When we met, we had both come out of long relationships and planned to spend some time on our own. We were old enough to know our own patterns, and, to our own surprise, young enough at heart to want something new. If we were going to try, it had to be in a new way: letting each other all the way in, guards down, so the old mistakes could stay in the past. So we made a choice early on: to be open with each other about our childhoods, the wounds we carry, the habits we brought from earlier relationships and our deepest, scariest secrets, and to talk about what happens between us while it happens.

One evening we sat down to identify the common values we wanted to build our relationship on. We looked at what had been missing before, in childhood and in earlier love, and at what we longed for now. We landed on three: honest, brave and I'm yours. Later, when everyday life threatened to swallow us, we added one more: we play our way through life.

Over time we noticed that our best conversations followed the same path. First each of us looked honestly at ourselves. Then we met each other with the courage to try something new. Finally we committed to each other to make it real. That path became the Rewiring the Heart Method. Honest became Map, brave became Rewire, and I'm yours became Anchor.

We found it in our life as a couple. We have shaped it so that any two people who matter to each other can use it: partners, friends, siblings, or a parent and a young adult.

Rewiring the Heart is shared experience and practical suggestions for how two people can move closer to each other and understand each other better. We write as a couple, without training as therapists, and the method rests on our own lived experience rather than on clinical research. Where research helps explain what we have been through, we say so and point to the source.

Still, something keeps happening when we share what we have learned. Friends, family members and couples we know have loosened situations that had been stuck for years, and stepped out of old patterns, after following Map, Rewire and Anchor. That is why we share it here.

Everything you read here starts with the two of us. When something happens between us, or in our family, we talk it through, wherever we happen to be. Most of those conversations we record from beginning to end. The ones that arrive somewhere a recorder never could, we tell again soon after.

Sometimes it starts with one of us alone: a reflection in a voice memo on the way home, about being your own person and standing steady in yourself, even as we have chosen to share a life. We bring it into our life together, and it becomes part of the conversation.

Once a conversation is over, it is transcribed. The transcript becomes the raw material for the articles on this website. We read it together, find the insight in it, and shape it into a text that others can use. Where it helps, we add research that explains what we experienced.

The topics come only from our own conversations, experiences and real situations. The method was found the same way: Map, Rewire and Anchor are the steps we kept seeing in our best conversations, long before they had names.