What Happened to Us A Million Green Flags

Stories · Science · Stronger Relationships

Sia Stevens

Modern love, finally explained.

A fable to feel it.
A framework to build it.

Two Books · One Framework · Attraction → Reciprocation → Co-creation · Vessel & Ink Press

The Books

Start with the story, or start with the framework.

The Fable · Fiction

What Happened to Us

A Fable of Modern Love

It ended on a Tuesday, over takeout they didn’t finish. No fight. No betrayal. Just a good man in her doorway saying: nothing happened. I just don’t feel it anymore, and I don’t know why.

Sia debugs code for a living, and she cannot get over the fact that her own love story ended with no known root cause. So she goes looking — from Seattle’s streets to snow-covered peaks, from a Hollywood vineyard to a Himalayan monastery, to a Greek village kitchen where she is handed the wisdom our villages knew and our cities deleted.

What she brings home is bigger than an answer: an engineer’s framework of modern love, delivered on a stage before a thousand women, with the two men she loved in the crowd.

Sixty short chapters · Paperback & Kindle · Illustrated section openers

Order on Amazon Read an excerpt

The Framework · Self-Help

A Million Green Flags

How to Build Lasting Relationships in the Digital Age

We are the most connected generation in history — and the loneliest ever measured. The people didn’t get worse. The conditions did. The ghosting, the breadcrumbing, the games — these aren’t character flaws. They’re symptoms of a starving generation, in a world engineered to keep it hungry.

Drawing on psychology and behavioral economics, with an activity at the end of every chapter, this is the manual nobody handed you: how attraction sparks, how connection sustains, how love lasts, and how relationships transform.

It won’t teach you to avoid red flags. It teaches something better: how to grow the green ones.

27 chapters · 27 activities · 27 green flags · Paperback & Kindle

Order on Amazon Read an excerpt

The Framework

Every lasting relationship moves through three stages.

Attention and value are the two raw materials every connection is made of. Each stage is just those two doing different work — and the stages are a cycle, not a staircase. When the cycle keeps turning, the relationship lives. When it stops, you get the sentence everyone says: nothing happened, it just faded.

Attraction

fuel: value

Something draws you in — you notice a person and recognize their value. Not magic. A measurement: a live reading of perceived value, rising, falling, buildable, rebuildable.

Reciprocation

fuel: exchange

You invest. Attention becomes engagement, value gets exchanged back and forth, and trust accumulates in the flow. The ordinary Tuesday is the relationship.

Co-creation

fuel: growth

You build. Attention becomes shared focus, and the two of you create value that didn’t exist before either of you: rituals, a home, a future tense. Love consumed burns down. Love built compounds.

“Red flags and green flags are two directions the same force can point — and conditions decide which one grows.”The novel walks the three stages as a story. The self-help book explains each one, and hands you the labors.

Peek Inside

From the pages.

What Happened to Us

“If a project fails at work, there’s a post-mortem: a whiteboard, a team, a list of lessons. If a relationship fails, you’re told: shut up, move on, stop overthinking. And you drag your unanswered questions into the next relationship like broken glass in your pockets.”

The Library

“Love that is only consumed burns down. Love that is built compounds. We were a beautiful bonfire, Victor. But we never planted a single seed by its light.”

The Himalayas

“Athena didn’t redeem Hercules with a promise. She guided him through twelve labors—and let the labors do the choosing.”

The Auditorium

A Million Green Flags

“We are the most relationship-educated generation that has ever lived. We know our attachment styles and our love languages. We can identify gaslighting, name our boundaries, spot a red flag from across a bar. Our grandparents had none of this vocabulary — and their relationships, for all their real flaws and real injustices, held. We know everything. We build nothing.”

Chapter 5 · Knowing Everything, Building Nothing

“The ordinary Tuesday is not the filler between the real moments. The ordinary Tuesday is the relationship, thousands of times over. Whoever shows up for it is who you’re actually with.”

Chapter 15 · The Tuesday Test

“When novelty fades, don’t replace the person. Create something new with the person.”

Chapter 16 · The Orchard Theory

Beyond the Books

Read the story. Learn the framework. Then practice it.

A book can hand you a model. Only practice can hand you a skill. Everything below runs on the same three stages.

The Course

Modern Relationships 101

The interactive companion to both books — the same three stages, taught through short lessons, real activities, and exercises built to be done, not just read. Where the practices in the book become a program.

relationships101.co

The App

Red Flag Detector

The record-keeping system from the final part of A Million Green Flags. You don’t ask the heart — you ask the bow. Track patterns, promises, and what actually happened the last three times a standard was calmly held.

redflagdetector.pro

In Person

Alt Therapy

Therapy that lives where you live. Walk-and-talk sessions, couples companionship, activity-based support and life navigation — in real places, not an office. Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

alttherapy.co

About the Author

Sia Stevens

Sia Stevens is a writer and relationship educator. Before either of those, she was a software engineer — a decade building systems at scale — and then an MBA, studying how incentives shape what people do. Somewhere along the way, the question changed: from how systems fail to why the most important system of all — the way we love — quietly fails the people running it.

A breakup she couldn’t explain sent her looking for the root cause of love itself. The year-long search became What Happened to Us, a novel; the framework it arrives at — attraction, reciprocation, co-creation — became A Million Green Flags, and the course Modern Relationships 101. She publishes under her own imprint, Vessel & Ink Press, and founded Alt Therapy.

She lives in Seattle, in sight of Mount Rainier.

Reviews

Both books are new. Be the first to say what they did.

Books like these live or die by word of mouth. If one chapter named something you could never name, or one practice changed a Tuesday, a short honest review on Amazon takes two minutes and helps the next reader find it.

Review What Happened to Us Review A Million Green Flags

Contact

Media, events, and everything else.

amilliongreenflags@gmail.com

Location

Seattle, WA