A hiring manager I know once described her inbox on a Monday morning: fourteen unread emails, eleven of which opened with some version of “I hope you are doing well” or “I hope this email finds you well.” She told me she’d started skimming past that exact sentence automatically, the same way most people scroll […]
A client of mine, Deepa, spent most of a session trying to explain why she felt unhappy in a relationship she couldn’t actually point to anything wrong with. “He’s not cheating. He’s not mean to me. He just… doesn’t really do anything,” she said. “I plan every date. I text first every time. If I […]
A friend of mine described her ex once, only half-joking: “He was fine to look at, but honestly, the way he explained things — that’s what got me.” She used the word “sapiosexual” to describe herself a beat later, then immediately followed it with, “wait, is that even a real thing, or did I just […]
A client of mine, Rohan, spent three days trying to write one text. He’d typed and deleted at least a dozen versions — some too dramatic, some so vague they barely counted as a confession, one that was, in his own words, “unforgivably cheesy.” By the time he showed me his drafts, he wasn’t stuck […]
A client of mine, Priya, came to a session frustrated after four months of seeing someone. “We go out every weekend, he introduced me to his roommate, we text every day,” she said. “But when my sister asked if we’re dating or if he’s my boyfriend, I genuinely didn’t know what to say.” She wasn’t […]
A client of mine, Aarav, had been talking to a woman he liked for almost two months — daily texts, inside jokes, the kind of rapport that made his friends ask “so are you two together or what?” He knew he wanted to tell her how he felt. He just couldn’t figure out how to […]
A reader wrote in a few months back with a question that comes up more often than people admit out loud: her coworker had mentioned, almost casually, that she was “seeing a sugar daddy.” The reader had heard the term for years — in memes, in Reddit threads, in the occasional Netflix subplot — but […]
Selene remembers a client who came in holding her phone, scrolling through a folder of screenshotted quotes she’d saved over two years. “I didn’t even realize what I was doing,” the client told her, “until I looked back and every single one was about someone making themselves small so someone else could feel big.” That’s […]
