Will You Join Me, Love Me, Marry Me?
Different cities. Different life stages. Different professions. Did an ethereal thread stitch together two hearts? Or, if destiny is in the not-yet written, is Andy and Rachel’s story a Romeo and Juliet revival? No. Here, truth outpaces fiction. This story reveals the intuitive chance one took to ask the impossible and the courage of the other to say “yes.” Here is Andy and Rachel’s one bold story . . .
The prompt: Tell me a little story from your life, a story that shaped you.
EARLY JUNE 2022: HI,HI
ANDY: Rachel and I were cofounders of FeelReal, a consulting practice that teaches the art of meaningful dialogue. Then Rachel took about a year off. She had been married and then divorced. We reconnected in 2022.
She was living in Austin, Texas, and I was in Chicago. I had studied something called Authentic Relating and it has a practice called “Withhold.” The idea of Withhold is holding anything back that’s truth, that’s vulnerability – and most of us do – even with the people we love most. Because it’s scary. It’s scary to reveal, especially something maybe that we feel guilty or ashamed of or that we think might hurt the person.
It’s also scary to share things that we might call “good” news like, in this case, me telling Rachel I have a huge crush on you. So I was in Austin because I have family there. We spent a day together, kayaking and hanging out.
Then we’re at dinner, and I tell her my feelings and she proceeds to say . . .
RACHEL: I said, “Thank you for being so vulnerable . . . and I don’t know what to say right now.”
ANDY: Part of this practice is not being attached to the outcome so I’m like OKKKKKKKK (imagine a high-pitched soprano-y voice that is normally a deep, rich baritone).
RACHEL: So I get a text a couple days later and Andy was flying out of Austin to Chicago and it was one of those days where you need to go to the airport and they push it back, you change flights and you end up being at the airport all day long. So he was texting me and said, “I might actually be here tomorrow so maybe we’ll get lunch together.”
I found myself starting to get excited about seeing him the next day. And then it turned out he got a flight and he left. So we never had lunch. It was just the right amount of, I think, supply and demand (she laughs; we all did). I thought: I think I missed an opportunity here.
ANDY: For some, this might have been the end of the story. But not us.
In my 22-year-long business journey as an entrepreneur, I’ve been very committed to people who actually care. Care about culture. Care about people. Care about doing things. There’s no reason just because it’s business that we can’t take care of people. In fact, business has an extraordinary power and responsibility to take care of people.
So along the way, while I have numerous certifications in coaching and consulting, one of them is in the Collaborative Operating System, a set of tools to honor principles that are fundamental to me: dignity and agency.
How can everybody have a voice? How can you decentralize decision-making in an environment? How can you help people align their individual purpose with their company purpose?
During the training, I met Christy Reiners of IHS who for 25 years has been going into the West Bank of Palestine to help develop programs and collaborate with locals that help Palestinian women have more access to medical services and particularly for breast cancer. It’s a unique challenge in that environment.
Christie invited me to go to Palestine to tell their story. She knew I had studied journalism at Northwestern, and she knew I cared about people.
I have a spiritual practice where I convene with a higher source of wisdom and it had told me that this trip would be not only something good for me, but it would be foundational to Rachel’s and my relationship. The higher source of wisdom was right.
LATE JUNE 2022: HELLO AGAIN
RACHEL: I was going to be in Chicago in June so we were able to reconnect.
JULY 2022: LOVE
ANDY: And then in July we hung out quite a bit. Rachel’s and my love affair was moving along rather rapidly.
AUGUST 2022: CHICAGO
ANDY: Rachel and her ex-husband used to live in Chicago and my stepdaughter, Georgia, was born in Chicago so thankfully he really wanted to move back to Chicago and so he was actually sort of the momentum. So they all moved here.
Then I popped the question: “Hey, by the way, I’ve been invited to go to the West Bank of Palestine and Israel at the end of September. What do you think?” (Andy flashes a boyish grin.)
SEPTEMBER 2022: THE MOMENT
ANDY: What was really touching was going deep into the West Bank, traveling to villages. We were in a breast cancer awareness workshop with women in this village. It was the first time they had let men into this kind of workshop and we’re interviewing people. And there’s this moment between us where I was running the camera and (he turns to Rachel) you were actually running the interview. Rachel was interviewing a woman who only spoke Arabic so there was a translator.
It just felt like this really amazing moment in the field. Where it’s like Where are we? What is our life? I remember that moment. I just remember looking at Rachel and thinking:
Oh my God, I want to do this with you forever. Whether it’s telling these kinds of stories – a more extreme example of what we do usually on a Saturday afternoon. I just want to be with this woman. I want to do important work with this woman.
RACHEL: There's two layers for me. The first is the connection with the women and to just be able to have the privilege to sit and hear their stories. There’s so much red tape around their healthcare. In the villages, many of the husbands, brothers, fathers do not want the women to even go to a doctor’s appointment to have a mammogram or anything because if she’s gone, who’s going to take care of the kids? Who’s going to feed them? Let alone if over your whole lifetime she’s not there.
Fourteen women that day had never had a mammogram. A few of them were having signs of early breast cancer and so these Navigators drive them to mammogram appointments. There’s a whole other layer of just getting out from behind the wall and going to the best hospital in Jerusalem, which they don’t have in Palestine, getting the medicine, the medicine crossing the borders. There’s just so much red tape. It was touching to be there and to hear all the work and love that was going into that.
And then the piece with Andy and I. One of the things that made me fall in love with you was (she turns to Andy; it’s a sacred moment and I wonder if I’m hovering like a ghost watching a rare moment instead of sitting on the other side of their cocoa-colored coffee table, a soft wood built by someone's hands).
I think that you can be in this place of just pure care for people and Andy would say it too. He’s an empath, someone who is just so in tune. To see him holding space . . . it was completely free of ego.
That’s what I saw in Andy, completely free of ego. He was just there, holding space for the interview, holding space for the women, being behind the camera, capturing these stories. It was beautiful. You were a vessel for good in that moment.
ONE YEAR LATER, OCTOBER 7, 2023: EPILOGUE
ANDY: We came back with maybe 10 hours of interview footage and 4,000 photos. I’ll be honest. I didn’t do a lot with it. I kind of overwhelmed myself. People have been trying to tell that story for decades, maybe centuries.
And then, a year later, October 7 happened. Rachel was really the impetus to say: “We’re going to launch a YouTube channel. We’re going to call it Unpacking Palestine and we’re just going to post this interview footage. And we’re going to let the story tell itself."
Christy had said that the most important thing you can do is tell the story. Now, we have the privilege of telling stories together. After falling in love in a faraway, almost unimaginable place, we came home. We got married.
And we continue to tell that story and advocate for peace, along with many others. And this created the foundation for purposeful collaborations, projects and now launching CoGo based on first-hand experience building AI that makes our relationship flourish.
The Storytellers
Andy Swindler and Rachel Zargo are co-founders of CoGo, the live AI mediator that builds relational health by guiding couples from conflict to connection. Andy is CoGo’s chief empathy officer (big vision guy) while Rachel is chief manifesting officer (she makes it happen!). Both are born difference-makers. Andy and Rachel co-founded FeelReal in 2019, which grew to 1000+ spaceholders and 300+ online dialogue circles.
Meet Andy and Rachel IRL
Catch Andy’s free monthly meeting circle called The Gathering for Change Agents (13 years running!). Next Gathering is Wednesday, October 1, featuring Rachel exploring “The Art of Agility: How Your Being Shapes the AI Conversation.”
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