If I Speak - 07: What do straight men know about dating?

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Ash and Moya talk to Matt Kendall from The Love Cupboard podcast about how straight men perceive the women in their lives. Plus, a dilemma from a listener who’s been evicted by her friends’ parents. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello and welcome to If I Speak, the birds are singing, spring is springing, and I am joined by what is known in a court of law as my accomplice, Moya Lothian-McLean. How are you doing today? I just want to refute what you said because the spring is not springing. This is one of the worst, grimmest springs that we have had, that I can remember. The spring is not here. They did stop the spring from coming. And I also just wanna make a quick apology to our dedicated and beloved listeners. Somebody, my assistant,

when packing for the work trip I'm on at the moment, forgot to pack their microphone. Sorry, she forgot to pack my microphone. It definitely wasn't my fault at all. So my sound is not as good as it usually is. Apologies. Who's your assistant? You don't know how she goes to different school. It definitely wasn't my fault. We also have, if we are going to be continuing with my criminal justice metaphor, what I think is known as an

accessory to the fact. So a little bit later, we are going to be joined by Matt Kendall, co-host of The Love Cupboard, a podcast for men about dating, love and mental health. And basically bringing him on to see if what I've got to say about straight men is completely delusional or maybe it is hitting somewhere near the mark. So later on, I'll be sharing my big theory about the best advice you can give to a straight guy. And we've got an audience dilemma about the interpersonal dynamics of the private rental sector. As always, if you think that we couldn't possibly make any of your problems worse, please send them to us and we might try and talk them through. Just email ifispeakatnavaramedia.com. That's ifispeakatnavaramedia.com. But first, as always,

is our traditional icebreaker, 73 questions. Minus 70 because who's got time for 73? Moya, what have you got for me? All right, let's go with the big guns. What was your first thought this morning? My first thought this morning, it's actually really sad. Because I am very much grieving at the moment. My stepdad, who was like was like you know a dad to me died two weeks ago so every morning I wake up I open my eyes and I go oh fuck so that was my

first thought this morning my second thought this morning was um oh I better feed the cat um I both regret and I'm happy I asked that question because I think it is this is a podcast about being real and this is something very real that you're going through uh and I'm I really understand and empathize with that level of waking up and remembering someone that you love very much is not in your life anymore uh so I'm sure we will probably talk about this in future on the podcast but now I need to ask you another trivial question so what was the last purchase you regretted oh what's the last purchase I regretted um oh it's easy it's one that I made yesterday I bought a bottle of oyster sauce and

it was actually just way too salty so then when I used it in my cooking, it was just like overpoweringly, you know, just mouth moisture, wicking salty. So a bad oyster sauce. What brand? It wasn't Lee Kum. Yeah, Lee Kum slaps. Of course it wasn't Lee Kum. Yeah, Lee Kum's great. Stick with Lee Kum. Third question. What is a really popular song that you always skip past? Really popular song that I always skip past. You know what? Dua Lipa just doesn't do it for me.

I was about to say any Dua Lipa, but then I like Dua Lipa and I still think all her songs sound the same. So it doesn't really matter which Dua Lipa just like no Dua Lipa like I sort of associate Dua Lipa with like you know songs you hear when like getting your nails or your hair done and I'm just like why don't you like to hear songs when you're getting your nails or your hair done no I do like hearing songs when I'm getting my hair and my nails done but like I like hearing songs that I enjoy, whereas Dua Lipa is just, it's as if she was created in a laboratory to be heard precisely in that context, which isn't the sign of good music.

You've got to feed the gays, Ash. Dua Lipa is for the gays. Of course she was created in a laboratory, a very special laboratory, the same laboratory that produced Kylie. You know, and I'm very glad about this i don't think that the gays are underfed when it comes to popular music all right they're not underfed they're not starving you're actually so right my song for work is hot stuff by i want to say something chocolate what's the name of the band using hot stuff no hot stuff is donna summer is it yeah who's the band that's like called hot chocolate that sing they did you sexy i also

hate that song those are two songs there's the two songs i don't like i don't like hot stuff and i don't like you sexy thing you know what song i actually really really love yeah unironically and it just makes me so happy whenever i hear it it's kung fu fighting I'm not gonna say anything about that I don't want to get into any trouble any more trouble if I speak if I speak uh shall you tell us your big theory because it is a big theory and it's quite a wild one so I'm ready I really want to get into it it is a big theory I'm ready to bring on our first straight man advisor. We have every time we talk about straight men, we should really bring on an advisor for every demographic we talk about. But every time we talk about straight men,

then we get told, what the fuck are you talking about? You don't know anything. So now we've decided to test that theory in real time. So Ash, please introduce your big theory. in real time so ash ash please introduce your big theory well first i want to introduce our straight man consultant matt kendall matt it's so good to have you with us today um are you are you prepared for a whirlwind tour of mine and Moya's neuroses? I am absolutely ready. Yes. As ready as anyone can ever be. Yeah, as ready as I could ever be. Also, thank you for saying that I'm the straight man consultant. I hadn't thought of myself that way, but it's nice. It's nice to have that moniker attached to me.

Nice? What do you mean nice? You're Atlas. You're carrying the weight of the world. Are you ready to be a mouthpiece for 3.5 billion people um i'm not sure i am but i can certainly say some things about being a straight man great you know what that's all we need from you we are more than happy to draw wild generalizations from this one guy we've got to agree to come on our podcast i mean we do it when there's no guys present anyway so we may as well just carry on the tradition ash come on tell us your big theory come on all right big theory big theory big theory my big theory is that the best advice you can give pretty much any heterosexual man is to remember that women are people. And this first came up ages ago because I was talking to

my husband and he was saying that in his twenties, the biggest turning point transformation for him came when he just sort of realized that women are people and his approach to dating, his approach to sex, his self image, how he felt about masculinity, all of these things were changed by this realization that women are people. And so what does it mean to realize that women are people? Because obviously, you know, it's not just a case of like, oh, like they are the same species. It's realizing that how you form a rapport with a woman that you're sexually interested in or potentially sexually interested in isn't actually radically different from how you form a rapport with your female friends. It's also about realizing that women aren't out to get you. They're not looking for weaknesses and you don't have to do this mad dance of enticement

like they're easily spooked dear um you also don't have to you know perform this very like rigid narrow and contradictory version of masculinity to get women to like you either. And also, lastly, but I think also most significantly, if you realize that women are just people, then their judgments don't matter so much and rejection isn't going to kill you. So someone's not interested. That's not a fundamental indictment of who you are. and so the reason why I was thinking about this thing that my husband said that when he's you know when he was in his 20s he realized that women are people and everything changed I was thinking about it this weekend because I was hanging out with a really close friend of mine who's a single straight man and he was talking about how he feels this immobilizing anxiety you know this like

truly paralyzing level of self-consciousness when he's around women who are around his age and also potentially single so his brain gets really really busy he starts catastrophizing and it really is like he lives or dies by whether these women find him attractive or not and that's even before he thinks do I find this person attractive he really really needs these women to find him attractive um and obviously because because I'm his friend I can see that there's a difference between how he feels when he's around women who he thinks of as a potential sexual intrigue, and what he's like when he's around women

who he's friends with. Because around me, he's very authentic, he's very, very candid, and he's really self-aware without being totally hamstrung by self-consciousness. And so as I was listening to him talk about this anxiety, I was just like, you know that women are just people. The potentially single women that you're meeting on a night out, they're all cut from the same cloth as your female friends

with whom you've got very healthy, kind and reciprocal relationships with. And I wasn't saying that in a sort of like, ha ha, you're a fucking idiot way. relationships with and I wasn't saying that in a sort of like haha you're a fucking idiot way um but it was kind of new to him this idea that the women he's interested in are the same species as women that he's friends with um so I really do think that that the best advice you can give straight men is to remember that women are people and I do think it cuts the other way as well. Like particularly whenever I see straight women talking about men on TikTok, I just think it sounds completely fucking delusional

because it's this whole idea that as a straight woman, what you've got to do is like extract maximum value from men in a way that's really dehumanizing and also assumes that men are governed by a set of incentives and behaviors which are just completely alien to me as someone who is friends with straight men so that we saw this tiktok of a girl who's like eating in a restaurant and she was saying how you know you should dress up nice and go to fancy restaurants by herself and a man a random man will buy you dinner and i was like this is completely loopy like it's so far out of the realm of normal male behavior because if you were to speak to any one of your

straight male friends and you're like would you just buy dinner for a random woman who you saw sitting by herself they'd be like no um that's crazy so yeah i i wonder if this advice that remember women are just people is actually useful for straight men or if i'm completely just extrapolating something from one thing that my husband said and i also wonder if this idea of remember that the opposite gender they're just people um is particularly pertinent for straight people because the way in which we're socialized into our own gender, it involves being socialized to view the opposite gender as though there are different species and you've got to perform your own gender in this like, you know, completely bizarre dehumanizing way in order to attract them.

completely bizarre dehumanizing way in order to attract them um so yeah matt moya what do you reckon are women just people uh well first of all thanks thanks very much for having me on i'm really really glad to be here i mean look it sounds it sounds obvious to say it because of of course women are just people we're all just people people. How can we not be? But I know what you mean by it. And I can understand, I think, that sense of anxiety and maybe even fear and self-consciousness that your friend has expressed. And I think there's always been that element in dating or even just social interactions of making a good first impression, dressing well, looking the part, trying to come across as an interesting and engaging person. For some, that potentially leads to an inclination or a self-imposed pressure to impress, which means potentially deviating from expressing your personality and who you are and that idea of just being yourself, right?

But I think it's kind of challenging because i think we have a whole set of vocabulary and messaging around being a certain man that women will be attracted to that whole idea of nice guys finish last or nice guys being friend zoned because your behavior isn't conforming to certain stereotypes about what a real dominant or successful man should behave as well as messaging around what women want you know there's lots of advice out on social media this is what women want from a man and I guess the that means that some young men are still kind of being fed that advice that essentially says to impress a woman, you need to double down on reasserting your masculinity in that traditional way. And I think there's just a lot of that ends up with a lot of strategy and game playing that takes us further away from that theory of yours of women just being people just approaching each other as people we

might be attracted to we might want to get to know and figure out whether you know whether we're both a good fit so I think we have this this this language and advice that is grounded in kind of conquest and competitiveness and that means that maybe that search for the partner might not be the relaxed affair it should be because you're too preoccupied with with kind of looks or the idea of being a certain a certain individual and and i think it's it's also pitched differently with friendships where you can be more relaxed about who you are the stakes are lower it's not that you're trying to impress someone else um and so there's more there's more scope to just to just be yourself I suppose and I think that that does make it all of that does make it challenging sometimes for men to differentiate or also I guess to not differentiate

between friendships with women and you know attraction to women and finding a partner. It's essentially the same thing. I would also say, I hate to bring it up, but I do think dating app dynamics have a pot to play in this. I've actually just come off them about a week or so, or a couple of weeks ago, I think. But it really plays into this sense of competitiveness because basically women end up getting a lot of likes a lot of uh a lot of matches perhaps too many in certain cases and there's probably a small cadre of men who you know are attractive enough who come off polished enough on their dating profile to to kind of get matches and get dates and then other men who perhaps struggle just because of the sheer numbers game that it is, this sort of competitive online marketplace that dating apps

sort of force all of us to play a part in. And so I think that also contributes to this sense of commodification of emphasis on looks, on being able to sell yourself in a certain way. That again, just it, it makes you want to perhaps makes you want to put across a certain version of yourself that isn't authentic. I guess I'm interested in what you make of the distinction that straight men draw between women and their friends who also happen to be women. Because it's sort of, as I was chatting with my friend, obviously he knows that I'm a woman, but it sort of didn't occur to him that

I was the same kind of woman who, you know, he could encounter and think of as like potentially single and part of the reason for that sort of distinction and why it's so strong is because when we met and became friends um I was already engaged the first time I met him my partner was there too and so I think I just went straight in the category of not single woman therefore human whereas if he'd encountered me in a way where even if we weren't attracted to each other and nothing romantic happened you know we're still on a path to friendship but if he encountered me and understood me as a single woman or a potentially single woman I would have gone into like a completely different category and his behavior would have been different and his um you know anxiety levels

would have been different you know it was sort of like by being known to be off the market I was safer somehow yeah I think I think that plays into what I've what I was saying about you know what you need to do to impress the opposite sex and it's almost it's almost like we're being sent this message of having two different version of ourselves one that's you know the authentic version of ourselves where we can express ourselves and and who we are and maybe um the other version that that needs to put on a certain facade because it's it's as i said the the kind of stakes are higher that all their different stakes i guess um around trying to impress someone i just i just think ultimately there's just a lot of messaging that is, as I say, grounded in traditional kind of stereotypes about gender roles, about masculinity, patriarchal norms around being this dominant, strong sort of assertive individual.

And that's what is attractive. And, you know, to a certain extent, I guess when we go out into the world and go to bars and clubs, we sort of we tend to want to put on that that version of ourselves that is confident encourage some men at least to actually just say, well, I'll just be myself. I'll view this as another way to meet people, express who I am, and see if there's a good fit. Because I think the other thing is there's perhaps a tendency to always want to impress as opposed to seeing it as a process in which to always want to impress as opposed to seeing it as a process in which you meet someone and you both evaluate how good a fit you are for each other as opposed to constantly trying to to think about how you can impress the other person so it's not a mutual process again it sort of ties into that competitiveness angle of I have to impress someone else so these are the behaviors I have to exhibit.

Moya what do you make of this does this resonate at all with your experiences of giving maybe straight male friends advice and also thinking about it from the perspective of like okay but I'm having to like deal with and encounter this divided self when I'm out there trying to meet people and trying to date? First of all I reject the premise of the initial theory because I don't think this is the best advice you can give straight men I also don't particularly like that we're just being like this is the best advice you can give straight men because this advice is purely for romantic and sexual purposes i think there's other advice you can give straight men or men of any sexual orientation that would better serve them at meeting and connecting with people for any type of purpose and this the way we frame the question kind of implies that the we're still putting in

the box of the only relations that can happen between straight men is a romantical sexual connection with a woman who dates men um so the the premise of the question i i reject i'm really sorry all the theory i reject uh but that's fine we're here to we're here to have that disagreement we're here to have that that discourse I just want to impress you that's all I've ever wanted oh see Ash maybe this is where it's coming from you're put you're projecting onto the straight man no I'm joking um so what I was thinking when you were both talking I thought what Matt was saying was really interesting about this idea this pressure of split self and the lack of synthesis that you at least feel as a straight man when engaging in a romantic or sexual way with people that you're romantically or sexually interested in and how there's a

division as well between the people classed as your friends who might belong to the same gender category that you would normally be sexually attracted to and the people who are classed as those romantic interests who you have been like actually I'm attracted to them and therefore myself is split and I have this pressure to impress them what I think about a lot and what's coming from this and the discussion of like the both sides the game playing all of that is I don't think this is a problem um restricted only to heterosexuality I think that it's something we see quite prevalent in like our generation I can't speak for older generations but I know that if you are single and older then you've probably been sucked into more of the strategizing and game playing because if you're dating in a

modern fashion then you are going to be doing within the frameworks that we have now um and I think that it just comes back to what we talk about again and again and again which is that the nature of dating one dating has changed we don't know exactly it doesn't have like a single purpose anymore um and i think that's really thrown heterosexual dating in particular into you know chaos because no one knows exactly what it's for like it used to be definitely going to do it for marriage. And a lot of people still have that in their minds, but the rituals and parameters that govern those courtship processes are gone. And it's not like you meet someone, you present a ring and it's like,

okay, that's a promise. We're going to get married and then we're going to exist, whether happily or miserable for the next 40 years. And obviously there were deviations from that within that framework, but that was the traditional framework. I think it's silly to imagine that people who aren't straight and people who aren't straight men um don't suffer from this idea of splitting the self and needing to impress and i know you mentioned straight women as well but i don't want to just like gender essentialize it or

sexuality essentialize it either um i don't think that's the right term i think that i think in a world where scope it captures and which is this like the power of the visual currency that we carry um based on perceived attractiveness which is not like how attractive you are to another person but it's how much you fit into a certain type of attractiveness that might carry traction on platforms like social media or i don't know just like in that digital world then there's going to be more of the split cells because i see this constantly on you know social media sites tiktok platforms like that where it's this idea of like glow up glow up glow up glow up and it's like who are we glowing up for what is the purpose here it

is this okay it's this idea of attractiveness what is the attractiveness for it's this sort of like latent sexual attractiveness that's not actually very sexy or anything to do with sex in reality it's got much more to do with just like the reception of being attractive um and i think that that plays more into like split self and like being attractive to the people but what you're noticing more and more and more is people complaining they can't actually connect with someone else on like an emotional level and that actually when they're presented with you know conventionally attractive people on say a dating app you'll blur into one and it's like there's no actual spark or connection or any of that and some of that's the platform but

also in real life you get that quite a lot it's like this just it's almost like kendall's and like barbie's where you'll blur into like one smooth mass of non-genitalia and it's just like you're so gorgeous and there's nothing happening because we're just focused on like the peacocking i don't know if that makes sense but in my head there is a stream of consciousness there where i'm trying to basically say i don't think that this is the best advice we can give to straight men or anyone i think the best advice we can give to people is actually because i think this is framed around the idea of romantic and sexual connection. I think the best advice we can give to people is the advice that the actress who played Jessa, Jemima Kirk, gave on social media. Someone said, oh, what advice would you give to

young girls who have like anxieties? And she was like, I think you think about yourselves too much. And that is theieties and she was like I think you think about yourselves too much and that is the advice I would give I think we think about ourselves too much you know what that's really that's really interesting I will I will come back to um I think standing up for my big theory but I think that that advice of you know I think you think about yourself too much one of the things that's really interesting is that a friend of mine who's in recovery and is in recovery for narcotics alcohol sex and relationships the advice that he receives most often from his sponsor is stop thinking about yourself so much and identifying that sort of compulsive self-consciousness as a thought pattern which reinforces feelings of emptiness which primes him for compulsive behaviors where he's not in control of himself and when he's sort of in the thrall of of this, whatever it is, whether it's to do with drugs,

sex, relationships, or alcohol. And so that being a form of advice, which is given to people when they're having to really reassert some kind of control over themselves and like build up their sense of self from, you know, literally rock bottom, I think goes to show just how crucial it really is.

And we, I mean, not to to be like we live in a society but we live in a society where we've got so many mirrors to the self we've got so many mirrors to the self where we're constantly engaging with a reflection that we've created and that other people are interacting with it's really hard not to think about yourself so much because everything we have in society is telling us to do it. The reason why I think that you can redeem the big theory of the best advice you can give straight men is to remember that women are people is that it is a reminder

that everyone you're interacting with is a person just the way you are. reminder that everyone you're interacting with is a person just the way you are so if you don't make insane arbitrary judgments of other people the likelihood is that the person that you're interacting with and interested in isn't going to be doing that either um it's a reminder that you know rather than sort of setting up sexual and romantic connection as the sort of be all and end all it's actually situating that within all the other kinds of social connection that you can have and saying, remember, this is like this, right? You know, it's not a completely different category. And I think that for what it did for my husband, when he realized realized this it meant that he could be a lot more relaxed about in particular

having sex because you know in his 20s you know early 20s he'd go out and if he didn't hook up with someone regardless of whether or not he'd met someone who he found attractive but if he'd gone out and someone hadn't made it clear that they found him attractive enough to go home with he very much internalized that as like I am unattractive there's something wrong with me I failed in my masculinity somehow and that reminder that women are people it's not just about how do you become a more attractive um proposition though I think that of course people who are relaxed in themselves you know that's a very attractive quality it was also about changing the way he saw himself and it opened up possibilities of all kinds of relationships

sexual romantic and also friendships as well i mean yeah matt what do you what do you sort of make of that thing about mirrors to the self because we often talk about that in relation to women and body image issues and the pressures on performing a certain kind of femininity but like how does that context of social media and always being bombarded with you know the sort of doppelganger that you've created for yourself online, does that play out in specific ways for straight men? Speak for your people. I will speak for my people. I think it does put pressure on men as well, increasingly. I think there's just, with social media, there's just a bombardment of advice. With social media, there's just a bombardment of advice.

Often a lot of it is misguided and unhelpful. But even if you look at the, I don't know, beauty and cosmetics, for instance, I mean, that's a kind of growing industry now for men, telling them basically to be more concerned about their appearance, that that's the kind of key to unlocking success with romantic relationships. Or I don't know if you've heard of the phrase looks maxing. What's looks maxing? Basically, this idea that you have to try and improve your appearance to maximise your appearance in any way possible. your appearance in to maximize your appearance in any way possible so that might be exercises to accentuate your jawline or even just just going to the gym or in more extreme circumstances going

under the knife and actually having some sort of procedure to make yourself look more physically attractive but it's sort of taken to extremes and I'm going to fence it a bit on your theory and say I think it's not it's not a bad piece of advice but actually I think the key is more how can we get to a place where authenticity is sort of valued by men and women and how can we get to a place where um authenticity is sort of the goal for both of us so that we can do away with all this this game playing this strategizing um and ultimately get to what i think we all really want which is you know healthy and thriving relationships where we have all authenticity honesty respect respect, healthy communication,

you know, trust, forgiveness. I think all of this kind of gets us further and further away from that. And I think we need to move forward with that by doing away with a lot of the kind of stereotypes around masculinity and gender roles. And maybe there is a bit of that mirror image of saying you know don't worry about this so much but also um you know how how can we get to a place where also men are encouraged to work on their own sort of personal development as well so that they can have emotional intelligence and maturity and and things like that. Moya how would you answer that question of how do we get to a place where authenticity is valued? It's really difficult

because there's two pillars for me for what it means to be authentic and what is authentic will change constantly throughout your life like Like, I think perhaps being authentic is living in a place where you are, for the most part, comfortable and confident in yourself as a person. And you can go into a space and feel happy with the way you proceeded in that space when you leave it without, and this might be controversial, without the influence of additional substances. And that's not saying you can't drink, you can't do drugs if you don't want to, if you do want to, but you don't need those things. You don't need any extra aids to go somewhere, feel confident in yourself and how you proceeded.

And when you make mistakes, and when you do things you regret you know how to handle them in a way that doesn't make you feel leave you with a long-lasting feeling of shame and uh i don't know anxiety but instead can either resolve them in a way that you're happy with and that you have like a wide circle of almost even a small circle of support basically i think an authentic person is somebody who can live not without regret but knows how to not let those regrets dominate their life and they live according to their principles rather than constant external validation that's just like my vague definition on the fly of what authentic is um but what i'm kind of interested in this might be a complete side note is i want to ask matt how many uh female friends he has because i'm really interested in this this thing in the first place it's like

if we want to go back to this initial premise and decentralization of um straight men straight women or just women in general um like how many you said you had a breakup recently how many women friends did you have during the relationship how many women friends do you have now because I've noticed with the very scant completely straight men I have as friends there's one or two bisexuals in there but again quite scant like most of the men I'm friends with are gay men um they tend to disappear during their relationships and then come back. And I don't hold that against them, but I am aware it's because I think with, from what I've heard, the friendships that often straight men have with other men,

they don't tend to have like an emotional depositing ground. What's your emotional, where do you talk about emotions? Like who are the people you go to on talk about emotions apart from on podcast yes solely on podcast I just go to as many podcasts as I can um no uh I think it's yeah probably mostly the the female friends in my life that I talked to about emotional issues. Some men as well, but I think a lot of male friendships tend to be somewhat skewed towards doing activities, going to the cinema,

going to a gig where there's less scope, I guess, to kind of get really deep in the weeds um and you know and and therapy essentially I think without without kind of therapy I think it would be quite quite difficult for me to express emotional needs or or kind of personal issues and I think that's that's something borne out in statistics as well I mean if you look at statistics around mental health and um you know even suicide rates for men under 40 like they're super they're really really high and it's it it's basically kind of underscores just how difficult it is for men to not only identify that they're having trouble but actually seeking out help when they are in trouble there's also a reciprocity to it I mean just as you were saying that a notification flashed up on my phone

uh a voice note from one of my straight male best friends and I know that the content of that voice note is going to be all about emotional connection um and I don't know if this is unusual but it's a very distinct feature of my my life that you know in terms of the very close friends I have where we lean on each other emotionally and actually the main activity you do together is talking about what's going on in your life that's about 50% straight men some are single aren't, some are people who have known since school, some are people who have met more recently. And I think that there is a cultural change that's going on about what a normal level of explicit emotional interact you know interaction is for men i think that baseline is beginning to change and that's for the better and i think that that's where

some of this stuff about you know do you perceive the opposite sex as this sort of totally alien you know other or do you see them as human beings much in the same way as you are that's the place where it can begin to break down it's through how friendships change your perception and then I think you can take that out and that can inform how you make romantic and sexual connections I I'm afraid we're going to have to break up with you now, Matt, and chuck you back into the dog eat dog world of dating and romantic connection. But where can the people find you if they want to hear more of what you've got to say? So they can find us, both myself and my co-host Reist, on the Love Cupboard podcast, which is on all good podcast platforms. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at the Love Cupboard. Well, we will leave you to the Love Cupboard. Matt, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Right. Problem solving time. Dear If I Speak, I was living in a house owned by my best friend's mum. We lived there together during our postgrad. They moved out, but I stuck around and a few other friends moved in. Then my friend's parents decided they don't want to keep the house anymore and evicted me and my housemates.

The terms of the eviction were fairly reasonable, three months notice, last month rent free, but an eviction is an eviction and leaving a home when you don't want to still sucks. I lived in that house for three and a half years and it really felt like home. A week or so after I told my friends I'd been evicted, another one of my best friends who'd been in the house with me for a year approached my landlord about buying the house. It's going ahead as it was a convenient sale for both of them and my friend already knows they like living there. It's been really painful for me. The thought of going back to that house as a guest or showing up to a housewarming party makes me feel a bit ill. My homeowner friend said I can move back in as their lodger in a year or so but I've already moved all my stuff into my new house

and I'm not sure how I feel about having a friend as a live-in landlord in a house that was once my home. I always knew I would start to see friends with generational wealth become homeowners at this age, it was always going to sting but I didn't think it would ever get this close to home, pun intended, pun received. Having one friend's parents evict me then another completely separate friend buy the house has been a weird sort of double whammy. I felt a lot of pressure to hide my negative feelings from both friends, especially the buying friend. How upset am I allowed to be? So to sum up the dilemma, I lived in a house with a couple of other people, owned by another friend's parents. Parents evicted them, and then a friend who lived in the house bought

the house and now this letter writer is feeling really bad about it ash how upset are they allowed to be well i think this is an interesting one because there's sort of two dimensions to it right one is how are you supposed to feel and create a sense of home when the economic context that you live in means that that process is really precarious particularly if you're a renter because there are five cities in the uk where the average rent increase is going up more than the rate of inflation. So I think that's Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and London. It's of course where a lot of young people live. And your rights are just really in the toilet. There is very little enforcement of what few rights that renters do have are and

you know landlords want to sell up for whatever reason they want to cash in on their investment they're basically risk-free investment because someone else has been paying off the mortgage costs for them and then they get to just eat up all that lovely lovely uh inflated asset value and so if you're the renter in that context, how do you feel that your home is secure, which is such a basic psychological need? How do you feel that the place where you live is really yours and you're not going to have to move and find another place to live in six months, 12 months? I mean, that is just an inherently destabilizing thing. So, you know, apparently destabilizing thing. So, you know, no wonder our dilemma sender is feeling upset,

because on top of that, they've got this sort of social stratification that's playing out within their social group. So they're left in this really financially precarious situation, that precarity has involved finding a new home and yet they're seeing that their friends because of intergenerational wealth are having a very very different kind of experience so in terms of how upset are you allowed to be the answer is well you're going to be quite upset um it's not a question of permission you just are because you know i think that if you were to model these conditions on like rhesus monkeys in a lab somewhere those would be some really fucking stressed out rhesus monkeys so you know of course the same is gonna be the case for you for me the

interesting bit and this is what i'm really um keen to hear your thoughts on moya is this idea of how much of that can you share with your friends who are in a financially different position and in a way have at you know a sort of societal level benefited from the sort of economic precarity that you're experiencing how do you express that to your friends how do you you be real about your feelings without capturing your friends in a dynamic of guilt and shame? That's the thing I can't wait to hear you hold forth on. Why did you leave the hardest bit for me?

Why do I have to hold forth on that? I will, but why? Yeah, just to reiterate what you said, it's not a case of how allowed are you to be upset, how upset are you allowed to be? You will be upset, whatever happens. Just want to underline what Ash said there. You are going to be upset.

There are several things here. We talked about this a bit in, I think, a previous episode about the economic schism that will divide your friend groups and i was actually discussing this really recently i discuss it a lot because every time i think about the next time i get evicted and how rubbish that will be when it definitely comes i think where am i going to move to it'll be either the outskirts of london or i just have to go i'll just have to leave like I don't have money for that and we were talking about this new concept that's emerging which is friendlanthropy I'm

calling it because it particularly emerges in the housing sector because as we pointed out there is a lot of millennials who are actually going to become very wealthy soon or have the assets because the boomers are dying off and they are going to inherit those assets it's going to be completely inequitable the way that that inheritance works this is not a meritocracy uh this is not a situation where the economic goods are going to be redistributed equally some of us are going to be really rich and have assets suddenly and some of us are going to be redistributed equally. Some of us are going to be really rich and have assets suddenly. And some of us are going to stay in the exact same place and it's going to suck.

That's what's happened to you. So we, yeah, so this friend philanthropy thing that I'm seeing with housing is a lot of people our age hold like superficial, at least left-wing positions. Some of us are quite committed so when

they inherit this wealth there is this idea of what we're going to do that obviously i'm going to buy a house like i'm gonna and there's there's no because we we live in a very very restricted system it's like you either rent or you buy and unless you have loads and loads of money to suddenly buy up a whole street of houses and turning to some sort of co-op, then what I'm seeing, the way people invest their money is they will buy a house and they will let a friend live there. And this is what I mean by friendlanthropy. You, and I'm seeing it in this letter, which is, for example, someone buys a house and they say you can live here, the rent for you, you can live here for a reduced amount of money.

But it is totally relying on interpersonal dynamic and it is not secure in any way. And it causes resentment and still worry because at any point you could fall out with your friend. It is, I think, even worse than philanthropy because it's not just this idea of like faceless charitable donating. It is charitable donating that puts your interpersonal relationship and your dynamic at the center. And you, whatever happens, have to get on with your housemate from then on. You are living under their roof. You are having to tread in a way that means that if you fall out with them, you might become homeless. And people say, no, that will never happen. That will never happen. It happens all the fucking time. People are unpredictable.

You never know how your feelings will change. We, you know, we are a species that is often prone to impulsive, irrational, egotistical decisions. And I do see it a lot that there's this living situation and someone has more power in the dynamic and it changes and then someone is homeless that that happens all the time in breakups in friendships um so in the letter the letter writer says you know they offered to be they said i could be their live-in lodger i don't think it's just the fact you've moved all your stuff to another home that is causing you stress about that is the idea of being totally at the will of your friend in that house you might be paying money but you're still you know there's a power dynamic that stops you being on an equal level and that is really distressing as well but i also want to flip this because

the friend that has bought the house also lived in that house they also have viewed that house as their home so this is another thing with house shares when you have multiple people living in that house who has the claim to that house it's not fair that they have the money to buy the house. It's not, you know, there was a raffle and someone just got a name and that's fine. It's all democratic or whatever. They have the wealth to buy it, but they view it as much as their house as you have viewed it, your house. That's the problem. house that's the problem so i imagine that as well is very difficult when you're trying to discuss this with your friends and when you're trying to say you know this is making me feel a way because they can just be like well i live there too this is my house if you bought it up um and there is also this level of like pseudo politeness that surrounds discussions of finance and money when someone has more money it's almost vulgar to reference that you're really stinking rich and you just bought a fucking house you'll talk about behind their back you'll be like

this bitch just bought a house like damn she's doing she's fine she's living but to their face you just got to be like well done that's amazing congratulations um because it's it's kind of considered rude to point out these discrepancies and especially if it's money that's unearned you just kind of be like well that's really relieving for you that's really relieving for you you know from the friends who have bought houses around me it's weird i don't actually envy them that much because it's just so far away from my realms of possibility i have to work to find the empathy when they complain about stuff which is like you know actually costs way more to do this.

And I'm like, yeah, but bitch, you've now got a house. You've now got a secure asset. You have an asset. The question of how do you discuss this with your mates? How do you stop this from pulling yourselves apart? And I don't know if there's like a really one size fits all answer here. The first thing is you're upset. the second thing is you want to tell them you're upset you want them to know that you're sad about this and you don't feel like there's an outlet to do this and that is sort of that is that is like the real um sticking point here that you can't express and this is the probably one of the first points of major

difference within your friend group by the sound of it that two people have these houses or like their parents have a house and then one of them's bought the house and then everyone has to be happy about it and this is the first time where the people that you normally go to to talk about something that upsets you they are the source of the issue um i would just genuinely be honest and say look i really understand that this is not your fault um that you've bought this house and that it's also your home. I just want to say to you, I'm struggling a bit because it makes me sad that I will never, not never,

it makes me sad that I can't envisage at this moment being in the same position and I don't have someone secure to live. And I know you've offered to let me be your lodger and I would love to think about that some more, but I'm not in an immediate position to say yes because of X, Y, Z and all these reasons. And I I'm telling you this not because I want you to feel guilty or ashamed that you've been able to do this but because I want to be honest with you and clear the air and I'll add

one more thing which is that my friend um my friends who are in programs like AA they have this thing called a resentments list that they do in, I think, step four. And I've recently thought I need to do this because you write out your resentments and some of them you do like analysis, sorry for anyone in AA who thinks I'm actually butchering this, by the way, but the basic premise is you write out your resentments and you kind of analyze particularly what about those things you resent. And it always comes back to something to do with you. And this is obviously a social problem that you've been stuck in the middle of and I don't think it's up to you to have to you know suddenly be all happy for your friends and

put all this aside but getting that stuff out and saying it out loud like you've done here like you type to us but also finding a way to express it to people really does help like um disassociate that resentment and that will make your friendship stronger in the long run because unfortunately there is nothing you can do on a material level at this point that will fix the problem like being able to buy your own house all you can do is control how you communicate this resentment and how you i don't know process it with your friends because that's kind of the only way forward unless you want to do a massive life blow up and just like exit from them,

which I don't advise on any level. See, this is why I asked you for the difficult bit of advice because you're really good. I think, however, that is all we have time for this week. Moya, you've been great. You're always great. What if I was shit?

Would you tell me if I was shit, Ash? Not while we were recording. Once I said to a therapist, I was like, can you give me some feedback that isn't good? And she was like, I think, and her feedback was, you always want people to criticize you. Read to shit. You walked straight into that one. Yeah yeah and that was the only piece of

useful constructive criticism she actually gave me she didn't criticize me enough anyway ash you also have been great so this is just now a circle jerk oh my god i love you so much oh my god um and we also love you so much and we'll be back next week this has been if i speak thank you so much for tuning in bye