Eric Ebert

Founder of lovlov, based in Berlin. I studied business at WHU, founded two successful companies, and as an angel investor I have backed more than fifty founder teams, most of them in health.

None of that gave me a model for a relationship. My parents divorced when I was a teenager, and what nobody handed me along the way was any idea of how a good partnership actually works. For a long time I assumed that was my particular gap, and that other people had been taught something I had missed.

Years later I finally started looking at it properly, where it actually lives: what I want from a relationship, what I bring to one, how I read what is going on between two people, and what I even think a working relationship is. I sat down and wrote it out for myself, and what I found first was how little I had understood. Not only about relationships. About how I work inside one, and where I do not.

Then I started asking other people, and most of them were carrying the same open questions. Almost nobody was taught this. We inherit it from whatever we grew up with, and some people are luckier in what they inherit than others.

A great deal of research exists on this, and a lot of good thinking around it; I have spent real time in both. Most of it does not need reinventing. What is missing is the fit: which of it is right for you, and how any of it survives contact with an ordinary week alongside the person you live with.

Out of all of it came patterns and approaches I could actually use. lovlov is built out of those. They are mine, written for my own life. I also started far too late, and the longer I left it, the harder it got.

lovlov is what I would have needed in everyday life, early enough that things never reach the point where they are hard to repair. And it is still what helps me when something hard does need repairing.