The Uncommons

What happens when the strength that helped you succeed makes it difficult to let go in your relationship? Many women have learned to be capable, independent, and in control, qualities that can help us thrive in life but can also shape the dynamics we create with our partners. In this episode, Parisa and Pej explore masculine and feminine energy, polarity, the tradwife debate, and the tension many...

I came to the US with $150 in my pocket, no place to stay, and no one waiting for me. I was 21, and I had just traveled through a war zone in Afghanistan to get here. In this solo episode, I share the full story of how I arrived in America, including the moment a complete stranger handed me $2,000 in a foreign country with no guarantee he would ever see me again, and how that single act of trust c...

What if your financial ceiling has nothing to do with how hard you work? In this episode, we talk about the beliefs underneath our relationship with money: fear of losing it, fear of not having enough, the messages we inherited from our families, the way we view wealthy people, and the deeper question of whether we actually feel worthy of having more. Pej shares the financial ups and downs of entr...

After our first interfaith marriage episode, thousands of comments came in: some full of hate, many full of genuine questions from people privately navigating the same situation. In this episode, we sit down and answer the real ones: how we designed a wedding ceremony that honored both faiths, why neither of us converted and the specific reason that had everything to do with what we wanted to mode...

Nobody warns you about the guilt that can come with outgrowing your friends. Sometimes nobody did anything wrong. You still love the person, value the history, and miss who you were together. But somewhere along the way, you grew apart. And admitting that can somehow feel like a betrayal in itself. In this episode, we talk honestly about outgrowing friendships and the complicated guilt that can co...

Two years ago we made a decision most people in our lives didn't fully understand.. we pulled our kids out of school and committed to homeschooling completely. Two years later we're sitting with a question we didn't expect to be asking: did we get it right? In this episode we get honest about what two years of homeschooling actually gave our kids, what it cost them, and what it cost us, including...

Before we got married, he asked for a prenup. I couldn't sign it. Not because I didn't trust him, but because everything I believed about love, faith, and marriage made the idea of a prenuptial agreement feel like a betrayal of what we were building together. It nearly ended our relationship before our marriage even started. Nearly ten years later, that prenup is still valid. In this episode, we s...

A few weeks ago, my aunt called to tell me the community had found the podcast. I spent the next week confronting a fear of rejection and an anxiety I hadn't felt in years... not because I had done something wrong, but because being seen by people who knew me felt far more threatening than being seen by strangers. In this episode, we explore why the fear of rejection and the fear of being seen are...

We are four days into a cleanse as we record this. And by day two, what surfaced had nothing to do with hunger. In this episode, we explore what your relationship with food actually reveals about your relationship with every desire in your life, and why the way you respond to a craving tells you more about who you are than almost anything else. Pej brings his four-layer bridge connecting the gut-b...

Who are you without your career? Without your success... Your relationships... Your reputation... Or the roles you've spent your life building? At some point, many of us realize we've confused what we do with who we are . And when life changes—as it inevitably does—it can leave us questioning our identity in ways we never expected. In this episode, we explore the hidden identity crisis that often...

Twenty years of practicing medicine in the US. A company built and sold. One of the highest paid employed physician positions in the country on the table. And he said no to all of it, because success had answered every question except the one that actually mattered. In this episode, Pej shares the story he hasn't told publicly before: what drove him to walk away from everything he built, what pull...

If you're a people pleaser, saying no doesn't just feel uncomfortable — it feels like you're risking love, connection, and acceptance all at once. In this episode, we get honest about a pattern we both still live with, where it came from, and what it has quietly cost us over time. We talk about why the nervous system learns early that saying no means losing love, why the "good girl" identity becom...

This episode started as a conversation about overprotective fathers and ended somewhere much more honest. We got into the specific fear each of us is carrying into raising our daughter — he wants to protect her from men, and I want to protect her from the fear of them. I share the story of growing up in Iran where my femininity was never fully mine, the thirty years it took to start reclaiming it,...

Are we accidentally raising entitled kids? In this episode, we get honest about one of the hardest questions in parenting: where is the line between raising children who feel abundant and raising children who think the world owes them everything? We both grew up with scarcity and rebuilt our relationship with money as adults. Now we're trying to give our kids something neither of us had without ov...

Most people have a list. The problem is that the list is usually made of what we think we want—not what we actually need. In this episode, we reflect on how our views of relationships evolved over time and the qualities we've come to value most in a long-term partner. We share the lessons that came from past relationships, the assumptions we got wrong, and the characteristics that ultimately matte...

Can an interfaith marriage really work? As a Muslim woman and a Jewish man, we've heard that question countless times throughout our relationship. While many people focus on religious differences, we've found that shared values often have a much greater impact on the success of a marriage than shared labels. In this episode, we explore what it's like building a life together while coming from diff...

For most of our relationship, commitment wasn't something we viewed the same way. One of us believed marriage was a natural next step when building a life together. The other spent 50 years avoiding it. In this episode, we explore one of the biggest questions in relationships: What actually makes someone commit? We talk about: Fear of commitment vs. fear of losing freedom How childhood experiences...

Co-Parenting, Blended Families & Learning Compassionate Boundaries This episode of The Uncommons is one of our most personal yet. It's the story of how we built a blended family through circumstances neither of us fully understood when we stepped into them, and what it actually took emotionally to survive and grow through it. We explore: ✔ How our relationship began and what we walked into bef...

Why We Chose Homeschooling: Intentional Parenting, Emotional Development & Raising Kids in the AI Era This episode of The Uncommons isn't a debate about homeschooling versus traditional school. It's a deeper conversation about the environment children are actually developing inside, and whether that environment aligns with the values you want to raise them with. We explore: ✔ Why we chose home...

Traditional vs. Modern Roles in Marriage: What Nobody Talks About After Having Kids Are traditional gender roles in marriage making a quiet comeback, even for couples who never expected them? In this episode of The Uncommons, we share how our relationship roles shifted dramatically after becoming parents and why we stopped fighting it. We explore: ✔ How unspoken expectations quietly create resentm...

We talk about the differences between men and women in relationships, the double standards that come up, and how understanding those differences can change the way we see each other. In a light and funny way.

We talk about our son’s horrific ski accident: how we navigate fear, uncertainty, and the emotions that came with it, in real time. This is one of those challenges that could break us apart but we share how we actively choose to stay courageous and face it all together.

We talk about the internal tension between pursuing ambition and wanting to be present for a young family: wanting to achieve more while also being present and attentive to the needs of people who matter most, and how we navigate and struggle with that balance.

We talk about marriage and romance challenges while caring for small kids: The Challenges of prioritizing your marriage when life gets overwhelming. From kids to business to exhaustion and what it takes to choose each other even when resentment builds.

In our first episode, we share who we are, why we started this podcast, and the real-life challenges that shaped us. From navigating hard seasons to growing through them, this is an honest conversation about what it takes to build a strong relationship and family when life isn’t easy.