My story

I don't have a partner or a family of my own, and that absence hurts me deeply. I can carry considerable responsibility in my professional life, solve difficult problems and function successfully in the world — and then I come home in the evening and there is no one there to talk to, no one with whom to share what happened that day or what is going on inside me.

This is one of the reasons this website exists.

I have reached a point where I don't see another realistic way of finding someone who could genuinely belong in the world I have spent so many years discovering and trying to live by. The kind of relationship I am looking for is bound up with this way of understanding ourselves, other people and life itself, and it feels very far from the way relationships are usually formed around me.

So putting this work into the world is personal in a second sense. Perhaps by making this world visible I can meet people who recognise something in it — and perhaps, among them, one day, the woman with whom I can actually share it.

At the end of my teenage years I lost something. I remember thinking that I never wanted to suffer that way again.

I thought that if I could understand how our minds work — how our behaviour comes into existence, what unconsciously drives us — perhaps I would not simply repeat the patterns that had led there.

That question became a journey of roughly twenty years.

Pattern recognition matters to me because I believe it is one of the most fundamental capacities of the human mind: seeing that apparently separate things belong together.

For me, maturity is not simply reaching a certain age. It includes becoming able to see more of what you would otherwise pass on to a child without noticing.

A parent who can recognise their own patterns has a better chance of recognising how patterns are forming in their child — and perhaps of intervening before unnecessary suffering becomes part of that child's personality and later life.

Throughout these years I kept returning to this question.

I came to believe that love may develop in a very different way from the way relationships are commonly formed today. I would like to describe this more openly, but our culture is full of taboos and preconceptions around relationships — some of which may be exactly what prevents us from creating better ones. For now I would rather keep to myself how I believe an ideal relationship could develop.

I will say one thing: fairy tales tell us surprisingly much about it.

I believe we can fall in love with the content of another person — with what we discover within them, and with the qualities they bring into our lives that make life safer.

But reaching that kind of love also means facing the inner forces that stand in the way. In the language of fairy tales, we have to meet our dragons and witches. The dragon is fear, social pressure, the unconscious pattern. Defeating it does not have to mean destroying an enemy. It can mean understanding what previously ruled us.

Much of the misuse of power in human life is, I believe, an attempt to compensate for inner insecurity and psychological wounds. What begins invisibly inside individuals and families appears eventually on a completely different scale — in the way we treat one another, in society, and in the way we treat the world.

My own life has been a test of this. Because I think differently from many people around me, I have often met resistance and sometimes direct attacks. Over time I learned to handle those situations differently: not to attack back, but to understand more of what was happening. Sometimes I could leave a situation in a better position while the person who had attacked me could leave it without feeling humiliated. Some of them became friends.

I learned to win without needing the other person to lose. In that sense I changed from someone who often experienced himself as a loser into someone who could navigate this world — without becoming like the world that had hurt him.

Can the understanding that changed my own life reach other people? Can we rediscover the invisible world inside us — the unconscious forces that move us — and become safer and freer for it? Can we stop passing so much unnecessary suffering on to our children?

And underneath all of those, one more.

Can a journey that began with loss lead to love?

I don't know. I have travelled a long way, I believe I have found something valuable, and I am putting it into the world to see what happens.