I’ve spent a lot of years learning about relationships.

Some of that came through education, reading, listening, asking questions and eventually doing the work I do today.

But a hell of a lot of it came from getting things wrong.

I’ve hurt people. I’ve been hurt. I’ve stayed in relationships. I’ve left relationships. I’ve ignored my own boundaries. I’ve crossed other people’s. I’ve mistaken being wanted for being valued and sexual connection for intimacy.

And I’ve learned that sometimes you don’t realize what a relationship was teaching you until years later.

We don’t enter relationships as blank slates.

Long before we meet the person we’re going to build a life with, we’re learning what love, sex, safety, connection and relationships are supposed to look like.

My early experiences affected how I saw myself, particularly my sense of worth. They affected how I viewed men, sex and relationships. And I carried those beliefs into adulthood without fully understanding how much they were influencing my choices.

I didn’t believe I deserved very much.

And when you don’t believe you’re worth very much, you can accept things that someone with a stronger sense of self might question.

You can also hurt people who love you.

That’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, but it’s true.

I was married for 23 years.

And when I look back, there were some really good years.

We laughed. We had fun. We built a life. My husband supported me in some extraordinary ways.

When I went back to school, I was working full-time and attending classes in Toronto at night. Twice a week, after working all day himself, he would get back into the car around nine o’clock at night and drive into the city to pick me up.

Through snowstorms, exhaustion and everything else.

He never told me to figure it out myself.

That mattered.

But other things were happening in our marriage too.

There was infidelity. There were lies. There were things on both sides that damaged trust and respect.

And over time, we developed increasingly separate lives.

He had his interests. I went back to school, started building a business, networking and changing in ways I don’t think either of us anticipated.

Eventually, I checked out.

By the end, one of the strongest feelings I remember was simply:

I didn’t feel like I mattered.

There wasn’t one terrible moment that destroyed our marriage.

We drifted.

And that’s one of the reasons I talk so much about disconnection now.

It doesn’t always arrive with a bang.

Sometimes it happens so gradually that you don’t realize how far apart you’ve become until you can barely remember what it felt like to be close.

Leaving didn’t magically fix everything.

By the time my marriage ended, I had already started doing a tremendous amount of work on myself. I was reading, learning, exploring my spirituality and intuition, looking at my patterns and trying to understand why I made the choices I made.

Eventually, I knew I didn’t want to be married anymore.

I also knew that if I stayed, I wasn’t going to become the person I was beginning to discover.

Our separation and divorce were relatively easy. We’re still friends today.

And it was still hard as hell.

I had more relationships after that.

And each one taught me something else.

One relationship in particular changed me enormously. He believed in me, encouraged me, pushed me outside my comfort zone and helped me face fears I might otherwise have continued avoiding.

I’m grateful for much of what I learned through that relationship.

But I also did things I didn’t particularly want to do because I wanted to please him.

At the time, I didn’t always recognize the difference between stretching myself for a relationship and abandoning myself to keep one.

I do now.

Relationships require compromise. They require us to stretch sometimes and consider another person’s needs instead of always choosing what’s easiest or most comfortable for us.

But boundaries matter.

A boundary isn’t a weapon we use to control another person.

It’s knowing where I end and you begin.

It’s being able to say yes because I genuinely choose yes, rather than because I’m afraid of what will happen if I say no.

And it’s giving the person I love exactly the same freedom.

My relationships also taught me that intimacy isn’t the same thing as sex.

Sex can be incredibly intimate.

It can also have very little intimacy in it at all.

Real intimacy requires vulnerability, emotional safety and trust.

It means allowing another human being to see parts of you that you don’t show everybody else and trusting that they won’t use those parts against you.

It means being able to talk about what you want. And what you don’t want.

It means being known.

And knowing the person beside you.

I’ve also learned that love requires give and take.

Two people cannot build a life together while both are insisting on getting their own way all the time.

Sometimes something matters enormously to me and barely matters to you. Sometimes it’s the opposite. And sometimes we both care deeply and want completely different things.

One of the questions I’ve learned to ask is:

Is this really a hill I’m willing to die on?

Because not every disagreement is.

Giving doesn’t mean becoming a doormat. Compromise doesn’t mean betraying yourself. And having boundaries doesn’t mean refusing to bend.

Healthy relationships require us to figure out the difference.

And through all of this, the most important relationship I’ve built has been the one I have with myself.

Today, I don’t need a man in my life.

I’d like one.

There’s a very big difference.

That doesn’t mean we need to become totally healed, very confident or completely self-sufficient before we can have a healthy relationship.

We grow through relationships too.

Other people have helped me discover parts of myself I might never have found alone.

But the better I came to know myself, the more clearly I could see what I wanted, what I didn’t want, what I was willing to give and what I was no longer willing to sacrifice.

And perhaps most importantly, another person’s desire for me stopped being the thing that determined my value.

Which brings me to why I do the work I do.

I started as a holistic nutritionist working primarily around weight loss.

That bored the hell out of me.

So I started studying hormones.

Then sex hormones.

Then hormones and sex.

Then sex and hormones.

And eventually I found myself going deeper into intimacy and relationships.

Looking back, it makes perfect sense.

The more I studied sex, hormones and the ways they affect our relationships, the more I understood that sex doesn’t exist separately from the rest of our lives … and neither does intimacy.

Our bodies, hormones, stress, history, beliefs, experiences, relationships and sense of self all come into the room with us.

And somewhere along that journey, my professional work and my personal life met.

I know what it feels like to become disconnected from someone you once built a life with.

I know what it feels like to leave.

I know what rebuilding afterward looks like.

And I don’t believe every relationship should be saved.

Sometimes leaving is the right choice.

But I also know that feeling disconnected doesn’t automatically mean the relationship is over.

Sometimes you still love each other.

Sometimes you’re not even sure anymore.

Sometimes you just know that after 10, 20, 30 or more years together, you’re not ready to walk away without understanding what happened to the two of you.

Because sometimes the love isn’t gone.

Sometimes it’s buried under years of stress, resentment, hurt, responsibilities, misunderstandings and simply getting through life.

Sometimes you’ve lost your way to each other.

And helping long-term couples understand how they drifted, and how to find their way back, is why From Roommates to Lovers exists.

If you and your partner have started feeling more like roommates than lovers, but you’re not ready to give up on what you’ve built together, my free 8-week email series, From Roommates to Lovers Again, will help you begin to understand how you got here and start finding your way back to each other.