tldr; @lovable helped her build an app. It helped me find compassion.
This week, my wife built her first app using Lovable. She finally felt what it’s like to get lost in the bliss of creating digital products, and I finally felt what it’s like to be outside of a loved one’s creative process.
For context:
My wife is an executive leadership coach. Her work is in-person, relationship-focused, and non-technical.
I’m a software engineer with 25 years of experience, and for me, making new things has always meant quality time with myself and learning.
But… The love for making things also put pressure on our relationship:
When I got absorbed in coding personal projects, I would vanish for hours, often days, hyper-focused, even thinking about the problem when off-screen.
So, even though I was physically “there,” my wife experienced absence.
She couldn’t understand why I poured so much energy into these side projects. And then my attempts to show her “the latest version” usually made things worse for her: too excited, too technical, too too hard to follow. And then, of course, I would feel misunderstood and alienated in turn. Yeah.
This week, something shifted. For the first time, my wife built her own app—with Lovable. She got hooked. She disappeared for hours, making, testing, playing around, chasing down bugs, refining features, obsessing over details.
Two days ago she sent me this:
“[…] since yesterday, the automatic cataloging of the photos and the recommendation engine have already been fundamentally improved, but right now the database integration is a bit buggy.”
I couldn’t believe it. She had stepped into my world of making. And I had stepped into her world of waiting, standing outside, feeling the distance, rooting for her and at the same time wondering when she’d come back.
That role reversal gave us what years of explaining never could: perspective and empathy.
She now knows what it feels like to lose yourself in digital creation. I now know what it feels like to be left “outside” of it.
Yesterday and today we’ve reflected on this change in perspectives. I feel much more understood in my love for making and I feel a deeper understanding for how my deep-dives felt for her.
Thank you Lovable!
PS: One a side-note, I’m also in awe. In just three days, she fully iterated on her idea and built a solid product with actual non-trivial technology. I say this as someone who’s been doing this for 25 years: her app is getting really, really good.