Why We Stay in Bad Relationships, Solved

Why do smart, emotionally aware people stay in relationships that are clearly destroying them? Drew and I dug into the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard marriage, to walk through the seven psychological mechanisms that quietly lock people inside bad relationships and make leaving feel impossible. If you have ever watched someone you love stay in a relationship that is destroying them, or if you have been that person yourself, this episode will shine a lot of light on what is really going on under the hood. Get your free episode guide: https://solvedpodcast.com/bad-relationships/ CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: When Smart People Stay Stuck in Bad Relationships 00:05:05 Meet Johnny Depp: From Kentucky to Captain Jack Sparrow 00:12:44 Meet Amber Heard: Growing Up in Texas and Breaking Into Hollywood 00:14:40 Mechanism #1: Normalization - The Water You Swim In 00:25:11 Mechanism #2: The Identity Trap - Filling the Void 00:40:07 Mechanism #3: The Slot Machine Effect - Addicted to Volatility 00:47:08 The Escalating Violence: From Breaking Things to Breaking Trust 00:49:58 Mechanism #4: Cognitive Dissonance - Rationalizing the Unacceptable 00:59:37 Mechanism #5: The Sunk Cost Fallacy - Throwing Good Years After Bad 01:10:00 Mechanism #6: The Guilt Cage - Blaming Yourself for Everything 01:13:52 Mechanism #7: The Terror of the Void - Learned Helplessness 01:21:38 The Legal Aftermath: When Nobody Wins 01:27:33 Practical Takeaways: How to Escape the Seven Traps 01:39:00 Final Reflections: Compassion for the Trapped ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iammarkmanson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Drew, you're still sick. I don't. Spoiler alert. We recorded the last episode two hours ago. That's right. But you're still sick. I continue to be sick. Why? I don't know. I never get sick either. This is weird. This is highly inconsiderate of our production schedule. I know. I don't appreciate your... I don't appreciate it either. You don't appreciate it. Well, I would appreciate it if you'd stop being sick by the end of this episode, so... I'll do my best. Yeah, get to work on that. This is our version of an abusive, toxic relationship. That you are unable to leave. Trapped. You are trapped. That is what we're talking about today, everybody.

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  If you have ever watched somebody you care about and you love stay in a relationship that is absolutely destroying them, this episode is for you. If you have been the person yourself who's been white-knuckling through what is actually just an absolutely terrible relationship, staying in it for way longer than you should, making bad decisions, this episode is also for you. I feel like this is something that everybody goes through at some point in their lives. They stay in a bad relationship for too long. And it's... There's a lot of different... Like, I've definitely done it myself, and I look back with a mixture of regret, shame, embarrassment, confusion. Like, what was I thinking?

• 1:28Mark Manson?

  And so, prepping for this episode, it brought a lot of clarity. Ultimately, it's not about being dumb. It's not about being weak. It's not about being needy or desperate. We've identified seven psychological mechanisms that act against us, that keep us in bad romantic situations, and make it feel reasonable and logical to stay when you're in that situation. So, whether you're somebody who has gotten out of a horribly toxic relationship and wondered what the fuck you were thinking, or you are somebody who is currently in a bad relationship and struggling to make a decision to leave, this episode should shine a lot of light on whatever you're going through. Now, the crazy thing, too, is that the smarter you are, or the more emotionally

• 2:11Mark Manson?

  attuned you are to the people around you, in some cases, the more susceptible you are to falling into a bad relationship, getting trapped inside of it, and not knowing how to leave. So, there's just a lot of misconceptions around who gets stuck in a bad relationship. There's a lot of misconceptions about why, and I think we're going to dispel all of those misconceptions today. So, a few of the things that we're going to talk about today in this episode of Solved. One, why in bad relationships, it's the good moments that are, in many cases, actually more dangerous than the bad moments. The invisible process by which a controlling relationship doesn't just restrict what you do, but it quietly rewires how you see yourself, how you feel about yourself, how you see the world.

• 2:53Mark Manson?

  Why the people most likely to end up in abusive relationships are often the most empathetic. How the traits that make you good at love are also the traits that make you most vulnerable to the toxic forms of love. Why resilience can often backfire. You are able to tolerate more bullshit for a longer period of time. We'll talk about the bystander effect, which, in this case, is applied to close friends and family members, people who stand by and watch a slow-moving train wreck happen in front of them without ever voicing an opinion or trying to stop it. And we'll talk about why just leave is potentially the most useless piece of advice for somebody stuck in a bad relationship. That, and much, much more. My name is Mark Manson. I'm the three-time number-one New York Times bestselling author, and this is Drew

• 3:38Mark Manson?

  Bernie, my co-host, producer, and better half of my codependent relationship. And this is Solved, the most comprehensive podcast on the planet, where we take one burning life question, and we solve it for you once and for all. Now, we're doing this episode a little bit different, Drew. I'm excited, because we're experimenting with a little bit of a shakeup here. So, for our listeners to give some context, what we did is Drew and I, we agreed on the episode topic, we agreed on the main point, we did some initial research, and agreed on the main points that we were going to hit, the seven psychological mechanisms that keep you stuck in a bad relationship. But from there, we split up the task completely.

• 4:21Mark Manson?

  So what Drew did is he went with the research team and they dug into all sorts of research that I'm not aware of. I don't know what you guys dug up. I've not looked at it. So a lot of it's gonna be news to me. And then on my side, I went and found a case study of two very prominent people who were stuck in a famously horrible relationship. And we're gonna use them as the example as we work through these seven concepts and these seven mechanisms. And Drew does not know who these people are. He does not know the story. Are you ready for the reveal? Yes, I'm ready for the big reveal. I've been waiting all these weeks. Fun fact, nobody on the team knows. I know, you kept a tight lip. I kept a tight lip.

• 5:05Mark Manson?

  So, our story today begins with a young man named Johnny Depp. Oh, okay. Oh, I didn't even think of that one. Born in Kentucky over 60 years ago today. So Johnny was born in Kentucky to working-class parents and he moved around a lot as a kid. According to him, he moved over 30 times by the time he reached high school age. So that's like twice a year for your entire childhood. And I think that's really interesting because it kind of explains, you know, why you would become good at acting or maybe have a natural talent for acting. Johnny was obsessed with music as a child. He wanted to be a rock star. He learned to play guitar.

• 5:50Mark Manson?

  He joined a band. He actually toured with that band around... He ended up in Florida. He toured with that band around Florida in the southern US. And then eventually moved out to Los Angeles to try to make a career in music. Now, the interesting thing about Johnny that's relevant for this story is that his mom was extremely abusive and violent. She used to throw things at him. She would scream, yell, just verbally abuse and berate Johnny and his siblings. And then she would throw things at him. Throw ashtrays, telephones, break furniture, and just beat the shit out of him. And he would later say that his mother could be both the sweetest and warmest person

• 6:34Mark Manson?

  in his life and the most doting with love, but she could also be the scariest and most violent and most harmful person in his life.

• 6:44Mark Manson?

  This is gonna come back. You wanna guess who discovered Johnny Depp? You'll never guess. It's crazy. I have no idea. I had no idea until last night. Nicolas Cage. Nick Cage did, really? Nick Cage discovered Johnny Depp, and the reason was, so Johnny was trying to make it as a musician in the mid 80s.

• 7:01Mark Manson?

  He was dating a makeup artist who worked on Hollywood films and Hollywood sets. And the makeup artist was good friends with Nick Cage. And so Nick started hanging out with Johnny, and after hanging out with him a few times, was like, dude, you'd be a great actor. You should audition for something. And so he introduced him to his agent, and then went to his first audition, and immediately landed a role on Nightmare on Elm Street. Okay. The Freddy Krueger movie. Yeah. And so that was his big break. And so it's kinda funny, he was never trained as an actor, never took theater, never practiced, never like, went through the whole grind of Los Angeles. Just got a part. And from there, got a TV part on 21 Jump Street. Became a teen heartthrob.

• 7:47Mark Manson?

  Was on the cover of all sorts of teen magazines and stuff in the late 80s. Became a huge celebrity, and he absolutely hated it. And so by the 90s, he had decided, I'm only gonna take roles that are kinda artsy and weird, and Johnny always had a desire to kinda subvert expectations of the audience. And so he started taking, he started turning down very prominent, you know, kinda big, typical Hollywood star roles, and he started taking a bunch of kinda weird, offbeat roles instead. Landed in Edward Scissorhand in the early 90s. That kind of established him as that type of actor. And then he went on to have an extremely successful career throughout the rest of the 90s. Get to the 2000s.

• 8:32Mark Manson?

  Disney was creating a concept called Pirates of the Caribbean. And they wanted a unique character for the main role, Captain Jack Sparrow. They wanted somebody who was both mesmerizing, but a little bit offbeat, a little bit like, you know, not your typical Disney role or Disney character. It was the first kinda big mainstream role that Johnny. auditioned for and like really wanted and people in Disney were very torn over it even like after they filmed the movie they were still unsure if they were actually going to use him a lot of Disney executives were like what are we doing this guy's a nut job in fact there's a there's a funny anecdote where some of the people from Disney actually

• 9:16Mark Manson?

  asked Johnny on set like hey man what's the deal with what's the deal with this character like is he drunk is he mentally ill like does he have brain damage and Johnny just looked at him and said yes

• 9:31Speaker 01

  I remember thinking the same thing when those movies came out I'm like what is with this this is a wild character

• 9:38Mark Manson?

  such an incredible character like such an incredible character but something interesting happened so obviously Pirates of the Caribbean is massive hit massive massive hit I think there were four movies and I forget the exact number but combined across the four movies that they grossed well into the billions and and Johnny at the time you know had a piece of that so it was pretty standard back then that if you were an A-list actor like he was you would get what was called the 2020 deal which is that you would get 20 million upfront and then you get 20% of the gross so Johnny became extremely rich extremely rich we're talking hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars over a short period

• 10:23Mark Manson?

  of time on top of that Captain Jack Sparrow became so popular and so synonymous with him that what happened was what happens to a lot of actors who experience maybe a little bit too much success with a role is that he couldn't shake the character from then on everywhere he went he was Captain Jack Sparrow all of his little offbeat quirks and funny lines and awkward things that he would say they're like oh he's doing Captain Jack Sparrow not realizing that like no that's who he is he tried to do he tried to branch out into other roles and start doing other movies But it just, nothing ever seemed to land. The audience now had a different relationship with him.

• 11:06Mark Manson?

  And so he ended up in this place where he felt kind of trapped by the success. On the personal life side, he had a long-term partner, he had kids. That relationship was going south. He was starting to drink a lot. He was doing drugs again. He was kind of spending a lot of money. He bought an island in the Bahamas. I think he bought, I think it was 17 properties in like eight different countries or something. He had a, he bought a wine cellar with like 10,000 bottles of wine. There's a building here in downtown LA where he bought all three penthouses, even though he's just one person. So he just kind of went on this spending spree.

• 11:49Mark Manson?

  And at one point, I believe at the peak, his monthly expenses were $2 million just to cover, like just to cover the like property taxes, you know, landscapers, housekeepers, like everything on all of his property. So he was burning through an insane amount of cash. So you've got this weird dichotomy where he's on the one hand, like at the peak of his success, the peak of his fame, but he's feeling trapped and stifled creatively, professionally. On the other hand, his personal life is completely spiraling out of control.

• 12:29Mark Manson?

  His, his, they never got married, but the mother of his kids, like they're growing apart. She doesn't really want to see him anymore. He's spending all this money. He's drunk all the time. He's kind of becoming a fuck up. And then that's when he meets Amber. Amber Heard, funny enough, grew up where I grew up. I didn't know that either. She and I actually had a few mutual friends in high school. Oh, I didn't know that. I never met her, but she, I believe she went to St. Michael's. I went to St. Andrews. It's funny, actually, one of my childhood friends did know her in high school. And I, I asked him a number of years ago what she was like in high school.

• 13:09Mark Manson?

  And his answer was, "Smoking hot." But Amber Heard grew up outside of Austin, like I did. And Austin in the 80s and 90s was a very different town. It was extremely conservative. It was the Bible Belt. Everything was about Jesus and football. Talked about this before and very much like me, she fucking hated it and could not wait to get out. By all accounts, she grew up with an abusive father, used to beat the shit out of her mom, drug problems, alcohol problems, in and out of jail, legal problems, the whole gamut. So she dropped out of high school at 17, moved to New York, became a model, moved to LA,

• 13:54Mark Manson?

  started her acting career and like a lot of beautiful faces in LA was kind of like climbing up the ladder, you know, starting with like music videos and little, you know, side roles in small TV shows and then maybe starring a indie horror movie and then kind of working her way up to more prominent feature films, but still is like a supporting actress or like kind of a minor role. I think she was in Pineapple Express, she was in Friday Night Lights. So she's like making a living, but she's by no means like famous. And then she lands on the set of The Rum Diaries, acting opposite of Johnny, and that's when

• 14:39Mark Manson?

  she met him. So the first psychological mechanism that I want to get into with both of their backstories is the concept of normalization, which is that we all come to our romantic relationships with a map and understanding of what romantic relationships are supposed to look like. There's a great book that we bring up sometimes by Harville Hendrix called Getting the Love You Want, and he talks about this throughout that book, that basically the, one of the primary roles that your parents play in your life is that their relationship becomes the standard by which you judge all of your future partners. So it's like whatever mom and dad did with each other and whatever mom and dad did with

• 15:20Mark Manson?

  you, that is quote unquote "normal" and that is expected and that is like your definition of love. And so here we have two people. Who come from abusive households. In Johnny's case, he is an extremely violent mother who physically abuses him. In Amber's case, she has an alcoholic, drug addicted father who's also abusive. And this is just their understanding of what relationships are. And it's the water they swim in. And so the things that would maybe strike you and I as a red flag doesn't strike them as a red flag. And I think all of us who struggle deeply in our relationships, we have to deal with this at some point.

• 16:01Mark Manson?

  There's like always a moment where we're like, oh, this thing that I always thought was normal is actually kind of fucked up. And I have to come to terms with that. And maybe change my programming a little bit, like change my definition of like, what is intimacy or what's okay. Otherwise, things are going to get very destructive or unhealthy.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  In the research, they call this your schema. Right? That's what gets normalized is you have this schema, this, this program running in your head, I guess. And it is based on those early experiences. And there's really, it's not just the family though, too. Right? There's the actual, there's other layers to it as well. The family is kind of the personal layer to it. But then there's also your social circles. So the people around you too. And then the wider culture as well. You know, so like, we, we talk all the time about like Latin American culture as well. Jealousy is seen as like passion.

• 16:55Mark Manson?

  Right, right.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  You don't have the, quite the vocabulary there as, as something being like, if someone is very jealous or controlling, in that culture, it might be very, that might be seen as almost a good thing.

• 17:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And so the schema has actually developed throughout that whole layered system. So it's not just the family, but the family is one of the most powerful, I would say.

• 17:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think the culture point is really important, especially in the context of Johnny Depp and Amber. It's, there's a Hollywood culture ecosystem that they, they exist within, right? So Johnny is the, the troubled genius. He's the rock star actor, right? He, he was Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, right? He's like famous for these kinds of roles. He's famous for being a little bit unstable. He's famous for being just offbeat and kind of wild and crazy. And so there's, there's a little bit of an enabling that goes on, right? So it's when he's drunk for three, he goes on a three day bender and blows $2 million on wine, like.

• 17:59Mark Manson?

  People kind of shrug and they're like, well, that's just Johnny being Johnny, right? And I think in Amber's case, she also exists within this ecosystem at the time where, you know, beautiful young women are taken for granted, not treated well, not respected, put up with a lot of bullshit, and you're just kind of expected to suck it up and deal with it. And all of this is playing out on that backdrop of expectations of like what's normal and what's not. I'm curious if you've like run into anything in your relationships that like something was very normal for you, and then it took a relationship or two for you to be like, oh, wait, no, that's kind of fucked up. I should stop doing that.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course it does. It does for all of us. I mean, not necessarily as explosive as that necessarily, I would say, but even things like avoidance, right? That gets normalized. I think that was, you and I probably actually share a lot of that. Like when I was growing up, avoidance was kind of like the baseline.

• 19:02Mark Manson?

  Right. You just don't talk about it.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Don't talk about it. Don't rock the boat, like, and, and put on the face that everything's okay. I think that's a very, very common one too. Probably more common than the like explosive stuff. Well, I don't know, maybe, maybe not. But I know for me anyway, just not addressing problems, like that was the baseline. Because if you, if you admitted to the problem, or if you're addressing the problem, you're admitting defeat, basically, right? Like, oh, something's not right, so just don't even bring it up. And if it doesn't come up, then it's not a problem. So I think that was one of the first ones I found anyway. I didn't realize that you could have a healthy disagreement with somebody that you loved, you know? That wasn't, that was weird to me. That was very strange to me.

• 19:43Mark Manson?

  I experienced the same thing. And it's funny because in my early relationships, I used to experience, like I used to catastrophize. So if my partner would get upset with me or we'd have a fight.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I still do that, yeah.

• 19:53Mark Manson?

  My brain would immediately go to, yeah, we're breaking up. This is it.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  I still do that.

• 19:58Mark Manson?

  She's mad I didn't take out the trash. I'm, I'm gonna be single forever. Like that, that's immediately where my brain would go. And, and it took me a long time to realize just how irrational that was. Speaking to the culture thing, the normalization thing, I think. It's a relationship can become healing if the two normalizations kind of balance each other out, right? So like, for instance, I have the same thing. It's just like, pretend there's nothing wrong, sweep it under the rug, it's gonna be fine, ignore it. My wife comes from a world where everything's a fucking problem. And you like, you, you get in people's

• 20:37Mark Manson?

  face about it. And there's too much drama and too much conflict and people are too confrontational. Like, they're, they're stirring up problems where there are none, just because that, that's how they understand intimacy and that you, you care and love for each other. And so, it's interesting, because I think she and I balance each other out really nicely. I think she has learned to pick and choose her battles and like, really stop and think like, is this worth it? Nah, let it go. But on the other hand, like, if there is something that needs to be addressed, she's very able to address it. She's very able to bring it up to me and be like, hey, we should talk about this. Whereas I struggle to do that. And on the flip side, if I see her kind of freaking out about something that doesn't

• 21:20Mark Manson?

  matter, I'm very good at being like, hey, chill out, this, this doesn't really matter. Like, let's go for a walk. Like, this isn't, this isn't a big deal. I think it's healthy if those two predispositions are kind of balancing each other out. Where things get really ugly is if you get two people who have either complementary or the same issue, because then it starts reinforcing each other, right? So, and we'll see this, in the case of Johnny and Amber, like, in their minds, it's, this is just par for the course. It's like, yes, addiction problems, drunk benders, violence, breaking furniture, throwing things at each other, like, to both of them, this is normal. And so, when it keeps, when it,

• 22:02Mark Manson?

  as it escalates, none of, like, doesn't really occur to either of them to like, slam on the brakes or like, pull the ripcord. The other really dangerous thing about this is that if you grow up around fucked up chaos, fucked up chaos starts to feel like home. I think the danger of this normalization, like, what it actually, the way it actually plays out is that even though it's really toxic and unhealthy, it's known. It's the old saying, like, it's, you prefer the devil you know than the devil you don't, right? So it's like, okay, I'd rather, I'd rather tolerate something known.

• 22:36Mark Manson?

  But uncomfortable than to push into the unknown and like explore a relationship that I've never experienced before.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, related to that too is kind of the when things get normalized, you kind of think that you're the exception almost, you know, you're you kind of think that, oh, okay, yes, I see this person, I see what they do to everyone around them, but I know this, this is normal to me and I can handle this, I can handle this, I it's not something that's not going to kill me, so it's going to make me stronger type of thing, I can do this.

• 23:08Mark Manson?

  I survived this once before, I'll survive it again and I can fix it.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Right, and everybody else around me, maybe they can't handle it, but I can, because this is normal to me.

• 23:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, that's a, that's a very insidious subtle trap you get.

• 23:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah, which is the resilience thing, right? It's like, it's, uh, being resilient's good unless you're tolerating something you shouldn't be tolerating.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Right, right. Um, I think one, one interesting thing we found too about schema formation, so these, these ideas, this normalization kind of machine you have in your brain, a counterintuitive finding is that it emotional neglect is actually more powerful for schema formation than say, like, physical abuse, or, you know, all the screaming and yelling and throwing things you're talking about, it's actually the emotional neglect that comes from like a bad relationship, especially when you're growing up and you're young, that actually has a more powerful effect on the, the way you approach relationships than any sort of like physical abuse. It's, it's kind of strange, like, kids can tolerate that a little bit more, apparently, or they can at least navigate it better, but emotional neglect is actually one thing

• 24:13Speaker 01

  that's just, seems like we can't come back from, which is, I don't know, cruel.

• 24:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  If you think about it.

• 24:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, it was, it's something that's been found in the relationship literature anyways, that emotional neglect is actually one of the most powerful drivers of the schema that you end up creating in your own mind going forward.

• 24:31Mark Manson?

  I think the, the, the bond a child has with their parents, it's evolutionarily is driven for survival, right? Like, it's, it's, mother nature needs.

• 24:41Mark Manson?

  The parents to take care of the child and so it kind of programs the child to like mold themselves to whatever the parents whatever is going to get them attention and affection from the parents even if it's really harmful and damaging because then at least it's attention at least they're paying attention they're around whereas if the parents are just like checked out and gone then then the child's even more vulnerable.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah, I think that's what it is, yeah.

• 25:08Mark Manson?

  All right, moving on, so Johnny and Amber meet on the set of Rum Diaries in 2009. Apparently there's intense chemistry but nothing happens. Amber at the time is in a relationship with a woman and I did not know this but she apparently she was the first prominent actress to ever publicly come out as bisexual.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:31Mark Manson?

  And was celebrated for it at the time and was in a long-term relationship with a woman and at the time this was mid 2000s it was it was seen as a career risk especially for somebody who's not like A-list and it could have potentially affected her career negatively. Jump ahead to 2011, the Rum Diaries which was filmed in 2009 is about to be released and Johnny and Amber are about to do a press tour which you do for a film so you travel around the world together you go to premieres you do a bunch of interviews you show up to film festivals Q and As all sorts of stuff so you're spending a lot of time together and at this point Johnny's I'm going to call it marriage even though they legally weren't

• 26:16Mark Manson?

  married Johnny's marriage is basically over his wife has moved to France with the kids Amber's relationship is also ending and so she's in really a state of flux struggling to know who she is and this brings us to our second concept which I'll call the identity trap.

• 26:37Mark Manson?

  Basically, our intimate relationships form a large percentage of our identity. They dictate largely how we view ourselves, how we feel about ourselves. Anybody who's dated somebody for a long period of time, like you notice that your interests start to converge, your habits start to converge, your preferences start to converge over time. Like, that's not an accident. Right. It's because a lot of your ego and self-identification is based on your partner. And if you have a healthy relationship with that partner, that's actually an extremely healthy thing. Right. Like, I think this is, I don't want people to lose sight of this, you know, that merging of identities, to a certain extent, is potentially healthy. Like, you can, that's where the healing of a relationship takes place, where if you,

• 27:21Mark Manson?

  you know, let's say you have some shame or trauma in your background that you've never completely dealt with, by kind of integrating with your partner and experiencing that loving acceptance from them, like, that can heal that part of yourself and that relationship with yourself in a way that you wouldn't necessarily be able to do on your own. The identification with the romantic relationship is ultimately a good thing in a vacuum. But, the downside is that once you exit a significant romantic relationship, there's an identity vacuum. There's this feeling of like, I don't know who I am anymore. I don't remember what I like on my own. I don't remember what I do on my Saturday mornings on my own.

• 28:05Mark Manson?

  I don't, I don't know how lovable I am. I don't know why people like me. I don't know who I'm gonna spend time with, right? So there's all these unanswered questions of who you are, what you're gonna do, how you're gonna spend your time. And that's like a very, there's a bit of an existential crisis that takes place in that moment, because you have to... Go through a process of figuring out who you are again and trying to understand. Now, people who are extremely codependent, and by codependent, I mean like they derive all of their self-worth from their partner, they suffer really intensely when they come out of a romantic relationship because their supply of self-esteem has just been like

• 28:48Mark Manson?

  yanked away from them. And so those are the people that you see just kind of go from monogamous relationship to monogamous relationship, like they can't really, they can't seem to emotionally sustain themselves while being single. Johnny Depp was definitely one of those people. On top of all of his other issues, right, he's professionally stagnant, he's been typecast into this character that he can't seem to get away from. And similarly, on her side, you know, she's still climbing that career ladder, still trying to make a name for herself. And up to this point, the thing that she's best known for is being that Hollywood actress with a girlfriend. But that girlfriend's gone now, right? So who is she? Like, why is anybody gonna pay attention to her? Why is anybody gonna be

• 29:32Mark Manson?

  interested in her? Why is anybody gonna give her a role in a film? And so, he fills a void, right? Now she gets to be Johnny Depp's girlfriend, right? It's like now she's, she gets to be a part of his world. And it's this huge, like, it opens all of these doors, not just professionally, but emotionally and like psychologically for her. So this is the identity trap. When you enter a relationship, not because you have a strong identity and your partner has a strong identity and you're genuinely very attracted to each other's identities, but you enter a relationship to fill a gap or a void inside of who you

• 30:12Mark Manson?

  are, you're using that person to like build an identity for yourself. This creates a very unstable foundation to build off of. And what's very paradoxical about this is that it's these, it's the identity trap that you see this like intense romantic chemistry very, very quickly. Like, the people just become like, they latch on to each other and they're like, "Oh, my God, where have you been my whole life? Thank God you're here. I'm safe again," right? And this is exactly what you see with Johnny and Amber. It's just like... Fucking zero to sixty within a month. She's like, she's like moved in with him. She's like traveling the world with him.

• 30:55Mark Manson?

  She's going to set with him like she's everything. She's there every day. She's involved with everything. It's like very, very, very intense.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  What happens is you come into a relationship. You feel like two individuals, right? You enjoy each other's company. You start figuring, you're learning about each other, figuring things out about each other. Over time, that develops kind of into like a we. You know, you have this language around what we like to do or what we do or who we are. Yeah, right. There's one way you're talking about it where it's like you just skip that altogether and you just fuse right away.

• 31:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Right, and that's like, that's usually fireworks, what you see right away and not in a good way.

• 31:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah, both good and bad.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Right, right. The more normal, healthy way though is, yeah, you do have this kind of gradual. They call it self-concept. Your self-concept of the relationship kind of, I don't know if I would say merges, but you develop a self-concept that includes the other person in your, in the relationship.

• 31:46Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Right? And you have that language around like we and us.

• 31:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Where it starts to get toxic or maladaptive is when you start to think of like, what is the other person? How would they think about this? And how should I think about this because of what they think?

• 32:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Right? Your identity like takes a backseat to whatever the other person's preferences are. It can even be weaponized by one of the people too, right? Like you, oh, you, your, your social circle kind of goes out the window. It's just you two. It's us against the world.

• 32:18Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  All of these kind of like, that's when your identities themselves start to merge. Not that like the separate kind of healthy, normal thing has been created. That's greater than the sum of its parts, if you will, right?

• 32:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  But it's that, that, that over identification with the other person and what the other person wants. Where your needs and identity even to just take a backseat.

• 32:41Mark Manson?

  I, I think one way to think about it, you know, so back in the purpose episode, we, we discussed diversifying your identity, like finding purpose and meaning from multiple different places. And I think in the ego episode, we also talked about having like a diversity of things that you identify with. A diversity of ways that you see yourself. I think the danger here is, and this is, I hear you're getting at and you're describing is like, you think of like, two people's identities as like a Venn diagram, right? Like, I think a healthy relationship is, there's a significant percentage of overlap between the two circles, but it's definitely not completely overlapped, right?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Mark Manson?

  And a toxic, codependent relationship is when the two circles are like, almost 100% overlapped, like, both people are literally emotionally incapable of functioning without each other, unable to make decisions without each other, unable to like, think or do anything without each other's approval, right? Like, it's a very dark, toxic place to be, and that's where a lot of abuses, abusive relationships begin, which we'll get into why in a minute. Another unhealthy version of this is just when the Venn diagrams are like, completely separate, and there's no overlap, right? Like, that's when you're like, uh, that's like the people who are married for 20 years but feel like roommates, right? Like, that's the people who, um, you know, haven't really talked to each other in six

• 34:04Mark Manson?

  months, even though they've, you know, they've got three kids together, you know? So it's, you want some of that overlap, but you don't want all of that overlap.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, I think too, one of the things in this story in particular too, is that there, I don't think there was a whole lot of, you've mentioned this already, there wasn't a whole lot of clarity for either of these two of who they were even, necessarily, right? They, they mixed a lot of their professional and personal identities together, and so it wasn't very clear to either of them who they were.

• 34:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  And that's actually in the research that comes up with, where you have a lower self-concept clarity, what they call it, like, yes, I know who I am and I'm very clear about that. They didn't, they, like, and I think that happens in a lot of creative spaces too, your work and your personal life get all mixed in together, and you, it's very hard to know who you are.

• 34:51Mark Manson?

  Absolutely. I mean, it's, it's, I think on her side, right? It's like, she started getting all of these acting opportunities, all these doors started opening, things started getting financed that she wanted to do, because she's Johnny Depp's girlfriend. We'll kind of get to the public side of this later, I think there's some interesting... Commentary we can make on that towards the end of this episode. I want to save commentary on the legal case and kind of how the cultural moment of Johnny and Amber. Until after we've kind of gone through the relationship itself. So like even if you you give her credit and you you don't assume you assume she's not like this evil conniving bitch. Who's like using him and leveraging him like right like it's just being a human being with incentives.

• 35:34Mark Manson?

  Right? Like it's it's like if like dating this guy fucking 10x is your career overnight. Like it's really hard, really hard to bring yourself to question that relationship. There you know, it's that it's that famous up in Sinclair saying of like. It's impossible to convince a man that he's wrong if his paycheck depends on it like it's just that's how human beings function. It's just it's not evil. It's just the way our minds work. It's a psychological mechanism that we all have inside of us. I think on his side, he's probably, I mean, it sounds like he's deep in a midlife crisis. Right? Like his career has peaked. He knows it.

• 36:13Mark Manson?

  He's he's getting old. At this point, he's he's in his 50s. His family's left. You know, he's in a funk. He like doesn't know what to look forward to. He doesn't know. You know what to be excited about, right? And then he's got this young, beautiful girl who's like madly in love with him and it's. It's something, right? It's something to kind of like put himself into. It's interesting. So one of the fascinating things about this story is that we. Two things are very unique about this story, aside from them just being famous.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:47Mark Manson?

  We have three court cases worth of depositions and. Evidence that's been introduced into the public record. So that is interesting on the one handed. And we have hundreds of witnesses, you know, bellboys, assistants.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Drivers, yeah.

• 37:06Mark Manson?

  Drivers, doormen, like so many people were around when all this stuff happened. And have gone on the record to like describe the certain events. The other thing that's really unique in this, I. In a sick way, I found this amusing is that the relationship became so volatile so quickly. That both of them and both of them were very aware of how prominent they were and how this could go south. So both of them began secretly recording conversations.

• 37:36Mark Manson?

  Without the other knowing.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:37Mark Manson?

  Which I, to me, there's just like, there's like a divine comedy in that. That they're both secretly running tape recorders while they're fighting, knowing that like one day they might be in court and have to like use it against the other one. So, so tons of these fights that they had are actually recorded and are, again, in the public record.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I will say in terms of like the identity stuff goes though, they, it's, even if you're not, you know, Johnny Depp or Amber Heard, the more your identity gets entwined.

• 38:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  With that relationship, the harder and harder it is to leave, let alone just see what's even going on.

• 38:15Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Right? Because again, it's not just that, oh, we, I have the shared kind of self-concept with this person that we have this life together over here and then I'm over here. It's not that at all. It's like, this is who I am. I'm all wrapped up in it. Who am I without it? Just like they were in their previous relationships as well.

• 38:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  That's why from the outside looking in, you look at somebody and they're like, why don't you just leave? Well, this is one of the reasons is like, because your identity is wrapped up in this.

• 38:41Mark Manson?

  They're literally your whole world.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:43Mark Manson?

  Like you can't imagine life without them. The, the other aspect of this, like, I think it's worth explaining the reason why these relationships become so volatile is because if your entire identity is based on another person and then that person comes home drunk and says something mean to you, like, that, that feels catastrophic, right? Like, this is, this person is 100% the source of your self-worth and they're coming home and denying you validation and respect. Like, it just feels so awful, whereas like, again, somebody with maybe a healthy identity, a healthy ego and a healthy balance in their life, right? Like, what would you say if your girlfriend came home and sat drunk and said something mean to you?

• 39:28Mark Manson?

  If my wife did that, I'd be like... Go the fuck to bed.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Don't talk to me like that and we'll talk about this when you're sober.

• 39:36Mark Manson?

  It's like, don't talk to me like that and you should go to bed. And then that would be the end of it. And then the next morning, she'd probably wake up and apologize. And then we'd, life would move on, right?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Whereas if your identity is all wrapped up in that, you're like, how can I, how can I get this fixed? How can they fix this for me? How can I get them to fix this?

• 39:51Mark Manson?

  It's intolerable. It's absolutely intolerable. So that volatility, that roller coaster ride of high highs and low lows. This leads us into the third psychological mechanism that keeps people trapped in abusive relationships or bad relationships. Now, in the psychological literature, this is known as variable ratio reinforcement. But we're just going to call it the slot machine effect.

• 40:17Mark Manson?

  Which is basically, if you go back to behaviorism in the 1950s with B.F. Skinner and the test that he ran on rats. What they found is that if you provide unpredictable rewards for a behavior, people are much more likely to get addicted to that behavior. And so this is why gambling is so addictive, is because you go to the slot machine and you have no idea what's going to happen each time you pull it. But sometimes something great happens, sometimes something bad happens. But you want to keep pulling it. And if something great happens, you want to pull it again because something great might happen again. And then if something bad happens, you're like, well, I should pull it again until something great happens. And so you, what you see around addictions is that it's, a lot of it is very much based

• 41:01Mark Manson?

  in this variable ratio reinforcement of like not, not knowing when the reward is coming. Like the reward does come sometimes, but it doesn't always come and it's not clear. You can't really predict when it comes or not. And so what you see is that people literally get addicted to the relationship. And I've often, in previous episodes, I've often described toxic relationships as an addiction. Like people behave the same way addicts behave. They justify, they rationalize the same way addicts rationalize. They, they lie and cover their tracks the same way addicts lie and cover their tracks. They, they become delusional the same way addicts become delusional. Anything to get their next fix, which is, in their case, the relationship.

• 41:46Mark Manson?

  And sadly, the more volatile the relationship, the more this addiction mechanism kicks in. Because... Hey, anytime it's bad, you wonder like, well, maybe today will be good.

• 41:58Mark Manson?

  Maybe this next trip will reconnect and things will be better. You know, he's so great when he's sober, like, if I can just get him to cut back on the drinking, things are gonna be great.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  There's that little shred of hope.

• 42:10Mark Manson?

  There's always, yes. There's always, and again, it's like the gambler at the blackjack table. It's like, you know, one more hand, one more hand, one more hand.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've even shown too, like with people who are addicted to gambling, if you let them win every single time, they get bored and they leave.

• 42:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  It's insane. I know it's very counterintuitive, but it's not like the bad moments that you get trapped in. Like people from the outside looking like, this is awful, why don't you leave? And it's like, because there is that little shred of hope.

• 42:37Mark Manson?

  Cause when it's good, it's so good.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  The good thing, like you have all this dopamine building up, right? And anticipation, and then once it finally does hit, it's so good.

• 42:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Because, and even compared to those bad moments, it's so good.

• 42:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  It's exactly why you get trapped inside of that.

• 42:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:53Mark Manson?

  And interestingly, you know,

• 42:56Mark Manson?

  there's reams and reams of text messages from both, both sides, Johnny and Amber, and you see this pattern play out across both sides. It's, it's, there's, there's this cycle of, you know, there's a blow up, and then there's a reconciliation, and then there's like, oh, I'm so sorry, like, let's make it good again, let's be good to each other, and then things are amazing, and they're madly in love, and there's all this like sweet lovey dovey stuff going on. And then one of them gets triggered, and then it escalates, and then there's a blow up, and it, there's an escalation to it, and I think what people need to understand is that escalation is necessary. Right? Because that's what keeps both sides feeling loved. It keeps that sliver of hope.

• 43:38Mark Manson?

  Like, the bigger the problem you surmount, the bigger the high on the other side of coming back together. But the bigger the high on the other side of coming back together, the more upsetting the next blow up is, and the more furious and frustrated and hurt and angry each person gets, which then makes the makeup that much more intense, which makes the next high that much more intense. And so you get this, just like, this escalation that keeps happening to keep both people justifying staying in the relationship.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Oh, so that's just people that do this too. Fascinating study I found, actually rats do this as well.

• 44:14Mark Manson?

  Really?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you expose them to these variable reward schedules, like you put them in the Skinner box and, you know, give them a give them a treat just every randomly, every time they press a lever five times, 10 times, whatever it is, random, right? They actually, if you do this long enough, if you do this over a period of weeks or so, these rats will actually become more risk-taking. They'll seek out risk more. Yeah, so they'll put them like in an open field or something like that, which for a rat, an open area with the bright lights is very, it's dangerous. They usually don't want to go out in the middle of that open field like that, but they'll do it more often if you expose them to more variable rewards.

• 44:49Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  So it's just, it's like a fundamental mammalian thing for some reason, that if we're exposed to like these kind of uncertain environments, then we have to ratchet up that risk-taking. And this happens in relationships as well. So it's pretty wild.

• 45:02Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:03Mark Manson?

  So I think the volatility with Johnny and Amber started relatively quickly, according to a lot of people who worked with them or were around them a lot, assistants, employees. The fight started kicking in within a couple of months and they just slowly escalated from there. It was interesting, a lot of Johnny's friends described him during this period as happy than they had ever seen him before, but also distant, disconnected and aloof, which I think is very indicative of this sort of relationship, right? Like it is, again, like an addict, like when they're in the throes of their addiction, like they're happy.

• 45:46Mark Manson?

  They're going to tell you like, everything's great. Met this new girl. She's incredible. We like, we're flying around the world together. We're doing all these amazing things together. We're working on all these amazing projects together. But meanwhile, they've lost interest in other things, like they're, they've, they're losing interest in hobbies. They're losing touch with friends. They're disconnecting from family members. And it's again, like an addiction, it's, it, it prunes your outside life away from you. And not, again, not in like an evil, conniving, manipulative way.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 46:21Mark Manson?

  It's, it's purely because the more invested you get into the relationship, the more of your self-worth you're deriving from the relationship, the more you're riding the volat- the emotional volatility and the slot machine effect.

• 46:35Mark Manson?

  The more boring and unimportant other things are gonna seem to you, right? So it's like, well, why should I reach out to my music buddies? Or, you know, why should I bother flying home to see my mom? Like, it's, I got too much going on, like, right now with her. And, you know, we're in a good spot. I don't want to mess anything up. And so you just kind of end up isolating yourself with the partner, which then just feeds back into the dynamic even further. Right. So it's probably worth describing the volatility. Johnny's substance abuse just got more intense, more, more extreme. His binges got longer and longer. He would lock himself in rooms for days at a time. He would disappear for days at a time. Nobody knew where he went.

• 47:19Mark Manson?

  He'd come back completely fucked up, like, barely conscious, incoherent. Her volatility was much more around emotion and anger. So initially, I think the violence started on his side, but it wasn't directed at her. It's he would break things. So he would, like, destroy an entire hotel room. He would break a bunch of furniture. He would throw stuff through a wall. He would just kind of make a mess of everything. But obviously, it was, like, very scary and very intense. There's no, like, from what I found, and don't come at me in the comments, but like, from what I found, there's no direct evidence that he hit her. Obviously, she says that he did. And there's a whole defamation suit.

• 48:03Mark Manson?

  We'll get into that in a minute. But it does seem that his violent outbursts seem to be more, like, substance-fueled and more directed towards, you know, the kitchen cabinet than a human being. Whereas, her violence seemed to definitely be directed towards him. At some point, she started violently lashing out at him, hitting him, throwing things at him. And this is on recording. It's on the public record. So it's, that's not a controversial statement to say that. But again, plays back into the normalization, right?

• 48:42Mark Manson?

  So it's like, now she's tolerating this drunk, drug addict, fucking weirdo like her dad. And he's, the woman he loves most in the world is like, throwing shit at him when she's mad. So that feels like home. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So this, this slot machine escalation of the relationship takes us up to early 2015. Johnny and Amber are married in February and in March, they're in Australia and Johnny is hospitalized because Amber threw a vodka bottle at her and it shattered on his hand and cut off the tip of his finger. Like most people in an abusive relationship, he went to the hospital and tried to explain to the nurses some bullshit story, that he tripped and fell and it was an accident and

• 49:27Mark Manson?

  all this stuff, but it is, it's, things were pretty ugly by that point and it was only about three years. And, but then you ask yourself, okay, as this volatility escalates, as the fights get worse and the makeup gets better, like, how do people rationalize this? How do people justify what's going on? And this, we get into the fourth psychological mechanism that keeps us trapped in bad relationships, which is cognitive dissonance. And we've, we've talked about cognitive dissonance multiple times on the show before. I forget which episode, but like, we've gone pretty deep into it in the past. But for new listeners, cognitive dissonance is basically, when you believe something's

• 50:12Mark Manson?

  true and you're faced with a contradictory reality, generally speaking, people do not change their beliefs, they just warp their perception of reality to fit the prior belief. And so, I think, in the case of a, of a toxic relationship, probably the most common belief that everything gets wrapped into is that, "I can fix this. I can change things. I can change him, or I can change her." And you see this in their text messages around this time. She's often texting her sister and her mom saying, you know, "When he's sober, he's so amazing, he's the best guy in the world, I just gotta, he's just gotta quit drinking." His text messages, he's explaining the friends, like, "You don't understand, like..."

• 50:58Mark Manson?

  When things are good, she's the most caring, loving person I've ever met. She understands me better than anybody else I've ever known. She's just, you know, I've got to be better. I've got to change things. We're going to fix it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is just, this is, this is quicksand. It's like the more you say it, the further you sink, the worse things get. The really dark thing about these rationalizations, these justifications, is that each time you rationalize bad behavior, you lower the bar. You normalize it, right? So it's like, the first time she throws a vodka bottle at you, maybe you're extremely upset.

• 51:42Mark Manson?

  But then the third time she throws the vodka bottle, it's like, oh, this is just another fight. And so that normalization starts to expand. And the bar of your expectations continues to lower. And again, this feeds back into that escalation of the volatility. Until you eventually reach a point, like all cognitive dissonance, you reach a point where you're just kind of detached from reality. Like you've lost track, you've just completely lost the plot and you can't, you're no longer a reliable source of like, what is okay and what's not. And I think this is, this is the point that like friends and family and loved ones kind of look on with a little bit of shock and concern of like,

• 52:26Mark Manson?

  well, no dude, like throwing a vodka bottle at you is not okay. Like you shouldn't be okay with that. It's hard, it's hard because it's, it's like, once you're in that world and this is normal to you, like it's, it's hard to see outside of the bubble.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Right, and there's that, so it's the cognitive dissonance kind of coupled with the rationalization is the mechanism here, right? Which is, you know, the cognitive dissonance is that like, like I love this person and yet all these terrible things are happening. How do I resolve that? And you start rationalizing like that. And like you said, they kind of escalate.

• 53:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  And this is definitely what they find like, first you see, you know, maybe somebody's like, oh, they're brilliant. But, and brilliant people are difficult, you know, like. Amazing people are just hard to like Johnny Depp, right? He's, he's a brilliant actor.

• 53:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Of course, he's going to be difficult and he's quirky and he's weird. And yes, this is what I signed up for.

• 53:17Mark Manson?

  Right? Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Those just escalate and escalate until even somebody from the outside. At some point when they do come in, it's usually way too late. Right? It's usually at the point where this person has, has been rationalizing this behavior for so long that anything you throw at them, they're going to already have an excuse for it. So that's why I think a lot of people are like, you know, I, I brought this up to them. I brought it to them.

• 53:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  I pointed it out to them. I don't know what else I could have done. Well, you were too late.

• 53:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  By that point typically, because there's this kind of like slow progression and you just that cognitive dissonance, you, you get really, really good at resolving it with rationalizations.

• 53:50Mark Manson?

  It's almost like kind of brainwashing yourself.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  It is. It is.

• 53:54Mark Manson?

  Into the relate, like both people brainwash themselves into believing that the relationship's okay.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:59Mark Manson?

  And normal.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:00Mark Manson?

  I'll give you a couple of text message examples. So there's a, an example of, of Johnny texting one of his, his friends justifying her behavior, saying she's so passionate. That's what I love most about her. Similarly, she texted her mom at one point. She said, no, his drinking is the problem, not him.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Right, great. Talk about rationalization.

• 54:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, right?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:28Mark Manson?

  It's interesting. I don't know if you've ever ridden this escalation roller coaster in a toxic relationship before. I, I did in my first relationship.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:36Mark Manson?

  And I have a pretty vivid memory of this dynamic of this kind of slow brainwashing that happened. So my first girlfriend and I, both young, stupid, damaged, inexperienced, like it, it, it was a bad situation and we were both bad to each other in different ways. But we both justified it and, and, you know, found reasons to, to stay together. And so we kind of ended up on this like escalating roller coaster that, that happens with toxic relationships. And my memory was, you know, we were doing the last year of our relationship, we were doing long distance and, and we would just have these like horrible fights and, and just like hold all these awful things against each other and say all these terrible things

• 55:21Mark Manson?

  to each other. And then we would make up and we would see each other again and it was just like bliss. It was absolute heaven for like three days. And then we'd have a huge fight and then things would go to shit and you know, we'd break up with each other. Or one of us would cheat on the other and like so on and so forth. But it's funny because like when I think about my mental state at the time, like the thing, I had this unwavering belief that we were meant to be together. And like this was like, it didn't matter how like, and part of that was because we had already been through so much. I was like, we've been through so much already, like nothing's gonna pry us apart. If we were gonna break up, it would have happened years ago.

• 56:06Mark Manson?

  Like we've survived so much turmoil. So clearly we're gonna go all the way. So this is just another obstacle. This is just another thing to get through. And then once we would get through it, it would just reaffirm that myth of like, see? I knew we're supposed to be together. See, we just got through another thing. And it like, it kind of becomes this, again, it comes back to the resilience, right? Like it starts working against you. Like the fact that you are, you are able to just eat such a, so many shit sandwiches is, starts to become the problem.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:44Mark Manson?

  Like you, when I look back at that, you know, my 21 year old self, I'm like, my dude, like, fucking stand up for yourself, like, like just draw a line in the sand and end it. But it, that would dispel that mythology, it would kill that romance, it would destroy that narrative. And then it would destroy that identity. So it just, it never happens.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  That rationalization again, it can be so, like it's so powerful. The, the people who, this is why I'm just very suspect of anyone who's like, you know, it's us against the world. Or this is my ride or die, like all that kind of language is usually some sort of rationalization for really shitty behavior. Most of the times what I see anyway, it's that. And like, I get it, yes, you want somebody who is going to stick by you through like, you know, tough times. Like I get that.

• 57:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  That makes sense, but not like shitty behavior after shitty behavior. That's a whole different story we're talking about.

• 57:38Mark Manson?

  I think one thing that's, that's important to note here too, is that social aspect. So I remember in my personal case, you know, I had been, I was in college. I was long distance with this girlfriend. All my friends knew I was in a long-distance relationship. You know, every, all of her friends knew, like, everybody, we were traveling all, we were driving hours and hours to see each other all the time. We were giving up weekends. We were visiting each other in each other's schools. We were like, it was, there was so, such a logistical mess around our relationship. And we had invested so much into it, um, that it just felt, there was, I, like, the

• 58:19Mark Manson?

  idea of admitting that that was a waste, like, felt very shameful. You didn't wanna, you didn't, I like, the idea of, like, facing my friends and being like, "Oh, you know that girl that I've been driving eight hours to see for the last two years?"

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah, she was, she was terrible. It actually didn't work out. Like, it just feels so bad. Like, so you don't even wanna, like, face that thought. So you just convince yourself that it's, it's okay. And it's interesting, like, one, I think one point with, with, like, Johnny and Amber that maybe didn't come up is, is like, they were, they were being written about in such glowing ways in the tabloids at the time. Like, they were being kinda held up as like, the most beautiful couple in Hollywood and like, the brilliant stars and all this stuff. They were like, all these tabloids were doing these like, gushing features about their wedding and their honeymoon and, and so it's, it's, I imagine if you live

• 59:21Mark Manson?

  in that world, it's, the pressure to like, keep up appearances must be really, really intense. Which I guess brings us to mechanism number five, which I think a lot of people will relate to this one, which is the sunk cost fallacy.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Yes, this huge, huge. Yeah. This is probably one of the, like, top reasons a lot of people will. I don't know if they'll say it out loud, but if you pay attention to what they're saying.

• 59:47Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  You'll see this is, oh, but I put so much time into this. I put so much of my love into this. I put so much money into this. You know, we built a life together.

• 59:55Mark Manson?

  I can think of two relationships of people I know off the top of my head that

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:59Mark Manson?

  I think the only reason they're still together is sunk cost fallacy.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, alright.

• 1:00:03Mark Manson?

  So, we might as well explain the sunk cost fallacy for people who don't know. Sunk cost fallacy comes from economics. So, it's the fifteen dollar movie ticket problem. Let's say you buy a fifteen dollar movie ticket, you go into the movie, you start watching it. Within ten minutes, you're like, I fucking hate this movie. But you spent fifteen dollars, so you stay the entire two hours and watch it to the end.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:25Mark Manson?

  Technically, that is a waste of time. You already spent the fifteen dollars. You can't get it back. So, the fact that you stay even longer is actually just devaluing what you've already invested. But, our psychological mechanism makes us feel accountable to that decision. So, it's like, we don't want to feel like we wasted money. We want to feel like I got the full two hours worth of my money. So, you stay in a bad thing to justify a prior bad decision. And we do this all the time, right? So, it's people, in the case of relationships, it's people who are like, well, I've already been with them for eight years. Like, what's another year or two to see if things get better?

• 1:01:10Mark Manson?

  Like, why not put in a little bit more time, a little bit more effort? In gambling, they call it throwing good money after bad. You know?

• 1:01:20Mark Manson?

  You know, you lose, you lose a bunch of money on a bad decision, and so you bet more the next time, hoping to earn it back. And it's like, no, actually, that's an even worse decision. So, yeah, this shows up in all sorts of different places, and it's extremely common.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've shown it empirically, Mark. I mean, there's a study, I don't know if it was meta-analysis, probably, actually, there was fifty thousand people participated in this. It was Ruzben's investment model, okay? There's actually three parts to it.

• 1:01:50Mark Manson?

  So catchy.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Right. There's actually kind of three parts to, like, how, what determines how invested you are in a relationship? One of them is relationship satisfaction, right? Okay, the more satisfied you are, the more invested you're probably gonna be, right?

• 1:02:01Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Quality of alternatives, too. So, like, okay, where do I stand in the dating market? Or, you know, what are my alternatives out there? And then third is this investment size. And what they found through this huge study that they did on this was that investment size, like the time spent, the emotional energy spent, the money spent within a relationship, that actually predicts whether or not you stay in a relationship above and beyond satisfaction even too.

• 1:02:30Mark Manson?

  Oh wow.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  So people will like, they will hold on to a lot of misery. They will tolerate a lot of that just abject misery because they have sunk so much time and energy and just emotional bandwidth into another person.

• 1:02:46Mark Manson?

  It's so ironic because the cost of leaving a relationship only gets higher.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:52Mark Manson?

  The longer you stay.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  And that's, yeah, that's what they're trying to, is that sunk time effect, it ratchets that effect up even more so. And that's exactly what they're trying to do.

• 1:03:02Mark Manson?

  And like, I've literally seen this with friends of ours. Like, we've had friends who are miserable in their marriages. And they're like, well, let me stick it out for another year or two and just see if it gets better.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:13Mark Manson?

  You know, we're moving, or he got a new job, or like, you know, whatever it is, whatever rationalization it is. Yeah, let's just see if it gets better. And then they, not realizing that a year or two down the line, it's gonna be even harder.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:26Mark Manson?

  Because now they're even more invested. And now their identity is even more merged into the other person. This is painful to watch. The sunk cost is just like, it's upsetting. When you see somebody you care about doing this, it's very, very upsetting.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  And I mean, it's not just about, like, it's not just going forward, like, oh, I gotta give all of this up and it's just gonna be gone. It's like, now I have to look back at my past.

• 1:03:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Everything I've done, all of that, all of that pain and heartache or whatever was

• 1:03:55Mark Manson?

  Was for nothing.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  For nothing.

• 1:03:56Mark Manson?

  For nothing.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  So, like, it does make sense in some weird way. I get it.

• 1:04:01Mark Manson?

  The other dynamic at play here is that, you know, we talked earlier about how toxic relationships are isolating. They have one of the side effects is that they isolate you, right? So it's like, it's doubly bad because what happens is, is like, you end up giving up other parts of your life.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:18Mark Manson?

  To try to make your partner happy, right? So you give up hobbies, you give up friendships, you give up trips and things that you were looking forward to, to try to keep your partner happy. And the fact that you gave those things up creates more of a sunk cost fallacy. That's gonna keep you there and keep you.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  That's vicious.

• 1:04:36Mark Manson?

  It is vicious.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. As this sunk fallacy becomes more and more real to someone, they're like, oh my God, I've spent all this time. Put all this effort and all this heartache into this relationship, can't leave. It becomes kind of a, what they call that, action in action framing.

• 1:04:51Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Uh, kinda takes over. So. Uh, in a 2018 study, they found that people have this bias towards doing something. When a relationship is bad, you want to do something about it, right? And so leaving feels like giving up. It feels like inaction.

• 1:05:06Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  In some way. So what you end up doing is you end up doubling down more.

• 1:05:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  And investing even more in it. So it is like every step of the way. With this sunk cost fallacy that we're, we're talking about, it just, it ratchets up.

• 1:05:18Mark Manson?

  Gets worse.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  It just gets worse and worse and worse. Taking action, I mean. If, if staying is framed as taking action, well, no, I'm gonna stay and I'm gonna fight this out. I'm gonna do something about it. I'm not gonna give up. I'm not gonna leave.

• 1:05:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  That usually, there's some more cognitive dissonance going on there as well. But it just ratchets up that sunk cost fallacy even more.

• 1:05:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah. You know, cause we were talking earlier about how people get kinda caught in the cycle of like, you know, we're gonna figure it out and I'm gonna fix them and it's gonna get better and, you know. Our love is gonna conquer everything. You know, you kinda have this mythology that you've bought into. I think once you get to the sunk cost fallacy. There's almost this like despair and resignation that sets in and probably resentment as well. The people I, I've known who have. Definitely been in the sunk cost fallacy territory, there's like. Some really intense resentment of the other person and like. Why haven't you changed? Why haven't you gotten your shit?

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Given all of this, why haven't you done?

• 1:06:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Any of this? Yeah.

• 1:06:15Mark Manson?

  And.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Waiting for some return or something.

• 1:06:17Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Mark Manson?

  In the case of Johnny and Amber, they definitely reached this spot pretty quickly after their wedding. Um, he started just traveling all the time for work. Um, you know, they were checked out quite a bit. They were openly angry at each other. Almost all the time. Uh, there was a very famous incident during this period, uh, with the. The bed shitter. Uh. Which is. Probably the most

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Who pooped the bed?

• 1:06:45Mark Manson?

  Who pooped the bed?

• 1:06:48Mark Manson?

  This is probably the most amusing thing that came out of this entire episode.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Internet went crazy for that one.

• 1:06:53Mark Manson?

  Oh, my god. It's, it's, uh, so the story behind it is that Johnny was out of town for some work engagement. Amber was at, at the apartment in LA. She hosted a party with a bunch of friends. By this point, uh, her friends hated him. She kinda hated him, like, no, everybody, nobody liked him. And so when he came home from his trip, mysteriously, on his side of the bed, was just a load of shit.

• 1:07:26Mark Manson?

  To this day, nobody knows who pooped in the bed. She claims it was the dog.

• 1:07:34Mark Manson?

  This, I found this absolutely hysterical, is that they actually introduced as evidence in the, the trial, uh, like, photos of the poop. And, um, and they had, like, witnesses render opinions on whether this was actually dog shit or human shit.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Expert turd analysis.

• 1:07:57Mark Manson?

  Turd analysis.

• 1:08:01Mark Manson?

  And sure enough, by consensus, everyone pretty much agreed, because their dog was like a tiny Pomeranian or something.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:08:08Mark Manson?

  And, uh, pretty much everybody agreed by consensus that it, the, the shit was much too large to be a dog.

• 1:08:16Mark Manson?

  But nobody, nobody has stepped forward and taken, taken responsibility.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  That one might never get solved.

• 1:08:22Mark Manson?

  The, the mystery of the bed shitter.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:08:30Mark Manson?

  So we talked about how there's like, kind of this hope and faith that leads you to a point of delusion. I think at some point that starts to get shattered, turns into despair and resentment. Now, let's talk about guilt. What's interesting is that people in the worst relationships tend to have the most guilt about those relationships. Right? So you're, you're in this awful situation. Maybe you hate your partner, maybe you love, hate your partner, maybe it's up and down with your partner. Things are not working, they haven't worked for a long time. You feel stuck, you don't know where to go. And interestingly, in that moment, a lot of people start blaming themselves.

• 1:09:13Mark Manson?

  They start saying, "I should have known better. I shouldn't have stood for this. I should have left years ago. I shouldn't have enabled that behavior." They start finding all of these reasons that they fucked up. And it's almost like they are justifying their own misery. Right? Like, it comes back to how we tend to rationalize how we feel. You know, we invent the narratives to justify the feeling, not the other way around. They feel awful about where they are, and so they find narratives that justify what they've done to deserve this. And this just takes you to a very dark place.

• 1:09:56Mark Manson?

  I mean, now you're justifying everything.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:00Mark Manson?

  Right? You know, it's like, "I have to do this." Right? Because it's, "I chose this. I didn't leave soon enough. And now I'm here, and there's no way back."

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's my fault.

• 1:10:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's my fault. You also see a lot of the guilt come up with the prospect of leaving. You know, so it's like, "If I leave, he's gonna destroy himself. I'm the only thing keeping him sane and tethered to reality. If I leave, I'm gonna hurt my family. I'm gonna hurt the kids. I'm gonna, you know, mess up everybody's life." Right? So it's like, there's a there's a feeling of guilt of like, "Why do I even want to leave in the first place? I'm gonna cause such a problem for everybody." Not realizing that it's like, "You're not actually the problem. You're not the cause of the problem. You're the effect of the..." Like, the leaving is the effect of the problem, not the cause.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's some, there's some good research that by the time you get to this stage, though, too, one little silver lining, I think, is that if if there is external support, and it's very concrete, and like, "Look, I see you're feeling guilty, you're afraid, this and that." But if there's external support and like a plan coming from the outside with somebody who's supportive, that's actually usually a pretty good entry point for like to at least plant the seed for somebody to leave a bad relationship like that. So yeah, I mean, it sucks.

• 1:11:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  You're blaming yourself, you know, there's all sorts, all sorts of these, like the cost benefit analysis that goes into this is distorted big time by the other person. So this is where like external help can come in and actually do some good.

• 1:11:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah. There's an interesting parallel too with with the addiction angle, you know, one of the common traits of addicts is that they experience an intense amount of guilt and shame and embarrassment for their own behavior and their own decisions. And ironically, that that guilt and shame and embarrassment ends up motivating further indulgence in whatever they feel, whatever their vice is. I think the same thing, you could say kind of a parallel thing is plays out here and that you you feel so much guilt, shame and embarrassment for what you've tolerated, what you've been through, what you've done, that

• 1:12:23Mark Manson?

  you feel like you owe it to the relationship to fix it, to make it better, to like, you can't abandon it, you can't like ruin something and then just leave it there. You have to at least clean up the mess you made. It's interesting because a lot of Johnny Depp's text messages centered around guilt, like just this constant apologizing for his behavior, for his addiction, for his blowups. It's actually really fucked up. His substance abuse got so intense that he, like a lot of the stuff that he was put on trial for, he didn't, he didn't remember because he was so fucked up. So he had to answer that I don't remember,

• 1:13:07Mark Manson?

  I blacked out. Sad. So it's like, like your ex-wife is literally saying, he beat me.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Mark Manson?

  And then a judge asks you, did you beat her? And he's like, I actually don't know.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Mark Manson?

  On her side, I think it was a little bit of a savior guilt, right? Which happens a lot with codependents and who are with addicts, which is like, I'm the only thing keeping him alive. I'm the only thing keeping him sane. I'm the only thing keeping his life together. If I leave, he's probably gonna die without me. So I have to stay. And it becomes, it kind of imprisons you. It becomes like a cage. And then the final psychological mechanism we'll talk about is the terror of the void.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:52Mark Manson?

  The fear of the unknown.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  You gotta explain this one to me, Mark. I do not get this one at all. I mean, I get it, like, from an intellectual level, I get it.

• 1:14:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  Okay, but I've never been afraid of this. I'm like, yeah, I'll be single, it's fine.

• 1:14:05Mark Manson?

  Well, you're an avoidant.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  I'll be a Lloyd, I'll be alone. Yeah, but even then, even, I don't get like, there's pressure from the outside, like, people are like, oh, but my family's pressured me, or whatever. I'm like, yeah, my family's pressured me, I don't care. I don't, but like, what is it? I guess, what is the?

• 1:14:19Mark Manson?

  For the record, I've never experienced this either.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:14:22Mark Manson?

  First of all, let me describe it. So the terror of the void is like, you know, once your identity is so enmeshed with the relationship, like, it's completely merged, you're cut off from so much of the outside world. You've lost friends, family, hobbies, interests. Like, your partner's just everything. There's a real fear of like, how am I gonna function without them? Like, who am I without them? Where am I gonna go? What am I gonna do? It's, it is like a very real fear. And Tim Ferriss has this great quote where he says, "Most people would rather be right than happy." Right?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:14:56Mark Manson?

  And so it's, I think the truth here is that like, people would rather deal with a hell that is known than an unknown anything. Especially once their self-worth and self-esteem has just been brutalized for years, and they have like absolutely zero confidence in themselves to function in the outside world alone.

• 1:15:20Mark Manson?

  The prospect of like, taking a chance on that, they're like, you know what, I can tolerate this a little bit longer. To answer your question, I also have never felt this. But I will say, I think I can sympathize a little bit, but only because I've now been with my wife for 14 years.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Mark Manson?

  Like, one of the interesting things that's happened, I would say, just in the last three or four years with her, is, I've actually gotten to a point where I don't remember what I was like, without her.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:15:50Mark Manson?

  Like, I can't remember who I was. Like, and that sounds very abstract and philosophical, but like, that is an honest feeling that I have. When I try to imagine, who am I without her in my life, like, I can't, like, nothing comes up.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:08Mark Manson?

  Because the last time I was without her, I was 27, which is, like, I was just a completely different person. So, I can see, so the thing I struggle to sympathize with is like, the desire to leave. I have zero desire to leave my marriage, but I imagine if my marriage was bad, like, that would be very intimidating. It'd be very intimidating. Like, I don't know what I like, I don't know what I would do, I don't know, like, would I keep my friends? Would my friends keep me? Like, would I live in LA? Would I move somewhere else? Would I, yeah, what would I, I honestly, I have no idea.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. Yeah, see, I guess my, because I've never experienced that, like, I've never been in a relationship with someone for 12 years, or whatever it is, like, I get the whole, our lives are a mesh, we've moved in together, we've like, have this whole like, like, there's a big, big cost to leaving, I get that.

• 1:17:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  I've just never got like, oh, I guess I can't face the void alone, I guess, because I've always just faced the void. I don't know, I've always been like, just growing up, I was kind of just, you know, raised to be independent. That was the family I grew up in, like, everybody was just, you were expected to be independent, so.

• 1:17:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah, same.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  I understood that. Like I said, sometimes family members make remarks, like, you know, you're 40s and singles. I'm like, I don't care what you think, I just don't care what you think. I don't give a shit. I really don't.

• 1:17:33Mark Manson?

  This is probably partly why you don't end up in relationships like this, is because you're not this way. Like, I think it's, it's one of these kind of sick things where, like, the people who... Have no ability to emotionally function as individuals are the ones who end up in relationships like this.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Yes, okay.

• 1:17:50Mark Manson?

  Which then makes it even scarier for them to try to function like individuals, right?

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. And I get it too. Like we were talking about, if you don't have like a strong sense of your own identity anyway, and you get into these relationships and like with Amber and Johnny, it provided them, you know, both publicly and privately, a, an identity that's very intertwined. Yeah, okay, I get that too, but I don't get that, like the external pressure. I don't know, I don't get that. Maybe that's not what we're talking about here, but I don't know.

• 1:18:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know if it's external pressure, it's just as like, because I think the part that we can't, we really shouldn't gloss over here is that when you're in a toxic relationship like this, you know, we mentioned it in passing earlier, but like when you're in a toxic relationship like this, it actively wrecks your self-esteem.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:18:39Mark Manson?

  Because essentially what, what you're doing is you're putting yourself in a emotionally harmful, sometimes physically harmful environment intentionally, and then justifying to yourself that you deserve it. That this is okay, that this is normal.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:18:53Mark Manson?

  And so like if you just imagine like what that does to your self-esteem, your self-confidence,

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:58Mark Manson?

  And then run that out for like eight years, 10 years, 12 years, whatever. Like you, as an individual, you're gonna hit a point where you're just like, you're like a fucking mouse. You're terrified of your own shadow. You feel like you don't deserve anything. You don't know how to do anything. Especially if you're coming from a relationship where your partner is extremely controlling and dictates everything about your life.

• 1:19:20Mark Manson?

  And it's, yeah, it can be, it can be terrifying.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  Okay, that, that makes a little more sense because I have been in relationships where for a short amount of time where that felt like the case and it was just very disorienting and I didn't know what was going on. I was like, I gotta get out of here. And so I did. And I, I can see if that goes on for years and years though, yeah, that would be, you have a complete, just like disassembly of your own identity. You don't know who you are at that point. And, and so facing anything outside of that is probably terrifying.

• 1:19:48Mark Manson?

  It's like the, the, you know, the old learned helplessness experiments with the dogs.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:19:54Mark Manson?

  Which is that, that's actually probably an interesting thing to go into, you know, so Marty Seligman. Really extremely famous psychologist, uh, kind of made his name in the 60s by doing these experiments where it's kind of fucked up now, but um, back then they didn't treat animals, animals as nicely. He took dogs and he found that, you know, that if you punish them predictably, you, you could train their behavior, but if you punish them unpredictably, eventually they would just give up trying. They would just lay down and they would just take it. You know, it was a pretty salient question around that time in the 50s and 60s, uh, was about the Holocaust, you know, like why, why didn't the Jews rise up? Why didn't

• 1:20:36Mark Manson?

  they resist? Why didn't they rebel? Um, similar questions kind of around slavery. Um, and the Seligman experiments around learned helplessness were really, really impactful and kind of providing a psychological explanation of like, why people just give up and accept abuse after a certain point. And, and again, it comes back to that variability of, of reward and variability of punishment. If the variability of reward, it's like it generates addiction and like people compulsively keep, keep pursuing something and the variability of the punishment, uh, just kills all internal motivation and like desire to do anything, any agency or anything. So to wrap up, well, let's, let's wrap up the, the Johnny and Amber

• 1:21:21Mark Manson?

  story and then we'll talk about, um, takeaways, kind of final thoughts, um, practical things that people can use to assess in their own lives, why, why they stay in bad relationships, um, and what maybe they should do if they are in a bad relationship. Um, so 2016, allegedly, uh, Johnny Depp threw a phone, hit Amber Heard in the face. Um, she immediately went to city hall, filed for divorce. Um, she was photographed with bruises on her face. He denies that he did anything. Um, witnesses say that he didn't do anything. Those witnesses were employed by him, so they're not exactly the most reliable witnesses in the world.

• 1:22:03Mark Manson?

  Interestingly, her mother died just a couple of days before the incident. Um, I think one thing that happens often with people is when a parent dies or a loved one dies, they kind of have this little bit of a carpe diem moment of like, holy shit, life is fragile. It's, it goes by fast.

• 1:22:24Mark Manson?

  Stop fucking around, like, change things. So I imagine that was an influence on it. This happened in 2016, they had a divorce settlement, they had a public statement, everything kind of went, went on, life is normal. Until the next year, the me too moment happened, and she decided to write an op ed in the Washington Post, describing herself as a domestic abuse victim. Not naming him by name, but clearly insinuating that he had been violent and abusive throughout their marriage, and that she was a survivor, and that she was, you know, it was kind of her me too statement.

• 1:23:06Mark Manson?

  He immediately lost some very large movie roles, it tainted him across the entire industry. People, he was doing the, there was a Harry Potter spinoff that he was supposed to star in, there was like a boycott to get him, to get him uncast from that. It completely fucked up the trajectory of his career, I imagine it fucked up his personal life quite a bit, and so he filed a defamation lawsuit, she immediately counter filed a lawsuit against him, they went to court, that's where all these audios and recordings and stuff came out, turned out that they had both been recording the marriage through, through most of the relationship.

• 1:23:49Mark Manson?

  Eventually, the court, the court ruling was like amazing, in that it both rewarded damages to him and to her, so basically, the court, the court was like, you're both right, you're both fucking awful, so here, each of you take your money. She appealed one of the results, they ended up settling out of court, so a lot of money changed hand. There's, the very tragic ending to this is that it basically obliterated both of their careers. Yeah. Neither career has recovered. Also, during this time, and in the immediate aftermath, and through all the lawsuits and everything, he ran through pretty much all of his money, she definitely ran through all

• 1:24:34Mark Manson?

  of her money, so they're both broke, they're both out of work, and it's, it's just...

• 1:24:43Mark Manson?

  Like, nobody won in this situation. It's like, it's terribly sad.

• 1:24:49Mark Manson?

  He, according to one source that I saw, he spent over that, that 10, 15 year period, he spent $650 million.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Oh my god. He had that much money? Oh my god. Okay.

• 1:25:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:25:06Mark Manson?

  The aftermath of relationships like this is, it's, I think it's different than a lot of, you know, again, comparing it to an addiction, right? Like, if you have an alcohol problem, and then you go and get cleaned up, it's kind of like, like, sure, there's probably things you did and people you hurt that you need to go and deal with and reconcile with one-on-one, but in terms of like, public reputation, like, the public kind of gives you a pass. You know, the, the, the relationships in your life, you kind of get a pass. It's, it's, like, the collateral damage of this whole thing has been so severe

• 1:25:47Mark Manson?

  that it's just hard to imagine them being palatable in public life ever again. The other interesting thing about this is that she very much became an emblem, a cultural emblem of the Me Too moment, and when he sued her, it, and the fact that she countersued him, it even made her more, like, she was celebrated as a hero, right?

• 1:26:12Mark Manson?

  Interestingly, he then be, kind of became a hero. Once the trial actually started taking place, he became a hero for, for men who felt like Me Too overstepped. And he was kind of emblematic of the justice for, for men who had been either wrongfully accused or there had been an overreaction against them.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Mark Manson?

  And so it became, very much became this cultural moment about three or four years ago, and everybody was talking about it, and it was like, you couldn't go anywhere without seeing something about it. And it's all, it's, it's kind of crazy. It's like, it's one of those like, wow, I can't believe that thing happened.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Nobody won, like you said.

• 1:26:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Nobody won.

• 1:26:53Mark Manson?

  The public didn't win either.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  No, and everybody, you know, you might have an opinion about this, but nobody won.

• 1:26:58Mark Manson?

  No.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Two, two lives were destroyed and, and, and nobody won.

• 1:27:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Which, it's funny, if you ever, you always know a good lawyer when you talk to him about a case and they tell you that. They're like, what's the best case scenario here?

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:12Mark Manson?

  Right? And then they kind of lay it out and they're like, okay, great. You, you won some money.

• 1:27:19Mark Manson?

  You, you burnt tons of bridges, you spent three years of your life being upset and angry and fucking hating somebody. Are you sure this is winning?

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Mark Manson?

  So let's, let's, let's go through like, what, what are some of the takeaways here? I think it's, it's worth revisiting each, each of these seven and just kind of maybe speaking for a few minutes on, how can we counteract these tendencies or how can we kind of best prepare ourselves? I think in the case of normalization, I think honestly, just listening to podcasts like this is, and like reading books and, and informing yourself about relationship dynamics and educating yourself on like, what a good relationship looks like, is probably the best thing you can do. Especially if you grew up in a family that was not super functional or your parents were not the most emotionally mature. Like, simply educating yourself on these concepts, understanding how these dynamics work,

• 1:28:15Mark Manson?

  understanding your own tendencies and proclivities is like a huge part of the battle.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  You mentioned it at the top, but that book, Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendricks.

• 1:28:26Mark Manson?

  It's great.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Cannot recommend it enough.

• 1:28:27Mark Manson?

  It's great.

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  Around this whole like normalization thing, why you do what you do, the way you behave in relationships, what you need from someone else, and it's called Getting the Love You Want.

• 1:28:36Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  For a reason, that will, I think that will take care of a lot of these issues here.

• 1:28:41Mark Manson?

  By the way, like, why is this shit not taught in schools?

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, well, I don't know.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  Would you have paid attention to that either?

• 1:28:48Mark Manson?

  I would have.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  Or you think so?

• 1:28:49Mark Manson?

  Dude, I mean, once you're old enough, yeah.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:28:53Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Mark Manson?

  For sure. Or maybe college, like.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:56Mark Manson?

  I, I feel like if I read, there's like a handful of relationship books, that being one of them. If I read when I was 18, I, I do think it would have.

• 1:29:06Mark Manson?

  It would have helped.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:07Mark Manson?

  Maybe, maybe not would, maybe wouldn't have prevented all the dumpster fires that I-

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  There would have been some awareness, though.

• 1:29:14Mark Manson?

  But yeah, a little bit more awareness, probably maybe some damage mitigation. Just understanding like what the fuck was, because I mean, I remember it wasn't until I got in therapy that I started having like a decent understanding of how my, my childhood and my parents affected me.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  It's, it's one of those water you swim in type of things. You don't realize how weird your family is until you can compare it to something else objectively.

• 1:29:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  And I think that either therapy or a book like that goes a long way to help you with that, yeah.

• 1:29:43Mark Manson?

  Mechanism number two, the identity trap. I think the biggest takeaway here is, is you have to maintain your own independent identity within a relationship. It's, it's healthy for both people.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Mark Manson?

  It's-

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  It's harder when you're young, too, I think.

• 1:29:56Mark Manson?

  It is.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  The younger you are, the harder that is.

• 1:29:57Mark Manson?

  Because you don't, you don't know who you are.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:00Mark Manson?

  I, I also, yeah, that's actually a really good point. I think young people tend to often have very toxic relationships and I think-

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  They're all my, the worst relationships I have.

• 1:30:08Mark Manson?

  And I think part of that is a lack of experience and lack of emotional regulation, but part of that too is like, you just don't know who the fuck you are.

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:15Mark Manson?

  Right? Yeah, I, I remember being that age and it was like pretty much whatever any girl I dated was into, that's what I was into.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, same, yeah.

• 1:30:25Mark Manson?

  So yeah, maintain your own identity, keep your interests, keep your own friends outside of the relationship and try to strike a balance on that Venn diagram. The slot machine affects.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  This is, but this is a hard one.

• 1:30:39Mark Manson?

  I'll say this.

• 1:30:42Mark Manson?

  If there's enough conflict in the relationship to create this effect, like that in and of itself is the problem.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:51Mark Manson?

  And I think, you know, the point you made about gamblers getting boring if they won too much, God, that's so true with like healthy relationships, like, because it's-

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  It looks so boring, doesn't it?

• 1:31:00Mark Manson?

  If, if normal for you is toxic-

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:31:02Mark Manson?

  Healthy feels very boring.

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:31:05Mark Manson?

  Very boring. And I resisted that for a long time. There were a number of, of women I dated when I was younger who were very healthy and mature and secure and they just struck me as boring. I was like, this sucks. I'm out of here.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:21Mark Manson?

  There's no fireworks here.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Now for me, I don't know, one of the more exciting, well, I don't know, it's not exciting, it's still boring, but one of the more satisfying things for me is just having a conversation.

• 1:31:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Like, that's one of them, it's, same thing. When I was younger, if this would be told me-

• 1:31:39Mark Manson?

  So domestic.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it is, it's weird. I know, like, you hear that, and if you are somebody who's, like, addicted to all that drama, you're like, "That, you are so fucking boring, I'm never gonna be like that, blah, blah, blah." No, it's, you don't know it until you're in it.

• 1:31:52Mark Manson?

  Again, a young person thing, like, I think we talked in the happiness episode, how young people tend to associate happiness with excitement, you know, with novelty, whereas when you get, slowly as you get older, you begin to associate happiness with calm and peace. I think that's definitely true. Like, yeah, it's my idea of being happy when I was 21 was like, getting hammered and fucking all night. You know, like, that was like, peak relationship experience. Now I like to be in bed by nine and like, reading a good book together.

• 1:32:28Mark Manson?

  Number four, cognitive dissonance. This one is tough. I feel like-

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  It's tough because you, you're literally tricking yourself, so you don't know when it's happening. And this is not just in relationships, but any beliefs you have, you know, political beliefs, whatever they are. That's why it's so hard, is because you're literally tricking yourself, so by definition, you're not aware of it.

• 1:32:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I think the remedy to this is finding people in your life that will call you out if you're in a bad situation. Trusting them to say something and also trusting them when they say it. The paradox here is that somebody who is toxic and is gonna end up in a bad relationship like this is probably also not gonna have very healthy friendships.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, right, right.

• 1:33:11Mark Manson?

  And like, people that they trust and can count on and will listen to if they say something. So, yeah, this is a bit of a catch-22, I think, but that is probably the solve. Maybe family members. But again, if you grew up in a family that this sort of behavior was typical and normal, then- What are you gonna do?

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:32Mark Manson?

  Sunk cost fallacy, this you can train yourself. This you can absolutely train yourself. This is something that, once you're aware of and you start spotting, because this, this happens everywhere in life.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:44Mark Manson?

  Everywhere in life. There's even things like, I remember like six months ago, my wife and I, we bought tickets for a concert and we got halfway there. We were fighting LA traffic, right? So it's gonna be like an hour and a half to get there. We got halfway there and my wife realized she forgot the tickets. And so we're like, oh my god, we gotta go back to the fucking house. So we turn around, drive back to the house, get back, and then go back, get back on the 10, get back in the, in the traffic, and we're like, dude, we're gonna get there, like, the show's gonna be half over. By the time we get there, we're literally gonna spend more time in traffic than we are at the show. And I remember having this conversation with her and it's, and it's funny because early in our relationship, like, she, she was very much, especially around money, she was always,

• 1:34:29Mark Manson?

  she grew up poor, so she was, she was like, we bought the tickets, we're going to the fucking show.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:34Mark Manson?

  Whether you, whether we like it or not. And, but slowly over time, you know, it's gotten a lot better, being like, okay, we can either go home now and just enjoy our evening, or we can spend two and a half hours in traffic to enjoy 40 minutes of a concert. And we were like, let's go home.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:34:53Mark Manson?

  And enjoy the night.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:54Mark Manson?

  So you can practice this in multiple areas of your life and you can train yourself to spot this and, and nip it in the bud.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I used to be absolutely terrible about this, that sunk cost thing too, you know, like I've talked about, grew up humble means too and all that. Uh, you know what actually helped me though is years ago, you, uh, I think, I don't know if it was a blog post or a social media post at one point, but you were like, you know, if you're reading a book and you don't like it, you don't have to finish it.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  And like you said, we do this in all areas of our lives. You know, you go to a restaurant and you pay for a crappy meal and you're like, well, I'm gonna eat it even though it's a crappy meal. Or, or you know, your kid doesn't eat it and so you eat it.

• 1:35:30Mark Manson?

  I'm bad with that.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  I'm bad with that kind of stuff, too.

• 1:35:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  But that little, that was a little in for me that you had, like, this is a, which is kind of like, for me, it was a big investment, right? Not money wise, but it's a lot of time you're investing in a book or whatever.

• 1:35:41Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  If it's, if it's a crappy book, just stop reading it. Who cares if you gave up on it? It's fine.

• 1:35:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  And that showed me just in other areas of my life where like, oh, this applies in so many different, so many different areas. And so if you can just find something like that and then you're like, oh, okay, that wasn't so bad.

• 1:35:58Mark Manson?

  We discovered it with trips too. So like, we would book, say like a 10 day trip somewhere and then we'd get to like day seven and want to go home. And then we'd force ourselves to stay to last three days and like do all the stuff we didn't want to do. And eventually like finally, like three or four years ago, we were just like.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  Change the flight.

• 1:36:15Mark Manson?

  We should just change the flight and go home.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Mark Manson?

  Like, it's so stupid.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22Mark Manson?

  All right. Number six, the guilt cage.

• 1:36:26Mark Manson?

  This one's hard because again, I think it's downstream of that cognitive dissonance, that rationalization.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Mark Manson?

  But it's, you know, the thing that comes to mind when I think about this is that scene in Good Will Hunting where like Robin Williams is like hugging Matt Damon and he's like, it's not your fault. It's not your fault until Matt Damon starts crying. Yeah, I feel like that's just kind of what people in this spot need to hear is that it's not your fault. It's like, you're human, you act like this, you acted in a completely human way. You love this person. You want to be able to look back and say that you gave everything and tried to make everything work.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  And you're not doing them any favors by enabling bad behavior.

• 1:37:05Mark Manson?

  That too. That too.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  So I like.

• 1:37:07Mark Manson?

  You're not saving them.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  That's, that's really hard.

• 1:37:10Mark Manson?

  You're not fixing them.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  Just gonna tell somebody that and they're gonna stop. I get that, but helping somebody see that.

• 1:37:14Mark Manson?

  It's not your responsibility.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:16Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:17Mark Manson?

  And in many ways, you can, you can actually be, you know, if you're enabling them, you can actually be holding them back from the transformation that they need to have.

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:27Mark Manson?

  So yeah, it's, it's hard to come to that conclusion yourself. Again, I think, I think the support network is key here. I think probably a good therapist or a marriage counselor is like super key here. I feel like there's gonna have to be somebody outside of you, like, kinda calling that out and being like, "It's not you. It's not your fault." And then the void, the fear of the unknown. The only thing that comes to mind here is just having faith that you will figure something out. That it's like, there's so many stories of so many people who have left awful marriages, relationships, gone out on their own. I mean, like, so many stories of particularly like abused women who like leave in the middle of the night with

• 1:38:08Mark Manson?

  a toothbrush in their pocket and no money and they make it work. They figure it out. It's, obviously it's not easy, but it happens. And as we talk about this, I feel like there's maybe a little bit too much resilience within the relationship and not enough resilience outside of the relationship. And maybe, maybe part of this too is like, you can kinda rehearse for this by build, starting to build that identity outside of the relationship. You know, find things you're interested in outside of your partner, find things that you can do, people, make connections, reconnect with old friends, reach out to a family member. Like, build some sort of scaffolding outside of the relationship before you make the leap.

• 1:38:51Mark Manson?

  So you're not leaping purely into the unknown. Plan, plan the escape. Anything else, Drew? Any a-hahs or takeaways for you here?

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  You know, for me, it was, I think all of these, these seven things we went through. I think at some point, I've realized before that, "Oh yeah, that's a contributing factor." Seeing them all together and how like kind of interlocking they are though, now it makes a lot more sense to me anymore. I think I'm a little more sympathetic to people who do end up in these situations. Because this is, each one of these kinda builds on the other, right? And they're kind of interlocked to form this really, really like tight psychological trap that people feel when they're inside these relationships. So for me, it was just like, I have a little more compassion for that and a little more understanding around that. And you know, you could usually point to one of these like, "Oh, they feel guilty. They don't wanna leave this person because they think they would,

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  you know, wouldn't make it on their own or whatever."

• 1:39:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  You kinda understand that. You're like, "Yeah, but that's not a very good reason." But when you stack all seven of these together,

• 1:39:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Man, that's a, that's like a psychological steel trap you've put yourself in.

• 1:39:56Mark Manson?

  It really is.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  And it's just hard. I have a new appreciation for how hard it is to get out of one of these. Yeah.

• 1:40:02Mark Manson?

  I think- The insight I got from this episode is just how, like you said, how interlocking those things are, how reinforcing they are. That's it, yeah. You know, like you said, I've had friends that are clearly stuck in the sunk cost fallacy with the relationship. I've had friends who that are racked by guilt. I've had friends who have grown up in super fucked up situations, don't even realize how messed up their relationship is. But like realizing that all these things kind of like reinforce one another, right? Like the more you tolerate, the more volatility you deal with, the more cognitive dissonance you introduce into the relationship. The more addicted you get to it, the more, yeah. The more you normalize it, the more you justify it, the more guilty you feel. You know, so it's like everything kind of compounds on top of itself.

• 1:40:46Mark Manson?

  It is intimidating. It is, toxic relationships are scary. It's, you know, we talked on, I forget which episode, back in February, maybe the dating, maybe the love relationship, but it's, the researchers really do find that it is better to be single than in a bad relationship, but it is better to be in a good relationship than no relationship. So it is, relationships are amplifiers. I've always, this, you know, love is not, doesn't necessarily make you happy, it amplifies whatever is already there. So if you love somebody who is bad for you, and is toxic, and abusive, and hurts you, and makes you feel guilty, your love for that person is only going to amplify all those

• 1:41:30Mark Manson?

  feelings and dynamics, whereas if you are with a person who is healthy and secure and happy and is supportive and cares about you, then the love just amplifies all of those aspects as well. So, all right, that is it for this episode. As always, please leave a review and follow the show on whatever platform you're on. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you again.