If I Speak - 17: Feeling seen w/ Nicola Dinan

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Moya and Ash talk to Nicola Dinan, author of Bellies, about why we crave external validation yet hate to be perceived. Plus: advice for a listener who got engaged while drunk. Come and see If I Speak live at the London Podcast Festival on 15 September! Tickets available from kingsplace.co.uk now. Got a problem? Tell […]

Hello fellow audio travellers, welcome to If I Speak, your regular injection of pop psychology and scurrilous gossip. We don't usually do that much gossiping. Maybe we should up the gossip. I think there's a lot of scurrilous, but not a lot of gossip. Yeah, maybe we should start spilling more tea. Anyway, before we get going, we've got news. If it's not enough to have us beamed into your ears every Tuesday, well, here is an opportunity to come get us beamed into your eyes too,

which sounds so painful. We're going to be doing, and if I speak, live event, live event. Live and direct. On the 15th of September as part of the London Podcast Festival.

There are concession tickets from £9. There are standard tickets from £18. We're so excited. I haven't even introduced you yet, but I'm still like, Ash, come in. Tell me how excited you are.

I'm actually a little bit nervous about it because If I Speak has developed in a setting which is quite intimate and it has allowed me to open up my little oyster shell into the gooey insides. And because it goes from kind of intimate, cloistered setting straight onto Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts,

that's felt like a very safe process. And the idea of doing that with people looking at me, I'm excited, I'm scared. Well, how we're going to mitigate that is by making the show very- MDMA. Michael, don't listen to this. By making the show very interactive.

So it's not just our oyster shells that will be opened up. It will be the oyster shells of attendees and some special guest appearances. That's a drum roll. We'd love to see you there. So visit kingsplays.co.uk for tickets. Now on with today's show. I'm Moya Lothian-McLean and I'm contractually obliged to be here. As is Ash Sarkar. It's the terms of her

probation. Ash what's cracking? You know what mildly frazzled um but looking forward to chatting with our special guest. Oh yes you've revealed the big news we have a special guest there is someone else in the studio today uh Nicola Dinan is the author of Bellies which you can't see I'm holding by i'm holding a stunningly beautiful book which i speak from reading it myself that looks at the changing lives and relationships of two characters called tom and ming who meet at university fall in love and then begin to navigate adulthood and what it means to grow into yourself nicola welcome hello what are your headlines this week um meaning what's going on

yeah um i'm actually so stressed this week i'm i'm interviewing someone for their book later on i have an event tomorrow i sort of i'm still in the midst of the paperback yeah i'm quote unquote tour and like the tour life is not for me man life on the road is not for me as in like Scotland two weeks ago and I was like I can't do this anymore um I think I I'm like self-employed and I write full-time and I spend most of my working day alone like not really talking to anyone which I love okay no I found that horrific I hate my own company so I find like having small things in my diary incredibly overwhelming not to say I'm not extremely excited to be here thank you so much for having me on you've been marched here at gunpoint

but it's funny because authors I find you guys are always just like interviewing it's a chain of interviews yeah because you're interviewing someone else and then my best friend in the whole world is interviewing tomorrow and it's just like we're swapping notes for like i'm interviewing nicola today i'm interviewing nicola tomorrow and it just rolls on a literary polycule is it a polycule platonic polycule which is called friendship i always say this i say you're obsessed with the polycule ash i know it's because it sounds like Polycrisis And there's two words Which I find are fun to say

What is poly Is that just money Crises So people say We're living in the polycrisis By which they mean Things are happening at once You know what

That's so true actually Things are happening At once So much Yeah That's so That's so insightful It's like

All the different ways That people come up with to say now so they'll say the conjuncture or late capitalism or late late neoliberalism or the polycrisis

and I'm like are you just saying now I'm just saying now I'm saying the moment like you know at uni whenever you'd write an essay you'd be like

I'm looking at the way bodies exist in space as opposed to where else are they you know actually liminal spaces no not always in liminal spaces everything was about lim are they no actually liminal spaces no they're always in

liminal spaces everything was about liminal spaces talk about liminal spaces let's fill this liminal space between segments 73 questions let's fill this liminal space with matter so as ever this is 73 questions minus 70 which for the women in stem amongst you will know equals three questions. Question one. This is for you, Nicola. For you. Are you warm or executive and are you cat or dog? So are you a warm cat, an executive dog? We need to give some context. I think like less context, the better.

And I'm actually going to throw one on you guys. Less context, the better. And I'm actually going to throw one on you guys. You have to answer this first. So I think I'm definitely an executive cat. You're an executive cat. I'm like a little cat in like a work suit. Just run herself. Yeah, definitely.

What are you guys? The quickness with which you got that mental axes that Ash has just created. We're like two horses in one harness. Two horses in one harness. That's an unhappy, you shouldn't put horses in one harness as the first place. We're not going to get on some treatment horses in industrial Britain. Um, what are you Ash? I think I'm executive dog.

You are an executive dog. What are you? Obviously an executive cat. I'm a cat that walks by themselves when you say executive that's someone with high functioning right yeah yeah i'm executive as hell so not to interrupt the three questions but what i'd like to present to you is female fat lad loves it hates it what can i answer this without getting cancelled what is this you need to contextualize this one no it's like you just know i'm a fat lad he hates it yeah that's great

we're good i guess i don't know what i am what does this mean you know what it means i know what it means you know what it means i actually loves it i loves i do i loves it I'm female hates it maybe I loves it no I hates it I'm a fat lad who hates it yeah yeah yeah because in my head it's like you say that and I think of like it's less to do with weight

and much more to do with energy I think about the guy that stuck a flare up his arse at the Euros and I've got that in me. Wait, who? Charlie Perry. What did he? Charlie Perry.

Did you see the video? Euros 2020. There was this guy and there was videos all over social media. Stuck a flare up his ass. Did you see this? And he was the same guy throughout the day. He was like doing keys and like, you know, so. I think he might be fat lad Lasset.

He is fat lad Lasset, but he's got that energy. He's got that energy. But so he was like the main character of that day, right? And everyone was like, yeah, Charlie Perry, he didn't interview the sun. So soon after that was Freedom Day, 21st of June, I believe. The clubs reopened. My partner at the time, not my ex,

went to the clubs, loves the clubs, and about seven hours into this clubbing extravaganza sent me a photo of him and Charlie Perry. Amazing. In the same bucket hat that he'd been wearing when he had the flyers on. Do you remember which club? It was Fabric.

Do you remember? I can't remember where that photo was taken, but it was like a big photo and it was like nighttime scenes. And then people were like, oh, this has like the perfect composition of like a Renaissance painting. Yeah, there's the guy like stretched out.

Like a broad painting. Yeah. But it was like, not the correction. But um i in that moment i love this country are you talking about the one where the person was lying on the grass yeah that's enough questions okay sorry sorry next question manchester thank you for the corrections so you are an executive cat executive cat executive dog uh question two what music do you listen to when you're properly suffering oh you know what i've been listening to non-stop um is the oh which sounds like i'm no i think it's uh no so at the moment i'm really into the Under the Skin soundtrack,

which is composed by Mika Levi. It's so good. It's like very good all moods music. If you want to zone out because you're suffering, if you want to zone out because you're working, I recommend that. All right. The brought painting plus that is giving.

She's cultured. She is cultured. Oh my God, are you a novelist? Question three. What game are you best at? Oh, you know what? I am surprisingly really good at Elden Ring. What? Yeah.

So it may surprise you to learn that I am an Elden Lord. This means nothing to me. I'm like, Zelda like yeah I'm generally quite good at those RPG kind of games I have a PS5 at home um which I like to think surprises surprises people maybe it doesn't I'm very cool um I yeah I'm actually really good at that game sick how long did it take you to get good at that game? A while. But I think the whole thing is like you find, it's like a very, this is very boring,

but it has like a very diverse gameplay. So you just have to find what works for you. You find your niche. It's a good lesson for life. Yeah, you find your niche. That's a good lesson for life. Let's go on to life because we've got big theory today courtesy of moi um we haven't done a big theory in a while either so i brought a big theory out especially for you maybe it's because we've had no thoughts for a while yeah big theories are hard man like i feel like i have to get my big theory out to the level of i don't know i've got tiny theories yeah i've got small theories

but they fall apart upon uh any interrogation and actually i kind of hope that my theories will fall apart on interrogation because that's what makes them interesting right anyway i'll keep this short and sweet so this big theory is partly inspired by bellies which is doubly narrated by tom and ming who are both at the start like very entwined yeah right um and they're but they're also longing for the other person and the people around them to see them and recognize parts of themselves that they don't speak aloud uh my theory is thus we've never had such control over the way we construct and present a self-image particularly on line etc etc but at the same time i think lots of young people feel really unseen um which perhaps

feeds into like romantic disappointment we hear about all the time because romantic relationships are framed as this site where you will be seen by other people, even if that isn't really accurate to the way that you might experience romantic relationships. And I think there's a huge longing for other people to like recognize both our value,

but also like intrinsically what we're thinking feeling um and i wonder if these same pressures existed in the past where like celebrity and visibility cultured less of a premium this idea of like always being seen and being recognized um so my theory is we're perceived more than ever while simultaneously being unseen by external validating forces and this is making a lot of people very unhappy and angry and it makes me use my finster diary too much what do other people think well who do people want to be seen by that's what i'm asking tell me tell us about bellies who do people want to be seen by in bellies well i just think like you know we have all these like outer modes of expression um i might dress as a certain way because I want people to perceive me in a certain

way but fundamentally when it comes to being understood I think sometimes we look for shortcuts for vulnerability to escape like the actual act of having to expose yourself to someone else have them understand things that maybe you feel ashamed about um want them to know and you're offering these shortcuts um whether it's to family or to partners and that creates so much frustration and resentment when people don't understand you but i think the sad fact remains and i do think this is sort of timeless in a way maybe just in contrast with the amount of modes of expression available to us it's more noticeable now but i do think it's an

eternal thing of you do have to express you know the actual underlying emotion in order to be understood you have to ask for what you want sometimes in order to get it um and it's a hard true it's a hard lesson to learn that people aren't mind readers. But you experience a lot with parents, right? I think that's like such an interesting lesson to learn as you get older. You know, that moment at which your parents just become people and suddenly you're like, oh, okay, they can't read my mind.

And they're not this like omniscient or knowing being. And that makes my relationship to them quite complicated but it's also probably the root out of resentment did you want your parents to read your mind like when you're going I know I didn't want my mum to know me I don't think I think there's like a sense where it's like I didn't it's like a yes and no right it's like come here leave me alone yeah exactly it's like sometimes it's like you're protesting to not be known um because you don't think that they have the capacity like you wouldn't understand mom you know you don't get it yeah um yeah this is who i am

um but there's definitely that um you know this this assumption that your parents won't understand and therefore this like pushing away, even though they might. I mean, some parents don't surprise us and, you know, they're exactly who our worst suspicions confirm that they are, but some parents do. comes to parent-child relationships you strain against the telepathy of quite often your mother because you're wanting to establish your own independent identity and I think that's kind of a part of it which is when you are smothered by a parent's knowledge of who you are that really constrains the ability to form your own identity and then part of growing up is like kind of returning and coming back and saying you were right about a lot of things but also acknowledge that you're not all seeing either you maybe knew me a lot better than I wanted to accept but that doesn't mean that your knowledge is total or totalizing and I think that that's a

kind of almost like an ideal pathway back into a parental relationship when you're an adult. I think when it comes to being seen, I mean, this is something that me and my partner talk a lot about because he's like, you've got a whole world out there seeing you. You've got hundreds of thousands of people who follow you on social media. You are just seen all the time. And as much as we talk about the ways in which that's negative, he's also like, well, that's also hugely validating. And you've got to understand that most people don't have that because I really strain against it.

And I go, oh my God, I really hate it when people have, well, not hate it. I don't enjoy being in real life and what people want is the persona me and not just the me that happens to be there um and I think the thing that my partner says is that there's also an element of luxury to that as as well like you're really really seen um and so what that might mean for my expectations within relationships I don't think that I go oh my god see me like see me it's like oh what I want and like most desire is to like disappear into like you know the affectionate bonds of the world around me and I don't actually have to be perceived at all.

Do you relate to that at all? No, because I don't have quite, I don't have the same kind of following. I don't feel seen a lot in a way that I imagine you do. But I think there's also a difference between being perceived and being understood. That's like the critical distinction here is that you can have a lot of people recognize, see you, acknowledge your work. And I think that's where that sort of validation comes from. But I don't think it's a supplement for true understanding of your character, of your needs,

which forms the basis of more like more meaningful relationships what's quite what's i found really interesting about bellies and when i was reading it is when you have tom's narration so just a bit of context for listeners who haven't read bellies so initially obviously tom and ming meet at university and then they begin this relationship and then ming transitions but what is interesting is that through Tom's eyes Ming has all these vulnerabilities and then when you have Ming's narration she's like so vibrant and so alive and just seems a lot more fun yeah than in Tom's narration and I wondered what you were doing with that with the idea of like how people are seen and then their actual internal character well no definitely so I'm so drawn to the first

person just because of how vibrant someone's mind can be and I think you know the first four chapters are told through Tom's perspective but then we move to Ming's and suddenly like it's told in the present tense and the sentence are much shorter and I think there's a difference in the tone between the two characters um that just really made me enjoy writing the first person because I think you can show that so much more distinctly but I think Bellies is so driven not only by our desires for other people but also what we desire them to be and you know it's interesting that you kind of mentioned um ash that stuff about you know people's relationships to their mothers where they feel you know almost quite like limited by their mother's knowledge of them and quite confined in a time that you want to break out of it and i think you see something um that runs parallel

in bellies where you know tom kind of wants to see ming as being a bit helpless you know she really suffers with ocd she in some ways is really dependent on him after they graduate from university they move back to tom's parents house um so ming's living there um basically rent free and getting to pursue her career in the arts while she's deciding whether to transition although it hasn't told Tom and so there is a sense in which she sort of needs him but there's sort of a vibrancy there that I think Tom is maybe distracted from because he needs to feel needed this is but this is what I'm meaning about like this idea of being seen can we really see because I often walk down the street this is you're gonna meaning about this idea of being seen. Can we really see?

Because I often walk down the street. You're going to get real inside into my ears right now. I often walk down the street and I think of something really funny or that I think is funny. Or I'll be having a thought and I'll be like, what a great thought. Wouldn't it be great if someone saw this? Or I do all these silly little things and I'll be like, that's so endearing.

Imagine if someone was endeared by that, you know? And it's this weird idea of like, why do I need an external person to see that? And my friends see some of it and I'm always surprised when they pick up on it. And it's this, it's this weird dichotomy, I guess,

of like, I'm kind of longing to be recognized and seen and understood by another person. But at the same time, when they do that, I'm like, oh my God, how did you get that? Like,

I would have never picked up on this thing. i'm not sure that my own thoughts are that interesting when i'm by myself do you write them down on your notes no i always think i will remember that later i never do but it's this i guess it's a bit like smile your own fart situation but it's more coming from when i dig dig deep down it's like i'm trying to perceive myself or see myself difference i'm trying to see myself from someone else's perspective and like in a lovable fashion and i think that there's something which is like good and healthy about that because my self-loathing is so out of control the minute i go how might someone else perceive me i'll be like well as a

dumb fucking bitch that's how like it will just it will just kick in and so i just try and not imagine the external voice as much as i can it's like the disappearing yeah because that's how i managed like well one the self-loathing and two i do have lots of people every day telling me how shit i am so i just sort of enter standby mode if I'm not like around other people that I like it's just tumbleweed if you said like what are you thinking when you're by yourself I'd be like tumbling tumbleweed that's so nice I crave the tumbleweeds sometimes it's like sometimes it's hard to stop the what's the inner monologue like um constant incessant but what was it focusing on like especially when it comes to like the idea of,

do you want to be understood by, do you feel understood by other people? Well, the thing is, is like, so on the necessity of being understood, you know, when you were like, oh, but like, why do I need that? I'm like, I just think, you know, we're social creatures.

There's sort of an inherent social aspect to the way that we participate in society and move around our lives. Um, and so you're just going to have a large number of social relationships. And I don't, I don't think the psychic burden of having all of those relationships be ones in which you don't feel as if you're, you know, authentic self, the weight of that inauthenticity just, it just becomes too much. And I think you need those sort of few relationships at least. And you know, that maybe that goes back to the idea of disappearing, you know, those few

relationships at the very least that you can retreat to and be understood so that the weight of engaging with the world more widely becomes more manageable i suppose the thing that i wanted to ask because so far the way we're discussing it is that i've got a desire to feel understood and i really can feel when people don't understand me and what about adding where we don't understand ourselves particularly well. And it is through connection with other people that we end up with a better understanding of ourselves. And, you know, there are friends of mine who've really played that role for me.

There's a particular friend, the one who I always mentioned who lives in Barcelona, who has been the person who will reflect my emotions back to me by saying, you're feeling like this. And the emotional story goes like this. And I'll be like, damn, bitch, how did you know? Like, she's very, very good at that. You know, my partner as well has helped me arrive

at a better understanding of myself. And how do you contextualize this desire to be seen and understood when sometimes we're not the best judges of our own character? I feel like tom represents this as in he because he just doesn't know he doesn't know himself who he is yeah whereas ming has a much better grasp on who she is and tom's just kind of like what am i doing where am i going well i think with you know i think what i tried to illustrate in the book is i often had the question okay well if I didn't if say if I wasn't trans if I was just and yeah also if I wasn't Asian like if I didn't have these experiences

that I consider to be quite formative particularly being in this country I didn't grow up here but you know after moving here um what would my life look like? And I'm like, okay, sure. Being trans is a very difficult experience to go through, but I think it offered me so much focus, um, and confidence to actually reach for the things that I want in life. And it forces a certain level of introspection, you know, and I think in terms of your identity, but I think then that introspection then bleeds into other areas of your life. But Tom doesn't really have that. And he's sort of just this sort of, you know, quote unquote, straight passing white guy who just ends up in a job in finance, despite, you know, having very

socialist leanings at university and I think that's because there's not much of a sense of challenge but that is sort of the function you know as Ash said of so many relationships is to you know challenge certain beliefs we have about ourselves we also outsource to the people around us the things that we want in our lives but can't do ourselves so I'm a very security oriented person i really really like things like nailed down where i can see them very stable my partner is very much about experimentation and exploration and hates unexamined assumptions and sometimes of course that's fucking annoying because the unexamined assumption is the thing you want to do next and he's like but what if

we queried him like what if we didn't um but the thing which i really try and do is go well i chose you right i chose you not in spite of our profound differences but because of them and i've outsourced this thing which i don't have but one needs to you and i wonder if with tom and ming there's a part of that which is tom hasn't had to examine who he is in relation to the world as ruthlessly and with as much depth as Ming has but has outsourced that yeah well I think there's yeah there are definitely healthy ways of doing that um and I think maybe you know what you've described with your partner sounds healthy but I think when Tom let's not let's not speak too soon yeah speaking on this yeah I guess

I've never seen you guys together how many podcasters do you know with healthy relationships let's just put that on the table first such a great observation um I that should have been one of the 73 questions I think um I you know that initial magnetism that Tom and Ming sort of see have for one another is driven by each person seeking in the other what they feel they lack and I think for Ming she sees in Tom initially this sort of very you know she sees someone who seems very stable and very like robust. And I think later sort of learns that that's not entirely true. And for Tom, he's drawn to someone who seems very comfortable in terms of who they are. Again, later we find out that's not entirely true.

Someone who's like lively and energetic in a way that he often feels like he's lacking. You know, so I do think we seek in others what we perceive that we lack um but you know there's not not to quote myself but there's like a line in the book where it's like um that I always think of where I think it's a chapter told from Ming's perspective and she's watching her best friend and this sort of um tom's best friend who sort of have a fling in the early stages of the book that's quite damaging to his um ming's best friend cass and ming says oh you know like sometimes we seek people to fill a void but up close the voids are

almost always much larger which i think about a lot because the void they can't they can't possibly feel that void they can't possibly like it's gonna it's gonna engulf them instead yeah and I think we can be challenged in certain ways or people can work like synergistically which is maybe an example of what you're describing where you're just like pushed to think in a slightly different way and I think think maybe that's like the strongest benefit of a relationship. But I think what you see with Tom and Ming is each person seeking some sense of, okay, well, this relationship might fix me.

And there's a moment where Ming comes out to Tom and she's like, all I ever wanted was a boy to fix me, which I think in turn meant more making these feelings about her body go away um but that is obviously unsuccessful one of the really standout moments for me is when Ming stages a play yeah and it's based on these very intimate conversations that she has with Tom and linking it back to the question of being perceived other people who know us and know us very well are like custodians of our identities and how they choose to present that and share that with other people can be obviously it can really gas

you up right so you know when you know it's always like your best friend who'll be like oh and you know this is my friend moya and she does this and she does this and she's the best and you're like oh my god that's actually the job i do for my best friend i'm annie's hype woman and i love it like i'm her manager um you know you're sort of like you know somebody's hype man and then there's the other side of it which is you know imagine i came on the podcast and i started talking about my husband and all of the things that we find really difficult and all of the things that like have annoyed me or, you know, that would be such a profound betrayal. And then there's something more in the middle, which is if I were to share the things which are deeply intimate, the most like treasured memories and like rich and layered and nuanced elements. It would be also a betrayal right like i'd be exposing

it to other people's eyes so i guess the question is how do we square the need to protect the privacy of others while also telling people about ourselves and the most impactful events of our lives which by necessity involve other people which i also don't think is just limited to also telling people about ourselves and the most impactful events of our lives, which by necessity involve other people. Which I also don't think is just limited to people in the creative sphere, I want to say, because nowadays you have like Instagram stories, et cetera, et cetera, or TikTok and you see people like we're the extreme end of it where we're on a podcast or you know, you might be writing a confessional essay and things like that, but you have people constantly

like on stories, on TikToks, trying to tell others about their life and be seen, but it involves exposing others. So yeah, but like Ash said, how do we square the idea that we want to perform ourselves with protecting the privacy of others? It's really hard.

I think, you know, I think what Bellies tries to examine is that significant events in a person's life don't often belong to one person alone. And going back to what we were talking about earlier, because society is an inherent part of how we live, then there's a social aspect to our lives that means what we perceive to be our own stories inevitably touches on the lives of others and so it's hard to exercise and rather present an exhaustive list of how to be careful in writing stories and you know what we have the right to tell even before the podcast started we

were talking about literary dramas on twitter and how there was a big one called bad art friend yeah about the woman who accused another woman of stealing her story about altruistically donating a kidney and the woman who donated the kidney is portrayed like really badly the story it's like basically she's donating the kidney um to as part of like a white savior complex so it's like very unflattering and this woman's like like what the hell i thought we were friends everybody needs to stop donating kidneys and write creative essays that's what i took from it i mean like if it's a white savior complex or not you've just donated a kidney like take the kidney and run yeah take the kidney I'll take it I'll take five um so you know I think it's a difficult question of how um you know what responsibility

you have as an author and I always think of this responsibility existing at several levels you know you have this micro responsibility maybe to those around you um and okay well how do you navigate you know writing about an event that you feel other people will recognize in the book and you might decide to talk to them you might show them a certain draft but all of this is very you know specific to things like culture and you know the temperament of your friend group or your family um and also you know your specific ties to them you know whether or not you're estranged or whether or not they're identifiable within the text you know all these things are so impossible to calculate and that's what makes it such an agonizing exercise i mean there's also a way in which people have to make this decision in

you know their daily lives even if they're not part of a creative profession and that's how do you narrate people's lives after they've died because this is such a huge moment of setting the story in stone of who someone was and what they did. And obviously the ritual of a funeral very often can be one of nailing down the official biography, the authorized biography. So the things which are difficult get euphemized or excluded from the narrative and the things which are very good get sort of, turned into something like larger than life, right? They become a statue, they become a monument to themselves, which is so much less human than the person that they were. And the first time I really, really like interacted

with this was when my grandma died. My grandma very much was a larger than life woman and all these things that she did were incredible. But then when she was no longer around and it was a way of deciding also the family history and a way for people to define themselves in relation to her, all of the things that were flawed and human got written out. Jordan human got written out and she just became this heroic totem of the immigrant experience for then the other adults in the family to relate themselves to and I felt a profound sense of loss as that was happening because then she wasn't my real grandma who I missed anymore she was she belonged to posterity in a way when you were writing in the book about there is a there is a death at one point which is when i fully just dissolved into tears how were you thinking about that idea of like preserving people after death and writing it

it's interesting how you know we eulogize the dead but i think it's so important to recognize narrative where narrative exists like we're not no one's really looking at something like a eulogy and seeing okay well no this is a structured narrative about a person and I don't think we are so used to interrogating like the truth of narrative or seeing narrative where it exists beyond just like simple written text. Shall we move on to other people's narratives? Oh my gosh. Okay. Are you ready for this, Nicola?

We're going to do it. I'm in big trouble. This is our dilemma section this is one area where we have been deputized to turn other people's experiences into content and that feels really good don't say like that they'll stop sending in problems if they see it if they think that their content for them no we treasure everything you say we see you we can like both treasure what they say and it can also be content fodder now that's how i get into trouble with all my exes how do they submit themselves as content fodder if you would like to be fodder for the content machine uh churned up then go to go to send in your dilemma uh to if i speak

at navarra media.com or feedback or anything in general that you want to say to us just have it there ash do you want to read out the first dilemma dilemma uno i have lots of female friends and colleagues who confide in me about their dating shenanigans i am feeling increasingly frustrated by how confining the role of emotional support is. I don't feel I'm able to be open and honest about how repetitive, boring and self-sabotaging their dating behaviours seem.

I feel I'm getting so despondent about it that I start empathising with the stranger they have dated rather than the person I know. I no longer feel comfortable responding in the same reaffirming, light-hearted way. I feel responsible if I keep giving advice and comfort that perpetuates the belief that they are the victim that they are right and have been wronged I've had to do it again and again when I don't necessarily believe it I want to give advice that's brutally honest constructive and speaks to

their autonomy their responsibility and power but I feel it's especially hard to give when the other women in their life aren't i feel the people closest to you should be truthful and honest maybe these cyclical and harmful patterns when comforting and supporting friends are actually dangerous and debilitating i want the culture and habits around this to change please could you advise me um i think one of the best skills anyone can have in life is knowing how to serve a shit sandwich. How do you serve? These, these women, these like women who are coming to you for advice do need to hear the

truth. And it is okay to be like, you are so amazing. You deserve X, Y, Z. But can I, it's okay if i'm just really really honest um and then you can say something like i don't know what this these particular situations are uh but you're finding yourself in a bit of a pattern here and you can't control what these men say um or do but you can control moving yourself out of this particular pattern for example and then you then close with a few extra compliments i'm always here from you bam shit sandwich like you do it's such an

effective way to deliver a hard message so i think that the the issue here isn't that you want to communicate um something truthful and difficult to hear it's more that it's the as an issue of packaging in my mind i think that was a perfect answer um and also how don't listen to this my friends bad news um i love this message because it's like i don't support some of you bitches some of you bitches are very dumb like what kind of bad like like your hair looks so beautiful today by the way your cat died no it's like you were so you're so like you always as you say it's like you're so wonderful and i want you to remember like you are you deserve to be loved and all of this i'm wondering if you know this this this these the series of men that you've been dating or this series of dating encounters you're having,

as you say, all have a common thread. It's like exactly who you say, the shit sandwich. It's about reflecting themselves. I think that there is maybe an unexamined feeling of superiority in this. But we all have that. Which we all have. Especially when people are coming to you with advice. It's hard to not feel powerful.

You're like the Dalai Lama at the top of the mountain being like, ah, my child. Yeah, and I think that that's a dynamic which always exists within advice. And I think that's a dynamic that exists here where it's like, it's their shenanigans. I'm frustrated by this role. It's repetitive.

It's boring. There's a little bit of superiority there. Now I'm not saying that means you have to be an enabling best friend who just says exactly no matter how like unhinged or unrealistic the thing your friend says you don't just have to go exactly because that's also kind of lazy but I think sometimes you have to say the thing that's honest you I think you've got to say it with love and you've got to say it with kindness but you also have to have a look at how precarious the superior role of advisor is because it doesn't take much in your own life to destabilize you and switch up that role and

that's when you kind of have to go all right well if i connect my sense of self to being someone who doesn't do this boring stupid shit then you're actually in a much more vulnerable position then let me tell you that's when you're going to the stupid shit yeah well i was actually then gonna say well maybe the next step is also for dear sender to you know reflect on what they might be projecting onto these women are these frustrations with them linked behaviors that you actually recognize in yourself and i do think when you are able to recognize similarity between yourself through some serious interrogation that kindness and sympathy starts to come a lot easier as well as the honesty phrased in a kind and sympathetic way because there is such a thing

as toxic femininity though yeah of, of course. I mean, are we toxically feminine? No, I'm bringing back toxic masculinity. We're, we're executive cats. Yeah. I mean,

I think there's probably a wider frustration as well in this letter about, I imagine maybe they're on social media and they're seeing like a lot of the discourse about women and like the victimhood roles and always like, you know, men are people who do something the discourse about women and like the victim roles and always like, you know, men are people who do something to us and dating and like always fuck us up and like that kind of, cause there's like, I feel it's especially hard to give advice when other women in their life aren't.

How do you know other women in their life aren't giving them this advice? I guess, yeah, these are colleagues, aren't they? Yeah, some of them, they say female friends and colleagues and it's like, well, the people you're closest to, are you closest to your colleagues? And those are the people you wanna be like like bitch stand up you know and we built a media organization on deranged people i don't ask you people for advice the way the way they've written

this is why i want to give advice that's brutally honest constructive and speaks the autonomy there the way you phrase that tells me that you know how to do this yeah like the way you've put those things together you know how to you know how to articulate that in a way it's quite easy again it's it's it's another permission letter of like let both clips loose all these people who are asking you for advice and and getting into a better repetitive dating behaviors i think you were so right nicola when um you were like you need to you know we project stuff onto, or we see in other people, the stuff that we might be capable of ourselves. And we resent that, whether they are,

whether they're doing things that we might have done and like grown out of, and we're like, why have you not caught up with me? Or we resent it because we know we're capable of it and it fucking scares us to see how like sad we might look or how desperate and how vulnerable. Well, like you said said like how quickly we can slip back into um into that i think i've been seeing a lot of this kind of discourse around um

um by discourse i mean like some tiktoks about um women who are complaining about their friends in relationships telling them to just put themselves out there like oh because you know it's and they're talking about their friends who maybe met someone at university or at school and have been in these really really long-term relationships telling them to put themselves out there not realizing that you know if you hadn't met this person or something gone wrong with that university or school relationship you might be in the exact same shoes i'm in and sometimes i think those single women weren't feeling that sense of recognition from their sort of partnered friends what's funny is that that conversation about um you know the i resent my friends for telling me to put myself out just put myself out there we've been having

that conversation about resenting our friend yeah so like 20 years that's bridget jones diary-esque dialogue and it's come right back around to today it's reinvented for every generation that's a different platform to talk about it on very interesting yeah i mean the thing is is that when i think about my very very best friends i don't really don't resent them yeah i just really really love them and i think that after a while you get over yourself a bit and you stop seeing everyone as mirrors to yourself either showing you back a superior reflection or an inferior one and you become a bit more capable of loving them and i think that comes with time yeah yeah i totally agree i mean do we have any advice for this letter sender i

mean i thought you had it exactly right with the shit sandwich well yeah communicate well but also maybe do some reflection i think is the full answer yeah have a look at why you resent these people for coming to you let's do another dilemma time for one more okay should i read out did i read out the other one no i read out the other one great okay well i'm leaving this one out i read it with what in year three you'd call expression did you do you not think we do everything with expression on this podcast i don't always do it with what in year three you'd call expression. Did you? Do you not think we do everything with expression on this podcast? I don't always do it with expression, but this time I really tried. Ash, Ash, Ash. I think you don't understand how much expression you bring to everything you do.

Very vibrant. Okay, dilemma two. I love my partner very much. We got spontaneously engaged under the influence on New Year's Eve. We woke up the next day having announced to everyone we know that we are engaged via video amazing work and spent new year's day making lasagna to celebrate the issue heavenly this is getting nuts the issue is he spends all his free time reading about marx and i work in violence against women and girls what's the issue

it's just jobs shared values of socialism and feminism are pretty and shakable parts of who we are and who wants to keep on being whereas marriage is a big show of patriarchy and capitalism that you love like little pigs in a trough sorry and the day itself is littered with misogynist traditions and the legal benefits are all seemingly related to tax insurance. So tell me, what do I do? I want to have a wedding. I want to gaze at my boyfriend in front of 200 people

and for, exactly, and for everyone to admire how obnoxiously adorable we are. I want to look hot as fuck for a day, solve my way through some vows, dance to our favorite songs and drink some April spritz. But I don't want to lazily prop up structures of oppression by signing up to an institution with shitty values akin akin to the ones we're supposed to be fighting against i mean this is a brilliantly

written dilemma ash i really want to hear from you on this as well because i'm too married you're literally a wife guy marxist wife guy i am a marxist wife guy. I mean, TLDR, get married. If you don't want to have a marriage where the ceremony really does bake in gender roles, you can do what me and my husband did, which we got a civil partnership. So we're legally partners. The only one in my family to get gay married despite being straight.

Very queer-ish. Very queer-ish. I'm an ally. but yeah we got we got a civil partnership because what we wanted the papers to reflect was a partnership rather than a husband and a wife and we are flexible with our use of language because it's what we feel comfortable doing like it wasn't a day that was celebrating patriarchy and capitalism. It was a day where we brought everyone who we love around us and some people who we don't, but mostly people who we really, really love. No, we loved everyone who was there. And it was a day where we made what

was already a private commitment to be together forever public and you're inviting other people in to say we need your help to do this because no couple can stick together through all the things that life will throw at you by themselves it will take a community to make a partnership or a marriage whatever like I think that this idea of like you know reading about marks or like working in violence against women and girls i mean like there's abuse in like boyfriend girlfriend partnerships too right there's nothing inherent to marriage that's going to make that happen and this is again like anecdotal this isn't going to be the same for everyone but this very much has been the case for me, which is getting married and becoming not just a couple, but sharing our families in the way that we do. Particularly since my stepdad died,

my mom and my husband have this relationship, which kind of doesn't include me in some ways, where he'll just be like, yeah, I've invited her to do this thing um because she's his family now and that's how they see it um that has also enabled me to be a lot more focused politically and committed politically because there is this um kind of rock solid thing at the heart of me so if I can get married man I'm just distracted all the time because I don't have a husband what do you think about this dilemma about the the couple who got engaged on the influence and uh she really really wants to wear a nice dress they sound really fun I think you don't need the approval I I think there's something okay that we just have to acknowledge sort of a very left-wing couple thinking the only way they can get approval to get married is if Navarro media

I don't think we just we just need to call that out for exactly what this is back in the day it was the catholic church and now it's Navarro and so maybe I my opinion matters less because I don't work here white smoke billows from the office building. The barns go up. And be a shut up and get married. Yeah. What else is there to say? Like you love each other. You made New Year's Day lasagna, like engagement lasagna.

I don't see what the relevance really is about like Marx and working in violence against women and girls. Marx, in my wedding speech, my opening words were, Karl Marx wrote that marriage is bourgeois prostitution. Of course that was your opening wedding speech, of course that was your opening speech. But that was the first thing I said.

The interesting thing to me is like, this letter writer has said, like, I want a wedding. Do you want a marriage? Just always the question. You want a wedding, but do you want a marriage? Like, I don't want a lazy pop-up structure of depression by signing up to an institution which she defies. Well, don't then.

You're already in a straight relationship yeah do what you want do what you want when you're in that institution yeah like get your tax breaks and create i don't know the tax breaks actually aren't that good really not that good well also um straight women apparently are much happier being unmarried and child free yeah just saying it according to paulan. The happiness. The happiest demographic in the world, aren't they?

Yeah. Damn. I mean, I went into getting married thinking it wouldn't change anything. It actually changed a lot for the better. This is obviously

not even a full year in, so I don't want to be like, Oh my God, time's slow. You know, oh yeah, marriage is so happy and in 10 years, I'm like, we're just curdling and resentment in to be like time to slow you know oh yeah marriage is so happy in 10 years i'm like we're just curdling and resentment in the same house so you know watch this space

i've been a new house by then you can cuddle cuddle somewhere else cuddle in a nicer place um but i am generally very supportive of people who view getting married as a ritual that makes their private commitment public so it's not about this gonna um you know fix the problems that we had it's about the the change is inviting other people into your commitment yeah girly get married and send us your send us your wedding playlist because i want to know what your favorite song is or invite us to the wedding so we can like sit in the back and just

judge away we did not approve any objection of our media do you want to know the thing which really annoyed my mum what

so walk down the aisle to love never felt so good by Michael Jackson because I love it and then as a joke for after like you know

we got we got, we got pronounced as partner and partner. The song that I had my friend play at ear splitting volume was international players anthem. You are the biggest jester I know, but that I have a great remix of that. I have amazing remix of that. I played at the last club night I did,

which is by, um, booty. Oh, it's so fun. That is a great song. It it's a great song it's a beautiful song too and it's about weddings what would be your alt like wild choice to play if you ever got married I mean I've already done wait play at which section at the end like what's the like when everyone's coming out like the lights come on yeah oh i don't know i think mine would be 21 questions by 50 cents it's a beautiful question i think this is one area where we're incredibly alike

we're like a wedding an opportunity for comedy i think i mean what else can you do anyway to the marxist and the the vogue worker enjoy your special day. The Vogue worker. Well, that's his Vogue. Violence Against Women and Girls, Vogue. Oh, the Vogue. Oh, okay. Yeah. Anyway.

Nicola Dynan. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. You've been a joy. Thank you so much for having me. Can you come back and do some dilemmas with us another time? I would absolutely love to. Maybe for a dilemma special. We are planning. Don't give that away.

Who have you been? I've been Moyal Ovi McLean today, but I might be someone else tomorrow. I've been Ash Sarkar. I'm Nicola Dinan. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. Bye. You a fairy