275. When You Outgrow the Life You Built ft. Sarah Vacchiano

Finding Mr. Height: The Podcast

Ali Jackson

Society & Culture, Relationships

3.9 • 712 Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Ali sits down with Sarah Vacchiano, author of Soft Launch, who got married at 21, divorced at 27, and moved to New York City to start over from scratch. Sarah shares what it felt like to leave a marriage that looked fine on the outside, how she navigated a world she’d skipped the entry points to, and what it took to finally build an identity that was genuinely hers. She remarried at 37, and the conversation gets into what was fundamentally different about love on the other side of all that work.

This week’s Media Mention is Bumble’s announcement that they are scrapping the swipe and dropping the women-message-first rule. CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd calls what’s coming “revolutionary” but has yet to say exactly what it is (though Ali has a guess).

Where to find Sarah: On Instagram @sarahmvacchiano and at www.sarahvacchiano.com.

Grab Sarah's Book "Soft Launch" here: https://www.sarahvacchiano.com/

Timestamps: Sarah joins us at around minute 13.

Ask questions, make a Storytime submission, or give feedback here: https://tinyurl.com/fmhpodqs

If you'd like to hear Ali’s personal updates before everyone else as well as exclusive episodes every week, ad-free listening, monthly lives, and more…join FMH on Patreon: www.patreon.com/findingmrheight .

Thanks to this week’s partners:

Bilt Rewards: Take advantage of your Neighborhood Benefits™ by going to joinbilt.com/fmh

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0	I wouldn't have even been able to live the answers at that point.
0:03.9	You know?
0:04.2	Right.
0:04.4	Like I had to experience life in the way that I had to go through it to be ready for all of it.
0:20.2	Hello and welcome to their episode of Finding Mr. Hide the podcast. I'm your host,
0:23.5	Ali Jackson, and I am bringing you my positive and practical approach to dating relationships
0:27.3	and a whole lot else about life, brought for you from my lived experience. Hello, hello.
0:33.1	I am yet again not in New York. I am traveling to adult volleyball nationals, which I've been going to now.
0:40.3	I realized for 14 years, not consecutively. We skipped a couple during COVID years. But that's just
0:47.0	wild to me. It's so more to come on this as I like fully reflect. But the fact that I'm here doing my
0:54.0	childhood hobby that I love so much when I was
0:56.5	14 and I'm like years and year. God, oh my God, oh my God, 20 years, 25 years later, Jesus,
1:03.2	I'm still doing it and it still brings me so much joy. It truly blows my mind. But that is not
1:09.7	why we were here today.
1:13.0	Today's guest is Sarah Vakiano.
1:16.8	She has her debut novel out, which I absolutely loved.
1:18.7	It is fiction, but it is based on her real life.
1:19.7	It's called soft launch.
1:29.8	Long story short, she got married at 21 and then decided to go to law school and realized that she had completely outgrown the life that she thought she wanted and got divorced at 27, moved to New York City, had this experience
1:35.7	of being nearly 30 and feeling like a fish out of water, and like she was experiencing so much
1:40.4	for the first time that a lot of people had experienced a decade before her.
1:45.7	Her words are like good on paper emotionally a mess.
	...

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