ReFraming Life

Some rooms change you the moment you walk into them. You don't know what's happened yet, but you can feel it. The air is different. The person you love is sitting there, and before a single word is spoken, something in you already knows. That afternoon, I walked into our office carrying takeout for dinner. I walked out carrying a new reality. In this episode, you'll hear about the c...

There's a strange grace that comes when the unthinkable begins to feel like everyday life. The fear is still there, but moving alongside it is something that looks a lot like hope. In the months after Adel's diagnosis, we didn't slow down. We moved forward. Not despite what was happening, but through it, together. In this episode, you'll hear about the moments that carried us:...

There are moments that divide a relationship into before and after. Ours arrived quietly, not as a dramatic turning point, but as a phone call I somehow already understood before a single word was spoken. I couldn't get to Adel fast enough. And in those three minutes, love stopped being abstract. It became the only thing that mattered. What followed wasn't fear; it was quiet, focused, de...

Most people don't ask it out loud, but I hear it.  Why would you share something this personal?  The honest answer has two parts.  The first is a promise I made to Adel: that what we had wouldn't fade into memory, but would live on for anyone still trying to build something real.  The second is something I've learned to be true again and again: that the deepest connections, the true...

Some of the most beautiful seasons of our lives only reveal their true meaning in hindsight. Not because anything went wrong in the moment…  but because we later realize we were living inside a chapter that wouldn’t last forever. In this episode, I take you back to the summer of 2018, a time when life with Adel felt full, expansive, and open in every direction. We travelled to Budapest, where she...

Someone once told me they had stopped celebrating their first date anniversary after they got married. They figured the wedding had replaced it.  I sat with that for a while, because Adel and I never saw it that way.  Every Wednesday, for more than fourteen years, I would turn to her and say: "Happy weekversary." Not every year. Every week.  Because we believed you don't wait for th...

This is the beginning of a 20-episode true love story. My name is Kent Waugh. And the woman who changed everything I thought I knew about love was named Adel. She was the only person who responded to my dating profile — one response, to 20 very specific things I had written about what I believed and what I was looking for. She answered every single one. What followed was 14 years of something I ca...

It was early 2006 when our plane landed in Mazatlán, one of our first real trips together, just the two of us. Adel brought a camera, and since photography had always meant something to me, you'd expect I'd never put it down.  But somewhere in those early days, I stopped. Adel noticed before I did. When she asked me why, I sat with it for a long moment before the answer came: every time...

By the summer of 2018, Adel and I had turned travel into something close to an art form, not about plans, but about presence. Barcelona was supposed to be a simple day trip. It became one of the most chaotic, most hilarious, and most revealing days we ever had together. A hotel booked for the wrong night. A missing backpack. The wrong train. The wrong station. And a locked gate at 1:00 in the morn...

There is an old belief that the people we are meant to love are already tied to us by an invisible red string, across distance, across time, pulling quietly until we finally arrive.  I used to think that was a beautiful idea. Nothing more.  And then I met Adel.  This is the story of what I've come to understand about soulmates, destiny, and the strange thing I call retroactive destiny, the wa...

The hardest speech I've ever given was at my wife's Celebration of Life. I opened with: "One of us was sleeping with their boss." The room went still. In this episode, I share the partnership few people knew about, how Adel and I spent 24 hours a day, seven days a week together, not just as partners at home, but at work. We were us to the power of two. And what we discovered th...

The stress had been building for weeks, a money issue, the kind that tightens your chest and makes you want to be right more than you want to be close. I felt my voice climbing. And then Adel looked at me with no judgment and asked just four words: "Are we still on the same team?" That was all it took.  In this episode, I share what it meant to grow because of someone, not just with them...

For years, my wife Adel hid new clothes in the trunk of her car — not because she couldn't afford them, but because a previous partner had shamed her for wanting them. She only spent her own money. She earned more than he did. And still, shame found a way in. It followed her into our relationship before she ever said a word about it. In this episode, I share the small acts of trust that slowl...

The Friday after our first date, I told my sons I'd met someone very important to me. I felt the knot in my stomach as I said it. They had me exclusively for four and a half years, and I knew what I was asking of them. But I had made a promise to myself long before Adel: I would never bring someone into their lives unless I was deeply confident it would last. With Adel, I had no doubts.  So n...

A close friend gave me a set of coasters after my first marriage ended. One of them had a simple phrase: "Love like you'll never get hurt." I set it on our living room table and watched it sit there for weeks, right in front of Adel. Because she was building a wall around her heart, one brick at a time — and I had made a quiet decision. For every brick she put up, I was going to rip...

I pulled my hands away when she reached for me across that Starbucks table… Twenty-four hours after our first date ended, we were already together again — sitting across from each other at a Starbucks table, laughing, soaking in what felt like the most natural thing in the world. And then she reached across the table to hold my hands. I pulled away. In her eyes, I saw something I never wanted to p...

What happens when you finally meet your soulmate… and one day, they’re gone? In this opening episode of My Soulmate Named Adel, I share the true story of how Adel and I met online, the instant connection that felt like destiny, and an 8-hour first date that changed everything I believed about love. You’ll hear: • How rewriting my dating profile like a “manifestation list” led to one message that c...