Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

June 19, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:19:00

My Father was a Predator, and my Wife is a Witch! Freedomain Call In

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	So I start off, I am 32, recently filed for divorce in what has been the most bewildering and stressful time of my life.
	So you no doubt get a lot of emails like this every day.
	I start to say your time must be immense.
	Your work has really opened my eyes.
	So here's the background.
	I met my wife when I was 24, and she's 22, so I'm 32 now.
	We lived together for four years and then married in 2018.
	So it was December 2018.
	Myself, I'm introverted and had next to no dating experience prior to her.
	So I had like one girlfriend prior to her.
	She attached onto me very quick, very hard.
	She would say a number of things, which now, in hindsight, were probably red flags.
	So she would say...
	Early on, she would say continually that she'd kill herself without me.
	That was her life.
	And she was needy.
	She definitely was.
	So at the same time, I've had anxiety struggles my whole life.
	And that, along with my insecurity, I like this.
	I like that she was so attached to me.
	And so in hindsight, I think we were codependent.
	During this time...
	Actually, shortly before we got married, she had a brief bout of anorexia, and she was a cutter growing up.
	She never went into a lot of detail, but I caught her at least one time cutting herself early on when we had an argument.
	Just to get more specific about it, it was a pretty intense argument.
	Like all arguments, you say things, you Shouldn't have said.
	I don't even know what it was over, but she goes upstairs into the bathroom upstairs and comes out and turns out she had carved the word bitch in her thigh.
	So that was kind of a red flag at the time, but I thought she'll grow out of it.
	And this was shortly before you got married?
	Yeah, this would have been within the first two years of us being together.
	So she moved in...
	Like, I want to say three or four months after we met.
	And so that incident, I think, happened probably about a year into it, I want to say.
	And, you know, honestly, people tell me, it's like, oh, you know, you dodged a bullet and all this, but she was great, you know, and she wasn't quite, this is going to sound egotistical, quite as smart or mature as me, but, you know, she...
	She was family oriented.
	She wanted a kid early on.
	She's pretty clear about that.
	Age 27, 28.
	I did not want to.
	I was having a lot of anxiety about it.
	I wasn't sure we could pay for it.
	So eventually I realized, okay, time to grow up.
	Let's do it. So about a year and a half ago, we start trying for a kid.
	We end up buying a house right when COVID hit.
	So April of 2020.
	And this is a house that she wanted desperately.
	So I got her this house.
	We start trying for a kid.
	About a year goes by, she's not pregnant.
	So she eventually finds out that, I don't know what the term is, but she has to have this surgery.
	It's not a huge surgery, but it's an outpatient one.
	But that her uterus is essentially not properly shaped, so they have to go in there and For lack of a better term, kind of straightened out.
	So part of me was sort of relieved by this because I wasn't totally on board with the whole kid thing anyway.
	But, you know, looking back, she definitely took that as a sign that she was not meant to have a kid.
	And I really think that this is kind of when things begin to turn.
	So our relationship really got strange late April.
	She became distant and cold.
	Before, I was really her god.
	She was my social circle.
	She was my emotional support, everything.
	Now she became much more interested in work.
	She's always used THC a lot, but she was using these vapes heavily, constantly, all the time.
	She would talk to me with disrespect.
	I think the best word I would use would be disdain.
	She would just talk to me just disdainfully, whereas in the past, you know, she was very preoccupied by how I was feeling.
	So she would say constantly she needed space.
	She has nothing left to give, nothing left to give.
	She wanted freedom.
	So anyway, so she starts, because I question her, I'm like, what is going on, these challenges?
	And, you know, she'll say, well...
	I don't know if I want this life anymore.
	I don't know what's going on.
	I just don't know.
	I need space. So we settled on this idea that she would, and I was against this, and I begged and I plead with her not to do this, which probably wasn't the right thing to do.
	But she said she was going to move out for two months.
	It was going to be limited to two months.
	She's going to be with her brother, and she would come back.
	Before she left, she wrote a note on the fridge saying, I will be back.
	I love you. She told me numerous times, it's not about you.
	I'm coming back.
	I just need to figure out what's going on with me.
	We even took a road trip right before she left because it was my birthday.
	Two months during that time, she moved out May 31st.
	Obviously, we're here in late August.
	She didn't talk to me very much.
	We saw each other a couple of times.
	I went into problem-solving mode, so I was reading relationship books.
	We went to a joint marriage counselor, who turned out to be pretty worthless because he didn't really allow me to talk.
	And I wrote her letters, and I was really doing everything I could to get her back.
	And The woman I married was, I would describe as loyal, dedicated, and kind of a throwback in a lot of ways.
	She comes from a Mennonite family, though her parents were divorced, and her mom is pre-religious now.
	And she knows she wanted a family.
	She kind of had those old-school values, even though she became very adversarial to faith towards the end.
	That was becoming more important to me.
	I remember about a month before she moved out, she went up to me randomly and said, you know, I'm never going to be a Christian, right?
	So she was very – Sorry, what are your religious views?
	I'm Christian.
	Okay, sorry, go ahead. Not a great one by any means.
	And so she just went – so anyway, so since she's moved out, she's been kind of alternating back and forth.
	She would say things like, I wish I would have just packed a bag, because she ended up moving all of her stuff out, at least most of it.
	She's got some more to move out.
	And she acted like she would come back within a matter of weeks.
	And obviously now months has gone by.
	She turned 30 July 29th.
	Shortly before, she signed an 11th month lease.
	And That was sort of the final straw for me.
	I filed for divorce, but I really did this to kind of send a signal to her that I'm not going to be put in this limbo, and I was really hoping that would kind of wake her up and she'd want to come back.
	And for a while, it almost seemed like that's what was happening.
	About two weeks after I filed for divorce, she came over to the house and She said things like, oh, don't give up on me yet.
	I don't know what's going on with me.
	It's like I'm a different person.
	My mind is split in two.
	I feel numb.
	She would say that she hides in her closet at her new apartment.
	She has to obsessively be outside.
	She didn't really feel safe inside.
	And so I was encouraged by this.
	So I'm thinking, okay. She's starting to finally take some responsibility because prior to that, she was more negative.
	Oh, our relationship isn't healthy and it was parent-child and I need independence and freedom.
	But now she was acting as if she realized she had a problem and she wanted to come back.
	And so I fell for this and I was really encouraged and I was starting to even regret my decision to file for divorce.
	And I said, listen, I think we can work this out.
	And then she stops responding to any contact for me, and then we get together for her to sign some papers, some divorce papers, and she's back to being cold.
	Matter of fact, she just came over to my house, our house, mine now, a couple weeks ago to move stuff out, and she had a friend with her, and they were laughing and giggling.
	My wife didn't make eye contact with me, and...
	I was very disheartened by it.
	So now I'm kind of at a place where I just feel like I don't know how to move forward.
	I just feel blindsided.
	I mentioned earlier I've got anxiety, and this was one of the things I never worried about.
	She was always going to be my constant.
	She was always going to be there for me.
	And now I don't really know how to view it.
	How to view what happened.
	I've done a lot of research online and things have come up, like maybe borderline personality.
	I know in our first year or two together, she would say things like, how do you want me to be?
	I'll be anything you want me to be.
	Some of that's kind of red flags, but it's like a switch just went off.
	Of course, a lot of my identity was tied up in her.
	And so it's been a very emotional rollercoaster for me.
	I lost 30 pounds.
	I ended up going on antidepressants.
	And, you know, every day is kind of like, man, what the hell is going on?
	It kind of feels like a dream.
	Right. So that's the email as a whole.
	I mean, is there more that you want to add to this since you wrote it or anything new that's come up?
	No, I think that about gets it.
	Hopefully, I know it's a lot to throw in there, so let me know if there's anything to clarify or expand.
	Oh, no, no. That's all totally fine.
	That's all totally fine.
	And is there anything that you wanted to add?
	Again, just before – I don't want to sort of dive into questions or all of that without checking if there's more that you wanted to add.
	Well, I would say that I have been very conscious of not going in this – I'm down this path where I'm just looking at her faults and I'm not taking any sort of responsibility.
	I was too rigid on things.
	I know that I would get on her if she wouldn't do certain housework that we agreed we're going to do because I wanted her to prove some maturity to me, and I'm sure that was tiring.
	She definitely...
	I probably felt responsible maybe for my happiness and some of my emotional needs, and I take responsibility for that.
	But a lot of the things that she complains about with the marriage were all complaints that emerged after she left.
	So prior, it was really nothing to do with us.
	She even told me this. She just was going through a crisis.
	She called it an identity crisis or a midlife crisis.
	And then after she leaves, depending on her mood on any given day, she would invent complaints about the marriage.
	Like, I didn't open the car door for her.
	She didn't feel loved.
	I wasn't always emotionally available for her.
	But to me, I'm very much thinking that she started to kind of rationalize her decision by finding fault for And really kind of creating almost like a lawyer, like creating a case as to why she was justified to leave when that was not what was in her mind when she left and even certain periods of time when she's come over.
	So she now has talked to a therapist.
	She's seen a therapist the whole time I've been with her and a psychiatrist, and she claims that they – They say everything is fine with her and she's just going through life, but I'm not so sure.
	So that should about sum it up.
	Now, I mean, the torture, it seems to me, and, you know, don't let my thoughts, you know, if I'm wrong, let me know.
	But the torture seems to be like, what the hell is going on?
	It's the incomprehensibility of things, right?
	If she had been like, I had an affair, I found some other guy super attractive, I'm really bad, I'm sorry, you know, if it's some conceptually understandable cause and effect, would it be fair to say it would be painful, but the torture is the not knowing what's going on, right? Okay, I just wanted to check on that.
	It's been a lot of mental energy trying to figure it out, and it's just an enigma.
	Well, it's not. I'm sorry to be annoying, and it's only not because I'm not you.
	So it's really hard to see.
	You know, things from the outside, right?
	If you ever get married, every now and then your partner will say, hey, let me check your back for moles.
	Why? Because you can't really see them, right?
	So it's hard to see the things when you're on the inside, right?
	So it's not incomprehensible at all.
	The comprehensibility is the best thing that I can do for the pain, right?
	Because I think we can bear the pain of anything except confusion.
	Because that's just... Then you just circle.
	You're obsessed, right? You're round and round, right?
	If you have a causality, then...
	Like, how do we move on from things?
	So it's when we understand them. And if we can't understand them...
	And I think this is what your fear is, right?
	Like, if I can't ever understand this, how the hell am I supposed to move on?
	Yes. Okay. Now, I just wanted to check that you and I both agree on what might be needed.
	Because if we don't, then we'd have to rejig or readjust.
	Okay. So, I don't want to talk about your wife just yet.
	Um... I want to talk about, or at least want to ask about, and hopefully you'll talk about, what led up to this, right?
	Because we look at messes in the present and we say, I've got to fix this mess in the present.
	But, you know, if you were having a heart attack, yeah, you need to fix the heart attack in the present, but then you need to look at your diet and exercise and all the stuff that over many, many years or decades led up to the heart attack, if that makes sense.
	Okay. All right. So let's do mom.
	Let's do your mom, he said in a rather rude phrasing.
	Oh, boy. Yeah.
	So someone taught you to take care of unstable women, right?
	And it wasn't you because that's not something you wake up and want to do, right?
	So let's talk about mom and dad and childhood and all of the yellow brick road bricks that put you on this merry path.
	Well, yeah, that's quite the can of worms there.
	I had a bad childhood.
	I'll start with my mom.
	My mom, she's got OCD. She's a very unstable personality.
	She is on all sorts of medications and things.
	My dad currently is living alone.
	He has not married since he split for my mom and they officially divorced when I was like nine.
	So he lives alone.
	I think he's got alcoholic tendencies for sure.
	He has kind of been moping for a lot of his life.
	So my mom is just very tiring to be around.
	She'll Be all over the place.
	She filled me with a tremendous amount of anxiety growing up.
	I did live with her on and off.
	She was seeing different guy friends.
	She would say things that were just kind of hurtful and sort of bizarre, which she claims is her disorder.
	And I've never had a great relationship with her.
	My dad was much more stable.
	But also sort of the depressive type, passive, didn't have a lot of ambition and drive.
	And he even had a moment where he got in trouble legally with having sexual relations with someone that was too young for him.
	And I was I was like eight when that happened, and I didn't understand it.
	Wait, what? Too young for him?
	That's not a law? Oh, I should – I'm sorry.
	So he was basically essentially like a social worker, and the girl was – he said 16.
	She said 14.
	I've heard different accounts, so she was technically underage, but he didn't go to prison.
	I'm sorry. There's no – okay.
	If she was 14, I don't think that's technically there.
	Yeah, you're right. Not technically.
	Well, see, this is the thing.
	My mom told me she was 14.
	My dad told me she was 16.
	So I've never really wanted to look into it.
	Wait, but how old was your dad?
	He would have been in his late 30s.
	And was this girl...
	I mean, she was a child either way, right?
	But was this girl... Somebody that he had some sort of authority over or influence over as a social worker?
	Yes. Absolutely.
	That's fucked up beyond words.
	Yep. I mean, I know that you want to minimize, and I get that, and I understand that, but holy shit.
	You know, having sex with a child that you have power over as a social worker is not really voluntary, no matter how you cut it.
	It's not. It's not.
	The fuck? No.
	Yep. Yeah.
	And... Wait, wait. So he got in trouble.
	I mean, you don't have to get into too many details, but did he get in trouble, like, go to jail, lose his job, lose his career?
	Did he get sued? Like, what the hell?
	Lost his job and got probation for five years, I want to say.
	And do you know, did he end up...
	I don't know. Don't tell me where you are, but did he end up registering as an offender?
	Yes. Yes, he did. Okay.
	So I think that's the underage thing then, right?
	Yeah, yeah. And the whole thing was terrible.
	But I think after that is why he shut down his world basically and he didn't really date or anything like that.
	And my mom, just to give you a representation of how she is, she would rub this in my face constantly.
	What do you mean, rub it in your face?
	The guy she chose turned out to be a kind of predator, and she's rubbing it in your face?
	It's like, you chose him? I don't understand.
	How does she rub this in your face?
	Look how bad my choices were, you idiot.
	It's like, they're your choices?
	What are you talking about? Exactly.
	So let me give you kind of a story that will kind of encapsulate how she sort of reacts towards me.
	So this is all going on with my dad, right?
	So I'm living with her, and she's living with...
	My grandparents, her parents.
	And I don't remember all the details, but I had like a birthday party, right?
	No, I had a friend who had a birthday party, excuse me.
	And I wasn't invited for whatever reason.
	And I was pretty introverted, very much so even now, but especially then.
	So my mom, instead of comforting me, instead of saying anything like that,
	she goes, well, your dad was on the news and they probably saw that he was on the news
	and that's why they didn't invite you.
	Right?
	Okay.
	So she would like put that kind of shame on me, you know, and make me feel like I was less than
	and like I should have to be something to be ashamed for.
	And, you know, in reality, she's the one who didn't offer me any,
	because I eventually went to live with my dad from the age of like 11 on,
	because she didn't have any- Wait, and this was, sorry, was this after this incident?
	Yes. And do you have any idea if it was like a one-time thing?
	Was it a quote-unquote relationship or how did that play?
	It was a one-time thing.
	Did you have any indication, and I'm sorry, I know this is tough stuff, and don't talk about anything you don't want to, but did you have any indication that there was any of this creepy stuff about your dad before, or...
	No.
	No. I remember he came home one time, and he took a very long bath, and he remembered he was telling me, hey, whatever happens, I love you.
	So I knew he was... Something had happened, but I was so young, I didn't know what.
	And yeah, I mean, like I said, it was tough because I still love him and I still feel when all is said and done, he's an infinitely better parent than my mom, but my mom didn't set the bar very high, as you can tell.
	Right. Okay.
	Yeah. Okay, so you were talking about how your mom would sort of, I guess, just throw this in your face?
	Yeah, she would throw it in my face.
	She would find ways to degrade me and just always kind of make me feel like something was wrong with me.
	It's kind of how her OCD is and was then and is now.
	Just as a quick example, when I... I told her about what had happened with my wife.
	Her reaction was, oh, I'm not surprised based on how you've been treating me.
	Oh, yeah. Make it about her, right?
	Right. Yeah, she made it about her and then she would subsequently text me and say, hey, if we reestablish our relationship, then maybe she'll want to stay.
	Oh, my God. So she's leveraging your divorce to manipulate and bully you into spending time with her.
	Yes. Yes.
	And... Even my wife would tell me that my mom is toxic.
	The whole thing is just super bizarre.
	It was an unstable childhood.
	I shut myself off socially.
	I did not have a lot of confidence around women, of course.
	I did not I was just kind of – I had a negative mindset.
	My dad was very depressive, and he was very negative about the world, and my mom wasn't especially positive either.
	And so I just – I never really spent any time planning the future or looking forward to things.
	I was just kind of enduring life.
	And I think I – as I got older, part of me thought that finding a woman would kind of fix this, right?
	And, you know, enter my wife.
	So tell me a bit more about finding a woman who would fix this.
	Just want to make sure I understand your thinking in that area.
	I call this screwed up stoicism, which is like, yeah, life sucks, but you've got to endure it.
	And it's not any philosophical thing.
	It's just because you're just surrounded by such awful people that it's like life is just something to be endured, like my social circle, so to speak.
	Right. Yeah, I felt that it would fix the emotional emptiness that I had.
	I didn't really feel love really for anybody.
	I just kind of – I had – I guess I would describe it as I pitied my dad and loathed my mom.
	And I wanted – I was lonely, and I wanted a sense of love, and I wanted someone that I could really trust and live life with.
	And I think I was huge into movies, right?
	I didn't – I read and I listened to podcasts because I didn't go out, really.
	And I think the movies just got me with these romantic notions.
	And I thought, well, okay, this is my ticket, right?
	I got to find someone to be with, right?
	And it took a lot to get to that point, to have the nerve to even start dating and all that.
	Yeah. And how old were you when you started dating?
	Honest, I think I was 23, I want to say, yeah.
	And what was your first girlfriend, that kind of stuff?
	So I, looking in hindsight, there was a few girls that I think had expressed some interest in me, but I was totally shut off to it.
	So really my first girlfriend would have been Around the age of 23, she would have been, at the time, she was actually older.
	She was much older. She was like 33, if memory serves.
	And she was kind of an eccentric woman who had moved out from the Oregon area.
	She was really into yoga and New Age stuff and was just...
	Very cerebral and smart in some ways, but also kind of seemed like she was also a little bit on the spectrum, just not having any self-awareness and being sort of self-absorbed.
	I realize now I was essentially just her meal ticket.
	I would take her out and I would pay for dinner and she would drink and it never really went much any farther than that.
	She eventually just said, hey, let's be friends.
	So this was not a really romantic relationship?
	Was there sexual activity?
	Yeah, it was very limited sexual activity, but there were some.
	We'd make out and things.
	We even called each other boyfriend-girlfriend, but it really only lasted a few months.
	That was the extent of my experience.
	Before meeting my wife. Okay.
	And where did you meet your wife?
	I... It was an online dating app.
	And what was it that drew you to her in the beginning?
	I'll tell you what drew me to her.
	I met her at a restaurant and she was the least unpretentious woman that I had met.
	She had like on these raggedy shoes and this kind of old coat and she just was, I'll use
	the word meek, and she subsequently said she hates that word, but she was.
	I mean, she was meek.
	She seemed very interested in what I was interested in.
	You know, we would talk about like shows like Ancient Aliens, right?
	She was unassuming, nice, but then also like not worldly.
	And she seemed, you know, kind of had like the streak of sort of old fashionedness, you
	know, and how she would talk and things.
	You know, I impressed her, right?
	And that's kind of what drew me to her was the reaction I got from her.
	So, she shows up.
	In raggedy clothes with like ragged shoes and so on?
	Yes, because – well, her clothes weren't necessarily ragged.
	Her shoes were. And she just kind of had – it was very kind of nondescript clothing.
	And I was just attracted to that because I'm like, this woman is not pretentious.
	She's just authentic.
	And she was very thrifty speaking with her.
	She didn't want to spend any money.
	She – Didn't have a car.
	Turns out she had lost her license for a brief time.
	And she was just very, like, I considered it down to earth.
	You consider her what?
	I considered her to be down to earth.
	Like, she wasn't, you know, out there, like, materialistic.
	That's... Now, how is that a virtue?
	Or compared to what is that a virtue, right?
	Is your mom very material?
	Like there was something you're bouncing off here.
	Because, you know, if a woman shows up, you know, women love to dress up.
	They love to look attractive, especially on a date with the guy they're interested in.
	And if she shows up with this homeless chic going on, that's an indication of a problem, right?
	If a guy shows up to a job interview in his gym clothes, right?
	Yeah. Because there are these kind of social standards here, right?
	Right. That exist.
	So what is it that was appealing about this to you compared to someone?
	You're bouncing off something here, right?
	Okay, yeah. And I should even say that first date we had, she was almost trying to call it off.
	And say, yeah, I can't get transportation.
	I don't know what to do. So I really talked her into that.
	So, yeah, I'm kind of connecting some dots here.
	So what am I bouncing off?
	I think some resentment for the girls in my high school, I would say.
	You know, that were kind of the preppy type, that were affluent, and they would always dress up.
	I just never really felt comfortable around them.
	I probably didn't feel like I was good enough around them.
	My wife, she didn't give off that air.
	She didn't look down to me.
	She looked up to me pretty quickly.
	Okay, so the girls who are well put together...
	Are annoying to you?
	The girls who have good grooming, good whatever, right?
	So help me understand what's the resentment there.
	Is it because you couldn't date them or they didn't show any interest in you or what?
	Yeah. That's a good question.
	I went to a high school that was, for the city, very affluent.
	And the kids would drive cars better than me.
	And so a lot of the girls there would just be, like I said, very, very pretentious.
	And yeah, I guess part of it was I didn't feel like I could get them, even though I never tried, so I can't say that for a certainty.
	But they were also – I remember one girl in particular, kind of going back to my dad, had found out that he was on the sex offender registry, and she had – I brought that up during class one time.
	I don't know. I just remember just looking at her and thinking, man, you've had everything handed to you in life, and all you can do is try to tear people down.
	At least that was my mindset. I think I had just some distrust of women in general, I would say.
	Right. Do you have any, do you remember the circumstances in which you brought this up, your father being on the registry?
	Well, you know, it's not fully, I know kids, you know, because the internet was, I mean, it was on back then, of course, you know, everything was, we were doing it, but like, you know, kids would, they go to the computer lab and they would screw around.
	And so I think the kids were just screwing around and Using class time to look up funny things.
	Someone ended up going to that website and they just started typing in names.
	Someone had told her and she ended up bringing it up.
	Again, I know it's a while ago, but she brought it up.
	I'm trying to figure out the circumstances in which she brought it up.
	Did she say, oh, did you know that?
	I think she's the one who played it up.
	I think someone had said, hey, did you know that there's a so-and-so on the registry?
	Because I have the same name as my dad.
	And I said, no, it's a common name.
	No, no, no. But then I was also kind of getting embarrassed and getting read.
	And I remember she would say, oh, look, you're getting read.
	She would say something to that effect, like that is you, basically.
	And I just remember just being very upset with her about that.
	Right, okay. Yeah, I know.
	Well, and as a girl, I'm not trying to excuse her behavior, of course, but as a girl, she may very well have known someone who was sexually assaulted as a child, and this may be Her way of warning people...
	I'm not trying to justify it, but, you know, a lot of girls, if they talk to their friends, I mean, it's one in three girls, one in five boys, right?
	Sexually attacked as children or significantly inappropriate things, right?
	So it may have been a, you know, look out for this guy, right?
	It may have been a, don't go to this guy's house because he lives with a guy who's on the sex offenders list.
	Yeah, I mean, I was...
	I was well-liked in school.
	I mean, I was popular because I was kind of eccentric and kind of different, and so people eventually kind of laughed this off, but I think my resentment was more so just that a lot of these girls and a lot of the guys, they didn't go through what I went through, and life was just kind of so easy for them, at least seemingly.
	It built some resentment.
	With my current wife, I knew that wasn't necessarily the case with her.
	Oh, so that she'd had it tough when she was a kid?
	Yeah, she gave off that vibe initially.
	So you thought, like, here's a fellow trauma traveler, and we'll for sure get along, or at least understand each other better?
	Well, in hindsight, I think that's what I thought.
	I don't know if I consciously thought that at the time, but...
	Oh, no, no. Listen, we scan for these things, right?
	Like, we scan for, is this person safe?
	Is this person going to be attached to me?
	Is this person going to be loyal?
	And there were signs, I guess, from her that...
	This was the case. So imagine if you had gone on a blind date or something or a date from an app and this woman had showed up and she was like, I don't know, some super competent lawyer or a doctor or something.
	I mean, how would you feel in that circumstance?
	Oh, I would have been totally intimidated.
	Right, right. So you're looking for somebody who's kind of in the underworld like you, right?
	Right. Yes. Yes.
	Absolutely. And so let's say the woman had shown up and she's like an attractive, crisp, efficient, effective lawyer or a doctor or something like that.
	And would you have felt that you had something of value to offer her or would it be like, oh God, this is the wrong planet for me?
	No. I would think that I didn't have anything to offer, especially at that time.
	Didn't have a lot of confidence.
	Right. Okay. Yeah, you're right.
	Absolutely. Okay, so when she shows up in her Raggedy Ann outfit, you're like, okay, so this is somebody who is not going to make me feel insecure, and she is non-functional enough that I feel I have something to offer her.
	Like the 30-year-old flake that you went out with and bought drinks for and so on and got to first base with or something, right?
	The woo-woo queen.
	Not a competent person, right?
	Well, you put it that way, but...
	If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
	I'm just trying to synthesize what you said.
	You're not wrong. You're not wrong.
	I don't know. You're right.
	I scanned her.
	I don't know if that's how I would have verbalized it at that time.
	Well, your genes scan her, right?
	So your genes are like, okay, is she going to laugh at me?
	Is she way too competent for me?
	Or is she kind of down in my underworld level and we can hook up or whatever?
	Yep. No, that's exactly – that was certainly a thought process.
	Yeah, 100%.
	Now, I mean obviously that doesn't serve you in particular as you're finding out through this divorce process.
	So the question is then, who does it serve?
	Who does it serve? Well, I guess it served her at the time.
	Yeah, but you just met her.
	You don't have any desire to serve her.
	Who else does it serve for you to be around the trashier side of people?
	See, I don't think she was trashy, but I thought she was just misunderstood.
	I'm so sorry.
	I apologize for that.
	That was harsh and unpleasant and unfair.
	So let's just say the – who does it serve to have you around the more chaotic and less accomplished and competent kinds of people?
	I don't know. I don't know if it really serves anyone.
	Oh, it serves someone.
	Because we don't behave randomly, right?
	We don't behave... If somebody buys lottery tickets because they want to win the lottery, we don't behave randomly.
	Right. All right.
	Who do you think? I guess I'm not...
	Oh, I don't think. This one I know.
	Okay. So let's put it this way.
	If you were to be around a woman of...
	Competence and self-knowledge and all this kind of stuff, right?
	And then she was to meet your family, what would happen?
	Oh. Well, I would fear that she would be put off by them.
	At least my immediate family.
	Okay. So what would she think?
	Let's say, forget about the dad for the moment.
	Let's say she just goes and meets your mom.
	And your mom is like OCD and manipulative and chose to marry a guy who turned out to be a predator.
	And then she later married someone who's 30 years older than her.
	Right. So what is...
	Lisa, the competent lawyer, who's efficient and brisk and gets things done and knows what she wants, how is she going to react to spending the next 30 or 40 years, if you guys get married, in the company of your mom?
	She's not going to want anything to do with her.
	Right. So then, assuming that Lisa, the competent lawyer woman, let's say that she...
	Likes you enough or wants you enough or desires you enough, but she's like, I can't handle your mom.
	I don't want to handle your mom.
	This is not what I've fought hard in my life to get is to end up in a situation like this.
	So what is she going to say or what is she going to suggest with regards to your mom?
	Or rather, what is the requirement of her getting married to you going to be with regards to your mom?
	Minimize or cut off contact.
	Yeah, exactly. So for your mom, does it benefit your mom for you to meet and date a competent, efficient, intelligent, assertive, decisive woman?
	No. Right.
	Now, let's say that you really like Lisa, the competent lawyer, and And she says, you know, you're great, but I can't have these people as grandparents to my kids.
	And then she breaks things off with you, right?
	Right. So, how are you going to feel about your family if they cost you the love of your life?
	Very resentful.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Of course. Of course, right?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	I will say – and my mom has made everything about her.
	When I had first – when my wife had moved in prior to us being married, so we lived together for four years, my mom was like, oh, you just started dating.
	You need to keep playing the field.
	I felt like, oh, she's not even happy with my decision.
	I would complain about my mom constantly.
	It was pretty obvious that my wife did not care for her.
	She was pretty explicit about this later on.
	My mom either didn't realize that or was in denial about it.
	So they had a strange story.
	Not liking someone is obviously challenging, but the real question is, did she say, I can't have someone like your mom in my life unless she deals with her issues or stops being manipulative or stops being kind of nutty or whatever it is, right? Or at least apologize.
	See, here's the thing, right? So someone loves you, right?
	Someone loves you. And If you love, I mean, take a silly example, right?
	You love your dog and someone tortures your dog, right?
	They feed them weird meat that, you know, they feed the dog alcohol, like they just harm your dog, mess with your dog, really screw up your dog.
	How do you feel to that person?
	I'd hate them. You'd hate them, right?
	So if someone loves you and your parents did significant harm to you, how do they feel about your parents?
	Yeah, they would hate them.
	Well, I think so.
	I think so. Yeah.
	Yeah. And she got along very well with my dad.
	Yeah, you're right. She never did...
	She never did...
	Draw any boundaries with that.
	And I don't know if it's related at all or if this is a tangent, but one of her chief complaints was me not being as accessible to her family.
	I didn't like going to their reunions.
	I felt there were too many of them and didn't want to stay all that long.
	Too many of them? What do you mean too many of them?
	I'm sorry. I was thinking of some big moral thing.
	It's like, nope, number's too high.
	No, I'm sorry. Too many gatherings.
	Too many things. Family was, according to her, happy that she left.
	What do you mean? Happy that she left?
	What do you mean? Well, I mean, I'm very surprised by this, but I asked her, I'm like, what?
	Because I was expecting her family to try to talk some sense into her, right?
	Because she's 30, she wants kids, she wants family, she's throwing everything away.
	And she goes, no, no one in my family said that, except I guess her grandma said something kind of along those lines.
	My mom, when I told her, said, about time.
	Oh, about time she left you?
	Yeah. Right. And of course, I don't know if that's accurate or not.
	Right. I mean, you don't have to get into details, but I assume that her family was as much of a horror show as we would imagine from somebody who was anorexic in this cutter.
	Well, the family that I think they've Put themselves together.
	So her mom and stepdad, her mom I think kind of has changed over the years, but her mom is just kind of very much this sort of submissive, love my husband, Christian mom who's just sort of naive to the world.
	At least that's what she gives off.
	Her dad is definitely sort of dysfunctional.
	And my wife claims was emotionally abusive for her growing up, and he kind of lives...
	He's sort of disheveled and kind of obnoxious.
	Her brother's a nice guy, easygoing, but not especially mature.
	And her sister, which is, I think, the favorite of the family, is very sort of pretentious and married a guy who's, you know, Pretty affluent and his family's pretty affluent.
	And I know my wife has some insecurity about her sister.
	So, you know, she's got her own family dynamics going on.
	They're not quite the same as mine, but definitely challenging for her.
	Do you have any knowledge about what circumstances produced this really dysfunctional behavior of the cyanorexia and the cutting and so on?
	Well, with the anorexia, I don't know.
	It was very strange because I would tell her, hey, something's wrong.
	You've got to figure this out.
	No, you're being weird. You're being weird.
	Everything's fine. And even my family, as you can imagine, especially my mom's parents, my maternal grandparents, were complimenting her on her weight loss.
	Right? And I was the only one seeing a red flag until she went to a doctor and they diagnosed her.
	The only thing I can think of was her fear of maybe not being able to fit into her wedding dress.
	The only time she would really talk about it was that she just had this voice in her head.
	And it was a dark voice.
	And as far as the cutting, I know she did that more in high school.
	The incident that I saw There was probably more cutting than I witnessed, but we got in a fight, as I mentioned earlier, and I did, and it was wrong, but I called her a bitch.
	And she went up to the bathroom and carved that in her thigh, and the only connection that I was able to draw from her was she would take in these insults growing up from her father, and she would just...
	Repeat it over and over to herself and make sure she never did it again for him to do that.
	So I don't know what she accomplished by doing it, but I suspect there was a connection between the emotional abuse that she experienced growing up with her father.
	So at what point in your relationship did she say that she had dark voices in her head that told her to do self-destructive things?
	When she finally came to terms with the anorexia.
	And that was, what, a year or two into your relationship, or was that earlier?
	No, that was, I'd say, about two and a half, three years in.
	Okay, so before you got married, because you lived together for four years, right?
	Yes, yes, sir. Yeah, so before you got married, she says, I have dark voices in my head that tell me to do bad things.
	Mm-hmm. And did she get that resolved?
	Did she sort that out?
	Well, seemingly, yeah.
	I mean, she was very thin for the wedding eventually, but yeah, she got her weight a lot more stabilized.
	And her weight has fluctuated between now and then, but she never went back to that anorexic condition.
	No, that's the symptoms.
	I mean the actual voice, voices in her head.
	Oh yeah, she never brought it up again.
	I will say, and this is going to be a strange sort of thing to throw in, but she hasn't
	said anything about dark voices, but I know prior to her leaving, you know, the months
	leading up to it, she was adamant that she had psychic abilities and that she could sense
	things and, you know, she would even say things like, I sense something bad is going to happen.
	We need to know we have each other's backs.
	I just feel like something bad is going to happen.
	She even put salt around the house at one point.
	What's the purpose of the salt around the house?
	She was sensing bad negative energy.
	No, is that like a thing? Is that like to keep demons away?
	I know the salt over the shoulder thing.
	I don't know the other thing. Oh, yeah.
	I guess it's to keep spirits out.
	Yeah. Was this a new thing for her, psychic abilities and salt around the house?
	The psychic abilities were new.
	We always would watch ghost shows and she would go on haunting tours with me.
	It's something we both enjoyed.
	I kind of took it as more of something to do, but she...
	She claimed to have seen a demon before she met me, growing up with her friend who was very dysfunctional.
	But other than that, she never really claimed to have abilities until, I'd say, maybe four or five months prior to her leaving.
	What's the story with the demon?
	Well, she would ghost hunt prior to me and she had this friend...
	...category, had a bunch of kids, was cheating on her...
	Sorry, you just cut out for a sec.
	You said you had a friend and then something to do with the category?
	Oh, I'm sorry. No, my wife had a friend who, when growing up, was definitely a bad influence on her.
	Was very trashy, cheated on her husband, had all these kids at a young age.
	Anyway, her and her friend, that friend, they were at a cemetery once, and I guess they had brought a Ouija board, and my wife claims that a demon appeared.
	And what's the story?
	What did she say? She said it was like they were doing this Ouija, and this dark shadow appeared, and scared the bejesus out of them, and then it left.
	Yeah. I never...
	I don't know if you can hear me but you've cut out again.
	I can't hear you.
	Hello? You cut out again?
	I couldn't hear you. I don't know if maybe you need to move closer to the router or something.
	Oh, I don't know. It's showing as good internet.
	I'm sorry. You can hear me though?
	Yeah. She did Ouija board stuff in a graveyard and then claims that she saw a shadowy presence and a demon and if you could take it from there.
	Yeah, but I never really questioned her too much on it.
	All I know is that's She had that experience.
	She referenced a haunted doll one time that wouldn't burn when she was a kid that they tried to get rid of, and they tried to burn it and it wouldn't burn.
	So her family was mystical in this way as well, right?
	Not mystical.
	They would write everything off as demonic, whereas...
	Oh no, that's mystical, right?
	I mean, if you've got a demonic doll that won't burn, I mean, that's fairly mystical.
	I mean, I know it's within the purview of Christian theology and so on, but it's, you know, haunted dolls, that's fairly mystical, right?
	Yes. Yes.
	But, you know, her parents would never talk about these type of subjects.
	Only she would.
	So, you know, they weren't like openly mystical about it.
	The other thing that was interesting was shortly after she had moved in, we were in bed, and she claims to have seen lights above my bed, which she said were good.
	My guardian angels.
	And she said something about them not liking her.
	And I always thought that was super strange.
	I even asked her about it, you know, a few months prior to her moving out and said, do you still see him?
	And she goes, yeah, see him all the time.
	Now, do you believe her?
	I mean, I believe in...
	You know what?
	I think I might. I think I do, yeah.
	You think you believe that she saw your guardian angels?
	I mean, I believe in guardian angels.
	Do I believe she saw them?
	I mean, do you believe that guardian angels would be visible to her, but not to you?
	Because if they're supernatural beings, they can absolutely, completely and totally be invisible, right?
	Because they're not visible to you, right?
	Right, right. So I'm not sure why they would be – I mean, let's accept the existence of these things, right?
	But how on earth could they possibly be visible to her but not to you?
	Well, it would only be possible if she's got the abilities that she claims to have.
	Oh, no, no, no, that's not how it works.
	No, no, that's not how it works at all.
	Because if the guardian angels have the ability to not be seen, then they have the ability to not be seen.
	Right. Right? There's no asterisk there, right?
	Right. Yeah.
	It'd be like, you know, I've designed a stealth fighter that is invisible to everybody except people with incomprehensible mystical powers, right?
	That's like Emperor's New Clothes stuff, right?
	I hear what you're saying.
	I don't know. I don't know what to make of it.
	I do, but all right.
	I just know that...
	Well, tell me, what do you make of it?
	Because I don't know. Oh, she's lying.
	Okay. Now, the lying, let's not get into the epistemological reality or unreality of guardian angels.
	But, yeah, she's lying.
	She doesn't see these things.
	But it's a way for her to feel like she's got something special without actually having to earn it.
	I mean, this is quite common among, maybe a little bit more common among women than men.
	But it's like, well, I want to be special.
	I want to be thought of as special.
	It's like, okay, well, could you develop a special talent?
	Could you become super virtuous?
	Could you help the poor?
	Could you start a charity?
	No! That's a lot of work.
	Right. So I'm just going to claim to have mystical abilities, right?
	Okay. Yeah, that's interesting.
	And I'll tell you why I also don't believe the story in the graveyard.
	So she took a Ouija board to a graveyard and summoned a demon?
	Yes. Okay.
	And then she did other creepy, dangerous, in this worldview, mystical stuff afterwards, right?
	Yes. She would do spells and things.
	Which she's gone back to.
	She's gone back to being a witch.
	She's gone back to being a witch.
	Yeah, prior to her moving out, she told me that she was more pagan and that she does spells for people at work.
	Oh, okay. So this is another way of providing value without actually having to do any work.
	I mean, or it's a way just to impress the people she works with.
	I don't know. Okay. It's a perception of value without having to do any work.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	I mean, you know, for me to provide value, boy, I had to do a lot of work, take a lot of bullets in this life.
	Right. I had to study philosophy for 40 years.
	You know, I could be platform pretty much from everything except gravity, and I'm sure that's still pending.
	And, you know, but I don't just claim I can do magical spells, and that's why people should think I have value, right?
	Right. Yeah.
	So she goes to a graveyard with a Ouija board, she summons a demon, and then she continues to do this stuff later on.
	Okay, so...
	Including haunted house tours.
	Okay, so I'll just...
	Yes, to an extent.
	When she lived with me, she knew that I was not down with any of the summoning, I didn't want any of the occult stuff, and so she didn't bring any of those books in.
	No, no, no, I'm not talking about you.
	I mean, we will get to you.
	I'm talking about her.
	Yeah, but I'm just saying she stopped that, supposedly.
	No, but she should stop that because it summoned a demon.
	Right. Do you know what I mean?
	Yes, yes, yes. If I'm like, boy, every time I play this song on the radio, I get into a near-fatal car crash, right?
	I think I'm going to play that song again and again and again.
	These two things can't coexist.
	If I genuinely believe that playing a particular song on my car radio is going to cause a near-fatal car crash, I stop playing that song.
	And if she genuinely believed that she summoned a demon, then she would stop doing that stuff, right?
	Yes. So I don't believe it for a second.
	Okay. Yeah.
	Again, tell me if my logic is off, Bob.
	No, I definitely – I will say this.
	In my experience, like with the prior girlfriend to her, I mean when you get really into new age, I think it is about inflating your own sense of importance.
	So I didn't feel that that was true of my wife initially.
	But I certainly feel that it's true of her now in the way that she talks and how she uses it.
	I bet she's special because she has these powers and these abilities.
	And of course, if you question or oppose any of these powers or abilities, she gets very huffy and offended and upset and angry, right?
	Exactly. And you know what?
	Prior to her leaving, I remember we were out there smoking cigars and I was just asking her.
	I was like, you know, something's off.
	What is going on? She looks at me and she goes, I'm evolving and you're not.
	And along these lines, it seems to be what she was getting at.
	Oh, that she's becoming more mystical and you're not?
	Well, that she's becoming a different person.
	She even said, I'm sorry that I'm not – you can't put me in a box anymore.
	I'm a lioness.
	She's a lioness?
	Yes, that's what she called herself.
	She goes, I'm not meek anymore.
	That's not me. She talked about her abilities.
	She would brag about her work.
	Oh, like the spell book?
	No, her work.
	She is a trainer at a call center.
	She would She constantly wants to be around them.
	She would call her trainees who are typically teenage girls, older 19, 20.
	She would call them her babies because they would look up to her and she would be popular.
	It's all very strange.
	Okay, so let's go full Christian if you don't mind me.
	I'm sure you won't mind if we go full Christian for a moment, would you?
	Okay. Sure. Okay, full Christian.
	Yes. So what would the Christian explanation for, I continue to meddle in demonology, and now my personality is changing, and I'm becoming something else that is full of pride and arrogance and destruction?
	Possession. Yeah, demonic possession, right?
	Yeah. I got a dark voice in my head that tells me to hurt myself.
	I'm destroying my relationships.
	I'm lording it over my teenage trainees.
	I'm making absurd claims that nobody could really believe and then getting crazy angry.
	And it's harming.
	Well, it's destroying my marriage, but I'm going to pursue it, right?
	That's straight up demonic possession, isn't it?
	Yes. I suspected that and I told her that.
	Mm-hmm. Well, and now she does witches, right?
	I mean, Christianity is very clear on witches and mysticism and spells, right?
	Very clear. It's not even close.
	Nope. You're 100% right.
	And the only thing I could say to minimize it would be maybe she's just trying to put me off and...
	You know, I've always had this sense that during this whole thing that she wanted to have me initiate the breakup more so than her.
	Well, demonic possession would explain that as well.
	Because the demon would not want her to take any responsibility for the bad things in her life.
	Otherwise, she might change to improve them and the demon would lose control, right?
	Yeah. I've told people there's, I suspect, some sort of attachment.
	Right. Okay.
	Now, this doesn't obviously explain from a sort of psychological standpoint or so on, but, you know, as far as the Christian worldview goes, and again, it's not like I'm some big expert on these things, but it seemed to me that that would be – I know how they would explain all this in the Middle Ages, whether we agree or not, right? Yes, sir.
	All right. Okay.
	Now, this theory of attachment or demonic possession, it hasn't given you enough comfort that we don't need to talk, right?
	Right. That's true.
	Okay, so, I mean, having said that, and I think it's a very interesting thing to talk about, but it's not why you're calling, right?
	Yes, no. So the why you're calling is, what the hell happened to my marriage, right?
	Yes, sir. Sorry, what the heck happened to my marriage?
	My apologies. No, you're right.
	What the hell happened? What happened to my marriage?
	Okay, okay. And you said that now she is moving on to, you know, even more sort of spellcasting, witchy stuff, and all of that, right?
	Yep, and she – when she's around me, she's very businesslike.
	She would say – last thing she said was, I love you, but this is something that's happening.
	I'll tell you one thing you might find interesting.
	Oh, you have told me many things I find interesting, but let's add one more to it.
	Well, that's good to hear, sir.
	So when we were signing some of the divorce papers, she had her ring on, her engagement ring.
	And I said, hey, you still got your ring on.
	She looks at me.
	She goes, yeah. Isn't that what a woman in mourning is supposed to do?
	And I'm like, what?
	Because I'm thinking, I'm not dead.
	You moved out.
	But that has very much...
	It's hard to explain, but her...
	No, it's mixed signals. I truly mourn the end of our marriage, but I'm not going to lift a finger to solve any problems.
	Exactly. And she will not go back to her maiden name.
	She wants to keep my name.
	So she's acting as if I died in a car accident, not that she left.
	It's the most bizarre thing to describe.
	It's as if she has no agency, and yeah, she may not want it, but it's what's happening.
	That is how she has acted since the beginning of this.
	Right, right.
	So, I don't know if you can make sense of that, but...
	I mean, I think I can make sense of it.
	I obviously can't tell for sure because, you know, it's your life and all, but do you...
	Is there more... I'm happy to hear more information.
	I have a tentative hypothesis, but I'm certainly happy to hear more information.
	I would just say I feel as if I've kind of gone down this road trying to understand what went wrong...
	With the marriage, as you can imagine, went to a lot of reading a lot.
	And one thing that I've heard, I don't know your thoughts on it, but this phrase that men love idealistically, women love opportunistically.
	I thought it was interesting because I'm wondering, like, I don't think it's a coincidence that, you know, she didn't become pregnant and she has to have the surgery.
	And so she started questioning even if she wanted a kid.
	And right around that time, that's when she became annoyed with me.
	That's when she didn't want this life anymore.
	That's when she left.
	So I feel as if she's got trauma, but I feel as if the trigger for the trauma was just not feeling like she was good enough to have kids, and I became of no use to her anymore.
	That's the most sense of it I can make.
	I don't know. Yeah, I think that's all very interesting and it may be true, but it's not going to help you as it hasn't helped you, right?
	No. All right.
	Now, how much agency do you want in this?
	In other words, let's say that the price of understanding your marriage is self-criticism.
	Is that okay? Yeah, no, absolutely.
	Right. So what went wrong with your marriage is you.
	You chose a woman who went enormously against your values on just about every conceivable level.
	She went enormously against your values and now you find it incomprehensible that it didn't work out.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	You went for a woman, and I say this with all sympathy, and we've all made these mistakes, so I'm not preaching from any place of perfection here in any way, shape, or form.
	We're all in these trenches together, so to speak.
	But she had red flags coming out the wazoo from the very first day.
	Yep. I don't think I was cognizant to it, but you're right.
	Oh, no, no. You chose her because she was...
	I mean, one of the reasons you chose her was that she...
	Again, whether you're conscious or not, but you were relieved that she didn't even know how to dress for a first date.
	Yep. Like, why is she relieved she can't have children?
	Because she is a child. She's a child.
	Because she has imaginary friends.
	She thinks that spells work.
	She makes up silly stories to get attention.
	I mean, she is a child.
	Yep. In the same way that children don't know how to dress for a date either.
	Right. Right.
	Yeah. So what was attractive about her?
	Okay, is she physically attractive?
	Is she pretty? Is that the thing?
	She is. Okay, so is she like...
	She's not a 10, but she's attractive.
	Okay, so she's pretty to the point where you're going to make up her virtues, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, I didn't have a lot of self-confidence or self-worth, so yeah.
	I mean, I was like, this is...
	She was a huge ego boost, a huge ego boost.
	Yeah, because she's so pretty and she's willing to go out with you, right?
	Yes, and she worshipped me early on.
	Well, that's a love bomb.
	That's a cult tactic, right?
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, you're the most important person, blah, blah, blah, and I'm pretty.
	And what it's designed to do, that level of attachment, what it's designed to do is to completely crush your capacity for critical thinking and judgment.
	Yes. Right?
	Yeah, yes. And some people do it with sex, some people do it with money, some people do it with status, some people do it with power, but that's all just like, I will kill myself if I'm not with you.
	Yeah. Right?
	And so you've got this pretty woman who's, you know, ferociously, in fact, psychotically attached to you.
	She's an ego boost, and so you succumbed to what's the sin called in Christianity.
	Lust, would you say?
	I would say lust. Vanity.
	Yeah. Right? Laziness to get a woman of real quality.
	I mean, there's probably a whole number of sins here.
	Right. And attachment to the things of this world, in other words, physical characteristics, right?
	Yep. Yep.
	And, of course, as a Christian, you would have been warned about this from day one, right?
	Yes. I mean, I didn't take my faith this seriously, but yeah, there were...
	Yeah. I knew that it was not in total alignment.
	Oh, no, no, no. Don't stop flaking on me now, brother.
	No, no. Not in total alignment?
	Is that how we're going to phrase it?
	Really? Yeah.
	I thought I would correct it.
	Yeah, no. That's the vanity, though, right?
	That's the sin of vanity. I was the rescuer, and she needed me, and I was like a father-like figure to her, which is pretty obvious, I think.
	And... I was happy with that because I was going to solve things and it didn't work out that way.
	Well, if you choose someone because they're incompetent, then they can't ever become competent because you chose them and are with them because they're incompetent.
	So why would she become competent if the only reason you're with her is because she's incompetent?
	Right. Yeah, I guess at the time I didn't really, I mean, she's got good traits.
	And listen, I'm happy to hear them because I don't want to paint her in a one-dimensional light, so give me the good traits.
	Well, she was very loving.
	No, no, no, no, no, no.
	I mean, you can give me the good traits.
	But saying, I'll kill myself if you're not with me, that's not loving.
	That's not healthy love. That's like terrifying.
	You're right. That's manipulative, stalky, and that's what she's doing there also is she's trying to say, okay, how crazy is this guy?
	Will he put up with this?
	Will he put up with this? Will he put up with this?
	Will he put... I mean, you know, the abusive guy doesn't start off by just decking the woman, right?
	He pushes her a little.
	He throws the food against the wall.
	He talks about his passions and, you know, it escalates over time, right?
	So listen, I'm happy to hear her virtues.
	I really am. But loving ain't one of them.
	Yeah, you're right. You're right.
	She was... I mean, she's feminine.
	She's become kind of more masculine now, but she was...
	Feminine is not a virtue. I'm happy to hear the virtues, but feminine is not a virtue.
	I guess I'm giving you what I was attracted to.
	And that's fine, but you said that she's got a lot of good qualities.
	One hell of a cook.
	Well, I was going to tell you loyal, but I don't know if I could say that anymore.
	You think? Yeah.
	I mean, I don't believe she's cheated on me, but her leaving and breaking the marriage vow is definitely not loyal, so...
	Yeah. What else? I guess I'm questioning that statement, but she was – okay, she was very cognizant of my needs and wants during the marriage.
	That can be used to manipulate, right?
	Yes, yes, it can, and maybe almost to a fault where I was too dependent on her for my needs.
	But she was supportive.
	That's the best I can come up with.
	She was supportive. Supportive?
	Mm-hmm. I mean, she just toasted your whole marriage.
	Right. Well, I mean, previous to this.
	Okay. Again, I'm happy to hear the case.
	What's an example of her being supportive?
	You know, talking with me after I would meet with my mom and my mom would be just totally off the wall, you know, Helping me when I was struggling.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Let's just do these one at a time.
	Okay, so you'd have a really difficult interaction with your OCD mom, right?
	Right. Now, supportive is what?
	Just listening to you? Oh, that's tough.
	Oh, that's difficult. Oh, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Yes. Okay. Do you know what supportive is?
	Oh, telling me to...
	Cut it off? Well, I don't know.
	You can't tell people to cut it off, right?
	But supportive is trying to make sure that you don't end up in these abusive situations.
	And whether that's family therapy, whether that's a conversation with your mom, whether that is cutting it off if no progress can be made.
	But that's supportive, is making sure that someone you love is not being abused.
	Right. Right.
	Yeah. And she's...
	There were times where she told me to kind of cut off communication with my mom, but yeah.
	I guess the other time would be I would have a lot of identity crisis with my jobs, feeling like I wasn't doing enough, like I wasn't accomplishing enough.
	And she would always tell me, I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.
	You're really smart. I love you.
	I mean, she would be supportive and emotionally supportive like that.
	But did she help you get to the root and solve the problems, or did she just say, you don't see yourself correctly, I do?
	Yeah, you're right. The latter, yeah.
	Right. So that's almost like an insult.
	You know, like you have such a self-distorted vision, you don't see yourself clearly, I see you clearly, I wish you could do that.
	That's kind of like a, almost like an insult, because she's not trying to Figure out what is the cause of this stuff and what's going on, right?
	It's like she's, in a sense, lauding it over you.
	Like, I see you clearly.
	It's just too bad that you don't.
	Yeah, well, now you put it that way.
	Yeah, I'd agree with that.
	Yeah, so that's what I would say.
	Okay, so you chose her because she was pretty.
	Fundamentally, right? I think because I felt she needed me and she would.
	Well, you chose her because she was pretty and a failure that you could fix.
	Yes. Right.
	Yeah. Now, do you think that she was unaware of this, that you chose her for her looks and her failures?
	Um... On a certain level, yeah.
	Okay. She would question my love for her a lot.
	Okay. Now, of course, the formulation that I have is love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous, right?
	That's why I asked about her virtues.
	That's why I generally ask about people's virtues, right?
	You say, I love this person, right?
	Okay. You loved her enough to get married, so what were her virtues?
	Now, I am...
	Not alone in this. Again, this is basic Christian theology, that you can only love someone for their virtues.
	That loving them for their failures is not love.
	It's feeling superior.
	It's a way of making yourself feel stronger by being with someone who's weaker.
	And loving someone for their physical appearance alone is not only not love, but it's a sin.
	Because you are devoting your time, energy and resources to a woman who is literally summoning demons and consulting with dark voices in her head and you're not giving your love time and resources to a good Christian woman who would never go within a thousand miles of a graveyard with a Ouija board.
	You're taking resources away from a good Christian woman and giving it to a demon-centered witch.
	Does that help Christianity?
	Does that reward Christian women for being virtuous when they have no control over how they look in their face and all that?
	Yeah, certainly I was – I think the Christian term would be unyoked.
	I mean certainly she was not a believer, but she did express openness to it.
	She did express what?
	Openness to it. Openness to what?
	Christianity? Yeah, going to church with me.
	Oh no, she was a believer in mystical, powerful forces, right?
	Because she says she summoned demons.
	She says she saw your guardian angels floating over you.
	Yeah. Right, so she believes in invisible good and evil forces, right?
	Mm-hmm. And yet, and she also said, I mean, I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but she also said that your guardian angels hated her.
	Yes, at least initially.
	I don't know if they ever changed their opinion of her, but yeah.
	I doubt they have now.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Okay, so you took your precious and scarce resources, your masculine energies, your testosterone, your money, your sperm, and you gave it to a witch consorting with demons at the expense of a good Christian woman.
	And you consorted with the devil and you got your pay.
	Yeah. How is this not Demonology 101?
	How is this not Genesis? How is this not the fall of Lucifer?
	How is this not you lay down with the devil, you wake up with some sulfur?
	Well, yeah.
	But like I say, that was all in her past until she left.
	She wasn't As far as I know, she wasn't summoning.
	I didn't allow the Ouija board in the house.
	We weren't doing seances or anything like that.
	Oh, but had she been scared away from summoning demons to the point where she embraces virtue and rejects mysticism and spells and witchery as a portal to hell?
	Yeah, so in other words, she just did it for me as opposed to actually changing her mind.
	Well, and she's still seeing angels and demons while she's with you.
	I don't know if she saw a demon, but she did see angels, yeah, with me, yeah.
	Angels who didn't like her.
	I mean, that's pretty much a confession, right?
	Yeah. Your guardian angels hate me.
	I'm not saying we have a title for the show because it won't make any sense out of context.
	Yes, right. Well, no.
	I mean, if there was a demon within her, wasn't he just laughing at you at that point?
	Like, I'm openly telling him that his guardian angels find me dangerous.
	Yeah. But I guess I'm pretty enough that he'll continue to fall into sin.
	I guess I took it more so that they're really protective and they're unfamiliar with me.
	No, no. They're angels.
	They have mystical powers.
	They can read minds. Wow.
	Wow. They wouldn't be very good guardian angels if it took them five years to wake up to any potential danger.
	That's like a house alarm that goes off five days after you get robbed, or the airbag that goes off three days after your accident.
	Yep. I agree.
	Yeah, in hindsight.
	Because you know the saying, why are you looking...
	At the moat in your brother's eye when you're ignoring the beam in your own, right?
	Because you're spying into her and saying, oh, what went wrong?
	What fault of hers did I not see?
	What fault is she manifesting?
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Also, another sin, right?
	To find fault with others without examining ourself is sinful.
	Again, I'm no expert, but my understanding is that that's the case.
	So the reason you don't have an answer is the answer is in the mirror and you're just looking off the balcony, right?
	Well... It's like you're looking in the clouds for a pimple that's on your own nose, right?
	Right. Right.
	Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, I think when you say I chose a woman against my values, I mean...
	Well, this isn't even a little bit!
	Right. Right. You're a Christian and she openly confesses to consorting with demons, unrepentantly so, before you marry her.
	Yeah, I mean, there was a period of time where she went to church with me.
	She was open to it. She said she tried to become Christian.
	You know, she wanted the family values.
	I mean, she had the right signals for a long time.
	It was just more so like, oh, that was in the past and I've learned from it.
	I'm not going to do that."
	I mean, that was kind of the way she broached that whole thing.
	And I guess I felt like I was making real progress.
	Wait, are you saying that the devil can sometimes pretend to be good?
	Wait, that's not ever discussed in Christianity, is it?
	That the devil has a fair and pleasing aspect and is good at imitating virtue?
	So are you thinking it's that as opposed to like a mental illness?
	No, no, no. Listen, I'm not a demon guy.
	I mean, I think that they're very powerful analogies or metaphors for what can happen.
	in the brain. And I think some what's called mental illness can result from pathological
	lying. In other words, if you keep lying and keep lying and keep lying and keep lying,
	eventually you break your brain.
	Right. So you think she was, what, do you think she was ever the person she portrayed
	herself to be, to me?
	Well, I think that she was exactly the person she portrayed herself to be.
	Yeah. I mean, not verbalized, but if I look right between the lines, but...
	Okay, so you said that she started treating you.
	I think your word was disdain, right?
	Yes. Okay, so contempt is the biggest signal that a relationship is going to fail.
	Yes. Okay. Yes.
	Why did she have contempt for you in your formulation?
	Why did she turn into having contempt for you?
	In my formulation, it's because she didn't feel like she was getting anything.
	She didn't have use for me anymore.
	That's as much as I can think.
	Okay, I think that's not correct.
	And again, listen, it's your life, your relationship, so I could be totally wrong about this, right?
	And I was holding her back.
	No, none of that. She didn't want anyone to answer to.
	None of that. None of that.
	Okay. Again, it's your life.
	So if I say something that's incorrect, right?
	I just want to say that because I can be very forceful in my arguments.
	And if it's not your experience, you can just tell me I'm wrong and I will humbly accept that.
	Okay. So you told her you loved her, right?
	Yes. Except you didn't.
	Because you can't love somebody who's not virtuous, and she was not virtuous.
	I'm not saying she's like some big evildoer or whatever, but she's not virtuous.
	So, every time you loved her, you were saying, I love your qualities of character, because that's all that love can be.
	There's lust, and I get all of that.
	And lust is a fine part of a relationship.
	There's nothing wrong with that, right? But when you say you love her, when you love the fact that she's a pretty failure...
	And you can't love prettiness and you can't love a failure.
	Now, that doesn't mean that everyone who fails is unworthy of love.
	I mean, Lord knows I failed a lot in my life, but she's a failure in that she's failing to process reality correctly.
	She's full of vanity. She manipulates.
	She bullies. The idea that this woman was going to save you from your mom when she's kind of like a shadow cast by your mom is not particularly sensible.
	So you said, I love you!
	You're a good person, you're a wonderful person, when she's not.
	So you're concerned about her manipulation of you, but the reason that she turned on you is because you lied to her about loving her.
	You had lust for her, she was high status, you found her attractive, she made you feel good, but not love.
	And if we, again, step back into the Christian framework, right, this is a woman who summons demons and has dark voices in her head and all signs of flirting with devilry, right?
	And so the idea that you would say, I love you.
	So when you said, I love you, you were pretending that that was her quality of character, her virtue, her generosity, her kindness, her moral courage, none of which she seems to possess at all.
	And I have sympathy for her history, and I'm not trying to portray her.
	I'm just telling you the mechanics of why she turned on you.
	And you think you're the victim of manipulation?
	No, you were manipulating.
	I mean, was she? Yes, of course.
	But I'm not talking to her, I'm talking to you, right?
	So you look at her and you say, I love you.
	Now, if you said, I don't like really any of your personality, but you're very pretty, and I feel I can rescue you because you're such a failure.
	Right? Would she have...
	If you had told her the bold, honest truth, and I'm not saying you even knew it at the time, because we all get blinded and clouded by lust.
	So if you had said to her at the time, if you were not pretty, I wouldn't have anything to do with you.
	If you were a man, I wouldn't have anything to do with you.
	But my balls say to say I love you so that we can make a child that can then be turned half crazy by you.
	If you've been genuinely honest with her and said, you're pretty and you're a failure and I'm attracted to you physically and I want to lord it over you by being more successful and competent than you.
	If you had not lied to her, if you had not manipulated her by pretending you left her personality.
	So of course she's going to end up with contempt for you because you have contempt for your own honesty.
	That's really interesting.
	Putting that together, towards the end, one of the things she kept saying is, you're never going to love me for me.
	You're never going to love me for me.
	You're never going to love me for me.
	And I'm like, what do you mean?
	No, I don't love this new personality of yours.
	And she was very much, no, this is the real me.
	She had put on this act.
	But she hadn't put on an act.
	She was crazy from the get-go.
	From the first date.
	Yeah. What act?
	You used her to satisfy your own vanity because she was pretty.
	And she was a prettier girl than you ever thought you could get.
	And people were like, wow, your girlfriend's really pretty.
	And so it was vanity.
	And you pretended to like her so you could use her for your vanity.
	Yeah. And listen, I say this with no superiority whatsoever.
	I've done exactly the same thing.
	I mean, I really did want a family with her.
	I mean, I provided for her.
	I got a house for her.
	I was always thinking of her best interests.
	Like, she's not very mature.
	No, you were not always thinking of her best interests.
	If you were pretending to love her because she was pretty and a failure, that's not thinking of her best interests.
	Right. I mean, I guess I viewed myself in kind of like a fatherly role, and she even said it was like a parent-child relationship.
	Okay, is it good for an adult woman To assume a paternal role with her?
	Is it healthy? Does it give her independence and self-esteem and confidence to be treated like a child?
	No, I'm just saying I think that's what she wanted.
	I didn't ask who wanted it.
	I asked if it was good for her.
	No, you're right. No, you're right, sir.
	No, it's not. No.
	And given your father's history, I'm not sure that infantilizing your
	sexual partner was the wisest idea.
	So you got to.
	And again, I say this with sympathy and again, no superiority.
	I'm not lecturing from any high plateau here.
	And all men have this temptation.
	And all men fall prey to this temptation.
	So again, massive sympathy.
	This is nothing. I'm not trying to lord it over, right?
	Because I've been there and spent a pretty terrible amount of time on this.
	So I say this as a fellow traveler, as somebody else in the trenches, right?
	But... You trapped her in this underworld, and she trapped you in this underworld, right? So, of course, she's manipulating you, you're manipulating her, and you're both pretending to like each other for reasons of vanity, for reasons of Material security, right?
	I assume that you made decent money.
	You said you bought her a house and so on, right?
	So you can either buy a house because you're competent and good at what you do, or you can buy a house because you're willing to have sex with a generous guy who loves you or pretends to love you for your incompetence, right?
	So competence can get you a house and incompetence can get you a house.
	And once you give a woman a house for being incompetent and then say, well, now the thing is to become competent, that's, you know, all human beings respond to incentives, right?
	You know, that's like paying a million dollars to someone every year for having bad posture and then saying, well, no, but now you need to have good posture.
	It's like, no, you just gave me a million dollars for having bad posture.
	Why the hell would I have good posture? I get another million dollars, right?
	Right. Right.
	So you think that she started to pick up on the fact that I had some doubts about her character?
	Right. No, you didn't have any doubts about her character.
	Because you're not an idiot, right?
	See, I always give my listeners top 1% of brains.
	Always. This is why I don't talk down to anyone, right?
	And give you frank stuff. And that's why I ask you, how much ownership do you want?
	You have no doubt as to her character.
	She was a cutter. She was anorexic.
	She consorted with demons.
	She cut the word bitch into her thigh.
	She was unstable.
	Those were all flashpoints in time, though.
	It wasn't like consistent behavior.
	What do you mean flashpoints in time?
	Do you think that personalities just mutate like clouds?
	I mean, I was hoping that she would grow and mature.
	I mean, she's the one who claims to, and that's why she's leaving, but...
	Well, look, I have no doubt that in order for her to have a chance of growing, she has to be not with the guy who's with her because she's incompetent.
	Yeah. Right? Because...
	So it's inevitable that she either, I don't know, completely conforms like her mom does, or she kills you in her sleep, or she gets out.
	Okay. Okay, and she wasn't willing to conform?
	Mm-hmm. And thank goodness she didn't kill you in your sleep, or this would be a whole other conversation that would turn me into a Christian because she'd be talking from beyond the grave.
	Yeah, you know, that's interesting.
	Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. No, you're right.
	I mean, because she would bring up all the time, hey, I'm not going to be a Christian.
	I'm not going to do this. I mean, at the end, you know, and she was just very adversarial.
	So maybe that was just her letting me know explicitly she's not going to be who I want, even though she put on No, but you didn't want her to be competent.
	You may have said that you wanted her to be competent, but you didn't really want her to be competent.
	And I know that because at the beginning of this conversation, I asked if Lisa, the hyper-competent lawyer, showed up on the date, you'd be totally intimidated, right?
	Oh, yes, yes.
	So let's say that this woman had dealt with all her issues and had swallowed a magic pill of maturity and wisdom and all of that, and she just woke up one day and saw this guy who chose her, who lied about loving her, who had sex with her under false pretenses, and chose her for her incompetence and chose her for just her looks alone and all of that, unless she woke up with full maturity and she would look at you and say what?
	I wasn't good enough. I don't know.
	No, what would she look at you and say?
	I don't need you. She would look at you and say, you chose me for the opposite of who I am now.
	So if you chose me for the opposite of who I am now, how could you love me then and love me now?
	We can't love the thing and its opposite, right?
	Okay, so you're saying that she's just kind of revealing herself in a more explicit manner than she was before.
	See, you're still focusing on her.
	I'm trying to wrench your searchlight that's going around the sky looking for one engine noise, right?
	Right. I'm trying to get you to shine it on yourself.
	Yeah. That you lied to her about loving her, that you manipulated her.
	That you used her as a vanity prop.
	You used her! Okay.
	You chose her for her prettiness.
	You chose her for her failure.
	Okay. In other words, you chose her because of your contempt for her.
	Now, you may have told yourself the story is like, well, I'm going to help her along.
	But that's all nonsense.
	Because to help her along would have been to significantly oppose her very distorted thinking about the world.
	But you didn't want to very much oppose her very distorted thinking about the world.
	Why? I don't know if I agree with that.
	I mean I'm – I'm the one telling her when she went through anorexia that, hey, you got a problem.
	Hey, you got to fix this when everyone else was blowing smoke up her butt.
	I was – Okay, but that's not getting to the source of the issue.
	No, I mean I encourage therapy and stuff.
	I mean I remember she – towards the end, we had this conversation.
	She's like, you don't think I'm good enough.
	You don't think I'm good enough. And I said – and I meant this with all sincerity.
	You're right. You're not good enough, and I'm not good enough.
	I want to both – Grow as people because I didn't view myself as good enough and I have confidence issues.
	So I wanted to both kind of go on this self-improvement journey with her.
	So you chose her for her failure and then wanted the relationship to succeed by her becoming a success?
	Yes. Right.
	Yep. Okay. So when she talked about her very distorted thinking, right, when she talked about Demons and mysticism and psychic powers.
	And again, I know the psychic powers came along much later, right?
	Even after the divorce situation.
	But she had distorted thinking ahead of time, right?
	Yes. Now, did you rigorously oppose that distorted thinking to the point where it's like, listen, I care about you so much, I'm going to tell you the truth, even if it makes you run away from me, because I really care about you.
	And I want you to be mentally well, and I want you to have clear thinking, and I don't want you to get sucked into this weird other-dimensional demonology mysticism stuff.
	When she said, I saw a demon, did you say, no, you didn't?
	When she said, I see your guardian angels, did you say, no, you didn't?
	That's unhealthy. You are playing with fire and your brain is going to melt.
	I did not say that.
	No, you're right. I mean, I did tell her not to mess with the occult, but I did not confront her in that manner, no.
	Right. See, when you care about someone...
	You pull a sliver out of them even if it hurts them.
	Right. Right?
	So if you really cared about her and wanted her to become competent, then she needed to stop with the mysticism.
	Now, if you look at it from a Christian perspective, she needed to stop flirting with demons, obviously.
	If you look at it from a philosophical perspective, she needs to stop flirting with anti-rationality because anti-rationality is going to mess up your brain.
	Yes. So it's either demonic influences, which means, like, don't mess with that stuff.
	Like, you think you saw a demon because you were in a graveyard with a Ouija board.
	You've got to get to a priest, and we've got to fix this.
	Like, we're going now.
	Because you gave a demon entry to your heart.
	And who knows what's living in there now, right?
	So you take it to, from a Christian perspective, you would take it to a priest.
	Right. Now, and if you care about someone and they say, I took a Ouija board to a graveyard and summoned a demon, and I see angels, then you would say, you are really flirting with extraordinarily dangerous and toxic levels of mental instability.
	You cannot continue to believe these things and be well.
	And so, this I'm going to lay out, right?
	Oh, you think you can see...
	My guardian angels, okay, let's put this to an empirical test, right?
	Talk to them and tell them, ask them to tell you something about me that I haven't told you and then tell me.
	You put it to an empirical test, right?
	And if she says, well, it doesn't work that way or they're not talking to me right now, it's like, okay, I mean, you got something from them because you got that they don't like you, so they're telling you something, right?
	They're giving you some information.
	So, to test your theory that guardian angels are floating over me, that you know, that are communicating with you, have them tell you something about me that I haven't told you.
	Now, of course, she would be utterly unable to do that because the guardian angels don't do that, right?
	I mean, from a philosophical perspective, they don't exist and so she can't get that information, right?
	But if you really care about someone, you don't let them indulge in deranged thinking or deranged demonic practices from a Christian perspective, right?
	And you don't give them money despite the fact that they're not giving up on this distorted thinking.
	You don't give them money. You don't give them resources.
	You don't give them, quote, love.
	You don't give them your life.
	You don't give them your marriage vows.
	You don't give them a ring because then you're rewarding them For being crazy!
	Right, right.
	Whatever you feed grows!
	Right. Yeah, I guess I just thought I would change her.
	I mean, I don't know.
	I guess, I mean, we were together for eight years and I felt like...
	Sorry, for how long?
	Okay, so you've got a hypothesis.
	And again, I'm trying to give you the strictness mentally, right?
	So you've got a hypothesis that says, I can change crazy people, right?
	Yep. Okay. You already have a test case before this woman ever came along.
	And who is that? My first girlfriend.
	And who else is that?
	Oh, my mom. Your mom!
	So you've got a hypothesis that says, I can change people.
	I can change people who are crazy into being sane, right?
	You've also got me versus the world if you want to throw that little test case in there as well, right?
	Yes. So you've got a hypothesis that somehow you have this amazing magical ability to turn crazy into sane, right?
	And you, I guess, have been working on it for some decades with your mother, right?
	And how's that worked out?
	It has. I mean, it's...
	Spinning my wheels. It's never gotten anywhere.
	She's never going to change. So don't tell me that you have this theory that you can make crazy people sane when you've got decades of experience with your mother.
	I guess it would have been 20 years or 22 years or whatever by the time your girlfriend or your current girlfriend came along or maybe 25 years.
	So you've got a quarter century or let's shave it down to 15 years if you want or shave it down to 10 years if you want.
	I don't care. Maybe from 15 to 25 you were trying to make your crazy mom sane, right?
	Right. And it didn't work.
	So when you have 10 years of empirical evidence that you can't do something, and then you get into another 8-year relationship trying to do exactly the same thing, please don't tell me that you had a genuine theory that you could turn crazy people sane.
	Well, I get what you're saying, but you have to understand from my perspective, to put Her, on the same level as my mom, the same level of crazy is just...
	It's just not accurate.
	I'm sorry. Are you saying that your mom is crazier than your girlfriend?
	Way crazier. Okay.
	I'm happy to hear how she's way crazier than your demon-loving, self-cutting girlfriend.
	She's not demon-loving.
	She's just...
	So, my wife is...
	I liked being around her, right?
	She... I told you earlier about the support of it.
	Like, I would not feel...
	Like, I felt comfortable around her, whereas my mom, I mean, being around her for just two minutes is...
	That's enough.
	A little bit goes a long way.
	I mean, so I wasn't...
	I'm drained. Okay, okay.
	Let's go back to your girlfriend.
	And I don't mean to interrupt you, but let's be real brisk about this, right?
	So let's go back to your girlfriend.
	Now imagine that you have absolutely no sexual access to her.
	You can't kiss her, you can't touch her, you can't make love with her, anything like that.
	Okay? No sexual access.
	No romantic access.
	She is, I don't know, she has zero interest in sex.
	She finds sex repulsive.
	She finds romance repulsive.
	She would never date any man.
	There's no sexual access to her whatsoever.
	No romantic access to her whatsoever.
	Yes. Okay.
	How long does your relationship last if there's no sexual or romantic possibility with your wife?
	I mean, it doesn't.
	It doesn't last. You're right.
	Okay, so obviously no sexual or romantic access to your mom.
	And you say, well, I can't stand my mom, but I was fine with my girlfriend.
	It's like, yeah, because one of them gives you sexual access, right?
	Yeah. I don't mean to be overly blunt, but let's call a spade a spade, so to speak.
	Yeah. No, I hear it.
	Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
	I get what you're saying. And again, I've been there.
	I had the girlfriend who claimed psychic powers and...
	I said, let's go to Vegas and pick up the million dollars from the amazing Randy for proving psychic powers and, you know, I'll split it with you 50-50.
	We can both walk out of this a half a million dollars US richer and this is back when a half a million dollars was real money, right?
	So I'm like, you know, I called her bluff, right?
	Yeah. And of course she said, it doesn't work that way, right?
	There's no testable way, blah, blah, blah.
	It's just a feeling. It just happens and there's no prediction.
	So she knows it's a lie.
	If she genuinely believed she had psychic powers, she would go and win a million dollars.
	Yes. Which is a standing offer from the amazing Randy in Vegas to anybody who can prove psychic powers, right?
	So if she genuinely believed she had psychic powers, this would be like somebody holding a lottery ticket they know is worth a million dollars but simply refusing to cash it in.
	Yes. So she knew that she was lying.
	Right? In the same way that if you were to say to your girlfriend, oh, have the guardian angels tell me something about me I've never told you.
	And then she would immediately remove that as a standard of proof, even though that's a perfectly logical standard of proof.
	Right? So if your girlfriend was on the phone with some guy, or your wife, and that guy, and she said, oh, this guy claims to know you, and you don't know the name, right?
	Right? Right.
	You'd say, oh, well, where does he know me from?
	Oh, he met you in Salt Lake City.
	And you'd say, well, I've never been to Salt Lake City, so you would find out things, right?
	Yes. Or, you know, oh, he says he grew up on your street, and you didn't believe him.
	You'd say, okay, what was the street I grew up on?
	And if you couldn't answer that, you'd just know it was a scam, right?
	Right. Just basic questions, right?
	Yep. And so if she says, oh yeah, no, there are guardian angels around you and they're already communicating with me because I know that they don't like me.
	It's like, okay, well, let's test this, right?
	And you know what would happen.
	She knows she's lying. Because the moment that you would ask her for proof, she would just move the goalposts, which is what scam artists always do, right?
	Right, right.
	Yep. I should have known from my mom's experience.
	I can't change her. You're right.
	Well, you can't change her by rewarding her.
	You can't change her by buying a house for her.
	Yeah, even though that's what she wanted, but it's not going to change her.
	Well, no, it's because that's what she wanted.
	If you give someone what they wanted and they're crazy, then don't tell me you want them to be sane.
	Here, you're crazy, I'll give you a house.
	Oh, she's still crazy?
	That's weird. It's like her being crazy got her the house.
	Yeah. So, all the way back to the first date, you said that she was really uncertain and really ambivalent about getting on the date.
	It was real hard to organize, right?
	Yeah. Now, do you know what that's for?
	Why did she do that?
	You know, I don't know. I mean, I know she was used by a lot of guys prior to me.
	Well, she used them too.
	Let's not give her the victim card, right?
	Right. Okay, so the reason why she made it very hard for you to have a first date is to filter out all the guys who aren't totally desperate.
	Okay. Right, so she's like, okay, how desperate is this guy?
	How controllable is this guy?
	Again, I'm not saying this is conscious or anything, right?
	So she makes it really hard to arrange the date.
	Now, if you're trying to arrange a date with someone and they keep changing the time and then canceling and this and that and the other, what does a guy with genuine self-esteem and lots of options, what does he do?
	Well, he quits.
	Like, he stops. No, he's like, you know, this woman doesn't even know how to set up a date.
	I'm not going to bind my life in together with her, right?
	Right. She's too chaotic to even have a first date with.
	I mean, my God, this isn't going to go well, right?
	Right. Yeah. Yeah.
	Okay, so then she shows up disheveled, right?
	That's a strong word.
	She just was very unassuming.
	Plain. I would be more comfortable with plain as opposed to disheveled, but plain.
	What was it about her shoes? Do I remember something about her shoes?
	Ratty shoes, yeah.
	They were like old and...
	Coming out. Yes.
	Yep. Okay. So that's ready.
	Okay. Yeah. Got shoes with holes in them, right?
	Mm-hmm. So that's also how desperate is he?
	Is he going to overlook the shoes?
	Right? And then how long was it after your first date that you had sex?
	It was, I want to say, after our first date, it was within a couple of weeks.
	Okay, so that's pretty fast, right?
	And that's certainly not what Christianity would recommend, right?
	Yes, and she initiated.
	Okay, so then she gives you the romance bomb, she gives you the love bomb, and then how long after your first date and first sexual activity was it that she's like, if you're not here, I'll kill myself?
	Okay. Well, that came in after she moved in, and she moved in within about, what, three, four months.
	And why did she move in?
	The apartment that she was sharing with someone, the lease was going to be up for renewal soon, and she kept hinting around that she wanted to move in, and I finally took the hint and invited her in.
	And did she pay her half of the bills?
	Oh, yeah. Okay.
	All right. And so was it shortly after she moved in where she's like, if you're not here, I'll kill myself?
	Yes. Yeah, actually even there was an incident prior to her moving in where she comes in my house, my condo at the time, and it's like – because she worked second shift at that time.
	So I'm sleeping, right?
	So she comes in at like midnight.
	She comes in and I was not expecting her.
	And instead of going home, she comes to my house, comes in the bed and says, I didn't want to go home.
	I belong with you. So she even sent signals even before she moved in that she really needed me.
	Right. Now, was your place much nicer than hers?
	No. A condo versus a roommate in an apartment?
	I mean, it was...
	Okay, she was in a nice townhouse-style condo, but she didn't like her roommate, and obviously she would save a lot of money with me.
	So in that respect, she was nicer.
	Wait, wait. Hang on. Why would she save a lot of money with you?
	Well, because I owned the condo, and so I have a mortgage versus...
	They were running out of townhouse, and so half of my mortgage was much...
	Cheaper than half of her rent.
	By how much? Probably, you know, all said and done with utilities.
	She'd probably say like $300 a month, I would say.
	Okay. And did you guys merge finances or did you just both cut checks or how did it work that she would pay half your mortgage?
	She would... Give me a bunch of blank checks and I would tell her the amount every month and I would deposit it.
	And that's how it goes.
	We didn't merge finances until we got married.
	Okay. So she, I wouldn't say snuck into, I guess she had a key to your place before you moved in together when she was working the second shift.
	And she has a key to your place and she comes in a couple of months into your dating or a month or two into your dating and just kind of crawls into bed with you?
	Yes. It says that she couldn't bear the thought of being away from me.
	Right. Direct appeal to vanity, right?
	And this is a time when she was angling to get in and have a decent place, or I guess her place already was decent, but have a better living situation and save some money too, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, I think she was attracted to me as well.
	I mean, she wanted security.
	She wanted stability. Yeah.
	Well, being attracted to security and stability is being attracted to your resources.
	Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
	But that's probably, isn't that true of most women or all women?
	Well, women are attracted to resources, of course, and men are attracted to beauty, of course.
	And we're aware of that.
	It's like saying, well, everybody wants to eat Sugar and salt, right?
	It's like, well, yeah, we're all attracted to sugar and we're all attracted to candy, which is why we have to be very disciplined about these things, right?
	Yes. I mean, we're all attracted to resources.
	Women are attracted to resources and men are attracted to physical attractiveness of beauty, right?
	And so we know that.
	And of course, Christianity warns us about that and philosophy warns us about that too.
	That just because something tastes good doesn't mean it's good for you.
	In fact, the better it tastes, particularly at the beginning, the more careful you have to be.
	I mean, everyone has a food weakness, right?
	I mean, mine is like carrot cake or whatever, right?
	So everyone has a food weakness, and it's like, that's why I don't keep carrot cake in the house.
	Right. So yeah, women are attracted to resources.
	But... You guys ended up flipping positions, right?
	So you started off as the dominant one and the one in charge and the one with resources and the one who was going to help her and the one who was elevated.
	Is that fair to say? Yes, absolutely.
	Okay. And then how did it end up?
	Well, I mean, I guess the only thing I could say is what she was once attracted to.
	She seems to resent me for her.
	Well, we haven't even really asked the question of what she was attracted to, so I'm not sure what that is as yet.
	But what happened is it started out with you being superior and her begging for things, in a sense, begging to move in, begging to have your company, and now she's superior and you're begging for things, right?
	Yes, and I'm begging for her attention and her love.
	So the mechanics of the relationship have inverted in a completely predictable fashion.
	So, where you are at the end, in terms of your status and need, is the opposite of where you were at the beginning.
	Does that make sense? Yes.
	Right. And again, that's, I mean, that's tragically very predictable, right?
	Yeah. And that's the price you pay for vanity.
	The price you pay for vanity is humiliation, right?
	Yeah, I feel humiliated.
	Yeah, and I completely understand that.
	And the reason you feel humiliated is you think that something is being done to you that's somehow different from every choice you made along the way.
	It's sort of like if I eat 10,000 calories a day and then I say, well, I feel really humiliated that I'm overweight.
	Right. And this is the concept of sin and the concept of temptation and the consequences of the wages of sin, right?
	Right. The wages of sin is death, and in this case, the wages of sin is the death of the marriage, right?
	That you got involved with a woman who was against your values in massive ways, right?
	And the wages of sin is death, right?
	And you felt superior to her, and now you end up, right?
	I mean, you know the story. The devil gives you all this elevation, and it's like, oh, you get money and power and fame and glory.
	You get all this elevation, right?
	And then you end up humiliated and under the control of the devil, right?
	So you get all this high status, which then translates into incredibly low status or negative status in that case, right?
	So you were tempted by the flesh.
	You were tempted. You didn't want to grieve that you couldn't fix your mom.
	So you tried to fix this woman to continue the pattern, right?
	Because if you accept that you can't fix your mom, then you have some tough decisions to make about your mom, right?
	Right.
	or I can somehow make them improve and right.
	And you say, well, my mom is crazy because she rejects reality,
	but you're not any saner by thinking you could change her because that's rejecting reality.
	Right?
	So, the reason that we don't grieve our losses
	is we pretend that we can fix them somehow in the future in some undefined.
	So we keep chasing after this, quote, salvation that means we don't have to grieve.
	Look, man, you had a really tough brother as a kid and I really sympathize with that.
	I mean, that's very humiliating to have a crazy mom.
	And for those of you out there who listen to this eventually, if you don't have a crazy mom, you don't know, or a crazy dad, you don't know how humiliating it is.
	Because friends want to come over, right?
	And you're like, oh, I don't know, man.
	Maybe you can come over when my mom's not here.
	And it's really embarrassing to have very dysfunctional – and particularly if you go to this kind of wealthy school, right?
	It's really, really embarrassing to have this kind of dysfunctional family.
	Because it's shaming, right?
	So, you know, your whole life, you're like, low status, negative status, low status, negative status, crazy mom, predator dad, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And I really feel for you.
	That's low status, right? Now, I mean, you're more mad at the girl who talked about your dad than you are at your dad for doing this.
	Yep. So, you've got a lot to grieve with regards to Your childhood.
	There was a lot of humiliation in your childhood.
	A lot of humiliation, right?
	And so you meet this girl and you're like, oh, I know how to solve the humiliation of my childhood without actually processing it.
	I'll just have high status now.
	I'll get the pretty girl. I'll get the skinny girl.
	And everybody at my wedding will be like, oh man, I can't believe you've got such a great girl or blah, blah, blah, right?
	So you're pushed down.
	You're pushed down like a helium balloon.
	And you know what happens. You're like a boom, right?
	All the way up, right? Like in the balloon in water, right?
	So you're pushed down. You're pushed down.
	And you've got to grieve that being pushed down.
	The humiliation, the people who are responsible for it are your parents.
	And your society, extended family, whatever, right?
	So... And what we avoid grieving, we reproduce.
	So you're like, oh, I'm going to solve humiliation by being superior to my wife, my very pretty wife.
	And then what happens?
	What do you end up with? Same damn thing over again.
	You're humiliated. There's no solution to grief except grieving.
	You had a very tough as a kid on every conceivable level and some, I mean, I had a pretty tough as a kid, but not, you know, as far as your dad goes.
	I mean, that's a whole special category of hell, right?
	So, you know, massive sympathies.
	And how do you deal with that?
	Well, first of all, you accept that it wasn't your fault.
	And secondly, you accept that you can't change it.
	You can't change your parents.
	I mean, it's hard enough to change yourself, right?
	Let alone somebody else.
	And you can't change your parents in particular because it's a power dynamic that was established for 20 years where they're in charge.
	I mean, as a parent myself now, I fully accept I could never change my mom.
	Because you remember your mom from the age of 5 or 6 or 7 or whatever, but your mom remembers you in her womb as a baby.
	So you have years and years, half a decade or more, as a parent of your kid being helpless and you being completely in charge, and you just can't change that dynamic later.
	Yep. You can't change your mom, and you're not responsible for what you did.
	You can't change your dad, and you're not responsible for what he did.
	But the avoidance of that...
	I call it Simon the Boxer, like this repetition compulsion, because the grief that's avoided will just be like, okay, you can avoid me.
	You can spend eight years if you want avoiding me, but I'm going to put you right back in that position until you acknowledge me.
	I feel like you've hit it on the head.
	I definitely was avoiding grief.
	And here's the other thing, too.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, and I'll shut up in a sec.
	But here's the other thing, too, is that it's not just a decision you made.
	Like, I just wake up and go, hey, I'm going to avoid grief, right?
	No, who does avoiding your grief serve?
	If you don't process your grief, that you can't change your mother, that you can't change your father, that you're not responsible for their terrible decisions and the bad things that happened to you as a kid, right?
	If you process your grief, whose interest does it harm?
	Well, I guess I would say maybe my parents.
	Yeah, of course. Once I processed my grief, and this was like two years of therapy for three hours a week and eight hours of journaling and all this kind of work, work, work, right?
	So if you process your grief and you give up the hope that your parents will change, I would argue that the only thing that's keeping you in the orbit of your parents in the way that you are is the hope that they'll change.
	And if you give up that hope and say, you know what, I'm just going to accept them for who they are, that's going to fundamentally change the relationship, right?
	And if you say, geez, I mean, after 30 plus years, my mom is now manipulating my divorce, so I'll spend more time with her.
	Jesus. I mean, it's kind of unholy in my opinion, right?
	To use your most essential and horrifying suffering in order to manipulate more resources and time and whatever out of you, right?
	Yeah. Yes. Talk about going through the body and looking for the wallet, right?
	For me, when I accepted that my parents, they're not going to change.
	Or if they are, it's going to have nothing to do with me.
	And certainly me giving them resources without them changing only rewards them for not changing, which means they're even less likely to change.
	So for me, it's like, okay, I have to look at my mom, look at my dad, and say, do I want them for who they are?
	Do I like them for who they are?
	Forget about some fantasy parents that could somehow magically inhabit their bodies and turn them into whoever, right?
	Some great people. Forget all that.
	Like, I complain that other people don't live in reality.
	Let me live in reality. Instead of nagging the world for being anti-irrational and anti-empirical, why don't I stop being anti-irrational and anti-empirical with regards to my own family and say, okay, this is who they are.
	Do I like them for who they are?
	Because being with someone conditional upon them changing is to say, I don't love who you are.
	In fact, I quite dislike it intensely.
	But I'm going to sit here and pour resources in in the hopes that you change.
	So when you're with your girlfriend and wife, when you're with your girlfriend and wife, On the belief and the hope that she will change, you're openly saying to her, or I guess not openly, you're pretty unsubtly saying to her, I don't like who you are, but I'm willing to stick around for who you might be.
	It's like, well, why would you stick around for someone she might be?
	Because she's pretty and you have sexual access.
	So you're having sex with someone, you're openly basically saying, I don't like you.
	Because you have to be enormously different for me to really respect you and like you.
	So having sex with someone you don't like, and then you say, gee, well, other men seem to have used her in the past.
	Having sex with someone you don't like, and then saying, well, you know, she can be kind of manipulative.
	Or having sex with someone you don't like while saying that you like them, lying to them about liking them.
	In other words, having sex with a woman through deception, then you say, well, you know, she really doesn't seem to have much respect for me.
	Well, of course not, because you have no respect for her.
	Yeah. So how do I... Oh, please don't jump into how do I fix this.
	No, I was just going to be like, how do I move forward?
	I don't know. I just process my grief and just accept it.
	Like, this relationship is not redeemable, does it sound like to you?
	Well, I... I can't make that determination, but I will say this, that if you accept that it's a tough call in the middle of a divorce, which can be a legally volatile situation, but the thing that I would do if I were in your shoes would be to say, okay... Let me start by being passive, right?
	Because when you're the victim of abuse as a child, you either become totally passive or you become kind of hypo, hyperactive, right?
	I've got to fix everything. I've got to solve everything.
	I've got to manage everyone, right? You become like this crazy, busy bee on cocaine or whatever, right?
	So for me, one of the big things was like, okay, instead of me telling myself what I should do, why don't I just see what I feel like doing?
	So I would sit there.
	I'd look at the phone. This is back in the days.
	I think this was post-rotary dial, but pre-cell phone.
	So I'd look at the phone with these little push buttons.
	And I'd say, okay, I know my mom's number, obviously.
	Do I want to call her?
	Not should I. Am I obligated to?
	I haven't called her in a while.
	Tension is mounting. She wants me to call.
	Do I want to call her?
	And I just waited. And I wouldn't make myself do anything.
	You know, people complain about all this tyranny coming from the outside, and I get it, and I understand that, and I sympathize.
	But the tyranny that most people experience is on the inside.
	Right? Having some obligation, having some imperative, pleasing other people who are dysfunctional, running after the crazy kite tail of random people and just, I gotta, I gotta, I must, I must.
	And I just sat there and said, okay, if I don't want to call my mom, what does it mean to have integrity?
	Now, I can call her up and say, listen, I'm hesitant to call you because of X, Y, and Z, and I did that sometimes.
	It never went well. But what is it to have integrity?
	Well, if I don't want to call my mom, is it having integrity to force myself to call my mom?
	No. If I don't enjoy my conversations with my father...
	Because I told my father about the issues I'd had as a child, the violence and the dysfunction and all of that, and he would never bring it up again.
	So I'm not going to sit there and have a call where avoiding the elephant in the room.
	That's a form of rejection.
	And that would be entirely for his benefit.
	So I talk to my son.
	But if he's going to ignore the basic reality of the violence that I experienced as a child, why on earth would I want to talk to him?
	Do I want to participate in another denial of something I made very clear to him that he never is going to talk about?
	No, I don't want to get involved in that.
	No, thank you. So, and it's just asking yourself those tough questions.
	Okay, what did I really respect and admire about my mom?
	What did I really respect and admire about?
	And don't make stuff up.
	Don't be sentimental. Don't pull out the Hallmark cards, right?
	Don't be sentimental. Just be really, like, blank slate.
	Right? And the other mental exercise that I did, which I've shared before, is, okay, so I'm at a dinner party with just some people I don't know, and my dad sits beside me.
	And he's not my dad, he's just some guy.
	Or my mom sits beside me.
	Okay, am I enjoying their company enough where I'm going to say, let's do this again sometime?
	Do you like someone in the moment?
	Forget the history and the imprinting, because we live life in the moment, and you can't just get sentimental because of past stuff.
	I mean, you can, but it just means you get controlled by it, right?
	So I'd sit there and say, well, do I want to call my mom?
	Do I want to call my dad? And I would just wait for that to happen, and I wasn't going to force myself to do it, because that's being a bully to myself, right?
	So you've got to ask yourself, okay, what did I really like about...
	And you can give yourself the gay test, too, right?
	So the gay test is, if I were gay, would I want to hang out with the woman who's my girlfriend, right?
	In other words, if I was not sexually attracted to her at all and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Would I want to hang out with her if...
	I were gay. Or if she were a lesbian, and there was no possibility of romantic access or whatever, right?
	And if the answer is no, well then you're there for the sex, and that's going to blow up in your face, no question.
	Because no woman enjoys being used for sex in the long run.
	She'll dangle it to get a short-term attachment, but she'll end up with nothing but contempt for the man
	Who lies about her moral qualities in order to have sex with her?
	And she can't solve the fact that you humiliated his kid And she's not responsible for doing that.
	Yep. And she shouldn't be.
	Right. Well, thank you, sir.
	I really appreciate your time.
	You are very welcome. Does it sound like it was useful?
	Was it a helpful convo for you?
	It was very helpful.
	It was very profound.
	I have a lot of processing to do.
	Well, that's how I roll, man, and that's why I didn't want to do it when you had to go relatively quickly, and I know you've got a boogie now, so I just wanted to make, because we only had an hour and a quarter the way it was scheduled originally, or at least in the second round, so I wanted to make sure we had enough time, because it's a big topic.
	Will you keep me posted about how things are going?
	Yes, I will, sir. All right, appreciate it.
	Have a great evening. You too, sir.

▲