Love and Healthy Relationships: Sapira Cahana, Dr. Aninda Sidhana & Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Can we love someone deeply without losing ourselves?

Love brings us together, but healthy relationships also need space for individuality, boundaries and personal freedom.

In this episode of The Listening Commons, Canadian journalist Scott Douglas Jacobsen, New York-based mental health practitioner Sapira Cahana, and Indian psychiatrist and psychosexual medicine specialist Dr. Aninda Sidhana explore what it means to love, care and connect without losing our sense of self.

Together, they discuss communication, consent, emotional intimacy, loneliness, grief, disability, caregiver burnout, and the delicate balance between independence and interdependence.

How do we express our needs without making demands? Can we respect differences without feeling rejected? And how can love become a place where both people feel valued, understood and free to grow?

Drawing on journalism, relational and existential therapy, psychiatry and psychosexual medicine, this conversation invites us to rethink love beyond possession, sacrifice and traditional expectations.

Because love is not just a feeling. It is also how we listen, respect boundaries, care for one another and make each other feel that we matter.

And no one should have to choose between being loved and being themselves.

The Listening Commons | Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Sapira Cahana & Dr. Aninda Sidhana

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