Choose connection on purpose
Start with one small choice today
If you’ve ever left a dinner with your partner and realized you spent most of it rehearsing tomorrow’s presentation in your head, nothing is wrong with you. You’re busy. Busy is the condition that quietly turns a relationship into logistics: who’s picking up what, who’s traveling when, who remembered to book the thing.
I’m Katie Crosslin, PhD, and I run The Alchemized Life, a coaching practice for high-achieving professionals. Physicians, attorneys, founders, executives. They arrive with the same confession in different accents: on paper everything is handled, and inside they feel disconnected from the person they chose, or from the possibility of choosing anyone at all.
What they want isn’t romance advice. It’s a way to bring the same deliberateness they apply to a career into the relationship that’s supposed to matter most. That’s what intentionality is. Not a mood. A set of choices you make on purpose, repeatedly, including on the days you don’t feel like it.
What Intentionality Actually Means
Strip away the aesthetics and intentionality has three parts: a direction you chose, attention you keep returning to, and actions small enough to repeat. If any one of those is missing, you have a wish rather than an intention.
This is where I part ways with a lot of what gets sold as manifestation. I believe internal state shapes what you notice and what you’re available for. I don’t believe a vision board performs labor on your behalf. You can hold the clearest possible picture of a connected partnership and still spend your evenings answering email. Intention without behavior is decoration.
The encouraging part: intentionality is learnable, and it doesn’t require a personality transplant. It requires a few decisions made in advance, so you aren’t relying on spontaneity during the least spontaneous years of your life.
Start With Purpose, Not Just Attraction
Defining your relationship goals allows for specific intentions to follow
Frameworks that support relationship coaching
I don’t work from vibes alone. Three frameworks shape the way I guide clients through relationship change, and naming them explains why some conversations move and others stall.
Before you optimize a relationship, get honest about what it’s for. Most clients I work with can describe what they want in a partner in granular detail and can’t answer a simpler question: what kind of partnership am I building? Attraction tells you who you enjoy. Purpose tells you what you’re committing your limited time and energy to.
I ask clients to write two lists. The first is short term: what do I want the next six months to feel like with this person? The second is long term: what do I want this relationship to have made possible in ten years? Specifics matter more than adjectives. “More connection” isn’t a goal. “One unhurried conversation each week with no phones in the room” is a goal you can either keep or miss.
Approaches to Coaching
- Motivational Interviewing: I’m trained to evoke your own reasons for change rather than lecture you into them. Nobody argues themselves into tenderness because a coach told them to.
- Empowerment Theory: The work is built on your existing strengths and your authority over your own life. You’re not a problem to fix. You’re a capable adult with a blind spot.
- Hope theory: Hope isn’t optimism. It has three parts, goals, pathways, and agency, which means you know where you’re going, you can picture a route, and you believe your effort counts.
That last one matters most for clients who arrive cynical. Cynicism is usually hope that got tired, and rebuilding it is a skill rather than a trait you were born without.
Rituals of Connection Beat Grand Gestures
Intentionality shows up in ordinary moments far more than during anniversary dinners.
- When you imbue a small action with meaning, the action changes. There’s a real difference between a kiss that’s habit and a kiss with feeling in it, and your body knows which one it received.
- One of the simplest ways to build connection deliberately is to take something you already do and make it intentional. A cup of coffee handed over with eye contact. A hand on the back while you both wait for the kettle. Small touches through the day. Reaching for your partner in the specific ways they like to be reached for, which requires knowing what those are and asking if you don’t.
- Physical connection is easy to let slide when you’re depleted. Treating it as a priority rather than a leftover is a choice, and it tends to pay back the energy you spend on it.
Curiosity Is a Skill, Not a Personality Trait
You can’t be intentional with someone you’ve stopped being curious about. This is the most common pattern I see in long partnerships: two people who know each other’s schedules perfectly and haven’t asked a genuinely open question in months.
Curiosity isn’t an interrogation. It’s the practice of treating your partner as a person with a story rather than a known quantity with predictable habits. Ask about the thing they mentioned in passing last week. Follow the thread instead of redirecting to logistics. Share parts of yourself too, since one-sided curiosity becomes an interview.
This applies before partnership as well. When you’re dating, focus on connection rather than contact volume. A hundred low-effort messages create the sensation of intimacy without the substance. A short text saying you’re thinking of them carries more weight than another round of scheduling chatter.
Protecting Your Time Together
You cannot be intentional in a relationship you have no time for, which means boundaries are built into this. Learning to decline things, including good things, protects the energy you need for the people you’ve chosen.
Deliberately spending time together, and at times placing someone else’s needs above your convenience, takes work and focus. It also pays back disproportionately. Time you’ve defended is time you can actually show up inside of, rather than the distracted half-presence that feels worse than absence.
Shared experiences may not require lots of money
New experiences give a relationship fresh material to grow on, and they do not require a trip or a major plan. Try a recipe neither of you has made, walk a different route, learn a card game, or visit a neighborhood you have never explored. What matters is mutual novelty, not expense.
Intention is not control
What makes those moments intentional isn’t the activity. It’s that you decided on it together, in advance, instead of waiting for a free evening that never arrives. Calendars aren’t the enemy of closeness. Unscheduled hope is.
Here is where the spiritual and clinical perspectives converge: you can act with deep intention and still not receive the outcome you hoped for. Your partner is a whole person with agency of their own, and focused energy cannot override their choices. Intention guides how you participate in the relationship; it does not determine how they will.
I have seen clients wear themselves out trying to create an imagined version of a partner instead of engaging with the person in front of them. That is not intention; it is control disguised as intention. A healthier commitment sounds like this: I will show up with purpose, speak honestly, and remain curious about the response. Then I will respond to what is actually happening, not to what I wanted to happen.
A Rhythm That Survives a Full Calendar
Intentionality dies in abstraction, so keep it concrete. A few structures hold up well with clients who travel constantly and run teams:
- Set one recurring anchor each week that doesn’t move for anything short of an emergency.
- Name one behavior you’ll do daily, small enough that exhaustion can’t excuse it.
- Check in monthly on the two lists from earlier, and adjust them rather than abandoning them.
- Say the appreciation out loud instead of assuming it’s understood. A short text counts.
None of this is dramatic. That’s the point. Intentional relationships get built out of unremarkable moments that someone chose to make meaningful, over and over, long after the novelty wore off.
Ready to build a relationship that feels as intentional as the life you’ve created? Reach out to schedule a discovery call, and let’s explore what purposeful connection could look like for you.
Katie Crosslin, PhD, is the founder of The Alchemized Life, a coaching practice for high-achieving professionals navigating relationship goals, personal growth, and the gap between outward success and meaningful connection.
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