Are
Relationships
Worth It?

If our wounds pick our partners — why bother?

I opened with the hardest version of the question I could find, because it had been sitting with me for months. Kirby teaches that our subconscious gravitates toward whoever fits our oldest, most unresolved fears. We don't choose our partners so much as our wounds do. And if that's true — why be in a relationship at all? No compromise, no one triggering the things you haven't dealt with, full space to actually heal. Isn't alone just... easier?

Kirby didn't defend relationships. He did something more interesting — he pushed the question one level deeper: why do you want one in the first place? Most people never ask. The craving for partnership, he argues, comes from the same place as everything else in attachment theory: an inborn hunger to feel wanted, chosen, and prioritized. It's survival wiring. It's ancient. And it doesn't care whether the relationship you find is good for you.

Some people answer it honestly and land on: not right now. Not like this. Kirby's fine with that. What he's not fine with is the unexamined version — chasing partnership on autopilot, reenacting patterns absorbed in childhood, because we came out of the womb not knowing what normal is, and we learned it by watching. However our parents fought, bonded, and repaired — a little voice in us concluded: that's how it's done.

How much of it is love — and how much is numbing?

Then Kirby said the thing that stayed with me longest. He talks a lot about "numbing agents" — the things we reach for to avoid feeling what's actually there. Netflix. The gym. Harry Potter re-reads. Alcohol. And then, without flinching:

Which led us somewhere neither of us fully planned. I asked what happens when someone starts healing while inside a relationship — and mid-process realizes the partner they chose was the wound talking. That they picked this person for the wrong reasons entirely. Does healing sometimes end the relationship it happens inside of?

His answer was immediate: "Yes. I see that all the time." And more than that — he sees people who sense this coming and resist the work entirely. Who click the off-button the moment a conversation approaches self-awareness, because they already suspect what they'll find. I recognized that. I told him about my own years with anxiety — the shame, the isolating, the way I'd distance myself from a partner instead of finding words for what was happening inside me, until the relationship quietly starved. It took me years to see anxiety not as the enemy, but as a signal pointing at something that needed attention.

Kirby's reframe of that experience is one of the most useful things in the episode: anxiety is just a fancy name for fear, and fear is just an experience — a message from a part of you that doesn't speak in language. Run from it and you get anxiety about your anxiety, fear of being afraid. Listen to it, and it becomes data.

Chocolate pudding, a phone, and the moment a wound is born.

I wanted to pin down the thing that always felt vague to me in attachment content: how do these wounds actually form? Is it one bad moment? Years of repetition? If I ever become a father — can one mistake mark my child for life?

Kirby's answer came as a story, and it's the clearest explanation of attachment trauma I've heard anywhere.

You're in the fight of your life — and you never trained.

Fresh off my Vipassana retreat, I brought in what I'd learned about impermanence — sensations arising and passing, observed without craving or aversion. Kirby respected the technique but asked the question that cut through: what happens when you leave the meditation hall and walk straight into the lion's den? Home for Christmas. The same family, the same triggers, dozens of years of practice at setting you off. He sees it constantly: people reach a beautiful equanimity in a protected container, then get utterly hijacked by ordinary life.

His alternative frame is the best practical metaphor in the episode: emotional capacity works exactly like the gym. Nobody walks in after three years away and lifts the heaviest weight. You find the edge of your capacity, work just past it, tear the tissue slightly — then rest, recover, rebuild stronger. Stress plus rest equals growth. It's true for muscle and, he argues, true for the nervous system.

That's why the big fight goes so badly — not because you're broken, but because you're running a marathon with zero training. The work, in his model, is deliberate: identify the recurring conflict, take yourself to the trigger on purpose, build capacity rep by rep — so that eventually the reaction doesn't need suppressing, because it doesn't surface at all. Not managed. Rewired. Do that across enough domains, he says, and you no longer classify as anxiously attached. The label was only ever a description of the responses — and the responses changed.

He had sharp words, too, for the version of healing that avoids all of this — the endless sound baths and modality-hopping he watches from his home in Ubud. If a practice only ever makes you feel good, he argues, it's probably not healing you; it may be one more numbing agent wearing spiritual clothes. Growth lives at the edge of the comfort zone. A modality that never takes you there is a very pleasant way of staying exactly where you are.

So — are they worth it?

Near the end, I brought us back to the opening question — but by then it had transformed. Because everything we'd discussed pointed at one uncomfortable fact: you cannot find your deepest fears while sitting comfortably alone. On the meditation cushion, veging out on Netflix, in the endless pleasant solitude of a life with no one close enough to disturb it — those fears simply never surface. And what never surfaces never heals.

That's the inversion the whole conversation was building toward. Relationships aren't the obstacle to healing — they're the fastest access point to what needs healing. Nothing else gets close enough. The very thing I'd framed as the reason to stay alone — someone will trigger everything I haven't dealt with — turns out to be the reason to be in one.

And on the other side of the work, Kirby describes what a healthy relationship actually feels like — not flawless, but antifragile: a bond that gets stronger through every rupture and repair. Where a fight that once lasted four hours resolves in thirty minutes, not through suppression, but because both people can feel their own nervous systems acting up and name it before it floods the space between them. Where having someone beside you doesn't complete you — it extends you. You can push yourself to your absolute limit, tap out to zero, and come home to safety. And every time you touch your limit with safety waiting on the other side, the limit moves.

The healthy relationship, he says, becomes almost a mathematical formula: two people, each growing bigger, almost exponentially — because each one gives the other a safe place to fall. That's why you bother. Not to be completed. To be extended.

The language of the episode.

Kirby Fling.

The GwtF closing question. Kirby's answer.

Kirby had two candidates. The first: five months of healing from a vehicle accident taught him more about wound care and the miraculous capacities of the body than he expected. But that wasn't his answer.

His answer came from the retreat he'd run just weeks before our conversation — his first ever. Eight people, six days, and transformations he says he couldn't have achieved in ten one-on-one sessions: