Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about love. But for many people, it lands as pressure, performance, exclusion, or quiet disappointment. In this episode, Lynne, Dan, and Dr. Patti take a familiar cultural moment and do what we always do on Listening for the Questions: we slow it down and ask better questions.

Together, we explore what Valentine’s Day reveals about how we define love, worth, success, and belonging. We talk about the stories we inherit about romance, the commercial scripts we rarely interrogate, and the invisible hierarchies that decide which kinds of love are celebrated and which are ignored. We also ask what gets missed when love is framed as a milestone instead of a practice.

This is not an episode about how to “do” Valentine’s Day better. It’s an invitation to examine what love actually means in your life right now, who it’s for, and how curiosity might open up more honest, humane, and expansive ways of relating to ourselves and others.

Questions we explore include:

• Who is Valentine’s Day really designed for, and who gets left out?
• When does love become a performance instead of a lived experience?
• How do scarcity narratives around love shape our choices and expectations?
• What might love look like if we treated it as a verb, not a status?

Whether you love Valentine’s Day, dread it, or ignore it completely, this episode offers space to reflect without judgment and to reconnect with love as something broader, messier, and more human than a single day can hold.

Resources we found helpful when prepping for this episode:

1. All About Love by bell hooks
   A grounding exploration of love as action, ethics, and responsibility rather than fantasy or possession.
   
   
2. The Gottman Institute Relationship Research
   Evidence-based insights on what actually sustains connection, trust, and intimacy over time.
   
   
3. Esther Perel’s work on modern relationships
   Particularly her talks and writing on desire, independence, and the tension between security and freedom in love.
   
   

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Listening for the Questions asks better questions so we can live more honest lives, together.

Listening for the Questions is where curiosity is our compass.

We are surrounded by misinformation and disinformation, but reacting faster is not the solution. Asking better questions is.

In this episode, Patti Fletcher, Dan Ward, and Lynne Cuppernull explore the difference between misinformation shared without intent to harm and disinformation spread deliberately to deceive. More importantly, they examine why both work so well and what they reveal about fear, identity, trust, and belonging.

Drawing on the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory Confronting Health Misinformation, the conversation frames misinformation as a public health issue that requires collective responsibility, not individual perfection. The episode also explores deeper meaning-making frameworks, including Richard Rohr’s work on Order, Disorder, and Reorder, and why periods of disruption create fertile ground for false certainty.

Along the way, the trio reflects on cultural touchstones like Schoolhouse Rock and ABC After School Specials and what we lost when we stopped teaching people how to think instead of what to think.

This episode is not about debunking. It is about slowing down, noticing our reactions, and asking better questions before belief hardens into certainty.

Resources mentioned

• Confronting Health Misinformation, U.S. Surgeon General
  https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-advisory.pdf
  
  
• Richard Rohr, The Cosmic Egg
  https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-cosmic-egg-my-story-and-our-story/
  
  
• The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder
  https://store.cac.org/products/the-wisdom-pattern-order-disorder-reorder
  
  
• Schoolhouse Rock
  https://www.youtube.com/user/SchoolhouseRockTV1
  
  
• ABC After School Specials
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4_H2rkrpOuvXd-7hJoZBzIoUdo09NdnM
  
  

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Listening for the Questions is where curiosity is our compass.

New season. Same curiosity. And a topic most of us have a complicated relationship with.

In the Season 2 premiere of Listening for the Questions, Dr. Patti Fletcher, Dan Ward, and Lynne Cuppernull take on New Year’s resolutions and immediately question whether we should be making them at all. Instead of debating which resolutions work, the conversation focuses on something far more interesting: the questions underneath our urge to start fresh every January.

Why do we keep making resolutions even when we know we will probably break them? Who are these resolutions really for? Why do they feel so loaded with pressure, perfectionism, and failure? And what if the problem is not our willpower but the way we frame change in the first place?

Lynne, Patti, and Dan explore the difference between resolutions and goals, identity and transformation, progress and perfection. They unpack the gendered pressure baked into many resolutions, especially those tied to appearance, discipline, and self control. They also play with the idea of replacing resolutions with questions and what happens when curiosity takes the place of self judgment.

Along the way, the conversation wanders through birthday resolutions, school year fresh starts, acting as if you are already your future self, and even how AI can interrupt our default thinking by asking better questions instead of offering quick answers.

This episode is thoughtful, funny, honest, and deeply human. It is not about fixing yourself. It is about understanding why you want to change, whose values are shaping that desire, and how asking better questions might lead to more meaningful growth.

As Season 2 begins, this episode invites you to consider a different kind of fresh start. One where any day can be January 1st.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Listening for the Questions is where curiosity is our compass.