However, there are roadblocks and misguided perspectives that come up frequently with my clients when we sit down to figure out what went wrong. The following is a short list of love and relationship truths that I hope will give you clarity, support, and resonance.

A few years ago, my best friend and I broke up with our boyfriends during the same week and we were completely devastated. We cried together, took turns bringing chicken soup to each other’s apartments, and made sure the other one was brushing teeth on a regular basis. After about a month of this we were still not feeling better or getting out much and we decided that had to change. We were in New York City after all, and being on a diet of Ben & Jerry’s and cheap martinis was ruining any judgement we had left. John and I created the Thursday Night Supper Club and we would each invite 2 people to dinner at the Standard Hotel and the 6 of us would drink some drinks, eat some food, laugh some laughs, and slowly we started to feel human again.

Yes, it’s really happening right at this moment. Some people don’t like you, and guess what? There’s nothing you can do about it. No amount of coercion, toadying, or pandering to their interests will help. In fact, the opposite is often true; the more you stand for something, the more they respect you, whether it’s grudgingly or not.

Think back to 2000. Web browsers are just a few years old, your parents probably didn’t have email, you possibly didn’t own a cell phone yet, almost no one had broadband. The commercial web was all about portals big monolithic sites that you’d visit to read your mail, view your calendar, check headline news, etc. all in one place. The internet was all abuzz with the idea of merging big media with the web. This stuff was costly so they needed to keep your eyeballs on the site as much as possible. Any new thing they could tack onto a site to keep you there a little longer was fair game.