The Hilary Silver Podcast - #88: How Kimberly Found Love After 13 Years of Avoiding It

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

When you’ve been single for 13 years, “I’m fine” starts sounding a lot like “I’ve given up.” Kimberly was successful on paper, but she was quietly miserable off it. Between perimenopause, work burnout, and pandemic isolation, she’d convinced herself she was too busy (and too jaded) for love. Then she found Ready for Love, and everything shifted.  She thought she was signing up to find love. Happily, she found herself in the process. In this episode, Kimberly gets raw about forgiving herself after an affair, dropping decades of shame, and learning what real emotional maturity looks like. She shares how doing the work helped her move cities, meet her partner (again), and launch her own consulting business with actual self-trust. Now she’s living proof: self-love isn’t a backup plan, it’s the whole plan. Episode Highlights: Why independence can be emotional armor in disguise The real reason self-forgiveness changes everything What “doing the work” actually looks like when it sticks How loving yourself first changes your love life and your career The secret to attracting love that feels calm, not chaotic Episode Breakdown: 00:00 Finding Love by Loving Yourself First 00:22 13 Years Single and Ready for Change 05:53 Healing Shame and Rebuilding Self-Worth 07:58 How Attachment Styles Impact Relationships 11:40 Meeting Her Partner and Creating Healthy Love 16:02 From Self-Love to Career Confidence 17:50 Why Investing in Yourself Always Pays Off ✨ I’m Hilary Silver, LCSW, former psychotherapist turned master coach and founder of Ready for Love. I help high-achieving women show up in love as confidently as they do in their careers. 💡 Through this podcast, I share my WOMAN-centered, SELF-centered approach—time-tested methods that blend psychology, brain science, relationship skills, and no-BS dating advice. 🎙️ Since 2017, we’ve helped over 10,000 women with a 98% success rate, making Ready for Love the #1 program in the world for women who’ve tried everything else. ✨ Ready to stop repeating the same patterns and finally create the love you deserve?  🎯 Watch my free masterclass to learn the proven 4-step Ready for Love Method: https://readyforloveinc.com/masterclass 💬 Apply for a free Love Breakthrough Call with my team: https://readyforloveinc.com/apply

Finding love really manifested in finding love of myself first, right? So the course helped me uncover that. And I think that really established myself in the ability to have confidence. Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Ready for Love podcast. Thanks for tuning into the conversation today. If you haven't already, it would mean so much to me. If you'd take a minute to just click that five-star rating on your podcast app, leave a review and subscribe so you never miss one of my episodes. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider sharing it with a friend because if you like it, they will probably like it too. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Ready for Love podcast. Today we are joined by one of our Ready for Love graduates, Kimberly, and I'm so excited that she's here. Of course, I always

love when women are courageous and brave enough to share their stories because this is really just so personal for so many women. But when women share their story, it really helps other women who are listening, hear themselves and see themselves in each other and maybe reach out to get help that they need. So let's welcome Kimberly. Hello, Kimberly. Hi. Nice to be here. Oh, I'm so happy to talk to you. I reached out because I saw on Facebook that you and your honey went on a long trip together and I was like, oh yeah, it's happening. So I got to reach out and find out more. So we're going to talk all about where you're at now. But before we get there, If you could, if we could just start with a little bit about where you were when you found

me and you reached out. Like what were you struggling with? What was painful for you? What was happening? Oh gosh. Well, it was 2021. In the in the midst of kind of like the beginning of the COVID lockdown. I think guys, I was actually really really struggling personally and professionally. It had been 13 years since I got divorced and I had been really resisting any kind of serious relationship. And I think it was maybe it was a, you know, combination of COVID, perimenopause, you know, my job, not being happy, not being isolated, that I was like, I really need to change something. And it was literally out of nowhere. I feel like the universe was listening to me and like your video, your website or video came to me.

And I was like, oh, my goodness, like, this is exactly what I'm looking for. And yeah, and it was the best decision I ever made. Oh, my gosh. I love to hear that. And, yeah, everybody was struggling. I mean, our business more than tripled in COVID. Yeah. Just because I think really busy, high achieving women, all of a sudden, if you remove the hustle and the

bustle and the activities and the distractions, I called it sitting and spinning. Women were sitting with themselves and spinning out about like what was going on. with them getting real with themselves and there was no, you know, distraction. So a lot of women reached for help at that time. Tell us, okay, so you had been divorced 13 years. Yeah. And when you were avoiding relationships, meaning were you dating at all or were you just getting into little things here and there? Yeah. I mean, I think I was really not serious about relationships. I realized I wasn't emotionally available. I was just, you know, I guess having fun, but the same time not. And also struggling to find someone I wanted to be with.

You know, and I think through, and we'll get to it, but like through the course, I realized that I was really blocking myself, those 13 years. And, you know, part of it was like, I think I needed a reset. And in 2021, when I started a program, I was like, now I'm ready to really kind of take the blinders off, take everything off and really, what I would call it, ready for love. I was really calling it finding love. Yeah. Well, and you can't do it until you're really ready. You just can't. You know, if we came across your feed earlier, you either would have ignored us or been mad at me for saying you're the problem. Or, you know, you just would have just skipped right over it. And so you were wanting a relationship, but also just kind of putting it on the back burner at the same time. You know, I thought I wanted a relationship, but I really didn't because I wasn't emotionally available. Yeah.

You know, and I actually, the truth is I didn't really know how to love myself. And so I think maybe I had not forgiven myself from the divorce and was using that as an excuse to not find love. Yeah, I mean, you said like you had an affair in your marriage and you were just hard on yourself, beating up on yourself, couldn't forgive yourself, couldn't get over it. And I think a lot of women who do that, whether it's an affair or anything, thing just feel like I don't I did that and now I don't deserve love yeah I mean it was a little bit of that I mean you know I'm not happy about it would have of doing that but you know realized you know I am

I really didn't have my own voice in my relationship with my marriage um I didn't and quite frankly I was really immature emotionally um you know and it was sort of like you had said you know it was like a drop of a sponge it was a wet drop on a very dry sponge and I was this dry sponge that I was just like oh my god I have an attention and and I got caught in that and but it what it forced me to realize was that I was really you know not ready to be in a relationship and and and for 13 years later I wasn't and I not until I came to the program but I just love your ownership of that and you know we do a lot of healing and self-forgiveness in the program and a lot of of self-compassion, which most women don't do very well. We're very good at being hard on ourselves,

but not good at having compassion. Most of the time when people have an affair, it's because they're struggling and suffering and don't have words for it or don't know how to fix it or don't know how to get help. And I'm not excusing the behavior, obviously, but there's always a good explanation. And if you had lost yourself in your marriage, just to share with the listeners, that drop of water on a dried out sponge is kind of my metaphor for women who are starved in their relationship, even men. When we're starved for feeling seen and witnessed and appreciated and valued and important and loved by somebody because of the dynamic that's going on in the relationship,

what each person is bringing, it doesn't take much for an outside influence to give it to you. It's all too alluring if you've been parched in a desert for someone to come along. and be a tall drink of water, you know, it's too easy. So do you feel like then some of the work in the program was learning self-forgiveness? Absolutely. I mean, I think it was, it was, you know, the course in itself really helped me. First of all, you know, sort of forgive myself to give me grace. You know, I'm people who have affairs are not bad people. It happens to everybody. I think, you know, at the time reflecting back, you know, I was really young. I didn't know how to have my own voice. I didn't know how to do that. Lots of women are like that. I just, I grew up in a family

that, you know, we really didn't voice what our true intentions were. And so I'm not giving that as an excuse, but it really taught me that, you know, how to build confidence, how to build my own self, a reassurance that I deserve to ask for what I want to be my voice and things like that. And so it really taught me a lot. It taught me, you know, the attachment style was really something that was eye-opening for me. And I practice that every day. I understand why I behave a certain way and my partner behaves a certain way. I think there's just, just understanding those dynamics is really important to be in a mature relationship. And I think that was all the lessons, all the mistakes that I've made in the past have really helped me learn and grow into the relationship

I have now. Yeah, and now you can trust yourself to handle it differently this time around. Like, it's important to learn to trust yourself that, you know, part of the taking responsibility in the program, which can be that bitter pill to swallow down, is actually the magic pill to solve everything. Because when you see where you went wrong and why, and then you learn what's better to do differently going forward, you trust yourself to move forward. Yeah, exactly.

So tell us a little also, I know that you said, had a huge impact on you professionally and that you had been struggling professionally too. So how did this translate over into helping you in your career? Great question. So, you know, as I mentioned, your program was ready for love. And for me, in my head space, I was thinking finding love. And finding love really manifested in finding love of myself first, right? So the course helped me uncover that. And I think that really established myself in the ability to have confidence who I am. I think, you know, one of your, one of your meditations was one of my favorite.

And this might be kind of a, you know, an opening to people who haven't completed the course yet. But when you talked about that metaphor about the marble and that each person is born with this beautiful shaped marble and the things that happened to them chip away a little bit. on that marble. In the end, you're this beautiful marble that is unique to yourself because of all the experiences you have. And I think that was so profound for me because I was like, you're right. Like no one else is this person. I'm the only one that's gone through these experiences. I am this beautiful marble shape and this. And yeah, and I had the confidence of really believing in myself and loving everything, even all my mistakes, even the affair, even everything that I has done I sort of unforgiving now and that's really allowed me to get

confidence in myself and trusting myself and trusting my gut and then based on that love I'm able to give more love if that makes any sense so that was really profound for me and it was just like aha I was had to hold myself back from squealing with delight because I just love I love that so much And you're talking about the visualization in the journal, the daily journal, which is, I sell the program, I sell the daily journal separately. And for anybody listening, you can go to Readyforloveink.com forward slash journal and check that out. It is sold separately. But it is rolled into the program among all the other things that we do. And there are lots of visualizations as part of that.

And one of them is this marble where I talk about where all this chunk of marble really just undefined amorphous when we're born and over. time, our experiences and the messages we get and all the things that happen along the way, slowly chisel away until we become this really unique creature that no one else looks like us. And there's also a lot of other ones too. Like, do you remember the tree in the in the metaphor? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a very visual person. So creating those was really deeply personal for me. And those were the things that helped me and my own personal journey to get where I am. And so I just love sharing that with everybody. So tell us now then where you're at with your love life.

We'll talk about your work too. Yeah. So I think since the program, I actually moved. So in 2022, right after I completed the program, I ended up getting a new job and I moved myself to Boston, which is where I found my partner who, interestingly, I had met previously five years before but we did you know we didn't we were like see you get never and then we we re met in boston we actually moved at this almost about the same time and and i think both of us came at the same time really kind of wanting to find love and and um and yeah so ever since we've been

together did you say see again never yeah we did we were like see you again never and that was you five years before I started that program or four years. And I was, and it was like that kind of, I was, oh, I was awake, you know, and he was also awake. And so we just came together. And I'll tell you, like, we're been three and a half years. I mean, it's not perfect. Let's just be honest. Nothing is ever perfect. I'm never perfect. And I think one of things that I would, you know, plug is that attachment style and just recognizing my attachment style and his attachment style. I mean, we are the most completely opposite people, but we kind of come together and sort of bring each other to the middle. I think it's also respecting each other and the way we attach in our personalities.

You know, your model of the sunny side up was so important for me because it was two people coming together. And even though we fight, we have arguments, and at times it can be really difficult, we're always coming together. in a very respectful way to understand each other's perspectives when we're, you know, common collective. But it's that communication that really brings us together, keeps that circle around us very, very solid. And I would say, you know, that, that really sticks with me all the time. Yeah. That's another visual, of course, and another metaphor. And I call it sunny side up simply because it looks like two fried eggs. Yeah, exactly. And yeah. And, you know, in the program, basically, you're, you've really done a great job

demonstrating a lot of the highlights of our program in terms of like we help women understand how to be healthy in a relationship and all that includes that includes boundaries and communication and how to how to create intimacy and safety and all of that and then also how to love yourself and value yourself and forgive yourself and be your best self and it wasn't just about finding love because you found him and here you are still using the things that you learned in the program what, five years later with this man that you've been with now, three years? I love that. That's a testament to you, Kimberly, for really absorbing and owning it all and being committed. Yeah. It's practice. It is a practice. You know, I think it's just, I think opening my mind up to, well, first of all, forgiving myself, forgiving my family.

I think that was also another part of it, you know, and then also being aware of just how I, how I, how I, show up, you know, in the world and how I show up to my partners and my friends and things like that. And I think it was that the tools that you provide in the program are, you know, not just relationship also, but professionally too, because you've got to build relationships for those people as well. And I think it's just really great practice. And in fact, I use your journal still to this day. It's a really great exercise to start, you know, really and putting intentions forward and being mindful of it and doing the work. I think that's so important because it doesn't just come to you.

You really have to do the work, doing the practice. And you know, you continue to use. And I, as I've, you know, been talking to you through this as I still use those tools every day. And I, and it is the best, the best thing that ever happened to me. So I just feel like my heart's exploding right now because I just feel this is, this is what I get to do every day. and I'm so lucky that I get to be a part of that for you. And I'm so excited for you. And I love celebrating women.

So tell us what you're doing now with work because I know you went out on your own and that's really exciting. So tell us what you do. And you probably use the journal to help create that and make that happen, right? Yeah. So about a year ago, I decided to start my own consulting business. I've, you know, and actually I was really built up from my network. work, of relationships that I had built, who have been carrying me along this way. And it's exciting. And, you know, I think it's part of just, like I, like you said, like the marble. I am

this unique marble. And I'm here out for the world to really help other companies. So my specialty is really around precision medicine and oncology and helping startup companies develop their innovative tools and bring them to market. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's been a really great experience excited about it so that is really interesting so if i mean i don't know who's listening that has a biomedical company but like do you have a website like how can people check that out it's a great i mean i'm on lincoln you can find me on lincoln i i don't i hate to say it i'm still not early stages and i'm more word of mouth but you know i'm i really can across all of the the spectrum you know really can help with with with the starting businesses or even

maturing business is if they're interested in getting into sort of the digital AI space. You're so smart. Oh my gosh. But we'll put the link to the link in and the show notes in the description and all that stuff so people could check you out. But I want to thank you so much for sharing so openly. What would you tell somebody who's listening and they're like, oh, is that for me or is it not for me? Or I don't know if I need that or I'm on the fence or what if it doesn't work for me? Like what would you say? I mean, I think hopefully my story will really help convince people that this is absolutely worth it if it's to invest in yourself it's a small fraction of really trying to improve yourself and it was the best money ever spent to this day

you know and i would say you know you've got nothing to lose and you've only to invest in yourself and you know when you're your mind go be so open after this experience that you know limitless possibilities. Yes. Oh my gosh. Well, I definitely are definitely a model student and I'm so excited for you. Well, I mean, I really have to thank you, Hillary. I mean, you're a gift because like it was almost like a calling and you came to me and I was like, oh my God, this is what I needed. I mean, you're exceptional what you do and I'm really grateful that you're in the role you have. Oh, thank you. I feel blessed and just big hugs to you. I'm always cheering for you, always, always, always.

And I love you so much. And thanks for being here. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, take care. Thanks for listening, everybody.