What You Wish For

For the person who buys all the books, and wonders why nothing is changing. For the partner who gets handed a book to read and finds themselves nowhere in it.

What You Wish For argues we've been thinking about passion and security backwards.

We tend to think of them as a tradeoff. Get too comfortable, too known, too settled, and something vital drains out of the relationship. Most of us have absorbed this story without quite deciding to believe it.

Drawing from attachment science, emotionally focused therapy, and ten years of clinical work with couples, the book makes the case that emotional security doesn't dull desire. It creates the conditions for it. When people feel genuinely safe with each other, they can keep expanding: taking risks, discovering new parts of themselves, bringing that evolution back to a bond alive enough to receive it. It's disconnection that narrows us, not closeness.

The book explores attachment, intimacy, conflict, longing, and the ways our relationships shape who we become over time, and asks what people are really seeking beneath the fights, the distance, and the desire that won't quite go away.

Forthcoming.