Finding Connection in Unexpected Places

I didn't expect a soccer tournament to teach me anything about my counseling work, but life has a funny way of surprising us. This summer, with Kansas City serving as a host city for the World Cup, I've watched connection surface in places I wasn't looking for it — in my marriage, among my kids and extended family, with strangers, and with a city I already loved but am somehow loving more, and then with the wider world.

It started with my husband. Somewhere in the first few matches, we realized we'd stumbled onto something more consuming than our usual sporadic outings to a KC Current game. Before long, our days began organizing themselves around it — kickoff times, standings, who we were rooting for that night — with the rest of life's obligations tucked in around the edges rather than the other way around. It's a small thing on its surface, but as a couples therapist, I know how rare it is to discover a genuinely new point of connection with your spouse after decades together. We weren't trying to reconnect. It simply happened, because we made space for something that captivated us both.

Then it extended to the rest of the family. My kids, my nieces and nephews, my siblings and in-laws — suddenly we shared a common language. We could trade the elation of a last-minute goal and the sting of a loss in the same breath, across generations that don't always find much natural overlap. That is connection doing precisely what it does best: giving people something to reach toward one another with, rather than past each other.

Two moments, in particular, cemented what my husband and I now affectionately call "the bug" we caught for this tournament. The first came when close friends of ours — the kind who fly to Europe just to catch a single match of their favorite club — came to stay with us and surprised us with tickets to Netherlands vs. Tunisia match. We fell for the Dutch fans that night. A deluge disrupted the pre-game festivities and delayed kickoff for hours, and still, their excitement never dimmed. Their kindness, and their sheer determination to simply be there, in that stadium, for that match, was palpable in a way that's difficult to describe unless you witnessed it yourself. It reframed something for me about what devotion to something shared can look like when it's genuine.

The second was the way the tournament kept delivering strangers to our doorstep, so to speak. Kansas City's role as a host city meant a steady stream of visitors, and I had some remarkably unplanned moments because of it. A group of guys who once lived in Silver Spring, Maryland — a place my own family called home until about five years ago — wandered into my gym, and we spent a good thirty minutes trading stories about a place we both still hold close. I got to dust off my rusty Spanish to help a cluster of Argentinian fans find their rally, and later helped a family visiting from DC try to flag down England players we happened to cross paths with out in the wild. There was something almost startling about spotting those same players in CVS afterward, buying headphones like anyone else — a reminder that they were normal people with normal, everyday needs, just like the rest of us. On some basic, human level, we all matter just the same, celebrity or not. None of these were people I set out to meet. They were simply present, open to connecting, and so was I.

I've also caught myself consistently rooting for the underdog throughout the tournament — partly hoping it might improve the US's odds, but mostly because it's simply who I am. I hold a genuine soft spot for the underdog in culture and society more broadly, and this tournament handed me repeated chances to feel that instinct in real time. The city itself has felt different this summer, too — a kind of renewed civic pride, watching visitors from around the globe remark, again and again, on how kind the people here are. It's the sort of thing you already believe about your home until someone from somewhere else confirms it, and somehow it lands differently when they do.

Now, with the tournament's end drawing near, my husband and I find ourselves already grieving it a little — half-joking, half-serious conversations about what on earth will fill the void once the matches stop. What will organize our days and points of connection? What will give us and the kids something to root for together? I don't have an answer yet, but I suspect the search itself says something important: once you've tasted a season of shared excitement like this, you don't want to simply let it lapse. You want to find the next thing worth building a rhythm around.

What strikes me most, looking back on all of this, is that none of it was planned. I didn't set out this summer to deepen my marriage, to build something new with my kids and extended family, or to meet strangers who call my old neighborhood home. Connection found its way in because I was paying attention, and willing to let something unplanned pull me toward other people.

That, honestly, is most of what I do in this work. Relationships — with a spouse, with family, with yourself — rarely deepen because of some grand gesture. They deepen in the small, unplanned moments where you notice yourself reaching toward someone, and you choose to keep going. This summer, for us, it was a soccer tournament. For you, it might be something else entirely. But if you're craving more of that kind of connection — in your marriage, your family, or with yourself — that is exactly the work I love doing with people.

If any of this resonates, and you're wondering what that could look like for you, I'd love to talk.