PODCAST EPISODES

Work is what you do to survive. It can’t be what you do to sustain or connect with your intimate partner. As a professional woman, you may constantly be chasing the elusive balance between work, home, and intimacy. In today’s Bonus Episode, Dr. Erica Holmes, a licensed clinical psychologist, educator, community consultant, and author of Dating With Purpose: A Single Woman’s Guide to Escaping No Man’s Land, talks in detail about how we can gain insights into our dating behaviors and practices to progress towards healthier intimate relationships. Wondering why you show up differently at work than you do in your personal relationships? Or maybe you constantly cycle through the same relationship patterns? Perhaps you are a workaholic and work inevitably seeps into your personal life. This Bonus Episode has nuggets for women at every stage in their relationships. 

Topics Covered: 

• Defining a healthy intimate relationship 
• What it means to date with purpose
• The influence of gender socialization on dating 
• Common dating behaviors and identities
• How our professional identities may influence our intimate relationships
• Why we may show up differently in intimate relationships than we do in our friendships and professional lives
• How to identify and learn from how you show up in intimate relationships
• Breaking patterns in intimate relationships
• When you should consider ending a relationship
• Identifying deal breakers and essentials in a relationship
• Setting expectations for the division of household labor
• Finding a partner who supports your professional success

Highlights:

• “Women have been taught and empowered to pursue various areas that were once thought to be only for men. Women are praised for pursuing education. Women are praised for setting goals in their professional lives and reaching those goals. But when you look at our socialization around dating relationships and marriage, that hasn’t changed much in our culture. Women are still taught in a lot of ways to be very passive in mate selection and dating.”
• “The same behaviors that it took for us to achieve our professional goals, we have to begin to put those in our intimate relationships.”
• “Work is what you do to survive. It can’t be what you do to sustain or connect with your intimate partner because that’s not the foundation of your relationship.”
• “If our identity comes from our career, we’re automatically going to have difficulty connecting in intimate relationships.” 
• “There are a lot of women who have focused on their education, profession, and female relationships and not as much on their intimate relationships. They are well-developed intellectually, but undeveloped or immature in intimate relationships.”
• “There’s a difference between chronological age, developmental age, and emotional IQ.”
• “When you’re in a relationship and you’re thinking about a long term relationship, especially a committed relationship like a marriage, you can’t go into the relationship to change someone. You have to ask yourself: ‘If this person never changes, would I be happy with them for the rest of my life the way that they are?’”

Connect with Dr. Holmes: 

On her website: https://www.docerica.com/

On Instagram: @itsdocerica

Other References: 

• Clair Cain Miller, Young Men Embrace Gender Equality, but They Still Don’t Vacuum, New York Times, Feb. 11, 2020.
• Ella Bell and Stella Nkomo, Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity
• Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I A Woman

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