Real Love Ready: The Series

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  Ashanti Branch – Can You Be Loved If You're Not Fully Known? | Real Love Ready Ep 20 15.09.2026 1sa 22dk

  "Where are you fully known?" That's the question a mentor once asked Ashanti Branch, and it stopped him cold. Because when he really thought about it, the answer was nowhere. Ashanti Branch is the founder of the Ever Forward Club and creator of the Million Mask Movement, a global initiative that has reached people in over 100 countries. Raised in Oakland by a single mother, told at seven years old that he was "the man of the house," Ashanti spent his childhood learning to hide his anger, his sadness, and eventually his whole self behind a mask of toughness. Featured in the Sundance documentary The Mask You Live In, his work with boys and men has taken him from an Oakland classroom to a TEDx stage to the U.S. Surgeon General's office. In this episode, Robin and Ashanti explore what it actually takes for men to let themselves be known, and for the people who love them to become a safe place to land. They talk about the difference between belonging and fitting in, why anger is so often a cover for grief, and how vulnerability, far from being a trait some people are simply born with, is a skill that can be built one honest conversation at a time. Ashanti also leads Robin through his own Million Mask exercise live, a moment that gets right to the heart of what this conversation is about. At its core, this is a conversation about what changes, in a friendship, a marriage, or a family, when we finally let someone see what's on the other side of the mask, built on a simple, powerful idea: we can only be loved as deeply as we are willing to be known. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:04:32) Can You Be Fully Loved If You’re Not Fully Known? (00:08:28) Becoming “The Man of the House” at Seven (00:16:32) From Engineering to Teaching (00:24:06) How the Ever Forward Club Began (00:29:52) The Million Mask Movement (00:32:37) What Boys Hide Behind the Mask (00:35:14) Anger, Heartbreak & the Rules of Masculinity (00:39:14) Creating Safe Spaces for Boys (00:45:50) Why Vulnerability Is a Skill (00:51:09) What Anger Can Be Hiding (00:54:07) Connecting the Head & the Heart (00:58:08) How to Reach the Men & Boys You Love (01:03:21) What Ashanti Wants Men to Know (01:07:58) The Mask Exercise (01:13:58) The Myth About Men & Love (01:15:32) What Is Love? QUOTES "You can only be loved as deeply as you're willing to be known." – Ashanti Branch "Violence is what happens when men and boys don't know what to do with their anger." – Ashanti Branch “Vulnerability is not a trait; it’s a skill.” – Robin Ducharme "Men are loving, caring people who have been trained to operate in a world where they're not allowed to be that all the time." – Ashanti Branch ABOUT THE GUEST Ashanti Branch is the founder of the Ever Forward Club and creator of the Million Mask Movement, a global initiative that has reached people in over 100 countries. Raised in Oakland by a single mother, told at seven years old that he was "the man of the house," Ashanti spent his childhood learning to hide his anger, his sadness, and eventually his whole self behind a mask of toughness. Featured in the Sundance documentary The Mask You Live In, his work with boys and men has taken him from an Oakland classroom to the TEDx stage, and earned him the U.S. Surgeon General's Medallion for his work on youth mental health in 2023. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/branchspeaks/ Website: https://www.branchspeaks.com/ Ever Forward Club: https://everforwardclub.org/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Dr. Ingrid Clayton – When Survival Looks Like Love | Real Love Ready Ep 19 08.09.2026 1sa 18dk

  What if some of the ways you learned to love were actually ways you learned to survive? Dr. Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist and the author of Fawning, Believing Me, and Recovering Spirituality. Through both her clinical work and her own lived experience, she explores the trauma responses and protective patterns that can quietly shape the way we relate to ourselves and the people we love. In this episode, Robin and Ingrid explore fawning, the lesser-known fourth trauma response alongside fight, flight, and freeze, and how it can show up as people-pleasing, caretaking, appeasement, and self-abandonment in our closest relationships. They unpack why these patterns can be deeply adaptive in childhood and how they can follow us into adulthood long after the original danger has passed. They talk about the difference between performing love and actually experiencing it, and how addiction, spiritual bypassing, and even 12-step recovery can become ways of escaping what we feel rather than facing it. Ingrid, sober since 1995, shares what it took to build the internal safety she never had growing up, not by finding a self that was buried, but by building one from the ground up. At its core, this is a conversation about learning that real love does not require us to disappear, and that the relationships which let us become more fully ourselves may be where love becomes possible in the first place. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE 03:46 Finding Her Voice and Her Path to Psychology 07:30 What Is Fawning? 13:20 How Our Past Shapes How We Relate 19:39 The Importance of a Compassionate Witness 26:55 When Healing Pursues You 32:03 Performing Love vs. Experiencing Love 36:31 Alcohol, Trauma, and Sobriety 44:35 Spiritual Bypassing 52:13 What Healing Really Takes 01:00:37 Fawning in Our Relationships 01:06:01 How Healing Changes the Way We Love QUOTES "How could I know what real love was if I was never even there to experience it?" – Dr. Ingrid Clayton "I would rather have me in my life than abandon me one more day for anybody else." – Dr. Ingrid Clayton "I am wired to want to love well. And I think we all are." – Robin Ducharme ABOUT THE GUEST Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist with a Master’s degree in transpersonal psychology and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She has maintained a private practice in Los Angeles for over seventeen years, supporting individuals in healing trauma and reclaiming their sense of self. Her work has been featured in Oprah Daily, The New York Times, Women’s Health, and Forbes. She is the author of Fawning, Believing Me, and Recovering Spirituality, and is known for bringing clarity, accessibility, and humanity to conversations about relational trauma and healing. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ingridclaytonphd/ Website: https://www.ingridclayton.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Cindy Gallop – The Sex Talk Nobody Gave You | Real Love Ready Ep 18 01.09.2026 1sa 21dk

  What happens when porn becomes sex education by default? Cindy Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a social sex video-sharing platform built on a simple idea: the problem isn't porn itself — it's what happens when a culture that can't talk openly about sex leaves porn to fill that gap by default. In this episode, Robin and Cindy explore the space between what we see on screen and what sex actually looks and feels like in real life. They talk about why there's no formula for great sex, how mainstream male-lens porn shapes expectations without us realizing it, and why communication, curiosity, and shared sexual values matter more than knowing the "right" move. The conversation also covers body image and desirability, sexual agency, and what it looks like to bring empathy, respect, generosity, and honesty into the bedroom. Cindy shares how parents can talk to kids about sex and porn without shame, how couples can finally open conversations they've avoided for years, and why becoming a great lover starts with a willingness to learn — not perform. At its core, this is a conversation about what becomes possible when we stop outsourcing our understanding of sex to porn, and start treating sex as a place to practice the same values we want in love: honesty, respect, curiosity, reciprocity, and care. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:03:04) From Advertising to Reinventing Sex Culture (00:05:06) When Porn Becomes Sex Education (00:10:50) Great Sex Starts With Communication (00:12:31) Body Image & What We Really Find Attractive (00:15:56) Love, Vulnerability & Real-World Sex (00:19:49) Why Sex Is Part of Who We Are (00:24:35) What Are Your Sexual Values? (00:26:33) The Male Lens & Why Not All Porn Is the Same (00:29:47) How to Talk to Kids About Sex & Porn (00:40:43) What Teenage Boys Really Want to Know (00:45:39) Sex & Communication in Relationships (00:52:19) Teaching Children About Sex, Love & Connection (00:56:43) How Couples Can Talk About Sexual Values (01:02:57) The Future of Sex Education (01:09:00) What Makes a Great Lover? (01:13:16) Romantic Love Isn’t the Only Love QUOTES “We cannot talk about real love and leave sex out of it.” – Robin Ducharme “It’s not porn’s job to educate; it’s society’s.” – Cindy Gallop “Great sex is born out of great communication.” – Cindy Gallop “The values have to be shared in the bedroom too.” – Robin Ducharme “What makes a great lover is someone who absolutely comes to bed with a willingness to learn.” – Cindy Gallop ABOUT THE GUEST Cindy Gallop built her career in brand-building, marketing, and advertising, running the US office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty starting in 1998 and earning Advertising Woman of the Year in 2003. In 2009, she launched MakeLoveNotPorn at TED, one of the most talked-about talks of the conference, and later grew it into the world's first user-generated, human-curated social sex video platform. She's the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn and IfWeRanTheWorld, a vocal advocate for diversity and inclusion in advertising and tech, and author of the TED book Make Love Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cindygallop/ Website: https://cindygallop.com/ MLNP Academy: https://makelovenotporn.academy/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Dr. Alexandra Solomon – Marriage 101: How to Get Better at Love | Real Love Ready Ep 17 25.08.2026 1sa 15dk

  What if loving well is something we can actually learn? Dr. Alexandra Solomon is a licensed clinical psychologist, founder of the Institute for Relational Self-Awareness, bestselling author, and longtime professor of Northwestern University’s renowned Marriage 101 course. For more than 25 years, she has been teaching people how to understand themselves more deeply and build healthier, more connected relationships. In this episode, Robin and Dr. Solomon explore what Relational Self-Awareness looks like in practice: noticing the stories, wounds, and nervous-system responses we bring into our relationships, and learning to stay curious about what difficult moments might be trying to teach us. They talk about why healthy relationships are not conflict-free, how to know when to pause, and why real growth requires both acceptance and change. Dr. Solomon reflects on how the way we understand love is changing, what different stages of life can reveal about our partnerships, and why healthy relationships require honesty, curiosity, and a willingness to look at our own part. She also challenges some of the messages we have absorbed about romance, from mistaking intensity for intimacy to assuming that the right relationship should always feel easy. This is a conversation about learning to love with more awareness, intention, and skill. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:05:34) How Our Gifts Grow From Our Wounds (00:14:32) Marriage 101: Teaching Love (00:20:13) What Young Adults Are Asking About Love (00:27:03) What Is Relational Self-Awareness? (00:29:07) Curiosity, Conflict & the Nervous System (00:36:05) Acceptance, Change & Relationship Growth (00:41:41) The Truth Isn’t Cruelty (00:43:22) Empty Nesting & Who We Become Next (00:52:41) What the Movies Get Wrong About Love (00:57:04) Relational Red Flags & Healthy Love (01:03:09) Why Young People Are Dating Differently (01:07:03) The Myth That Love Should Be Easy QUOTES “Love is not something we find. It’s something we build, something we learn, something we can actually get better at.” – Robin Ducharme “You are the through line in all of your relationship stories.” – Dr. Alexandra Solomon “When we view moments as teachers, our partners as teachers, it just opens up all kinds of possibilities.” – Dr. Alexandra Solomon “You know you’re ready to come back when you want to understand.” – Dr. Alexandra Solomon “I want to learn how to love in the best way, because I know what an impact that makes in our lives and the quality of our lives.” – Robin Ducharme “Being loved means somebody celebrating your evolution.” – Dr. Alexandra Solomon ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Alexandra Solomon is internationally recognized as one of today’s most trusted relationship experts. As a licensed clinical psychologist, she translates research and clinical wisdom to help people expand their Relational Self-Awareness. She is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, the face of MasterClass In Practice, the host of Reimagining Love, and the award-winning author of three bestselling books including Love Every Day. Her work is frequently featured in outlets like NPR and The New York Times. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.alexandra.solomon/ Website: https://www.dralexandrasolomon.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Marianne Williamson – What Blocks Love? | Real Love Ready Ep 16 18.08.2026 56dk

  What would change if love was not just something we believed in, but the principle we used to make our decisions? Marianne Williamson has spent more than four decades exploring that question. A bestselling author, spiritual teacher, and longtime student of A Course in Miracles, her book A Return to Love introduced millions of people, including Robin as a teenager, to a different way of thinking about love, fear, forgiveness, and inner peace. In this episode, Robin and Marianne explore how we can train our minds away from judgement, blame, and fear, recognize the everyday thoughts that block our capacity to love, and practise forgiveness without abandoning boundaries or the ability to say no. They talk about what we bring to our relationships, why love requires us to take responsibility for our own part, and how even small moments of judgement can shape the way we move through the world. Marianne also reflects on what running for president taught her about power, speaking up, forgiveness, and owning her mistakes without becoming consumed by resentment or self-blame. This is a conversation about choosing love as a practice, from the way we think about a stranger in a café to the way we treat the people closest to us and the world we create together. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:05:49) What A Course in Miracles Teaches About Love (00:08:36) Training Your Mind to Choose Love (00:13:31) Making Love Our Bottom Line (00:17:45) The Blind Spots That Block Love (00:20:36) Mercy, Forgiveness & Intimate Relationships (00:24:54) Ego, Fear & the Illusion of Separation (00:28:01) Radical Accountability & Spiritual Detox (00:35:30) Forgiveness, Repair & Atonement (00:36:29) What Running for President Taught Marianne (00:44:55) Owning Your Part & Choosing Again QUOTES “Every moment you are making a decision. Will your heart be open to accept, to be your best, to hold another person in a space where they can be their best?” – Marianne Williamson “How very important it is for us to take radical accountability for our part. As human beings, that’s hard to do, but that’s what’s required.” – Robin Ducharme “When someone treats you without love, the only appropriate response is to see that as a call for love.” – Marianne Williamson “How can we be more loving in our individual lives, so that we are contributing to a more loving world?” – Robin Ducharme “The miracle is the new beginning. Get up, choose again.” – Marianne Williamson ABOUT THE GUEST For more than four decades, Marianne Williamson has been a leader of spiritual and progressive circles. She is the author of 17 books, four of which became #1 New York Times bestsellers, including A Return to Love, A Woman's Worth, The Law of Divine Compensation, and The Mystic Jesus: The Mind of Love. She founded Project Angel Food, which has delivered more than 20 million meals to homebound patients with life-threatening illnesses across Los Angeles since 1989, and co-founded The Peace Alliance in 2004 to support the creation of a U.S. Department of Peace. Williamson has run for U.S. president twice. Instagram: www.instagram.com/mariannewilliamson/ Website: Marianne.com Substack: MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarianneWilliamsonCommunity GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Janna Meyrowitz Turner – Love Is a Form of Leadership | Real Love Ready Ep 15 11.08.2026 1sa 7dk

  What does love have to do with leadership? For Janna Meyrowitz Turner, everything.  After twenty years building power for women, shaping cultural narratives for brands like Estée Lauder and the WNBA, and organizing 150 venture capital firms behind reproductive justice, Janna had a revelation: the powerful women she'd spent her career building up were going home to men who weren't growing alongside them.  That observation became Antenna Up, a platform of summits and community infrastructure built to send new signals about the health and wellbeing of American boys and men. Recorded in New York as part of the East Coast Tour, Janna and Robin trace her pivot from the women's space to the men's space, and why she calls love a leadership skill. More than a conversation about men and women, this episode offers a framework for reimagining leadership itself, what changes when we build institutions, relationships, and culture around love instead of greed. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:02:50) Meet Janna (00:03:52) From Building Women Up to Seeing the Gap (00:12:41) Founding Antenna Up (00:18:39) Love as a Form of Leadership (00:23:12) What Is Buoys Club? (00:27:26) The Antenna Up Fund (00:31:34) The Business Case for Healthier Men at Work (00:37:40) The Vulnerability Gap (00:47:08) Time, Money & Relationships (01:02:17) Myths of Love & Janna's Definition QUOTES “I believe that love is a form of leadership.” – Janna Meyrowitz Turner “We need to build organizations and institutions that are both financially rich and emotionally rich.” – Janna Meyrowitz Turner “None of us are free until all of us are free. That applies to men and boys too.” – Janna Meyrowitz Turner ABOUT THE GUEST Janna Meyrowitz Turner is the CEO of Antenna Up, a company platforming events and conversations alongside brands, media, and corporate sponsors to send new signals about the health and wellbeing of American boys and men. A career strategist and entrepreneur, she spent 20+ years building values-aligned coalitions in the women's space — shaping cultural narratives for brands like Estée Lauder and the WNBA, and coaching Fortune 500 leaders — before having a reckoning that the men adjacent to the powerful women she was building up weren't growing alongside them, and the women in their lives were paying the price. Antenna Up and Buoys Club, Antenna Up’s 700-member ecosystem of men's wellbeing leaders across North America, operates with the core thesis that healthier men = healthier societies, workplaces, families and communities. Antenna Up: https://www.antennaup.com Buoys Club: https://www.antennaup.com/buoys-club LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jannameyrowitz/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Ashley & Lair Torrent – Can a Relationship Help You Heal? | Real Love Ready Ep 14 28.07.2026 1sa 8dk

  Sometimes the parts of us that helped us survive are the very parts that make love harder to receive. Ashley and Lair Torrent both learned early to become what the people around them needed. Ashley learned to read every room, care for everyone else, and disconnect from herself when life became unsafe. Lair learned to be the good boy, the caretaker, and the hero, while making his own needs and feelings as small as possible. Today, Ashley is a psycho-spiritual counsellor, intuitive medium, and spiritual guide. Lair is a licensed therapist and the author of The Practice of Love. Together, they co-host The Practice of Love podcast and have spent more than 25 years learning what it means to love each other well. In this episode, Robin, Ashley, and Lair explore how childhood wounds become adult relationship patterns, why conflict is rarely about what it appears to be, and what it takes to stop fighting to win and start listening for what is underneath the reaction. They talk about protective parts, the “not enough” wound carried by so many men, and why some of our deepest healing can only happen in relationship. Ashley and Lair do not present love as perfect or easy. They share what it has taken to become mirrors and safe containers for each other, to receive difficult truths without turning away, and to recognize when the parts of themselves built for protection are taking over. This is a conversation about what it takes to keep choosing connection and why love is not just something we feel, but something we practise again and again. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:03:49) How Ashley & Lair Learned to Love (00:09:09) The Good Boy, the Caretaker & the Hero (00:16:22) When Survival Patterns Enter the Relationship (00:20:09) Becoming Mirrors for Each Other (00:23:21) The Moment Healing Begins (00:32:47) What Are You Really Fighting For? (00:38:03) The “Not Enough” Wound in Men (00:48:01) Healing Happens in Relationship (00:54:05) What Love Teaches Us QUOTES “Sometimes the thing that helped us survive becomes the very thing that keeps us from the love we want.” – Robin Ducharme “There’s a part of me here that is not designed for connection. There’s a part of me here that is designed for protection.” – Lair Torrent “Anytime I’m fighting to win, that means she loses. If she loses, that means we lose.” – Lair Torrent “You’re fighting about something, but really, you’re fighting for something.” – Ashley Torrent “Love requires work. It takes responsibility. It requires a lot of courage.” – Robin Ducharme “It’s a myth that you’re going to do all the healing on your own. I think it’s in relationship that we heal the most.” – Ashley Torrent “Love asks more of us. It’s asking you to dig into yourself and find the wounds that are there, the things that need healing, the parts of you that nobody claps for.” – Lair Torrent ABOUT THE GUESTS Ashley and Lair Torrent bring a rare mix of psychology and spirituality to conversations about love. Ashley is a psycho-spiritual therapist and intuitive medium who works with individuals and couples and co-hosts The Blue Butterfly Effect Podcast; Lair is a marriage and family therapist and author of The Practice of Love, with work featured by NPR, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. Together, the longtime couple co-hosts The Practice of Love Podcast, exploring what it means to love with intentionality, curiosity, and care. Instagram: @ashleytorrent29 @lairtorrentholistictherapist Website: ashleytorrent.com , lairtorrent.com GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Lori Gottlieb – The Stories We Tell About Love | Real Love Ready Ep 13 21.07.2026 1sa 6dk

  We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. The story we tell ourselves about why a relationship ended, why we have not met the right person, or why someone else needs to change before things can get better may feel completely true. But it is still only one side of the story. Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, New York Times advice columnist, and host of the podcasts Dear Therapists and Since You Asked. She has spent years listening to the stories people tell about their lives, while also being honest about her own experience on the other side of the couch. In this special episode of Real Love Ready, recorded live at the Global Love Conference in New York City, Robin and Lori explore what changes when we become willing to question our own version of events. Together, they talk about why the most dangerous story in a relationship is that everything was the other person’s fault, what flexibility can tell us about someone’s capacity for partnership, and how to know whether someone is genuinely ready for love. They discuss ghosting, rejection, chemistry, and the conversations we are often afraid to have early on in a relationship. They also look at how AI and texting are changing intimacy, what many of us have been taught about vulnerability, and what it takes to make room for someone new after divorce, loss, or a whole life lived before them. This is a conversation about becoming a more honest narrator of your own life, not by taking responsibility for everything, but by getting curious about the part that belongs to you. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:06:52) The Stories We Tell Ourselves (00:10:20) Unfinished Business & Flexibility (00:14:38) Are You Actually Ready for a Relationship? (00:17:19) Ghosting, Rejection & Taking It Personally (00:22:37) The Cement Is Still Wet: Speak Up Early (00:25:51) The Conversations Couples Need to Have (00:29:28) AI, Texting & Real Connection (00:38:02) Starting Over & Making Room for Someone New (00:45:34) Situationships, Infidelity & Audience Questions QUOTES “It’s not that people aren’t telling the truth; it’s that they’re telling the truth as they see it.” – Lori Gottlieb “The stories we tell ourselves often shape the way we love.” – Robin Ducharme “Relationships are like cement. In the beginning of a relationship, the cement is still wet.” – Lori Gottlieb “It’s so much about communication. It’s so much about just being honest. It’s scary to have those hard conversations, but you have to have them.” – Robin Ducharme “The easy part of a relationship is: we are both really interested in each other. The harder part is, how do we deal with difficulties that come up?” – Lori Gottlieb ABOUT THE GUEST Lori Gottlieb is a licensed psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which has sold more than three million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. She writes The New York Times' "Ask the Therapist" advice column, co-hosts the podcasts Dear Therapists and Since You Asked, and spent six years writing The Atlantic's "Dear Therapist" column. Her highly acclaimed 2019 TED Talk, "How Changing Your Story Can Change Your Life," has been viewed more than 7 million times and was named one of the year's 10 Most-Watched TED Talks. Lori is a frequent guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, CBS Mornings, CNN, and NPR's Fresh Air. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lorigottlieb_author/ Website: https://lorigottlieb.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Terry Real – Is It Too Late To Break The Cycle? | Real Love Ready Ep 12 14.07.2026 1sa 7dk

  There is a version of love most of us were never shown. Not because it doesn't exist, but because the people who raised us hadn't found it yet either. Terry Real has spent his life showing us what that love looks like. He is a family therapist, the creator of Relational Life Therapy, the founder of the Relational Life Institute, and the bestselling author of four books including Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. His first book, I Don't Want to Talk About It, published in 1997, was the first book ever written on male depression. Esther Perel has said, ‘When I need advice, I call Terry Real.’ He is also Robin's former therapist. He sat with her through one of the hardest chapters of her life. And this conversation is unlike any other in this series, because today Robin gets to flip the dynamic and ask Terry questions.  In this episode, recorded in Boston, they explore what it actually takes to break the cycle of generational trauma and love better than we were taught. They talk about the Adaptive Child and the Wise Adult, why grandiosity feels good and what it costs you, and what it means to be the one person in a generation who turns and faces the flames.  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:23) Meet Terry Real (00:02:42) The Work That Saved Robin (00:06:38) Terry's Origin Story (00:12:52) Breaking the Cycle (00:16:14) Something Better Than This (00:26:15) Is It Too Late? The Wounded vs. Adaptive Child (00:33:41) Never Too Late (00:37:42) Men & Masculinity (00:49:10) Grandiosity, Contempt & Empowerment (01:01:33) Myths of Love & Defining It QUOTES “If you treat someone as they are, they will be as they are. If you treat someone as they ought to be, they may become who they ought to be." – Terry Real “The only thing that counts is love, and everything else is just BS” – Terry Real "Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow." – Terry Real "The relational answer to the question who's right and who's wrong is 'who cares?'" – Terry Real ABOUT THE GUEST Terry Real is a nationally recognized family therapist and the creator of Relational Life Therapy (RLT). He's the author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship and I Don't Want to Talk About It, the first book ever written about male depression. A former senior faculty member at the Family Institute of Cambridge and Clinical Fellow at the Meadows Institute in Arizona, Terry now trains therapists in his RLT method and leads workshops for couples and individuals through the Relational Life Institute. Instagram: www.instagram.com/realterryreal/ Website: https://terryreal.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Dr. Sunita Puri – What Dying Teaches Us About Love | Real Love Ready Ep 11 07.07.2026 1sa 22dk

  What does love look like when everything else has been stripped away? When there is no more time to perform it, delay it, or get it right later? Dr. Sunita Puri has spent her career in the rooms where that question gets answered. As a palliative care physician, she sits with people who are dying and what she has witnessed again and again in those rooms is something profound about love. About what people reach for at the end. About what they wish they had said. About what it means to stay present when everything in you wants to run. In this episode, Robin sits down with Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care physician, literary memoirist, Rhodes Scholar, and Associate Professor of Medicine at UC Irvine. Together they explore why we are so afraid of death, what a terminal diagnosis can give you that nothing else can, and why the conversations we keep avoiding are actually the most loving ones we can have. They talk about what it means to die as you have lived, how to show up for someone who is dying, and what the dying teach us about how to love more fully right now. This episode carries something deeply personal. It was recorded the day before Robin's mother, Glenda Ducharme, passed away on June 2, 2026. We dedicate this episode to her, a woman who lived fully, loved deeply, and left a mark on everyone she touched.  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:18) Meeting Dr. Sunita Puri (00:04:08) Why We're Afraid of Death (00:06:28) What Palliative Care Really Means (00:10:21) Faith, Medicine, and Becoming a Doctor (00:21:34) Fighting, Giving Up, and What "Everything" Means (00:32:29) Delivering Hard News and Finding Your Anchor (00:42:29) End-of-Life Clarity and Dying As We've Lived (01:01:44) A Listener's Question on Losing a Parent (01:04:13) Poems on Love and What Remains (01:10:24) Closing Questions: The Myth and Meaning of Love (01:13:54) Dedication and Credits QUOTES "Embedded within each love is loss. It's the sharp side of loving somebody." – Sunita Puri "What remains is often much bigger than what is taken away." – Sunita Puri "I've talked about my dad and when he passed, and the same thing with my twin brother — I loved them so, so deeply. And now that they're not here in the physical, they're even more with me now that they're in spirit — I've taken on more of them in myself, like their gifts, their talents." – Robin Ducharme "Nothing really ever dies. We don't ever really lose people or their essence." – Sunita Puri ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Sunita Puri is an Associate Professor of Medicine at UC Irvine School of Medicine, where she directs the Inpatient Palliative Care Service. She's the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed memoir on redefining what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. A Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, and her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and in a Guardian mini-documentary viewed over 3.5 million times. Dr. Puri is a sought-after speaker on how compassionate language can help patients and physicians navigate conversations about living and dying. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sunitapurimd Website: https://sunitapuri.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Caroline Myss - Why You Can’t Heal | Real Love Ready Ep 10 30.06.2026 1sa 25dk

  Don't meet your idols, they say, unless your idol is Caroline Myss. For the first interview of our Chicago stop on the East Coast tour, Robin sits down with one of her lifelong idols and one of the women whose writing has shaped the very foundation of her spiritual practice. Robin first encountered Caroline's work as a teenager with the book Anatomy of the Spirit, then Sacred Contracts and nothing about the way she understood love, the soul, or the invisible world has ever been the same since. Caroline Myss is a five-time New York Times bestselling author, a medical intuitive, and a mystic whose work has shaped the way millions of people understand who they are and why they are here. In this episode, they explore what sacred contracts actually are and why the people we love were never accidents. They talk about woundology — the way we use our pain as currency — and why liars don't heal. Caroline breaks down what it means when a relationship loses its life force, how to tell when a contract has reached completion, and why your soulmate may not be the person who loves you most, but the one who recognizes your soul. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:01:15) Intro: Love as a Spiritual Force (00:05:42) Medical Intuition and Mysticism (00:12:20) Western Medicine vs. Spiritual Intuition (00:16:36) Intuition: Is it Gendered? (00:21:33) Why Sacred Contracts Exist (00:34:32) Robin's Matchmaker Journey (00:38:08) Why Relationships Are Rocky Right Now (00:42:36) When is a Sacred Contract Complete? (00:50:11) Bringing Your Soul Into a Relationship (00:57:32) Woundology: Why We Hold Onto Wounds (01:03:40) Choice, Grace, and the Power of Words (01:12:16) Why Liars Don't Heal (01:17:34) Debunking Myths About Love QUOTES "Love is what God feels like to us while we are in the human form. We have no other way to experience love except with each other." — Caroline Myss "We are spiritual beings having the human experience, not the other way around." — Robin Ducharme "Your soulmate isn't the person who loves you the most — it's the person who recognizes your soul the most. And that could be the greatest adversary you ever meet." — Caroline Myss "Sacred Contracts was a book that made me understand that the people I loved were not accidents, that my heartbreaks had a purpose. That love, real love, is a spiritual act." — Robin Ducharme ABOUT THE GUEST Caroline Myss is a five-time New York Times bestselling author, medical intuitive, and mystic whose work has shaped the way millions of people understand the soul, healing, and personal power. She is the author of Anatomy of the Spirit, Sacred Contracts, Why People Don't Heal and How They Can, Entering the Castle, and Defy Gravity, among others. She holds graduate degrees in theology and mysticism and has spent decades teaching at the intersection of science, spirituality, and human consciousness. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolinemyss/ Website: https://myss.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  The Angry Therapist | Learning How To Love Well with Robin Ducharme & John Kim 23.06.2026 44dk

  Nothing activates us quite like love. This week, we’re sharing a special episode from The Angry Therapist podcast, hosted by John Kim, licensed therapist, author, co-founder of Soulprint Media, and Robin’s dear friend. John sits down with Robin to talk about the story behind Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy, and the experiences, losses, lessons, and relationships that shaped her belief that love is something we can learn, practice, and grow in. Robin shares where her lifelong love of love began, what working as a matchmaker taught her about the way people show up in dating and relationships, and how losing her twin brother and her father changed the way she understands grief, purpose, and connection. Together, Robin and John talk about forgiveness, family, spiritual connection, relationship patterns, and the myths that so many of us carry about love. At the heart of this conversation is the question that sits at the centre of Real Love Ready: what would change if we treated love not just as a feeling, but as a practice? We’ll be back next week with a brand new episode of Real Love Ready: The Series! IN THIS EPISODE (00:00) Why Love Is So Hard to Learn (01:01) Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy (02:08) Robin and John on Friendship, Soulprint, and Synchronicity (02:50) Where Robin’s Love for Love Began (06:22) From Matchmaking to Relationship Education (08:25) Losing Her Twin Brother (13:48) How Grief Changed Robin’s Mission (17:48) Forgiveness as an Act of Love (21:49) The Origin of Real Love Ready (22:22) What In Bloom Is Really About (27:00) Joy, Learning, and Walking the Walk (28:59) Why Robin Wrote Real Love Ready (30:24) High-Functioning Codependency, Fawning, and Healing Patterns (00:00) Love Myths, Relationship Skills, and What We Were Never Taught QUOTES “People struggle with love. That’s the thing we struggle with the most. And so, how do we learn how to do it?” — Robin Ducharme “Our loved ones don’t go anywhere, they don’t leave us, they stay with us.” — Robin Ducharme “Forgiveness is one of the greatest gifts of love that we can give ourselves.” — Robin Ducharme “Forgiveness is the way into seeing someone’s wholeness, and all the beauty of who they are.” — John Kim “This stuff should be taught in high school and college. We learn from our hearts being shattered, we learn from divorce, we learn from relationships going sideways. We learn the hard way.” — John Kim GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart.https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook ABOUT JOHN KIM John Kim, also known as The Angry Therapist, is a licensed therapist, author, speaker, podcast host, and co-founder of Soulprint Media. He is the author of I Used to Be a Miserable F***, Single on Purpose, Breakup on Purpose, and It’s Not Me, It’s You, co-authored with Vanessa Bennett. His new book, Love Hard. On Purpose., is available now: https://www.theangrytherapist.com/love-hard Instagram: @theangrytherapistWebsite: theangrytherapist.com FOLLOW US @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Damona Hoffman - The Future of Love | Real Love Ready Ep 09 16.06.2026 1sa 24dk

  What does the future of love actually look like? Not the version we inherited, like the relationship escalator, the fairytale, the prince who saves you, the outdated rules about who texts first and who pays. But love as it's really evolving: in a world of dating apps, hot-take profiles, AI technology, and a communication crisis that's reshaping how we connect. In Episode 9 of Real Love Ready, Robin sits down with Damona Hoffman, a relationship futurist, dating coach, and love expert on The Drew Barrymore Show. She's the author of F the Fairy Tale, host of the award-winning Dates & Mates podcast, and has spent nearly two decades advising the world's biggest dating apps behind the scenes. Together they unpack how dating has changed, why intentionality matters more than volume, what AI is doing to the way we relate, and how we get to write our own love stories instead of the ones we were handed. Whether you're single, married, divorced, or somewhere in between, you'll walk away with real, practical ways to bring more love into your life, by being more intentional, more honest, and more loving. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. Get the Real Love Ready book: https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Episode Overview: The Future of Love (00:01:12) Meet Damona Hoffman (00:05:59) How Dating Has Evolved (00:09:27) The Communication Crisis (00:13:18) Dating Burnout (00:15:02) Robin's Story: Getting Ready for Love (00:20:09) Intentionality, Hot Takes & Clear Coding (00:26:32) Are Dating Apps Working? (00:32:51) Non-Monogamy & the Sex Recession (00:38:02) Money, Shame & Who Pays (00:43:40) Writing Your Own Rules & Choosing Each Other (00:50:32) Vulnerability, Safety & Single Shame (00:56:10) How the Generations Love Differently (01:01:46) The Future of Dating & AI (01:15:40) Myths of Love & Damona's Definition QUOTES "We need to feel empowered enough to write our own love stories, and to live our own love stories every day." - Damona Hoffman "When you come from love, intending to do the most loving thing, you're going to create more love." - Robin Ducharme "The best relationships will illuminate the areas where you can grow, and elevate you in the areas where you're already strong." - Damona Hoffman "Your time is your most nonrenewable resource. Don't give it to someone who doesn't align with what you want." - Damona Hoffman ABOUT THE GUEST Damona Hoffman is a certified dating coach, relationship futurist, and the resident love expert on The Drew Barrymore Show. She is the author of F the Fairy Tale and host of the award-winning Dates & Mates podcast, and has advised many of the world's leading dating apps behind the scenes. Her next book, The Communication Code, explores how we identify and share our most comfortable methods of communication with the people we love. Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/damonahoffman/ Website: https://damonahoffman.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow us:  @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Shaka Senghor - The Practice of Forgiveness | Real Love Ready Ep 08 09.06.2026 1sa 11dk

  What does it actually mean to forgive? Not the version we were taught like turning the other cheek, being the bigger person, letting it go. But real forgiveness. The kind that doesn't require you to go back, nor erases what happened. In Episode 8 of Real Love Ready, Robin sits down with Shaka Senghor, bestselling author, speaker, and an incredibly powerful voice on personal transformation and healing. Shaka spent 19 years in prison for second-degree murder, seven of them in solitary confinement. In that darkness he looked at himself deeply and honestly  and wrote his way through rage, shame, grief, and the long process of forgiving himself. What came out the other side wasn't just survival. It was a profound understanding that forgiveness, at its deepest level, is love in action. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Episode Overview (00:03:40) What Forgiveness Really Means (00:05:13) Shaka's Story (00:10:38) Growing Up in Trauma (00:19:34) The Road to Forgiveness (00:20:48) The Letter That Changed Everything (00:28:54) Solitary Confinement (00:34:17) Mentoring Forgiveness & The Power of Writing (00:41:50) Forgiving Those Who Hurt Him (00:55:19) Breaking the Cycle for His Children (01:01:20) Collective Forgiveness & Truth Telling (01:04:34) Myths of Love & Shaka’s Definition QUOTES "The gift of forgiveness had already been given to me. I just wasn't able to receive it." - Shaka Senghor "Forgiveness is like one of the most powerful acts of love. It's love in action. Giving love to yourself and giving love to others." - Robin Ducharme "The inability to forgive is one of our greatest hidden prisons, because somehow we think that we're punishing the person that we choose not to forgive without really deeply understanding how much we punish ourselves." - Shaka Senghor ABOUT THE GUEST Shaka Senghor is a bestselling author, speaker, and advocate for personal transformation and criminal justice reform. After spending 19 years in prison, seven of them in solitary confinement, he emerged as one of the most compelling voices on redemption, forgiveness, and what it means to truly change. He is the author of Writing My Wrongs, Letters to the Sons of Society, and How to Be Free. Social media: @shakasenghor  Website: shakasenghor.com GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow us:  @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Sabrina Zohar - Opening to Love Again | Real Love Ready Ep 07 02.06.2026 58dk

  Are you ready to love again? After six episodes exploring love from every angle — what it is, where we learned it, why we hurt the people closest to us, and where it goes when it ends — we arrive at the question that follows all of that work: how do you open yourself back up? In Episode 7 of Real Love Ready, Robin sits down with Sabrina Zohar, dating coach, author, entrepreneur, and host of The Sabrina Zohar Show. Sabrina is known for her no-BS approach to anxious attachment and for giving people the exact tools to stop letting it run their love life. In this conversation they talk about why we keep chasing the spark, how to tell the difference between a relationship that feels calm because it is healthy and one that just feels boring, and why sitting in discomfort might be the most important skill you can bring into love. Sabrina shares what it took to stop being the girl having panic attacks over a text. Robin opens up about what it finally felt like when love felt calm. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready.IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Episode Overview: Opening to Love Again (00:03:11) From Fashion to Dating Coach: Sabrina's Evolution (00:05:02) Being Your Own Worst Enemy: Anxiety & Self-Sabotage (00:06:12) Sabrina's Framework: State, Story, Strategy (00:15:41) The Spark Myth: Chemistry vs. Calm (00:18:30) The Moment Everything Changed: Choosing Yourself  (00:23:48) Navigating Texting While Dating (00:29:29) What a Real Red Flag Actually Looks Like (00:32:51) Calm vs. Boring: How to Tell the Difference (00:34:53) Love Bombing: What It Is & Why It Happens (00:47:15) Knowing When You're Ready to Love Again (00:51:15) Myths of Love & Sabrina's Definition QUOTES "What parts of yourself do you not think anyone is ever going to love? Because that is driving the car." - Sabrina Zohar “It's not about if he likes you. Do you like him?” - Robin Ducharme "Love to me is that I can be here with you, but I can also let you go. If I really love you, I have to be okay if this doesn't work and let you free." - Sabrina Zohar "The one myth that drives me insane is that relationships and love should be easy. I don't know who told us that, but relationships take two people that choose each other every single day." - Sabrina Zohar ABOUT THE GUEST Sabrina Zohar is a dating coach, entrepreneur, and host of The Sabrina Zohar Show. Known for her honest, no-BS approach to modern dating and anxious attachment, she has built one of the most trusted voices in the relationship space. Her new book Why Am I Like This? is available for preorder now. https://sabrinazohar.com/book Instagram: @sabrina.zohar  Podcast: @thesabrinazoharshow GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow us:  @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Bob Dalton - Home: Where Love Lives | Real Love Ready Ep 06 26.05.2026 56dk

  What does home really mean? When Bob Dalton asks people that question, the most common answer he hears is safety. Not a place. Not four walls. Safety. In Episode 6 of Real Love Ready, Robin sits down with Bob Dalton, social entrepreneur, community builder, and founder of LOCL and Sackcloth and Ashes, a blanket company that supports homeless shelters across the country. Bob has spent his life asking what it means to truly belong somewhere. What he has found is that home is not strictly defined by where you live but also by how you love and are loved. This conversation explores why safety is so foundational, not just in the buildings we live in but in our relationships and our ability to love well. Robin and Bob talk about the power of building community locally, why every single one of us has the ability to be a community builder, and how the most powerful displays of love are often the ones we receive in the seasons where we least expect them. We get to create the future we want to see. And more often than not, it starts right where we are, in our communities, with the people closest to us. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:01) Introduction  (00:02:00) Meet Bob (00:04:17) How Community Raised Him  (00:08:39) When Bob's Mom Became Homeless  (00:10:01) How Sackcloth and Ashes Was Born  (00:17:11) The Three Things That Actually Help Homelessness  (00:20:16) Why Local Action Is More Effective  (00:22:53) Breaking Generational Patterns  (00:25:22) Being Good with the Person in the Mirror  (00:27:21) What Is Home?  (00:29:16) Having a Roof Over Your Head Changes How You Love (00:31:15) The LOCL App: Building Micro-Communities  (00:33:18) Community Builders Are the New Influencers  (00:42:02) Creating the Future We Want to See  (00:44:51) The Myth About Home and Defining Love  (00:46:56) Bob's Definition of Love QUOTES "The most common answer I get when I ask people what is home to you? It's safety." — Bob Dalton “To give with no strings attached. The most powerful displays of love is something that was given to me despite me deserving it. When you experience love, grace, mercy in a season where you don't deserve it — that is what truly has the opportunity to change a person." — Bob Dalton “The only antidote to addiction is community." — Bob Dalton "Intentional time spent with somebody is one of the most powerful things that we can do. We're spending a lot of time together but we're not having intentional time with people." — Bob Dalton "The people that are going to rock with you no matter what. The people that you can call when you're at rock bottom and you know they're going to be there for you. The people that show you grace in the midst of your own fuck-ups — that is about as home as you can get." — Bob Dalton ABOUT THE GUEST Bob Dalton is a social entrepreneur, community architect, and founder of Sackcloth and Ashes, a blanket company that has donated over 200,000 blankets to homeless shelters across the United States. He is also the creator of LOCL, an app designed to help people find and build micro-communities within a 50-mile radius of where they live. Bob's work is rooted in the belief that community is the antidote to disconnection and that everyone has the power to build belonging right where they are. Download the LOCL app: https://home.locl.com/ Sackcloth and Ashes: https://sackclothandashes.com GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBookFollow us:  @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  John Kim - Where Does Love Go When It Ends? | Real Love Ready Ep 05 19.05.2026 1sa 14dk

  Does love ever really end? One thing about love is that it rarely prepares you for its own ending. It doesn't give you a manual for what to do when the marriage ends, when the house burns down, when the person you built your life around is suddenly gone. And you're left asking: where does love go when it ends? In Episode 5 of Real Love Ready, Robin sits down with her dear friend John Kim, known as The Angry Therapist, a licensed therapist, author, and co-founder of Soulprint Media, who has lived this question in every possible form. His first marriage ended at 35, and instead of hiding the wreckage, he blogged the whole breakdown in real time. His honesty became a movement. Last year, he lost his home in the Altadena fires and everything he had built was gone in a single night. This conversation is deeply personal. John opens up about loss, the grief, the guilt of moving on too fast, and what it looks like to model vulnerability as a pathway to healing. Together, Robin and John challenge the myth that endings mean failure. Relationships transform. And in that transformation, if we are willing to look, there is gold. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. Next week, Robin sits down with Bob Dalton to explore what it means to build belonging and why community holds us through the hardest chapters of our lives. Episode 6: Home: Where Love Lives. IN THIS EPISODE ​​(00:00:00) Introduction (00:04:00) Does Love Actually End? (00:07:45) The Angry Therapist Origin Story (00:12:32) What Emotional Unavailability Really Looks Like (00:14:38) How John Became Emotionally Aware (00:17:36) Why Not All Breakups Are the Same (00:20:12) The Day John Lost Everything (00:27:16) Navigating Different Grief (00:32:30) The Power of Grieving Together (00:37:00) Why Heartbreak Lives in Your Body (00:42:28) How John Got Into Men's Work (00:48:31) How a House Fire started a Publishing Company (01:03:44) Divorce as the Greatest Catalyst (01:06:05) Myths of Heartbreak & Defining Love QUOTES "My divorce was the hardest thing I've ever gone through. But the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. That repositioning has given me so much.” - John Kim “Just because I was the one that made the decision doesn't mean that I wasn't completely heartbroken." - Robin Ducharme "I don't think love ends. I think if you look at love like energy, it changes form.” - John Kim ABOUT THE GUEST John Kim is a licensed therapist, author, co-founder of Soulprint Media, and founder of The Angry Therapist. He is the author of I Used to Be a Miserable Fck*, Single on Purpose, Breakup on Purpose, and It's Not Me, It's You, co-authored with his wife Vanessa Bennett. His new book Love Hard is available June 6th. He also hosts The Angry Therapist podcast. Instagram: @theangrytherapist  Website: theangrytherapist.com GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow us:  @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Vanessa Bennett - Why We Hurt the Ones We Love | Real Love Ready Ep 04 12.05.2026 1sa 3dk

  Why do love and hurt travel together? In Episode 4 of Real Love Ready, Robin sits down with Vanessa Bennett, author, licensed holistic psychotherapist, codependency coach, and depth psychologist. She is the author of The Motherhood Myth, and co-author of It's Not Me, It's You (with her husband, therapist John Kim). Her work is built on a belief that most of us are not ready to hear: that the people hurting us in our relationships are often holding up a mirror. And that the most powerful thing we can do is look into it. We have a whole cultural vocabulary around toxic relationships, red flags, and narcissism. What we don't have is enough honest conversation about our part in the patterns we keep repeating. That's what this episode is for. Honest, direct, and genuinely compassionate, this conversation covers shadow work, codependency, projection, and how understanding why we hurt and how we heal, is how we learn to love better. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. QUOTES "Everywhere you go, there you are. You're going to continue to show up and entertain these toxic relationships. So, until we really say, okay, they acted in narcissistic ways. How did I act in narcissistic ways? They were toxic because of this. How was I toxic too? Those are the conversations that actually start to turn the needle in behavior change." — Vanessa Bennett"I do think that deep, intimate love can be difficult. If you really want to go there, it's going to take work…mostly because we are confronted with ourselves. That's the hard work. Having to see ourselves and having to actually decide if we're going to do the work on ourselves that's required to have real, intimate love." — Vanessa Bennett “Love to me feels like a mirror. A compassionate mirror, but a mirror nonetheless. And love to me, a lot of times, means accountability. It's accountability to myself. It's accountability to others. It's accountability to that part of me that's striving to be the best version of myself." — Vanessa Bennett "I don't think it's possible for somebody else to build that sense of safety in us. We need to build our own internal safety…Because ultimately, what that means is, it actually doesn't matter what he's doing. Because I'm safe, I've got me." — Vanessa Bennett ABOUT THE GUEST Vanessa Bennett, LMFT, is a licensed depth psychotherapist, author, and facilitator known for her no-nonsense yet compassionate approach to healing. She is the author of The Motherhood Myth and coauthor of It’s Not Me, It’s You.A former New Yorker turned Angelino now practicing internationally, Vanessa leads transformational retreats and workshops rooted in Jungian and depth-oriented psychology. She is the founder of Inner Compass Academy, a depth-based training and coaching program, and hosts the Inner Compass Podcast. Through her writing and teaching, she supports both personal and collective healing—helping people break generational patterns and awaken to the ways harmful social systems shape their lives, so they can reclaim agency and live less from conditioning, and more from choice. Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/vanessasbennett/ Website: https://vanessabennett.com Substack: https://substack.com/@itsvanessabennett Inner Compass Academy: https://www.vanessabennett.com/inner-compass-academy GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow us:  @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Matt Ritter & Aaron Karo - The Gift of Friendship | Real Love Ready Ep 03 05.05.2026 1sa 3dk

  Who shows up for you? In Episode 3 of Real Love Ready, Robin sits down with authors, comedians, and best friends since second grade Matt Ritter and Aaron Karo. They are the men behind the book The Buddy System and the podcast Man of the Year. Their thesis is simple and radical at the same time: friendship is not a luxury, it is essential to our survival. And yet platonic love rarely gets the same attention as romantic love. We have entire industries built around finding a partner. But the friends who show up at 2am, who have known you since second grade, who celebrate your wins and sit with you in your grief? Those relationships tend to get taken for granted. This episode is here to change that. Funny, warm, and quietly urgent, this conversation covers the loneliness epidemic, why your partner cannot be everything to you, and why the people who really show up are the ones you never forget. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:38) Episode Overview: Friendship as a Form of Love (00:03:30) Matt & Aaron's Story: The Man of the Year  (00:06:49) The Male Friendship Crisis  (00:10:04) Friendship is the Most Underserved Relationship (00:13:45) How to Actually Make New Friends (00:21:15) Showing Up Through Grief and the Hard Moments (00:23:03) Friendship Breakups and the Friend Emeritus (00:25:22) Can Men and Women Really Be Just Friends? (00:44:57) Rituals and Maintaining Your Friendships  (00:54:50) Myths of Friendship and Defining Love QUOTES "Our friends are so essential to our well-being and it's our biological need as human beings... Make that phone call, send the text, actually plan a date with your friend." - Robin Ducharme "Men don't have falling outs. They have falling offs. You just don't talk to your friend for two weeks, then two months, then two years, and then you never talk to him again…but nothing happened." - Matt Ritter "A useless friend is a friend who can do nothing for you. They can't help you in your job, they can't help you financially. They're just someone you enjoy hanging out with for the sake of hanging out. I think that's one of the purest forms of love." - Aaron Karo ABOUT THE GUESTS Matt Ritter and Aaron Karo are best friends and co-hosts of "Man of the Year," the #1 podcast on male friendship, and co-authors of "The Buddy System," the #1 bestselling new release in Friendship on Audible. Together they have been featured in The New York Times, on NPR, and the Today Show. Matt is a former lawyer turned Hollywood creator and the leading voice of the modern friendship movement. Through his viral social content, newsletter "The Friendship Habit," and his company Friendship Productions, he is building a media empire devoted to helping people strengthen their social fitness in an age of disconnection. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattritter1/ Website: https://www.thefriendshipguy.com Aaron is a screenwriter, comedian, and #1 New York Times bestselling author whose feature "Tickle Me Elmo" was voted #8 on the 2024 Black List. His next book, an oral history of the movie "Elf," will be published by HarperCollins in November 2026.  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aaronkaro/ Website: https://aaronkaro.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow us:  @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Chelsey Goodan - The Blueprints We Inherit | Real Love Ready Ep. 02 28.04.2026 1sa 12dk

  Where did you learn to love? In this second episode of Real Love Ready, Robin sits down with author and girls' advocate Chelsey Goodan to explore the patterns installed in us long before we had the language to name them. Chelsey has spent 17 years working with teenage girls. She became their microphone, their advocate, and their translator between worlds. What she's found is that the teenage years are when childhood patterns solidify into adult relationship behaviors. They are also a raw and unfiltered window into who we are becoming. And there is so much we can learn from those years, especially from teenage girls. They love with a fullness, a fierceness, and an openness that most of us now adults have spent years trying to find our way back to. Maybe the goal was never to fully grow up and move on. Maybe the goal is to heal so deeply that we return to who we were at that age, before the world told us to be smaller, before the labels, before we learned to dim the light. This conversation explores why healing our inner teenager is essential to breaking the patterns that no longer serve us — and why teenage girls right now might be the first truly liberated generation and what they can teach us about loving better. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:30) Episode Overview: Teenage Years as the Blueprint (00:03:01) Chelsey’s Work Becoming a Voice and Advocate for Teenagers (00:05:28) The ‘Good Girl’ Trap and the Impossible Binary (00:07:16) The 3 R’s: Framework for Releasing, Reclaiming, and Reframing the Labels We Carry (00:12:01) Listening as a Form of Love (00:19:18) Parents & Their Own Unhealed Teenage Stories (00:32:06) Body Image & the Mother-Daughter Dynamic (00:43:55) Radical Honesty among the Liberated Generation (00:57:10) Boys, AI, & Breaking Cycles (01:05:55) Debunking Myths of Love and Defining It QUOTES "These years shape everything. When we think about our blueprints, we often focus on early childhood. But what about the teenage girl we were? The moment we learned to be good instead of bold." - Robin Ducharme “74% of girls are incredibly worried about pleasing everyone, and that’s a constriction and tension that is not sustainable.” - Chelsey Goodan “I'm changing the dynamic with how I'm parenting my kids.. If I can disrupt my own patterning and raise them differently.. We still have that opportunity..” - Robin Ducharme  “This generation of girls is the most liberated generation of girls to ever live. They are going to step into leadership and build a different world.” - Chelsey Goodan ABOUT THE GUEST Chelsey Goodan is an author, educator, and girls' advocate who has spent 17 years working with teenage girls across the world — in workshops, mentorship programs, and her Teenage Girl Cabal. She is the author of Underestimated: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls. Her work bridges the gap between teenage girls and the adults in their lives, helping families build deeper connection, trust, and love. Instagram: @chelseagoodan Website: chelseygoodan.com GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow us:  @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices