If I Speak - 06: Do you owe your parents anything?

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Ash presents her big theory about chosen families and what to do when your best friend is having a baby. Moya shares two listener dilemmas: can you live in a different city to your partner? And do you owe your parents anything? Plus, the wisdom of skunkworks. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* […]

Hello and welcome to If I Speak with me, Moyla Othie-McLean. And me, Ash Sarkar. Ash, how's your week been? Let's start there. I haven't seen you in ages. You know what? I've been feeling the emotion of flustered. And I think it's been a combination

of working really hard and competently, which means incompetence will find a way. Just like life in Jurassic Park. So all my technology is breaking down. I feel like an ancient civilization and like the signs of the apocalypse are everywhere and there are Spaniards over the horizon and it just can't be good nothing against the good people of Spain I'm talking about the conquistadors how's your week been how many minutes in are we and we've already managed to offend

uh the Spanish population we haven't even got a listening audience there yet and we're already rejecting them. That's terrible. How's my whip been? I'm sick, so I'm nursing a Nurofen mug and as it kicks in during this episode, I guess I'll get moderately more peppy. Yes. Shall we start with some questions though?

It's time for our traditional Icebreaker Vogue's 73 questions. But as always, we don't have time for our traditional icebreaker folks 73 questions but as always we don't have time for 73 questions or the copyright on 73 questions so it's actually just three questions um moya what you got for me this one is a audience participation one and by audience i mean you ash because i'm talking to you uh what was the last meme you saved to your phone what was the last meme i saved to my phone okay let me let me look let me look um okay all right it is a trash bag astrology meme and it's a very sad spongebob square pants with massive eyes and a long nose and the caption is when you take away an airy spicy take no shit fuck around and find out tough outer shell this is what you're actually left with ash ash there's such a look into your like current inner psyche and mood it really is this is me if you even care this is me um it's funny you said Spongebob Spongebob's

really making a renaissance at the moment I watched perhaps my favorite skit of all time this weekend which was by this guy called Michael Fry who was an episode of Derry Girls and is a comedian and he's remembering he's playing granddad's square pants so he's spongebob square pants when old and he's remembering what life was like under the sea and it starts you know it's so pitch perfect in the way that uh it's like an old person being asked to recall their memories and being filmed it's like sort of archive piece that the bbc used to do but it it turns into this incredible mediation on the beautiful same-sex relationship between Patrick and SpongeBob it's so good I never really I never

really understood that Patrick was meant to be a starfish when I was a kid he just sort of seemed like you know an obscene collection of tongues glued together at the root and spongebob loved him anyway so just it just goes to show beauties in the eye beholder um okay question two what is your favorite flower what is my favorite flower jasmine easy scented beautiful reminds me of being on holiday in poolia it's giving white lotus it's giving luxury jasmine all day and especially when it grows and it like surrounds a pillar that's a great flower for you well i can see you wearing like jasmines in your hair as well that was that's a really good i've never done that but maybe i will you should when you go on the holiday i prescribe for you uh okay what is the current book you're

recommending to everyone so not your favorite book just the book that right now when someone asks oh what you reading you say this book okay it's actually really fucking nerdy and i don't think that you'd guess it at all. Is it something about the Roman Empire? Not about the Roman Empire. It's called Skunk Works and it's basically about how Lockheed Martin set up an organisation within an organisation, small number of highly capable individuals

with a high level of autonomy from the rest of the organisation so they could work on innovative products, which in the case of Lockheed Martin was like stealth bombers and shit and the reason why I'm reading this book is because I want Navarra Media to have like a skunk works I want us to have a skunk works not for like stealth bombers but for like media innovation purposes who wrote this book and what happened to this skunk works well it's become like a business term so skunk works was a particular thing for Lockheed Martin and it's now become a sort of

generic term for an organization with within an organization with a high degree of autonomy so Navarro is probably a bit small for a skunkworks because this is usually organizations of thousands of people and they set up something with like maybe a hundred. But, you know, I just sort of think like when I win the Euro millions and it will happen because I'm manifesting it. When I win the Euro millions and I give Navarra loads and loads and loads of money,

I want us to set up a skunkworks, you know? Do you not already think that sometimes we do have a bit of a skunkworks? Yeah, I mean, I think maybe if I speak as the skunk works you know do you not already think that sometimes we do have a bit of a skunk works yeah i mean i think maybe if i speak as the skunk work pockets pockets operate by themselves like i feel that we've all at times been engaged or are engaged in skunk workery um secret skunks everywhere also who's going to be part of the skunk works because surely the point of the skunks it sounds kind of exclusionary to me surely the point of a skunk works is there's if it's a secret organization within navara coming up with ideas is that very leftist i mean you're

talking about an arms company that came up with this concept i don't know how well that maps onto a navara thing sell it to me ash listen to me obviously it's not a leftist idea it's from lockheed martin all right they weren't like hey we're really trying to transform the world one cluster bomb at a time you know they were like we want to sell arms capable of inflicting untold amounts of human misery and it got me thinking i want to produce podcasts which are capable of producing huge amounts of human misery and that's what we're all about at this organization podcasts for human misery not to derail but that begs another question I know the right are really good at picking up leftist concepts and warping them but are the left are there any right wing concepts or strategies that the left can pick up

and turn into something positive for our own ends because I don't know if it's ever worked that way well that's the thing the reason why I'm even engaging with the idea of skunk works is because my partner is obsessed with learning from the right and learning from tech and learning from big well-resourced corporations and thinking about how you can apply that to left-wing causes so because these books will end up sort of scattered around the house I'll invariably pick one up and despite my best efforts not to learn anything a concept will creep through so it's not me that's the leading edge of like oh you know what can we learn from Jeff Bezos and his approach and apply that to the left or like you know oh how can like so from Jeff Bezos and his approach and apply that to the left? Or like, you know, oh, how can like some and so's theories around metacognition be utilised by, you know,

left-wing forecasters or movement organisers? This is all just going on in my house and by accident, I will absorb some of the ideas. some of the ideas ash you're in charge this week get into the driver's seat take me to wherever we're going i don't know what gesture i just did because i don't drive so my idea of getting into driver's seat was like thunk thunk which is kind of more like get in the chopper rather than i don't drive either. We are two non-virgins who can't drive. I'm a virgin who can't drive. Okay, so this week I'm going to share with you my big theory and it's about what changing family types mean for our friendships because I was listening to this podcast on the Ezra Klein show and it was, I think, making a point which seems so obvious but hadn't heard it put this pitifully before which is we're living in a period of history where there's more variety

than ever before for what kinds of families you'll find in a society so there are really obvious things like there are single parent families and there are blended families adoptive families foster families families with parents of families, adoptive families, foster families, families with parents of the same gender, extended families with multiple generations living under one roof. And I also think we've broadened our understanding about what a family is. So it's not just about parents and children. And I think that's something that's come very much from the queer community, this idea of chosen family, that there are people who you don't share blood or genetic material with, but they'll care for you and love you in a way that one would normally expect from families of origin. So

whether or not you have kids, that's family. And that's before you even get into all of the things about people maybe not being able to form the family units that they'd want to because there's a housing crisis so you can't afford to have kids you can't even have a dog how are you going to have kids so basically what I'm trying to say is that we're not all on the same path anymore the friends that you made when you're at school or at uni it's not guaranteed that at 25 your lives are going to look the same at 35 your lives are going to look the same at 45 your lives are going to look the same and thinking about how friendships adapt and adjust and cope with lives taking very divergent paths. I've been thinking this because I've got a particular friend who I met literally in my first week of uni and since then

we've been just extraordinarily close and the word friend doesn't even seem to fit what it is we have. It's like in some ways we're sisters, in other ways it's like platonic life partners and even though we do live in different countries we're still sharing one brain cell across the borders of nation states um and i think one of the reasons why we've managed to retain that closeness even though she lives in spain and i live in london is that our lives have followed the same pattern so far so we graduated at the same time we then found our careers after kind of kicking our heels and not really knowing what we were doing at the same time she met her current partner a year after I met mine and her wedding is going to be nearly nearly exactly a year after I had my wedding so

it's like everything is happening at the same time so even though you're not sharing a geographical location you're sharing so much experience and that means that you're turning to the friendship to make sense of those shared experiences but something is going to change in a very big way because she's planning to have children and I'm not planning on having children so at some point in perhaps the near future our lives are going to look very different from each other's because we want to form different kinds of family and I'm not anxious about this and I'm not thinking to myself oh my god her attention is going to be split from me stupid baby I'm actually suspicious of my own laziness and I'm suspicious of my own lack of conscientiousness about what it means to be a parent and I want to make sure that

my own complacency doesn't have a negative impact on our friendship because things are obviously going to change in ways that we can't even anticipate and I just want to be thoughtful and present for her in a way which will work for her when she does hopefully become a mum and I'm thinking these things because there isn't a clear line between what's friendship and what's family anymore and I think that's a good thing and I think it's a good thing that there's a greater variety of families than ever but that's going to have a huge impact I think for all of us on how we maintain friendships when our social worlds diverge so what do you think about that big theory the variety of families and the potential strains that can put on preserving friendships that you formed earlier on in life. I have so many thoughts.

The neurofen's kicking in. My main thought, I'm just considering how real to get on here, but I think I should get very real because that's what the punters love to hear. I had a friend, I have have a friend who had a baby and I was lazy I was lazy I let that friendship um I wouldn't say die we're still like in contact we're still friends but the nature of friendship has very much changed because she had a baby very young. She's an amazing mother, like an amazing mother. But I wasn't, I don't think, ready to change my life in ways that would bend around her. So I didn't make the level of effort that would be needed

to maintain the kind of friendship we had. And yeah, it's changed in nature because of it there's no other way to put it i think there's two things that are really significant here because you talked about changing family structures from the past and i think that is true but i also would say in the past that families weren't as traditional as we always assume they are there were lots of different family structures especially among working class communities when you saw you know kids would be left with other families um you'd be sent away to stay with strangers like community the way the communities worked was not this completely like straight up 2.5 children, two parents, etc.

I would say that was, you know, more prevalent in the middle classes, but in working class communities, then there was a fluidity there. You had, you know, even in the Victorian era, you had marriages that would break down. You would have people who would end up single parents, essentially, and trying to find a way to build a family structure or a family framework without the traditional pillars that were being propagated, you know, mother, father, etc.

So there have always been divergent family structures and people who made it work. I think what changes now and why we move away from the traditional family model as much is because of geography. we move away from like the traditional family model as much is because of geography uh a lot of us don't live in the same way i say a lot of us some of us don't live in the same places where we grew up or where our family might be based uh in the past i think you'd have probably stayed in the same city or stayed in the same place more likely and stayed in the same community and lived out your life there whereas now it's like your friend is in Spain or you might have traveled to go to university and lived in that university

town and then you might have gone somewhere else and like the friendships that you make along the way you're all on different paths anyway so you're moving about so I think the geography throws more of a spanner in the works than actually the divergent lives because if your friend lived two minutes away from you and had a baby you'd still be going to see her like you'd still be going and hanging out with that baby even if you were scared of your laziness because it wouldn't be as hard it's actually the geography that puts the bigger obstacle in the way of maintaining the friendship on the same levels because then you've got the geography and a baby. So the lives are diverging in two very specific ways or very like significant ways.

It's hard because I'm also not the best with keeping up my family relationships. I think I've been very good with my friendships because I've built them around me in London at this point in time. And I do have friends who live elsewhere who we have those amazing friendships where we might not talk for six months but as soon as we see each other

it's just immediately back to the same rhythm and understanding and those those I love but like a gaggle of geese just like yeah like a like a gaggle of geese but just like that deep soul connection where you you just really know this person and even the life changes, you're there to listen and soak them up and you're so excited and you feel so nourished by seeing them. But yeah, the friendships that I have at the moment and that I consider sort of like my family are also because they are around me, I guess. Like they're in close proximity. Those people are there. Whereas my family relationships, me and my family, I have an amazing family they're so loving but I think I don't go back home very often I go home once a year and it's about four hours away so I'm probably your greatest fear

Ash because I am the lazy person I'm the person who prioritizes my own life and my own selfishness and my work and my schedule over maintaining that but what I will say is that is changing and even if at first you have that relationship with your friend where you know she has this baby and you do fall off um you can change that all of these relationships are within your power to change you can reach out to people you can rebuild fragmented things and even if they might not accept that but most of them will most people if you make an effort will want to receive that uh and so i think that's just worth bearing in mind for people who this change might have already happened to it's not too late to ever try and repair and rejuvenate a friendship that has changed in nature in a way that you don't want it to or that you have been complacent about you can always reach

out like and I want to go back to your second Ash but just looking at my family relationships again something that I've really noticed and I don't think they'll mind me sharing this bit is maybe it's just because I've got older and I'm more aware of it but my family talk so much more now about the things that are going on in their life good and bad but just very open and there's a real effort you can see in communication to each other and one example of this is me and my mum we're much closer now than we used to be and I made a real effort to do that and a few years back I started saying to her at the end of calls I would say I love you and I'd never done that before and now every time we call I just hear her go I love you like I love you so much like that is a thing that

we've now brought into our relationship and I've started saying to her you know how are you what's going on not just surface level and actually asking questions about things that are happening um emotionally for her and she'll reach out to me and say hey are you around I'd like a chat to like I just need some support right now and that's a real change in our dynamic and a real change in our relationship um and I think that knowledge that you can alter the parameters of relationship and you can change the person that you've become in a friendship family relationship whatever um and change the type like the i don't know whatever roles you've been baked into it is within your power to change those things um so if you become lazy if you become complacent there is a simple answer to that which is make a fucking effort i mean i think i think that um willingness to change is so important because we think about relationships sometimes in a very static way and we think about

it almost as a contract where someone outlines their needs and you outline your needs and you see what matches up and then you sign the contract and you try and keep it the same and obviously that cannot withstand life because your circumstances change your personality changes your ways of dealing with conflict and opportunity and your approach to life changes massively and I think particularly you know when you go from your 20s to your 30s where 20s is all about defining yourself by encountering new things and your 30s are about going okay all right I can't just keep on raw dogging life so like what are the things I'm going to choose and what things perhaps I'm going to turn away from or perhaps turn the volume a bit down on that's a massive change in your life and I think like what someone having a baby sort of throws up is that you're not just having a relationship with

them you're having a relationship with their relationship to their child because they are no longer orbiting themselves, right? Like a little planet around a very big sun, they're orbiting the baby because that's what it means to be a parent. And sure, their attention will also be split in various other ways. That doesn't become the entirety of their identity and I'm not suggesting that, but it's just such a huge reorientation of their life. And rather than thinking about that as like kind of a threat to me, and I've got to sort of, you know, fight this newborn child for my best friend's attention, the way I'm trying to think about it is going, well, how can I participate in that? How can I form a relationship with this child in such a way, which is going to really deepen and nurture my relationship with my best

friend? And the reason why I think I've got that in my head is because my mom, when she was a single mom, had a best friend who you would more describe as a platonic life partner. So my mom's best friend's name was Sarah. She she was a social worker as well she's from australia and she became friends with my mom but that friendship deepened through her relationship with me and my sister so she became our favorite aunt she was very much the person whose house we wanted to go to like she would take care of us when my mom couldn't and even when my mom remarried and got married to my stepdad her and Sarah preserved that friendship what ended up happening is that Sarah um she she was diagnosed with breast final years and months of her life in a way that you two women and a way in which it involves

children sorry I never had any children but her relationship with my mom was also a relationship with me and my sister and I want to be able to model some of that and in some ways go against my own instinctive discomfort with children so I'm just like oh my god you're just fucking screaming all the time you're just screaming and being sick it's like freshers week of university all over again I don't know how to cope with this um and I want to be able to move past some of those inhibitions that I have in order to be the best possible friend to my best friend and be the best possible friend auntie whatever to this child who doesn't exist yet I'm just anticipating their existence we're talking here about female friendships really because unfortunately like I think

especially among the straight men I know the ones that have talked about their friendships there can be some exceptions where they're really deep and really emotional and I have talked to some straight men who have this um and I think the bonds between the gay men I know tend to be able to mirror female friendships more um just from you know the fact that they're put outside the bounds of patriarchal masculinity in the same ways. But a lot of the straight men I know, I often assume that their friendships are as deep and have this emotional communication,

this level of emotional communication. And then they will talk to me. Someone was saying to me the other day, I was describing my friendships on the podcast, actually. And someone listened and was like, oh, I wish my friendships were like this. And I was like, they're like my soulmates. And and they were like I don't think I have that with my male friends like I wish we had that and there's some I can talk to but we don't have and they're

like I really want a partner because I don't have that level of emotional communication with my male friends and that's something that I still think a lot of um as I said heterosexual male friendships lack unfortunately and some of them are changing, but some of them aren't. So we're talking here about the models of female friendship that we've seen, because often female friendship is a refuge against, I think, the pressures of patriarchy and the unsatisfying relationship models that we're taught we should be going for.

I don't know. Do you agree with that? I think that is exactly right. Like exactly, exactly right. Because I don't think that it is a coincidence that my mom was forming this friendship with Zara exactly when she was a single mom and she needed a partner.

She needed a partner because two parents struggle raising children so what are you gonna do when you're just one you have to bring in these kind of other parental figures and she was you know sarah very much was a second parent to me and my sister um and so I think that that's one way in which coping with the burdens placed upon you as a woman created this friendship it was formed as a kind of you know uh alliance as a kind of uh I guess like a haven as a kind of, you know, buffer between, you know, these women and the patriarchal world that they lived in. And I think that in terms of my friendship with the friend I'm talking about, the one who lives in Spain, we have been that for each other through dating and relationships and the absolute fucking, you know, trench warfare that is dating in your late teens and 20s and so I think

that that is an ingredient which is missing for heterosexual men is that they're not used to relying on each other in that kind of way for their emotional survival and I think that's something which they should, not should, like, I'm not shaming people being like, you should learn this. But I think when you look at the rates of like, depression and substance abuse and suicide amongst in particular young men, there are needs which are going unmet, social needs which are going unmet. there are needs which are going unmet social needs which are going unmet and you know part of that might be transforming their relationships with the women around them but i think it's also about transforming the relationships with the men around them and being able to need one another

openly in the way in which i think women are more comfortable with needing each other god yeah learning to need my friends taught me how to love but um so i wanted to go back to your initial point because you said something else just now um that i wanted to pick up on and first i think you'll be still be an amazing friend to your friend in spain because you have this model and you've thought about this so much and it's quite clear you interrogate what it means to be a good friend to them uh and also it's funny that your mom's friend was called Sarah because mine is called Sarah without a h mine's actually her sister uh she's got she's the the second mother to me was my mom's sister my aunt Sarah um I was basically raised in a matriarchy.

But my mum recently shared a memory with me for an article I was doing. So I don't think she'll mind me sharing here about her other best, like her actual best friend who's not related to her, who's called Liz. And the memory also involves how Liz interacted with us as children, which is that when my father,

and the prompt for this memory, just to kind of give it context was when have you felt what was the most meaningful way someone has shown you they loved you um and my mother said that the most meaningful way someone showed her that she loved her was when my father uh left me and my sister and my mum when I was about three years old. Then the weekend that it was kind of confirmed and all that, Liz turned up at the door unannounced. She'd driven up from her own family.

Then her and my mum lived several hundred miles away from each other, didn't see each other much, talk on the phone, but didn't see each other much. She turned up unannounced with all the ingredients to make a sunday meal um and presents for me and my sister and she just stayed with my mum uh and she cooked all the food and my mum said i felt in that moment that someone could really see me and just could hold me and care for me and that that's like the act of love we're talking about that's like an act of that we're told a partner will do for us but I think a lot of us know that we will find that consistency in our platonic female friendships but what I want to pick up on what you said was I think you're scared you won't like the child I think that's what you're worried about

it's not that you can't be a good friend to your friend i think what you're scared about is that you won't like your what is essentially your sister's kid and you're really worried that you're gonna have to mask a dislike of this child for the rest of its life until it gets old enough that can trade witticisms with you i don't think you're gonna dislike this kid i think you will a your friend lives in spain so this kid won't annoy you but from what i've seen of the uh women around me who's you know actual biological sisters or the women who are their sisters have had who have had children they love those children they love those children because the extension of their friends and even when they don't love those children they're not around the children enough that it's a problem you know what i don't know i don't i don't think it's i don't think it's um

being anxious that i won't uh like the child but you know some children can be bad vibes just putting it out there that's a risk i was you know practice safe sex because otherwise you might end up with a bad vibes child but i i think it's not that i think um when it comes to interacting with kids I know I'm really good with kids actually and I know that I'm good at making them laugh and making them feel like they've got all my attention but that's because I'm anxious about the parents feeling that I'm doing a good job with their kids and a big part of that is to do with family expectations, my nieces and nephews and feeling like as the, you know, one that doesn't have kids, you know, my sister has a baby, you know, two out of my three cousins have, you know, children, you know,

my stepbrother's got three kids. As the sort of conspicuously childless one, I feel that I have to go above and beyond in looking comfortable with children, because if not, I'm going to be judged. And the reason why I think I have the space to reflect about what my relationship is going to be with my best friend's future children is because it's the first time I'm able to think about this purely in terms of me, my friend, this child, and I'm not thinking about this sort of wider audience of people looking and making judgments. So I think it's about having the space to reflect on something rather than being like, oh my God, I'm going to like the baby. I'm probably going to like the baby. Babies are kind of fine.

I personally think that we can come back to this topic in the future when your friend has had her child because there's we can do a sort of where are we now um on it because there's there's still so much to say about it uh that you can't put into one episode but the upshot is things will change between your friends ash but the difference is you will change with them inshallah um it's time for audience dilemmas moya do you want to take it away yeah go on then why not first dilemma i'm from the uk living with my partner abroad i really want us to move to the UK fundamentally for me it feels like home and I feel happier and safer there understandably she doesn't feel the same way as she has lots of friends here and I don't on one level I want to ask how do I persuade her to agree

with me but maybe the real question is how can we have a conversation about this really fundamental disagreement where we can reach a resolution that we're both happy with one way or the other? I definitely don't want us to break up. Whatever happens next, we have to do together. Oh, so I think that there are two aspects to this. One of the practicalities and the other are the emotions, because actually the practicalities are relatively straightforward. If you really want to trial living somewhere else for a bit, you can do it, right? You can seek out a job in the place where

you want to go. You can, you know, temporarily rent a place. You can stay with family if that's available to you. You can trial being in a different place for a bit. You can even save up if that's possible and take a bit of a sabbatical and trial it for three to six months. All right. There are practicalities, right, that you can try. But fundamentally, fundamentally, it is not about the practicalities. It's about the emotions and it's about how you navigate a partnership where both of you feel that your personal happiness relies on something which is different from what your partner wants and your partner's personal happiness and I think that this is one of the most like fundamental critical questions in long-term relationships which is how do you deal with

wanting really really different things and one of the things that me and my partner had to really learn was how to get out of being in a tug of war so when we wanted different things and it was very often the case that he would want something different and I would want something to stay the same we ended up in this dynamic where he was almost like a dog trying to like pull off the lead and I was trying to dig my heels in and not give an inch and that was just mirrored across every conversation that we had where he was frustrated from the beginning I was mistrustful from the beginning and it would just sort of unravel from there and the thing that we had to learn to do is uphold the primacy of our relationship first, above and beyond what we wanted as individuals. So we had to sort of think of this relationship as being something that existed outside of

ourselves as individuals, that we had to serve and look after and nourish and nurture. Because when we did that, it became easier to think about differences in what we wanted and to think about practical ways in which we could come up with compromises and move forward together about it but it was really about letting go of I guess a kind of ego and a sense of the I and a sense of well I want or I'm unfulfilled or I'm threatened or I'm being pulled away from the place that feels safe um so yeah I would say the really key thing and this might be difficult is letting go of what you want just a bit because you might find there's a bit more movement towards what you want if you're able to truly do that.

I don't know. What do you reckon? I totally agree. As someone whose pattern of finding compromise is often being very dogged in the first instance, then having a spiritual realisation, completely changing my mind and deciding that I don't care at all. And then I get the thing that I want. Oh my God, you are my husband you are my husband and it's been an absolute treat to be married to you ash i've loved every second um yeah i i there's two there's two bits to the what i'm gonna say i always say that i don't know there's two bits to what i'm gonna say and then often i never get to the second bit i'm gonna stop making promises about there being two parts to my advice um as you know I'm a practical person so I'm going to give a practical bit and then I'm going to

talk about the letting go bit so practically if you wanted to do something that could maybe reach compromise you could just say hey honey wouldn't it be great for I don't know let's do a house swap in summer so for six weeks we'll go to you know the UK and someone will come and stay in our house from the UK and then I can get some of my UK dosage I don't know why you'd want to do that because it's shit here but that's if that's just a surface level advice but i really agree with ash and here is an example of why i agree with ash when i was in a relationship all those many moons ago never again uh i really wanted to hear my partner say i love you i wanted this more than anything else because i'd said i'd love you quite early on. And I knew that, you know, I just couldn't stop saying it.

That's how you know you mean it when it's just like, I love you. I really love you. It's like spilling out of you like vomit. And they, for various reasons, didn't hold much stock in the phrase, I love you. And at first, you know, I didn't complain about this to them that they couldn't say I love you because I was being cool and understanding. But it was bugging me. It was bugging me. Why can't they say I love you because I was being cool and understanding and but it was bugging me it's bugging me why can't they say I love you because I could feel they loved me I could see the way they the way they looked at me uh the way that they you know

the things they did for me they just treated me such love and care I'd never felt so loved by someone who couldn't say I love you and it started coming up because I know they felt guilty about not being able to say it um and they were first they were just like you know I'm not ready and then they were like people say I love you all the time and they don't mean it and they do terrible things to each other people say I love you and do bad things to each other and they said do you not feel loved and I was like I do really feel loved like I've never felt so loved you love me so much I can just see it in the way that you, you just know. And they thought that the phrase I love you was this kind of like meaningless thing if it wasn't backed up with action.

And I held on to it for a while and then I was like, do you know what? I actually don't care anymore. I don't need to hear this. It took it took a while for me to get to that point. It's like I don't need to hear this. It took a while for me to get to that point. It's like, I don't need to hear this because everything they do is so loving. And I'd never been in a relationship that made me grow so much or that made me stretch myself and have to learn things so much. And so I said, you know,

I don't need to hear that anymore because I can see it in what you do for me and how you treat me. And one day they called me up. This was a while after I'd said, I don't need to hear I love you anymore because I do feel it I'd really dropped it I'd really let go of having to hear I love you I was just talking nonsense they went Moya I love you and it's because I'd been able to let it go that they could also meet me and think you know how do I feel about this phrase is it something that I now feel I can

say and we both let go of our sort of like dogged positions and were able to meet each other and when I heard it they didn't stop saying as well once they started saying it but once I heard it I thought that's nice but I really was at where you were at and they'd come to meet me where I was at and so Ash I just want to say that's proof in the pudding of your advice that if you let something go and look at it a different way, you will find more room for manoeuvre on the other person's half because it is about letting go of the ego and looking at the actions and sort of how they're behaving.

And another example, actually, is recently I was talking to someone who had a very similar problem in that they want to move to a certain country and their partner doesn't want to and they found out that their partner had you know who'd been doggy saying i don't want to move to this country i don't want to move to this country had been looking up job positions in the country they wanted to move to um and because of that the pressure kind of lift lifted from this other person to make the move to this country because they'd made that slight effort to see it from their point of view. They were like, now I can come to you and see it from your point of view, too. So it really is a sort of letting go of being so stiff and instead trying to be fluid together and move together.

And you'll probably find the resolution through that. together and move together and you'll probably find the resolution through that there's also something that I was thinking about the nature of a partnership where you're living in a place where one person feels a lot more comfortable than the other because I suppose in my own relationship that's me I won Tottenham I fucking won like we live in tottenham it's the place where we have like put down our roots we're surrounded by people who are primarily my friends although my friends first although our housemate is someone who's best friends with him first and we live fairly close to my family whereas Russ's family all live up in Yorkshire. A lot of his friends from home live in Yorkshire and his friends are a lot more

scattered around London than mine. Although of course my friends are now his friends, yada, yada, yada. But the people that he knew before me. So I fucking won. All right. I won the arm wrestle of where do we live, but there are compromises involved and where the compromises ended up is that in order for me to have the rootedness in Tottenham he's also got to have the freedom to be away from home for stretches of time that I can imagine lots of people would feel uncomfortable with in their relationship so spending five weeks in the states without me you know he'll be up in Yorkshire for like two weeks at a time because he needs that he needs that time to connect with his friends and family up north and I can join for a bit of it but you

know my work is down here whereas his work is is quite easy to to do remotely And I think what that recognises is that, going back to our conversation about friendship earlier in the show, is that friends aren't fungible. So you can't say to someone, oh, well, you'll just make new friends. Because yeah, you can and you will make new friends, but it will not be the same as the friendships that you've had in other geographic locations which reflect other points in your life so really it's about going how do I best preserve these other relationships these other friendships when I'm not living near them. And I think that is a different thing to introduce into the conversation with this reader and their partner. Reader? This is a podcast. This listener and their partner. Because rather than going my happiness or your happiness, it's then going, well, how

do we access the things that make us happy within either the settlement that we've got or the one that I want to have? Shall we do another dilemma? Because I know we're meant to keep to a certain time, but I also know the listeners are fucking loving this podcast from the reviews we've got so far. They're fucking loving it. All right.

They're fucking loving it. And I think we should just do another dilemma. Shall I read it out? I'm going to read out another dilemma. My parents are amazingly supportive and loving parents, despite some faults. And they've supported me and my siblings financially to a considerable degree.

They're very left-wing, like me. However, I don't feel like I owe them, in quotes, anything. I raised this with them and they completely agreed. My mum said something along the lines of, it was our choice to have you. we took great pleasure in it despite difficulties and we didn't do it because we expected anything from you. In this vein, everything I do for them and give to them is freely given and not to service a debt. But when I spoke to my friends about this, they were all shocked and completely disagreed with me.

I think they felt I was ungrateful, which maybe I am. I'm not sure I feel gratitude for what my parents have done for me. It's what I'd do for my child if I could, without expecting gratitude. But that's not to say that I don't appreciate it, or that I wouldn't care for them in return and try to look after their needs, as I would do with anyone I love. Anyway, this reaction has upset me, and being in the position of privilege that they've given me, which I enjoy but also somewhat resent, made me question whether I was wrong so do i owe my parents anything ash what do you think so i think that the word oh can be interpreted in really different ways because there's a sense of what do we owe one another that is extractive which is about guilt which is about shame and which is very open to

manipulation right there's there's that version of you know well you owe me this and there are examples of parent-child relationships where that is manipulated by a parent to extract either you know acts of emotional service which are unreasonable or to prop up behaviors, which are, you know, not healthy and it's all bound up with, well, you owe me this because I'm your parent. And I would say that language of debt and owing is really unhealthy and both you and your parents are right to reject it. But there is a language of owing and what do we owe one another which is I think based in an idea of what do we owe one another as part of our shared humanity obligations we have one another which are generated from a sense of love that I think is really really

important because what do I owe my mum I owe her everything what would she ask for well it wouldn't be everything so I think that these things have to be balanced out by a sense of what's reasonable to ask because then you're sort of free to say I owe you everything is that I think that has to be tempered by a degree of like emotional regulation and self-control but you know I I'm very wary of discourses that associate freedom with a lack of obligation because I actually think that the obligations that we have to one another enable the freedoms of other people so the fact that I can be trusted to care for my loved ones allows them to operate more freely in the world and to try things and to take risks and to you know to flourish and the same goes for me the ways in which people are obligated to me and they care

for me allows me to be freer in the world so I don't like the opposition between obligation and freedom what about you what do you owe your parents it's funny because with my mum I feel I owe her so much and I'm constantly trying to I always say in these terms I'm like I'm trying to repay a debt first I'm trying to repay an actual financial debt because I did not recognize the value of money while at university and even though my mother doesn't have much she gave me loads of her savings which I'm constantly paying her back uh through a literal direct debit um the second is that I I always think I have to repay her and I owe her for the sacrifice she made having me even though she said having me was the you know the best thing as well as my sister include both of us was the best thing she ever did but I'm always like I'm taking you on holiday I'm doing these things for you this

is the least I can do however I don't think this problem this dilemma that's been sent to us is really about the relationship with their parents at all because they've spoken to their parents their parents said no you don't owe a shit like it's fine they've got an agreement it's the friends that they feel annoyed at it's the friends that there is a discord with and a difference of opinion so the question you're asking is do you you know on the surface do i owe my parents anything but the question you're really asking us is are my friends wrong and why do i feel so hurt by their judgment you you feel judged by your friends. You feel judged like you're not recognizing,

you know, you mentioned your privilege, which you said, I somewhat resent it. There's obviously tensions between them and their friends around the level of maybe leg up this person has got because they mentioned throughout, you know, financially have been very supported and their friends are like, why aren't you more grateful to your parents why aren't you more

grateful about what you've got which says to me it's this is more resentment about economic status um and a difference between friends in their economic status probably uh than it is about a difficulty with the parents there's no difficulty with the parents there's nothing going on the parents the parents and them had a conversation and they said yeah we're calm you do the same like we did this for you freely the beef is with your friends you're wanting us to back you in front of your friends um and uh it's actually a different problem to the one that you've written in that's what i think anyway detective mclean on the case i did used to want to be a detective you know when i was six

you know what when i was little i wanted to be a detective you know when I was six you know what when I was little I wanted to be a burglar once more we perfectly complement one another yeah that was the first job I ever wanted what do you mean you wanted to be a burglar like to be a burglar but what burgling what like jewelry were you like a residential burglar houses was this from reading like burglar bill it was from reading burglar bill obviously obviously so first job i ever wanted oh wow that's just i guess reappropriation um of assets kind of tracks out yeah so my advice this person is you and your friends i think there's a bit of resentment there going back and

forth and i think that you feel guilty and maybe i don't know if embarrassed is the word but there's there's a awareness that you might have different economic status and they want you to be pay more fealty to your parents and be more sort of i don't know they see i think they think that there's like not enough humbleness in the fact that you're like well they gave it to me freely and i'm not going to pretend that i'm like on my knees thanking them so much for this it was their choice to give it um so i think these these differences in economic backgrounds start to really hit when you're in your i imagine your 20s uh or your 30s but that's when they really start coming out and this sounds like a problem between your friends rather than a problem between your

parents and i think you should talk to your friends about how you feel it's a classic case of delayed middle class onset disease because there's a sort of false equality of the rental market and depressed wages, which is unless you are literally in the top 5% of earners, nobody is achieving social mobility, becoming middle class because of their job. So you have to wait and see who's getting that help from their parents and their grandparents in the form of intergenerational wealth to see who's going to become middle class. I mean, that's how I have become middle class after my grandmother passed away. You know, I've been able to, you know, get a good old terminal case of the bourgeoisie because of something

which is wholly unearned um but it's in terms of my own asset wealth that kicked in when my grandma passed away and I could afford a deposit on a house. So that was the thing which lifted me out of, you know, rental market. And it wasn't so much because of wages, it was because I got a book advance and a bit of inheritance. So two lump sums, one of which is wholly, wholly unearned, and is a reflection of intergenerational wealth which was the result of owning a house in London you know she owned a house in London and so that's what I mean by delayed middle class onset which is if it was purely down to my own efforts yeah sure maybe I'd have been able to buy a house and that would have been something that happened a bit later down the line. But if I'd only been earning a wage from Navarra, probably not, certainly not in London.

That's not because Navarra underpays, it's just a reality of just how fucked the housing market is. The thing which allowed me to become middle class was wholly wholly unearned right oh it was significantly unearned the portion that came from inheritance and so i imagine that that's part of the backdrop to this it's 100 i think that's i think that's personally and this person you're welcome to write in and tell us if we're wrong but i think probably this is more of a disagreement around uh these schisms that are starting to form between the economic circumstances of you and your friends and the fact that these are not big enough resentments to break up a friendship but they're big enough to needle each other when a topic that skirts around the issue comes up and that's what i have to say on that matter showing the show

showing the show let's wrap this up we'll see you next week this has been if i speak with and me ash sarkar bye Join the show. Let's wrap this up. We'll see you next week. This has been If I Speak with Moylo The McLean. And me, Ash Sarkar. Bye.