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May 24, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:34:41
"I NEED Him to Throw Me Up Against the Wall!" A Woman BEGS Her Man to be Assertive
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*Try to the end* Oh, it's long, but it's so good!
*Try to the end* Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain, hope you're doing well.
Please, please engage yourself in this conversation.
It was one of the most remarkable things that's ever gone on on this show.
This is a young couple.
We hear first from Sarah and then from James.
It's not their real name for reasons that will become abundantly obvious over the course of the conversation.
Sarah is a young woman.
She's a bodybuilder.
She's very attractive and very smart and has great values.
James has the same values.
They can't quite get their relationship to work.
It's been three years of on again, off again during a very crucial time in their development.
And so we're going to hear from Sarah what's going on.
Then Rashomon Style, we're going to flip the script and hear from James what's going on.
And it really is an astounding conversation.
I really, really want to thank these two very brave young people for opening up their hearts and minds to the world.
I'm incredibly honored that they chose this as the platform in which to discuss these challenges.
you are going to learn just about everything there is to know about how to run a productive and positive and loving relationship, these stumbling blocks of the past, the possibilities of assertiveness.
And I just want to thank them again.
And thank you, of course, for giving me the platform and the opportunity to have these kinds of incredible conversations with the world.
Please don't forget to help out the show at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
All right, enough of that.
Let's get to it.
Hit it.
Oh, sure.
Dear Stefan, please help me.
I honestly do not know where to turn or what to do.
I'm in a state of inconsolable sadness and confusion.
And if I could get the tendency of wanting to destroy my own happiness in check, I might actually create a I do not know where to start, so please forgive me if I repeat myself or my sentiments in this email.
I am a 27-year-old virgin, as the title indicates, and it has always been my intention to save myself for a man worthy of me, i.e.
a man who treats me right is also a virgin.
A stable, normal, and a reasonable person.
I have found that person, I think, and I am afraid that my own inability to behave as one worthy of such a man will prevent me from having him and building this life we have imagined building together.
My relationship slash friendship with this person is very odd, and I have been trying to make sense of my feelings for him for many years.
I cannot seem to figure out whether I want to marry him, but I feel like I should because we are good together, at least on paper.
I do not know if there is any physical attraction there.
In fact, I seem to be vehemently against exploring any attempts at intimacy with him because I feel like I can do better.
As to what this better might be, I do not know.
I guess he might have more abs and a motorcycle and a history of being a drummer.
All of your favorite things, I know.
I have tried to perceive physical affection from him, but I cannot bring myself to do so, and I don't know why.
Even the idea of him kissing me or holding my hand Sends me into a fit of genuine anxiety where I start to panic and shut down.
I feel so uncomfortable around him since we've been exploring these feelings and I don't know if it is because we legitimately are not good together or if I just destroy my own happiness because I do not trust happiness and stability and joy because I've never had it with any type of consistency.
I have watched your show for many years now, and I see in myself the foundation of the qualities of a virtuous woman, but I am consistently torn down the middle between being some degenerate PG-13 level hoe and tease and being the virtuous woman I know will make a good wife and mother to a man who has put up with my nonsense but I am consistently torn down the middle between being some degenerate PG-13 Having followed your show for a long time, I imagine myself putting these principles into practice, but I can't seem to do so entirely, and now not at all,
as I am about to make some pretty bad decisions just because I am frustrated with my own inability to live up to the standards I know will result in a good life as I am about to make some pretty bad decisions just because I Something is always holding me back.
It is as if I do not trust that this tried and true path will make me happy.
I am always looking for the next best thing, and I have never had both an emotional and physical connection with a man.
It has always been one or the other.
However, I am still a virgin in just about every sense of the word, but I am not naive to the fact that I am a walking contradiction.
I am sitting at work right now, I am a public school teacher, and I am less than thrilled with my job, and I cannot even get my thoughts out straight in order to clearly express to you what an absolute fuck-up I am en route to becoming.
I take one step forward and about six steps back, and I do not know why.
I just want a nice, stable life with a man who loves me and shares my values, and yet here he is, and I am sabotaging it all, as if to say, fuck you reality, I'm going to do what I want to do, even if it means destroying myself.
I'm a gym rat and that is my obsession and the place in which I hide in.
My lifts and pursuits at the gym come before everyone and anything else.
It is safe and I'm capable and in control and alpha.
Recently I have wanted to spend all my time there and I already spend a fair amount of time there.
I get the attention from the gym daddies I so desperately wanted from my actual dad and I get to be worshipped and gawked at for all my hard work and effort.
However, I am not stupid, and I know that the odds of me meeting a man of quality here are very bad.
I can tell you stories of being pursued by married men, men who just got out of jail after 11 years for assault and battery, men with girlfriends, and just general, low-quality, degenerate, and yet gorgeous and physically dominating men.
I would not want any of them to be the father of my child, and yet I give them all my time and thoughts and interest.
However, this man I mentioned earlier, who has put up with all my shit for three years, is someone who I would actually want to be the father of my children.
And yet, I do not want him myself.
I do not know why.
I find him completely physically undesirable, and yet there is nothing physically wrong with him.
He is tall, at a good weight, and handsome.
He has the same values as I do, and he wants to make me his wife.
He wants to be my husband and give me a good life and marry me.
He wants me to stay home with our hypothetical children and he has promised to work to provide such a life.
He is so stable and so good and so much better than me in every way.
He would marry me tomorrow if I got my act together, but for some reason I cannot.
I am resistant to my own happiness and I make self-destructive decisions, sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly.
My father is an emotionally unavailable asshole, which explains why I go for emotionally unavailable assholes.
And my mother is a useless mouse of a woman who I'm going to despise for the emotional manipulation she has used on me all these years.
I cannot help but blame them for all the things wrong with me, and her specifically, for she chose my father after knowing him for approximately 11 minutes.
I've been in therapy for a year now, and I think I'm making Hedgeway, but I find myself reverting back to what is comfortable.
That is, chasing and teasing gym alphas.
Allowing their mind games to dictate my behavior and pushing away the best man I've ever known who loves me and cares for me because he is not also an emotionally unavailable fuck-up like myself.
At this point, I'm setting myself up for failure and for living the life of my mother.
I have major daddy issues I have been working through and I find it very difficult to connect with men my own age.
I want a true connection with a man, but as I've mentioned before, it is not possible for me to connect emotionally and physically I want to be taken care of as my mother was by my father.
That is why she married him after all.
And I cannot seem to get past the idea of needing a man to pet and approve and be amused by me.
Very much like what I wanted my father to be.
To protect me and be pleased with me and be amused by me.
I am such an absolute fuck up.
And very much like this email, my mind is always going in a million different directions.
Just trying to make sense of the spiderweb of thoughts that I've gotten stuck in.
I do not know what to do at this point, and I feel so alone and very much like I am at a fork in the road.
The way I behaved this year will set my life on a path of virtue or lack thereof.
I don't know what love is, but I've often heard you say it is a natural response to virtue if we are virtuous.
Perhaps the reason why I cannot accept the love I so desperately want is because I know I am not virtuous, even though I very much want to be.
Stefan, please help me.
Please help me sort out these feelings and emotions and devastating inclinations To destroy myself so I can be a wife and mother and give all the love I want to give to a man worthy of receiving it That's the end Do you want to hear something really petty?
What? You're a school teacher, right?
I am. That's why I'm sorry.
You haven't got to the petty part yet.
So the petty part, and we're going to refer to you as Sarah, not your real name, and the guy is James, right?
So Sarah, when I get your email, do you know what my first impulse to do was?
Correct the title. That's right.
Red line. Circle.
Give you a grade. Send it back.
Because I'm 53 and I'm still 13.
Anyway, okay. I looked at it and I'm like, come on.
The freaking title has a typo.
Needs work. Three underlines.
One, two, three. See me after class.
You're going to be perfect for a Van Halen song.
All right. I just wanted to...
You know, you get stuff off your chest, I get stuff off my chest, and then we move forward.
Absolutely. Well, how do you feel reading this out?
Well, anything...
And I write, like, a lot.
Because I also teach writing.
I mean, my kids' writing is not that great, but, like, I write a lot.
It helps me get my emotions out.
And any time I ever write about James and...
I read back the things I write, especially if I read them to somebody, which I have done so in therapy.
I just get so bogged down in my emotions that I just end up crying because I just don't understand what I'm feeling for this person or what I should be feeling for this person and I don't know if I'm just Emotionally manipulating myself or if I'm just feeling like this is as good as you're gonna get so you might as well just take this person because you're 27 and you want to get married and you want to have kids and blah blah blah and like I listen to your show a lot.
So one of the things that I remember you recently saying and I just kind of chuckled to myself.
As you said, to a guest, when a woman rejected you, you were just kind of like, what are you waiting for?
Who are you waiting for?
I don't know that there's a lot of upgrades, but yeah, good luck with that.
That's kind of how I feel about this person.
I very much just feel like...
I don't know who I'm waiting for or what I'm waiting for.
Basically, I'm waiting for a unicorn, as my friend says, because he's like, you very much are a unicorn.
He's like, you're a virgin, you're very, very, very good looking, and you have all of these traditional values, and you're waiting for a unicorn, and it's not going to happen.
Something has to give, essentially.
Okay, okay. I was down in Florida, gave a speech recently, and I took my daughter to a theme park.
Not a Disney one, but anyway.
It was karaoke night.
And I don't know if you... This is a really old song by now.
I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore by REO Speedwagon.
Yeah, I know. And there's that lyric, you know, I've been running round in circles in my mind or something like that, right?
And I'm like, this is like round and round, right?
There's no escape from this trap, right?
You just go round and round. It's like these debates that you have with yourself or like what's wrong with me and so on.
And listen, we will...
We're going to put this in some cement shoes and get to the bottom of it, which sounds a bit more sinister than it actually is.
We're going to drown you. No, that's fine.
Because cement is grounded.
Yeah, we'll get through to this.
Okay, so a couple of questions first, just to sort of get the lay of the land, right?
So to speak. And the first question is, you say, okay, I'm waiting for a unicorn, waiting for a unicorn.
But what does that mean? Because this guy, he said he's tall, he's good looking, he shares your values, you know, he cares about you, he's interested in you, you've known him for three years.
So, other than, you know, I guess a rap sheet longer than a rapper's, I mean, what is it that's missing?
You don't know, right? Because it's not like, well, you know, he's short, he's bald, he's 50, but, you know, I mean, there's not a lot of missing stuff, right?
I've dated people less appealing than him.
I just, I don't know, and I'm very annoyed with myself, and I feel like I'm just sabotaging myself.
No, no, no, no, hang on, hang on, hang on, Sarah, Sarah.
You're going to have to let me lead just for a little bit.
And the reason is I asked you what was missing about him and you went straight to how you feel.
And you've been doing the how you feel for 27 years and it hasn't really solved the problem.
So how you feel is not...
We'll deal with the feelings and all that.
I'm going to be there for you for that.
Thank you. But what's missing from him that you feel like there's a unicorn out there?
Like what's not...
Okay, so you're asking me this question.
What do I think is missing? Yeah.
Okay. For me, some type of physical urge that I just want to be around him all the time and I just always want him near me and I just always need to be in his company.
Oh, so he would be the perfect guy for you if he turned you into a stalker.
Do I have that correct or am I missing something here?
Well, when you say it like that...
Around him all the time, never leave his side physically attached, wearing the same underpants.
I mean, come on. That's a bit of a standard.
That's obsessive, right? That's like Glenn Close territory.
Yes. I suppose I just always thought that that is what it meant.
Yeah, you know how those country songs turn out, right?
Oh yeah, badly.
Most of them are about very toxic breakups and hookups and one night stands.
Well, and there's, you know, this movie Walk the Line with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, where it seems to be a happy, it all looks like happily ever after until you check out the actual facts of the situation and they had a miserable, addicted, brutalized marriage going forward.
But anyway.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I guess my question then is, where do you get the sense that obsessive codependence is synonymous with mature love?
Let's see. That is a marvelous question.
Where do I get that sense from?
Where do I get...
I suppose the way that I grew up is the only thing I can think about.
And like the movies that I watched and just what...
Love was always presented as, to me, my parents, they do not have a good marriage by any means.
And my mother, to this day, and she's told me this since I was about five, like, as long as I can remember, my mother cannot stand to be in the company of my father.
Like, my mother cannot stand it.
And she makes that, like, very known.
And she's very passive-aggressive.
And if he ever walks into the room, she just, like, sighs and rolls her eyes and feels like, She would just rather him not be around.
So I guess, to me, the opposite of that is, I just always want to be with you.
I just always need you. There has to be a sense of urgency for me to be around you.
It can't just be like, oh, I enjoy your company.
It has to be like, I need you.
I need you all the time.
So, Sarah, are you ready for your first truth bomb here?
You're an educated woman.
You're obviously very smart, so we can go straight to the core here, right?
Yeah. All right. You understand, or at least I hope that you will understand by the time I finish this tiny little speech, that what you're talking about is self-erasure.
Because if you're simply focused on your need to be with someone, it's like you're not there.
You're simply focused on them.
And I'll give you sort of an example, right?
So I assume it's a very fit woman.
I don't know. Maybe you do your hiking or your climbing or whatever it is.
But let's say you're hiking somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, and you think you see a bear behind you, and you're alone, right?
Yeah. Well...
Your focus is going to be what?
The bear. The bear.
Are you going to have a lot of meandering thoughts about your relationships?
No. No. You'll be like, well, I can't continue to have meandering thoughts about my relationships if I get my head eaten by a bear.
Because he will digest all of that complexity and REO Speedwagon songs will be no more in my brain, right?
So when you are focused on someone else who's highly problematic...
Or the kind of insecurity that you get from not knowing if the guy is really that into you or if he's stable or if he's together or if he's committed.
The time you spend thinking and worrying and concerned about him is a way to escape yourself.
To focus on another human being is to jump out of your own skin to abandon ship and to cling to someone and become a ghost to your own needs, identity, and preference.
Okay, go ahead. That, wow.
No, that's amazing because that's literally what I'm doing with stupid gym person.
Wow. Wait, is stupid gym person referring to you at the gym or the guys at the gym?
No. Okay, I'm not sure how third person you were getting here.
That's funny. No, that's funny because there's this other guy at the gym.
We'll just call him the Goomba.
Um, and that's literally all that's been in the back of my mind as well.
Just, does he like me? Does he want, like, I don't understand why he's so hot, why he's so cold, why he's so inconsistent, why, why, why?
And that's true.
And I can't even focus on, on whether we're a good match when obviously we're not, because the only thing there is that you find me very physically desirable and vice versa.
And we don't have any Meaningful conversations, and you've not demonstrated to me that you're a worthwhile person, apart from stalking around the gym like an alpha.
Right, right, yeah. Now, you don't want to be a hole with glutes, like well-toned glutes to a guy.
That's not... Okay, but see, when you focus on that guy, you escape yourself.
Yeah. Right?
And this guy, the problem with this guy is he doesn't help you escape yourself.
Because he's a known quantity, right?
You said he will marry me tomorrow if I get my shit together, right?
Yep. So this guy will not help you escape yourself.
Now you're drawn to that, but at the same time it's like, okay, well if I'm with him and those questions are answered, I'm going to turn on myself.
Like a pit bull.
I'm going to just tear myself apart unless I'm relieving my focus on myself by focusing on someone else.
And this guy doesn't need you to focus on him because you can actually build a stable, healthy life together based on what you said.
So can you stand your own company undistracted by someone else?
And that's the big question, right?
Yeah. And I guess the answer to that is probably not because I definitely...
I struggle with just feeling like a piece of shit, like, a lot.
And just feeling like I'm not worthy of these sorts of things.
And I've told him this.
I have told James this.
And he's brought this up to me many times, just about, well, what are we?
Are we ever going to be anything?
Do you want this?
And I've told him, like, you're too good for me.
And I really just, I don't understand, like, why you keep bothering me.
Because... You're too good for me.
You're very stable. You're all of these fine things that I just don't know how to handle and I'm not worthy to be with.
I get it. I get the self-flagellation, but let's be really, really frank with each other, right?
Yeah. The fact that you feel so messed up on the inside and he wants to be with you makes you intensely suspicious of him, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Like, what's he there for? Is he there because you're hot?
Is he there because you're a virgin?
Is he there because, because, because?
Because if love is an involuntary response to virtue, when you feel...
Exactly. You feel only potentially virtuous.
Yeah. Then you have, you know, reason to be suspicious.
I'm not saying suspicions are correct.
He's not on the call. Maybe he can join us some other time.
But that's the thing.
Like, if you don't feel worthy of love and someone claims to love you, it feels like they're manipulating in some manner.
Yeah. And it's just, why do you have such low standards?
Like, I don't understand.
And I've even, like, spoken to gym bros, various people at the gym who I'm friendly with.
About this issue.
And they've all kind of said, well, it's because you're a nine and he knows he's not going to get anything better.
Like all he wants is to fuck you.
All he wants is this. All he wants is arm candy.
You know, you can do better than this person.
Granted, they don't know him and all of his good qualities.
They're just going based on like his exterior and just based on the very brief things that I've told them about him.
You know, that all he just wants...
Right. Now, that could be true.
That could be true. I have some doubt about that, and I'll sort of go into that a little bit later.
But it could also be that he sees beyond your parents to the real you underneath.
Yeah. And in that case, like if he's just there for sex and all that, yeah, that's a patient guy, right?
And I don't know how many squats you've done, but I assume you can crack walnuts by flexing, right?
So if that's true, you know, that's three years, a lot of time to spend in the friend zone, right?
Yeah. And so I suspect it's more than that.
And I suspect that he sees the you that calls me.
Rather than the you that's been eviscerated by your parents' distraction.
Does that make sense? Yeah, I know.
I've even told him that.
Like, my sister-in-law and my brother have a really, really good relationship.
And, of course, I've spoken to them about this.
And she asked me, she's like, well, what is, like, your favorite thing about him?
And I said, well, he makes me want to be a better person.
I'm like, now whether that actually happens is a different story.
But he makes me think that I could actually live the life that I dream about living with somebody who's stable and not an asshole and not going to cheat on me and all of these things that I encounter at the gym.
Has he dated anyone else to your knowledge in the three years that you've known him?
Oh yeah, he has. All right.
Yeah. But is he currently in a relationship at the moment?
No. Sorry. I give myself full redlining for redundancy there.
Is he currently at the moment?
No, he's not.
And he even confessed to me because I told him about two years ago when he was dating this girl who was completely wrong for him.
And I was like, listen, she's wrong for you, etc., etc.
Here's all the reasons why.
And we're both Catholic.
And that's a really big part of where we get our values from.
And I expressed to him, like, okay, yes, she's Catholic, but there's this, this, and this that, you know, she is not.
And I remember just kind of, like, not, like, jealously, but just kind of, like, snoodily thinking to myself, because I'm all those things, you idiot.
Like, obviously, she's not for you, because I'm the one who you're obviously going to end up with.
Why are you wasting your time?
And sure enough, that only lasted, like, about four months, and when we started having These more emotionally open conversations, he told me he was like, you know, I would text her and I would think I still like talking to Sarah more.
Like, I just, I don't understand why we're not together.
I still like talking to Sarah more.
Why? Why is she only my friend?
I still like talking to Sarah more.
Well, because you're torn between the guy who worships at the altar of Jesus and the guys who worship at the altar of the gym mirrors.
No, it's true. My God, the biceps!
No, it's true.
And when I say it's literally like torn down the middle, it very much is because the two things do not go together.
And the mentality of someone who is deeply religious and deeply devoted to the gym do not go together.
No, no, no. I think, listen, I think physical perfection, the muscular Christianity, I don't think that there's a contradiction between worshipping God and being physically very fit.
I don't see any contradiction.
I don't see any contradiction between that at all.
I mean, you don't see, I mean, I hate to sort of put it this sort of crassly, but, you know, I see abs on most of the crucifixes around.
I mean, Jesus wasn't a couch potato, right?
He exercised, he walked, he was a carpenter, he worked with his body, he worked with his hands, and the glory of God's creation of the human body is not served by piling it in layers of fat and artery-clogging, whatever, right?
Yeah. I don't see any particular contradiction between that.
Now, of course, it's a balance, right?
I mean, if you worship the body to the exclusion of the values, then you've kind of descended.
Like, we can't be animals. We can only be non-human, right?
Because we are still human.
We have the reasoning capacity.
So if we descend to the mammal, then we are not a mammal in a sense.
I mean, I know biologically we are, but we are not an animal because we can't be, but we're not human either because we've descended to the level of the animal.
So our only choice really is to be human or inhuman.
There's no sort of third option.
So if you or the people at the gym end up worshipping the physical to the exclusion of the values, then that is definitely against what would be against velocity.
It would be against Catholicism and so on.
But at the same time, saying, you know, my body is an enemy that must be punished is doing scant disrespect for the work that God did in creating a functional body.
So, you know, if someone lends you a car, you know, you don't respect the friendship by not changing the oil, right, if you need to.
And it's the same thing. If God's giving you a body, you don't do any respect to God by...
Trashing it or letting it decay or deteriorate or whatever so that's always like what I thought as well and what actually got me I used to love that's part of the story too but in my early 20s I Went through I guess but religious people now call like a dark night of the soul and I basically was en route to becoming like an alcoholic and it was very bad and I wanted to do like a physique competition.
I don't know if you're familiar with those, but it's when you get really, really, really, really lean and you pose on stage and you get really unnaturally tan looking.
And it was fun. And that's what I wanted to do.
And in order to do that, I obviously couldn't be pounding down shots of whiskey on a regular basis.
So that got me to stop drinking.
And I just got engrossed in that.
And the person who trained me for that happened to be a Christian.
So then I went back into my faith and I started behaving better and more virtuously and desiring more virtuous things.
And it just seems like my love of the gym, because I'm so capable at it and I'm quite strong and I'm quite a looker.
I've been told it's kind of overtaken all of the other virtuous things that are more important because those things last forever.
Obviously, I'm not going to look like this when I'm 50, and I'm aware of that.
But it's like I can't seem, despite knowing that this is very short-term, I can't seem to look towards the 10-year goal Of being happily married and all of these things.
Look, the fact is I don't think that you have conceptually identified the essence of the conflict within you.
No, I haven't. And I thought I have.
Once you have conceptually identified the conflict within you, resolving it is usually pretty easy.
In other words, virtue is knowledge of conflict.
And because you're running around in your head and you haven't gotten to the root of the conflict that is within you, you rely on decaying willpower in order to try and be good.
Yeah.
And that doesn't work.
It's like swimming where there's a strong undertow.
I mean, you can get somewhere, but you're going to lose the fight sooner or later.
Swimming with the current, you can float, you can kick back, you can fold your arms across your belly and stare at the sun while seagulls fly in the distant blue.
But if you're swimming against the current, you're just going to run out of steam.
You're going to run out of energy.
So right now, I would say not having identified the conflict.
Now, I'm going to give you a quick one, two on conflict identification here.
I mean, I think I have an idea, but it's your life, right?
So I don't want to say things against what your experience is, right?
So conflict identification is, if you have dysfunctional parents, if you have dysfunctional people in your life, conflict identification is this.
There are things that the bad people want for you, and there are things that you want for you.
There we go. That's it.
That's the entirety of conflict figuring out, right?
So your parents, if they are dysfunctional, and they have not acknowledged or Worked on their dysfunction, if they lack self-knowledge, then whether they like it or not, whether you like it or not, whether they're conscious of it or not, it doesn't matter.
The reality is they want you to fail.
Yeah. They want you to fail.
Now you are self-aware enough and intelligent enough and I dare say have listened to this show enough that you don't want to fail.
No. So when you have people rooting for your failure who are very significant in your life, you have people rooting for your failure who And you have yourself desperately trying to not fail.
That is the essence of the conflict.
So, my question is, why did your parents' marriage stay so bad, or why has it stayed so bad for so long?
Because look, if you have a bad relationship, Jesus, Lord above, excuse my French, but Jesus.
If you have a bad relationship, you can fix it or you can quit it.
But this godforsaken Conan in a circle running round and round, decaying, destroying, disrupting, crapping on everything and everyone's happiness in the vicinity and playing the victim and playing the bully and eye-rolling and stuff.
And it's like, good Lord, you know, you have one short span on this mortal coil and to spend it chasing after this petty self-justification and bullying and feelings of superiority for someone you chose in terms of your mother, right?
right it's such a pathetic sad empty disgusting waste of human existence that there's got to be some kind of what they call secondary gains right so secondary gains are well i'm in a relationship where i'm being abused but i get to feel superior and i get to play the victim and i get lots of sympathy from people and i get to not be with myself because i'm constantly focusing on how bad my relationship is right so yeah there are these secondary gains so that's my question Let's just talk about your mom, right?
Your mom hates being in the room with your dad, right?
Your dad, you said, was an emotionally distant, unavailable a-hole.
Yeah. Why did your mom choose him, and why is she still there?
And please don't grace me with an I don't know.
I know you won't. No, I do not.
I know you've heard this show long enough that I don't take that.
I know very much why. Yeah, okay.
Well, they found each other, and it was, I think, very much a marriage of convenience and a marriage of necessity.
My mother was my father's third marriage, and then my father was my mother's second marriage.
My mother had married a heroin addict when she was 18, who was older, too, so it seems where I get my daddy issues from, partially, to get out of the house because her father, my grandfather, was verbally and physically abusive to her.
So she stayed with the heroin addict for 10 years, and my father knocked up somebody when he was 17, got a divorce, Got remarried.
She cheated on him with his best friend, so he divorced her.
And then, I guess, out of desperation, they turned to religion, and there was some crazy evangelical revivalist type of movement going on in the 80s when they met.
And the way my father always...
Makes this, like, elaborate explanation as to what happened in the spiritual realm when he saw her.
Like, there were firecrackers around her head, and all she just stood out to him, and he only saw her and nobody else, and, like, all this theatrical nonsense.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
What? Oh, my lord.
Yeah, my dad's a nut, and so is my mom.
No, no, that wasn't going to be my comment.
Oh, what was going to be your comment?
Let's just rewind a little bit, shall we?
What? Oh, no!
No, no, you got it. Tell me what I'm going to say.
Internalize your Steph bot.
What am I going to say? Like, that's what I want.
I want to be like, oh, my God, this is the only person I see.
And this is the only person in the world.
And this, like, supernatural moment that occurs when I meet the person I'm supposed to do it.
You gave me a good red herring there called, oh, it's the country songs, rather than the entire foundation of my parents' relationship.
That's right. All right.
It's okay. I'm going to my Zen place.
No, that's true.
I guess it's just been told so many times.
And again, unfortunately, my father tells the same story.
So my sister-in-law and brother were staying with me for Thanksgiving and we went over to my parents' house and my father tells her the same story.
And I'm just like, oh my God, I've heard this so many times.
And so they got together.
Basically, out of necessity.
My mother was very poor, having fled her heroin-addicted ex-husband.
She didn't have, like, a car. And one night, the pastor who usually drives her home couldn't drive her home, so he asked my father.
And that's when, like, they exchanged numbers.
And then six months later, they were married or something.
All right, all right. So hold on just a sec.
So you've got a story arc here, right?
You have a story arc which is...
Obsessive, stalky, one-itis.
I don't know if you know that phrase, one-itis, like there's only one person from me in the whole lot, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obsessive, stalky, one-itis leads to what in the long run?
A very bad relationship.
Well, contempt, disgust, eye-rolling, because there's no possible way that anyone can live up to those obsessive, ludicrous, worshipful standards.
Yeah, that's true.
And I guess that's why with James every single good thing he does or every single thing that like positive things that he has changed like and I've like not I have changed this man but like because of the ways that I'm very disciplined in he has kind of been like hey you know I want to be disciplined in these ways like you so I've helped him in certain areas And I like roll my eyes at that.
No, no, no. We'll get to that.
You're jumping away from the revelation, right?
So your mom is like...
Because what I'm doing here is I'm poking your inner mom...
That sounds bad. I am triggering your inner parental alter egos, right?
Because your inner parental alter egos are saying to you that the foundation of a good relationship is this obsessive, stalky one-eyedness.
Yeah. And they're maintaining this belief within you, hang on, they're maintaining this belief within you despite the fact that you've seen that after a couple of decades they can't stand each other.
Yeah. Okay, so when I say, what's the story arc here, your parents are desperate to resist my analysis of that because it loosens their hold over your future.
Because it's not you who wants yourself to fail.
We don't wake up in the morning and say, gosh, how can I harm myself today?
How can I undermine my values?
How can I go against what I treasure?
How can I ensure a bad future?
No animal, no organism does that.
The battle is, of course, between values and history.
The history wants you to repeat the mistakes so it doesn't feel like it made a mistake.
Yeah. Right? Like, I don't sit there with my daughter and say, well, you shouldn't, you know, by the time you're 53, you shouldn't be susceptible to gravity anymore.
That's ridiculous. I mean, gravity is just a kid thing.
You're supposed to outgrow it. I don't say any of that.
It would be a pretty weird thing to say to her, right?
Yeah. We don't want our kids to outgrow them.
We want to give them sort of constant and perpetual values.
But if you escape the fate of your parents, something terrible happens to them.
Because they, I bet, have universalized their mistakes into the human condition.
Like I universalize my experience of gravity to it's the human condition to be susceptible to gravity and time.
It's like, yeah, well, it is, right?
I mean, that is the human condition.
We're mortal and there's gravity, right?
I mean, there's one of the many constants in human life.
But if you take failure and you universalize it to the human condition, Then you inflict the very worst and most destructive curse upon your children, because here's my question.
So the question is, have your parents, recognizing how bad their own marriage is, sat you down and said, hey, here's what went wrong with us and here's how you can avoid it?
No, absolutely not.
And I've even asked both of them on separate occasions.
And I've just kind of pointed out to my mom, you know, you're very passive aggressive, you can't stand being in the company of my dad, like you don't see this as a problem.
And she denies that she is passive aggressive, even though she clearly is.
And then I brought it up to my dad, like, you don't see a problem with the fact that your wife can't stand to be around you that like she clearly doesn't enjoy your company.
And he either is oblivious or just doesn't care.
I don't know which one is worse.
I don't know if it's worse to be oblivious or it's worse to not care.
But they've never admitted that.
Either way, the curse lands on you to repeat their behavior.
Yeah, I would say so.
Right. Right.
Okay, so that's the challenge that you're facing.
Because if your parents had said, you know, here are the mistakes we've made, and here's how we think you can best avoid them, then you don't have a conflict between values and history.
But if your parents won't admit that there's any problem...
Then they are unconsciously demanding that you do the same as they did and you make the same mistakes and you end up in the same situation.
Yeah. Even though, like, I don't want to do that.
That's like the very opposite.
Well, no, no, no. Hang on, hang on, hang on.
So you use the word I here like that's just some simple thing.
I call it the MECO system, right?
Which is that we are an ecosystem.
We are a sort of...
Like the jungle is not just one thing, right?
The jungle isn't just one creature.
The jungle is a whole bunch of different creatures all competing for the same resources.
Now, in our personalities, in our histories, in ourselves, in our identities, there are a large number of conflicting...
personalities, alter egos, all fighting for the scarce resource called the future.
Yeah.
So when you say, well, I don't want to do that, what you're saying is, I am the first human being in existence who has zero desire to please her parents.
Yeah.
You are a remarkable young lady, but nobody's that remarkable.
Like, it's not, it's environmentally, it's evolutionarily impossible.
We always want to please our parents.
Listen, my mom would like it if I went crazy.
I'm not saying that's all she would like, and she's conflicted and ambivalent about it too, but that's an important thing.
is that I need to face, right?
There are people in this world who are enormously invested in me completely failing in what it is that I'm doing.
And they work very hard sometimes, with some success sometimes, to achieve that goal.
So I know that.
I know that conflict.
I know that fight.
And so if you understand that when you say, well, I don't want a life like my parents, that is isolating yourself and reducing yourself to only one equation, to only one variable.
And There's no human being alive who's that simple.
Listen, you ever done this?
You ever go to a park and you try and feed a squirrel or a bird from your hand?
Okay, so what happens to that chipmunk when you're trying to feed it from your hand?
It comes up to my hand and eats it?
Well, no, it doesn't just do that, right?
Because the chipmunk wants the food, right?
But what is it afraid of?
Me. It's afraid of being caught and eaten or whatever horror show goes on in a chipmunk's brain or whatever, right?
So even if you look at a creature as relatively simple as a chipmunk trying to eat food out of your hand, it has desire and it has fear.
And you can see the chipmunk warring with itself over whether to risk...
Getting caught and eaten to get the food, right?
Because the food is like, it's a trap.
It could be a trap, right? So even if you look at it, and you can see this with birds, you can see this with a wide variety of creatures, even very, very simple creatures.
You offer them food.
They're suspicious. They want the food, but they're afraid of being caught or killed or eaten or whatever it is, right?
And so if you look at an animal as simple as that, if that chipmunk was calling into my show and said, well, I just want the food, what would I say to the chipmunk?
I would say, but aren't you afraid of getting the food?
If all you wanted was the food, you wouldn't need to call in, right?
So you want...
When you say, well, I don't want that, it's like, well, yes, we can say that your healthy, original ego that wants a happy future doesn't want that.
But part of you, and the part of you I would assume that's kind of trying to please your parents or conforms to the parents, part of you...
the disaster that you're kind of cooking up in the back, right?
Yeah.
Because that will please your parents.
Yeah.
Like it would be something to talk about.
And I have two other siblings.
They're both extremely dysfunctional.
And my mom visits them all the time.
And one of them is actually suffers from allegedly manic, like depression and anxiety and lives in the house now.
And he's like 40 and she enables both of the behaviors.
Now hang on, didn't you say that you have a, was it a brother or sister-in-law or something that you were talking about?
Yeah, so half of us are like really, really dysfunctional and then the other half are extraordinarily functional.
So I have a brother who has had a girlfriend for five years and they're both wonderful and they're going to get married.
And then I have a brother and sister-in-law who were just at my place for Thanksgiving.
And they both have PhDs in philosophy.
So we have very good conversations.
And then I have another sister, an older sister from my mother's first marriage and an older brother as well from my mother's first marriage who are both completely dysfunctional.
Like who are just completely, they're on antidepressants and my brother's on a whole slew of drugs.
And my sister has never like worked a day in her life because she just claims that she can't work and has too many issues with anxiety.
and she visits and enables both of them, and it's really disgusting, like, to watch.
It's to the point that, like, I don't want to go to their house anymore because I can't stand seeing my 40-year-old brother Just in a state where essentially he's just...
The only thing that can happen is he's just going to die.
Like, there's nothing else that can happen.
What does he do with his time, do you know?
Well, he was like a correctional officer.
And then he kept taking family medical leave or whatever, FMLA, for a condition with his hands.
Like arthritis of some sort.
And then also just like general anxiety and depression.
And to my knowledge...
I'll just pal around with my mother.
So if my mother goes to the grocery store, he goes to the grocery store.
If my mother goes here, he goes here.
And oftentimes when I visit, like we have to visit for Thanksgiving, He will either just be sleeping or he'll be on the couch, like, inebriated or just sitting there.
Wow, so it's kind of like the correctional officer is in a prison.
Got it. Yeah, yeah, and it's really, really sad.
Now, can your family talk about any of this stuff?
Can they say, like, is there any possibility for, like, what would happen if you came and sort of sat down and said, you know, some of us are doing well.
Sorry, there's a lot of background noise in what you're doing.
I'm not sure what you're doing with you.
Oh, sorry. I was just zippering up my jacket, but it's zippered now, so.
So, does there any capacity in your family to sit down and say, you know, something's not quite right here?
You know, we got a 40-year-old guy on the couch.
We've got, you know, a woman who doesn't work.
You know, this is like, what happens if you try and have those kinds of conversations?
Yeah. And I have tried and I've had those conversations.
And I get immediately shut down.
And my mother specifically gets very, very defensive.
And she says just very general things of, I just do the best I can.
I don't know what you want from me.
This is the best we can do right now.
Everything's fine. I don't know what you're talking about.
And then my father, he is dumb.
Which part of me, I feel very silly saying this, but part of me does think he's actually just not very intelligent.
Like, he's just not very aware of Or he doesn't care.
And he'll just say things like, what are you talking about?
Everyone's fine. You know, your mother's sorting it out and everything's going to be fine.
And it's fine. Everything's fine here.
And I'm looking at him like he's absolutely insane.
I'm like, clearly, you're not fine.
Clearly, this entire situation is completely dysfunctional.
And you're allowing it like in your house.
My mother hasn't worked in A real job since they got married.
So he was a union electrician since he was 17.
He recently retired. I'm like, you are allowing your wife to take your money and just enable people into self-destructive behavior.
And I told him, I said, he, my brother, my half-brother, I guess, is going to go on disability, he's going to move here indefinitely, and then he's going to die.
And two of those three things have happened.
He has applied for disability and he's moved there indefinitely.
And no one addresses it.
I get yelled at for addressing it.
And it's really not a situation that I see any solution to because they will not put him into any type of, like, care.
They will not challenge him to do better.
They will not say, okay, you can stay here for three months, but then you need to go and try and get well.
No proactivity at all.
All right. So what does James think about your family?
Your parents, let's say.
He does not like the fact that my dad has treated me the way that he has treated me throughout my life.
And he thinks that my mom really did a very poor job in choosing a husband.
And he's a little bit resentful of her for that, I would say.
He seems to think that I've received, like, Bits and pieces of their very worst inclinations, which should be accurate.
Albeit I fight against those inclinations, but I've received her anxiety and a little bit of his temper, a lot of her anxiety, and just her lack of trust of people, I would say. Not her incompetence, because my mom is completely incompetent.
What are his suggestions about how you should deal with your family?
Well, he advised me to move out, which I did, obviously, because we had that issue with the basement connection.
And he really just wants to, in a way, just run away and make a very stable life.
He's just like, why don't we just make our own family where people are normal and people are stable?
And you don't have to deal with these people, you know, if you don't want to.
And obviously, he's never said, oh, don't talk to them, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But he's definitely respectful of the fact that, like, I just don't have any patience for them anymore.
And he doesn't think that I'm unreasonable for just not having any patience for them anymore.
Is there something that you would like him to have said about your family that would give you some relief?
Well, Well, he does often comment on the fact that my mom is a hoarder and that when we are together, if we are together, we will keep a very stable and clean house.
Part of me wishes that he just seemed a little bit more brutally angry towards my dad.
Yeah. Because even in recent days, my dad...
So long story short, I was visiting them.
I hadn't seen my neighbor in 10 years.
I went over with my dad to say hi to my neighbor.
And my neighbor comes over when my dad's not home to continue the conversation.
And I had thought that he wanted to speak to my dad and was just waiting for him to come home.
So I spoke to him.
And he touched me and got really inappropriate with me.
The neighbor? Yeah.
Yikes. Yeah.
And it was like really startling to me because I grew up with his daughters.
Like more than sort of Joe Biden inappropriate shoulder rubs?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I'm like...
A hefty girl. Like, I'm a strong little thing.
And I was just, like, really startled.
And I called him.
I called James. And he immediately was like, that is not okay.
Like, that is not acceptable.
Like, do you want me to come over?
Et cetera, et cetera. And just, like, comforting me.
And I tried to keep it a speaker for my dad because...
My biggest fear, which came true, was that my dad would do nothing and would kind of be upset with me, which he was.
But I essentially had to tell him because he was going to go into business with this person.
And I'm just like, I can't.
I couldn't let that happen.
So... That bothered me that my dad seemed to not care.
So I guess that's where the need for like this brute alpha quote-unquote like masculine display of strength That desire comes from.
That I never felt safe with my dad.
And James is... Well, this is why you're attracted to the gym bros, right?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because they will go and rearrange someone who touches you.
Now, that may not be wise, and that may land them in jail...
Yeah. So going from, I guess, a very, very squishy beta like your dad, you kind of go into the other extreme, which is to the, you know, you said the guy who 11 years in prison or something like that?
Yeah. Yeah. For violent assault and battery with a deadly weapon.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
All right. Because I can tell you what I think you need to hear from...
See, here's the thing.
This is what's tough about being a nice guy.
It's what's tough about being a nice guy.
Yeah. So, being a nice guy, you don't want to impose your will.
Being a nice guy, you want to accommodate.
Being a nice guy, you don't want to say or do things that upset other people too much, right?
I mean, that's part of being a nice guy.
But, unfortunately, that doesn't get you the girl.
Yeah. Yeah. That's what gets your friends out.
I just posted this thing on Twitter where feminist women are most attracted to sexist men.
I mean, it's so predictable.
It's so bloody predictable, right?
So I'm going to just guess.
This is a total guess. And tell me if this makes any sense to you.
And this is not any kind of commandment for a change in behavior.
But I think that what you need to hear from James is something like this.
Sarah, I've been way too nice about your family.
I've been way too nice.
And, you know, I guess I can take comfort in the fact that I was nice.
So hopefully now that I'm not, quote, nice, you'll take it a bit more seriously.
But you know what? They're never going to change.
Yeah. And I'll tell you what, man.
If you want to have a family with me, I do not want those people in my children's life.
I don't want those people in our children's life.
Listen, you've got a couple of siblings that are great and I've got no problem with that.
But every time you're around your family, you get messed up.
And every time you're around your family, we get messed up.
Because your family, deep down, really don't like me.
Your parents, right? I mean, I know your siblings are fine with me and all that, like the functional siblings and all that.
But your parents, they really don't like me.
And I guess...
You have a choice. And the choice is this.
If you want to be with me, and I think you should be with me, I think I'm the guy.
If you want to be with me, you're going to have to make a choice.
Because I'm not having people in my family, like my current and future family, I'm not having people in my family who were against me.
I'm not having your mom and your dad floating around our marriage, undermining our marriage.
Not going to happen. Like, there's a big, fiery, testosterone circle around our family.
That's my territory. That's my turf.
And you don't fuck with my family.
So, I'm sorry that you had the childhood you had.
I really am. And I really wish that your parents had listened to you in the Lord knows how many years you've been trying to fix them.
But they're not going to... They don't even admit there's a problem.
And what's happening is they're kind of pulling you away from me and they're pushing you towards these trashy guys so that you can end up just doing what they did and there's no one's going to challenge them because they don't want you to be with a guy.
And listen, I'll sit down and say this straight to your parents' faces if you want.
I mean, they're not my parents, right?
I can be scared of my parents. I don't have to be scared of your parents, right?
But I can sit down and say, listen, I'm laying it on the line with regards to your daughter, which is I think she's a great woman.
I think that you've really messed her up.
And your inability to admit that there's serious dysfunctions in the family is not something I want around my family.
So I want her. I want to marry her.
I want to be the father.
I want her to be the mother of my children.
I want to be the father to her children.
But you guys are not welcome in that scenario.
Now, that's her choice to make.
She can choose to stay with you guys because you're like this shipwreck that's going down in the sea of history, whereas we're like this new Atlantis that could rise and have a different future.
But, you know, as a father, as a man...
Provide and protect, man.
I can provide for my family.
I gotta protect my family.
And I cannot have people in my family circle who are not 100% positive about me and about the family.
And you guys have never been that positive about me.
You won't admit the kind of mistakes you've made that could free...
Sarah from ending up in the same situation.
So, you know, all due respect, which frankly is not very much, I've just given her a choice.
She can come with me and build a new future or she can stay on this sinking ship and she can end up hooking up with some guy who's going to be just fine with it because she's pretty.
But that's not me. Yeah, I mean, so you would say that by virtue of not addressing their issues, they're kind of saying no to him.
They're kind of saying this isn't the type of guy we would want you with.
Because we're not even addressing the issues that we have that made our marriage so dysfunctional.
So we're saying, oh, go and have your own dysfunctional, messed up marriage.
Yeah, listen, they don't want their children to succeed.
Because success would be a repudiation of their projection or universalization of their own dysfunction into something that you can't escape.
Yeah. And I guess that's why...
Back to the gravity example.
If my daughter starts walking on air, I'm like, holy shit.
Wait, what? I've been like earthbound for like 53 years and I could have just been walking on sunshine?
Are you kidding me? That would make my whole 53 years of being subjected to gravity kind of dumb, right?
Like if you walk everywhere and then suddenly, oh, there's a car, you know?
It's like, why the hell am I walking everywhere kind of thing, right?
And so with your parents, if they're not willing to admit their dysfunction...
Which they're not. Then they're going to curse you into repetition.
Because anything that comes along, like, you know the old bull in the china shop, right?
So someone who's genuinely honest, who cares about you, who cares about his family, and even cares about your parents, is going to sit down with them and say, guys, this is a messed up family.
Yeah. This is a messed up family.
I'm not comfortable with it.
I don't like it. I don't feel welcome here.
I don't feel like I can be honest here.
I don't think I can point out things that are messed up.
And I think you guys are constantly burying bodies, and you've got a hoarder, you've got a stay-at-home, deadbeat 40-year-old kid, you've got just messes everywhere you look.
Yeah. And no one can talk about it.
Listen, I cannot be in a family environment where honesty gets you attacked.
Like, I'm an honest person.
And I'm not going to sit down there and break bread with people where I've got to bite my tongue every time something messed up happens.
And it's kind of in my face, right?
This isn't like some guy locked in the attic I don't even know about.
This is people sitting right across the table from me.
And I spend the next 40 years biting my tongue.
Life is not that long that I'm willing to spend five minutes biting my tongue, let alone 50 years.
And it's honestly, like, even for me, and I grew up with these people, like, it's just really uncomfortable to be around.
And it just totally changes my mood.
And it just totally, like, makes me into a panic.
Even around Thanksgiving, I said to my brother and my sister-in-law, can we please leave?
I don't want to be around this.
I don't want to be around a stumbling, drunk, depressed person.
I don't think he's a drunk, but he does drink often.
My older brother.
I don't want to be around this.
I don't want to be around a dad who puts on a big show See, my dad never really knew how to be a dad, so when he's in a social situation, he kind of puts on a caricature of what he thinks a good dad should be, and it's extremely exaggerated and extremely uncomfortable.
Like some sort of roided-out ward cleaver?
It's sort of the image that I take?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, unfortunately, yes.
And it's like extremely uncomfortable for everyone who knows him.
And I'm around that.
And then I'm around, you know, my mom who I think my mom has like very high functioning depression or just intense sadness or something because ever since I can remember all she's ever said to me about life is all I want to do is just wake up and and finish my day so I can go back to bed.
All I want to do is finish so I can sit down and be alone and be left alone and go back to bed.
And I've heard this from her for as long as I can remember.
So I guess that might be the root of this desire to kind of just take what I want from a guy and then be left alone and not have to deal with them emotionally and then subsequently not have to deal with myself.
Let me ask you this.
Do your parents know that you dated like a felon?
No, no, I did not date this gentleman.
Oh, he was just interested in you.
Yes, I did a Google search of this gentleman, and I found out all of those things.
And I found out, this was after I had a phone call with him, and I found out that he was like 55, and he was all of these things, and he was lying to me about his military experience because he was in jail.
Right. He said he had all this.
Okay, well, let me ask you this.
Do they know about James?
Has he met them? Um, yeah, briefly.
I mean, I kind of don't go there a lot with him because the house is a mess and gross and I just don't like being there.
But are they at all, do they sit down with you and say, well, okay, you know, eggs gathering dust, young lady.
I mean, what's the plan here, right?
Do they sit there and say, you know, we want you to succeed and how can we help you with what's going on with your dating life and all that kind of stuff?
No, no. Actually, what also really upset me, my aunt, I'm fairly close to her, and she told my dad about my dating history, which consisted, unfortunately, Of dating much older men.
And like my dad didn't even care.
Like he didn't say anything to her.
He didn't say anything to me.
So they're just completely not interested.
And there was a period of time...
So why do you want to be around people who don't care about you?
I suppose because I don't really think there's much about me that one should really care about, I guess.
Oh, so you believe them.
You accept their perspective on you.
So you're lying to me, calling me up saying, Steph, I've got a very challenging set of life circumstances.
I really want you to dig in and help me out because it's what?
Do you believe you're interesting?
I mean, why am I spending my time?
If there's nothing interesting about you, why are you calling me?
Well, then I guess I don't actually believe that, but I'm acting like I am because that's based on...
Because you've been told you want to please your parents.
Yeah. Because if you are interesting, your parents are total jerks.
Yeah. Yeah, no, they are.
My dad especially is a total jerk.
Okay. So let's try that one again.
Why do you want to be around people who don't think you're interesting and don't care about you at all, it seems, from everything you've said, right, from the neighbor who grabbed at you to indifference to your problems growing up to indifference to the honesty that you bring to the table to indifference about your dating history, which could be quite dangerous. Why do you want to be around people Who don't care about you?
Part of me is afraid of what will happen to them if, like, I'm not around, if that makes sense.
That's part of why I'm still in this area.
Okay, so what will happen to them if you're not around?
That there will just be, like, no medium for them to communicate with, and my mom will...
Continue to enable my brother and my brother will continue to go down.
Give me some empirical evidence that you being around has changed one thing about any of that.
It hasn't. Okay, so that's a false hypothesis.
Yeah, like it hasn't at all.
So it's not because you hope to affect them for the better because you haven't.
So what's the real reason?
Don't give me this surface crap.
What's the real reason? The real reason I want to be around someone I don't That doesn't care about me?
Do you want to know the answer?
Well, why would I, I guess, because I don't find myself interesting.
No, because now you're saying that you have no reason for it, and that's an insult to you as well, right?
Of course you have a reason for it.
I can tell you what the reason is.
The reason you stick by people who don't care about you is to avoid the pain of not being cared about.
So it's more painful to acknowledge, OK, this person does not care about me.
They're not interested in me.
It's never going to change. There's nothing I could do.
There's nothing I could have done.
I was only a kid.
I can't do anything at the age of 27.
I sure as hell couldn't do anything at the age of 7 or 17 or 7 months, for that matter.
They're never going to care about me.
They don't have the capacity.
They don't have the muscle.
I'm like trying to ask a guy with no arms to clap and applaud me.
It's never going to happen. And that's a lot of pain to process.
You're hanging around waiting for it to happen is a way of avoiding the pain that it never did happen and it never, ever will.
I think you're 100% right with that because...
A lot of what I do and my behavior is to get my dad's attention.
And I'm realizing that as I'm getting older and I realized that the greatest compliment I ever got from him was, you should have been born a boy because you're so strong.
Because I was helping him move some giant TV or something.
And then immediately I'm just like, yeah, none of your freaking boys...
Because my brothers are all thinking men and they're all wonderful.
They're the best men I know. But they're not like that.
And I was always the one who was kind of the meathead, who wanted to know how to build things.
Yeah, but his supposed compliment is a denial of your femininity.
Come on. You can be feminine and strong.
Oh, yeah. Of course.
Yeah. I think I struggle a lot with that.
And I struggle with wanting to feel like, oh, you know, I'll fucking kill you.
But when I'm in a situation in which I'm vulnerable...
Obviously, like with my creepy neighbor, that wasn't my response.
And I really wished I had, you know, that masculine figure to kind of do what traditionally a man would do, which is to protect the honor of his daughter or his sister or his wife or whatever.
Well, if your dad was that kind of dad, the neighbor would never have hit on you to begin with.
Yeah, and I realized that as well because my father had told me when I told him...
He was like, you know, this doesn't surprise me.
And I just look at him. I'm like, what do you mean?
He's like, because when you were like 20 and he saw you walking around with the dog, I was talking to him and he says to me, oh, you know, your daughter's like shaping up to be a really beautiful woman.
Like, you know, I get with her.
And I just looked at him and I thought, like, what type of like pussy ass man are you that a man will say that to your face about your daughter and you don't say anything?
Well, and I think that part of the reason you pursue such a significant degree of physical strength is to be the protector for yourself that you never had from your father.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. I'm what they call a buff bitch.
I'm very, very muscular. Not obscenely muscular, but I wear it well.
But I'm a bodybuilder.
That's what I do. And a lot of that drive has to do with getting to stalk around and Look tough and look like somebody who you don't want to talk to.
Underneath the muscle, you're still a girl.
Yeah. And this is why when the neighbor, right?
Yeah. It didn't play out the way that the action movies have it play out, right?
Yeah. With Angelina Jolie and Salt and beating up all these Marines.
Like, okay, please. Yeah.
It doesn't. It doesn't work.
And I guess... I just wish that James was more of an asshole, like was more of a meathead, and I just felt more like...
No, no, no, not asshole.
That's not the word you're looking for.
You wish he were more assertive about what's right.
Yeah, I do.
Part of me feels like he's a yes man, like my brother and sister in law met him.
And they said, Well, you know, he's very nice.
And he obviously like really, really loves you.
But it just seems like you physically feel very uncomfortable around him.
And I feel like he's a yes man, like he just wants to be with you so much that he will say or not say anything.
Please, God, please, God, tell him to call me.
He died now.
No, please. James, I know that's not your real name.
Please call me. Please call me.
Listen, I appreciate the nice guy thing you've got going on there.
A nice guy is great.
A nice guy is great when you're inside the circle.
You're inside that circle of protection.
You've got to be nice to your kid.
You've got to be nice to your wife.
But there's a whole hard, bitter, nasty world out there that you can't be nice to.
It'll just take advantage of you.
No, it's true. And like, either consciously or subconsciously, sometimes it was consciously, like, I would be absurd.
Like, I would be clearly unreasonable.
And like recently, and he just, he would just say, okay.
Yeah, no, he's hoping that if he's nice enough to you, you'll tingle for him.
And it's not, it's not true.
No, and I wish it was.
Tell him to go read Fifty Shades of Grey and then come back to me and tell me that he understands female sexuality.
Come on, it's the most popular book ever written, for God's sakes.
And I very much do feel like...
That is a big reason why we just are not working at the moment or, like, won't work, that he just doesn't understand.
And he is, like, two years younger than me as well.
And, again, I'm a virgin, but I've had more experience insofar as physical intimacy goes, and he really just has not because he maybe had a little bit more integrity with that pursuit than I did.
Well, no, but it's not that.
I mean, it's not that.
I mean, you're quite a force of nature just in terms of personality and your physique and your looks and all of that.
It would be a challenge for a lot of men.
I hate to say to handle you like you're some sort of horse that needs to be broken.
That sounds terrible.
But you know what it is that I'm talking about, right?
Yeah, I've been told that.
Yeah, yeah. And listen, I respect that and I understand that.
And he probably is just listening to a whole bunch of romantic comedy movies or songs or, you know, like, I can't feel my face when I'm with you.
I don't think that, like, post-dental numbness is the way that you show your attraction to a woman.
But anyway. No. So the nice guy thing is, well, it's basically just a big shit test, right?
And of course, listen, you've got to be nice to people, but only when they're safe.
Yes.
And him being nice to you, if you have this attachment to your parents that is dysfunctional, then he needs to recognize that as a threat to his future with you and deal with it accordingly.
Now, what that is, I don't know, because I'm just talking to you for the first time and all that.
Maybe it is sitting down with your parents.
Maybe it is provoking a discontent or a disagreement and handling it.
Or maybe it is, you know, whatever it is, taking a break.
Who knows?
Right.
But he is waiting for you to make a decision, which is by God, the most frustrating thing a woman can experience.
I'm still here.
I'm still here.
If you want me, I'm still here.
And it's like, oh man. Because if you have to make a decision to choose him, that's going to kill your desire right in the cradle.
Unfortunately, yeah. And honestly, part of me just like...
So he is applying to various PhD programs of which he will get into because he is brilliant and he has connections.
His father is a university professor and he knows professors, blah, blah, whole shebang.
And The reason why we started trying to figure out if we should be together is because of that reason.
And he's like, hey, you know, I'm going to be leaving soon.
Like, what are we?
Do you want to be something? Are we something?
Wait, wait. How long is he going to be doing his PhD for?
Five years. He will know by the end.
So what, you're going to be 32 before he can even have a chance at a steady job?
Well, I have a job, but yeah.
Sorry. No, but in terms of like, he's going to be starting his career when it's getting real time for you to get on the old making babies horsey, right?
Yeah, so I mean, that's also something I consider as well.
I mean, like, I do have a job.
What the fuck is the plan there? Excuse my French.
What is the plan there?
I can tell you what his plan was.
Okay. And that was like the last real conversation we had before Thanksgiving when I just completely shut down because I'm just like, I can't deal with this right now.
So he is 24.
I'm 27. And his plan is that he will go wherever it is, you know, he gets called to go to, which will be at the beginning of this year or next year, rather.
He'll find out like if he gets accepted, where he gets accepted to, etc.
And he wants me to move out there with him.
And we would just kind of like live life together.
You mean when he's doing his PhD program?
Where he's doing his PhD? Yeah.
So does he want to get married to you before he starts his PhD or what?
He wants to wait because of how flaky I am, which is very wise.
No, it's not wise.
No, it's not wise.
No, it's not wise because you're flaky because he's not showing up.
What do you mean? Let me sort of give you an example, right?
Yeah. So imagine how much work it is to play a game of tennis by yourself.
A lot, yeah.
Right? That's bloody exhausting.
I remember this example. Yeah, yeah.
Or table tennis or whatever it is, right?
You can play basketball by yourself, I guess, right?
Just shoot the hoops or whatever. But tennis, you've got to run back.
It's exhausting. Yeah.
So he's just sitting there, as far as I can understand it, saying, I want you.
Let me know. Yeah.
And that's not going to work for you.
Is what he's saying. That doesn't work for women.
Yeah. And there have been times, oh golly, I sound like such a not nice person.
There have been times where like, I've literally just ignored all of his attempts to contact me, knowing that I can text him now, and he would respond immediately.
And I just feel like having that type of power for anybody, especially for women, because I know how I as a woman am, and just the nature of women.
I listen to your whole thing about female evil, and I agree 100% with how women are.
We are very manipulative if If we are allowed to be.
And men have capacity to great evil without being restrained.
So if he were to sort of step up and be assertive, that would help you a lot.
Because you are trying to become attracted to a guy that you kind of need to swoop in and take command.
And I know this ruffles everyone's feathers and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But it's true.
Listen, from a female who, you know, as my friend says, is very much a unicorn.
Like, it's true.
It's all true. Like, women do not want these types of men who cannot be assertive, you know, when it matters.
And I do very much agree with Jordan Peterson that women don't want, you know, nice men.
They want men who are dangerous but control their aggression, control their temper.
Because you're measuring his capacity to go out there and fight In the world to bring resources to the family.
And if he kowtows to you, then maybe he's going to kowtow to some competitor who's going to get the job that would have made you guys very comfortable.
Or maybe he's going to defer.
Or maybe he's going to be manipulated or controlled by some student.
Or who knows, right?
Or some faculty member.
So you need to know that he's strong enough to go out there and fight for the family.
And if he's just deferring to you, that's not a good sign.
Yeah, I do fear that.
I really do. And it makes me feel like a really bad person.
Wait, wait, wait. What's with the judgment?
I don't understand. Why does that make you feel like a bad person?
You're going to need to depend on this guy.
Like if you become a stay-at-home mom, you're going to need him to provide for you for like 20 years, and he's going to have to do a damn good job of it.
Like why on earth would you not want to probe and test his capacity to go out there and fight for the decreasing amounts of cheddar in a postmodern world?
Well, I suppose when you put it that way, I'm not a bad person.
No! I'm a very thoughtful person.
No, listen, it's about your children.
Everyone thinks it's about the partner.
It's not. It's not about the partner.
It's about the children. If you didn't want kids, this would be a whole different kind of equation, right?
right?
Oh, absolutely.
It's because you need someone who's going to go out there and fight like hell to get resources to bring home to the family.
And at the same time, you don't want him to be so coarsened and brutalized by the fight for resources that he comes home and is either completely exhausted or fights with everyone at home because that's all he does.
Yeah.
And that's like what my dad was.
So, So I guess like I want, not like the opposite of my dad, but...
Someone who is emotionally available, but has that work ethic as my dad does.
Like my dad provided for six kids and drove to and from New York for 60 years, like four hours a day.
And he did it, you know, and he did it every day.
And he didn't complain, but he wasn't very nice.
So, or emotionally available.
I remember you had a show, it was like, ladies, you can't have it all.
You can't have, you know, the guy with the app who is emotionally available, who buys you the Mercedes, which I don't want at all.
I have no interest in such things.
But you can't have it all.
And I question whether I'm trying to have it all, you know, whether I'm trying to be this, like, kick-ass, badass, like, gym goddess that is very much part of my identity, as well as this, like, virtuous Catholic woman who wants this family, which I think is very much part of my identity.
As well as this successful woman who has her own career, which isn't as much as part of my identity.
No, but those things are not all mutually exclusive, right?
So I don't think that that's unrealistic.
If you have a lot to offer, and I think you do, then you have...
The right to ask. You know, Brad Pitt doesn't just go up and say, hey, just give me 10 bucks for the movie, man.
I'm good. Yeah.
Right? I mean, so if you have a lot to offer, there's nothing wrong with asking for a lot.
That's always how I felt, if I just may say so.
Am I wrong for feeling like I'm a catch?
No. I do deserve somebody who can provide all of these things because I am bringing a lot to the table.
Well, I mean, but that's the contradiction, right?
You say, well, I'm not that interesting, and then it's like, yes, but I do bring a lot to the table.
That's the battle between history and the future, right?
Indeed. Now, here's a thing that I wanted to touch base on.
And I'll try and do it pretty quickly.
But honor thy mother and thy father.
I have wrestled a huge amount.
You know, I was raised Christian and so on.
So honor thy mother and thy father.
I'm going to give you a little speech here.
And I think it will help with regards to this.
Okay? Yeah.
So I've talked frankly about my mother and my history and all of the problems and all of that.
But I'll tell you this. I do honor my mother.
And I do not honor her by doing the same.
The man who grows up with an alcoholic father honors his father by not touching alcohol.
And so with regards to you and your parents, I think that the honor thy mother and thy father needs to be combined with do not bear false witness.
Yes. And so when you understand the weaknesses and sins of your parents, you honor them by not repeating them.
Now, if they are constantly encouraging you to repeat their sins, taking a break from them so that you can do the opposite is serving virtue, is serving God.
Because if somebody is constantly plying you with a drug and you need to quit taking that drug, separating from that person who's plying you with the drug is honoring your sobriety.
And if you're Parents are undermining you and causing you to bear false witness.
In other words, they're punishing you for any semblance of truth you bring to the table.
Then you honor them by doing the opposite.
You honor what's best within them by listening to the devils who've got control of them and saying, get thee behind me.
I do honor my mother every day.
I honor the lessons that she inflicted upon me and the My dedication to reason and self-knowledge and peaceful parenting and integrity and virtue, my focus on all of that is a form of honoring her because I've seen what happens when you don't.
And if I can do my part to make fewer of my mothers in the world and fewer of me's as a child and what I went through in the world, that is turning...
Her immorality to virtue.
That is how you honor your parents.
And if you can find a way, and I know that you can, to do the opposite of what your parents are doing, you are honoring them.
Slavishly following your parents into sin and repetition of dysfunction is not doing them honor, and it certainly isn't doing God any honor.
Maybe, just maybe, God put your parents there, so to speak, so that you could learn And you could do the opposite, and you could separate from that kind of dysfunction.
So honor, to me, is a complex word, and it certainly does not mean slavishly imitating the worst impulses of those around us.
That is not honor. The word does not obey your parents.
The word is honor. Honor has virtue.
And if the way that we get to virtue is by extracting the opposite lessons of immorality, that is absolute honor.
So if you end up not spending as much time with your parents or any time with your parents so that you can take the lessons that they have inflicted upon you and build a positive and virtuous and honest and true environment for your kids, that is honoring your parents.
Almost despite themselves.
Because that's something that is tough for a lot of Christians.
But to me, the complexity of the Bible is founded in this.
It doesn't just say obey.
It says honor. And honor has virtue in it.
And if your parents are not virtuous, the best way that you honor them is turning to virtue as a result of seeing their vice.
And if they're constantly tempting you to vice, well, your path is to virtue, not to a slavish obedience of historical dysfunction.
So I just really wanted to put that out there because that's something that is a big problem for a lot of people who believe in the Old Testament.
And it is a challenge for me as well because I'm like, I feel like I'm honoring her, but I know I... And by talking about the stuff that my mother did that was wrong, I'm teaching people and showing them the effects of that.
Yeah.
Yeah. They all have such good marriages and they're all successful and they're all happy.
And how did I, who unfortunately have lived a life of really just mediocrity and intense unhappiness, some self-inflicted, I presume, how did I get these kids?
And I feel like I'm the one who's not I'm going to have her ask that question, and she's just going to say, oh, you know, you married someone just like your father, because that's all you know, and that's what you're attracted to, and that's all you see, and that's all you know.
And I get very disappointed in that prospect.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, well, don't do that.
Don't end up in that. I mean, that would be a terrible, terrible life.
Especially because you do have access to such great tools.
Jordan Peterson, this show, your therapy, self-knowledge.
I mean, you just have access to such amazing tools to change the course of your life that you almost have no excuse if you don't, right?
No, absolutely. It's like you're choosing to live a crappy life, like you're choosing to sabotage yourself.
So, okay. Pretend that I am James.
Okay. And pretend that your words can have an effect on him that they didn't have on your parents.
Okay. And tell me, as James, exactly and deeply what you need.
Okay. So I really just need you to be more...
I think I don't have a clear understanding of what masculinity is.
No, no, no. Good Lord.
Sorry, that's like the most soulless depth of feeling that I've never experienced in my life.
Let's try that again and pretend it's not an essay that you're reading to a grade 6 class.
Come on, this is your deepest need.
This is what you passionately want from this guy to sort your life out.
So let's try that again, but put some heart into it and don't give me so many abstractions, please.
What do your ovaries want from this guy?
What am I thinking right now about this person?
I really wish that you just made me all hot and bothered and wanted to have your babies and I get really frustrated with you because it seems like we make so much sense on paper and we have all of these beautiful, wonderful conversations and our ability to talk and communicate is so great and that will go further than Your abilities in bed but I feel like you don't have any and I feel like I don't want you to touch me because you're not capable of turning me on and if I'm not turned on by you I can't have your children and the only difference between a great friendship and a romance is the ability and desire to be physical with each other and I don't know why that's not there.
And the prospect of you touching me gives me such anxiety.
And I don't know if it's because I emotionally connect with you.
And so I feel like I don't want someone to know me as deeply as emotionally and physically connecting with me.
So I've always just chosen one or the other.
But you want both.
And I just don't want you to know me, all of me, because I just don't feel like I'm that awesome of a person to know all about.
Hang on. No, no. See, now you're sliding into self-criticism.
Let's just do it.
This is great at the beginning.
I'm sorry to be annoying and coachy, but listen, now you're sliding into self-criticism, which is your mom taking over and collapsing your needs.
Imagine that every single one of your needs is completely legitimate.
Okay. Completely, like, don't judge them.
Don't evaluate them. What do your eggs want from James?
Like, what I want him to do with me?
What do you want from him that would give you security and allow you to surrender to him?
I want you to take more steps physically and I want you to be more assertive physically and not give me these pussy ass side hugs and annoyingly try and peck me on the cheek and peck me on the lips and wait for me to tell you that everything that you've been wanting to do with me and to me for three years is okay and I want you to just put your hands where you want them to go and I just want you to be more physically assertive And to convince me that you can take care of that need too,
which is also very important.
And I feel like the only need you're not demonstrating the ability to take care of yet.
Okay, now let me just be him, right?
So I'd say, but I want to treat you with respect and me too.
And like, this is confusing.
Which is what he said.
I know, I know. What do I respond to that?
The way that you can respect me is by putting me up against the wall and doing things with me.
The way that you can respect me is by feeding into this desire to be taken care of physically by a man who is worthy of me.
And I think you're worthy of me.
And so anything that you want to do, apart from, you know, the big thing, which we obviously want to save for marriage, I would like you to be confident in doing.
And you can respect me by respecting yourself and making me believe that the things I see in you Are things that you see in you too, because I feel like you don't think you're a great person.
And you've said to me that.
No, no, you're getting to be, this is all big analysis stuff.
Let's get back to the, and it's not just sexual, right?
I mean, I get that, right? I now have a title for the show, which is don't put me on a shelf, put me up against the wall.
Ha ha ha! That's excellent.
Yeah, but, so, listen, like, your needs, listen, I get the sexual side of things, and I'm not going to disagree with you about any of that, but the needs that you have for, like, security and protection and his assertiveness, like, tell me a little bit more, or tell me, if I'm James, like, what do you really need from him over and above the sexual stuff?
I want to know that you are somebody who's not...
Pushed around or bossed around because it really is concerning to me that I can manipulate you and I can get you to do whatever it is I want because you want me so much.
So my concern is that you'll want something and you'll do whatever it is you think needs to be done to get it even if that means trying to be a pussy.
And I feel like that's not you.
And I feel like you need to be more confident in yourself and in your ability and your value.
And if you don't value yourself, there's really an issue with you being viewed as valuable in this academia, this academic field that you want to go into.
I feel like you're not You're not confident in yourself and you seem just very insecure when you have no reason to be.
And it's extraordinarily frustrating to me because I just feel like you're very whiny.
And it annoys me because I don't think I'm whiny and I don't know how to deal with somebody who is supposed to be all manly and capable who's just whining all the time.
Well, what do I whine about?
You whine about your mom.
You whine about, oh, my mom, she's always bitching at my dad and I can't stand the way that she talks to him in front of me.
And I give you all of this advice and I make these suggestions to you and you don't do it.
So I'm kind of just like, well, you clearly don't want to change this issue about yourself.
And you're just going to be walked all over by your mom because what you want from your mom is peace.
You just don't want to hear her. So just like how you want me, you think giving in to everything I want is going to get you me, you think just letting your mom bitch at your dad is going to get you peace in the house.
You whine about, oh, why am I not more muscular?
Why am I not this?
Well, dear, because that's not your priority right now.
Your priority is to get into a PhD program.
As I've told you, you know, if something isn't a 100% priority for you, which isn't bad, like I'm not saying you should be like some meathead crazy person like me, but like if that's not your priority, it's not fair to expect that you'll have the same results of somebody whose priority it is.
And you whine, you whine about me and about wanting to be with me and about, you What you wish we could be together, even though I feel like we're not right for each other and I wish we were.
And I feel like you don't do what needs to be done to make everything that matches up on paper be applicable in real life.
And it's really frustrating to me because you're not being proactive.
In these areas. And you're not doing what I feel like I've kind of overtly told you to do to get what you want.
And it must be so frustrating if you feel that he's treating you in a similar manner that he treats his mother.
Yeah, I feel like he...
In a way, I think his mom is on a pedestal.
But I feel like he patronizes me.
And I feel like I... I can do no wrong in his eyes.
And I'm a very flawed person.
Okay, I'll be not more flawed than normal people, not less flawed, like whatever the case may be.
But I'm not a perfect person.
And I feel like he puts me up on this pedestal.
And one of the lines that I always tell him is...
You know, you have these expectations and I can't meet them.
And I'm not in a place where I can be all of these things that you need me to be.
And I don't know what to tell you because you have these expectations and I can't meet them.
And I guess I don't even really understand what I mean.
When I say he has these expectations, maybe I'm just trying to...
No, listen. If you're perfect, then...
Sorry, you got a bit of rustling going on with the mic.
Oh, sorry. If you're perfect, then you can't improve, he can't give you feedback, and the relationship cannot grow.
Yeah. You know, if you've just created the perfect sculpture of a lion, you'll never touch it again.
Yeah. It will never evolve.
It will never get better because it's already perfect.
And so the idea, when you put a woman on a pedestal, you're promising her that there's going to be no growth in the relationship.
Yeah, I can't stand it. Or if there is going to be growth, it's going to be him trying to crawl up your Mount Everest of perfection to get to the snowy cap or whatever, right?
And so the problem with putting women on a pedestal or anyone on a pedestal is that the relationship immediately becomes boring.
Because there's no challenge.
There's no growth. There's nothing to improve.
There's nothing to progress on. I can't stand it.
And I don't know if that is part of the reason why the idea of being close to him gives me ridiculous, panicky anxiety to the point that I shut down.
I am quite a decent communicator and we have really good conversations over the phone and we can talk for hours and whatnot.
But then in person, just like when he's looking at me, and he has very blue eyes, and his eyes are black because he's just like staring so intensely at me.
And it's so uncomfortable because I literally don't understand what he's looking at.
And I've asked him, I'm like, I don't understand what you're looking at.
Like, I don't understand like what you see.
When you look at me. And he just very instinctually, you know, and I think he was genuine, said, well, you know, I see, obviously, like, a gorgeous woman who can talk to me about everything, who's going to raise my kids well, who is not going to be a hoarder, who is not going to be a third-wave feminist, and who's going to raise my kids to like their dad.
And that's what I see.
And that's why I look at you so much, because I see a good future with you.
And I'm just like, okay.
I'm glad you see that because I don't know what I see when I look in the mirror.
If he sees and says all of that, I know you're paraphrasing, but if he sees and says all of that while you have this intense ambivalence, he's not seeing you.
Yeah. Right. So he needs to see you and to embrace all of that ambivalence.
Listen, I mean, I haven't said there, I've sort of, quote, embraced the ambivalence, right?
I mean, it's not a boyfriend situation, of course, right?
But I'm not sitting there saying, well, you know, it's just one thing or the other and so on.
And if he's looking at you and saying, well, I don't see any problems of future life together, mother of my kids and so on.
It's like, but there's this ambivalence that you have about him.
And if he doesn't embrace and accept that, he's not seeing you for where you are and who you are, right?
Yeah. Yeah, and I guess that's like what the most frustrating part is, because I guess very much like the frustration I feel towards my dad when I state, you know, mom clearly doesn't like you.
And he's like, what? What are you talking about?
And I just look, and that's what he says.
Like, that's what he sounds like.
Like, what do you mean?
We're fine. I'm sure he doesn't sound exactly like Foghorn Leghorn, but all right.
No, listen, you have too much power in this relationship with James, right?
Yeah, I can't stand it. You have way too much power, and when you have too much power, it just breeds disrespect.
I mean, it's inevitable, because nobody should be giving you that kind of power.
Yeah, and I actually ran into the dad of a friend from a long while back.
He's kind of a windbag, but we had a decent conversation, and he always liked to talk about relationships.
And one of the things that I said was, Well, you know just from what I've learned recently is if you don't have similar experiences in life You kind of have problems connecting and he tried to like reprimand me and I was like, oh, you know Let me like explain in a different way if the experiences that the person has had or has not had Causes them for whatever reason to not have respect for that person.
They cannot be together so if for whatever reason something within me is I know we're talking about him like this is all hearsay,
so to speak, right? Yeah.
But if he has not evolved to the point where he's able to deal with his appeasement of his mother, I think as you've described it.
Yeah, it's really annoying.
Well, that's a big problem.
Yeah, and I've told him that.
And again, I've said this before, and I'll just touch on it briefly here.
A man looks at a woman and says, wow, you know, it's going to be me and her.
A woman looks at a man and says, wow, there's a whole lot of people coming along with him.
100%. Right, and so you're looking at him and saying, okay, so am I going to now engage in a half-century battle for his soul with his mother?
Yes. Like, what if his mother says something that goes against my interests?
Right. Who is he going to side with?
Well, that's a big problem.
You need him to side with you.
Listen, you're supposed to let go of the mother and embrace the wife.
That's the deal. And it used to be a pretty well understood deal until this perpetual adolescence of being in school into your 30s kind of kicks in for people.
But you're supposed to let go of your mother's skirts and you're supposed to embrace your wife, the mother of your children, your current family.
And hey, if you've got a good mom and she's coming along and she's there, but she is way in the back.
Like, your focus, like, I mean, when I got married, I mean, the idea that I would put my family of origin preferences, or my family of origin's preferences, any one of them, that I would choose that over my wife in any way, shape, or form was incomprehensible to me.
You know, that's why I had a guy who said, well, I really want to get to know your wife because you're probably just going to get divorced anyway.
I'm like, bye-bye. Oh, my God.
Yeah, I'm like, bye-bye, man.
Sorry. If you're going to be there, Iago-style woman, like, trying to unravel my marriage or trying to...
I'll tell you this, my dear.
When I had friends who were going through significant marriage problems, I mean, I'd sit there and chat with them for a bit, but you've got to keep that shit to a minimum because it spreads.
You know, divorces, they spread.
They're, like, contagious. Right?
So, like, anyone, anything, anywhere, anyhow, gets between me and my family, it's like TikTok.
You know, like, you get a couple...
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And so, you know, if if he's still appeasing his mom and hasn't stood up to his mom and he's like he's almost 25, he's almost a quarter century old.
Yeah.
Well, you're looking at that and saying, oh, I can't rely on this guy to choose me over history.
Now, to be fair, he can't at the moment rely on you to choose him over history, as we talked about earlier.
But I think that's the challenge.
And you can both have a conversation about that.
You sit down with him and say, okay, I want to move.
Your mom wants you to stay.
I want to do this.
Your mom wants to do that.
And who do you choose?
Yeah. Because that's the vow.
That's the vow to love, honor, and obey.
Not the mother-in-law, not the father-in-law, not the siblings, not the second cousin's roommate, but that's who the vows are for, is each other.
Yeah. And part of me fears being in a situation where, you know, just as I... Wanted to feel protected by my dad and didn't.
You know, I'm going to marry someone for whom I don't feel protected by, for whatever reason.
And then I'm going to seek that elsewhere, you know, as I'm seeking it elsewhere at present, albeit not as intensely as I was before, like I started therapy and stuff.
But it's still there. Sorry to interrupt.
Does he know this about your father, that you felt the need to be protected?
Oh, he knows I... Yeah, he knows I have really bad daddy issues, absolutely.
He is very, very, very aware of that, which is why I even told him, I'm like, the fact that I've even considered this, and we've been considering it since last Easter, is a miracle in itself, because I don't date people your age.
I don't date people my age at all.
It's not even on my radar.
So, I mean, that's kind of special, I suppose, because we do make so much sense on paper.
And then sometimes I wonder, you know, we make sense on paper, but that doesn't necessarily work when applied outside of the notebook.
Well, no, but listen, the on paper has to include the history section.
Right.
And if if part of you is drawn to him for reasons of ideological or philosophical compatibility.
Yeah.
The fact that you're recoiling from what may be untrustworthiness within him is actually to be a very good sign because it means that you're not dedicated to reproducing the lack of trust or lack of protection issues you had with your dad.
In other words, and this is probably the result of your therapy and self-knowledge and all of that, because otherwise you might be like, oh, he's perfect, you know, in a sense, right?
Because he's going to reproduce that stuff with your dad and he's not going to threaten your dad and your relationship with your dad or your non-relationship with your dad or anything like that, right?
So the fact that you are pushing or you are recoiling from someone who reminds you of some of the more negative aspects of your dad is actually kind of a positive thing.
thing now there is an opportunity there and i think that the opportunity there is you gotta it and i would say do this no matter what like if you guys end up together or not do it because it'd be great for you do it because you care about this man do it because even if he's just gonna stay in the friend zone or whatever but you gotta wake him up to his mommy issues yes right
and and so sitting there like you know this has been me sort of waking you up to some degree to like the family of origin issues and all that which I know you're pretty aware of But for him, and this is why, you know, please urge him to call me.
I would really like to get this side of the story.
Yeah. You know, if he's appeasing his mom or if he's the kind of guy who's like, well, you just have to be nice.
And it's like, no, nice is not the definition of masculinity.
It's what pretty negative elements of society want men to believe is what women want.
But it's not what women want.
What women want is to be protected and provided for if they want kids, right?
It's a whole different situation if you're older or you don't want kids or whatever.
But a woman's instinctual vulnerability and dependence upon the man requires that he be assertive outside the circle and kind inside the circle.
And that's a challenge, right?
But so what? I mean, listen, men have challenges like, well, we want to really, really respect women, but then you want to be thrown up against the wall.
Like, I get that. It's a challenge, right?
And men have challenges like, yeah, she wants me to be really alpha and assertive, but when I come home, I'm supposed to be a teddy bear.
Yeah, I get that, but so what?
You know, I mean, you have your own challenges as a woman, right?
That you want to be a nurturing mother and, you know, a complete wanton in bed and a great cook and a great conversationalist and you want to have this great intellect, but at the same time, you want to be running after kids for year after year.
Like, there's a lot of contradictions for women as well.
That's just part of the joy and complexity of sex and of marriage and of family and reproduction.
There's a lot of different and complex roles that we all have to fill, and I think we should embrace that rather than say, well, wait a minute, which is it?
No, it's like there is no which is it.
It's all... A challenge.
Like, I have to go out there and be fierce sometimes in the world, and I have to come back, and I have to be, you know, very gentle with my family.
And yes, that is a, you know, it's a complex character study, I guess, and that's life.
And so the fact that, you know, you want him to be nice to you, of course, right?
You don't want him to be, like, yelling at you all the time.
No, no, no. Yeah, okay.
Yeah, absolutely. So, listen, I know we've been talking for a long time, and I know we haven't had, like, we've had a couple of, like, medium-sized revelations, but I think the revelation comes in the conversation with him about his mom.
And also in trying to figure out the effects of...
The toxicity of your parents on your success.
But the one last thing I wanted to ask you, you said at the very beginning, you said, I'm about to make a bad decision.
Were you just speaking existentially or immediately like there's some Chippendales guy who's got your number or something?
I'm getting really frustrated with this whole pursuit of saving myself for marriage.
And I very much just feel like I'm doing it with such resentment that It doesn't matter.
The reason why I'm doing it has just gotten so lost to me and in me.
And honestly, what I told my therapist, I just want...
Like, to be thrown up against a wall.
No, listen, 27, that's a long time in the desert.
I totally get that.
But I, you know, again, if I were you, if I were you, I would grip my teeth, have this conversation with the guy.
There may be a beast within him that just needs permission to come out, which might actually resolve things for you guys.
Or there's no beast whatsoever, in which case there's a resolution there as well.
So, yeah, but I would pour, I mean, if this guy's good on paper and you've had three years and so on, then, you know, and it's tough because you don't want to order him to be assertive because that doesn't really work.
It's very frustrating, right? That's why.
Have him call me. But also talk to him about what's going on with his mom.
And I think if you focus on him and where he's falling short, so to speak, I think that may get what you want through the side door, if that makes sense.
I haven't, and I know you have to go, but I haven't talked to him in like a week, so I don't really know what to do now, because my family was up, so he kind of just like left me alone, and the last message you sent, I ignored him.
Just tell him to call me before this show comes out.
Yeah, okay. Tell him, tell him, I want to talk to him, and I appreciate and understand where he's coming from, and I really want to help him get what he wants.
Okay, I will tell him that.
You know what, here's the email.
Say, your name, Wall, some assembly required.
Absolutely. All right, so yeah, I won't publish this till I hear from you about that.
But yeah, please, please have him call me.
I will. And it will be very helpful for him and for you.
And I think it would be certainly illuminating for people to hear the other side.
But how's the conversation been for you overall?
It was very helpful.
I feel so thrilled that you took my email because I woke up and I just felt so lost and just confused and just go out and go bang Jim Bro or something.
I don't feel that way anymore.
And I do feel like... He has his issues too and he's not like this perfect person pursuing this broken person that, you know, we both have things that are in our history that impact how we interact with each other and it's important for me to realize that too and it's important for me to realize that wanting somebody who will protect me and provide is not unreasonable.
Right, right. Okay, good.
Good. All right. Well, listen, keep me posted.
I'll look forward. I'll just stare at my inbox till the email comes in.
No, I'm going to tell him immediately. So tell him I'm going to get a crick pretty quickly and he'll be responsible for it.
He'll have to come over and wrap my neck or something.
But thanks for a great call.
I'm really, really thrilled that you reached out.
And, you know, this is a lot of what people are facing in this postmodern dating world.
So I really, really appreciate your openness with this.
And I'm sure it'll work out.
And I look forward to hearing from you again.
All right. Likewise. Thank you so much.
Take care.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy and And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
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freedomain.com/donate Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
You know how we have this phrase, catch you on the flip side.
Well, we've talked to Sarah, and now, by golly, we get to talk to James, who has gamely stood up to the challenge and is going to have a chat with me.
James, thanks for taking the time today.
Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me on.
So, three years, right?
Three years you have been, I don't know, it seems like it's like the planet that you want to land on, but it kind of goes hot and cold.
How would you sort of describe the three years you've had with Sarah?
Yeah, that sounds kind of accurate.
it you know sometimes it's I guess I guess to use a cliche it's kind of been on again off again yeah so so I mean would you like to know like the full story behind it like how we met I really would. I really, really would, if you would mind.
Okay, yeah, sure. So, about, yeah, so three years ago, I signed up to go on this religious trip or pilgrimage to the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. And while we were on the trip, it was funny.
I think the first time we really spoke to each other, there was a torrential downpour, which is apparently fairly common in Washington, D.C. And none of us were really prepared for the rain.
And we were trying to run from one building to the other, and I saw that she had an umbrella.
And so I ran over to her because I was like, well, okay, she has an umbrella.
And we just kind of started talking as we were walking into the Basilica down there.
And I kind of thought to myself, hmm, okay, this is kind of a nice person.
And kind of as we got going throughout the day, I could just kind of learn more and more about her.
I found out that, you know, she likes Ben Shapiro.
And I thought, OK, that's interesting.
And then I asked her, do you like Gavin McInnes?
And I was a little concerned about that because, you know, sometimes people will like Ben.
But, you know, Gavin is a bigger step forward.
And she was like, yeah, I really like Gavin.
I was like, oh, my gosh, what?
And so and so I was like, OK, this is different.
This is very different.
And just kind of as time went on, we start talking.
We find we have more and more common, a lot of values in common, both religious people, both religiously conservative people.
Because, you know, being a Catholic, sometimes, you know, you you can either run into a Nancy Pelosi type or a Nancy Pelosi type.
or you can run into someone who takes...
There's a spectrum, let's say.
Yeah, generally the conservative types don't act outrage when you say, do you hate this person?
Oh, no, I could never hate a person.
As a Catholic, I'm just insulted.
But, anyways. So, you know, we get to know each other fairly well, and I'm like, okay, I like this person.
You know, she's attractive, she's religious, she's conservative.
So I ask her out.
We go on a couple dates. Things kind of end fairly quickly.
The first time, a bit messy, you know, nothing...
And not really anything worth describing, but...
Do you mind?
I mean, because, you know, the first time or the first reason why things end is usually why it's tough to start again.
So I kind of feel like we're skipping over that part, if you don't mind.
So you went on a couple of dates, and then how did it go from there?
Did you date officially, like become boyfriend-girlfriend, or what happened?
Um, I, it was about, after about six, six weeks, I would say there, there was a, uh, an incident that, uh, I didn't really handle very well.
I kind of, uh, flew off the handle, got a bit embarrassed and, uh, uh, said some things, you know, I, I, I, apparently she said that I said F you to her and I, I don't remember saying that, but, uh, that really put her off, I would say. And, um, Basically after that she sent me a message saying that she didn't really want to see me anymore.
What was the provocation?
What happened? Well, so we were together.
We were being intimate and I just sort of lost control of myself.
It's pretty embarrassing, obviously, but it embarrassed me, and so I kind of just lost control of my emotions for a few minutes and just started yelling and hitting the steering wheel of the car we were in, basically. Lost control of yourself.
So that's, I mean, I don't mean to dig too deep and, you know, don't say anything you're not comfortable with.
Of course, I don't need to tell you that.
But, I mean, is that emotional or premature ejaculation or, like, grabbing something you shouldn't?
Or what do you mean? Yeah, yeah, like the PE. Ah, okay.
And that felt embarrassing to you.
Yeah. And, you know, I sort of, I get it, like I'm a guy, right?
I get it. And I sort of hate to say, but it's kind of a compliment in a way.
Like, I mean, I sort of, you know, you're that attractive, honey, that, you know, the safety's off, so to speak, right?
I mean, that would have been that, obviously, looking back on it, that would have been the smarter way to handle it.
But, you know, I was, it was an embarrassing situation.
And how did she react to that?
Um, she seemed, I mean, she didn't seem like, like she didn't tease me about it or anything, but she, I think what she was more off-put by was my, by my reaction to it, not necessarily that it happened.
Right. Although one could argue that the teasing had already occurred.
Ba-dum-bum. All right. But, um, what, um, what do you think happened in your mind or your heart or your soul, for that matter, that this seemed egregiously humiliating to you?
I mean, it seemed like it's something that, I guess, a more mature man would be able to have a better control over, I guess.
I'm not sure exactly.
It's hard to describe.
It's kind of just emotive.
No, but I mean, and again, I appreciate you going to this sort of place, but...
It is one of these somewhat involuntary bodily responses, right?
Is it that you're supposed to not experience that kind of lust outside the confines of marriage?
Is there a religious component to the shame or the guilt?
Is that part of it? No, it's not a religious thing.
I don't know. I just feel it's more like a...
I mean, even though, like you said, it is kind of involuntary, it's...
Something I would want to have a better control over.
Well, I mean, and I guess the control over it that you would have would be to say, you know, stop doing whatever you're doing before I start doing whatever I'm going to do, right?
Yeah, I got it. Like, did you kind of skate close to the, you know, I think of a canoe or this is a terrible analogy, but I sort of think of a canoe or like right to the edge of the waterfall and it's like, oh no, I'm going over, you know, I thought this was going to be edging or whatever, right?
Right. Right. Right, okay.
And so you felt ashamed, and I guess the question is...
I mean, again, hindsight is always so bloody obvious.
It's painful, right? But I guess part of the thing would be to say, you know, the acting out thing, right?
I feel ashamed at what just happened.
I feel actually quite upset with myself.
I feel like it was, like, not mature or whatever it is.
Like, as opposed to that sort of lashing out thing that happens when we don't say what we're feeling but kind of act it out, if that makes sense?
Mm-hmm. So I guess then my question would be, do you have anything in your history, your childhood, your past, and so on, the foundation of all that is James, that that kind of behavior was modeled by anyone in your family when you were growing up?
In other words, did you have someone who wouldn't be honest about what they were feeling but would kind of act it out?
Yeah, sometimes I would say, you know, I think...
Growing up there were instances where like my mom would kind of lash out about things and you know I'd kind of talk to my father about it later and I'd say he'd be like it's not about you know that you spilled the milk or whatever it's that you know she's you know having difficulty with her cooperating with her brother or something and and that's really what's what's got her you know upset and don't worry about you know because you spilled milk or whatever and so so yeah I would say I would say that That would be something that I'd seen growing up.
And how often would that kind of stuff occur?
It depends. It would depend.
I mean, sometimes we'd have strings where it'd be okay, and then as I got kind of older, like into my mid-teens, you know, we had to move my grandmother and my mom's brother, who's disabled, we had to move them into the city where we lived because We just needed them closer to take care of them, and that was a really stressful time period.
First, my mother going back and forth between our town and their town and taking care of her and then convincing her to move here, which was quite a task.
I mean, it was a lot for her to have on her plate, but it resulted in a lot of not necessarily lashing out at her siblings who were not helping her with that process.
The process of moving her mother and her brother from one city to another when they're both in need of a lot of care.
So not necessarily lashing out at the people who aren't helping her with that, but like lashing out at us, like me, my dad, my sisters.
What happened with your uncle?
My uncle is...
It's kind of complicated.
The easiest way to say it is that he has mild autism.
He's in a lot of ways self-sufficient, but in a lot of ways not at all.
So he does live independently, is that right?
Yeah, he lives in Section 8 housing.
And this, I guess, has been a sort of from childhood issue?
Yeah, ever since he was very small, he's been disabled.
How do you think it happened that...
And it's funny, you know, because there's always this one kind of target that gets on one person in the family.
If they're a bunch of siblings and there's someone who needs resources, it's not like an eeny, meeny, miny, moe situation.
It's like, well, it's going to be...
This person, who's going to take the lead on this and who's going to handle that?
Do you have any thoughts or knowing sort of the family dynamics, why it may have ended up?
Because it sounds like your mom really, really took most of it, if not all of it.
Yeah, basically all of it. Really what it came down to was, so my dad's a university professor.
And when he finished his degree, he got a job offer at the university that we're at now, which is about an hour away from the town where my mom grew up and where her mother still was for quite some time.
And it was a very convenient situation that my dad could have a tenure-track position, and we could only be about an hour away from my grandmother, who was going to need some help.
And was your grandmother's issue just sort of general age and infirmity or was there something else?
She had multiple sclerosis.
My gosh. I mean, sympathy, of course, goes to your uncle and your grandmother, but to your mother and to your family as well, those are like multi, there can be like multi-decade, well, for your uncle, I guess, multi-decade, but that's like an extraordinary amount of resource requirements that are going on.
And I mean, she's raising kids, she's a wife.
Did she work as well? She worked part-time for a while.
She did SAT tutoring at night and Then she stopped that a couple years ago, and then in the last few years, now that me and my sisters are older, kind of all out of the house, she went back to school for nursing, and she just finished her nursing degree last year, and so now she works part-time.
My grandmother passed away in 2015, so we're obviously not taking care of her anymore, but her brother is still there, and that's still, I mean, while it's not as much work as taking care of the two of them, it's still a good amount of work.
And does she have any siblings in the vicinity or anyone else who helps?
No. So she has a sister who lives in the Boston area and a brother who lives in the Denver area.
All right. So, I mean, unless there's a massive emergency, they're not going to be doing much, right?
Yeah, that's right. Wow, that is quite a thing.
And so it's mostly geography.
Is it that she's the eldest? Do you think that had something to do with it?
No, she's actually the youngest.
Oh, really? Mm-hmm.
All right. So the brother who's disabled is the oldest, actually.
Oh, yeah. So obviously it's going to skip him, right?
Mm-hmm. Right. Okay.
All right. So when you were growing up, I mean, very few of us who were growing up don't experience some sort of punishment or whatever it is, right?
Whether it's, you know, yelling, timeout, spanking, or whatever.
What was punishment in your household growing up?
Well, my parents didn't really ground a lot.
There was some corporal spanking and that kind of thing.
I don't really think it's fazed me in one way or the other.
There was a decent amount of yelling.
I mean, my parents certainly weren't wishy-washy.
They didn't just let us do whatever we wanted.
I'd say they were purely not being overbearing with their discipline, but I think reasonable.
Right. And how is your parents' relationship?
It's good. They're still married, obviously.
A lot of times I don't necessarily like the way my mom talks to my dad or talks about my dad.
But they're still married.
They aren't showing any signs of divorce, that's for sure.
Alright, the next question I guess is pretty obvious.
What don't you like about how your mom talks about your dad?
She can be kind of belittling with him.
She'll say things like, oh, he just comes home and watches TV all day.
Like, well, yeah, he worked all day.
He wants to take a break.
And You know, she'd say, oh, I can't do anything, right?
He's so lazy. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that you were growling a little bit in your mom impersonation there.
I didn't quite get that. An impression that I guess people who are more familiar with me would get.
But no, you know, she'd say like, oh, he eats too much, he drinks too much.
He's in decent shape for a man of his age.
He's in his mid-50s.
I remember when that seemed old to me.
Oh my! Okay, I'm staring down those double barrels of mid-50s in two years, but anyway.
Okay, so how long has this kind of, I think you said belittling, is that the right word?
Yeah. How long has that been, is that something newer, or is that, do you remember that from early on?
I mean, I can't necessarily, it's not something I've really been noticing Until, like, the last couple of years, but I have to imagine that it's...
I mean, I can't really reach that far back into my memory for, like, specific instances where people said specific things, but...
Excuse me.
But I would imagine it's been going on for longer years.
Yeah, I mean, these patterns tend to be sort of pretty early on.
But your father, I mean, seems quite successful, and, you know, he's a university professor, as you say, and so it's not like he's some, you know, unemployed bum who's, you know, playing scratch lottos for his retirement all day.
Oh, no, I mean, and this is part of what annoys me about it.
It's like, you know, the... And, I mean, my mom stayed home and worked part-time, so really most of what we have is because it's the fruits of his labor.
And, you know, having a job at a university means me and all my sisters get to go to college for free, so that's a massive financial strain off the family, so I don't...
Well, or a massive temptation to do something with your 20s that may not be massively productive.
But we'll talk about that in a sec.
Now, I'm...
No expert on Catholic marital relations, but the little bit that I do know, I'm not sure she's specifically following ideal biblical instructions when it comes to wifely relations with the husband.
Am I on the mark at all there?
Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with you on that.
But has anyone talked to her about those particular injunctions to treat the man as the head of the family, that the wife is to the father as the father is to the church or to Jesus?
I mean, has anyone sort of sat her down and said...
That doesn't really come up.
It doesn't really come up.
I bet there's a reason why it doesn't really come up.
I'd like to be able to walk out of the house. I'm sorry?
I'd like to be able to make it out of the house.
Okay, okay, so this is important, right?
And I think this goes back to what's going on with Sarah.
So, what happens If you are as frank with your mother, like the woman who bore you and gave you life and all of that, as you are with me, like this dude on the internet, right?
So what happens if you sit down with your mom and say, you know, hey, mom, you know, great stuff, you know, love you, but, you know, a couple of tweaks might be kind of cool.
Here's things that I've noticed that, you know, because, you know, when I was growing up, you gave me a lot of instruction on how to improve myself and how to be a better Christian and so on.
A couple of things that I've noticed that I think would be worth chatting about, like...
Where does the conversation go from there, if that's what you bring up?
I mean, in that way, being as calm about it as I can, I'd like to think maybe she would take it seriously and be calm about it.
But a lot of the times, like I talk about this with my sisters, we fear that she would just fly off the handle and say, oh, I'm just such a terrible mother, if we bring this up to her.
Oh, you just think I'm a terrible mother, da-da-da-da.
Do you mind, can we just take this for a spin?
Because I just want to get a sense of who I'm dealing with.
And, you know, if there's anyone who can imitate parents, it's the kids, right?
So, like, give me the worst-case scenario playing out with regards to this kind of conversation.
Like, if I'm you and you're your mom and I sit there and say...
I've noticed a couple of things, like, you know, you seem to be kind of down on Dad a lot, and, you know, I'd like to see you guys, particularly now that the kids are older, we kids are older, out of the house and all that, I'd like to see you guys get along better.
I think that one of the reasons why he comes home and watches TV is that I think sometimes you're kind of down on him, like you kind of put him down a little, and, you know, for men in particular, that's really, really tough, so I just wonder sometimes maybe he escapes to TV because he feels like maybe he's been put down or whatever, and I just would love to see you guys get along better, and I wanted to know what you thought about that.
And so you want to know what she might say?
Yeah, just be here. She'd probably say something along the line, well, I don't think I do that.
I don't think I talk down to your father.
What makes you think that I do that?
Well... There's kind of a scrolling marquee list of complaints that you have about him.
He drinks too much. He eats too much.
He watches TV too much.
He's too distracted. He's not present.
He's emotionally unavailable. There's just a whole lot of kind of I mean, more than nitpicky, they're kind of foundational.
You know, it's not like I don't like the way he folds his napkins on his lap.
I mean, they're kind of what some people call character logic, right?
They're kind of like down to the essence of his personality and his interaction.
And I don't speak for dad, but I can sort of put myself in his shoes and say, boy, if my wife had those opinions about me, I'd feel kind of rejected.
Hmm. And she might go on to say, well, it's true that he eats too much and it's true that he drinks too much.
Well, yes, and it's also true that you've been talking about this for years and it hasn't changed, right?
And so, you know, one of the things that we should do when we want to achieve an effect and it's not...
Working is change what we're doing, right?
Like, you're kind of stuck in a rut. You criticize these things about him, and I don't notice him criticizing as much about you.
You criticize these things about him.
I think it kind of drives him away.
It doesn't change his behavior, and you're just kind of stuck.
And, you know, I think that...
I don't think you need to be stuck in that kind of place.
Yeah, I mean, I think if there is a way to approach...
This situation, I think this is the best way to do it.
In the most calm, rational way possible.
Well, here's funny because here's where you short-circuited on the roleplay, so to speak, right?
Because when I was sort of bringing up the...
And listen, trust me, it's easy for me to be mild with your mom because she's not my mom, right?
So it's easy for me to be like super rational dude when thinking about talking with your mom, but that's only because she's not my mom.
If it was my mom, I'd be in your situation.
So I just understand that it's easy for me.
But the question then becomes if you approach her in a more reasonable fashion and here's where it didn't go forward.
Right.
Like you couldn't imagine what she would say next very easily.
Right.
Because it's kind of tough to, you know, if people are defensive about something, I mean, you know, this stuff, I'm sure as well as I do.
When people are defensive about stuff, what they are is passive aggressive until someone gets angry and then they shut down the conversation because the other person is just too angry.
So that's the challenge, right?
Which is, you know, can you be calm and reasonable enough so that that's not a legitimate defense?
And if it's not, then they usually have to have some kind of secondary defense if there's something they really don't want to talk about.
And that's, I think, where we couldn't go forward because I don't think you knew what you would do if someone was that reasonable in that criticism.
Yeah. Yeah.
I would agree with that. Now, have your sisters tried any of this?
Um... I'm leaning towards no.
I mean, maybe there have been times where they try to bring it up and I'm not really aware of it.
There was one time, however, where it was funny.
Me and my sisters, we kind of laugh about this now, where she did one of these things where we had sandwich rolls out on the kitchen table and he asked her, it was around dinner time, we're making ourselves dinner, and he says, can we use these sandwich rolls?
And she said, she kind of snapped at him something like, no, those sandwich rolls are for something else.
I'm sorry I didn't make dinner tonight.
You just come home and you think that I'm going to make you dinner or whatever because she wasn't cooking.
And I looked at her and I said, no one attacked you.
And she kind of said back, well, your father was giving me attitude.
I said, no, he didn't. I said, he just asked you if he could eat these sandwich rolls.
No one's attacking you.
And she kind of just, like, backed off.
And I later said to my sister, I said, that kind of felt like an out-of-body experience.
What do you mean?
From a third-person perspective.
Wait, what do you mean an out-of-body experience?
You had a touch of the divine while confronting your mom.
That's pretty wild. Yeah, I mean, like, I just, it was almost kind of like this empowering moment where, like, I actually, you know, stood up to the behavior that's been annoying me for years.
And then she actually, you know, kind of responded well to it.
And then I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I did that.
Well, and the interesting thing is that that was a one-off, right?
So why? You know, honestly, a lot of times it's because I'm not in the room.
I'll hear something like this happen in another room, and I figure, you know, by the time I get up and go into the room, like, it's already kind of passed on.
And my dad, I mean, he's just kind of at the point where he just, like, kind of lets it roll off his back, I think, because he's so used to it.
And that if I, you know, come into the room, like, even a few minutes later and say something, that it might lose its effect.
Well, or they could just say, you know, we've already dealt with it, you know, whatever, right?
Yeah, that did. Do you...
Do you want your parents' marriage?
Do you think? I mean, if you end up in a situation...
Do you mean, would I want my marriage to go the way of my parents?
Yes. I mean, in the sense that they've been married for 25 years and had relative stability, yes.
But in terms of the way they interact, no.
Okay, so all abstractions point to yes, but all actual empiricism points to no, right?
Yeah. Go ahead.
Even my sisters have said, you know, if I treat my husband the way mom treats dad, just, like, slap me.
Right, so it's bad enough that your sisters are even vaulting out a female in-group preference to say, no, that's no good, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah. I brought it up to them a couple years ago, and ever since, they've kind of basically been in agreement with me on that.
Do you think that if you tried to stand up more for your dad, that you'd get more pushback from him or from her?
Um... Oh, that's a good question.
I'm not sure. Because I think my dad would push back a little bit, just trying to, you know, keep the peace.
Yeah, it's all fine for you to confront her, but I gotta live with her after you go home or something.
Yeah, yeah. That's for sure.
Yeah, I'm really not sure.
Right. Well, this can be the kind of marriage, you know, this is where Professor Emeritus comes from.
So for those who don't, I think Professor Emeritus is like, yeah, I've kind of retired, but I'm still teaching.
I'm still around. And usually that's like, yeah, my wife is kind of cranky, so I'm happy to stay.
This is the foundation for like the people who work themselves and literally fall into the grave, you know?
Like, they dig a six-foot tunnel right under the desk just so they can slide the person in when they die at the desk because, you know, that's kind of rough, right?
I mean, that's a rough situation to be in.
Now, with your parents, is there...
I don't know how to put this. So, you know, for some relationships, it's not too, too common, but for some relationships that I've seen or talked about with people, there's kind of this scenario where it's like, you know, it's mostly good, and then there's this, you know, there's like crabby stuff that comes up.
And for other relationships, there's not a whole lot of positive.
There's not massive negatives, but it kind of trundles along in vague dissatisfaction.
Are they close and happy, and then there are these snappy things, or is it kind of a low-grade thing all the time?
They can still be close and happy.
I'd say even more so recently, I'd say more since she's been working, got done with nursing school.
Nursing schools, I don't know if you know, but it can be pretty demanding.
Oh yeah. Especially on someone who's not college age.
But I would say since they started working, she's been more effective.
My dad has always tried to be effective with her And I would say more so in the past, she hasn't been as receptive with it, but recently she's been more receptive, although it seems like, you know, he's doing most of the, he's putting forth most of the effort on that.
Right, right.
It's an interesting thing that she would go into a demanding educational and then career situation.
I assume she's similar age, like in her 50s.
Yeah, she's a few years younger than him, but mid-50s.
But she was an environmental engineer before You know, that's what she studied in college.
And then when we were, me and my sisters were born, she just kind of quit that and stayed at home.
So she's pretty, you know, she's pretty aspirational in that.
Certainly seems like she's continuing to engineer the environment, but that seems like a bit of a cheap shot.
So I'll, I won't pursue that.
Okay, so if, so what are the aspects of your parents' marriage that you would like to have in your future marriage?
I mean, you said stability and all that, but emotionally or interpersonally?
I mean, they've...
You know, they do take good care of each other.
They... You know, my dad has always been, you know, like, when my mom was going through nursing school, she was very supportive of her, regardless of, you know, the situation.
You know, there would be, like, weekly conversations.
Maybe I should just quit.
No, you shouldn't quit. You can do this.
You can finish this. I think that's the third time you've referred to your father as a she.
Did I? Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
I'm sure that's, you know, I'm not going to get all Freudian on your ass or anything.
I'm just, you know, it's just I've never quite experienced that before.
But anyway, go on. But yeah, so my dad, he's been very supportive of her in the difficult times, which I've always admired.
And yeah, my mom raised us, and so I like someone who can raise kids in that kind of firm.
I think my parents did a really good job with it, like I said, not being too...
Discipline, but not being like helicopter parents, that's something I liked about them as well.
That's something I think...
Because, you know, me and my siblings have all had fairly even-keeled light.
You know, none of us have had problems with alcohol or, you know, extramarital pregnancies or anything like that.
So, yeah, I'd like to think they raised some decent kids.
So I would hope that I'd be able to raise similar kids with my eventual spouse.
Where does she sit with regards to feminism?
My mom? Yeah. Um, she, she talks about feminism in a more positive way than, than I do.
And I would say my, my sisters are more anti-feminist than her.
I, I, I don't wonder if, you know, because like, so for example, when, when she was in engineering school, someone, one of the like professors in the department basically told her, um, you know, we wouldn't have accepted you here if you were a man.
And so, you know, I think maybe back, maybe back then, you know, in the seventies, eighties, whatever, um, You know, things weren't quite as good for women back then as they are now.
Wait, wait, wait. Hang on. Hang on.
I'm sorry. Sorry if I'm missing something here.
I apologize. I just... I always want to make sure I'm following what you're saying.
So the professor said we wouldn't have accepted you here if you were a man, so she got preferential treatment because she was a woman?
Because she was a woman, yeah. So then you said things were worse for women back then, but they were getting preferential treatment.
I'm just trying to square that circle.
Yeah, I understand that.
But it was kind of like they...
I completely see what you're saying there.
And they were right. You know, not with regards to your mother's intelligence or expertise, but she got a degree and went to raise kids and then became a nurse.
So she provided, like, nothing to do with environmental engineering to the world.
So they were right, or whoever said that to her was right in his assessment, in that they were training her for something that she wasn't going to do, and the world was then short one environmental engineer, right?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, definitely.
I see what you mean. But does she say about that guy, yeah, he kind of had my number back then.
Boy, you know, I did all this education and then became a full-time mom and then a nurse.
So, or does she say, gosh, that I was really victimized back then?
Yeah, she doesn't talk about him in that, like, oh, wow, he was right, you know, maybe I shouldn't have been there.
She kind of talks about him like, oh, that guy, that bastard he told me I didn't belong here.
But he was right.
Yeah, he was. I'm sorry.
Obviously, she's not right.
I can't believe those sons of bitches won't let me do hair commercials.
You know, these bastards.
I mean, just so you know, I'm almost totally bald.
So, you know, like, I can't believe these bastards.
They won't let me play Cleopatra, even though I have man boobs.
But so now that's interesting.
Now, tell me what would happen.
And I mean, this may be a total, you know, if you pull the pin out of the grenade and roll it into the tent of your mother's estrogen fest, like if someone were to say, if this story came up to say, yeah, but he was right.
I mean, you shouldn't have been there because you never became an environmental engineer.
Well, she did work for a few years as an engineer, but really, I mean, not...
Not compared to a guy, right?
Yeah, not like a 25-year career.
If I said that, I would then run out of the room very quickly.
Okay, but what would happen?
Because, I mean, listen, that's not an unreasonable perspective, right?
Let me give you an example, like a tiny example, right?
So I went to the National Theatre School, studied acting and playwriting, and I've never really worked as an actor or a playwright, right?
So for that investment, like if they'd have said to me, man, you really don't belong here, right?
You know, and if I said that, then someone said, well, they were kind of right, because you then went to get a history degree, then you became a software entrepreneur, and now you do philosophy on the internet.
So, you know, they would kind of be like, yeah, you know, that's kind of correct, right?
I mean, it wouldn't be that upsetting to me, because empirically, it would kind of be a fact.
But how would your mom react to that statement of like, well, that dude kind of had a point, right?
Yeah. A typical line that she'll pull out a lot when it comes to this.
Oh, I wasted my time getting that engineering degree.
Oh, I'm such a loser.
I got that degree and then I just became a mom.
And it's like, well, first of all, there's nothing wrong with being a mom.
It's a very important job.
But that would probably be her response to it.
So this kind of sarcastic exaggeration, like if you criticize anything about me, you're just saying I'm the worst person ever and roll the eyes, right?
I wouldn't necessarily say it's sarcastic.
I don't know if it's self-pitying, looking for fishing for compliments, but she seems to be kind of sincere when she says that.
Okay, so I was thinking earlier, and I'm just trying to get this pattern of behavior.
So I was thinking earlier how you were saying that if you criticize something about your mom, you'd be like, oh, I'm the worst person or the worst mom.
It was something like that, right? Right, right, right.
So if you said about the engineering, if she said, oh, this guy said I shouldn't even be there, and it's like, well, but you didn't really work as an engineer, and maybe he kind of saw that coming, and then she would say, just give me what she would say again.
I want to make sure I get this behavior.
Right. About what the guy said in engineering school?
And if you said, well, yeah, but you didn't actually work as an engineer, so he had a bit of a point, right?
She would say, oh, well, look at me.
I got that degree, and I didn't use it, and I just became a mom, and I'm a loser, and my other friend is a pharmacist or whatever, and I'm just a stay-at-home mom.
You'll probably go something along those lines.
Right, okay, so I'm trying to figure out what she's doing there.
What she's doing there.
It's a bit tricky because it's an annoying thing to hear.
I mean, I'm annoyed hearing it and I'm not even her son, right?
Yeah. Because it kind of shuts down the whole conversation.
It's such a sort of an extreme response that you end up dealing with her response rather than the actual conversation, if that makes sense.
Yeah. I don't wonder if it's like, you know, just like the self-deprecation and then looking for somebody to...
I disagree with you and say, no, you're not a loser.
No, you've done plenty with your life.
Being a mom is not...
When people say just being a stay-at-home mom, that's still a real job in a way.
Well, I mean, it's how I know why it's annoying.
Now, honestly, I don't know why it's annoying for you, right?
I'm just telling you my sort of experience.
So I'm just sort of thinking, like, if my mom said, oh, you know, I'm such a loser, I was only a stay-at-home mom, I would sort of feel insulted as a kid.
Like, what, time with me was so problematic that you'd rather have been, like, I don't know, trying to clean up the wetlands with a fire hose or something?
Yeah, I'll occasionally joke, like, yeah, I'm such a pain in this family, I've ruined my mother's career.
Right. Yeah, that's the insulting thing.
That's the insulting thing.
It's kind of like, well, I could have been a movie star, but I decided to marry you instead.
It's like, oh God, please don't do me any favors, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I've never taken it that way, but I can see how you would interpret it that way, for sure.
And then the conversation ends, right?
Because then it becomes about managing her response rather than the content and flow of the conversation.
Yeah. Okay, okay, okay.
And so then you kind of prop her up, and it's also kind of a warning shot to not bring up the topic, because you won't be able to complete on it anyway, right?
Oh, yes. Certainly.
Certainly. Wait, that sounded stronger than I thought it was going to be, so tell me where that certainly is coming from.
Well, just, you know, sometimes my sisters and my father will have conversations about like, oh, don't bring that up to mom, because you know how she would react if you said that.
Right. And it's just kind of joking like, oh, she would hang me in the front yard.
I mean, not literally, but like...
No, I get it. I get she's not like Lizzie Borden with perimenopause.
But okay, so this navigating strong reactions on the part of your mother is, I wouldn't say overwhelming, but would you say it's a significant part of the family mechanics?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's something you have to tread lightly on, for sure.
And so when you're kind of hanging out with your family, how far is it from your mind, or how self-censorious, self-censoring is a better way to put it, how self-censoring do you have to be for, you know, the Voldemort topics, right?
The topics that can't be spoken on.
I mean, I would say it really depends on the topic of conversation.
You know, like if it's, say, for example, just something mundane like movies, I would say we probably aren't thinking about it too much.
But if, for example, we're talking about, you know, our parents' time in graduate school or her, you know...
Her brother who doesn't, not the disabled brother, the other brother who lives in Denver and doesn't help us out with anything.
Maybe if we bring those kinds of things up, tread lightly because you're not really sure where you might make a wrong step.
Or Gavin McGinnis.
Yeah, no, I get it. I wouldn't even expose her.
She's not very internet savvy and I certainly wouldn't show her that.
No, no, I can understand that.
I can understand that. And the funny thing is, too, is that if she's sort of more positive and feminist, she's a little bit of an anti-feminist cliche, right?
Because she got the engineering degree, she became a stay-at-home mom, which is traditional female, and then she became a...
Nurse. Which is a typical female, right?
So, you know, it's almost like some sort of ideology led her to be an engineer.
She didn't really like it as much.
She stayed home and then became a nurse and so on.
And actually, I know a bunch of engineers who've taken this path.
You know, like I took engineering.
And now I work in sales.
You know, that kind of stuff, right? It's not too...
I think a lot of women went into engineering because they felt it was like striking a blow against the patriarchy and striking a blow for feminism.
And then it's like, ooh, it's just icky stuff.
I'd rather work with people. Yeah.
That's interesting. Just give me the rough area.
What does your dad teach him?
He's a medieval history professor.
My kind of guy. Yeah.
Love that stuff. One of the greatest courses I took was...
Anyway, medieval economics, believe it or not.
But anyway... That was interesting.
Does... If you were to ask your mom...
And you can roleplay this if you want, but just to get...
If you were to ask your mom what she respects about your dad, what would she say?
I would say...
Probably something along the lines of he stands up for what he believes in and he doesn't take a lot of crap.
This is going to sound funny, but he doesn't take crap from a lot of people.
A lot of people that he works with.
He has a reputation for storing the pot here at the university.
Probably that kind of thing.
Instilling good values on us kids and I would hope at least that she would say those things.
Could I just ask you for a wee favor?
Yeah. Just so everyone doesn't keep checking their phones, if you could just silence your notifications.
Let me try to...
Hopefully that's not Sarah wondering how the conversation is going or whatever.
No, but I'm sure I'm going to get a message from her at some point today, yeah.
That's the goal. That's the goal.
All right. Now, when was the last time that you heard either of your parents speak with glowing positivity about the other parent?
I mean, I would say that my father will speak in glowing terms about her more often than she talks about him.
See, that's part of the thing, is that, you know, he'll say a lot of nice things about her, you know, like, oh, she was such a great mother, she was, you know, he loves her and all that kind of stuff, and, you know, even my sisters will bring up, like, you know, I can't remember the last time mom said something nice about dad, even though he'll make an effort to compliment her.
Why do you think that is?
I don't know. What does it cost her?
It's always fascinating to me.
Like that you'd love someone, you'd live with them, you'd be married for a quarter century, raised children and so on.
I mean, it kind of...
My daughter rolls her eyes a little bit when I praise my wife.
It's like... Because you're not crapping on the other person, you're crapping on yourself, right?
Right. Because, like, this is who you chose.
Mm-hmm. You know? Oh, man, I can't believe I'm a podcaster.
It's the worst thing ever.
Oh, it's terrible. I have to deal with people all day long, and all they do is tell me they're...
It's like, you know, you could do anything with your life, right?
Yeah, right. It's just...
So why do you think...
What would it cost her emotionally...
To praise your father.
Because, I mean, it sounds praiseworthy to me in many ways.
Yeah, you know, I don't, like, it wouldn't cost her anything.
And if anything, it would improve the situation.
No, no, it costs her something. If she's not doing it, it must cost her something.
Oh, what does it cost her to not compliment him?
No, what would it cost her to compliment him?
It will cost her something, otherwise she'd do it, right?
Because she knows that, I mean, she likes receiving compliments, right?
Oh, I'm sure. Of course, right?
And sometimes she engineers those compliments by putting herself down, right?
Yeah. So she likes receiving compliments.
And if you were to ask her...
Boy, I wish she was on the call.
But if you were to ask her, do people like hearing compliments?
She'd say yes. And then she would say...
Then you would ask, do you think your husband would like hearing compliments?
And she would have to say yes, because he's a person, right?
And then you would say, well, when did you last compliment him?
And then there'd be a long pause.
And then she'd say, oh, I guess I'm the meanest wife, whatever.
Yep, probably. So the question is...
And this, believe it or not, I mean, this is about your mom, and I'm fascinated by that stuff too, but this is about Sarah, I believe, as well.
So, it costs her something to praise him.
To acknowledge the great things that he's done.
To appreciate him.
It costs her something.
And by God, it's not uncommon for this to be a marriage dynamic, right?
But it's important to understand why it's occurring.
So what do you think it is that keeps her from praising him?
I mean, it could be that...
It could be that she might feel like...
Maybe threatened isn't the right word, but if she compliments him, it might take something away from her.
This might not be the best expression, but living in his shadow, so to speak.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, it certainly doesn't help her ego to think that she married a doofus, right?
I know that that's not the right phrase or whatever.
Okay, so living in his shadow, but if she has the love of a very competent man and he's provided for the family, doesn't that mean she chose well?
Yeah, you would think so. Okay, so it's not that.
It's got to be something else.
What does it cost her?
Like, if you were to sit down and say to your mom, Mom, say something.
Like, tell me what you admire about Dad.
I mean, what would her response be?
I mean, I think that would go back to, like, the question you asked earlier about, like, what...
Didn't you ask something about, like, what would she say are the things in him that she likes...
Right. Now what I'm looking for is not the content but the resistance.
So if you said to her, you know, Dad's right here.
Like, tell him something you really admire about him.
Like, she would make a face or she would record.
It would be something. So I'm not looking for, like, what's on there.
I'm looking for what is the resistance that she would have to saying that.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, she probably would be like, why do I have to do that?
He knows I love him.
Right. Well, and then you'd say, of course, well, you like hearing compliments, and why wouldn't Dad?
Yeah. So she would probably be like, well, okay, I guess, if I have to.
He's a snappy dresser right now.
Yeah. Alright, alright.
So, not knowing this dynamic, I think, is a big challenge.
Because this dynamic of undermining, nagging, Snipping at someone, a little bit grinding them under heel, fairly constantly.
I don't want to over-exaggerate it.
Sorry, that's redundant. I don't want to exaggerate it.
But it's a dynamic, right?
Right. And you have internalized, of course, your father's experience of all of this.
And there's a reason why your father has not been assertive with regards to this.
Because he doesn't like it. Nobody would.
Who would want to hear negative things about themselves like a constant little drizzle, right?
Right. So there's a reason why he has not...
Early on, like when you're dating, before you get married, before you have kids, or during the child raising, to sit there and say, you know, this has got to stop, right?
This is undermining me in front of the kids.
It's harmful to my career because it kind of whittles away at my confidence.
It's insulting to both of us because you wouldn't choose an incompetent man.
I am a competent man.
I am providing.
I did get a tenure position in a highly competitive and difficult field.
And, you know, I've earned the respect and justice is when we pay what we owe, right?
Justice is don't pay what you don't owe, but do pay what you do owe.
So he would sort of sit there and they would work through that.
But there's a reason why he hasn't done that.
And there's a reason why your mother keeps doing it.
The reason we're not assertive in relationships...
See, here's where Sarah starts the whole interview, right?
So the reason we're not assertive in relationships is because we fear that assertiveness will end the relationship.
Yes. Right?
I would agree. So, your mother...
Spoiler!
Your mother grinds at your dad because it gives her power.
Because she is then in the position of judging him and finding him wanting.
And he's in the position of running after her for approval and never getting it.
Right. Do you see why I'm saying Sarah's hoving into view?
Yeah. Tell me how I may have shot an arrow over the house and hit a bullseye.
I might have done the same thing to her.
Yeah. I think with Sarah, your concern is probably based upon your father's behavior, that if you want a successful relationship with a woman, you better damn well not stand up for yourself, and you better just turn your soft shoulder when she endlessly bites at your fur.
Right. Assertiveness is the end, right?
Now, I don't know, of course, enough about your mother, and I'm sure you do.
We don't have to talk about it now.
I'd be certainly happy to if you want to.
But do you think...
Okay, what would happen if your father stood up for himself?
And for the family as a whole, and for his children?
Because this all has an effect on you, right?
Right. There would probably be some resistance, but just thinking about that one time when I kind of stood up to her and she didn't really...
Push back on me that hard.
I'd like to think there would...
Yeah, but you didn't do it again!
Right, yeah. Right?
It's like, hey, I said no to one piece of cheesecake in my life, so I guess I'm a good weight, right?
Once I didn't have a cigarette, right?
Because that's the question, right?
Because I think that deep down, maybe it's not even that deep down, there is probably a bit of an implicit threat, which is the only way that you have a relationship with me is if I'm in the driver's seat, if I'm in control, if I hold the authority and the power.
With your mom, right? Right.
Because none of you, like, you're grumbling about her behind her back kind of thing, and your sister's like, oh, shoot me if I ever treat my husband like that.
So, you know, but it's like, what about, like, caring for your dad?
None of you were kind of stepping up and saying, no, no, no, come on, this is no good, right?
And you guys got another 30 years to go, mid-50s to mid-80s, that's a long time.
Yeah, it's a long time. It's a long time for you to be like, and another thing, you know, that's a long time for, I can't believe you lose your keys all the time, or whatever it is, right?
Yeah. And so the question is, why is no one, like if your dad's not able to stand up for himself or has chosen not to for whatever reasons of his own history and his own mother and all that kind of stuff, right?
Why is this minor emotional mutilation going on on a regular basis and no one is saying, this has got to stop?
I mean, this has been going on.
They have longer to go than they've already been married, right?
Yeah. Let's see.
25 years, they got 30 years to live, right?
So they got 30 more years of marriage, probably, right?
Right, yep. So why is no one putting a stop to this?
And please understand, I'm not like judging or like, oh, you terrible people.
I'm just like, I'm genuinely curious.
Like, you love your dad, I assume, right?
And you care about your mom.
You love your mom. Of course.
And so if someone is engaging in behavior that is making them unhappy, is making the other person unhappy, is putting a negative spin on the whole family dynamic and so on, right?
Mm-hmm. Then why not step in on a persistent...
Oh, you did that thing once?
Now, of course, she would give way.
I mean, if I were her, right? If there's, like, this kind of behavior, it's like, yeah, I'll totally give way.
Mm-hmm. And I'm just going to see if it's going to come up again.
Now, if it comes up again, I think this is why it didn't come up again.
It's because you kind of got, like, it's going to be a whole different kettle of fish if it comes up.
If it becomes a regular thing, like a one-time thing, okay.
But if it becomes a regular thing, then you probably have a bigger problem, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So why, what's the implicit threat that is keeping you guys from helping your dad and your mom in the long run?
I think it's just the fear of her turning that onto, you know, if we try to, you know, stand up to her that she would, you know, turn her higher onto us and that she may, you know, the relationship may deteriorate if she thinks that we're, like, attacking her all the time.
Okay, so she's the only one who's allowed to attack, right?
Like, if anyone fights back, is the fear that she would ostracize?
I don't think—that's never really come up with any of us, although there—I mean, there—I'd say recently, maybe once or twice, I have thought about that, but it's never been, like, a prevalent— Like, thought about your mom ostracizing you if you stood up?
Yeah. Okay. And now the ostracism, of course, can take a bunch of different forms.
It can be, you know, this sort of heavy Italian opera, I have no son, but that's usually pretty rare.
But usually what happens is there's like an exhausting battle that doesn't go anywhere.
And then the next time you interact, your mother would behave as if nothing had happened.
And then if you bring it up, there would be the threat of another exhausting battle.
And it's just a war of attrition.
Like you'll just stop bringing up this topic because – or if you bring it up, it's like an exhausting negative battle every single time.
Right, right.
Is it more like that?
Yeah, I think that's more of an accurate description of it.
So, my friend...
We talked about your mother's Christianity, right?
Right. What's your relationship to thou shalt not bear false witness?
I try to be a straight shooter.
I try to tell the truth. Right.
Except with your mom. Yeah, yeah.
What do you think the commandment would have you do?
I hate to leverage this stuff, but I'm genuinely curious, right?
Because there is honor thy mother and thy father, and I get all of that.
But I think it's around honoring the best within them, not enabling bad behavior or anything like that.
But what do you think the commandment to not bear false witness would say about your relationship with your mom and how much you don't say?
I think they would say that I'm not doing a very good job because...
There's things that I'm not saying to her that she probably should hear, which is causing a negative strain on the familial dynamic.
Right. Do you know much about her childhood?
Oh, yeah. And do you have any idea where this kind of stuff, these habits may have come from?
Um... I think a lot of maybe the inferiority complex, you know, her...
So, her two older, the brother who's not disabled and the sister, were kind of more, seemed to have been held in higher esteem by my grandparents than my mother was.
Like, for example, my aunt was very, you know, very thin, and my mother was not, my mother wasn't overweight, but she was just...
Normal weight, yeah. Yeah, fuller, right?
And so my grandfather would always kind of get on my mother's case about her weight, which...
You shouldn't do as a parent, especially when your child isn't obese, right?
And especially when you, as the parent, are kind of responsible for the food that's in the house.
Oh, yeah, no, certainly, certainly.
And then, yeah, and then her brother, like I said, the one who lives in Colorado, he was just, you know, my mom always kind of described him as the golden boy, and nothing was ever good enough for him, and they definitely, he was, I mean, certainly the favorite child, which I can, you can tell, kind of built up some resentment over the years.
Right, right, okay.
Okay. Right.
Okay, so... The patterns that seem to come out of sort of primary maternal relationship, and of course the relationship with your father, right?
Because not only is your relationship to Sarah conditioned to a large degree by your relationship with your mother, but your relationship to Sarah is also conditioned by how your father behaves, right?
And if your father's behavior is self-assertiveness leads to disaster Endless appeasement is the way to gain and keep a woman's heart, right?
That is not at all a universal statement, right?
I mean, I think we could say that, you know, screaming epithets at people is not a way to get them to love you.
you.
There are some universals that you could say, but the question with regards to your parents is if you treat women like your father treats your mother, you're going to end up in a marriage like your parents.
And then thou shall, like once you're married and all of that, okay, so like if you're dating a woman and she's kind of snappy with you or snippy or puts you down or whatever, then okay, you're just dating, right?
You can say, hey, knock it off, right?
Or if she doesn't, you can just say, okay, like I'm not dating you anymore because I don't want to live a life like this, right?
Even when you're engaged, once you're married, I mean, obviously particular, right?
Catholic and till death do us pardon someone, for better or for worse.
Then anything that you would do that would risk a significant fracture or whatever, or just lead you into one of these endless, exhausting pitched battles with someone.
Yeah. It's like, well, it's easier to appease in the moment than it is to fight a real battle, which maybe I'll win, or maybe I'll really lose.
And the really lose may be even worse than divorce, which is just an endless, exhausting battle, right?
Right. So I think that in the situation that you're in, I think that you're torn.
And I think that the tornness comes out in your relationship with Sarah.
So the tornness, and like, dude, anything I get wrong, anything that doesn't accord with your experience, just tell me I'm wrong.
I mean, I'm just theorizing here, right?
So please don't ever let me tell you your experience.
Just push back on whatever. It's just my thoughts, right?
But if it's something like this, I don't want a woman like my mom.
And that doesn't mean you hate your mom or anything like that.
There's things that are great about your mom.
She gave you good value. She was a good stay-at-home mom and all of that.
But you don't want a marriage like your parents, then you're kind of swimming against the current, right?
Now, if you can identify the undertows versus your efforts, then you can get a lot further.
Like if there's a way to swim out of the current, you can, I don't want to overindulge in the analogy, but you know what I mean, right?
I see. Yeah, so, yeah, I know you're going to do a PhD, a smart guy, right?
So with regards to your mother versus Sarah, Sarah wants a very assertive guy.
Yeah. But your conditioning is assertiveness is disaster.
Right? So I think that's the ambivalence that's got you, you said, on again, off again, right?
Yeah. Does that make any sense?
Yeah, I understand what you're saying.
Yep. And how does that fit in terms of your experience with Sarah?
Yeah, it does seem like, and it's something I've noticed, and it's something that I've tried to work on.
Definitely at the beginning of this epic story, I certainly wasn't as assertive as I think I am.
I don't think I'm perfectly assertive now, but I think it's something that I've tried to work on, and I think it's something that I've tried to work on because I understand that that's what she wants, and I'm trying to Do that so that I can do what she wants.
Wait, wait, wait.
So I can do what she wants?
No, I mean like so that she can, you know, I can be the assertive guy that she wants to be.
But that's not being assertive.
Doing something because it's what the other person wants is not assertiveness.
If only I can find a way to conform to what she wants while being assertive.
It's like those two are opposites, right?
Yeah. If you're doing something to please her, like this is back to your mom, right?
Like you're keeping quiet to please her.
Right. You're not pushing back against her, nagging of your dad to appease her.
You're not being frank and blunt with her to appease her, right?
And this is what's going on with Sarah.
If you're trying to do things to please her, I mean, it's kind of a weird paradox, right?
Because we want women to like us, and the best way to get women to like us is to not do anything to please them.
Shit, yeah. You know what I mean?
Yeah. So what would you suggest then?
Okay, now this is the big question, and I like how you're jumping straight to solutions.
We get close to the center, and it's like, no, no, give me a solution.
Okay, so...
Can you learn to be assertive?
And please understand, you are assertive.
I'm not, you know, you're a successful academic, and you're gonna do your PhD, so this is just a particular area.
I'm not trying to paint you with a big, broad, you're not assertive, right?
But in this particular area, With regards to honesty and assertiveness with women, which is something that men wrestle with a huge amount.
I wrestle with it.
It's a huge, huge issue.
And one of life's complicated challenge that perhaps nature or God has given us to wrestle through.
So, can you be assertive with Sarah if you're still subservient to your mother?
In other words, you have to deal with the primary relationship before the effects spill over to the secondary relationship.
I don't know the answer to that.
I don't mean to pull this out, but what you're saying is I have to put my foot down with mom before I can put my foot down with Sarah.
Right.
Right.
And the other thing, too, because he is.
Yeah, I don't want to speak for Sarah, of course, but I'll just speak in general that a woman finds it very hard to commit to a man who's subservient to his mother.
Do you know why?
Yeah.
Because because the woman knows that if the man is subservient to his mother, then he's always going to be more loyal to mom than he is to the wife.
Yeah, she's going to lose every fight.
Right. And losing every fight, nobody likes to feel powerless, right?
Losing every fight means that she's going to lose her respect and her sexual desire for the man.
Because, you know, I'm not calling you a mama's bi, of course not, right?
But if the woman, like if Sarah looks at you and says, well, you know, his mom's still running the show, then eventually she's just not going to feel sexual desire for you.
It maybe comes and goes or whatever, right?
You're an attractive guy.
But that concern is fairly big.
So even if you say, well, I'm not going to deal with my mom, I'm just going to deal with Sarah, Sarah's still going to suss out, I think, that you're not dealing with your mom, rather dealing with her is kind of a bit of a fake out, right?
Right. Yeah.
Because you can't be assertive with her if you're still subservient to your mom, because your mom will then make you not assertive with Sarah if it gets in the way of your mom's interests.
Sorry, that was a bit of a winding road there, but I think it came across.
I follow, yeah. Yeah, okay.
So then the question is, if you say, well, what do you do?
Give me... Sounds like an order.
Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. So no, but imagine that there were no negative consequences, right?
Like, we all have stuff bottled up that we'd love to say to people, particularly parents, right?
Even the parents we love, even the, like, there's still things, right?
So if you had no negative consequences, and you could just give the speech that you want to your mom, the good, the bad, and the ugly, what would you say to her if you knew she would listen and there'd be no blowback?
Uh, it would probably go something, you know, along the lines of, you know, Mom, I love you, you know, you've raised me, that's great.
Uh, but, you know, the way that, you know, you've kind of...
And I would only say this if there are no consequences, but the way you've ruled, you know, the house with an iron fist over the last decade or so has just really put a bad strain on the family, you know.
I think it's put a, you know, I think it's, uh, uh, Hurt your relationship with dad.
I think the girls, you know, kind of have a feeling of resentment towards you for that.
You know, I certainly feel have a feeling of resentment over that.
And that doesn't mean we don't still love you.
It doesn't mean, you know, we don't want you around.
It just means that we think that you need to act differently so that the family can operate better than it has in the past.
All right. That's good.
That was very analytical.
Boy, you're an intellectual.
And that's good, right? I love that.
I love the intellectual side, but you've got to connect with the heart, mind, and balls a little more.
Soul, if you like, right?
Let's try that again, and I'll try being a difficult mom, all right?
Okay. Because the assertiveness is usually...
It's hitting the ball back, so to speak, not serving in a sense, right?
Okay, so give me the speech just a little bit more if you don't mind, just like, not like you're reading off a laundry list, but like this is the core of the challenges you're facing with Sarah, with your relationship with your mom, and how to make your family happy, and how to obey or conform to do not bear false witness.
So give me that biblical speech and I'll try pushing back.
Okay. So, well, Mom, we all love you.
You raised us, me and the girls, and we all appreciate that.
But there are certain things about the way that you've been ruling over the house over the last decade or so that just have put a strain on the family.
For example, the way that you talk to Dad, we kind of find that the way you talk to Dad is kind of belittling.
You don't prop him up the way that you don't talk about him in the positive ways that he talks about you.
You know, the girls kind of resent you for that.
You know, the girls look at that and they say that that's not how they want their relationship with their husbands to be.
I look at that and I say, I don't want my relationship with my wife to look like that.
You're saying my children resent me?
Because of your actions.
I don't care why you're saying, wait, you and the girls resent me?
We don't resent. We don't resent you.
No, that's what you said. You said the girls resent you.
And you do too. You resent me?
Oh, stop. Listen. We didn't say that we resent you as a person.
I started this off with saying, I love you.
We resent the way that you have conducted yourself over the last years.
Oh, so you only resent me for the last 10 years.
Before that, I was fine. Well, I don't remember that far back.
Okay, so as far back as you can remember, you resent me, but I shouldn't take it personally.
I didn't say I resented you personally.
No, you shouldn't take it personally because that's not a personal attack.
You're saying that I'm fracturing the family by telling your dad he needs to lose weight and exercise a little.
I'm somehow undermining, fracturing and destroying the family.
It's been going on for 10 years.
My children resent me, but hey, I shouldn't take it personally.
No, no, listen, because it wouldn't be, the issue is not that you're telling dad that he needs to lose weight or whatever, you know, what you just said.
The issue is that is only, the things that you say to him are only in the negative.
You never stray anything into the positive.
You never tell him, oh, you know, you're such a great husband, you've been such a great dad, look at the life that you've been able to build for us.
It never goes on to that side.
But that's because I'm worried.
I'm worried about his cholesterol.
I'm worried about his heart health.
I'm worried about his posture.
I'm worried about his lack of exercise.
I'm worried about his waistline.
And why don't you go and talk to your father and tell him to listen?
Because I have to keep repeating things because he won't listen.
But oh no, you just want to come and talk to your mom and say how I'm bad when you don't go and talk to your dad and say, hey dad, maybe for the sake of being living past 60, you should listen to mom once in a while.
Listen, you know he exercises.
It's not like he isn't taking things into consideration about his health.
I mean, it's just...
It's not that...
You need to have a more positive attitude about these.
You need to have a more positive attitude about how things go on in the family.
And that has to start with the way that you talk to dad.
Because when the girls see that, that's the example that is set for the girls and how their relationships are going to be in their future.
And it's the example for how relationships are going to be in my future.
And you've thought this for 10 years.
I've been formulating these thoughts more recently, but it's been developing.
How long have you thought this?
For a few years now.
For a few years, you've had these negative judgments of me, and you've said nothing.
Why? Why?
Because if anytime we bring up a criticism of you, you tend to fly off the handle and then you just self-deprecate yourself and make it out like we're attacking you and we're saying we think you're a terrible mother.
That's obviously not the case.
We can bring these things up to you civilly and logically And try to offer you ways to improve yourself so that all of us can benefit.
But, you know, a lot of times when people bring these things up to you, you just kind of fly off the handle like you've kind of done right now.
So, but if I understand this correctly, you think I've been a pretty bad wife for 10 years and you have known about this for a couple of years and you haven't said anything.
I would say yes.
And why have you said nothing?
Because we're afraid of the way that you're going to react.
And are your fears coming true in this conversation?
No. So you were wrong?
Yes. And if there's things that I should have done differently, you should have brought them up years ago.
And why is it that you're complaining about your father when your father is not complaining to me?
Do you think he also thinks these things?
Have you talked to this with him?
Yes. And what does he say?
He agrees with us.
So you have all been talking about this behind my back and not to me.
Yeah. And how do you think that makes me feel?
I understand that it probably makes you feel pretty cruddy.
Well, I'll tell you what it makes me feel as I look back over the last couple of years of family gatherings and I think everybody's been completely two-faced.
Talking about me and my supposed negative behavior behind my back while I'm sitting there carving the turkey and everyone's stuffing themselves on my Thanksgiving meal while thinking that I'm mean to your father and talking about how mean I am.
How am I supposed to look at our family photos for the last couple of years knowing that everybody is talking about me behind my back?
Well, look, you can't change anything in the past, but we're addressing the situation right now.
We can either decide that we're going to change the way things are now so that we don't have to continue on with this, or you can lament about how things were in the past, but you can't change the past.
If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we all would have had a Merry Christmas.
I don't quite get the last bit but what I'm understanding from what you're saying is that you would like me to not criticize your father because criticism is bad but it's good to criticize me because criticism is good.
Is that what I understand? No.
What I'm saying is that there needs to be a balance with the positive and the negative.
You can express your concern to somebody about, for example, their weight without saying you're just fat and lazy.
You can take the approach of maybe, you know, honey, I'm concerned that you might be gaining a little weight as men get older.
They tend to put more weight on.
Maybe you need to watch what you're eating.
Maybe cut back on soda.
Maybe go exercise. But it's the way you approach things that I think is...
Is causing some of the deterioration.
So you're saying that you've heard me refer to your father and call your father to his face fat and lazy?
Yes. What if he is?
Am I not supposed to bear true witness?
Well, think about it. What if I came to you and said you were fat and lazy?
But I'm not! I don't know about that.
You think I'm fat?
I think you could afford to, you know, you always say you want to lose weight and you always say you want to exercise, but when I offer you solutions on how to do that, you never follow through.
I see. What else do you find so terribly wrong about what I do as a wife and mother?
Let's get it all out. Let's just get everything on the table because it's been years now that everyone's been talking about this behind my back.
I might as well see the whole deck of cards.
I mean, I think we've covered most of the basics.
Okay, let's cover the things that aren't the basics.
Let's cover all of the basics.
What else do you have in your little bag of criticisms that you need to tell me?
I think that's a lot of what it is.
I don't want to wait another couple of years to find out everything.
Should I get the girls on the phone?
Should we go through their list as well?
You could if you want. Well, let's talk about yours because apparently everyone's been talking about this and I guess I'll go talk to my husband next.
I just want to know, this can't be all of it, what else do I need to hear?
I think that's most...
That's the list of my complaints.
You think, but you're not sure.
You've had a couple of years to think about it.
I'd hope you'd be sure. If anything else comes to mind, I'll let you know.
So I'm fat, I'm lazy, I'm mean, I'm fracturing the family, I get enraged when anybody criticizes me, I fly off the handle, I blow up, and everybody has to lie to me because I'm such a Grinch.
But other than that, I'm good, right?
Other than that, I was a great wife and mother and you love me.
Yes. Does that seem like a reasonable thing to you?
I think it's the...
You are the one who is deciding to put the negative spin on this.
I have come at this... Negative spin?
Because I am trying to point out things to you that are things that I think that...
If you change them, the family dynamic will get better.
And all you can dwell on is, you know, oh, woe is me.
You can either, like I said, we can either take this opportunity now to make changes that are necessary to improve things, how things go in the family, or we can continue to dwell, oh, you can just keep bringing, oh, you've been lying to me this whole time.
It's all been behind my back.
What have been people thinking about me?
Again, that's all in the past.
We can't control what's in the past.
What we control is right now.
No, you could control what was in the past because you could have come to me sooner.
Yes, I could have, but you know what?
I didn't have the stones back then.
Tell me, dear child of mine, fruit of my loins, please tell me what criticisms you have of your father.
What criticisms do I have of dad?
Yes. Well, I do think that in a way he has become a little bit more removed.
I mean, you know, sometimes you are right.
He does watch it. Oh, so the only criticisms you have of your father are very minor and my fault.
That seems very fair, very objective.
So I'm a terrible person, but the only reason your dad has minor bad habits is because I'm a terrible person.
Let me question you this.
What criticisms do you have of your father that don't involve my behavior?
He chews too loudly. Fine.
What else? He has a bit of a big head and at social gatherings he talks too much.
What else? I haven't really been thinking about that too much recently.
So, on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the criticisms you're supplying to me, what would you rate your criticisms of your father?
Oh, certainly not as high.
3? 4? I don't know, maybe 20.
Well, I think that's generous.
So tell me, in this new world that you're opening the family up to, I would just like to see you have a more positive, a more friendly attitude as it comes to how things go in the house.
You know, like I said, it's alright if you want to bring up to dad concerns about his weight.
But you have to do it in a way that he will be receptive to.
People are not going to be receptive to harsh, you know, twisting the knife kind of criticisms.
You have to bring it up in a way that's showing that you're only bringing it up to him because you care about that kind of thing.
And I think that if you have more of that kind of relationship with Dad, you're not necessarily griping at him.
But if you bring things up in a way...
If you bring things up to him in a way that show that you want him to change something about himself because you care about him and you want him to be in better health or better, you know, physical health or mental health, whatever that is, I think myself, you know, I think, first of all, he would appreciate that because he wouldn't be getting, you know, griped at so much. And then certainly me and the girls would appreciate that because we wouldn't have to watch this go on.
So if I understand you correctly, my child...
What you're saying is that the way I bring things up is not motivating your father to do better.
Yes. And therefore, that's a fault of mine.
I'm a bad person for bringing things up in a way that does not motivate him to be better.
No, no one said you were a bad person.
Okay. But it's not good behavior, according to you.
No, it is not.
So, I'll tell you this. Since we're being so honest with each other, I will tell you this.
Okay. The way in which you are bringing up these criticisms to me is not motivating me to be better, and therefore I find you to be guilty of the same crime you're ascribing to me, which is bringing things up in a way that is not motivating, is not positive, is not helpful, is not productive.
So I want to know how you get off scot-free when you've had years to plan this conversation for criticizing me for not criticizing others in a positive way when I don't feel one shred of positivity coming out of your criticism.
Now, hold on, because I have not brought this up in a way to demean you, okay?
I've brought this up because I want to make you better.
And I'm sorry if...
That's exactly what I do with your father, but apparently that's bad now.
that it's bad when I do it, but it's good when you do it. - Well, look, none of this has been brought up in order to demean you, okay?
Understand, all of this has been brought up to try to make you better.
Man, she's good. I'm sorry to break out of this in the middle of it, but she's good.
I don't know how I'm doing relative to your mom.
I feel like she would have broke by this point, but...
I feel that way, too.
Like, I think she would have escalated to the point where the conversation...
I'm sorry, go ahead. You did really well.
I was like, man, he's really persistent with this.
Right. So I feel that she would have...
And this is why I had to sort of pause here, because I feel she would have escalated to the point where communication would have become somewhat impossible before this.
But I wanted to give every possible defense that she could come up with.
And man, she's got some good ones.
So, yeah, I think you, I mean, first of all, you did fantastically.
Oh, thank you. That's, that's hard.
It's hard, right? Yeah.
You feel like your brain is like working like on overdrive or something just to try and dodge all of the rockets and bullets and lightning storms coming your way, right?
It's like playing singles tennis against two other people.
It's five other people and a howitzer.
Yeah, that was good.
That was good. And how did you feel over the conversation?
I mean, I felt like I was making my points.
I tried to make sure that it was not an attack on her person.
It's trying to advise her, like I said, to just make things better for her.
I'm not trying to say this to try to make her feel bad.
I'm saying this to try to put her in a position where she can be better, where we can all be happier.
Right. Now, a couple of tips.
And again, this is easy for me because it's not my mom.
So I'm not, you know, claiming any big guru status here.
But okay, first of all, I think that she had a point about everyone talking about stuff without talking to her.
Right now, I think, listen, and this is why it's really important in relationships not to let criticisms pile up.
Now, it's different with your parents because you're a little kid and you don't have the independence or the authority or whatever it is, right?
But, you know, when people say, wait, you've been talking about this for years and you're like, yeah, and it was really, really bad.
We were not honest.
We were not forthright.
We acted out of fear.
We bore false witness.
And, you know, like I think legitimately taking ownership for things that you could have done better usually really kind of deflates the escalation potential.
Especially when the criticisms are pretty big and foundational.
Now, when you listen back to this, you'll see, you know, when she was characterizing the, I say she like it wasn't me, but yeah, I went to theater school.
Right.
So when she's mirroring the criticisms back to you, she was escalating them a little bit, but they really are pretty harsh and deep.
Right.
And so I think it's important to say...
I should have brought this up sooner.
You know, I let this kind of get away with me and we shouldn't have been talking about it without including you.
Like, I think that kind of stuff can be really helpful because that kind of stuff...
I mean, I think it's whatever is honest, right?
And it would have been much better if this...
I mean, I think you're in your sort of mid-late 20s, so it would have been great if you guys could have all brought this up like five years ago or seven years ago or whatever, right?
Right.
Right. Right.
Right. Then she has to kind of at least let it go for the course of this, and you can bring it back up later or whatever, right?
But if she says, I can't believe you didn't, and you're like, yeah, that was wrong.
You know, that was a failure of nerve.
That was a failure of honesty.
That was a failure of...
And that was wrong.
You know, in our defense, we were kids and blah, blah, blah.
It's sort of dad's job. But you're right.
You know, that was wrong. And I apologize for that.
Then you can get back to focusing on the stuff with her.
Now, it's always an interesting question to me.
And I don't know the answer to this.
When you have a lot of piled up criticism.
How much do you bring up at once, right?
Because it can be kind of overwhelming, right?
And that's why she's like, tell me more, right?
Because she was looking for more things to push back on.
And she does, I wasn't sure, I mean, you said in the, she does actually call your dad fat and lazy?
Um... I wouldn't necessarily say that she directly tells him he's lazy, but she'll say things like, oh, he never does anything around you.
Oh, because that came up in the convo, right?
So you have to make sure you don't accuse something of someone they can deny?
Yeah, yeah. Right?
Because that's also bearing false witness if you sort of exaggerate the negative behavior or whatever, right?
Yep. Now, I know it was just a role play and all that, but how was your pulse, your blood pressure, your heart rate, your alertness?
How was that going? Yeah, I wouldn't say I felt like my hands weren't shaking.
I didn't feel my heart fluttering or anything.
Right. But it's work, right?
Yeah. Now, what happens with that kind of conversation, do you think?
I mean, I know we're sort of circling back a little bit, but this is in order to get us to Sarah, right?
So if you have something like that, and, you know, maybe it would be better if the whole family was there, right?
Because, you know, but then it's much more like an intervention or something, right?
But what happens with that kind of conversation with your mom?
You think it would just blow up and then she'd pretend nothing happened later?
It's possible. Um, I think it's possible that this might have to be, like, a more, like, something that's more of a long-term corrective thing.
Like, continuously, like, okay, she does it.
Correction. You turn the supertanker, and it doesn't, like, flip on a dime, right?
Right. Right, right. Now, do you think it's worth doing?
Yeah, I think so. Why is that?
Um, because it's...
You gotta at least try to fix it.
I think so. I think this is love, right?
I mean, it's acting out of love.
It is acting out of love for your mom.
Now, and again, to me, conflict is all, if you have your motivation straight, your chances of success are enormous, right?
In other words, if you're like mad at your mom, which I can completely understand, then it's going to come across much more negative and critical.
But if it's like you're reaching past some historical dysfunction that your mom's probably not even aware of and trying to grab onto her best self and pull it to the light for her happiness, like you're not fighting against her, you're fighting for her, for her future happiness, for her future contentment and so on.
If you have that in your motivation, then it's not a matter of winning and it's not really even a matter of assertiveness.
It's just, you know, like a kid who's got a sliver.
It's going to hurt when I pull it out, but...
I'm not trying to cause you pain.
I'm trying to save you pain in the long run, right?
It has to come out. I'm sorry?
It has to come out. It has to come out, right?
So if you can get to that standpoint, then the assertiveness, you can't lose, right?
Because if it's like your will versus her will, your dominance versus her submission, that's a win-lose, and she's got way more experience than you have, right?
And she's probably willing to go to greater lengths to defend her position than you would, right?
But if it's steadfast in reaching for the best, you know, like hate the sin, love the sinner, so to speak, then I think that assertiveness then becomes much easier.
Now, with regards to Sarah, I think...
I mean, do you want her as a potential life partner?
You know, in the last...
Week or so, I would say that that desire has significantly declined.
And why is that? Because of the feeling that it's not going anywhere.
Right. Yes.
Okay. And that makes perfect sense.
I mean, if there's no bus coming, you don't want to stand at the bus stop until you rot, right?
I totally get that.
It's just this feeling of like, you know, there have been times where we've tried and then Within three or four weeks, she's telling me things like, I don't want to see you, or I don't understand why I feel the need.
Why am I obligated to talk to you every day?
Things like that.
Even if it starts off well, and I think, maybe she's turned a corner, maybe she'll...
Be more consistent about this, then it just always ends up back in the same place.
Right. Because...
And I'm not defending what she's done.
That's harsh stuff, right?
And it's particularly harsh if there's a circle back scenario.
You know, like if you say to someone...
You're fired. Okay, that's harsh.
Maybe it's necessary or whatever, but at least they can move on with their life.
But if it's like, you're fired.
Just kidding. I want to give you a raise.
No, maybe you'll go on administrative leave.
No, you're fired. No, actually, I'm going to make you see.
That's just like, ah! Right?
I mean, that's just like impossible to function and to process.
So my guess is something like this, is that she is...
Trying to find out whether you're going to stand up to your mom.
And what that means, of course, is that if you can stand up to your mom, then your career is going to be much more successful.
Right. Because if you can stand up to your mom, then you won't let somebody who undermines you in your life.
And I can completely understand how Sarah's caustic comments, the come here, go away stuff, is undermining your confidence, is undermining your happiness, right?
Right. So this is kind of like a big test.
Like all of life is this bloody big test that never ends, right?
But that's life, right? So the test is like, okay, can I just stand up for myself, refuse to bear false witness, say what I think is important, not manipulate, be direct, be honest.
Have standards, right? I'm not saying you don't have standards, but, you know, like really clear and, you know, standards that you can really rely on.
Right. Now, if she sees that you can do that, she no longer is going to fear that she's marrying your mom by dating you.
Right, which is a very, very big thing.
I said this in shows in the past, like men look at a woman and it's like, oh, it's just her and me, right?
Women look at a man and it's like there's him plus 20 relatives who are going to, you know, control everything, try and control everything we do.
So she needs to know that you can build that fiery moat around the family and that you will be...
See, it's funny because women don't want you to be beholden to other women, but they kind of want you to be beholden to them.
Right.
And you got to say no to both.
Right.
That's it's like they call it a shit test.
I'm sure you've heard this kind of phraseology.
Right.
So and so the past is just, you know, I'm just going to tell the truth.
Right.
I'm not going to manipulate.
I'm just going to tell the truth.
I'm not going to bear false witness.
And I'm not going to accept behavior that is destructive to me or others from people I care about.
And you can't run around the world like pulling a drink out of everyone's hand and knocking cigarettes out.
But as far as the world that you have control over, you say like, no.
Right.
Because the challenge with Sarah is because it's been three years, my concern is that, like, part of your heart is kind of stuck with her.
Yeah, yeah. And you're not going to be available to someone else without resolution.
Now, resolution doesn't mean an end.
It may. Or it may mean a commitment and a going forward.
But that's my concern.
Like, you're half Velcroed to her.
And it's like, okay, I can move on, but I'm leaving half my heart behind because it's not resolved.
Does that make sense? Yeah, no, and I mean, we've even talked about that.
It's kind of, you know, we were speaking the other day, and she was kind of like, why do we keep, like, essentially, like, why do we keep going around in these circles?
Why doesn't it... Because you're good on paper!
Yeah. No, no, exactly!
I mean, if there's a computer program that's going to match people of, like, similar intellects and values, it'd be like, yeah, you guys are perfect, right?
Yeah, no, exactly. And I even, and she even, I said to her, I was like, there's just a certain attachment I have to you that I just can't That just keeps sticking around.
Well, I mean, she's Xena.
She's like warrior princess.
No, you're too young for that.
She's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah.
She is, right? She is smart and she's cool.
And she's fierce, right? Yep.
And that's, you know, I hate to say like a...
A woman to tame, because, you know, men get tamed and all that kind of stuff too, but there is a lot that works on paper between you, right?
And the question then is like, okay, well, if that doesn't work, you kind of move forward in your life.
It's like, okay, well, who is it going to work with?
If you're really good on paper, but it doesn't work out, then most likely, whatever is making it not work with Sarah is going to make it not work with the next girl.
Yeah. Right, right.
So... I don't ever tell anyone what to do because that's sort of pointless, right?
And you wouldn't listen to me anyway because you're a smart guy who doesn't want to get told what to do.
Unless we're roleplaying as your mom again.
But I think that's the challenge that if you can be honest with your mother.
And what I mean by that is do not...
Erase yourself to please others.
Because with your relationship with your mom, and listen, I know we've just talked about the negative.
I know there's a lot there that's positive, otherwise we wouldn't even be having this conversation, right?
But you can't just erase yourself in the presence of others.
I mean, you can. But it's very disrespectful to the relationship and to yourself and to the truth and to at least one of the Ten Commandments, probably more, right?
So if you sort of say, look, I am not going to self-erase in the presence of others.
If I say something, I'm not going to just blurt it out and hurt everyone all the time and just cause problems, but I am going to tell the truth in my relationships.
That is a very, very powerful place to be.
And... Living out of, in a sense, anxiety or concern or this over-solicitousness of other people, but I don't want to make other people upset.
But that's giving manipulation a lot of power, which it doesn't actually have unless you comply with it.
Right. So with regards to Sarah,
I think that if you can find a way, and I know you can, right, to sort of be honest and direct with your mother and just, you know, you can control what you do, blah, blah, blah.
I can't control what other people do.
You can control your level of honesty and your level of commitment to the best in your mother and your father and yourself.
You can't control her response.
And maybe her response will be to go thermonuclear, then things cool down.
And, you know, maybe there's a better conversation second round or whatever it is.
Or who knows, right?
I don't know.
But if you make that commitment to tell the truth, though the skies fall, so to speak, then you can bring your whole being to your relationship with Sarah.
Now, whether that works out or not, I don't know.
But right now, because you're only half with Sarah, because half of you, she's concerned, I think, that half of you gets erased when your mom snaps her fingers.
Then it's the worst kind of situation because, you know, this is something Trump said the other day.
He said, a good employee is the worst.
It's the worst of all.
And it sounds kind of like a paradox, right?
And he said, listen, a bad employee, you just fire him.
It's done, right? A great employee, you keep them, you give them raises, you hold on to them like grim death.
But a good employee is really frustrating because they're just kind of trundling along.
It's not bad enough to fire.
It's not good enough to give a promotion or a raise to.
And they just consume your, how can I help them?
How can I fix them? How can I prop it up?
It's like the car that's constantly breaking down.
You spend more time fixing it than driving it.
It's like... Yeah, right?
A car that just completely bursts into flames, you're here, I need a new car, right?
A car that works fine, you don't even think about it, but it's those limp along cars that are really, really horrendous, right?
So I would say that if you can bring all of yourself to your relationship with Sarah, then you can find out if you guys fit when you're both fully present.
But if you kind of get eclipsed half the time because you kind of train to defer to women and that's something that she doesn't want, right?
I mean, I think that's fairly clear, right?
Yeah. Then...
I think if you can bring all of yourself to what's going on with Sarah, you can find out if you work or not.
I think you will. And then, if it doesn't work out, you at least won't sit there and say, well, I'm going to bring the same problems to my next relationship.
But if it does work out, you get the benefit of Sarah, who's a pretty great woman.
And also, you get...
You know, the sort of last step of manhood or adulthood, I suppose, which is I'm not going to be frightened into lying by my mom.
You know what I mean?
Yeah. Yep. So I'll shut up now and just what do you think?
How has this worked for you?
I actually have a question.
So would you recommend Bringing this up, like, immediately?
Or should I wait until there's a situation that warrants this bringing this up?
Well, what is assertiveness?
Is assertiveness waiting or acting?
Acting, yeah. There you go. You're looking for a good excuse to defer, which I can completely understand.
When I had to sit down with my mom, oh man, that was a long bus ride to get to her place.
It was like 4,000 stairs to get up to the apartment.
We all want to defer this kind of stuff, but we don't live forever and the moral commandments are for the now, right?
Yeah. All right.
Yeah. However, you know, talking things over with your siblings and, you know, they may be like, good luck, son.
You know, we'll be rooting for you from the bunker.
I would certainly ask them if they would want to participate in this, but if they don't...
Well, also, you know, get their notes and all of that.
And I don't know.
It's an interesting question whether you want to talk about it with your dad or not.
Because here's the problem. If your dad says, for God's sakes, don't do it.
Well, then you have another problem, right?
Yeah. Yeah, because he might bring up the, you know, but I still have to deal with her once you guys are gone.
Right. But the reality is that he's already had his marriage and you're struggling in a relationship, I think, to a large degree because of this.
So, you know, you have to live with her in a sense for a lot longer than he is because you're younger.
Yeah. I see what you mean.
And how did the conversation go relative to your expectations?
Because, I mean, it's not like you're some big regular listener or anything.
Yeah, no. I mean, like I said, I thought that she probably would have...
It probably would have ended quicker than it did in our roleplay, but, you know, I mean, it was good in the sense that, you know, I kind of...
You know, I mean, you were throwing a good amount of stuff at me, so I mean...
Sometimes I feel like I'm one of those automatic server machines, but with bullets and all that kind of stuff.
Will you let me know how it goes?
Yeah, I will definitely let you know how it goes.
All right, all right. Well, listen, I really, really appreciate the conversation.
It was very generous of you to agree to do it, number one, and to be so open about it is amazing.
You are a very powerful guy.
And, you know, I think with this little tidy spot behind you, I think you and Shara have a real shot, and I hope that you do work it out.
And I really, really thank you for your time today.
Well, thank you. Thank you so much for going through this with me.
I'm just a stranger that someone said, hey, you should talk to him.
There aren't any strangers.
There's only people we haven't roleplayed with yet.
Thanks, man. Keep me posted and let me know how it goes.
Thanks again. I appreciate it.
No problem. Thank you again.
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