The 3 Love Blocks Keeping High-Achieving Women Single with Sanaiyah Gurnamal

You can negotiate a contract, raise your prices, and hold a room. So why does love feel like the one thing you can’t build?

I almost didn’t release this episode. I recorded it months ago and sat on it, because talking about soulmates while grieving the biggest love of my life felt like teaching a class I was failing. I turn 49 this year. I’ve never been married. And for years I carried a belief so heavy I mistook it for the truth: if I really loved myself, I’d have been chosen by now.

My guest dismantles that belief in the first twenty minutes.

Sanaiyah Gurnamal is a self-love and relationship expert, a two-time TEDx speaker, and the host of Project Loving Myself — a Spotify Top 50 podcast with over a million downloads. She’s worked with more than five thousand women, and she’s watched the same patterns repeat so often she gave them names. She calls them love blocks, and three of them run almost every story:

• The People Pleaser learned to earn love by performing. As an adult she makes her partner the center of everything, pours out endlessly, and quietly trains him that her needs don’t count.
• The Commitment-Phobe grew up where love and comfort didn’t live in the same house. She says she wants the whole thing — and keeps choosing people who can’t give it, because deep down she’s certain love will hurt.
• The Runaway Bride has been burned before. She can date, even love — but the closer it gets, the more she manufactures conflict, guarding a freedom that’s really just armor.

What struck me hardest wasn’t the blocks themselves — it’s what Sanaiyah says about receiving. High-achieving women have fought for everything: the career, the respect, the life. Fighting is our first language. But you cannot fight your way into being loved. Receiving is a different skill entirely, and most of us were never taught it.

She tells a story about a long-haul flight — no kids, no husband, uninterrupted hours, and a book she was determined to finish. Her eyes kept closing and she kept fighting it, until sleep won. When she woke, high above the clouds, one sentence arrived: “All I needed was sleep, and I couldn’t give that to myself.” If you’ve ever bargained with your own needs — later, after, once I’ve earned it — that sentence is for you.

And for anyone mid-heartbreak, as I am: her reframe on grief is the kindest math I’ve heard. We treat a relationship that ends as a failed investment and go looking for the return we didn’t get. But the return was never the ring. The return is who you grew into inside it — and that part, you keep.

Near the end, she offers the journal prompt that reveals your block: What’s the worst that would happen if you met your soulmate tomorrow? The runaway bride answers “I’d get hurt again.” The commitment-phobe answers “I’d lose my freedom.” Your honest answer is the door.

The 3 Love Blocks

The People Pleaser — she earns love by disappearing into other people’s needs.
The Commitment-Phobe — she keeps one foot out the door and calls it standards.
The Runaway Bride — she wants it right up until it wants her back.

In This Episode

[02:35] Growing up with a script: the choices made for you before you could make them
[07:54] Sanaiyah gave up on love, poured into work — and the work led her home to herself
[10:30] A four-day wedding, a week in person, a yes with no hesitation — married 15 years
[15:45] The airplane story: “All I needed was sleep, and I couldn’t give that to myself”
[20:03] Self-love vs. selfishness — and the self-abandonment nobody names
[22:46] The high-achiever blind spot: when you’ve fought for everything, you never learn to receive
[25:58] The 3 love blocks — which one is running you?
[31:41] How the rewiring actually works: inner child work + subconscious repatterning
[43:30] Honoring heartbreak: keeping the growth when you couldn’t keep the love
[52:13] The question that reveals everything: what’s the worst that would happen if you met your soulmate tomorrow?

Brave Questions

1. Which love block is running your story — and whose voice taught it to you?
2. What’s the worst that would happen if love arrived tomorrow? Write the honest answer, not the polite one.
3. Where do you negotiate with your own needs — later, after, once I’ve earned it?
4. What did your last heartbreak hand you that you haven’t counted yet?
5. Where are you leading with fear and calling it standards?

Connect with Sanaiyah

• Project Loving Myself — wherever you listen to podcasts
• Sanaiyah’s TedX Talk
• Instagram + YouTube: @sanaiyahgurnamal
• The Love Blocks quiz · 99 Self-Love Journal Prompts

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