The Ritual of Disbelief

On love, exhaustion, olive oil, and why I keep showing up anyway.

The ritual of disbelief.

It’s not a single moment of heartbreak. It’s not cynicism, exactly. It’s something more cyclical (and more exhausting) than either of those. It’s the repeated experience of having your faith in something broken down and rebuilt, over and over, without resolution. You show up. You hope. Something encourages that hope. Something else shatters it. You walk away. You absorb it. You show up again. And the ritual continues.

What makes it a ritual is that you keep participating. What makes it disbelief is that participating gets harder every time.

—

It was the very end of 2024. I was making a professional dream of working for myself a reality. I felt so good in every way – professionally, physically, energetically, emotionally. I was soaking up everything NYC had to offer. And I was dating a man who felt like a gift. The kind of connection that felt easeful and exciting all at once. An incredible dance and bit partner. He said I love you first. He introduced me to all his friends first. He was planning a trip for us. It was right. And then, without warning, without explanation: a FaceTime call while I had the flu, and then silence. No reason. Gone.

It was one of those situations that rewires your nervous system. And it happened two weeks before I hosted my first NYC dating event, while I was deep in promotion. I took that constant loop of “what happened?” and built a business to explore that question. I ran dating event after dating event. I soon learned that for a lot of people, dating (especially in this city) is a process of asking that exact question.

—

I’m not new to love. I’ve been in multiple long-term relationships. I’ve been engaged. I’ve dated with full investment in the belief that romantic relationships have the power to illuminate self and life in meaningful ways. For most of my life, I’ve felt good at this. I’ve tried to lead with honesty, compassion, and kindness. I’ve showed up.

But something has shifted over the last few years – in dating, and far beyond it.

We are living inside an era of collective disbelief. A global pandemic that restructured reality as we knew it. Election results that made millions feel like the rug had been pulled out from under them. Innocent people being ripped away from their lives and families by ICE without explanation or rights. Children being senselessly killed in wars started by ego. The most powerful men in the world being known predators, rapists, and pedophiles with absolutely no consequence. Every week, something happens that should not be possible. Something that breaks every framework we have for how things are supposed to work.

Disbelief layered onto disbelief, so much so that now it’s the standard.

And dating mirrors this exactly. It has become its own arena of the impossible: a place where the rules don’t hold, where doing everything right guarantees nothing, where love can appear completely real and then vanish without explanation.

The ritual of disbelief isn’t unique to romance. It’s the condition of being alive right now. Dating is just the perfect test case.

—

My hypothesis for my work was that community could be the antidote. That if I could build the right kind of room steeped in social accountability — warm, honest, unpressured — I could give New Yorkers back something they’d stopped believing in.

I tried to create spaces where people could show up without having to perform. No scanning the room and strategizing. No ping-ponging between dopamine hits on an app and the emptiness that follows. No predatory coach with the one answer, the one tool, or the one approach that will get you love. Just people being honest with each other about something we discuss endlessly and somehow say very little about.

It worked. There was an openness in those rooms. A light, tentative treading back toward hope and connection.

And I stood at the front of all of it, preaching about joy and possibility…while my own dating life was continuing to happen to me.

—

There was the executive who courted me for several months, slowly and intentionally. When I asked him what he needed to grow emotional closeness, he started yelling out of discomfort and said: “Relationships should always be easy and I don’t have hard conversations. I will not speak about emotions.”

There was the tech guy who insisted on being exclusive when I said we didn’t need to yet. Come to find out, he was a serial cheater who slowly and methodically revealed how much he deeply disliked women.

There are more examples of those “what?” moments — in dating, in work, and beyond. Each one its own iteration of the ritual. Show up. Believe. Get hurt. Walk away. Absorb. Repeat.

The question I kept returning to: what has happened to the basic architecture of how people treat each other?

—

I tried to build something to help people. And in building it, I absorbed more than I anticipated.

The woman who hadn’t dated in ten years because her last experience had been so traumatic and disappointing, she’d simply stopped. The multiple men who put every date into a spreadsheet, tracking variables, patterns, results – searching for the system that would create some semblance of outcome control. The woman whose fiancé left without a note.

Different people. The same ritual. The same step by step erosion.

People doing everything right and still getting hurt. Showing up with good intentions and getting hurt. Moments of real connection that left marks. No cause and effect. No fairness. No system to understand or game. Just people trying their best inside something that doesn’t reward trying your best.

I absorbed all of it. And, honestly, I broke.

I won’t get into what that looked like, but it took more than I expected to come back from. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from holding space for other people’s disbelief while slowly losing your own belief.

I thought being close to hope would sustain me. It didn’t. What I didn’t know then is that witnessing belief in others is not the same as having it yourself. You have to cultivate your own.

—

And then a woman approached me at a sauna. “I went to one of your events,” she said. “I want to thank you. I found hope and perspective again. And now I’m in love and so happy.”

That’s the ritual of disbelief. One moment you are holding the weight of stories of loss and pain. The next moment, someone is standing in front of you, glowing, telling you it worked. Both things are equally true. The devastation and the beauty. The ritual doesn’t resolve. It just keeps turning.

—

For a long time I thought the answer was hope. But hope isn’t quite enough. Hope implies a reasonable expectation and a belief that things will probably work out. And the evidence doesn’t always support that. Hope can curdle into passive waiting. Into wishful thinking that the ritual of disbelief eventually erodes.

What I’ve found myself reaching for instead is something stranger and more deliberate. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it the willing suspension of disbelief. He meant it for poetry and fiction: the conscious choice to believe something that defies easy logic, not because you’ve been convinced, but because of what that believing makes possible.

Suspension of disbelief is not hope. Hope is something that happens to you. Suspension of disbelief is something you choose. It’s active. It’s powerfully defiant. It’s the decision to say: I see the evidence. I know how this looks. I’m going to stay open anyway. Not because I’m naive, but because I now know the devastation that happens inside me when I don’t.

The people who move through the ritual of disbelief with the most grace aren’t the ones who’ve found reasons to be optimistic. They’re the ones who’ve decided to keep participating anyway. To find their story and stay in it. To let the ritual turn without being destroyed by it.

That’s the invitation, if you want it. Not to feel hopeful. Just to suspend disbelief. Enough to show up. Enough to let something surprise you. Give yourself chances.

—

And that’s when delightful things happen.

Over the years, there was the man who dropped everything when I needed him — no hesitation, no calculation, no expectation – just to help. The man who apologized so fully, so without defense, that I felt belief in people’s capacity to grow. The man who planned a full day around nothing but my favorite things, who had paid enough attention to know every detail of what they were. The man who heard me mention my wrists hurt from typing and brought a laptop holder to our next date. The man who cooked a six course meal based on my favorite songs. The man who surprised me with a trip to another city to see my favorite artist. The man who sat with me in my heartbreak, supporting my pain through his own. The man who wrote me a series of love letters so thoughtful and moving that they’ll remain in my heart and mind forever.

These things happened too. I keep saying that to myself. On repeat.

So this is not a eulogy for love in NYC, or for the broader state of the world. It’s a reckoning with what it costs to keep believing in it. And why that cost is worth it.

—

I’m writing this from a café in Italy, where I’m spending a month studying olive oil and remembering what it means to believe. A month of slowing down, of paying attention to something so undeniably sensory. Reminding myself of how to really be present and taste again.

Some say it’s an “eat, pray, love” move. I say it’s an aggressive act of suspension of disbelief.

But that’s the point. After a year of absorbing everyone else’s exhaustion, after a lifetime of believing in love and connection and watching the world make that belief feel increasingly unreasonable, I needed to practice it somewhere easier. To remember what it feels like to choose wonder and possibility and curiosity and presence over evidence.

And then, because the ritual of disbelief turns in both directions, I met a man here who is building belief again. A man who organized a day of two olive farm tours, a beautiful villa, and a home cooked Italian dinner with all his friends on a picturesque farm on the outskirts of Bologna. The kind of day that shouldn’t exist in the same world as spreadsheets and devastating FaceTime calls.

And yet. Here it is. The ritual continues.

But I’m sitting here in this moment of suspension of disbelief, and it feels right.

—

Fully yours,

Isabella

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