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.