The Quiet Search for Love Across the Muslim World

My mother spent her life believing that love could be learned.

Not performed. Not endured. Not organized around roles assigned at birth and enforced by silence.

Learned — practiced, repaired, deepened — by any human being willing to do the work.

In 1983, Lori Heyman Gordon, Ph.D., founded PAIRS Foundation with my stepfather, Rabbi Morris Gordon, Ph.D., on that conviction. From a Jewish family’s kitchen-table faith, they built a body of work around one simple belief: every human being carries the same fundamental need to love and be loved with dignity.

My mother and stepfather are both gone now. But something is happening with their work that I do not think either of them fully anticipated — and that I find myself unable to stop thinking about.

Over the past year, more than 200,000 people from 150 countries and territories have downloaded Yodi, our AI-powered relationship coach built on PAIRS relationship skills.

What has captured my attention is where some of that growth is coming from: societies where Islam shapes much of public and family life.

In previous years, we might have seen only a handful of website visitors from places like Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, and the United Arab Emirates. Over the past year, that has changed dramatically. Thousands of people from those societies have quietly found their way to PAIRS.

Something has shifted.

And I think it matters.

What They Are Looking For

Most come quietly.

They do not announce themselves. They do not explain their politics, religion, or views about Israel or Jews. They download Yodi — an AI-powered tool that teaches communication, conflict resolution, and emotional connection skills — and they begin learning.

Privately. Confidentially. Often anonymously.

That anonymity matters. A class requires visibility. An app allows someone in Beirut, Amman, Tehran, Ramallah, or Dubai to begin learning at midnight, without permission, explanation, or exposure.

My mother spent much of her life wondering how to make these skills available to people who would never walk into a workshop. She could not have imagined that Artificial Intelligence accessible on a smartphone might become one answer.

Often, I imagine, it happens at whatever hour the household is still enough for a person to sit with their own longing without anyone watching. I keep thinking of those midnight moments, a phone lit in a dark room, where someone quietly decides that what happens between them and another person matters.

A person can open a phone and encounter a radical idea:

I matter.
You matter.
What happens between us matters.

That is not a small thing in places where family roles, privacy, and emotional expression can carry profound social weight.

What My Mother Built

PAIRS was never, at its core, a Jewish organization, though it grew from Jewish roots and a distinctly Jewish philosophical lineage.

My mother was shaped by Martin Buber’s teaching that human beings relate to one another in two basic ways. In the I-It mode, the other person becomes an object: a role, a function, a means to an end. A spouse who performs. A parent who provides. A child who reflects well on the family.

In the I-Thou mode, the other person is encountered as a full human subject: present, irreducible, worthy of genuine attention.

My mother spent fifty years teaching people how to make that movement. PAIRS, at its core, is applied Buber: the practical work of learning to meet another person as a Thou.

My stepfather brought to that work the Jewish teaching that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim — in the image of God — and therefore carries inherent worth. Not worth determined by gender, role, power, culture, or performance. Worth that is simply there because a person is human.

And my mother brought the influence of Virginia Satir, the pioneering family therapist who became her most important mentor. Satir reached the same truth through clinical work: every person matters, every inner life deserves to be heard, and healthy connection can be learned.

Three traditions converged in PAIRS: Buber’s philosophy of genuine encounter, Jewish ethics of inherent human worth, and Satir’s clinical wisdom about emotional health.

Perhaps the greatest surprise is not that people are searching for better relationships. It is that so many have found themselves learning from ideas that began in the home of a Jewish family thousands of miles away.

The Crack in the Wall

I do not think this is primarily a political phenomenon. It is a human one.

Lebanon is not Iran. Jordan is not Pakistan. Gaza is not Dubai. Each place carries its own history, pressures, customs, conflicts, and possibilities.

Family life is being reshaped by familiar forces: economic pressure, migration, war, social media, generational change, and loneliness. Relationships are expected to function without ever being taught how to heal.

In many families, men and women inherit roles before they learn how to know each other. A woman may be expected to carry emotional burdens silently. A man may be expected to perform strength so convincingly that honesty begins to feel like failure. Both can become trapped by the very roles meant to hold the family together.

And yet, thousands are quietly searching for something more. Numbers tell me something is happening. People tell me what it means.

Consider one man — I’ll call him Tariq — who began using Yodi from Tehran. He wrote to us simply to say that, for the first time, he had found words for what he had been unable to say to his wife for years. Not political words. Not religious ones. Just honest ones. He was not looking for revolution. He was looking for a way to be known.

Or a woman from Gaza who I’ll call Hanan. She wrote that she had never considered that her inner experience deserved to be named — not buried, not managed, not performed around — but simply named. She found that idea in an app. She said it changed how she listened to her children.

These are not data points. They are people.

And they are not crossing a religious boundary. They are crossing an emotional one.

Buber believed the longing to be met as a Thou rather than managed as an It was not Western, Jewish, Eastern, Muslim, secular, or religious.

It was human.

Lebanon

I want to pause for a moment on Lebanon, because the growth there has been especially striking — and because Lebanon holds a particular place in my own thinking.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire framework and what it would take to make peace last along that border. My argument was that diplomats can sign agreements, but only people can keep them. Lasting peace requires capacities built not only in conference rooms, but in living rooms: the ability to name fear without weaponizing it, to acknowledge another’s pain without feeling erased by it, and to repair after rupture rather than reaching for retaliation.

I did not know then that so many Lebanese users were quietly reaching toward those same capacities through an app inspired by my mother and stepfather’s work.

I know it now.

I do not want to overstate what this means. Downloading an app is not building peace. Learning communication skills in private does not solve security arrangements, sovereignty questions, disarmament, trauma, or history.

But I also do not want to understate it.

A society’s politics do not emerge from nowhere. They are shaped, in part, by the habits of human encounter its people practice every day. If the smallest unit of society teaches domination, humiliation, silence, and contempt, those patterns rarely stay small. If the smallest unit begins practicing dignity, listening, repair, and mutual worth, something different becomes possible.

Not inevitable.

Possible.

What This Asks of Us

I am not writing this to suggest that relationship skills are a substitute for justice, security, sovereignty, or the hard structural work of peace.

I am saying something smaller and, perhaps, more durable.

When a person in Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Tehran, Ramallah, or Dubai opens an app shaped by a philosopher’s vision, a rabbi’s conviction, and a therapist’s faith in human growth, something true is happening.

They may not realize they are encountering ideas that emerged from Jewish thought. Perhaps that is part of what moves me. They may be reaching toward a human idea that a Jewish family helped make accessible: that worth is not assigned by gender, role, culture, or power. It is already there, waiting to be honored.

The person across from you — your spouse, your child, your neighbor, perhaps even your enemy — is not an It to be managed.

They are a Thou to be met.

Buber wrote that in 1923. My mother spent her life teaching it. Virginia Satir gave it clinical language. Rabbi Morris Gordon gave it spiritual language.

And somewhere in the past year, something opened in places where many people are hungry for a different way to love.

Behind every download is a person searching for a better way to love. Many of those searches are happening in places where I never imagined my mother’s work would travel.

My mother believed love could be learned.

I used to think her students were the people who sat in her workshops.

Now I wonder if some of them are opening an app in Beirut, Tehran, Ramallah, or Amman after everyone else has gone to sleep.

She never met them.

And yet, somehow, she is still teaching.