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Jan. 2, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:08:16
"My Wife Cheated - I Almost Lost It!" Freedomain Call In
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Good evening, everybody.
Oh my gosh, is this one of the few shows before Christmas 2020?
It is the 18th of December, and gosh, I can't believe it.
My daughter is turning.
12 tomorrow.
I guess five hours from now, she will be 12.
It's pretty wild to think.
In four years, she can drive.
In six years, she can vote.
In seven years, she can drink.
And 284 years from now, she can vote Democrat.
It's pretty wild. How time flies.
So, yeah, thanks everyone who's been along for the journey.
Thanks to all the great parents who send me their questions, their comments, their suggestions, their issues.
Thanks to all of the great parents who've been on these conversations in freedom and the realm of philosophy.
Thank you to everyone out there who is Supporting the show, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
You get some tasty goodies and bonuses, especially if you subscribe, which you can do through freedomain.com forward slash donate.
You can also, of course, support me through locals, freedomain.locals.com and freedomain.com forward slash connect to follow me on a wide variety of social media platforms because I suppose it's rather important to not have your eggs In one basket, so to speak. So, with the great praise and thanks to you, the wonderful listeners, out of the way, let us move straight on.
We got a two for tonight, assuming that I don't spend too long on each one, which is always a distinct possibility.
James, who do we have up first?
All right, so our first caller tonight writes in, Dear Steph, I'm not the kind of guy who usually seeks out help from others, but I have a problem.
I have a single father of two boys, ages 12 and 14, and I have not been able to fully get over their mother.
We were together for six years when we went through their worst breakup, in my circle at least.
She lied to me for months, cheated while carrying my second son.
She stole all the money we had in our account and left me to fend for myself alone and sad.
This was twelve years ago now, almost thirteen.
At first it was harder than I could bear.
I spent most of my time inside a bottle to numb the pain.
Eventually, I made a choice.
I was tired of feeling sad all the time.
I decided that I wanted to feel happy.
It's amazing what a choice can do.
I literally turned my life around in the next few years.
Today, in spite of the COVID situation, I am doing well.
I have been part of my kids' lives from day one and have been a father to them every step of the way.
I have a place and a good car, the things that they want to have.
The problem is with my ex.
First, for some reason that logic does not touch, I still love her.
She and I get along enough, mostly because I keep my mouth shut about most of the things bothering me about her.
She has had two divorces since me.
I somehow feel lesser because she seems to choose anything with a pulse but me.
I think it could be some guilt that she feels about the way things went down between us, but that is just a theory.
Her most recent ex is a bad person.
She went to prison, hit her, did drugs, etc.
I told her my concerns.
She did what she was going to do.
I'm only finding out now about how bad it actually was.
I'm worried for her safety and for that of my children when they are away from me.
Part of me wants to run over there and take her away and make things right, but how?
Part of me wants to drink a potion that makes me forget all about her and never look back again.
Neither of them seems like a workable option.
I respect your views on relationships and need a fresh pair of eyes in this situation.
Maybe there is something I'm not seeing, a path, an option.
Let me know and thank you in advance.
You're very welcome. How does it feel?
Coming back to this topic, this conversation, how do you feel hearing, I guess, this email or this message that you sent?
Well, I mean, obviously that's a shortened version of things.
It's really hard to actually deal with the things that have been between us.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I'm a little bit nervous. It's very difficult for me to talk to my ex about these things, and I don't really talk to many of my friends about these things in depth.
So, hearing it out loud is kind of shocking in a way.
Like, part of me doesn't really want to fully explore things because I think I know the conclusions that you're going to come to.
Well, I would be not very good at philosophy if I inflicted a whole series of conclusions on you.
This is exploration time, right?
And, you know, any man who's not thrown himself full off the cliff of infatuation has never really lived.
And you really do have to throw yourself heart and soul into love, attachment, affection, connection.
And, you know, it seems like you almost see an image of a trampoline that turned into quicksand, in a sense.
And that to me is really fascinating.
But no, listen, I respect, frankly, completely and totally respect that you got completely infatuated with this woman and you're in, right?
You're in. Now, I mean, there are some questions around...
Is it productive? Is it lending your heart to be open to anyone else?
All this kind of stuff, right? But no, listen, massive respect, massive props.
The people who overly shield their hearts may go through life relatively unscathed, but really what's the point?
You know, maybe I'm a bit too much of a thrill junkie or a risk junkie, but I think it's worth going all in for stuff.
So, you know, I think that's a great, great thing.
Now, whether that's good for your future, sort of another question, I don't know that yet, right?
So, let's just go over this letter in a bit more detail.
So, two boys, 12 and 14.
Not being able to fully get over their mother.
Okay, so the first thing I would say is nobody ever gets over anyone.
Nobody ever gets over anyone, let alone fully.
And I'm talking like I, everybody, come on, let's be honest, you occasionally will think of women you dated when you're teens, you know, even when you're older.
I mean, it's not like I never ever think about women I dated in the past.
And so, you know, I don't know, but I don't know what get over means, but fully get over their mother seems like a bit of a high standard.
That's sort of the first thing that I would say.
And I just would like to know if you could inform me what you mean by that.
Well, in other relationships with other women since her, I felt like I was never fully in.
Maybe that's a function of how bad I got hurt in that situation.
After you get hurt like that, your guard's up and you don't want to go through that same thing again so you can never have those depth of feelings for someone else.
You know what I mean? Since then, I've never let anybody in.
Honestly, like, I've felt things for a girl here and there, but I've never loved a girl since her, if that makes sense.
Right. Okay, so here's where, you know, it's good that we diverge this early on, because there's not much point in us nodding across the table at each other, so to speak, right?
But here's where you and I would diverge.
And I'm not saying I'm right.
I'm not saying you're wrong at all.
I'm just telling you where there's a difference of opinion, because I want to be obviously as frank as possible.
Okay. So when you say, you got hurt, that's a phrase that is really, really interesting.
You got hurt.
Because it portrays you as a passive victim, almost like a lightning strike out of a clear blue sky.
I got hurt. Like, hey man, I'm walking down the street and it looks like the manhole cover is on.
It's not. I wobbled through.
I got hurt. Okay, I could accept that, right?
I got hurt. But that's not what happens with a woman you date and marry and choose to have two children with, right?
You didn't just get hurt.
Let me give you another example, right?
So when I was a teenager, I was working in a hardware store and a guy came in who was part of a motorcycle club That would, as their initiation rituals or as their typical way of motorcycling, you had to triple the speed limit.
And he came in and he was like walking all kinds of gimpy and his head was rolling and all that.
And he came into work and he said, man, I got to work.
I just spent like three months in the hospital, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Because he was part of this motorcycle club that would triple the speed limit.
And it's probably dead now.
All these people are dead now.
It's so funny, right? Because probably, right?
This is the funny thing that happens when you get older, right?
So I was like, I don't know, 15 or 16 when I worked in this hardware store.
And this guy was in his, you know, late 30s or whatever, right?
So this like 40 years later, I guess he could still be alive, late 70s or whatever, right?
But I don't think so because his judgment was blah, blah, blah, right?
But he decided to buy a motorcycle.
He decided to ride a motorcycle.
He decided to join a motorcycle club.
He decided to join a motorcycle club that tripled the speed limit.
He decided to try and drive triple the speed limit.
Now, It's not a perfect analogy, of course, right?
But would you say, if he said, wow, I got hurt, would that fully encapsulate his decision-making process that led to what happened?
No, it wouldn't. It absolutely wouldn't.
And me saying that in that way is not complete and not correct, because there were plenty of red flags along the way that I should have paid attention to.
In retrospect, I would have paid attention.
Like, in relationships that I've had, when those red flags come up, I do pay attention to them now.
You know what I mean? Except for I seem to have this blind spot for her.
And the way that I would put that analogy is, like, you got a motorcycle, but no one ever taught you how to ride it.
Yes, you decided to get on the motorcycle and ride, but you didn't know how to do it, and then you ended up getting hurt.
Well, no, but see, hang on, hang on.
So first of all, I mean, the analogy is incomplete.
And again, when I say something, I know you feel a little nervous and all that.
And I know I am a sort of a quasi-authority figure.
Forget all of that. We're just two guys, like, sharing life, right?
So forget about all of that, right?
So when I push back again, it doesn't mean you're wrong or I'm right, anything like that.
But I would say, well, no, you chose to get a motorcycle, you chose to get on the motorcycle, you chose not to learn how to drive a motorcycle, and then you drove a motorcycle outside of your abilities.
And the reason I'm saying is that if something happened to you, if something just happened to you, you will never be able to love again.
You will never, ever, ever be able to fall in love again.
If you weren't 150% responsible for what happened with your wife, then it could just happen again, right?
In other words, if I'm out there holding up a lightning rod during a lightning storm and I get hit by lightning, then I can say, okay, well, if I'm not out there holding up a lightning rod during a lightning storm, I'm probably okay when it comes to the lightning, right?
But No, it absolutely does.
And I think that's probably part of my issue, is that...
There is this unresolved problem that I had that I'm still trying to grapple with and understand.
I was listening to Jordan Peterson about it, actually.
He was talking about the things that happen to you that you're still grappling with years later are things that you haven't fully dealt with and you haven't fully processed.
It's a problem that you still might trip over.
It's an obstacle that you're not seeing fully.
And I think that's probably true.
So let's go back.
Well, she was the hostess.
I was a waiter at a restaurant.
She gave me the batty eyes.
She threw the V-bomb at me right away.
That was probably a red flag.
She had just gotten out of a relationship with someone else who I found out later, months later, that she didn't break up with him before we started dating.
That was a pretty big red flag.
Sorry, she was dating?
She just got out of that relationship or she was still in it?
I'm sorry, I didn't quite follow that. That's what I was told is that she had just got out of a relationship but I found out later that she didn't know that.
Oh, so her boyfriend didn't know that she'd broken up with him.
Yeah. So by definition, she wasn't out of the relationship, right?
Correct. Okay.
All right. And then, I mean, early on, like, she cheated on me early on.
Did. Okay, so hang on.
How long did you know her before you had sex?
Maybe two months.
And how long since you started flirting or considering some sort of romantic relationship, how long was it between then and having sex?
About two weeks.
So you went on a couple of dates over a two-week period, then you had sex, right?
Yeah. Hey, I've heard sooner.
I think in modern days, she's pretty much a nun.
So, okay. And then how long was it before...
Did you then find out that her boyfriend didn't know she'd broken up?
Or did she cheat on you before you found that out?
I was...
So she was in theater.
And I was two years older than her.
She was still... It was her senior year of high school when we met.
I was 19 at the time.
I was just a little bit older than her, but...
She had a school play, and the dude showed up to the school play with flowers and stuff.
And I was like, I knew who it was.
I knew of this person.
I never really talked to him. But I was like, what the hell are you doing here?
And the reaction that she had...
Hard to describe. It's like she didn't know that he was going to be there, and she wanted to make him feel extra jealous or something, so she threw herself at me in front of him to make him feel bad about himself or something.
I don't know what her point was, to be honest.
So, I mean, she's manipulative to the point where someone's going to beat her up, probably, right?
I guess it did happen with the criminal guy, right?
Yeah, it did. Okay.
And how long into the relationship was that play night?
That was probably four months-ish, four months, I'd say.
Four months? So four months, you found out that she was manipulative and dangerous and cheating on you, right?
You, in fact, were the guy...
That she was cheating on with her boyfriend, although you didn't know, right?
Yeah, yeah. And honestly, I was younger, and I was...
Yeah, yeah, now I get it.
No, men are competitive, right?
So you beat this guy, and the prize is this lovely woman, right?
Okay. Sure, and I didn't know how the world worked, really.
Four months in, and how did she process or talk about this situation with the other man?
She's very good at misdirecting and avoiding.
So when you confront her directly with an issue, she's good at judo turning it around to a different subject or, you know, you know what I mean?
I don't know what she says.
Is she like a fog queen, like the fog people?
Like, after a while, you simply don't know which way is up.
Like, I had that when we were talking about the bannings on...
Sunday, I was in a conversation with someone and within like five minutes, he was really like, I don't know which way is up anymore.
Things get so complicated and convoluted that it's like, I don't even know what we're talking about anymore.
Was it that kind of stuff? Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. Right.
Okay. She does it skillfully, too.
Oh, yeah, of course. I get it.
People can be very good at this stuff, of course.
It's a survival mechanism in an abusive environment.
Okay, so four months in, you, to some degree, have the goods on this woman, right?
That she's manipulative, that she's dangerous, that she's lying, that she has...
She's put you actually in considerable danger.
And let me just sort of explain that.
I'm sure you know it. But for those who've never been in this kind of situation, she's put you in considerable danger on two levels.
So the first is that by openly using you to taunt her ex-boyfriend, he could have become violent, right?
Right. So she's putting you in significant physical danger.
She's also put you in a very difficult emotional situation because you've bonded.
You've already had sex.
And men bond over sex.
Everyone thinks, oh, it's just the women who bond and men can do whatever they want.
It's like, nope. Men bond over sex as well.
And because you've already had sex and you're already committed, you're the guy, you're the boyfriend in your mind, then by showing up and using you as a weapon against another guy, she's now put you in a situation where you...
You really have to reevaluate the last couple of months, right?
Because you committed to this woman and it turns out she's a liar, she's a cheat, she's manipulative, she's vengeful, she's vicious, and so on, right?
And she's also without shame.
That's a very dangerous characteristic.
Because she's not sitting there saying, oh man, I'm busted.
I've been so bad. I've been so wrong.
I'm so sorry. No shame, right?
I strung two guys along.
I'm a really terrible person.
She's like, eh-heh.
You win, he loses.
No conscience. No capacity for guilt or shame.
I mean, you were there, but that's sort of my read on it.
Well, along those lines, and I don't know how much you know about this, she's been diagnosed with a personality disorder.
Really? I mean, I would have guessed, obviously, but borderline?
What are we talking? Narcissistic?
Yeah, borderline personality disorder.
She's claimed. Right.
Which means all kinds of things. Well, I mean, look, even if she's lying, she's still saying, I consider myself a borderline, which is enough of a warning that...
Right. Yeah.
Okay, okay. Four months in, you hit this crossroads, right?
You recognize it, I guess, looking back, right?
The crossroads is ZOMG, the nature of this woman has now been completely revealed to me, and what happens then?
Well, I wouldn't call that the crossroads, actually, to be honest.
That was more just, like, something that happened.
Oh, no, it was. It may not be the only one, and I'll be firm on this, which, again, doesn't mean I'm right.
Okay, well, then there was another more major crossroad that happened fairly soon after that, because we kind of just, you know, again, like I said, when that happened, I took that as, ha-ha, I win, not as a red flag.
Sorry, more than that?
What, you helped her hide a body?
What, even more than that?
What are you talking about? So, I was working nights, and she and her mom were not getting along at all.
Her mom actually threw her down a flight of stairs at one point, and I felt like I needed to protect her.
So, she was, I think, one month out of high school, like, just graduated, and I had her move in with me in a basement that I was renting from somebody.
And, yeah, I was working nights, and I got off of work one night, and I was off a little bit earlier than I normally was, and I walked by the window, I looked in, and what do I see?
We're sitting on the couch, some dude, not doing anything right then, but it's pretty obvious what's about to happen.
You know what I mean? Yeah.
And... I should have.
I don't know what I should have. I knocked on the window.
I was like, what the hell?
And did the other guy turn to you and say, hey man, I win.
No, he didn't.
I mean, they both jumped up and freaked out and had to leave and da-da-da-da.
Like, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
What do you mean, sorry?
Like, what was going on there?
Oh, we were just talking. Yeah, bullshit, you're just talking, you know?
Like, that was the major crossroads for me when I actually realized how bad it was.
And how long into the relationship was that?
Uh, this was probably six months.
Okay, so then what? I already had feelings for her at this point, you know?
And I'd already, like, walked away from some friends and did some things and kind of put myself into this corner where she was my social circle.
I think that was probably her manipulation, too, looking back.
Oh, that she kind of isolated you from friends?
Yeah. And, uh...
I decided that I wanted to work it out with her.
In spite of the red flags, in spite of this giant...
Looking back on it, that was the crossroads to me.
You were saying before, the other thing was...
No, this was. That was the time that I should have walked away with my dignity intact.
No, no, but you had the fantasy of the mighty healing penis, right?
No, no, man. I can bang her into coherence.
I can love her into sanity.
My almighty Led Zeppelin-style solar-eclipsing penis can pummel her into robust mental health and maturity.
Something like that, right?
That's actually pretty apt.
That's not off the mark.
Oh no, I know. Listen, we've all been there.
With the power of my mighty oak love piston, I will sex hammer her into rationality.
No, I get it. I get it. I mean, everyone's had that fantasy.
And women have it too, right?
With the power of my vagina, I will make a bad man good, but still bad enough to be exciting.
So, okay, so six months in, you've both been the...
Cheater, and you've been the cheating guy, and then you've been the cheated-upon guy, and then what?
Low self-esteem, lack of support, no good role models.
I just went down the path, man.
I stayed on the tracks that I was on, thinking that we could work things out.
And, of course, I mean, this is a long period of time, six years that we were together.
There was a lot of things that happened.
But, certainly, I stayed on the road that I knew I should get off of.
I mean, we were both going to school, we were both going to college, like, both working full-time, you know, and trying to make time for each other, but a lot of the time that meant not seeing each other very much.
And because of what happened, it led to a lot of trust issues, which ultimately ended up breaking up the relationship.
I believe. Okay, so what were the dominoes that knocked it over?
Well, the boyfriend that she had before me and her were together.
The guy you met at the play?
That was the major domino.
Years later, when she'd already had a kid, and You know, we're having problems and fighting and this and that about stupid stuff.
She was talking to him.
And there was one day where I forgot something out in the car.
We'd just gotten groceries or something and I had to run out to the car.
And I ran out to the car and her phone was sitting in the car.
And I grabbed it. Like, oh, you forgot your phone.
Let me grab it for you. And I look on it, and it's like, oh, you have a new text message.
Let me look at it. I'm going to spy a little bit right here, right now, whatever.
Also, it could be a helpful and important message she needs to see.
So I look at it, and it says, Auntie Cell.
Like, my aunt's cell phone number.
It says, my cock misses you.
I feel like we should now change the conversation to discuss the auntie who seems...
A bit off the beaten path physiologically.
So I go upstairs and I say to her something like, does your aunt own chickens?
I'm sorry, this is black humor, but alright.
You can laugh about it now, but you know.
Yeah, she was like, what do you mean?
My aunt owned chickens? I'm like, yeah, does your aunt have like a chicken coop in her backyard?
Like, I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm like, well that's funny because your aunt's cock misses you.
And we had a huge fight.
And did she come out full attack mode?
Like, you drove me to this.
He makes me feel special.
You don't romance me anymore.
It's your fault. Like, how did she...
Well, I'm skipping ahead to the final chapter here, really.
But... What ended up happening was she tried to grab the phone out of my hand.
I didn't let her.
I'm going to call this anti-cell and figure out who this is.
She tries to grab it again.
I don't let her. I didn't push her.
I didn't hit her. Nothing like that.
I'm just keeping her from getting up. You can hold it up.
I walk out the front door.
She walks out the front door after me.
I walk down the stairs. We both smoked back then.
Cigarettes. There was this big heavy metal ashtray outside of the front door.
She tells me to stop.
I keep walking. She chucked it and hit me in the head with the ashtray.
I've got three stitches on top of my head from it.
I didn't call the police.
Someone called the police because I'm bleeding all over the hallway.
They come. They arrest her.
They take her away. They put her in jail.
I don't know what to do, man.
Like, this is the worst situation that I've ever been in.
Oh, no, no. Could have been worse.
They could have arrested you.
Oh, that's true. And were your kids...
How old were your kids at this point?
They were two weeks old and a year and a half.
Oh, so that's why the aunt said, my cock misses you, because she'd been pregnant and having a baby, so...
Couldn't peck, so to speak.
Is that right? I think it was more like we're having sexting back and forth, and that was just the most recent message.
Like, hey, my cock misses you.
Okay, I'll be over later.
Like, that kind of thing. What, two weeks after birth, man?
Yeah. Wow.
Alright. We were fighting pretty good at that point.
In my mind, it was like...
We're having a second kid.
She's been crazy hormonal.
Like, I have been, like, crazy stressed out.
We've been snapping at each other.
We're gonna figure it out.
Right now is really bad, and just hopefully, you know, like, the storm can blow over.
I didn't know anything like this.
Okay, you gotta stop that as a whole.
And again, I'm thinking about your future heart here.
And this is all the couples out there.
Don't fucking blame adversity for your problems.
Do not blame, well, I was having a tough time at work and she was hormonal and we were, you know, we were going to get evicted and our bills were piling up.
Do not blame adversity for your problems.
Do you know why? Because there's absolutely no reason in the world why adversity causes conflict at all.
There's absolutely no reason.
Let me say this again so everybody understands it.
There's absolutely no domino-like causal reason why adversity causes conflict.
It could just as easily be that adversity brings greater love, greater togetherness, greater understanding, greater sympathy.
It's like a woman saying, well, my husband lost his job and he got sick and that's why we were fighting.
It's like, no, that's not why you were fighting.
You were fighting. Why?
Why were you fighting? You were fighting because you chose to fight.
That's all. You were fighting because you chose to fight.
And this idea that, well, it was a tough time in our life...
So naturally, we turned on each other.
It's like, why would that be the case?
Surely, when it's a tough time in your life, you should be more supportive and positive towards each other so that you've got a port in the storm.
But I'm just, it bothers me.
I'm not saying I'm right. I'm just, this is my case.
It really bothers me when people say, well, we were fighting a lot and it was because of A, B, C, D, through to Z, external situation.
Bullshit. And I'm saying that to you because if you ever want to love again, guess what?
Bad shit's going to happen.
You're going to lose job.
You're going to lose some savings.
You're going to get sick.
You're going to get old. You're going to die.
And if you think that bad things happening in life means that you're going to fight, Then you're never going to be in a situation where you're not going to fight.
Or not going to fight on a regular basis because bad shit happens all the time.
All the time. All the time.
I'm working through one right now.
It doesn't matter what it is.
Bad things happen all the time.
All the time. And if you're like, well, but bad things mean we're going to fight, then of course you can't ever fall in love again.
But there's absolutely no reason why bad things happening means that you fight.
It can easily, as easily mean that you get closer together and more supportive and appreciate each other even more.
And admire each other even more.
So, I'm sorry to interrupt your story.
I still really, really want to focus on the story.
But my God, man.
If there's one illusion you've got to get rid of, it's the idea that somehow you guys weren't fighting because you chose to fight.
It's not external circumstances.
It's not external stressors.
You know, people's marriages get strengthened during wartime.
People's marriages get strengthened during life-threatening illnesses.
I know this personally. I got cancer.
My wife and I didn't fight.
We fell in love even more.
No reason for it. Sorry, go ahead.
I honestly wish that's the way that it had gone.
I do. I wished for that.
I had patience.
I tried hard.
I failed. By me saying what I said was me trying to take responsibility for my part in that failure.
Well, no, see...
Obviously there's something...
No, hang on. But you're still protecting her, right?
Because you went from its circumstances to now it's you.
You failed. Now, if she's got a genuine personality disorder, I don't know...
I'm not a psychiatrist.
I'm not a psychologist or anything.
I don't know how much a genuine personality disorder...
Whether the relationship between a genuine personality disorder and free will, as I understand it, is kind of like the relationship between...
Being in a wheelchair and being able to be a high jumper.
Like, are you so crippled?
You have no observing ego, you have no physiological capacity for self-reflection or self-correction, and you're just acting out, externalizing for your whole damn life.
Maybe, maybe it does.
Maybe it does. Maybe people who have deep, genuine personality disorders, and borderline is just about the worst, and you can't fix it.
In fact, therapists run screaming from borderlines.
So, as far as I understand it, you can't fix it.
What will happen over time is the borderline will mellow out a little as they get older.
So, I don't know.
I don't know if she has any responsibility from a moral free will standpoint, as far as I would understand it.
I don't know. It's an interesting question.
I mean, does my mother have free will?
Well, see, but I would say that my mother had free will.
I think she lost it before I was born, but she's still responsible for losing it because...
She made the choices that led to that and she had a terrible upbringing and, you know, you saying that your ex-wife was thrown down the stairs by her mother so she grew up with violence and chaos and brutality and probably surrounded by quite the constellation of personality disorders.
But if it's either circumstances or you, then she's still not present in the moral universe that she inhabits, right?
And she is. Equal, like I said, 150% kind of tongue-in-cheek, but she is equal and responsible for the issues in the relationship, as far as I could tell.
So what happened when she went to jail?
So, she goes to jail.
It's like a Friday or something like that, so her court date wasn't for a couple of days.
And, you know, I've got a newborn baby...
A one-and-a-half-year-old, two jobs.
Basically, I got fired for one job before she even got out of jail because I had to not show up for the entire weekend.
Like, sorry, I can't be there.
I gotta do this.
The other job I ended up losing on a side note a couple of weeks later because I wasn't doing my job because I was so strapped from everything.
I just checked out.
Lost my job there, too.
So I basically went from two jobs and a wife to no jobs and no wife.
And I guess you've got to be full-time with your kids then, right?
She had her court date.
I go to court. Testify to try to get the charges dropped down as little as possible because in my mind we're still going to work this out, right?
And basically the money that we're going to have to pay to the court is going to come out of my bank account ultimately so it's in my best interest to go to the court and try to get them to reduce things as much as possible.
Which they do. And they let her out.
And then she doesn't come home.
For like two or three more days.
Wait, isn't she released to you?
Her mother picked her up.
Oh, the mom who threw her down the stairs?
Yeah, that one. One who also hates me.
Right. But yeah, her mom picked her up.
That's the first complimentary thing I've heard.
That the woman who throws her own daughter down the stairs doesn't like you.
Gotta be horrible if she did like you.
When I found out about that, I instantly had a problem with her, and I'm the kind of person where if I have a problem with you, I'm not going to just sit there and be like, oh, everything's fine.
Wait, what? Oh, you didn't just say that on the heels of my wife put a three-stitch gash in my head with a heavy ashtray, but I was like, hey, we're going to work things out.
It doesn't sound to me like these two theories of your behavior work well together.
They don't play well together either.
One glaring exception.
You're right. Oh yeah, one glaring exception.
One exception who glares at you.
Okay, got it. It's fine.
We all have complexities.
I just wanted to make sure that we weren't missing that one.
Oh, thanks for pointing that out.
That's a good call. Yeah, I forgot where I was.
Okay, so she gets out of prison.
She's not home for a couple of days.
In that couple of days, like I said, I've been working two jobs.
I've been working my butt off.
We've got Over $10,000 saved up.
We're trying to buy a house at some point.
All this stuff is going on.
I go to the grocery store because the kids need some stuff.
Swipe my card.
Denied. What do you mean denied?
I got like tons of money in the bank.
Everything's fine. Swipe it again.
Nothing. Call the bank.
Your balance is at $0.00.
A joint bank account that was in both of our names.
She couldn't close the account unless we're both there.
She can take it down to minimum balance and then open up a new account in just her name, which is exactly what she did.
Wait, she drained that account like it was her aunt?
Wow. So, that happens.
And I'm still in this apartment, right?
Like, I'm still in this apartment that we live together in.
And, like, finally she comes home and we have a pretty good fight.
And it ends up, I'm moving out.
You can stay here. Like, I want nothing to do with it.
I don't even have any money anyway.
Wait, you said you're moving out or she's moving out?
I'm moving out. Like, I moved out.
She can keep the apartment. So I moved in with my brother into his basement for a little while.
And, gosh, this was a couple of weeks later.
This is the worst part of the story to me.
There was a day that I had the kids, and this is while I still had that other job before I lost it.
And I had to go to work, right?
Like, I have the kids on these days, and then I'm going to drop them off to you and go to work.
So I'm calling her and calling her and calling her, and she's not answering her phone.
Like, pick up the kids or tell me where I'm gonna meet her or do anything like that.
It's time to leave. Like, I gotta go.
Right? So I just drive to the apartment.
Keep there. Car seats.
Walk up the stairs. Pound on the door.
Doesn't come to the door. I know she's there.
Her car's out front. Walk on the door again.
Two-bedroom apartment. Doesn't take that long to get to the door.
Like, I know what's going on.
You know what I mean? She finally answers the door, and I push my way past her, goes straight to my bed, and here's the dude, completely naked under the sheets.
Oh, the aunt guy? Yep.
And... Sorry, that was him?
Yep, that was him. So did he, like, because you thought you won, right?
Turns out, funny story, he won, yay!
So, I kind of had a...
You ever hear the story, or the saying, I guess?
I saw red? Uh, yeah.
I saw red.
It's not a joke.
I literally...
Everything turned red.
And... It was like a religious experience.
I don't know how to describe it.
Because everything turned red and it was like I had two paths before me.
Like two futures. One future in which I would be a father to my children and be part of their lives and be an upstanding citizen and do things in the world and be a good person.
And another future where I was in prison.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
I don't know how long it was.
It seemed like 15 seconds.
When the red went away, my hands were around this dude's throat.
She was hitting me in the back.
It was just glancing off of me like the Hulk getting shot or something.
He doesn't even notice it.
Oh, you're so full of adrenaline at this point.
It's like you're on the PCP I Can Take On 10 Cops album of greatest hits.
And I was sweeping his throat, choking the life out of him, and he had the look of, I'm about to die, in his eyes.
I let go. I walked away.
I went to work. I got fired, like, a day later.
For reasons, I mean, I was...
I'm not joining you on the giggle fest regarding this.
I'm sorry, man. I'm just trying to, you know...
No, you're trying to invite me into a place where this is funny that your kids could have been a witness to a murder.
It's serious, though. You're absolutely right.
It's pretty fucking serious.
There's not much more that is more serious, right?
So, no, listen, I appreciate the offer of let's giggle about this shit, but, you know, denied.
Refused. You're too good at this stuff.
Can we talk more? I'm trying it again.
Still not doing it. Still not doing it, brother.
Okay, so then what?
So, I didn't have a job and kind of bounced around to a different city and got away for a couple of weeks and tried to recenter myself and realized that was pretty much hopeless.
It was like, deal with your problems here or deal with your problems where you can still see your kids.
So, I went back and got a job at a hotel as a bartender and got an apartment and It kind of sucked.
It was in an area where I didn't know anybody, and it was a job where there weren't very many friendly people.
I was, like, really depressed.
Honestly, that was the most depressed I've ever been in my entire life.
But you weren't still in your brother's basement, right?
Not at this point. This was maybe two or three months down the road.
I was doing my best to just be there for my kids as much as I could.
Hold myself together.
Not let everything fall apart.
It was falling apart because I was so...
I had so much pain inside of me.
All I could do was...
Get high, get drunk, whatever I could to not feel pain.
And temporarily it kind of worked, but it's a downer and I always feel like crap.
You know, you always feel bad and that just makes the depression even worse.
And after a couple of months of that, I got to this point where I'd hit pretty much rock bottom.
You also would be being driven here by the unconscious of your ex who desperately needed you to fail so that she could feel like she didn't make a terrible mistake.
Probably true, too. She certainly did things to...
She puts hurdles in the road, you know?
She didn't make... She put hurdles in front of me.
It wasn't like... Yeah, of course.
She made the...
In front of me easier.
I don't know.
I just got to this point where...
Like, suicide was a contemplation.
Not a serious one, but it popped in there and I'd have to fight it back, you know?
Like... Yeah, like, if the rest of your life is gonna be this daily shit sandwich, what's the point, right?
You know, I'd go to work and, you know, I'm a bartender.
I'm supposed to be, like, the life of the party and I'm just...
I'm not having it. I'm not happy.
I'm not having a good time.
And... Woke up one day.
You don't exactly become a bartender to get away from people with personality disorders, right?
You're making me laugh again.
You're not supposed to. Yeah, all right.
See, it's fine when I do it.
Totally fair. Totally fair because I'm a raging hypocrite.
All right. So, I mean, no, that's an observation, but it's true, right?
I mean, most of the people, particularly the people who are hanging around the bar all day, I mean, it's not a healthy crew, right?
Well, and I should probably tell you about this part, too.
Because it was a hotel bar, and being the hotel bartender, I get a lot of keys from women.
And I am ashamed to say I've used more than a few of those room keys in that period of time.
Oh, so like CD one night stands, get yourself tested afterwards, hope nothing erupts from your penis like Vesuvius?
Yeah, something like that.
Huh, now I have three!
Yeah, that's not good.
That's not good. Alright. And then what?
Well, I guess go back to despair.
I got to that point where I was as low as I'd ever been.
I woke up hungover, just feeling bad, depressed.
I said to myself something like, I am so sick of feeling like this.
Do something else today.
Have fun. Make a change.
Do something. And it was like a switch turned on in my head.
Where it's like...
I don't care if it's raining on me.
I'm going to dance, you know?
I don't care if the building's on fire.
I'll, you know, run over there and grab some buckets of water and throw it on there.
It's great, you know? Like, that's what we got to do?
Cool. And I just, like, overnight, almost, my attitude changed.
And there's something about when your attitude changes or circumstances start to change.
And it kind of builds on itself and builds on itself.
And it got to a point where...
I mean, it took a couple of years to go from pit of despair to like, holy cow, I'm doing pretty good right now.
But eventually got there.
And, you know, the kids were six or eight years old by this point.
I was like five years down the line.
Something like this is about what I'm thinking.
And, you know, like, hey, you want some video games?
Let's go buy them. Like, hey, you want to go to this place for your birthday?
Let's do it. Versus there was a point before that where it's like, hey, do you want to go get a cheeseburger and split it between the three of us?
So, that was a pretty big deal for me.
Okay, so let me just pause you for a sec here.
I still want to get on with the story, but I want other people, and tell me, of course, if this does or does not accord with your experience, my friend, but...
So, when we grow up, and we will get your childhood, but when you grow up being punished, then we...
As adults, continue to punish ourselves.
When something fails, when something goes wrong, when something goes badly, we want to punish ourselves.
It's not like we want to, it's just that that's what we're used to and that's what we feel we deserve.
So for you, you're like, hey man, I chose the wrong woman, I almost attacked the boyfriend, the marriage failed.
I'm not successful.
I got fired.
Now, what that leads to is, I must be punished!
I've been bad.
I've been bad. I must be punished.
And so you punish yourself, right?
You punish yourself with depression, with anxiety, with suicidality.
And then, at some point, Your sentence is over.
You've punished yourself enough, and you can get back to living.
There's a whole judge, jury, and executioner that goes on in her head, usually implanted in there by violent and abusive childhoods.
But no, this man, you've been bad.
And you've got to write out 10,000 times, I will no longer be bad.
I am a bad person.
I will try not to be bad.
And you punish yourself.
And you punish yourself with booze.
You punish yourself with smoking.
You punish yourself with one-night stands.
You punish yourself with being a bartender.
You punish yourself with misery, anxiety, suicidality.
But there's a will to live.
There's a will to surmount. There's a will to survive.
And at some point, the judge in your head says, all right, okay, that's enough.
I mean, I'm not going to go any further because if we go any further, It's not like you lose the desire for self-punishment, but what the judge in your head says is he says, okay, if I punish you too much, you're going to throw yourself off a bridge and I won't get to punish you anymore.
So, you know what? I'm easing up.
I'm going to let you out of jail because otherwise you're going to go on a hunger strike and kill us all.
So, yeah, okay, you can head out, but don't worry.
I've shown you my power over you.
I've shown you my power to destroy your happiness.
So the inner tyrant will always be here ready for the next screw-up you're going to do.
And that's probably got a lot to do with the caution with which your heart faces the world, is knowing your capacity for self-punishment.
But there's no reason why failure should lead to self-punishment.
There's no reason why massive screw-ups should necessarily lead to self-punishment.
They could lead to self-sympathy.
They could lead to self-understanding.
They could lead to wisdom.
But you pause, and I'm not sure it's because it's not relevant.
You fell asleep. It's too relevant.
You feel too much. Where are you?
Relevant. Relevant.
Yeah. Because you were punished as a kid, right?
Oh yeah. And how did that go?
What happened? Well, I mean...
When I was little...
No, no. Stay with your feelings. Go back.
Go back to where your feelings were.
Because if you're reporting to me rather than us having a conversation, we're not going to get too far.
You've probably told these stories before, right?
So when you were feeling something, you said, oh yeah, very feelingly about the punishment.
So what happened when you were a kid, when you were punished?
What was it like?
At the metal end of the belt, my mom...
My dad didn't need to do that, though, because he was strong enough to beat you, you know?
Sorry, you just cut out with that for a sec.
Your mom and then your dad, sorry.
My dad was strong enough.
He didn't need the belt. So he just beat you with his hands?
He had these big golden rings.
He would turn them around so when he smacks you with them, you get, like...
I forget what it was. It was some gold coin, like the size of a dime.
I'd have these dimes on my back.
Right. And he went to jail, so...
He went to jail for what?
Embezzlement, basically.
He was stealing money and funneling it through an intermediary and got caught.
And let me guess, did he beat you for lying?
I'm sure that was in there.
See, son, I might be embezzling, but I'm going to have to beat you for lying when you're seven, because that's really serious, man.
He went to jail when I was, like, five.
He got out when I was nine.
Four years for embezzlement?
Man, that must have been more than eight bucks.
It was much worse after he got out of prison.
Oh, he was? Yeah.
And your mom stayed with him?
She died a couple years later.
From what?
Other than stress.
He had cancer.
Right.
Right. Right. And she stayed with him while he was in prison, is that right?
Yeah. See, that's the strange thing about these two major women in your life, right?
Your mother stays with your father, though he's a thief, a liar, a fraud, an embezzler, a criminal, and goes to jail.
Your mother stays with him.
But your wife wouldn't stay with you, right?
I think it was such a shock to me when it happened with her.
With who? With my ex.
Like, when she left, I was so unprepared for it because in my mind, she's supposed to stay, you know?
Yeah, your mom stayed. Why wouldn't you?
It looked like you went to prison, right?
I mean, you could have, but you didn't.
I made the other choice.
Yeah. I mean, you still had your hand around his neck, right?
Almost made that choice.
Right. So your father would beat you halfway to straight-up torture.
And your mother would hit you, beat you with a belt.
The metal end of the belt, right?
With the spike. I don't want to paint my mother that bad because she wasn't, honestly.
She did hit me with a belt, but it wasn't on the regular.
And when she did, it was because I was being bad.
I'm not saying that's how you should punish a child, but that's how she was raised.
And honestly, Stefan, let me give you credit where credit's due.
That's how I thought kids should be raised.
Until I started listening to you.
I appreciate that. I really do.
And I will bookmark that.
Let's get back to mom. Now, I know this is tough because she's dead.
So I'm not trying to throw the coffin under the bus, so to speak.
But your mother married and gave children to a violent criminal.
It's not an untrue statement.
It's a distinctly true statement.
Now, the first impulse that we have, particularly with women, you and I know this as men, right?
The first impulse we have is to make excuses.
Right? So, yeah, your mother beat you with a bell.
She married and gave children to a violent, child-torturing, Criminal.
And you say, oh, but she was raised badly.
Yeah, you know what? So was I. Now, let's say that tomorrow, in some alternate universe, let's say that tomorrow, it turned out that I was in fact a violent criminal.
Would you be disappointed?
Yeah, I would. Why?
I was raised badly. I had a bad childhood.
I was abused. Why don't I get to be a violent criminal?
Or marry one. Why do you have these high standards for me?
But not for your own mother?
Me, some guy on the internet.
You've never even met.
You've got these high standards. But for your mother?
Nope. I never beat you with a belt.
I never married a criminal.
I never stood by while a spouse battered a child.
With a metal ring, leaving welts on his back?
I just stood by and let that happen.
So why don't you have high standards for me but junked your mother?
There were times that she didn't stand by and let that happen.
At times when she stopped it?
Yes? Yes.
All right. Did she stay married?
Did she report him to the police?
See, if she'd reported him to the police, then all the money he stole might not have been stolen.
So she's part of that too.
Because he would have been in jail, or at least would have been warned by the police, and he wouldn't have been embezzling money and stealing from people, right?
So she's part of that theft, right?
Yeah. I suppose she is.
So why do I have the high standards from you, but not your own mother?
She's my mother. It's not an argument.
It's a statement of biological facts, not an argument.
Listen, do you want to fall in love again?
Yes, I do. Then raise your standards, brother.
Raise your standards. And don't have the bullshit, which we're all tempted with, especially when it comes to women.
We're all tempted with lowering our standards for women, aren't we?
You never would have accepted behavior from a male friend that you had from your girlfriend, fiancé, wife, mother of your children, right?
No. Not in a million years.
Never would you have accepted that behavior.
But we're tempted to lower our standards.
I talked about this over a year ago in Orlando, right?
Because women can end our bloodline if they choose not to have children with us, right?
So we lower our standards just so we can reproduce.
But it doesn't work. At least it doesn't work in the way that we want.
Because if you want to trust women, you've got to take standards you have for men and apply them to women, if you understand.
No pussy pass.
No sex pass, no lowering the standards because you're horny.
No ball-draining, ball-busting bailouts.
You understand? You toughen up and you say to a woman in your mind, maybe directly to her, I will not accept any behavior from you that I would not accept from a man.
You get no pass with me.
I'm going to hold you accountable, fully responsible, fully adult.
And you know why? A, because it's right, and B, because women have been telling me that that's all they want, you see?
All they want for the last 60 fucking years, maybe 70.
You could go all the way back to the suffragettes.
We want to be able to vote just like men!
We want to Have all the great jobs, just like men.
We want to be soldiers, just like men.
Oh, great. Okay.
Here's your moral responsibility, just like men.
No, no, no, no. That's not what we meant.
We want all the cool stuff.
We don't want the moral responsibility stuff.
But you look at a woman, take away the tits, take away the ass, take away everything else, Bare forked animal.
You look at the woman, and you imagine her as a man.
We could say auntie style.
You look at the woman, you imagine her as a man.
Would you accept that behavior from a man?
Let's say that you had a male friend who was two-timing, a naive young woman who loved and trusted him, and he was having sex on the side.
What would you say to him? Say you're a piece of crap?
Yeah, stop doing that.
You're not my friend anymore and I don't want to hang out with you?
Yeah, maybe you'd give him a chance to come clean.
See if he could do the right thing, do the honorable thing.
Maybe. I don't know. Depends how long the friendship was and how much investment there was.
But you would not gloss over it, right?
You certainly wouldn't say, hey, high five to you, two-timing brother.
I'm going to buy you a car.
Can you imagine that?
Bet you spend a lot more money on your girlfriend than buying a car.
Hey, two-timing female!
High five! Here's a car!
Right? You wouldn't buy a car to a male friend.
You wouldn't buy a car for a male friend who was cheating on his girlfriend.
You don't give resources to women who do that.
You don't. Sorry, you were going to say?
I bought her a car right before we broke up.
There we go. You bought her a car right before you broke up with her.
I'm sorry. We shouldn't laugh.
You don't go to a friend and say, hey, did you cowardly hit me from behind with a heavy ashtray when I was leaving the place?
Oh, you did? Did I have to go to emergency and get three stitches put in my head?
Could you have given me brain damage?
Could I have ended up in a wheelchair?
Certainly could have. So, the sucker punch, in a sense, from the sky, with the heavy ashtray that put me in the hospital, good job, here's a car, free and clear.
No, no, no, equality, man.
UPB does not stop at the vagina.
I mean, practically, it kind of does for a lot of men, but philosophically, it doesn't.
Universally means beyond sex, beyond gender.
There's no separate category for women.
None. And if that's not clear to you yet, you will never be able to trust.
See, it's not that you don't trust women, it's that you don't trust yourself around women.
And you have reason to, if you have these double standards.
And if you give excuses to women to say, well, but my mother was raised badly.
But boy, if I found out that Steph, who was raised badly, did one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of the unethical things my mother did, I would be really shocked and appalled!
Because, you see, men are subject to high moral standards, and women get weak-kneed excuses, right?
See, any woman who has self-ownership and is responsible as a human being for her own life, Will avoid you like the plague.
Do you know why? Wait, say that again.
So any woman who has strong and assertive self-ownership, who takes responsibility and holds herself the moral equal to a man, will avoid you at the moment like the plague.
Do you know why? No, I don't.
Because she doesn't want to be treated like a retarded child by you.
And I think if you look back at your relations with women, and I'm perfectly happy to be corrected on this, and you can tell me in the audience as well, if I'm unfair on this, but I think if you look back on your relations to women and how much you hold them accountable, you treat them kind of like retarded children.
And there is this meme in the Manosphere, right?
Women are just children with tits, they say like...
And, uh... Well?
Yeah, I mean...
If you treat them that way, why would they grow up?
I don't know. Not in every relationship I've been in.
Yeah, I do tend to phantom...
Anyway, if they were a dude, I would not.
So you treat them as...
And it's not even children.
Not even children.
Because you wouldn't reward children with a car for being violent to you, right?
No, you wouldn't. James, this reminded me there's a line from...
A movie called As Good As It Gets.
Jack Nicholson plays a writer, a very cynical writer.
And this wide-eyed woman says, you write women so well.
How do you understand so much about what it's like to be a woman?
And he says, it's easy.
I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
And Julie in the chat says, give me my agency!
No, come on, man.
See, I grew up, I mean, yeah, there was my mother and, you know, my mother's loser dipshit friends and all that, right, who were all involved with abusive, violent men and my mother and her friend were held at gunpoint by some crazed boyfriend or whatever, right?
But you see, that was sort of on one side of these idiot children analogy, right?
But the other side is my aunt's Pretty strong, tough, able, competent, sensible, hardworking women.
You know, they're not all like that.
They're really not.
But you see, if you're just going to say, well, I can't hold women accountable because if I hold women accountable, if I judge women as adults, If I hold women responsible, as responsible as I hold men, no woman is going to want to have anything to do with me.
If I treat a woman as a genuine equal, I'm never going to get laid.
Like, any woman with self-respect will get that perspective from you.
Well, I can't hold women accountable.
I can't be responsible. I can't hold women responsible.
I can't treat them as equals because they're kind of retarded children.
If you believe that, I think there's indications that you do.
And again, I'm not saying this is some conscious belief or anything, but if this is what comes from defending your mom, right?
Then a woman of self-esteem and maturity and confidence, I mean, I'm sorry, this sounds kind of silly, right?
But imagine there's some, you meet some guy, you like him, you hang out, you have a couple of beers, you shoot the shit or whatever, right?
And You say, oh man, I gotta go drain a vein.
I gotta go bleed the lizard.
I gotta go to pee, right? And he says, he gets up and he comes with you, right?
And you're like, what are you doing?
He's like, well, I need to unzip you and hold your pee-pee while you pee.
What would you say? I don't know what I would say to that.
I don't know either, but it would be pretty odd because he's treating you like a retarded child, right?
Would that enhance your friendship?
No, it would not.
No, of course not, right?
Of course not. It would be you don't want to be treated like a retarded child, right?
Definitely not. And if after you ate some pizza, he dipped his handkerchief into some water and wiped your mouth, it would be weird.
You're like, dude, I'm an adult. What are you doing?
So that's what a competent, mature woman experiences when you treat women as if they're retarded children.
I see what you're saying.
And... Honestly, I'm probably guilty of it.
Not probably. I am guilty of it to some extent.
Guilty is not a thing.
I'm not talking about guilt. I'm so sorry to be annoyed.
I'm not talking about guilt. No, no.
See, this was what was necessary to survive your mother.
Listen, there are some women.
There are men too. I'm just talking about the women here.
There are some women who react With extreme violence when they are held responsible for their behaviors.
You know this, right?
I mean, you took a fucking ashtray to the head because of this, right?
You held your wife accountable for her actions, right?
And what does she do? She threw an ashtray at me in the head and went to jail for four days.
She could have gone to jail for a lot longer.
She put you in the hospital. Why?
Because you held her responsible.
Did you attack her?
No. Did you threaten her?
No. Did you punch her? No.
You simply said, you're responsible for this.
100% responsible. You're responsible for your actions.
Now, again, there are some men, we're talking about women at the moment, there are a lot of women in this world, when you hold them accountable, they will respond perfectly.
With extreme violence. And throwing a heavy ashtray at someone and hitting them in the head is extreme violence.
And your mother, I guarantee you, doesn't mean I can't be corrected.
I'm just saying this is how confident I am.
Your mother was one of these women.
Hold her accountable.
Hold her responsible.
She would get violent, either directly or she would use your dad to enact her rage.
It's like an allergic reaction.
I can't explain it fundamentally because I've always been one to take on too much responsibility.
In that, you and I are similar.
It's kind of a male thing, but we take on too much responsibility.
So for me, the idea of having an allergic reaction to the assignment of responsibility is incomprehensible.
I can't understand it. But then, I'm not a pretty young woman, right?
So, I don't know what that's like.
I don't know why it happens.
Maybe people can give me some thoughts.
I don't know why it happens.
But I do know that it happens a lot.
That if you assign a particular type of woman, you give her responsibility, you assign her full moral responsibility, she will react to violence, and I guarantee you, your mother was like this.
And so it's not like you're guilty of something, or you just woke up on morning and said, I'm going to treat women like retarded children.
No, it's like if you didn't treat your mother morally like a retarded child, she'd beat you with a fucking belt.
It's not a guilt thing.
This is what you did to survive, and I commend you for it.
I would have done exactly the right thing.
In fact, I did. I did.
I very distinctly remember the few times when I was an adult.
Your mother's dead, so you can't do this.
I'm sorry for that. But I remember, I've talked about this on the show before, I won't get into the details yet, but I remember the couple of times in my adult life when I went to my mother and said, here's a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of very sympathetic responsibility.
And do you know what happened? Extreme violence.
Now, I was too big for her to enact that violence against me.
I didn't do that when I was a kid.
What are you, crazy? I'd never do that as a child.
Because she could have killed me.
I'm not kidding about this.
Because she had already...
It acted life-threatening violence against me when I was four fucking years old, beating my head against the metal door.
I could have died or been brain damaged or become one of those retarded children.
Maybe it pounded philosophy into me.
I don't know, but I would never...
I mean, I tried that once when I was a kid.
No, no, no, thank you. So I did it when I was an adult and I was too big for her to physically hurt, but the violence was incredible.
The violence to the environment.
And I don't know. I think it's a bad conscience.
I think it's the eternal childhood of the spotless vajayjay.
I have no idea. Genuinely no idea.
I don't say that very often.
I have no idea why they're so allergic to responsibility.
I mean, they hold it as a standard for other people because your mother would hit you for being bad or whatever you did.
You're responsible as a kid, right?
But... Yeah.
In certain circles, holding women accountable is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly dangerous.
Even as an adult, right?
You could have been hurt or brain damaged or Lord knows what, if that makes sense.
Does this fit with your experience or thoughts?
Honestly, no.
It doesn't. Good. Okay, tell me.
Aside from the things that you pointed out, right?
You're sticking with a criminal who beats his children, right?
And the little bit that she added to that.
She did, in fact, step in the way of that several times.
She took the brunt of it several times.
There was never a woman that I've ever met in my adult life that had the responsibility that she took for her children that I mean, the way that she faced her cancer head-on, beginning to end, and didn't put it on anybody else, and didn't blame anybody, and didn't, you know, make it someone else's problem to take care of her.
She was the strongest person I have ever met.
With regards to her cancer?
Oh, that is a good example, yeah.
Okay, so she, listen, I'm perfectly happy to be schooled on this, happy to be corrected, but I'm having trouble understanding it.
So your father was a violent criminal?
She was the glue that held the family together.
She was the cornerstone.
Okay, hang on. I've already got the praise, and I'm happy to hear more of it again.
But she was the woman who chose to marry and have children with a violent criminal.
Yeah, and I admit that, and I say that that was her fault, but I think, honestly, this is me giving her agency.
This is me not treating her like a retarded child.
I think that she was afraid.
What do you mean, afraid of what?
In what, dating, marrying, staying with?
I just don't know what you mean.
She was afraid of leaving him and being with someone else.
She was afraid of crossing that desert.
And, you know, that's what it is, right?
If you leave a relationship and try to find a new one, it's like going through a desert.
You might not make it.
You might end up in that desert for a really long time.
You might not ever find that oasis.
You have a good chance, you know, if you put your stuff together, you got a good camel, you'll probably make it.
But, and you have four kids, and a mortgage...
Like, you have four kids with your dad?
Yeah. Four kids.
I have two...
Okay, so here's another thing, too.
When my mom died, my oldest sister, who's 14 years older than me, I was like the surprise child, you know?
Whoops. Yeah. She became my de facto mother.
I moved away from my dad when I was 15.
Moved in with my sister at that point.
Finished high school. Went to college.
I didn't talk to my dad for 10 years after that.
She died last year.
Your dad died last year?
No, my sister.
My de facto mother.
How did she die? She's young, middle-aged.
How did she die? Well, my mom died when she was 50 of cancer.
My sister died at 50 of cancer.
Same kind? Breast cancer?
Friend kind. I'm sorry?
Friend kind. It was, uh...
She had her own set of problems.
My mom had cancer six times before it finally got her.
My sister had it four before it got her, so...
Was your sister, again, I'm not trying to say it's all stress-related, but was your sister living a life of significant stress?
I think so. I mean, she was corporate executive of a major company that everyone would know if I said the name, you know.
She had really good money, but it was a high-stress job, and I think she probably had some...
I know she had some relationship issues with her husband because her husband cheated on her.
One time, at least, that I know of.
And I know that she dealt with a significant amount of stress, and she, for her part, tried to help me out, but the amount of help that I needed, she was not able to provide.
Oh, like she warned you away from dating this woman?
I think she did, actually.
It wasn't a strong warning. Wait, what do you mean you think she did?
I'm not sure. That seems a pretty important one to get right.
I talked to her a really long time ago.
I seem to remember having that conversation, so yes.
Did she warn you against marrying her?
Having kids with her? I think that it kept a lot of the things about our relationship...
Away from my sister because I didn't want to color the person that I was with as being bad.
So she didn't have the full story.
Eventually she got the full story, but...
Until after things were done, if that makes sense.
Did she have kids?
Yeah, she does. Okay.
All right. I appreciate that update.
Let's go back to your mom.
Let's go back to your mom. It's a tough nut to crack, which is exactly what I would expect.
And again, I could be wrong. I'm just telling my thoughts.
Okay. So...
Do you think that...
It's an abstract principle.
Start with the abstract first, right?
Because that's how we... We've got to judge the personal according to the abstract.
That's why... It's philosophy.
It's not therapy, right? It's philosophy.
So do you think that someone who chooses to expose children to violent child abuse is a good person?
Okay.
I mean, if that is the extent of the question, obviously the answer is no.
They're not a good person. Okay, now listen, there may be good aspects to them.
They may be very nice to animals.
They may be very kind to strangers.
They may give to charity.
But as far as the parenting goes, if a mother...
See, here's the thing. You're talking about your mother's fear of, you know, if she leaves this guy, maybe she won't find another guy or whatever.
And okay, yeah, we can say that kind of stuff if we want.
And there's probably some truth in it.
I get all of that. But I don't care about it at all.
Honestly, and it's your mom, I get you do, and I'm just telling you from a philosophical standpoint, I couldn't give two shits about it, and I'll tell you why.
Because your mother was with your father by choice, and you weren't.
You were trapped and enslaved in that violent household.
And that's what you're missing.
So you can theorize about why your mother stayed, but she always had a choice to leave.
But your choice to be there was utterly dependent upon her choice.
And a good person would say, I'm scared to leave, but I cannot continue to have my children beaten and half-tortured.
You're saying? I honestly do.
I'm not saying she was like some stone evil witch from hell or anything like that.
But what I'm trying to say is if you knew of a male friend who had a girlfriend or a wife who was half beating the kids to death or half beating and torturing and hitting them with rings and so on and stayed it was a man What would you say?
You'd say, listen, I sympathize.
I'm really sorry. But you've got to protect these kids.
You chose to be with this person.
You chose to marry this person.
You chose to have children with these people.
Your kids didn't choose any of this at all.
And you have to act to protect them.
I guess when you're talking right now and I'm thinking about it, I always felt as a child...
Like, he was the tyrant, and the mom was, like, victim of it, like us.
Like, she was subject to a dictator.
Right. So, you understand, putting your mother in the category of children with you is treating her as a child, but the fact that she's an adult means you're treating her as a retarded child.
I see it. I see it.
Now, because you don't give your mother agency, you end up with a woman who won't accept any agency.
Because that's women for you.
Asking a woman to have agency is like asking her to have a penis.
But we've got to go back.
If you want to be able to trust women, you've got to give all the women in your life 100% agency.
Not to their face, not when they're armed with an ashtray or a gun.
100% agency. I don't want my daughter to go out into the world where she's not given any responsibility and is treated as a retarded child.
Because that's kind of feminism, right, as a whole.
Women can't be expected to have any real agency.
And it causes just these kinds of messes, right?
Because I want you to have a quality woman in your life.
But in order to do that, you've got to break this idea that Women are idiots with tits.
That they're not responsible, that they have no agency, that they're victims.
Because that's what you did with these two forks in the road, right?
One I said at four months, one you said at six months, right?
Four months you're at this place, six months she's with this guy in the basement window.
So if that was a dude, you'd have said, hey, scum what?
Don't do that. That's wrong.
I won't have anything to do with you if you continue to do that kind of stuff.
But because she's a woman, she can play the victim with you.
And women, some kinds of women are always seeking out.
Like, you ever see these nature documentaries where the The octopi are feeling their way through the coral.
They're feeling with their tentacles and their suckers and their little teeth on rings on the underside of their tentacles.
They're kind of feeling in, looking for sea urchins or crustaceans or shrimp or whatever the hell they eat.
I don't know, some back menu of red lobster or something, right?
They're feeling their way into the nooks and crannies trying to find their prey.
And there are some women out there, Pirandello style, what they do, Strindberg style, what they do is they, they just, they feel around.
Is this man not going to give me agency?
Can I get away with everything?
Can I play dumb?
Can I play the victim and get everything from him?
And will he never hold me to account?
Because if He's that guy.
If he will never hold me to account, then I can take him for everything.
You see, it's a predator-prey relationship.
If you have no defenses, if you have no standards for women, they can sleep around on you.
They can steal from you.
They can hit you with an ashray.
And you'll still claim to love them because it's too dangerous for you to give them agency.
Okay.
Let's try this. Can we talk to your mom?
Through you? Sure.
Give it a shot. All right.
So you be your mom. I'll be you back in the day or now.
It doesn't really matter. Pretend she's still alive or when she was.
Mom, why did you stay with dad?
Because I was afraid to leave and I was afraid of what the neighbors would say and how the kids would be treated if there wasn't a mom and dad together and married.
This image is very important for this family for some reason.
But why were the neighbors' opinions more important than your own kids?
Because you know we were beaten, right?
You know we were half tortured, right?
Never figured that one out, Steph.
What? That's one that I've thought about for a long time and I've never figured out.
My parents both have this outward image of perfection and inward turmoil that if sunlight hit would just...
I don't know what I'm trying to say.
Oh no, listen, no, sorry.
I mean, there's really complicated stuff in this world and maybe this is just not complicated because I'm not you.
But that one's not hard to figure out from the outside.
Again, I don't want to make you feel like not smart because you are a very smart guy, right?
So this is just because you're inside, you can't see it.
But I can tell you what the shiny exterior is for.
It's camouflage. It's camouflage to hide the crimes within.
And also, it means that if you go to complain about violence in the household to the neighbors, the neighbors won't believe you.
Because it all looks so perfect, right?
And my mother was pretty good at this kind of stuff.
When she was younger, it kind of fell apart when I got older, but...
No, she was pretty good at this stuff.
Um... She was the cool mom when we were out there.
You know, I remember running, I said this before, I remember when I was in boarding school, she'd come and visit me sometimes on the weekends.
And one time I was running around a fountain in my school uniform and I fell in.
Now normally I'd get the crap beaten out of me for not being careful.
And now the clothes are ruined and like it was all just made up garbage, right?
Public humiliation leads to private torture.
But she, and I was terrified because I fell into this fountain.
I was terrified. I thought I was going to get half killed.
And because there was a crowd of people around, open mouths, staring, she laughed.
She says, oh, not the best time for a swim.
And she gets out, we take off my shirt, we wring it out, we lay it out to dry, we sit and have a lemonade and we chat, outdoor cafe.
Total peaceful parenting stuff.
And maybe this was the case for you.
You're out there in public.
Something happens and your parents are like model parents.
Because there are witnesses, right?
In the same way that the thief doesn't steal when the security guard is standing right there, right?
The shoplifter doesn't steal.
Or among us, if the camera's blinking, you know, do the kill right there.
But that's...
The thief...
Doesn't avoid stealing when the security guard's there because he's had a change of conscience.
He just wants to be able to continue stealing so he doesn't want to get caught right there, right?
So the camouflage, the looking good for outsiders, that's just straight up camouflage.
And also to discredit you should you complain to the neighbors because the neighbors will be like, you're being overdramatic.
Your parents are great. I remember being out and about when I was a kid with my parents and being terrified of the prospect of them having to take me to the bathroom.
Because if you were in a public place, you can't just beat your kid in the public place.
You have to go to somewhere private to do it.
And that was always the idle threat was, you know, let's go to the bathroom.
Oh, God. Oh, shit.
I'm sorry for my earlier analogy about your friend following you to the bathroom then.
Uh... Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Or, God forbid, that your parents experience some humiliation, quote, as a result of you.
You know, God help you later, right?
Yep.
When you got home.
Yeah, that's no good.
So... I mean, to be an embezzler, you have to be pretty good at camouflaging it, right?
So the fact that you would commit crimes under the umbrella of camouflage is not too shocking, right?
It's not, no. But it also means that your parents are much more morally responsible because they knew how to be good.
Like, you're basically with your mom, you're trying to give her the insanity defense.
And we do this with our parents all the time.
Oh, they were so damaged.
They didn't have moral responsibility.
They didn't know any better. They did the best they could.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, right? But the insanity defense is pretty simple.
And I take this from a principle of law all the way back from my philosophy of law course at York University Glendon campus back in the day so many days ago now.
The insanity defense is very simple to break.
And the insanity defense is Do you know better?
Now, if you say, well, I was insane.
I didn't know any better.
Come on, I strangled that hobo right in front of the cop.
I didn't even try and hide the body.
I did a dance on his head.
I yelled at the skies, right?
Well, okay, that's a potential insanity defense, right?
But your father to be an embezzler had to act like he wasn't an embezzler.
Like he didn't say to the people he was stealing from, I'm going to steal from you.
I'm not going to cover my tracks.
I'm not going to hide anything.
It's boom. I'm coming to your house and I'm going to take some jewelry.
Right? I mean, probably took a while to catch him.
He hid things pretty well.
My mother knew exactly how to be a good mother.
She knew exactly how to be a good mother because that's what she largely did in public.
When people were watching, she was pretty good.
So she doesn't get an insanity defense at all.
She knew how to be a good parent.
She could enact for quite considerable periods of time.
Being a good parent, sometimes we would go and visit my aunt for a week.
And my mother did not beat us once in that whole week.
So she knew how to not Beat us up for a week.
Straight. Sometimes longer.
Never beat me up in public.
Never screamed at me in public.
Never threw things at me in public.
She knew exactly and perfectly well how to be a good mother.
Perfectly well. And she was able to achieve it for significant periods of time.
Now, If someone has cancer, that cancer doesn't magically disappear the moment they set foot in public.
But if they have a cancer of the spirit that magically disappears the moment they set foot in public, they don't get the insanity defense.
You understand? If you cover up the crime, you don't get the insanity defense.
You don't get to say, well, I'm a compulsive kleptomaniac who has no control over stealing if every time the security guard is around or the camera's on, you don't steal.
Hell, you don't even get to say I'm an addict if you can effortlessly not succumb to your addiction for a week straight.
And since my mother and your mother sailed through decades of social life without anyone suspecting how violent they were, they get no insanity defense whatsoever because they knew it was wrong, they knew how to hide it, and they were successfully able to not do it when it would be negative to them.
Does that make sense? Yeah, it actually does, Steph.
Some way, you just gave me a breakthrough.
Tell me. Like I was saying earlier, I always felt like...
My mother was one of us, like a victim of the tyrant, of the dictator, of the head of the house, the dad who's going to be pissed off, the dad who comes home and opens up the garage door and your heart sinks into your stomach and you rush to the kitchen to see if there's any dishes in the sink that you didn't wash.
Because if there is, you know, you're going to get it.
I always felt like she was a victim of that too.
But thinking about it right now, listening to you talk about that right now, I'm looking at her as someone who didn't have the moral strength to stand up to that and walk away.
Didn't have the moral strength?
What the hell does that mean? I don't know if that was the right term.
Oh, it's a very specific term and one that again strips her of responsibility.
I don't have the physical strength to lift 500 pounds over my head.
Does that mean I'm responsible for not lifting 500 pounds over my head?
No, I'm physically incapable. I just don't have the strength.
How do you know she didn't have the strength?
She might have. She certainly had the strength to be a good mother in public, right?
She didn't choose to walk away when it was obvious that it was a bad situation for the kids.
She preferred to stay.
Listen, you've got to be positive because she made a positive choice every day to stay at the expense of her children's mental health and happiness and physical safety.
She chose to stay.
She chose to fucking stay.
Not a victim. She chose to stay.
Saying that your mother is a victim for staying in that marriage is even more ridiculous and offensive than saying your father was a victim for being in jail.
See, when your father was in jail, he couldn't leave, but your mother could leave every moment of every day.
She wasn't in prison. There was social safety nets, charities, support, you name it.
Your father chose to embezzle And when you choose the actions, you choose the consequences.
You choose to smoke, you get lung cancer, you chose to get lung cancer, right?
Your father chose to embezzle, ended up in prison.
Now, would you say your father was a victim in prison?
No. Because he chose to embezzle, right?
Now, your mother chose to marry and stay married.
She chose to date, get engaged to, marry, stay married to, and have four children with a violent criminal.
Now, here's the thing though.
At least your father went to prison.
You and your siblings were in prison.
Your mother was not.
And you were in prison because of her.
She created the prison.
She kept you there.
Your mother was the jailer.
That's what they call moral responsibility.
They say, oh well, but my father hit me too.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
But women still choose more than men.
When it comes to dating. This is why men ask women out.
It's why men buy dinner.
It's why men pay for vacations.
It's why men buy presents. It's why men buy the engagement rings.
Maybe it's 51-49.
I get all of that. But your father being in prison was not a victim.
Now imagine if your father imagine this.
Imagine your father had a younger brother who didn't embezzle But because your father blamed his younger brother, his younger brother was sent to prison instead of your father.
What would you think of that?
Actually, my dad does have a younger brother who did not embezzle.
If he got blamed for it, that would be really unforgivable.
Right. So, if your father had got someone else put in prison, that would be unforgivable.
But that's your mother with you, man.
What you saying? You see what I mean?
She birthed you in prison, and she kept you in prison.
Now, do you want one more breakthrough?
This is going to be a big one. This is going to be a big one.
You might need a crash helmet.
You might need to assume the position under the table with your head between your legs.
50s thermonuclear style.
Are you ready? I'm not sure now, actually.
Now that you say all that, I'm not ready.
It's your choice. I can give it to you.
I can keep it to myself. Give it to me.
All right. I don't think...
Your mother was that brave with her cancer.
I think she didn't really want to live.
Because if your mother had the courage to face down death when she desperately wanted to live, she would have had the courage to save her children.
If your mother had the empathy to take on that burden more of herself and not burden others, then she would have taken on the burden for the sake of her children of keeping you safe.
I think she was so unhappy at this point, and you know this from your own suicidality, and you weren't married.
Well, I guess you were married to a criminal because she assaulted you.
But the wrongs that she had done, the violence she had done under her children, beating them with belt buckles, it's entirely possible.
It would be my working hypothesis, which is not proof.
Probably never have proof, right?
Maybe if you found secret letters or a diary or something.
But if your mother had the kind of strength and moral courage that you talk about with regards to her cancer, it's incomprehensible to me that she wouldn't have worked to protect her children from the violence she birthed them into.
So, it's possible that she just kissed the cancer in a way.
Take me out of this. I don't think so on that one.
Well, you knew her better than I did, obviously.
Now, how did your father get caught?
I'm not entirely sure about that.
This was a subject that in the house was never allowed to be discussed growing up.
I mean, he went to jail when I was five years old.
He got out when I was almost ten.
He was there almost five years.
We're never allowed to find out why.
And it wasn't until what actually, why he went to jail.
I wasn't allowed to know. Well, you knew it was embezzlement, right?
I was a kid. I had no idea.
It wasn't until Google.
I Googled his name and found the articles from 1985 or whatever, you know?
Right. So...
Here's my theory, based upon what you've told me.
Hopefully it will be of value.
My theory is this, that you have defined femininity as attractive, retarded childhood, which is almost perfectly embodied by your ex.
Now, you are attracted to women, you're heterosexual, you're And so your ex, in a sense, perfectly manifests your theory regarding femininity.
Now, if that's the case, of course you can't get over her, because then getting over that definition of femininity is like saying, hey, want to be gay?
Do you want to be attracted to something that's not a woman?
Well, if you're heterosexual, that's not such a good or compelling offer, right?
You can't get over her because she is, in a sense, the quintessential, not the perfect, because that's got all the moral connotations, but she is the quintessential, the essence of female.
And so, facing the future, the less a woman is like your ex, the more she's not a woman.
So how on earth, you can't be attracted to someone like her because that's self-destructive, but you can't get over her Because to define a woman as something other than that, as something that's oppositional to that, means that you wouldn't be attracted to what you define as female anymore.
And because you're heterosexual, that's just not going to work for you.
So it's, she's going to be like my ex, or she's not going to be like a woman at all.
I know all there is to know about the crying game.
Sorry, that's a way old reference, but...
Do you see what I mean?
Yeah. I do.
She's either going to be like your woman, or it's going to be one eyebrow-raising, dick-shrinking surprise when the boxers come off, right?
Yeah, neither one of those is a good thought.
You get Kim Kardashian or Caitlyn Jenner.
Sorry, go ahead. I have dated girls like her.
Because, in a way, what you're saying is true.
The person that I'm attracted to is like this.
You're like her.
Let's try it out. Oh, you're like her.
Ah! Right, right.
But if she's not like her, then she's not...
How pretty was she, by the way, back in the day?
Maybe even now? Oh, she's 10.
She's a 10. Yeah.
And do you know what 10 stands for?
10 stands for this.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Countdown to doom.
It's 10. It's like the LED on the old James Bond movies that counts down to the bomb that goes off right between your legs.
And here's the other thing, too.
I'll mention this. I'll get your last thoughts in a sec.
But... If you ever really want to put your balls through the shredder, all you have to do is think, these five words.
Five words to doom for a man.
Are you ready? Five words for doom.
And the five words are, she's too good for me.
She's too good for me. Because then you've got no place to negotiate from.
You've got no equality.
She holds all the cards.
You'll never do as well as her again.
Now that's the desert, right?
The real desert isn't, can I find another good woman?
It's, can I find a sane ten?
Well, in the past, I think you could have.
Maureen O'Sullivan was this incredible Irish beauty and actress.
In 1945, she was calling out the Me Too movement, the sexual perverts of a particular kind at the heads of the Hollywood studios and the producers and the agents and all of the slimeballs who were constantly Me Too-ing women into the stratosphere.
Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful women in the world, also a genius cryptologist.
Lots of great women out there.
But if you get involved with a woman and you think she's too good for you, you'll never be assertive enough to maintain her attraction.
I bet you the guy you found her in bed with treated her like shit, right?
Because he didn't think she was too good for him.
Thank you.
And he was kind of right in a horrible way.
Anyway, what are your last thoughts on this?
What do you think? How's the convo been?
Good, except for it never got to current events.
What do you mean? Never got to what?
Where it's currently at.
I'm happy to hear, man.
If you've got stuff to spill, let's hear.
Sorry for the next caller.
I don't know. I'll get to another call.
We'll do it midweek.
Bring me up to speed.
I'm happy to hear you. Sorry, other dude.
I didn't mean to do that. So...
It was about, what, like two months ago?
I get the phone call from her dad saying that I need to come pick her up from his house because he just got her out of jail because...
And her husband had gotten in this huge blow-up argument and took the kids to school, then went to her dad's house and picked her up and brought her back to her house.
I don't know, like, crazy story.
She ended up getting a gun taken away by the police because of things that were said and...
It was a whole terrible situation.
I didn't know how bad things were.
Like, I knew that her and her husband weren't getting along very well right now, from what I understood by talking to the kids, which I do often.
But I didn't know that...
Who was doing drugs?
The husband.
And it wasn't like, oh, he's smoking some pot.
I don't necessarily agree with that around my kids.
If that's all you're doing, I'm not going to be like, oh, get him the F out of there.
But he was doing like...
Oh, he's the method?
And apparently he was before and had gotten off and met at church and yada, yada, yada.
And then they were together and things were going great.
He went back to his old ways, of course.
And that meant doing that, then being violent with her.
Like, he had bruises and this and that.
And honestly, like, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Because even if we're not together, Call me a white knight.
Okay, fine. This is the feeling that I get.
I'm going to go beat your face in.
I don't care. You know?
Oh, you mean you want to attack the guy who hit your ex?
Yeah, because I never...
All the bad stuff that we went through, I never laid a finger on her.
And... To me, that's...
But did she ever apologize to you?
For hitting you on the head with the ashtray?
She did, yes. She did apologize?
Years later, but yes, she did.
No, no, but was it sincere, like, years later she did?
How did it come about years later that she apologized?
That was after her first husband after me.
After they got a divorce, there was a period of time where Didn't have a ton of money and I was kind of in between places and moved out, so I need a place to stay.
So I stayed on the couch at her place for a couple of months.
And during that time, we became closer friends, I guess you would say.
Well, she could probably be a bit more sane if sex wasn't on the table, right?
That's the thing, dude. Like, where we're at right now...
I feel like problems that we had are not the problems that we have.
I feel like if we were able to make things work out, then it would have to be in a positive, healthy, functional way.
But if we were able to go to counseling or something like that, maybe we could work it out and maybe that would be really, really good for the kids.
Sorry, what else?
I'm not saying this is my plan, but this is a thought.
No, but sorry, I'm not sure. When you say work it out, work what out?
Our relationship. I know it's been 12 years or whatever since we've been together, but...
Wait, did you not...
You didn't hear the borderline thing earlier?
What do you mean work it out? No, I mean, I'm genuinely confused.
I mean, you've looked up borderline, right?
Yeah. Can they have functional, healthy relationships?
No, I guess not. Well, I don't think so.
My thought is that she has grown up in this whole situation somehow, that circumstances are different than they were.
Or I'm just insane. Sorry, hang on, hang on, hang on.
When did she get the gun taken?
How long ago? When was this?
A month ago. A couple of months ago?
Yep. Dude.
Dude. She's grown up since then?
Well, gun thing I don't think was her fault.
Oh, are we back here?
Oh, no, no, no. Are we back to here?
Please, please tell me the last two hours have not been a complete waste of my time.
Not her fault! Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
You're taking it as, oh, it's, she's, yeah, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying... Situation that she was in, she found out that this dude was doing drugs and cheating, and then they had this huge argument, and then the cops got called, and then a nosy neighbor said to the cops, oh, by the way, she's got a gun in there.
They took it away and put her in a 24-hour hold, because she was being crazy right then or something.
Like a psychiatric hold?
Yeah. I'm sorry?
Yeah, that's right. It sounds terrible what I'm saying.
It's ridiculous when I say it.
You're right. Okay, Stefan? You're right.
Thank you. Thank you.
Because you also dissed the neighbor, right?
Listen, can you at least understand why the neighbor might be concerned that this lovely couple has a weapon?
Criticism of the neighbor starts with other things, but yeah.
Well, just, you know, I'm sure the neighbor's not perfect, but, you know, you said it, the nosy neighbor, you know, like, well, it's completely fine for the violent meth head and his girlfriend or wife to have a gun.
I assume it was not a legal gun.
It was. Oh, it was?
Oh, okay. Well, then why, if it's a legal gun, what's the problem?
Um, well, if there is the potentiality for self-harm or something like that, I guess, I don't know.
I don't know what the local law is exactly about it, but they found out that there was a gun and they decided to take it.
But it wasn't illegal for her to have it, they just took it as a precaution, is that right?
She supposedly is getting it back from the police in the next, like, week or so.
Okay, okay. All right.
Of course, the neighbor doesn't know whether the gun's legal or not, and we can assume that the guy who's doing illegal drugs may not have the most legal weaponry in the world.
It wasn't his gun.
It was hers. Oh, her gun.
Okay. So she's got a gun in a house with a drug addict.
Again, I don't know that she knew that, but yes.
Wait, knew what? He was doing drugs until she found out, and that was the end of the relationship at that point.
So this was just a boyfriend?
Oh, his husband. Oh, husband.
So that was the end of the marriage, a couple of months ago, right?
Correct, yes. Okay, so she divorced him once she found out that he was doing crystal meth.
But she didn't have any clue that he was a drug addict or doing these serious drugs before, is that right?
That's the theory? That's the theory.
Right. And what makes you think that she didn't have any idea he was doing these drugs?
I think that she had probably suspicions, strong inclinations, but no proof.
Does he look like you would imagine he looks?
No. I'm sorry if you answered, I didn't hear.
I'm sorry, no, he does not look...
He's like a UFC fighter, ex-UFC fighter guy.
He looks like he could kick your ass, is what he looks like.
Not like, oh, that guy did meth in the back corner.
Ah, okay. How are your kids doing?
They're great. They're actually...
No, no, no.
That was way too quick.
They spend four days a week with me.
And everything with Dad has been normal and steady and good this entire time.
Dad has not been doing drugs and getting guns taken by police or police even called or anything.
Like, anything at all. Right.
At least half of their life has been really good and stable.
The other half, I feel like she's done a fair job at keeping them out of it.
Not 100%.
She's in a violent relationship.
She was in a violent marriage, wasn't she?
Sorry, do I have that right?
Yes, that's correct. She was in a violent marriage to a man dangerously addicted to dangerous drugs, right?
That's correct. And that's where they spend three out of seven days?
Again, not happy about it, but yes.
Okay, so don't spin me this line that they're just great, right?
Because it's tough.
And it's tough also because...
You chose her. And you're going to have to explain that.
I mean, maybe you've had to already.
I don't know, right? But at some point, they're going to be like, so dad, step me through this.
How we ended up in that situation.
Now, you can say, well, if she wasn't her, you wouldn't be you, and I love you.
I get all of that, and that's true, but you want them to choose differently, don't you?
Which means you're going to have to fess up everything that you did wrong so that they can choose someone different, right?
And that's going to be a tough thing because, you know, as a dad, we want to have authority.
We want to have respect.
We want to be looked up to.
We want to guide them, right?
I guess here's the problem that I'm having.
She... It's their mother, and if I stand back and let her ship crash, they're not going to have their mother anymore.
Why's that? Well...
I'm thinking, like, she's not going to be able to afford the apartment that she's in anymore, and no one's going to step up to help her pay for it, and she's going to end up back moving in with her dad in the basement, and yada yada yada, and...
Oh, so your kids might learn that actions have consequences, and women should be held accountable for their behaviors?
Oh, no. They're going to learn that men aren't just simpy white knights who run after the prettiest girl on the block, even if it means going off a cliff?
They're going to learn that women shouldn't be treated like retarded children their whole lives?
I mean, do you hold your 12-year-old responsible for what he does?
Yes, I do. Do you hold your 14-year-old responsible for what he does?
I do. Do you hold your 30-something wife, ex-wife, accountable for what she does?
Obviously not. So maybe one day you'll be able to treat your wife...
You'll be able to treat the mother of your children with the same level of moral responsibility that you do a 12-year-old male.
But if you don't, if you don't, they'll end up with someone like her.
Right. I think I know.
I think I'm good now. You got to where you needed to get to?
I think we got it now, yeah.
All right. All right. Will you keep me posted about how things go?
And listen, I really appreciate the call.
You did fantastically.
And it's a hell of a topic to deal with.
And I really, really appreciate you opening up your life this way.
I mean, I think it's helpful for you.
I certainly really appreciate the insights that you're bringing and the information that you're bringing and...
Great job keeping things together in a truly chaotic world.
And last but not least, which doesn't mean I get the last word or anything, but I'm so sorry about what happened to you as a child.
The beatings, the rings turned inwards, the mark of gold on your back, the beatings with the belt from your mom.
I'm so sorry, man.
That is, it's brutal.
It's that behavior without characterizing your parents as a whole, that behavior is stone evil.
There is nothing more cowardly, despotic, bullying, vicious, violent, and evil than beating helpless and defenseless children.
It's the worst form of bullying there is, and it is really the source of all the other bullying we have to experience in the world.
So I'm really, really sorry for what you experienced as a child, and I'm really grateful to you for sharing your hard-won lessons so that other people can benefit.
That's a very gutsy and courageous thing to do.
It wasn't easy. I do appreciate you, though, Steph.
And I do want to say I've been listening to you for six or seven years now since I found your channel.
Infowars of all places, by the way, which...
Is it true?
Did David Knight get let go?
I don't know. Did he? I don't know.
I haven't watched them in a long time.
Can someone look that up for me just before I go?
I think I heard that somewhere, but I didn't triple check it.
Just let me know if that's...
It was always the most sane voice on that whole channel, I thought.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, I just want to say thanks for that.
And I haven't been doing the peaceful parenting thing for about six years now.
And my kids, thank you for that.
Oh, I thank you for that.
I mean, this is part of the world my daughter is going to have to live in long after I'm gone.
So I really appreciate everyone out there who's raising their children peacefully so that she's going to have someone to hang out with when she gets older and we're all gone.
Just waiting for that last fact check.
Sorry if people can just check it.
Because I remember being on David Knight's show in studio many years ago.
And he seemed like a very...
I don't know much about him, but he seemed like a very nice guy.
And... This was regarded?
David posted on Twitter, apparently.
Okay, let me just check here. David Knight abandoned and fired by backstabber Alex Jones of Infowars.
Ah. Yes, a guy hasn't seemed to age much since I saw him.
He was in his studio many years ago.
Well, that's a shame.
I don't know much about the backstory of that, but I'm sure I'll hear about it over the weeks to come.
All right. Well, thanks everyone so much for a great evening's conversation as always.
Love you guys for the opportunity to discuss these amazing, amazing issues.
Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful evening.
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