LOVE, CONNECTION, AND BELONGING
Modern Dating Support
The dating landscape is broken. That’s not a you problem.
WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING
The apps are designed to keep you scrolling, not to help you connect.
The cultural scripts are decades behind the actual lives people are living. The advice is either tactical garbage or therapy-speak that doesn’t translate to a real Tuesday night when someone you liked just ghosted you.
And underneath all of it, a structure so old and so assumed that most people never think to question it. The idea that one person should be everything. That romantic partnership is the destination. That if you haven’t found it, or kept it, something has gone wrong with you specifically.
Nothing has gone wrong with you. The structure is just too small for the life you’re actually trying to live.
WHAT WE INHERITED
The village didn’t disappear. It got collapsed onto one person.
The nuclear family, the romantic love marriage, the idea that one partner should meet every need: these aren’t ancient wisdom. They’re recent inventions, accelerated by industrialization pulling people out of villages and into isolated units, dismantling the communal webs that used to distribute belonging, security, passion, and care across a whole network of relationships.
We collapsed the village onto one person. Then we gave people, women especially, enough freedom and enough information to see clearly that it isn’t working. And then we told them to swipe differently.
Therapist and author Esther Perel has written extensively about this dynamic: how impossible it is to ask one relationship to carry everything a community used to hold. You’re not failing at dating. You’re feeling the structural fault lines of a system that was never designed for who you are right now.
That’s the real starting point.
WHAT’S ACTUALLY POSSIBLE
Not a list of outcomes. A different orientation entirely.
Connection that doesn’t cost you yourself
Partnership entered from wholeness rather than hunger.
A clearer sense of your own patterns
Why you keep landing in the same dynamic, what your nervous system is actually doing when things feel high-stakes, what you’ve been tolerating and why you’ve been tolerating it.
More honesty about what you actually want
Not what you’ve been told to want, not what looks right from the outside, but what fits the specific person you are and the specific life you’re building.
A life genuinely full enough that romantic connection has room to breathe, because it isn’t also trying to be your entire village.
WHO I AM AND WHY I DO THIS
I’m not standing outside the jungle handing you a map.
I’m Erica Johnson. Therapist, coach, RPCV, former theatre kid, current nomad, and someone who has personally field-tested enough of the modern dating landscape to have strong opinions about it.
I’ve spent years sitting with people in the middle of their most confusing relational moments. Including some of my own.
My clinical training is in attachment, IFS, and somatic work. I understand why people love the way they do, where those patterns came from, and how to actually shift them rather than just name them. I also understand the particular exhaustion of being self-aware enough to watch yourself repeat them anyway. I work with what’s happening in your body, not just your thoughts, because your nervous system is making most of the relational decisions before your brain even catches up.
I’ve lived across five continents, navigated dating in multiple cultures, and sat with enough people mid-spiral to have lost all patience for advice that treats a structural problem like a personal failing. The dating landscape is genuinely strange right now. Not just hard. Strange. And most of the advice out there was written for a world that no longer exists.
I’ve been in it. I know the terrain. And I have a really good compass and flashlight.
TWO PATHS, ONE PHILOSOPHY
Start where the conditioning landed.
For Women
The exhaustion of the modern dating landscape is real. The pressure of timelines, the shortage of emotionally available partners, the slow erosion of knowing what you actually want after years of contorting yourself to be wanted. We start at the edge of that grief. And then we expand what love gets to be.
For Men
Most dating advice for men is either tactical or condescending. This is neither. We look at what’s actually getting in your way, the patterns underneath the patterns, and we do something about it. No performance required.
The two pages use gendered language because the cultural conditioning around dating does land differently depending on how you’ve moved through the world. That specificity is intentional.
But this work is for anyone navigating the complexity of modern dating, regardless of gender identity, orientation, or relationship structure. Nonbinary, trans, and gender-expansive folks are fully welcome here. If neither page quite fits your experience, reach out directly.
WHAT’S COMING
The individual work is where we start.
The vision is bigger: workshops, group events, and eventually mixed-gender relational spaces where the internal work people have done starts meeting the actual dynamic. If that interests you, stay close.
Questions about dating coaching
START HERE
The apps won’t fix this. Understanding yourself will.
Free 20-minute consultation. No pitch, no pressure, just a real conversation about where you are and whether this is the right fit.