If I Speak - 02: Is my long-distance relationship doomed?

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Ash and Moya respond to a listener embarking on an LDR across the Irish border, and tackle Ash’s Intrusive Thought about her cat Moussa. Plus, Moya has the best way to lance an infatuation boil. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello! Against all odds, our schedules, we are back, locked and loaded, ready to chat breeze for a good 30 to 45 minutes. I'm Moyalothi McLean. This is Ash Sarkar. No, this is Ash Sarkar. And this is If I Speak, a podcast for me and Ash to give ourselves advice via the medium of discussing other people's problems. Today, we have dilemmas to sift through. Ash is asking why is she such a cat lady? And I'll be trying to avoid giving too much away about the disaster that is my personal life.

But first, 73 questions minus 70. Ash, my short-term memory is completely frazzled. Can you please remind me and the listeners what this is? Okay, so clearly Moya doesn't even listen to this podcast. In the grand tradition of Vogue's 73 questions, we came up with 73 questions and then we just got rid of 70 of them. So it's actually three questions. And I would like to open with Moya, when's the last time you really misjudged somebody? Oh, oh my God. Okay. I think I really misjudge people all the time. I don't want to say who was.

Okay. Well, can you, can you like anonymize it? Can you anonymize? I really misjudge someone. I, they'll probably listen to this and know exactly who I'm talking about. I love and adore this person. They're quite close to me now. And I first, I think, met them because I was being a bit obnoxious at a function that they were throwing. And I first, I think, met them because I was being a bit obnoxious at a function that they were throwing. And I thought they absolutely fucking hated me and was stressed about the obnoxious thing I'd said. And I avoided them because of that. And since then, I've realized, no, they were just stressed because they thought I wasn't having a good time at this function. I was just making like a stupid joke about music.

And I really want to say who it is because now we live together. Now we live together. And I think they're amazing. And I was like, wow, I really misjudged you you are so kind uh so you know generous and actually were just in the same sort of wavelength as me as feeling oh no this person is not having a good time crap I need to make sure they have a good time not instead trying to make me go and like face the music and be like how would you sort it out then stop complaining um so yeah that's when I really that's when I remember really really misjudging someone but I misjudge people all the time the thing with getting older is you realize that you know you

don't the change the rate of misjudging people doesn't change you just realize you have done it when whereas you're younger I think your first impressions tend to stick I had a real um misjudge like full spectrum experience recently where I thought someone and I thought they were hot and mean and then I was like no I misjudged them. They're just hot and shy, which reads as mean. But then I realized, no, no, no, they're hot and mean. So I really came around to like the first impression. Question two, which trait would you most like to cultivate in yourself? Patience. And the way, the quickness of the answer to that tells you everything you need to know. And the way, the quickness of the chance that tells you everything you need to know.

And question three, what's the most morally reprehensible thing you would do for £12 British sterling? I used to ask this question is £6, but it's been adjusted for inflation. £12. £12. It depends what you think morally reprehensible is. I'd do some stealing. Tell me how low you'd go. But I don't know how low it is. Like for for me going low I don't see many things as like really morally reprehensible for me moral reprehension is you know committing war crimes or marrying Jeff Bezos those are morally reprehensible things and I would do those only well I wouldn't do any war crimes but I would

you know marry Jeff Bezos for if I knew I was going to get a massive payout that then I could turn into a huge I don't know multi-billion philanthropic project like his ex-wife has done but for me there's not that many things that are morally reprehensible that I could do for 12 pounds because more reprehensible for me is a very high bar I think so I don't I don't stick a finger like up a stranger's nose no that's disgusting I'd need way more money to do that I find that I feel so invasive I just don't think that 12 pounds is a high enough price to buy the level of things that I would consider morally reprehensible sorry you need to up your price if you want me to do some terrible things no no no but that's the point the point about 12 pounds is that it's quite low so the purpose of

this question is that it's not an amount of money that you'd walk past if it was on a bus seat do you know what i mean be like oh 12 pounds i hate to say this ash but i throw away i live in london if i breathe i spend 12 pounds that's not an amount of money you can control me to do morally reprehensible thing i don't know maybe i cat call a man i don't know is that morally reprehensible yes it is morally reprehensible and at least we found out what you would do for £12. You'd catcall a man. It turns out maybe I'm just a lot more morally reprehensible than you. Because I'm like, £12, that could encompass some minor crimes.

But maybe that just means that your idea of what's morally reprehensible is very different to mine. So your bar might be different. Whereas mine, when I say morally reprehensible I'm talking really serious shit and I'm not doing that for 12 pounds okay all right well next time I'll make it clear that is nothing that would breach the Geneva Conventions but look that was 73 questions minus 70 and I do hope that you all feel you've gotten to know Moya a hell of a lot more but they wish they hadn't it's kind of time to to you know talk about me like enough about you oh yeah let's move on about you I want to talk about your intrusive thoughts something that's

been plaguing you and your one this week I would say is a curveball to people who don't know you well this is the thing is that it's become a genuinely intrusive thought and it all started I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who I do hope will come on the show one day because he's got this wonderful gift to just sort of say something very cutting about a life choice that you've made um without meaning to be cutting so for instance, once we were talking and he didn't know that at the time I was engaged and he was like, marriage, why would anyone do it? It's bourgeois prostitution. And I was like, well, good news. And in that kind of

vein, we were talking about pet ownership. And I mentioned how much I love my cat, Moosa, who is named after one of the greatest midfielders Tottenham Hotspur has ever had. And this friend of mine sort of looked me dead in the eye and he went, do you ever think it's a bit weird to keep an animal in your house? And I was like, well, no, not really, because I love him. And he was like, well, think about it this way. Would you let a naked man just roam around your house all day, like rubbing his ass on things? And I was like, no, of course I wouldn't do that. And he was like, well, that's what you're doing. You're just letting this naked, hairy man roam around the different rooms, eating off the floor, rubbing his ass on all your furniture. And you call him

son. And since then, every time I look at my cat, I just think, oh my God, you're a little naked hairy man rubbing your ass on my soft furnishings. And it got me thinking that when you strip the relationship between human and pet of sentimentality, it's a really weird thing because here's this animal who's been bred over centuries to be totally dependent on me for food and its survival i mean dogs are even worse because cats can kind of you know get on out there in the world but like we've cultivated a relationship where i feed him twice a day and he purrs and he sits on my lap and i call that love but is this not like a coercive relationship of some kind? And what does it say about me that I need something in the house that can't talk back

and will never learn to talk back to love me unconditionally? So this is my intrusive thought. I've got a naked furry man in my house rubbing his ass on everything. And is it because I'm mentally unwell? No, I think it probably means it's interesting because you say that you're not maternal in any way and that you're not predisposed to being maternal but what you're describing is the way that I see people's relationships with their children and I don't it's not an uncommon thing for people to say your pets are like your kids I personally don't think I want children and I also don't like I it might change a lot of people have said to me but I recently got a good lesson in why I don't think it will change and that is because I lived

with two cats and I I moved into a house where there were two cats already and they you know the owners adored these cats they were were deeply loved. They were house cats. I'd always grown up with cats that had lived outside. And I had to take on some of the responsibilities for those cats when the owners would go away. Or I was the only person home. I would be feeding them, cleaning up their litter tray. Let me tell you, it fucking sucked. I hated it.

I thought I wanted a cat. I do not want a cat. I resented the cats. I resented the time it took to look after the cats. I resented their presence. I resented the cat hair that was on my clothes all the time. I resented the fact that, you know, these animals were in the space rubbing, they're naked little hairy men's were rubbing their little asses all over this space.

Because I think it really showed that I didn't have that maternal instinct, which is hilarious because people say, you know say it's biological, all of that. For whatever reason, I didn't have that caring, nurturing instinct towards these cats. And I think what it's saying about you is that you do have a caring instinct that seeks to protect this animal, that seeks to look after this animal. And I do find it interesting you say you don't want kids because your cat is your baby. And maybe it's a supplement for that. Maybe that's where all your caring goes, maybe it maybe it's a maybe it's a supplement for that maybe that's where your caring goes but it shows in there I think if I got a cat I'd probably look

after it but I think I now I know I would resent it I mean I think that this particular cat one of the reasons why I love it so much is because it's the cat that I got with my partner so it's the pet that we got together and it was this sort of like living purring furry embodiment of our relationship that exists outside the two of us, which I know is how people talk about children. I mean, what's kind of interesting to me at the moment is that I've just had a new niece, a new niece has been born. And she's the first child of my brother-in-law and his partner. she's also kind of not she's the second baby because their first baby is this massive dog it's like a mix of all the biggest dog breeds you can think

of like Kane Corso, Great Dane, Rottweiler. You know your dog. Yeah it's I mean it's just like it's the world's largest dog and this dog called Bill who's like a really sweet natured dog when they brought the baby back they were sort of expecting the dog to be like and I will protect and love this baby but the dog freaked out so this dog was like whimpering and trembling and basically crying because he was like I've just been supplanted and for me it was this really fascinating moment because my brother-in-law and his partner were genuinely finding it difficult and they felt this guilt. They were like, oh my God, we've disrupted Bill's life. He didn't ask for this baby to be born and now he's no longer the baby. And for me, it just threw this whole thing about human and animal relationships and all the different ways in which they interact like into such stark relief, which is if you tell the story it sounds kind of silly like I had a baby and the dog got jealous but actually it was really stressful for them in those you know early days of having a newborn for the first time they were like oh god we've like broken the trust

between us and this animal and unlike a child who will one day grow up to understand the decision that you made and either get on board with it or not this dog will never understand you know and that's the difference between having a child and having a pet a child will grow into an independent being a pet never will so i'll ask you again is it deep down a sign of weakness or narcissism or something kind of dysfunctional that I brought a pet into my life knowing it can never be an independent no no you know what the pet could have been an independent being you chose not to make an independent being there are the cats that i you know we owned they roamed around they ate at like rabbits and uh birds etc back and back in the homestead in the farmland george mombo is listening to this shaking his head and disgust because that's another thing there is a campaign against domestic pet ownership um on environmental terms um so the

cat could have been a an independent animal if you wanted it to be it might have had a short life in london because of cars etc but you could have made that cat mostly live outdoors maybe put a bit of food he does he does he does you know he's an outdoor cat he can go out outdoor but he's not surviving solely on the food that he's you know foraging outdoors like he's a domesticated cat um he can only catch worms moya i think something in yeah i think something in you obviously wants to have that relationship where a being is dependent on you and you are responsible for caring for it and this is this is something i've been thinking about a lot because i went and looked after an animal so i could stay in another country for a week.

And it took so much work. It was a lot of work looking after this animal. And single people in particular who get pets, they get them for this emotional support, I guess, and companionship. Even though the animal can't talk back, it's just a thing that you can project all your love and care onto if you can't find a partner or your partner lives somewhere else. But I don't understand as a single person why you would get an animal because that animal needs so much more commitment than you're willing to give it. I don't think we take that seriously as people. I think a lot of people don't take the levels of commitment an animal needs seriously. Like that's why, you know, I end up would feed the cats when people are away.

I understand it and I get it but at the same time it's like if you can't fully commit to this animal how come you got the animal like it is there is a form of selfishness in there right and it's I'm not saying that I wouldn't do that or exercise that selfishness myself I can be a very selfish person but there is that level of oh it'll work out someone will step in someone will do that without really thinking about this animal it's like attachment to you. It needs itself. It's just thinking about, well, I really want something to cuddle.

I want something to look after. I want something that will be in my house so I don't feel alone. I want something that is proof of this relationship I have with my partner. It's a seal of our love. What happens when people break up? The cats have to go with one person or the other. This is something I'm seeing a lot with couples my age in that in lieu of being able to, I don't know,

buy a house or do other things that, you know, even things moving away from marriage, say. People get pets. They've got pets as this marker of their relationship. And now the age I am, which is approaching 30, the relationships are starting to break up. And a lot of people have said to me, yeah, we broke up. What the fuck are we going to do about this cat

and it's funny because neither person like really wants the cat or one person really wants it but can't look after it because they've got to go to their parents and they haven't got a house in the rental crisis in London um so you know there's not that planning there the animal just gets I bet you any money as well after lockdown a a load more pets went into, you know, RSPCA and care because people had realized they got a lockdown pet and then had jettisoned them once their social lives took off again and realized,

oh, I can't look after this cat or this, this dog or whatever to the same level I did. I think everyone should just get fucking gerbils and live in a cage and die quick. Don't get a long list. I've got a friend, I've got a friend who's got

who's got guinea pigs and they're just like little toupees with anxiety just gonna be like i mean i mean it is i look at them and i'm just like you like you look like you should be living on michael fabricant's head i mean two things one is quite deliberately when we got the cat i put everything to do with the cat in my name because I was just like there will be no court case no judge in the world would award you joint custody of this cat it's my cat so to the vet he is known as Musa Sarkar we didn't double barrel um and the thing about about single people getting pets so a friend of mine who's single has a pet and she is a very naturally nurturing person.

She always has been. She's just been the kind of person who wants to take care of others. And I think that being single, one of the things that she struggled with is that she's like, hang on, I really wanna just like open up the floodgates of love and affection and care. And there isn't a safe place to put it.

And so she's got this cat who's really, really sweet. And she's loving it. She's loving cat life. And I was sort of thinking about the way in which maybe pet ownership reflects our relationship with other humans. So we want to love. It's not just we want to be loved, but we want to love in a way which feels unconstrained by, oh my God, am I being too much? Does this person like me back? I'm scared of rejection. I'm scared of this thing falling apart. And a pet allows you to do that, right? You can be as soppy and as loving and as tactile as you want without having to worry about rejection I mean I agree it would mirror my relationship with pets which is avoidant that was that thesis maps on very very well I mean you are obviously like a very loving person who

likes uh you know a solid I call you a wife guy right i call you a wife guy um i am a wife guy your wife guy so it makes sense that you would want a pet that mirrors that relationship as a wife guy whereas i'm an avoidant person who's terrified of you know putting myself out then being rejected and also feels a burdened by the expectations of others in committed relationships so it makes sense that when it comes to pets, I will feed it and I will water it and I will resent that it's rubbing its hair on me and I will give it the bare minimum. So I think that's actually a very accurate analysis. But I also think the climate crisis thing is quite an interesting aspect to it. In an age of climate crisis, is it selfish to own pets? Is it selfish to have

a cat which might kill all the birds in your local area or kill the rabbits? Is it selfish to have a dog which, I don't know, digs up the fucking floor and fauna in the garden? These are arguments that are being put forward increasingly as people are talking about, well, we'll have to change the way we're living. I know George Monbeau has been beating the drum of don't own pet cats for a while now. And obviously there's a large cat lobby. And also it comes into the exile bully thing, the individualization and the libertarian approach we have to pet ownership, which is do as you want to do, have whatever pet you want to have, which is do as you want to do, have whatever pet you want to have, it's fine, versus this idea of the nanny state stepping in to regulate the XL bullies because the children aren't tough enough

and they can't withstand having a couple of limbs torn off. It's an interesting discussion about who gets to own a pet, how different pet ownership is codified according to your class background, where you live, et cetera, et cetera. And I've avoided all that simply by saying, oh, maybe I dislike pet ownership and any responsibility. I think you're right about cats being an ecological disaster. And I think you're right about cats reflecting our relationships with other humans. However, I'm in too deep, right? deep right my brain has been hijacked by this little furry bastard um and i would be unable unable to let him go all i would say to wrap that up is you're the one who's worried about your relationship with the cat you merely asked me about the relationship with the cat i think you

need to think about why you're concerned about this relationship with the cat and why you're worried a about maybe the judgment of your friends um talking about the naked fairy men but also what you might be worried about this this the relationship the cat says about your wants and things that you thought were certain in life maybe even the child rearing situation because maybe that's what's really worrying you deep down that you become very attached to a small dependent animal and you're worried that maybe just maybe you might be reconsidering other small dependent animals that's all I'm going to say having watched my friends and as somebody who hates cats I think that we will we will um leave the bumper stock of nieces and nephews that I've uh gotten in recent years for another show. So we are moving on to your dilemmas. So we put out a call out on Instagram for you to send us your problems. And we were,

I'm very happy to say from a selfish perspective, inundated. It's not so good for you guys because you guys clearly have a lot of problems. We only have been able to select one, maybe two that we'll be able to discuss, but we will be getting through them in due course. So if you sent us your problems, don't give up hope. I mean, maybe give up hope with regards to the problem, but don't give up hope we might address it. So Moya, can you introduce dilemma numero uno? Of course. This one speaks to me.

I'm in love with a girl I met in Redacted on a night out. We really hit it off. There was a clear spark and we exchanged numbers. I'm from Dublin and she's from Northern Ireland. We're both recently out of long-term relationships and she said she's not looking to jump into another so soon. My problem is I've fallen for her. I'm hanging on her every text. Please advise.

Romance across the whole of Ireland. Romance attempting to do what politicians couldn't and unite Ireland. So, all right, we've got, I guess, I don't know, the Good Friday Agreement. Can it be broached by these two star-crossed lovers? I mean, okay, I know what I think. And maybe as a sort of married auntie at this stage, I'm totally wrong. But I kind of think when someone tells you they're not up for a long- relationship right now, you have to believe them, you've got no other choice.

And even if their behavior is signaling a kind of intimacy and warmth, that's because they obviously miss those aspects of a relationship, but the responsibilities and obligations they're not feeling ready for. And people get sucked into a situation where they're like, oh,'re giving me all this warmth and there's so much intimacy so they must be ready for the other side of it the commitment and the obligation and it's like no they just want the milk without buying the cow and you're the cow what really grabs me about this dilemma actually there's about three aspects one is i'm in love with You're not in love with this person. Unless they've met up more than they say. But what they say in this dilemma is,

we really hit it off. There was a clear spark. We exchanged numbers. I'm hanging on her every text. How can you be in love with someone that you've met once that we know about? And the suggestion is they live in different places. There's not actually, like they've not met up since. They've not done X, Y, Z. I feel confident saying that they don't see each other and they

are texting. You are not in love with this person. I'll start there. Secondly, the other person is also recently out of a long-term relationship. That to me was two screaming things. Obviously, everything we're saying is kind of speculation and projection based on our own experiences. And with that in mind, I feel confident going ahead and saying, what's happened here is one person, and I don't know the genders of these people, but usually in this situation, I would say there is, if it's a heterosexual couple, usually one is a straight man, one is a woman. And the woman is saying, I'm not ready for something else. I'm not ready for something else.'m not ready for something else and the other person is saying I'm in love with

you you've become a vessel for all of my you know unmet hopes for my last relationship all of my maybe pain etc that I haven't processed but I've met someone shiny and new I've hit it off with you and I'm in love with you you don't't know them. You're texting them. They are a projection. They are a fantasy. They have literally said to you, you know, the more that they were drawn from you, you're like, no, but you're my like one hope, my connection, et cetera. When you come out of a relationship, if you are somebody who perhaps isn't facing their pain or grief, well, even if it was amicable, even if it was time, there's still going to be pain and grief there. And if you're not facing that head-on what happens instead i think is it gets buried and you try and fill the void and you try and fill the void immediately with someone else and that means the first person

that you meet that you think is you know a the shape of a person that could fill that void you will cling on to like hell that is called a rebound and there is a name for that it is called a rebound relationship um and you can become quite obsessed with that person i don't do this because i'm an avoidance i'm the other person in this situation but you can become very obsessed with that person as you know this is my hope that this is my way to get over this other thing that happened to me this is my way to repress all that pain this is my escape and this person's not interested so they're clinging on even tighter to that that's what i'm getting from this it's less about the other person to me and more about what does this say about you and why do you think you've fallen

in love with someone that you don't know well i think what's really interesting listening to you is this distinction between love and what's going on here because Because I would say I agree, but maybe there are also different kinds of love, right? Infatuation can make us do utterly insane things. And I think that the reason why infatuation can have this effect on us, it's not because it's love, it's precisely because it's about our relationship to ourselves and our hopes and our desires and the way that we pin them on someone else. Because actually, if you're seeing this person as a fully rounded human being, who is neither capable of completing you nor destroying you utterly, right? There's someone who may be able to meet your needs, they might not be able to meet your needs and you'll kind

of work out which is which. If you saw them as a full human being, you would probably be less inclined towards the massive gesture, the huge outburst, the sort of declaration or dramatic withdrawal. Things would be less volatile because they'd be a real human being with whom you can have a conversation and a negotiation and a discussion about what you want. But when they are that kind of totem of what's going on internally with you, I think that that is the thing which drags unreasonable behavior out of us. And I've also, I've also been there a million times. I mean, you know, I remember dating someone who, you know, I I I ended up with my self-esteem just being such in such a low place by the time it ended and it was because I was sort of fighting to get validation out of them and there was a sort of law of diminishing return so the more I was fighting for their validation

the less I was getting it and by the time things ended I felt absolutely dreadful and I was talking about it with my best friend afterwards and he was like yeah but did you actually really like this dude and I was like no but that's not the point the human being at the center of it was not the person who was dragging these feelings out of me it was all of the things I'd projected onto them or the things that I made them a vessel for in your words um and I suppose maybe the question that I have for you is that if you're in a situation where somebody is a vessel for your own desires they're a fantasy they're a projection of all your hopes and dreams can they ever turn into a real person with whom you can have a relationship or is it just dead on arrival not you're asking me this question at this particular juncture in my life

ash it's almost like we talk okay i think i think this is a this is a difficult question because i also i would like to say that i do distinguish between infatuation and love, which is why when I talk about love, I'm talking about what I recognize as love, which is not the feeling of falling off a cliff. I call it the feeling of falling into a warm cloud. That's been the difference for me when I fall in an infatuation, which is up and down, constant stress, eczema going crazy versus love, which still for me carries stresses and worries because of my own particular personal approaches to relationships but feels more like a warm swelling inside me and like this very beautiful magical thing that's happening but I do think that at the start of

every relationship there is an element of fantasy there is an element of projection so you know you go in and you think someone is a perfect person you live in a honeymoon stage for a while that's always going to be there. I think the question for me is, are both people engaging in that in a way where they're willing to work through to the real people underneath? Or is it just a one-sided thing, which this dilemma feels like, where it's one person seeing this person's fantasy, they fall in love with them, and the other person is saying, I'm not ready for getting into something.

And getting into something, if they're not even wanting to engage in that in the first place, then clearly they're not ready to enter in that process of cutting through the lovely, warm, fuzzy fantasy and getting to the gritty stuff underneath where you really get to know people as they are and build something lasting. So it's less about anything built in a fantasy can that actually happen and more is it are people prepared to put in the work to you know strip back because also when you get into like infatuations two people can join that and they will want the fantasy and then as soon as the fantasy goes away they're like oh this is terrible we need to get

out because this is no longer a fantastical thing whereas when i've been in love it's been more like okay you you get to start dating someone you see their flaws and you're like you know what I still really love you even though you do some crazy shit and I still want to be here for all of that god I miss I miss that feeling of being like in love oh my god it's for me it's it's I think that the word that I would use to distinguish love and infatuation is building so when you're in love with somebody and it's reciprocated there is a feeling that you're building something together and I think that looks really really different for different couples right for people, they're building a social world together, right? Which includes bringing their friends together. For some people, it's

building a home and a family in a way which looks like a very traditional nuclear family kind of setup. For other people, the relationship they have, it allows them to pursue their dreams and their ambitions and the things that they really want to work on as individuals. And also, you know, it's not that it's simply any one thing. Couples can have a combination of those things. But that for me has been the difference between relationships, which were fireworks, right? So they just sort of exploded into the sky and then fizzled out into nothing. And you're sort of left with this emptiness of going,

what did this sort of take from me? I feel worse at the end of it than I did going into it. I feel less than I was before. And ones where even though they did end, I felt like we built something together. It didn't work out, but they taught me things about myself. They had traits that I wanted to emulate and continue emulating. And that will absolutely always be with me. And I think that going back to our dilemma, talking about feeling that they're in love with this person after meeting once and texting

are you building something together or is it you've created a little bubble in which you can experience these very intense emotions but it doesn't have this component of being transformative in your life in some way my yeah i, I think we need to also give, that's useful practical initial advice. And my second practical advice is, I've also thought about the distance element as well. They live far away. So the reality of them is you're not being confronted

with the reality of them. I would say practically the best way to lance a infatuation boil is confront it head on with yourself and say hey you know you said you're not ready for anything i just want to know definitely what you mean here i'm enjoying texting you but i am really looking for something more and if they say i really am not up for that you need to just kind of cut off communication unfortunately and confront your own fantasies and what they're about because i don't think it's about this person at all as special as they are i'm sure i think it is about projection because they have already told you they're not down for what you think you want and for some

reason that has spurred you on further but again it's the distance they're not the real person is not in front of your face you can't see them when they're breathing heavily at night or shitting in the toilet or making an off-color joke you can't see all the bits of them that form a real relationship and that's not even something they want so the question is why do you need this fantasy is it just a way for you to wean off your actual pain of your relationship ending and one of the things that I think is also applicable outside of simply this dilemma is that it's so easy to put yourself in a situation where you give the other person all of the power, right? So you go, well, I want absolutely anything this person can give me. And I'm just here

contorting myself into the most amenable shape. and I'm just waiting for them to turn around and give me the thing I want. They have all the power. And it's kind of perverse because on the one hand, you're the one defining what the ideal outcome is. And on the other hand, they're the ones with all of the agency and all of the power to determine whether or not that happens. And it is this curious relationship between very extreme passivity and a really heightened intensity of emotion. And I think that one of the things which it took getting, you know, to the ripe old age of 31 to realize was, is that responsibility is really liberating. The minute I started asking myself, what responsibilities do I have here, right? What's my half of this dynamic and how am I creating it? What are my responsibilities as

this other person? What's my responsibility towards myself? I felt so much less in the power of other people. And it made the relationship that I have better because it meant that I started approaching conflicts differently. I stopped thinking about conflicts as either I'm the worst person in the world and I've created this disaster and it's because I'm so essentially shit, or it stops a conflict being, and you have wronged me in so many ways. Let me open up my book of imagined slights it started making me feel like i had agency and control and power and i think it made me marginally more bearable to live with just tiny bit this is the thing taking responsibility can be terrifying

because it means that you are actually in control of your fate and you do actually can you can direct the way something is going and you might not even get the outcome you want but sadly the feedback I'm receiving from everyone in my life who has started taking responsibility and accountability for their relationships particularly romantic and you know saying this is actually how I feel this is actually what I want this is what I can bring if you want that too I'd love to explore that with you they do say it's very liberating and it actually lessens the amount of stress they feel because they're not just interacting in their heads with a fantasy having a one-sided sort of conversation about where this could go and constant fretting and sleeplessness however

taking that first step is really hard so my advice is to hire someone else to draft a text and send it for you I love drafting texts for other people and maybe this should be a sort of like I don't know maybe we could have like a patreon service or something maybe we could you know we always warn about like commercializing every aspect of our personalities and of course that's bad and and that makes us lesser human beings but in this case i might want to do it pay me to write your texts because i i love other people's business you can start with one of mine actually i'd happily pay you to write some texts for me i'd maybe not 12 pounds 12 pounds okay 12 pounds for 12 pounds the morally reprehensible thing i would do is hand over private communications i have with someone

else so that you could steer them for me that there we go full circle that's what I do for 12 pounds I would do that for one pound anything that anything that means that I can um delegate my emotional responsibility and vulnerability to someone else so I don't have to feel it I would do that for free I would sell anyone out for that that seems like a really good place to wrap up I think that we've left you Moya in a more psychologically unhealthy place than we began which is what this podcast is all about it's the opposite of self-improvement antitherapy this is antitherapy if i speak the antitherapy podcast oh my god we just found our tagline um moya it's been great ash i feel psychically damaged that's all i've ever wanted see you next week Thank you.