All Episodes
Previous Next
March 14, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:38:57
Sexless Marriage!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning. Good morning.
How are you doing? Doing great.
How's the call quality?
Not bad. I appreciate that.
It's a lot nicer to not have the nightmare of post-production, so I thank you for the mic, and I'm all yours.
How can I best help you?
Yeah. How do you want to start?
I see you read the email.
Do you want to read that off just so we get context?
I don't have it in front of me.
Unfortunately, I'm kind of out in the wilderness right now.
Ah, okay. Yeah, you can just tell me what's going on.
Yeah, so basically, the gist of what I wrote is I've been married for 17 years.
Oh, I'm sorry. You asked me about audio quality.
I'm getting a fair amount of wind noise.
Right. It's because I'm outside.
Yeah. Let me turn this direction.
How's that? Well, I can't tell you yet, but keep going.
Alright, so I've been married for about 17 years.
I'm going to be 17 in May.
And we've never really had a good way of resolving conflict in the marriage.
And I remember distinctly having a specific conflict right after we were married.
I'm not exactly sure You know the exact timing but it was fairly soon after we had started living together because we were both raised conservative Christian and you know we didn't have sex before marriage we didn't live together obviously and you know after we moved in and started organizing our lives some conflict arose I don't know the details of it but I remember distinctly Thinking to myself, there's no way out.
I tried to make my case.
It was as if what I said didn't actually matter.
So I sought some counsel with my father and basically he told me, look, you got to pick your battles.
You got to cut your losses. Some things are not worth fighting about.
Basically, save your anger for things that are important.
Because I guess in his mind, whatever I was upset about or arguing just didn't, to him, didn't seem to be worth trying to jeopardize the marriage.
So, I took his advice.
I basically dropped it.
But the problem was I didn't really drop it.
I think to myself, okay, yeah, I just got to basically walk on eggshells when it comes to these types of things.
So I think that's been driving a lot of resentment in me for a very long time.
And it kind of culminated about...
Five years ago, I guess is when it really started.
During the whole COVID lockdown thing, our lives got upended during that whole disaster fiasco.
That's not to say nothing happened in the 12 years prior, but that was when things ramped up in our lives.
And that's when I think the bitterness and the resentment kind of took hold and started manifesting.
It turned into me being snippy and snappy.
Verbal abuse, for sure.
There wasn't anything physical.
Sorry, what sort of verbal abuse? Just name-calling, like, you're stupid, you're retarded, that kind of thing.
Just Me being really horrible.
And did she pay back in kind or no?
Sorry, I got a guest to win here.
Can you still hear me?
Alright, perfect.
She would respond by getting hyper-emotional because I'm hurting her emotionally and Basically, her responses would be to the effect of, that's not how you're supposed to be.
That's a horrible thing to say, etc.
I don't recall verbal abuse from her coming back at me.
Yeah, I would say no.
Okay. So, where we are now, I have a daughter.
She's turning six this year.
We've been kind of...
Wow, you guys were together for a while before you had kids.
Yes. You want that story too?
Okay. So, after we got married, since we obviously didn't have sexual relations, there was some Difficulties with having sex.
Sorry. Oh, since you didn't have sexual relations before you got married.
Right. We were both virgins doing the Christian thing, and I highly recommend it, even though it didn't quite...
I think our circumstance was kind of unique, but I mean, I don't go around quizzing people on their sex lives.
But how old were you when you got married?
I was 20 and she was 21.
So... And she's actually my first girlfriend.
And... It was...
I didn't really play the field so much.
My... My history was...
Is like...
Wasn't really...
Didn't really pursue a lot of women during high school because of...
I was really career focused at the time.
I know from 16 onward, I was working out in the workforce.
And I was doing electrical work, making pretty good money.
And I knew that all the women in my social circle at that point were going to go off to college.
So I didn't really think about that so much.
But when I met my wife, it was sort of a small young adults group at the church where I was going.
And I knew right away that she was the one because she was awesome.
She had super high morals, very similar to mine.
And I mean, I really do think she's quite the woman.
But the reason we waited so long after getting married to have kids is we had the difficulty having penetrative sex.
And it was...
The technical term is called vaginismus.
And it's, you know, it makes penetrating very, very difficult, very painful for the woman.
And it's...
It's very difficult to think about, you know, hurting your wife when you're trying to, you know, do what you're supposed to do when you're married.
Of course, I'm so sorry.
Yeah, so, I mean, thanks.
I just don't expect to get so emotional about it.
The act of love is causing your wife pain.
This is terrible. Right.
We had some various emotional issues arise from that.
She did go through physical therapy to try to fix that.
It was very interesting because, of course, she's telling me everything as we're going through it.
She was mentioning how they...
The therapist is saying, oh yeah, very strict religious upbringing.
I see a lot of patients with this similar background to you, which kind of got me thinking.
So very Christian conservative women can't have sex.
Honestly, I have no idea what it's really supposed to be.
Sorry, but I don't understand why Christian conservative women would have this particular issue.
Well, the therapist, she was saying usually it's because of abuse of some sort, usually sexual abuse, and as far as I know, my wife has not experienced any of that.
I've asked her on numerous occasions if there was anything like that in her history, and she said no.
Sorry, and I apologize.
I mean, I've heard of this, but I don't really know the details.
Is it scar tissue on the vagina or the labia?
Is it involuntary muscle contractions?
What is it that makes the penetrative so difficult?
It is the involuntary muscle contraction specifically.
So when you go to penetrate, it'll get real tight real quick.
And she had to do breathing exercises and ways to try and relax her body.
So it's kind of like very similar to having an anxiety attack, but it's surrounding your sexual organs and muscles.
I assume it's physiological or psychological.
I mean, you wouldn't say psychological in a way, but it's like an involuntary anxiety response.
Is that right? That would be my best description, you know, amateur description.
That's how I would call it.
You're less of an amateur than I am because you've dealt with it for 17 years.
Yeah, it's definitely muscular because you can feel it going on.
It does depend on her cycle to a degree.
Obviously, when the woman's ovulating, things loosen up down there, which also...
Made things better, for her at least, but if we were...
Well, better or, like, good or just less bad?
Less painful. She wouldn't experience pain when she was ovulating.
And that's just... Sorry, but would she experience pleasure?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I would make sure to...
Satisfy her. Oh no, sorry.
I'm not talking about non-penetrative sex.
What I mean is that during penetrative sex, would it be pleasurable for her?
And I'm sorry to ask, I just kind of want to understand the context of this.
Would it then be pleasurable for her, or just less painful or neutral, like the penetrative sex?
I haven't asked her specifically if she...
Ever experienced pleasure while having penetrative sex?
I would assume no. It always seemed like, hey, you've satisfied me, now I'm going to satisfy you.
Not like a gross transactional tit for tat, more like she's trying her best to make me have a good time.
She would say, yeah, you can go in, but there was never...
As soon as I would get in there.
I would try and finish as quickly as possible.
Because to me, it's like, I'm hurting you.
I can't. I don't want to hang around.
Holy boner killer, Batman.
That is stressful. Yeah, and I apologize if I laugh about it because it's kind of just like a coping thing.
Because it's really serious.
It sucks. It's funny how you'd say it sucks.
I mean, I'm sure that's just an accidental choice of words.
You know, the English language is...
Not precisely. In many words, it means anything.
In fact, very precise. I mean, I'm obviously not serious.
I'm really sorry for this.
That's a very difficult and horrible thing.
Did she, I mean, if it was not sexual abuse, was there any other, I don't know, vaginal trauma or, I don't know, a pole vaulting difficulty or some gymnastics?
I mean, what do I know about mysterious plumbing?
Was there anything else that might have caused these psychological spasms?
I can speculate wildly on that.
So her parents were very control of.
They're still very control of.
I blame them 100% for it.
Basically, from what she's told me about her first boyfriend experience, she grew up in the backwoods of Maine, like 40 minutes from the coast, mid-coast Maine.
And they had a very small, tight-knit community.
Baptist, if you want to put a label on it.
They're actually very, very nice people.
I've been up there to visit them.
Very welcoming, very generous, very kind people.
And there was a young fella up there who was interested in her when she was, I believe, I think it was 17 or 18.
Because I met her...
When she was, I believe, just turning 20.
So they had just moved to my area and she was still emotionally attached to him when they moved down here.
Remind me, how long had they gone out?
I'm going to guess at least a year.
But, I mean, going out in a tight-knit Christian Baptist scenario is more or less, hey, we're together, air quotes, but there wasn't any sexual contact, you know, no touching, no groping.
No, I get that for sure.
Yeah. But there was a lot of stigma and pressure because of their ages.
Obviously, they were young.
He wanted to get married, but the parents...
Her parents were like, you're not ready to get married, etc.
And she ended up sneaking out and meeting him.
And the story is, because I wasn't there, this is all secondhand, she kissed him.
And her parents somehow figured out that this rendezvous had occurred.
And basically, she lied to her parents to try and get out.
And the lying...
You mean try to get out? Well...
Oh, you mean to get out of trouble?
Right, right. She was trying to lessen the severity of the reaction, so she lied to them about it, and then I don't know how exactly they figured it out, but they eventually got full details.
Either she confessed to it, or I'd have to ask her.
But regardless, the punishment that she endured for that, you know, acting out as Basically, a 19-year-old woman at that point.
She was banished to her room.
She was isolated from the family.
I think her dad tried to spank her, but she wouldn't let him when she was at this age.
They believed in spanking, too.
Which, when I heard that, I was kind of like jaw to the floor.
Sorry, maybe you can help me understand something.
Yeah. These are the people that you refer to as very nice people?
No, no, these are her parents.
I was saying the community around them were very nice, based on my interactions with them.
Her friends up there, which are now in their 30s, they all have kids.
Okay, got it, sorry. I'm not a fan of her parents at all for this experience.
I think that's the source of it.
I don't think they comprehend how damaging that was to her.
I know her mom has I apologize for it in passing.
It wasn't a real apology.
Like, you're not...
You know, I probably shouldn't have done that sort of thing.
Like, that kind of an apology. There was no, like, remorse.
It was sort of like...
How long did the punishment last?
I'm not exactly sure.
But it was not quick.
It was at least a week.
Could have been a month. I would guesstimate in that time frame.
Like, it was... It was full-blown ostracization.
Get that word out. And of course, she couldn't see the boy ever again?
Right. Well, no, she saw the boy after that, but it was pretty much a choose your family or the boy scenario.
It was very much hammered into her.
And another thing that I know occurred is...
After so long, the boy basically gave up trying to pursue her.
Because to him, it's like, hey, I'm just not going to go through this with her.
So she got rejected.
And it wasn't like he didn't like her.
She knew he liked her.
And they liked each other.
And so it was, I think, pretty terrible.
And, um... And, sorry, what is it, um...
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I just like asking the question, I'll ask it, right, doesn't mean anything, but I'll ask it anyway, because I think it's important, and...
I mean, that seems like a lot of punishment for a kiss.
Yeah. So...
And the lying. It was really about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get that, but she must have been frightened enough of her parents that a kiss...
So after you've been dating a guy for a year, and you're 19, the idea that you can't have a kiss?
Oh, it was...
I mean, like, honestly, that's crazy.
Yeah. Right?
So, like, I'm trying to figure out if they're unbelievable, like, almost unbelievable religious extremists, that they would expect their child, not their, they would expect a young woman in sort of the height of her hormones to date a guy for a year and then punish her viciously if she had one kiss?
Yeah. That's hard to believe.
Now, as you know, it was only a kiss.
I don't. I can't verify it.
I mean, I could probably call the guy up.
Well, he's probably not going to say too much to the husband.
Well, I mean, I've actually never met him.
I mean, I don't blame him for pursuing her.
She was smoking hot, babe.
Some guy, 20 years after, called up and said, did you do more than kiss my wife?
What's he going to say?
Absolutely not.
We were more than honorable, sir.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Honestly, the idea that you would...
Hit your child at 19 for kissing her boyfriend of one year because he was going to spank her, which is also completely bizarre for an adult.
It's bizarre enough for children.
It's completely bizarre for an adult, right?
Well, she didn't let it happen.
She basically said, absolutely not, and locked herself in a room.
No, I get that. But the fact that that would even be on the table, so to speak, is bizarre.
Yeah. So the level of punishment, either the parents are completely insane or I would agree.
I don't think it was more than a kiss.
So the parents are legit psychos when it comes to this?
Oh, 100%.
And that's not just based on this story, that's based on interacting with them for the last 18, 19 years.
When I met them, when we were dating, or I guess before we were dating, when we were kind of seeing each other in a group context, her mom and dad Would prohibit her from going out to the group and say things like, oh, you've had too much socializing, for example, as if she wasn't capable of making that decision for herself.
And they, you know, knew better.
Okay, so really neurotic.
It drove me bananas.
And honestly, sorry, I am being honest.
When I was dating her, I had zero understanding of how that environment affected people at that point in time in my life.
Oh, you mean like the family environment and its effects on your wife?
Right. Looking back, thinking about it now, there were massive, massive red flags that I just was not aware.
I didn't have the knowledge to decipher it.
And know what it would lead to?
Because, you know, I'm young, dumb, and full of cum, as they say.
And they seemed like good Christian people, you know, the kind of people you want to associate with in the Christian community.
And my experience with the Christian community was pretty standard.
Not Baptist. My family wasn't Baptist.
They were... I guess Baptist light without naming denominations, but then went into the Presbyterian Church, kind of went like full spectrum from Armenian to Calvinist.
But if you're not familiar with doctrinal disputes of the Christian faith, that might be my point.
I have some familiarity, but I'm certainly not an expert.
So what with the green flags?
You said she was the one, you saw her, the angels, right?
She dressed modestly.
She was very kind.
I absolutely loved her attitude when it came to just being around people, very sociable.
She wasn't...
I kind of look at it like she was the hot girl that didn't know she was hot.
You've got a bit of a librarian thing going on.
Yeah. And of course, she plays the cello, which just ups the sex factor, like, by a thousand.
I don't know if you've ever...
Oh, you look at that finger dexterity on the shaft, and yeah, yeah, I get it.
Okay, dude. I saw her play in church, man.
That was not...
Well, it wasn't just God who was in that church then, my friend.
Well, it was, you know, she's...
She's not a classically trained musician, but she does a lot of...
Oh, what's the word?
You play by ear...
I can't think of it. No, listen, I get it.
She's got her legs spread and she's playing the shaft.
I get it. I'm down.
I understand. I just need a moment.
Okay. No, but it's just...
So you obviously found her.
She was pretty. She was attractive, sexy, all of that kind of good stuff.
Virtuous. The kindness thing I'm trying to sort of square with the later marriage stuff, like where she doesn't listen to your side of a dispute.
I don't see the kindness thing regarding that.
Okay, so what were the other green flags for you?
Well, like I said, from a morality standpoint, she was far more righteous in the Christian standard than I was.
I was, you know, I work in construction and I hang with the guys, you know, and that kind of potty mouth type scenario.
You're a little more earthy than she is.
Yes. Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
You know, when I met her, I think I was wearing blue jeans with oil stains on them because I was working on my motorcycle.
So she may have had a little bit of a bad boy thing going on too.
A cello player and the motorcycle guy.
This is almost like some Harlequin cliche.
I sort of picture you with Fabio's hair on a wimpset mountaintop taking her off.
Fabio's hair is way too straight.
I have curly hair. Right, okay.
Completely different. Sorry.
Okay, so you admired her faith, you admired her skills, her musical abilities, her talents, her kindness, obviously intelligence.
She knew how to make a meal.
She used excellent homemaking skills.
That was one thing her parents did get right, in my opinion.
Yeah. So it's like you go over to her house and she's making dinner and it's like, oh, okay.
All right. I don't have to live off Hungry Man if I marry this woman.
Right. I don't have to love her for radiated food.
24-7. Got it.
So she's ticking all these boxes and I said, yep, I'm going to commit to her because I was thinking about children and I was thinking...
You know, this woman would be a great mother for all the reasons aforementioned.
Got it. Okay. And then how long was it until you got married?
We met in, I believe, June of 2006 or 2000.
No, it was 2005. And then we got married in May of 2007.
So there was a little bit of drama when she first came in that this other guy was pursuing her.
So I had to kind of snatch her from the jaws of the wealthy farmer fella.
That's a whole other story.
But that was an interesting side of our dating life.
But I could tell she didn't really like him.
I could tell she liked me more.
She was giving me all the signals and giving him none of them.
So I just bid my time and eventually they broke up and then I said, hey, you're my girl.
And yeah, so we were engaged for about six months because we had known each other at that point for a very long time.
So we didn't really want a long engagement for obvious reasons.
We're not sleeping together.
Okay.
And is there anything else that you wanted to talk about with regards to courting and
dating?
No.
I would just say from the courting side, I mean, we were really hot and heavy for each other.
I mean, we did not sleep together, but we got pretty darn close, I'll tell you what.
And it was a The hormones were flying.
Her parents did attempt to control that as much as they possibly could.
To the point where I think my wife, and actually her sister, her sister got married very quickly too.
They got married, they had like a shorter courtship with her husband.
And they got married within like six months of meeting.
And they're still married, they have three kids.
And then my wife was literally five months after that, we got married.
So her and her sister were both itching to get the heck out of the house as quickly as possible.
And that was kind of the vibe, like, let's go, you know?
Let's get out of here, because she just could not live with them.
But you were willing to wait longer, right?
Of course, yeah.
And which one of you wanted to wait longer?
Oh, I don't think either one of us wanted to wait any longer.
It was her parents trying to control and manipulate the scenario.
They put some stipulations for me, like, you got to get a life insurance policy, which is not a bad idea at all.
You're going to take care of my daughter, that kind of thing.
But I had to ask her dad to marry her, which I didn't mind.
To me, that's kind of the way it works.
Not that he's...
And I always thought that was kind of funny because you don't own your daughter.
And we could just elope.
It's not like you could stop us.
Some of the tactics that you've employed are technically kidnapping and unlawful detainment probably would be the nicer way of putting it.
I never kind of...
Put that in their faces because I wanted to have a good relationship with them because of her.
I didn't want to be like, your parents are absolutely horrifying and we need to disconnect.
I have since changed that tune over the last probably three years.
Really, the COVID thing kind of sealed the deal.
I don't want anything to do with them at this point because of how they responded during COVID. So, yeah, as far as the courtship goes, it seemed pretty standard from a Christian perspective.
Okay. And then, of course, after you get married, you run into these sexual difficulties, and, I mean, they remain unresolved.
Is that right to some degree?
It's gotten better over the years.
I, based on my marital problems, we haven't been sleeping together.
For quite some time, I'm not exactly sure, but it's been at least six months.
Six months, you had no sexual activity.
Right, from now.
So it was kind of on the uptick.
When she started drawing boundaries with her parents, I did notice that things started to improve in the sexual penetration side.
Well, okay, but so let's do a little bit.
So when you started, you ran into these problems.
It was painful. And how long did it take for you guys to go and get the medical help?
I want to say maybe a month or two.
We didn't wait to try and figure it out.
It was, hey, this is not the way it's supposed to be.
She has way too much pain, that kind of thing.
So she went and sought help pretty much immediately.
Okay, and I guess you got psychological exercises, relaxation, breathing exercises.
And so what was happening with your sexual frequency early in your marriage?
Well, we did a lot of playing around, basically doing...
I mean, frequency, I would say probably once a week, maybe.
But it was kind of like, hey...
I don't want to...
It was weird.
It was just weird. It was hard for me to not feel like I was being selfish if I wanted to have sex with my wife because of the pain.
And, of course, she wasn't...
She didn't think of it that way.
She thought of it as, hey, I want to make my man happy.
Yeah, wife's duties and so on, right?
Right. So, I mean, we were young.
We did have sex frequently.
But a lot of it was not penetrative.
Like, I believe it took about a month.
Yeah. It took, oh no, it took like two or three weeks before we actually consummated the marriage in the traditional sense.
Right. And then you would have non-penetrative sex immediately.
Once a week or maybe more, but obviously you avoided the painful stuff, right?
Right. Got it.
And I guess sex was enjoyable for her as long as it wasn't...
Again, I'm sorry to be so asking, but I just want to map the marriage.
So sex for her was good as long as it wasn't penetrative, right?
Yes. And I would do my best to satisfy her in all the right ways without penetration.
Got it. So sex was relatively good and fun, as long as you avoided the difficult stuff, which was, I guess, I mean, it wasn't that much fun for either of you at that point, right?
Like penetrative stuff. Okay, got it.
So, given that you could have penetrative sex, and it took you, I don't know, rough math, what, 11 years?
Nine years? To have kids.
Was there a reason why you decided to not have kids for that length of time?
Absolutely. So, that reasoning in my head goes back to my childhood and her childhood, 100%.
I am one of eight kids.
And I'm number two in the line.
And basically, my dad and my mom, I mean, I was rejected as a kid, you know, because childhood neglect doesn't exist, right?
And so it's like my wife was over-controlled, over-scrutinized.
I was pretty much left out for the wolves to raise me.
And I noticed a sharp decline in my parents' attention towards their children the more children they had.
Since I was one of the older ones, a lot of the responsibility of babysitting, doing diapers fell onto me and my older brother.
My older brother was pretty much unhelpful in that regard.
He was very rebellious.
I say that, but Looking back, he was not getting what he needed from our parents.
So he was basically acting out, trying to get attention.
And my parents were always just focused on babies, babies, babies.
So in my head, I got married and...
I was like, hon, do you really want kids?
Because I'm okay waiting.
And my dad, I remember my dad coming to me saying, hey, you got married.
You guys need to start making babies.
And I kind of looked at him and I was the thousand yard stare like, how could you possibly think that I would want to do what you do?
Because you just got My father was not a wealthy man.
He worked constantly because he had 10 mouths to feed.
He ran his own business, which was somewhat successful some years.
He programmed COBOL, by the way.
Just shout out to you.
Hero of mine. Yep.
And he got a job one year up in a pretty...
Got a job in a town about an hour and a half away.
He was getting paid like 50 or 60 bucks an hour in the early 2000s to program these Cobalt machines that were still running manufacturing lines.
Yeah. That was kind of like the highlight of his career because he made a bucket of money back when $50 an hour was probably like, what, $200 an hour now?
Something like that. Especially grocery bills, yeah.
Yeah. So that contract ended.
He started an ISP, actually, in the late 90s, 97, back when you could use the POTS network for resold internet.
So I had a T1 in my house.
When I was...
Yeah, 97 up to 11 years old.
I had 3 megabit per second up and down symmetrical.
And everyone else was on 14.4 modems.
It's great. I still remember my first upgrade from the 96k modem.
Yeah. So...
I was popular at school at that point because I had the bandwidth.
That was it. I was the bandwidth kid.
So when Napster hit...
He was like, what song do you want?
I can get them all.
So, he was...
His career was very tumultuous.
Struggled sometimes, didn't struggle.
They were always... My parents were always kind of bad with money.
And it seems like when I was in high school...
We finally achieved a little bit of stability in the house we all lived in.
And then my parents decided to sell that house.
I think it was like 2000 and...
I want to say 2005.
So right when the real estate market was really ramping up in the US. And they sold that house and they bought a bed and breakfast the next county over.
God, it's like flipping the...
When I was a kid, some kid would come and say, with a deck of cards, right?
Hey, do you want to play? You'd have some cards.
What do you want to play? Hey, do you want to play 52-card pick-up?
And you'd say, sure.
And they'd knock all the cards out of your hands, and they're like, hey, and now you get to pick them up, right?
You know that old joke, right?
And so it's like your parents are like, well, which of the random deck of entrepreneurial possibilities are we going to draw from today?
Exactly. And that business failed miserably.
It really opened my eyes to the absolute evil of the banking system in America.
Because when it was all said and done, they lost all of their money, everything.
The bank took the house and then stole it and made money based on what they had put down prior.
I'm to the point where I think foreclosure should be illegal just based on the fact that the banksters literally want you to fail.
And it's so freaking possible.
Well, they want you to fail if they can make more money from your failure.
They always do.
That's the dirty secret.
Like anyone who says, oh, I lost money.
No, no. I mean, look, I'm sorry.
I know people who've failed and the bank has had to eat a lot of money.
A lot of money. Like they've declared bankruptcy and the banks have – like banks do lose money on loans from time to time and it's really – look, I'm not trying to give you big sympathy for the banks because they're all tied into central banking and all of that, but there are times when the banks really do lose some money.
Now, of course, they can just run to the Fed window and get more, so it's you and I, but it does sometimes happen.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no.
In this scenario, this type of property, they mortgaged it at like $700,000 US in 2006 timeframe.
And they were paying the mortgage up until they couldn't.
So they were making interest on the money.
They had sunk probably $300,000 into it to get in there.
So it was like a million dollar property.
But it was a functioning business at the time.
The business ran for maybe two or three years, but eventually they couldn't pay the mortgage.
They had to declare bankruptcy.
They stalled it out over a long period of time.
The bank eventually took it and then sold it for around $650,000.
So it...
Just a basic math.
Wait, sorry. Your parents bought it for $700,000, put $300,000 in, became a million-dollar property.
The bank sold it for $650,000?
No, no. The buy price was a million.
And then they had to mortgage 700.
So, the bank probably broke even.
My parents lost absolutely everything.
But that's in the past.
It's like... Sorry, but why did the business fail?
Because my parents weren't...
Their standards were not high enough for the Ben Breakfast industry, in my opinion.
They didn't have the resources to really invest in the upkeep and the maintenance.
They were always...
They dropped 300 grand into the property?
What do you mean? Yeah.
Yeah, but they didn't leave any to...
They didn't leave like $100,000 sitting around to just say, all right, we're going to update the rooms, we're going to do this, that, the other thing.
So they were always...
Sorry, I'm always curious about business successes and failures.
So they put 300 grand, but they didn't upgrade the rooms?
Correct. But the rooms at that point were not in terrible shape, but they did need attention.
What did they put the $300,000 in?
That was just the down payment for the property.
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought they did $300,000 in improvements.
No, no, no. That was just the down payment.
They took all of the money from the original house and then sunk it into the other house.
So they bought a house too expensive for them to upgrade?
Way too expensive.
Okay. So, I mean, the business failed because they bought the wrong house, right?
Correct. So what's with all the...
And again, I have problems with the bank, but it sounds to me like you've absorbed your father's losing story.
That it's the bank's fault or the bank profit.
And it's like, no, you're responsible for your business.
I mean, you know what I mean?
Everybody has to deal with banks.
Their business is to succeed.
Yeah. I point the finger at the banks just because of the whole interest speculation calculation.
It was predatory in my opinion because looking at my family's financials, there must have been a ridiculous amount of lying going on for them to get any banker to approve that mortgage.
I look at it as they knew they were going to fail from the get-go.
Just because the map is so absurd.
Oh, come on, man. Now, I've got to push back on this one.
And I could be wrong, obviously.
It's your family.
So are you saying that it's the bank's fault that your parents lied to the bank?
No. It's my parents' fault for them lying to the bank.
And the bank was like, sure, we absolutely will hand you $700,000 based on very loose figures.
But I mean, everybody was doing that in the 2005 era.
Everybody was doing that.
I mean, this is why the banks ended up having to run to the government for their trillion dollar bailout, right?
Well, it wasn't from this property.
Well, no, but that's because they sold it before the crash, right?
Well, they did not sell the property before the crash.
They got kicked out in 2010, Hallpark.
Oh, so when the recovery was a little bit underway.
Right. They did the whole foreclosure thing.
They stalled it for about a year.
Listen, again, I don't mean to poke any old wounds here, but it bothers me when people blame external circumstances for their own failures.
It just bothers me. I look at it as like a societal ill situation.
Yeah, but there have always been societal ills.
There are always societal problems.
Yeah, the banks, of course, want to make their money and the banks have access to easy credit.
We don't. But there are still bed and breakfasts.
You know, I remember being in a place where they said, hey, this bed and breakfast has been running since like 1930.
And it's like there are people who navigate it.
It's not all just the external stuff.
And the reason I'm saying this is that if you have a view of your father where your father gets to play victim, that's going to infect your mindset too.
Right. And I know it was dumb.
Like, I know it was completely stupid.
I'm just trying to be...
I'm not trying to give the banks a pass on it because if I was in charge of that, if I was the decision maker at the bank, I wouldn't have given them a dime.
And it wasn't that hard to figure out.
That's really my gripe.
Well, no, because the banks can give anybody any money they want because they could just run to the government for a bailout, right?
I mean, it's not bad on the part of the bank if you get a bailout, right?
Well, sure, but that's But now you're just taking advantage of people who are dumb.
Well, okay, but everybody knows that the banks can run to the government for a bailout.
Everybody knows. I mean, they were literally called liar's loans.
Do you remember that phrase? No, I've never heard that.
So everybody knows the bank is not vetting anybody, and also that it's kind of illegal for the banks to vet some people because they wanted more minorities in home ownership and all of that stuff I've talked about before.
So everybody knows the bank is just handing out money like candy.
Yes. Yes.
And my family, my mom and dad, were responsible for that, ultimately.
Yes. Okay, good.
Sorry to be a nag, but it's because the reason why I'm asking this question is going back to the conflict you had with your wife at the beginning of your marriage that has continued, where you are nervous to assert authority in your marriage.
Is that a fair way to characterize it?
Yeah. Now, if you're nervous to assert authority and you don't assert authority, your only remaining choice is to play the victim.
Hmm. Now, your wife...
And sorry, I don't mean to interfere with your father's career stuff.
Interesting, though, it is. And it was a very good segue, because I think it leads us to here.
So, with regards to your marriage, right?
You have a disagreement early on in your marriage.
You can't remember exactly what it is about.
But you know that your wife doesn't give an inch, right?
She doesn't allow...
For us to have a rational discussion about it.
Okay, and how did she not allow that?
She got hyper-emotional.
And by hyper-emotional, I mean she would interrupt, yell, say, just start accusing, like, you don't care about how I feel.
And essentially shut down the ability to resolve it.
So there's no more discussion.
So the girl who was raised in an abusive and anti-rational household is anti-rational.
Yes. Yeah, interestingly enough, she was raised speaking English.
What language did she end up speaking?
English. Right?
Because that's how she was raised, right?
She was raised where escalation, emotional aggression, and dominance, and so on, that that is how you tend to resolve disputes, right?
Decibels equals dominance.
Right. So I assume you knew the story before you married her of her father threatening to spank her at the age of 19 and locking in her room for kissing a boy, right?
Yes. Okay, so you knew that's how she was raised, right?
And did you have conversations?
And listen, I'm not, I mean, you were a young guy, so this is not any criticism at all.
I'm just, you know, I mean, I assume you didn't have conversations saying, look, we're going to have disagreements in our marriage, so how are we going to resolve them?
No, I don't recall any of those types of conversations.
We did do some marital counseling prior to getting married.
That was one of the contingencies of my church.
And we just, you know, sat through some classes, went over, you know, basic belief type stuff.
It was more boilerplate, like, hey, are you a conservative and you're a conservative?
Good. Then you won't have to disagree on, you know, politics, for example.
You know, that kind of stuff.
It wasn't If I was running a premarital counseling class right now, I would sit down each individual in different rooms and I would say, tell me all of your childhood trauma.
Make sure you damn well deal with that right now.
Well, I mean, that's certainly a possibility, but I would certainly say to the couple, the marriage is founded on one thing and one thing only, which is a methodology for resolving disputes.
That's what the marriage is founded on.
I mean, we assume the attraction, the love, and this and that.
The marriage is founded on how you're going to resolve disputes.
Are you going to resolve disputes according to reason and evidence, or are you going to escalate and yell and throw tantrums and manipulate, right?
I think one of the reasons that I got really abusive verbally is because if we're not going to be rational, I think to myself, well, might is right.
Let me just resort.
I use this analogy all the time.
If we don't have law, what else do we have?
We have violence. That's the only other way to resolve it.
If the person who yells loudest is going to win, then at some point you're going to have
to just yell loudest because you can't be in a marriage if you never win.
Yes.
Okay, now I...
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I've deferred to her on...
Basically, I just tiptoe around.
If there's something that's going to trigger her, I don't.
I don't talk about it.
I try not to talk about it.
I just avoid the topic altogether.
Even though I may think I'm right, there's no hashing it out.
There's no, hey, what do you think?
I can't even talk about...
Back then, I was really into politics.
For example, it was something that interested me at the time.
My wife couldn't stand it.
She did not want to talk politics ever under any circumstance.
My family at the time, when we would get together, they liked to sit around the table and discuss And she would get offended routinely about that and say, why can't you just not talk politics?
And I'm like, well, it's what we like to do.
When we get together, that's what we do.
And I think, in hindsight, she was asking for more attention toward her.
But I couldn't discuss politics with her.
She would just shut it down the exact same way.
It would be like, I can't talk about this.
This is ridiculous. It's making me feel terrible.
And that whole idea that when as soon as she starts feeling terrible, whatever it is we're discussing has to end right now, or else it'll just escalate.
Yeah, well, that's women. Women as a whole are not overly committed to free speech because free speech hurts the feels.
Okay, so, but she's, I mean, she's, I mean, I would say a fundamentalist Christian.
Is that a way to understand it?
You know, I have been trying to figure out what fundamentalist means when it comes to Christian, because, you know, I played ball growing up, and everyone told me, you got to work on the fundamentals.
So, people are like, you're fundamentalist.
What does that mean? Well, it just means that, I mean, it means that you take the Bible very seriously, and its instructions are law, right?
Yeah. I would think so.
Okay, so help me understand.
Again, I'm no theologian, so if I go astray, put me straight.
But as far as I understand it, the man is the head of the household, and she as a wife is supposed to submit to her husband in matters of the world in particular, right?
Oh, you want to talk about love and submission?
Yes, you're right.
And just as a brief aside here, You did a fantastic exegesis on Genesis 2, better than most Christian sermons.
Wow, thank you. Just want to throw that out there.
You nailed it dead nuts on because there's a whole hierarchy and order within the creation narrative that people just completely ignore.
It's something that I've studied very deeply and If you look at Paul's writings later on in Scripture, it just reaffirms what Moses wrote in Genesis.
So, yes, if you're a Christian, in my view, you read the Bible, you take it seriously, you do what it says.
No, that's not in your view.
That's what being a Christian is.
Yes, but there's a lot of people that claim to be Christians that would disagree with that.
Not in theory, but in practice.
Okay, so does your wife disagree that you're supposed to be the head of the household?
She doesn't disagree with that, she just hasn't defined what that means.
Well, at the very minimum, it means that she has to listen to your complaints with an open heart and an open mind, right?
I would say yes.
Does she know that she's accumulated 17 years worth of sin under her belt that she needs to atone for?
She would not look at it that way.
Okay, so what will she say?
If you could just play her, because I don't really get her thinking yet.
So if I, as you, were to say to her, listen, we're Christians, and I'm supposed to be the head of the household, that doesn't mean, of course, that I get my way all of the time, or I don't listen to you and take your feedback and your input, but particularly in worldly matters, which I'm sort of out more in the world, and you're more home with the kid.
So, we've kind of missed the mark on the Christian marriage because I don't really get a chance to sort of put my side of things out there and I do a lot of tiptoeing around because I'm frankly quite afraid of your temper and your escalation and that's not good Christian beliefs and I think that we've really sinned or we've drifted from the true path in our marriage.
What do you think? Well, I would say that your temper's terrible, and you've verbally abused me, you've followed these cults, you hate women, you're misogynist, and I can't respect you until you repent.
Well, I certainly do repent the times that I've raised my voice.
I certainly do repent the times that I've called you names.
That's not the right approach.
And when I give the reasons for it, these are not excuses.
These are ways that we can work together to minimize these problems.
I mean, I just remember very early on in the marriage, and it's been kind of like a constant thing, That if we have a problem, I really can't say anything, because anything I say just results in you either detaching or getting aggressive, and I really can't think of a time over the course of our marriage where I've had a conflict or disagreement or an issue with something you're doing or something that's going on in the marriage where you've let me have a sort of calm, reasonable explanation of what's going on for me.
I also want to point out the irony that you accused me of being verbally abusive
and then you tell me that I'm a woman hater.
I I mean, to call me a hater of women when I'm married to a woman and have a daughter, to call me a hater of women is one of the ugliest things I've ever heard in my life and you have the nerve to say that I'm verbally abusive and then you drop these bombs on me?
Come on, that's not reasonable.
You're a hater of women because You've listened to these people who obviously hate women, who have infected your mind.
I mean, you're a cultist.
You don't. Okay, so just to pause you for a second there.
So you're saying that I have a problem with my temper, and then you accuse me of being controlled by people on the internet, having no thoughts of my own, and blindly following People who train me like a dog to hate women.
I mean, do you realize that's about as insulting a thing as you can say to someone?
Does that trouble you at all, that you're saying these incredibly insulting things to me?
Honestly, they're relationship-ending things to say.
I just want to be frank with you.
If you genuinely believe that I hate women and I'm an empty shell of a person who's programmed by insane people on the internet, Then there's no relationship.
Like, there's no love. You can't love someone like that.
So what you're saying is relationship ending.
Now, I mean, obviously, we're married, we have a kid and all of that.
But I have to not believe what you're saying in order to continue the conversation.
Because if you were just some stranger and I was having a debate with you on a plane or in a bar or something like that, And you said, well, you're just a person with no thoughts of his own.
You're just full of hate and you're programmed by hateful people on the internet and so on.
I would not continue that conversation.
So either you genuinely believe these things about me, in which case you hate and fear me and there's no love in our marriage, or you're saying these things because you're upset and want to hurt me because you feel hurt or something like that.
I can't believe that you genuinely believe these things about me.
That would be beyond shocking to me, and I don't honestly know how we could continue.
I mean, if I told you that you just hated men and had no thoughts of your own, that would just be a statement of such contempt for you that I wouldn't know.
How would you be able to continue?
She doesn't answer those questions.
We should have a conversation.
I would try to continue.
Can you at least understand that to hear that you hate women, have no thoughts of your own, and are just programmed to be malevolent by strangers on the internet?
Can you understand that that's one of the harshest and most negative things you can say to a man with two females in his family?
I have made a case, obviously not verbatim, but similar to that, where I have literally called out, you're telling me what you're saying is extremely insulting.
You're saying that I don't have the ability to say it.
No, but what does she say?
If you were to say, can you at least acknowledge that these are very terrible things to say?
I don't think I've asked her that.
I didn't say, please acknowledge it.
Okay, well, so imagine, right, what would she say if I said, listen, I'm not trying to fight, but we kind of need to be on the same page here.
If you genuinely believe these things, then you would have to leave me.
I mean, wouldn't you? If I genuinely hate women, hate my daughter, hate you, and I'm just a dangerous attack robot NPC programmed by malevolent people on the internet, wouldn't you have to leave in order to stay safe or not to expose you or our daughter to such hatred and so on?
It's kind of jaw-dropping and, of course, incredibly painful.
So either I think that it's true that you genuinely believe what you're saying, that I'm really a terribly evil fellow, Or you're saying these things in an effort to control me or hurt me or something like that, which would make you the terrible person.
Once you say these things, either I'm a terrible person and you're a terrible person for staying, or you're a terrible person for saying these things when they're not true.
I mean, do you genuinely believe that I just wake up, get programmed by the internet, and go through each and every one of my days seething with hatred against you and my daughter?
No, not when you put it that way.
I don't think that happens. Okay, so is it fair to say that I'm not a woman-hating misogynist programmed by the internet?
I think you've been deceived by other misogynists.
Oh, so now you think I am a misogynist again.
Sorry, I thought you said that it wasn't quite true, that that's my day, or I hate women in that way.
Well, not in the way that you described.
Do you think I am a woman hater or not?
You put out this great, exaggerated, grandiose, you know, you must think I absolutely hate women.
No, I think you've been a part of a cult, and I think you've been deceived, but I still believe that there's hope for you.
And in what way do you think I've been deceived?
How have I been deceived? And I'm not asking this to argue with you.
I'm genuinely curious what you think.
Well, I think you completely misinterpret Paul's meaning when he says wives submit to husbands.
Wives are never supposed to submit to husbands if a husband is asking or commanding his wife to commit sin or to do something or just really anything evil.
And I think you've braided about that term in the wrong context.
So you think that I have commanded you to do evil?
I don't think you've commanded me to do evil, per se.
Sorry, you just brought that up as an example.
Hang on. I need to know.
I get very lost in these conversations because it seems like the definitions keep changing, so I apologize if I'm missing something.
There's no definition.
This is how it is. No, no.
Hang on. So, let's go back. Sorry, you said that you're not supposed to obey me if I command you to do evil.
And then I said, well, have I commanded you to do evil?
And you said no. So it doesn't really apply then, right?
Correct. Okay, so if I'm supposed to be the head of the household, as long as I'm not commanding you to do evil, I'm not saying you should just obey me like an animal or something, but if I'm the head of the household and I'm not commanding you to do evil...
Then shouldn't you at least listen with an open heart?
Yes, I would agree with that.
And do you think that you do that?
I think I am standing firm against your misogyny that's been infected in your mind by cult leaders.
Okay, so at the moment, am I exhibiting misogyny by telling you that calling me a woman hater is unpleasant and nasty?
No, I don't think you're committing misogyny right now.
But I think what you've done in the past five years, you've rejected me, you've neglected me, we don't sleep together.
I've asked you to take me out on dates.
You haven't done any of these things that I need.
And I'm convinced that you hate me because you have been listening to these evil, evil men on the internet.
And I think they've poisoned you and set you against me.
So the only problem in our relationship, if I understand this correctly, and I'm not arguing with you, I just want to understand your thinking.
So the only problem in our relationship is that somehow I've fallen under the demonic spell of internet misogynists, and it's nothing to do with how you and I have interacted for the past 18 years.
And it certainly has nothing to do...
Sorry, let me finish, and I'll...
So it's got nothing to do with anything that you've done...
Or anything like that.
And I'm not trying to blame you. I just want to make sure I understand what you're thinking.
The only problem in our relationship is not anything that you've ever done.
It's only who I listen to on the internet.
Yeah. Yeah.
So you have been a perfect wife.
I just fell under the spell of these internet misogynists for unknown reasons.
Is that right? I have loved you.
I have... Raised your daughter.
I have stayed home.
I have done the absolute...
I am God's gift to womanhood when it comes to homemaking.
And I'm not a feminist.
That's one of my faults breaking character here.
I've called her a feminist, which is dumb.
And you just hate women...
Okay, listen, I appreciate you telling me that, and I'm really, really sorry that you feel that way.
And obviously, I have something to do with it, so I'm not going to pretend that this is all your fault.
I've obviously had things to do with that, and I want to talk more about that.
But there is an interesting question in what you said, right?
So you said, you've loved me, right?
Now, it's an interesting question because I don't feel loved.
Like when you call me a woman hater and a sinner or an evildoer or infected by a mind virus with no thoughts of my own, you can understand that that's not something you would say to someone you love, right?
So it's interesting when you say, I've loved you, when I actually don't feel loved, I feel kind of hated.
So when you say that you've loved me, If I don't feel loved, have you loved me?
It's sort of like if I say, I've made you your favorite meal, and it's your least favorite meal and you hate it, and I say, but I made your favorite meals, then you would say, but I don't like those meals.
I, in fact, hate the taste of that stuff, and you know that.
So if you say you've loved me, and then you call me an evil woman hater with no thoughts of his own, you understand that that is not loving me, right?
And you've said that, of course, for quite some time.
So when you say that you've loved me, isn't it sort of important, not that you say that you love me or you think that you love me, but that I also feel loved?
I'm not sure if I'm making any sense.
Does that make perfect sense?
It's important for me to feel loved as well as you feel like you're loving me.
Yeah. 100%.
Okay, good. It has to be that way.
So if I don't feel loved, then you're not loving me.
Correct. Okay, so when you say, I've loved you, that's not actually true, because I don't feel loved.
In fact, I feel kind of hated.
I don't think she would agree with that.
I have no idea how she would respond to that.
What part would she disagree with?
She genuinely believes she loves me.
No, no, I get that. And I would understand that you feel that, but can you understand that...
So we had... Let's go back, right?
Let's go back to our wedding day.
And it was a wonderful day, and I'm sure we can get back to that level of happiness soon.
Let's go back to our wedding day. Now, our wedding day was full of the vows of love, right?
Love, honor, obey, till death do us part for better or worse.
Oh, no, no. She ex-nayed the obey.
Okay, that's fine. To love and honor and all of that.
Cherish. It was cherished. To cherish.
That's fine, too. Although, ixnaying the obey is important, right?
Because it's actually both people who say obey, right?
And there are things I obey that my wife says, of course.
I mean, why would I want to do everything she's good at, right?
That makes no sense. So, now, if I had said, right, so these were words of cherish, love, honor.
So these were words of love on her wedding day.
Now, if I had said that...
I want to insert into our wedding vows that you, my bride, the love of my life, that you hate men and have no thoughts of your own, and are incredibly susceptible to malign forces and will act out demonic thoughts in our marriage, and I treasure that about you.
Can you imagine the looks on the audience's Faces like on everyone who was there to witness the marriage.
Imagine if I had put that in or if you had put in to love, honor, and cherish this man who hates women and has no thoughts of his own and is easily programmed by demonic forces to attack his own family.
Can you understand that the whole ceremony would come to a screeching halt and everybody would say, wait, what did she say?
Because that would be completely the opposite of love, right?
Yes. Okay, so when you say to me these things, you can't also say, I've loved you.
And that's sort of an example from the wedding.
Like, if we put those things in the vows, everybody would say, well, this is not a wedding.
Like, this is not a wedding I should...
Right. And then as I said, anybody who thinks that these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, speak now forever, hold your peace, like the entire congregation would jump up and say, well, those vows would be why they shouldn't be joined together in holy matrimony.
So you can't say you love me and also at the same time say that I'm a woman hater who has no thoughts of his own and is easily programmed by demonic external forces to attack his own family, right?
Correct. So what I'm picking up here is what you're doing is you're defining love.
And you're defining it by what it can't be.
It can't be this constant needling of your spouse.
It can't be a... No, it's not needling.
No, no, it's a condemnation to say that I'm a woman hater with no thoughts of my own is an outright condemnation of my character.
It's not needling, right?
Needling is, I don't know, hey, I thought you were going to take out the garbage or whatever it is, right?
You're a woman hater who's programmed by demonic forces to attack his own family.
That's an absolute condemnation of my character, so just to be clear.
Yes. Yeah, you can't be married and condemn your spouse.
Why would you be married? Well, you can!
You can, and I think that's why we're talking.
You can, right?
Yes, correct. So, would she understand that attacking your spouse's foundational character and calling it malevolent and evil is not the same as loving?
I can't believe I need to say this stuff.
If I call someone fundamentally evil, that's not the same as loving them?
Yes, Steph, I believe you have a point.
Can you still hear me? Yes, I can.
Perfect. Yeah.
There's... I mean, there's more to the story.
Just because... No, no, hang on, hang on.
So, if she says you have a point, would she say something like that?
I don't know.
I've been trying...
Okay, let's imagine she would.
Okay. That you would have a point, right?
So... Thou shalt not bear false witness is one of my favorite and most important commandments, because if you lie, there's really not much else you can do that's good, right?
Correct. For how long has she been calling you a misogynist and all that?
It's ramped up over the past year.
But before she would call it more rarely?
For how long has she been condemning your character in one form or another?
A year. And before that, she was more full of praise and all of that?
Yeah, it was a pretty standard marriage, I suppose.
I mean, we had our tiffs.
We would fight and make up, apologize.
Really, I think we did way too much verbal abuse to one another because, to me, verbal abuse Really, I kind of just got clued into as to the damaging, horrible nature of it.
Oh, everything after verbal abuse becomes avoidance and survival.
That's all it is. Avoidance of the pain and survival of the day.
Correct. And I didn't realize that's what my marriage was.
Until I got clued into verbal abuse and how dangerous it is.
Well, I'm so sorry. So you said that she's really only been harsh with you for the last year, but then you say that a lot of your marriage has been based on verbal abuse.
So just if you can help me understand that.
Sure. Let me clarify that.
When we would get into arguments or disputes, we would escalate and verbally abuse.
My tendency specifically is to say names, say horrible things, malign her character.
Like the stupid and what's some of the toughest stuff you've said to her?
Toughest stuff, I mean, I've called her a bitch.
I have called her a cunt when I'm extremely aggravated because there's just, there's no excuse.
I'm just I'm just trying to map here.
I'm not trying to blame. I just want to understand what bombs have been rolled into the tent, so to speak.
Right, right. Yeah. I've called her retarded.
I've called her just evil, vile shit.
And what she does is she will rightfully bring up, like, you have a daughter.
Do you want her husband treating her that way?
And she's a thousand percent right about that.
Like, absolutely. No.
And it's But he most likely will, if you don't change, right?
Correct. And I get extremely upset when I'm trying to make a point and I feel like I just can't say anything.
There's no way out.
It's just whatever she says has to be right or else there's nothing.
And this is the definition of terms that was happening in our little roleplay?
Absolutely. There's no definition of terms.
It's whatever she feels.
It's entirely about her emotional state.
If she feels bad, it's wrong.
Okay, I got it. And so you've called her these terrible words.
Have you ever wished, I don't know, you'd never met her, that you hadn't got married, that you were still single?
Have you ever sort of, in a sense, disavowed the marriage?
Yeah. Yeah, I would say yeah.
And what have you said? Well, I haven't said anything to her, but I've thought it.
I've thought to myself, this is horrifying.
I'm just a donkey.
I'm just here to satisfy your emotional state, whatever it happens to be, at various hours of the day.
I don't have a voice.
Donkey, sorry, that's almost like a beast of burden, like a workhorse for money.
Yeah. And it makes, you know, one of my coping mechanisms is working way too much, so I mean, I'm in a way making myself a donkey.
Well, you are respected and functional at work, and you achieve positive things, right?
And, of course, as a man, I mean, I think both men and women want this, maybe men a little bit more, we need to feel like we're functional and effective and achieving positive things, and that we're respected.
Now, at work, of course, right, you're the big man on campus, you're the alpha, so you are respected, and so you're drawn to the place where you, men are always drawn to the place where they get the most respect, right?
Right. And so how many hours a week were you in the heights of workaholism or so?
And how many hours a week were you working?
Well, I run my own company, so I don't do a strict hours thing.
I would say probably 10 to 12 hours a day.
When you run your own company, you get to work half days.
Any 12 hours you like.
That was my dad's job.
But weekends too, or...?
Oh no, weekends was 100% family time.
We specifically do not work on the weekends.
And I'm very, very flexible.
On long days, I will work 12 hours.
Some days, I'll do six hours maybe.
It's very dependent on clients and what their needs are.
Well, but your wife may perceive you working harder as you avoiding her.
Yes. And there's probably a little bit of truth in that.
I know that there's clients and all of that, but...
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, I have used my work as an escape mechanism specifically because, hey, if I... I have a choice of either fighting with you or making money.
Right, right, right.
So I can go make some money.
And how often over the last couple of years, I know the last year it kind of escalated, but how often do you and your wife have these...
I don't mean mild disagreements, and I don't mean the worst of the worst, but how often do you have unpleasant disagreements?
It's become more frequent over the last month or so, two months maybe.
Before that, I would say probably we were in a cycle.
I would guesstimate around once or twice a week.
It would be, you know, get upset, get angry, be horrible to one another, make up, I apologize, I apologize for calling her names, she apologizes for not listening to me.
And then you do it all over again a couple of days later.
Right. Exactly.
It's flawed.
Flawed? Okay.
Now you're redefining things a little.
Okay. Okay, so like 75 times a year, you're having these kind of mini or medium or maxi blow-ups, right?
Yeah. Okay, that's completely unsustainable and absolutely terrible for your daughter, just so you know.
Oh yeah, I know, and my daughter is horrified.
She's turning six, and she knows when mommy and daddy are about to get really upset, and she starts getting upset, and we both know that this can't continue.
Oh no, you don't know that it can't continue, because it does continue.
Yeah, it continues.
So you guys hate each other more than you love your daughter, by definition, right?
Because if you're doing things that cause your daughter trauma, but gets you to fight with each other, then your dislike for each other is more powerful than your love for your daughter.
That would be the logical conclusion, yes.
So what the heck, man?
Wouldn't you and your wife say, listen, we can't upset our daughter like this.
Like, whatever we have to do has to get done.
I mean, if you were on...
If you were on a boat trip and your daughter got really sick, you'd say, we got to get our daughter to a hospital.
It wouldn't be like, well, you know, I'm really enjoying this boat trip, so suck it down, honey.
You'll be fine. Just try and throw up blood over the side of the boat.
Don't attract sharks. Daddy wants to go snorkeling, right?
You'd be like, well, we have to stop our vacation to go and deal with our daughter's ill health, right?
So what the heck? Help me understand.
I mean, you're sacrificing your daughter's future happiness and mental health for the sake of these fights.
I can't rebuild my marriage on a foundation that it's been on for the last 16 years.
Okay, that's a lovely...
It sounds like a lovely opening to a passionate speech, but I could care less about it.
Like, honestly, I see you climbing up on Mount Sinai there in storm clouds about to give me some oration, you know?
My marriage and its history and the blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, you can't fight with your wife like that.
My wife...
No, no, no, no.
You now want to go to my... You!
You can't fight with your wife like this.
You can't do it. Like, you can't do it.
Now, who's in control of you?
You, right? Does your wife provoke you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what?
I mean, you're the leader of the household.
You're certainly the leader of yourself, and I'm talking about sort of biblical precedent here, right?
But if you can't be in control of yourself, how on earth can you expect to be any kind of leader in your marriage?
You're literally falling for your wife's needling like an amateur guy on the internet meeting his first troll.
No, that's been the fundamental problem.
I haven't been the leader.
Okay, so why do you rise to your wife's bait or why do you descend?
Why do you take this bait every time?
Hint, it's not your wife and it's not your marriage.
It's your childhood. It's your childhood.
Yeah, it's female rejection.
This is to do with the neglect you talked about from your mom?
Yeah. Okay, so tell me a little bit more about that.
I mean, because if you're mad at your mom and taking it out on your wife, that's pretty bad for your daughter.
So... My God, maybe you are a misogynist.
No, I'm just kidding. Go on. My mother basically stopped.
She was like a baby-making machine, right?
She had eight kids over the course of 17, 19 years with a couple miscarriages in there.
And their idea of what childhood is supposed to be was essentially...
Slavery. For anyone who happens to be sentient.
Yeah, look after your brothers and sisters was like the mantra of your day, right?
Right. It's one of the reasons me and my wife chose not to have children for so long.
Yeah, you mentioned that.
Okay. We just didn't want to do what my parents did.
And my mom...
My mom...
And dad would fight over money specifically because of my dad's career.
And he...
She would escalate.
She would get emotional. I don't think they had rational fights.
I remember my dad screaming at my mom.
What was the content of their fight?
I mean, you said about money, but what would they say?
Like, you're not earning enough, and then what would your dad say?
Oh, my mom would say, we're all going to be homeless.
And she would basically scream that.
My dad would then argue back, we haven't missed a meal yet, we're not homeless, it's not near as bad.
So my mom would say, it's way too bad.
My dad would say, it's not as bad as you think.
So both your mother and your wife have anxiety issues?
Yes. If I'm not correct, obviously this is your life, but this is what I sort of gleaned and that doesn't mean I'm right.
Yeah. No, I mean, it would be fair.
My wife, or I should say, sorry, my mom, she doesn't have anxiety attacks or anything like that.
I've never... No, no, that's why I said anxiety issues, right?
Like, she's worried about being homeless when you haven't missed a meal.
Right. And, of course, if you're worried about being homeless, the last thing you want to do is stress out your husband and scream at him because that's going to cause him to lose energy at work, to not sleep well, to not be a good provider.
Like, that's the last thing...
That you want to do. Literally, it's like somebody who's carrying 18 glasses of wine on a tray.
You don't want to trip them up and say, aha, look, you see, I knew you were going to fall.
To attack your husband for his failure to provide is going to cripple his ability to provide.
So it's the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy.
Seth, my wife has been out of the house for a week and I have been so freaking productive this week because I just don't have a cloud of...
Doom and anger staring at me like a laser beam.
Oh, yeah. Now, you know that meme of the woman who says, I'm going to ignore him all day so he knows how mad I am at him and the man's on the track to be like, wow, what a nice peaceful day.
So quiet. I know exactly what you're talking about.
And if you go back...
Oh sorry, sorry, just to be clear, your mother was sabotaging your father's ability to survive.
Sorry, not to survive, to provide.
Your mother was sabotaging your father's ability to provide.
So women have a complicated relationship with a man who provides, because they want a man
who provides, and provides well, but their concern is that if their man provides and
provides well.
Other women are going to try to take him away and might succeed, right?
So women have a very complicated relationship with male provision.
It's kind of like the guy whose girlfriend is kind of chubby and unattractive or whatever, and he's like, you know, you need to work out and you need to look better, and then she works out, she gets a fantastic physique.
And she looks amazing.
And then what happens?
Some guy takes her away. She finds a better man.
Right, right. So this is very complicated with women in providing.
So a lot of times women will nag a man for not providing because they feel humiliated that they don't have more money.
But if he does start to do well, they'll sabotage it so he doesn't get too high a dating value and get taken away.
Well, my dad...
I don't think he was...
He wasn't a high-status male in that regard.
You mean in terms of money?
In terms of social...
Interactions, like in his tribe, if you will.
He was not the top man on the totem pole, I don't think.
Well, no, but that's in part because his wife kept tearing him down.
And by the way, by the way, women are right about this.
When I first became successful as an entrepreneur, within fairly short order, I dumped my girlfriend who wasn't going anywhere in life.
And she knew this, and she was very ambivalent about my success.
Right. It was very quickly, because when she put me down, I'd be like, well, hang on a sec.
What are you doing with your life?
Right, right. You're working as a secretary, and I'm running a software company.
Who are you to tell me how to live?
Give me a break, right?
You don't have any credibility with me, right?
So they're right that if...
And this is why success for men is so rare, because you have to have a woman who's willing to encourage you and grow with you, and who has the confidence to know that you won't leave her if you get more successful.
See, you know, I wonder if there is some of that going on subconsciously in the marriage, because where I am with my specific business, my wife has done things in the past, not so much now, in the recent past, but A year ago, she was the subject of some strife between me and my business partner that caused a pretty significant rift at the time that was really damaging to the productivity of the company as a whole.
Because we have this extra layer of abstraction that we have to tiptoe.
It's like, oh, what's she going to say?
Is she all right?
Is she okay if you're spending this time?
Hang on. Your wife can be verbally aggressive, if not downright abusive.
What on earth is she doing having a relationship with your business partner?
Well, it was more or less my business partner wrote her a nasty email, which I corrected him on, saying, like, look, you can't do that.
Why did your business partner write your wife a nasty email?
Yeah. Because my wife was barging into the office and interrupting business operations.
Okay, but you have to tell us you can't do that.
Like, this is not a thing. Right.
I have laid down the proper boundary.
And again, this kind of goes back to the authority thing.
Like, I need to be able to be authoritative.
Like, I need to feel comfortable being authoritative.
Yeah, you cannot undermine my authority at work.
That's sabotage.
Yeah. But she wouldn't listen to just keep coming back and causing problems for you at work?
It was more or less, hey, the family's here and we're having an issue.
And I need your help to deal with the issue.
And my response at that time was, hey, I need you to take care of it.
I'm sorry, the family? What family?
Her family? Your kid?
Like, what do you mean? Yeah, yeah.
So she'd have a problem with your daughter, and she'd come to work and interrupt your workday so that you could solve the problem with your daughter?
Is that right? Correct.
And was this during a time when you were working a lot?
It's during the...
We're building out our business system.
And at that time... No, I get that. But it was this time when you were working a lot.
Yeah. Okay, I can't even tell you how trashy that is.
And listen, I'm really, really sorry to use this word because I know she's a cello player and I'm sure she's all kinds of refined.
But dragging family conflicts to your husband's place of business is so trailer park, I can't even tell you.
Well, I mean, we don't have a physical location.
The place of business is my house.
So, there's going to be overlap.
So, a lot of grace was given for that.
Oh, so she's interrupting meetings in your house with family colleagues.
Right. That's a basic normal thing.
That's a trailer park on wheels, not on bricks.
But it's not much of an upgrade.
I mean, I don't think she would ever come.
Like, if we got a commercial location and I was there, I don't think she would ever come in and be like, you gotta come.
Like, no. Okay, got it, got it.
Never do that. Okay, so she brings family conflicts to a business meeting in your house, which again, I can somewhat understand a little bit more.
So why does your partner end up writing her a nasty email?
Because I was complaining to my partner about it, instead of addressing it with my wife, which is what I should have done.
Oh, so you're dragging your partner into this, and then your partner thinks, hey, you know what's really great?
I'm going to write a mean email to this guy's volatile wife, and that's going to make everything better.
Is that that was his plan? Yeah, it was a bad plan.
Didn't work. Well, I can't think of anyone who's doing anything remotely sensible in this entire quicksand situation.
All right. No, it was bad.
And did he copy you on the email?
Did you know it was coming? I think he didn't copy me, but he did say, I'm going to let loose.
I'm going to go. At that point, I think I was so pissed off at her that I didn't try and stop it.
Obviously, it didn't happen. And then what was the fallout from that?
Oh, the fallout from that was...
She basically said, I don't know if you can work with this guy.
And I was like, you don't get to decide who I work with.
So you sided with the business partner over your wife?
No. I said, both of you...
There's no way.
This is just such a bad situation.
I said to my wife that wasn't appropriate for him to do.
He needs to come through me.
However, I wasn't, I don't think, strong enough in my disagreement with the things he was saying.
Like, he wasn't accusing her of being horrible.
He was basically saying... Okay, so hang on.
Just so you understand, family is a close-ranks situation always.
Right. Always.
And that's your vows.
Right? So, I mean, I've said this to my daughter, right?
If I ever come across her in a public conflict, I will 200% take her side.
I mean, I'm sure the same thing would be true of my wife, though.
I can't really imagine that happening, but it's like, yeah, she's in the right.
I'm 150% with her now.
Maybe I might have some minor things to say later, but family is always a close-ranked situation.
Right. Like, you defend your wife, right?
Yeah, yeah. But of course, you were mad at her, and I understand that.
I was very angry at her, and I think at that point, I was even living...
Like, I had very briefly lived in my mom's place, like in the basement, for just to have a bed to sleep in.
How long did you do that for, and when did that happen?
That was off and on for about two months' time, last summer.
Oh, it's almost like a trial separation, right?
Yeah. I'm so sorry, man.
This is terrible.
Of course, where does most of my sympathy go?
To the child. Yeah.
It's jaw-dropping what you guys are doing to this poor little girl.
I mean, you know what Jesus says, right?
Oh, yeah. To calm the children, where should they go?
Into the water with a millstone around their neck.
Yes. He said it was better.
I'm not quite that harsh. I'd give you a millstone and a couple of rubber duckies, you know, just to be fair.
But, uh, this, this is, this is like, you can't, you just, you can't do this stuff.
You're a father. I mean, if you and your wife want to bicker until the cows come home, whatever, I can, it's a stupid way to live, but, you know, that's just yourself, you're harming, and maybe you're employees if your business goes up.
But you know how this plays out.
Okay, so, so what happened with your parents' marriage over time?
Well... My dad and my mom had a pretty, I think, crap marriage.
But they had a good facade.
My dad was a workaholic.
I think that was his mechanism of getting away from my mom.
And your mom reacted to that by attacking him, that's driving him further away, and yeah, that cycle, right?
Right, right. Yeah.
You don't ever hear, you don't help with the kids, you just place like a hotel.
Right, okay. Right.
So... Let me rush home from work to more of that!
Right, well, he worked from home the last 20 years of his life.
He passed away in 2021.
That's a whole other thing.
How old was he when he died? 69.
Holy crap! What wore him out so quick?
Sorry.
No, that's fine.
So.
He.
you He got pneumonia in the middle of the COVID stuff.
And my...
He was sick right after Thanksgiving 2021.
And, you know, full disclosure, he was overweight.
He wasn't, like, terribly unhealthy.
I mean, he was unhealthy. Let's not mince words.
Like, he did not take care of himself.
But, you know, he wasn't...
I'm going to guess. I think he was somewhere around 240 pounds.
He was 6'1".
He's not super massive.
Maybe 40 pounds.
Yeah. He wasn't gargantuan or anything.
He got sick right after Thanksgiving 2021.
He was at home for a couple weeks trying to fight it off.
He had sleep apnea, which did not help the situation, but it was early December.
My mom took him into the hospital and they gave him a COVID test and then systematically murdered him in the hospital.
And it was...
I couldn't see him.
You know the standard COVID shit.
I'm kind of waiting for...
You know how the Germans...
When the German people discovered the death camps?
Remember the reaction?
I'm waiting for our fucking culture to get to that point with COVID. Because it was just as bad.
It was the same shit.
And I'm not being hyperbolic when I say he was murdered.
My mom was in there every day trying to fight for my dad.
And the doctor attending to him said, You know, when he came in there, like, oh yeah, he's going to die.
Like, he's going to die.
Like, it's pretty much set in stone.
And my mom, you know, of course, it freaks my mom out.
Sorry, did he test positive for COVID? Yeah, they took a PCR test, but you know, everything tests positive.
Yeah, they cycled it up like crazy, right?
Okay. Yeah, it's like Coca-Cola's got COVID too, along with my dad.
So, the scam is, you know, you test positive, now you get locked into a protocol that shall not be deviated from, according to, you know, Lord Fauci.
Well, and the hospital is tough for the hospital, too, because if there are deviations, they have massive legal liability.
I mean, it really is just a massive trap for just about everyone.
Sorry, go ahead. I have absolutely zero sympathy for a man who says my father's going to die when my mother...
Says, my mother asked him outright, said, would you go through the same protocol if you had COVID? He said, absolutely not.
I would go to Florida and get the monoclonal antibodies.
That's what the doctor said.
That is what the fucking doctor said to my mother who was treating my father.
And then he couldn't be released and get anywhere that he could get a different treatment, right?
Correct. They systematically murdered him.
I'm really sorry for this experience.
My gosh. So, my mom calls me up like December 20th and dies dead.
We thought it was getting better, but his lungs eventually wore out.
But he was on a BiPAP machine.
He was not on the ventilator.
He was on the ventilator light.
And the scenario, my mom had asked the doctor, hey, could you try and giving him Lasix?
And from my understanding, that kind of treatment would drain fluid from the patient's lungs.
Sorry, if you can just get back out of the wind a bit.
I'm just having a little trouble hearing what you're saying.
Yeah, here, I'm going to zip up the coat real quick.
Sorry, was he vaccinated?
Absolutely not. Okay, got it.
Yeah, of course, as some people would say, that was the problem, right?
Oh, my sister tried to say that at the funeral, but I got the last word on that, so haha.
But regardless, my mom was trying to advocate for...
Because my mom was reaching out to anyone and everybody at this point.
You know, like, hey, has there been any treatment?
What do you got? Give me your info, etc., etc.
And... Me and my business partner were actually doing our research on the other side, trying to get contacts and just trying to pull every lever we could possibly find to try and change the outcome.
My mom said, my mom got a call about, you know, someone mentioned to her, like, hey, my husband was in a very similar situation.
The doctor gave him Lasix, which would, from my understanding, drain fluid out of the lungs.
And my mom mentioned this to the doctors, like, hey, can you try this?
Can we just, you know, do anything?
You know, throw the kitchen sink at it.
Who cares? He's going to die, right?
And, of course, they denied it.
They said... You know, it's not going to do anything.
He has no fluid in his lungs.
Well, we got an autopsy. His lungs were full of fluid.
So, he probably would not be dead if he was at home.
In fact, it would have been better had he died at home.
At least for me and the family.
Oh, because you would have had visitation and all.
We would have, that along with, he would not have been murdered.
It would have been an unfortunate event.
It wouldn't be, oh, society's killing your father.
And everybody's cool with it.
And this was the time of, this was Alpha, right?
And Alpha was, I mean, everybody, there's a lot of people who, sorry, go ahead.
No, it was, I believe it was the Omega variant or Omicron.
It was one of the O's, I forget.
Okay. The Alpha one was pretty nasty and pretty virulent.
A lot of people judged COVID by what came later when it had lost some of its potency.
But I think, I'm no doctor, right?
This is my particular opinion, is that the first variant was pretty nasty.
Right. You know, at the funeral, my sister tried to say, you know, it's because he wasn't vaccinated and all that stuff.
Well, I got up and basically stood in front of everybody and said, my father was murdered.
This happened in our town, in our culture.
There's XYZ, ABC treatment options.
They were only allowed to do one thing and one thing only.
You know, they were trying to get him on remdesivir, which would just kill him faster.
It was very, very interesting because the way that whole scam worked was it was pulse ox driven.
So they're monitoring your oxygen level in your blood.
And based on that, they're determining treatment.
And the reason I say it would have been better if you stayed home is because you don't have that information at home.
You're just trying to breathe, for example.
And if you've ever had pneumonia or bad flu, That can get dicey, but you're not reading your pulse ox and making decisions based on that.
So they set a threshold for the pulse ox.
They said, you're not quote-unquote better until your pulse ox reaches a certain point.
So essentially, you are doomed because for the duration of the illness, the pulse ox would never get up to a point where It's going to remedy itself.
So they're like, oh, put you on more ventilator.
So it's like you're just exacerbating it.
You're not treating it properly.
I don't know the causality, but there's a lot of people who were put on ventilators.
Was it 80% or 70%?
I can't remember the exact number, but it was some crazy high number of people put on ventilators died.
And of course, I'm not a doctor.
I don't know the cause and effect.
Is it like, well, the ventilators were bad or they were in such a bad state that the ventilators saved 20% of them?
I don't know. No, in my view, it was the ventilators is basically wearing out the lungs.
It's just like blowing up a balloon.
But it's done because they're like, we cannot have the pulse ox drop below a very certain threshold.
Well, you can.
You can go a lot further than they say you can.
And that's the justification for putting you on the ventilator because the ventilator is forcibly blowing air into your lungs so your pulse ox will go up because there's just way more air getting crammed in there.
So it It was just, it was awful.
And it was crazy, of course, that, I mean, I've talked to people who, you know, I've got COVID, I'm having a tough time, and basically they were just told, well, go home, and if you can't breathe, go to the ER. Like, there was nothing else.
Right. I mean, I didn't even get COVID for an entire, like, year.
You know, during the whole lockdowns and all that stuff.
But, yeah, it was awful.
My dad passes away.
My mom pretty much immediately starts dating.
What? Oh, come on.
She's not that mean, like she'll bring a date to your funeral if you're her husband?
Yeah, I mean, she waited, I think, five or six months, but it was really illuminating because you know how you think of like, The Victorian times where the women are supposed to wear black for like half a decade or whatever, you know? Yeah, Queen Victoria style, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. It dawned on me that that's not for the women.
It's for everybody else, you know?
It's so that everyone can see, oh, you're in mourning.
Stay away. You're going to freak everybody out if you get hitched immediately.
Because My mom just got married last weekend.
And how long was she married to your dad?
She was married to my dad from 83 to 2021.
Oh, wow. So, I mean, that's almost 40 years, so 38 years?
Yeah. So she's married for 38 years, and she manages to almost pull half a year before dating again.
And she...
I mean, she got married last week, so 2024, so three years in between.
But she was kind of dating.
It wasn't quite a year, but it was more than six months before she started.
It was well before a year.
Wait, sorry. So she was more than six months.
Sorry, I thought you said four or five months.
Yeah, it's fuzzy.
It was really soon.
Because I remember her talking to me about it, and I was just like, I don't know what to...
I don't know how to process it.
But it was definitely before a year was done and I was just...
It's like I'm not a part of that scenario.
It's like my mom invites me to the wedding and I was joking to people.
It's like, it's really nice when acquaintances invite you to weddings.
You get to go have some food, talk to people.
Oh, you mean like you refer to your mom as an acquaintance?
Is that what you mean? Yeah, because it has nothing to do with me.
I was not consulted.
I am not a part of this.
My mom wanted to do something like...
I want to make sure we use some time.
Have you talked to your mom about the issues you have?
And I'm not saying whether you should or shouldn't.
I'm just curious. I haven't, and the reasoning is I really don't want to buzz kill her.
I don't want to be that guy.
It's like, hey mom, I think it's really inappropriate that you're marrying.
No, no, I mean, this stuff as a child.
Yeah. I... I need to talk to her about that.
And it's just, with the whole wedding timing thing, again, I don't want to be that Guy is just an asshole.
No, come on, man. Like, I mean, honestly, hang on.
So if you've covered up how you feel towards your mother since you became an adult, which is probably, I don't know, you don't have to tell me your age, but you mentioned 30s, right?
So like, you know, 15 plus years ago.
So 20 years, you've been an adult, and you never once sat down and said to your parents, hey, you know, I had some issues.
Yeah, and I need to.
When I was a teenager, I started drinking when I was 16, and my parents pretty much had nothing to say about it.
They didn't restrict anything.
I was kind of on my own at that point.
Do you know why they didn't say anything?
Sorry, your wife is going to get spanked for kissing a boy when she's 19, and your parents are like, yeah, booze it up, kid.
They weren't pro-booze it up.
They were indifferent or ambivalent toward the fact that I was boozing it up, particularly on weekends.
Okay, so why did they not intervene?
I think they were too focused on themselves, the businesses.
No, no, no, no, no.
Come on. If you're really focused on yourself, you don't have eight kids, so it's not that.
Yeah. I mean, not having eight kids is a great way to not be focused on yourself.
I don't think they cared.
Right. So let me ask you this, brother.
Have you ever had the experience of feeling truly loved?
Oh, God.
So...
Didn't get it then, didn't get it since, aren't getting it now, right?
you Yeah.
Sorry, it's not funny.
You know, I don't even know if people, you know, people even know what it means to love someone.
Right.
You know, You know.
It's like, I want to say my wife loves me.
Or if I were to ask my mom, do you love me?
She would say, of course I do. I absolutely love you.
I don't think she's lying.
I think she just doesn't know what it means.
That's why I asked earlier, people can say whatever they want.
I'm a zillionaire.
I am a Lamborghini, right?
I mean, you can say anything you want.
That's why earlier I was, because I had this sort of suspicion, right?
That you didn't know what the experience of being loved was.
That's why I said, so your wife says, well, I love you or I've loved you and blah, blah, blah.
And then, but you don't feel loved.
And if you don't feel loved, you're not loved.
Can you feel happy?
Can you be happy without feeling happy?
I don't even know what that means.
Well, can you say, I'm happy if you're miserable?
Well, you can say it, but are you happy if you're miserable?
And are you loved if you don't feel loved?
No. Now, of course, people will say to you if you don't feel loved, right?
What does everyone say to you who's dysfunctional, who claims to love you?
Say, oh, we love you, we love you.
If you say, I don't feel loved, what do they always say?
They blame you. They say, yeah, you're just not capable of feeling love.
You're too messed up to feel love.
You're defended against love.
The reason you don't feel love is because you're mean and you call me names and it's all you.
It's all you, right? Which is like me, if I'm a chef, yelling at somebody who doesn't like my food, well, your taste buds are clearly cancerous, and you're deficient, and you've got bile problems, and you're pathological, and you're a hater, and it's like, well, maybe you're just cooking some bad fucking food.
Maybe your food tastes like shit, and there's nothing wrong with me and my tongue.
That's the thing. It's like, I feel like I'm growing up in a matrix, or I've grown up in a matrix where love is just this Love is a word that is used to get resources from you.
Love is one of the most predatory and exploitive words in the English language.
You have to do this because I love you.
I love you. You owe me an income.
I love you. You owe me a phone call.
I love you. You owe me time and resources and money, and I love and I love and I love.
Love is just this cheap, shitty coin for most people.
I'm not saying everyone in your life, but for most people, love is just this cheap, shitty counterfeit coin that they exchange to get real resources, usually from men.
Although men do it as well, right?
They say to women, I love you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sex, and then go to them, right?
Yeah. And it's like, do I even love my own wife?
Well, if you did love your own wife, you couldn't call her a see you next Tuesday.
You couldn't call her a bitch.
You couldn't call her retarded.
like you couldn't. It would be like... and nobody could pay you any money to do that.
You could no more verbally insult your wife than you could dangle your child
over a balcony, Michael Jackson style.
Sorry, somebody tried to call me, and I missed the last 15 seconds.
No problem. So, if you truly loved your wife, nobody could pay you any amount of money to call her these horrible names, and you would no more be able to call her those horrible names than you would be able to dangle your own baby over a balcony Michael Jackson style.
Yeah. Yeah.
What are you trying to do?
And forget the moral side of things, because we already know about that, right?
So when you call her a bitch, what are you desperately, and obviously not very successfully, what are you trying to achieve?
What's the purpose of that?
It's not like to say, oh, it's mean.
It's like, yeah, yeah, it's mean. But there's a methodology.
There's a reason behind these things.
What are you trying to do when you call her a bitch?
I think it's cathartic on my side.
I want to feel better.
I want to inflict pain so that I guess the misery gets shared.
I'm trying to dig into here.
I'm very upset.
I'm really angry that I don't have a say.
Alright, I'm going to stop you because this is all a very good theory, but I'm going to give you another theory.
If it hits, great. If it doesn't, we'll go back to yours.
Is that fair? Yeah, go for it.
You desperately want her to stop hurting you, but you don't believe she'll do it out of love, so you want to hurt her so she'll stop hurting you.
She's saying all these terrible things to you, she's doing these terrible things, she's mean, she's whatever.
You need her to stop doing that.
You need her to stop hurting you.
And you can't...
If you say to her, I'm hurt, right?
I mean, it's kind of like if...
I mean, we could use the sex example, but the more common example is you go to hug your wife and you put your elbow on her hair and pull her hair and she says, ow!
And you're like, oh, I'm so sorry, right?
So you hurt her, you don't want to, and you stop.
And I mean, I guess this happened with sexual activity, of course, penetrative sexual activity in the past.
So if you hurt someone you love, or, you know, if you're roughhousing with your daughter and she's like, ow, oh, sorry, like, you stop, right?
Because you don't want to hurt the people that you love.
So if your wife is saying and doing these things that are just so painful to you, then if you say, that really hurts me, Your fear is that she won't stop, but she'd be like, well, good, you deserve to hurt because you're being an asshole or whatever it is, right? Right.
And I think this particular style of just verbal abuse, put-down type language, it all comes from high school where that was the way to get people to stop harassing you verbally.
You would harass them back better and essentially publicly humiliate them.
Well, no, because those people were enemies, not people you married.
Correct. So that's not the case.
Those people were openly enemies, not people you commit your whole life to.
Right. So it's because you've married her and then you put her in the category of enemy.
It's almost like to use...
Verbal abuse as a punch, right?
It's a punch. And it is a punch to the soul.
It's a punch to the heart, right?
So you're not allowed in moral terms, right?
You can't just go up and punch people. But if somebody's punching you, you can punch them back.
Because somebody who's punching you has already broken the non-aggression principle, and then it's just a matter of self-defense and survival, right?
Mm-hmm. So...
Both of you probably perceive that you're punching back in legitimate self-defense.
That he's hurting me.
He obviously doesn't love me enough to not hurt me because he's, I mean, calling a woman these terrible names or calling you the terrible names like the misogynist, the woman hater, all of this terrible stuff.
So clearly you don't love each other enough to not hurt each other.
So everything after that becomes legitimate self-defense, and things get so tangled in their cause and effect that you probably could both state your case towards God himself, and God would be like, yeah, I can see both sides.
Right. It's like, yeah, you're both right, but you're destroying your daughter, so you're both wrong.
Well, you both have plausible justification for your acts of perceived self-defense.
Sorry to get overly technical.
It's sort of like if two guys are in a fight, right?
And nobody saw how the fight started.
And this happens in the playground, right?
You get into a fight with some kid, right?
And nobody saw how the fight started, and the teacher comes, and what do both kids do?
They blame each other. Yeah, he started it.
He pushed me. He took this.
He grabbed my picture. He did this.
He tripped me. He took my ball.
So they both are pointing at each other, right?
Now, nobody saw how the fight started, right?
So what does the teacher have to say?
Basically, you both can't do this.
Or work it out?
Well, the teacher can't come down on anyone's side because nobody knows who started it.
And this is true of marriage, right?
So you both could make plausible reasons as to why you have done what you've done.
You know, well, she was calling me all these terrible names, so I called her a terrible name so she'd understand how much it hurt.
And she could probably say the same thing.
And, you know, again, there's no objective record of our marriage, right?
There's only what people remember.
And memory is pretty malleable, right?
Yes. So, I would, I mean, not that I would ever be any kind of external judge in these kinds of situations, but I could certainly see how even God himself, or maybe God would know, but, you know, maybe he'd just blame, you know, her dad and your mom.
I don't know, right? But you're not fighting each other, right?
You're not fighting each other.
You're fighting the people you didn't choose.
So the habits that you have of self-defense...
Okay, the habits that you have in prison are not the habits that serve you out of prison, right?
Right. So you developed habits of self-defense and you saw situations of verbal abuse and aggression with your parents that you did not choose.
You did not choose to be in that environment.
You did not choose to be born in that family, right?
Right. So all of these habits are in a situation of no choice, but the difference is you chose your wife.
Your wife chose you. So all the habits that you guys developed as children, I mean, your father-in-law seems to be a past master of verbal abuse because he's virtually disassembling his daughter's morality because she kissed a guy when she was 19.
I think it was more her mom than her dad, because her mom had a pretty sordid childhood.
Her dad married her mom, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so then if she wasn't defending, then she was basically saying, well, this is what mothers do.
They verbally attack people to ensure righteousness and godliness.
Yes, and my wife's mom is very strict, disciplinarian type.
No, she's not. No, no.
Oh, my God, that is so not the right word.
Okay. No, listen.
If you're not in control of your temper, I never want to hear how strict you are.
Your first strictness should be with your own emotions, right?
Correct, yes. So if you're really, really strict, then if you're such a disciplinarian, how about an atom or two of self-discipline?
Oh, you know, I love pointing out, what's the root word of discipline?
Disciple. Disciple.
Right, following the virtuous and self-control.
So yeah, people who escalate and yell at people and call people names and so on and then talk about self-discipline, it's laughable.
It literally is the 400-pound guy telling you how to eat healthy.
It's like, honestly, I can barely keep a straight face when people who are verbally abusive talk about discipline.
It's like you don't even have the discipline to not pour tongue shit on people you claim to love.
You're self-indulgent to the max, right?
Yep. And you and your wife have both been very self-indulgent in terms of your attacks on each other, right?
Yeah. And that's one of the reasons she's not in the house right now, because it's better for our daughter to not be around us the way we behave toward each other.
Are we in a salvation situation or a not salvation situation, do you think?
I don't know the answer, obviously.
I'm not you. What do you mean by that?
Well, I mean, can the marriage be saved?
I think we both can save the marriage, yeah.
Okay. And what's your evidence for that?
We both have a desire to not ruin our daughter's life.
No, you don't. Not really.
Because you are, right?
I have a desire to lose weight, says the 400-pound guy with his face in fucking cheesecake.
It's like, you really don't, right?
Not really. Okay, so what else have you got?
I'm not disagreeing with you, I just am a racist.
We still have affection for each other.
At least, there's still sexual attractiveness.
Despite no bang-a-thons in six months, right?
Correct. I think my wife has shown a willingness to go to therapy with me.
She wants to go to couples council.
We had tried that initially, but it turned into this sort of me letting loose in the therapist's office.
Because, you know, a third party's present, I can now say everything that's been on my mind.
I literally said everything.
Well, what's wrong with that? Sorry, how does that mean it doesn't work?
You're not supposed to be honest in a therapist's office?
That was what I told her.
She didn't think I was being fair.
I didn't know what that meant.
Because... Oh, fair means agreeing with her.
Yeah, just so you know. Fair means not disagreeing with her.
So, I don't see the marriage being capable of being saved unless that changes.
That idea of only how she feels is the only metric by which anything is measured.
Because I have to admit...
Okay, so let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this. So, you can't change your wife, right?
Obviously. Right.
Right? So, you can only change yourself.
So, what behaviors, and outside of therapy, which I think would be great if you get the right therapist, so what can you do differently?
To help with these issues?
I would say the only thing I can do is self-discipline.
I cannot react.
What does that look like?
So, she's in a bad mood, she's needling you, she's upset, she's aggressive.
What do you do? I cannot react.
I have to disengage.
I have to say, I have to actually put a boundary down with her and say, look, like, for example, the whole cult thing.
You can't treat me like that.
You can't accuse me of these things and expect me to be...
Okay, that's engaging.
Right? That's engaging.
Okay. So, shut up and walk away.
What would you suggest?
Well, okay, so if somebody is insulting you to that degree where she says you're part
of cults and you don't think for yourself and you're a woman hater and so on, right?
So in terms of... if you take it personally, then you're doomed.
you Like, honestly, you have to assume that she's lying about all of this, because if she genuinely believes that, the marriage, in my view, I don't even know where you could go.
If she genuinely believes you have no thoughts of your own and you're full of hatred towards women...
And you're controlled by online demons, so to speak, or something like that, right?
Right. You're just serving a cultist.
So you're serving the cult at this point.
Right, right. And it's an evil cult, right?
So, you know, like, if there's online articles and stuff about me, they call me, like, the worst guy in the North.
Or whatever, right? Now, honestly, I don't take any of that stuff seriously.
And the simple example to do that, you go to Wikipedia and look up Stalin and look up Che Guevara.
Like, Stalin murdered at least 10 million people.
And what does Wikipedia say about Stalin?
Well, it's controversial.
There's pluses and minuses.
There are people who have different viewpoints.
Yes, there were 10 million killed, but he also did slightly advance the GDP of Russia.
There's all of this controversy.
Well, I'm going to present to you both sides of a guy who fucking slaughtered 10 million people.
Right, right. It's important to get both sides of the story.
Let's look at the pluses, right?
The guy who advocates for peaceful parenting is just straight-up Satan.
Well, it's because you, what you stand for, is so fundamentally life-changing.
Yeah. Well, I don't want to get into the whys in particular, because I appreciate your thoughts on that, but I want to make sure we focus on you and your wife and your daughter.
It's not personal.
I hate to say it.
I know that she's going at you, and she's going at you hard, and she's clawing at your wounds and stuff like that.
If it is genuinely about you, if she thinks you're a total evildoer who hates women and is trying to raise a daughter...
Then there's no marriage, right?
Right. She should run for the hill.
If she's a good person and you're an evil person, she's going to hate and fear you, right?
Because good people can't love evil people.
I know that there's love your enemies and stuff like that, but that doesn't mean get a mass murderer to help co-raise your children, right?
Correct. So it's not personal.
Now, you often have to recognize that when you called her a bitch and retarded, it wasn't personal.
These weren't your genuine beliefs about your life.
Yeah, I don't want to be married to a retarded bitch.
Of course not. So you were both bearing false witness in order to hurt each other.
It's not personal.
So you have the thing where she says you're a misogynist.
What you want to say is, well, of course I'm not a misogynist and here's why, right?
So you think that it's personal.
And that you have to defend yourself.
It's her trauma. It's that's the cult shit that she literally grew up in. Well, whatever it is action. This is
how she and and and also You have reinforced this behavior in her for 18 years,
right?
We're 17 years of marriage and I think it was a year or year or two before you got married
But so close to two decades You have not broken this pattern and what she does works
So women look at his a you don't tell anyone else right Just between us bros, right?
So men would rather have no interaction than a bad interaction, which is why you go to work, right?
A lot of women would rather have a bad interaction than no interaction.
And it's a real tragedy and a trap that a lot of women get caught into, where they feel kind of isolated and rejected and lonely, which causes great stress and anxiety.
So she's a stay-at-home mom.
She's dependent on you, right?
So if things aren't going well, you're like, well, I'll live.
But if things aren't going well, she feels very unprotected, and she might get tossed out on the street and have to live in her car, right?
At least evolutionarily, that's what.
So women feel a great deal of anxiety when relationships are going badly that men don't, right?
Which is the old beam that we talked about earlier where I'm going to ignore him all day so he knows how mad I am.
And the guy's like, oh, what a lovely, wonderful day kind of thing, right?
I heard it summed up to saying men play the game of life, women play the game of men.
Well, men may be security and so on, especially if they're moms, right?
But it's that resource versus relationship dynamic.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I would say that women play the game of people, and men play the game of things.
But, you know, it doesn't really matter.
I think the same is both.
So, for your wife, if you are not paying her much attention, if you're avoiding her, then, like, if you have a customer who's not buying from you...
Sorry? I'm tripping her anxiety by avoiding her.
Well, so then she freaks out, and then a wise woman will say, gee, I should make myself more appealing and attractive because my husband doesn't seem to want to spend a lot of time with me.
But unfortunately, a more insecure woman, maybe slightly neurotic, will say, my husband is avoiding me.
That causes me anxiety, so I'm going to attack him because he's making me feel terrible.
And it's his fault that I'm feeling terrible.
He's a bad guy. So I'm going to get mad at him because he's avoiding me.
Now, of course, getting mad at someone who's avoiding you is the worst thing you could do.
You know, if you run a restaurant and somebody doesn't come into your restaurant and then you scream at them on the street, is that going to make them want to come to your restaurant?
Of course not. No. If I can...
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. So...
In her past, specifically growing up, you know, talk about fundamentalist Christian.
There was a lot of, I guess, really, you know, patriarchal, we can loosely use that term, you know, just male-focused influences in her past where she went to these, I guess, I don't know if they were like a day camp scenario where essentially Women were looked down on.
It was completely horrible.
Like, I've had some, one of my close personal friends, his wife went through a similar camp.
It wasn't the same one my wife went to, but...
Is it sort of like a sort of documentary?
I think it was called Jesus Camp, where some of the kids were put through struggle sessions about sin and hell and stuff, and it was pretty rough.
It could be. I haven't seen that.
That'd be interesting. I should probably look that up, but...
My wife's or my friend's wife's experience at those same organization camp was like, she had to clean a floor with a toothbrush, that kind of thing, like female training.
It was just completely degrading.
And my wife was like, this is total bullshit.
This is not what it means to be a good woman.
So we have these, I call them blasphemous assholes.
Basically using the name of Jesus and God to...
Hey, blast holes! That's a new word.
Hey! I like where your head's at.
And you're using God to promote something evil.
You know, not the first time, won't be the last time.
Well, and this is, of course, this is men who are angry at being humiliated by their own mothers turn out to humiliate other women, right?
Yeah. So when I, you know, you can tell basically about my whole little COVID scenario, I'm not a big fan of the mainstream, for example.
And the way I picture this in my head, my wife has built a bulwark around the internet personality and she's sitting behind it.
And she's hurling over the wall.
You know, you're the cultist.
You have to destroy the cult.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by she's built a bulwark behind the internet personality.
I don't quite follow that. So it's like she's using it as a shield.
She's saying, everything is my problem because you listen to internet people.
Oh, rather than say, okay, so she can't get mad at the right people.
And the right people aren't even the glassholes who force her to clean a floor with a toothbrush, which is horrible.
It's her fucking parents.
Yeah, so she can't get mad at the right people, and neither can you.
So you get mad at the wrong people, and then it never gets solved.
And she's been making ultimatums about these internet personalities.
And because I was involved in that, I was involved in a group of people.
We had a great time during COVID. We were probably one of the only groups of people having a good time during COVID besides, say, the Amish.
You know, we just didn't do anything.
Boy, but they have vindicated, eh?
I have a little video.
I can't believe these people with their horse and buggy crap.
Oh, they're fine over COVID? Oh, they didn't get...
Oh, really? Holy crap.
I have a video of me driving down the road in the car saying, I feel so safe in my steel little box, and I pan over to the Amish spring gathering where there's literally 500 people, none of them wearing masks, none of them doing anything.
Yes, also very few of them are overweight and none of them got vaccinated.
Yeah, none of them got anything.
Nobody's really processing that.
I've yet to see the media go talk to the Amish and say, oh, that's interesting.
Well, it's a profit from the 17th century, isn't it?
Okay. So, you know, I was involved in this group.
Now, I have since distanced myself from it.
I don't even listen to the online streams anymore.
And I actually, my wife requested that I stop.
And I honored that request.
I said, I don't agree with you.
I don't agree with what you think about these people.
But I will stop listening to them because I love you.
And I want you to be the focus.
I want to eliminate them as a variable in our relationship.
And that hasn't had any effect.
It's She's still standing behind the bulwark, blaming those guys.
Saying, you have to disavow.
You have to do this. You have to do that.
And I'm saying, look, I don't even listen anymore.
I have no idea what they're talking about these days.
And she'll send me a link of some YouTube.
And these people are obviously banned on YouTube because they're not saying mainstream appropriate things.
And I tell her, I'm like, YouTube is a propaganda thing.
It only allows what is mainstream approved to be on the platform.
So obviously you're only going to get critiques of this individual, not what the individual
thinks.
There's no exploration of both sides.
People get banned in parts so that they can be attacked without any opportunity to answer
the attacks, right?
Well, and look at, I don't know if you saw the recent Tucker Carlson interview with the fellow who worked at the State Department, I can't remember his name, but He basically described the censorship apparatus and its chief function, which is to isolate geographic locations based on opinion and direct or censor content accordingly.
It's way more sophisticated than I even thought was possible.
Well, you know, when you've got a couple of trillion dollars at stake, people would do some crazy stuff.
Oh, yeah, yeah, no.
Okay, listen, I appreciate all that, and I know I've got other things on for today, so I'm going to have to wind up soon.
So I just want to make sure we sort of do maximum value.
Fascinating, though, this other stuff is.
I do appreciate bringing it up.
Yeah, yeah. The concern that she would have is that male community in the past was harmful to her when she was a child, right?
The men all agreed with each other, the women should clean the floor, the girls should clean the toothbrushes and things like that, right?
I'm sorry? Yeah, fucking toothbrush, I'm adding.
Yeah, I mean, that's just beyond appalling.
I mean, that is specifically humiliating.
And it's not even productive.
They can't even pretend that that had anything to do with productivity, right?
It was just humiliation.
Yeah, just, you know. And so for her, men getting together and agreeing had her on the floor weeping as she tried to scrub with a toothbrush, right?
But that's not you.
You didn't do that to her.
So it's very tough to get angry at the right people in this life.
It's very tough. I mean, especially if they're parents, because getting angry at your parents when you're under their power and control, if they're abusive, can be very dangerous.
Like, very dangerous. And in fact, we view it as almost a form of suicide to get angry at abusive parents.
Because throughout most of our evolution, it would really harm our chances of survival, if that makes sense.
And this is true for you. As well.
Like, if you had said to your parents, look, the fact that you want to have eight kids is no obligation to me.
If you want to have eight kids, you take care of them.
I didn't choose that. Right.
Right? I'm going to go have a life.
That would have been the most, that would have been viewed as the most selfish possible thing I could even say.
How dare you not help?
You live here. You owe us.
You know, it's like, you're still fed, therefore you have to X. It's like, no, that's not a thing.
Right. I mean, would you say that to a political prisoner?
You know, North Korea?
Well, you know, you're being fed, so you have to, like, no, no, no.
You chose to have children.
I didn't choose that you have eight children.
You are the parents. You take care of the kids.
Or at least I'm not going to do it as much as you want, right?
So, if you had tried to stand up for yourself in that way, it would have gone very badly for you.
And evolutionarily speaking, infanticide was like a real thing.
And the inconvenient kids weren't fed, weren't protected, you know, and sometimes were just outright killed.
So, I know this is sort of the study I've done of primitive cultures, and it's not that long ago that we in the West were pretty dead primitive cultures.
Right. I just want to mention, my older brother was the example of the individual who was lashing out at my parents, and he got punished.
He had a completely miserable fucking childhood, and I observed it as a second-born and simply chose differently.
Of course. I made better decisions, you know?
Okay, bro, I gotta finish.
I appreciate what you're saying, but we've got so many rabbit holes here.
So, to get mad at the right people is really, really important.
And the habits that you have with each other were developed in childhood.
Is that fair to say? I would agree with that, yeah.
Now, for you, it may have been more provoked.
For your wife, it may have been more observed.
In other words, she observed her mother being aggressive, therefore she's aggressive.
With you, it may have been more that you fought back a little bit here and there, and therefore you're used to that kind of aggression, or maybe you saw it as well.
But it's not that these habits were imprinted upon you, and it was wrong that they were imprinted upon you.
You should care for your children more than you care to win stupid points in a pointless argument.
And you should care for your children enough to make sure that you have adequate childcare for your children without destroying their lives.
Right. Or, if that's too strong a phrase, overburdening them with childcare responsibilities.
No, you should be investing in your children.
You should be pouring your life into them to give them a leg up, not expecting them to pour their lives into yours.
Well, and also, if you're going to have eight kids, you better make sure that there are two sets of grandparents around, that there are aunts and uncles, that there's lots of places that you can go to for childcare, rather than relying on your children as sort of unpaid daycare workers.
Correct. That was not done.
So, with regards to your wife, these are bad habits from childhood, and that's why it's not personal to each other.
You guys just learned as kids that escalation and aggression is the only way to win, and there's only win and lose.
There's no win-win. So, you're either on the losing side, or you're on the winning side.
And, you know, I'm sure sometimes you're on the losing side, but you can't do that forever because it's too humiliating, and it causes too much resentment, so then you fight back, right?
So, These are bad habits that came from childhood.
It's not personal to each other.
It wasn't generated by each other's behavior.
And so, not taking it personally.
So, when your wife starts to escalate, I mean, in my mind, it's almost like, listen, I don't want to interrupt your fight with your father, so I'm going to go for a walk.
I'm not saying you'd say that, right?
But I'm saying that that's the mechanic, right?
Oh, are you chatting with your dad now?
Okay, listen, you know, you're mad at your dad, I get that, so I'm not going to get in the way of that.
You have a good old fight with your dad, and here's a hand puppet of a bald guy, and go to town, right?
No, but I mean, isn't that the truth?
Yeah. Like, you're mad at your dad?
I'm not going to... If I scream at her, I'm really mad at my mom.
It's like, I don't want to interrupt your psychodrama with my presence, so go to it.
But I mean, is that not somewhat the mental attitude that's not bearing false witness?
Because when she starts yelling at you and you take it personally, you're just not processing the reality of the situation that it probably has almost nothing to do with you.
And she grew up in a household where the love was, well, quote, love was extremely conditional.
Extraordinarily conditional, right?
You don't do the right thing.
I'll beat your ass and lock you in your room, right?
There was a lot of other elements in there, too, with just emotional manipulation.
None of her siblings are...
Functional in a traditional sense, they have pretty severe issues.
Right. I am sure of that, and so that doesn't work either.
And that's another thing that gives you humility, is you say, well, all of the emotional habits that I learned from my family have not resulted in good things for the children, so I have to assume that this is not the right stuff to be doing.
Yeah. So, don't take it personally.
Don't engage as if it's you.
Like, honestly, if she had some really rude waitress, right?
She came to you and she said, man, that waitress was totally rude to me today.
And you were to say, I wasn't rude to you today.
Wouldn't that be kind of like weird?
And she'd say, what are you talking about?
I'm talking about the waitress, not you.
But it's the same thing.
I'm really angry at male authority.
Hey, you know, I get that.
You know, your dad was definitely tough.
I'm not talking about my dad. I'm talking about you.
No, you're not. No, you're not.
Yeah. Right? I mean, you've got to have that level.
And that's what, to me, it is to not bear false witness, is to actually know what you're talking about rather than act it out.
Right. Because you're a safer target than her dad.
1,000%. And the most ironic saying that I get, and you're 100% right on the taking personally thing, because she says, She accuses me of me attempting to control her, and it's the most dumbfounding thing because I have no idea how she could get to that conclusion if it wasn't a projection.
Well, no, but you are attempting to control her because when you call her a bish and retarded and the see you next Tuesday word, you're attempting to control her behavior with negative stimuli when the person you're actually angry at is your mom, but it's easier to counterattack your wife or to attack your wife than it is to talk honestly.
This is why I ask if you talk to your mom.
It's like, well, no, that's too scary.
Man, I'll fight with my wife five times a week, but actually talking honestly to my My mom, God no, right?
It's like, so what are you doing?
Like, you're a big tough guy yelling at your wife, but you can't even say anything honest to your mom?
You know what? I think I'm going to start by saying something honest to my mom when she gets back from her, honey.
Well, you know, here's the thing.
I'm not saying whether you should or shouldn't, be honest with you.
Oh, I know. I'm just saying that you're all kinds of tough with the mother of your child, but not with your own mother.
I bet you don't. Would you ever call your mom a bitch and retarded and see you next Tuesday?
Not to her face.
Right. So you see, your wife also sees this.
Your wife sees that you treat your mother infinitely better than you treat her.
How does that make her feel?
Oh, yeah. And you see your wife treat her father infinitely better than she treats you.
How does that make you feel?
It's like...
I look at it like you are treating that asshole who locked you in the house and did all this horrible shit.
And you understand, the better she treats him, the worse she's going to treat you.
And the better you treat your mother, the worse you're going to treat your wife.
So go have an honest conversation with your parents.
You'd be amazed at what that does to your relationship with each other.
Yeah, that's going to happen, like, in the next minute.
All right, all right. So it sounds like, listen, I really appreciate the call, and, you know, I also really appreciate the strength that it takes to talk about these things.
It's a tough situation, but this obviously has to be driven, and I've mentioned it, so I'll just close on this, has to be driven by your daughter did not choose any of this.
I mean, I guess you guys can be kind of crappy with each other.
I think it's bad, but at least they're all voluntary wounds.
But your child is not with you by choice.
And your child cannot see this.
There's a lot of damage that's already been done, and the only thing you can do is stop adding to it and start subtracting from it.
And so, for the sake of your daughter, right?
I mean, I'm sure if your daughter was being menaced by a big dog, you'd grab a stick and stand between her and the big dog.
And yet, you traumatize her with this bullshit, right?
So, to protect your child, this is the self-discipline, right?
To protect your child, to protect your marriage.
Because look, Not taking it personally, being the bigger person, not engaging with this stuff.
I'm sorry you feel that way, and so on.
She can't keep fighting if you're not fighting.
That's just not a thing. She can't just keep fighting if you're not fighting.
Having that level of self-discipline is going to be something that she's going to end up respecting.
Save her from herself, be the leader.
And you are, of course, an introspective and thoughtful fellow with a fine mind and great language skills.
And if you take the lead, but if you get down in her with the muck and fight at this level, It's harming your daughter, and you don't have the right to do that.
Again, you can waste your life fighting with your wife if you want, but you don't have the right to inflict this on your daughter.
And, you know, maybe it's not too late for her not to be an only child, if that's your choice.
But right now, of course, six months in the desert ain't producing anything other than dust devils, right?
So, yeah, I'd say definitely don't stop taking it personally, however tough that might be.
If you have an honest conversation with your mother...
You will at least identify the person who probably did you a lot more harm than your wife did, and that will take a lot of the pressure off your anger to your wife.
No. Will you keep you posted about how it's going?
Absolutely, dude. Thanks, man.
Great conversation. I appreciate the time.
Thank you so much. All the best.
▲
Export Selection