What did you mistake for love? That’s the question I want to start with today.

Because sometimes we spend years asking the wrong questions. Why did I stay? Why did they treat me that way? Why didn’t I leave sooner? Why does she keep going back? Why would anyone put up with that? We can be so quick to judge someone’s choices without ever stopping to wonder what happened underneath them.

This episode comes from Chapter Three of my new book, The Great Investigation, a book built around one simple idea: what if we learned to ask ourselves better questions?

Because our brains can be incredibly quick to judge. We see someone struggling, behaving differently, staying in a relationship that hurts them, repeating a pattern, or making choices we don’t understand, and almost instantly, we create a story about who they are. But where did we learn to do that? Who taught you to judge?

So much of what we carry is learned. Racism is learned. Shame is learned. Prejudice is learned. The language we use is learned. The beliefs we form about ourselves and other people are often handed to us long before we’re old enough to question them. And sometimes, we don’t even realise we’re carrying someone else’s beliefs.

So what happens when we finally stop and investigate?

Instead of asking, “Why did I stay?” we can ask, “What did I mistake for love?” Instead of asking, “Why didn’t my intuition make me leave?” perhaps we ask, “Why did I stay when something inside me was telling me to go?” And instead of looking back at every relationship and deciding whether it was a success or a failure, we can ask, “What did each relationship teach me?”

Because perhaps the people who hurt us aren’t simply chapters we’d like to erase. Perhaps they’re clues. Perhaps the patterns we keep repeating aren’t proof that something is wrong with us. Perhaps they’re invitations to investigate what we were taught, what we believed, what we tolerated, and what we confused with love.

And maybe this isn’t just about the people we’ve loved. Maybe it’s about the way we’ve learned to see ourselves, too.

So today, we’re going to look at the mirrors we’ve been handed, the mirrors we’ve chosen, and the reflections we’ve spent years believing were actually us.

This is The Great Investigation.

And the first question is a simple one—but it might change the way you look at your entire history:

What did you mistake for love?