About Melissa
I spent years trying to figure out why love seemed to happen for everyone but me.
My friends got married. They had kids. Their lives seemed to be moving forward.
And I felt behind.
So I did what I do when I can’t figure something out.
I read the relationship books. Took the courses. Went to therapy. Studied men. Studied dating. Studied myself.
I knew how to make myself valuable. I could understand him. Anticipate him. Support him. Soothe him. Fix things. Adjust.
But I was so focused on his experience of me, I wasn’t paying enough attention to my experience of him.
The pattern I couldn’t see
I thought all that effort was intimacy.
It was transaction.
Was I happy? Did I feel safe being fully myself? Did I actually like the relationship I was working so hard to keep?
Coming back to myself
I stopped making relationships my job.
I started investing in myself. Ballroom dancing was part of a life that belonged to me, too.
The biggest realization was how much of myself I had been pouring into the guy. I was trying so hard to be enough that I wasn’t fully showing up as myself.
I became less interested in whether I could make something work and more interested in whether it actually worked for me.
I started helping other women find love.
And, ironically, that happened before I did.
The questions I had spent years asking became part of my work with other women: How much of your relationship is spent understanding him, soothing him, and trying to get it right?
And where, in all of that, do you get to be yourself?
That is at the heart of what I teach: learning to experience your own relationship instead of constantly monitoring his experience of you.
And then, my own story continued.
Iain and I reconnected in January 2020. Our engagement became another chapter in a life that had already begun to change.
By then, I was asking different questions. Could I be fully myself? Could I let someone actually know me? What was my experience of the relationship?
Those questions mattered beyond dating. They mattered as we built a life together.
Our wedding.
In July 2022, I married Iain. These are a few moments from our day.
That is why Gumball Love is so personal to me.
I know what it feels like to spend years trying to figure love out—and to become so focused on being enough for someone that you lose sight of your own experience.
Today, my work as a relationship coach is about helping women recognize that pattern and make room for something deeper: being fully themselves and participating in real intimacy.
I want you to have room in your relationship for your experience, your needs, and the person you actually are.