Robert & Michelle Colt

How We Met

Michelle and I met in the summer of 1992 at a Co-Dependents Anonymous meeting in New York City. The week before I met her, I had been a day away from homelessness. After a series of extraordinary hardships, I was on welfare and food stamps. The owner of a restaurant where I used to wait tables, a lovely and generous man, would let me come by for dinner. It was out of desperation that I started going to 12-step meetings.

On August 19th, after one of those meetings, several people were going to lunch at the Hollywood Diner on Broadway. I didn't have money for lunch, but I went because Michelle was going. When everyone started ordering, I said I'd had a big breakfast and wasn't hungry. Actually, I was starving. Michelle and I sat across from each other, and at some point she asked if I wanted to finish her Yankee Bean soup. I said sure. I wanted to wolf it down.

During lunch, I pointed to a picture of Marilyn Monroe and said my mother looked like a cross between her and Natalie Wood. Michelle told me she had a daughter who was with her father in Los Angeles and that he was an actor on a television show called Homefront. I said, "My friend Harry's on Homefront." Michelle said, "Small fucking world."

She had no idea.

Five years earlier, Harry and I had been in the same acting class. At one point he'd told me he had a one-year-old daughter with a woman named Michelle. Yes. The Michelle sitting across from me at the Hollywood Diner. And the coincidences didn't stop there.

After lunch, four of us started walking toward Central Park. I told my sponsor, Andrew, that I really liked Michelle. He said, "That's good, that's good, but you have too much on your plate right now." I said, "I don't care how much is on my plate. I just don't know how to ask her out. What do I say? Would you like to go out for dinner, I have food stamps?"

Somehow Michelle and I ended up walking together and the other two went their way. When we reached 86th and Columbus, Michelle said, "Do you mind if we go into that check cashing place? I have to cash my welfare check."

YES!!!

That's what I felt on the inside.

We walked around the reservoir in Central Park, and at one point I asked if I could hold her hand. She said she wasn't ready for that yet. Eventually we walked back to where she was living, Ruppert Yorkville Towers. Fourteen years earlier, during summer breaks from college, I had worked as a security guard in that very building and later as a maintenance worker. Of all the buildings in New York City, Michelle was living there. What a movie.

From that day forward, we never went a single day without seeing each other. A week later, I proposed to her in Krumville, New York. Ten months later, on July 9th, we were married.

We didn't meet when our lives were going great. Quite the opposite. We met during a low point for each of us, when both of us were dealing with our own struggles, histories and conditioning. More than three decades later, after a lifetime together and more than twenty years helping other people, there is something about the way we met that feels even more meaningful to us now.

What Happened Next

Somewhere along the way, our own journey became the work we began sharing with others.

For more than twenty years, we’ve worked with over a thousand people from all walks of life. And while everyone comes to us for different reasons, there’s something we hear again and again.

They feel better about themselves.

People tell us they’re happier, more confident and have a greater sense of well-being. That they’re trusting themselves more and living a fuller life.

And throughout the years, we’ve been told something we never take lightly:

Working with us changed their life.

We love what we do. Not because we have all the answers.

Because there’s nothing quite like watching someone discover more of who they really are and live more fully as themselves.