In the summer of 2023, I was three years into dating after losing my husband and I was doing it badly.
Not badly in the way people mean when they say someone isn't ready — I was ready, or ready enough. Badly in the way that suggested I was following a pattern I couldn't see clearly yet, the same kind of man leading to the same kind of ending and the same bewildered walk back to my phone to open the app and start over.
My friend Deidra suggested I talk to Angela Wetzel (epicinitiator.com). Angela is a relationship coach based in Houston — not a therapist, she's clear about that — who works with high-achieving women on the gap between how capable they are everywhere else in their lives and how confused they feel in romantic relationships. We met virtually every few weeks through the summer and into the fall.
The homework from our third session was this: make a list. Not a list of qualities you want in a partner — that's backwards, Angela said. A list of how you want to feel in a relationship. Start there and work outward.
I sat with that instruction for a few days before I could do it. It sounds simple and it wasn't. I had spent most of my adult life oriented toward other people's feelings — anticipating them, managing them, adjusting myself in response to them — and being asked what I wanted to feel was a question I didn't have an immediate answer to. I had to think about it the way you'd think about a language you studied once and haven't spoken in years.
Eventually I picked up a journal and wrote the list down by hand. Supported. Pursued. Beautiful. Loved. Passionate. Valued. Reciprocity. Connected. Playful. Safe and grounded. Prioritized. Intellectual — interesting. Ease.
Fifteen things, and some of them surprised me when I wrote them.
"Pursued" in particular — I sat with that word for a while, feeling slightly embarrassed by it, then wrote it down anyway because Angela had said the point was honesty, not performance.
The insight from that session that landed hardest wasn't on the list itself.
It was something I said out loud that I hadn't quite admitted before: that I had a habit of waiting for an invitation to share how I was feeling rather than just saying it, that I wasn't going to offer it unless someone asked.
I had framed this to myself as discretion, or self-sufficiency, or not wanting to burden anyone. Angela reflected it back to me as something else — as a woman who had learned very early that her feelings were safest kept to herself, and who was now, in her 40s, paying the relational cost of that lesson.
I'm not going to pretend one coaching engagement resolved that, because it didn't. But naming it changed something, and the list changed something too. Starting from how I wanted to feel, rather than from a checklist of his characteristics, reoriented me in a way that was small at first and then, over time, significant.
A few weeks after I made that list, I met someone.
I think the timing worked because I had finally gotten clear enough on how I wanted to feel that I could recognize it when it showed up — instead of talking myself into something that looked right on paper while feeling wrong in my body.
When "Daniel" arrived he was, as my friend would say, almost suspiciously good. He was kind in a way that didn't require anything from me, present in a way I hadn't experienced before, and he was the kind of guy who said things I found myself writing down in my phone late at night — not because I was planning a book, just because I didn't want to forget them. The way he showed up felt like the list made real, and he didn't even know it existed.
That's when I started keeping notes. Not out of ambition, but out of disbelief mostly, and a kind of reverence for the fact that it was possible — that the work had pointed somewhere real and it was better than Hallmark.
The novella I'm releasing on my birthday, May 5, is The Mutual Appreciation Society. It grew from those notes. It's fiction — names changed, timeline compressed, a few scenes invented for the sake of the story — but the feeling at the center of it is true.
And it's short. Apparently, you don't have a novel if it's under 22k words. Mine's about 20k. Go figure.
Here's where the name comes from: On one of our first dates, I told "Daniel" I liked him, and he smiled and said that we were members of "the mutual appreciation society." I loved that. I wrote it down that night because I knew immediately it was the title of something, even if I didn't know yet what.
The idea that you can do the quiet work of understanding what you actually want and then one day meet someone who says exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment — that part is not made up.
That's why I wrote it, and that's why the list is free.
Angela Wetzel is a relationship coach based in Houston. You can find her at epicinitiator.com. The Feelings List — a result of the homework she assigned me in August 2023 — is available as a free download at papertiger.store.