoy time with them. You feel energized from spending time together instead of feeling drained. You feel like you aren’t fitting yourself into someone else’s projection of a partner. When you are with someone who is genuinely right for you, the energy you usually spend managing your presentation becomes available for something far more interesting. Actual connection.

You feel like you matter to them.

They want to know how your mind works. They’re curious about what shaped you, what you actually believe and why, and what you’re still trying to figure out. And here is why that matters more than almost anything else on this list. Being attractive to someone is not that hard. People will find you attractive. People will enjoy your company at dinner, text you enthusiastically for two weeks, and make you feel wanted.

Being truly curious about you is different. It requires attention. It requires the willingness to actually show up and pay attention to who a person is, rather than who you would like them to be. And that quality of attention, when you are on the receiving end of it, feels completely different from being desired. It feels like being valued.

You have ease together.

I am not talking about the absence of difficulty. Every relationship worth having will have its moments of friction, its necessary conversations, and its periods of discomfort. What I mean by ease is something more specific: Neither of you is forcing it. Neither of you is working to manufacture a connection that is not organically there. There is a natural reciprocity — they are as drawn to you as you are to them — and that reciprocity is very different from the anxious, effortful energy of a one-sided investment.

You can approach difficulty together.

This is perhaps the most underrated green flag of all. Do they shut down? Do you? Or can both of you stay present in a hard conversation, uncomfortable as it is, long enough to actually reach each other on the other side of it? The willingness to stay in difficulty together rather than flee from it is part of the foundation of what every long relationship requires.

You feel safe enough to be vulnerable (and you create that safety for them).

Safety in this context is not comfort. It is not the absence of challenge. It is the felt sense that you can say something true and uncertain and not be punished for it. That you can change your mind without losing their respect. That you can show the parts of yourself that are still unfinished and be met with curiosity rather than judgment. And equally, do you offer them that? Do you hold space for their vulnerability as carefully as you hope they will hold yours?

They have depth in their other relationships.

How someone loves people in their life is a preview of how they will love you. Not a perfect preview (family relationships are complicated and carry their own history), but a meaningful one, nonetheless. Do they show up consistently for the people they care about? Have they demonstrated the capacity to repair, to stay, to grow alongside someone over time? These are not incidental questions. They are the most revealing ones available to you in the early stages of knowing someone.

They know how to take care of themselves.

Emotionally. Financially. Physically. I am not talking about perfection or about having everything figured out. I am talking about a fundamental orientation toward self-responsibility. Can they sit with difficult feelings without requiring you to manage those feelings for them? Do they have some working relationship with their own inner life, through some form of personal development, through genuine self-reflection, through the willingness to be accountable for their own behavior? And practically, do they have a functional relationship with their financial reality, whatever stage of life they’re in? These capacities matter.

You share a vision for what a life well lived actually looks like.

This is the conversation most people avoid. What do you want? Children or not? How do you want to spend your time? What do you believe about money and about work and about what gives a life meaning? What is your relationship to faith, community, and family? These are not peripheral questions. They are the architecture of a shared life. And two people who love each other but want fundamentally different things from their lives are not poorly matched because they lack love. They are poorly matched because love, however real, cannot substitute for alignment.

They have integrity.

By which I mean something very specific. Their words and their actions correspond. They do what they say they will do. They take responsibility when they fall short rather than constructing elaborate explanations for why it was not their fault. They are committed not just to being good but to becoming better. This consistency between the private self and the public self, between the promise and the follow-through… is the engine of long-term trust. Without it, everything else doesn’t matter. This is about character.

There is genuine physical desire.

Attraction can develop. Chemistry deepens over time. I am not suggesting that the presence or absence of immediate physical electricity is determinative. But I am suggesting that desire matters and that pretending otherwise does a disservice to the full reality of what a romantic partnership is. The erotic dimension of a relationship is not separate from the emotional one. It is woven through it. And the willingness and ability to speak honestly about your physical needs, to bring that conversation into the relationship rather than hoping it works itself out, is itself a green flag worth noting.

I want to end with something that gets lost in the green flag conversation. These qualities are not a standard to hold your potential partner against while exempting yourself from the same scrutiny. They are a mirror. They ask you to look honestly at what you are bringing to the table, too.

What’s your most important green flag?

I want to hear from you.

Love,
Jillian

It’s time to talk about women and their lack of pleasure in the bedroom.

Most women have had a lot of sex that was fine. Technically adequate. But not amazing.

And I want to talk about why. Not to be provocative. Not to make anyone uncomfortable for the sake of it. But because I genuinely believe that this particular silence is costing women something real. Something that goes far beyond any single encounter and reaches into the center of how we understand our own desire, our own bodies, and our own right to ask for what we actually need.

Let’s get into it.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why so many people — genuinely good people — are not finding good people to love. They’re stuck swiping, stuck in situationships, stuck going on first dates that lead nowhere, and stuck wondering what the hell is wrong with everyone out there.

The uncomfortable truth? The problem is often with our unconscious beliefs and habits.

Here are three things that might be preventing you from meeting the “right person.”

You resent the people you’re trying to date.

I know. But hear me out.

Whether you date men or women, there’s a really good chance that somewhere underneath the surface, you carry some version of fear and resentment toward them. Because you’ve been hurt. Because your friends have been hurt. Because we are marinating in a cultural moment that is essentially a gender war, and it is bleeding into various interactions people are having on dates right now.

When we experience relational pain, our bodies learn to protect us. We begin to generalize. We tell ourselves stories: all men do this, all women are like that. These stories feel like protection. But what they’re actually doing is keeping us in a state of low-grade threat response every time we try to connect with someone new. And here’s what’s so important to understand: people feel this. Not always cognitively. But somatically — in their bodies. When someone is sitting across from you carrying the weight of “I don’t trust you because of what people like you have done,” your nervous system registers that.

What I think is actually missing from the conversation is empathy.

For example, women deal with an insane amount of pressure around their bodies, their age, and their emotions. They’re told they’re too much and somehow not enough, often at the same time. Past 30 and want a family? You’re desperate. Don’t want kids? Something must be wrong with you. Show your feelings? You’re too emotional. Your body doesn’t look a certain way? The world has opinions about that, too. The pressure around age, specifically, and the fact that so many women start feeling “old” in their thirties, is genuinely heartbreaking.

That’s a story we’ve been sold, and it does real damage.

Men have intense pressure too: the pressure to provide, to achieve, to have a certain physical presence. The impossible standard of being emotionally available while simultaneously being told that emotional expression makes them weak. So many men have never been given permission to simply feel, and that unprocessed pain shows up in relationship in ways that can look like unavailability or shutdown — but underneath, it’s often just a person who never learned that their inner world was safe to share.

Every single one of us is walking around with some version of the fear that we are not enough. The specific ways that fear shows up are different depending on who you are, how you were raised, and what the world has told you about yourself. But the fear itself? That’s universal. And if you can actually feel that in the person sitting across from you — instead of seeing them as the enemy — everything starts to shift. When we can hold compassion for those distinct wounds rather than weaponizing them against each other, we then begin to create the conditions for real intimacy.

You don’t actually believe you can make a relationship work.

This one is hard to admit because most people don’t even know they believe it. But if somewhere in your subconscious you’re convinced that you’re going to blow it, that you’ll get into something real and then somehow ruin it, you will find a way to make that true. Or you’ll never get close enough to find out.

Being in a relationship is genuinely confronting. It asks you to be less selfish. It asks you to say things that are uncomfortable, to stick around when your instinct is to leave, to let someone see the parts of you that you’ve spent a lot of energy hiding. And, most of us don’t have great models for what that actually looks like.

But here’s the thing: not believing you can sustain a healthy relationship doesn’t mean you can’t. It means you have to get honest about what your patterns are. What you’ve done in the past that didn’t work. What you’re afraid of. To communicate needs rather than suppress them. These are learnable skills. But they require us to first acknowledge that we need them.

Awareness is where all real change begins. Because as long as this belief lives only in your unconscious, it will run the show.

You’re wasting time in connections that aren’t meant for you.

I’ll say it plainly: Our nervous system finds familiarity comforting even when that familiarity is painful. This is why so many of us stay in relationships long past the point where we know, somewhere inside, that this person is not our person.

Every day we spend in a connection that keeps our system in chronic stress, and that erodes our self-worth, or asks us to be someone who we are not, is a day we are not available for something that could genuinely nourish us.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not talking about leaving at the first sign of difficulty. Real relationships require repair. They require us to stay in discomfort and work through it. But there is a difference between productive relational friction and an ongoing pattern of suffering that we keep hoping will resolve itself.

Sometimes the most loving thing we can do — for ourselves and for the other person — is to release the connection with honesty and care.

That’s not a fun sentence. But I really believe it’s true.

Look - if you’ve had a lot of pain in dating, I’m not dismissing that. I know it can be super hard out there. The goal here isn’t to minimize what you’ve been through. It’s about doing the careful exploration of how we might be getting in our own way.

The good ones are out there. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. But you have to do the work to be ready for them. And that starts with getting real about what’s actually going on beneath the surface.

That’s the work. It’s not always comfortable. But it’s worth it.

Love,
Jillian

P.S. Have you listened to this week’s episode of Jillian on Love? I sit down with Dr. Nicole LePera to talk about the powerful ways our past shapes how we think, feel, and relate to others, why we get stuck in patterns we don’t understand, and what it actually means to heal.

🎙️ Listen on Apple Podcasts

There is a question I hear in many forms, across many different people, in many different stages of life:

Why can’t I stop thinking about this person?

Why, after all this time, after everything I know about why it didn’t work, am I still here, still obsessing, still reaching, still unable to fully close the door?

I want to offer you a different way of thinking about this. Because in my experience, the obsessing is almost never really about the person.

The Person Is a Metaphor

When we cannot let go of someone — whether it is a relationship that ended badly or a person we barely knew who somehow hijacked our entire interior life — we tend to treat it as a problem of attachment. We analyze the connection. We replay the moments. We try to understand what it was about them, specifically, that made them so impossible to release.

But the person, in most cases, is not the real subject of the obsession. They are a symbol. A metaphor. A screen onto which we are projecting something that belongs entirely to us: a longing, a fear, an emptiness, a question about our own lives that we have not yet been willing to face directly.

Let me explain.

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