How To Avoid Destroying Your Relationship - Matthew Fray

Matthew Fray is a relationship coach, blogger and an author. Matthew's marriage ended because he left a glass next to the sink. Well, not exactly, but near enough. He spent the next few years recovering, reflecting and writing about how a relationship can fall apart without anything catastrophic happening, and also working out how to stop it from happening again. Expect to learn how even good people can be bad spouses, why men and women aren't speaking the same language in most relationships, why most relationships are initiated by women, why trust is even more important than love, why peace and contentment are better life goals than happiness, and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy This Is How Your Marriage Ends - https://amzn.to/3L78KzK Check out Matthew's website - https://amzn.to/3L78KzK Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #dating #marriage #mentalhealth - 00:00 Intro 00:25 Matthew’s Divorce 05:31 How the Sexes Interpret a Situation 11:13 Trust’s Impact on Love 16:20 Good People can be Bad Spouses 29:45 Overcoming Divorce 39:29 How Do You Build Respect in a Marriage? 50:55 The Pain of Seeing Your Ex with Someone Else 59:08 What it’s Like to Be a Woman 1:03:30 Work for Contentment & Peace 1:07:02 How to Find Matthew - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I believe trust usurps love, that it ranks higher. If you had to like rank the conditions that need to exist for relationships to thrive, to survive, to last, I just think trust ranks number one. I think people routinely end relationships with people they love all of the time.

• 0:17Chris Williamson?

  Matthew Fray, welcome to the show.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Hey, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. Appreciate your time.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  How did you end up being here talking about divorce?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  In 2013, my marriage ended. And I don't want to say that I didn't see it coming because there was an 18 month lead up to it where it was sort of like a slow decay and it was pretty awful and we were in different bedrooms, but there still was nothing that had prepared me for the experience of my wife literally like moving out, packing a suitcase, taking her little boy. I always want to make sure that people don't imagine like an angry woman kidnapping our child. She very peacefully and, and, and promising me that I'd see him tomorrow or the next day, you know, drove and said, I'm going to be at my mom's. Though that's what it was. I don't want to make it seem like she was a kidnap kidnapping our son, but, but she left and it was brutal and I had a really difficult time with it. We'd been together for 12 years, married for nine of them.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  And I, I was 34 at the time, just about. And I don't know, I, I never had like a frame of reference for anything that sucked that bad before, that was that sort of awful. And that was it. It was, it was my personal crisis. The, everybody can only know what they know. Everybody can only have experienced whatever adversity or pain that they've experienced. And I don't want to make excuses for my relatively non-resilient, fragile life up to that point, but it was simply the most difficult thing I'd encountered. I, I hated it and I had to get to work on figuring out what I'd done to contribute to it. I needed to selfishly protect my future self from having this happen again. And in that process, I believe I sort of.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Evolved and came to some valuable insights and conclusions about ways in which I had a lot more power and influence in my relationship than I believed on the day she drove away, where I felt like a victim. And I don't feel like a victim anymore.

• 2:13Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that you talk about the exit being unceremonial, unspectacular, you know, it wasn't someone threw a glass and then she stormed out and this, that and the other. And I think you mentioned about how you think most relationships end with a whimper rather than a bang.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that there is, I mean, I don't like to try to speak for everybody. I'll speak for me and trust that lots of people also thought and felt this way. Growing up, when marriages ended, and I heard about it, I always assumed somebody had done something sort of overtly horrible. Sexual infidelity, physical abuse, a crime, you know, just major deceit, something, something really bad that we would all like sit around a table and agree, man, they definitely should have ended their marriage because of that awful thing that person did. And what I've come to believe in my work and in my personal life is that the great majority of relationships do not end that way. That they end from things

• 3:17Speaker 00

  that people want to fight about whether they should end over them. And those are conversations around somebody leaving a dish by the sink or a piece of laundry on the bedroom floor or the state of the bathroom when somebody walks into it, you know, after somebody got ready and brushed their teeth in the morning. And these are the little things that are so easy to write off as benign, as inconsequential, as no big deal. And because one person cares about it, because the other person insists that it's not a problem, it never gets repaired. The disharmony never heals, never gets repaired. And it's my strong belief that those pile up hundreds of times, thousands of times over the duration of a relationship. They erode

• 3:59Speaker 00

  trust in a way that I think of as like a paper cut each time. And that the accumulation of these paper cuts compromises the stability, the integrity of the relationship. And then, you know, often it's something that really overtly bad does happen. And I don't necessarily mean infidelity or something, but like an external trauma, like a Often the death of a loved one or sickness, you know, somebody gets diagnosed with like a really scary disease and those break relationships in which the foundation of like safety and trust has been eroded.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  The resiliency has already been damaged and then something heavy enough comes in that can snap that.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  That's what I believe the most common story in relationships are. But again, it's often not, it doesn't even require the big thing, doesn't require the the health diagnosis or the death in the family or anything like that. It, we can absolutely destroy, you know, relationships in these super slow ways. And finally, somebody has enough, somebody has enough data points to say, this is going to happen forever. So I either have to voluntarily agree to stay in it or I have to leave. And I think, I hate to say this because so many people take it as if I'm blaming men. I'm not blaming men. I, I think most men are exceedingly decent people. I think they miscalculate for how much pain their partner experiences because of things they do or don't do, that they're not even really aware of.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  So often I think men are sort of inadvertently putting their wives or girlfriends in a position in heteronormative relationships to like to make that decision. And it's, it has a tough spot for people to be.

• 5:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's the blame game, which kind of is very common on the internet is something that I, I really tried to steer out of a lot. Um, you know, the sort of manosphere slash red pill and then the kind of whatever most recent wave of feminism slash women go in their own way movement. Both of these are, they have kernels of truth in them, but the problem is that they look at the problem through a two resol- as low resolution viewpoint, right? It's all women are X or all men are X or this is the way to deal with the situation. Nobody should get married because it's a complete waste of time. The entire institution of marriage is skewed against men or you need to be completely, never open yourself up to men because men are going to be this sort of using abusing

• 6:16Chris Williamson?

  force. And you go, okay, like, look, to me, that doesn't seem like it moves us any closer to a, a useful outcome. And I think that one of the fundamental things I learned from David Buss, who's an evolutionary psychologist, one of the fathers of evolutionary psychology, is that he.

• 6:36Chris Williamson?

  There are different ways that men and women can interpret the same situation. And this isn't something conscious, right? There's an overestimation and an underestimation bias when it comes to attraction. So you can have the same interaction go from a man to a woman and a woman to a man. They're both experiencing the same thing. In terms of self-report afterwards, the man presumes that the woman was way more interested in him than she was, and the woman presumes that the man was way less interested in her than he was. And you can scale this out replicably. It's been done at speed dating competitions, so on and so forth. That's kind of like a, I don't know, like a funny, relatively harmless example. But roll that clock forward, that kind of starts to explain how the boss might have seen the receptionist as actually having, her eyes have lingered on him a little bit too long.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  And then that signal begins to get confused. She thought she was being polite. He thought she was being sort of flirty. And you go, okay, so who's in the wrong here? And you go, well, kind of not really anybody, because both people acted on the situation that they saw, right? And this is what we're talking about, how I'm inferring that you're talking about the symbolic significance of leaving glasses on the sink, that to one person, the language of leaving glasses on the sink doesn't mean anything at all. And to another person, what, how they interpret that situation is it's a, it's a really, really big deal. And understanding that men and women see the same situations in different ways is

• 8:00Chris Williamson?

  just such a great hack for dissolving conflict, because what we presume is, hang on, this upset me. How can you not see that this would upset you too? Which is like, because I'm not seeing the same thing that you're seeing.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, I, I posit that at the root of trust erosion in relationships is one person saying, hey, this upsets me or hurts me on some level. And the other person indicating that they shouldn't think or feel the thing that they do, essentially saying.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  That shouldn't matter to you. That shouldn't be as painful or as important as you're making it out to be. And so, and when it's something that I did or didn't do, I just believe over time our partner doesn't trust us anymore. You know, I liken this scenario to the analogy or the metaphor that I use in the book is the idea of the field of optometry. Back in the 1700s, we hadn't scientifically proven color blindness yet. So it's conceivable that two people, one person with color correct vision, one person with color blindness could be standing there having a very honest debate about the color of a painting or a bushel of vegetables or a field of flowers. And both would be telling like the whole truth. But you can just sort of in your own mind, like,

• 9:16Speaker 00

  see how these two people could come to, you know, fight and call each other names and have an enormous amount of conflict because you'd believe that this person has to be intentionally like screwing with you in order to have arrived at this conclusion. And it's, you know, it feels deeply insulting to say that thing's orange when I know it's green. I know it's green. I see it right now. It's, it's there. And it's funny, right? Cause there's all sorts of like funny little things on the internet where people hear different things or they see a different color. And there's been sort of like famous examples of that in the last, I don't know, 10 years in pop culture. But I, I like to imagine like the optometry fairy, this like Wizard of Oz like Good Witch of the North shows up out of the sky and like hands the people the glasses that would allow them to see the color that the other person saw.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Or hell, just be there for optometrists being able to verify in whatever scientific method they use to verify it, that people literally see different colors. Because nobody had a frame of reference for that possibility. And I essentially think that's what we're talking about in relationships. I do think it manifests as like men do this, women do that a lot. I, I, I think there are examples where it's not always that way. Where, so I, I try not to like exclude people. I try really hard not to say, men are always like doing, saying, thinking, feeling this and women are doing the opposite.

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  Everything should be caveated with on average beforehand.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And that's how I think about it. It's sort of like statistically observably true most of the time.

• 10:38Chris Williamson?

  That's a good way to put it.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, I mean, that's just like how I think about it. And I, and I think it's really important. It is, that is the idea that started me on this path. It was was that framework was that there other humans literally see and think and feel different things. And that sounds so ridiculous to emotionally intelligent, naturally empathetic people. But when you're me, where I'm from, that is a foreign concept, that another person could describe something 100% differently than me, and both could be true.

• 11:09Chris Williamson?

  And still be telling the truth.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not something that I understood.

• 11:14Chris Williamson?

  How have you come to see the relationship between trust and love?

• 11:21Speaker 00

  I believe in the context of a romantic relationship, that a lot of people think love is is the the end all be all is the thing that you need, that if you have enough love in place, everything's going to be okay. And I don't believe that. I believe trust usurps love that it ranks higher. If you had to like rank the conditions that need to exist for relationships to thrive, to survive, to last, I just think trust ranks number one. I think people routinely end relationships with people they love all of the time.

• 11:50Chris Williamson?

  Because of a lack of trust?

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, but yes. And again, and it's not. And I think a lot of people hear that word trust. And they think, well, gee, I don't lie. I don't cheat. I'm a reliable person that goes to work and makes money and comes home and I don't gamble it away. What are they talking about? And it shows up in these really nuanced subtle conversations where one person sees orange, the other person sees green. They're like, I see this differently than you.

• 12:14Chris Williamson?

  Give us an example of that.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Well, okay, so it's let's just the my most famous example is the dish by the sink. And I insisted that it was ridiculous for my wife to make a big deal out of a dish laying by the sink essentially. And I don't want to, a lot of people think this is a literal conversation about dishes and that I was some slob and that she had to pick up after me all the time. And that's not true. It was a drinking glass that I put water in so I could take like vitamins and stuff in the morning. And so I'd set it there just because it felt like an efficient way to go about it. And I didn't think it was this, I just thought it was ridiculous that she like kept like sort of like getting on me about it. The thing that hurts is not the dish being there. It's not. The thing that hurts is when somebody feels as if you've promised to love and care for them

• 13:01Speaker 00

  and be their adult partner always. And you simply have no respect and do not value what they think, what they feel, what their experiences are. The dish communicates, "I'm going to choose me, my beliefs and my feelings, my wants, my needs. I'm going to choose them over you." Every time our experiences don't align with one another. Every time I don't agree with the thing you're asking for, the thing that you want, the thing that you wish I'd do different. If I don't approve of the message, if I don't concur, I'm going to do what I want, even at the expense of what you think of what you feel. And I think that you can get away with that hundreds of times probably.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  But I believe these are the subtle paper cut moments that destroy trust, intimacy and relationships. And finally, a person says to themselves, "Okay, let me just make it about my marriage. My wife finally learned that if I didn't agree with whatever she believed or whatever she felt, that I was always going to choose me over her." And that's where the trust goes away. It's not trust in terms of honesty, it's trust in terms of reliability, sustainability, consistency. It is, "I don't trust this relationship's going to last, or even if the relationship does last, I calculate it's going to be even worse for me down the road than it is today." That's a dangerous place to put people in.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  People that have a healthy amount of self-respect and self-love will exit a relationship in which they predict a year from now is going to be worse than today. Five years from now is going to be worse than today. Anyway, and I think we inadvertently put people in that situation a lot.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  What about the archetype of the person who knows that the relationship is already doomed to fail, but then doesn't have the bravery to leave? That seems to be a very, very common situation that I see.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, fair enough. The one I imagine, and I'd love to hear different ones that you imagine, the one I imagine when you say that is, and this is pretty stereotypical, is because seven out of 10, at least in the United States, seven out of 10 divorces are filed by women. So statistically, you know, women are being fed up in my estimation because of these sort of like subtle moments of trust erosion. And eventually they work up the courage to file for divorce, but there might be a number of months or years prior to that decision, right, where they held on. And I'm pretty generous about it. I think it's usually I'm staying together for my children. Um, I'm staying together, it could be fear based.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  I'm staying together because I don't know what his reaction is going to be.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  I think for me, one of the ones that I would definitely see in the modern world, uh, financial reliance, uh, you know, it's increasingly difficult to be a single person supporting a household potentially with kids or without kids, sticking together for the children, sticking together because of a fear of what comes next, you know? I don't have the support structure that I should do. You know, we've got a world which is connected more than ever before and yet more isolated than it's ever been as well. So people, you know, you can't go and live with your Facebook friend. And yeah, you're probably right. When we're talking about this, given the fact that seven out of 10 divorces are instigated by women, if we're talking about somebody that kind of knows the relationship should

• 16:24Chris Williamson?

  end and doesn't, on average, that's probably going to be women as well. And I'd be really interested for the women that are watching to throw it in the comments below or do whatever, because, you know, if you've stuck about in a relationship, I'd be very interested to work out what compelled you to stay and what, what didn't compel you to go. Um, but one of the interesting things that I quite like that you come up with is that even good people can be bad spouses. And that's such a, like a lovely way to frame it. And it also highlights the fact that this is why I think a lot of the men in some of the sort of manosphere movements feel particularly embittered because they didn't do anything wrong in their vision, right?

• 17:07Chris Williamson?

  They got up, they went to work, they didn't cheat on their wife, they came home, they tried to pay the mortgage, they tried to be a this, that and the other. And yet it still didn't work. And yet there was maybe the paper cut syndrome, the glasses left on the side, the lack of validation. The lack of sense of belonging that that was needed to keep this going. And that sucks, man. Like, that's hard for me to hear men going through a situation where they were doing all of the things that men were told that they were supposed to do. You're supposed to work hard, be right by your woman, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And then there's what? There's like this, I don't know.

• 17:43Chris Williamson?

  Translation error that's occurred, which has meant that men are now, the good man still wasn't a good husband somehow. And squaring that circle, it's, it's tough and it's tough for the woman as well, you know? I think that a lot of women are probably pretty empathetic and they know, look, this is a man who's working. This is a man who's trying to provide for me. And yet slowly over time, the way that I feel about him just isn't working and there isn't anything. He didn't cheat on me. He didn't abuse me. He didn't spend all of the money down at the casino and then tell me that it was on something else. You know, it is this whimper, not a bang. And this is, I don't know, it's so.

• 18:27Chris Williamson?

  It's such a bourgeois luxurious way to, to do something catastrophic. Does that make sense? Like, it's so comfortable, it's so convenient, and yet it's completely, completely atrocious and painful.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  I wish I could, I wish I could prove this with data. I really believe it's the most common story of relationships that end. And I, I hope that that's a hopeful message. What I'm trying to do when I say good people can be bad spouses. Can be bad partners. It's, it's, I'm trying to disassociate character from like the behavior. I don't think the harm that's caused in relationships is a result of anybody with ill character or ill intention. And what I really would hope guys will learn to do collectively is, is stop with the defensive responses. Defensiveness is inherently invalidating. And when somebody says, I hurt, and then we make it about us, we make it about our good intentions.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  The person's pain never gets repaired. Trust never gets restored. And I know it might seem like a minor inconsequential moment, and I know a lot of these guys might say, well, what about my pain? What about my mistrust? It's my belief that we're the first domino to fall most of the time. I will defend every guy in the world in which I don't believe he's the first domino to fall. A man inadvertently does something, thoughtlessly, and I don't mean thoughtlessly like carelessly. I mean, it doesn't even occur to him because he's trying to do what he perceives to be his role in his relationship and his family, doing the right thing, often as a provider, often. It's like, I'm a provider and I will not cause harm. Is more or less like the two pillars on which he leans. And he's always believed that would be enough.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  And he had every reason to believe so, based on the feedback of this person that said, I do, and that I want to be with you for the rest of my life. And then he goes and does it. But then, right, while he's like not paying attention in his blind spots, these little sort of pain points are occurring, these little teeny tiny moments, and they don't get repaired. And when they pile up over the course of five, 10, 15, 20 years, the other person feels so hurt by this idea that I can't trust this person to behave in a way where the math result of their behavior isn't painful for me. And even worse, if I try to say something to about, say something to him about, if I try to recruit him to help like the painful thing stop, he gets really defensive, or he implies that I'm wrong, that I'm crazy, that I'm stupid, that I'm weak, that I'm hypersensitive, that I'm too emotional.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Because he doesn't know how to see the orange thing that I see as green. Or whatever, you know what I mean? And I just think that's a really tragic story. I really do. And I just think we need to learn how to value the idea of repair and safety and trust in our relationships, even if the other person is saying something, we don't calculate to be dangerous, to be harmful. That's like the great lesson. Doesn't matter what our beliefs are, it doesn't matter what our intentions are. The math result of things that happen in this world or things that we do absolutely can still result in pain for other people. And we can deny that if we want. I just posit you won't have healthy relationships with those people.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Let feel pain, feel free to disagree with with other people if you don't approve of the pain that they're claiming to feel. I think if we want to have healthy relationships, we absolutely have to acknowledge that person's suffering, even if it seems really small, even if it's presenting like really small, like a dish by the sink or a conversation about laundry. And the people that learn how to see that and to acknowledge that and to repair this teeny tiny moment and not allow them to accumulate, I believe they'll never have the trust erosion. They'll never do the fall out of love thing.

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  You talk about invalidation and consideration as two pillar habits that people need. Dig into that for me.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Um, all right. So I think the low hanging fruit of things that we do in our relationship, the easiest thing to practice doing habitually, like mechanically to make things better is to learn how to validate instead of invalidate. And a lot of guys think that I'm advocating, they hear that I'm advocating for agreeing with your relationship partner, no matter what. And I promise I'm not doing that. And so what that looked like in my marriage is the three distinct ways. I refer to it as the invalidation triple threat. This idea that there are three specific ways we invalidate somebody, even if our intention is not to invalidate them. I think we think of it as disagreeing, honestly, and that we should be allowed as adults to disagree with other people. And I think we can get away with

• 23:01Speaker 00

  this with virtually everybody in our world. I think it will destroy trust and intimacy with our romantic partners and probably with our children, too. Um, my wife would come in the room, she'd say, Hey, Matt, this bad thing happened. I feel bad about it. And version one of this invalidation trouble threat was I disagreed intellectually with what my wife is saying happened. She'd tell some story and how it made her feel bad. And I'd be like, that's not even what happened. This is what happened. So version one is I corrected the mental intellectual experience she had. Version two, wife walks in the room, says, Hey, this thing happened. I feel bad about it. And this time I'm fully on board that the event happened exactly as she says it did. But now I'm like, but why are you feeling that way about it? Why are you allowing that to affect you that much? A more normal

• 23:44Speaker 00

  or fair or appropriate reaction to that incident is to feel this way about it. And I try to correct her feelings this time instead of whatever she thought. And then version three is just defensiveness. Hey, Matt, this happened. I feel bad. I'm like, wait a minute, let me explain. Let me just try to explain to you what I was doing. And I feel like once you understand, you won't be mad at me anymore. You won't feel like I did anything to cause harm. And I just believe that the math result of those three patterns, those three habitual responses that I think are patterns in relationships. The other person never gets told, I understand that this situation affected you, even if it didn't affect me. And you can trust me to like,

• 24:28Speaker 00

  do something about it moving forward. You can trust me to cooperate that if it's something that I have the ability to influence, that I'm gonna do it differently moving forward. Because I would never allow you to feel hurt just because I was too comfortable to like, change my ways. And I just, that's the thing is, I don't think any of these guys would do that. I don't think any of these guys would truly know that the wife, girlfriend, whoever they love, hurts in a measurable way and say, I'm too comfortable to do things differently. They literally don't believe that the scenario is as painful as they say. So, a lot of guys are like, so what do you want from me? You want me to agree with her? I'm like, no, let's go through this thought exercise. And I, I love it when people are fathers because they identify with this really easily.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  I'm like, let's please imagine a small child being afraid of a monster hiding under their bed. So I imagine my son, he's 13 now, but he used to be four. And he was a threat when he was four to wake up crying hysterically because he was afraid of a monster under his bed. This didn't literally happen, but it could have absolutely happened any day. And this does happen in lots of families. And we as dad can run up to that room, open the door, survey the scene, find out he's upset because he thinks there's a monster under the bed. And I think the easiest, most logical way to try to solve that problem is to convince him he's mistaken about the presence of the monster. It's what I used to do. Dude, there's no monster under the bed. The reason you're crying is, isn't even real. You know, you're overreacting right now. You don't need to cry this much. Everything's fine.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  And I might say something thoughtless like, go to sleep, you're fine, your bedroom's safe. And if I'm not being my best self and I want to go watch sports on TV or go back to sleep if it's the middle of the night, go to sleep. I don't have time for invisible monsters right now and I might leave. I think there's some really important ideas here. One, I'm right. In this scenario, there isn't a monster there. I'm correct. So I think logic and reason are on my side. And I think that's where a lot of guys land in these conversations. This belief that they're the logical or the reasonable ones. I think there's a real danger in leaning on logic and reason in the context of trust and relationships. Also, fact two and three that I can't prove, but I hope you'll believe. I love my son intensely.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  He's my favorite person on earth, and I would never behave in a manner designed to inflict harm. I would never intentionally do something to hurt. And I think almost every husband in world history that truly loves his wife would say that same thing about his relationship partner. I love her. I I'm right about this, and I would never intentionally do something to hurt her. So I'm just saying, there's no monster under the bed. Like, relax. There's what's the math result of that situation, though? As the dad of this kid, um, my son is still afraid of the monster. He still feels fear. Whether whether he believes there's still a monster there or not, sort of irrelevant. He's afraid. He's still crying, but but now he's abandoned alone in the dark.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Dad just implied he was dumb. He was crazy. He was weak. He wasn't good enough. He wasn't behaving the right way when he's afraid of a monster under the bed. And now what I'm saying is not that he's right and I'm wrong or vice versa. I'm saying my relationship just took a hit. My relationship suffered. And I don't think that kid, if that's how I always show up when he's suffering on some level, when he feels bad about something, whether it's fear or anger or sadness or whatever. And that's always how I respond to him. Eh, it's not as bad as you're making it out, son. Toughen up. Everything's gonna be okay. I don't think I'm gonna get to have a healthy relationship with him after three years, after five years, after 10 years. So this is a choice. And so what's the alternative look like? I think it's I go in that bedroom. I hug my son.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  I say, buddy, I don't think there's a monster under the bed, but I'm really sorry that you're afraid right now. I mean, remember, we're talking to a four year old in this instance. Hey, I'm really sorry that you're afraid right now. Let's turn a light on. Let's make sure there's no monster under the bed. And I think the great lesson and the one that applies most symbiotically or whatever with our adult relationships is the final idea. It's, son.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Whenever you're afraid, whenever you're hurt, whenever you're sad, whenever something's wrong, I want you to know you can always call mom, you can always call dad, we're gonna show up for you. We might not be able to fix what's wrong, we might not be able to like solve your problem for you, but you never have to feel like you're the only one alone, like dealing with this by yourself, suffering in this way. We're always going to be by your side during life's like crappy moments. And I think that's a profoundly simple yet powerful idea that we don't communicate to our adult relationship partners when we paper cut them with arguments about dishes and laundry and the state of the restroom and all sorts of things. Like I can't even begin to calculate for all the little fights different couples have with one another. But I think it's more or less the equivalent

• 29:07Speaker 00

  of there's no monster under the bed, so you shouldn't be afraid and you shouldn't be this upset with me. It's not useful who's correct or incorrect, it's not. What's useful is responding to somebody in pain in a manner that restores trust, that increases intimacy, that increases safety. And if we can apply that monster under the bed principle and think about wanting to have good relationships with our children, and we can apply that same idea to our adult romantic relationships, I think we can practice a habit of responding to people in a way that's useful for relationship health instead of a way that's inadvertently not useful.

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  There's a guy, Adam Lane Smith, psychotherapist from the Midwest, and I had him on the show last year, and he was talking about how male depression and female depression both get treated like female depression. So female depression, the way that that's supposed to be fixed is by women being made to feel safe and comfortable and like they belong and like they're loved. And male depression gets treated the same way. But that's not what men want. They don't want that sensation. What they want is to feel like they have a purpose and the ability to achieve it. And this is borne out in the way that men and women bond as well. So women bond through oxytocin, right? You have sex, that's the hormone that's released heavily for women, and it is for men too, but that's not one

• 30:29Chris Williamson?

  of the primary bonding drugs. For them, it's vasopressin.

• 30:34Chris Williamson?

  Is released when there is a challenge to overcome and that men can overcome it as well. And you see this get borne out in, you know, the meme about women like people and men like things. Like women are interested in people and men are interested in things. So with all of this, one of the conversations and for women that are listening as well, like, think about how he sees the situation. The immediate knee jerk response is going to be to try and apply some sort of rational logic to the situation to highlight the hypocrisy or the irrationality or the illogical nature of whatever it is that's coming up. And for the men, you need to think, look, it's not even about that.

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  It's not about you. You can't fix this feeling problem with things logic. What you need to do is say, look, I understand, I hear you, I am here, you're validated. I I'm I'm listening. Now let's slowly step you through this. And then if the reverse happens with a man, you know, making him feel like he's safe and loved and belongs. That might not be the best approach, perhaps for to stress test some of the things that he's got going on to hear him, to validate him. But then to step through bit by bit with some logic. And again, this is women need to speak men's language and men need to speak women's language in order to continue to move forward.

• 31:59Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to me as well, the way that your marriage actually ended. I think that that that story is is probably pretty useful for people to hear. Can you go through that?

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Um, you might need to provide some clarity about exactly what you're asking.

• 32:15Chris Williamson?

  The situation, was it her dad who'd passed?

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you. No, you took me back the right way. I appreciate it. Yeah. Approximately 18 months prior to our marriage ending. Should go back a little further than that. I don't remember the timeline exactly, but we lost, we lost my father in law, my, my wife's father. Out of nowhere, completely unexpectedly. We'd had dinner with him the night before and and the family, they were, they were watching our son. Was with his grandparents. He was only maybe two years old at the time. And so the five of us, the grandparents and my wife and I and our son in a high chair were were having dinner and it was great. And then the very next night I come home and I get a call from her cousin saying, you had a heart attack and he's gone.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  So I have to go like drop this news um to her and then the world was insane for several months because you're dealing with sort of the grief and the shock and the loss. And then there's all these sort of like logistics, things that you have to do. We had to like move her mother, you know, somewhere else and and and my wife at the time was responsible for that. She was like the manager of trying to clean out and sell the home that she grew up in, that she was born and raised in and that we still went to on weekends and things like that and that had to go away. There were so many layers of sort of trauma and grief and loss that she was experiencing

• 33:38Speaker 00

  while also trying to be a good daughter to her mother, while also trying to raise our son. And here she is, married to a guy where every time she's requested that something be done to alleviate her of some level of pain or to honor some, some, you know, pain point for her that was designed to say, I'm, I'm respected, I'm safe, I'm loved because of this thing here he's doing, you know, he didn't do it for, for the better part of a decade. And I just think when a person is put in that situation, that that's the outside trauma that that breaks the relationship, at least it was for us. She told me at dinner one night, I'm not sure I love you anymore. I'm not sure I want to be married anymore.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  And I, I pouted and took it really hard and I moved into the guest room because I thought she was being unfair. I thought she was betraying me. I thought she was uh implying that she might be, you know, thinking about quitting on our marriage. And I thought, you know, I hadn't done anything wrong. So you get your, you know, you get it together. I'm going to go in the guest room and, and once you straighten up and figure out what you want, you come tell me about it. And eighteen months later, she packed a suitcase and left. It, that was just the eighteen most miserable months of my life where nothing positive happened in any way. And it's exactly the most wrong approach about anything that I've ever done.

• 35:04Chris Williamson?

  How does it feel to have your life direction upended so much from where you were expecting to go?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Well, I actually think, other than the literal loss of the two humans that, you know, once lived with me every day, there's a real shock when people just disappear, when they go away. I used to talk about how loud the silence could be, how loud a house that used to be full of life just felt so still and empty. It's really shocking and really unnerving. But I think that's a really powerful question that you just asked. I felt like divorce had robbed me of my past, meaning I'd wasted 12 years of my life in a relationship that was now gone. And it's like, the thought process at the time is, well, hell, if I knew then what I know now, I would have invested in a different relationship, and I wouldn't

• 35:56Speaker 00

  have wasted all this time, all these years. But I think maybe the most significant loss, aside from the physical, aside from the literal humans, is this notion of like, what's tomorrow gonna be like? What's next year, five years, 10 years from now? Every single thought I'd ever had, every daydream about imagining the future, involved my family, involved she and I being old together on a front porch or whatever, you know, watching grandkids run around potentially, who knows what it would be. It's sort of not relevant what it was. What was relevant was the idea that it takes all of that away. Everything gets taken away. At least, I think, people who really, truly value this idea of their marriage

• 36:38Speaker 00

  and/or their family being intact. And it was, I mean, it was a tremendous loss for me. I don't want to whine about it and act like other people don't have greater traumas and greater losses. They certainly do. But for me, in a relativism way, it was the worst thing that I've ever known. And I think for a lot of people, it's the worst thing they ever know. And I think it's really tragic that the reason they get there is through a series of things they're not even paying attention to.

• 37:01Chris Williamson?

  What did the process of reintegration into a somewhat normal life look like over the period after the divorce?

• 37:10Speaker 00

  I was just drinking for a while to try to numb it all. And I called, I'd never talked to a therapist in my life. I was sort of somebody that was like anti-therapy. I thought that was something like weak or crazy people did. I was a special guy. Like, I needed a lot of help and didn't know it. And I called this therapist on a 1-800 number. You know, half crocked on vodka. And she's like, she said, Matt, you should write. You should write this stuff. You should write your feelings. And I'm like, okay. And she obviously meant journal, like an adult. Um, but instead I just put it on the internet. And I didn't think anybody would read it.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  But once the feedback started rolling in, I got really serious about not being like, I got really serious about not wanting to just be another jerk off on the internet. Bad mouthing marriage and my ex-wife and I, I, I needed, if, if I was gonna literally have an audience that was paying attention to me, I wasn't gonna take that lightly. I was gonna be committed to trying to do something positive, do something meaningful. So finally I started writing what I perceived to be vulnerable stories about the really, like the true process I was going through mentally, emotionally. As I tried to assemble the story of my marriage, because the one I believed was obviously not true.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Or, or at least, or at least my, my wife's version of the marriage, I didn't understand. I needed to understand something because I needed to protect myself from having this happen again. I was so afraid I would end up another 12, 15 years from now and the same thing would happen again. I was like absolutely terrified that that could happen. So I needed to get it. It was called an insurance policy. And it was extremely empowering to discover that all along I could have made radically different choices. They would, they would have been subtle though. You know, to me they weren't obvious, but they were radically different. That I think would have had like significantly different outcomes for the relationship. And that's essentially what my work's based on today is trying to help people identify

• 39:18Speaker 00

  these little everyday moments that they don't think are a very big deal. I frankly think are informing the direction of the relationship. And they maybe just don't hurt enough to realize it yet.

• 39:29Chris Williamson?

  You say that feeling respected by one's wife is essential to living a purposeful and meaningful life. How is respect built up over time? If you're a man that wants to be respected, how do you do that? Is it given? Is it earned?

• 39:46Speaker 00

  I mean, I certainly thought I was entitled to it. You know, in the, in the men do this, women do this often dichotomy. As we've talked about, right, there's this idea of women wanting to be seen and heard and understood and cared for. And, and, and the quote unquote man's side of the equation is this idea of having purpose and, and, and respect. And I, I'm glad you talked, I'm glad you talked about this idea of, what did you say? A challenge to overcome. This idea of having something to achieve, um, I think is really important.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  I think maybe men believe what I believed, but I don't, I don't, I don't know that I can answer this in the spirit of the way that you're asking it. I believed I was entitled to respect because I never, I never associated these so-called little things in relationships with the idea of being respected. It did, they would have never, ever been connected. I thought she was wrong.

• 40:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  To elevate a dish by the sink, right? To a marriage problem.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  I have a job. I'm working hard. I'm being loyal. I'm doing the things like that's what you're told that respect comes from. Yeah, it seems like, you know, the, the common arc that we're finding here is the big things are still the big things, but the little things can also be the big things too. And, you know, you need to, as a man, cover that base if you want to ensure that your partner is going to feel happy and that you're going to continue to be respected. And I understand, man, like I get why there is a, uh, culture on the internet of men that feel like, well, look, women's standards are just ridiculous.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  Like, why is it that I should have to do all of these things in order for me to just get the basic human, uh, like value of respect, right? And you think, yeah, well, fair enough, man. Like, maybe that's a really good question that I don't particularly have an answer to, but. This is, these are the rules of the game. You go, well, why should I have to change my behaviour? Why can't she change hers? And he goes, well, maybe she is. Maybe there already are concessions that as two people with penises, we can't really like dip into working out how that happens. But I'm sure that there are lots and lots of things that women do as well that they have to make concessions on. And I do understand, I understand why it feels hard for

• 42:11Chris Williamson?

  men. And then you also see this seven out of 10 divorces are instigated by women thing. And then you hear these stories about, oh, well, because you've got an international dating market that's facilitated by Tinder and OnlyFans and Instagram. It means that what women are doing is they're just finding the beater and then moving on to the alpha and doing all this sort of stuff. I simply haven't had that experience reflected in the real world. Like, I understand that there are men out there who have had traumatic situations with women that have used them, that have left them for people that were able to offer them more resources or status or wealth or comfort or whatever it was that they wanted validation in life. I haven't seen that with

• 42:51Chris Williamson?

  the women that are going out with the friends that I have around me, with the women that I've been out with. It simply doesn't map onto my experience. And that gives me hope. And unfortunately, it sounds like, I don't know, it's like a rich kid saying, don't worry about money, because I haven't encountered this problem. And I don't disagree that other people have. But my point is that there are tons and tons and tons of very healthy, very well balanced, very lovely women out there that would make fantastic wives. And the same goes for men. And this is, I've had so many of these conversations recently, man, like, you know, imbalances in the dating market, the evolutionary psychology that underpins why increasing female

• 43:35Chris Williamson?

  achievement with status and resources and education is making it ever more difficult for them to find men that they're fundamentally attracted to. Like, this is, you know, the most interesting dynamic that I've discovered probably over the last year. And like, the real core of what I'm trying to get to is, look, this is a

• 43:55Chris Williamson?

  Ancestrally, limbically, psychologically, evolutionarily, psychographically, novel situation for us to be in. It is a new type of environment for everybody to be in. And yeah, maybe it sucks more for some people than it does for others, but like this toothpaste isn't going back in the tube. Like, we're not undoing women outperforming men in college. Like, what are you gonna do? They've just got equality. We could take it away from them? And then, like, you know, what politicians running on that? Like, women, we're going to put you back in the kitchen to make your relationships better. And then, on the flip side of that, you go, well, why is it that men are the ones that seem to be suffering in this? You know, women are kind

• 44:39Chris Williamson?

  of wistfully chasing after the guys that are across and above hypergamously, and men are the sexless underclass that don't get to have any attention at the bottom. You know, you look at the stats on Tinder where 80%, the bottom 80% of men compete for the bottom 20% of women, and the top 80% of women compete for the top 20% of men. And you go, well, look, if you're in the bottom 80% of men, which almost all men are, because it's the bottom 80%, how's that fair? And you go, well, it's not. I understand that it's not. Well, why can't women fix their hypergamy? And you go, well, dude, I, why can't I fly? You know? Why am I, why am I afraid of heights? You know, all of these things. Like, there are certain parts of our biology which are maladapted to a modern environment. And this, for better or for worse, right now, is the

• 45:24Chris Williamson?

  situation that we're in. And I think that the message I'm really, really trying to get across to people is that a hopeful view of relationships is going to be the best thing that you can do. Because there's an easy cope here, right? Like, the cope is, modern relationships and modern dating is completely fucked. I don't need to invest my time in finding a woman because fundamentally, they're only bothered about being gold diggers, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And you go, well, dude, like, don't get me wrong, you're probably not gonna get hurt. Like, you've, congratulations, right? You've won the game of insulating yourself from the entire world outside. Congratulations, well done. Maybe for some people, that genuinely is a better option. But that inner citadel that they're retreating to...

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, like you've got what fucking 80 years on this planet? Is that really how you're going to progress through the rest of your days with this defeatist mentality, especially for men that often talk about, you know, like overcoming adversity, not being a victim, taking on that sort of victor ideal? And you go, well, look, like, what would the victor do? He'd shoulder a burden, you know, he'd pick up a weight and carry it. And I really, really want to try and have a hopeful view of relationships for people. Yes, modern dating is difficult. Yes, divorces can suck. But dude, like, what else are you gonna do with your time? What else are you gonna do? Really? Retreat into the citadel again? No, like, that's what I want people to take away. Like, look, there is, there is hope and there are principles.

• 46:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm adamant that almost everybody is like one or two principles away from a radically different life, right? If you'd known two principles from the stuff, maybe not all of them, but just a couple of them, you would have a radically different life. And so would pretty much everybody else. And that's the goal of, as far as I can see, sort of this modern insight, sense-making, wisdom-based communication stuff is like, look, where's the pitfalls? How do I avoid them? Where's the successes? How do I expedite getting towards them? And whether that be blending your finances in the right way. We had this amazing guy on doing data-driven tactics for accumulating wealth and stuff like, okay, should I max my 401k or should I put it all into the S and P or whatever, right? Like, there's a principle, right? You just learn the principle.

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  Or the principle about communicating with your spouse, or the principle about why you should go sober 30 days out of every year, or whatever it is. Just picking up those principles over time. But yeah, the principle about being hopeful around dating is one that I hope people take on board.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  I think so too. I really do. I'm going to address a couple of the things that you said that I think are really important. You talked about the idea of men saying, you know, why don't women need to change? Why does it have to be on me? The thing that I would ask for a smidge of compassion on the, on the man's side about is frequently pain is being experienced by the other person.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  And pain is not being experienced. You're frustrated. You're angry. It sucks. It's inconvenient. But pain is being experienced on the other side, I think, in the common heteronormative male-female relationship. And I, I think that's the chasm between, why do we need to change? Because I don't think we should hurt people that we promised to love. I think that's bad. Even if we don't mean to, I think we should accept responsibility for doing things differently so that the math result of our behavior isn't pain. And then on the side of like, the dating marketplace, I just, I don't know. I'm a big, I'm in favor of two ideas. One, accept responsibility for partner selection. I do not,

• 48:59Speaker 00

  I'm so sorry for guys that have felt conned, or duped, misled, victims of, of cheaters and liars.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  And I don't mean to like hold us up to some grand standard that, that these guys are like somehow too dumb to have like been able to avoid, but I've, I've never been in a relationship, even a short little dating relationship, with somebody that I felt conned by. Ever. I don't, I believe strongly I can avoid. I, I, I know how to ask questions and discern whether somebody is sort of an awful evil person or not. I'm aware there are anomalies out there. But I, I just, I want to be responsible for, for partner selection. I just think it's really, really important. I'm not, and then, so right, I'm not going to hurt somebody and they be mad at them that they don't want to be with me anymore. And if somebody does something awful to me, well, at the end of the day, it's still on me

• 49:54Speaker 00

  because I chose them. And I really wish people would, it's just empowering. I just think a victim mentality is, is really dangerous. To, to believe that we don't have any control over what happens is really dangerous. We have an enormous amount of influence. Be somebody that people want to be with. And I understand that there are resources and genetics and all sorts of things that factor into this. But at the end of the day, I want the math result of my behavior to be attractive or at minimum not unattractive. Not something that this, so I meet somebody. I don't want them five years from now to not want to be with me anymore because of the math of my behavior. And that's how I think about it. And maybe people think that that's a ridiculous idea.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  But I don't believe I've ever met anybody that would.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Trick me would keep me on the line for five years. I, I, I believe I pushed them away because of things I do or don't do. And I think that's the healthy way to think about it.

• 50:55Chris Williamson?

  Taking responsibility in that way seems to be, I don't know, it's just the more hopeful way of looking at relationships. I had the Director of Behavioral Science at Hinge on the show a couple of weeks ago, a lady called Logan Urie, she's just written a new book, How Not to Die Alone. And she said she had, she had some really interesting insights about, she called it intentional dating. And there's something still icky about that, right? That men that take how to date courses, like both for men and women, that it's a little bit like, well, hang on, is this not supposed to be like emergent and natural and part of

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  your sort of male charisma, like the musk that comes out of you, it's just supposed to exude from you normally. And there's something, I think previously, might be slowly being degraded now, that felt, it was presumed to be a little bit icky somehow, that this felt not manipulative, but deficient in some way, right? That it was highlighting the fact that this man wasn't enough as he was, so therefore he would need to become more, when it's very sort of, I think there's something about the fact, it's only one step away from a narcissist who's sort of playing the game, but not, not loving the game, so to speak. He's not invested in the game, but he's just learning, you know, the pick apart, this sort of community of 2000,

• 52:17Chris Williamson?

  the early 2000s kind of laid the foundations for this. We're doing deliberate and intentional about the way that you date. We're deliberate and intentional about everything else. Everybody that's listening to the show is deliberate and intentional about the time that they go to bed, and about the macros that they eat during the day, and about their hydration, and about their training, and the people that they spend time around, and the type of Breville sandwich maker that they use, and what notes taking app they decide that they're going to optimize their Kindle highlights with. And then you get to something like dating, and you're like, oh, well, we'll just leave it up to Mother Nature. And you think, well... Maybe not. Maybe, maybe there is a degree of where you could be over intentional and kind of so deliberate that all of the love and presence and grace gets taken out of stuff.

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  But definitely with this, you know, one or two principles away from something really important happening. Um, one of the things that I thought was really, really interesting that I wanted to discuss was that you talked about how having not been with your wife for quite a while and not being intimate with her for a long time, even before that, that there was a, an extra level of existential pain to think about another man touching her. And this is something that I think is very, very difficult for men to explain to women what, how this feels, the fact that you can have someone who you are no longer intimate with, or maybe don't even particularly have a

• 53:42Chris Williamson?

  desire to be intimate with anymore. And yet there's something in your programming that causes you to feel like this sort of guttural pull that something or someone that was once yours now isn't.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  Sure. I mean, I think if it mattered, I, I, I cared a lot less today. That we're nine years out now, literally, mathematically. It was April 1st, 2013, when she drove away. Um, it's, I, I really, it's not a thing I think about very much anymore. And I even go so far as to say, I like the dude that she's been with for like five or six years. He's a good guy. I, I had the experience of her dating somebody I, I wished would die. And I've never wanted anyone to die before, and I mean that. And I didn't really want him to die so awful. I, I, I don't even think that that's true. I just kind of wouldn't mind it if like an accident

• 54:41Speaker 00

  had befallen him. That was it. But so much of it was about, was about my son. So much of it was about like somebody I calculated to be an awful human being in my son's sphere. And yes, I was offended by the idea that you're talking about, that like this gross person like got to be with her. Because that was- Well, I perceived to be relatively soon after the marriage ended, and I think there's an important idea here. For her, she'd probably been done for like

• 55:08Chris Williamson?

  She'd checked out quite a while ago.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  12 to 18 to 24 months. And for me, it was like immediate and right now. And people need to understand that that is like a radically different experience. Once again, it's the orange, I see orange, they see green. It's all of that. But yeah, it's pretty bad. And I think a lot of people probably feel really awful about it when when relationships end. And maybe even like a current dating partner that perceives you to like still want your ex, because you're, I mean, I was, I've been accused of that, um, early years ago, that, you know, I was dating a couple of people that are like, he's still hung up on his ex. And I'm like, really not. I hung up on the idea that I messed up, I feel like in

• 55:52Speaker 00

  my relationship and that it was the single greatest sort of misstep in my life. And by messed up, I really mean millions of them, you know, day in and day out. It was like, what you don't know can't kill you.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  That's an important learning experience, right? Like, it's difficult, maybe, again, this is the what do women see, what do men see thing not working, that what you're looking at in retrospect now is a very valuable learning experience, a strategic learning experience from which you hopefully can, um, again, expedite success and avoid pitfalls. But from perhaps a woman's perspective, looking at you, still ruminating about situations and stuff like that, it's not about logically, rationally, what can you pull out of this situation? It's about, it must be the emotions. It must be that he's still in love with his ex. And you go, well, no, there's a difference. And again, on average, I have tons and tons

• 56:45Chris Williamson?

  of female friends that are way, way more logical than some of my guy friends. But my point is that I could see how that would be an interpretation.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's really interesting. So yeah, it was. I wrote about that at the beginning of the book. I was having a really tough time with thinking about, I mean, I thought about it like every day. It was really awful. I was like sitting around miserable, drinking vodka, just upset and imagining her doing god knows what with, you know, this person that I thought was awful. And that was, the value of it is, I don't believe growth, change, evolution, if you will, occurs until standing pat, until inertia. The pain of inertia.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  I have to, the discomfort has to be, I can't sit still anymore. Forgive me for not being able to get this out. I need, change is uncomfortable, but the discomfort from the change is less severe than the discomfort of doing nothing, because this feels so bad, I can't stay like this ever again. That was the only thing in my life where that had ever been true about, where I'd been motivated to action because it felt, the idea of being stuck, of being still, of not doing anything different, was too impossible to imagine. I'm like, I'm not going to subject myself to this identical thing happening again. What's so interesting to me is how I went this way, and then you talked about like,

• 58:11Speaker 00

  right, the manosphere, like red pill guys, and they're who I get like the greatest amount of criticism from. If, if I have like intellectual critique of my work, it's from them. They believe that I'm advocating like men being effeminate and taking blame, and I'm, I promise I'm not, I'm, I'm just, we better give a shit about the experiences of someone else. I don't really care who we're with, and also I'm not a marriage advocate. Don't get married, don't date, don't, don't do anything you don't want to do. If, if the mission is a relationship with another human being, I don't care who they are, you better value what they value, the requisite amount, or they're going to choose to not be with anymore. They're not going to trust you anymore.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  They're not going to perceive you to be reliable anymore. And then they're going to want to go away. And I don't understand why that is a uncomfortable concept for people. I invite everyone to test that idea out for themselves.

• 59:08Chris Williamson?

  I think it puts a lot of the onus on the guys if you do that, which is one of the problems. So I had Jeffrey Miller on the show. He was basically the father of the sexual selection, sexual dynamics movement when it comes to evolutionary psychology. So he's the guy that began the red pill movement from an academic standpoint, right? So everybody that's in the manosphere now that is sort of promulgating these ideas, they're quoting Jeffrey's own work back to him. You know, he's the guy that did the studies and he was writing this in the 90s and then in 2000. Before he released a book and then in 2013, he released another book called Mate with Tucker Max.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  I have that book. Yeah.

• 59:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So Jeffrey's the academic rocket power behind that and Tucker's kind of like the real world.

• 59:53Chris Williamson?

  Stress testing, I guess you could say. And dude, they say in mate, they're talking about, and I asked him about this, that they spent so much time in the first chapter of mate, explaining to men, this is a book for men, how to, how, what women want and how to give it to them, something like that. Like the most pick apart is the title ever, but it's a fantastic book. And in the first chapter of it, they spent like five or 10 pages explaining to men what it's like to be a woman on the dating market, like in real graphic detail, like explaining what it feels like to be physically weaker than the people that you're choosing to go out on a date with and what it feels like to have to tell your girlfriends.

• 1:00:36Chris Williamson?

  If I don't message you by this time, then you know, here's where I'm going to be or even find my iPhone on and all of this sort of stuff. Just passively, bro, because again, there is a non-zero number of men out there that are assholes. And women therefore need to have a particular protection mechanism in place. What does it feel like to be judged primarily on your looks, that being the fundamental source of value that you have on the dating market? What does it feel like to be in competition where there is a, the cash value or the price of sex continues to be degraded because women are increasingly prepared to have sex with less and less commitment from men because sex has now become decoupled from having babies and then

• 1:01:17Chris Williamson?

  norms around casual sex has continued to be degraded and blah, blah, blah. So if you're a woman who wants to wait for a few dates, that means that you're playing a game against the women that don't want to wait for a few dates because he can go and get sex on date two, but you'll want to make him, make him wait till date four. All of these things, pages, pages and pages and pages of these guys. Explaining it and I asked Jeffrey about it and he said, well, yeah, this is the thing that the sort of modern dating movement that's helping men is missing, which is if you want to be effective in the dating market as a man, maybe spend a nanosecond thinking about what it's like to be a woman. What are you optimizing for here? Are you optimizing for yourself? Or are you optimizing for the person that you're trying to attract? And yeah, I

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  can understand why the position that you put across is triggering or makes men feel, some men in the manosphere feel dissatisfied.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Me too.

• 1:02:08Chris Williamson?

  Because for them, any, any advocacy that it's not women's fault is unacceptable, right? It is almost always about the fact that women are overly hypergamous, that they're gold diggers, that they're prepared to leave the beta to fuck the alpha. Like, that's the, rubric that just kind of gets thrown at whatever the situation is. And yeah, I think, you know, again, like this is the more, to me, this is the more hopeful view, man, like that there are solutions out there, that there are ways to optimize your dating life, to be intentional, to be deliberate, to find somebody that's good for you. That seems far more hopeful.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I hope so. And again, I heard everything you just said, and I am sympathetic, backslash empathetic to those guys. But the part that that leaves out is personal responsibility for partner selection. I just, it's a nonstarter in a conversation with me. If you can't accept responsibility for the person you're gonna share space with and share resources with and potentially share children with, I don't know how to have like, a conversation about that. That's because that, if it's all women's fault, then that means you bear no responsibility in like who you choose to spend your life with. And I don't understand that.

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  You said, when talking about what constitutes a good life, that a better word than happiness might be contentment or peace or balance.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:03:40Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right. I think when I try and think about what I optimize my life for its peace, I don't try and necessarily optimize it for peak experiences. And this is one of the things that I try and tell my friends, look dude, like, there is no value that you can place on your sanity. When you have the decision to make between cheating on your girlfriend, because there's this like hot chick in a bar or whatever, and then going back, like, look, if you're going to spend the next three weeks turning yourself inside out, because you can't believe the person that you were did the thing that you did,

• 1:04:18Chris Williamson?

  that there is no, what, £100,000? £200,000? What would you pay to get those three weeks of your life back? Remembering that time is something that you're never going to be able to reclaim. You know, you're in the prime of your life and you've spent all of this time obsessing over some terrible situation that you put yourself in.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Chris Williamson?

  So optimizing for sanity, for peace, for contentment, for balance, that's what I think people should be moving toward. And then from there, you have the opportunity to build towards something that's better. But that's, you know, you can't put a price on sanity. And I think that that's what we should be protecting as much as we can.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  It's incredibly valuable insight. You know, my experience with that was when my marriage was falling apart and I was sleeping in the guest room for 18 months, or the nights afterward, where I'd be up for two, three, four hours in the middle of the night, just simply unable to sleep, feeling the most miserable I've ever felt. And there's nowhere to hide from it, there's nowhere to run away from it. Comes to work with you and rides in the car with you and it does all the things. And, um, right, if there was some economical way to like, exchange money to make that stop, I would have absolutely traded financial resources for it. But there isn't. And I think there are probably many, many wealthy people out there that have experienced that, that have had the three, four hours of being unable to sleep in the middle of the night,

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  of trying to concentrate in a high level executive meeting, but can't think about anything but like the horror show at home. And, right, it doesn't matter how many zeros are in their bank account. There's no peace.

• 1:05:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the thing, forget, you know, whether it is that we couldn't pay our way out of it, neither can Elon Musk.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

  You know, there isn't a way to fix this. The ultimate cash value of sanity is infinite.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think that's really important to think about. And I mean, I'm not perfect. I haven't achieved some incredible state of zen where I feel good about myself all the time. I don't mean to imply that. But in the, I believe strongly that healthy relationships are huge for providing stability in our lives. And so being mindful of how we might be inadvertently like jeopardizing its integrity, jeopardizing its longevity, is a really valuable thought exercise and something to consider and practice new habits for. Because that is one of the things that will like just really mess up your life. If you value the stability of the marriage and family. I don't want to place my values on other people. But if that's,

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  I think most people care about their home life being some sort of oasis from, you know, the shit out in the world.

• 1:07:01Chris Williamson?

  Matthew Fray, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with what you do online, where should they go?

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  Um, thank you. My home on the internet's MatthewFrey.com. Just Matthew with two Ts, Fray, F R A Y. And yeah, I mean, there's every social channel and email address and things like that. If anybody wants to participate in these conversations to say, oh, yeah, that's really great, or you're a moron. I'm, I'm open to either conversation, I promise.

• 1:07:28Chris Williamson?

  Thanks, man. I appreciate it.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  No, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.