Nashville Life & Love

There was a season in our marriage where Brittney was doing significantly more of the invisible work of our relationship than I was. Not the dishes. Not the laundry. The other work — the noticing, the initiating, the tracking of where we were emotionally and what the relationship needed. I didn't know I was doing this. That's the thing about emotional labor that makes it so corrosive — the person not carrying it often has no idea the work is happening at all.

Brittney and I have three kids — eleven, seven, and four. Anyone who has navigated the exhaustion of raising children across that age range knows what it does to a couple's bandwidth. I work with enough sandwich generation couples to understand viscerally what happens to a marriage when caregiving expands beyond children to aging parents simultaneously. Here's what actually helps.

There's a version of intimacy most couples are chasing that doesn't actually exist — the one where the spark stays alive through grand romantic gestures. What Brittney and I eventually discovered is that the big moments can't compensate for what happens in the small ones. Here's what the research actually shows about what keeps couples genuinely connected over time.

One of the things Brittney and I figured out — not all at once and not without friction — is that we are genuinely different people who need different things to feel fully alive. The assumption that a good marriage means wanting the same things at the same time is one of the most quietly damaging myths in the cultural narrative about long-term partnership. Here's what parallel intimacy actually is and why Nashville couples need to understand it.

For a long time, our phones were at the dinner table. Not constantly in hand — just present. And both of us knew the other person might pick theirs up at any moment, which meant neither of us was ever fully there. The phone problem in our marriage wasn't dramatic. It was subtle. And addressing it changed the texture of our evenings in ways that surprised us both.

Nashville has always been a more complicated city than its reputation suggests. And Nashville's LGBTQ+ community — vibrant, resilient, and growing — deserves the same quality of thoughtful intimacy support as everyone else. What it has historically lacked is a coaching resource that genuinely understands the specific landscape of intimate life for LGBTQ+ individuals and couples here. This post is an attempt to address that directly.

The first years of marriage carry a particular kind of energy that most couples don't fully appreciate until it's behind them. Brittney and I know that feeling — and we know what happens when you assume it will maintain itself without deliberate attention. If you're a Nashville newlywed, you don't have to wait until year seven to learn what we learned. You can start now.

There's a particular kind of quiet that arrives when the last child leaves home. It's not the quiet of an empty house — it's the quiet of a relationship that suddenly has no more logistics to hide behind. In my coaching work with Nashville couples, the empty nest transition is one of the most consistently underestimated chapters a marriage moves through — and one of the most significant opportunities most couples never fully take advantage of.

Seven years into our marriage, Brittney and I hit a wall we didn't have a name for yet. The relationship was good. The love was real. But something in our intimate life had gone quiet in a way that neither of us knew how to talk about. What we discovered is that we weren't alone — and that what was happening had a name. Here's what the research shows and what we did about it.

My wife Brittney and I didn't start Do You Feel That? because we had everything figured out about intimacy. We started it because we didn't — and because we were tired of pretending otherwise in a city that rewards the appearance of having it together. Here's the real story behind the podcast, the platform, and the coaching practice we're building in Nashville.

If you've reached the point of actively searching for intimacy support in Nashville, the hardest decision is already behind you. What comes next is understanding the landscape — therapists, coaches, guided audio, and everything in between — and finding the right fit for where you actually are. Here's the honest guide nobody else has written.

Nobody warns you about this part. You prepare for the sleepless nights and the logistical chaos — but almost no one prepares you for what having children does to the intimate connection between you and your partner. Nashville is full of couples navigating exactly this. Here's what the research shows and what actually helps.