I Lost My Fiancé to His Life Coach

The beginning of the end for me and my fiancé happened over brunch in Bentonville, Arkansas. The restaurant, five minutes from the too-big house we’d recently moved into, sat beside a small airfield where hobby pilots landed their Cessnas and Walmart executives glided in on private jets. It had been four months since we’d traded our apartment in Washington, D.C., for a three-bedroom home, ballooning utility bills, and a lawn we didn’t know how to take care of.

My fiancé, let’s call him J., had been part of an online life-coaching program for two years. I watched it unfold in slow motion: the free PDF, the Instagram posts, the $1,000-per-month subscription. The first time I watched one of the coach’s videos, something cold coiled in my gut. His tone was calm, hypnotic. But nothing he said meant anything — an overdressed word salad. He spoke about sovereignty, “changing your templates,” and “inner ego” frameworks, a slurry of spiritual jargon that sounded urgent but said nothing at all. His wife sat nearby, motionless, like a hostage. J. was hooked.

Two years later, we were eating fried pickle chips and avocado toast with nine people who’d similarly uprooted their lives to be closer to this coach. It had started with a half-baked theory about a lost civilization with advanced tech buried by a global cover-up. He pointed out “proof” of it everywhere — churches, train stations, old government buildings. Then came the East Palestine, Ohio, train crash, which had apparently been “a psyop.” Earthquakes in Turkey. Fires in Maui. All man-made, all orchestrated, all part of some invisible agenda.

At the table, I felt my knees start to buckle. My peripheral vision closed in on me. The life coach was supposed to show up any minute, and I was having a panic attack, terrified that he would.

To my right, one woman was recounting a trip to Germany.

“And, you know,” she said casually between bites of omelet, “I visited Auschwitz, and there is no way as many Jews were killed there as they say.”

A crouton lodged in my throat as I lurched over the table, turning my whole body toward her. There is no way I’d heard this woman correctly. “Auschwitz isn’t in Germany,” I croaked, both of us surprised to hear my voice. “You said you went to Germany and visited Auschwitz,” I reiterated. “Auschwitz isn’t in Germany, it’s in Poland.”

I would like to say I stood up, lectured her on antisemitism, and walked out.

But I didn’t. I picked at my shitty salad and began planning how I could get myself out of this, the grip that this “coaching” had on my relationship. The way it shaped how J. spoke, how he spent his money, how he made sense of the world. The man I’d built a life with had been twisted into someone unrecognizable.

I met J. in the late summer of 2020. A mutual friend, someone I’d gone on a couple of dates with earlier that year in New York, came to D.C. for his birthday. We went to dinner with a group of his friends, pandemic style: two large outdoor tables separated by eight feet and a jumbo bottle of hand sanitizer. J. was at the other table.

He had kind eyes, a gap between his two front teeth, and a performative confidence about him — like he was giving a TED Talk using salt shakers and napkins as props. The next day, he asked me to get coffee. When the shop was closed, he shrugged and pulled out a blanket, a bottle of wine, and a chessboard from his backpack. The night before, I had mentioned that my father never taught me how to play. At some point, I told him I’d been daydreaming about picking up tennis, and later, that Valentine’s Day, he held out a racquet like a bouquet, tied up in red ribbon.

I had another date planned for the day he taught me to play chess, but I texted and canceled. I wouldn’t go on another date for four years. We quickly fell into a comfortable domesticity. Early on, I found myself thinking what a good father he would be. By December, he told me he loved me. Sometime in January, we were naked in my bed and said “I would marry you” again and again to each other. By May, we lived together.

We built a life in D.C. We cooked recipes from a shared Notes app. Lay on the grass in Kalorama Park. Played Bananagrams every Sunday morning. He wanted to do something entrepreneurial with his career; I wanted to live in Paris.

After years in the military, J. had been searching for something to help him make sense of himself. He didn’t say it directly, but I could feel it — a restlessness. A hunger for authority. For a mission. When we moved in together in the spring of 2021, J. was already involved in an online coaching program. It seemed innocuous to me — breathwork, somatic healing, group calls where people took turns in “the hot seat,” screaming or sobbing as a form of trauma release.

Then, in 2022, he started referencing a new teacher. He was captivated by what looked like AI-generated photos with elegiac captions about ancient wisdom. There was the occasional mention of some conspiratorial concept he’d come across that day, though he quickly stopped bringing them up after seeing my sharp response, and I stopped asking.

It still looked like growth at first. He was journaling more. Meditating. I wanted to be supportive. He started using new language, and I’d been around enough yoga teachers and New Age healers to know the vocabulary. But the language began to intensify. Soon, he was referencing “inner ego fragmentation” and “crafting new identities.” He talked about how emotions are a distraction and pain is just unintegrated data.

Whenever I voiced my doubts, he told me I was in resistance. That I wasn’t “seeing clearly,” and that that was okay because it just revealed my blind spots.

I kept telling myself it was just a phase. That eventually he would find what he was looking for. My body told a very different story — it began to tense at the mention of the coach’s name. My jaw would lock. My stomach would turn. J. watched lectures for hours, and the coach’s voice became incessant in our home. I started leaving the room. Then the floor. Then the house.

Some part of me knew, very early on, that something was deeply wrong. But I didn’t let myself say it aloud — not even to my closest friends. I was terrified someone would say, flippantly, “That sounds like a cult,” and that I would break. The validation of my intuition would mean I’d have to do something. I tried to out-reason the feeling. I told myself I was being judgmental. Controlling. Unwilling to let him evolve. By the time J. said he wanted us to move to Arkansas in January 2024, there were three of us in the relationship.

On a rainy afternoon a few months later, I stood barefoot in our half-packed D.C. apartment, Bubble Wrap sticking to my feet and plates stacked high on the counter. Movers shuffled in and out as I tried to steady myself against the rising sense that I was making a mistake. J. had made Arkansas sound like salvation: After years of odd jobs and existential flailing, he was applying to six-figure roles in Bentonville, a manicured town where Walmart money funded bike trails, art museums, and farmers’ markets.

We could buy a house, he said. Take real vacations. Live slower. He didn’t have a job yet, and we were moving to a town we’d never seen, for a life I didn’t entirely believe in. But I found a rental with an oak tree in the yard and got paint swatches, telling myself this was what trust looked like.

I had to give up my job — not a dream job, but one I’d fought to land after years of temp work, layoffs, and a master’s degree I was still paying off. The consistency I’d finally carved out for myself. The friendships. The familiar smell and faces at my pottery studio. The well-tread paths of Rock Creek Park. I told myself I was softening, letting my partner lead. We’d been in Arkansas less than 24 hours when the coach came to our home for the first time. He and his wife walked into our empty living room, voices echoing off bare walls. The coach didn’t say anything of substance, but my fiancé leaned forward like he was reading Scripture.

What I didn’t say outright, but sensed immediately, was that the move to Arkansas wasn’t really about the job. The high-paying role he talked about was the packaging. The reason was the coach. Nothing made that clearer than when, just weeks after we arrived in Bentonville, J. casually announced that he’d decided not to pursue a corporate role after all.

It was around then that I found myself Googling therapists and choosing one based solely on her headshot. Her office smelled like a Yankee cinnamon candle and printer toner. In our first session, the words poured out of me so quickly that I scared myself. I’d never said it all in one go. I was manic. And then, finally:

“It’s like a fucking cult.” The words hung in the air.

Saying it meant shattering the illusion I’d been living inside. It meant admitting that the life I’d built was rotten at the root. It meant letting someone else see, and risking that they might agree. People ask if I wish I’d left sooner. But I needed to see it up close — to smell it, feel it, let it crawl across my skin. I needed that proximity to name what my body had been signaling for years.

“I wouldn’t have offered that myself,” the therapist said. “But now that you’ve said it, I agree.”

I hadn’t realized how badly I needed that. Just someone to tell me I wasn’t crazy. That what I was feeling was real. That I could trust my own instincts.

After that, we met weekly. One hour at a time, we laid it all out.

“We’re going in circles,” she said one afternoon in July, watching me contort myself into yet another rationalization.

I was telling myself he wasn’t hurting me, not really. That it was okay if we had different ideas of reality. Maybe I was overreacting. I convinced myself that if I gave it more time, if I worked on being less reactive, less judgmental, more committed, it would settle.

My therapist stood up, typed something into her computer, and handed me a warm printout with a checklist for identifying cults and high-control groups.

I scanned the list. Unique language. Thought-terminating clichés. Isolation. Financial buy-in. High exit cost.

“I want you to tell me one example for each,” she said.

What I know now is that, in high-control groups, it starts with platitudes general enough that anyone, even mildly algorithm-curious, can fall straight down the funnel. And once you’re in, it escalates fast. Conspiracy theories are used to reality-build. First, they dismantle your faith in the world as it is: Your eyes can’t be trusted. Your gut is just programming. The more disoriented you feel, the more certain they sound. The goal, if you’re lucky enough to have your eyes opened, is to identify these outdated “templates” and rewrite yourself into alignment. For anywhere from a couple hundred to tens of thousands of dollars, you’re offered private coaching to collapse timelines, reveal truths, and master consciousness.

I copied the list into my phone and, over the next two sessions, added my answers beside each point. Whenever I felt myself slipping — wondering if I’d made it all up — I pulled it out and read through it like a rosary.

Slowly, I started to believe myself. To believe what my body had been telling me for years.

When J. walked through the door in the first week of September, I knew it was time.

“I can’t stay in this relationship if you’re in the program,” I said.

His body deflated, and I knew he’d already made his choice. The realization was both relieving and annihilating.

Being part of the group meant daily engagement: constantly messaging on Discord, weekly calls, and regular meet-ups with other members in town. It was a closed ecosystem, one where language, logic, and allegiance were constantly reinforced. I asked him to take a few days off. To tell his coach that I was the one who asked him to step back. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but I needed to see what would happen when loyalty to me was placed directly in conflict with loyalty to the group.

Not even 24 hours later, sitting in the living room — him fidgeting, me quiet — J. told me it had been hard not being in contact. I nodded but said nothing. I already knew the depth of his dependence. He was just finding out.

He opened his phone and said he’d let the coach know he was taking some space to focus on our relationship. “I want to read you his response,” he said. “Just keep in mind, I think it’s a very measured response.”

Measured response. The phrase lodged in my body like a blade. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.

He began: “It doesn’t surprise me that, as the daughter of an alcoholic father, she would generally distrust all men.” I levitated. It felt like I was watching myself from above. “You are in a different dimension,” I said, cutting him off. He stared back.

“You are in a different dimension,” I repeated louder, trembling. “You are in a different fucking dimension,” I said again with more power in my voice than I’ve ever heard.

We did not break up then, in one single moment. It was a slow unraveling that had started two years before and ended when I was finally able to say aloud, “We are not getting married. We are not staying together.”

Finally, we were lying in bed together. Both swollen-eyed and exhausted from days of crying. He asked me where I would go. I told him I’d go to Paris. “You should write your book there,” he said. And I think he meant it. Just like he meant it when he said he loved me, when he made me tea and taught me to play chess. He meant it, even as something else entirely was pulling him further and further away — into a world where intuition was pathology and devotion meant self-erasure.

He meant it. But it still wasn’t enough.

There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes from loving someone who no longer lives in the same reality as you do. It’s only now, months and thousands of miles away, that I can see the full cost. Not just of the relationship, but of the stories that I spun to make someone else’s disorientation feel like my failure. That’s what almost got taken from me: not the partnership, but my ability to trust what I already knew.

Within two weeks, I walked myself through the disintegration of a life: Called my mom and wept, asking if I could stay with her for a couple of weeks while I regrouped. Asked my brother to fly to Arkansas and help me drive back East. Braced myself for all their questions and was thankful when none came. Spent most of my savings covering the financial fallout — selling a car I’d bought on loan, paying to break our lease, chipping away at credit debt I’d racked up after quitting my job. Deleted wedding Pinterest boards for a wedding we never actually planned.

We said good-bye under the skylight in our kitchen. I thanked him for everything I learned through loving him. Thick tears ran down his tanned cheeks. When he walked out the door, I collapsed onto the linoleum and pressed my cheek to the tile. Relief flooded my body, which surprised me.

I thought I’d miss J. That the loneliness would be inescapable. That I’d reach for my phone at night. But I didn’t.

I never spoke to his family. But I did call his friends. Part of me still wanted to protect him — to make sure he had someone to fall back on once I was gone. On the night before I left Arkansas, I cried and said to J., “I’m the last one left. The last person who is going to look you in the eye and tell you this is wrong.”

For weeks, I was torn about whether or not reaching out would cross some invisible boundary. When I did finally connect with one of his friends, he was shocked to learn the details — J. hadn’t shared the extent of his relationship with the life coach nor the disintegration of our own. We spoke for an hour and mapped the history of J.’s search for meaning and authority outside of himself. He said he would stay close, that he had faith J. would be all right.

I used to wonder how J. would explain it. She left because I’m in a cult, I imagined him saying. I knew better. To preserve his version of reality, I had to be the uncommitted one. The reactive one. The one with too many blind spots. We all get to tell our own stories in the end.

Mine continued across an ocean. First, wandering the wet streets of London. Then crying on the floor of my flat in Paris and getting up and going out for a croissant. Nearly a year out, it’s a story stitched together through cold Scandinavian swims, dancing in borrowed kitchens, endless hours of therapy, and the lifeline of late-night voice notes with my women.

It’s a story about choosing, again and again, to live a life that is my own idea. About resisting the pull to explain, to contour myself into something palatable. About naming the harm and living anyway. About saying: I will not betray myself just to be loved.