Advice Assumes You Already Know What's Wrong. Most People Don't.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
Almost all relationship advice takes the same basic shape: here is what you should do about your problem. It's a genuinely useful shape, for one specific situation — when the problem has already been correctly identified. What that shape of advice cannot do, and rarely admits to not doing, is help with the much more common situation: not being sure what the actual problem is in the first place.
This is a bigger gap than it sounds. Most people seeking relationship advice can describe symptoms fluently — we fight about the same things, I feel disconnected, something feels off — but symptoms are not diagnoses, and advice built to answer "what should I do" quietly assumes the diagnosis step already happened, somewhere upstream, correctly.
When the diagnosis is wrong, well-executed advice for the wrong problem doesn't just fail to help — it can actively make things worse, consuming effort and goodwill on a fix that was never aimed at the actual mechanism. This is precisely why so much advice, followed diligently, produces disappointing results: not because the advice was bad, but because it answered a question that was never the operative one.
What's missing for most people isn't more advice. It's the step before advice — the one that identifies, accurately, what's actually happening — which is a different kind of help entirely, and the one almost nothing in the advice ecosystem is actually built to provide.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai