🎙️Why Breakup Culture Isn’t the Whole Story- The Hidden Complexity of Modern Love
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Episode Description
You don’t actually want to leave—you just want rest. Somewhere between loving him and feeling depleted, breakup culture starts whispering that leaving is the only empowered option. In this episode, we unpack why that story isn’t the whole truth, and what modern love is really asking of us beneath the exhaustion.
Topics We Cover
Breakup culture and modern relationships
Feeling torn between staying and leaving a relationship
Why women feel emotionally exhausted in relationships
“He’ll never get it” and what that feeling actually means
Emotional maturity gaps in relationships
Why love feels confusing even when it’s real
Is leaving always the healthiest option?
Search Tags
breakup culture, modern love struggles, should I break up, feeling exhausted in a relationship, emotional labor women, relationship confusion, stay or leave relationship, modern relationship advice, emotional maturity gap, unhappy but still in love
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Transcript:
Hey, y'all. Okay? Today we are talking all about. Why breakup culture isn't the whole story. The narrative of modern love is so much more complex. There's a lot of hidden complexity here, and we are gonna dive straight into it. So I know this is gonna sound familiar to you, where there's this moment, usually late at night when the house is quiet.
And your nervous system finally has a second to speak to you, and this thought slips in almost against your will, where you think maybe he'll never fucking get it. Maybe he will never get it, not angrily, not dramatically, just tired. It doesn't come from a place of hatred. It's actually coming from a place of depletion.
You've explained yourself so many times. Your own words feel hollow at this point. You've softened your delivery. You've tried being direct, you've tried being patient, you've tried not caring so much, and somewhere along the way the cultural chorus just keeps getting louder. The, if you wanted to, he would, or you shouldn't have to teach a grown man or men.
Don't change or don't waste your best years waiting and suddenly leaving gets framed as empowerment, as clarity, as self-respect, and sometimes it is. Sometimes leaving is the right choice, but what no one talks about is how many women don't actually want to leave, or at least not fully. They just want rest.
They want to stop feeling like the emotional manager of the relationship. They want to stop translating their inner world into freaking bullet points. They want to stop carrying the invisible weight of what's missing. So breakup culture offers a super seductive promise. If you leave, the ache will end, and for some women it does, but for many others, the ache just shifts into something else.
It rests in another arena of your life. Because the ache was never actually about him. It was about being asked to hold a kind of relationship that our, our culture has never actually taught anyone how to sustain. And this is where I'm gonna slow down because the story that women are waking up and men are.
Behind is true, but it's also completely incomplete. And the story that love should be easy. If it's right, is comforting but misleading. What if the problem isn't that your relationship is broken? What if the problem is that we are trying to live inside a relational paradigm that is still in its infancy and calling ourselves failures when it hurt?
It's what if your exhaustion isn't a sign that you should give up, but a sign that you've been carrying something far larger than any one woman was ever meant to carry alone. So that is the doorway we are walking through today. Stay with me.
I'm going to help explain all of those.
Contradictory, confusing urges you have of staying or leaving of loving, but also being disappointed of trying so hard, but never really seeing change.
So here is the part that changes everything once you've actually let it land. The kind of relationship you are trying to have is basically brand new, not just to you, but to the world.
This version of love and partnership has never existed in human history. For most of human history, relationships were about survival. You paired up to eat, to have kids, to not die to get more property, but you did not expect your partner to understand your emotional triggers or to process their childhood wounds, to co-regulate your nervous system, to talk about feelings without shutting down to share domestic labor.
Equitably, stay sexually connected for decades and help you become your best self. That is like a lot. That's a lot to expect outta a partnership. I'm not saying you shouldn't, but stay with me. Let me explain what we're asking. Of. Relationships now would've been spread across an entire village before you would've had women for emotional closeness.
Elders for wisdom, community for support. Ritual for remaining lovers, for pleasure. Now we're like, Hey, can you do all of that for me forever? And also not be annoying? And when it doesn't work, we assume something is wrong with us or with him. But the truth is, we're in the early stages of a relational experiment.
No one prepared us for. Modern emotional love. The idea that your partner should see, you know you and grow with you is still in its infancy. We don't have models, we don't have training, we don't have shared language. We're just kind of out here winging it with nervous systems shaped by generations of survival, scarcity, and emotional shutdown.
I mean, just think about your parents for a moment. I'm guessing that you didn't receive. The best
paradigm for connection from their relationship. So when women say, I've outgrown him, or I'm doing all of the emotional work. Or I feel like I'm dragging him forward. That's not because men are inherently incapable. It's because we handed them a rule book that never taught them how to play this game. And then we told women they were crazy for being exhausted.
And this doesn't mean you should tolerate neglect. Obviously it doesn't mean you should stay in something harmful at all, but it does mean that the pain you're feeling isn't necessarily evidence that love is a lie. It's evidence that the structure we're living inside of is incomplete, and once you see that, the question stops being, what's wrong with him?
Or why am I still here and starts becoming? What kind of support would a relationship like this? Actually need to survive this magical, co-creative, egalitarian, mutually growthful relationship that has never existed before in human history. What would that actually need to survive? Because most couples aren't failing.
They're just trying to build something unprecedented without any scaffolding at all.
I.
When women say he'll never learn what they're actually naming isn't a man. They're naming the collapse of a story. The story that love should eventually work. The story that if you try hard enough, communicate clearly enough, evolve enough. The relationship will meet you there. And when that doesn't happen, something in the body kind of gives up.
Not loudly, not dramatically, but quietly. He'll never learn. Isn't a judgment, it's a grief response. It's what the nervous system says when it's been reaching forward for a long time with no reliable place to land. And here's the part that's rarely named. Women aren't outgrowing men. They're outgrowing a relational paradigm that never accounted for their full of aliveness.
For most of history, women's emotional and erotic needs were not the center of relationship. They were managed, contained, sacrificed, spiritualized, or ignored. So when a woman today says, I need more emotional presence, or I need depth, I need intimacy, that actually changes me. We're not asking for too much.
We're not asking for something that has. Never we're asking for something that has never been structurally supported, and when that need goes unmet, we individualize it. We make it about him or about her. He's emotionally unavailable, or I chose wrong, or I'm bad at relationships. But what's actually happening is larger than any one couple.
We're living inside a transitional moment in the history of intimacy right now, a moment where women's in their lives are no longer optional, but the structures to hold that truth haven't fully arrived yet. The norms to hold that truth haven't fully arrived yet.
The rhetoric on relationships has not caught up to us, so he'll never learn, becomes a story that helps us survive that gap because believing the relationship is impossible, feels safer than staying inside longing with no language for what's actually missing. This is where breakup culture steps in and says, don't ask questions, just leave.
Don't stay curious. Choose yourself, girl. Don't grieve. Upgrade, and sometimes that's necessary, but other times it's short circuit, something far more interesting because the question isn't, can he learn? The question is what kind of relationship would make learning possible at all? That's the inquiry. Most of us were never actually given permission to ask.
The truth is that we've been taught to think about relationships as something you either get right or fail at, compatible or incompatible, healthier, toxic. Secure or doomed. But that frame is actually too freaking small for what relationships actually do to us. A real relationship doesn't just support you, it initiates you.
Initiation isn't comfortable, it's not efficient. It doesn't happen on a timeline. Initiation is what happens when life puts you in a situation that exposes the exact places you've never had to grow before and doesn't let you bypass them.
That's what long-term relationship does. It brings your unfinished business to the surface, your defenses, your survival strategies, your old bargains about love. And for women especially, this is where the confusion really sets in. Because we were taught that maturity means communicating better and being self-aware and doing the work.
So when a woman grows and her partner doesn't immediately meet her, there. She assumes the relationship has failed, but initiation doesn't happen simultaneously. People wake up at different moments in different ways through different doorways, and modern culture has no tolerance for that and no roadmap.
For what to do. We want relationships that look evolved without going through the destabilization that actual evolution requires. So when the relationship starts to stretch us, instead of asking, what is this asking me to become, we ask, is this a sign I chose wrong? That question shuts the whole thing down because initiation requires staying present in uncertainty, in discomfort, and not knowing yet what the relationship is becoming.
This doesn't mean staying in something unsafe at all. It doesn't mean enduring chronic neglect, not even a little bit. It means not every moment of misalignment is a verdict. Not every developmental gap is a deal breaker. Not every struggle is a sign you've outgrown love itself. Some relationships aren't dying.
They're trying to initiate both people into a deeper adulthood without a script, without elders, and without a culture that knows how to guide that super complicated process. So women end up alone with the questions, is this growth or is this stagnation? Am I being patient or am I abandoning myself? And because we don't have a map for that territory, we reach for the loudest narrative available.
Break up, start over, try again. But initiation doesn't end when you leave. It just keeps following you because the work was never about him. It was about learning how to stay present in a living, evolving bond without disappearing, without dominating, without giving up on love too early or giving up on yourself.
This is the part of relationship no one teaches us how to recognize.
So this is the real reason why leaving isn't always the liberation we think, and why staying isn't weakness. There's a story circulating right now that says if it's hard, you're settling. If you're frustrated, you've outgrown him. If you're unhappy, the answer is to leave, and sometimes that's true. Leaving can be literally lifesaving.
It can be soul saving. It can be clarifying. It can be the first time a woman actually chooses herself in your lineage. But here's what we don't talk about enough. Leaving has become the only culturally sanctioned move for a woman who wants her pain taken seriously. Staying as framed as weakness, as low standards as fear.
So women learn to hide the truth. I still love him. I don't actually want a different life. I just want this one to feel alive again. And because we don't have language for that longing, we collapse it into a simpler story like he's holding me back. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Leaving doesn't automatically free you from the work, it just changes the setting.
If you haven't learned how to stay present in conflict, name your needs without disappearing, feel, desire without over-functioning, repair, without keeping score. Those patterns don't dissolve. When a relationship ends, they reappear with the different face. And this doesn't mean that staying is always the braver choice.
It means bravery isn't determined by whether you stay or leave. Bravery is determined by whether you're willing to stay in truth. And truth is rarely clean and tidy. Truth sounds like I'm not okay with how this is, or I don't know yet what I want, or I need something different and I dunno how to build it.
Breakup culture doesn't leave room for that kind of honesty. It wants a villain, a conclusion, a glow up arc, but real relational maturity live. In the in between and the willingness to ask, what is this relationship actually asking of me now? What am I avoiding by leaving? What am I betraying by staying, those questions don't have Instagram answers.
They require time and support, and a framework that understands relationship as a living system, not a pass fail test. And without that framework, women are forced to choose between two false options. Endure in silence or leave in certainty. But there is a third way and it requires a different orientation to love.
And here is the reframe that I want to give you today. Most relationships don't fail because people don't love each other. They fail because they don't have the infrastructure to hold. What love brings up. Love activates everything. Attachment, fear, desire, power, shame, longing, and we throw couples into that fire with no training, no shared language, and no rituals for repair.
No understanding of nervous systems. No cultural patience for learning curves. Then we're shocked when things fall apart.
So women assume the gap they're feeling is permanent, that if he hasn't changed by now, he never will. But what's often missing isn't desire or capacity. It's a shared container for growth. Without that container, effort turns into resentment, and communication turns into policing, sex turns into pressure, and then everyone blames themselves.
And women end up thinking, I'm asking for too much, and men end up thinking, I'll never get it right, and neither of those is true. What's true is this growth inside relationship is not intuitive. It's taught, it's practiced. It's reinforced through experience. When couples learn how to repair instead of retreat or slow down, instead of escalate, track the relationship instead of blaming each other.
Stay present. When it gets uncomfortable, something fundamental shifts the relationship, stops feeling like a problem to solve and starts feeling like a living thing. You're tending together. That's not romantic fantasy. That is developmental reality. And without access to that reality, breakup culture becomes the default.
Not because it's wiser, but because it's the only option anyone ever explained.
So I wanna leave space for a little bit of storytelling. Now I'm gonna give you a backstage pass into a moment in my own relationship, uh, that really changed the way I understand. The he'll never learn idea.
And this is the moment I saw the younger version of my partner. And I don't mean like metaphorically, I mean for a split second. It was like I could actually see it like his face softened into this younger. Much younger face, the one from before, he learned how to be guarded in my, in my mind's eye, I saw his small body like tiny, a little boy in the hallway or a kitchen and somebody's voice getting sharp, tension, filling the room and his whole system, doing what a kid's system does when it realizes, oh no, I'm not safe right now.
He didn't fight. He didn't argue, he didn't explain. He just turned away. He got quiet. He went somewhere inside of himself where no one could reach him, and suddenly I understood something that no amount of communication tips ever taught me. When I'm trying to talk to him about those moments, I'm not talking to a fully resourced adult all the time.
I'm talking to the part of him that learned a long time ago that closeness costs that being seen as dangerous, and that conflict means punishment. Here's the part that like really cracked me open. At the same time I saw my younger self, not in a like cute inner child way, in a visceral body way. I could feel her.
The part of me that has been tracking time, like it's a threat. The part of me that's like, how long is this going to take? Am I wasting my life? Am I going to end up like the woman before me strong and tired and swallowing my needs? If I don't fix this soon, I'm going to disappear. And I realized this dynamic isn't just women evolved, man behind it's too nervous system with two nervous systems, with two different survival strategies.
His says, hide, shut down, turn away, stay safe. Mind says, speed up. Solve it. Fix it. Now, don't lose your chance. So when I'm pushing for the conversation. When I'm pushing for the repair, it's not because I'm controlling, it's because a part of me is so terrified. And when he's shutting down, it's not because he doesn't care, it's because a part of him is terrified too.
And in that moment, something deeper than compassion happened for me, when I saw all of that, it wasn't poor him or I should be softer. It was more like. The spell broke. The spell that says, one of us is the mature one, and one of us is the problem. Instead, I could see like, oh, this is what love brings to the surface.
It brings up the unfinished places, not because the relationship is failing, but because intimacy is an arena where our old protective strategies, strategies finally get exposed. And that's when the real question became clear, not who's wrong, but can we stay present long enough to meet what's actually happening underneath the fight?
Okay. Can we build a kind of relationship where both of these younger parts, his and mine, don't have to run the whole show? Because when we can name that layer, you stop trying to win the argument. You stop trying to force growth, and you start doing something else entirely. You start creating conditions where two adults can come back online, where repair is actually possible, like real repair, where you feel loving afterwards.
Not secretly resentful where love isn't a performance, it's a practice. And that's when I felt it, not as a thought, but like a bodily truth inside of me. That pressure doesn't create evolution, presence does.
So if you've been listening to this and thinking, okay, but what does this actually mean? And what am I supposed to do? Here's what I wanna offer. The question isn't should I stay or should I leave? That question is too small. You are bigger than that. It assumes there are only two choices, endure or exit.
But there is a third path that almost no one names because our culture doesn't know how to hold it. And that path is learning how to be in relationship differently. Not harder, not longer, not more patient, not more feminine, not more
surrendered, not more relaxed, differently.
Most couples were never taught how to repair after rupture, stay connected during comfort, move through different erotic seasons, or let growth happen without one person carrying the whole thing.
And so when the relationship starts to strain, women assume it's a dead end.
But it's actually often a threshold.
What if you are actually living at the edge of a new relational paradigm that hasn't fully arrived yet?
One where love isn't about finding the perfect person, but about learning how to tend a bond that changes over time. One where women don't have to disappear to be partnered and men don't have to shut down to survive closeness.
So if you're sitting there thinking, okay, I feel seen, I feel less crazy, but what do I actually do with this? This is where I wanna be really, really clear. The answer is not, try harder, communicate better, be more patient, or quietly prepare your exit strategy. I know the women listening to this podcast are usually overfunctioners you're trying to fix.
The problem with every bit of strength that you have, but I'm here to tell you that what you need is a new relational container, not more effort.
That is why I created Reset your Erotic Rhythm, my couples course for.
Over-functioning goddesses who are desperate for their men to meet them. In their actual capacity, and they are so, so done with being the teacher in their relationship to try to make that happen. Because we all know that if we are participating in our relationships as a teacher or as a space holder or a therapist, we're not actually creating a new paradigm.
We're recreating the one that's existed for centuries.
Reset erotic rhythm or RYER exists because I keep working with couples. I kept working with couples who weren't broken. They were just trapped inside a paradigm that gave them no way forward. Women who were exhausted and starting to harden men who were confused, defensive, or shutting down, and both of them loving each other so deeply, and also losing the ability to feel close.
RYER gives couples what our culture never did. A shared rhythm, a shared language, and a shared developmental pathway. It slows the relationship down enough for both nervous systems to come back online. It is eight weeks long. It has three tracks,
the first and the second You are.
Learning separately. There's a her path and a him path, and you're getting the cultural education, you're getting the cultural deprogramming that we all need, the nervous system skills that we should have all learned.
And the relational
codes that are actually going to enable you to live inside the new paradigm that both of you are so longing for. Ryer teaches. Uh, reset Erotic rhythm teaches men how to stay present without being shamed, and it teaches women how to stop carrying without disappearing. It creates space for the parts of you.
We talked about this scared little boy, the time tracking little girl to stop running the show finally, because you're actually being held, both of you. And here's the part I really want you to hear this. Getting to where you wanna be is not about convincing your partner to do the work. It's about inviting the relationship into a dis different field altogether.
One where growth doesn't happen through pressure or ultimatums, but through attunement and repair and repeated lived experience of to safety and truth.
Reset erotic rhythm is for the relationship itself. It allows the space for you to grow because both people are being held by something larger than their individual defenses, and that's the loop that we get caught in so many times in relationships.
The feedback that I often get from this program, from the women that participate in it is. They, they are so grateful that someone else is telling their partner the things that they've been trying to communicate to them for so many years, and they're just really grateful for that.
So the way that this program is structured is, like I said, there's the first two tracks, which are you learning separately. A her track and a hymn track and the very last track. The third is where you two come together and you put into practice all of the individual skills that you have learned.
It is a beautiful two week long somatic reset. With facilitated practices for you, for your bodies to learn to trust each other again, which is a step that so many of us underestimate the importance of as we're trying to change our relational dynamic. You can talk about changing things all you want, but if your body isn't on board, you're not gonna see the changes that you're seeking.
This eight week. Live online course is my response to this breakup culture rhetoric. I see so many relationships that have so much good and have so much potential and so much intention that both parties are just pouring into it, and I see that they aren't being given the rules of the game.
RYER is the handbook for Modern love that we should have always inherited.
I. So if your body is feeling a quiet yet a yes, a sense of, oh, this is the conversation I've been waiting for forever, then consider this your invitation. You can find all of the details in the show notes.
I.
We begin February 23rd,
and if you are intrigued, don't wait to sign up.
The first 10 couples to sign up will get a discounted rate, which is something that I'm not going to announce anywhere else. That discount is only available for podcast listeners, so get in on the discounted rate before it increases after the first 10 signups.
Reset Ubo Rhythm was born from women I've worked with who feel exhausted just like you. Not because they don't want closeness or sex, but because they were doing all of the emotional and erotic labor to make it happen.
You don't need to abandon yourself to stay connected. You just need a new starting point and a little focus direction. I made this course just for you because you deserve to be met.
