We got engaged!
By Emily Blefeld, LICSW and Dan Cohen, PhD
In some ways, our engagement is the latest chapter in a question we’ve been living for years: What happens when the life you already love begins asking to become more?
More intimate. More honest. More alive. More deeply claimed.
For me, this choice was about taking vows, joining family systems, and leaping in love to my soul’s highest timeline (which also meant taking off my running shoes and looking in the eye at any patterns formed from heartbreak – mine or Dan’s). This required a hell of a lot of transformation around areas I was holding back giving and receiving love, and saying “yes” to a deeper commitment and current of belonging to the magical path of my soul.
For Dan (in his words), “it took releasing the deep-seated familial entanglement to never make a decision final and always keep the exit in sight. From early on, I always wanted to ‘love Emily forever;’ that was never the question. It was about allowing my love out in the open.”
Our relationship never followed a straight line. Anyone who knows our story knows that finding each other required both of us to walk through some very uncomfortable territory.
Before we met, we had each reached a point in our lives where we wanted more..
And wanting more is rarely as simple as admitting the desire. Desire has consequences. It asks questions of the structures we belong to, the promises we’ve made, the identities we’ve built, and sometimes even the people we love.
For me, that was happening everywhere.
My work as a psychotherapist was opening into something I didn’t yet have language for. My psychic awareness was growing in extraordinary ways. I had discovered Systemic Family Constellations, women’s mystery traditions, and how inherited ancestral patterns were at the root of most intentions and challenges in life. As my private practice and expertise grew, I was becoming increasingly aware of spirit consciousness moving through my life.
At the same time, I was asking for more from my marriage. Sometimes, our work in the world becomes an initiation into more meaning, purpose, love, money, health, or magic. When we begin moving toward a fuller expression of who we are through a creative project or spiritual awakening, we find there is less tolerance of the places where we are living as a dimmed-down version of ourselves. Inevitably, that movement touches everything around us – including our partnerships.
Our relationships have to be able to grow with us.
This is one of the uncomfortable truths about wanting more:
Our work. Our marriages. Our friendships. Our relationship with money. Our families. Even our understanding of who we are allowed to become.
This can lead to an excruciating choice: do I keep following what feels deeply alive in me, or do I make myself smaller to preserve the life and relationships I belong to?
I had married a wonderful man who had been the right partner for a younger version of me, and I loved him with all of my heart. But as I changed, our relationship wasn’t changing with me.
Eventually I had to face the painful truth that our marriage could have been right, and loving, and important … and still be ready to complete itself.
Dan walked through his own version of this:
“Before I met Emily, I had recognized that my marriage was coming to its end. And facing that was incredibly painful because, in a way, I didn’t feel like I had chosen for my marriage to fall apart. I felt like my soul was asking something of me that the life I belonged to could no longer hold.
The guides and the ancestors began to speak to me, but most powerfully, I experienced a kind of divine feminine presence through Mary Magdalene. She kept appearing in unexpected ways, through other people, through constellations, through moments I could not have planned or anticipated. Her message was consistent. Do not remain inside such a small expression of what love could be. I was being asked to have the courage to choose life again, to follow what would bring love, vitality, and movement into the next chapter of my life.
And then Emily came into my life.”
We met in 2012, at a women’s leadership program where Dan had been invited to give a one-hour demonstration of Systemic Family Constellations and how family patterns that invisibly cascade down generations impact one’s approach to making a difference in the world. He asked for a volunteer to serve as the focus client. I raised my hand, and in a few minutes, I was standing in front of representatives for four generations of women in my maternal line. I left seeing, for the first time, the thread of belonging and longing that connected me to my great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, sister and myself.
Within weeks, I broke through stuck places within my family that had been barriers for years. I connected the dots back to Dan’s demonstration and decided to reach out. We talked about what had happened and how Constellations worked. Neither of us knew yet that this conversation would become the seed of Seeing With Your Heart’s work — and our future life together.
That conversation became a working partnership: referrals, then sessions side by side, then workshops, then traveling together to co-facilitate retreats. In the middle of all that shared work…
Our hearts opened to each other, and we recognized that we had a common mission. We had a life to share that was beyond our imaginations. We both wanted to contribute to the lives of others, and we could do it together in a way that went far beyond what either one of us could do individually.
But loving each other brought us directly into another constraint of belonging: all the collective ideas about who we were allowed to love, what that love was supposed to look like, and what other people could accept.
The most judgemental of these ideas is what I call the big “ism.” Ageism.
An older man and a younger woman. Most struggle to endorse that relationship up and down the line. And to be honest, I didn’t either. But there we were.
Our love lit up the light of our souls. And, it was a truth bomb, burning up structures of belonging and requiring us to go forward with greater courage, audacity, and commitment to our soul’s purpose. In a way, the divine feminine chose us. It grabbed us each by the heart, pulled us together and told us to go create something, beyond what we thought was allowed, and to do it together.
Through these years, we built a life and a practice without crossing the threshold of marriage. What we did not know was that each of us had set a private course toward marriage. Without ever discussing it, we arrived at the same shore within days of each other. On my birthday in 2025, I stood in the shallow surf at our home in Aquinnah and set a private intention: by the time of my next birthday, I would live with my heart open completely, to Dan and life, holding nothing back. I sealed it with fire.
In Dan’s words, “The following spring, walking along the same beach, I heard the ocean whispering to me. The pull had been gathering for a long time, finally cresting into certainty. I wanted to marry Emily.”
Neither of us knew about the other’s timing. We only knew what had been building for months — the way you feel waves rising before you can see them. The proposal came two days before my birthday – marking 1 year of living with my heart completely open and holding nothing back.
When we put the dates together, the synchronicity was uncanny, and yet, it’s what we have come to expect working in this field of magic: each of us had answered the same call from a different direction, arriving at the same shore within forty-eight hours of each other.
What strikes me now is that wanting more had brought us together all those years ago… and here it was again. Only this time, “more” wasn’t asking us to leave something behind. It was asking us to go further into what we had already created.
To let love deepen. To make another vow. To discover what else this relationship could become and co-create.
We are allowing our hearts to heal and create a new form of marriage, a new type of bond that doesn’t look like the constricting traditional form.
It’s always going to be a work in progress, but we’ve come to the point where we want to experience what love can look and feel like, what commitment and marriage can mean, and what two systems coming together in vows (with community, family, children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews by our side) can be beyond institutional constraints.
Dan often describes this dance as the call of the soul against the constraints of belonging.
And perhaps that is one of the great tensions inside wanting more.
We can deeply love what we have and still feel the pull toward what it could become.
Our engagement is one expression of that. But this question is alive in so many places.
→ What happens when you love your life and still want more from it?
→ What happens when your work is meaningful, but you know there is more you’re here to create?
→ What happens when you want more intimacy inside a relationship you already cherish?
→ What happens when the desire for more freedom, beauty, purpose, money, magic or sheer aliveness becomes too intense to ignore?
And maybe the deeper question is: can you let yourself want it without immediately deciding what it means?
Because we are often very good at finding substitutes for that hunger. We work more. Attempt to achieve more. Buy more. Eat more. Drink more. Scroll more. Keep ourselves extraordinarily busy. And still, we want…
…more life.
