Real Love Ready: The Series

What does love look like when there is nothing you can do to make the pain go away? Dr. Jessica Zucker spent years working as a clinical psychologist in reproductive and maternal mental health before experiencing a miscarriage herself at 16 weeks. The loss changed the course of her life and work, eventually leading her to create the #IHadAMiscarriage campaign and write I Had a Miscarriage and Normalize It. Through her own experiences with pregnancy loss and breast cancer, Jessica began to see just how often grief is made harder by everything surrounding it. The silence, the shame, the pressure to be okay, and our discomfort with pain we cannot fix. In this episode, Robin and Jessica explore what happens when we stop trying to tidy up each other’s pain. They talk about the instinct to reach for silver linings, the ways women are taught to question or minimize their own experiences, and why emotional intimacy requires us to stay present even when we don’t have the right words. Jessica also reflects on how loss has shaped her relationships, her work, and her understanding of what it means to truly be there for someone. This is a conversation about making room for the things we cannot make better. About telling the truth when silence would be easier, asking people what they actually need, and allowing ourselves to be fully known in the hardest chapters of our lives. Because sometimes the most loving thing we can do isn’t to take the pain away — it’s to stay with each other through it. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:02:14) Introduction (00:03:23) Jessica’s Earliest Memories of Love (00:09:15) Experiencing Miscarriage at 16 Weeks (00:11:11) Breaking the Silence Around Pregnancy Loss (00:17:10) The Cycle of Silence, Stigma & Shame (00:26:33) Jessica’s Breast Cancer Diagnosis (00:35:06) Creating Rituals Around Grief & Loss (00:39:12) Loving Someone Through Pain You Cannot Fix (00:46:12) The Things Women Are Taught to Keep Quiet (00:49:20) Aging, Desire & Letting Go of “Should” (00:52:00) What We Teach Our Children About Love (00:52:49) Being Seen & Finding Our Way Back to Ourselves (00:57:05) How Love Changes Over Time (00:58:41) What Is Love? QUOTES “Can we replace silence with storytelling? Can we help women not go to that place? And can we see pregnancy loss as normative, albeit heartbreaking, so that we can talk about it?” — Dr. Jessica Zucker “We have to go through it. We have to feel it.” — Robin Ducharme “I think that true emotional intimacy only exists when we can be present through pain and through roadblocks and through joy, of course, as well.” — Dr. Jessica Zucker “I really want to remove ‘should’ from our language. It’s not productive. It’s not helping.” — Robin Ducharme “Time helps with healing, but talking really helps us find our way back to ourselves.” — Dr. Jessica Zucker ABOUT THE GUEST Jessica Zucker is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in reproductive health and the award-winning author of Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women’s Lives and I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement. She is also the creator of the viral #IHadAMiscarriage campaign. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ihadamiscarriage/ Website: https://www.drjessicazucker.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do you heal when your hardest moments become entertainment? For six years, Mary Bonnet shared her life with millions on Selling Sunset. Viewers watched—and scrutinized—as she built a career, fell in love, navigated fertility, and grieved in real time. The cameras captured a lot, but they never captured the whole story. Mary became a mother at 15 and has lived through an abusive marriage, financial control, sexual assault, pregnancy loss, and the deeply complicated experience of having private pain become public conversation. In this episode, Robin and Mary talk about the intuition that has guided some of her biggest decisions, the ways trauma can remain in the body long after the threat has passed, and the difference between pushing through pain and actually healing it. Mary opens up about reaching a point where Selling Sunset was taking more from her than she was willing to give—and realizing she wanted her life to feel like her own again. Mary’s story isn’t powerful simply because she survived. It’s powerful because survival was never where she wanted to stay. Through heartbreak, loss, reinvention, and years of public scrutiny, she has continued to trust her instincts, choose kindness, and believe in love. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:01:19) Introduction (00:03:22) How Mary Learned About Love (00:08:16) Becoming a Mother at 15 (00:13:23) When Drive Becomes Tunnel Vision (00:16:45) Surviving Financial Abuse (00:22:05) How Trauma Lives in the Body (00:26:19) Self-Love, Reality TV & Public Scrutiny (00:30:30) Miscarriage, Grief & Being Watched (00:35:00) What Healing Looks Like Now (00:37:03) Walking Away From Selling Sunset (00:41:42) Life After Selling Sunset (00:49:12) Choosing Kindness (00:52:12) Loving Yourself Through Heartbreak (00:55:25) What Is Love? QUOTES “I think in so many ways, you just have to trust yourself. I think we all have intuition, and we have it for a reason. It’s to help guide us and to help protect us.” — Mary Bonnet “When you follow your intuition, it’s like everything in you—your soul, your spirit—is saying, ‘This is it.’” — Robin Ducharme “I feel like I just had this big fake smile on for a while because I had to. But inside I was kind of dying.” — Mary Bonnet “I think our tolerance for bullshit changes as we get stronger and more whole in ourselves.” — Robin Ducharme “People don’t understand that you’re still human. If you’re on TV, you still have feelings.” — Mary Bonnet “Everything that’s been done has been done… I’m not going to dwell on what I can’t change. I’m saving the fucking dogs.” — Mary Bonnet ABOUT THE GUEST Mary Bonnet is a luxury real estate agent, Vice President at The Oppenheim Group, longtime cast member of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, and author of Selling Sunshine: Surviving Teenage Motherhood, Thriving in Luxury Real Estate, and Finally Finding My Voice. With more than $140 million in career real estate sales, Mary was also named one of Variety’s 40 Most Powerful Women on Reality TV. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themarybonnet/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever reacted to something in a relationship and wondered, where did that come from? Vienna Pharaon is a licensed marriage and family therapist, founder of Mindful Marriage and Family Therapy, and bestselling author of The Origins of You. Her work explores the origin wounds we carry around worthiness, belonging, prioritization, trust, and safety—and how experiences from our past can continue shaping the way we love in the present. In this episode, Robin and Vienna explore why we can understand our patterns and still find ourselves repeating them. They talk about the moments that activate old wounds, dysregulation as active self-protection, and what it actually takes to respond differently instead of falling back into familiar roles. Together, they explore what changes when we understand not only our own history, but the history of the people we love. Because healing isn’t about never being triggered or never getting it wrong. It’s about creating enough space to make a different choice, repair more quickly, and stay connected through the hard moments. As Vienna says, healing is the shift from survival to choice. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:04:12) Vienna’s Origin Story (00:07:36) Why We Repeat the Same Relationship Patterns (00:09:23) What It Looks Like to Do Something Different (00:15:32) What Are Origin Wounds? (00:20:35) Dysregulation as Active Self-Protection (00:24:54) How a Prioritization Wound Shows Up (00:30:15) Why Awareness Alone Isn’t Enough (00:35:43) Healing: From Survival to Choice (00:36:49) Why Knowing Your Partner’s Story Matters (00:39:37) How Healthy Relationships Move Through Hard Things (00:44:22) Origin Wounds & Inner Child Work (00:48:23) Does Healing Mean You Stop Getting Triggered? (00:51:04) Why Romantic Relationships Activate Our Wounds (00:58:16) Changing Long-Standing Relationship Patterns (01:00:31) Doing the Work While You’re Single (01:04:57) Parenting, Repair & Owning Our Mistakes (01:09:00) The Myth That Healthy Love Should Be Easy (01:12:21) What Is Love? QUOTES “One of the greatest loving gifts that we give to each other is to learn about each other’s origin stories and wounds and histories.” — Vienna Pharaon “I believe that you cannot love better without first understanding what you’re carrying.” — Robin Ducharme “It is not about wishing or wanting for the absence of hard. It’s about being able to go through the hard and stay connected with one another and come out the other side. That is what builds secure, healthy relationships.” — Vienna Pharaon “We have to open our minds to this concept, because this whole thing of falling in love on the first date, second date, third date—you don’t know this person. You really don’t. It’s important to get to know somebody over time and through conflict, through all the things.” — Robin Ducharme “Context doesn’t excuse behavior, but it is the bridge. It really helps us move into that space of compassion while still holding accountability and ownership and responsibility.” — Vienna Pharaon ABOUT THE GUEST Vienna Pharaon is a licensed marriage and family therapist and one of New York City’s most sought after relationship therapists. She has practiced therapy for more than 17 years and is the founder and owner of the group practice, Mindful Marriage and Family Therapy. She received her masters of science in Marriage & Family Therapy from Northwestern University. Her book The Origins of You is a national best seller. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulmft/ Website: https://viennapharaon.com/ Substack: https://substack.com/@viennapharaon The Origins of You (book): https://a.co/d/02lkGkBC What's Your Origin Wound (free) Quiz: https://1wsm6geg69z.typeform.com/to/d981R7Cl GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if the way you love was shaped long before you ever chose a partner? Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh has spent more than two decades studying how people love across cultures, languages, and continents. A social psychologist, psychosexual therapist, author of Love by Design, and creator of the Emergent Love model, her research with couples across 41 countries asks what actually helps love thrive. In this episode, Robin and Sara explore the blueprints for love we inherit from our families, cultures, language, and earliest experiences—and how those invisible influences shape what we expect, accept, desire, and believe we deserve in relationships. They talk about why two people can say “I love you” while meaning entirely different things, whether romantic love can truly be unconditional, and why we may be asking one relationship to give us more than it possibly can. Together, they challenge the idea that love is something we simply find, fall into, or either have or don’t have. Instead, Sara invites us to look at what actually creates love between two people: trust, respect, compassion, intentionality, and the everyday ways we relate to one another. They also explore the difference between knowing about relationships and actually becoming fluent in them—and why, in a world increasingly designed for comfort and convenience, practising human connection may matter more than ever. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:04:14) Our Earliest Blueprints for Love (00:05:34) How Culture & Language Shape Love (00:11:18) Is Love Really Unconditional? (00:17:16) How Culture Teaches Us to Relate (00:21:04) Why Relationship Education Is a Human Right (00:29:31) What Is Universal About Love? (00:31:23) Deconstructing What We Believe About Love (00:34:05) Which Cultures Get Love Right? (00:36:24) Are We Asking Too Much From Our Relationships? (00:41:25) Emergent Love: When One Plus One Equals Three (00:43:47) AI, Comfort & the Future of Relationships (00:48:11) Relational Literacy vs. Relational Fluency (00:52:52) What Sara Had to Unlearn About Love (00:57:48) Being in Love vs. Practising Love (01:01:49) Knowing About Love vs. Actually Living It (01:07:45) What 41 Countries Taught Sara About Love (01:10:07) The Myth About Love We Need to Unlearn (01:10:53) What Is Love? ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh grew up in Iran and went on to create The Whispers, a BBC World Service program that opened honest conversations about sexuality and relationships with Persian-speaking audiences around the world. Today she is a social psychologist, psychosexual therapist, and author known as a Relational Architect, with more than 500 keynotes and workshops delivered across 40+ countries. Her award-winning book, Love by Design, received the 2025 Clark Vincent Award from CAMFT and introduces the Emergent Love Model, a framework drawn from research with hundreds of couples across 41 countries. She has been featured by BBC, CNN, NPR, and Al Jazeera, and was named one of Harper's Bazaar's "Best Love Doctors." Instagram Website QUOTES“When you have clarity of mind and peace of heart, you have arrived.” — Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh “Where you are born shapes the way you love—the rituals, the language, the expectations.” — Robin Ducharme “The ingredients for loving relationships are the same no matter what.” — Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh “It is about the little things. It’s how we treat each other in the day to day. The little details matter.” — Robin Ducharme “We all carry different meanings packed into that word. I say, ‘I love you,’ you say, ‘I love you’ back—but do we exchange the same expectations and rules of engagement within that one specific word? We don’t.” — Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh “You don’t fall out of love; you fall out of loving.” — Robin Ducharme GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBookFollow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Where are you fully known?" That's the question a mentor once asked Ashanti Branch, and it stopped him cold. Because when he really thought about it, the answer was nowhere. Ashanti Branch is the founder of the Ever Forward Club and creator of the Million Mask Movement, a global initiative that has reached people in over 100 countries. Raised in Oakland by a single mother, told at seven years old that he was "the man of the house," Ashanti spent his childhood learning to hide his anger, his sadness, and eventually his whole self behind a mask of toughness. Featured in the Sundance documentary The Mask You Live In, his work with boys and men has taken him from an Oakland classroom to a TEDx stage to the U.S. Surgeon General's office. In this episode, Robin and Ashanti explore what it actually takes for men to let themselves be known, and for the people who love them to become a safe place to land. They talk about the difference between belonging and fitting in, why anger is so often a cover for grief, and how vulnerability, far from being a trait some people are simply born with, is a skill that can be built one honest conversation at a time. Ashanti also leads Robin through his own Million Mask exercise live, a moment that gets right to the heart of what this conversation is about. At its core, this is a conversation about what changes, in a friendship, a marriage, or a family, when we finally let someone see what's on the other side of the mask, built on a simple, powerful idea: we can only be loved as deeply as we are willing to be known. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:04:32) Can You Be Fully Loved If You’re Not Fully Known? (00:08:28) Becoming “The Man of the House” at Seven (00:16:32) From Engineering to Teaching (00:24:06) How the Ever Forward Club Began (00:29:52) The Million Mask Movement (00:32:37) What Boys Hide Behind the Mask (00:35:14) Anger, Heartbreak & the Rules of Masculinity (00:39:14) Creating Safe Spaces for Boys (00:45:50) Why Vulnerability Is a Skill (00:51:09) What Anger Can Be Hiding (00:54:07) Connecting the Head & the Heart (00:58:08) How to Reach the Men & Boys You Love (01:03:21) What Ashanti Wants Men to Know (01:07:58) The Mask Exercise (01:13:58) The Myth About Men & Love (01:15:32) What Is Love? QUOTES "You can only be loved as deeply as you're willing to be known." – Ashanti Branch "Violence is what happens when men and boys don't know what to do with their anger." – Ashanti Branch “Vulnerability is not a trait; it’s a skill.” – Robin Ducharme "Men are loving, caring people who have been trained to operate in a world where they're not allowed to be that all the time." – Ashanti Branch ABOUT THE GUEST Ashanti Branch is the founder of the Ever Forward Club and creator of the Million Mask Movement, a global initiative that has reached people in over 100 countries. Raised in Oakland by a single mother, told at seven years old that he was "the man of the house," Ashanti spent his childhood learning to hide his anger, his sadness, and eventually his whole self behind a mask of toughness. Featured in the Sundance documentary The Mask You Live In, his work with boys and men has taken him from an Oakland classroom to the TEDx stage, and earned him the U.S. Surgeon General's Medallion for his work on youth mental health in 2023. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/branchspeaks/ Website: https://www.branchspeaks.com/ Ever Forward Club: https://everforwardclub.org/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices