Everything Is Content - Shon Faye - Everything In Conversation

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

In our first Everything In Conversation of 2025 we’re talking to thee Shon Faye- brilliant author, writer and journalist. Shon’s first book The Transgender Issue was a bestseller and her new non-fiction Love in Exile is already one of our favourite reads of this year.Exploring both her own experiences of love, heartbreak and feelings of unworthiness as well as the problems and challenges of modern love from multiple angles, this is a book for anyone in love, out of love, wanting to understand love and romance in new and radical ways. In our chat Shon talked about romcoms, break-ups, community, addiction, different ways of mothering and what she’s learned about the history of love. She's funny, she's brilliant and we can't wait for you to listen. Follow Shon on Instagram @shon.faye and pick up your copy of Love In Exile here or in any good book shop! (Out in the U.S. in May) If there’s anyone else you want us to chat to- drop us a line @everythingiscontentpod. O, R, B x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Richera. And I'm Anoni. And this is Everything in Conversation. This week we're in conversation with Sian Faye. We're going to be chatting about her and her latest book, Love in Exile. Sian Faye is the author of acclaimed bestseller, The Transgender Issue, as well as being a widely published journalist who also writes an advice column, Dear Sean, for Vogue.com. We can't wait to get into the part memoir, part political education, but before we do, remember to follow us on Instagram at everythingiscontentpod and hit follow on your podcast player so you never miss an episode. Hi Sean, thanks so much for joining us. How are you? Hi, thank you for having me. I'm good. I had a very nice... Last week my book came out. Book release day is always really stressful, but the weekend, the weather is vile.

So I just stayed in watching rom-coms and dissociated. And I think it was the best possible thing I could have done and I'm in a much better mood now as a result. Which rom-coms, obviously we have to ask. I watched the entire Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight trilogy. I'd only ever seen the first one before. So I re-watched that because it was like 10 years ago and I saw it. I think I intended to watch the whole series then and I didn't. But actually Before Sunset, the second one,

where they meet up in Paris, is the best one. Like it was, it's amazing but it um yeah it definitely is I don't know I was texting a friend who always falls like in love very temporarily when they're on holiday and I was just like this must be like your catnip and they were basically saying like I can't want that I have to have a health warning with that film because it runs through my head every time I have an inappropriate holiday romance I saw you watching on your stories but I've never watched it but I did weirdly listen to the sentimental garbage Carolyn O'Donoghue's podcast where she did like an episode on all of the films I don't remind me that I need to watch it I was gonna say I haven't

watched the third one because I hear the third one is more like this is what happens when the two people you're shipping actually get together and it's not perfect so I don't want to see that one yeah exactly it's it's about like long-term love and stability yeah it was funny one of the things that happens though when you like write a book about love and end up talking about it loads is that you just start sort of everything like romantic for a while has become a bit like any rom-com I mean they're not rom-coms they are but the dialogue is often quite about love itself and like what love means and I just feel like I keep thinking oh that's like something that I read or that's like something like a note I took or that's like something that's in the book and I hope that I'm gonna lose that

lens because it's not fun I love it I love rom but I've been bringing to rom-coms this January I think it's partly I rejoined dating apps and realized how like they've deteriorated even in the years since I was last on them um just in terms of getting no responses at all even when you match with someone and so I think and it being January for forever it just um it was comforting to sort of start watching rom-coms every Saturday night so it's become my little winter tradition more and more fuel for my avoidance because I'm just funneling all that energy back into fantasy and then the reality is even more disappointing. I did want to ask you actually on the on the note of being able to engage with like romantic stuff like did you take any break after like I assume the book took

however many years to put together record the audiobook all the edits are done did you take a break from kind of engaging with like the love and romance or were you able to just kind of like glide back into rom-com land? I mean the honest answer I wrote an essay for British Vogue um a January issue this year about how like last year I took the entire year off all romantic dating involvement myself everything dating flirting sex anything and as a result of that that was partly because of the book because the book was like flagging up to me some of my patterns that had not changed that I really needed to like detach from and then as a result of that like I didn't watch any rom-coms or anything like I remember Challenges came out last year and I was like I can't watch that um because I think to not be consumed with anxiety that at my age I

was missing out by not participating in the dating realm I just felt like any kind of romantic films would sort of fuel the sense of like missing out. And I was trying to sort of de-centre the quest for romantic love for a little while. So I didn't then. So actually, yeah, it took and that all coincided with the gap between there's a year's gap usually between when you finish a book and when it comes out. So I finished the book in February 2024. And so yeah yeah I sort of I divested from rom-coms and romantic novels and all of that stuff but I've just quite enjoyed returning to it because I think I don't know like actually I like really like 90s rom-coms because I'm actually also slightly I re-watched Sex and the City at Christmas and I'm slightly older than a lot of the romantic

heroines from the 90s because they kind of thought the romantic heroine should be like maximum 32 um and so it's quite a it's quite a relief um to um to just watch them all and be like yeah this is this is not real life and I don't need to I can just enjoy this as a fantasy like Game of Thrones that is so interesting that during the writing process you actually were having realizations about yourself and your own patterns of behavior so before we get any further into it because we all loved love and exile and i started reading it the minute i got my proof and within about four pages i was texting the girls like we have to speak to sean because i'd gone through a breakup i think beth had literally just gone through a breakup and i was like this is confirming everything you need to read this right now

so for the uninitiated and those who haven't picked up a copy yet, could you give us a plotted synopsis about Love in Exile and what it is about? Sure. So Love in Exile is both a memoir and an analysis of love in all its forms. Not just romantic love. It sort of begins with romantic love and then moves outwards into all kinds of love, the love of family, friendship, sexuality, self-love, and even like spirituality and religion and my kind of journey with those. And yeah, it sort of begins with my experience. And so there's some very memoiristic parts. It literally begins with a breakup I had with someone that I met around the time I turned 30. And then from there, it sort of expands outwards because at the beginning, I was very focused on me. And what I quite quickly realised is a lot of the anxieties and feelings of exclusion I had around partnership and heteronormativity and motherhood and family were actually pretty common.

Actually, even for people that seemingly from the outside look like they're doing it the sort of standard way. A lot of people, women and men, I think, feel like they're doing it wrong or they're excluded in some way. Challenging this belief that you had around being unlovable is a huge part of the book and I definitely really resonated with I think an experience you shared of reading into rejection and heartbreak as confirmation of that kind of intrinsic belief you have of unlovability and I was wondering can you tell us a little bit about that and why you felt in exile from love and your journey to unlearning those really, you know, horrible, horrible beliefs? It was, I guess it was potentially quite exposing to actually lay it out that the core belief I held was that I was unworthy of love or unlovable in some way. But there was no way of

really avoiding it because it kept recurring. So I always say with heartbreak, with breakups, I think, you know, most people do not like heartbreak. For most people, it's one of the most painful things I'll ever go through. In particular, there'll probably be a handful of heartbreaks that someone goes through in their life that may really break them before they get, well, before they move on. That said, I think there's a difference between like a heartbreak that's like, I'm really gutted this hasn't worked out and that this has failed. And then there's the kind of heartbreak that comes from, I'm gutted this has failed. And it's failed because of course it's going to fail because like, I'm not lovable. And this was what I was banking on. And now my life lacks meaning in some way, or even worse, like my

life's not livable. And that's like a very extreme form of belief. And I actually started to realise that there are, are yeah that it's not strict binary and I think that people can be along the spectrum but I realized that there were actually quite a lot of people that had this core belief of being unlovable because once I started being quite honest about it quite a lot of people especially women because I spoke to women more about the book were like no I feel that way and for me I guess for people that haven't read the book I kind of try and examine quite forensically, like, why do I feel this way? Now, obviously, being a trans woman, that's like a very obvious explanation about there

are some very real factors there about how trans women are framed within, especially trans women that date men, is that we're operating within like a heteronormative dating landscape. But we, there's still quite a lot of stigma attached to dating us. We're often quite coveted in a sexual way, because it's sort of considered transgressive. But at the same time, there are a lot of stigma attached to dating us. We're often quite coveted in a sexual way because it's sort of considered transgressive. But at the same time, there are a lot of men that wouldn't date you. And whether you choose to say no to those men or you choose to have like a secret relationship with them or whatever I've done, I've tried all strategies.

I think what happens over time is that it crystallizes inside you that your romantic prospects are not as good as other people's. Like when I broke up with the ex that begins the book, I remember texting my mum the night before I broke up with him. And I was like, it's going to be really easy for him. He'll be able to move on really quickly. And I'm not going to find someone else. I mean, to a certain extent, just because the way society is, he would be able to move on quicker. I suppose what I learned is that moving on isn't necessarily for me was not the barometer of whether or not I'm leading a good life as in moving on to another person, not moving on emotionally. So there was so that obviously being trans had a had a role to play. But what I actually sort of look at, I look at also my

childhood, my parents marriage, the messages I got from my background about what romantic love looks like. And also, you know, I struggled a lot with addiction, which I also write about, particularly in my 20s, a lot of that was dominated by alcoholism and mental health problems, and also about the effect that those things have on one's sense of being lovable. And if anything, I was looking, the worse that that got, the more I looked to men to kind of like as rescue, as lifeboats to sort of save me. I sometimes joke now that I've like, I struggle to date far more now, when I feel much happier about my appearance when I'm sober, when I have a successful career. And I was like, I always had boyfriends when I was drinking all the time, I'm really unhappy.

And I actually think it's linked. Because, because there was more need for me to get into relationships and arguably relationships with people I wasn't compatible with, truly, mere fact of being in a relationship was was giving me a sense of self-worth externally. One point as well that resonated with me really early on in the book is you say you thought of love like a noun I can't remember if you said this but it felt like as I was listening to you on the audiobook this kind of like whoosh feeling that you know that sense of like coming up that's what we think of as love. And you reference bell hooks, talking about love as the act of loving, using it as a verb, you know, loving somebody nourishing them. And I was just wondering, I think about that so much. How much do you think pop culture crystallizes that impression of love

as a noun versus a verb? Oh, I mean, massively. So I think the, you know, what Bell Hooks says in that book, All About Love, that if some, if people haven't read it, they'll have probably seen it in most bookshops. It's like 25 years old, but it's had a huge, it was out of print, I think, for many years. But it's so popular now. And I think it's so interesting that culturally, we're really looking for like guidance on love. But her sort of fundamental argument is, which i broadly agree with is we don't actually one we we have one word and we don't really all know what we mean by the word love and the second thing is that we don't we're not actually taught how to practice love and pop

culture has a huge element of that because whether it's pop music or romantic fiction or rom-coms like we were talking about i think the general vibe is that like love is a passionate overwhelming feeling that somewhat submerges our rationality and like of course you're going to behave a bit crazy when you're in love and that's actually a sign that it's like it's the real deal and it's passionate and I think like what most people who end up in healthy long-term love bonds learn is that that's actually not true long-term. You might feel those sort of rusher feelings early on, but really for anything to have any kind of stability, it has to actually be calming and safe for a person's nervous system. And I don't think we learn that because, in general in pop culture right like the love story ends when the people realize that they're both in love with each other and then they sort of get

together and you know like pop songs tend to focus on like really intense emotion what we don't really see is like how people build and practice love like the the skills of mutuality, trust, generosity, forgiveness. It's really about like childish idealization a lot of the other person when we look at it in pop culture. And I grew up in a diet of that stuff, like because I grew up in a single mother household and my parents' marriage had been quite rocky and then it ended really badly and my dad kind of disappeared from the scene. I think I was more, I was both like very cynical about love from a young age because I'd seen how it really hurt my mum but also alongside the cynicism I was really imbibing quite a lot of pop culture and fantasy about love that meant that when I actually sort of came the first sort of person first guy that

was a bit lovebomb me I was like yeah this is great so I really bought into this idea of love as this overwhelming feeling and you know it can't be like if it was going to be if it's overwhelming then it's actually that's not good you know it's not sustainable I think that's the the core of it is that I think romantic love is and and all forms of love I think we also don't we sort of tend to put romantic love, that's the other thing that pop culture does, it puts romantic love on a pedestal and says, this is different and superior to all other kinds of love.

Well, it's interesting because I sort of have been thinking a lot about that and about that way that we organise love. Like if I was to say to my friends and family, I would love to raise a family or buy a house with my best friend who we are not sexual and not romantic they would be they would have pause and they would have questions whereas if I sat for example on an airplane for eight hours talked to the person next to me got off the airplane and said I'm in love with that man we are going to get married people you know there's a greater script for going great that makes sense that absolutely

cuckoo bananas thing you said makes total sense that's romantic and i am struggling with this now in my 30s how do i actually and maybe you can answer this maybe this is not but it's how do we actually better organize and better kind of rank for want of a better word our relationships so that we aren't giving this outsized level of of meaning and airtime to just romantic relationships and actually the hierarchy is a bit more reflective of of where the most love is which is in our you know communities and partnerships and often our families is there a way is this book the answer I mean I can't sell it on that basis I think um it's such it's such a good point and what I was thinking about when you're describing the plane scenario which obviously might seem extreme to people but even just subtly like I

said I had a year off dating and I was sort of like when people would ask me what I what was going on in my dating life which when you're actively not doing it it really shows you how often you're asked like people go oh that's great that sounds so healthy and I was like you know telling people but then the minute I went back to dating if I was like oh I've been talking to this guy and this is his job and And it sounded a bit promising. People get, friends get so excited on your behalf. And I'm like, oh, we're all deranged. You know, you weren't like, as much as people say it's healthy, everyone gets so excited for you.

If they think that something, you know, and these days it's like the bar is in hell. So it's like we're going for coffee. And this person is just like managing to like string a sentence together that's not dripping in misogyny and people like oh my god I'm excited for you and so it's really hard not to internalize that I think um honestly I I think one of the key things I learned from the book I don't like takeaways because I'm not necessarily trying to tell people how to feel but for me, what I realized was one of the huge issues with this question of feeling unlovable was that it obviously wasn't true. Right. And people love me my whole life.

Like I've had some pretty rough experiences, as most people have. But also there are lots of people that have and do love me. And actually a lot of the block was coming from me was that I was unable to receive that. And I realised that my issues with intimacy weren't just there in terms of part of the counterbalance to waiting for a big romantic love to come and save me. And I really mean that when I was in my late 20s, even, I was sort of thinking, I don't need to decorate the place I'm living in, because I'll meet someone and then I can lead a grown up life when I'm in a couple or whatever, really sort of banking on a certain relationship to kind of suddenly make me wake up. And that's really devaluing your own life. And the other sort of counterbalance to that was I didn't

really let friends in. I thought I was good at practicing intimacy and some of that's to do with addiction. I think people who've struggled with addiction have issues with. And we tend to build friendships based off the back of our more problematic behaviors when we're younger. But like I, yeah, I wasn't very good at like opening up and being vulnerable with friends. I wasn't very good at allowing people to help me. I still struggle with like even celebrating my birthday because I have all this sort of like social anxiety and fear that no one's going to turn up and that like, it's like a permanent 13 year old. And I know that sort of all sounds very simple. But I think I think you have to begin by choosing to value and invest time and energy in the other forms of love in your life properly, before you can expect

like anyone else to treat them with the seriousness that you might hope for and the other thing too is you kind of have to let go of what other people think of you as well that I sort of recognize being realistic I live in a culture which really prizes romantic love and like yeah I think being like I'm quite long-term single now and I still definitely feel the stigma I don't pretend to be like a cheery single positive one note person like I definitely there are times in which life is and doing the admin of your own life is so much harder. I mean, with my book release last week, definitely the thought crosses your mind, like when you come home and you're like, no one's here to be pleased for me. But actually there are, there were so many people

that were pleased for me. And it's about, for me, it's been about allowing those people in. I have so much I want to say about everything, especially about not dating. am finally like detached from the dating apps and I can't believe I didn't do this sooner because when you're not on them I've just decided in my head that everyone's single and wants me because I don't know because I'm not looking on the app whereas when you're on the dating apps you're like oh my god only like the most unattractive people in the world fancy me and then there isn't anyone else anyway on to different types of love I found the book so relatable even though as you said we're living different experiences you're trans women and we're cis women and yet the crossover of our experiences and our understanding of the world is actually so

so similar it's such so much more universal than maybe we might realize and especially the part about motherhood which I think me and you have spoken about before but all of us talk about on the on the podcast about whether or not we want to be mothers and if you don't mind I want to quote this bit back to you because I just think it's amazing. You say, I believe in motherly love and its joys, but motherly love is a damaging concept only when it's sequestered and exclusionary and becomes a petitioning of love to particular people in a particular bond. When extended beyond the parent-child relationship, it has much to teach us. Motherhood is not something I'll ever experience in the literal sense, but as my youth gives away to experience, I feel its models of care and kindness inspire me more and more.

Perhaps I'm mothering every time I share a voice note with a trans girl in her early 20s going through a hard time in the city. And I love this whole idea of the fact that being motherly and showing maternal and motherly love can take lots of different forms. And I think it's a really important thing because I think often we do feel those things and feel like we're unable to take that label. And in talking about, you were just talking about, you know, making friends when you were going out and in that era, but you also speak in the book about how queer communities are often better at community building out of a sense of necessity because of this feeling of being an exile. And I wondered for people who were looking to build community or expand the parameters of the way that they keep people in their lives, if you had any advice for that, if there's anything you've learned over the years. I think the first thing I would say about community, like a sense of community is I think like being open to other forms of love, like friendship or yeah, even kind of like I have friends that are younger than me.

And there is a sort of sometimes there is a little bit of a maternal aspect to them. I think there is it has to be an openness to that. And also you have to put effort into it like it was one of those things that I realized unfortunately by virtue of like yeah being 36 on the cusp of 37 a lot of friends of mine who I was friends with in my 20s like we're still friends but obviously if they're married and having children and sometimes now at my age they're on their second child so it's really like you know they're not going to be able to do anything without their children and that's different to the kind of pace that I might lead my life is I've had to kind of keep, you know,

this like flexibility with, you know, being open to making new friends in quite an intentional way. Like, I mean, it sounds a bit creepy to say, oh, I ask people out because I don't like think I'm asking them out on a friend day. But like, sometimes I realized that as adults, I think we can be quite nervous, actually, about approaching people to hang out socially, because there's this idea that maybe we should have all of our friends by the time we've kind of left university, or maybe from our first couple of jobs if we're in London. And I actually, for me, I think, I don't know if I kind of could, it is sort of similar in the sense that if I kind of click with someone in a friend way, I tend to

try and follow up on that. And some people aren't available for it. And some people, you know, well, some people have been, I mean, I've made quite a lot of friends, I moved back to London in 2021, after the pandemic, and I've actually made quite a lot of new friends in that four year window, just because I was in London living and living on my own meant that I needed a fairly large social life in order to not just because I work alone and I live alone otherwise I just feel mad um I don't know if I'm answering your question about community because I guess community is tied to friendship but I think you have to start with building relationships at the individual level and yeah I do think I guess with with queer people

it's a little bit easier because we yeah we have a slightly sort of more niche social scene that you can sort of potentially plug into and also there's less heteronormativity around so like I can spend quite a lot of time with like younger gay men who aren't asking me why I you know like why I'm not married and why I don't have a kid and like I can actually forget about that aspect of my life because I'm not completely wedded to the mainstream normative script about those things but yeah so I guess like it's a bit imperfect advice because it's so general and I can't I can't necessarily speak to everyone depending on where they live or whatever but I think there are ways I just think it it requires effort and I think we're often not we're not encouraged to

make effort we're actually encouraged to think so much about partnership and and children on the on the motherhood thing i guess for that quotation i yeah i i i've been thinking about that a lot because even actually i did i've done some obviously other promo and other podcasts and stuff for the book and i don't really look at comments but i did see i did it's interesting i saw i did see a comment the other day that really not pissed me off that was like well she she doesn't want kids probably because she's trans like that basically it was a low-key sort of transphobic comment that was like well she wouldn't have any maternal instincts which is nuts because actually like a lot of trans women i know really desperately want to be mothers and actually they're the big crisis of their life is that they they're not sure it's going to happen for them because it's difficult and there are there are

more there are less avenues open and the other thing too is i was like well that's very it's probably speaks to the world we're in that's's very regressive. The idea that like someone with a certain type of body or even hormonal makeup, which would have more natural instincts towards child rearing. I mean, it sounds quite Republican, but yeah, I think it's, I think for me, it's like interesting because yeah, because it sort of reiterated the point I make in the book, which is that we have this particular idea that if you don't want to gestate and give birth, or in my case, adopt children and raise them in a traditional family that you lack any nurturing instincts, or that you don't like children, or that you're selfish, that's the worst one. And I think none of those are true. And that's

what I kind of make an argument for in the book is that actually, I kind of used to say, I'm not maternal, and I don't have any nurturing instincts. And that was kind of my like, persona, because it was almost a defensive thing. And I think as I'm getting older, I am trying to create space in my life for the ways in which actually nurturing and having those kinds of bonds with people is quite enriching for me. Yeah. I definitely relate to this feeling of you're either one, mothering and nurturing, or you're not at all. It definitely feels like that binary is something that I can see peppered across my friends even the way we view ourselves and each other based on whether we want to be mothers or not one thing that I really want to ask you about is you're so

generous with the experiences you share in the book personal writing is not easy we've all had a go at it and we've spoken about it before it's so vulnerable and obviously in the book you talk about love mental illness and your childhood Was it difficult to write about these experiences? And why did you want to draw on your own experiences to make those grander points about politics and structural issues as well? Yes, it was challenging. It's interesting, too, because I don't know, I was texting a friend earlier who asked me how everything was going. And it's really hard, because all I'm getting is maybe like snippets of what people say to me, or when people tag me on social media when they've read the book. And I'm like, I said,

I think, I don't know, but I'm getting the impression maybe people actually prefer the memoiristic parts. It depends on the reader. But actually, it sort of did begin, it was, you know, I always intended to write from my personal experience with this. Because, yeah, it was of interest. And actually the way that expands out on the political writing sort of came second. It is. I don't know what you think about it from your own experience. But I think the hardest thing about personal writing is actually being honest. There was like multiple times where I would have I looked at what I had written, look back at what I had written. And I was like, well well that's actually not honest I've kind of like done a PR job on my own life here because

there's a part of me my ego is protecting myself because I don't want to admit just how abject I look this breakup was there's a there's a chapter on addiction where I have this quite unhinged summer romance with a man that's a little bit younger than me and um I don't know like for years like my narrative is very focused on like it was a very it was one of those like very like intense three months and then it was like done and it was over and it ended very acrimoniously and um I you know was so fixated on the other person there and actually it was quite helpful writing that chapter about that relationship because I had to get really honest about the fact that like I took part in that and we were both saying like I love you within weeks like and I and it is like I was I was I was being nuts and um and uh yeah having to be really

really honest about like letting the reader in to be like yeah she's being crazy here um which is very the the more honest it got that I could tell the more satisfying a read it was but the the difficult more difficult it was the the other point and less so about the mental health stuff oddly I think because I'm very used I've become very used to talking somewhat in like like in addiction recovery for example you get very used to talking about mental health and telling the story of your addiction so it becomes sort of quite second nature to talk about it but I actually found there's a chapter on sex in the book and I found that really hard because I think it's really hard to be honest about sex in memoir, because especially as a woman, and particularly for me as a trans woman, because there's so much fear of I don't

know, like, at one point, I realized, and I say this in the book, I worry that I'm straying down this path of saying, well, I when I was being when I was being really promiscuous and sleeping with loads of guys, it was because I secretly wanted to be loved and I substituted sex for love and then I was like actually that's just not true I mean sometimes I had very ill-advised sex because in that moment I wanted it and then years later it's easy to look back and be like why did I do that it must have been like I must have been damaged in some way and um yeah to really sit with the ambiguity of how we behave particularly with like infatuation and with desire these are like by their very nature quite impulsive especially when you're young and yeah to try and

kind of bring all that ambiguity into the book and not care too much about what people are going to think of you is challenging I can see why people end up writing fiction immediately after they write a memoir because you realize like the pitfalls of having to be honest get the spotlight off me I mean you say like the memoir is the part that you're sensing people are really enjoying and I'm not going to disagree with that because I'm I really love how you write about feeling it is so generous it is so insightful even though I don't feel as though I'm sort of peeking in your window I feel like I am getting a greater understanding. But what I really liked about the book is that I was learning so much that I was in terms of the historical context of like love matches and marriages and you know, things that I had a vague understanding

of that marriage is an institution that exists, or existed originally not really to serve a romantic narrative. I found that so fascinating. It's incredibly thoroughly researched. I think it's brilliant. My question would be, was there anything that you came across in your, you know, fact gathering and your research in that realm that you thought, this is actually very shocking, I'm actually very surprised, or I'm, you know, that sort of stayed with you as, you know, a fact about love, marriage, relationships that you maybe didn't know before you embarked on the researching? Yeah, that's such a good question. I mean, I think there was fair about, I know, I mean, I suppose the big top line part of that, that I think is quite shocking to people is that the

idea, like our idea of what romantic love is now is about 200 years old. It's so new. And I guess what I mean by that is it's this sort of combination of the idea that you partner with someone for love rather than for monetary or dynastic ambitions. Or if you're if you're a peasant because, you know, two neighboring families have agreed you'd get married. So this idea of a love match, also the idea of even sexuality. Right. Because I think a lot because one of the things I look at in the book is to be a straight trans woman is a sort of odd thing where you you end up straddling well I I become I became a straight woman because I um date men but I had grown up with quite a queer experience I'm realizing that like actually this idea of like a straight person and heterosexuality and and a lot of men I dated had had you know clearly beneath the surface with some sort of anxiety about what it meant for their own sexual identity, and actually realising that that itself, that we didn't really have

words for homosexual, heterosexual, until the 19th century. So what we're grappling with is all concepts like romance, heterosexuality, and, you know, the idea that marriage or long term partnership is supposed to be loving. Yeah, that it's so new. And that, of course, because of changes in society, economic and political and social, particularly around the role of women, that women are now seeking something that is very new, even newer, like romantic. Esther Perel says that romantic relationships

have changed the most in the last century, yet we haven't really acknowledged societally the change, that something that was largely an obligation in the last century, yet we haven't really acknowledged societally the change that something that was largely an obligation that women weren't supposed to be able to leave has now become, for the most part, you know, more, anyway, elective for both people. And as a result of that, the expectations that we have around it have changed. So I think, yeah, those two things, the fact that it's the concept of romantic love is so new in the way that we envision it now. And we've just had a lot of novels and Hollywood

cinema in a very short space of time indoctrinate us into this. And the second fact that the changing role of women means that often the fantasies that women ourselves are nursing about being chosen or, you know, romantic love, meaning that we're special and meaning that we're desirable. They are actually the legacy of an old trap that was designed to keep your grandmother in a marriage for like 40 years that where she wasn't necessarily happy, and she was doing unpaid labor. And that sounds, you know, even saying that now, it's like, that sounds so depressing. And not because I, you know, I still feel the kind of flutter of, of like romantic fantasy when, when I'm fantasy when I experience those feelings with someone. But I think it is also healthy

to have a real kind of grounded perspective about the fact that building sustainable, long-term partnership is no mean feat. And therefore it's probably just on an intellectual basis, unlikely that you failed if you've not managed to do it because it's quite a big ask. And lots of people who are doing it from the outside probably are finding it quite unfulfilling I would say it's such a tangled web like this modern relationships idea and I think you do such a good job of unpicking it because sometimes we're so bought into the fantasy that we don't really

zoom out and look at what's happening and one of the bits I found really comforting was you're talking about how often when you broke up with a man he would get with someone else really quickly and that's always been my experience no matter how long my relationship was the man would be like engaged within a month and you said I always thought that was because like I wasn't good enough they'd met the right person and then you posited the thing which I thought was so interesting you're like the more I thought about it I realized that actually women have this foundational friendship with all these other women that when we go through a heartbreak we turn to them and they help us heal and we sort of rebuild and try to emotionally get over the relationship whereas men do not have this shared language of emotional vulnerability with other men

so they immediately seek out and obviously this is like not necessarily true in every situation but it made so much sense to me and even you talk about how you would speak to men and you'd realize the last time they had an emotionally vulnerable or slightly emotionally literate conversation was with their ex-girlfriend because it's so few and far between for them and I thought it was such a good example of again male loneliness epidemic will we ever stop talking about it but it's it's funny how all of these things kind of weave in to each other and how quickly we can be to assume that it's because it's something that we're at fault for when actually when you zoom out it's a much bigger problem really that's causing this kind of pattern within man um yeah i don't know if you had any thoughts on that but i just love that bit yeah it's so funny i have the book in the us in new

york they sent out like proofs because it's not out in the us yet comes out there in may and my one of my american friends in new york she voice noted me because she read it they all read it later than it was sort of being read by people here and she mentioned that bit and she was like I posted that bit in my group chat and it kind of broke the group so I feel like there's something there like an aha moment and it is just like a theory I did run it by two male friends when I wrote when I wrote it the reason being is actually came from both conversations with um yeah ex-partners and also my male friends because I was like why do men always

move on quicker and um I had that classic thing too where you like if you have like a male friend and then you sort of talk to him about the men that you're engaged with romantically and then he delivers his opinion then he's literally doing the same thing in his love life it's very classic but they basically did yeah that was the kind of consensus was that like often there's like deep loneliness and sadness and like quite a lot of um yeah exes and male friends said that like basically when they go through a breakup it's like it's very classic like laddy vibes but like you might go to the pub and like be a bit sad like for like a couple of weeks and then after a month like there is no there's no tolerance to keep talking about i mean i i mean maybe i'm particularly unhinged but i need

to be continuing to process a heartbreak for, I would say, minimum six months. And revisiting. And like, there's a high level of, and the same, right? Like, you know, when a female friend goes through a breakup, you're like, buckle in. This is the next six months we're talking about this. And like, actually, when you think about like like, the idea that, like, men aren't robots, right? They are going to feel all of the same sadness and loss, but have no tools or environment to foster a sense of safety to necessarily talk about that. I think it does make sense that there's something there about the fact that, like, yeah, that they will tend to seek out like their relationships with women tend to be

the space that they're allowed to access certain parts of themselves. So the so the idea, the very simplistic idea is that like, you can just move on by moving on to another person. I actually obviously don't think that tends to play out very well. I know some men that really that, you know, there's the illusion when it's you and you've broken up with someone and then yeah, they're engaged or whatever you like, they've won and this is humiliating or whatever but actually I mean realistically like I think those problems tend to that where they're running away from something and it tends to follow them because I think yeah I think a lot of not always I know plenty of women that like overlap relationships too but like as a rule I think especially as you get a bit older I

think there is a sense of like I need to reflect on what went wrong and deal with this heartbreak and I know I know men that like intend to do that I've had male friends who say I'm going to take a year off and be single and I don't know one of them that's managed it for like more than a month it's actually crazy but I yeah I it's it's part of a broader section in the book about men and friendship because I actually do think it's a huge issue for straight men is that they they don't have effective emotional friendships they tend to have very functional friendship again huge generalization there are some friends some male friendship groups that open up but often it is rooted in this kind of taking the piss out of each other doing things shared interests but not kind of the deeper emotional work which does in my experience mean

that they can also offload onto women when they start dating them a little bit emotionally and even when they're not you know you're not even when you're a girlfriend I mean I've had men unload too much like when it's like this is this is we're not intimate like that please please get a therapist so I think we kind of touched on it but lots of people feel super pessimistic about love and relationships right now despite exploring your own heartbreaks and also many of these structural issues at play when it comes to you know people maybe prioritizing it to their own detriment that is romantic love I mean can you tell us why you decided to end the book optimistically?

And if it was difficult to find that optimism on a personal level, too? Well, I end the book, actually, yes, I end the book with this, there's a section at the end of the book, not to give any spoilers, but it's fine. It won't ruin the book is that there's a there's a section at the end called postscript. And it's called that because the book was kind of ready to go. And then I decided to add a little two page addendum. And that was because the book was kind of ready to go. And then I decided to add a little two page addendum. And that was because whilst I was writing it, I'd had like a romantic disappointment. It wasn't a breakup. It was like, I'd hoped something might progress with someone and it didn't. And it really caught me unawares about how upset I was because I had to basically go to no contact with

this person. And what it made me realize is I spent ages and I'd not been heartbroken like that really since any of the events I described in the book. And I was like, fuck, I'm actually no better at dealing. I was like, I'm no better at dealing with this. I'm going to put out this book and pretend to be an expert. I'm like devastated over a man again. And I actually did bounce back quicker that time. But I realized and I'm so glad that I did is that I basically want to.

The note of the book is that books about love, especially memoirs about love are supposed to end for women. It's like the eat, pray, love thing. You're supposed to actually accidentally end up in a relationship anyway at the end, or you're like, I don't need men. Sisters are doing it for themselves. I love myself or whatever. And I was like, what if I was actually tried to be honest again and say the truth, which is I don't love myself perfectly, but I'm getting better at it. And actually, no, I haven't found romantic love and I'm not also anti it. Like I remain open to it and I would still quite like it because I'm a 36 year old woman. I don't want it to be the end of my romantic

love life. And that the reality is, is that that means that this book might somewhat come back to bite me because if I don't say I'm not an expert because I'm likely to be unhinged, a fear of being afraid of humiliation, afraid of abandonment all over again. Because fundamentally, what the final sort of takeaway, I guess, I said I didn't like the word takeaway, but whatever, of the book is kind of like commitment to love in all its forms. But like romantic love specifically, which just requires like renewed optimism again and again, because all of us have 100% failure rate in our love lives when we start a new relationship. And that's what's scary about it. But the fact is, is that it's part of being alive. And, and yeah, I think that is quite hopeful, again, because it's honest, because it's saying like, this doesn't, you know, this is a snapshot. And for me, it doesn't end here. And I'm still a living breathing person with feelings so I will go on

and continue to make mistakes in this arena because I'm not perfect and I guess to the reader it's like you don't have to be either and I think there's optimism in that because it's honest because I think the hardest thing about love is the uncertainty and we don't know even even you know non-romantic love because we don't know if someone's going to leave us or die. Those are the two options. And loss is part of love. And so committing to keep on keeping on with it and to keep going, you know, is the optimism because the other options are to just cling to certainty to be like, right, well, I don't want to get hurt again. So I'm not going to allow anyone close or to say I'm a failure. So I'm not going to find anyone. It's much harder to sit with the uncertainty of I want to be open. I want to try, but also I failure, so I'm not going to find anyone. It's much harder to sit with the uncertainty of,

I want to be open, I want to try, but also I can't control what happens next. And that's kind of the optimism the book ends with, I hope. Thank you so much for listening this week. Make sure you grab a copy of Love in Exile, which is available now at all good bookshops. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please do leave us a rating. Or if you're feeling extra juicy oh a review on your podcast at five stars please also follow us on instagram and on tiktok at everything is content pod see you next week bye