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June 12, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:06:02

"Dad Left Us For A Stripper!" Freedomain Call In

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	Hi, everybody.
	I'm here with Tiffany.
	And not only is this one of the rare morning calls, but she has a tale of woe and potential and even unhappiness to tell.
	What is that?
	I would like to revise a little bit.
	I don't necessarily think it's as much unhappiness as it is unsatisfaction, because there are a lot of happy things in my life, too.
	But I will start with I did just turn 30.
	And I have been in a relationship for eight years with somebody I would consider my best friend.
	It's a very good relationship.
	We're very close.
	It has been eight years and he is 12 years older than me.
	I would say 12 years.
	Yes, which might be, you know, I've spent my entire adult life pretty much in this relationship.
	Up to this point, I had not wanted children.
	Potentially, I wanted to get married, but it wasn't really a necessity.
	I kind of had that, oh, it's just a piece of paper view.
	I'm rapidly changing my mind faster than I thought I could change my mind.
	There's a few factors, I think, that are kind of playing into it.
	So, just for those who are doing math on the fly, you were 22 when you met him and he was 34.
	Well, I was 21 when I met him.
	I was 22 when we decided to date.
	Right.
	And how did you meet him?
	We worked together.
	And it was back when I was working three jobs to pay my bills.
	And he was one of the supervisors where I worked.
	Not over me, I would like to say.
	But we met when I was trying to get some assistance at work.
	And he was the only other person that seemed to understand how to make things work there.
	So, um, we worked together really well.
	Uh, we were always, um, two of the people that people went to in order to get things done.
	Uh, not only were we, like you always say, go to the busy person and it'll get done.
	Uh, that was us.
	And, uh, we were always busy because, uh, we got work done well together.
	So we, we worked together quite well.
	Um, We were both in a relationship when we met.
	We didn't, uh, I would say nothing inappropriate while we were in relationships.
	Um, I've always tried to be pretty moral when it comes to that.
	I would say we got along and I was a little uncomfortable with some of the conversations just because I felt that it could go somewhere.
	But until, uh, we were both out of a relationship, we did not, we did not consider or even talk about dating.
	Right, right.
	And was he married before?
	Did he have kids before or anything like that?
	He wasn't.
	He was in a very long-term relationship when he was young, very young.
	We're talking, you know, 16 to maybe 23, 24.
	He very badly wanted to get married to her and have children, but it didn't go the way he wanted.
	And now he knows that it's for the better, but it didn't work out.
	She found somebody else.
	Yeah, there's this funny thing.
	I don't know if you've found this in life.
	I apologize for jumping in right when you're telling a story, but I've wanted to say this for a while.
	No, it's okay.
	If you're unhappy about what's happening in your life, wait five minutes.
	You know, sometimes.
	Wait five minutes or five months or five years.
	When I look back on my life, the stuff I thought was really negative at the time often turned out to be positive.
	Like, oh, this girl broke up with me.
	Oh, that's terrible.
	And it's like, you meet someone better.
	Or this job didn't work out, you get something better.
	Or it's just funny the way that things work out.
	This is why now I have a very tough time judging what's good or bad.
	I mean, morally, yes, obviously.
	But in terms of consequences, this is why I've further given up on consequentialism, is when you get older, you look back on your own life and you say, all this stuff that I thought was really good, a lot of times didn't turn out to be so good.
	Like, oh, that girl did decide to go out with me.
	And it's like, actually, I don't really like her.
	You know, like, yay!
	Oh no, right?
	Or, oh no, yay!
	And given where I am now in life, which is a wonderful place, everything that led here, both the plus and minus, allowed me to get to where I am.
	And so judging it at the time as good or bad is really, really tough.
	And that doesn't mean that we can't judge things.
	What I'm saying, by the way, in terms of judging things by consequences is is tough.
	So he's like, Oh, no, this relationship from 16 to 23.
	It didn't work out.
	He was probably heartbroken.
	And yet, now looking back, he's like, Oh, actually, that was actually a pretty good thing.
	He did let it affect him for much of his life.
	I've heard you say that it takes half the amount of time you'd put in a relationship to get over it.
	I would say it took him double the amount of time he was in a relationship to get over that relationship.
	You know that means that he wouldn't be done then by the time he met you?
	I guess just so.
	Yes, just so.
	Coming to an end, I think maybe meeting me may have caused that.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Okay, now I'm confused about the math.
	math because he met you when he was 31 or 31 right 30 30 30 I was 21 when we met and he was I might have done that wrong.
	Oh, sorry, sorry.
	Because we're 12 years apart.
	No, no, you got that right.
	I got that wrong, sorry.
	Right, right, right.
	And he had had other relationships in the meantime, but nothing that... They were almost just very casual relationships up to that point.
	He's never lived with anybody besides me.
	I did live with my boyfriend.
	Before him for a short period of time.
	But he has never lived with anybody until me.
	Right.
	OK.
	All right.
	So you guys got together.
	And how long after you got together did you move in together?
	Let me do the math.
	Let's see.
	We met when I was 21.
	We hooked up when I was 22.
	And it was two years after that.
	So I was 22, 23.
	I was 24 when we moved in together.
	We moved into his house.
	So I had my own apartment.
	I was only about five minutes away.
	Right.
	Now give me, if you would, just sort of an overview of your 20s.
	Sorry, this sounds like a job interview now.
	What would you say your greatest weakness is and where do you see yourself in five years?
	No, but just an overview if you could.
	Okay.
	At 20, I had already been working for four years because I did graduate high school at 16.
	I graduated very early.
	Um, school wasn't for me.
	I was great at it.
	I graduated with a 4.2.
	I'm very intelligent, but it definitely wasn't my thing.
	I couldn't stand to be there.
	It was extremely boring.
	So I actually got a job.
	I'm gonna actually start at 17 if you don't mind Just for the background Tiffany is very very intelligent which according to feminists means all men must be terrified of her which I don't find to be the case lovely person, but That's that's sort of the backdrop of what we're gonna be talking about in the core issues But let's get the the backstory and and just to that point all of my friends have always been men I mean, I get along with them better.
	Women, it just, I have a hard time with it because everything's so superficial.
	I can't get into the TV shows, the superstars, you know, the basics.
	It just seems like everyone is basic.
	Very, very rarely I have one very, very good female friend who is on a similar intelligence level as myself.
	She was in the Air Force and was Very good at what she did.
	And one of the only people I can really talk to, I think, that is a woman.
	So I would definitely not say that men are intimidated by.
	Smart woman.
	At all.
	I feel that they can talk to us.
	It's a little easier.
	It's one of these evolutionarily ridiculous things, right?
	So it's often people on the left who are more secular and who praise evolution think that men are turned off by intelligent women.
	And it's like, dudes, how on earth could we have become intelligent if men were turned off by intelligent women?
	Because they would be evolutionarily negatively selected.
	Anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
	It's just one of these ridiculous things.
	But go ahead.
	Okay, I'm going to start at 17 because I'm going to go with ... I'll actually start right when I graduated high school because I kind of feel like that's where most people start in their 20s.
	I graduated high school.
	I badly wanted to go to college.
	I felt that that was going to be my calling.
	I wanted to be a cardiologist.
	I'm very fascinated with biology and the human heart.
	I got accepted.
	I scored a 31 on my ACT, which I do believe is extremely high.
	I can't quite remember what the top score is, but I did get accepted into many of the schools that you would desire.
	Any parent would be very proud to send their kid to the schools that I was accepted into.
	The problem was I couldn't afford it.
	And I was definitely not willing to go a million dollars in debt to be a cardiologist, especially considering I knew not only was it difficult to pass the course and I knew that there were tests that were going to come along the way that if you did not pass them, you would, no matter how much schooling you did, no matter how much money you spent, that it still wasn't a guarantee.
	And I'm one for more of a guaranteed outcome.
	So I did not end up going.
	I got a few scholarships or grants, I guess you would consider them, but it wasn't enough to even pay for a first semester of college.
	So I did not end up going.
	Consequently, there were a few people who got much lower grades than me.
	Um, probably not quite as intelligent that did get full rides for other reasons.
	Uh, and for a long time in my life, I was very bitter about that, but I've gotten over it at this point.
	I'm very happy.
	I didn't go to college at this point.
	Um, but I got a job right out of school.
	Um, a friend of mine, her boyfriend, uh, was my friends have always been older.
	So that's kind of keep that in mind.
	A friend of mine, her.
	Husband was managing a store and I had never, I had had one job previously where you had to have a permit cause I was very young, but, um, this was going to be my first job job.
	So I went ahead, I went in, I got the job immediately.
	It was for sales.
	I'm pretty good at sales.
	And, uh, within two to three months at the age of, you know, just turning 17, I was promoted to the assistant manager.
	Uh, I felt extremely successful.
	Um, at the time I was proud.
	And within a year, I was the general manager and he had moved on to something else.
	So I stayed at that job for a little while.
	When you're young, it's a lot easier for you to not understand your value.
	I did work for less than I probably was valued to the store that I was working at.
	But nonetheless, I was pretty happy.
	I was in a relationship that I now realize was a very toxic relationship.
	How toxic and how so?
	Um, he was only a year older than me.
	Um, we had gone to school together, so he did graduate after me, even though he was originally a year ahead of me.
	Um, we, I don't want to say it was completely his fault.
	Uh, he didn't have good guidance when he was younger either.
	Um, and I kind of feel as if I may have gotten guilted into the relationship.
	Um, we were, which I obviously I had, I could have made that decision, but I didn't.
	Um, we were friends in high school and, uh, I would say we started dating way too young.
	Uh, I was 13 years old and, um, I, we had just been kind of on and off dating, um, up until we graduated.
	And then I would say it was more of a, his mother had died.
	Uh, he was over all the time.
	He didn't really have anywhere to go, and I'm still angry at my mother for this.
	She let him move in with us, and then I moved out to get an apartment.
	How old were you when your mother let your boyfriend move in?
	I was, after I graduated, 17 probably.
	He still had a year left of school.
	So, did she let him move in, like, he goes to the basement and there's an armed guard at your door?
	No, she didn't.
	Like, yeah, you guys can sleep together?
	No.
	Okay.
	So she's like a buddy mom, right?
	No boundaries, no standards, no.
	Um, I wouldn't say that.
	I just feel she's very, she was being very naive.
	She just assumed that I was, I wouldn't, Let myself get into that situation because she never, I guess, essentially caught us.
	But we did.
	I mean, if I could go back, I would change it.
	Wait, wait, sorry.
	She didn't know that you were sleeping together with your boyfriend of four years as a teenager.
	Right.
	As a teenager.
	And yes.
	And I do want to state, because it's probably important to the conversation, when I was 14 would be the first time that we did something.
	And we'd only did it once.
	It was awful.
	I mean, it would probably be one of the things that in my head, if I could go back, I definitely would never have done that.
	I would have actually waited until I met the person I'm with now, if I could have.
	Right.
	Right.
	I'm sorry about that.
	But toxic would be his mother overdosed on drugs, and she died, and he had a little bit of an anger problem.
	And he was always easily frustrated, very depressed.
	Did his mother, sorry to interrupt, did his mother overdose on legal or illegal drugs?
	Legal.
	She was extremely overweight.
	She was probably around 450 to 500 pounds.
	Holy cow, but great, Batman.
	Oh my god.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's the thing you would see on those crazy TV shows.
	That kind of thing.
	The trailer is, like, bent.
	Like, the trailer is, like, cantilevered one side down.
	Okay, got it.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And, um, she was with, actually, she, she was married to her husband was quite larger than her.
	And when we were very young, uh, 14, 15, when it wasn't, I wouldn't call a serious relationship.
	Um, her, his stepfather had died.
	And then, um, when we, he was getting ready to graduate a little before graduation, his probably about a year before graduation, his mother died.
	Um, they both died in the same thing.
	It was Oxycontin.
	Um, Just stay slowly and slowly, it stops working for you.
	And they would take more and more and more.
	And the pain that they were in, I would feel bad for them.
	But when you are that large and you don't make an attempt to fix it, the pain isn't going to be fixed by medication.
	You have to get up, you have to move around, you have to eat healthy.
	And I just I hate to say this, but they made their decisions, and she put her children in a bad situation for it.
	Right.
	Yeah, so, I mean, because of that weight, you've got back pain, joint pain, knee pain, you name it, right?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And watching your mother, and I mean, me even watching it, it was traumatic for me too, because you spend a lot of time with somebody, you do get close to them, even if they're not necessarily The best people.
	Um, you know, I, it was sad to watch her die.
	In fact, I was the person who found her unconscious.
	So, uh, they were able to bring her back after that, but they were not able to keep her alive.
	Um, she watching her, uh, not out in front of her children, watching her, um, drive, uh, and almost kill her children.
	Um, Washing her scream and yell because of the addiction and the withdraws.
	The whole scenario was a very, very hard situation to watch.
	And he would often come to my house to kind of escape that.
	Um, and it wasn't as toxic in the beginning.
	Obviously we were kids.
	We would go and we walked to the park and we would ride bikes together and we were both active.
	We'd play sports and, um, you know, we'd play catch with a baseball and just, You know, things that teenagers would do and almost more like what children would do.
	Jump on the trampoline in our backyard, have a good time.
	And it was just more enjoyable.
	And then he'd go home at night.
	So even before he lived with us, he spent a lot of time there.
	Yeah, I mean, I know that when I first moved to Canada, there was a girl who liked me and I was, like, I first moved to Canada, I was put in grade A and then I was put back two grades for reasons I can't quite fathom, because they had more of a focus, I think, of keeping you aged.
	Like, I was two years ahead when I came to Canada, they put me back two years to be in sort of age-appropriate grades.
	But there was this girl who came up to me.
	I guess I was 11 or so, maybe 12.
	No, I was 11.
	She came up to me and she said, do you want to go steady?
	And I'm like, sure.
	I don't know what it meant.
	And we did end up hanging out.
	But it was nothing particularly romantic about it at all, right?
	We never even kissed.
	I don't think we held hands.
	Because I didn't actually know what she meant.
	And of course, you couldn't go look things up back then.
	Like, what is the local Canadian slang for being someone's boyfriend?
	And I actually remembered her name and some years ago I sent her a message to apologize for my incomprehension and hope she never took it personally because she was a very nice girl but I don't know if she wanted to hold hands or a kiss or whatever but I had no idea what she was talking about in terms of going steady and I was new and I wasn't going to ask anyone because that would be for a man, a boy, to admit not knowing something.
	So I mean that early I guess friendliness slash Quasi-romance stuff can be can be nice.
	Although for me, of course, a little incomprehensible.
	But anyway, did you want to go on?
	Because I have a question or two about this.
	Sure.
	Sure.
	Let me let me just say that that's kind of how I felt.
	I don't think guilt might be the wrong word.
	But the relationship just there.
	I felt too bad to not hang out with him.
	Well, you can't end it.
	I mean, it's really hard to end when his
	morbidly obese mother is ODing on drugs and you know that's like and now I'm breaking up with you and it's like oh but that's yeah that's a I mean of course we know that that's an absolutely terrible reason to stay in a relationship but it's really hard to change that right which is why you have to be careful who you get involved with in the first place because you can get sucked into this kind of undertow where someone's life is so disastrous that you don't want to stay but it's so disastrous that you fear leaving and his mother begged me on her deathbed
	To make sure that he was happy and that his sister was taken care of.
	Yeah, that's a horrible form of bullying.
	I mean, I have nothing but contempt for a woman who does not take care of her own children and then death bullies a child into taking care of her children.
	That is, well, there's morbidly obese and then there's just morbid.
	Right.
	Right.
	So, okay, if you want to keep going, that's fine.
	I can bookmark my questions.
	No, it depends.
	The next thing I would probably talk about would be what maybe caused that relationship to end.
	No, I'm curious about what the hell caused that relationship to start, Tiffany.
	Well, yeah.
	Why wasn't your mother saying no?
	Come on, this is not...
	This is not a family environment that you can, I mean, you know, be friends with the person, maybe, but he's going to be really needy.
	He needs, like, professional help.
	You know, you don't do dentistry for your kids and you're not going to try and help a kid deal with this kind of trauma because that's really the job of somebody who knows what they're doing, like a long-term therapist or, like, he needs help and, you know, we'll get him set up.
	The school has therapists or psychologists, like, we'll help them.
	But this is not a dating scenario.
	This is a terrible idea.
	It's a very wrong thing.
	You're not helping him, you know, by propping him up this way.
	And you're going to get stuck in a relationship that's going to be almost impossible to get out of because he's never going to be in a place where you feel he's strong enough to handle a breakup, which means you kind of be chained there like some woman in diaphanous gowns chained to the bedpost of a sultan or something.
	Like you're just not going to be able to make free choices about this relationship.
	That's my question is, well, first of all, not much mention of a dad.
	And secondly, where was your mom and any kind of remotely wise feedback in this kind of situation?
	She did protest the relationship for a little while.
	My mom is not, she always claims to be a very strong, independent, not that she was when she was younger, but you know, when she was married to my dad, I do have a dad.
	We had a very rough patch when I was younger.
	I would say that I've probably done more... Sorry, you said you had a very rough patch and I just missed that part.
	Yes, my dad.
	I do apologize.
	When they did get a divorce... No, no, no, sorry, I just said it was language.
	You said we had a very rough patch in our agenda or something like that and I just missed that.
	Oh, yeah, we had a very rough patch in our relationship, my father and I. Between probably the age of eight and I would say Right around when I graduated high school Okay, so that's a long time.
	It is a very long time Since then I have done more Self-understanding and My father and I have both done that together we have he has apologized and it's not a a Fake apology.
	We have sat down.
	I went to a therapist when I was younger.
	I haven't gotten since.
	What age?
	I was very young, actually between 3 and 13.
	Wait, you went to a therapist for 10 years between 3 and 13?
	No, not straight.
	In the beginning, my parents made me go when they first got a divorce.
	Because they thought that I would feel that it was my fault.
	Now, I know everyone says that this isn't normal, but I can remember when my parents left.
	I know I was young, and my parents tell me that there's no way I can remember, but I can.
	I can remember it like it happened yesterday.
	You'd be shocked at what kids can remember.
	My first memory, my daughter was just asking me about this.
	My first memory is very vivid and it's before I could walk.
	So probably 11, 12 months.
	So you can remember, but sorry, go ahead.
	I'm so happy you said that because everyone tells me I'm crazy, but I can remember things from my very early childhood when I was very, very little.
	Um, but they, they tell me I can't remember.
	Well, my parents, I knew it wasn't my fault.
	I remember what happened.
	My, my dad got a new girlfriend.
	Uh, my dad liked, he went to the strip club.
	And found himself a new girlfriend.
	Wait, literally went to the strip club?
	Yes, literally went and got himself a very low quality woman who had two children and married her after divorcing my mom.
	I remember it happening.
	My mom and dad had a business together.
	My mom went into work and my dad had hired her as the secretary.
	Wait, your dad hired the stripper as the secretary?
	Yes.
	And tried to say they weren't in a relationship.
	And I can remember this because I can, you know, your parents don't think you're going to remember it.
	So they, the fights happened in front of me, you know, and my baby sister, I have a baby sister.
	Oh, I have a little sister.
	She was a baby at the time.
	Um, so these fights did happen in front of me.
	My sister doesn't remember them, but I, I definitely do.
	Um, and I remember my mom and, Going to work and she took us with her.
	It was family business, you know, we were always, I was always with my mom when I was a kid.
	So we went to work together and, uh, I was playing with, uh, office Max, our kitty.
	And, uh, I remember my mom asking the woman who she was.
	And, um, I remember very rapidly the discovery.
	I remember the employees faces that were sitting around, um, And I remember the fight, uh, and it was a physical fight.
	I remember my, my mom, I was never been in a physical fight in her life besides this one.
	Um, and I remember us leaving.
	I remember us taking the cat.
	I remember my dad coming home.
	Um, he, they, he never hit my mother, but there was, uh, this was the very, a very big verbal fight.
	Um, my dad, we had a, we, we had a lot back then because my, my parents at that time in my life, They had a lot.
	They had more than needed.
	And we had this big, beautiful chandelier in our kitchen and a big, beautiful glass table.
	And it ran the whole length of the kitchen.
	My dad picked up the table and threw it, and it just shattered.
	And that was the day that my dad moved out.
	So I do remember it.
	And I knew it wasn't my fault.
	And my parents insisted I go to therapy because I was going to think that it was something that I had done.
	And I knew, even as a very little child, that it wasn't my fault.
	I could understand that.
	And I told the therapist that.
	So that didn't last very long.
	That therapy, I went, I think, two or three sessions.
	And the therapist didn't feel it was necessary for me to return.
	The next time I went was when I started.
	I just want to point out that your parents are fighting like two bald cats in a bag rolling down a hill, your dad smashing tables and hooking up with a stripper with two kids.
	Yes.
	But you're the one who goes to therapy.
	Yeah.
	That's highly responsible.
	And I can remember this vividly.
	I can remember a lot.
	They gave me Barbie dolls and they asked me to And the little one and the two adults.
	And they asked me to play out what a life scenario is like.
	And I remember looking at the therapist and saying, well, my life used to be mom and dad and me and my baby sister.
	And it was good.
	And mom and dad worked together.
	And then I said, my dad found someone else and is starting a new family.
	And it's going to be just me and my mom and my sister now.
	And the therapist looked at me like I was crazy as a child.
	And that was it.
	And then after asking me multiple times if I felt it was my fault, and then reassuring me I did nothing wrong, I reassured the therapist, I know I've done nothing wrong.
	I am only a kid, and my dad is the one.
	I interpreted it as if my dad was the one that had done something wrong at that time.
	Well, at least they listen to you.
	I mean, I remember when I was in boarding school, I had to write a letter to my father every week.
	I'd get a haircut and then I'd write a letter Saturday afternoons or Saturday mornings, I think it was, to my father.
	I would write to him, dear, first name.
	And the school, which would review the letters, would get mad at me and say, no, he's your father.
	And I said, no, he's my ex-father.
	Right?
	He's my mother's ex-husband and he's my ex-father.
	Because he's literally on the other side of the world.
	I never see him.
	So he moved out from my mother, which makes him her ex-husband.
	And he moved out from parenting me, moved to the other side of the world, which means he's my ex-father.
	And people were just really mad at me about this.
	Like I was saying something kind of incorrect.
	And I never, I mean, yeah, okay, I complied.
	I mean, they had a cane, so what am I going to do?
	Stand on principle for this kind of stuff?
	But yeah, I remember even into my, when I was 10 or 11, referring to somebody said, you know, and I was referring to my ex-father and people were just like, no, he's your dad.
	And I'm like, no, because a dad is someone who, parents, a dad is someone who's there, who instructs you, who gives you feedback, who plays with you.
	And you know, like, I never, I never see the guy.
	So I mean I would see him maybe once a year if he was around in Ireland or I went out to Africa when I was 6 and then I think when I was 15 or 16 again.
	But you know there was no Skype, there was no long distance phone calls, there was nothing really.
	I mean he would write me letters, he did write a lot of letters but they were very very hard to read when I was a kid.
	Just because handwriting and all but I remember this tweed tweed vu a second fault that was the the I guess it was Afrikaans for the letters that would come from from Africa but yeah it's just you know kids will just say truth you know and it's funny how parents are like well you you think this is your fault it's like nope And people are like, no, he's your father.
	It's like, no.
	I mean, he has similar impact to me as a sperm donor.
	And you wouldn't call a sperm donor a father, right?
	So anyway, it's just kids will say stuff that is honest and adults are like, that's shocking.
	And it's like, it's just shocking because the Overton window has shifted from honesty because you're an adult now.
	Exactly.
	Alright, so then you would go again intermittently until you were 13?
	Yes, they made me go again.
	I had a very hard time with when I started kindergarten, and it was at a Catholic kindergarten, so it was very small.
	It was half a day.
	It was all women that ran it.
	Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it wasn't necessarily I guess what most people fear when they send their kids to Catholic schools anymore.
	But my mom went to drop me off and I got so upset that I was being left there that I screamed and kicked and essentially to the point of blacking out until my mother took me back home.
	And it was every time, even after they sent me to therapy for that, Which, I don't know why they send me so much therapy.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but your father got what he wanted by kicking and screaming and throwing tables, right?
	Correct!
	So, I mean, this is what kids learn when they see this kind of stuff.
	Right.
	Like, Dad wants to move out, they're having a big fight, Dad gets his way by smashing a table.
	Right, and I remember being terrified.
	So, if you want to get your way, what do you do?
	You do what Dad does, because that's what you do.
	You do what works.
	When you're a kid, you see what works and you do that.
	Right.
	And I remember a lot of it, too, was fear.
	I was scared.
	Very, very scared to go to kindergarten.
	I remember the fear.
	I remember my heart racing.
	I don't know why I was so terrified to be there, but I felt like I was being permanently abandoned.
	I'm sure that has something to do with my dad.
	But it was one of the scariest moments of my life, even to this day.
	No, I think that's worth pausing on.
	What was your relationship with your dad like after he moved out?
	Did he move straight in with the stripper?
	Yeah, he went and got an apartment.
	He let our house go, so we ended up moving into an apartment.
	We were then very poor after that.
	He moved into an apartment in one of the worst areas, because that's where she was from.
	I can remember this too.
	Even being a child, my dad moved into the apartment with her.
	She moved in with him.
	She was still married at the time.
	She was married.
	A married stripper, if you can imagine that.
	And had two children.
	And they were all three living together at that time.
	So the ex-husband to be was sleeping on the couch.
	And, yeah.
	Now, my mom was... I'm sure that there's probably something that caused him to leave.
	I try to figure it out sometimes.
	My mom was very beautiful.
	I would say she was definitely much more beautiful than the stripper.
	My mom was a tent when she was young and took very good care of herself.
	Our house was always clean.
	Dinner was always cooked when my dad got home.
	My mom would leave work three hours earlier than he did, come home, clean the house, cook dinner, do laundry, take care of the kids.
	You know, I cooked dinner with my mom even at a young age, and it is one of my better memories of being a kid.
	We would get the dinner table set and ready to go, come to find out my dad was also leaving work an hour early and heading somewhere else that he shouldn't have been before he would come home to us.
	But anyways, after that, he moved in with the stripper.
	He would bring us over there to meet her, which was awful.
	And I think once or twice we did that.
	Until they eventually moved into a larger house with her two children and her and he got engaged.
	They ended up getting married.
	Um, my relationship with him, I would go over there every other weekend as most divorced families do.
	Um, and my dad worked a lot.
	Consequently, I work a lot.
	Um, and, uh, it is a miserable thing, but he, uh, he worked a lot.
	We, he would come and pick us up.
	And he would take us over to his house and he would leave us there with her and her kids.
	And it was a torturous experience.
	And that went on from... So after my parents got divorced, I didn't spend the weekends with my dad till I was about five.
	There was a gap there where his dating life was more important, I suppose, than seeing his children.
	They were going through court for custody and child support and all of that.
	They lost their business because He can't run a business that the two of them mentally ran when you're no longer married.
	So they lost their business.
	I didn't see him for probably two years in the passing.
	At five, I was going over there every other weekend, sometimes once a month.
	When we would go over there, he would leave us with her while he would go to work.
	And you said that was torturous.
	What was torturous about it?
	Um, her children were very violent.
	Um, she was very hateful.
	Um, I was a very beautiful child.
	I looked like my mom.
	Um, I look just like my mom.
	I still look just like my mom.
	Um, and my dad had tried to, after fighting and leaving and being in that situation where he was in the apartment with her.
	I believe tried to come back with my mom to apologize, and at that point my mom was like, absolutely not.
	Wait, wait, tried to come back to repair the relationship with your mom or just to have an apology and go back to the stripper?
	Yes.
	No, maybe, but no, from what I understand is he tried hard to make amends and come back to my mom, but my mom didn't want to do that for us, supposedly.
	She thought that it would just happen again and it would be a Rollercoaster ride for the kids.
	Can I just, I'm sorry, because I know you've talked to your dad since this, Tiffany, I mean... Yeah.
	There's a fall from grace, right?
	But this, I mean, this is more than a fall from... This is almost Luciferian, if that makes any sense.
	Right.
	It gets worse.
	No, no, but just, do you know, do you have any idea, I mean, you've talked to your dad since this, right?
	Do you have any idea why he would trade His hardworking, intelligent, entrepreneurial, hot tan of a wife for some skeevy stripper with a husband sleeping on the couch and two violent kids and destroy his business and destroy his income and destroy his relationship.
	Like what, what, what the hell was behind this decision?
	Has he attempted to explicate this at all with you?
	When he does, when we do talk about it, when he starts apologizing, and he's never told me the reason he did it.
	That hasn't happened.
	He will tell me how regretful it is.
	He cries.
	I mean, he breaks down in violent tears and will tell us that it was the worst thing he's ever done in his life.
	If he could go back, he wouldn't do it.
	But it's the why that counts, because the fact that he's got regret doesn't help you avoid the next situation.
	Right.
	Right, so if someone gets mauled by a lion, them crying about how badly they got mauled and how painful it is, I mean, I have sympathy, but the most important thing is to say, well, you know, I saw these footprints and I thought that they were some other thing and then I heard a crack in the tall grass and I didn't run and, you know, like, something.
	Something that can help you prevent a recurrence because it's hard to avoid being paranoid unless you know the causes of the disasters that happen.
	So the fact that people are sad about those disasters, I sympathize and I care, but what really matters is here's the steps that led me to this so that you can help avoid anything like this in the future.
	The only thing he has said to me, now my parents got married when they were Very young, which doesn't matter in my opinion.
	Um, being very young and running businesses when I was very young, you can be intelligent when you're 20.
	Um, they got married young.
	Um, they were married for seven years before they had me.
	So it's not like it was a rushed relationship.
	Um, they tried very hard to have me.
	They almost, it took them years to make me.
	And then me and my mom both almost died the day I was born.
	So it almost ended very, very quickly, too.
	And my dad will go into these long stories, even to this day, these long stories of how it was terrifying and he thought he was going to lose the love of his life, which he later left anyways, and lose his child.
	And he did for some time.
	We were both pronounced dead for a good amount of time.
	And he will say how it was terrifying and the worst day of his life.
	But he'll say that and then he'll turn around and look what he's done with his life.
	He's on his third marriage.
	There's no stability in relationships in his life besides romantic relationships.
	I would say we are at a comfortable level, though I've never forgiven him for that time period.
	But does he have any kind of addiction or dysfunction?
	He does, yes.
	And what's that?
	Well, just cigarettes and alcohol.
	And two of his siblings have actually died from addiction.
	So it is something that runs in he did have a bad childhood.
	And when I say bad, I mean, it was bad.
	Um, so he didn't have stability when he was a child, neither did my mother.
	Uh, I'm sure that's part of why they were attracted to one another.
	Um, my dad came from a, uh, abusive household.
	His dad worked all the time.
	He was left with his mother who did stay home to raise the children, but she was very abusive to them.
	Uh, torturous, not just.
	Abusive she would torture them.
	Um, like, like, like, do you know how, how, how would the, I do know how, um, there are four children.
	There's one girl and two, sorry, two girls and, uh, two boys.
	And my dad is somewhere in the middle.
	I don't know exactly where, um, either second or from the oldest or second from the bottom.
	Um, and he has a little brother, uh, and him were very close, but, uh, his little, she would leave them in, uh, their diapers for days.
	And just let them be dirty.
	She wouldn't let them take baths.
	It was more of a cleanliness thing.
	The littlest boy, my uncle, was deaf in one ear.
	and as a teenager, she was very...
	They went to church and she would...
	Oh, my beautiful children...
	Oh, you know, they would obviously shower before they went to church, I'm sure.
	But so nobody really realized what was going on at home.
	You know, he can't hear, we need to raise money so he can get hearing aids.
	Um, and everyone's excited, you know, everybody, he's, he's going to be able to hear better.
	Um, so they raise all the money and then she spends it.
	So she left her son without, uh, some of his hearing.
	I think he was 70% deaf for, Most of his life, until my dad went and got a job and bought them for his younger brother.
	But she wouldn't clean, let them clean themselves.
	She wouldn't brush their hair, the girls.
	She wouldn't let them get haircuts.
	They never had clean clothes.
	She wouldn't do laundry.
	The house was a mess.
	And the father was always at work and he didn't do anything about it until he divorced her when I believe my dad was a teenager.
	So his father, your grandfather on your father's side, would work all the time and leave his children with an abusive woman and then you would go to your dad's and he would leave his children with an abusive woman.
	Yes.
	It's the same pattern, right?
	Yes.
	And the mother too, this is an important distinction just for people to bookmark.
	I'll just be brief on this, Tiffany, but there's a difference between selfishness and sadism.
	And it sounds like your father's mother, there was certainly some neglect, but it's one thing to say, I'm not going to do laundry.
	It's another thing to prevent the children from doing laundry.
	It's one thing to say, I'm not going to pay for your haircut.
	It's another thing to say, you can't have a haircut.
	And the one is sort of selfish neglect.
	And the other is active sadism.
	Which is taking pleasure in destroying the hope, happiness, and primarily sexual market value in the future of your children by sending them to school as unattractive as humanly possible.
	And that is a very big moral differentiator.
	Now, I believe that people can come back from neglect, like they can come back from not taking care of their kids.
	Because that's cruel, but it's passive.
	And the purpose is not cruelty, the purpose is selfishness.
	It's not that you want to hurt your children, it's just that their needs don't really matter to you.
	But if you have children and then you actively work to hurt them in a sort of sadistic fashion, well, I don't think there's any coming back from that.
	I mean, I just, I don't think, at least I've never seen it.
	No, she's currently dying alone.
	She's had both of her legs cut off due to diabetes.
	His mother.
	She is in a nursing home and she is alone.
	And nobody goes and visits her.
	Nobody cares to go and visit her.
	I haven't seen her my whole life except for maybe once or twice.
	Yeah, it's funny because it is a terribly sad situation when people get older and they're helpless to be able to hurt you, then of course they play the pity card and all that, that's sort of inevitable.
	It is very sad, and you know, part of me is like, oh we should give these people comfort, and another part of me is like...
	No.
	No, I mean, you take what you want and you have to pay for it.
	I mean, if you take your children's happiness, you know, it's like the moms who dump their kids in daycares and then complain when they get older and their kids put them in an old age home.
	It's like, what are you talking about?
	I mean, you're getting what you earned.
	You take what you want and you pay for it.
	That's life.
	And we can pretend that that's not the case.
	But it is.
	And I also think that that kind of cruelty, if you work too hard to assuage it emotionally, then you're actually almost encouraging other people to do the same thing.
	Because they're like, hey, that woman got away with it.
	Her family still visits her and brings her cake and reads to her.
	And you know, so I guess I can be a complete horror show of a parent.
	And you know, you kind of need those examples.
	And as a society, we don't like those examples anymore, because we've become all feels-based, which means we're open to rank manipulation from the lowest ranked people in the universe.
	But those people need to exist as guideposts for other people in order to make better decisions.
	Yes.
	And, you know, in all fairness, she tortured her children knowingly.
	And now she is in a nursing home and she's still probably being taken better care of than she did her own children.
	Yeah, true.
	Yeah, it is true.
	Alright, so your dad had that, and was his mother attractive when she was younger?
	No.
	Okay.
	Your father must be very good-looking.
	He's not.
	He's not?
	He's not.
	I suppose when he was younger, my mom claims she thinks he was good looking.
	When I look at pictures, I'm like, Mom, he was a troll!
	Oh, not just neutral, but like... Compared to my mom, he was a 5, and my mom was definitely a 10.
	My mom was 120 pounds the day that I was born, and very well put together.
	Long legs, Curvy and not curvy in the new term curvy, curvy in the old term curvy.
	Shaped like an hourglass.
	Right, more Marilyn Monroe, a little bit less Lena Dunne.
	Yeah, yeah, yes.
	Yeah, very much so.
	A little less Marilyn Monroe, too, because she was pretty skinny.
	But yeah, no, I definitely... My mom was the better looking of the two.
	Do you know why your mom got together with your dad?
	Um, I do.
	And, uh, I don't know the heavy details.
	Um, my family is Italian and without getting into too many details, there are some things that the older Italians don't necessarily talk about.
	Uh, but her dad was violent.
	Um, they had six children and my mom is the baby.
	Uh, her oldest sister is 20 years older than her.
	So there's quite a gap.
	and the siblings.
	My mom lost her mother very, very young, uh, at 20, I believe 2021, somewhere in there.
	And her father, right after that, um, the dad, uh, was violent with the kids and with her mother.
	And, um, when my mom and dad were dating, it was, they hadn't been dating for very long.
	And my, my mother's father had an alcohol problem.
	And right after, uh, his wife died, Well, she had beat her the whole time that they'd been together.
	And it was assumed that when she got sick and when she got cancer that that may have been what killed her.
	Wait, what killed her?
	Do you mean the cancer or the beatings?
	The beatings.
	Oh, the beatings provoked this stress, cortisol, fight or flight, and wears down her system.
	Yeah, and internal bleeding, I would suppose, from Well, you know, when you start to have those treatments and stuff for cancer, your body is a lot weaker.
	Wait, he beat her when she was taking chemo?
	Yeah.
	Oh my god.
	Yeah.
	My mom does not talk about it and will not talk about it.
	She just breaks down in tears.
	Holy, what pit of hell did you... Oh my god.
	Yeah, my mom, she has fond memories of her siblings.
	I mean, they lived on a farm.
	They were always out.
	You know, with the cows and the pigs and they had a good time out there.
	No, Tiffany, don't jerk me from beating the cancer victim to pleasant memories with cows.
	Like that's, that's too much of a roller coaster for me.
	I can't.
	Well, those are the only two things that she's ever talked about.
	So those are, that would be my only two.
	Uh, I do.
	And then my dad will tell me the story of the day that they moved in together, which was my dad had just, uh, bought, started, um, to buy a house and he had went to pick my mom up I'm sorry.
	He had picked my mom up for a date.
	And then when he went to drop her off that evening, uh, her dad was waiting there with a gun because they were late.
	And so my dad took her home and just never, that was it.
	That was the end of it.
	Now that probably was a good thing because my dad was probably a little less, uh, of a bad decision than her dad.
	Um, so they moved in together and then they got married about a year later.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	So I don't really, as far as grandparents, I never met my mother's grandparents because I was long, or my mother's parents, I was long after that.
	I did meet my dad's father and his new wife.
	They just recently passed away.
	Okay, well I appreciate that.
	That certainly gives me some Context.
	And let's move to your 20s, if that's all right.
	Sure.
	Like I said, I'm going to start right after high school, because I think that's probably a little bit more accurate.
	So I dated the guy I was with up until 21.
	So towards the end of that relationship, I worked a lot.
	He worked very little.
	It was hard to get him to go to work.
	It was hard to get him.
	He would call off a lot.
	He was very lazy.
	Was he smoking marijuana?
	No, no.
	Not drinking, not smoking marijuana.
	He had no addictions, believe it or not.
	And I think it's because he watched his parents die from them.
	Right, right, okay.
	Right.
	Well, he was depressed, I assume, right?
	I mean, in that way.
	He was.
	He was very depressed.
	He always tried to talk me into having kids.
	And I did not, he had a genetic disorder that was very much able to pass on to the children.
	And so I think that was when I first decided I didn't want to have kids and kind of just burned it into my brain because I didn't have the heart to bring a kid into the world that could potentially have what he had.
	It was a physical deformity, but it also affected him in other ways.
	So, consequently, And I've never thought about it to this point.
	Uh, he was probably a five and I'm probably somewhere up at least at that time was probably a nine or a 10.
	So I kind of did the same thing my mom did, but, um, he, he, he stayed home.
	He didn't do a whole lot.
	I definitely was out of his league, uh, not only on an intelligence, uh, level, but on a looks level.
	Um, but he was always trying to push me to have children.
	Didn't want to have kids.
	Um, mostly for that reason, like I said, um, I would go to work.
	And I would come home and he was just laying around.
	And it was, you know, I'd come home, I'd cook dinner, I'd do laundry, I'd clean the house, I'd do all the stuff that I needed to do and sometimes go to a second or even at one point third job to pay for everything while he wasn't doing much.
	Um, and I caught him talking to women on the internet and, uh, I don't know how I didn't leave at that point.
	I think it was because this was right around, 18, 19.
	So, uh, it was maybe two years after his mom had died.
	I still felt that pressure and that guilt from that deathbed.
	You know, it was burned in my brain at that point still.
	And I felt too guilty to leave.
	We talked it over.
	I felt like I could trust him after that.
	Um, no, but you, I mean, you weren't, you weren't helping him, right?
	You were enabling his right slide away from the world, right?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And I mean, the things that he was, When I say talking to women on the internet, I don't just mean chatting.
	This is when dating websites and stuff were starting to become a thing.
	There was a potential that he could have cheated if he wanted to.
	Maybe not if they met him, but, you know, there was a potential there.
	And then...
	And did you have anyone...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Did you have anyone at this phase in your life, Tiffany, saying...
	What are you doing?
	What are you doing?
	Did you have any other guys around saying, like, why are you dating this guy?
	Come on.
	I mean, like, let's up your game a little here.
	I had one right before I graduated high school.
	And to some extent, I regret not making that decision.
	But to the other extent, I'm very happy the relationship I'm in now.
	And I think I wouldn't trade it, let's say that much.
	But towards the end of high school, my best friend, who had been my best friend, like I said, I've always been friends with guys.
	I just, I like to go fishing.
	I like to go boating.
	I like to ride four wheelers.
	I like to do the things that guys like to do.
	I like to be adventurous and I definitely don't watch television.
	I'm not into any of the other stuff that it seems like a lot of girls my age were into.
	Pop music and stuff like that just wasn't my thing.
	So my best friend and I, Right towards the end of high school, he said, what are you doing?
	He's like, you can do so much better than this.
	He says to me, I'm sorry, I don't mean to say like so many times.
	Oh, you've seen the comments on the other videos?
	Actually, I don't read the comments because I work so much, I just listen.
	He had expressed to me, he said, you can do so much better.
	He goes, you're smart, you're beautiful, you take good care of yourself.
	Why don't you leave him?
	He goes, you can be with somebody.
	You can be with me.
	He's like, why don't we get together?
	And I'm like, you know, we're such great friends.
	And I hate that I did this to this poor guy.
	We're such great friends.
	I don't want to ruin it.
	I feel like if we get in a relationship that it'll end and then we won't be able to go fishing anymore.
	We won't be able to go out on the boat.
	We won't be able to go for walks.
	We won't be able to ride bikes.
	We won't be able to do all the stuff that we do together if it goes sour.
	I think I broke his heart.
	And I don't even think that.
	But you were also training him to not be friends with the girl, right?
	So because the idea is you're supposed to like each other and then get together, right?
	So you liked him.
	You were friends.
	So you also trained him.
	And I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
	It's just the inevitable consequence, right?
	You also trained him that – I mean because this is the nice guy's lament, right?
	The nice guy's lament is, well, why wouldn't she be with me?
	Like, she likes me, we share the same values, I'm attractive, and she's dating some loser, some schlub, some schlob, or whatever, right?
	And so this is how women train men to not be nice to them, right?
	Because she's saying, well, you know, she's with some guy who's lazy, who's ugly, got a genetic disorder, which is not his fault, but it's important if you want to have kids.
	I don't know if you had told him, did you tell him at this point that the guy was flirting with other women on the internet?
	Oh, this was before that.
	This was right at the end of high school.
	He's the only person that's ever told me that it was a bad idea.
	Right, right.
	So yeah, you're basically training him that if you're friends with a woman, then it's not going to work out.
	So you don't want to be nice to a woman, because then she'll put you in the friend zone.
	And that is, you should, if you still know him, you should, I don't know if you've ever contacted him to apologize.
	Oh, we're still friends.
	Oh, okay, good, good.
	Did he end up in a good relationship?
	Yes, he's getting married.
	They did have a kid before they got married, but it is their child.
	They've been together for five years now.
	So he's very, very happy.
	I'm friends with her and friends with him.
	So we all get along.
	We all still like the same stuff.
	It's a good relationship.
	Good.
	All right.
	And she's very intelligent, too.
	I mean, he did very well for himself.
	All right.
	So then how long did it take for you to get out of Zombie Boy's rotting arm embrace?
	This is a good one.
	So, uh, at the point where I turned 21-ish, uh, right around the time that I met, uh, my boyfriend now, um, he, my, my boyfriend at home was becoming, uh, more distant.
	And I kind of realized something was wrong, but I was just, I think subconsciously I'm like, just let it happen.
	Just let him leave, let him leave on his own.
	It'll be easy.
	Uh, I probably didn't express that out loud, but I think I was kind of letting that happen.
	That's at least what I can kind of decide at this point now that I look back.
	And he had asked me to marry him and I said, no.
	And I said, we're not ready.
	You know, we're 21 years old, 22 years old.
	I don't want to get married.
	Really, I just didn't want to get married, but I did use the excuse that it was our age.
	And he's like, well, why don't we plan the wedding and we'll just get married later?
	We'll start paying for it now so that We'll start paying for it.
	Really?
	Couchboy is going to contribute quite a bit there, right?
	Correct.
	So, one of my friends, probably, I wouldn't call her a friend, but like I said, I didn't have a whole lot of girlfriends.
	She was a year younger than me and she was helping me plan for a wedding, I suppose you would say, along with my little sister, which You know, I didn't necessarily confide in my sister as much as I should have, because I do believe if I had told her as much as what was going on, that she would have told me to get the hell out of there.
	But she was also, the girl, not my sister, the girl that I was friends with, also worked with him.
	And she was also quite overweight.
	She resembled his mother quite a bit.
	The two of them would supposedly talk about planning my wedding that I hadn't agreed to at this point and he ended up sleeping with her.
	So, the way I found out was I was at work, because I was always at work, I was at work and I had found out that the girl had slept with her boss.
	Sorry, but you were also at work because you didn't want to be at home, right?
	I mean, nothing drives ambition like a bad relationship, right?
	Very, very true.
	I could not wait to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to go work in a factory for 12 hours.
	And then I could not wait to come home, change my clothes, and go to work until midnight, come home and sleep for 5 hours.
	You know what I mean?
	Home wasn't the thing I wanted to be, which is probably why he cheated.
	I mean, I know that.
	Um, I think I was pushing that to happen.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Come on.
	I mean, it's more complicated than that.
	I don't want to get into a big thing here, but just saying, well, he cheated because I was at work.
	It's like, well, you were at work because he was a loser.
	Right?
	So it's, it's, there's not one side or the other, right?
	Correct.
	I don't necessarily think I minded that he cheated.
	I think I did.
	It gave you a good excuse to get out, right?
	It did.
	And, and the way I found out is I confronted the girl because I found out she was actually sleeping with her boss as well.
	She was a lovely woman.
	And I said, you know, he's married.
	You shouldn't do this.
	This is going to break up a marriage.
	And whether or not their relationship's good, it's not your place to jump in.
	You know, and he's not divorced.
	They haven't broken up.
	He has five children.
	You cannot do this.
	And she said to me, well, I'm sleeping with your boyfriend, too.
	And I lost my mind for 30 minutes, and then I was fine.
	And I was like, wow, I'm going to go home.
	And the Band-Aid comes off.
	It did!
	The very next day when he went to work, I packed the few things that he paid for, which was one tote full of stuff, and his Xbox, because he loves video games, which I had paid for, but I could care less.
	I'm not into that stuff.
	And I put it all in the tote.
	I put it on the front porch.
	I changed the locks, and I told him to leave.
	And that was it.
	And he begged me and begged me and begged me to forgive him for weeks.
	And, you know, he came over.
	Mind you, this is the only person I've ever been with.
	Okay.
	This is the only person I've ever had intercourse with or a relationship with at all.
	So, um, to even think if he was decent besides that, which I don't think anyone who cheats as a decent human being, um, to even think it could work out, it couldn't because it would be, and I would, the only reason I think that morally I felt okay in that relationship is because we had only been with each other.
	So I think that that really, it, That was the thing I told him.
	It'll never work out.
	Never.
	He goes, well, you can go and sleep with somebody and come back.
	I'm like, no.
	This is not how things work.
	Well, I robbed banks so you can too.
	Right.
	No, that's not how this is going to work.
	Thanks, but no.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah.
	I said, please leave.
	So he went and he moved in with his aunt.
	He came back a few weeks later.
	He bought me a giant ring, which he financed.
	With very little income, it's amazing the way credit cards companies will give young people credit cards.
	He bought me a giant ring, probably two carats, and I gave it back to him.
	I said, I can't even take this from you.
	I don't want it.
	So it wasn't a material thing.
	He couldn't afford it, but there isn't anything he could have done that could have gotten me to stay, and I was thankful to be out.
	Well, you wanted to leave for a while.
	All right, so let's move on to the next guy.
	Okay.
	Sorry, that sounds bad, like you're a conveyor belt or something, but this is the relationship that we're talking about.
	Right.
	Definitely not a conveyor belt.
	I have been with two people.
	If I could take it back, I would have been one.
	Um, so, uh, we met, we got along immediately.
	Um, it was almost, and you know, I listened to your calls all the time.
	So, uh, I know that physical attraction has a lot to do with interaction in the beginning.
	Um, we are both physically attractive, uh, even still, even You know, eight years later.
	I know that we were probably physically attracted to each other at first.
	There was kind of like that, boom, immediately we couldn't stay away from each other.
	Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that.
	I hope people, like, understand the complexity of this.
	I've never said that physical attraction is a bad thing.
	And it's a wonderful thing.
	It just ain't the only thing.
	You know, dessert is great, but you can't live on it.
	I mean, we were like magnets.
	I mean, from the moment we met, we were inseparable.
	I mean, we could talk to each other.
	So, obviously, Lux played a huge part in it.
	He's also extremely intelligent.
	He's an electrical engineer.
	And so he knows how to make things work.
	I know how to make things work.
	Our brains are both high functioning.
	He's an electrical engineer.
	He knows how to make things work.
	There was great electricity, because you know, if he'd been a chemical engineer, there would have been great chemistry.
	Anyway, sorry, I just had to get those dad jokes out of my head.
	No, so okay, so we, we, A, we're probably physically attracted to each other.
	The day we met, Within probably a couple weeks, we could talk to each other for hours at work.
	I mean, we could talk about anything.
	And I knew more about him before we actually started dating than I think I knew about the guy I had been with the whole time I had been with him.
	I mean, I knew his entire... I knew all about his family, his aunts and uncles.
	I knew about who he cared about.
	I knew about his godkids.
	I knew about his best friends.
	I knew the things he liked to do.
	And, you know, those were the things we talked about before we were in a relationship because, like I said, I made sure we didn't get romantic.
	Even though there was a lot of, like you said, electricity there, we were very pulled towards each other.
	But once, you know, we were both in relationships that were not good.
	So they both ended around the same time.
	And I'd say we were still Just friends for about three to four months after that, which I know after coming out of a long relationship probably is a bad idea.
	How long was the relationship?
	For me?
	For him.
	Sorry, so this was the relationship that you were coming out of the guy who cheated on you and he was coming out of some other relationship.
	Right.
	Oh gosh, I'm sorry about that.
	But I'm of sort of two minds about this, and I don't have any data.
	I'm just sort of telling you what I think, so don't take any of this as gospel.
	Well, nothing I say should be taken as gospel, of course.
	But to me, if you've emotionally disconnected from a relationship, it kind of counts in terms of the breakup time.
	Right, so if you're fully in love with someone and then they just leave you and you don't know what happened and so on, then a couple of months is too short.
	However, if you've been in a relationship that's been on the skids, it's been on the outs, and you've kind of been looking for months or maybe longer to sort of how to gracefully end it, that kind of is part of the breakup time frame in my experience.
	And again, that's not any kind of science.
	It's just something I've kind of noticed in people.
	Yeah, I would definitely say we were both, and like I said, both of us were respectfully trying not to be romantic with each other before we actually got out of those relationships.
	Listen, I know your dad cheated.
	I know your boyfriend cheated.
	I know his girlfriend cheated.
	We've established this beyond the shadow of a doubt that you guys were trying to be honorable.
	The more you repeat it, the more it sounds like you did something bad.
	One or two is good.
	Three, four, five, we're starting to look at, hey, did something right.
	Okay, so you're with this guy.
	I think I'm doing that because it was hard not to.
	Because like I said, we got along well.
	And even after, even when I would say we started dating, we actually dated.
	It wasn't like a jump into bed with each other.
	So we would go out on dates and we would talk.
	That's the thing too, is that people don't understand this, that if you really enjoy the person's company, Not having sex isn't really that hard.
	Now, if you're only with the person for physical attraction, you're kind of going to grit your teeth through making small talk and being bored by, you know, their stories of their dogs or whatever, then, you know, it's kind of tough to not have sex.
	And one of the reasons people jump into bed is because they don't like each other that much and they want to find something positive in the relationship and therefore, you know, fluid release is the way to go.
	And so, yeah, it's not hard to hold off if you really enjoy each other's company.
	We actually had a hard time finding when the right time was, because it was, you almost had to interrupt conversations to do it.
	And I will say that the first time we did, it was just talk, talk, talk, talk, real quick, talk, talk, talk.
	And that wasn't the highlight of the day.
	The highlight of the day was the time we spent together.
	Put your pants back down, I've not finished my story.
	Exactly.
	You know, and it was great.
	And, you know, afterwards, you know, that night I was probably thinking about it for a while.
	But for the most part, I couldn't wait to see him again.
	It had nothing to do with All right, so let's move to you are pursuing higher education You're 30.
	I never did.
	I'm sorry.
	Sorry higher education.
	Ah, so Once I hooked up with him, he's very encouraging.
	We encourage each other To do the things that we want to do the things that would make us feel fulfilled in life But we had never you know, he he is 42 years old now.
	He was 34 when we officially hooked up first date whatever and We had, you know, he had never really wanted, he had wanted kids when he was younger, when he was with the girl I explained earlier in the conversation.
	He wanted to get married and have kids then.
	But now that he was getting older, and at 34 years old, he already had his house paid off.
	Big, beautiful house that he built.
	He had already had all, I mean, he was debt free.
	He had money in the bank.
	He could easily have retired probably in the next, probably at 40 to 45, if he wants to.
	Um, and so having kids kind of went away in his mind.
	So the fact that I at that point did not want them did not bother him.
	Um, so now we've gone this 10 years or sorry, eight years together and We've never talked about having them or really even kind of... We've almost said we didn't want them.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	What do you mean you've almost said?
	Because I just want to make sure I understand this.
	Because you were talking about how the fact that you didn't want kids was, I guess, kind of a relief to him if he didn't want kids.
	So you must have had some conversation, unless I'm missing something.
	We did.
	In the beginning we definitely did.
	Yeah, do you want kids?
	And you both said no.
	Yeah, correct.
	And it was fine.
	And then I would say probably about Five years in, so three years ago, I'd kind of said something along the lines, you know, I am 12 years younger than you.
	And I'm kind of nervous that I'm going to get old and I'm going to be alone if you go before I go.
	Well, because it's a double whammy.
	Not only is he older, but men generally, on average, as you know, die younger than women.
	Correct.
	And I said, you know, that is a fear of mine.
	But at that point, I'm like, I still don't know that I want to commit to raising a kid.
	But I have always been told my whole life, and this has played a huge part in this, you know, oh, you're so smart.
	You've got to become something.
	You've got to be somebody.
	You're too smart to not be independent.
	You should go do college.
	You should go work your way up in the corporate ladder.
	I mean, these are the things that you should do.
	In fact, I had one college recruit come to my school, and I remember him telling me very vividly, if you do not go to college or you do not work in the corporate atmosphere, you will not become anything.
	You will not become anything?
	That's almost like a curse, like you have disturbed the tomb of the feminist icons and they have laid a curse on you of non-existence and turning into the very ether itself and spiraling off the planet like the fart of a comet and it's like, wow, that's Kind of high-pressure sales techniques there, right?
	It was, and I did not go to his college.
	Yeah, no kidding.
	If you don't end up in debt!
	So, you know, for years I worked and worked and worked and worked, and I would never say I was unhappy.
	I did eventually start to realize that I was running other people's businesses for them and making them very rich.
	Meanwhile, I was working, you know, a lot of hours to make a little money.
	I am very artistic.
	I started a business, and it was supposed to be a side hobby business.
	It's for a little extra money here and there.
	I never really wanted, because I was told, to let a man take care of me.
	I wish I hadn't been told that, because the man I'm with now would very much have, if we started our relationship on those guidelines, taken care of me.
	I mean, he would have let me stay home.
	You know, let me take care of the house.
	We have a little farm.
	Let me take care of the farm.
	He would have let me do those things and been happy to take care of me and not minded whatsoever.
	However, I was always told I needed to be independent.
	I have to be independent.
	You have to take care of yourself.
	Well, that's partly because, of course, you get this from leftist indoctrination, because married women vote for smaller government, and the left wants a bigger government, and so they have to tell women to not trust men, to not get dependent, to not get married.
	Marriage is just a piece of paper, and you've got to be independent, and you don't need no man to take care of you, and you're strong.
	They just need to poison the well so that you don't get married.
	Because if you get married, you're not going to rely on the state, you're going to rely on your husband.
	And in fact, if you rely on your husband, you want a smaller government because he's taken money from your husband and your family to give it to women who don't have a husband, basically.
	And so it's so sad.
	It's really, really horrible just how much People, certain people are willing to destroy, you know, pair bonding, love, marriage, family, children, just in their thirst and lust for political power.
	But I mean, it's not shocking now that we sort of understand how this stuff works.
	But yeah, I mean, the marriage is poisoned, because married women want smaller government on average.
	I've witnessed many of the people I've graduated with.
	I At 30 years old, I'm a millennial, so the people I graduated with are millennials as well.
	They are not happy.
	They are the screeching blue-haired, you know, had one abortion, have one kid with no father, living on government welfare, miserable.
	You know, it's hard to watch.
	I'm thankful that I would never have let myself get in that trap.
	I never even thought about it.
	No, but you're not like, oh man, I can't afford college.
	It's like, thank goodness I couldn't afford college.
	Right, it is.
	One of the things I'm most thankful for in my life is that I did not go to college.
	Even though I badly wanted to be a cardiologist, what I do now, I make as much as I would have as a cardiologist.
	And I didn't go into debt for it.
	And I can do it from my home.
	Well, you would have ended up healing other people's hearts while having not one of your own.
	Right, and to think that those people, you know, cardiologists work, you know, sometimes 18-hour days.
	Granted, every once in a while I'll work an 18-hour day, because I do have a small farm and I do run my own company, but it's not all the time.
	No, and they get the joy of endless paperwork and lawsuits.
	Exactly, and no one's going to sue me for what I do.
	And here's another Kind of an insight to what we're talking about.
	People have become so enamored with their animals, with their pets, because no one has children.
	What I do, I have a animal-oriented, I custom make things for people's pets.
	Listen, if you want to, I mean, it's your choice, right?
	Depending on whether you want to give your website or not.
	I'm perfectly fine with it, but you know, you may get a couple of negative emails, but if you want to, you can or not.
	It's totally up to you, but I'm perfectly happy with it.
	Because most of my clients are the unhappy leftist.
	I'm going to avoid that.
	Because they are all the cat ladies and... They want little Lord Fauntleroy sailor suits for their Chihuahuas.
	Yes.
	Pretty much.
	I custom create dog hauler collars for people is what I do.
	And I sell hundreds of them weekly.
	I have a couple staff members that are elderly women that need a little extra money or young college girls that need a little extra money.
	It's like if you ever pick up those magazines at the supermarket checkout, you know, the celebrities and the stars.
	They're just like us, right?
	Right.
	I actually don't look at any of that stuff.
	Oh, you should, you should.
	No, you should.
	I mean, that's the zeitgeist.
	At least I find them interesting, but I'll flip through it.
	And then at the very back is like the little glossy pink tombstone of the West, which is, because I assume that this is mostly middle-aged or older women who buy these magazines, and in the back it's like, she's a realistic baby.
	She moves.
	Oh, I've seen them.
	She coos.
	And she comes nestled in a giant Fabergé egg with silk.
	And you can get her for four easy payments of $39.95.
	And it's like... Well, that's horrible.
	You know, that's horrible.
	You can buy an artificial baby to replace the children or the grandkids you never got a hold of.
	You know, people are like, oh my god, I can't believe men want sex bots!
	It's like, well, I can't believe it either, but... What about kid bots?
	What about substitute babies?
	I mean, that's really sad.
	Terrible.
	That you would want...
	A fake battery-operated baby Terminator because you just couldn't be bothered to get a good man and have kids.
	And I just think that's... because they're in every magazine.
	I mean, just the other day I was like, this one, this one, this one, this one, and it's like, oh my gosh, that is the saddest thing in the universe.
	You know, I never really looked at it that way.
	I've seen them because I actually bought one for my goddaughter because she really wanted a realistic baby doll.
	Oh, I got no problem with that for kids.
	Right.
	And I do because I was and I see people doing it to her because she's also very intelligent.
	She she's on track to be just like me.
	She's going to end up graduating from school early.
	She's she's very smart.
	But I try to be the opposite opinion because everyone's pushing her the same way they pushed me.
	And I'm like, it is okay.
	You know, I've always told you have to be somebody.
	But I was never told that somebody can be a mom and can be a wife.
	And that is being somebody.
	In fact, it's probably the most important somebody you could be.
	Well, I mean, there's a couple of things, obviously, as an intelligent woman.
	You're going to have intelligent kids which means they're going to be a huge amount of fun to raise.
	A huge amount of fun to raise.
	I literally, my daughter like every day jaw drops me with some thought or some insight or some connection or something which is blows my mind.
	And it is, you know, I'm a smart guy.
	And I find parenting to be beyond satisfying intellectually.
	And that's true, even when she was little people, oh, all they do is poop and pee.
	It's like, no, no, no, no, come on.
	I mean, seeing a brain unfurl itself, like you just took this tight little flag to the top of the greatest ship in a decent wind and unfurled it across the horizon, watching a brain unfurl, it's like watching Atlantis come up from the sea fully populated with Ewoks.
	I mean, it's an incredible thing, and I'm happy and very proud of the work I've done in philosophy and the world.
	But I'm not saying that that's deeper or richer or more intellectually stimulating or better than being a parent at all.
	To me, they're perfectly on equal terms.
	And if all I had were podcasts, if all I had were videos, that would be pretty sad for me.
	That would be pretty, you know, all of the achievements that you have that don't actually come to life, walk around and engage with you will eventually turn to ash in your hands.
	They will.
	And I remember reading, uh, it was a mystery writer from some years ago who had every single conceivable award on her shelf.
	And you know what she said when she was in her fifties, I think she said, I would take them all and trade them for one day with a baby.
	One day with a baby.
	We're bribed for infertility.
	We're bribed with approval and we're threatened with punishment.
	Oh, you quit your career to be a mom?
	You know, like you suddenly became addicted to fentanyl and are robbing homeless people?
	It's like, yeah, so sorry that I'm actually creating the life that you enjoy.
	I'm so sorry that I have decided to continue 3.5 billion years of hard-won gains in the evolutionary gladiatorial combat of ancient history.
	I'm so sad that I'm creating the kind of intelligent people that actually keep the civilization running that you rely on.
	You know, everyone's like sipping their latte saying, oh, having children, it's like blah blah blah.
	Well, who grew that?
	Goddamn coffee.
	Who shipped it?
	Who organized the supply chain?
	Who brought it to you?
	All human beings.
	And you're just not paying it forward.
	You're not participating.
	You're not creating life as you were created.
	You enjoy your life?
	Then pay it forward!
	It's so selfish to be in the recipient, if you can have kids, right?
	It's so selfish to be in the recipient of three and a half years of blood-soaked, ferocious evolution, to be the recipient of all the gifts that that has produced, and just say, well, no, that's it with me.
	I want to go pick grapes in Queensland and play video games.
	It's like, come on, dude.
	I mean, you've been given this great inheritance and you're frittering it away for the sake of transitory hedonistic pleasures or avoidances of what you imagine to be suffering.
	For what?
	I mean, for what?
	Your Xbox is going to be buried in the ground as recycling long before you're in the ground.
	Like, what's the point?
	You don't gain achievements from video games.
	I like video games.
	I don't have a problem with video games.
	But they don't give you achievements any more than porn gives you children.
	And it just, it really frustrates me how susceptible people are to this avoidance of the creation of life.
	That is the most powerful and beautiful thing in the known universe.
	And if you think that being a quality parent is something that someone from Guatemala can fulfill for minimum wage, You are insulting every decent, competent, hard-working, intelligent parent out there who's doing the right thing.
	It's an old thing I said years ago.
	I'll just touch it in here and we'll move on.
	You cannot be replaced by low-rent labor as a parent anymore.
	You know, let's say it's your 10th anniversary and your wife comes up and says, hey, where are we going?
	And you say, well, I'm busy.
	But what I've done is I've hired a guy from Mexico to go out for dinner with you.
	And she'd be like, what are you talking about?
	You hired some stranger from Mexico to go out to dinner with me on our 10th year wedding anniversary?
	What are you, some kind of monster?
	It's like, no, it's just what we did with our kid.
	We put her in daycare.
	We put her in kindergarten.
	We, you know, we had, we had strangers raise her.
	What's, what's the difference?
	He's got two legs, just like me.
	Two eyes, just like me.
	Teeth, just like me.
	He's pretty good with English.
	So what's the difference?
	She'd be like, I don't have any history.
	I have a relationship with this guy.
	And you're like, at my point it's exactly, exactly.
	And the difference is, you don't need to breastfeed this guy from Mexico, but you really need to breastfeed your kids.
	Anyway, so it's just, it's one of these sad things.
	I just really wanted to put that pitch in.
	And it's easier now to have kids than at any other time in human history.
	I mean, imagine having kids without antibiotics, without air conditioning, without hospitals, without good healthcare, without relatively pain-free dentistry.
	Like, come on, it's way easier.
	People had kids during the Black Death.
	People had kids during the Blitz.
	People had kids during the fall of the Roman Empire and people are like, well, you know, I am watching a series on Netflix, so I'm not sure I'm going to have the time to create life.
	I don't know.
	It's just, it's really, really tragic.
	But anyway.
	Okay.
	So let's get to the decision point now.
	Kids, no kids.
	Okay.
	Right.
	Well, like I said, in the beginning I had originally, you know, no kids and we didn't talk much about it after that because it was kind of just an agreement from the beginning.
	I said one thing somewhere in the middle about being afraid to die alone.
	Was that picked up though?
	Because that's a pretty big fear.
	It was.
	So what did your boyfriend do when you said this fundamental existential fear of him dying before you and you being completely alone?
	Well, Nasty, he is also obsessed with talking about dying.
	I don't know if it's because he's terrified.
	It's the one thing that he really doesn't open up about is dying.
	Wait, sorry, I thought you said he was obsessed with talking about dying, but he's obsessed with not talking about dying?
	Right, it's just, maybe not so much talking about why, or it's, he'll always say, when I die, I know you'll be okay.
	He's like, I'll leave, because he, we're not married on paper, but if he were to die, everything is in both of our names.
	He likes to remind me that I'll be well taken care of if something should happen to him.
	But hang on, so you'll have enough money and that's what being well taken care of means to him?
	Does he not understand how women work at all?
	Well, he did make it to 34 years old and not get married, so probably not.
	Well, no, I'm not trying to diss his knowledge.
	I mean, maybe he's wise in the ways of femininity that I'm not, but the idea that You know, the women that you talked about, and I'm not putting you in this category, of course, Tiffany, but the women that you talked about, like the blue-haired women who've got some kid with no father around and they're miserable and all that, well, they're not starving, right?
	They've got enough resources or income to be comfortable, at least relative to human history, right?
	So they're okay, right?
	They're not going to starve, they're not going to be homeless, and they're not happy.
	I mean, it's like saying everyone who wins the lottery is also super happy, and they're not.
	Come on.
	And this is true.
	I'm, and I'm gonna go ahead and put this out there.
	Um, and I think I know why he does this.
	I'm pretty good at analyzing things.
	Um, his, so he, Oh God.
	Um, I have a lot of things.
	I have a lot of stuff and it doesn't make me happy.
	Um, I have Lots of jewelry, big house, everything that I want, he'll get for me, or I'll get it myself because I make a ton of money too.
	You know what's worse about having a big house?
	It's empty.
	Having a big house after your husband dies and you're wandering from room to room to room and all you're seeing is all the rooms that nobody's in.
	Right.
	Even now we don't use all of our house.
	I mean, in reality, we use a third of it, you know.
	The other half of it's not even done yet because we don't know what we want to do with it.
	It's still... Okay, so why do you think he keeps saying you'll be fine and brushing off any concerns you have?
	I think, well, for one thing, his father and mother, they're still married.
	They've been married for...
	Jesus.
	Forty years.
	So, more than 42 years, because he came after the marriage.
	I'm going to have to cut off your exit ramps to tangents.
	Okay.
	Why is he so nervous about this?
	His father does the same thing to his mother.
	He just takes care of her.
	He makes sure she has everything she needs financially.
	No, but he gave her children.
	She didn't want them, but he did, so she gave him a child, I guess you would say.
	All right.
	Oh, just one?
	Yes, just one.
	He's an only child.
	Boy, not breaking a lot of stereotypes there now.
	Anyway... No, he's an only child, and he also has only one cousin, and his mother has three siblings.
	So it's not a common... The family doesn't have a lot of children.
	Right.
	So why does he not want to?
	Now you're putting the onus on his parents.
	Why doesn't he want to listen to your concerns about dying alone?
	Well, he's starting to listen now.
	But I think where I'm struggling with getting my point across.
	So I feel guilty because in the beginning, I, you know, I didn't want them i feel like i'm changing the agreement even though it's not necessarily written what's wrong with that right what's wrong um i mean i'm happy to hear you say that because that is where i i i feel i mean come on you've got free will i don't want to push him to do something you don't have to change your mind right right and i what granted
	i was very young when we hooked up and Listen, I'm going to break it down to you from a man's perspective.
	He got the benefit of a super-hot, super-smart 22-year-old, right?
	Yes, at 34.
	He's 34 and he's like, woo-hoo!
	If the age gap was a child, it could be legally violated in Mexico.
	Right.
	So, you have... he has the benefit of the hot, brilliant, young woman, right?
	Now, the difference is, though, that you're still evolving.
	Right, so if you were like 35 and you'd never wanted children and you got together and you say, I don't want children, and then you get 37, you're like, oh my God, I want to have kids.
	Well, okay, you were 35, you got together, you should know what you want by then.
	It can change again.
	You're always free to change, right?
	But the idea that the 22-year-old, okay, yeah, you know, you're young, you're hot, you're But you've got a ways to go in terms of growth, right?
	Particularly when you come from a very difficult and traumatized history where your dad's hooking up with violent strippers and they're feral children, right?
	Correct.
	So he gets the heart, and he gets the youth, and he also, if he's rational, and he's an engineer, so I assume he's rational, though probably a little bit too literal, but then he gets, you also get the change.
	Right?
	Which is that you're going to change over the eight years from 22 to 30.
	Of course you are!
	It's not like you're unformed.
	It's almost like you're preformed as we generally are because we don't get any instruction from our parents or our culture.
	We're kind of blobs in our early 20s, right?
	We just kind of Making it up as we... we have to raise ourselves.
	It's crazy these days, just how untutored we all are.
	Which is tragic, but also gives us great opportunities for change.
	But that's the deal.
	The deal is, hey, she's 12 years younger than me.
	Good, I guess you like that.
	You know, she's unspoiled, she hasn't ridden the carousel, her heart's still an open book, and she's taught and young and blah blah blah, right?
	And she doesn't come with baggage and she doesn't come with kids and she doesn't come with two ex-husbands who are busy sawing off shotguns or something.
	So there's a lot of pluses.
	And the minus is, guess what?
	She's going to change her mind about some pretty big things over the course of your relationship because you started dating her when she was 22 and you were 34.
	So you're more settled and she's... So you have every conceivable, every conceivable right to change your mind.
	That's what he gets for dating someone 12 years younger.
	I should put this in here too, and I'm going to make it quick.
	He is very intelligent.
	He is over-literal.
	He does overthink everything.
	He's never ready for anything because he feels like he needs to be over-prepared.
	He has diagnosed OCD.
	And not the OCD where people walk around the house and clean things constantly.
	The OCD where he does repeat words and phrases here and there, but he's got it very well controlled without medication.
	So I should put that out there.
	And it doesn't affect his intelligence by any stretch of the means.
	What was that?
	It may help.
	It does.
	I think it does.
	I want an OCD engineer who's building something I have to live in, for instance, or a bridge that I have to drive over.
	Yeah, feel free to check that 20 times before you build it.
	I'm good with that.
	Yes, and everything that we have, he's probably put his hand in building.
	I mean, everything we have functions great.
	It's part of why we get along, because I can think like that, too.
	Yeah, so he's a good builder.
	You want to build a baby.
	Right.
	But what comes with it, is he over...
	Like you said, he overthinks and over-perfects things, but he also is very nervous about change.
	Change does bother him.
	We do talk about it.
	He has a hard time with large changes.
	But he dated a 22-year-old.
	If I was talking to him, I'd say, dude, you dated a 22-year-old.
	What did I say earlier, Tiffany?
	Take what you want and pay for it.
	Right.
	So you want to date a 22 year old and you say, well, I'm not comfortable with change.
	It's like, well, you dated a 22 year old.
	There's going to be change.
	In the back of my mind, and especially after listening to you for so long, part of me wonders if maybe not, you know, straightforwardly, but maybe subconsciously he's looking and going, well, here's where I can get everything I wanted.
	I can still have my big house.
	I already have my big house.
	I can still have my, uh, A wife and kids because she's 22.
	And I still have all of this time to do that.
	Even though he had agreed to not having kids with me at the time, I think subconsciously he had to know that I would probably change my mind.
	At 22 years old, most people aren't ready to be parents.
	Let me ask you this, Tiffany.
	Does he know you listen to what I do?
	Yes, he does.
	Does he also listen to what I do?
	He's not very patient with that stuff.
	He reads a lot.
	That's fine.
	That's fine.
	He doesn't necessarily listen.
	Okay.
	So I assume you've mentioned that I'm somewhat pro-child, pro-parenting over the course of listening.
	Right?
	Because, I mean, it's funny because I'm like a third wheel in a lot of relationships.
	And people really need to be aware of this.
	Like if you're just listening to this, if your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your sibling, like if you start listening to my show, ask people questions about what I'm saying and what my arguments are and like get involved because otherwise there's going to be this drift, right?
	You're listening to something that's very influential or thought-provoking or whatever, right?
	And he's not.
	So I assume, maybe I'm wrong, right, but I assume that you're saying to him, oh yeah, you know, Steph loves being a parent, you know, he's very pro have kids and enjoy family life and so on, plan for the second half of your life and don't think that a schnauzer in snow pants is going to substitute for an actual child who can debate with you.
	So he knows that you're Consuming pro-parenting content, right?
	Is that fair to say?
	It is, and it is probably one of the reasons that I started to feel the opposite way, because it makes you feel like it's okay to not just be a business owner.
	That that's not what your calling is.
	It's good for the government that you pay taxes, it's just not good for your life that you don't have children.
	I pay a lot of taxes.
	A lot.
	That's a whole other conversation.
	So he knows, and how long have you been listening to what I do for?
	Probably about four years.
	Four years.
	Okay, so you've had four years of me whispering snake-like into your ear about the joys of children and the tragedy of wasting your gifts, right?
	Yes.
	And I tell him that I listen to you anytime there's something on.
	So he knows I listen to everything.
	Right, right.
	So there's a battle, right?
	You've got the fertility god on one side and the sterile god on the other side of your shoulders, right?
	Each whispering into your ear.
	So the idea— - What's the biggest concern?
	Hang on.
	So just the idea that you're consuming pro-parenting content and you're still, of course, able to have three, four kids if you want, right?
	So you are consuming pro-parenting content, which he knows about.
	And so I would assume, I mean, if my girlfriend and I didn't want kids, my girlfriend was listening to somebody who was really, really pro-parenting, I'd sit there and say, okay, well, What's, you know, what's the story here?
	Like, I mean, how are you feeling about kids?
	What do you think of this guy's arguments and his experience?
	And, you know, he's obviously influential and so has any of that been occurring where he knows that you're young and younger than him, of course, and that you want, you might want kids and you're listening to pro-parenting arguments and so on?
	Yes, I would say the two biggest hurdles we have right now when we talk about it is he is to the point where he could almost retire very young, and that is very attractive to him.
	I think he fears that he wouldn't be able to do that and have a kid, which in reality, my business, especially if he were to no longer go to work, the two of us could work four to eight hours a day and live a very comfortable lifestyle.
	Just the two of us.
	What does he want to do when he retires?
	I mean, he's obviously smart.
	He's got, as you say, mild OCD.
	I assume that he's kind of a working guy, hardworking guy, because he's had a lot of success.
	So what does he want to retire for?
	What does he want to do?
	You know, here's the thing.
	I know he feels very unfilled.
	He doesn't like what he does.
	He's like me.
	We have the same battles with going in to work for somebody else.
	You're creating walls for someone else.
	When you have the intelligence to do it yourself, it's hard to do that.
	Now, if you don't have the intelligence to do that, it's not necessarily that hard.
	Um, but knowing that you're going in and you're almost wasting that, I feel like it's starting to bother him.
	I feel like he's, he sees what I've created and he knows that maybe if he had started at the same age that I had, that he could have done the same thing.
	Well, he does contribute to my business quite a bit.
	I think he feels like he's missing something.
	The practical considerations aren't that important, right?
	Because you don't need a big house at the moment, right?
	So if you sell the house and you downsize, you could have two kids, be comfortable, live on your income, he could do consulting.
	As far as that goes, you'd have a pretty sweet deal when it came to parenting, right?
	Yes, actually we could maintain our lifestyle.
	on working a few hours a day between the two of us and both be home.
	And it would be great.
	So you realize that there are about 10,000 goddamn ancestors screaming in your ear, like, what are you kidding me?
	We have kids when there are wolves snatching babies from the crib made out of sticks.
	And you guys are like, well, it may be slightly inconvenient for me if I have to live in a big air-conditioned, internet-enabled Wi-Fi household and maybe work sitting in front of a computer for a couple of hours a day.
	We just feel that this might be too much of an interference in our hedonistic, pleasure-based lifestyle.
	So we're just not really sure we want to carry on the actual act of there being human beings in the world.
	I think it's... Come on!
	I think it's going to hurt his ego.
	I think that him not being the breadwinner is going to hurt his ego because his whole family has been, the men in the family have always been the breadwinners.
	Who cares that he's the man in the family if you don't have kids?
	Oh, the patriarchs is like, you know what a patriarch is, is actually having children.
	You're not much of a patriarch if you don't have kids.
	I mean, you know what I mean?
	Well, the thing is, is I could look at him and say to him, because he does pretty He does want me to be happy.
	I mean, we both want each other to be happy.
	That's why I feel that if I were to go the route I'm about to say, that I would feel wrong about it.
	If I were to look at him and say, we're gonna go get married for Christmas and next year we're gonna make a kid, he'd probably just say yes.
	But I feel guilty doing that because it's not necessarily what he wants.
	It's what I want.
	He wants to retire and Potentially have a small side job.
	And those are his main worries right now.
	He's gonna spend the next 50 years of his life doing little side jobs?
	He's convinced he's gonna die young.
	He's convinced he's gonna die by the time he's 60.
	And that's the biggest, that's the other biggest fear.
	He's definitely afraid of dying.
	He thinks that he's gonna die young.
	That's why he wants to make sure that we have everything taken care of now.
	So that if he were to die, I would be able to I live comfortably on my own.
	But he doesn't necessarily seem to... I tell him, you're going to be okay.
	Does he have a family history?
	I mean, does he have any reason to believe?
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Well, one thing.
	I try to, and I do explain it to him well, and once we talk about it, he's over it for a little while, but it always resurfaces.
	He had one uncle who died of a heart attack at 40 years old.
	Right.
	39 years old, actually.
	And he is in the same industry as him, and when you have OCD, you kind of pair things together in your brain.
	Wait, but did the uncle have any other risk factors?
	Smoking?
	Overweight?
	Lack of exercise?
	No, he didn't.
	He didn't.
	Oh, so is it like, my career is stressful, that killed my uncle, so I have to retire so I don't die?
	Right, because his uncle died because his career was stressful.
	Right.
	Yes.
	And I feel that he's terrified to die.
	I almost feel like if I could get him to go ahead and leave his job, that it would be a little bit easier to make that decision.
	Because you're right, I don't think he would be so terrified to die if he wasn't in a stressful environment.
	But if he has kids now, they'll be virtually adults by the time he dies, even if his fears come true.
	And then you will have companionship and memories of him, right?
	Because the kids will be half him, so he will live on, right?
	And you will have connection and so on.
	So even if his worst fears come true, that would make the argument to have kids now rather than later.
	Right?
	Right.
	And we've... You know, he... I'm sorry, I'm starting to trip again, but I assume he gets check-ups and all that, right?
	So he's checking his health and... Actually, he does not go to the doctor.
	What?
	He won't go.
	He will when he's sick.
	I'll force him to go.
	Wait, he doesn't do his annual sort of blood work and... No, no, he goes and gets an annual.
	He has to for our life insurance.
	I want to assume everything's fine there, right?
	Yeah, everything's fine there, but if he doesn't go and... Recently he developed allergies, and they're bad, and I basically had to drag Quite larger than me human being to the doctor for that.
	So, right Okay Is it the case Tiffany that Having children is important to your happiness going forward.
	I I Think it is I you know, and like I said, it's starting to come on me fast.
	So a year ago I would have said no but Now, it's not necessarily just that I'm afraid of being alone, because, you know, I could be alone.
	I wouldn't be alone.
	I have godchildren.
	I would have other people around.
	But... No, no, listen, listen, listen, listen.
	I need to get you clear on this.
	If you don't have family when you're alone, When you're older, you're alone.
	I mean, there's a few exceptions, right?
	But in general.
	And I'll sort of tell you why, just so you understand how this plays out.
	So you say, well, I have godchildren.
	It's like, okay, so maybe you'll get to see your godchildren for an hour or two every week or two or three, right?
	It's not a lot of time.
	That's a lot of time to not be with people, right?
	You say, oh, well, I'll have friends.
	It's like, well, but the problem is when you get older, your friends will be very busy taking care of their kids or their elderly relatives, right?
	Their mom and their dad.
	They're going to need a lot of resources and so on, right?
	So they're not going to be able to have... That's what we're doing now.
	I'm sorry?
	Yeah.
	That's what we're doing now.
	In fact, that's probably another roadblock.
	We're taking care of a lot of older people.
	Right.
	So that continues and that's something that shouldn't really be part of your life.
	You know, I talked about this with another woman who was with an older guy and he died.
	I'm sorry to mention this, but this is a very different situation.
	Mine's not going to die.
	No, no, no, he's not.
	This was, you know, the guy who had a risky lifestyle and all of that.
	So that's why I say it's a different situation statistically.
	Yeah, so now she's trying to date and she's, you know, she nursed a guy through death, you know, and it's like, she's in her 30s and she just, it's like, that's not where your life should be.
	Like, you're too young to be taking, like, the reason you're supposed to have kids young is so your kids are older when your parents get older if you need to take care of them, right?
	But if you have your kids in your 30s, your kids are growing up at the same time as your parents are getting older and may need more resources and it's a, you know, it's a challenge, right?
	Which is why, one of the reasons why I advise People, to have kids younger, but there's this show called Friends, which is probably something akin to hieroglyphics to you now, because you're young, but... Oh no, I remember Friends.
	Okay, so there's this show Friends, I mentioned this on the show years ago, and I say this just because I want people to know when I repeat myself, but it's... I remember seeing this show where Rachel is pregnant and she freaks out.
	And she's like, I don't want to raise this baby alone.
	And all her friends circle her and hug her and says, you're not going to do it alone.
	We're all going to be here for you.
	And I'm like, no, you're not.
	Come on, you're not.
	You know, when the baby's up for the third time in the middle of the night, Rachel ain't going to be calling you and you're driving back over to help her out.
	Or if she does call you, you'd be like, hey man, I already drove out there twice.
	I got work in the morning.
	I'm so sorry.
	Good luck.
	I got to get some sleep, right?
	They're not going to get their own lives.
	They're going to move.
	You're never going to move because you made some commitment to your friend to be there and help her raise her baby because the father isn't around.
	You're not going to date someone new.
	You're not going to have your own kids.
	And come on, biologically, we're going to pour more resources into our own kids than even our friend's kid.
	Right?
	So this idea that, oh, you know, if you don't have a dad, your friends will be there for you.
	Or if you don't have a family, when you get older, who's going to be there for you?
	Your friends, when you get older too, they're going to die.
	They're going to move.
	They're going to become disabled.
	You may have a falling out because blood is thicker than water, right?
	So family bonds generally outlast, you know, differences of opinion that can sunder friendships, right?
	So this idea that, well, you know, if you have kids and you raise... I mean, you're bonded, man.
	You're a good parent.
	You're... I mean, they may move away.
	It's not a guarantee, obviously, right?
	But as far as odds go, it's a hell of a lot more.
	You know, if your friend moves away, it's unlikely you're going to pack up and move with them.
	If your kids move somewhere, you may move there, right?
	They may want you to, right?
	So you're available.
	Your kids are going to have their own kids, and then you're going to have great value as a grandparent.
	And don't you want to spend the last third of your life nurturing new life rather than wiping the asses of your friends who are scrabbling off the cliff of mortality into a bottomless grave?
	Don't you want to be sort of herding and shepherding new life into the world rather than easing bodies into the endless dark.
	I feel it would be a shame not to.
	I feel it would be a shame for the two of us not to have children because we're in a very stable and friendly and happy environment and we're both intelligent and the children would never have to go to daycare.
	I could potentially homeschool my own children.
	It is, like you said, it's an absolute waste not to do it.
	I know that I would be an amazing parent Because I have love for a kid I don't even have.
	I have all the ideas planned in my head, the things that I would want to do to make sure that the child lived a wonderful life.
	Or children.
	Yeah, I mean, I might die in 20 years.
	Good Lord.
	I mean, people had kids when there was smallpox racing around, wiping out a third of the population, for Christ's sakes.
	Come on.
	I understand caution and concern, but then there's just basic paralytic paranoia.
	Yeah.
	No, he's very scared to die.
	I do believe when he was talking to the therapist about the OCD, That it has something to do with that.
	It's an obsession, and it's just something he has a hard time getting over.
	Even though when we talk through it, he sits down and realizes, you know, my grandpa did live to be in his 90s.
	You know?
	And my grandma, too.
	Here's the other thing.
	If you're afraid of dying, that's a great argument for having children.
	Because you gain immortality, right?
	Your genes live on, your personality lives on, your ideas, your arguments, your thoughts.
	If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my daughter lives on.
	It makes you less afraid of dying because you have achieved and taken part of the general infinite buffet of immortality.
	So this idea that, well, I'm afraid of dying so I don't want to have kids is like Well, first of all, it's a good thing that nobody thought about that in your family tree in the past, because it's such a gift!
	The people who struggled and scraped and went through the Great Depression and wars and disease and famine and plague and you name it, right?
	They scraped together the resources so that you could come into being.
	And you guys, in your big, comfortable, rich house with your part-time jobs that make a fortune, you're like, well, I don't know that we can get around... Come on.
	Come on.
	And even that, I know he likes travel.
	I know that's another thing he thinks that would inhibit, but you would just take the child with you.
	I mean, if you're homeschooling your kid, there's no reason.
	Seeing the world is just as much intelligence and teaching as Staying at home.
	In fact, it might be more.
	So, and we like to go see, you know, historical places and stuff.
	So it's not that it would be a bad experience.
	I think that's another thing that bothers him.
	Wait, so he likes to go to visit places that were built by other human beings.
	Yes.
	But he doesn't like, he doesn't want to make any human beings.
	Well, he also loves the beach.
	Right.
	He also loves the beach.
	I mean, that is the favorite place.
	The beach?
	I mean, yes.
	Yeah.
	We have a condo in Florida too.
	So we go down there often.
	You have a big house that you use only a third of.
	You have a condo in Florida, but you can't really see your way clear to having any kids.
	Right.
	And wait.
	Financially, it's not a problem.
	I actually purchased a house to move my mother out here, too.
	You have three houses now.
	You're approaching Bernie Sanders levels of real estate moguldom.
	Well, I do have a loan on one of them, but I mean, it's going to be paid off in five years.
	Alright, so your basic concern is that, what, if you say, if you want to have kids, you want to be honest with the guy, right?
	Right.
	Okay, so if you want to have kids, if you want to have kids, be honest with him.
	And now, if it's like, well, if I say I want kids, he's going to do it just to please me, and his heart might not be in it, and so on, it's like, you're just saying you don't trust the guy to be honest with you.
	Oh, no, I definitely think that That if he had children, it would make him happier.
	I feel like that's what he's saying.
	Okay, so then do it for him!
	Just make it happen!
	Come on!
	Be a leader!
	It's not wrong to do.
	I feel guilt.
	I feel like it's wrong to say, we have to do this.
	I've always been a leader.
	We have to do this.
	I mean, like I said, if I told him... No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	I get it, I get it.
	Listen, my little Luftwaffe commander, you're not saying, we have to do this.
	You're saying, I want to do this.
	We have to do this as an order.
	I want to do this as honesty, right?
	Right.
	Okay, so the real question is, do you want kids?
	Like, if being with this guy means no kids, that's the question, right?
	Right.
	I would not give up my relationship to start over with someone else.
	And then have children with them.
	One of the reasons I want to have kids is because I feel that we'd both make great parents and it would be a positive environment for a kid.
	That's one of the reasons.
	You're eight years in, so it's a known quantity, right?
	Right.
	Someone new could be, right?
	Right.
	Okay, so if you know If you know what's best for him, which after eight years and an outside view, you certainly have the right to make that claim, right?
	So if you know what's best for him, in other words, if you know that he's nervous about having kids, but once he has kids, he's going to be like, I can't believe that we didn't have these earlier, right?
	Absolutely.
	Okay.
	So if you know what's best for him, tell him what you want and tell him what's best for him.
	Now you say, well he's only going to do it to make me happy.
	It's like, that's not trusting him.
	Right?
	You have to trust him to be honest with you and don't try and manage two sides of the relationship.
	Don't try and play tennis with yourself.
	It's a pretty sad spectacle.
	In a relationship you say, this is what I want.
	This is what I think is important and this is why I think it's a good thing for you too.
	Right?
	Just be forceful and direct in what you want.
	A dictator, right, the other person can say, I don't agree, I don't want to, blah blah, and you can have that negotiation, right?
	But, just be, you can't, it's not healthy to try and manage both sides of the relationship.
	It's like if you go in for a job, and you're negotiating for salary and benefits, you say what you want, you don't say, well you leave the room and I'll negotiate for both of us.
	Right.
	I mean, that wouldn't make any sense, right?
	It's a little narcissistic, and please, I'm not trying to label you, it's a tiny bit narcissistic to say, I'm going to negotiate on your behalf.
	I think I more meant, and it did come off wrong, he likes to push things off.
	Not necessarily because he doesn't want to do them, but because he is so particular when he plans things that it takes a while to plan them.
	So, you know, eight years in a relationship and He's bought me a lot of rings and hasn't asked me to marry him because it's the whole planning that goes into it.
	I think that's the problem, even though he'll call them my engagement rings.
	So just take charge!
	That's what I'm asking!
	Just say no, listen, we're getting married and we're having kids.
	Right now he can push back.
	He can push back if he wants, right?
	He's free to.
	But you're like, look, look, you've been in charge to somebody.
	You bought me all these rings.
	Like, you say, look, you have a problem.
	Everyone has strengths and weaknesses in a relationship.
	Daphne, you know that.
	And don't enable his weaknesses.
	I mean, to a smaller degree, but in the same vein as the way that you work three jobs to pay for the guy to sit and play Xbox and rot his life away, right?
	Correct.
	Don't play to his weaknesses and your weaknesses.
	You want to play to his strengths and your strengths.
	Now, if your strength is to be more decisive and his weakness is to overthink things and get paralyzed, then just take charge.
	If you want to get married and he's bought you a bunch of rings, he clearly wants to get married.
	If he's not getting around to it, if he's not doing this, if he's not doing that, then just take charge and be the leader.
	There's nothing wrong with that.
	In fact, it may be absolutely essential for you guys.
	I think it is.
	I think that's probably where my biggest question was, and I think we've maybe gotten to it, is if I were to plan it, he would be there.
	I mean, if I were to say, we're going to do this, he's not going to protest, right?
	He's bad at it, you're good at it, so you take charge of it, right?
	The stuff he's good at, like building houses that maybe you're not good at, so that's what he does.
	Right.
	Yeah, we work very well together.
	I usually do make the decisions.
	Just because he has a hard time doing it, not because I want to be, you know.
	I don't want to force him to do it.
	That's the thing.
	I don't want to force him to do anything.
	I feel like, I always feel like I'm forcing him to do something because he doesn't make the decision because he has to overthink it.
	He has to see how it works.
	He's, oh my god, Tiffany, he's begging you to take control.
	Okay.
	Come on.
	Okay.
	He's begging you.
	He couldn't be more explicit if he was, if he had Billie Eilish's Die t-shirt.
	on.
	I mean, sorry, that's a bad way to mix things.
	But she's pretty explicit about her negative influence in the world.
	And he's he's begging you to take over.
	He's begging you.
	It is and I don't need a big wedding.
	We can just go get that's not that's part of the reason we have money as we save it.
	So I to me I we could just go get married.
	It's not gonna make a difference to me.
	Well, whatever you want.
	If you want if you want to have a big wedding and invite me that would be great.
	I'll invite you.
	You can come.
	I'd probably just go do it to Vegas.
	I like Vegas.
	So do I. There's nothing wrong with you being in charge.
	There are things that my wife is really, really good at and I'm not good at, so she's in charge of those things.
	And there's stuff that I'm better at that I'm in charge of.
	I mean, this is the division of labor.
	This weird egalitarianism stuff where everyone's got to be equal in every decision.
	Come on!
	That's not how your business works, right?
	Correct.
	And it's not how marriages work.
	Marriages work when we surrender our authority to people who are better at things.
	I don't make my own shoes.
	I don't do my own dentistry, right?
	I surrender my authority to people who are better at those things.
	And the same thing works in your personal relationships.
	Surrender your authority to people who are better at stuff, and you gain this incredible power.
	I mean, imagine if we didn't have any division of labor, we wouldn't have a civilization at all.
	Division of labor in a marriage.
	So if you're really good at being decisive, And you have a track record of making good decisions, which you do, then just say, you know, with all due respect to the eight years of paralysis we've experienced in X, Y, or Z issue, you know, we kind of need to reconfigure this because stuff ain't working, right?
	So just be in charge.
	And so if he loves you and he's an intelligent guy and he recognizes competence, if you're competent at certain things, He will recognize that and it's a mark of respect plus humility to defer to people who are smarter than you about things or have better decisions.
	Sorry, not smarter.
	Who are better at making particular decisions, right?
	I mean there's a reason I don't do all my shows on my own.
	There's a reason I bring endless amounts of experts in to talk about things because, you know, they're experts and I am an amateur in just about everything.
	So that's really important.
	It's very Important that you have authority and the division of labor in your marriage.
	That's where the real strength of marriage comes from.
	And a lot of people's marriages or relationships are kind of crippled by this hyper-egalitarianism, if everyone's got to agree on it, on everything.
	And it doesn't, it's just not productive.
	I mean, can you imagine if every time you wanted to make a business decision, you had to get everyone in your life to agree with you?
	Right.
	It would never work.
	You've got to be decisive.
	it's going to work.
	Right.
	And he'll thank you for it.
	I mean, according to what you say, right?
	He'll thank you for it.
	I think so.
	I think it would be... I think it's what's missing.
	Because I know he feels unfulfilled.
	I know him as well as I know myself.
	And I can see it that something's missing.
	That he feels like he didn't... that there is something missing.
	He's not satisfied or feeling fulfilled.
	Well, sorry, one last thing that I will say, and I apologize for interrupting at this point.
	I thought of this earlier and it slipped my mind.
	So thanks for your patience.
	So he probably has a fear, as you may as well, that the future is going to be like the past, that you're going to parent like you were parented, right?
	I don't think I have that fear.
	Okay, good, good.
	Because I pretty well analyze what happened in my childhood and I know that I would never put a child in a situation like that.
	Right.
	Okay, good.
	So he may have that concern that he's afraid of repeating patterns of the past and so on, to which I would say to him, Wait, so you want to judge your future parenting by how you were parented in the past, which is kind of like me saying, I'm never going to date again because I had a bad boyfriend once.
	In other words, we wouldn't be together if I was judging you by the behavior of the past.
	Right.
	I don't know where he falls on feeling.
	His childhood wasn't, uh, Bad, maybe a little bit over-controlled by an Italian mom, but other than that, it was pretty stable for the most part.
	There's a couple things that he's worked out that may have caused his OCD from my childhood, but it's nothing that... Yeah, isn't the Italian phrase for OCD of a cannoli disaster?
	But I could be wrong about that.
	We do like cannolis.
	We're both very Italian, so our cultures, our backgrounds... Actually, I gotta tell you, having a big house with no kids in it, that's not overly Italian.
	It isn't.
	No, we're very different to what, you know, the rest of my family is like.
	There's a gazillion of them.
	And watch the first five minutes of the movie Idiocracy.
	I haven't.
	Yeah, you should.
	It's on YouTube.
	It's free.
	You can just watch the first five minutes of the movie Idiocracy and you'll see one of the challenges.
	Yeah, so that's most of what I wanted to say.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
	No, I think this was really helpful.
	I think, uh, I've just been so nervous to make the decision for him, but like, now that we, we've had the conversation, I realized I, he kind of has already put that trust in me because most of the, when we, things need to be planned, he knows he struggles with planning.
	Uh, and I always just go ahead and plan things for us and he's always happy.
	He's thankful and he's grateful for it.
	I've never pushed anything on him at that point.
	I think just because it's such a big decision.
	I think that's why I don't want to go ahead and start planning it, but I think if I don't, I don't think it's ever going to happen, because it's never going to be perfect.
	And really, when we sit down and think about it, the situation that we are in now is probably one of the best that you could raise children in.
	Was he happy that you dragged his recalcitrant ass to the doctor when he had allergies?
	Absolutely!
	He goes and gets an LSU shot once a week now, and he can breathe.
	Excellent.
	So he's very happy that you muscled him into doing something that was good for him.
	Good.
	Yes, he hates doing it, but he's better for it.
	Will you let me know how it goes?
	I will.
	And I'll invite you to my wedding.
	I would love to get that invitation.
	I appreciate that.
	And my very best to you both.
	It was a really, really great chat.
	I think you're both wonderful people.
	And parenting will be a true joy for you, I'm sure.
	Okay, thank you very much.
	Take care.
	Bye bye.
	I appreciate the time.
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