Subscribe Now
Could your love relationship use a bit of boost? Some calm in the storm? Or are you looking for love that’s been hard to find? In this On Health for Women episode I’m joined by Dr. Alexandra Solomon, a wonderful couples therapist, professor, author of Love Every Day and the host of the Reimagining Love podcast. Together we explore the real meaning of love and how it can be cultivated through daily practices of self-awareness, self-compassion, and intentional connection. Whether single, in a relationship, or simply seeking a better relationship with yourself, this conversation offers powerful tools to foster a deeper, more resilient connection to yourself and others.
Dr. Solomon sheds light on using Relational Self-Awareness (RSA) to build fulfilling partnerships, understand our Family-of-Origin influences, and tackle relationship conflicts as a team. Join us as we unpack the complexities of intimacy and share practical guidance on nurturing love in ways that are both transformative and healing.
Episode Highlights:
- Long-Term Partnership Wisdom: Dr. Solomon’s advice on nurturing enduring love with the help of daily practices that strengthen connection, respect, and joy.
- Love as Daily Practice: Why love is more than a feeling—it’s a mindful practice that requires small, intentional actions each day.
- Understanding Family-of-Origin: How early family dynamics, or our “Original Love Classroom,” shape our relationship patterns, and ways to move beyond them.
- Navigating Attachment Styles: A look at common attachment patterns like anxious and avoidant types, and ways to harmonize different styles in relationships.
- Relational Self-Awareness (RSA): How RSA can unlock healthier relationships by increasing empathy, self-understanding, and resilience.
- Turning Conflict into Connection: Practical tools for approaching challenges as a team and transforming conflict into intimacy and personal growth.
- Self-Compassion and Self-Respect: Balancing self-love with loving others without losing yourself in the relationship.
- Modern Dating Realities: Dr. Solomon shares insights into why dating can be difficult today and how to embrace a compassionate approach.
Resources and Links:
- Alexandra’s Website: dralexandrasolomon.com
- Follow Dr. Solomon on Instagram: @dr.alexandra.solomon
- Connect with Dr. Aviva Romm: @dr.avivaromm
If this episode resonated with you, consider taking action by sharing it with a friend or leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Make sure to subscribe to On Health for more conversations like this one, bringing you expert insights and empowering you to take control of your health and well-being.
The Interview Transcript: Alexandra Solomon
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Aviva: Hi, everybody, and welcome to On Health. My guest today is Dr. Alexandra Solomon, PhD, an internationally recognized couples and relationship therapist whose framework, relational self-awareness, has reached millions of people around the globe. Her new book, Love Every Day, offers 365 daily practices to cultivate a curious and compassionate approach to your relationships with others and to your relationship with yourself. Whether you're single, in a relationship, or between relationships, Love Every Day and our episode today invite you to get aware, curious, compassionate, and empowered so that you can be seen and loved as your most authentic self—and heal from those times when you weren't. Alexandra, welcome. I'm so excited to have you on On Health with me today.
Alexandra: I’m so happy to meet you. I have no idea how long I've been following you on Instagram, but it's been a very, very long time. I feel like you were one of my first follows when I got on the gram years ago.
Aviva: What an honor. Thank you! I love your work, and I'm so excited to chat about all the things, including your new book. I want to start out with the first word in the title, Love. It’s one of those words, like stress or family, that means a lot of things depending on our experiences. Just as an example, I had a friend who love-bombed me for two years. One of her phrases to me all the time was, “we’re family.” And I bought in. I mean, I loved her. I still love her. But here’s the thing—when she got what she wanted, she ghosted me, and I was pretty devastated for a while. I talked with my therapist about it, and one big thing she said to me was, “You’re my family.” So I felt especially estranged, right?
Alexandra: Sure.
Aviva: My therapist said, “Well, let’s think about that, Aviva. ‘Family’ means a lot of things to a lot of people, and sometimes that can mean love bombing and then dumping.” So I just want to emphasize that when we talk about these concepts, we can all think differently about what it means. Love is something we all want. Research shows its benefits in every way when it’s healthy, and we know that loneliness is downright damaging, especially for women. So let’s start by talking about what love means to you.
Alexandra: What a beautiful way to start this conversation. I think we can be expansive about the definition of love. One of the parts of my work is that I teach an undergraduate relationship and sexuality education course at Northwestern University, which I’ve been doing for longer than I’ve been a parent and almost as long as I’ve been a wife. So, this spring will be my 24th time teaching this class called Marriage 101. On the first day, I offer a working definition of love. We focus on intimate partnership and cultivating love in that relationship. The definition I’ve been using for 24 years—and will keep using for the next, God willing, 24 years—is one I got from bell hooks' beautiful book, All About Love. She got her definition of love from one of the original self-help writers named M. Scott Peck, who said back in the 1970s that love is…
Aviva: The Road Less Traveled, right?
Alexandra: That's right. Oh my God, I can see the cover of it. It sat on my mom’s nightstand when I was a kid.
Aviva: I know! I was first exposed to bell hooks when I was 14 or 15, and I still tend to write in lowercase. That influence from her was huge for me.
Alexandra: Yeah, she just put her little imprint on you, and it became this huge imprint on your soul from a very young age.
Aviva: Absolutely. One of my friends, and this is a joke, moms—cover your little ones' ears—said to me, when I once sent an email in all lowercase, “Aviva, please, punctuation. It's the difference between helping your uncle Jack off a horse or helping your Uncle Jack off his horse.”
Alexandra: (laughs) That’s so funny.
Aviva: But back to bell hooks and love…
Alexandra: bell said that M. Scott Peck, who wrote The Road Less Traveled, defined love as an ongoing commitment to someone else's spiritual evolution and growth.
Aviva: That’s beautiful because it really frames love as helping someone else rather than just filling something in ourselves.
Alexandra: And if you and I are in a relationship, and I’m here to support your spiritual growth, and you’re here to support mine, we both get our needs met—but we do it in a more expansive, abundant way rather than a kind of checklist, “What have you done for me lately?” approach.
Aviva: I love that. And one of the things you talk about in your new book Love Every Day is the idea that we have to practice love daily. I feel like that concept really lands for me on an embodied level. I want to hear more about that—what does it mean that we have to practice love every day?
Alexandra: For me, it’s about moving away from a perfectionistic idea of love. The first element of practicing love every day is knowing that we get another chance tomorrow. If I don’t feel like I showed up how I wanted with my husband today, I get, God willing, another chance tomorrow, and we can refine. Love Every Day is a year’s worth of musings, meditations, and practices about love. One entry is about asking for a redo, because how often do we speak before we think or from a triggered place? Part of practicing love every day is being willing to say, “I didn’t like how I did that. Can we circle back?” It moves us away from the idea that we have to get it right every time to be an adequate partner.
The Gottmans, who are treasured marital relationship researchers, found that it’s the small things that matter—the little elements of communication and connection. That idea is helpful because it runs counter to fairytales where love is made manifest in sweeping gestures and big moments. I mean, I love when my husband plans something grand, but there’s too much space between those big moments to try to capture an entire relationship in them. The practice of love every day is a reminder that the little, in-between moments matter. They fuel connection or create conditions for disengagement.
Aviva: I feel like I could cry. We went to New York City this past weekend, and as is often the case in my marriage, which is reaching 40 years this June—40 years!
Alexandra: You are? Wow, congratulations!
Aviva: Yes. Three-quarters of my life. I met my husband when I was 15. We’ve had a long journey together. He’s not the planned, grand-gestures type of guy, and sometimes I feel like I carry the emotional burden. I got the Off-Broadway tickets, found the show, made the dinner plans. And sometimes I can get resentful about it. This morning, I had a bunch of podcast recordings, and he offered to take a cab to get my car from the shop, which was 45 minutes away. He had work to do too, but he just wanted to help. When we got home, I jumped out and gave him a huge hug. It’s those little gestures, you know? I’ve heard people talk about marriages that didn’t work out as death by a thousand paper cuts.
Alexandra: Yeah, that’s right. And he missed an opportunity to self-inquire about what was blocking him. If he learned that declaring sovereignty or rebellion was how he survived a strict parent, he might act out of rebellion rather than support. There’s a kind of rationality that predates knowing his wife—he’s reacting to something deeper, an unexamined past experience.
Aviva: Right. It’s that practice of relational self-awareness you talk about, right?
Alexandra: Exactly. Relational self-awareness is about holding up a mirror and gently exploring what's happening within us in the service of our relationships. It’s so easy to place our confusion, frustration, or disappointment at the feet of our partner. But the courageous thing to do, and what is at the heart of intimacy, is to look inward and say, “What is this bringing up in me?” If I know, for example, that I have a tendency to feel neglected if my partner doesn’t notice the small things, I might pause and explore, “What part of me feels unseen here?” Relational self-awareness is ongoing—curiously and compassionately understanding our own interior world. It’s not about looking at our family of origin or past as an end in itself; it’s to gain awareness that helps us show up with more courage, vulnerability, and curiosity in our partnerships.
Aviva: I love that approach. And it segues beautifully into something else you teach, which is the idea of the “original love classroom.” That phrase feels so neutral; it doesn’t throw anyone under the bus, but it acknowledges where we learn our relationship patterns. Can you talk about how family dynamics influence us—maybe even subtly—and how we can unpack that together?
Alexandra: We’re doing this work at such an exciting time. When I started my career, exploring family dynamics was something people only did behind closed therapy doors. But now, we’re increasingly talking about trauma, family roles, and childhood dynamics openly. It’s not always about finding childhood trauma; it’s about looking at the roles we took on, who we felt we had to be, or who we weren’t allowed to be. It’s almost like doing anthropological work within our own families. That’s our first culture, our original love classroom, and we soak it up with no emotional boundaries when we’re young.
We observe our caregivers—whether they’re in relationships or not—how they handle stress, express love, or navigate conflict. And a lot of it is implicit. We don’t sit down and have explicit conversations about these things; we absorb it. So, looking at family dynamics helps us understand how we relate to others, even if it’s not about pointing fingers at our parents. Most parents are doing the best they can with their level of healing and the scope of their vision at that time.
Aviva: That’s such a compassionate lens. Conflict, of course, is inevitable in relationships. One thing I really resonate with from your work is the idea of fighting against disconnection, rather than fighting against each other. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to stay connected as a team during conflict, especially when one person might be shutting down, feeling defensive, or misunderstood. And I imagine this might also model conflict resolution for kids.
Alexandra: Absolutely. Research shows it’s not whether couples have conflict but how they navigate it that matters. And you’re right—how we handle conflict models so much for our kids. One of the most powerful things we can do is pause. Conflict often creates a sense of urgency to resolve it immediately, but that urgency comes from the pain of disconnection, the desperation to feel understood. The first step is noticing that urgency and recognizing when we’ve entered that cycle.
A lot of couples therapy approaches focus on learning to identify these cycles. For instance, I might start a session by helping a couple see how “the more I do this, the more you do that, and the more you do that, the more I do this,” creates a dance. Once we start talking about it as a cycle, it becomes something we’re facing together, rather than something one person is doing to the other. Finding the perpetrator and victim in these dynamics is ultimately pointless. What we really want is to look together at this cycle that’s harming us both. So, if you’re in a moment of tension and can recognize the cycle, pausing is one of the most powerful practices. Model for your partner, and your kids, that you can step away, take a breather, and circle back with clarity and compassion.
Aviva: That’s really interesting, especially given the focus on attachment styles these days. In my relationship, my attachment style is more anxious, and my husband’s is avoidant. So if we’re having a conversation, say about finances, I might mention a concern, and he hears it as criticism. He shuts down, which ramps up my anxiety, and then I’m chasing him for a response, trying to repair the fracture. And around and around we go. How do you work with couples to recognize these cycles, especially when one partner might not want to look at it?
Alexandra: That dynamic is incredibly common—the pursuer-withdrawer cycle. The more you pursue, the more he withdraws, and vice versa. It can be so frustrating. The way out is exactly what you mentioned: pausing and self-soothing. When you do that, it changes the dynamic and, over time, helps him feel safe enough to re-engage. What research shows is that the more you practice self-soothing in those moments, the more likely he’ll come back into the conversation voluntarily. It counters the urge to avoid and creates a safer space.
Aviva: It also weirdly starts to heal the rift inside myself—knowing I’m okay and don’t need him to respond immediately.
Alexandra: Absolutely. When you’re in that anxious pursuit, it can feel overwhelming, like it’s taken on a life of its own. When you step away, find your center, and self-soothe, the urgency calms down, and the issue feels more manageable. You can hold onto your concern while empathizing with his experience.
Aviva: That really resonates, especially with the concept of being embodied. So often, when there’s a rupture in a relationship, it becomes very verbal and intellectual. But so much of it is rooted in the body. Can you speak more about how being in tune with our physical selves plays a role in relational self-awareness?
Alexandra: Absolutely. My field, for a long time, was very cognitive and heady. But now, with all this emerging research in neuroscience, somatic science, and theories like polyvagal theory, we’re realizing how limited talking can be without including the body. So much of our experience in relationships is embodied. When we’re connected, we feel that physical sensation of safety. When we’re disconnected, our body knows it before our mind catches up.
Take, for example, a conversation about finances. When you and your husband are in a state of connection, you might feel his concern alongside your own. You’re able to approach the issue together, side by side. But when you’re in a state of disconnection, suddenly, the story becomes, “He’s not here for me. He doesn’t care about this as much as I do.” In polyvagal theory, Deb Dana has a phrase: “Story follows state.” So when you’re in a state of calm and safety, the story aligns with that state. But if you’re in fight-or-flight, the story becomes one of defensiveness, distance, and fear. And the work is to help your body find that regulated state because the body will guide the mind back to a more compassionate, connected story.
Aviva: I love that you bring up Deb Dana. I find her work so insightful. And as a midwife and MD, I’ve seen so many relationships up close, particularly around birth and major life changes. Sometimes it’s clear that a relationship just isn’t healthy. I’ve even found myself congratulating people on their divorces when it’s clear they’ve made the right decision for their well-being. How do you help couples discern when to keep working on their relationship and when it might be time to let go?
Alexandra: Such an important question, and it’s rarely a simple answer. One of the biggest shifts I’ve seen is moving away from the idea that divorce equals failure. Endings happen for many reasons, and a divorce or breakup can be a healthy and meaningful step. When a relationship ends, it doesn’t have to mean that the time spent was wasted. Even relationships that don’t work teach us so much about ourselves, about love, about life.
When I work with couples, I see myself as walking alongside them. I don’t tell them what to do; my role is to help them get clear on what’s right for them. And sometimes, very big problems can be overcome—I've seen couples who face infidelity or deep-seated resentment build something beautiful again from the ashes. But it often comes down to both partners being willing to engage in forgiveness and open-hearted dialogue. If one partner has been asking for help for years and the other has consistently refused, it’s hard. That thick wall of resistance can be challenging to break down, and it requires humility and accountability on both sides to start the healing process. So a lot comes down to whether both partners can honestly say, “I want to understand where I went wrong, and I want to do better.”
Aviva: That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes, though, staying connected as a team during moments of conflict can feel impossible. In those instances, what are some of the practices that have been helpful for you personally, and what advice do you give to others?
Alexandra: Sometimes you just can’t stay connected in the heat of the moment, and that’s okay. One of the best things to do is to pause. Take a step back and use the time to reflect. A colleague of mine, Eli Finkel at Northwestern, has done research on this. He found that stepping away and taking time to reframe the situation can be incredibly powerful. One of his exercises involves writing or meditating from the perspective of a neutral third party who deeply cares about both of you. This practice forces you out of that pity-party victim stance and into a space of compassion, where you’re more likely to understand each other’s perspectives.
When you come back to the conversation from this place, it can lead to a real shift. It’s as though the pause creates space for you to see each other again, to see the relationship instead of just the conflict. And in terms of what Todd and I do, we love going for walks together. Movement is incredibly regulating for our nervous systems. Being side by side, looking forward rather than directly at each other, shifts the energy. It helps us feel like teammates looking out at the world together, rather than opponents locked in a standoff.
Aviva: That’s beautiful. I also love how being side by side on a walk can make challenging conversations feel less confrontational. And as someone who’s more of a verbal processor, I sometimes bring up tough topics at night or early in the morning, and that doesn’t go over well with my husband. Do you have any advice on setting boundaries around timing for tough conversations?
Alexandra: Yes, I think timing is huge. Sometimes we don’t realize a conversation will be difficult until we’re in it, so grace is key. But ideally, I like to encourage going “meta”—essentially, checking in with your partner before diving into a topic. Saying something like, “Is now a good time to talk?” or “Are you available for this topic?” can make all the difference. If your partner is avoidant, this approach allows them to feel some control over the timing, which can reduce their inclination to shut down.
Aviva: It sounds like part of being in a loving, self-reflective relationship is understanding each other’s nervous systems, triggers, and wiring—and loving each other within that awareness.
Alexandra: Yes, absolutely. But it’s a double-edged sword. With awareness comes the desire for growth and healing, which is wonderful, but it has to be balanced with acceptance. It’s about loving someone as they are, even while holding space for who they’re becoming. So many of us approach our partners with an eagerness for them to grow, change, and become their best selves, but that desire can unintentionally communicate, “You’re amazing, but you’d be even better if…” That mindset can lead to pressure instead of connection. True relational self-awareness is as much about knowing when to pivot as it is about practicing acceptance.
Aviva: That’s a beautiful reminder. I often see in my practice that tension builds up when one partner really needs a change, and the other might resist. For instance, I had a patient with joint pain and inflammation, and she shared that her husband was a big source of her stress. How do we love ourselves without losing ourselves when we’re in a relationship where we feel a need for change?
Alexandra: Such a common experience. When we feel like our partner is the source of our stress, there’s often a lot of unspoken shame and disappointment. I’ve found that many husbands, for instance, deeply fear disappointing their wives—they want to be a source of joy for them. And yet, the story of “I’m causing her pain” is a loaded and paralyzing narrative, which can make it even harder for them to step in and make a change. So, couples therapy can help create a new narrative. It's a space for them to say, “I’m sorry. I want to understand where I went wrong, and I want to do better.” It’s also a space where both partners can work on recognizing the dynamic that’s causing the tension without laying blame on one person.
Aviva: That’s really insightful. I know you have a patient at the top of the hour, but I’d love to end with a question I ask all my guests: If you could tell your younger self one thing, how old would she be, and what would you tell her?
Alexandra: Oh, I love this question. I think I’d go back to my 15-year-old self. I’d tell her, “Just be sweet to you.” That’s when a lot of my self-critical patterns began, and if I could go back, I’d remind her that she deserves kindness from herself just as much as from others.
Aviva: That’s so beautiful, Alexandra. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing all of this wisdom with us. I love that your new book, Love Every Day, offers couples and individuals practical steps they can take daily to bring awareness and compassion into their relationships. It’s exactly what we need in a world where connection sometimes feels more challenging than ever.
Alexandra: Thank you, Aviva. It was truly a joy to have this conversation with you.
