So as many of you all know if you're up to date on the podcast I recently got married and of course when you get married you are thinking a lot about romantic love and what it means to make a romantic commitment and you know the kind of love that you have for someone who is a romantic and sexual partner who's also your family

it's just like a lot of different conflicting kinds of love. But love to me is so much more than that and somebody

asked me the other day what was the biggest shift that I made in my dating life in order to find

this partnership because my dating life was a dumpster fire for, I don't know,

decade or two before that.

And I think that they thought that I was going to, like, I don't know, say something

about like getting good at spotting red flags or I don't know some kind of

tactical something or other or something at least like to decide I was worthy of being a

partner or who knows I'm just speculating now what they might have been

imagining. But what I told them, which is both ironic and perfect, I think, is that the shift that was the

biggest for me was not about dating at all. It was actually a moment in which

I recognized how much love was already available to me in my life and how I was like a starving person who was ignoring a whole

pile of food just pining over one specific meal that I didn't have yet and that doing that and like fetishizing that specific kind of love was actually blocking me from finding it and experiencing it.

And so kind of reflecting on where I started in this journey and where I've come through my wedding and being on my honeymoon, which we took a group honeymoon, so we took friends and family with us on honeymoon, because that's really what we wanted both of us with my partner and

I when we I guess my husband and I now when we talked about our wedding the thing

that mattered the most of us was having time with our loved ones that we don't get to see that often.

And that was like our biggest priority and we built everything else around that.

And so we took some of them on our honeymoon.

And having that experience, seeing my beloved friends and his beloved friends and our families all meet and

connect and love each other just has made me so grateful for all the love in my life of which yes

my romantic relationship is one part but is by no means the whole thing or maybe even the

majority of it.

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