Today’s Fine Feminist Hour featured writer, publisher, and Offbeat Empire founder Ariel Meadow Stallings, whose latest essay on Voluminous Love stopped me in my tracks.
Together we put two very different dating frameworks in conversation:
mine, grounded in pattern recognition, attachment, and protecting your peace—and Ariel’s, which asks what happens when we stop treating love like a risk management problem.
Together we discussed:
Why modern dating has become a system of risk management — and what we lose when we optimize for emotional safety above all else
The idea that grief isn’t the cost of love — it is love, and what it means to expand your capacity for both
How analysis can become its own form of dissociation, and why the body often knows faster than the story we tell about it
Whether frameworks like anxious vs. avoidant attachment clarify our experiences — or quietly shift responsibility onto women
What trust actually means in midlife: not trusting others to behave, but trusting yourself to handle whatever happens
If you’ve been dating in midlife — especially if you’ve ever felt the tension between protecting your peace and staying open to love — this conversation is for you.
Thank you Lawrence Winnerman, Karen Marie Shelton, LeftieProf, Lynn, Maura, and many others for tuning in.
Love you all, mean it!
