Join Matt Walsh as he gives advice to people posting on the Slate forums. Including: -A “confused cuck” -A woman regretting dumping her boyfriend -A husband whose wife spent all their money -A woman dealing with a “sexist” 7 year old Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Being that I'm always right, one of my great talents is offering advice. | |
| The problem is that people don't ask me for advice. | |
| So that leads me to offer the advice unsolicited. | |
| And they call this mansplaining. | |
| I think that's technically what that's called. | |
| So today, instead, I've decided that I'd like to do a little advice segment. | |
| I'm going to pilfer questions from another advice column, and I'll give you the real advice, the correct answers to those questions. | |
| And for those purposes today, we're going to refer to Slate. | |
| Now Slate has what it looks like are a couple of different advice columns that are up on their website. | |
| They have all kinds of poor saps that come to them asking for help. | |
| And I thought this was especially important because the advice they get is terrible. | |
| The advice that's dispensed is often even more misguided than the original question so that everybody at the end of it is just even more confused. | |
| So today we're going to go through, take some of these questions and then give the real answers to those questions. | |
| All right, now, from Slate. | |
| Let's start here. | |
| Here's a question sent in by someone who identifies himself as ConfusedCuck. | |
| That's his. | |
| That's his name he's given himself. | |
| I didn't give him that name. | |
| He says, my wife and I live in a small conservative rural town that we both were raised in. | |
| After having been married for about 12 years, my wife and I began the hot wife lifestyle and have been hot wifing about five years now. | |
| No idea what that means, but I think we're going to find out. | |
| It was my idea, and she was initially resistant to it, but eventually she said yes. | |
| I find it an incredible turn-on, and honestly, she has enjoyed it more than she ever imagined. | |
| There have been different men over those years, some of them longer term and some not. | |
| My wife video records these encounters, and they've really enhanced our sex life. | |
| Dear God. | |
| Jay entered our life at about two and a half years ago. | |
| It's hard to describe him, but he's pretty much the perfect bull. | |
| I don't know what I'm reading. | |
| I'm getting the gist of it. | |
| I don't like the gist that I'm getting. | |
| He is handsome, well-traveled, speaks a half-dozen languages, teaches at a college with a PhD, does fitness modeling, is well-hung, kinky, and the man can literally have athletic sex all night. | |
| He is married, and his gorgeous wife is completely comfortable with his lifestyle, although she does not play herself. | |
| What's more, he is completely down to earth and you never know he wasn't just a muscle bro unless you engaged him on some other topic like foreign policy or Persian poetry. | |
| It's a joy watching him with my wife or on video occasionally. | |
| What's more, I really enjoy him as a person. | |
| My wife and I have two kids and they absolutely adore him and his wife and constantly ask to go visit them. | |
| Okay, you know what? | |
| This actually goes on much longer than what I just read there. | |
| This is like a whole novel from this guy. | |
| I don't even know what the question is. | |
| If the question is, Am I a deranged, disgusting degenerate? | |
| The answer is yes. | |
| That's a yes-no. | |
| I can just tell you it is right away. | |
| I don't need... Whatever other question it might be, I don't need to know what it is. | |
| Listen, this is not okay. | |
| No part of this is okay. | |
| No part of this is acceptable. | |
| It should literally be illegal. | |
| If I was in charge of the country, you would go to jail for this. | |
| I don't want to hear anything about, oh, it's this consensual relationship between adults. | |
| So, some consensual relationships are completely effed up, for lack of a better phrase, and this is one of them. | |
| By the way, it's not a victimless crime. | |
| There are kids involved. | |
| Your kids adore your wife's boyfriend, is what you're telling me. | |
| Yeah, well, your kids are not going to adore anything very much when they're paying thousands of dollars for the rest of their lives to a therapist, because you screwed them up so badly. | |
| So I know we're supposed to be open and have accepting attitudes towards all lifestyles. | |
| I don't, at all. | |
| Because some lifestyles are disordered and wrong and damaging and toxic and disgusting, like this one. | |
| So my advice is stop this, what you're doing. | |
| Just stop everything about it. | |
| Grow a pair, literally. | |
| Preferably your own pair. | |
| All right, so that was sufficiently traumatizing. | |
| Let's read something else. | |
| This is from someone who goes by no splitting the difference. | |
| She writes, I'm one of those letter writers who probably just needs to hear someone say what I already know. | |
| A few months ago, I ended a five year relationship with someone that I love dearly because I couldn't see a way to agree on a future family. | |
| When we talked about kids earlier in the relationship, my perception was that both of us were pretty ambivalent. | |
| Now it seems clear that becoming a dad someday is important to him. | |
| Meanwhile, my ambivalence has drifted toward being child-free. | |
| If baby fever hasn't hit me yet, it's just not going to, right? | |
| Everyone told me I'd changed my mind when I was older, but now I'm 32 and I still don't see the appeal of having kids. | |
| The stress of wondering whether we have a future together was really affecting me, so I called it off. | |
| At the same time, he's my best friend. | |
| I love him with all my heart. | |
| It's hard to imagine ever having that with someone else. | |
| Did I do the right thing? | |
| Is there any middle path for us that I don't see? | |
| And how were we able to misunderstand each other for so long? | |
| Alright. | |
| So your problem with this guy, you love this guy, he's your best friend, and your problem with him is that he's responsible and wants to have a family? | |
| That was the deal breaker? | |
| Most people aren't going to tell you this. | |
| Or won't put it to you like this. | |
| But the fact is that the reason you don't see the appeal of having kids is that you're selfish. | |
| That's the reason. | |
| I mean, that really is the reason. | |
| We could try to dress it up all we want and say, oh, there are other reasons why. | |
| No, 99.9% of the time, someone who's an adult, especially in their 30s, doesn't want to have kids still. | |
| It's just because they're selfish. | |
| They're pathologically selfish. | |
| That's the reason almost always. | |
| You know, you like your freedom, quote-unquote. | |
| You don't want anything tying you down. | |
| You want to be able to spend money on vacations and that sort of thing, and that's why you don't want to have kids. | |
| Well, the problem, and what you have to realize, is that a life lived only to serve yourself is not fulfilling. | |
| It can be distracting, though, right? | |
| If your life is fundamentally empty because you only focus on yourself, Then the good thing is that you have time and money to distract yourself, and so you can take all the vacations and buy all the fancy stuff. | |
| But the problem is that eventually life slows down. | |
| Maybe not yet for you, but it does eventually, and the distraction techniques don't work, and now you're left alone with the emptiness. | |
| And at that point, when that happens, your options are limited. | |
| You know, when people say, you'll regret it when you're older, they don't mean 32, okay? | |
| They mean like 52. | |
| And at that point, it's too late. | |
| To have kids. | |
| What will happen is you will regret it because you will be alone and old and you will die alone. | |
| And when you finally do die, no one's going to care because you don't have anyone around to even grieve your loss. | |
| Good news is you're only 32, so you can still change courses. | |
| Maybe go find that guy who you love so much and super responsible and wants to be a father. | |
| Maybe go find him. | |
| Maybe go get him back. | |
| Here's another one. | |
| It says, wife spent life savings. | |
| That's the headline. | |
| Okay. | |
| I'm married with four little kids. | |
| I work. | |
| My wife stays home. | |
| She has struggled with anxiety and depression, for which she is on medication. | |
| We're pretty easygoing, except for one big rift in our marriage. | |
| Credit cards. | |
| I'm against them and don't have one. | |
| My wife has always been financially smart and as often takes care of the bills in our home. | |
| We agreed that she would use her credit card smartly and pay it off every month. | |
| She did not like me seeing her card statements. | |
| Part of her anxiety is feeling judgment when there is none. | |
| I agreed and it was never a problem. | |
| So we stopped looking at the statement. | |
| However, in the last three months, she has spent our entire life savings in online purchases. | |
| I'm devastated. | |
| Well, my wife is really smart with money, except when she's blowing all of our money on Amazon purchases. | |
| But except for that part of it, she's really smart. | |
| I'm devastated. | |
| I have put a little money aside every month for various projects and vehicle upgrades, and it's all gone. | |
| The question actually goes on from there, but it's cut off because you have to subscribe to Slate to read the rest of it. | |
| Unfortunately, I don't care enough about this guy's problem to pay a monthly fee to read it, but I think I got enough of the idea of it. | |
| What I'll say is this. | |
| First of all, if your spouse doesn't want you to look at a credit card statement, that is like a red flag with sirens and warning lights going off and big just... | |
| Blinking lights saying, problem, problem. | |
| The only time when it's maybe okay for your spouse to tell you not to look at the statement is around a gift giving occasion. | |
| And they're saying, oh, I just bought you a gift. | |
| I don't want you to see it on the statement. | |
| So can you not look at it for the next week or something? | |
| But this is not one of those times. | |
| In fact, if there's anything your spouse doesn't want you to see, credit card, text, Facebook message, internet search history, anything, I mean anything, if your spouse is trying to block you from seeing anything, that means, with rare exception, they're doing something horrible and, or at least thinking about it, they don't want you to know. | |
| So when your spouse says, I don't want you to see this and you get that, if you get like a sinking feeling, like something's wrong here, well, something is wrong. | |
| I mean, something really horrible is probably happening. | |
| That's just the reality. | |
| This doesn't mean we should have no privacy as married people. | |
| It just means that we shouldn't be hiding things. | |
| That's, that's the balance. | |
| You have privacy, you get your own space. | |
| If you're making the effort to hide something though, now we've got a problem. | |
| All of this to say, how in the hell did she manage to blow through your whole life savings over the course of three months and you didn't notice? | |
| You want to look at the credit card saving statement and she said, Oh, it makes me, it gives me anxiety. | |
| When you look, please don't look at it. | |
| Oh, it gives you anxiety. | |
| When I look at the credit card statement, that's all the more reason to look at it. | |
| Bring it here. | |
| Now I need to see it. | |
| So I bet, I guess you were afraid of coming off as patriarchal or something. | |
| If you spoke up, so you didn't say anything and now you're broke. | |
| This is what happens. | |
| And guess what? | |
| You're the one who works and earns the paycheck. | |
| So your wife has lost her credit card privileges. | |
| That's the consequence when you plunge your family into destitution because you want to buy stuff from Amazon. | |
| Take the credit cards, you give her a monthly allowance like a child. | |
| You don't want to have to do this, but you're not working every day to support your wife's Amazon shopping sprees, are you? | |
| So she did that to herself and you did it. | |
| You're both at fault. | |
| All right. | |
| Finally, from someone signed, do I give him a timeout? | |
| Says, how do I approach a seven and a half year old boy who makes sexist jabs at me? | |
| Some context, I am his 23 year old cis female cousin, and I've been watching him full time since August. | |
| I adore him, but I loathe to tolerate another, yeah, but you can't use a drill because you're a girl comment. | |
| My current approach has been cool puzzlement. | |
| Hmm, why would you think that? | |
| Followed up with, I can see why you would think that, but there aren't such things as boy and girl things, and it hurts my feelings when you tell me I can't do something because I'm a girl. | |
| And then maybe some follow-up discussion about how making that kind of boy-girl distinction can hurt our friends. | |
| It's not getting through, though. | |
| I think part of the issue is that I'm working from home and I'm currently embodying traditionally feminine roles like caregiving. | |
| Plus, he is probably getting counter messaging at home. | |
| I love him, but these jabs are really hitting me in the soft spot. | |
| And honestly, I know these kinds of thoughts are hurting him too. | |
| How can I better approach this behavior? | |
| Let me see if I have this straight. | |
| You're getting your feelings hurt by a seven year old boy. | |
| You're a grown ass adult. | |
| And your feelings are hurt because a seven-year-old boy said only boys use drills? | |
| So the question is not how to approach this behavior of the child. | |
| The question is how to approach your own behavior. | |
| Specifically, the behavior of being fragile as hell. | |
| So what I would recommend here is get over it. | |
| I mean, he's a kid. | |
| Actually, there's nothing wrong at all with children associating certain activities with boys and girls. | |
| You know why the supposedly sexist seven-year-old is doing that? | |
| You know why he associates using power tools with boys? | |
| Because he has eyes and a brain, unlike yourself apparently, and he can see that most of the time when someone is using a power tool, it's a boy. | |
| That's just what it is. | |
| He sees that, and so he draws these connections. | |
| Absolutely nothing wrong with that. | |
| He is drawing reasonable connections and associations between things. | |
| That should be encouraged, not dissuaded. | |
| So, you need to get over it. | |
| The boy is fine, and that's all there is to it. | |
| Should we do one more? | |
| No, I don't think we should. | |
| I can only stomach so much. |