If I Speak - 69: Is marriage a hard border? w/ Jeremy Atherton Lin

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

Is marriage like an island, or more of an open house? Ash talks about state-sanctioned relationships with memoirist Jeremy Atherton Lin, whose new book Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, is out now. Plus, advice for a listener whose money worries aren’t shared by her partner. Are you in big trouble? Send us […]

Hello and welcome to If I Speak. I am piloting this ship solo because unfortunately, Moir is not well, but there are other people aboard this frigate. I'm very, very pleased to be joined by Jeremy Atherton-Lynn, author of Deep House, The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, which is published by Alan Lane and is out now. Jeremy, how are you doing? I'm well, thank you.

It's a real honor to be here with you, Ash. How do you feel about the nautical theme, which I established right up top? Yeah, well, when Ash noticed the kite, we started talking about Master and Commander, which is like my favorite. It's like my favorite repeat movie, Master and Commander. That already led us to a conversation on representation. I mean, look, maybe we can get into it. I mean, I suppose like on the representation thing, like a film like Master and Commander, there'll be a certain kind of person who says

there are no speaking women in it and that's a problem. Whereas I don't look at a film about naval warfare during the Napoleonic Wars and think there has to be women in it. Like I'm comfortable with there not being women. Well, I'm really happy to be here with you just because it's funny with both Gaebar, which is my first book and this book, I kind of always felt like I was writing to my sisters, like to girlfriends. And I don't know what I mean, I just think that I mean, I think one of the reasons for that probably is that when I went to the RCA, I was on a on a year that was almost all women. And so at that point in time, I was writing to them and in a way like we were writing,

you know, when we were doing our crits, in a way when you're doing a crit, a writing crit, you kind of feel like you're writing for the for the people that you're with. away when you're doing a quit, a writing quit, you kind of feel like you're writing for the people that you're with. And then when gay bar came out, and then it went into translation and stuff, I do events, and it's like, of sea of gay men in front of me. And I was weirdly I was really shocked. I was like, oh, gay men like this. You're like, where did you all come from? And you like this? Like, I thought it was like, you know, I thought it was like my cross connection experience that I was sharing.

Do you know something? I mean, we're going to we're obviously going to talk about the book a lot. And I've also got some icebreaker-y questions for you first. But before we do that, one of the things I really, really liked about this book, Deep House, is that a lot of the time when you're reading about sex and it's from the perspective supposedly of a heterosexual woman, it's still from the perspective of a heterosexual man and the sexiness is about what is it like to be desired by a man. And so it's a little bit of that John Berger thing of like, you know, to be a woman is to be seen and to be objectified. Whereas reading this, I was like, oh no, this kind of reminds me why I like men.

Like, what is the thing about men that I like, not about what do I like about being desired by men. It was nice. I think that I'm in the sex scenes in the book, while we were reading right in there. Yeah, just whoosh. I'm aware that I think that like my character, cause I kind of always feel like as a memoirist,

like I'm writing myself as a narrator because I can never be like the fully dimensional human being I am, right? I'm like your companion in this book. And I feel like when I was writing my narrator in these sex scenes, I can be quite narcissistic and like a bit sort of dominant. And I know if we're getting right into it,

but kind of like wanting to be served and like these kinds of private intimate exchanges between people, like consensual, obviously exchanges between people. And when I opened that up, it was kind of like one of those things where like, I interviewed the comedian, May Martin, and they were like, I figured out that if I say something

weird, it's more relatable because you're not necessarily, your audience isn't necessarily relating to the exact experience, but to the awkward experience of being a human in relational situations and encounters. And so I felt like I might open this up to be kind of quite raw about intimate encounters. And it is political too, because I think that you, this whole respectability politics thing,

like you know, we're supposed to be like kind of neutered in order to be acceptable. And it meant a lot to me that I think a lot of what this book is about is that whatever the outcome of various like civil rights movements are, underneath it is this like real live messy. We shouldn't have to like earn our civil rights

by behaving ourselves. Well, look, we are gonna get into the themes of the book, but before we do, we have our traditional icebreaker, which is in the tradition of Vogue's 73 questions, but who's got time for that? So we actually, we just have three. Question one, out of all of the Jeremy's, right? Corbyn, Clarkson, Hunt, Hardy, who's the best Jeremy and who's the worst Jeremy?

Jeremy O'Harris, because I just interviewed him for Fantastic Man and we had a big conversation about how many horrible ones there are. You know, there are like, when I moved over here especially, I'm like, I'm like kind of trying to like Jez from Peep Show because he's, but he's like, just kind of like an awful boy. But I'm like, he's like,

compared to like a bunch of these media personalities that have been here over the years, there's an actor, I don't want to say anything litigant, but there's an actor who was disappointed to me because of some of the comments that he made that kind of struck me as homophobic. So sometimes I think, and I was kind of rooting, that was another one where I was like, maybe he's going to be an all right Jeremy. So because I think sometimes and I was kind of rooting, that was another one where I was like, maybe he's gonna be an all right Jeremy. So, cause I think sometimes that's the harshest blow. You kind of know what you're getting

with like a Clarkson or a Beetle, but like when you're disappointed in a public figure, hurts. Like the people who I admire are footballers and they of course never do anything wrong. Famously, famously never do anything awful in hotel rooms. Question two. Your first book, obviously, is called Gay Bar. Second book is called Deep House.

So right now, do you prefer going ah, ah, or staying in, in, in? Well, I can go out, but it's like to a natural wine bar. But yeah, staying in, definitely. I mean, by the time I wrote Gay Bar, it was during COVID when it came out. And it kind of like, I think there's a bunch of us maturing gay men that were kind of forced into retirement.

And yeah, this is the domestic antidote. It's a very different kind of skin contact now. Now it's wine that tastes a bit like feet. You know what? I like a salty wine. I always ask if they can give me's wine that tastes a bit like feet. You know what? I like a salty wine. Like I always ask if they can give me a wine that tastes like Vichy Catalan. Do you know that water? I love Vichy Catalan.

You know how that water is like very salty? That's what I want my wine to like, bright and like fizzy, but salty. I was at a restaurant recently and I was like, oh, can I have a white wine? And I couldn't get away with just asking for white wine. Like there had to be descriptors. And so she was like, okay, well, this one's very pretty.

It's very pretty. And I was like, okay, I'll take your word for it. I say mineral. I find myself saying mineral a lot, yeah. Very minerally. And final question, when you're writing memoir, obviously you're pulling from experiences that include other people. Yeah.

Who's the reader that you're most nervous about? Oh my God, that's such a good question. There are some big issues about kind of public figures that you have to just be careful. And I think that nonfiction writers may or may not relate to this, but I have architected sentences and paragraphs as carefully as I can to make sure that everything is my impression, it's previously published information, all that stuff. It's those moments of the book become like, kind of like bitty technical work

in order to safeguard how you're presenting somebody. But then on a personal level, it's like, yeah, people who come across as a bit awkward, let's say, or just like, or not inconsiderate stuff like that, people from my past that, the thing about it is that's been really important to me though, is that, you know, there's a conversation that you can find online pretty easily, I think between Maggie Nelson and Kathy Park Hong, and they talk about the jerk encounter. And it's like such a typical thing that both

of them do and some on some, you know, very sophisticated level in creative nonfiction writing where you kind of learn from an encounter with a jerk. But the fundamental thing is you've got to be a jerk yourself. Yeah. You can't leave that situation and come across as unscathed. You've got to scathe yourself, because otherwise nobody's going to believe you. Nobody's going to believe that I walk into a room with a lover or a roommate or something like that, and the other person's awful. And I'm like, you know, always redeemable.

A precious baby angel. I believe it, Farzans wouldn't, but I believe it. You gotta meet my partner. He's kind of the precious baby angel, which I think is like pretty evident in the book. Like I feel like I kind of underwrote his sweetness as much as possible because I knew it would, I was very confident it would shine through.

It does, it does really, really shine through. So we now come to the meat and potatoes of our discussion, our middle segment, which today is presented as an intrusive thought, which has been generated by reading this wonderful, wonderful book, Deep House. So I've written about this elsewhere and many people in our audience will already know, but eight months after I got married, my stepdad died. And that was the end of a 21 year marriage with my mom. And what struck me at the time was that this was the ending that we all sign up for when we say our vows till death do us part. And I'm surrounded by people who are in the foothills of marriage. So it will be my second anniversary next month,

my mates, those of whom are married. It's all somewhere between one and four years. The longest so far is my brother and his husband, who are at a very princely six years, but they're sort of unusual because they met when they were really quite young. Like me, like I did, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, I think they were in their first year of uni. Yeah. Very, very sweet. Yeah, there's one couple I know above us that they're like the gay winners of like, yeah, long, long term. Malik and Malik and Zandra shout out. But yeah,

there was once a who shagged who chart drawn and my brother and his partner that was just like occupying a little island and everyone else was in this very messy Oh, and so there's a part of me that's wondering, you know, how many of us are going to make it? How do I live up to the promises that I made? Do I know how to do it? And is the context around me, is it going to be something which binds us closer together or does it tear us apart? And so for me, the question simulated by this book is, what does it take to sustain a lifelong commitment to a romantic partner? And very early on in the book you write that when you first met your partner,

same-sex marriage did not exist anywhere, not in any meaningful sense. It wasn't against the law for us to fall in love, but if we were to forge a commitment, there didn't seem to be any place to take it. And so I suppose my question for you to start off with, I mean, the big one is, what does it take to sustain a lifelong commitment? But with that being the starting place, you know, at the time you met, you couldn't see marriage as a destination for where the relationship would go. How did that change what it was like to fall for somebody? Well, it made it, it created this kind of

us against the world circumstance that we were, you know, and sometimes when people say kind of like, oh, what's the secret to having been too long? I'm like, it's kind of the admin. The fact that we were constantly trying to figure out the boring stuff together. And I think for a lot of couples, whether it be that they're queer or in some situation

that makes them kind of in a less privileged position, you have to kind of work harder to justify your... And this is like permeates a lot of different areas of life. But I'll give you an example, like when the Dobbs decision was handed down by the Supreme Court, this was like towards the beginning of my writing the book and that overturned Roe v. Wade, which ensures a woman's access to an abortion

in the United States. People were scared about Obergefell, the same-sex marriage decision being overturned. And in a lot of these situations, you're not worried about the title, the husband and wife, you know, husband and husband, wife and wife title, but you're worried about like your adopted kids,

or in our case, it was a border crossing because we were a bi-national couple. And there was this lesbian couple on the American news, and they were like, we have so many binders. I feel like they were sitting in an office full of binders. They were like, we have so many records to validate our existence, with it in mind that something might come down where we're

going to have to fight for something that we have come to take for granted, even if that has been like just having come to take for granted over a couple of years or something like that. So I think when you're in this position, you have this view of the world. I mean, to back it up, I feel like the reason that I get that we kind of fell in love is like, I was thinking about it earlier, and I feel like it was something that I shared with my sister where we saw the world as a magical place. We were curious. We were, found euphoria in nature, cities.

And we wanted to share it with each other. So we wrote each other letters, like I'm a sharer. And then he has that enthusiasm towards life too. So there's that, we're holding that, that kind of love of the world despite all of its horrors and catastrophes. But then the horrors and the catastrophes and just the banal kind of injustices

become weirdly clear with this partner that you have to become an ally or... When I was reading the audio book, one of the producers used this word conspiratorial. There's this moment in the book where I say, which is when he decides to overstay his visa, and we go out into the street when he should be going to the airport. And I say, I get something like I got high off of my role abetting a criminal. And then I got nervous because in technical terms, being an unauthorized resident in the United States is not a criminal act yet. It is a civil offense. And I was being so playful with the language. And then by the time that this book came out,

there's a real like kind of responsibility I feel like I was holding because of how they've been cracking down at the border and because of the fact that it seems like various people have been pushing for the criminalisation of being an unlawful resident. What do you think was the bigger obstacle for you both? Was it that when you meet, it's sort of in the middle of this big homophobic moral panic around marriage. You've got the Defense of Marriage Act where Bill Clinton is being pressured from all sides to state plane his opposition to same sex marriage.

Or was it the border and the fact that you are a binational couple, so it's a Brit and an American, what was the bigger issue? Well, for us, it was the border. Just in terms of, we thought of ourselves, we were put in this position where I playfully thought of him as a criminal and that it created this like,

like this us against the world feeling together. But marriage, I have a, I'm ambivalent about it. It's like, it was the neatest, easiest solution for us. I have a lot of role model, you know, for lack of a better word, authors that I look up to who have kind of fluid positions about it. I mean, when Eileen Miles ran for president,

Eileen Miles ran for president earlier on in their career as a poet, and I think kind of stick to claim against marriage at that time as a kind of radical queer position. But then later on was just a bit like, now I'm like, if you want it, you should have it. And like, why maybe shouldn't three people have it? And so on and so forth. So I couldn't necessarily take a stance where I'm like, people should have the right to get married because

they're a monogamous, wholesome, loyal, upstanding, law-abiding, da-da-da-da-da. I mean, by the time I got done with this book, I was just sort of like, I mean, by the time I got done with this book, I was just sort of like, you know, I feel like the liberal center is so scared about the term open borders. They're so horrified about not being seen as having some kind of patrol capability. And I just can't with it. I'm like, I just want to move around. I want to float on like our island and move around to different, you know. So is, I mean, just this idea like, is marriage a border? Because, you know, we've used words

like, you know, monogamous and wholesome. I mean, one, marriages which purport to be monogamous and wholesome aren't always. And I think that there are arguments that even the nuclear family can only exist because of the transgressions, right? That what we think of as transgressing the rules of a partnership can sometimes be something which keeps it together. And also there is a much greater acceptance of what would have once been very, very atypical relationship arrangements, at least ones to explicitly declare, but open marriages, polyamorous marriages, I mean, they're still unusual, but certainly not as unusual as they once were. I mean, so is marriage a border to you in your head or is it something else?

It is a border like the walls of a house and the thresholds of a house are porous. You know, I mean, I, there's a lot of, I think everything that I included in the book, almost everything I included in the book, I wound up finding worthy of including because somebody's sense of safety was eroded by a police invasion or like, you know, we were constantly in fear that the INS would come through the doors, like now known as ICE, the immigration officials in the United States.

So I think, yes, I mean, I think we're just kind of contradicting to what I said earlier, but I think we do need borders in our personal life and we need boundaries, but they are porous by nature. And I think trying to, that's my great life challenge, I think, really, is navigating, because I'm quite an open person. And sometimes you have to figure out where that, like if you're in a lane next to somebody and the lane is like a dotted lane rather than a solid line,

navigating the lengths between the open spaces and the closures. But I don't think... Are you talking about a border in terms of other people entering the arrangement? Maybe. I mean, I sort of think that like... I mean, we're so prurient as a society, so when we think about things being unboundaried or porous, we automatically go to sex. But there are other forms of porousness in a marriage other than to do with sex. It might be some of the things you rely on your partner for, do you also rely on other people for that as well? You can be sexually monamous, but still flirt with other people in a way which

is, you know, more or less allowed. You know, it's not just about get your kit off. Or it can be like masturbation, like watching porn. It's a funny one because I was thinking about this earlier. When I was at UCLA, I was assigned by the gay news magazine in the paper called 10% to interview a lesbian minister. And she was kind of making an argument for, she was kind of on the kind of conservative, lowercase c, conservative side of gay civil rights. So gays in the military, she had been in the military, same sex marriage. And she was making the case for same-sex marriage based on the fact that it was intrinsically

a more egalitarian relationship because of the same sex of the two partners. And I remember, I think I probably parroted that argument for a while because it just seemed fun to have an argument in your pocket and it seemed like, what a great word, egalitarian. But then it's like, that seems very not intersectional. Like, you know, what is the balance with somebody who, if they come from a really different economic

background, what is the balance of somebody who is just, you know, an awful person, an abuser, domineering, like all that kind of stuff? It's a bit of a... I think that's probably wrong now. And, you know, I think Maggie Nelson has said one of the most annoying things about hearing the phrase same-sex marriage over and over again is that that's not necessarily how people that she knows think of their desire as being same-sex. I mean, yes, it can. I mean, there can be this great homo desire, but I wonder if separating that and saying like, this is a more kind of equal arrangement isn't a bit closing down the way that I might be able

to talk to you about, like for instance, you chose to get a civil partnership, rather than a marriage. But then when you speak about it, you use the terms, you use marriage terms. I do, I do. So the civil partnership was part of a, I always knew that what I wanted was like a legal status for our partnership. And for me, the word I used was marriage. And for my partner, I think that he was coming at it because we all bring our baggage, particularly from our parents, right? So the baggage I was bringing into it was, what if you're just like my absentee dad? So the baggage I was bringing into it was, what if you're just like my absentee dad? And the baggage he was bringing into it was, what if this is the

end of all creativity, exploration, excitement, and we cease to be sort of stimulating for each other, right? You know, for him, the word marriage was sort of a cul-de-sac. So the, the compromise position we ended up with and one which worked very well for us was to say, okay, well, the ceremony we get will be civil partner. The status we will have will be partners. We like that language. And then afterwards, he never uses the word civil partner now, like, like ever, like even though this was sort of like the thing that he felt was important to him, he'll now say marriage. He still calls me partner rather than wife and I think maybe it's because wife to him sounds a bit like housefrow. And I say husband

when I'm talking to someone where the language of partner or civil partner just wouldn't it wouldn't make sense to them in terms of their worldview. Yeah the only time we use it is when we have to kind of get through some kind of bureaucratic thing or impress somebody you know what I mean we use it when we have to be a bit of a Karen. Yeah yeah yeah. My husband over there like yeah, we still use boyfriend. Well, see, sometimes we still use boyfriend and girlfriend as well.

I think that the terms have got a lot of fluidity. So I think my brother got married, married. So the joke in the family is that I'm the only one who had a gay marriage. I was the two of us. I took up the David Cameron offering of separate but unequal. Right.

Well, I think, I mean, going back to the question about, it's interesting that he saw it as a cul-de-sac because I think this goes back to maybe the heart of the question about marriage as a border is that I think when we made this commitment, I mean, I think we never made a commitment that was anything other than what we had from very early on.

But I think that commitment what we have to each other is an open house for other people to come into in terms of the fact that like, for instance, I think we're perceived as very avuncular. I think younger friends know that they can come to us if they are stressed out. Especially there's a comfortable thing with if somebody's parent has come out as trans and they just need somebody that they can talk to. I think part of what I am sometimes

able to offer somebody as their safe sense of safety that I'm going to be an open person weirdly comes from them being witness to my relationship. And in the book, a lot of it is, I mean, I think that our two cats have a huge role in the book. And seeing them to have a, seeing them, seeing us take care of cats, take care of a household, taking care, demonstrating care. And then that becomes expansive and welcomes people into that situation.

I completely agree with that. And I've noticed, because marriage did change things. You know, it changed how my family relate to him. So my mom feels able to make demands of him that when he was just boyfriend, she wouldn't have. So she now is like, okay, but now you're my family. So that means I can tell you. I'm going to put you to work. Yeah, like move the wardrobe. It was immediate. But also as a source of emotional support, particularly after she'd lost my stepdad, and also how people relate to us and our ability to offer our home up to people and advice and

support because of how the sort of stability and security we've established with each other allows us to share it with other people. Like it's certainly not a closed door in other people's faces. I mean, one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because something which comes up in the book again and again is homes being intruded upon. Yeah. So by the state, whether it's through homophobic policing. I mean, I think there was one where I was really surprised by how late it was, like maybe 1998 in Texas. Yeah, that's Lawrence v. Texas, yeah. Yeah.

But also a personal experience of a home being intruded upon by somebody who was sort of like hammering your door down, demanding sex really early on in the book. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I suppose that sense of intrusion, I mean, how has that shaped the kind of home that you've created together? That there are these experiences of intrusion by the state because of, you know, the kind of homophobic moral panic, but also a personal experience of intrusion. And it's never stable,

like as much as you can build a house, it's never stable, right? Like when we were in Los Angeles last with my parents, we were really quite close to the evacuation zone of the wildfires. I happen to have a neighbor in that I feel like might just invade our area of the property any moment because she doesn't seem to have the same sense of boundaries that we do.

You know, I was like really helpful actually having this kind of like troubling neighbor writing this book because I would never want to write it to the point where we had like found the perfect bourgeois like, you know, safety net and like everything was settled. And I was like, oh yeah, like precarity. That's how we lived all through those years feeling very precarious. And I mean, the really important thing about that case,

the Lawrence v. Texas case is the outcome sounds a lot neater than the reality. The outcome is, I think that you're right, it was 1998 that the apartment was invaded and the outcome was that in 2003, ultimately the Supreme Court finally struck down any existing anti-sodomy laws in the, in that state by state, some states still had anti-sodomy laws.

And there's an image around it where it was a bit like this happy couple, you know, won this victory on behalf of all gays. But the guys kind of were acquaintances. They didn't, they were both super dodgy. Like one had been, one had, they were both drunk drivers. One had killed a person by drunk driving. They, and they may or may not have been having sex. Like I think they, there's a historian who wrote a book about it that I bring in as like another character in the book

because he's able to tell this story based on all these interviews that they've done. And the initial call to the apartment was pretty much racist. One of the guys was black and his partner suspected that he and his partner and his friend were flirting with each other. And he knew if he called the police

that there would probably be racial profiling involved. So he called- What a terrible way to deal with a problem. Yeah. So yeah. I think these two people might be flirting. 999? Yeah, yeah.

911 in the states. 911. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. He said he was going to go down and get a Coke. And instead, he called the police. And when the police came through the door with guns drawn, the story goes that they were having, the partner and the friend were having sex.

One officer says anal and the other says oral. So already it's a kind of unreliable source. But I love this part in the book where Dale Carpenter figures out that there was two sketches on the wall of James Dean with an enormous erection. And the police officers seemed so put off by that, like, kind of like almost potentially instilled this kind of like specter of anal sex in their heads. So they may or may not have been having sex.

The motivations for everybody were corrupt or at least heavily influenced by their worldview and life experience. It was a total mess. The guys were like, they couldn't, the gay and lesbian lawyers who were pushing the case all the way to Supreme Court, basically shield them from public scrutiny. So that you're in your imagination,

you would have like Tom Daly and his handsome screenwriter boyfriend. Like, you know what I mean? Like that's the two, I think when they got married, they literally were two grooms on a cake that like had American and British flag decorations down the like cascading down the side. And they, you know, everybody wants those two groomed

figurines. How do you feel about that sort of respectability, I don't want to say game, but the pressures of respectability, I don't want to say game, but the pressures of respectability when you're trying to shift the legal or, in particular, shifting the legal status of a particular minority group. Because it's so hard to, speaking as someone who's been brown and Muslim my whole life, I mean, it's really hard to stand up for the right to be frightening to white people when you're in the context of something like the war on terror or the hostile environment. Like I understand strategically the need to be mollifying. I mean, where do you stand

on it? Yeah, I mean, I think I internalized that a lot over the years. I think I kind of like, you know, I do intrinsically believe in some kind of dignity, and I believe that that should be transferred into the sphere of public presentation. But yeah, no, it's just like, then it just started chipping away because I don't wanna have to prove that I'm good in order. It's so interesting because when I wrote an article,

when the first time I wrote about this was really early on, in the early 2000s, we're in the midst of like his unauthorized residency in San Francisco. We were facing this uphill battle. It was like writing from within. And there's a line I put in there that I just revisited recently.

And I said, you know, we're good people. We take care of animals. We tip well when we go to restaurants. Like we're kind to our friends, something like that. And I look back and I think that's maybe a convincing argument. It was a rhetorical tick that I'd done there. See me as human and don't like, you know,

but the rhetoric is contrary to my fundamental belief is, you should be able to get married or do whatever, basically, some harmless consensual activity, even if you're a jerk or weird or, you know. And then that's all of a sudden, I'm sure you were alert to the last presidential election in the states where like being weird was like totally used as a weapon against Vance and Trump.

And yeah, to me they do seem weird, but I was like, when I grew up, I was always the weird like, you know, I was like, let your freak flag fly. That's a very hard saying to say. Say it 10 times quickly. I was proudly weird because I had been identified as weird. And then I tried to figure out what is the respectability or dignity in being weird. It was really weird to see on that last election institutional norms and kind of like etiquette and predictability and all this stuff being

used from the center left. I suppose on the weird stuff I mean part of it is like maybe it's lesser claim on normativity and something more about being socially jarring. Icky. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Icky. Do you know what I mean? I would say the people who I love most in the world are weird. I don't find them socially jarring. I don't find them prickly or needlessly, heedlessly antagonistic in a vance way where it sort of feels like at any moment he wants to, I don't know what the American term is for when you grab someone's wrist and you turn it both ways.

Like in the UK we call it, you call it a Chinese burn, where you go like that, which seems like a real bygone era playground phrase. I definitely see where you're coming from. And I think that it's sort of like, it's trying to, I mean, I struggle with the word normalized, but you're trying to take away the bogeyman. Like with trans people now in the UK, I can't imagine that the people who are advancing these limitations on how somebody wants and needs to be in the world are then going out to dinner

with like a trans friend. I just don't, I think that there's a lack of contact and exposure. And so then you think, okay, the normalizing, softening, taking away all of the things that a scapegoat has thrust upon them, their kind of mal intention and all that kind of stuff. You see the political mechanism at work

at making people seem friendly so that you don't just on a very basic level want to push legislation forward that hurts your friends. But it's a double edged sword because then it's like, I want to read novels by my trans women friend writers where not every trans character has a heart of gold or they do, but they struggle with it and try to figure out ways to like get over some instincts and you know, they're human, multidimensional human.

So there's a conflict there or maybe a challenge in trying to figure out how to put your best foot forward, but not like leave other people out. And yeah. I mean, I hear what you're saying. I hear what you're saying. It's sort of like don't leave people behind, but also at the same time, you know, you kind of, especially in the context of a movement or a political cause,

like perception is always a consideration. Would that be a fair, a fair cause, like perception is always a consideration. Would that be a fair, a fair clause? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a part in the book where my friend says to me, the gay marriage movement needs a pair of poster boys and that is definitely not you two. It's like, and then we're going back

and looking at the pictures of us when we're younger. And it's like, he wears nail polish sometimes. And like, I just like, say confusing things because like they're funny to me and they don't always like, I'm not necessarily like media trained or you know what I mean? I get what he was saying for sure. I do think that like by now in a, it's funny because I think now I have basically written the book where we are kind of poster boys for and I think maybe there's something that is accommodated there where people are a little bit more used to

like a kind of sphere of identities that you don't necessarily need to fall in place. Well, I mean, especially when one of those identities is celebrated author. I don't think you get to be, you know, the... You know, there's something about like... And that's so interesting to me, which is something which would be considered non-normative, disruptive, maybe even like, you know, like, ugh, is that... There is also a process of... By which expressing it through like a particular cultural avenue

gives it a status. Like it gives it a status in this thing which was once like scary or butre. Oh that's so interesting. That's so interesting. The frame that hangs around the story. Yeah that's so interesting. I mean it's a real struggle for me because, yeah, it's sort of like I have certain sort of like prestige, like I have certain status symbols that hang around my neck from like what I've achieved as a writer. But I've achieved those through like crafting things in a kind of nuanced and messy way. It's a real, it's a real ongoing challenge. I mean, I keep coming back to this line that everybody, it's really commonly quoted by Joan Didion,

which is we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And most people leave it at that, but the next kind of sentences that follow are about how we create these mythologies, and as writers, impose a narrative line onto a given situation to take a kind of moral lesson from it. Kind of like we create parables. Whereas real life is a series of, I think she calls them, shifting phantasmagorias. And so that's the thing is like stories work to convince people of things politically.

There may be other people who are better positioned to tell that filtered, neat, acute and effective story. And I'm kind of like in the realm of the shifting phantasmagorias and maybe somebody who's more of an activist can take from that and filter what needs to be done in legal cases and in political arguments and so on that kind of tidies that up to be perfectly frank in order to achieve a given really basic fundamental right. Ah speaking of shifting phantasmagorias this takes us very nicely to the final part of our podcast, which is called, I'm in big trouble, and it's where we address audience dilemmas.

If you are in trouble, small, medium, large, just email us at if I speak at navaramedia.com. That's if I speak at navarro media.com. That's if I speak at navarro media.com Jeremy, you've said yourself that you're a vunk killer, that you like being a source of support. Do you feel do you feel well placed to be in an agony aunt? I think I've gotten better because I think I'm less probably the older I get I'm probably less concerned with being convinced that I have a solution to offer somebody and I'm a better listener.

Do you think that you've experienced that? I think I still struggle a little bit. So the thing that my partner says, like a common bone of contention is he'll say, you're always jumping to conclusions. And I say, that's only a problem if I'm wrong. Whereas like he wants to see me like go through the process of like being open to the existence of multiple possibilities. Whereas I'm like, well, I just look, ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eaten. Like if I'm wrong, it's a problem. If I'm right, it's not. There is a part

of me that loves rushing to judgment that I need to keep on a leash. But I think that's probably because your brain works quickly. You're such a smart thinker. And I think what happens is you, but this is what my guess is, that you have a fundamental understanding of something close to what we might call right and wrong in terms of the fact that like you understand that A workable solution to how we can live together involves compromise and I think you filter through the like

The compromises and come to something that is like the most equitable solution pretty efficiently Do you think that's a fair thing to say? That's incredibly kind. I just think that I've got anxiety and PTSD. So I'm okay. Okay, but if you work with me that way, I think that you think quickly towards that. I think what happens is that you're able to come up

with a reasonable solution and you can put it forward on TV. And like, you know, I mean, I'm so thankful, by the way, I'm so grateful that you speak truth to power. And I think that's what I'm basically getting at, the speaking truth to power. But I think that, I think I'm probably a bit more of a wobbly thinker. And I think what I've come to is being more alert

to people who are even wobblier than I am. And for it not to be like a condescending thing, like a patience thing, but to be like, look, we're all on these different paces and these different wavelengths. And this is a very long way of saying that I think of becoming a better agony gunkle by being open to where people are coming from and kind of appreciating that for some people it takes a lot longer. Shall we test that against someone who is having a wobble? So I'm going to read to you this dilemma. We call our audience special ones after Jose Mourinho. This entire podcast is inspired by the single most toxic man

who has ever lived and that is Jose. So, hi. Firstly, I want to say how much I love your podcast. I'm a new listener and already finding it so refreshing and comforting to listen to. I wanted to reach out about something quite personal that I've never really shared before. Growing up, my dad didn't earn enough

to support our family comfortably. It made things financially very difficult. I never had a nice home, so I was always the friend who never let anyone around her house. Sometimes we relied on the occasional food bank. My mom often encouraged him to change jobs that aim for more, but he never did and still has not. As a child, I was exposed to a lot of financial stress and conversations that in hindsight, I think I was too young to fully process. Now in my early 20s, I've just secured a graduate job. My boyfriend did not go to university, but has just got a job in a bank branch. He is incredibly supportive, hardworking and kind and he really looks after me. Nothing like my dad, which is lovely." I just love that when you describe a boyfriend,

you have to be like, nothing like my dad. Sigmund Freud is having a field day. But I'm struggling with a lingering fear that our future will somehow mirror my childhood, that we won't earn enough, that we'll always be scraping by and that I'll end up stuck in the same cycle as all my mum in. It honestly terrifies me and I cannot stop thinking about it. I'm a huge overthinker if you can't already tell. It's horrible. I've shared some of these fears with my boyfriend and he always reassures me, but there's a deeper anxiety I haven't fully opened up about. It feels irrational at times, but there is a part of me that wishes he was super rich and already really financially secure, which I know is totally unrealistic given how young we both are. I'd really appreciate any

advice you might have on how to start letting go of that fear and rewrite my relationship with money moving forward. Thank you so much. Lots of love and anxious special one." What do you reckon, Jeremy? How do we help our special one deal with these anxieties around money and the pressures it's putting on their relationship. Have you ever experienced that? You know, a sort of a money anxiety, which maybe isn't fully shared by people around you. It's very hard for me to blame either of the people in their relationship and not just blame the society that we live in. So, right? I mean, they're worried about money

because we don't have social safety nets in place to take care of us. Like this kind person and her hardworking boyfriend should, that alleviation should come from the society that we live in. But what do you do when you live? Okay, so then if that doesn't exist, that's the problem. I wonder if she's spoken to him about it.

Yeah, she says that he's been reassuring. Oh, right, so she has, right. But I wonder if she said it in a way that, hmm. What do you think? I think every single relationship has to contend with both parties being scared of replicating their childhood in some way. I just think that that's built in and it might be to do with infidelity and betrayal, it might be to do with communication, it might be to do with money, it might be to do with abandonment, it might be to do with boredom, it can be anything.

I think that every partnership is having to contend with that. And I think that special one, you've said you're in your early 20s, in the grand scheme of things, you're both really, really young. And so having a committed relationship at this age when you're still learning about yourself and still learning about how to deal with your own neuroses. You know, it's a challenging time, right? You know, I would never go back to my early twenties, even if you gave me the option. Like, I just really did it. Late twenties was so hard for me too.

I felt like I was very disappointed in myself. I felt like I was in a prodigy. I was so relieved to turn 30. Oh yeah, 30s. It's like reaching the promised land. Well, it's recent, I've recently promised and realizing it's not like a perfect utopia, but rather that it's just like, yeah. But your ability to cope with fuckeries is just like you's just like you take it in your stride. I think that the best advice my mum ever gave me was this, was if you go looking for a new situation, what you're going to find is new problems. So even if you had your super rich boyfriend, trust me, you're going to find some new problems with them.

Oh my God, for sure. The guy's already in banking, right? Yeah, I think he works in a retail bank branch. I think. I think that the worry is like, I don't want to contribute to the feeling that you need more and more and more, because that's like how wealthy people, why wealthy people are destroying the planet. Is, but I think I'm not being empathetic because I,

it's not about greed. It's about her feeling of, she feels unsafe. We all feel unsafe. Do you ever listen to Tara Brock? I do not. She's a Buddhist psychoanalyst. Oh wow. I think I would just basically defer on this one.

And I would tell her to listen to Tara Brough. Because if you take away the specifics of it, maybe that could help, right? If you just try not to dwell too much on the financial day-to-day details and realize that you're afraid. We all are afraid. And this is something that you're afraid, we all are afraid, and this is something that you're afraid of.

She's just great on kind of like moving us past the, like acknowledging the fact that we have these kind of like primal fundamental instincts built into us to keep us safe, but that they've become out of check. They've become, we have a more evolved for lack of better word, way of proceeding through the world. I think that thing about anxieties that are designed to keep you safe, but you wildly inflated or out of control or, you know, they have too much of a strong hand on the wheel

is that I think that's just such a strong part of everyone's stories, this fear of being hurt and fear of being hurt in the way that you saw a parent get hurt I think is so, so powerful. It's so, so powerful. Or fear of experiencing the helplessness that you did as a child. You know, you said in your letter that you were exposed to these conversations when you were too young to process them. So I think that I completely agree with you, Jeremy. I would separate these into two things.

The first thing is have a conversation with your partner about finances and what your goals are, but recognize that those goals aren't the same thing as safety and feeling good, right? So just say like, look, actually, these are the things I want to do. This is the kind of place that I want to get to. How can we do that together? And that's also a part, particularly if you live together, that that is a conversation that you're going to have to have.

I mean, you know, it looks different for different people. The way me and my partner do it is that we keep most of our finances separate. We've got a joint account for shared expenses. it works very well for friends of mine, particularly those who have kids, you know, they can buy in much more of their income. But I think just, just rather than it existing as a sort of like, unseen free brawl anxiety is just, you know, making some goals clear, and tangible and achievable. So it can't be in the language of feelings, because if your goal is, I want to feel safe, guess what?

That's not gonna, there's no amount of money in your bank account that's gonna do it. And then the second thing I think is about, give yourself some time, like give yourself some time to relax into the idea that the mistakes you'll make will be your own and they're not going to be your parents. Like there's a whole new world of problems waiting for you and you will have ownership of them and sometimes it's going to be horrible and sometimes it's going to be great.

And I think that the only other thing that I have to offer, because I don't, I don't know how to answer this question, but except from personal experience, what we were talking about my own experience before is we kind of, and maybe this is from a certain position of privilege or something, but we kind of tried to make everything into an adventure. We kind of tried to make ourselves a team and it was us against the world. And I think that's why I started this answer by being kind of like, this is a social problem, because it's like, if maybe there will be some kind of bolstering of her sense of her

approach to it, if she feels like they've really solidified as like in it together. Yeah, I just think in your early 20s,, it's so tricky because I can talk about the ways in which like me and my partner have navigated, you know, having different earnings. I'm the goose that laid the golden egg and he's good looking, right? We've separated the roles very, very well. But like, it doesn't mean that he doesn't contribute to the household

and in particular stuff that requires... He's so good at arguing with people on the phone. It's an incredible talent. He once started out getting a fine from HMRC and ended it with a tax rebate. I've never seen anyone be that white on the phone before. It was incredible. But there are lots of tasks that he's able to take on, which are about the sort of like dealing with

the logistical and financial underpinnings of our life together, which aren't just to do with how much money he earns. And he takes that on and he does it really well. But we're in our early thirties where admin and council tax and stuff like that, it takes in a, as you said, right, like, you know, the sharing of those administrative tasks actually does form a really big part of your

bond together, especially when you're older. I'm not sure if that advice is comparable for when you're in your early 20s and you're in a relationship. So I think it's, it's much more about talk about your financial goals together, you know, finding a way to, you know, it's so easy to say, look, your past isn't going to be your future. And I think particularly when you're coming up to this point of making commitments to each other, when I first got engaged, I had this huge meltdown in front of my mom and I was like, what if I married my father? And she was like, well, I mean, you know, he's not South Asian.

So like, you know, there are some, you know, there's some differences, Ash. But you just have to go through that fear that you're experiencing a compulsion to repeat. And I think if you've been together long enough, and you've also experienced hardships and gotten through them well enough, you know, that's all the assurance that you can get. And it's not a guarantee of a problem free life, but hopefully it means it means different problems. I'm going to revoke my own last answer. Yeah, prompted by what you

just said. Not going to revoke it. I'm going to equivocate it. I was talking about this teamwork, and this us against the world thing. And I think I closed down another aspect of it, which is you are part of a group of friends, community, family, which I know has had its challenges, but like, you're not alone. So you like, you know what I mean? Like a part of that, a part of that team that you form

with your partner should then become forming a coalition. And that, you know what I mean? Like, I think that there are, think about who in your life would not let you fall apart and they're there. They're, they're going to be there, you know, nurture that, that kind of relationship with people that you feel like you're going to be there for each other, because I think sometimes it's really easy to, I think the best piece of advice my mom gave to me is to think of the worst case scenario

and then dial back from that because we tend to, she sounds like she's catastrophizing a little bit rather than putting into place the mechanisms of like, what's the worst possible place? Something like, for instance, she can't pay her rent. How would you dial back from that? Who could you borrow money from?

How could you rearrange things? And it involves other people. You're not alone. And you know what? I always think about that Frank Ocean skit, a columnist on Channel Orange or Blonde, where his mom's like, stop thinking about it as just money. It's not just money.

Money, it's our sense of security. It's often our family stories, all of the stuff which is wrapped into it. But like I've got a friend who had an unexpected financial hardship recently and she's like me, right? Both of us are money under the mattresses girls. And we also get a lot of our sense of self from being financially responsible

like within our own households. And then when this thing went wrong, like she was quite shaken at first, really, really shaken. And she was like, oh my God, there's a massive hole in my finances now. And she's about to have a baby. It was a really, really bad time for it. But what she ended up with is having gone through that and having had a sense of challenge like that, she was like, actually, it's fine.

It's fine. It's nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be. Interesting. And actually like my sense of self is intact and maybe it's been a little bit good for me to experience this disruption so I can recognize that the things that I'm contributing to my relationship and my household, it's not just money. This is so fascinating and deep Ash because it's so wild that you went to that sense of self because it's sort of like a ghost of this other thing which is she seems like she's arrived at this sense of having more stability and now she's identifying with that so that's becoming like a part of her identity and I think what you want one of the things that we can do to step away from from from from various fears is to leave that identity

and be like, who else am I? Who else am I besides somebody who can pay the rent? And it's like proud that I can do that. That's one thing, but also whatever, she's an amazing, she's amazing bird watcher or whatever her other things are, right? Because then if she's, it's so fascinating to me that you said that it shook her sense of self

because she had become identified as like a self-reliant breadwinner, but that's not her whole identity. And it was also following the loss of a parent. So it's a similar thing of like, this thing in the family story and your experience of childhood being like, really disrupted by losing by, you know,

losing a parent or in this case, in part of your family story, special one is the sense that a parent wasn't parenting the way they ought to. Or like, you know, your father was also under pressures of his own, which maybe when you get older, you'll understand it a little bit more, even if you don't agree with it, you may you may find yourself with more empathy. may find yourself with more empathy. But I'm afraid that's all we've got time for. Jeremy Atherton-Lynne, author of Deep House, The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, out now, published by Alan Lane. Thank you so, so much for joining us. It's been a real pleasure. Oh, it's been an honor.

Absolute honor. It's been so great having you. And it is such an incredible combination of social history, of memoir, the's sexy bits. I am going to be lending it to my mum. She's very, very open minded about a sexy book is what I found about Mrs. Sarker. So we'll see how she copes. Thanks so much, Ash. Thank you. And see you all next week. Same time, same place. Bye bye. Bye!