Objectified or Respected?

What Two Real Trials Taught Me Before I Met My Husband

I want to talk about attracting a good partner — and I want to be upfront about why I feel I’ve earned the right to speak on it.
I’m married to my soul mate. His name means heart. Mine means love. He was born May 8th — my poetic mind hears “mate” in it. He grew up fifteen minutes down the road from me, though thankfully we didn’t meet until later, since I’m just enough older than him to have merited gratitude for waiting until we were both adults to meet. The synchronicities between us are real, and I hold them as sacred. Divine. Sublime. Yum.

But synchronicity isn’t why this marriage works. I did the work before I met him — real work, tested by two real trials where people tried to talk me out of what I was learning about myself, my path, and who I was meant to build a life with.

The Insight

Two days ago, something I’d lived for years finally found its language:

Any man who is trying to pursue you will never respect you — he will always object you.

Underneath that insight was a deeper instruction I’d received much earlier: pay attention to what people do, over time. Not what they say. Not how they feel in a given moment. I originally held a strict timeline around this — my husband and I didn’t end up needing it — but the clear insight and mutual commitment underneath it was non-negotiable.

Building Instead of Dating

Here’s the standard I set: I wasn’t looking to date, get to know someone casually, or build a family first. I was looking to build a project — something both of us were intrinsically motivated toward, something we’d work on whether we were together or apart, whether the relationship happened or not.
We agreed: no dating, no flirting. We were getting to know each other through the work, to see whether we could build together for the rest of our lives. When attraction arose — and it did — we intentionally set it aside, just to see what the work itself could reveal.

Multiple men agreed to this arrangement in the beginning. But as soon as feelings surfaced, it became “but these feelings, though.” And that told me everything. If someone can be moved off their commitments by their own feelings toward you, they’ll be moved the same way by their feelings toward someone else, too. What I needed was someone with the self-control and self-awareness to witness their own feelings without being ruled by them.

Respect vs. Objectification

Respect is an abstraction, and like all abstractions it is a word people define differently, so let me define how I mean it here: respect is the capacity to work together on something you both value — enough to see the other person as someone with their own path, their own dreams, their own purpose, and to want to help them toward it.

Objectification is the opposite. It’s using someone’s body, mind, space, and resources for your own projections — keeping them placated while you use them to try to fill something within yourself that was never theirs to fill. It’s usually what you get by default when someone pursues you from a place of projection rather than exploring true equal partnership.

Where Value Actually Lives

We’re taught that our worth is measured by how much someone else is attracted to us. I don’t buy that. Beauty comes and goes. Purpose is always. Real confidence isn’t built on what other people think of you — it’s built on your capacity to see yourself through the eyes of Source, and to know you’re living what you were made to do.

At the deepest level, someone who only wants to use your body is someone who doesn’t feel fulfilled within themselves. They don’t have an internal anchor. They’re trying to fill up through you — and in that process, they’ll never actually feel full, because fullness was never available from the outside. You can only overflow from within.

That principle — that the most satisfying relationships happen when both people arrive already full — is the foundation of the first part of our 9-part REAL Wellth framework. It’s called “Anchoring From Within.” This ebook exists: to help you build that internal anchor before you ever try to build a life with someone else.
The most satisfying relationship isn’t two people trying to fill each other up. It’s two people who’ve already done that work, joining together to genuinely grow, build, and overflow.

Get the Anchoring from Within e-book free here.