For years, Michelle Hays and her husband, Brian, kept running into the same invisible wall. It wasn’t a lack of love. It wasn’t a lack of effort. It was something far more basic—and far more overlooked—than either of them realized: they simply processed emotions in completely different ways.
Michelle is a relationship thought leader, speaker, columnist, and founder and host of the Monarch for Love Podcast. She is also the founder of the Love Literacy™ movement and creator of the 3D Emotional Reset™, dedicated to teaching couples the relationship skills that schools, parents, and society never taught them. And one of the most important lessons in her own marriage, she says, had nothing to do with love itself—it had to do with how she and Brian each moved through their feelings.
Two Different Languages
Michelle is what many would call an external processor. When something is bothering her, she wants to talk about it. Speaking her thoughts out loud is how she makes sense of them. Brian is the opposite—an internal processor. When something is bothering him, he needs quiet time to think it through before he’s ready to discuss it.
For years, neither of them understood that this difference was shaping so many of their interactions. When Michelle wanted to talk, she often interpreted Brian’s silence as disinterest, avoidance, or a lack of care. Meanwhile, the more she pressed for a conversation, the more overwhelmed he felt. From his perspective, he wasn’t shutting her out—he was trying to think through his own feelings before responding. What she experienced as distance, he experienced as pressure.
“We were both acting from good intentions,” Michelle explains, “but because we didn’t understand each other’s processing styles, we often ended up frustrated and disconnected.”
Reframing the Difference
The breakthrough came when Michelle and Brian stopped viewing their differences as character flaws and started seeing them as simply different ways of processing information and emotion. Michelle learned that Brian’s need for time wasn’t a rejection of her—it was how he gathered his thoughts. Brian learned that Michelle’s desire to talk wasn’t an attack or an interrogation—it was her way of seeking understanding and connection.
That shift in understanding is at the heart of what Michelle now teaches through her 3D Emotional Reset™ framework, which helps couples move from emotional reactivity to intentional response so they can create greater understanding, emotional safety, and connection. The first step, Define the Feeling, isn’t just about naming an emotion—it’s about recognizing that the story behind a partner’s silence, or their need to talk, might have nothing to do with how much they care.
“Once we understood that, we were able to approach each other with far more compassion and patience,” Michelle says.
A Different Kind of Question
Today, when one of them needs something different than the other, Michelle and Brian try not to let it mean something negative about the relationship. Instead, they recognize that two people can love each other deeply and still experience the world in different ways.
For Michelle, this is one of the clearest examples of a truth she returns to again and again in her work: many relationship struggles aren’t caused by a lack of love. They’re caused by a lack of understanding. “Sometimes the path to greater connection begins when we stop asking, ‘Why are they doing this?’ and start asking, ‘What might be happening for them that I’m not seeing?'” she says.
It’s a small shift in language, but it changes everything about how a couple moves through conflict—less accusation, more curiosity. And for Michelle, that’s really what Love Literacy™ comes down to: learning to see a partner’s differences not as distance, but as an invitation to understand them more fully.
“Our partners aren’t failing us. Our understanding of love is,” Michelle often reminds her audience—and few examples make that clearer than two people who love each other, speaking entirely different emotional languages, and slowly learning to translate for one another.
Through Love Literacy™, Michelle is helping shift the conversation from blame to understanding, reminding couples that love is not just a feeling—it is a set of skills. And when those skills are developed, even the relationships that feel stuck can begin to thrive again.