hello there.

I’m Morgan Burch

I didn't stick around long enough in most of my relationships for them to see me cry, unless you count the convicted murderer ex-drug-dealer that I dated, but I'll tell you about that ex another time. I was bubbly and warm on the surface, but never actually vulnerable.  I prided myself on "understanding them like no one else did" while also "not letting my emotions control me."  And yet, when I was with someone, they became my whole world. All I thought about, day and night, was how I could make them love me. What music should I get into? What kind of humor should I use? What gifts would they like? How much silence between texts would make me seem mysterious but not unattainable? 

Late one night, unable to sleep, I was sobbing on my bedroom floor from a breakup with a man we will call Steve. I had fallen in love with Steve only to discover he was hiding me from his family and friends because although he was supposedly "separated," he was a little more married than he originally let on.  I said to him, "Thank you for helping me realize I want a partner to build a life with. That's not what you want with me right now, and that's okay." He said we'd get together in the future, "We're like The Notebook; Noah and Ally."  I believed him for a while. I even wrote an embarrassingly long letter that I thankfully didn't send that said as much.  Sobbing on my bedroom floor, I realized that The Notebook was fiction, and so were we.

My vision of the future, however, did not have to be fiction.  I had just cast the wrong person in the role of my partner.

I wanted radically honest playful connection til death do us part. For anything less than that, I'd rather choose to be single and surrounded by people who loved the real me. So I decided to stop pretending or performing.   It was terrifying.  I failed at it often and people-pleased a lot. I still do.

And then, I met my now husband Dan.  I took it to the extreme and didn't clean my apartment the first time he came over. I said, "This is what you're signing up for. I'm probably never going to be good at laundry or cleaning." I was so certain that if I showed someone who I really was, or even worse, if I needed them, they would not trust me, would not love me, and would leave me.  I told Dan "take me or leave me" more times than I can count the first year of our relationship.  We had our rough times and near-breakups, but he always chose to "take me," which turned the near-breakups into breakthroughs instead.

Being with Dan, I started to realize that the most important thing about a relationship is that it is healing. Not long-lasting, not happy, not even healthy.

Not happy, because I should be loved even when I'm not happy, and so should my partner, and so should you. Being human should be the thing that makes us feel less alone; not more alone. This is something we still work on, which leads me to...

Not healthy, because unhealthy stuff and unhealthy beliefs are going to be in every relationship.  That's good!  Because, seeing those and choosing to heal them together is the only way we can heal them.  As Gabor Mate said, "Trauma was created in relationship, so that's where it has to be healed."  Feeling like we have to be perfectly healthy to be in a relationship keeps us judging ourselves so harshly that we can't heal at all.

Not long-lasting, because the most healing thing about some relationships is that they teach us to love ourselves enough to leave them.  Instead of trying to get a difficult person to be good to us, which I used to think was the whole point, we start to learn to choose to be good to ourselves first.  I thought my problem was that too many men broke my trust, but that wasn't what kept me stuck in the same old cycle.  I broke trust with myself, because I neglected my own needs so many times in the past and blamed them for not being telepathic.

So many of us were taught that having emotional needs made us needy or a burden or weak. That's a lie.  Having emotional needs is literally the only thing that makes us able to connect.  Without emotional needs, we would be unable to love.  The biggest thing we will do together in Sick of Single is discover your emotional needs and how to get those met. We will build your trust in yourself and in your future relationships, so you can approach dating with confidence, authenticity, and lightness.

hype woman, writer, Creator, & relationship Coach