Admiration

Why the path to finding your person begins with finding yourself and what it looks like when you do. 

Elizabeth Marshall ~ Founder, WhoU

When someone schedules a dating consultation, it is often because they are hurting. They feel the ache of loneliness like an endless crevasse of time stretching out in front of them, and they want it shortened. They want a five-step plan to find their person. Photos, check. A great wardrobe, check. The right introduction to seal the deal. I wish it were that simple.

Let me back up. As someone who spent her early years searching for people, places, and things to fill the void of despair and loneliness, I know this feeling intimately. I mastered the art of escapism in my youth, by any means available. So I can offer both empathy and understanding when it comes to the very human impulse to alter our circumstances through external forces.

In my years as an artist, my work with pottery taught me intimately about the nature of repair. When cracks form, smoothing them with water can create a temporary facade that looks seamless to the observer. The surface appears perfectly pristine, but as the pot dries, the veneer often settles and gives way to reveal the crack below. This describes not only a piece of pottery whose mending might have been better served by a different approach, but also a helpful metaphor for our hearts.

The problem is that moving on from a break-up or a loss takes real time and real work. You can have the perfect veneer of great photos, the right look, and a polished profile, and still not be ready. You may have moved through the stages of grief. You have been sad, angry, and bargained with yourself and with them. You have made peace. And yet there are cracks beneath the veneer.  A little more investment in your own story and healing might serve you more than any dating app ever could.

Kintsugi, meaning "golden joinery," is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Rather than hiding the damage, the technique highlights the fractures as an essential part of the object's history. The philosophy is that there is resilience and beauty in imperfection. The broken places, repaired with care, become the most luminous.

That said, I want to be clear. I don't believe there is a perfect time to date. We are always evolving, and waiting until we have it all figured out isn't realistic. That kind of thinking could cause us to miss some of the most meaningful connections of our lives. Often it is within relationships themselves where we do some of our deepest growing, practicing, and healing of old wounds alongside a partner, becoming more fully ourselves in the process. So friends, let's mend our hearts intentionally and beautifully, with gold, in the Kintsugi way, allowing the crooked wounds and jagged tears to become helpful reminders and deep sources of empathy and wisdom. Let them become guides for building a beautiful next chapter and a luminous part of our story.

Years ago I worked with a man who had many genuinely wonderful qualities. He was kind. He was devoted to his children. He loved helping others. And yet he seemed to attract partners who took advantage of that kindness. He chose relationships where the scales of care were chronically unbalanced, and after those people had taken what they needed, he was left alone. Again.

The problem wasn't his heart. It was that he didn't know his own passion, purpose, or the values that were meant to guide him. As someone who has spent a lifetime doing reflective work, I have come to understand how easy it is to drift through life without the anchors of knowing one's passion, purpose, and values.

As we talked, I asked him about his hobbies. He said he didn't really have any and that he was fine doing whatever his partner wanted. He just wanted to find his person. I could feel his loneliness, the deep and natural human ache for partnership. We are built for community. But as I gently pressed further, we found something else: he had few close friendships and no real sense of what lit him up. The cracks were there.

So that is what we did. Instead of smoothing over the fractured places with a veneer of quick fixes and dating strategies, we slowed down. We searched for his purpose and passion, traced the places where along the way he had been shamed or discouraged, and looked for where the gold needed to go.

We devised a quiet plan: make some friends,  find a hobby that genuinely excites him, build community, and discover what his guiding values actually were. The goal was that when the time came, he would be able to invite someone into a life full of joy and abundance rather than loneliness.

Then there's Jeannie. She worked, really worked, for three years. She built her world intentionally, with friendships, hobbies, and a therapist who helped her unearth deep relational patterns that had kept her stuck. We talked along the way about the fact that finding her person could happen quickly or take a long time. We even discussed that building a full, beautiful life with community at the center was, in itself, a worthy outcome regardless of her eventual status.

Jeannie had her own particular blind spot: her picker kept leading her to unavailable men. We talked about that too. And she kept going and kept growing.

Then one day she called me. A man in her office, someone she had known for years without giving much thought to, stopped by her desk and told her he admired the way she had decorated her space. And at that moment, an internal light bulb turned on.

Jeannie was someone who had discovered, over those three years, that beauty was central to who she was. She visited museums and wandered through gardens. She sought out craft cocktails and stayed for sunsets. She had learned to be genuinely mindful, to take in beauty as a practice, not an afterthought. And we had identified that among her core values, alongside family and justice, was this deep need to find and honor beauty in all things.

When Joe noticed what she valued, she recognized something. This might be a person worth knowing. Maybe he would just be a good friend, but she understood that admiration rooted in values was a lead worth following. So later that week, she stopped by his desk and asked him for coffee.

It wasn't fireworks at first. It was something quieter and far more lasting.

Over casual coffees and then real dates, she observed him, both in what he said and what he did. She noticed that he volunteered to mentor teenagers. She felt the steady, intentional way he pursued her. And instead of reaching for the usual exciting but unavailable type, Jeannie and Joe built something on mutual admiration. They are still together today. And yes, the sparks did eventually fly.

Values are the foundation of our happiness and purpose, but the sweet spot for lasting connection with another person is the mutual admiration of what lights them up and guides their life. When we find genuine admiration for those things in someone else and feel that admiration reflected back, it fulfills our deepest desire to be truly seen.

Here is what I know to be true: knowing yourself, your purpose, your passion, and what genuinely lights you up is the foundation. Not a prerequisite to check off a list, but a living, ongoing practice. And it is deeply attractive. When you are living a life where you are fulfilled, people feel it. Whether it draws a circle of great friends or one remarkable person, they see that you haven't simply smoothed over your hurt and fractured places. They see that you have tended to them carefully, with gold, and that the result is something radiant.

So what drives you? What brings out your light? Are you a humanitarian, a scholar, a person who comes alive in deep conversation or a quiet walk in the woods? Is your greatest care for your family, for leaving the world a little better than you found it? Those things are admirable. They are genuinely, deeply attractive.

Let's find that gold. Let's build connections based on that.

Who are you when no one is asking anything of you? What occupied your thinking the most this week, and why? Where have you been shamed or discouraged from following your passions? What does a life built from abundance rather than loneliness look like for you? What would you want someone to genuinely admire about you?

If you feel lost, alone, unsure who to date or how, let's keep it simple. Let's find your values and your purpose and build from there, step by step, on the path toward your happiest life.

That is where it all begins.  Ready to find your gold?