Empowerment and Entitlement can look alike. But to people we interact with, they don't feel the same.

Why it's time to move out of the drama of processing and into the business of loving.

Listening to these women mirror their modern, mate-selection process back to me, I realized how dismissive and petty we have become in our search for love. The desire to connect with another human has been reduced to a consumeristic process in which we pursue a collection of attributes, and try to order up our partners like we would a pizza or a coffee.

A variety of relationship experts are counseling men to pump up their masculinity and women to return to their softer feminine sides, in the hopes that some lost chemistry between the sexes will return. What’s great about these ideas is that it encourages men and women to think about pleasure, polarity and how they want to feel. But let's not sidestep the judgement in this way of thinking.

You’ve probably found yourself analyzing and diagnosing your significant other, hoping that he or she will listen to your diagnosis and change. This is both natural, and potentially toxic.

All through dinner prep and catching up with my friend, I breathed into my discomfort as I focused my full attention on him. My task was to really reconnect with my friend. We swapped stories and smiles, and even with the nagging provocation hangover, I was enjoying the reunion. About halfway through the meal, a miraculous thing happened. . .

Although it was a special Valentine's Day dinner, in a very pricey restaurant, we could hear the conversation of the couple next to us all too well. They weren't loud: We were quiet. Silent, in fact.

When you clarify your roles in relationship and bring consciousness to the leadership in them, something sacred happens. All the energy dedicated to jockeying for power and position gets contained in conscious roles, and frees you up to really focus on loving and on things you love to do together.