You Skipped a Step — And That’s Why It Didn’t Last

We got the order wrong.

Not just you. Not just the people you’ve dated. All of us — collectively, culturally — started doing it backwards. And nobody stopped to ask why it keeps ending the same way.

Sex became the handshake. The second date. The thing that happens before you even know someone’s last name, their relationship with their father, their deepest fear, or what they do when life falls apart.

And then we wonder why it feels hollow.

Thiago said something in our conversation that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

He said people are getting intimacy without affinity. They’re building closeness on a foundation that doesn’t exist yet. The warmth is real — but it’s borrowed. It doesn’t belong to anything yet. So when reality shows up, there’s nothing underneath to hold it.

Affinity is the thing that comes before. It’s the recognition — this person and I are made of similar things. It’s the conversation that goes longer than expected. The moment where you realize someone sees the world the way you do, or at least finds the same things worth looking at.

That’s not chemistry. Chemistry is fast. Affinity takes longer. And we stopped giving it time.

So what happens when you skip it?

You get closeness that mimics connection. Two people orbiting each other — sharing space, sharing a bed, sharing surface-level moments — but never actually landing. Never arriving somewhere real. And when the relationship ends, both people walk away confused, because nothing went wrong, exactly. It just never went anywhere deep enough to stay.

Thiago called it transactional. That word landed.

Because that’s what it becomes. Not because anyone is a bad person. But because without affinity — without the root — the whole thing is just an exchange. An arrangement. And arrangements end when they stop being convenient.

The Hero’s Journey, at its core, is about what you’re willing to build — slowly, honestly, without shortcuts. Affinity is slow work. It requires showing up before you know what you’re going to get. Staying in conversation before the stakes are high. Being interested in someone before you need them to be interested in you.

That’s the work nobody teaches.

And that’s why people don’t stay together anymore.

Not because love is broken. Because we skipped the part where you actually find each other first.

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