ABOUT ME

Hey there, I’m Maria.

I’m an ENM (Ethical Non-Monogamy) and Relationship Coach living in the multilayered city of Berlin.

I spend a lot of my time talking to people about love.

Which sounds very romantic until you realise this means I also spend a lot of time talking about jealousy, resentment, sex, boundaries, terrible communication, NRE, heartbreak, old wounds, new lovers, impossible decisions and arguments about things that are definitely not really about the dishwasher. :D

I love this work!

Partly because I find people endlessly interesting. And partly because I don't think there is one right way to love, build a relationship, make a family, or create a life with other people.

I am an idealist. I believe in big love, deep connection, relationships that make our lives larger, not smaller.

Unfortunately, I am also very pragmatic. :))

And somewhere between those two is probably where most of my work happens. Because wanting something and being able to live it are not the same thing. You can want freedom and still feel jealous. You can love someone deeply and not have the capacity to give them what they need. You can create agreements that look perfectly reasonable on paper and discover that your nervous system apparently wasn't invited to the meeting. You can know exactly why you behave a certain way and still do the bloody thing again. And you can have a relationship worth fighting for while also needing some things to change.

Over the years, I’ve realised that my work keeps coming back to five things:

agency, capacity, safety, intentionality and change.

• Can I actually choose, or am I reacting from fear, habit, pressure or an old story?

• Do I have the capacity for the thing I say I want?

• Is there enough safety for me to stay present when things get difficult, without confusing safety with never being uncomfortable?

• What am I trying to build here?

• And how do I stay fluid enough to meet change when it comes?

Because change is really the only guarantee. Relationships change. Bodies change. Desire changes. Needs change. People change. Families change. The things that once worked beautifully stop working. The things we thought we would never want suddenly matter. Even death is change.

So for me, the question isn’t how to avoid change. It’s how to move with it consciously. How do we adapt without abandoning ourselves? How do we transform what is happening rather than simply letting it happen to us? How do we keep enough agency and intentionality inside change that our lives still feel like ours?

That’s where a lot of my work lives.

I don’t have a preferred answer to any of this.

I’m polyamorous myself and part of Berlin’s kink and sex-positive communities, but I’m not interested in convincing anyone that ENM is more evolved than monogamy. I’m interested in helping you understand what is true for you, what you have capacity for, what is changing, and what you want to do with that change.

And perhaps this is why I became a coach after being a translator. Sometimes I think I’m still doing the same job. I translate nervous systems to each other. Fear into language. Defensiveness into what it is protecting. Jealousy into attachment, meaning, longing or threat. Beliefs into the cultures and histories they came from. One partner’s inner world into something the other can actually hear.

 And sometimes I help people translate themselves back to themselves: their fears, hopes, traumas, dreams, contradictions, desires.

Because so many relationship problems begin with two people speaking different internal languages and assuming the other person should somehow understand.

My work is often about slowing that down enough to ask: What is actually being said here? And once we can hear each other more clearly, we usually have more choices.