“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” ~Alexander Den Heijer
He was intelligent, well-read, and kind. A good father, careful about protecting his kids from meeting partners too soon. A man with a life philosophy, who kept his word, who told the truth with an honesty that didn’t flinch—and it wasn’t a performance. He wasn’t afraid of healthy conflict; he could sit in a hard conversation without disappearing. And he also happened to be tall, dark, and handsome.
He checked almost every single thing on my list. And I mean that literally. I had a list.
Not the naïve kind you make at twenty-two, wanting someone who likes dogs and doesn’t text in one-word answers. This one came from years of therapy, coaching, and self-excavation—the hard, unglamorous work of tracing my patterns back to their roots, along with the somatic work of feeling and recovery for months after.
I used to fall for a very specific kind of confidence: fierce, determined, unshakeable—the kind we’re trained as women to want, to read as leadership. I called it self-possessed. Most of the time, what I was actually responding to was ego—someone’s certainty about himself, which I mistook for honesty about himself. Those aren’t the same thing, but they can look identical from across a room.
And once I got close enough to see the difference, I noticed my own hand in it too: I’d match that same guarded confidence back at him, keep my cards close, and wait to see if he’d prove himself first. Still playing the games I played at twenty-two. Just calling it discernment now instead of dating.
The search when I found him was different.
This list came from wisdom. From knowing myself. From finally understanding what I needed versus what my nervous system had been trained to chase.
And there he was. So many of my boxes checked. Even the ones I’d stopped believing were possible.
Through all my self-help work, I’d come to believe that if I healed my attachment wounds and changed my patterns—if I did the work and ‘changed the soil’—I’d attract the right person.
Fix the environment, not the flower. And I did fix the environment.
I spent years understanding that I wasn’t drawn to people—I was drawn to feelings. That the electricity I used to mistake for love was often just my nervous system recognizing something familiar. That familiar isn’t the same as good. That a wound has a longing to it too, and trauma bonds feel incredible right up until they destroy you.
I changed what I was available for. I changed what I called home. I stopped romanticizing people who couldn’t meet me and started asking harder questions about why unavailability had ever felt like depth.
And then I met him.
A man in his power. Someone who had looked at his own life honestly and done something about it. Someone whose presence felt like steadiness rather than chaos, like expansion rather than that familiar, addictive ache.
This wasn’t the wound talking. This felt different because it was different. I had done enough work to know the difference. So I let myself go all in.
I won’t excavate what went wrong because that’s not the point of this, and it’s not my story alone to tell. What I will say is this: he couldn’t meet me where I was. Not because he was a bad man—he wasn’t. Not because he hadn’t done his own work—he had. But because even when someone is genuinely good and checks most of the boxes on the list you built with your whole healed self, sometimes they still can’t quite get there with you.
This didn’t feel like the old heartbreaks. I understood my role in those ones. I could trace the wound, name the pattern, understand what my nervous system had been doing. And part of me is still doing that now—looking for answers, searching for ways I could have grown better, flipping over my beautiful petals and trying to find where there is still dirt on them.
And it left me with a question I haven’t been able to answer.
If I changed my soil—and I did—and I attracted someone who matched the new conditions—and I did—and it still didn’t bloom, then why didn’t this relationship work out?
My mind kept searching for answers. Was there another layer of work I hadn’t done? Had I missed something? Was this simply what relationships are—people growing at different speeds, sometimes beyond each other’s reach?
Ultimately, I had to accept that I was sitting in the rubble of something I couldn’t explain away with a pattern, a self-help tool, or an eloquent one-line quote. Which meant accepting that I couldn’t control whether relationships would work out by digging deeper into myself.
I got good at the excavation. I called it tending the soil. But I think, if I’m honest, I was still fixing the flower the whole time.
All that work—the therapy, the somatic recovery, the discernment, the list—some part of me was still trying to become good enough, healed enough, whole enough that the right thing would finally hold. That’s not the environment. That’s still the flower, just working harder to bloom on command.
And it wasn’t only my own flower I was trying to fix. I think some part of me was trying to change his too—hoping the conditions I created, the version of myself I’d built, would be enough to grow something in him that maybe wasn’t there to grow. I didn’t see it while I was doing it. That’s usually how it works.
I don’t have a clean read on which one it was—soil, flower, weather, timing, none of it. Some things don’t come with a reason good enough to hold. This might just be one of them.
I did the inner work, and it still didn’t work out. I could easily keep analyzing where things went wrong, but I realize now it’s time to stop. Not because I’ve figured it out. Because I don’t want to figure it out anymore. I just want to live.
About Emily Brown
Emily Brown is a transformational coach, writer, and humanities professor who helps women find clarity through the moments that reshape their lives—relationships, career shifts, and everything in between. She’s the author of Love Notes: How to Tend to Your Broken Heart, Navigate Your Emotions, & Befriend Your Inner Child After a Bad Breakup or Divorce, writes the Substack newsletter Love Letters by Em, and founded GRLPWRDEN, a Denver-based community for young women finding their footing—because this work starts earlier than we think. EmilyBrownConsulting.com
