A listener wrote in wanting to know if he is the a-hole for ending a friendship, but what brought this on? Help defend free speech today! https://bit.ly/3LfFsAf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| What is an asshole? | |
| Can you tell me that? | |
| What is that? | |
| What is an asshole? | |
| How do I know if I'm an asshole? | |
| That's a great question. | |
| (dramatic music) | |
| So we'll go through some of these questions today. | |
| We'll start from Austin. | |
| It says, my girlfriend and I have two kids together, an infant and a three-year-old. | |
| You're not married? | |
| I've worked at the same place for four years, and she got a job a few months back. | |
| I don't mind if she works, but the kids cry for her every night that she's gone, and they won't sleep until she gets off at 4 a.m. | |
| I've run down the checklist, and they will not sleep until mom gets home. | |
| I asked if she cannot work now. | |
| So you've asked if she can stop working. | |
| And I can work extra until the kids are a bit older and our living situation is a bit more stable. | |
| But she claims that even though it's difficult for the kids and I when she's gone at work, it's not fair that I get to leave to go to work all the time and she's stuck at home with the kids 24-7. | |
| I told her life isn't fair and life will be more difficult if we just do everything on a basis of fairness. | |
| Am I the a-hole? | |
| Yes, but not for the reasons you might think. | |
| First of all, life isn't fair. | |
| That statement in an argument is rarely going to have You know, a positive response. | |
| You're rarely going to get a productive or positive response when you use the phrase, life isn't, yeah, life isn't fair. | |
| It's true though. | |
| I mean, it's, it is true that life is, is like fundamentally not fair. | |
| Life is unfair. | |
| And so you cannot be obsessed with fairness all the time. | |
| So it's, it's, uh, it's, you're not wrong in the point, but when you're making, when you're having this discussion, um, with your girlfriend, but my issue is just that it's with, so you're having this conversation with your girlfriend. | |
| So if you're an a-hole in this situation for any reason, it's that, like, why aren't you two married yet? | |
| Man and wife! | |
| Say man and wife! | |
| You have kids, you and your girlfriend have a three-year-old, and you're expanding the family, and now you have an infant. | |
| You are tied with each other already for life, because you have a kid, you have two kids together, you have a family. | |
| And yet you're not married. | |
| So- Put the damn ring on and take his ass down to the court. | |
| To me, that's what I zero in on with this, is that you got to get | |
| married. | |
| But it's relevant to your question too, because if you're married and | |
| you've both made that commitment to each other, then I think you've got | |
| a much stronger argument you can make that you could present to who | |
| would now be your wife and say, listen, how about for at least | |
| right now you don't need to work, Let me take care of you, okay? | |
| Let me take care of the family. | |
| And we just had a baby, the baby's an infant, baby needs you here. | |
| You could make a stronger argument for that, If you guys are married, but you're not. | |
| The argument is weaker, and without that commitment, she's probably also thinking, like, if you're not married, then the exit is always just, like, right there. | |
| You know, you could walk out at any time. | |
| And so maybe she's thinking, well, I gotta maintain a certain level of financial independence because we're not married. | |
| And I don't know, this thing could fall apart at any time. | |
| Men are the coolest, but I don't need them to survive. | |
| You do actually need men to survive. | |
| Get married first, then circle back. | |
| From Matthew says, Hey Matt, am I the a-hole in this situation? | |
| I blocked a friend who is also an SBG member. | |
| You better have a good reason for that. | |
| On my phone, because on two separate occasions recently, he was rubbing in that my favorite sports team lost, and I was not in the mood for it since I had a funeral for my grandfather, and he was aware of that. | |
| Wait, hang on a second. | |
| So you were at the funeral of your grandfather? | |
| And you're getting texts from your friend making fun of you because your team lost? | |
| Man, you are one pathetic loser. | |
| Is that what happened? | |
| Okay. | |
| In my prior interactions with him, he crosses the line from friendly banter to being obsessed with the rivalry and making the school he roots for a personality trait, even though he didn't even attend the school. | |
| I also wanted to know your opinion on people like him who are obnoxious about college sports rivalries when they didn't even attend the college they support. | |
| Well, not attending the college thing, that to me doesn't really make a difference. | |
| You don't have to have a direct tie to the team in that way to root for the team. | |
| I'm a big Baltimore sports fan, so I'm a fan of the Baltimore Ravens. | |
| I was never on the team. | |
| I never had any official involvement with the team. | |
| But I still consider them my team, and when I talk about them to someone else, I use the word, like, we and us. | |
| We played real poorly out there on Sunday, like that kind of thing. | |
| Even though I'm not, I mean, I am in no way a part of the team. | |
| So I don't think that's the problem. | |
| The problem is what you said about making your fandom your entire personality. | |
| And when someone does that, you know, yeah, it's going to be hard to have any kind of real friendship with them. | |
| I mean, blocking their number on your phone is a pretty drastic step, but it's going to be hard to be friends with someone when that's the only thing you can relate on. | |
| That's their whole personality. | |
| Sorry I annoyed you with my friendship. | |
| And this is where I think some people, you know, I bring up adults who are obsessed with video games. | |
| Yeah, you want a piece of this? | |
| F*** you, dude. | |
| Adults who are obsessed with superheroes. | |
| Adults who are obsessed with, like, going to Disney World. | |
| Silly adult. | |
| Disney for kids. | |
| And anytime I bring any of those things up and I say that the adults who are obsessed with these things need to grow up a little bit, I always hear, well, what about sports fans? | |
| You know, that's a game. | |
| It's the same kind of thing. | |
| There's nothing wrong with being a fan of a sports team. | |
| But if that's your entire identity, if you get way too wrapped up in it, where it's the most important thing in your life, and you're giving exorbitant amounts of time and energy to it, well, that's when it becomes a problem, and that's when you need to recalibrate, I would say. | |
| The one-year anniversary of Roe vs. Wade being overturned is coming up, and since then, the left has absolutely lost their minds. | |
| Pro-life efforts, which are more important now than ever, are booming. | |
| You heard that right. | |
| Despite the narrative, pro-lifers actually are not going away. | |
| They have increased in number. | |
| 40 Days for Life is changing hearts and minds in the most blue pro-abortion states in the country. | |
| They've had a record number of locations since Roe was overturned. | |
| They grew in both volunteers and locations. | |
| With about 1 million volunteers in 1,500 cities, they hold peaceful vigils outside abortion facilities. | |
| This success has come with new unwanted attention, as you'd imagine, from the federal government and the DOJ in regards to free speech. | |
| As one of the largest pro-life organizations in the world, no one is in a better position than 40 Days for Life to end abortion in each state in a post-Roe America. | |
| You can help them fight the ongoing legal battles of protecting free speech for their volunteers, including Mark, the 40 Days for Life volunteer who had his house raided by the FBI. | |
| Help them defend free speech by giving a tax-deductible gift of any amount at 40daysforlife.com. | |
| That's 40daysforlife.com. | |
| All right. | |
| From sbgwife says, looking for your valued opinion on whether or not I am the a-hole for refusing to name my hypothetical future son after my husband. | |
| For context, my husband and I recently got married and plan to start a family within the next two years. | |
| My husband was the only son in his family and was named after his father, same first and different middle, but he is not a junior or the second. | |
| I hate that. | |
| In all conversations with his mom and family, I never know which of the two they're referring to. | |
| Oh, sorry. Did you mean that or Peter? | |
| We're all calling him Peter. | |
| God willing, we'd both like to have two to four kids and love to play around with the baby name ideas. | |
| From the get-go, I told him that if we have a son, we will not be giving him the same name as my husband. | |
| It's confusing and, to put it nicely, a name I never have cared for, which is a point that I leave out of the conversation. | |
| Wisely so, I would say. | |
| At first my husband was either understanding or indifferent about it. | |
| Now he's growing more and more insistent on our firstborn son having his name. | |
| If my husband was formerly the second or suffix junior, I would begrudgingly oblige for the sake of continuity tradition, something that his parents didn't care to initiate and my husband doesn't find important either. | |
| I know this is all hypothetical, but am I the a-hole for refusing to name our future son after my husband and his father? | |
| I am also a believer that the woman carries the baby, and all, should have a majority rule over the name selection. | |
| I'm willing to compromise and either have his name be our child's middle name, or, if given his name as first, refer to our son by his middle name only, neither of which my husband is fond of. | |
| Lay your sweet daddy advice down. | |
| Okay, um, yeah, you are the a-hole, actually, on this one. | |
| I gotta give you the, yeah, I gotta give you the title of a-hole on this one. | |
| Two reasons. | |
| One is that, yeah, I do believe that this is something, this is important to your husband, and he feels called to Have his firstborn son be named after him to carry on. | |
| And even if you don't put junior or the second or something after it, it still is carrying on the name and carrying on the tradition. | |
| For our first son, my wife is the one who suggested it. | |
| So maybe you could be a junior. | |
| And I shot it down because it's just not something, you know. | |
| I didn't want to give my kid the junior. | |
| I didn't want to make him a junior. | |
| Don't call me junior. | |
| But for some men, that's important to them. | |
| And I think that you should respect that. | |
| And then, secondly, the woman has majority rule over the name selection. | |
| No. | |
| That's dumb. | |
| You're dumb. | |
| No, that's not the way that works. | |
| You are equal participants in creating the baby. | |
| You're both going to be equal participants in raising and caring for the baby in different ways. | |
| You know, your husband playing the role of father, you playing the role of mother, but you're still both intricately involved and indispensably involved. | |
| You were doing okay until you got to the last paragraph and you claim that the woman should have the final say on names. | |
| That's not the way it should go. | |
| And I think Here's the way that, with my wife, we never came up with, like, an exact system for coming up with names. | |
| We just sort of, with each new kid, we'd try to think of a name. | |
| And we had different strategies that we utilized. | |
| But, on a few of the occasions, you know, because, like, we have a million kids, gone through this a bunch of times, and there have been a few occasions where my wife just felt really strongly about a certain name, and I said, well, you feel that strongly about it, let's go with that. | |
| And there were other times I felt strongly about a certain name. | |
| So, I think if one member in the couple feels really strongly, like, I really want this name, and you don't have those same strong feelings for a different name, then I would defer to him. | |
| Okay. | |
| You a-hole. |