You Can’t Love Someone Into Being Ready

Why the most dangerous belief in dating is “I can fix him”

You love them so much, right? And you believe that if only they would let you love them, that would fix them, yes?

Sorry! That never works. You cannot love someone into being ready. You cannot love someone into healing a childhood wound or trusting a future they’ve already decided will disappoint them, or believing that they deserve the life you can see so clearly for them. You can only love someone. That’s it. That’s the whole power you actually have.

I know this because I almost died proving myself wrong.

The Note That Broke Me

After my husband Dan died, in the channeling I did, he said, “If you had left me, I would have lived.” I still remember that moment that shook me to the core.

Dan went on to explain what he meant. That I believed, with my whole heart, that I could make him happy. That I could show him how good it was to simply be alive. But he never understood that, not really, not until his body had already paid the price for a mind that couldn’t stop finding what was wrong. Dan had a brilliant, relentless brain, and he pointed it at every flaw in the world instead of the roller coaster ride we were actually on. That determined negativity cost him his immune system. It cost him his life.

I did not cause that. I want to be clear about that for every woman reading this who is currently doing the math on whether she is responsible for a man’s unhappiness. You are not. But I also could not cure it. Twelve years of loving him with everything I had could not out-argue a nervous system that had already decided the world didn’t live up to his expectations.

A few weeks after he died, I opened the New Yorker. There was a cartoon. Two people walking on a beach, and the man turns to the woman and says, “You’re right, Stephanie. It’s great to be alive.”

You cannot make this up. I didn’t. The universe has a sense of humor even when you don’t.

Why You Keep Falling for the Unavailable One

I see this constantly in my practice, especially with ready young women. Ready to build, ready to commit, ready to be chosen. And the man they love is not building anything. He hasn’t found work that lights him up. He’s chasing the fantasy that money will finally make him feel okay. Or he is simply too wounded, right now, today, to appreciate what she’s offering him.

Here is what almost nobody tells you: falling in love is not a metaphor for addiction. It is addiction. Functional MRI studies show early romantic love lighting up the same reward circuitry as cocaine. Dopamine, norepinephrine, the whole chemical cocktail that makes you check your phone every four minutes and rewrite his silences into secret meanings. Your brain is not weighing evidence when you’re in it. It’s chasing a hit.

That is why “just leave” is useless advice. Nobody has ever successfully will-powered their way out of a craving by being told to stop craving. You need to work with the nervous system, not lecture it.

What I Learned the Hard Way

I could not rewire Dan’s brain by loving him harder. Nobody can rewire another person’s brain. Neuroplasticity is real, and it is one of the most hopeful facts in all of neuroscience, but it only works from the inside. He has to want it. He has to do the work. You cannot want it for him, no matter how much you love him, no matter how clearly you can see the man he could be.

This is the sentence I now say to almost every client who is loving someone unavailable: his readiness is not your job. It never was.

How the Work Actually Helps

In hypnotherapy, we go under the story you keep telling yourself about why this time will be different, and we find out what you’re really attached to. Sometimes it’s him. More often, if we’re honest, it’s the fantasy of being the one who finally gets through.

Cognitive Behavioral tools help you catch the thought in real time; the three-a.m. spiral where you’re rehearsing conversations that will fix everything. You can interrupt that. You can build a different pathway, one small rep at a time, the same way Dan’s brain built the pathway that eventually cost him his life. The brain doesn’t care which direction you point it. That’s the good news and the terrifying news, in the same fact.

And in past-life regression, something else often surfaces. Clients discover they have loved this exact wound before, in another body, another century, and they survived letting go then too. There’s a kind of knowingness that lives underneath the conscious mind, a quantum field of memory the subconscious can access even when the rational mind insists this heartbreak is the only one that’s ever mattered. When a client feels that, really feels it, the current grief gets smaller. Not gone. Smaller. Survivable.

The Thing I Wish Someone Had Told Me

You can love someone all the way to the end and still not be able to save them. That is not a failure of your love. That is the actual size and shape of love’s power. It is enormous. It is not omnipotent.

If you are a young woman loving a man who is not ready, hear me: his unreadiness is real information, not a puzzle for you to solve. You do not need to leave in anger, and you do not need a villain. You just need to tell yourself the truth early, before your own body starts paying the bill the way mine almost did.

Ready to Stop Waiting for Someone Else to Be Ready?

If you’re loving someone who can’t meet you yet, or grieving someone who never got there, I’d love to talk. Through Hypnotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Past-Life Regression, we work together to loosen the chemistry, quiet the story, and help you trust your own future again, whether or not he ever trusts his.

Sessions available in person in Los Angeles and worldwide via Zoom.

(323) 933-4377

Sending you all hope,

Stephanie