My boyfriend says he can’t marry me unless I delete pictures of my ex who passed away. About 9 years ago when I was in high school I had a relationship of 2 years, he was an incredible guy but we just didn’t work together well romantically as much as we wanted to. About a month after we broke up he OD’d, this was heartbreaking. All this time later I still have all of our photos and videos together, I could never bring myself to delete them even though at the we weren’t together. None of my partners in the past have ever made me feel bad about keeping them, but my current partner (of about 9 months) said he always felt weird when pictures of us would come up in memories, and yesterday he sat me down and said he’d been thinking about it and he can’t consider marrying me if I don’t get rid of all our pictures and videos. I feel so weird about this and don’t know how to move forward. I feel like he’s out of line for being jealous of someone who’s dead, but also am I holding on to something I need to let go of?

First, I want to reflect something clearly: You are not holding onto a boyfriend. You are holding onto a chapter of your own becoming. What you experienced was not just a teenage romance. It was young love, rupture, and then death. That kind of loss imprints on us differently. When someone dies—especially by overdose—the grief does not neatly organize itself according to relationship status. The psyche does not say, “Oh, we had broken up, so this won’t matter as much.”
The soul does not calculate like that.
The soul gets marked, like scars, they stay with us.
You are not clinging to a fantasy of being with him. You are preserving evidence that something real once lived. Sometimes we resist letting go, of pictures, of memories as if letting go means erasing the importance of things. In depth psychology, we understand that photographs are not just images. They are containers of memory. And memory is not the enemy of new love.

Unintegrated grief is. There is a difference. Your current partner’s discomfort is understandable on a human level. When “memories” pop up and he sees your face intertwined with someone else’s, it can activate comparison, insecurity, or the ancient fear: Am I competing with a ghost? That is not irrational. But what matters is how that insecurity is handled.

A request born from vulnerability sounds like:

“Sometimes I feel insecure when those memories come up. Can we talk about what he means to you now?” An ultimatum born from fear sounds like: “I cannot marry you unless you erase him.”

Those are very different postures of love. Love does not require erasure of your history. Love requires integration of it.

If you were still emotionally fused with your ex—if you were secretly wishing you were still with him or comparing your current partner against him—that would be something to examine. But keeping photos of someone who died is not evidence of romantic attachment. It is often evidence of unresolved grief and sacred memory. There are many layers to consider here, are you holding onto pictures because you haven’t processed the grief? That relationship, however imperfect, shaped who you are. The heartbreak shaped you. The loss shaped you. The compassion you likely carry around addiction and mortality were shaped by that story. I would gently turn the inquiry toward you: Are the photos a shrine, or are they an archive? A shrine keeps something alive in the present tense. An archive honors something that has been integrated into the past.

If you cannot delete them, that does not mean you are stuck. It may simply mean you have not yet ritually honored the grief in a way that allows it to settle differently in your body. Perhaps the answer is not deletion, but transformation. Moving them off your phone, printing one photo and placing it in a memory box. Creating a ritual where you consciously say: Thank you for who we were. I release the unfinished threads.

Your partner’s jealousy is not about a dead man. It is about his fear of not being chosen fully. But being chosen does not mean pretending you were never someone else before him.

You are allowed to have a past. You are allowed to grieve someone who hurt you and whom you hurt. You are allowed to carry tenderness for someone who is no longer alive.

The real question moving forward is this:
Can your partner expand enough to love a woman with history? And can you differentiate between honoring memory and clinging to unfinished longing?

Marriage is not built on the deletion of ghosts. It is built on two people strong enough to sit at the table with them and say, “We see you. And we are here now.” If he cannot tolerate the fact that you loved before him—even someone who died—that is not about your photos. That is about his capacity for emotional maturity. And if you feel a quiet knowing inside that you are not clinging but simply honoring—trust that.

Grief is not disloyalty. Memory is not betrayal. And love that demands erasure is not yet secure enough for marriage.

— Paula Santos, LP

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i think my boyfriend thinks i’m stupid or something and i dont know what to do. every time i make a statement or tell him something he always double checks me, he’ll look it up online or ask someone else for confirmation or if ive been telling him something for weeks or months he just brushes me off, but if one of his friends tells him the exact same thing he listens immediately. i feel like its started making me second guess myself. like every time i get ready to tell him something i look up an article to prove myself. how do i make myself more believable or serious?

There is a particular kind of erosion that happens in relationships, and it does not arrive loudly. It happens quietly, almost invisibly, in small moments of dismissal. When someone repeatedly double-checks what you say, looks things up as if your word is insufficient, or only accepts the same information once it comes from someone else, especially a friend, something begins to shift internally. It is not just about facts. It is about credibility. And credibility is deeply tied to dignity. At first, you may tell yourself it is harmless. Maybe he just likes to verify things. Maybe he is detail-oriented. But when the pattern becomes consistent—when your voice is brushed aside for weeks or months, only to be validated instantly when echoed by someone else—the message your nervous system receives is not neutral. It begins to learn that your words alone are not enough. Over time, this creates a subtle but powerful internal shift: you start preparing proof before you speak. You begin attaching articles to your opinions. You rehearse your statements in advance. You brace yourself for dismissal.

This is not a sign that you are unintelligent. It is a sign that your sense of authority is being slowly destabilized. In depth psychology, we understand that when someone continually seeks external confirmation over their partner’s voice, it often reflects something internal to them rather than something lacking in you. It can point to insecurity, to a need for control, or even to unconscious bias about whose voice holds weight. Sometimes people feel safer trusting information that comes from outside the intimate bond, because trusting their partner fully requires vulnerability. To grant you credibility means to relinquish a subtle position of intellectual dominance. Not everyone is aware they are holding that position, but the body feels it.

The more important question is not, “How do I make myself more believable?” The deeper inquiry is, “Why am I working so hard to earn something that should be a baseline in love?” In a healthy relationship, there is an underlying assumption of mutual competence. That does not mean partners never fact-check. Curiosity is natural. But tone matters. Posture matters. There is a difference between collaborative exploration and corrective skepticism. One says, “Let’s look at this together.” The other says, “I’m not sure you’re reliable.” When this dynamic repeats, the impact is cumulative. You begin to second-guess yourself. You hesitate before speaking. You shrink your voice to avoid being subtly undermined. And that shrinking is the real harm. Not because you need to be right all the time, but because your right to participate as an equal is being quietly compromised.

It is also significant that when his friends say the same thing, he accepts it immediately. That is not about data. That is about hierarchy. Whether conscious or not, he is assigning more weight to their voices than to yours. And that can feel deeply destabilizing, especially in an intimate bond where safety should be mutual. The work here is not to become more convincing. If you attach citations to every sentence, you are reinforcing the idea that your word alone is insufficient. The work is to reclaim your internal authority. To speak without over-preparing. To notice when you are bracing. And then, gently but directly, to name the pattern.

You might say, in a grounded way, that you have noticed he often verifies what you say or seems to trust others more readily, and that it has begun to make you question yourself. This is not an accusation. It is an invitation to awareness. His response will tell you much. If he is capable of reflection, he will consider how his behavior impacts you. If he dismisses your concern again, that gives you important information about the larger dynamic at play. Love should not feel like an ongoing audition for credibility. You should not need to defend your intelligence in order to be taken seriously by the person closest to you. The right relationship strengthens your sense of self; it does not slowly chip away at it. You are not stupid. You are perceptive enough to notice that something in the dynamic feels off. And that noticing is wisdom. The real question is whether your partner is willing to meet you in that awareness—or whether you will continue doing the emotional labor of proving your own worth in a space where it should already be recognized.

— Paula Santos, LP

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It is the year of the horse. Which means intense energy, rapid, unpredictable change, and a push for forward momentum, independence, and bold, adventurous actions (according to google). It makes sense in a way, but I do have to ask.. why is the horse actively stomping on me? A common theme this year has been a nonstop flaw-state. Going from having a beautiful flow-state to a major flaw-state is jarring. Especially considering that mercury wasn’t even in retrograde at that point (I don’t know what that means but people use it in a negative connotation so…).

The stars misaligning is the only explanation to my front door handle breaking off in my hand, my skin breaking out, and forgetting my phone charger on a day I really needed it. This streak of bad luck is getting so out of hand, that I am trying to find good signs that may or may not signify a changing of the tides. One being a lady bug coming out of my purse (how it got in there is a mystery to me), an almost car accident, and a random sighting of Waldo, of ‘where’s Waldo?’ in the wild. Truly grasping at straws over here.

I will say, if you are going through the same thing, directing your negative thought spirals into positive thought spirals makes a world of a difference. I think it’s like a manifestation thing. Lately my mantra has been “GOOD THINGS ARE COMING”, and screaming that into the ether in an almost threatening way, genuinely works. Every time I use that mantra, good things do tend to happen.

Something I can attest to for a fact, is that January was the biggest flop, and February is fighting for that title. Though I refuse to let that happen, no more flopping allowed! The rest of this year will go amazingly well for all of us. Cue a moment of silence here, because guess what? Good things are coming. Good things are coming, I repeat as I rock back and forth, in a very Spongebobian way.

2026 has been rough, and we are only 2 months into it. I like to think that maybe that’s just all the bad energy clearing out. It is understandable to fall into a mental block because of everything going on in the world, and in your own lives. Being a human being is incredibly difficult, and going at it alone is close to impossible. Talking through it all helps, no matter how small your issues might seem in comparison to the state of the world, but they still matter. I think that if something is enough to bother you even just a little, then it matters, because it is affecting you, and you are allowed to feel however you feel.

A lot of people tend to find comfort in the thought that the universe is incredibly vast, and at the end of the day we are so minuscule in comparison, that technically nothing really matters. However I’m not one of those people. That thought freaks me out, if it helped you, then that’s amazing. But, if that thought also freaks you out too, then we can close our eyes, take a breath, and allow that thought to disappear. Our minds shape our realities, and if we constantly exist in this mental ideology of everything being difficult and out to get us, then our brains will only focus on that and filter out most other good things that come. I am trying my hardest to get my brain to focus on the good, and filter out all the bad, but it is difficult. Though I think it is incredibly possible and just trying already sets us on that path.

If you had a bad or difficult week, just know that once the week is over, it’s over. That’s it, it ceases to exist. How freeing is that? There is something so beautiful about that. Nothing is forever, so applaud yourself for getting through it, and open up your heart and mind to accepting that good things are coming. So get back on that horse, and ride the year out, the journey might just surprise you. Ponder on that ‘til next time.

I am 25 and my girlfriend is 35, Currently been dating for 2 months and everything is going perfect. The issue is im starting to feel a bit of anxiety when i think about how close we are getting or how vulnerable I’m being with her or if I’m enough for her or if I’m satisfying her. It’s getting to the point where I’m feeling nervous or feeling stressed around her and i don’t know why.. could it be that I’m falling for her and don’t want to accept it or is this normal when people start new relationships? It’s affecting me because I’m constantly stressed or feeling worried and I’m not even having the feeling to be intimate since my stress is so high

What you’re describing is incredibly common when something starts to matter. When we move from attraction into attachment, the nervous system often panics before the heart settles. Especially when the connection feels good. Especially when there’s something at stake. And in your case, there’s more than just chemistry. There’s:

– An age gap
– A woman who may feel more experienced
– A sense that “everything is going perfect”
– Emotional closeness happening quickly

That is a lot for a nervous system. Let me translate what might be happening beneath the surface.

When intimacy deepens, the psyche asks:
Am I enough?
Will I be chosen?
Will I be exposed?
What happens if I lose this?

Anxiety in early love is rarely about the other person. It’s about the part of you that is terrified of being seen and found insufficient. You mention wondering if you’re satisfying her. If you’re enough. If you measure up.

That’s not about sex.
That’s about worth.

And when worth gets activated, the body often responds with stress. Elevated cortisol. Racing thoughts. Reduced libido. It makes perfect biological sense. The body does not prioritize sexual desire when it perceives threat—even if the “threat” is emotional vulnerability.

Here’s the deeper layer.

You are 25. She is 35.

Even if she has never made you feel small, there may be an unconscious narrative inside you:

She’s ahead of me.
She knows more.
She’s evaluating me.
I need to perform.

Performance anxiety doesn’t just show up in the bedroom. It shows up in the soul. And the more
“perfect” things feel, the more pressure builds. Because now there’s something to lose. You asked a very insightful question:

“Could it be that I’m falling for her and don’t want to accept it?”

Yes. Sometimes anxiety is the body’s resistance to surrender.
Falling in love means losing control. It means dependence. It means someone else can hurt you. If you are someone who values independence, or has been hurt before, closeness can feel destabilizing. But here is the most important distinction:

If the anxiety feels like fear of vulnerability — that’s workable.
If the anxiety feels like something in you is saying “this isn’t right” — that’s different. From what you wrote, this doesn’t sound like intuition warning you away. It sounds like attachment anxiety rising as the bond deepens. Two months is exactly when this tends to surface.

The novelty wears off. The fantasy softens. Real emotional stakes begin.
The solution is not to push yourself to perform.
And it’s not to withdraw and shut down.

It’s to slow down.
You don’t need to decide if she’s “the one.”
You don’t need to prove you’re enough.
You don’t need to match some imagined standard of a 35-year-old man.
You need to regulate your nervous system.

A few gentle suggestions:
– Notice when the thoughts start spiraling. Don’t argue with them. Just label them:
“comparison,” “performance fear,” “catastrophizing.”
– Ground your body. Anxiety is physiological.
– Separate sex from performance. Intimacy is not an exam.
– Consider telling her, in a simple way: “I really like where this is going, and sometimes that makes me anxious because I don’t want to mess it up.”

Vulnerability often reduces anxiety more than avoidance does. Stress shutting down your desire does not mean you are not attracted to her. It means your nervous system is overwhelmed.

The paradox of intimacy is this:
The more we care, the more exposed we feel.
The more exposed we feel, the more our old fears surface.
That doesn’t mean the relationship is wrong.
It means it matters. The real inquiry for you is not:

“Am I enough for her?”

It’s:

“Can I allow myself to be loved without turning it into a performance?”
Love is not an audition.
And a healthy 35-year-old woman is not looking for perfection. She is looking for presence.

Slow it down.

Let yourself be human.

Let your body catch up to your heart.

Anxiety at the edge of love is not a red flag.

Sometimes it’s just the tremor before surrender.

— Paula Santos, LP

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This question is not confusion—it is clarity beginning to speak.

When love has been paired with harm, the word itself becomes unstable. It no longer points to safety or care, but to endurance. To loyalty at all costs. To staying. So when you ask, “Is love just staying regardless of what happens?” you are really asking something more honest: Is love supposed to hurt this much—and if it does, what does that say about me?Many of us were taught love through contradiction. We were told “I love you” by people who dismissed us, frightened us, abandoned us emotionally, or crossed our boundaries. Over time, the nervous system learns a devastating lesson: love is proximity to pain. Love is attachment without protection. Love is something you survive. bell hooks wrote with radical clarity about this confusion. She said that “most people do not know how to love,” and that what we often call love is actually dependency, attachment, or possession. In All About Love, she defines love not as a feeling, but as an action: the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. That definition alone disqualifies so many relationships we’ve been taught to romanticize. Love, in this framing, is not endurance. It is not self-erasure. It is not staying while shrinking. It does not require you to override your intuition or make peace with harm to prove your devotion.

Care and comfort are real. Enjoyment is real. Attachment is real. But love—as hooks insists—includes care, yes, and also respect, trust, responsibility, knowledge, and commitment. Not intensity without safety. Not loyalty without dignity. Not passion without accountability. So when you say, “I care about them. I like being around them. But I’m not sure I love them,” you are not confessing a failure—you are noticing nuance. You are separating affection from devotion. Attachment from reverence. Familiarity from mutual becoming.

And perhaps the deeper truth is this: you may not yet trust love because love has never been trustworthy to you.

When love has been paired with injury, the psyche adapts by redefining love as tolerance. If I can stay, if I can understand, if I can endure, then it must be love. But hooks warns us against this myth directly—love does not require self-betrayal. Love does not flourish where domination, neglect, or fear are present. Love is incompatible with abuse, even when abuse insists it is love. Real love, when encountered, often feels unfamiliar. Quieter. Less chaotic. It does not demand proof through suffering. It does not ask you to abandon yourself to be chosen. It invites you to grow, not disappear. So no—love is not staying regardless of what happens. Love is staying present—to truth, to impact, to responsibility, to repair. And sometimes, loving yourself means leaving what cannot love you back in ways that are life-giving.

If you don’t yet know what love is, you are not behind. You are honest. And honesty is often the first act of love we were never taught how to receive.

You are allowed to learn love slowly. You are allowed to redefine it.

That, too, is part of the education.

— Paula Santos, LP

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This is one of the most painful questions a person can ask—and one of the most honest.

When you’ve lost multiple relationships, the mind reaches for math: There’s a pattern. Our brains love pattern recognition and in this one, your brain has created the formula of: I’m the constant denominator. Therefore, I must be the problem. It sounds rational. It sounds mature. It even sounds like accountability. But often, it’s grief looking for a place to land.

The idea of being “the common denominator” can become a kind of self-indictment, a way to make sense of loss by turning it inward. At least if it’s you, there’s something to fix. It’s a way we feel in there is a solution, as if it will prevent further loss and grief. Something to control. Something to atone for. Uncertainty is harder to live with than blame. Blame and shame are where we go to, to avoid grief.

But introspection, taken too far, turns into self-surveillance. It stops being about responsibility and starts becoming a quiet form of self-abandonment.

Here is something rarely said plainly enough: losing relationships does not automatically mean you are doing something wrong. Sometimes it means you are changing. Sometimes it means you are no longer willing to contort yourself into shapes that once kept the peace. Sometimes it means you are going through change, and growth can be profoundly destabilizing to relationships that were built on your old self. Sometimes that old self was silence, your flexibility, or your self-doubt.

Self inquiry is beautiful though, and I love that you are willing to self reflect. But accountability has a very specific texture. When you are “the problem” in a given relationship, there is usually clarity—specific feedback, recurring themes, moments you can locate and feel regret for without collapsing into shame. There is room for repair. There is dialogue, even if it’s uncomfortable. Accountability is a clear mirror. When you are confused, and asking “am I the problem” it’s usually grief wanting to hide behind shame.

Shame is vague. It says, something is wrong with me as a person. It loops without resolution. It grows louder in the absence of information. And it thrives when relationships end without explanation or with emotional ambiguity.

It’s also worth asking a different kind of question—one that doesn’t center blame at all:

What kinds of people have I been choosing and what type of people have I been losing? What dynamics feel familiar, even when they hurt? Who am I when I am trying to be “good” in relationships, and what does that cost me?

Sometimes the common denominator is not a flaw—it’s a pattern of over-functioning. Of being the one who reflects, repairs, reaches, and bends. Of staying longer than is kind to yourself. Of confusing depth with endurance. In your case, based on you saying you try—really try—to be introspective and accountable. That matters. People who lack responsibility rarely worry this deeply about being at fault. The presence of this question already tells me something about your care.

The inquiry that might serve you more gently is not “Is it me?” but “What would it mean to let relationships fall away that cannot hold who I am becoming?”

Not every ending is evidence of failure. Some are evidence of discernment arriving late—but arriving, nonetheless. You are allowed to learn from loss without becoming its scapegoat.

— Paula Santos, LP

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How do i convince myself I'm worthy of being treated well?

You don’t convince yourself, that’s the first understanding. Worthiness is not a belief you successfully argue yourself into. It is not a mindset you master or a mantra you repeat until your nervous system complies. The very question “How do I convince myself I’m worthy?” already reveals the wound: somewhere along the way, being treated well became something you felt you had to earn, prove, or justify. So, you don’t convince yourself you are worthy, you unlearn the stories you believed in that made you believe you were not.

We learn this story early on, when love is inconsistent. Worthiness questions are not rooted in what is wrong with you, but in what happened to you that made you believe that. When care is conditional. When attunement arrives only after achievement, pleasing, shrinking, or performing. The psyche adapts beautifully—and tragically—by concluding: If I were more worthy, this person would treat me better. So we try to become worthy instead of questioning the bargain.

But worthiness is not the problem. Safety is.

Being treated well is not a reward for good behavior; it is a baseline requirement for relational health. You do not need to convince yourself of this truth—you need experiences that slowly, patiently contradict the lie that mistreatment is normal or deserved.

The deeper work is this: noticing where you override your own signals for safety. Where your body tenses but you stay. Where something feels off but you explain it away. Where you accept scraps because asking for nourishment feels dangerous. These moments are not failures of self-worth; they are echoes of survival.

So the inquiry becomes gentler and more honest:
What taught me that I had to tolerate less than care?
Who benefited from my doubt?
What would change if I trusted my discomfort as wisdom rather than weakness?

Self-worth grows not through self-convincing, but through self-allegiance. Through choosing, again and again, to listen to what hurts. Through letting your “no” be sacred even when it costs you belonging. Through allowing your standards to rise not out of entitlement, but out of reverence for your life. You are worthy of being treated well because you are here. Because you feel. Because you are vulnerable to impact. Because you are not an object to be endured, but a being meant to be met.

— Paula Santos, LP

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