March 7, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:59:01
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| All right, all right. | |
| Good evening, everybody. | |
| Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain. | |
| Hope you're doing well. And yes, yes, yes, we are back on this platform. | |
| I was just on another platform for two and a half hours. | |
| So we're back on this platform and we'll just do a wee chitty chat before we get our good friends in. | |
| We've got two callers tonight, in fact. | |
| And I think they'll be very good calls. | |
| I mean, hey, when are they not very good calls? | |
| That's my question to you. | |
| And the answer to that is, well, they are always, always fantastic calls. | |
| So actually, you know what I need to do? | |
| You know what I need to do? | |
| I'll tell you what I need to do. | |
| I need to share it on another platform as well, which I will do. | |
| And hopefully we'll get people coming in to give me feedback and talk about what's going on. | |
| Hello. Hello. | |
| Okay, I'm just going to switch off Wi-Fi. | |
| Hang on a sec here. Let's see if it still manages to retain its data. | |
| Let's find out. | |
| Let's find out, shall we? | |
| Can you still hear me? | |
| Can you hear me running? | |
| Hello, hello. How are you guys doing this evening? | |
| Are you doing well? | |
| Are you doing good and doing well? | |
| Always a good combo. Always a good combo. | |
| James, let me know when you are ready. | |
| And we can go from there. | |
| Hope you guys are having a great evening. | |
| And how's your weekend going to be? | |
| I guess a big shout out to all of our good friends in Texas. | |
| Is it Texas and Tennessee? | |
| The two T for two states are going freedom. | |
| Going freedom based. Go on freedom-based, unlike China, which now requires an anal swab for COVID if you want to visit the country, because nothing says joining communism than bending over and spreading your cheeks, don't you think? | |
| Plus, they can get a whole bunch of your medication information, they can get genetic information, they can get your food information, they can get your blood information, all from that kind of stuff. | |
| But yeah, bend over and take it seems to be pretty much the motto of communism, but it's nice to see it really going vivid in that way now. | |
| Yeah, it's pretty wild. It's a wild new world. | |
| And it's funny how these days everything is, you know, holding the line is considered progress. | |
| You know, slowing the decay is considered progress. | |
| And that's a strange thing. | |
| It would be nice if we actually did make some progress from time to time rather than just slowing the decline, but I don't imagine that's going to be imminent. | |
| In any way, shape, or form. | |
| But we can also, of course, we can make this kind of progress. | |
| So keep this kind of progress going in our own personal lives. | |
| Own personal lives. | |
| Hey, person whose name I'm not going to try and pronounce. | |
| Live. So tonight, we have a couple of callers. | |
| I'm not sure if we'll get to both of them, but very similar in topics. | |
| So hopefully, we're going to start with the one. | |
| That would be Morgan's Flying Saucer. | |
| Are you with us? Hello. | |
| Hey, how's it going? I can't. | |
| Fantastic. Yeah. Man, that's a difficult question. | |
| I am feeling nervous. | |
| But, yeah, thanks for taking the call. | |
| My pleasure. Now, normally, either James can do it or you can do it. | |
| We start off by reading the initial message, if you have it handy. | |
| I'm sure James does if you don't, but that's how we roll to begin with. | |
| Yeah, okay. Well, I don't have it handy, but I think I wrote that a A little while ago, maybe like a month and a half ago or something. | |
| James, do you have it? | |
| I do have it. And our caller sent a note to me saying that things have kind of changed since then. | |
| So if you want to just jump right in, although I can read it as sort of an introduction. | |
| Yeah, why don't you read it as an introduction and then, Morgan, you can tell us what's changed. | |
| All right. So our caller writes, Things aren't great. | |
| I've been in a relationship with my partner for about six years. | |
| Last year we bought a house and started trying for a baby, and we're now pregnant. | |
| That's the good news. | |
| I started listening to the show around 2017, so about three years ago, and have been doing some self-reflection and some therapy. | |
| I lied about finishing tertiary education to my partner and my family. | |
| I kept it up, despite the toil it was taking on my soul. | |
| So I comforted myself with the slow death of fast food. | |
| I never got obese, but somewhat portly. | |
| I'm still keeping to this habit, but I've been swinging on and off. | |
| An addiction. It is straining my finances and putting pressure on my relationship with the mother of my child. | |
| She has said that she doesn't love me anymore and doesn't want to be with me, but also says I'm a good person. | |
| I love her very much. | |
| I love her virtue. She makes me want to match her values. | |
| I know I've said some awful things and acted without virtue, without respect and love for her or myself. | |
| I just need someone to talk some of this out with. | |
| I can provide additional information in the chat. | |
| Is this situation salvageable? | |
| It might not come across as desperate, but I'm terrified of the life my child could have if we split up for good. | |
| I only want to be there as support for her and the baby. | |
| This is as real as it gets for me. | |
| Well, I appreciate that, and it's a hell of a thing to talk about this stuff. | |
| I mean, forget about everyone else, right? | |
| But it's tough, right? | |
| I mean, we just meet, and you're going to bare your soul, and hopefully we can get some help done. | |
| I'm sure we can. But you said you're feeling a little nervous, right? | |
| Is that still there? Yeah, a little bit. | |
| Yeah, no, I'm not too bad. | |
| I mean, I've been going to therapy for pretty much the entire year now, and it's really helping, being able to be open and talk about it with someone who's fairly objective. | |
| So, yeah, it's really good. | |
| All right. I'm not feeling too bad, yeah. | |
| I mean, I have a place I'd like to start, but it's your conversation, man. | |
| Where was it you'd like to start? Well, I don't know, man. | |
| Where would you like to begin? | |
| What would you begin with? The addiction. | |
| Fair enough, yeah. | |
| Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I... Probably for my adult life, I've been sort of struggling with food addiction, fast food addiction, I would say. | |
| So fast food addiction, what's your drug of choice? | |
| Let me think. | |
| It doesn't really matter to be honest, it's just whatever. | |
| Whatever's greasy and deep-fried and fat-based and carb-heavy. | |
| Yeah, whatever's just, yeah, delicious and nasty and horrible for me, pretty much, yeah. | |
| And here's the thing, you know, I really love cooking as well, so it's kind of this weird thing. | |
| I hear a lot of chefs, like, you know, they work all day cooking and stuff, but when they get home, they just can't be bothered. | |
| So it kind of reminds me a little bit of that. | |
| Oh yeah, no, I get where you're coming from. | |
| Is that one of the reasons why chefs, I always thought that chefs ended up overweight because people who like to cook end up overweight because they're always sampling, you know, they're getting high on their own supply, so to speak, or is it just because you just don't feel like cooking after you've been cooking? | |
| You know what, I think it's a bit of both, hey? | |
| Right, okay. And how old is your child? | |
| Yeah. Oh, Steph. | |
| Sorry, I shouldn't laugh. | |
| My child is non-existent anymore. | |
| What? What are you talking about? | |
| Yeah. So, my partner and I decided to try for a baby around September last year. | |
| Oh no, miscarriage? | |
| I wish it was. | |
| It'd be a little bit easier to deal with. | |
| So here's the situation. | |
| So we tried to have a... | |
| Okay, we'll go from here. | |
| So we bought the house last year sometime around the middle of the year and then we decided, hey, baby. | |
| And we got pregnant. | |
| We found out early December. | |
| Right around the time I lost my job, except Chinese tariffs on wine. | |
| That's really good. Anyway, we had Christmas and stuff at our place and then we went up to her parents' place for Christmas and Yeah, no, my parents came up for the first time and, you know, we had this big, amazing Christmas with their family and my family and it was all good. | |
| At the end of the day, my parents, you know, decided to drive home. | |
| And we told everyone that we were pregnant. | |
| And that was, you know, amazing. | |
| You know, when you tell your parents that they're going to be grandchildren for the first time and their parents were going to be grandparents for the first time, for the fifth time, I think. | |
| Yeah, it was amazing. | |
| And then... I got a new job at the start of the year and I'm still there and it's going really well and I'm really happy. | |
| A couple of weeks into January, we had this really big fight. | |
| I hadn't been paid from my job yet. | |
| Apparently that was what it was all about, but I think there was numerous factors. | |
| Anyway, we had this fight. | |
| She basically kicked me out of the house and told me to, you know, go to my parents' place basically. | |
| And yeah, I was really upset because we were actually going to go up to her parents' place for her birthday over the weekend. | |
| And that's really important to me because it's not only her birthday, it's also our Anniversary, because that's when we had our first date, was on her birthday. | |
| Anyway, yeah, so I was really upset because, you know, just being ostracized from something so important to me and to both of us, I would have hoped. | |
| And, yeah, then a whole heap of things happened on the weekend and I sent a really nasty text message to her that was just really out of anger. | |
| It was like basically the equivalent of yelling at someone, I suppose, in a fit of rage. | |
| And, yeah, that was pretty much... | |
| Honestly, we haven't had that much contact since, really. | |
| I went and saw her a couple of times and yeah, it's just been rough. | |
| Anyway, at that point we were pregnant and then I find out I think the first week of February or something, something around there, That she had made an appointment to go to a sexual health clinic. | |
| And then in a week after that, and that's when it was for, it was for a week after that. | |
| And I believe she's had an abortion. | |
| Wow. So no contact at all, right? | |
| Not even to the point where you know if she's had the kid or not. | |
| Yeah, so I went down there the Friday after we had that fight, so basically a week after. | |
| We had dinner and we had a bit of a chat. | |
| And she said, I think she was just laying the groundwork for the miscarriage story that she fed me. | |
| Yeah, so she basically said that she inhaled a whole bunch of fumes from the mower Because she, I don't know, for some reason decided it would be a good idea for her to do the mowing or something. | |
| Even though I'd said, hey, let me come and do the mowing on our lawn. | |
| Like, come on. You're pregnant. | |
| You shouldn't really be doing that, I don't think. | |
| Yeah, and we had dinner and we just had a bit of a chat and she basically laid the groundwork for a miscarriage, I guess, saying that, you know, I've not been feeling very well and, you know, all that sort of thing. | |
| And there's been spotting and all this. | |
| I was like, oh, good. | |
| Okay, that's terrifying. | |
| And I cried and she cried. | |
| Yeah, and also I'd ask, hey, can we go and get some therapy, go get some couples therapy? | |
| You know, I know I've done some really bad stuff to you and you've done some Bad stuff to me and all this sort of thing. | |
| We've been issue-cutting all last year and we've been stuck together in the house and just all of this stuff. | |
| I was like, let's go and try and work on all this. | |
| I love you and me and let's just give it a... | |
| You love her. Yeah. | |
| Well, I did. | |
| You love her. She lied to you and had an abortion, right? | |
| Oh, dude, no, I'm talking about before... | |
| I'm sorry, I wasn't being... | |
| Sorry if I got out of sequence. | |
| Yeah, sorry, no, no, I would have gotten out of sequence as well. | |
| That's my fault, sorry. | |
| No, sorry, this was a few weeks before the abortion, yeah. | |
| Okay. Yeah, basically. | |
| Again, I didn't know about it. | |
| I didn't know if she was even contemplating it at the time, but maybe she was. | |
| I don't know. She probably was. | |
| And I said, hey, you know, I want to move back in, I want to work on things, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Anyway, yeah, so she's basically like, no, you shouldn't come back. | |
| You know, I still need time, I still need space, all that sort of thing. | |
| And she told me that she was going to go see her family. | |
| I went back to the house just the next week to see if she was there or to see if I could move back in, blah, blah, blah. | |
| She wasn't there. | |
| And... I think she was with her family, and this was a week before the abortion or something. | |
| So it's like, I don't know, that was just, it was like she was retreating and escaping so that she could, what, do it without, you know, me trying to have my say even, really. And that's, yeah, it's heartbreaking. | |
| Yeah. The way she's acted. | |
| Honestly, I can't believe it. | |
| Alright. Is there more that you want to add? | |
| I don't want to interrupt if you're in the middle. | |
| I'm not sure. The Friday before she had the abortion, she called me up and said she'd had a miscarriage. | |
| Yeah. And that she wanted to break up. | |
| Right. Yeah. | |
| And... Well, I took the rest of the day off from work and I... Yeah, that basically told me everything I needed to know, really. | |
| Yeah, basically, yeah, it means that she doesn't care about me, doesn't care about telling me the truth, that I'm not important. | |
| Yeah, basically, it was just an overwhelming... | |
| Sinking feeling. I just felt, I guess, betrayed. | |
| Yeah, just almost empty in that sort of way. | |
| And how long had you guys been going out as a whole? | |
| Six years. Holy shit. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, I know. | |
| That's the sum total of your six years is... | |
| She lies to you and kind of offs the baby, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| That's right. Yeah, it's quite a hell of a hit. | |
| All right, so let's... | |
| No, it's fine. | |
| Let's go back. Let's go back and... | |
| Sure, sure. Tell me prior to her, right? | |
| Your childhood, your parents, and... | |
| Yeah. I hate to bug you because you've acknowledged it. | |
| You've got to try and drop the laughing stuff. | |
| It's really messed, right? | |
| I assume that the childhood ain't fun either, so just do me a solid if you can hold off. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| Okay, I'll try not to laugh. | |
| I know it's really hard. | |
| Okay, childhood. | |
| So, my my mom and dad are I'm a single, what was an only child. | |
| My mum and dad have told me that they didn't want to have another child because... | |
| It was so difficult, the pregnancy and everything surrounding it. | |
| When I was born a month and a half premature and they were terrified that I would die in one of those, what are they called, cradles, like an oxygen cradle, those isolation chambers. | |
| I'm going to just ask you for one other favorite. | |
| Literally every third sound out of your mouth is ah and um. | |
| Yep, sorry. And I know you're not like a broadcast guy or anything, but I just can't edit that. | |
| It drives me completely insane to try. | |
| So if you can just take a deep breath, get your thoughts. | |
| Don't pause. Just keep going. | |
| Because usually the R's and the M's are around self-control or measuring out your conversation. | |
| And this kind of conversation, self-control, is not a plus at all. | |
| So if you can just push through that and barrel through that, I would again... | |
| Yeah, sorry. | |
| I'll do my best. | |
| Okay. Yeah. | |
| Yeah. All right. | |
| Yeah. When I was a child, I was an only child. | |
| My mother was very attached to me. | |
| Her ma, because of her childhood experience as well, because it informs quite a lot of her behaviour. | |
| Okay, let's stop for a sec because you're killing me here and I'm not trying to criticize. | |
| I'm not trying to criticize. I simply can't have a conversation if it takes you like three minutes to get two sentences out. | |
| There's some barrier in the communication here. | |
| In other words, you are kind of sinking into yourself and you don't want to vocalize what's going on. | |
| And it's almost like a form of dissociative hypnosis that you're trying to cast on me. | |
| Again, I'm not saying consciously, and I mean this with no negative judgment or no hostility. | |
| I'm just sort of pointing out the basic facts that if I were to communicate in that way, like you would go insane, right? | |
| Yep, yep. No, I get that. | |
| I'm so sorry. Okay, so again, it's not your fault, right? | |
| What's happening is that there's emotional resistance to what it is that you're saying, most likely coming from your parents, most likely coming from your mom, okay? | |
| Yeah. So you need to fight through that fog... | |
| And talk to me directly. | |
| Because you're trying to make it impossible for me to have this conversation. | |
| Now, I think you want to have this conversation. | |
| I think your inner mom doesn't want you to have this conversation. | |
| So you are trying to get through her fog and she's putting all the errs and the ums and the pauses in so that I throw up my hands and say, oh, well, I guess we're not going to be able to communicate. | |
| So that's my particular... | |
| You've just got to really try and connect because this slowdown, I mean, I guarantee you this shows up in other places in your life. | |
| Yeah. And it's also related to the food addiction, which we'll get to later. | |
| But you've got to just push through that and just communicate with me directly. | |
| And if you go too fast, that's totally fine. | |
| But the slow stuff, it's killer. | |
| You can't have a conversation like that. | |
| So if you could just do me a solid again and just push through it and just talk. | |
| Don't worry about censoring. Don't worry about what you say. | |
| Just straight from the heart and keep it moving. | |
| Yeah. Okay. All right. | |
| I'll... Yeah. I'm sorry. | |
| I'll try my best. Okay. | |
| So, yeah. I'm an only child. | |
| My mother has loads of issues with her upbringing. | |
| She grew up without a dad. | |
| And she really loved her dad, as I've only recently found out. | |
| He died when she was 12. | |
| My grandmother didn't really... | |
| I want to support the family. | |
| She had this entitlement thing where she needed to have pensions and have people look after her. | |
| Yeah, so mum had this philosophy of money is the most important thing in life. | |
| And she pushed that on me from a really early age. | |
| And I was always a lonely kid. | |
| Even when I was at school, I kind of kept to myself and I was introverted. | |
| And my father... | |
| Wasn't really around very much because he worked really hard to do whatever he needed to do, keep the household running and keep Keep everything going, I suppose. | |
| And mum and dad never really said that... | |
| We never really said and didn't really talk about our feelings. | |
| And I... Well, I guess I grew up with not knowing that that was normal. | |
| I didn't know whether that was normal. | |
| How can I? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Now you have a thing going on where you're touching the microphone or something? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh, really? I don't think so. | |
| Maybe it's just brushing up against... | |
| Yeah, it must be brushing up against something. | |
| Sorry. Try fixing that. | |
| Maybe that's better. I don't know. | |
| Did your mother, when you were a child, did she try and get you involved in social activities or help you with social? | |
| I did sports, but I don't think that's social, really, is it? | |
| I didn't really like team sports as a kid. | |
| I was very disinterested in soccer and all that, even when they made me go. | |
| I like tennis. | |
| Yeah, not really. | |
| So when I hit high school, I started to do more social sort of stuff like the painting and all that sort of thing. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Not as a primary school student, I guess. | |
| Sorry, James, can you hear that mic sound as well or is that just me? | |
| I'm able to hear it, yes. | |
| It sounds like it's just Yeah, there's something rubbing or touching your mic. | |
| Maybe the mic is brushing against your shirt or something? | |
| Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I'm sorry. | |
| You're just going to have to stay still. Yeah, okay. | |
| I'll see what I can do. Thank you. | |
| Okay, so you were saying when you got to high school, you got more social? | |
| And what sort of social activities did you do? | |
| Yeah, so I did a bit of debating. | |
| What I really enjoyed was doing theatre where I was part of the backstage crew and I was part of the lighting team. | |
| So yeah, those sorts of social activities I enjoyed. | |
| And what then happened? | |
| My mum made me In a way, made me go to university just straight up, even though I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself. | |
| So I just had to basically dartboard and pick something to do. | |
| And that went on for way too long, really. | |
| And... Then I found something I like doing. | |
| I was doing sort of design for a few years and that's when I was halfway through my design education when I met my partner. | |
| And what was the circumstances? | |
| So she was a friend of one of my friends from high school. | |
| She was doing the same degree as her. | |
| And yeah, that's how we met through that. | |
| Okay. I feel like I'm pulling teeth here like I've got you cornered. | |
| You know, like I get you met at university or something. | |
| Like, okay, but what were the actual circumstances that you're meeting and what happened, right? | |
| I mean, I feel like I'm chasing you around the yard with a frypan here. | |
| I didn't know how specific you wanted me to be. | |
| Sure, I'll be as specific as I can. | |
| Yeah, sorry. Anything with emotional content is... | |
| Sure. Okay, so here's the story. | |
| When my friend was 21, she had her 21st birthday, and we met first there. | |
| You know, I thought, oh, she's cute, whatever. | |
| And then a year later, we were driving our car past the university, and she was walking along with her bike up a hill. | |
| And we pulled over and we said hello. | |
| My other two friends in the car said, hey, we're really excited about your 21st birthday coming up. | |
| And I saw her and I'm like, hey, that's that chick from a year ago that I saw at your party. | |
| She's cute. I'm going to ask if I can come to her birthday party. | |
| And it was pretty last minute. | |
| It was like a month away or something. | |
| And it's like a three-hour drive to where the event was going to be held. | |
| And I was like, hey, can I come too? | |
| And When she recounts the story back to me, she's like, hey, that dude's cute. | |
| Yeah, I'm going to invite that cute dude to my party. | |
| Why not? So the relationship is founded on cute. | |
| Oh, of course. I mean, it initially always is, isn't it? | |
| No. No? | |
| No. No, no, no. | |
| No. No, it's not. | |
| It's not. Always initially founded on cute. | |
| I mean, there has to be some level of attraction, but it's not always founded on cute. | |
| Because, you know, obviously cute didn't last for you guys, right? | |
| No. You could maybe the initial attraction, but yeah, shared values and virtues and those kinds of things, right? | |
| Yeah. Okay, so... | |
| That comes later. I mean, we hadn't talked at that point, yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get that. So... | |
| Well, you don't have shared values, right? | |
| I mean, assume that you value honesty and she doesn't. | |
| Yeah, apparently not. Well, no, don't give me apparently, man. | |
| Don't veg out on me here because you dated her for six years, okay? | |
| Yeah. So don't give me this passive-aggressive, not that it's passive-aggressive towards me, but you can't play the victim if you dated her for six years. | |
| Yeah. Right? | |
| You can't say, well, apparently we don't value the same things. | |
| It's like, no, no, no. That's the same with a prison cellmate that you get assigned to, not someone you voluntarily chose to date and vet for seven years. | |
| And I'm trying to, I sound annoyed, but I'm trying to give you some empowerment and ownership here because if it just turns out, hey, man, after six years, turns out we didn't value the same things at all and there was no way for me to know ahead of time, then you can never trust again, right? | |
| You can never, ever trust a woman again. | |
| Whereas if it's like, oh yeah, no, there were pretty early signs, pretty good warning signs early that I failed to notice or failed to act on. | |
| Well, then you can trust a woman again because you can say, okay, well, if those signs aren't there, but if you say, well, after six years, apparently we didn't value the same things, that should be your job. | |
| The job on the first date is to figure out what the hell your girlfriend values or your potential girlfriend values. | |
| Does she have integrity? | |
| And the whole point of early courtship, of course, everyone's just thinking about sex, but the whole actual practical point of early courtship is to figure out whether you're a bullshit artist or a good woman. | |
| That's the whole point. That's all it's about. | |
| That's all it's for. You're just vetting, vetting, vetting, vetting, vetting. | |
| First dates are no more about cute and fun and sex than job interviews are about polite chitchat. | |
| A job interview is, will you be of value to this organization? | |
| Will you be worth the money I'm paying for you? | |
| And are you better than any other candidate I'm likely to get a hold of? | |
| And it's the same thing with dating. | |
| Do you share my values? | |
| Do you have good values? | |
| Are you pretending to have good values or do you actually have good values? | |
| You date for six years and then you say, oh, it turns out we didn't share the same values. | |
| That's on you. That's 100% on you because you didn't do, and I sympathize with this because your mom didn't teach you how to do this, your dad didn't teach you how to do this, but the whole, like the first couple of months, it's all about the vetting. | |
| And it should be her vetting you as well, right? | |
| It's all about the vetting. And if you didn't do that vetting, then you can play the victim if you want later, but it's on you, right? | |
| You can't play the victim with me because you had six years to figure out whether this woman shared your values, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | |
| You are correct. | |
| And I say this, it's going to hurt you, but I say this so that you can actually fall in love again. | |
| Because if you play the victim after six years, what that means is that, well, even after six years, you could just be eviscerated, ripped apart, disemboweled by a woman, and there's just no way to know ahead of time. | |
| You can't ever trust, right? Yeah, exactly. | |
| Yeah, for sure. Whereas if you say, hey, I voluntarily ignored the signs, then it's painful, but you can trust in the future if you don't do that again, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. | |
| I'm recognizing that, starting to recognize that now. | |
| I talked to my mom and dad about, just yesterday, about why they got together and what values they shared and all that sort of thing. | |
| And they couldn't give me an answer. | |
| So, I mean, that answers, that explains to me why I didn't I didn't vet very well at all during my courtship process. | |
| Right. They didn't have the tools. | |
| How are they going to teach me? What do you mean they didn't have the tools? | |
| Well, they didn't use the tools, that's for sure. | |
| Oh, now they're the victims. Well, they just didn't have the tools, man. | |
| You know, the plane crashed in the desert and I just didn't have any water. | |
| Just didn't have the tools. | |
| Look, everybody knows. | |
| If you ask a thousand people on the street and you say, do you think it's important to share values in a marriage to have the same values and for those values to be good values, not the same values like we both love kicking cats or something, right? If you were to say to people, is it important to share values and for those values to be good values, like moral values, reasonable values, what would people say? | |
| Yeah, well, you need to have shared values, that's for sure. | |
| Yeah, and those values need to be decent values, right? | |
| Everybody knows that. Like, you ask people, you know, what's the capital of Timbuktu? | |
| They're probably not going to know. | |
| But if you say, do you think that shared values are important in a relationship? | |
| Everybody's going to say yes. So the idea that they just didn't have the tools? | |
| No, no, no. Come on. And it's not too hard to figure out whether people share your values. | |
| Right? So let's go back to the beginning of your relationship. | |
| We'll call this woman Sally. | |
| Hope that's not her name. But the beginning of your relationship with Sally, right? | |
| You go to the party. You hang out. | |
| You ask her out or she asks you out or whatever, right? | |
| So how did the values play out at the beginning? | |
| How did they play out? | |
| Okay. So, yeah, the first date we went on after the party, yeah, we went to dinner and we had a big chat over dinner. | |
| I don't think... | |
| Oh, I think we split the bill, which I think that's... | |
| Yeah, did we? | |
| Honestly, I can't remember. | |
| It's so long ago. Yeah. | |
| That's not a good sign. | |
| I can tell you pretty much everything my current wife and I talked about on our first date because it was so cool and it was so interesting to me and she was so funny and confident and delightful. | |
| I can tell you our first conversation. | |
| And that's longer than six years ago. | |
| So you have no memory of what you talked about? | |
| Yeah, I mean... | |
| Okay, that's fine if you don't. | |
| I'm just, I'm not trying to, you know, bug you. | |
| Yeah, I know. I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to think. | |
| It's like, it's not in the forefront of my mind. | |
| That's for damn sure. No, that's fine. | |
| When, how long was it? | |
| How long was it? Well, okay, so you enjoyed the conversation. | |
| I guess you had good chats, right? Yeah. | |
| So how long was it before her values began to emerge in your life? | |
| So, before we... | |
| We discussed having sex... | |
| You remember that! | |
| ...a few weeks into our relationship. Yeah, sure, sure. | |
| Sorry, how long into? We discussed it a few weeks into the relationship, but we didn't have sex for quite a while. | |
| So we discussed it because she was very open and honest about her history, sexual history, and she straight up told me that she had an STI. I was open and honest about that. | |
| So I know STD, like sexually transmitted disease, STI, is that infection? | |
| I don't know what the difference is really. | |
| I think it's the same thing. Do you remember what kind it was? | |
| Permanent, but not horrible. | |
| Like herpes? Yeah, yeah, like herpes. | |
| So she had herpes, okay, or has herpes, I guess, right? | |
| It's permanent, right? Yeah, well, yeah, that's right. | |
| Okay, and does she know where she got it from? | |
| Yeah, oh yeah, she does. | |
| Yeah, so what happened was her first or second year into college, she lived on campus. | |
| The... Boyfriend she had at the time or casual sex partner or whatever the hell the arrangement was, who was sleeping around at the same time as dating slash sleeping with her, he had STI, STD, whatever, he had herpes, and hadn't told her at all. | |
| When she found out, she broke up with him. | |
| Now, additionally, what happened was this dude's best friend, who was dating someone else, he sexually assaulted Sally. | |
| Holy shit, boss Batman. | |
| Yeah, but I didn't know about that shit for a long time. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. Hang on, hang on. | |
| No, no, no. And I'm not disagreeing with you. | |
| It's just that you're now mixing up time frames for me. | |
| So we're talking about, so a couple of weeks in, you're talking about having sex and she says, well, I have herpes, right? | |
| Yes. Okay. | |
| And then years later, I get the full story. | |
| Well, hang on. So there's two other stories. | |
| One of the stories is the man whore who was sleeping around, who gave her herpes because he had it and didn't tell her. | |
| And then the other was his friend who sexually assaulted her, right? | |
| Yes. Now, was the first part of the story, the man who was sleeping around while sleeping with her, did she tell you that in the first couple of weeks when she told you about the herpes? | |
| No, she just told me that that was, you know, that was her boyfriend and he had herpes and had given it to her. | |
| That's the extent that she... | |
| So it's kind of like a half-truth. | |
| Well, you know what your job is, right? | |
| To find out the whole story, yeah. | |
| Fuck yeah. Yeah, well... | |
| I mean, listen, if you're going to dip your wick in that, right? | |
| If you're going to have sex with that woman... | |
| You better damn well find out the whole story, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah, I know. | |
| But you didn't. I did not, no. | |
| Why not? And again, I'm not saying, ooh, bad you. | |
| I'm just curious. Like, why wouldn't you just keep asking questions until you got the truth? | |
| I was horny, man. I was 22 or whatever at the time. | |
| So, yeah, I was horny. | |
| And I didn't find out the whole story. | |
| And I thought she told me the whole story. | |
| Yeah. No, you didn't. | |
| No, you can't be both horny and think she taught you the whole story. | |
| Because one is an excuse and the other is a claim, right? | |
| If you were horny, you didn't want to ask too much in case she was a girl that you wouldn't have sex with and you wanted to have sex, right? | |
| Yeah. Again, I'm not criticizing. | |
| I was 22 once. | |
| I get where you're coming from. | |
| But you avoided digging into the story more because you were horny, right? | |
| Yeah, and also she was crying and stuff at the time. | |
| So, again, it's not an excuse on my part. | |
| Now, was it real crying, looking back? | |
| I think so. | |
| Maybe some sort of self-pity. | |
| Okay, real crying and self-pity are usually not the same thing? | |
| No. Also, crying... | |
| Yeah, sorry. | |
| Go ahead. No, you go ahead. | |
| Yeah, so hang on. | |
| Crocodile tears and self-pity are just... | |
| They're not real. So when you're feeling bad for yourself... | |
| I'll tell you why I wouldn't think that that's real. | |
| Sure, sure. Because if she's telling you something and you desperately need more information to keep yourself safe... | |
| To keep yourself safe? | |
| Look, what if she was sleeping with some other guy? | |
| Or what if this other guy had some other disease? | |
| Like AIDS or gonorrhea or chlamydia or something. | |
| Maybe she didn't even know about it yet. | |
| Right? So she says, when somebody says, I have an STI, what they really mean is, I have one STI that I know of. | |
| That I know of. | |
| Now, maybe she went for the full battery of tests, I don't know, but that would be something pretty important to establish, right? | |
| No, she'd had the full battery of tests. | |
| So, she was telling you something wherein you needed to know a lot more. | |
| And at the very time when you desperately needed to know a lot more, she was A, crying, and B, not telling you. | |
| Yeah. Now that's manipulation. | |
| Because you're not going to keep asking her something you desperately need to know. | |
| Look, I'm not saying everybody who has an STD is... | |
| Unclean, impure. I'm not saying that, right? | |
| I mean, there could be reasons. | |
| It could just be bad luck. It could be that the partner doesn't know. | |
| I mean, it could be a number of things, right? | |
| There's a certain level of irresponsibility there, but it's not like the mark of the beast or something like. | |
| But it is something that you really need to figure out and really need to know, right? | |
| Yeah. And you need to understand the full context and the full picture. | |
| And I'm going to hope that you weren't so horny, although, again, being 22, I can remember those days, that if she had said to you the whole story, like, oh yeah, my boyfriend, we had an open relationship, he was sleeping with other people, he got herpes, he didn't tell me, he had sex with me anyway, oh, and by the way, his friend sexually assaulted me, what would you do? | |
| I would either run screaming. | |
| What should you do? Well, I'd probably just run screaming, really. | |
| Or inquire more about the story, maybe. | |
| I don't know. I feel like I'm fairly empathetic towards other people, maybe not so much myself. | |
| Well, this is the problem. You were empathetic towards her, but not yourself. | |
| Yeah, it definitely is a problem, yeah. Yeah, you are empathetic towards her but not yourself. | |
| And again, I'm not saying, just to be clear, right, everyone out there, I'm not saying, oh my gosh, you can never go on a date with anyone who was ever sexually assaulted. | |
| I'm not saying that at all. Because people who were sexually assaulted are victims. | |
| Right? So she's not the evildoer. | |
| Her boyfriend's best friend was the evildoer, right? | |
| Right? Yeah. So it's not that she has an STD. That's not great, obviously. | |
| It's not that she was sexually assaulted. | |
| But the issue is that she's a terrible judge of character because she had a man lie her into a permanent STD and she let a man have sex with her whose best friend was a rapist. | |
| Yeah. Now, that's some seriously bad judgment, right? | |
| Yes, absolutely. | |
| Now, I'm also not saying that anybody who's had seriously bad judgment can never be dated. | |
| But how long in the past, when you found out later, did you ever get a sense of how long before you got together with her she'd had the STI and the sexual assault? | |
| Yeah, it had been two or three years. | |
| Wow. She was still crying, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Do you think that's true, two or three years? | |
| I believe so, yes. | |
| Okay. Well, based on what she said, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. So two or three years before you started dating her, she'd had these experiences, right? | |
| Yeah. Yes, she had. | |
| Now, here's the other thing. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. Sorry, I'll just interject. | |
| Here's the messed up thing is that her mom and dad, she told her mom and dad, you know, at the end of that year, whatever year it was, and they either didn't believe her or, and she told me she got the impression that they thought she was a slut. | |
| And they were, like, judgmental, and they just kind of moved her away from the situation. | |
| Just like, no, you can't live on college anymore. | |
| Go to a shit house. | |
| Right. Right. | |
| Now, of course, they had also raised her without some of the more elemental self-protections that women need to have. | |
| Yes. You know, like, this is always something that's just astonishing to me. | |
| There's a woman, we want to be treated exactly the same as men. | |
| It's like, but you're not. You have a treasure between your legs that a lot of men want, most men want, and some men will be violent in achieving it. | |
| Not many men. I mean, I think men who sexually assault are only a few percentage of the population. | |
| But if you've got 2,000 people on campus, you know, that's still 100 plus men, right? | |
| Yeah. And that's just the reality. | |
| So, oh, well, I wish it were different. It's like, yeah, okay, sure. | |
| But it's not. But it's not different. | |
| You know, wishing things were different is one of the ways in which people get really, really assaulted and exploited and taken advantage of. | |
| Yeah. Right? | |
| Like you wish your girlfriend was different than how she was or is, right? | |
| But she's not. Wishing things were different, especially when it comes down to basic biological facts that there are sexual predators out there and they occur for both men and for women. | |
| Men get raped at similar levels to women. | |
| And so they had not given her the elemental – the talk, the talk, right? | |
| I don't know what kind of talk you call it, like the Mike Pence talk, like don't have dinner with someone who's not your wife alone. | |
| Doesn't look so dumb now, does it? | |
| Right after all of this Kavanaugh shit that goes on, right? | |
| And the other is, you know, if you are an attractive young woman, or just a young woman as a whole, or I guess any age woman, but in particular with college, it's going to be young women. | |
| If you are a young woman, there are sexual predators out there who will assault you. | |
| If they think they can get away with it. | |
| That's just a fact of life, man. | |
| It's a fact of, oh, it shouldn't be the... | |
| It is. And, if it's any consolation to the feminists out there, it's not patriarchy because most of these sexual predators are raised by women. | |
| Most of these sexual predators are raised by women because women are part of the cycle of violence. | |
| So, as far as, yeah, you know, take her off campus, I can understand that. | |
| She got an STD and she got sexually assaulted. | |
| So she doesn't have the good sense that God gave her to keep herself out of these situations. | |
| Now, blaming her as a slut, and this is, I mean, that's terrible. | |
| And you can't blame your children for anything because you raised them. | |
| Yeah, yeah. There's a level of self-ownership there, isn't there? | |
| Did she go to the police? | |
| I don't think so, no. | |
| Right. Why is that bad? | |
| If she didn't. It's sort of a self-erasure thing that she's not taking... | |
| She doesn't want to take... | |
| It's almost like she doesn't want to... | |
| It's like she doesn't believe it's happening or she doesn't want to... | |
| Well, it doesn't want to hurt the rapist. | |
| I don't know. Oh, man. | |
| You need a couple of tweets under the hood, my friend. | |
| Yeah, I think I do. Because when I say it, you'll get it. | |
| And then you'll be shocked that you didn't get it. | |
| The reason you go to the cops is so the guy doesn't keep fucking raping people. | |
| Well, yeah, that's the reason you go to the cops. | |
| Sorry, I misinterpreted the question. | |
| I thought you asked why she didn't want to go to the cops. | |
| So she's become an unwitting and tertiary accomplice to future rapes if she has certain knowledge of a rapist and doesn't report him. | |
| Yeah. Right? | |
| So she's lacking empathy for other women who will unfortunately continue to be sexually assaulted by this guy because she didn't report him, right? | |
| I think, actually, thinking about it, I think she might have reported it to campus, right? | |
| And he might have got kicked off. | |
| I'm not too sure. I'm sorry, I'm just not too clear about that. | |
| Well, but that doesn't solve the problem. | |
| No, it doesn't, no. Right? | |
| It solves the problem maybe immediately locally on campus, but it doesn't solve the problem as a whole, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | |
| And this lack of empathy for herself, lack of empathy for others, culminates in an abortion. | |
| Yeah, it does. | |
| All right. So, she says, I have an STD, but she didn't tell you really how she got it in real terms, right? | |
| That she got it because she was needy, insecure, or maybe she was slutty in this sense, in that, like, why would you just have some... | |
| I believe she was lonely because she was three hours away from her family and she was 17 or 18 or whatever it was. | |
| I'm sorry, lonely does not translate... | |
| Hang on. Lonely in no way, shape, or form translates into cheap-ass fuck buddies, okay? | |
| If you're lonely... | |
| It shouldn't. No, it doesn't. | |
| It doesn't. Now, it doesn't. | |
| There's no direct line between being lonely and being promiscuous. | |
| If you're lonely, get a doc. | |
| If you're lonely, go out with some friends. | |
| If you're lonely, find a quality man and settle down into a good relationship, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. So it's not lonely. | |
| That's not the causal agent at all. | |
| Okay. The causal agent is... | |
| Probably doubting she has much value to offer other than sex. | |
| Or it's going for a man far above what she feels she can achieve and therefore she needs to give him sex and let him have sex from others as a way of just being around him, you know, because he's the alpha or he's the hot guy or whatever it is, right? Yeah, so like a low self-esteem, low self-worth sort of thing. | |
| Well, his friend knew that he could stay out of prison by sexually assaulting her, right? | |
| He correctly figured out or he correctly read that she wouldn't go to the police. | |
| Yeah. Right. | |
| He also correctly read that his father, that her father, sorry, wouldn't go with her to the police station, right? | |
| Yeah. So the whole family is like, well, you know, reporting him to the police is inconvenient, so let's just let other women get raped. | |
| Yeah, and that's... | |
| I think that's 100% true for their family. | |
| Yeah. Looking at it in hindsight, hey. | |
| Because I didn't want to see it at the time, that's for sure. | |
| Right. And... | |
| Blindness, there's a price tag associated with willful blindness, right? | |
| And now you had your willful blindness and you had your sex and now the bill is coming due, right? | |
| Or has come due. And I say this with empathy and I say this with, you know, I made mistakes. | |
| I'm, you know, I'm no perfect guy. | |
| I dated the wrong women. | |
| So I'm, you know, this is like one war veteran talking to another war veteran. | |
| I'm not, I'm not above this. | |
| I'm not, just so you know, right? | |
| We're in this together. I don't want you to feel lesser. | |
| So, a couple of weeks in, talking about sex. | |
| She says she has an STI, and you don't really find out the facts, and partly because she's crying, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. Right. | |
| So the tears, just so you know, right? | |
| And look, some tears are genuine and all of that. | |
| But the tears are, I'm too raw and sensitive to answer questions, right? | |
| Yeah, it's almost a camouflage. | |
| No, it's just totally a camouflage. | |
| Because here's the thing, man. This is why I asked how long ago had it happened. | |
| Yeah. And I thought that the answer was going to be in the months, not the years. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, right. | |
| Right? Because, listen, if she's still so emotionally raw and messed up from something that happened two or three years ago, oh my god, are you kidding me? | |
| You can't date her. | |
| Yeah. Because she hasn't moved on. | |
| She hasn't achieved closure. | |
| She hasn't dealt with it. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. Listen, when my wife was asking me about my childhood, I wasn't bursting into tears. | |
| Now, again, it's long ago and all of that, but you know. | |
| If you're asking her, oh, you've got to see what happened, and she's crying, and you can't even ask her more questions, and she's gasping for breath, or whatever was going on, that you couldn't keep asking her questions, it means that either A, it's still so genuinely raw that she's not dealt with it at all, in which case she's a landmine of emotional reaction, or she has dealt with it, but she's trying so that you won't ask her more questions. | |
| Either way... | |
| Either way, she's undateable. | |
| Possibly both, yeah. But either way, she's undateable. | |
| Absolutely, yeah. Look at that. | |
| We're three weeks in and we've only got almost six years to go. | |
| Look at that. Okay, so what happened then? | |
| You ended up becoming boyfriend-girlfriend, right? | |
| Yeah, that's right. And how did it go from there? | |
| For the first year, pretty good. | |
| Pretty good. Then she left for a city five hours away from me for a job. | |
| And why did she do that? | |
| She told me at the time, I believe, that she wanted to... | |
| She couldn't get a job closer. | |
| It was really difficult. | |
| To get jobs closer because it just was, apparently. | |
| You've got your exit strategy called apparently again. | |
| Yeah, sorry, sorry. | |
| Like, was it or wasn't it? | |
| That's what she told me. | |
| I believed her at the time, but if she cared about the relationship, she would have probably tried to get something closer. | |
| Well, I'm sure she did. | |
| I'm sure she did. This is my tip, right? | |
| This is my tip. If you're a young person, Now I feel like this. | |
| I hear bells or something. Anyway, so if you're a young person and your girlfriend moves five hours away, wish her well and say goodbye. | |
| Because you can't sustain a relationship. | |
| Yeah, you can't sustain a relationship if you're five hours apart. | |
| And listen, I've burned out more time than I care to admit in long-distance bullshit. | |
| Yeah, no. It's terrible. | |
| It's such a waste. | |
| It's such a waste of time. | |
| Even if you lived forever, there'd be no time for long-distance bullshit. | |
| You never have a real relationship. | |
| You're always thinking about each other. | |
| When you get together, everything's unreal. | |
| You just bang like a bunch of gong fanatics and you don't have a real life. | |
| Yeah, yeah. It's like a condensed part of the relationship. | |
| It's distilled into all the hot, heavy, good bits over a weekend or something. | |
| Yeah. Oh yeah, no, it's... | |
| It's not real. It's total bullshit. | |
| It's completely fake. Long distance is bullshit. | |
| And now, again, if you're married and for some reason you have to live apart for a while, okay, that's a different matter. | |
| But if you've only been going out for a year, plus, you know, it's kind of an insult to you. | |
| Right? Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, in choosing between you and this job, clearly I'm going to choose the job. | |
| It's like, okay, well, I respect your choice. | |
| Goodbye. Yeah. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| Okay, so she moves. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. Sorry, no, it's like her. | |
| It was like, I think when she told me, she was like, yeah, so I'm going to take this job. | |
| And it's like something about a dad. | |
| And I was like, oh, here we go. | |
| So it's all about your dad's plan for you, is it? | |
| Okay, great. So there's no consideration about me. | |
| Wait, she just gave it to you like, hang on, she just said it to you like, I want to take this job or I'm tempted to take this job, but what do you think or where do we stand? | |
| I think she did say, oh, what do you think about it? | |
| But it was very, the impression I got from the conversation was, I'm taking the job, you know, see ya. | |
| But I'm going to have my cake and I'm going to eat it too. | |
| I want the relationship, but I also want this job five hours away. | |
| So you understand the direct line here. | |
| I'm going to take this job. | |
| I'm going to have this abortion. | |
| Yep. I'm not going to consider your feelings at all yet. | |
| Yeah. Your input is not required. | |
| I'm telling you. Yeah, I'm telling you what I'm doing. | |
| This is what I want. Your feelings don't really matter, right? | |
| Yeah, exactly. Okay. | |
| This is all the red flag shit that I was talking about earlier. | |
| Yeah. Right? So, and then you say, well, apparently she didn't really, we didn't share the, you know, she's saying this from day one, right? | |
| Yeah. Okay. | |
| So she moves away and how much useless time did you piss away in the long distance part? | |
| A year. Okay. | |
| And then what? And then I took action and I said, hey, I'm going to move to your city and I'm going to study down there myself. | |
| And we can try and get the relationship to work. | |
| And now what was the draw? | |
| What was it about her? | |
| And sex doesn't count. | |
| What was it about her that was the big draw for you? | |
| What did you love about her? | |
| Well, I thought she was honest and direct. | |
| I thought she was really hardworking. | |
| And those are sort of the values that I saw in her and that I loved about her. | |
| Okay, what proof did you have that she was honest and direct? | |
| Because she wasn't, right? At least in the stuff that you've told me. | |
| She was only half honest about things, really. | |
| Yeah, that sucks. | |
| I thought she was being honest. | |
| I thought she was telling me when she was being upfront about things. | |
| But again, like I said, she's only telling me half the story half the time. | |
| Okay. Now listen, I'm going to give you a big tip here. | |
| You ready? Yep. All right. | |
| You were a direct participant in her dishonesty. | |
| Yep. Go on. | |
| Because I wasn't asking more questions. | |
| Exactly. Or asking about, yeah, absolutely. | |
| Yep. No, I see that. That's the first level. | |
| The first level is you were a direct participant. | |
| The second level is you knew she was lying. | |
| 100% knew she was lying. | |
| Which is why you didn't ask more. | |
| Right, okay. The moment you don't want to ask people something more, it's because you know they're lying. | |
| You want to keep the relationship, you want to keep the girl, you want to have the sex, you want whatever it is, right? | |
| Yeah. And so you're like, well, shit, I can't ask her anymore because then I'm going to find out she's a liar and I can't date her. | |
| And I want to date her. So I'm going to stop asking questions because I know she's lying, but I don't want to know that she's lying. | |
| Yeah, okay. Wow. | |
| And she knew that about you. | |
| Yeah. She knew that you wanted her so much that you were willing to throw any rational curiosity, integrity, and requirement for honesty out the window because tits, right? | |
| Yeah, pretty much. Okay, and this is another way in which you can learn to trust yourself and then learn to trust women again, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah. That you weren't a victim. | |
| And now, you were a victim with your mom. | |
| I get all of that. And you weren't acting with knowledge. | |
| So, I get that you weren't willfully, knowingly, blah, blah, blah. | |
| But I'm just telling you that the psychodynamics are clear. | |
| That we are the most exploited by the lies we already know about and are participating in. | |
| So, you move. | |
| To study where she's working and you move in together, is that the next step? | |
| Yep. And why wouldn't you get married? | |
| Well, I was still studying, I guess. | |
| So? So? | |
| Yeah. Okay, first of all, you do know. | |
| You absolutely know. | |
| I appreciate that people still try this with me after 16 years, but you absolutely know. | |
| Why didn't you ask her to marry you? | |
| Because I didn't want to marry her. | |
| Right. Why didn't you want to marry him? | |
| Because deep down, I knew she wasn't good. | |
| She wasn't acting with virtue. | |
| I'm telling you this, guys. | |
| I mean, she moved like five hours away. | |
| I mean, that's... Yeah. Yeah. | |
| There you go. And then I have to chase her. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| There's absolutely nothing coming back. | |
| Here's the thing. If you're in a relationship for a year... | |
| And you don't know whether you want to marry the girl, get out. | |
| Get out. Or, if you really want to live in a dangerous and exciting, this is my methodology, if you want to live a really dangerous and exciting life, you find out if you want to marry her by asking her if she'll marry you. | |
| Yeah, okay. Right? | |
| There's a reason why we sit in this stupid holding pattern. | |
| Over marriage, right? And what you're doing, of course, is you're breaking your heart slowly, rendering yourself unable to meet the person. | |
| Like, your perfect girlfriend, so to speak, might have passed you by, but you didn't see it because you were in this other waste of time relationship, right? | |
| Yeah. I mean, I believe she's in the future, but you know what I mean, right? | |
| So, the reason why marriage is important, and the reason we make such a big deal out of asking for someone's hand in marriage... | |
| It's because it clarifies whether the relationship is worth a damn. | |
| I mean, if you can imagine, if you had a rule which said, after three months, I have to decide whether I want to marry this woman or break up with her. | |
| I have to decide. Now, it doesn't mean you've got to go and ask after three months, but decide if you want to or if it's even a possibility, right? | |
| Yeah. Now, if you're dating and it's all just, oh, I'm going to live forever and it's loosey-goosey and it's fun for right now and blah, blah. | |
| Then you never have to make a decision. | |
| And then what happens is nature, fate, disaster will make that decision for you, which is kind of what happened, right? | |
| Yeah. But I suggest to everyone out there, Date. | |
| On the first date, say to yourself, do I even consider having this woman as my girlfriend? | |
| Leading to fiancé, leading to marriage, leading to the mother of my children, leading to wiping my ass when I'm old and drooling on myself, right? | |
| Yeah. You look at that. | |
| Now, you can look at a cleavage, and I'm not saying cleavage is irrelevant. | |
| You've got to be attracted to the person, but ask yourself that. | |
| And that way, you don't waste time. | |
| You don't waste time. | |
| So, you move in together, and this is in your third year of dating? | |
| Yes. And then what? | |
| Then, two years later, I was supposed to finish my degree. | |
| I I couldn't finish it. | |
| I just was completely disinterested. | |
| I didn't see a future. This is the design stuff? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| And what level of degree are we talking about? | |
| Bachelor's. How long did you work at the bachelor's thing? | |
| So I went through sort of a community college level thing first and then I had two more years to go with the bachelor's. | |
| So I studied at a university for two years. | |
| Right. Did you like the field or just not the study? | |
| Just a bit of both, really. | |
| I don't think I was interested. | |
| I just wasn't interested really. | |
| What did your parents say about your relationship with Sal? | |
| Not a great deal. | |
| And I don't know, why would I listen to them anyway? | |
| I didn't really trust their opinions or judgments about anything much at all. | |
| You know, because my mum was just pushing me to, you know, Go to uni, do all these things, get vocational qualifications, just do things. | |
| Just go and get money. | |
| Yeah, so she doesn't have a clue how to parent you, and so she just goes with cliches, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah, okay. | |
| Well, you know, successful kids, they tend to go to college, and so I don't really know what the hell to do with you, but, you know, since society says go to college, you should go to college. | |
| And I didn't get to go to college. | |
| I really wanted to go to college. | |
| You're going to go to college. | |
| Yeah, that sort of thing. | |
| Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, classic, right? Yeah, yeah. | |
| My mother wanted to be a writer and an intellectual. | |
| Anyway, I showed her. | |
| Yeah. Alright, so you just can't go on in school, so what happened? | |
| So then I got a job. | |
| I got a full-time job being a gardener in Canberra, the city. | |
| And that was great, and that's what I wanted to do. | |
| During those two years, I kind of figured out I wanted to do something with agriculture. | |
| In that sort of area and yeah, I had a really good job. | |
| The sign wasn't even close. | |
| Not really, no. | |
| I mean, same ass end of the alphabet, but I mean, sometimes I don't mean a lot, but it's like, design? | |
| No, farming. It's like, okay. | |
| It's not a lot of transferable credits there. | |
| Yeah, it's close. | |
| But man, you must have a killer design for your farm. | |
| Your logo must be fucking great. | |
| All right. Okay, so what happened then? | |
| Well, a year later, I told her and my parents that I didn't finish and everybody was very, very upset with me. | |
| Oh shit, you kept it from your parents for like a year? | |
| Yeah, yeah, I know, right? | |
| So you do share values with Sally? | |
| Yeah, I'm an excellent liar, yes. | |
| Yeah, yeah, well not just excellent in theory. | |
| But pretty good at practice. | |
| You kept that shit going for a year, right? | |
| Yeah. You just pretended to be in school? | |
| You, like, pretended to have exams? | |
| Oh, yeah, no. Well, I pretended for probably, like, three months, like, the last semester or whatever, and then, you know, I didn't tell them until a year later. | |
| So, yeah. | |
| Okay, but... That's semantics, yeah, sure. | |
| No, no, did they not expect any graduation photos or anything like that? | |
| Well, that was going to be where the graduation was. | |
| I told them when they came down for graduation. | |
| Oh, shit! They came all the way out to the town for graduation, and then you said, oh, by the way, I haven't been going for a year? | |
| Yes. Holy shit, man. | |
| It was friggin' awful. | |
| I can't... It's such a dick move. | |
| It's hard for me not to think they deserve it. | |
| Yeah. I mean, you're angry at them. | |
| Absolutely. And that's probably why I didn't tell them. | |
| I'm angry at you guys because you wanted me to do this. | |
| I didn't want this. | |
| Come five hours away, you know. | |
| Yeah, you made me waste three years. | |
| I'm going to make you wait five hours. | |
| Make you waste five hours. I think they got the better end of the bargain, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah. | |
| And you're angry at them for not caring about you and Sally and how things are going and not talking to you about whether to get married or not and not giving you basic advice about how to live, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah. | |
| I mean, raised by wolves would be an improvement. | |
| At least you'd know how to bring down a honey badger, right? | |
| So, okay. I don't know if they're honey badgers, but you understand what I'm saying? | |
| No honey badgers. | |
| So you come clean with your parents. | |
| There's some kind of scene, some big disappointment. | |
| And of course, what they do is they pretend that you're just some mysteriously bad person who did a mean thing for no reason and they're totally innocent, right? | |
| Yeah, pretty much. They didn't say, oh, shit, we've been bad parents. | |
| There's no self-awareness there. | |
| At that point, at least, yeah. | |
| Yeah, like, what did I do as a parent? | |
| I'm forcing the issue at home now. | |
| I mean, I'm talking about everything. | |
| I'm like, you did this, you did that. | |
| And I'm trying to get them to take some responsibility. | |
| Excellent. There's going to be more parental fans of my podcast. | |
| Yay! Yay! | |
| More people who love what I'm doing. | |
| Thank you for uncorking our son and having him talk to us. | |
| Oh, God. Yeah, like, I mean, so parents, this is parents, right? | |
| If your kid has lied to you for a year, it's largely on you. | |
| Like, why is it that your kid can't talk to you? | |
| What's wrong? Yeah. Right? | |
| Okay. So what happens with Sally? | |
| Well, she's upset with me, obviously. | |
| I mean, you'd be upset with anyone if they'd lied to you about something for a year. | |
| We had this trip... | |
| Wait, hang on. But she lied to you for a couple of years, right? | |
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah. But does she still try and pull the mall high ground? | |
| I can't believe you lied. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yep, absolutely. Hypocritical morality as a weapon. | |
| Oh, I bet you she throws labor. | |
| She does not. She's somewhat conservative. | |
| But, you know, conservatives where I am are basically labor anyway. | |
| So, whatever. Yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay. All right. So, how do things progress with Sally over the years? | |
| So we go on a trip to a country for two weeks that we were planning all that year. | |
| The trip was okay. | |
| And I think it was about a month after that incident with the reveal. | |
| Then we moved back to... | |
| I'm sorry, can you just remind me about the reveal? | |
| When I told everyone about the lie. | |
| Okay, that reveal. Okay. | |
| So you go on a trip and then what? | |
| Then we move back to the town we met in where I and my parents lived, where she went to uni. | |
| We move in with my parents for a bit while we try and find a house to live in, like a rental or whatever. | |
| On Christmas, she has an emotional breakdown and runs screaming to her family. | |
| An emotional breakdown? | |
| What do you mean? Well, it was on Christmas afternoon. | |
| She, I don't know, had a huge go at me for something. | |
| And you know what it was. | |
| I misplaced the present I got for my mom. | |
| And just recently I found it. | |
| I was like, ah, that's where that was. | |
| I knew I didn't forget. | |
| And she basically had a huge go at me because I forgot to get my mom a present for Christmas. | |
| Right. So, I mean, it's never that, right? | |
| No. 99% of the time, people are not fighting about what they say they're fighting about. | |
| It's always something else. | |
| So what was really going on? I'm sure she was just... | |
| I think she was upset about the lie and everything, I guess. | |
| Nope. Maybe she was understanding what... | |
| No. No, she's too selfish a person to be that fussed about a lie with your parents, plus she herself is a liar, so... | |
| No, no, what was really going on? This was Christmas year five, is that right? | |
| Yeah. Okay. | |
| Yep. Okay, you're going to have to... | |
| I can't figure it out. | |
| So the number of relationships I've known that have blown up in year five is almost too many to count. | |
| Because year five is... | |
| So are you going to marry me or what? | |
| Year four, basically, but it culminates year five. | |
| Year five is where shit gets real. | |
| Yeah. Because she knows that you haven't proposed, right? | |
| Yep. And she then believes that you don't care about her, right? | |
| And then she translates that into you not caring about your mother. | |
| Yeah. Yep. | |
| Okay. Yeah, I can follow that. | |
| Yeah, that makes sense. So this is for the dudes out there, right? | |
| Yeah. The dudes out there, women, the gold standard is marriage. | |
| Everything else is an insult. | |
| That's just a basic fact. | |
| Look, a woman can get a guy she just has to put out. | |
| We know that, especially a young man, right? | |
| We're both there. You're still there. | |
| I mean, to some degree, I was there. | |
| A woman can get a guy to be interested in her, flash a little T&A, and put out, and he's... | |
| He's there, right? He's done. | |
| You and I, we don't know what that's like. | |
| We don't have the first fucking clue. | |
| We don't have the first fucking clue what it's like to be that much in demand. | |
| Maybe if we were zillionaires or, I don't know, like super hot-looking dudes or whatever, I don't know. | |
| But I don't think we will ever have a clue. | |
| 99.999% of men will never have a clue. | |
| Like, we've got to work so hard to get a woman's interest, right? | |
| But for women, you know, you toss your hair, you bat your eyes, you unbutton your top, and guys are all over, right? | |
| We don't know. Absolutely. | |
| That's what it appears to be anyway. | |
| That's the way it is. Yeah. | |
| That's the way it is. Now, so for a woman to keep a man's interest, to get a man's resources, I know, I guess you were both working, right? | |
| So you shared your bills. But to get a man's interest is so easy it's ridiculous. | |
| But to get a man to marry you is totally different. | |
| It's a totally different animal. | |
| So tits and ass can get a man's attention. | |
| But for a man to want to marry a woman, he's got to really love her. | |
| Yeah. I mean, young men will screw just about anything. | |
| Young, dumb, and full of cum, right? | |
| We all know the phraseology, right? | |
| And it's a meme, or it's a joke, and it's true, because, you know, that's not the only thing, but there's elements of truth in it. | |
| But the longer you stay with a woman without marrying her, the more pissed off, insulted, and rejected she's going to feel. | |
| And you know what? She's right. | |
| Yeah. I'll have sex with you, but I won't marry you. | |
| It's about the most humiliating thing a woman can go through. | |
| Yeah, we discussed marriage before then, of course. | |
| Even worse. Yeah, because that means it's in the cards or it's in her mind or something, yeah. | |
| Well, no, it means what you're saying to her is you're saying, oh yeah, no, I've considered marrying you, I'm just not going to. | |
| Or I'm not going to do it yet. | |
| No. After five years, you're not going to do it. | |
| Yeah. You're not going to do it. | |
| Now, maybe she can bully you into doing it. | |
| Maybe she can shame you into doing it. | |
| Or maybe you'll just feel bad or whatever, right? | |
| But that's not the same as wanting to marry her. | |
| Hmm. Now... | |
| I'm doing my math here. Six years, you met late teens, so she's mid-20s, right? | |
| Yes, 27. | |
| Just turned 27. Do you know what happens when a woman turns 27 biologically? | |
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. | |
| There's about 90% of their eggs are gone or something, I believe. | |
| Oh, that's by 30, but no, her fertility begins to decline. | |
| Yeah. So she's sitting there thinking, holy... | |
| Holy skunk balls, man. | |
| I've sunk six years into this guy. | |
| My fertility is beginning to decline and he still won't fucking marry me. | |
| Yeah. Do you think it's gaslighting when she said, I don't really care about getting married? | |
| Do you think women have evolved to not care about securing a stable protector for their children when they're vulnerable? | |
| No. | |
| Any women. | |
| No. Because she'd pick some, a stupid, unstable guy, not that I'm putting you in that category, but she'd pick some, certainly the relationship, uncommitted guy, like that's you, uncommitted to her, right? | |
| And so, if she picked an uncommitted guy, and she, remember, throughout most of human evolution, women were disabled for about 20 years with childbirth. | |
| Somebody had to put food on the table. | |
| Somebody had to take care of her. | |
| Somebody had to keep her safe with predators and other men. | |
| So any woman who tells you she doesn't care about marriage is either A, lying, or B, has so little self-esteem that she doesn't even know how to protect herself in a basic sense. | |
| I mean, how well did not caring about a stable, committed guy work out for her before she met you? | |
| She got an STD and sexually assaulted. | |
| Yeah. So, in my view, that's her saying, don't do it because I'm pressuring you. | |
| But what I want you to say is, I can't imagine my life without you. | |
| I can't believe it took me this long to realize that you're the only one. | |
| You've always been the only one. | |
| I want to marry you tomorrow. | |
| Please, please, please be my bride. | |
| Live with me. Let's grow old together. | |
| Let's raise a family together. | |
| Let's have a life together. | |
| Yeah. Which you wouldn't do. | |
| Now, I'm not saying you should have, but you should have made a decision one way or the other. | |
| Because you've got a lot of time. | |
| She doesn't. Yeah, yeah, I know. | |
| So it'll take her until she's about 30 just to get over this relationship. | |
| And then she's got to start looking 11 years after she was last looking when she's older and more desperate, more saggy, more wrinkled, more bitter. | |
| I mean, you burned up half of her fertility. | |
| She burned up like 10% of yours. | |
| Yeah, I know that. | |
| And I'm not trying to make you feel guilty at all. | |
| I'm just, this is things that you should have been told that you weren't told. | |
| You don't date a woman for that long without marrying her. | |
| You just don't do it. | |
| Because you're playing with way more cards than she has. | |
| In the dating market, women have more cards. | |
| In the fertility window, men have more cards. | |
| And you probably were mad at her too, which is why you were wasting her time. | |
| Probably, yeah. Yeah. | |
| Now, again, she's an agent, she's an adult, but we're so propagandized by all of this, oh, just wait, and babies can wait, and families can wait, and just focus on your career and be a strong, independent. | |
| There's so much propaganda about this, so much anti-natalist propaganda, so much desperate population control bullshit. | |
| So I have sympathy for both of you, but I'm just telling you the way that I see it, which I think has some biological basis. | |
| So you view it as a meltdown, right? | |
| I view it as the eggs panicking. | |
| And rightly so. So then what happens? | |
| She has the meltdown at Christmas and then what? | |
| Yeah, she runs off to her family, stays there for a few weeks, then rents an apartment. | |
| Well, she rents a student accommodation with one of her friends, one of her girlfriends. | |
| And do you know what she's doing? | |
| Do you know what she's doing that whole time in her mind? | |
| No idea what she's doing in her mind, Steph. | |
| I can tell you what she's doing in her mind, I think. | |
| What she's doing in her mind, she's looking for you howling with need for her on the lawn. | |
| She's looking for you. | |
| I can't live without you. | |
| I'm so sorry. Let's get married. | |
| The whole time. Yeah. | |
| But you're not doing that, right? | |
| Again, I'm not saying you should. | |
| I'm not straight away, no. | |
| Okay, so how does that play out? | |
| So, yeah, we're still talking. | |
| I go and see her a few times and say, hey, I want this relationship. | |
| I'm committed, blah, blah, blah. | |
| And we decide to look for an apartment together. | |
| If she had said... | |
| If she had said, basically, marry me or GTFO, what would you say? | |
| I probably would have gone the marriage route at that point. | |
| But you wouldn't have done it yourself, right? | |
| Yeah, despite any of the issues and red flags. | |
| You know, I was completely enamored with her and the relationship and yeah, I really did care about her. | |
| So I would have said yeah, yeah, let's do it. | |
| Right. What do you think her level of respect... | |
| What level of respect do you think she had for you towards the end of that phase? | |
| Around then? Probably not a great deal. | |
| Yeah, I mean, she sees you lying to your mom for a year, right? | |
| And you won't marry her, right? | |
| Yeah. Okay, I'm going to be totally what some people would call sexist at the moment, but what the hell, right? | |
| So, look... | |
| it's quite another for a man to lie. | |
| Women are smaller and weaker than men physically, right? | |
| And so subterfuge tends to be their way, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. Now, let's say you have a male friend, right? | |
| And your male friend, another man makes out with his girlfriend, right? | |
| So we'll say there's Bob and there's Jones, right? | |
| So Bob finds out that his friend Jones made out with Bob's girlfriend, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. And let's say, not that I'm recommending it, but let's say that this happens, that Bob goes up and punches Joe, right? | |
| Yeah. Now, as men, we'd say, yeah, it's against the law. | |
| I don't approve of it, but it's understandable, right? | |
| Yeah. Now, let's say, instead, when Jones sleeps with or makes out with Bob's girlfriend, that Bob... | |
| Spreads a rumor that Jones is gay and tries to get him fired from his job. | |
| What would your respect level for Bob be? | |
| Oh, definitely lower, yeah. | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| So that kind of manipulation, or, you know, if you were asking Bob, your friend, something that was uncomfortable and he burst into tears and, like, it would be like, okay, dude, like, I mean, my sympathies, but... | |
| Can we testosterone it up just a little bit here? | |
| Yeah. So, women are smaller and weaker and vulnerable and in possession of sexual access, which is the greatest prize for men in the history of evolution because it's the only reason there is evolution, right? | |
| And the only reason you and I exist is because our father successfully convinced women to sleep with them, to have babies and all that, right? | |
| Yeah. So, subterfuge on the part of a woman... | |
| Is, evolutionarily speaking, far more acceptable than subterfuge on the part of a man. | |
| Now, if a man out of cowardice lies to another man, that's bad enough from a woman's standpoint. | |
| But if a man out of cowardice lies to a woman, that's even worse. | |
| That's about as low an estimation that a woman can have with that man, if that makes sense. | |
| Yeah, yeah, no, it does. | |
| You're supposed to be the strong guy, the tough guy, and the fact that you're so scared of your mom that you lie to her for a year. | |
| Oof. Yeah. Right? | |
| That's pretty bad, right? I'm telling you, this man-to-man, you've got to stay strong. | |
| By strong, I don't mean emotionally unavailable or stoic or stone-faced or spark-like or yelling or hitting things. | |
| That's all candy-ass bullshit. | |
| But what I'm saying is you must remain strong in the eyes of your woman. | |
| You've got to take responsibility for your actions. | |
| I like to think of it just in terms of authority. | |
| Sure. Authority. So, you give your woman, not you give her, but she earns her area of expertise and you give her leadership in those areas. | |
| Whatever those areas are could be different for every relationship. | |
| It could be the finances, it could be the home. | |
| You give your wife, or she earns it, not that it's yours to give, but you give your wife her own area of authority and you don't try to override her authority in those areas. | |
| In the same way, you earn or take your areas of authority and you don't let her interfere with the authority. | |
| It doesn't mean you can't take advice, but the final decision is yours, just as the final decision is hers in other areas. | |
| It's the division of labor. | |
| It's a very good principle as a whole. | |
| But trying to mix everything up is just a waste of time. | |
| Too many cooks spoil the broth, right? | |
| So... Like, you know, if you're cooking a meal, you don't both stand over the same pot. | |
| You have different things that you're working on. | |
| All right. So neither here nor there. | |
| So you end up moving back in together? | |
| How does it play out from there? Yes, we move in. | |
| COVID hits just as we move in. | |
| That severely limits our social interaction. | |
| Sorry, that mic thing is going on again. | |
| Sorry, the microphone thing is going on again. | |
| Sorry. Is that better? | |
| I can't tell yet, but keep going. | |
| Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Sorry. | |
| Yeah. So, yeah, we move in and then COVID restrictions hit us. | |
| And, you know, she's working from home for six to eight months or something. | |
| I think it was about six months she was working at home. | |
| So she didn't really get out at all very much. | |
| I tried to start a business at the start of that year and it sort of just shrunk from there and it was really bloody tough. | |
| Especially after... I'm sorry, real what? | |
| But he tough? I didn't quite... | |
| Tough? Oh, bloody tough. | |
| Okay, go. Yeah, sorry. | |
| Yeah, and then we bloody buy a house as well in the middle of that year, and we move into the house. | |
| Just so many things, just so many things just kept on rolling through, just kept on happening. | |
| It was just a... Well, those aren't things that happen. | |
| Whose idea was it to buy the house? | |
| Their choices, yeah. | |
| Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Whose idea was it to buy the house? | |
| She was pushing for it, and I agreed to it. | |
| Sorry. Right. It was our decision. | |
| Why did she want the house? | |
| It's part of the plan. | |
| It's all part of the plan. No, that doesn't answer anything to me. | |
| What does that mean? Well, she... | |
| I just needed to have a house. | |
| She didn't want to pay rent anymore. | |
| Yeah, I don't know. | |
| Well, do you know about it more in hindsight, that when a woman wants a house, what she's really saying is, I want a baby, right? | |
| Yes, that's right. Yes, yeah. | |
| Okay, just so everybody knows the code. | |
| Everybody knows the code. | |
| All right. So she wants to have a baby, and did you guys start talking about it at that point? | |
| Yeah, so three months after we bought the house, we started talking about having a baby and we started trying. | |
| Man, you were on a train and you don't even know it. | |
| Yeah, yeah, sure, we can get a house. | |
| Yeah, let's get a house. | |
| Let's have a baby, sure. No problem. | |
| Yeah, so for the man, it's like, when are we next going to have sex? | |
| And for the woman, it's like, where's my kid going to go to college, right? | |
| It's two different time frames that we're working with. | |
| Okay. Yep, absolutely. | |
| Yeah, so we started trying to have a baby because I had just gotten a new full-time job because the... | |
| The business wasn't working out. | |
| It was self-employment, whatever you want to call it. | |
| And I got a job. | |
| Then we were trying for the baby while I had the job. | |
| And then in December, they gave me the flick the day after my birthday, which was nice of me. | |
| You mean it's being laid off? | |
| Yes. Yeah, basically. | |
| Was there any... | |
| The business was doing badly. | |
| Was there any sense that this might happen or...? | |
| No, they did it pretty quickly after they heard about some sort of tariffs because they did a lot of exports. | |
| Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the China stuff. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, that. | |
| And they, yeah, really quickly just went, got rid of a whole heap of swathes of people at the place apparently. | |
| They were closing down the kitchen, laying off cellar door staff, yeah, all that sort of thing. | |
| Right, okay. All right. | |
| And that was December of 2020? | |
| Last year, yeah. | |
| A few months ago, yeah. A few months ago. | |
| And then? I told her straight away because, you know... | |
| She's not your mom. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| She's not my mom and I'm trying to be open and honest with everybody. | |
| And I just told her straight away and I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty devastated. | |
| This was a really good job. | |
| I was really goddamn happy. | |
| It's almost a dream job. I love wine. | |
| And she said, Basically, she was like, oh, that sucks. | |
| And hey, have you started applying for jobs? | |
| And I'm like, you know what? | |
| Yeah, I had. I'd already started applying on the way home. | |
| So yeah, I've already applied for a whole heap of jobs. | |
| And yeah, I didn't really get a chance to mourn over the loss of my job and my situation. | |
| And she didn't I don't know. | |
| It didn't seem to give me enough empathy. | |
| I needed a bit more maybe. | |
| I'm not too sure. That Sunday she told me that we were pregnant as well. | |
| Well, and I will also say this, that sometimes for a man, waiting for empathy is like waiting for dinosaurs to return, waiting for jetpacks, waiting for space travel that costs 12 bucks, waiting for the promise of the shuttle and airplane 2 to come in reality. | |
| Sorry, that's a bit of an obscure reference. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, it's waiting for empathy. | |
| Like, if you're a man and you're waiting for empathy, you'll be waiting a long time. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. | |
| Pretty much. I'm sorry to say it, but it's one of these things, you know, I wish it were different, but, you know, we live with what is, right? | |
| That's right. That's exactly right. | |
| And, you know, like she said, well, like I said, I basically got on with it and found a little casual job in between, just during the Christmas period. | |
| And, yeah, so that was fine. | |
| And then I got a call the day before Christmas. | |
| From my new boss. And he's like, hey, you want a job? | |
| Come in for an interview. | |
| And I'm like, you beauty. And yeah, I've been happy as Larry there ever since, which is good in that respect. | |
| So then what was it that... | |
| Sorry, and we've got like, I hate to say it, 15 minutes, but there's a hard stop at... | |
| Whoa! Something just happened to your mic there. | |
| It's okay. So, yeah, that's fine. | |
| So, just give me, and I'm sorry to ask you to be brief, but if you could just briefly give me the final crack-up situation. | |
| Sure. Yeah, so Christmas happens, and that's all good. | |
| You've got to, there's something going on with your mic. | |
| It's pretty brutal. Oh, really? | |
| I hate it. You just got to, it's 50, oh my gosh, it's 50 minutes. | |
| You just got to do something to stay still or something like that. | |
| Yeah, sure. Is it okay? | |
| Well, let's find out. | |
| All right, cool. So, yeah, Christmas happens and I tell everyone, oh, I got a new job, everything's good, you beauty. | |
| Yeah, we tell everyone we're having the baby. | |
| Well, we tell, you know, mum, dad, her mum and dad and her brother and sister and everyone's stoked. | |
| Yeah, everyone was stoked and I was genuinely happy about the baby. | |
| Yeah. And then I started my new job and two weeks later, she's asking, where's the money? | |
| Where's the money for... | |
| Why haven't you been paid yet? | |
| And I said, look, I haven't been paid yet because, you know, just after shutdown, you know, I had shutdown over Christmas and, you know, they kind of... | |
| Pushed me through the hiring process really quickly. | |
| I don't know why I haven't been paid yet into our account. | |
| And then I'm like, I'll see what I can do at work. | |
| And yeah, she had a big blow up about all of that. | |
| So what happened? One Friday, so middle of January, Friday, we were going to go up to her parents' place for her birthday. | |
| In the middle of the day, I call her up. | |
| I'm like, hey, I can't leave my car at work. | |
| There's been some break-ins. | |
| I don't want to leave my car here. | |
| Don't come and pick me up. | |
| And I assume in her mind, she takes that, oh, he's lying to me again. | |
| He's not going to... | |
| He's actually not working. | |
| He hasn't got a job. And she panics, calls work. | |
| They call me. | |
| And I take that as a huge... | |
| A breach of trust on her part and I'm really upset and I head home and she's got our bags packed and she gives me my bag and says, you know, go to your parents. | |
| Wow. I'm really upset with you, yeah. | |
| Right. Yeah. | |
| And I said, look, I'm really upset with you as well. | |
| That was a huge breach of trust, calling work and not believing that I was doing what I was saying I was doing. | |
| And I understand that. | |
| Well, but you lied to your mom and you've known your mom a lot longer than you've known her, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. | |
| But, you know, yeah, and I understood that. | |
| You know, plus she's pregnant, so she's hormonal. | |
| Yep, yep. | |
| And, you know, she rolled with the punches with you getting fired or laid off, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. And you get a new job, but you're not getting paid. | |
| So, yeah, she's full of anxiety, right? | |
| Yeah, she's upset. Yeah, I understand. Yeah, I completely understand. | |
| Yeah. So, you know, you took it kind of personally, but she had some reason to mistrust you. | |
| Yeah. And, you know, she didn't, like, show up and set fire to the office. | |
| She just called and asked where you were, right? | |
| Yeah. Right. | |
| Yeah. Look, um... | |
| We don't know what it's like to live with these kind of hormones. | |
| And I'm not trying to excuse her behavior or anything. | |
| It's just that this idea that men and women are just identical or whatever. | |
| You judge a woman the way that you would judge a man. | |
| Yeah, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. | |
| Nonsense. It's nonsense, right? | |
| So this kind of aggression or she was panicking, right? | |
| She was panicking. Yeah. | |
| So if she panics and you get aggressive, that's a very bad combination. | |
| If she panics, she needs you to be reassuring. | |
| I can understand why you'd be upset. | |
| I can understand why there would be trust issues. | |
| I get where you're coming from. | |
| Let's find some way to cool our jets here, right? | |
| Because that's a strong leader, male father or dude, right? | |
| Yeah. A lot of how female aggression manifests, we should not take personally. | |
| Because they're testing. They need to be reassured. | |
| You and I don't know what it's like to be that vulnerable. | |
| To be disabled by childbirth. | |
| If you want to be a good mother, to not be able to have a job for five years and be dependent upon a man's goodwill. | |
| Especially if you're not even married. | |
| I don't know if it's common law or wherever you are. | |
| You don't have to tell me. But you and I don't know what it's like either to be that much in demand or that vulnerable. | |
| For men, we're just like icebreakers who just go through life. | |
| I'm getting a little older. | |
| We just keep moving. | |
| Women, it's like a sine wave. | |
| It's all over the map. | |
| It's not because women are unstable. | |
| It's just because their circumstances vary far more than ours do. | |
| They go from being madly in demand and having all the power in their own universe over every man in the vicinity to being rendered... | |
| Romantically obsolete by having a baby, being incredibly dependent upon the goodwill of a man. | |
| Like, it's crazy what women have to go through. | |
| And I say this with massive sympathy. | |
| Not to mention periods, premenstrual cramps, premenstrual syndromes. | |
| Like, you know, again, we just icebreakers. | |
| Like, we don't know what the hell the month is unless we look outside and it's snowing or it's hot, right? | |
| Because we just cruise along. | |
| We don't have that monthly tick-tock of the menstruation and we don't We don't have pregnancy hormones. | |
| We don't create life out of our bellies. | |
| We don't know. And taking the rollercoaster of many women, not all women, but taking the rollercoaster of many women personally, like it's somehow personal to you in the way that you would if a man did that, it's not understanding what it's like to be in a relationship with a woman, in my humble opinion. They go through a lot more than we go through. | |
| They have a lot more power when they're younger, when they get pregnant. | |
| They oscillate. And they go from very high status to low status as far as, at least historically, women who had babies, well, they're off the dating market forever, right? | |
| I mean, that's it. They're the next-stop grandmother. | |
| So the fact that she's panicking about money when she's now dependent upon your income for the next five or ten years and you're not even married... | |
| Again, I can understand it. | |
| I'm not saying I condone the way it was expressed, but I can understand it, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. Like, shit, what if he's lying to me? | |
| He lied to his mom about being in school for a year. | |
| What if he's lying to me about having a job? | |
| I mean, there's no pay. There's no paycheck. | |
| And she panics. Now, does that mean you're an untrustworthy burden that she doesn't trust? | |
| She's panicking. It's hormones. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| She asked for proof that I was working and I had given it to her as soon as I could the next week and that did nothing to change the situation really. | |
| At that point she'd already made her mind up really. | |
| About the relationship and the baby and everything. | |
| I don't know when her mind was made up, obviously, but I would guess that her mind was made up when you took it personally when she panicked. | |
| Can't be dealing that with women. | |
| It's not personal to you. | |
| It's hormonal to the situation and dependent upon the vulnerability, the extreme vulnerability that she's going through as a pregnant woman. | |
| Again, you and I don't know what it's like to go from incredibly high status to having... | |
| A belly half the size of Kansas, right? | |
| Yeah. From being hot to being a blimp. | |
| And to never really get that hotness back. | |
| All the power that she had when she was younger, the power to attract male attention, it's all gone. | |
| She gets pregnant. I'm not saying women aren't attractive. | |
| I get all of that. But, you know, as far as that youthful vitality and elasticity goes, it's done. | |
| Yeah. Well, it's definitely different. | |
| That's for sure. Yeah. | |
| As a man, you say different. | |
| As a woman, it's a very different experience, though, because she goes from being in demand, and she also goes from she can dump you any time and have a guy within the next five minutes. | |
| If she has a baby, she can't do that anymore. | |
| Yeah, it's way more difficult. | |
| Yeah. And also, she goes from you, a pretty high-quality guy, to if she breaks up with you... | |
| She's got to try and find some guy who's willing to raise another man's kid, i.e., generally, a lower-quality guy. | |
| She has a liability now. | |
| I don't mean to say the baby's liabilities, but in terms of the dating market, oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. It takes a real gamma to want to raise another man's kid. | |
| Now, again, there could be noble guys who can't have their own kids, and I understand that. | |
| But, you know, I'm talking about the general, right? | |
| Yeah. General. So, the red flags. | |
| I am sorry. | |
| So, so sorry. And I have huge empathy. | |
| And I hope I haven't been overly lecturing. | |
| But I have huge empathy for... | |
| I have been, but it's alright. | |
| Okay, so I'll take that. So, I'm sorry that you received so little instruction. | |
| Hey, if it's any consolation, I received virtually no instruction on any of this stuff either. | |
| And I wasted a lot more time than you did. | |
| So, I hope that helps a little bit. | |
| Well, yeah, a little bit. | |
| Yeah, that's good to hear. | |
| As far as... | |
| I'm very sorry, of course, for the abortion. | |
| I think it's desperately sad, desperately tragic. | |
| If we take the abortion morals out of the issue, if we take the abortion morality out of the context of this situation, it's a bullet dodged. | |
| It's a bullet dodged. If you guys, after six years, had this volatile relationship... | |
| After six years and decided to become parents together and owning a house together, if you still had this volatile relationship, it's not a good idea for you guys to be parents. | |
| That is not a good environment for a kid to grow up in. | |
| Yeah. I guess what you reveal your... | |
| True yourself when you're under stress, right? | |
| Yeah, look, being under stress doesn't mean you fight. | |
| Being under stress means you get closer together. | |
| You team up together. Yeah, yeah. | |
| And I think that's what I... Maybe I was upset about that as well. | |
| She didn't want to be with me while we were having these difficulties. | |
| Yeah. Right. | |
| And because of that, almost without a doubt, the marriage would have failed. | |
| And then you're stuck with alimony, with child support, with co-parenting, and your possibility of being the kind of father that you want to be goes out the window. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. | |
| I get the heartbreak and I get the upset. | |
| Yeah. For sure, and I'm not saying don't feel it, but the longer view perspective is that this would have been a disaster for you, for her, for the child. | |
| Now, again, I'm taking the morals of the abortion out of the issue because I think it's just terrible as a whole. | |
| I'm just talking about sort of future practical consequences from an amoral standpoint. | |
| It's that I believe that you and your ex-girlfriend are better off. | |
| This would have been a disaster. | |
| Yeah. If you can't even get together because you don't want to leave your car somewhere and that causes a massive breakup, what happens when your child gets ill? | |
| Yeah. Right? | |
| I mean, if you guys can't handle that level of stress and tension without a huge blow-up and you've got to move out and this is like retarded shit like that, I mean, there's no way. | |
| There's no way that I think the marriage could have survived in any way. | |
| And divorce is much worse than this. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, well, this basically is a divorce because, you know, with the house involved as well, right? | |
| Well, you know, I merely meant a divorce with a child. | |
| Oh, yeah. No, right, yeah. | |
| That's what I'm talking about. You guys can split the assets in whatever you want to do, but with a kid, you're joined at the hip for 20 more years. | |
| That's right, yeah. So, it's very sad, and it's very heartbreaking, and I really, really sympathize with that. | |
| I really do. But it could have been a whole lot worse. | |
| Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. | |
| Okay, we've got two more minutes. | |
| They've given us a two-minute grace period. | |
| Is there anything else? I know I did a lot of listening here, gave a little bit of advice, but is there anything else, major yearning, burning, that you wanted to ask or mention? | |
| No, well, the only thing I can think is that, I know she's unwilling to get therapy and stuff, but I think she'd greatly benefit from therapy. | |
| I mean, she hasn't seen a therapist for any of her stuff that she's been dealing with. | |
| And the best thing you can do, if you want, is not be there. | |
| No, the best thing you could do with that is to show her what a good therapist has done with you, right? | |
| To mature, to grow, and then maybe she can be interested in it because of that. | |
| I mean, you guys are broken up now, right? | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| Okay, so it's done. | |
| And I'm not saying never be in contact again. | |
| I mean, not that you'd listen to me even if I did, but she's not your responsibility anymore. | |
| Her life is not your responsibility anymore, and you've got to start building a different path to get to a better place. | |
| I know it's tempting to look back and want her to be fixed and want her to be better. | |
| The less involvement you have after the breakup, the better. | |
| The better by far. By far. | |
| Because all you're doing is dragging you out. | |
| Then you're in a long-distance slow-motion breakup that just kills future possibility. | |
| And she doesn't have the time. You've got to take the band-aid off. | |
| Let her... Get her own life going forward. | |
| Anything that you do to hang around and try and fix her, improve things, or get back together, it's more cruelty around her possibility of having a kid with someone else. | |
| Yeah. All right. | |
| Again, I'm sorry for the slightly abrupt end. | |
| This is a server-implosed discipline. | |
| Thanks, everyone, so much for listening. | |
| I really, really appreciate it. | |
| Freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out. | |
| Lots of love from up here. And take care. | |
| Thanks for the call tonight. Sorry we didn't get to the other caller. |
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