I didn't invent the Garcia Love Scale™ in an office.
I invented it in a breakroom in 2016.
I was having a hard time. Something in my life wasn't right and I couldn't explain it. Not even to myself. I just knew something was off. I just didn't have the words for what I was feeling.
I was sitting alone in the breakroom sulking when a psychiatrist I worked with came in to microwave his lunch. He took one look at me and said, hey Robert you look a little sad today.
So I told him.
He stood there at the microwave and listened. Then when his food was done, he brought it over to the community table where I was already sitting, ate his lunch and kept listening. I told him everything. The whole story. All of it.
And when I was done, he looked at me and summed up everything I had been carrying around in just a few words. Then he identified the problem. Then he recommended a solution.
Then he went back to eating his lunch. Like it was nothing.
I sat there staring at him like he was from another planet. I said, how did you do that so fast?
He smiled and said, thirty years of practice.
I couldn't stop thinking about that. Thirty years. That's what it took for someone to finally name what I was feeling.
What if I didn't happen to work with a psychiatrist?
What if I never had that lunch?
What if I just kept carrying it around with no words for it at all?
That's when I looked up and saw something.
Right behind him on the wall was the Wong-Baker pain scale. You've probably seen it before. It's that simple chart with the faces on it. A smiley face on one end. A crying face on the other. Numbers in between.
Nurses, like me, use it when a patient can't find words for their pain. Maybe they speak a different language. Maybe they are too young. Maybe they are just too deep in it to explain themselves. So instead of asking them to describe it you just ask them to point to a face.
I stared at that chart for a long moment.
And I thought, why doesn't something like this exist for love?
Not for physical pain. For the kind of pain that lives inside a relationship that doesn't feel right anymore. The kind you can't explain to your friends. The kind a therapist spends three sessions trying to name. The kind that wakes you up at three in the morning and just sits there.
Right then I said to myself, self, if nobody has built this by the time I retire, then I will.
I had done it before. In 2001, I created the first ever WIC-only store in the San Francisco Bay area. A pilot program that nobody thought was possible until it was running. I knew how to build something from nothing when I could see that the need was real.
The need for this was real.
But back in 2016, I didn't have the tools to build this. So it sat. For years, it just sat there in the back of my mind waiting.
Fast forward to today, in 2026. Now, I have the tools. Now, I have the resources. Now, I am "retired." Now... the Garcia Love Scale™ exists.
Not because of a research grant. Not because of a university study. Because a kind psychiatrist microwaved his lunch and sat down across from me at the right moment. Because a simple chart was hanging on a wall behind his head. And because I have spent my entire career as a nurse sitting with people who were in pain they could not name.
The Garcia Love Scale™ exists because you deserve a way to point at what you feel.
Even when the words won't come.
