The Yellow Brick Road Gets Shorter as We Age: Love, Regret, and Real Connection
A reflective, sharp, and quietly hopeful series on love, aging, regret, and emotional growth. Told through the voice of The Cynical Romantic, this 11-part journey explores relationships, fear, comfort, and what it means to keep choosing love as time becomes more finite.
The Yellow Brick Road Gets Shorter as We Age
Part 3. The Scarecrow and the Love Lessons We Refused to Learn
Some advice doesn’t make sense until it’s too late to ignore.
We hear it early—about patience, compatibility, timing—but it rarely sticks. Not because it’s wrong, but because we don’t have the context to understand it yet.
This piece explores the gap between hearing wisdom and living it, and why experience has a way of confirming what we once dismissed.
The road teaches in repetition.
And eventually, the lessons land.
The Yellow Brick Road Gets Shorter as We Age
Part 1: The Tornado Was Birth, But Nobody Warned Us About Kansas
Emotional Inheritance
How our earliest emotional patterns shape the relationships we build later in life—and why recognizing them may be the only way to change them.
We do not choose the emotional weather we are born into. Before we ever fall in love, we inherit ideas about safety, affection, gender, marriage, silence, longing, duty, and what kind of love we believe we deserve.
Most of us start walking the road before we know we are carrying other people’s maps.
ADHD, OCD and Soulmates Part 2
She looked me in the eyes and called me her soulmate.
I didn’t suddenly believe in The One.
I believed in her belief in me.
Within 18 months: married.
New role: provider, fixer, designated hero.
I treated ‘soulmate’ like a job title I had to earn every day.
ADHD hyperfocus on a relationship looks a lot like devotion.
From the outside: ‘What a committed guy.’
On the inside: ‘If I stop trying this hard, I’ll lose everything.’
Pettiness. Jealousy. Double standards.
My gut whispered, ‘Something’s off.’
The soulmate story shouted, ‘This is just a test.’
Guess which one I listened to?
Pull up a chair. Let’s unravel the soulmate story—and see what’s worth keeping.
ADHD, OCD and Soulmates part 1
I never bought into the soulmate myth—I trusted hard work, common sense, and not embarrassing myself. Then a woman called me her soulmate, and all those rules vanished.
This series is my deep dive into that moment and everything that unraveled after.
I’m the Cynical (Yes Still Hopeful) Romantic: late-diagnosed ADHD, a sprinkle of OCD, and a relationship history that makes more sense in hindsight. For years, I chased the role of “someone’s person”—even when my gut said otherwise.
Here, I revisit my first marriage and beyond, sharing what I wish I’d known: how ADHD hyperfocus distorts love, how the hero complex turns romance into overwork, and why certainty makes the soulmate myth so seductive.
This isn’t a lecture—it’s memoir with side notes, a chance to learn from my mistakes so you don’t touch the stove yourself. If you’ve ever ignored a red flag for a good story, you’re in the right place.
Pull up a chair. Let’s unravel the soulmate story—and see what’s worth keeping.
Soulmates or Spring Fever
Your love life isn’t a rom‑com. That’s the bad news. The good news? It doesn’t have to be a horror movie either.
Movies teach us that soulmates arrive with perfect timing, dramatic rain, and a killer soundtrack. They don’t show you the boring Tuesdays, the money fights, or what happens after the big airport chase. So we walk into real relationships expecting Act‑Three fireworks… and panic when we get quiet, awkward, human moments instead. TCR introduces a new 7-part series on Soulmates.
Love is built
Modern love sells fairy tales: soulmates, destiny, perfect timing.
But lasting connection usually looks less magical—and far more intentional.
This piece explores the quiet truth: love isn’t found… it’s built.