If I Speak - 09: Should you ever shag a Tory?

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Ash and Moya tackle the politics of sex appeal in response to the show’s first ever Mystery Question, and respond to a listener struggling with guilt after cheating. Plus: things not say in bed. Catch Moya in conversation with Yomi Adegoke, author of The List, at Intelligence Squared in London on 29 April – use […]

Hello, If I Speakers! A quick, exciting message from me, Moya. On the 29th of April, I'm going to be interviewing best-selling author Yomi Adegoke, live in London for Intelligence Squared. And in partnership with them, we're giving all If I Speak listeners 25% off tickets. That's right, 25%. If you're yet to read Yomi's amazing novel, The List, it follows a high-profile journalist who's made her name uncovering abuse scandals in the age of Me Too. But when her fiancé is named

in a list of anonymous allegations, online politics becomes personal. I read this book the moment it came out and it is massively thought-provoking. I'll be interviewing Yomi about life lived online, social justice, victim blaming, trust and forgiveness. To get 25% off tickets for the event, click the link in description or visit the Intelligence Squared website at intelligencesquared.com forward slash attend and use the code SPEAK25. I'll repeat that, use the code SPEAK25. See you there. Hello and welcome to another brand new episode of If I Speak. With me, as always, is my shotgun writer, Moya Lothian-McLean.

Moya, how are you doing? I had a stress dream about recording If I Speak last night. What was the stress stream we were meant to record and every time we sat down something kept getting in the way of the recording and I had another podcast to record afterwards and I kept having to text them to push it back at one point our producer chow threw a party because there were lots of people in the room and that disrupted the recording um and then i woke up and was like oh gotta go record if i speak i had a stress dream last night as well but it's a recurring stress dream that i have where for some reason i've got to drive my mom's car and i can't drive and i've got to like try not to crash it and i'm going all right which one's the accelerator and which one's the brake and what

does the clutch do and then it combined with another one of my stress dreams that I have where like I have something stuck to the inside of my mouth and I'm trying to like get it out without pulling away like all my gum and palate so both these things were happening at the same time and I was like wow two stress dreams in one what do they mean beyond stress like what is the overarching thing to take from that what can you read into that um i think the car dream is always about some sense of responsibility so i've either got a responsibility that i'm simply not prepared for like driving a car or i've got to drive a car because it's part of being responsible for someone else and

the mouth teeth thing is just like a recurring motif in my dreams and i think generally it's sort of a sense of you've not looked after yourself properly and now your mouth is falling out of your face because i just read um the word for wildest forest ursula lewin sorry i'm reading a lot of ursula lewin at the moment which is obviously the novella. And one of the big themes in that novella is the Assythians, I might be saying that wrong, dreaming is part of their waking consciousness. And they say that humans are asleep half their lives because we ignore our dreams or we go to sleep

and we don't remember it. But for them, dreaming is a part of like language and communication, how they process the world actively, which was very interesting to think about that can you can you lucid dream absolutely not i can barely lucid awake so i can i can lucid dream sometimes wow how did you cultivate that good i don't know i don't know how it happened but I think it's because I'm quite a light sleeper so I can be in that state of like maybe a bit awake or like there's some kind of ability to shape what I'm thinking in dream form so I've had some fucking amazing dreams before because I'm like this is a dream so anything can happen I've scored the winning goal in a world cup against Argentina like that was amazing i've had so many excellent celebrity

sex dreams because i'm like why not why not why not i'm in control i feel like lucid dreaming one way you could look at it is obviously like we just talked about that it's a really good extension of your consciousness and you should take it as as important as the way you walk through the world like when you're awake but the other thing is having these dreams torture almost because you're having all these amazing experiences and then you wake up and they're not real but i suppose if you think about it the former way then it's it is real in some forms anyway yeah i mean it wasn't torture it wasn't torture i was like oh my god i can't believe that like i was playing as a defender and successfully like marking lean l messy and then miraculously scored the winning goal like who is your celebrity sex dream about

i can't say but there's lots of them that will be one of my questions in future episodes speaking of which it's time for our traditional icebreaker which is vogue's 73 questions minus 70 so moya what have you got for me after our conversation i'm just seeing my questions and saying number one who's the person in your celebrity sex dreams obviously um okay um the most recent one. The most recent one was a guy off that Korean game show, Physical 100. I've never seen this. I've never seen this. And that's not a celebrity. That is a cop out. Sorry. That is a reality show star. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because in South Korea, he's a celebrity. He's like a south korean actor okay so he's just like mega hot and sort of like comedically chiseled i think his name is like jay yoon or something

and i realized that i was dreaming and i was like remember that hot dude from that program you were watching during one of your sort of depression snoozes let's get him involved what's this show called physical 100 physical oh you got physical physical i got physical who's in it where do i find where do i find this lad okay search for like lee j yoon lee j i'm not i'm probably not gonna find him i'm gonna have to do this he's a hot man i'm gonna have to do this i'm gonna have to do this in my spare time and come back to you and but i'm sure he is gorgeous and I'm jealous that you can lucid dream because I would, me and Ryan Gosling would have some fun. I'll just say that.

Okay, question two. Question two. What item would you save first from a fire? To the Fire Brigade people, I know I don't want to do this. This is just for the sake of the questions. What item would you save first? My husband, housemate and cat are all safe they're all safe they're outside being like get the fuck out stop getting stuff okay um because it would have to be something irreplaceable

would it what did your mind go to first no because first i thought laptop well there you go there you go well no no it'd be laptop but you can you can replace the laptop and obviously like everything's like saved to the cloud and shit so it'd have to be something which is like completely irreplaceable or one of a kind um okay it's a ceramic tile thing which shows uh you know the virgin mary and jesus it belonged to my mom's best friend sarah and it's the thing that i have from her so it's a it's a black madonna and child and i think she got it somewhere in southern italy and so i can literally never get another one of these because it was hers and she passed away that's a very beautiful thing to save and better than your

laptop so better than your laptop okay question three what's your go-to quick weekday dinner oh go-to quick weekday dinner gotcha jang noodles nice what do you you like them you're talking about this recently you with your oyster sauce are you quite a big fan of uh east asian cooking at home i am and you know what's really fun is you can make biang biang noodles really easily so those are the thick chewy ones my favorites all you need is salt all purpose flour and water the ratio of flour to water is two to one and then it's all about how you work the dough so if you're working from home which i know you do sometimes moya because i work with you

you can make your own biang biang noodles and it's really fun because you're like slapping them against the countertop. Maybe I will. I'm in my cooking era at the moment because I don't date and I can't go on TikTok all the time. So I cook quite a lot. Maybe I will make some biang biang noodles. Oh, we should do a cooking section sometimes on the show. Oh my God, I would love that so much. Those are my questions.

the show okay oh my god i would love that so much those are my questions well it is time for us to move on and it's time for our very first mystery question so the idea here is that chow who is our wonderful long-suffering producer i like to think of her as like a silent partner you know she's always there pulling the puppet strings which make us dance for an audience so the idea is that chow will rattle the proverbial cages ruffle some feathers by asking us a question that we've got literally no idea what it's going to be so chow what have you got for us i want do a drum roll, but I fear that Chow will get annoyed about the sound it will make. Ooh. I heard a ding.

Mystery question. Should you ever shag a Tory? Oh, okay. Moya, I think this one's more for you. Why? Because I'm a married woman to a communist and i also have never shagged a tori knowingly i've shagged a tori next should you have a shag a tori uh

this question comes up a lot and i suppose it really is the ultimate is the personal political kind of question, which marries sexual behavior with social mores. And I don't think it's that big deal to shag a Tory personally. Actually, do you know what? It depends on the type of Tory when you were shagging the Tory. But when we say shag a Tory, a shag can be a one time sexual experience. It doesn't mean you endorse the person you're having sex with. when you were shagging the Tory, but when we say we shag a Tory, a shag can be a one-time sexual experience. It doesn't mean you endorse the person you're having sex with. It doesn't mean that you take on their values. Although me and my friend used to have a joke

that if you have sex with someone, then you have their skills for 24 hours. So if you shag a doctor, we used to be like, well, I'm a doctor for 24 hours. Like you've imbibed them by having sexual intercourse um but i i think the idea that like there's something wrapped up in this about purity isn't there i think what's wrapped up in it is the idea that sex is a reward

right it's like a medal that you're giving out and you're you're placing around someone's neck and that yeah sex is an endorsement of somebody that you're saying something about them and who they are by having sex with them. And I suppose the thing I'd say is, well, sometimes you are and sometimes you're not. Yeah, if I was endorsing everyone I've had sex with, then my rap sheet would be really checkered. I don't think- Like the evil you have done in't think like the evil you have done in this world

the evil you've done in this world is enough because and probably vice versa because you don't know the way that our current sexual marketplace whatever you want to call it works landscape works is that you are often having casual encounters however you want to frame that but casualized without an ongoing relationship with someone so you're not going to find out everything about that person their past their future um in one night you're probably just going to get some headline information and often when i shag the tory i haven't known the retory until afterwards i will say that as I've got older and I don't really drink on dates, um, well, I don't drink on first dates at all anymore. Um, because I like to go and roll.

Um, I would say as I got older and you know, these things that have been taken away that usually would be social lubricators or would overcome these gulfs and perhaps flatten the person in front of me into someone else and make me ignore warning signs, if you want to call it that, then it's less likely a shagatory. And I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, after I had a breakup, I went to a pub and this guy was really hitting on me and he was quite cute. Like he was quite cute, but he was also quite drunk and something about him, like I was attracted, but something about him was just saying to me, don't like, don't give in, maybe it's the wrong word,

but don't commit yourself to this encounter yet. Like just wait it out a bit i wasn't pushing him away and i wasn't saying no i was sitting down talking to him but i was like so there's some warming warning bells coming off here and the more i talked to him all i realized that not only was he very drunk he was also like coked up and and then he just started saying some really like fucking weird stuff and eventually just showed me unannounced a complete nude of himself like just shows me him naked which obviously made me go this is fucked um and then i kept talking to him because i was really interested in the mindset that would make him

do something like that because he kept switching between like him talking about how he gets anxious and like he doesn't know how to be himself around people um and then doing like five minutes of stand-up comedy he was reading off his phone and i was by this point just fascinated in the psyche of such a person who was so clearly like troubled and not at home with themselves but was switching between bravado and just deep insecurity that he was letting out because he was massively coked up and drunk. And in his parting words, he started just being a dick to me because he felt rejected because I wasn't going for it.

But his parting thing was that he was not only, he was a card-carrying Tory party member. And he says something else. It might've been about immigration. I don't want to libel him. But it was like, you're a hard right Tory. And it was just very interesting how those two things intersected and i think the thing is as well the tory party has massively changed so the kind of young men that i would be dealing with now who are in the tory party now is probably more of an offense to my

left-wing peers and and me to like have sex and wanting to engage in relations with them because of the views we presume they hold then it would have been even 10 years ago when it would have been distasteful but like okay but now the Tory party is so far like hard right and to sign up to them and still be part of them is seen as like you have to be pretty extreme as a young person to want to be part of this political organization i think it does take on different connotations but i also think that it depends on the type of sex sure relationship sexual relationship you're having with this person whether you should shag a tory or not so one of the things that it really did take the entirety of my twenties to work this out about

myself is that I had to find people attractive in certain ways in order to have good sex with them. And it meant that actually a lot of the time with like one night stands or just like meeting someone when I was out on a night out, I wasn't having good sex. Like I wasn't having sex that I was like, okay, just like from a purely physical point of view, this is enjoyable. And it's because, you know, the things that I found attractive about them were relatively shallow. So it didn't have the kind of connection and curiosity and the like, oh my God, I feel really drawn to you. That is for me just such a key ingredient of having good sex. So I think that that is different for other people.

And for some people that can have really, really good sex with someone who that they've, someone they've just met. And so whether or not they're a Tory or whether or not they share values with you, isn't going to matter as much. Whereas for me, without that kind of connection, values with you isn't going to matter as much. Whereas for me, without that kind of connection, curiosity, seeing them in a few different contexts, just my body doesn't want to body, you know, like I just sort of be so checked out of the experience that I couldn't experience a great deal of pleasure. I could experience a sense of validation of like, oh, well, you found me attractive enough for this thing to happen. But I couldn't experience pleasure. And one of the outcomes of that was that when I would sort of try and almost like fast track

that connection by like asking questions and initiating a bit more of a conversation to be like, I need this in order to have sex with you. People would be like, this isn't what I'm after. Like I'm after like, you know, a relatively shallow one night stand. So I think coming back to the core question of like, should you shag a tourie? The thing I'd say is if you're like me and you actually need some of that personality stuff

and you need to see them in some different contexts and you need to feel a in some different contexts and you need to feel a sense of you know values alignment but also enough difference to keep things exciting then probably not but i think if you're somebody where there are other forms of curiosity which are motivating you to have sex with somebody and you don't need to feel that you really vibe on like a political level or a values level then be my guest just going through the bad sex and the good sex i've had in my life also as i've got older um the sex i have now is mostly good sex because for the similar reasons as you there has to be certain things in place for me to

want to even engage in sex in the first place and usually that leads to having quite a good sexual experience but i'm thinking about whether i've aligned politically some of the best sex i've had in recent months has been with people where i've left and been like hmm that man was probably quite a misogynist. There's one story. There's one story that I love to tell and I can't tell in full because it's quite explicit. And I know my family- Names change to protect the guilty.

Not even the names. I know my family listened to this podcast and I don't want to give out identifying details, but let's just say at a critical moment, this person was having so much fun. It was amazing sex. This person was having so much fun that they yelled out in their native language some things.

And afterwards I asked, oh, what did you say? What did you say? Because it wasn't English. And I was like, what did you say? And they were like, oh, what did you say? What did you say? Like, cause it, cause it wasn't English. And I was like, what did you say? And they were like, oh, you know, like you dirty slut. Like you fucking whore. And I was like, what the fuck?

And then I was like, the feminism left your body, huh? And they were like, no, no, no, that's normal. And I think if you're at that moment where you're so unguarded, what you're saying is you come filled rack like in your native language and you're just like totally relaxed and that's what comes out i don't think that's normal i think that is a sign of deep deep misogyny and disregard for the woman that you're having sex with but did i enjoy it fuck yeah so i wouldn't be aligned the key question is would you do it again with that person absolutely 100 100 i would go back we don't live in the same country though but like if i'm back in their city i will i would hit them

up but i think the tory thing in the, probably not if I knew they were Tory, I wouldn't have sex with a Tory. But I also don't, I'm not attached to this question the way a lot of like leftists are, where they're like, is it bad to have sex with a Tory? It's really politically bad. I think no. I think that the question of,

by having sex with someone, are you endorsing them as a person? It's actually quite complicated. Like it is complicated because there are elements of endorsement sometimes and there aren't at other times. And I think that trying to fashion some kind of consistent rule of it's always like this just doesn't stack up. So I think that it's so context dependent.

And part of that context is the political context like is sex a reward yeah is sex a reward it's like well sometimes it is sometimes it is for me it's a little treat for me yes it's like a i've had a i've done a very good day at work please no after work i don't want to have sex i want to this is also a bugbear in my life like my when when i most want to have sex is usually like when i'm awake in the day and at night it's like no it's sleep it's sleep and book now please like have some fucking respect i don't i don't like not not in the nighttime mornings yeah phenomenal great love we're awake here we're awake and now we can go but like nighttime apps no i'm tired i've had a long day i've been to the gym please let me let me be

if i'm tired please i just want to watch star trek yeah this is unwind time this is not wind the up time i mean i think that i mean okay i've got a question for you which is what are the non-physical characteristics that make you go absolutely feral for somebody? Non-physical characteristics. When they're, okay, so this is the thing I say a lot, sense of humor, but everyone says that. But what a sense of humor says to me is when it aligns with yours,

it usually means you view the world in quite a similar way because you find the same things funny. That's how I see it. You have a similar perspective. So if we're laughing at the same shit it usually to me says it doesn't even mean that we're like same political alignment but it usually does mean there's some similar way of perceiving the world around you and some common ground there that you can build on and that if we're having sex and i don't know something funny happens that we'll both be able to laugh at it in the same way because we'll consider the same points funny um which isn't a given it's just like

sense of humor is a massive one if you can make me laugh i am putty in your hands uh i want to say intelligence but intelligence is subjective again but it's a certain type of sharpness one thing that i have found with like some of the men i date or have dated is they're all really super smart but they are threatened when someone can match them like one of my exes says you're too sharp like you'll cut everyone um which i took as a compliment but that's because i'm deeply mentally diseased but it was the idea that like i was too sharp i was too quick and i needed to like dull that edge a little bit but if you can kind of like go toe-to-toe if you can go toe-to-toe on bird law

we're jamming um what else do i find sexy uh unfortunately arrogance a little bit of entitlement the ability to phone a restaurant and ask for a reservation when you know it's why does this keep coming up moya because why does this keep coming one of the things i like with men it's it's not a certain like physicality i find sexy although my friends say that i go for whatever the ethnicity traditional hunks which is hilarious and so basic but there's always a certain like sort of cheek i want to say cheekiness and ability to like sort of slightly rip the piss out of me but also maybe like a caringness there as well it's interesting but there is definitely a thread of entitlement that has run through my exes and a slight

a slight sort of control issue i have my own control issues but i would say all of them are very sort of like confident on the surface often riddled by deep insecurity but we're very like this is where we're going this is a good place to eat this is that this is that still allowing me to like feed in and build those things and wanting to know about me but there was always that element of they could take charge and they could drive what about you have i ever dated anyone who can drive can your husband not drive as well no we're both virgins who can't drive wow i mean that's not a

bad thing he taught me how to ride a bike though he taught me how to ride a bike when we were in lockdown oh yeah that was so that was adorable see that's very that's a very big act of love and care yeah i know it nearly split us up because um not not because of anything he did because of how i reacted to the indignity of learning to ride a bike at the age of 28 and so he was obviously very very patient and he was like you know okay so we're gonna try this now and then if i'd like fall over i'd be like why are you making me do this like terrible activity and he's like it was your idea and you asked me to you might credence learning to drive with that experience because that's the same experience people would go through with their parents just yelling at them for teaching them a new skill

i mean i thought no one no wonder the idea of being in a car is one of my anxiety dreams i think in terms of like non-physical characteristic that makes me go feral it is something that manifests differently according to different people's personality so it's different in introverts than it is in extroverts but it is the sense of someone knowing exactly who they are and being at peace with it and being very grounded and centered in themselves and i've seen this quality in introverts and gone absolutely crazy for it. I've seen it in extroverts and I'm like, oh my God, yes. But that is the quality that will make me want to do absolutely unspeakable things to them, like absolutely unspeakable. And it like absolutely unspeakable and it takes a little

bit of time to discern I think like I know quite quickly when someone doesn't have it right and it would just be maybe a way they talk or like a trying to get in too quickly because they want to come across like the smartest person or you know you can tell when there is that discomfort going on and it's a discomfort with themselves and a discomfort with presenting themselves socially but it takes a little bit of time to detect whether the positive case is there and I think that's why I just was never that good at the one night stands like you know I can't really look back at that time and go yeah the funnest thing about that night was sex that lots of things were fun around it flirtation dancing sense of adventure sense of

possibility but the actual sex itself was never as fulfilling or satisfying as when I'd had that time to see if someone had that quality that I find truly, truly attractive. That's very interesting. Do you go for that quality because you yourself feel like you know who you are and you feel really centered and you want someone who can match that? Or do you go for it because you want someone who can sort of like teach you the skills of how to know who you are? I think that's changed over time. So when I was initially finding it really, really attractive, I had no fucking idea who I was. You know, it was like Greek theater where the masks keep falling to the floor and I'm like, ah, like which self am I going

to try and be today? Whereas now I've got a much better idea of who I am, that bit older, I've made certain decisions, very at peace with what those decisions are. And I find that quality in my husband to be reinforcing of something that's already good. And what's interesting is that people do change when you're in a relationship with them. And normally you tell this story as like a tragedy, right? People change when you're with them, they start out exciting story as like um a tragedy right people change when you're with them they start out exciting and then they become boring farts not always true you can see

how stability and security within the context of a relationship can allow other character traits to sort of like bloom into view in a way which is really really beautiful so like when i first met my partner i mean he came across very intelligent very poised quite suave um but he wasn't very silly you know like witty but not goofy not silly he is now the goofiest motherfucker on the planet and not just with me but with lots of other people as well and i think it's because that being such a part of our relationship is something we really really love about each other and one of our favorite things about how we spend time together and then makes him more confident in expressing that to other people and not feeling like he's sacrificing his respectability

yeah like his respectability and i think that you you have sometimes in jest called me a wife guy. And I do feel like a little bit of an evangelist for commitment, because I think that when commitment is done well, right? And that's, of course, a very, very big if. I think it can allow and facilitate really good changes in you. It's not the absence of change and it's not the death of change, but it's sort of the facilitation of change we but we need you to be a wife guy this could not just be a podcast with me being like a single guy and you being a wife like you being a single guy too we have to have a wife guy and we have to have the counterbalance we have to have the yin and yang of the interpersonal relationship a wife's guy and a fuck boy i'm not a fuck i wish i was a fuck boy actually i don't wish i was a fuck boy i don't have it in me but i'm not sadly i'm not

a fuck boy uh it's just i don't have the time i'm too busy i actually work comes first i'm a girl boss i'm a girl boss workaholic no i don't have time to be a fuck boy um so should you shag a tourie yes or no i feel like we both landed at maybe but probably not maybe gray area uh should you shag a tori yes if you want to if it doesn't impact your personal principles and the way that you carry yourself in the world and you can do it without feeling bad shag a tori but i think thinking back on the sex that i've had all of the Tory encounters have been bad sex so that's it's like not all of my encounters would not all of my bad sex has been with Tories but all of the Tories have been bad sex that's all I'll say and that's science baby

it's time for I'm in big trouble which is our audience dilemma segment our audience dilemma segment named by one of our audience this is an interactive podcast also remember if you want to weigh in on advice for this you can leave comments either on twitter or there's a little box on spotify where you can type it in or even on instagram we actually want to hear what you think of the advice we're giving to the listeners so please please let us know whether you think we're right or wrong or somewhere in the middle a secret third way dear if i speak i'd like your opinions on carrying shame with grace and healing as a perpetrator i emotionally cheated on my partner we've been together for a few years i don't want to give too much context because i'm still unpacking where i am slipping into excuses

and where i'm trying to take accountability. What I will say is that my fear of conflict and confusion about the relationship informed some bad decisions. The work unpacking this sits with me. What I'm struggling with is the desperate need to feel I am being punished, a sickening feeling when I'm having a nice time and the scrabble to find a goal, task or plan I can follow to make me feel like I'm working towards repentance how do you carry the cognitive dissonance of self-acceptance and shame sincerely anonymous but according to our producer it was a male name which doesn't actually help because it depends whether like any names don't names don't because it depends whether like any names don't names don't signify gender because there's so many different like names you can apply across gender now but i let's just let's just say this

person for now so what do you think i've got a lot to say in this one but maybe you should go first i think you spent too much time with therapy speak for a start. There's a lot of therapy speak on this. And I don't know how useful it actually is. Like put down the thesaurus and let's actually chat. It's my first thought. So in preparation for addressing this dilemma today, I reacquainted myself with Esther Perel's The State of Affairs, which is truly, truly an excellent read. And I think that there's a lot in that book that would

be helpful for our emotional cheater here. The first thing that she talks about is shifting from shame to guilt. Because the problem with shame is that you're so wrapped up with your own feelings of being bad that you actually close down the space to feel bad for the other person and I think that there is a lot of that in the way this has been phrased to us right grace and healing as a perpetrator dealing with shame my fear of conflict my fear of confusion about the relationship unpacking this sits with me it's all very me me, me. And what guilt would be as opposed to shame in the words of Esther Perel is a relational dynamic when you're thinking about what does it mean to repair with my partner? Interestingly, it doesn't say in this dilemma whether or not the partner knows about what happened so whether there is a known breach of trust that you're having to repair together as a couple or whether this is a

shame that you're just carrying with you so you can always get in touch with us again and let us know and then the second thing that I was thinking about, and this was like taking some of the things that Esther Perel says and like running with it, is asking myself the question, what makes emotional cheating cheating? Because it's not like with, you know, sex, where you can say, I can point to this activity and say, this was a breach of the boundaries of fidelity. Emotional cheating is very, very complicated

because some of those behaviors in a different context would be completely fine. So the thing that I would say defines emotional cheating is that it's less what you did than how you felt when you were doing it. And that requires a level of self-reflection and asking yourself some really difficult questions about why you did what you did and understanding how you felt when you were doing it. in order to then embark on the process of repairing something with your partner. Something that I think is that we fall into the trap of going to explain a transgression. You have to identify what was missing in your relationship. So, you know, well, I was scared of conflict, right? There was too much conflict. Like I was confused about the relationship and whether or well I was scared of conflict right there was too much conflict like I was confused about the relationship and whether or not I wanted to be in it maybe what it was was less about being drawn to this other person more about being drawn to how

you felt when you were interacting with them so it's actually a version of yourself that you were interested in and i think that that opens up possibilities for thinking about how you can bring that other self that you enjoyed being into your relationship with your partner um that would be i guess the beginnings of my advice but yeah what defines emotional cheating isn't what you do it's what you feel when you're doing it it's difficult on this i don't think we have very good frameworks for who gets to forgive because we are we live in a very like victim rights orientated sort of setup in the west at least where it's like the onus is you know sometimes rightly on the person who's been harmed and the idea is that the person who's been harmed can dictate rationally what should happen now.

And that that will always be the right thing to do because it's how they feel. And they're the person who suffered harm, which, you know, politically at least isn't always true. you know politically at least isn't always true um and assumes that someone who's been harmed is going to be talking from a place of like just cool rationality and it's sort of like the eye for an eye thing and there's stuff that happens a lot within the victims rights movements that is i would say can really actually hurt a lot of victims wholesale in the future or is weaponized to bring in like really draconian laws and stuff like that. Um, but we have got this idea in our head that if you're a victim, you are the only person who can, um, decide or what's the word? decide or what's the word? No, it's not edict. Issue. That's the word. If you are a victim,

you are the only person who can issue a final proclamation on forgiveness, redemption, and what should happen. And I think if you're looking towards your partner or former partner, we don't know which for redemption, and that's the only place that you think you can get it and self-acceptance, then you might never get that and you might never get that redemption. And I'm not saying here, what you did was fine and they should just forgive you because that's not what I mean.

What I mean is that if you actually do wanna do the real work of understanding what you did, why you did it and moving forward, at some point you probably will have to forgive yourself and not wait on them. And you talk about self-acceptance, but I have a feeling that if it was actually about self-acceptance rather than waiting on redemption from someone else, you do that work a lot quicker. I have people who were formerly in my life who i think are waiting for some kind of redemption from me and it's irrelevant what i think of them it's irrelevant now how i feel about them and they should not look to me for redemption because

they might never get it they should look to themselves for that redemption and i know that sounds a bit stupid because you're like well some men will just forgive themselves immediately and some people will some people will some men And some people will, some people will, some men, some women, some ladies, like some people will just forgive themselves without actually doing any of the work. But from sending this letter, it sounds like you actually do want to grapple with that and grapple with what you did. But even by sending this, you're looking to us to try and like say, it's okay to forgive yourself. It's okay to redeem yourself. Well, I am saying that it's fucking annoying when you're around someone who's just like constantly trying to like repent and get this forgiveness and is on

reputation management tour they're not acting from because you know what builds then yeah resentment resentment resentment of the role that you've been you've assigned having to yeah you've assigned yourself so i again it's quite hard to give you like specific advice without knowing whether you're with your partner still or whether they're a former partner because it's like okay if you weren't with them maybe it's a case of trying to make these amends if they're rejected you have to say well i've you know i've tried that now i need to just focus on me it's kind of irrelevant what they think of me i need to look at these different pieces and first step is

forgive myself to accept that this is a you know something that happened to me um or something that i did and that's how you take responsibility but if you're with them then that's you know a whole other ball game there's other stuff you'll be doing there um but yeah how do you carry the cognitive dissonance of self-acceptance and shame when you actually have to do the self-acceptance first then the shame goes away i sometimes wonder if forgiveness is a bit of a blind alley and it doesn't actually take you to the place where you want to go and if you're still with your partner and the two of you are trying to work out how you repair this breach of trust something that comes up in mr parell's book the two of you are trying to work out how you repair this breach of trust. Something that comes up in Esther Perel's book, The State of Affairs,

is the different ways couples who stay together after an affair choose to deal with it. And she says, you know, there are what you might call survivors, where the wronged party is just trying to survive what's been done to them and move forward but they're so caught up in resentment they can't help but just replay the same old wounds over and over and one of the things she says of resentment is that it's like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die um you know and i think that wronged partners can very much find themselves stuck in that role. And actually, when you as the person who has transgressed is playing the part of the person seeking repentance, you can actually, I think, deepen that resentment rather than finding a way of washing it away. a way of washing it away um the second is what she calls um the builders where they're just trying to do whatever it takes to go back to what life was like before and that's obviously impossible you can never turn back the clock on anything and then there's a third category of

people who she calls the explorers now the explorers look at an affair as a shared crisis so it's no longer about your affair what you did to me it's an event but it's not the defining event of a relationship and instead it becomes our crisis and she draws a parallel between you know affairs and you know horrible catastrophes like when one person's diagnosed with cancer you know, affairs and, you know, horrible catastrophes. Like when one person's diagnosed with cancer, you know, there are lots of relationships that say that was a horrible time, but it brought us closer together. It allowed us to connect with one another and repair things with one another because we had to make choices about being together and in what way we were together and who we are to each other. And affairs, I think can play a similar

role. So I think if you're with your partner, you know, obviously timing is crucial. If they've just found out about this transgression saying, well, we need to turn this into our crisis. Like it's probably going to land you a punch in the nose. So like, don't do that. Um, but that's the sort of understanding that you need to get to which is repairing your relationship is a shared project and if it's not a shared project it's just not going to work you can't do it by yourself they can't do it by themselves and if you're not with your partner anymore actually there's still some of the exact same work that I think needs to be done, which is really understanding why you did what you did and not just locating it in a narrative about who was found lacking, whether that was you or

whether that was the partner you were with, but really understanding about why you felt the things that you felt and who you were able to become kind of, you know, in this third person's orbit. And I think one of the things about emotional affairs, which is so sticky is that often your partner can detect that something is going on because they know you very well. And they can detect that this erotic energy this romantic intrigue is being directed elsewhere but because it's an emotional affair and it maybe doesn't come with some of the physical indicators of like you know an unexplained night away or lipstick on the collar or whatever it is um you know it's much easier to live in denial of like nothing's

going on nothing's happening and you can end up i think separating someone from their perception of reality you introduce an aspect where they can't trust their perception of reality and i think that's something which if you're still together needs to be healed. Right. So it's not just about your relationship with them. It's also about saying maybe what you were detecting and your perceptions were right. You know, I interrupted your ability to connect with the truth. And that was as much of a breach of trust as the actual relationship I had with this other person. Do you think humans are monogamous?

It all just seems so hard, doesn't it? I just listened to all that and I was like, oh, it's all so much work. It's so much work. Why can't I just leave like my daddy did? You know what? Affairs happen in every single arrangement of relationship whether it's monogamous or open or polyamorous or whatever affairs still happen so i don't think that the constellation of people is either the prevention or the cause of affairs.

And I think that if you want to sort of understand why affairs happen, I wonder if it's about the flexibility of the relationship to accommodate change and changing desires and aspects of one's personality that you know are unruly or discordant within the dynamic of the relationship as it is and like you know don't get me wrong i affairs are really really painful things really really really painful but because they're so widespread i just don't think that the language of judgment and condemnation is enough i also don't think the language of permission is is good either because you're saying well everyone's got the car a car

blanch to hurt people and i'm saying neither of these things I'm saying there seems to be like a really stubborn fact of human existence. No matter how much permission you have to experience sex and love outside of a couple form, they always still seem to happen. Polyamorous people cheat. I've seen it done. Polyamorous people do cheat. They also wear terrible outfits a lot of the time.

All right. On that note after pissing off the poly community we love you we would be nowhere without you field would be non-existent i'm actually not on field out of respect for the poly and kink community that's their space i'm also not on hinge out of respect for just general people dating because i've got no business there um you mean look obviously it's been it's been a while since i've been on the apps but what the what the kids tell me is uh that you know everyone's got like enm right ethical non-monogamy i'm like does anyone ever just have unm like unethical non-monogamy i mean a lot of people should have unm because

what also what they're talking about a lot of what people are talking about when they say ethical non-monogamy is just casual dating but they always need a new label to put if they were actually practicing ethical non-monogamy they'd be doing a lot more work on communication and building like separate you know um robust relationships with people but they have no idea what ethical non-monogamy actually means it's just like another way for them to see like casualized relationships anyway all these labels let's let's i i sent a future episode oh there's definitely a future episode on that but i think people talk about this quite maybe it's just my circles that talk about this actually we can discuss this in a

future episode we'll get your polycule we'll get our poly advisor on i'll put my polycule my platonic polycule aka friendship um this has been if i speak with me moya lodi mclean and me ash sarka uh if you want to send us a dilemma you know what to do it's if i speak at navarra media.com you can also send us fan mail there uh gift cards um just general plaudits we'll take all those um if you did like the show, please leave us a rating or a review. And if you want to send us a comment, you can do that on Spotify,

social media, anywhere. Basically, we just want to hear from you. It's great to hear from you. One of the best things is hearing from you. not just you, not just you.

Get your polycule to rate and review as well. I know some of you are in them. Yeah. Get them to rate and review. Everyone goes around. Put it in the group chat. All right to Rome with you. Everyone goes around. Put in the group chat. All right, we're off. Bye.

Goodbye.