I know what it is to desperately want to be chosen.

My Story

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I understood relationships. I still could not stop losing myself in mine.

In the first year of my marriage, I was drowning. Almost no one could tell.

From the outside, I looked educated, self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and capable. I had read the books, done the therapy, and learned the language.

Still, the moment my husband pulled away, I came undone.

I wanted what so many of the people I work with want. I wanted to feel chosen. Cherished. Secure in the love I had built my life around.

And when I could not feel that security, I did what had worked for me everywhere else.

I tried harder.

I became more patient. More understanding. More available. More accommodating. I tried harder, then I tried softer. I became the perfect wife, or at least I tried to.

I was exhausted and terrified that it still would not be enough to make him choose me.

My entire life, I had been rewarded for effort, excellence, and anticipating what other people needed. That strategy built my career. It made me capable. It made me successful.

Then I carried it into love, as though intimacy were something I could earn through performance.

But love does not respond to performance the way a career does.

Beneath all the over-giving, understanding, fixing, and trying harder was something I could not yet see clearly:

I was so afraid of not being chosen by him that I kept choosing against myself.

Then my husband handed me divorce papers.

And eventually I had to face the question underneath everything I had been doing:

What if the answer was not becoming more lovable?

What if the work was learning to stop abandoning myself in order to control whether someone else loved me?

That did not mean deciding I no longer wanted my marriage. I did want it.

It meant learning to want it without disappearing inside the wanting.

I began learning how to stay with myself when I was scared. How to tell the truth instead of performing the right response. How to recognize what was happening inside me before automatically chasing, fixing, proving, or trying harder.

I stayed in the ring with myself first.

From there, my husband and I learned how to stay in the ring with each other. We learned to see the pattern between us, take responsibility for our own responses, tell deeper truths, and repair what had been ruptured.

Twenty years later, Jeff and I have built the most secure, connected relationship of my life.

I know what it feels like now to be deeply loved. To be considered. To be cherished. To be chosen.

But I also know something I did not understand when I was desperately trying to save my marriage:

Being chosen feels very different when you no longer have to abandon yourself to receive it.

And something else happened that I did not expect.

The security I built in love began changing everything else.

I chose differently. I received differently. I took different risks. I became more honest about what I wanted. The home we created, the work I pursued, the things I stopped apologizing for wanting, and the life I allowed myself to build all began to change with me.

That is when I understood something that now sits underneath all of my work:

Security was not the highest expression of me. It was the foundation that finally made more of me available.

That experience became the foundation of my work.