The Burden of Having to Know What You Want

“Freedom saddles us with the burden of having to know what we want”

-Esther Perel

Right now, we’re in a time where the rules for relationships are rapidly changing, where space is opening up for new things, but where no one fully knows what these new things look like yet.

This can feel thrilling, like looking out at the Grand Canyon or beginning a road trip. It can also feel dizzying and terrifying, like there’s no solid ground to stand on.

Lots of people I talk to know that they want something different, in some way, but they struggle to articulate it. They have a vague sense that there’s a different way they want to love.

In the old way of doing relationships, we don’t have the burden of having to know what we want, at least not in a big sense. We have smaller choices, mostly the choice of partner that we will fit into an already-existing relationship structure.

If we start questioning the structure of relationships, all of a sudden we have much more freedom. And this freedom can be a burden. It can be overwhelming, it can be terrifying. How the hell do we know what we want? Especially when we come from a culture that doesn’t teach us many tools for figuring it out.

My new course, Inspired Loving, is meant to help bring structure to the experience of having so many options but no good words for any of them, or models for what they could actually look like.

The open-ness isn’t so scary if you know you have a means of navigating it. That means is your intuition. It can make the experience a frisson of open-endedness, rather than a fear.

The greater your ability to listen to yourself and trust what you find, the more clarity you’ll have about how you’d like to love. The clearer your vision is, the better you’ll be able to share it with others.

When you trust that you have the tools to listen to yourself, and when you trust that the things you find when you listen are possible to have, the freedom to know what you want becomes exciting. It becomes a dance with reality, becomes something that changes as you grow, as different people come in and out of your life.

Having to know what you want can be a burden, or it can be an opportunity.

Inspired Loving is $30 for the next week only, until October 25th. In each of the three sessions in this self-guided course, we’ll be diving into how to build up the skills of using your intuition to discover your unique way of loving, and the skills to express it to others.

Learn more about the course structure and get it here: