Beholding Love in the Digital Age: The Story Behind Yodi
What do you do when the world grows more connected — and more alone — at the same time?
You listen. You ache. And if you’re lucky, you build.
This is the story of how an ache for connection became a digital companion for love — and how a quiet app named Yodi has quietly reached over 200,000 people in more than 150 countries and territories, helping them learn the most human skill of all: how to love.
Love Isn’t Luck. It’s Literacy.
When the PAIRS Foundation was founded in 1983 by Lori Heyman Gordon, it was with a simple, revolutionary belief: that love should not be left to chance.
For more than four decades, PAIRS has helped couples, families, and communities strengthen the relationships that matter most — not through theory, but through skills. Emotional literacy. Empathy. Confiding. Listening. Navigating conflict. All teachable. All learnable.
But in recent years, something shifted. We began to notice a growing dissonance — between the emotional skills we taught and the frantic, fractured digital world people now inhabit.
People were scrolling more. Talking less. Connected everywhere, and lonely in all the ways that count.
Then the pandemic hit.
And suddenly, what had been urgent became undeniable.
What If an App Could Teach Love?
Like many things born of urgency, Yodi wasn’t part of a product roadmap — it was part of a calling.
We asked ourselves: If we could no longer count on classrooms and community centers, how might we bring relationship skills directly into people’s hands — and hearts?
We weren’t interested in creating another app that just filled the void. We wanted to build a tool that bridged it.
A way for someone — anyone — to pause during a tense moment and reconnect. To repair after a rupture. To learn how to speak so they could be heard, and listen so someone else could feel seen.
That became Yodi.
Seeing Outside the Box
As we were imagining this new kind of companion, we encountered the powerful concept of the Perception Box, created by Elizabeth Koch, founder of the Unlikely Collaborators Foundation — whose generous support helped bring Yodi to life.
Elizabeth’s insight was simple but profound: we don’t see the world as it is — we see it through a box of our past experiences, wounds, beliefs, and assumptions. That box shapes how we respond to others, how we interpret their words, how we protect ourselves — often without realizing it.
Yodi was created to help us see our boxes, and gently step outside of them. To pause the reactive dance of miscommunication and rediscover what it means to truly connect.
Because most of us aren’t unwilling to love — we’re just stuck in patterns that keep us from reaching each other.
A Global Whisper
We launched Yodi with no marketing team and no budget for buzz. Just a quiet hope that people would find it, and feel seen by it.
And they did.
Today, over 200,000 people in more than 150 countries and territories have downloaded the Yodi app — from bustling cities to quiet towns, from frontline workers to couples in counseling to young people trying to find the language of love.
They’ve found in Yodi a space to learn how to express appreciation, navigate hard conversations, ask for what they need, and deepen emotional intimacy — one conversation at a time.
The App is Free. Love Isn’t.
Yodi is free to download. Free to explore. Free to use.
But love itself? It costs presence. Practice. Patience. And a willingness to grow.
What Yodi offers is a path — not a fix. A way forward, not a finish line. A gentle guide back to the skills we all need but were never taught.
Because love isn’t a feeling we wait for. It’s a skill we choose to learn.
And Yodi is here to walk with us as we do.
🟣 Learn more about the Yodi app at www.MyPAIRSCoach.com
📲 Available for free on the App Store and Google Play
