The Gray Zones in Love

Gray Zones are live social experiences designed to reframe the way you think about a sensitive topic. The goal is to bring more empathy, awareness, and understanding to people’s biases and perspectives, thereby increasing our ability to have meaningful conversations both in work and life. Gray Zones is an experience that’s part focus group, part group therapy, part theater performance—designed to help you see beyond the box you may have created and open you up to more clarity and connection.

I started Gray Zones because I kept hearing that my liberal friends couldn’t sit down and have dinner with their Trump-supporting friends and family. The inability to have a conversation and listen and respect another person’s point of view shocked me, especially given my background as a design researcher. I set out to create a curriculum that didn’t feel like learning: immersive experiences that felt like a survey and that would show people where their blocks and limiting beliefs lie, so they can see that it’s not other people who trigger them—it’s they who are too easily triggered!

The first two Gray Zones experiences focused on sexual harassment and racism, respectively. Sexual harassment is still alive and well on Zoom. People are still unsure of how to tackle diversity in the workplace as they grapple with questions like, “Do I not hire the perfectly capable White man so that I can hopefully find a Black woman?” People feel more lonely and confused now than ever before. This is why we need training like Gray Zones—to bring out the conversations we need to be having so we can all progress toward workplaces and homes that allow us to be our best selves.

In our last free experiment for 2020, we tackle a topic that we want but often have a hard time defining and feeling: love. What is love? Is passion love? Can one feel loved if they feel lonely? What if we love something we think we shouldn’t—is that love? How quick are we to put conditions on love, especially when the stories have a truth in them that trigger us? 

I have a lot of stories about love—not all of them are healthy. The stories that we present in the Gray Zones experience on love come from my team’s research around people who also struggle with finding and keeping love.

Take a journey with us as we listen to a set of Tarot card readings about love and hear what the universe has to say about our (limiting) beliefs and biases when it comes to love. What does someone else’s story reveal to you about your story? Join us and find out.

Find out more about Gray Zones here. And get your tickets for Gray Zones 3: Is This Love? here.