Transcript | Ep. 151: Ask Unladylike: How to Stay Married

Heather: There are ways that marriage isn't constructed exactly in its most traditional sense to accommodate a full person. So you have to have this kind of reckoning where you and your spouse talk about, how are we going to make sure that we can each, like, you know, realize our dreams and and feel like full human beings in the world and not just like an appendage attached to somebody else.

[theme music]

Caroline: Hey y’all and welcome to Unladylike. I’m Caroline.

Cristen: I’m Cristen. And we are back with another installment of Ask Unladylike, where we reach into our mailbag to answer YOUR burning questions — the kind that Google could never.

Caroline: And I gotta say, Cristen, I am fangirling a little over today’s expert guest. Advice columnist Heather Havrilesky is joining us to tackle our listener questions. And y’all might know her from her column Ask Polly, which I’ve been reading for years and whiiiich has genuinely made me cry .. more than once.

Cristen: Why you cryin?!

Caroline: Yeah! The way she dismantles shame, and the way she reassures her letter-writers about their strengths and their inner beauty as they go through life … It’s basically free therapy.

Cristen: Yeah, I mean Heather Havrilesky definitely brings the tears, but she also brings the lols, as y’all will soon find out in this episode. She’s got a new book out this week called Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage. And in late December, an excerpt from this book went viral.

Caroline: Oh yeah.

Cristen: It was published in the New York Times with the headline “Marriage Requires Amnesia. Do I hate my husband? Oh for sure. Yes. Definitely.” And she says “hate my husband” in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way. Basically what she’s saying in this excerpt is that if you are going to be in a long term successful marriage it does at times require a little selective listening, a few willful blind spots to your spouse’s pet peeves, the things that might annoy you to no end if you let them. When in fact you have to kind of keep your eyes on the relationship prize. But! A lot of people on the internet flipped the fuck out over this.

Caroline: Oh yeah. Yes I think that is the scientific way to put it, C. Some of the responses I saw were just like super sanctimonious super huffy-puffy arms-crossed “I would NEVER say this about my spouse,” to which, I couldn’t help but think, OK, you’ve been irritated with the way your spouse loads the dishwasher? Like, you’ve never wanted to murder them in the middle of the night when they hog the bed and put their knees in the middle of your back? How are you even DOING THIS?! I’m just saying. That I really appreciate Heather’s take on relationships, on life. She really gives the warts-and-all approach and she’s so fucking funny when she does it. And so I just think that perhaps some of those folks who were really mad about the excerpt and helped it go viral, maybe they’re just not in on the joke as far as Heather’s advice goes.

Cristen: You know, I’m gonna go ahead and confess here and now that last night I reloaded my dishwasher.

Caroline: I do it every day!

Cristen: Because I opened it and I said “what fresh hell is this?!”

Caroline: Truly. What is wrong with people?!?!

Cristen: And as someone who’s been married for five years, which I feel like I’m I’m still relatively early in this divine tedium. So, I personally found our conversation and just Heather’s whole approach to marriage to be very reassuring and refreshing because I think the sooner sometimes we can just acknowledge just the hot mess of it all, the easier it becomes to really just appreciate each other as people and build your relationship and grow together.

Caroline: Yeah, absolutely. And so today Heather is bringing that perspective to y’all’s questions about marriage regret, sex drive and putting yourself first.

Cristen: And to start, we’re Zooming with Heather about her book Foreverland and her own 15 years of divine tedium.

[stinger]

Caroline: So Heather. Let's dive into your book. Why did you want to share the story of your marriage with the world?

Heather: The the word want is sticky sticking out for me in this question. That is a question that I asked myself many, many times in the writing of this book. Why would I want to write a memoir about my marriage while I was still married, while I am still married? Why would I set out to do that? And the answer to that question is complicated. I have been giving people advice for about a decade now through Ask Polly, and I don't necessarily give marriage advice or parenting advice that often because I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I have some special insights into marriage and kids, even after 15 years of being married and my kids are teenagers now, 15 and 12. But the main reason I wrote this book is that I felt like books about marriage were either very shiny, happy, sugarcoated accounts of an imaginary marriage that didn't sound familiar to me. Maybe my marriage is excruciatingly bad, but I didn't. I couldn't relate to the sort of gloss that I felt the authors were putting on their marriages. Or I would, you know, read books about marriages from the perspective of someone who's already divorced and is basically savagely ripping their marriage to shreds. And the story is that, of course, “My marriage was terrible. It was born to die. My marriage was, you know, it was doomed from the start. Through no fault of my own it became a living nightmare.” So I sort of wanted to write a book about how marriage can be both dreamy and a living nightmare at the same time. And, actually, that the experience of marriage is in some ways torments you. It's made to break you. It's made to like, rip apart all of your previous values and reconstruct them. It's made to make you doubt yourself. Marriage is this is this crucible that we don't talk about in our culture very often. We don't talk about how hard it is unless we're talking about marriages that have failed.

Cristen: I've been married for I think, five years now, and it's comforting to hear you say that because that's - I mean, I'll just leave it. I agree. You know, it's very much a “two things can be true at the same time” kind of existence.

Heather: Yeah, that's right. And and I do think that as you get into your late four, I'm 51. As you get into your mid 40s, I'd say early 40s. And also as you get into like 10 years of marriage, 15, 20 years of marriage, people are a little bit more forthright about the fact that that you can talk, you can complain about your spouse, and it doesn't mean that you hate them 100 percent or that you want to get out of your marriage. Old married couples tend to acknowledge the reality of marriage in a more kind of loving, happy way than new couples, because new couples are afraid that maybe their marriages are doomed because they are annoyed by each other constantly, which I mean, especially during the pandemic. You see this a lot. It's sort of like, I think a lot of people go through this thing where they're like, “How? How seriously should I take, how annoyed I am all the time by this human being who is at my elbow all day long?” You know, it's sort of like, Well, I mean, Have you ever had someone at your in the same room as you all day long in your entire life who you didn't really want to murder at some level? I mean, that's sort of the experience of of being a human being, actually.

Cristen: Yeah, it can feel weirdly sacrilegious sometimes to, like, just let it all out to vent all of the the annoyance.

Heather: Yes, sacrilegious is a great word for it because we have a lot of moral judgments that we place on how you handle this person who has - you made an active decision to bring this person into your life. And now you're supposed to be a patriot to his country for the rest of your days on Earth, which is, I mean, it's insane when you put it in those terms. I mean, part of the fun I had with this book was just trying to boil down what we expect of ourselves within marriage and how insane it is that we expect these things of ourselves and each other. I mean, just having a conversation like that with your spouse where you say, “Whoa, it's really weird that we sleep inches apart every night, you know, like, why are we even doing that? That's insane. Like, what were we thinking when we bought this bed that's, you know,” I mean, I can't understand anyone owning a bed that smaller than a king size bed.

Caroline: Oh my god, This has been a conversation I just moved in with my boyfriend a couple of months ago. We have a queen-sized bed

Heather: Yeah. Yeah, it's not…Queen size is not is not nearly big enough.

Caroline: No, that's like a one-person bed, I've discovered. A queen size is like one person.

Cristen: It was like cute when we were first dating, you know? Let's spoon now. Now it's like, what the fuck?

Caroline: Yeah, get OFF OF ME.

Heather: Why are you touching me right now? Why is it? What is that?

Caroline: Well, could you elaborate a little bit when you talk about how marriage is a thing that like breaks you down and rebuilds your expectations? What in what way are you talking about?

Heather: Well, I would say that your ideas about what a good person you are are challenged by marriage. You can resolve not to have the same argument over and over again, and then you can wake up eight years later, and there you are having the exact same argument that you said, let's never have this dumb argument again. You know, when you think about, “I've signed on to navigate my life in tandem with another stubborn, emotional, sometimes anxious human being, and we will effortlessly make all the big life decisions together in an unconflicted and mutually supportive way.” You know, that's again, an incredibly unrealistic goal or even expectation to have. My husband and I just moved across the country, and we each had a different emotional experience about moving itself, and packing was a complete nightmare. My husband, as it turns out, has no idea how to pack a box, so I packed, I think I packed 200 boxes. I mean, that's too much stuff anyway. But I single handedly was packing everything and he was, you know, to his credit, he was running errands and sometimes cooking. But at some point I had a breakdown, and I had to say I, I feel like you don't know how to pack a box, and he's like, “You're always hanging over my shoulder and telling me. So I don't feel like I really should be because you're going to tell me I'm doing it wrong.” All marriage things end up sounding kind of cringy and old fashioned because marriage is kind of cringy and old fashioned. You know, like, there are these ways that conflicts break down that are similar to each other. So when it comes to how does a marriage crush you into the ground? There are just endless avenues for discussion, essentially. It's it's funny that something that brings my life so much goodness and joy and happiness is also shaped like a nightmare a lot of the time. It sort of doesn't make sense. And when I started to write about my marriage, I mean, honestly, my assumption was that I would write a very - a kind of a simple story that's just like, “Wow, you know, it takes a long time to accept. But when you're in a really, really great marriage like mine, it's so worth it to be married. And all the little, small irritations are nothing compared to the love that you feel for your incredible partner, and the main thing is just to feel so grateful. And, you know, access the love that will engulf both of you if you're in a great marriage like mine.” And then I started writing about all the things that bothered me in my marriage And also, I started questioning the institution of marriage at large and why people do this, and I - which was, I mean, it makes for a good book, actually. And there were times when I would make Bill read chapters, and I'd say “This is just embarrassing. Like, why would I want this out in the world?” And his answer would be, “This is going to help someone. And it's funny. I mean, a lot of it is funny and you just need to keep going.” And I think that's I mean, that's probably like the best testament to my marriage if anything that I say or write in the book. You know, he's extremely supportive of me writing down the brutal truth of, you know, human life.

Cristen: Well, I'm wondering from your perspective what I mean, is there really a difference between a quote unquote great marriage and a flawed marriage because isn't that kind of a Venn diagram, ultimately?

Heather: Definitely. I mean, all marriages are flawed. You know, human beings are flawed, thus two human beings together forever - infinitely flawed, really. I don't know people who are in great marriages who don't talk about their own flaws and each other's flaws very openly. Now granted, I don't know that many people who are in great marriages who aren't also very honest with each other and themselves. So to me, it feels like a piece of it. But I think that, you know, great marriages to me are kind of defined by mutual acceptance. And whether that looks like talking about everything or not talking about a lot of things is kind of up to the two people involved, right? I mean, each marriage is almost like its own strange, collaborative work of art. And so when other people can walk by and say, I don't understand that or that doesn't work for me, you know, it's like you should treat it like they're looking at a piece of art because it doesn't matter what someone else can perceive about a work of art from the outside. With a marriage, all that really matters is the two artists' collaboration and their intention in building this thing and whether it makes them happy. But people can say that they have a great marriage and you can observe something that would drive you insane and you can conclude that that's a bad marriage, but that just means that, you know, that thing wouldn't function well in your life, and it might function perfectly well in someone else's life.

Caroline: You write in Foreverland that “being married is far more interesting than falling in love.” So in what way? What do you mean?

Heather: Well. First of all, I think we've seen the story of two people falling in love many, many times, and it's hard to do that story well anymore. It's kind of endlessly seductive, I want to say it's sort of that emotional porn of two people who are mysterious to each other become increasingly exciting to each other within a short period of time. And then at the end, it’s raining and they come together and grasp each other's faces and suck each other's tongue down each other's throats and then roll credits. Whereas the the interesting part actually begins when she moves all her shit into his house and she starts to criticize his taste in furniture. Yeah, they play Monopoly for the first time and realize they actually hate each other, which, by the way, is the underside of loving someone, is that you also kind of hate them because if you're passionate enough about them to want to just press your naked body up against their naked body, you're probably also provoked by them into a state of raging hatred at some cellular level. I mean, that's why you end up with someone who is a little bit different than you in certain ways. You know? There there can be similarities, obviously, but there's always some dark level at which you are kind of opposites and you're clashing. I'm making love sound very dysfunctional, but I just think that again, it goes back to that duality. You love someone and, you know, there's light and darkness in everything, let's say. You're you're conflicted. It’s it’s - our culture is very un- conflicted and it's very it's very into selling us an unconflicted story. And the reality of everything we experience in our lives is a million times more conflicted than the world will allow, especially that the world will allow for a woman, right? Because women aren't supposed to be conflicted, it's like it's not trustworthy for a woman to be at war with herself. That means she's either crazy or sneaky or evil.

Cristen: From that perspective of like women who are marrying men in particular, when it can really feel like, as you put it, “an outdated charade.” Is marriage even - is marriage a relevant institution anymore?

Heather: The answer to every emotional question might be “You've got to honor yourself.” I mean, I've probably written that a thousand times just in Ask Polly. But but honoring yourself doesn't always mean at the expense of all the relationships you've built. There are times in your life where honoring yourself means honoring something that you built along the way. Like, in my case, I'm married to a man, and he likes to play golf. And I never in a million years would have foreseen that I would land in this horrific position of waving goodbye to my husband so he can go play golf for five hours. It's sort of like no, I don't, I don't support that, but it's like my my husband's favorite thing to do is to play golf. He played golf as a kid, and it's sort of like, OK, fine. Yeah, go, yeah it’s Sunday, weather's beautiful. Yeah, you should be golfing. And there's there are ways that if you've been married long enough and if your marriage is trusting enough, it sort of grows into something that's a little bit, I want to say, less traditional, and I'm not talking about like, it becomes open. You're now, you're in an open marriage. Like, I'm definitely not talking about that, although some people do that. For me, it's more like it becomes sort of more tolerable, for example, that my husband is a golfer because I have equal and opposite things that I want to do with my time and my mind and you know my body. And I want to like, try on different ways of being without feeling like I'm threatening some kind of moral universe. And partially for me, it's like that is partially just to I want to be I want to spend time writing and using my imagination. I want to do a lot of things that are going to seem like a waste of time to another human being. I mean, I think that's a little bit of it, but it's also like, I want to go out in the world and be recognized by other people. I want to flirt, I want to have conversations. I want to have male friends. I want to have all kinds of friends. I want to feel like a vibrant human being until I'm dead. I don't want to feel like I'm just sitting around waiting to die with another person who is sitting around waiting to die. Well, that's really bright and cheery.

Caroline: I, uh, I love that.

Cristen: We’re gonna take a quick break.

Caroline: When we come back, Heather addresses some of YOUR marriage conundrums.

Cristen: Don’t go anywhere!

[stinger]

Caroline: We’re back with advice columnist and author Heather Havrilesky. All right, Heather. How are you feeling about some advice questions from Unladylike listeners?

Heather: That would be great. I'm my on-the-spot advice is sometimes spotty, but you know, sometimes I have good answers.

Caroline: Well, I want to start. I want to start with one that’s like a little a little dicey. This is from Lauren. She's in her early 30s and she has been dealing with a non-existent sex drive for a couple of years now. Here's Lauren's letter. She said, “I love my husband and try to get in the mood when he initiates, but I have an anxious voice in my head saying it isn't going to happen. I want to want to have sex, if that makes sense, but I have no desire and don't know how to change that. My long-term fear is that this issue will eventually ruin my marriage. My husband is aware of the issue and we do discuss it, but neither of us knows how to move forward. My therapist, who I generally really like, didn't provide much help, basically suggesting I muddle through for the sake of my marriage. I write to you feeling like I have nowhere left to go. What can I do to ramp up my sex drive? Vibrators, porn etc. haven't done the trick. My issue is a pleasure. It's desire.”

Heather: That's a hard one, because I think there are times in your life when you just don't have a vibrant relationship to your body, and and I'm going to say that the first thing, though, to do is to create a situation where there are no expectations at all so that you can get back in touch with what you want. Because in a situation, I think anyone can relate to this, where you're with someone and they are making it very clear to you that they're not getting enough sex. It's extremely difficult to locate your own desires within that context. What works is being suddenly freed from any expectation. It doesn't mean giving up on the whole picture. It just means setting up conditions where you say, OK, what I really need is just like a month or two, you know, look, just give me a full month of just like, don't even ask. I'm going to see where I am for a month and then we we can kind of be affectionate with each other, but you need to know that it's a dead end. There's no way you're getting laid, like it's not happening. There was a time for me when we were trying to get pregnant with my second kid, and it was like so much work. I just I had a kid. My I was not back into shape. I just had a bad relationship to my body and I was like, I had no fantasy life. My brain didn't even work that way. And I would say to my husband, I'd be like, “Oh, we're supposed to have sex right now. UGH.” And I just remember looking at him and saying, “there is literally nothing in the world and I less want to do than fuck you right now.” And he's like, “this is really great foreplay. Thanks a lot. Wow, you're really turning me on,” you know? And I was like, The thing is, we would laugh about it, but we had to work through that. It had to be on the table or I couldn't. I mean, I have a compulsion, unfortunately, where I feel like I have to be honest with someone or I can't feel connected to them. So it was like, it just had to be done. Luckily, Bill, my husband, understands that. I think that along with letting go of those pressures, I mean, unfortunately, with sex, it's like sex is connected to everything else in your life and you have to get in deeper and figure out what feels like it's missing for you. Like what part of your imagination isn't working? How do you feel about your body? What is your connection with your body at this time? It's like all these relationships with yourself have to be intact for you to have desire for another human being. And the thing is, if you have all of these relationships within yourself that are disconnected or aren't working, it's going to make you make it hard for you to connect with another human being. But also, I think that when you shut everything down, you have a chance to have, you know, more emotional conversations about what's left. It's almost like you're becoming friends again and then you kind of work from there and see if you can get back into bed. I guess, in closing, in my in my kind of rambling advice. I would also say that it's very normal to have times during a marriage where you just don't feel that connected to the other person and you're just not that affectionate.

Cristen: All right, our next letter is from Kimberly, subject line ”marriage regret.” So for a little little bit of background, Kimberly has been married to her husband since 1993, and she wrote to us realizing for the first time just how much of a gaslighting narcissist he is. So, Kimberly writes, “He has never admitted to any wrongdoing and has never said he is sorry for anything. I am 50 and at the point of just wanting to be happy before I die. I'm not sure what to do. I'm not happy, and I don't want to die this way. I regret marrying him. I regret changing my name. I don't know what advice I'm asking for. I just wish things would change in my marriage and in marriage in general.”

Heather: So now I'm giving her advice?

Cristen: I mean, yeah.

Heather: OK. My advice is, get divorced.

Cristen: Yeah.

Heather: I had one relationship with someone I would consider a gaslighting narcissist, the narcissist part. I'm not sure, but gaslighting, yes. And he also never, ever apologized for anything. He was so painstakingly careful not to apologize, which bleeds out into so many areas of human experience, you know, like he also basically found any problem that was happening was automatically my fault. I mean, that's how he experienced problems. It was probably something that I did that created a situation. And to the point where even if I said - he had this thing where he was like, “I need you to make I statements when you're upset, you can't just start talking about my behavior like, it's bad. You have to say I feel upset by,” you know, he had all these like structures. So one day I said I, you know, I got a little snippy with him, and then I said, “Oh, I know why I got snippy. I've been feeling bad ever since I looked at your old” — he had been married before and I found his wedding pictures and I had just been kind of sad and depressed about his just bumping into his old wedding pictures. Because I don't know. At the time I romanticized weddings. And so I explained this to him, and I kind of I was crying a little bit, but it was not about blame. It was just like letting him know the source of my frustration that really wasn't about him, it was this internal thing that had happened to me, and he stopped at the end of my I mean, I thought I was giving this kind of eloquent speech at the end about, you know, how we should be more connected. And there are ways that he is so beautiful to me and blah blah blah. And at the end, he said. “Where did this come from?” And I was like, “Oh, what do you mean?” And he said, “Because I just need to know so I can avoid having to do this again.” I was like, You know, this is communication. But you think it's torture? That's interesting. That's just like when someone doesn't apologize, ever, yeah, you have to think about like, what kind of threat does it pose to this human being to apologize? I mean, that's just the most rigid, absurd, punitive position to occupy across the course of a marriage. And you're talking about since 1993. I mean, they've been married for almost 30 years, and she's been married to him, if she's 50 since she was 23 years old. But what she's describing is “I'm unhappy and just I need someone to tell me that it's OK to get out of this.” I mean, it's amazing how we need permission from someone else at some point. Just to say “I'm allowed to want a different kind of life, you know, and a different kind of partner.” I have a friend who just got divorced, and she's seeing someone new and she's like, “I should have gotten divorced a long time ago. I'm just so much happier.” I mean, it happens all the time. Some people have people stay in shitty marriages. And when you're 50 and you've been miserable for almost 30 years, no, definitely. You've tried, right? I mean, It's like, OK, I'm assuming you probably tried for a few fucking times over the course of three decades. Yeah, be happy.

Cristen: Choose you.

Heather: Yeah, honor yourself, right? Just like we're saying, I mean. Yeah. Divorce. Stamp! OK, I need a big divorce stamp.

Cristen: I am wondering if you have any any advice in terms of like if you've spent 30 years with someone who does not apologize and makes the problem always you. I can only imagine how even just broaching the topic of divorce, what kind of hell that is going to unleash from this hopefully soon ex-husband. Do you have any I don't know any final thoughts on ways that Kimberly could kind of get herself, get herself in a place to just fucking do the damn thing, regardless of all of the terrible things he will definitely say on the way out.

Heather: I mean, when I was breaking up with that guy who I think was pretty messed up on several levels in retrospect. And I was not perfect at the time, of course, not remotely. But but when I was breaking up with him. I really wanted to avoid conflict, but I called him and I said when I realized that I needed to break up with him, and I said was, just, can we just have a conversation instead of arguing, can we just talk about how this just isn't working, and in some ways, it just never really worked. And we should just - we both deserve to be happier. You know, and he was like, “Yeah. I agree with that.” And there was just no pushback. I mean, it was it surprised me. I thought that he was going to argue for the relationship. And it's funny like, you think that you're doing this radical thing and then you realize that the other person has been waiting for you to break up with them for so long. I'm sure that she's in a in a similar she's probably in a similar situation. And I do think that with a divorce, you just it's so important to sort of find your higher self and keep the peace along the way. And also talking openly to your friends. The thing is a lot of people who write letters to me, they they write me things that they're afraid to even tell to their friends and family, But just tell a few friends and talk to your family like. Give it some air and see how that feels. So I would say talk to a few trusted friends about it, about how serious you are about getting out of it and how unhappy you are. I mean, this is the cost of the way our culture is about marriage and how moralistic we are about marriage. It's like people can't have conversations about how bad their marriages are without feeling incredibly ashamed. And that's sad, because, you know, a lot of marriages are bad and there's nothing to be ashamed about.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break.

Cristen: When we come back, Heather answers a few more listener questions and we learn what has most surprised her about doling out advice.

Caroline: Stick around!

[stinger]

Cristen: We’re back with advice columnist Heather Havrilesky.

Caroline: We do have a letter from another Heather. Just for a little background, she's a clinical psychologist. She busted her ass for 10 years. She got her Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She landed a dream job at a hospital, and she also in the middle of that met a great guy who's now her husband. She writes, “He's currently an E8 in the Air Force, a rank that is incredibly rare for someone with just under 17 years of service. At the very onset of our relationship, we had many conversations about the realities of the military, and at that time, we decided that should the day come when he gets orders for reassignment, I would stay in our current city, the place we ultimately want to live, and we would make a long-distance relationship work. Well, the day has come and that job is in Virginia. We are currently in the Pacific Northwest. Since receiving this news, I have felt judged, unsupported and misunderstood by family and friends for the decision we've made as a couple. Because as a military wife, the expectation is that I drop everything to support my husband and his career. Do you have advice for making long-distance marriage work and feeling supported in my decision? A good one-liner to get nosy people to check themselves would be great, too.”

Heather: I think not opening up the the decision to discussion, it's almost like this is a decision that that you feel incredibly comfortable with, that you know that your you're making the decision that's right for you. And in those cases, it's sort of an issue of even if you have some internal doubts, not not airing those and just keeping that part of your life safe from public scrutiny is really important. So I would just say don't open the conversation up to that avenue to begin with, but then also when people start giving you opinions about what they think you should be doing. I mean, I think that I've landed at a place where. I'm learning to just say less and to to kind of smile quietly and look at someone instead of explaining myself when they're pissing me off. It sounds a little bit pat, but sometimes like having just a clear, concise statement at the ready like. “This is a decision that works for both of us” instead of making it like, “well, you know, my career is really important to me” or going into any details, just saying. “Yeah, this is what we're doing.” I mean, it's almost like the the less syllables that come out of your mouth, the better sometimes when people are being judgmental and weird and intrusive. I have a friend who when people start to ask him complicated questions or questions he doesn't want to answer, he just gets this quizzical look on his face. And this a little smile and kind of goes like, “Hmm! What? Why are you asking me that?” Or “Why are you saying that? That's strange.”

Cristen: Oh that’s great

Heather: And it's just this indication, like he's not going to start talking any time soon. And also just, you know, when people say things like. Two and a half years, I mean, aren't you worried he's going to cheat? Or, you know, just all the stupid shit people say to just say, No, not really. The end, you know, just a no. “No.” And then do you just look, like ball’s in your court again. Never underestimate the value of a one word answer. And also silence. You know, you can shut things down really quickly once you make it super. I mean, in a friendly way, you can be friendly and still just offer nothing. It's very adult to me when people can manage that, I'm very bad at it. I'm just much more of like, Oh, well, let me give you this. Let me give you that. What else do you need? But I think I think it's just an amazing skill. And as far as like advice about keeping the relationship together. I don't know. I mean, there are so many ways to stay close to people, texting, talking on the phone. I assume they're going to visit each other. And I assume they're going to talk to each other a lot. I don't know, two and a half years goes by pretty quickly. You know?

Cristen: That's what I was going to ask like, am I am I off base for thinking like, that doesn't sound like an impossible amount of time and maybe could be kind of nice?

Caroline: Yeah cause it’s finite.

Heather: Yeah. You know, she knows what's right for her. She doesn't want to compromise her career. I don't know. It sounds, it sounds like he's supportive of the whole decision, too. So there's really no discussion that needs to happen with other people at all.

Caroline: Yeah

Cristen: I like it. All right, we've got one last question from Deb, and it's a little like relationship adjacent. Deb is married and she's got a relatable question, so. Deb writes, “This is more of a human question. I believe that has plagued women more than men. How do we balance responsibility to others and responsibility to self? I so often feel like I'm torn between choosing what is best for me and what everyone else wants. I don't want to put women in a box. We're the ones who only put others before us, but I feel like I'm expected to take care of everyone and myself. And hey, just ain't going to happen. Any advice?”

Heather: Yeah. My advice is learn to say no directly, which is very, very hard when you don't do it very often. Notice when you're giving way too much just on impulse of or sort of compulsively, right? I have this thing now where I can hear myself, I can hear myself coming like I can hear myself like running down the hallway with five offers of help to someone you know, Hey, hey, hey, you know I was I had a conversation before this interview with a publicist, and she mentioned a few things and I thought, Don't offer to do those things. Ask her if she can do them, you know, like which is, you know, I hope she doesn't listen to this. But you know, it's a good thing to be able to say, like she brought this up. She can probably do it. I don't have to like, jump in and say, I'll do all these things or, you know, you don't have to do any of these things. Trying to fix things by doing them all yourself is such a woman thing that I've been caught in for my entire life, and I'm really learning how to be selfish when I need to be selfish. I think with kids, you sort of are forced to be selfish a lot because you basically you can spend all your time serving your kids if you don't, if you're not careful. I'm careful never to serve my kids. Oh God, I'm really in for it with this book, man. I'm just so screwed. So screwed…But yeah, I mean, I think, even though I'm married and I'm so happy with my husband, he's great, and I love my kids and I love my life. A lot of the things that I care about are really cultivated alone. I mean I'm kind of the big thinker when it comes to designing our lives as a couple you know and as a family. And when you can't do those things, when you're just, you know, compulsively helping people and filling in the gaps and fixing things. You know, your friendships suffer from that too. All your relationships suffer when you can't say no to people. It's a generous act to say no to someone because there's energy there that - all of the psychic and emotional energy is going to go into saying yes to something that you absolutely know that you don't want, or that you feel like it's not really a responsibility to provide, you know, I mean, knowing the difference between the things that you really want to give. It makes you a more generous person, essentially, having the ability to say no. Some of my friendships with people who I could not say no to in the past were completely selfish because I never expressed where my boundaries were. And now they're generous because I'm always expressing, “I love you so much. I can't talk to you until next week, but I'm really looking forward to it,” things like that. But it's all boils down to something that we would call selfishness, because it's all about, you know, trusting your instincts and having faith in your own values and developing your own principles for how to proceed, And I think that, you know, the women I know who have learned to take on that kind of attitude are a lot happier than the women I know who just resentfully cater to anyone who shows up.

Cristen: So what? What has surprised you the most over the years about the advice requests that you’ve received, especially as it pertains to relationships and marriage?

Heather: Well. I think. The ability for people to sort of grind their gears on the same things over and over again for years is sort of mind blowing. It amazes me how we create conditions where we can be tormented in exactly the ways that we prefer to be tormented.

Cristen: Hmm.

Heather: So. Relationships tend to be an outcropping of that in some ways, you can kind of get outside of that by, say, marrying someone who has who's just really not like anyone in your family or marrying someone who doesn't set into motion the things that got set into motion when you were a kid that weren't working, like your insecure attachments and your sort of anxiety and your your dismissiveness or any number of things. But even so, you'll probably find that you're replicating those conditions in your friendships or you are finding ways to solve that same puzzle in your career. So I guess I'd say that the thing that surprises me the most about relationship questions is the same thing that surprises me about any kind of question, which is that you start to see the same mechanism and the same kind of compulsive, you know, intellectually tangled, anxious, repeating, problem-solving trap. You start to see these puzzles that people prefer in everything they do, and it kind of doesn't matter if it's about love or anything else. They're all the same. So the big question becomes, what are my repeating themes that I always return to. When I started writing Ask Polly, I would write over and over again, Oh, that situation sounds torturous. I hate the sound of that. You know what they're doing wrong this and that and this. And you know what else is stupid? This and that about our culture sucks. Which I mean, I still write that, but I didn't. I and I eventually maybe get to something like, you know, but you might be a person who does this to contribute to the situation. Now I find myself just saying, Well, you know, you're a human being, you're trying to solve the same puzzle you've been dragging around your entire life like, oh, you like big puzzles that poke at you all the time, you know, like, nice. I get that. Or, oh, you like a puzzle that ignores you and you've got to unlock it, to get it, to just interact with you or you like both kinds of puzzles, you want a high maintenance puzzle and an annoying puzzle. And I mean, we're all so drawn to working way too hard to be at peace. And eventually, you just have to say, holy shit, just put down your puzzles and figure out how to be at peace.

Caroline: Heather’s book Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage is out today y’all! Go grab it at your local bookstore. Plus, if you want more Heather follow her on Twitter @hhavrilesky or subscribe to her advice column Ask Polly on Substack at askpolly.substack.com

Cristen: Y’all can find us at instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. You can drop us a line at hello@unladylike.co. And you can support Caroline & me directly by joining our Patreon; over there, you’ll get instant access to nearly 100 existing bonus episodes, and a new bonus every week, including last week’s convo on the feminist politics of veganism and vegetarianism. You can find it all over at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Caroline: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Jared O’Connell. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Cristen: This podcast was created by your hosts, Cristen Conger

Caroline: And Caroline Ervin of Unladylike Media.

Cristen: Next week…

S: You grow up as a young girl looking at women's bodies and like, oh, I want boobs. That would be awesome. And then they start growing and then you're in sixth grade and they keep going past a double D and you're like, OK, you can slow down, you can stop even like, that's plenty. And then like in a year, they're a G and beyond. And it's like just an entirely different thing than I was prepared for, the pornographication of my body by the whole world.

Caroline: We are talking breast reductions with two Unladylike listeners — why they decided to get one, what happened when they did — and how the shitty stew of pain and patriarchy holds big boobs hostage!

Cristen:Y’all do not want to miss this episode! So make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Caroline: And remember, got a problem?

Cristen: Get Unladylike. (And possibly get a divorce!)