My first love.
I was 18. He, 20.
I remember the day as if it had been branded into me: Amherst College, January, a hockey game. A few friends from Mount Holyoke (where I was a student), light snow, the quad.
Guy Stevens – god, even his name sounded like a leading man – ran ahead and flung himself into a snowbank like a joyful maniac.
And in that instant, my whole body lit up with certainty: That one. Mine. Forever. Children, marriage, destiny.
It didn’t matter that he was dating an older classmate named Mary. Or that he never called. I was smitten and convinced.
I schemed like a lovesick general.
Step one: Feed him scrapple, the bizarre breakfast meat from Pennsylvania he claimed to adore. I carted it home from break and invited him over. Victory: He came.
Step two: olive pizza. He’d told me once about a birthday tradition he shared with his friend Tom. One year, a pizza had mysteriously vanished and they concluded “the God of Olive Pizza” had claimed it. So for his next birthday, I sent him one with a note:
Happy Birthday from the God of Olive Pizza
He tracked it back to me. He called. Within weeks, he dumped Mary.
I had my first real boyfriend.
Our romance sprawled across six years – through my time at Mount Holyoke, summers when he delivered bread on the Jersey Shore to pay tuition, my semester abroad in London while he was in Paris learning French. (Because yes, I refused to let him do Europe without me. That’s called strategy.)
After college, we lived with friends in New York, and eventually, just the two of us in the West Village. We built a whole life…and I was still convinced he was my destiny.
That is, until we moved in together. Suddenly, his devotion – his fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning, his calm steady presence – became unbearable.
I couldn’t breathe in the face of that kind of love. It. Just. Didn’t. Compute.
Don’t get me wrong…Guy was magnificent. He really was. Attentive. Devoted. Steady in a way I had never known. But because I was waaay too f*cked up to receive that kind of love, I broke up with him without ever being able to explain why.
I only knew this: my nervous system didn’t recognize his devotion as safety. It needed something jagged. Something unpredictable. Something more like home.
So what did I do? I hid in plain sight. And how do you hide in plain sight?
You break up with your nearly perfect boyfriend. You ghost your family. You stop returning calls. You become friendly with coworkers but let no one in.
You journal like your life depends on it – filling notebooks with myth, dreams, and desperate attempts at meaning.
You research ancient Goddesses while your peers are busy getting married, climbing career ladders, popping out babies.
You make zero plans because plans require hope. You survive, but you don’t live.
(If this story is stirring something in you, I want you to know I’m answering questions about exactly how I unwound this pattern later today at noon. Get on the guest list here.)
So…how does a woman who never had love – never knew love in her own body – open herself enough to receive it? And how does she go on to get married, have a child, write 5 books, and build an empire?
Surprising answer: Orgasm.
I know, I know. It sounds crazy and unrelated. But I am telling you the truth.
Literally, the act of orgasm – as a discipline, as a practice – saved my life. It allowed me to relax, soften, and let love in.
That practice has become the basis for everything I now teach.
And it’s what I’ll be exploring with my co-teacher, Stephanie Redlener, in our brand new course, Orgasmic Edge – a five-month immersion for women who are ready to show their bodies a different relationship to power, love, and leadership.
In just a few hours at Noon ET, I’m sitting down with Stephanie to answer questions about Orgasmic Edge. We’ll be speaking into what this work actually asks of a woman. What it rearranges. What it makes possible.
If you want to be part of that conversation, there’s only one step left: Pause. Listen. And let your body answer the brief questionnaire below.
Orgasm made the life I live now possible. What might it do for you?
Come find out at noon.
With so much love and pleasure,
