Why most dating and relationship advice you’ll see out there is garbage - and how I can help you unlock your full relationship potential
Bold statement, I know.
The problem with most dating and relationship advice that you’ll see out there - especially on the internet - is that it’s garbage.
How?
Let me count the ways - honestly.
I discovered this the hard way. Both when I was single throughout my 20s and early 30s, and when I was both in my painful first engagement, trying desperately to figure out what the heck was happening that made me feel so bad. I was a wizard at looking for online support. Trust me.
As someone who had grown up reading most of the self-help books out there (I was 12 years old when I read Susan Jeffers ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway guide to love’), and having worked in behavioral science, I had tons of resources at my fingertips. When instagram became a thing, I was a pro at trawling through endless relationship and dating coaches, screenshotting their tidbits of advice, and passive aggressively sending them to my partner at the time trying to make things better (terrible). I got into podcasts, listening to ones aimed at women, aimed at men, both, and doing my best to arm myself with knowledge and wisdom that would help me find the One. I was hooked on reality TV shows, Sex and the City, and whatever else I could binge on that would help me understand ‘love’.
I spent my late teens and 20s in therapy, working on ‘healing’ my abandonment wound from my high-achieving father who was absent throughout much of my childhood, busy working and providing for the family. I attended retreats and meditated, adopting all the in vogue self-help practices I could muster.
In my 30s, when my first engagement wasn’t going so well, I dived into marital counselling with him. We had separate 1:1 sessions with the counsellor, and whilst I learned a heck of a lot, it didn’t really help. If anything, it made me feel worse. It felt like I was drowning in the problem, picking it apart, analysing it, but powerless to solve it.
I was fraught. Nothing seemed to be giving me the clarity on the situation I needed, and what the heck to do.
I was glued to the instagram reels, reading blogs online, frantically googling ‘what to do if my engagement isn’t going well’. I delved deep into Reddit forums, reading posts on Weddingbee and desperately trying to piece it all together.
It was awful.
Whilst I felt like I was making some sort of progress - I was keeping ‘busy’ by researching and reading and listening…I wasn’t actually solving anything.
I was actually doing the worst thing I could do.
I was doing, what I call now, the scatter-gun approach.
Firing myself off on all corners, digesting every bit of information I could trying to figure it all out for myself, without any proper, in depth, real, tangible support.
I felt weirdly confident (I ‘knew’ a lot), but also confused, overwhelmed, and exhausted.
In retrospect, I now understand why.
The problem with the scattergun approach, is that it creates a false sense of security and comfort - that we are somehow solving things, fixing things. But we aren’t. All we’re really doing is digesting a ton of pop-culture soundbites from often extremely poorly researched (if researched at all) resources.
The reality is that most dating and relationship coaches have no backing, no training, and aren’t actually even in a relationship (seriously). They give out advice based on their own personal experience, without any scientific backing, psychological proof, or evidence that it works. Everyone is seemingly a ‘trauma’ expert (kill me now) and throwing out cookie-cutter little snippets like, ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ to find love is the norm.
Honestly, it doesn’t work.
It’s superficial, uninformed, not backed by science and often just the regurgitation of some toxic pop culture narrative that has become a sexy thing to say. ‘He’s just not that into you,’ ‘you have an anxious attachment’, ‘she’s a narcissist’ and bla bla bla.
The problem with a ton of this stuff too, is that it’s all so unbelievably niche - focusing on one TINY area of relationships (‘trauma’ the ‘somatics’, ‘attachment’, ‘polarity’, ‘communication’ or whatever the heck it is) that it’s just a load of incongruent, soundbite, narrow bits of info out there - that don’t actually work together as a whole, half the time, and don’t make sense when we pull them all in together.
Meanwhile, therapy, whilst it’s got its merits for bringing awareness to the problem, didn’t really fix things either. For years I was in therapy talking, talking, and talking about the problem, wading through its depths, but not actually solving anything. I had excellent self-awareness, sure, but did I know how to change? Heck no.
In the end, what really moved the needle for me was:
Finding an excellent relationship coach who taught me how to discern what was mine and what was my partners to own, so I could focus on what I needed to change;
Learning the behavioral science of what a healthy relationship looks like - with myself, and with a partner.
And I was lucky.
I worked in behavioral science, for a start - so I already had a shrewd head on my shoulders, but I’d also studied the gender dynamics between masculinity and femininity at Oxford for my Masters, so a lot of the polarity BS that I would see in the dating world, I knew was a load of superficial junk (and I do believe in polarity principles but only in a certain, very specific context - which is WIDELY misunderstood by most practitioners).
So that’s when I decided I’m going to enter this industry and do my damned best to change it.
So what I really wanted to do, and what my mission is, is to:
Create an end to end solution for taking folks from feeling disheartened in their dating and relationships, to becoming successfully in love -
In a way that is seamless, integrated, and coherent, taking them through the necessary 3 phases we all have to go to in order to find healthy love.
All the steps are included here and it’s all one, seamless journey - so you don’t have to be scrambling around online trying to find this and find that. It’s all there. End to end solution. Seamless.
Thank me later ;)
And within that seamless end to end solution, I wanted to infuse as many science-backed tools and techniques as I could, to ensure that everything actually flipping works.
So that this isn’t just some sexy little soundbites that make a nice podcast, or instagram reel, but actually legit, proven, evidence-based solutions to finding healthy love — fast.
How do I do this? Well, you can watch my video in the comments to learn more (and I don’t want this newsletter to get too long), but in sum, it looks like this:
There are 3 core phases:
Liberation: using techniques rooted in neuroscience and psychology, I help you free yourself from the unconscious blocks that prevent you from finding the healthy love you deserve - fast.
Behavioral Science: I help you discover what you really need in a long-term relationship to be truly happy, and how to create that - as shown by science.
Integrity: to create your ultimate relationship, you need a strategy - and one that works with your busy schedule. I help you make a tangible, realistic plan that lets you harness the science of attracting your best partner now.
If this sounds good to you, drop me a DM with ‘Behavioral Science’ and I’d love to talk.
Big hugs,
Katarina
P.S. I haven’t talked about this much but I also wanted to add in that a lot of the relationship coaches out there are….honestly, just outdated. There is a lot of OLD knowledge that doesn’t really work with the modern world of online dating, AI, insanely busy schedules, people living on a plane half the week, and being a global citizen. For this very reason, clients want to work with me because I am under 40, a 2x entrepreneur - and happily married (and have been engaged twice - ha), so I get what it takes to create a healthy, thriving relationship whilst juggling the busy demands of the modern day. I’m all about the latest, cutting edge behavioral science and the most contemporary techniques that work, rather than rehashing old, outdated stuff that honestly, isn’t context appropriate anymore.
