ReFraming Life

Some rooms change you the moment you walk into them. You don't know what's happened yet, but you can feel it. The air is different. The person you love is sitting there, and before a single word is spoken, something in you already knows. That afternoon, I walked into our office carrying takeout for dinner. I walked out carrying a new reality.In this episode, you'll hear about the call that ended the illusion we'd been holding, eight tumours. Then ten more in her brain. The DNR Adel tried to sign but couldn't. A seizure beside the Christmas tree, and the moment I yelled "Don't leave me now", and she heard me. This is the episode where everything changed. Part of the 20-part true love story: My Soulmate Named Adel.Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.https://open.spotify.com/show/6nKm4EerZk1sfsCR6yUMZUhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reframing-life/id1876090703

There's a strange grace that comes when the unthinkable begins to feel like everyday life. The fear is still there, but moving alongside it is something that looks a lot like hope. In the months after Adel's diagnosis, we didn't slow down. We moved forward. Not despite what was happening, but through it, together.In this episode, you'll hear about the moments that carried us: a Halloween surgery where the OR team arrived in costumes, Adel quietly taking control the morning her hair began to fall, a week in Los Cabos where strangers saw nothing but a woman with beautiful salt-and-pepper hair, and the day she posted four words on Facebook: one year cancer free. Part of the 20-part true love story: My Soulmate Named Adel.Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.https://open.spotify.com/show/6nKm4EerZk1sfsCR6yUMZUhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reframing-life/id1876090703

There are moments that divide a relationship into before and after. Ours arrived quietly, not as a dramatic turning point, but as a phone call I somehow already understood before a single word was spoken. I couldn't get to Adel fast enough. And in those three minutes, love stopped being abstract. It became the only thing that mattered. What followed wasn't fear; it was quiet, focused, determined courage. And it changed everything.

Most people don't ask it out loud, but I hear it. Why would you share something this personal? The honest answer has two parts. The first is a promise I made to Adel: that what we had wouldn't fade into memory, but would live on for anyone still trying to build something real. The second is something I've learned to be true again and again: that the deepest connections, the truest joy, come from choosing to stay open. Even when it costs you. This is why I'm telling these stories. Not to teach. Not to preach. To show what's possible when you choose to stay open, even when it's hard.

Some of the most beautiful seasons of our lives only reveal their true meaning in hindsight.Not because anything went wrong in the moment… but because we later realize we were living inside a chapter that wouldn’t last forever.In this episode, I take you back to the summer of 2018, a time when life with Adel felt full, expansive, and open in every direction. We travelled to Budapest, where she reconnected with her childhood story of leaving Hungary under extraordinary circumstances, and then to Tuscany, where a simple vacation quietly turned into something much bigger.That trip changed how we saw our future.We began to imagine a different kind of life, one built around experiences, travel, and fully living in the present rather than waiting for “someday.”And like so many dreams we created together… it felt completely possible.What we didn’t know at the time was that we were living in our final season of normal life. A season filled with gratitude, laughter, and possibility, one that would soon give way to something neither of us expected.Looking back now, I don’t see that time as something we lost.I see it as something we were lucky enough to fully live.🎙 My Soulmate Named Adel is part of the ReFraming Life series, true stories of love, loss, and what it means to be human.

Someone once told me they had stopped celebrating their first date anniversary after they got married. They figured the wedding had replaced it. I sat with that for a while, because Adel and I never saw it that way. Every Wednesday, for more than fourteen years, I would turn to her and say: "Happy weekversary." Not every year. Every week. Because we believed you don't wait for the big moments to celebrate love. The small moments are the big moments. They're the ones that become your life.

This is the beginning of a 20-episode true love story.My name is Kent Waugh. And the woman who changed everything I thought I knew about love was named Adel.She was the only person who responded to my dating profile — one response, to 20 very specific things I had written about what I believed and what I was looking for. She answered every single one.What followed was 14 years of something I can only describe as soulmate love. The kind that asks you to become more than you thought you were. The kind that reshapes you, quietly, from the inside out.This series — My Soulmate Named Adel — is the true story of that love. What it looked like. What it required. What it taught me. And what it left behind.20 episodes. One true story. I'm glad you're here.▶ Follow ReFraming Life on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.📬 Subscribe to the ReFraming Life weekly letter on Substack: https://kentwaugh.substack.com/

It was early 2006 when our plane landed in Mazatlán, one of our first real trips together, just the two of us. Adel brought a camera, and since photography had always meant something to me, you'd expect I'd never put it down. But somewhere in those early days, I stopped. Adel noticed before I did. When she asked me why, I sat with it for a long moment before the answer came: every time I looked through the viewfinder, I was framing the moment for someone else, and I lost the sense of being there with her. I didn't want anything between me and being fully present. Not even a lens.Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.

By the summer of 2018, Adel and I had turned travel into something close to an art form, not about plans, but about presence. Barcelona was supposed to be a simple day trip. It became one of the most chaotic, most hilarious, and most revealing days we ever had together. A hotel booked for the wrong night. A missing backpack. The wrong train. The wrong station. And a locked gate at 1:00 in the morning. By the end of it, we weren't frustrated. We were laughing, the kind of laughter that tells you something true about two people. Joy in a relationship isn't just romance. It's resilience with laughter in it.

There is an old belief that the people we are meant to love are already tied to us by an invisible red string, across distance, across time, pulling quietly until we finally arrive. I used to think that was a beautiful idea. Nothing more. And then I met Adel. This is the story of what I've come to understand about soulmates, destiny, and the strange thing I call retroactive destiny, the way the most sacred moments in life only reveal themselves when you look back. Even after losing her, I don't feel like the string has been cut. It feels like it's tied to something I can't see yet.It serves as a quiet introduction to the series My Soulmate Named Adel, a true story told across twenty episodes about love, timing, loss, and the moments that quietly change everything.

The hardest speech I've ever given was at my wife's Celebration of Life. I opened with: "One of us was sleeping with their boss." The room went still. In this episode, I share the partnership few people knew about, how Adel and I spent 24 hours a day, seven days a week together, not just as partners at home, but at work. We were us to the power of two. And what we discovered through all of it is something I didn't fully understand until she was gone: togetherness doesn't weaken strong relationships. It reveals them. Love doesn't need distance to survive. It needs alignment.

The stress had been building for weeks, a money issue, the kind that tightens your chest and makes you want to be right more than you want to be close. I felt my voice climbing. And then Adel looked at me with no judgment and asked just four words: "Are we still on the same team?" That was all it took. In this episode, I share what it meant to grow because of someone, not just with them. The ordinary riches of a Sunday morning coffee. The ER Valentine's Days under fluorescent lights. The business we built together, not out of necessity, but out of values. And the one question that kept us close, again and again, for 14 years.

For years, my wife Adel hid new clothes in the trunk of her car — not because she couldn't afford them, but because a previous partner had shamed her for wanting them. She only spent her own money. She earned more than he did. And still, shame found a way in. It followed her into our relationship before she ever said a word about it. In this episode, I share the small acts of trust that slowly undid that shame, the joint accounts we opened early, the bedroom fashion shows she'd put on just for me, and a Las Vegas afternoon that ended with a $10,000 slot machine jackpot, a pair of Jimmy Choo boots, and one of the most quietly beautiful moments of our life together. The real win that night wasn't the money.

The Friday after our first date, I told my sons I'd met someone very important to me. I felt the knot in my stomach as I said it. They had me exclusively for four and a half years, and I knew what I was asking of them. But I had made a promise to myself long before Adel: I would never bring someone into their lives unless I was deeply confident it would last. With Adel, I had no doubts. So nine days after we met, all of our kids were in a bowling alley together, two families cautiously orbiting each other, awkward and polite, keeping it light. And somehow, exactly right. In this episode, I share what Adel and I did, and didn't do, that made blending our families feel less like a strategy and more like a daily choice: just show up and love each other well.

A close friend gave me a set of coasters after my first marriage ended. One of them had a simple phrase: "Love like you'll never get hurt." I set it on our living room table and watched it sit there for weeks, right in front of Adel. Because she was building a wall around her heart, one brick at a time — and I had made a quiet decision. For every brick she put up, I was going to rip out three.In this episode, you'll hear what it looked like when Adel began testing me, and the raw conversation where she finally admitted she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.

I pulled my hands away when she reached for me across that Starbucks table… Twenty-four hours after our first date ended, we were already together again — sitting across from each other at a Starbucks table, laughing, soaking in what felt like the most natural thing in the world. And then she reached across the table to hold my hands. I pulled away. In her eyes, I saw something I never wanted to put there — the quiet hurt of someone who thinks they are being turned away. What she didn't know yet was that I wasn't pulling away because I didn't want this. I was pulling away because I had never felt anything this big before in my life.In this episode, you'll hear about that second date, the speakerphone call with my parents, the moment that told Adel everything she needed to know about who I was, and the honest conversation that may have saved our entire story before it had barely begun. Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.

What happens when you finally meet your soulmate… and one day, they’re gone?In this opening episode of My Soulmate Named Adel, I share the true story of how Adel and I met online, the instant connection that felt like destiny, and an 8-hour first date that changed everything I believed about love.You’ll hear:• How rewriting my dating profile like a “manifestation list” led to one message that changed my life• The moment we both wondered, “OMG… do you think we might be soulmates?”• Our first phone call, her unforgettable accent, and the line that stopped me in my tracks: “How can you miss someone you’ve never met?”• The countdown to meeting “IRL,” why we kept moving the time earlier, like excited school kids• Our first embrace at the restaurant door… and why Adel later said, “You had me at the a** grab.”• The 8-hour first date, the roses for her and her daughters, and the drive home, where I felt like I was floating in heavenThis is where our love story begins.