🎙️Modern Relationships Are Doing Ancestral Work
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Episode Description
You love him—and something ancient in your body is still tired. You can feel that what you’re carrying in your relationship is bigger than the two of you, heavier than language, older than this lifetime. In this episode, we open the door to why modern love is awakening ancestral work—and what that means for women standing at the edge of something new.
Topics We Cover
Why relationships feel exhausting for women
Why I feel like I’m doing all the emotional work in my relationship
Loss of intimacy in long-term relationships
Why desire disappears in healthy relationships
Emotional imbalance in heterosexual relationships
Feeling lonely in a committed relationship
Why modern relationships feel so hard
Search Tags
modern relationships, emotional labor in relationships, relationship exhaustion, women doing emotional work, loss of intimacy, loss of desire in long term relationships, feeling lonely in a relationship, healthy relationship but unhappy, emotional imbalance in relationships, why relationships feel hard, relationship burnout, intimacy issues in couples, modern love struggles, relationship dynamics women
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Transcript:
Okay. In today's,
in today, in today's episode, we are talking all about how modern relationships are doing deep, deep, ancestral work. If you are listening to this, there's a good chance you're inside of a relationship that from the outside, looks fine. Maybe even great. And yet there's this persistent feeling that something essential keeps slipping just out of reach, and that longing is what we are diving deep into today, where you love him, you're bonded.
There's history, loyalty, care, and still you find yourself doing things you never consciously agreed to do. Not with yourself, not with him. You're monitoring his mood, you're softening your tone before you speak, running a quiet calculus in your body about when and how to bring something up so it doesn't spiral.
You're noticing how often you're tracking the emotional weather for both of you. You might feel deeply connected and strangely untouched at the same time, like you're with someone but not quite met. Like intimacy has become something you manage rather than something you enter and rest into and desire.
You didn't lose it because you stopped loving him. It didn't disappear because your border broken or secretly uninterested. It went quiet because you're tired of holding the relational nervous system for two people.
And because you're a self-development goddess, you're not confused by any part of this. You're not clueless about any of it because you've read the books, you've done the work. You can name attachment styles, communication patterns, childhood wounds, you're emotionally. Super literate. You're perceptive, thoughtful, which is almost making all of it worse because now you're left wondering if I understand so much, why does this still feel so empty?
And when you go looking for answers, what you find is usually just noise, like and listen noise. One voice tells you to surrender into your feminine. Another says, the problem is polarity or masculine containment or divine feminine magnetism, divine masculine leadership. As if your very real lived relational exhaustion could be solved by performing a different energetic role, and that feels super hollow because you can sense clearly that this isn't about you not being feminine enough or receptive enough or soft enough.
Then you try talking to your friends and their relationship look exactly like yours. They're good men, decent partnerships, a lot of love and aqui, quiet resignation, that this is just how it is. Maybe the only woman you know who seems genuinely happy is divorced and traveling the world. And even then there's something lonely around the edges, something unresolved.
So the question becomes heavier, more existential. Where does good love actually live? Is there a place where intimacy doesn't cost this freaking much? And is anyone really doing things differently or are we all just negotiating the same disappointment with better language? And because you're as intelligent and as intuitive as you are, you've probably already sensed this, that the question you're actually asking isn't actually about relationship at all.
It's about something bigger. It's about why love something that matters this much. Something that shapes our entire nervous systems feels so hard to inhabit without disappearing parts of yourself. It's about why it feels like you are carrying something invisible, something weighty, something unnamed, and it's about why.
Despite all the noise, all the advice, all the suppo supposed answers, nothing quite touches the center of what you are living. That's what this episode is for. Not to give you another framework to try on, not to tell you what you're doing wrong, but to name what you're actually inside of and why it feels the way that it does,
and to create a space for you to rest into the truth that modern relationships are doing. Deep ancestral work.
All right, let's get into this. So usually at this point
you decide the problem is someone, sometimes that someone is you and you start running the internal audit. Maybe I'm not communicating clearly enough. Maybe I need to ask again, but nicer or simpler or with fewer words, or after he's eaten. You workshop sentences in your head like you're preparing a TED talk on your own unmet needs, calm, regulated, emotionally fluent, not accusatory, not dramatic, not shutting down a true vocal Olympics event.
And then other days it feels much. In other days it feels like the problem is him. You notice how much you are carrying, how often you're anticipating, reminding, tracking, adjusting. How you're the one thinking about the relationship as a living thing, while, while he seems vaguely aware that it exists and you swing into that more cynical, sharper inner voice.
Why am I the one doing all the work? Why do I care so much more? And why does it feel like I've emotionally aged 10 years and he's. Exactly the same. You might vent to friends. You might binge content that finally says the quiet part out loud about men and emotional labor and relational adulthood. And for a moment it's relieving because at least now the anger has somewhere to go.
But even that doesn't fully land because deep down, you know, it's not that simple either. You don't actually hate him, even if it feels like it sometimes you're not uninterested in partnership. You are not looking to reduce this to men or trash or women just have to accept less. That frame burns hot, but it burns out fast and you swing again, back to self-reflection, back to therapy language, back to wondering if this attachment stuff or trauma or desire issues or it's just what happens after the honeymoon phase.
You consider therapy again or a workshop, or you briefly consider living alone with a dog and an aggressively beautiful ceramic mug connect collection. All very reasonable responses. And here's the thing that matters in all of that, the fact that you oscillate between blaming yourself and blaming him doesn't mean you're confused or reactive or immature.
It means you're trying to make sense of something that genuinely doesn't fit inside the explanations you've been given, because what you're actually bumping up against isn't a personality flaw yours or his. It's this persistent feeling that intimacy has quietly turned into management. That love requires a level of vigilance.
You weren't told about that. Being good at relationships somehow means endlessly flexible, patient aware, and self-responsible. You often in ways that don't seem evenly distributed, and because you are sharp, you can feel that every explanation you try on is close, but not quite It. You are not really asking, how do I fix him or how do I fix myself?
You're asking why does love at this level of awareness feel like so much responsibility, so much weight, and so much confusion. Why does closeness feel like labor more than it does nourishment? Why does it seem like I'm evolving and the relationship is struggling to keep up?
And no one really has the answers to that that you found because culturally we're great at talking about romance and pretty terrible at talking about what happens after the women wake up emotionally and before relationships know how to meet them there.
The reason why this feels so intense for our generation is because what you are experiencing isn't just personal, it's historical, which sounds I dramatic, I know, but stick with me. For most of human history, relationships were built to hold emotional intimacy the way we, for most of human history, relationships weren't built to hold emotional intimacy the way we expect them to Now.
They were built to hold survival, stability, children labor, social standing, maybe companionship if we're lucky.
Love as in emotional attunement, mutual growth. Nervous system level, safety, erotic aliveness, and long-term partnership was not in the job description. That's a very recent assignment, and here's where things get spicy. For our generations, women woke up emotionally first, not because we're better, not because we're more evolved, but because the world required it.
We had to develop emotional awareness to survive inside systems that didn't protect us. And that harmed us. We had to read rooms, anticipate moods, manage relationships, translate feelings. Emotional intelligence wasn't a bonus skill, it was a survival one.
So now here you are where you have the language, the awareness, you can sense nuance, dynamics, undercurrents. You can feel when something is off long before it becomes a fight. And you're in a relationship with someone who may be loving decent, well-intentioned, but was never asked to develop those same muscles in the same way.
So intimacy becomes asymmetrical where you are not just in the relationship you're holding it to, you're tracking it, you're thinking about it as a living system, and that creates a very specific kind of exhaustion when it you're doing it alone.
This is also why so much advice feels off because it's either assumes both partners are operating at the same level of emotional development or quietly expects women to keep stretching, softening, adjusting, and being the bigger person. Neither of those actually names. What's happening, what's happening is that we are in a relational transition period.
Where the old models don't work anymore, new models haven't fully landed yet, and relationships are where that tension shows up first.
And when you don't have a map, it's very easy to assume you're lost, but you're not. You're just early.
And here's the pivot. I want you to really feel in your body
if you're multitasking.
If you're driving,
if your attention's somewhere else, I want you to come back to me and truly hear this.
What you are experiencing in your relationship isn't about wanting more. Exactly. It's about being asked to hold more than one nervous system was ever meant to carry alone. Because when you look honestly at your situation, what's actually happening is this, you are likely more emotionally literate than the women who came before you.
Not because they didn't care, not because they failed, but because they couldn't afford to know and act on what you know now. You have language your mother didn't have or wasn't allowed to speak. You can sense emotional undercurrents your grandmother had to ignore and you can demand something different.
You are aware of tone, pacing, repair, safety, nervous system states, things that were never allowed to be named or let alone prioritized. Just one generation, just a few generations ago.
And your partner who may be loving, kind, and trying is still often shaped by older masculine conditioning. That's the soil he was grown out of. It was conditioning that rewarded stoicism, that trained emotional suppression as strength that never asked men to become fluent and relational interiority. And I think we all assume that we have evolved past this as a society, and I see that we clearly have not.
Women are still shocked to see the same problematic dynamics existing in their relationships that they saw in their parents and their grandparents because the truth is relationships haven't caught up.
You are asking for something historically new,
and if we zoom out for a second, this starts to make a lot more sense because for most of human history, relationships were about survival, structure, duty, economics, raising children, staying alive. Emotional intimacy was a very distant bonus, but not the foundation. Now we're asking relationships to do something radically different than we ever have before.
We want emotional presence, mutual regulation, erotic aliveness over time, safety and desire. Growth without self abandonment. And here's the inconvenient truth. Our bodies don't evolve overnight and neither does the culture.
I. And relationships become the pressure point where unprocessed emotional inheritance shows up. Old survival strategies collide with new expectations. Desire collapses under invisible labor. Women become the emotional adults by default.
Because remember, for a long time, a woman's physical safety depended on being partnered. Her financial stability depended on staying. Her social survival depended on not rocking the boat. So emotional attunement wasn't about intimacy, it was about management. Reading moods wasn't a relational skill. It was a safety strategy, and softening wasn't a feminine essence.
It was risk mitigation. Suppressing desire wasn't prudishness, it was protection. If your grandmother learned to stay quiet, it wasn't because she lacked a voice. It's because having one could cost her everything. If your mother learned to be competent, responsible, endlessly capable to hold the family together emotionally while minimizing her own needs.
That wasn't martyrdom, that was adaptation.
There were wars, economic depressions, limited choices, limited rights, limited exits, and men too were shaped by trauma, scarcity, and emotional shutdown that no, no one ever named women learned to compensate for that shutdown. Not consciously, but somatically. So the relationship itself became the container for unprocessed nervous systems.
No one was asking, how does a desire move here? Or is intimacy, is this intimacy mutual? Or what does my body actually want? They were asking, can we survive? Can we keep the family intact? Can we get through this? And that matters because those strategies don't just disappear when conditions change, they get passed down.
They live in posture and tone and the way women still instinctively smooth things over. And the way men still default to emotional containment rather than expression. So even though you now have choice language agency independence, like I said, your body is still carrying wisdom that was forged under very different conditions and exist today.
And that's why this doesn't feel like a simple mindset shift. Because on a nervous system level, love used to be dangerous. Desire used to be destabilizing. Honesty, used to be risky. Dependence used to be unavoidable. And now very suddenly in historical terms, we're asking relationships to become places of emotional truth, erotic vitality, mutual presence and nervous system, safe safety.
And of course it feels really confusing. Confusing. Of course, there's friction. Of course, your body feels like it's running on an old operating system in a new world. You're not just renegotiating intimacy with your partner, you're renegotiating your relational emotional inheritance.
And your job is actually to complete something, to take the intelligence that once kept women safe and let it evolve into something that can now support, pleasure, choice, and reciprocity. That's why this work doesn't feel optional to you. It's not drama, it's not dissatisfaction, it's not being too much.
It's your body recognizing that the conditions have finally changed and asking whether love can change with them. And that's the moment we're standing in right now.
And moving beyond generations past to the messages we receive about love right now. Uh, we were given just absolutely terrible models of love, like aggressively unhelpful models. We were fed Disney rom-coms, heteronormativity, purity culture, hookup culture, the cool girl archetype, the ride of D myth. The idea that love means endurance, loyalty, and being chosen at all costs.
And when you look closely, these stories taught us a very specific curriculum. They taught us how to be chosen, but not how to choose. How to perform inti intimacy, but not how to feel it, and how to be sexually available, but not erotically alive. They trained women to become desirable, flexible, emotionally fluent, low maintenance, and endlessly accommodating.
And they trained men often without malice, just omission to stay emotionally contained, outcome oriented, and avoidant of interior complexity.
And then in relationship, we end up in a collision of scripts where one person is unconsciously playing caretaker, translator, emotional guide. The other is often playing good guy, provider, not doing anything wrong.
And this gap becomes even more accelerated when erotic disconnection starts to come into our relationships and. Oftentimes we've inherited this from our culture and our lineage as well. We inherited the nuclear family as an isolated economic unit. The myth of female sexual dysfunction, the loss of communal models of intimacy and partnership.
We inherited sex education that was rooted in shame, risk in biology, not connection, consent, or pleasure. We lost rites of passage. We lost elders modeling, relational repair. We lost shared language for desire and boundaries and erotic truth. So most of us grew up without erotic fluency. So we guess we perform, we fawn, we fracture, and then we wonder why intimacy feels confusing or pressured or brittle.
It's not because you're doing it wrong, it's because you were never shown how to do it relationally. Because you are the first of your lineage to ask for more. You're the first generation asking for co-regulation, co-creation, intimacy. That doesn't cost you yourself. You are the bridge generation. You know what you don't want, but you don't always have a clear inherited.
But you don't have a clear inherited model for what you do want. So you're parenting your inner child, unpacking trauma, learning emotional literacy, building intimacy skills while doing this in real time with a partner who may not speak the same language yet. So of course there's rage and grief and tenderness and confusion living side by side.
And in my sessions, this is at this point in the conversation, this is where we usually talk about erotic rhythm, which is not about sex tips or libido hacks or novelty or spice. Um, the concept of erotic rhythm is about how safety and aliveness learn to coexist again. Together. It's about how bodies relearn pacing instead of pressure and polarity instead of performance and responsiveness instead of obligation.
And it's a difference between intimacy that has to be managed and intimacy that moves and evolves and regenerates on its own. A simple way to say this is that erotic rhythm is what happens when love stops being something you carry and starts being something that moves between you. And here's where the lineage piece quietly clicks and clicks into place across generations.
Rhythm was disrupted. Survival required suppression and desire learned to be dangerous, indulgent or secondary, aliveness had to be contained to keep families functioning. So what you are doing now, whether you've named it this way or not, isn't just about your relationship. It's about restoring rhythm where it was lost.
And I want this next part to really land in you. So again, come back to me. If you are
multitasking, I want you to know that caring this much doesn't mean you are demanding or unrealistic. What it means is that your generation. Is capable of changing it for your entire lineage.
So once you see all of this, once you feel how big this actually is.
There's usually a follow up question that's something like, okay, but what do I do?
Or maybe it's a more urgent, where does this get held? How does this actually change?
And to this, I wanna say really clearly that this kind of relational shift does not happen through effort, through brute force. Because in reality, you are being invited into something that your body physically can't hold by itself. Not even two bodies can hold it by themselves. This is. Lifetime work you're being invited into, and it's cultural tectonic plate shifts that are manifesting themselves in your relationship and because of the bigness of this work that is.
The bigness of this work is something that, uh.
The bigness of this work is what has inspired me to create a larger container for this past my individual one-to-one client sessions, because if we are going to. Reset the rhythm of an entire culture. We need community and we need to see this new reality that we're all birthing collectively reflected back to us.
We need to see that it's possible, and that's why I created my eight week live online course online program called Reset Erotic Rhythm.
Which is a guided relational reset designed specifically for couples who are living at this edge. We've been talking about where love is real, where commitment is there, where awareness is high, and yet intimacy, desire and emotional reciprocity feel strangely out of reach
and. In this container, you are not the one who teaches your partner. That's explicitly not your job. Your participation in the program is actually you creating space to rest and receive and actually start stepping into the new paradigm that all the generations past have created the way for us to birth now.
You get to love in a completely different way than any woman in your line has ever had access to before. You get to participate in an egalitarian, mutually growthful partnership, just like your soul has always been longing for. And I am the one that holds the growth container for your partner because we have men's calls and we have women's calls.
And after both part of the couple is fed and nourished and they have their specific growth that they need, we then come together in this relational field again as a group. And I can't tell you how magical it is doing this work in community.
Part of the oppressive systems at play is convincing us that we are alone and that the thing that we are dreaming into existence is not possible when we do this work together.
We see so clearly that that's not true, that we have sisters and neighbors and brothers in this. And speaking just totally honestly, this container in the past has been such a beautiful opportunity to, to also for the women to see that men are trying so hard and. It creates so much more room for true empathy and compassion and slowness and space in a way that it's just hard to get in your relationship in isolation.
Relationships didn't exist in isolation like this before. They never have. No relationship is meant to exist in isolation. It's always a part of a community we're supposed to have.
A dynamic and intricate root system that nourishes the union, and that's exactly what this program is.
We begin February 23rd, and that is when the doors will close.
If you have curiosity about the container or you're on the fence and thinking about joining, do not wait because after the first 10 couples join, the price will increase, and I am only announcing that on this podcast for everyone else on my website. The price is just going to increase after the first 10 couples.
So that this discount opportunity is unique to you listeners as a giant, huge mega. Thank you for being here with me,
and I have a feeling that this program is going to sell out. So if you're on the fence, don't wait. Go ahead and take the leap.
There's so much good material in here. There's a lot of good space hold. There's so much good material in here. This space is going to be held exquisitely if I do say so myself, and we will have past pen part participants on the calls with us too. People that have experience on this journey are relational stewards.
And
you'll really have an opportunity to feel like you're being supported in this really intricate dance of metamorphosis that you are in right now.
If this episode felt like someone finally named the thing you've been living inside, if it felt like relief rather than in if it felt like relief, finally it means your body already knows. This isn't about trying harder or letting go more, or being more feminine, or being more patient, or more anything.
It's about finally being met by something that can hold the scale of the giant thing that you are carrying. Reset erotic rhythm. My eight week program exists for this exact moment in history for couples standing at the edge between inherited patterns and something genuinely new for women who aren't willing to shrink their desire for real intimacy, but are also done carrying the burden of making it happen alone.
You are not imagining this better kind of love, you're responding to the fact that the conditions have finally changed and this is the work that teaches love how to change with them.
All the details are in the show notes, and I'll see you next time.
