Laurel House

Relationships and Romance Scams Expert
Behavioral Dynamics Researcher

Understand the relationship you’re actually living inside.

For more than 15 years, I have helped people understand their relationships: who they choose, how they connect, what they need, what they tolerate, and what keeps repeating.

I am a five-time published author, an active eharmony Relationship Expert, Director of Relationship Intelligence at E3 Matchmaking, and creator and host of RomConned.

My work brings together professional relationship experience, behavioral research, continuing graduate education, and my own experience of romance fraud. I translate those perspectives into practical questions people can use in their relationships—and professionals can use when responding to exploitation.

Inside Relationships

Someone can care about you and struggle to understand how you experience closeness. Someone can promise commitment while repeatedly avoiding it. Someone can learn exactly what makes you feel understood and use that understanding to gain your trust.

Those situations require different responses. My work examines the behavior, its context, and what happens over time.

Inside Relationships connects the full range of my work: healthy relationship formation, intimacy, compatibility, communication, contradiction, manipulation, control, and romantic exploitation. A contradiction raises a question. A pattern helps us understand what that question requires us to examine.

Words Inform. Actions Demonstrate. Patterns Reveal.

More than 15 years working with relationships

My private coaching work addresses dating, partner selection, communication, boundaries, breakups, relationship decisions, and recurring patterns. I help clients move from broad descriptions—“I always choose the wrong person” or “We just can’t communicate”—to specific behaviors and choices they can examine and change.

That means looking at relationship history, emotional availability, compatibility, readiness, conflict, and the difference between the connection someone wants and the relationship they are participating in.

As an eharmony Relationship Expert for six years, I contribute to relationship research and public education by identifying dating and relationship trends, helping shape consumer-study topics, interpreting findings, and translating them into practical guidance. I remain active in that role.

Relationship Intelligence at E3 Matchmaking

As Director of Relationship Intelligence at E3 Matchmaking, I help clients understand themselves and their relationship patterns alongside the matchmaking process.

My work includes a Relationship Intelligence Assessment, Intimacy Typing, a Compatibility Blueprint, relationship readiness, date preparation, post-date reflection, and communication strategy.

A list of preferences cannot tell you how two people will handle disappointment, create intimacy, or make room for each other. Relationship Intelligence examines what people bring into dating and what becomes visible as a connection develops.

Intimacy Types and PrioriDating

I created Intimacy Types to describe five pathways through which people create, experience, maintain, and repair connection: Intellectual, Emotional, Physical, Purpose, and Experiential.

The framework helps people put language to experiences such as feeling deeply connected through conversation while a partner feels closest through shared experiences. It supports a more useful discussion about what each person needs and how they show care.

I also created PrioriDating, a values-based approach to identifying your priorities before making partner-selection and relationship decisions.

My lived experience of romance fraud

I experienced romance fraud after years of working professionally in relationships. Six months of daily video calls, attention, explanations, and conversations about a future helped make someone believable. Financial promises arrived within that relationship history.

Knowing the ending changed the meaning of earlier moments. While I was living them, I had partial information and decisions to make.

That experience informs the questions I bring to this work: What did this person know then? What explanation had they been given? What were they trying to protect? When did closeness begin creating obligation, pressure, or fear?

My experience is one source of insight alongside professional practice, research, and education. It is also why I take the person’s perspective seriously when an outside observer thinks the answer should have been obvious.

RomConned, LoveLied, and #iTrusted

I created and independently host RomConned: Inside Relationships — From Confusion to Crime. Through interviews, case analysis, and public education, I examine how trust develops, how behavior changes, and how patterns of manipulation or exploitation become recognizable.

LoveLied, a developing series within Inside Relationships, examines contradiction, betrayal, hidden behavior, and repeated broken agreements. Its guiding line is: When words and behavior stop matching.

Through #iTrusted, I am developing professional education, consultation, and victim/family education focused on romance fraud and relationship-based exploitation. The work asks how we recognize and respond to someone whose trust has been exploited without making that trust the thing they must defend.

Author, media contributor, and speaker

I am the author of five published books, including Screwing the Rules: The No-Games Guide to Love. I appeared as a dating coach on E!’s Famously Single and hosted DateNight with Laurel House on KABC 790 AM in Los Angeles.

My work has been featured in outlets including The Washington Post, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour, and I have contributed relationship commentary across television, radio, podcasts, and digital media, including On Air with Ryan Seacrest and Social Catfish’s Catfished.

In September 2026, I presented at the National Center for Victims of Crime’s National Training Institute in Chicago. My session used my own experience as a case study to examine romantic exploitation, victim decision-making, and the information available as events unfolded.

EDUCATION + TRAINING

Education and specialized training

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Graduate Certificate in Domestic Violence Intervention and Victim Advocacy

In progress; expected Spring 2027.

My graduate coursework includes domestic violence, victim advocacy, coercive control, intimate partner homicide, and fatality review. This work examines partial disclosures, the context surrounding decisions, and how professionals reconstruct a relationship after its outcome is known.

Click the certificate to enlarge.

COMPLETED PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

The Gottman Institute

Therapy for Partner Aggression and Abuse — On-Demand — completed October 13, 2026.

Specialized training examining psychological aggression, intimate partner violence, coercive control, and distinctions between situational and characterological partner violence.

WORK WITH ME

Work with me

Reach out about private coaching, E3 Relationship Intelligence, speaking, interviews, or #iTrusted training and consultation inquiries. Include a short description of what you need so we can identify the appropriate next step.