The Dating Detectives - The Self-Help Husband

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

This week our guest Claire shares the beginning of a relationship that seemed to have all the ingredients of a great love story: adventure, deep connection, and a partner who appeared thoughtful, supportive, and committed to growth. But as the years unfold, subtle moments of criticism, manipulation, and shifting power dynamics begin to reshape how Claire sees herself and her place in the relationship. In Part One of this powerful two-part story, Claire reflects on the early warning signs she missed, the ways coercion can hide behind self-improvement and good intentions, and how easy it is to lose trust in your own instincts when someone else becomes the authority on your reality.Are you in the Chicago, Tampa, or Orlando area and want to come see us live?! Get your tickets at the links below:7/16 in Chicago: https://tickets.thedentheatre.com/event/dating-detectives-llpj8q?utm_source=performer&utm_medium=performerlink&utm_campaign=datingdetectives8/5 in Orlando: https://www.etix.com/ticket/p/48863575/the-dating-detectives-live-orlando-funny-bone-comedy-club-orlando8/6 in Tampa: https://www.etix.com/ticket/p/35010834/the-dating-detectives-live-tampa-funny-bone-comedy-club-tampaClick here to join our Patreon! For only $5 a month you will get 2 extra episodes a month, monthly virtual live events, and access to our community page. And now for $9 a month you can get all of that, plus ad free episodes!If you've been dogfished and want to share your story on the show, email [e-mail] or contact us through our website using this linkThis episode of The Dating Detectives is sponsored by Bellesa. Get a free Whisper Vibe or free Rose Suction Toy with any Whisper order at bbvibes.com/detectives.This episode of The Dating Detectives is sponsored by Shopify. Sign up for a $1/month trial at shopify.com/datingdetectivesThis episode of The Dating Detectives is sponsored by Jones Road Beauty. For a limited time our listeners are getting a free Cool Gloss on their first purchase when they use code DATINGDETECTIVES at checkout. Head to jonesroadbeauty.com to get yours today!This episode of The Dating Detectives is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/TDD.***The following Program contains names, places and events that have been anonymized or fictionalized for the purposes of protection and safety. The following Program is provided for entertainment purposes only and any commentary from the hosts are strictly conjecture and should not be held as making any definitive statements about the truth or identity of any particular individuals or circumstances.If you or a loved one are involved in an abusive relationship, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for support.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The following program contains names, places, and events that have been anonymized or fictionalized for the purposes of protection and safety. The following program is provided for entertainment purposes only, and any commentary from the hosts are strictly conjecture and should not be held as making any definitive statements about the truth or identity of any particular individuals or circumstances. If you or a loved one are involved in an abusive relationship, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-723 for support. Happy Dating Detectives Monday. Hi, Hannah. Hi, McKenzie. How are you? Are you excited about our show?

Oh, my God. The tickets are going so fast. I'm so glad. It's kind of cool. It's like a little less than a month away that we are going to be in Chicago doing a live show and the tickets are available in the show notes.

And then in August, we're going to be in Orlando and Tampa. I've never been there. All I heard is that you have to visit the bean, that big silver thing, and the... and they said it's very, very windy, so you might break your umbrella. That's all I know.

All right. Well, I think I've heard that the summer is the absolute best time to go to Chicago. So even if you're not from there, but you're nearby and you've been like, I've been meaning to do a trip into the city, this is the time. And I'm so, like, it's so cool to know how many listeners we have in the Midwest. That's so neat. Thank you all who are getting tickets already. And thank you if you're on our Patreon. Yeah. And we, by the way, we had some really amazing success with the merch at that crime con. So we'll have some more of that for the live shows, too. So that's really cool.

For sure. We should post some on Patreon too because we love our Patreoners, $5 a month. You get extra episodes. And $9 a month, you get extra episodes. Plus add free listening experience for every episode. It's the girlfriend experience. Girlfriend experience. We're so silly. But seriously, thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting us. And enough about that. Let's get into the episode. We have a two-parter, y'all. Yep.

But it's so good. And I think that you'll really love Claire because she really, really, I think that she'll touch your heart. And I think there's going to be a lot of parts where our audience is like, oh my gosh, that has happened to me. And I never thought of it like that. And so I think that's always really interesting when we have those moments. Yeah.

No, Claire is fantastic. And this is a slow build, if you will. I think we, I don't know if we've had stories that obviously touch on coercion and grooming. But this one really makes you feel like you're in that long, years long journey of being coerced into abuse. So there's definitely some trigger warnings of rape and coercion. But there's also- Intimate partner issues that you don't think about, I think, often. We're also going to talk about polyamory. It's a polyamorous story.

And she talks about that in such an amazing way and a clear way. So if you're new to that or skeptical about that, she'll be a great ambassador, in my opinion. because she definitely doesn't come out of the story anti-polyamory. And I want to also mention when you're listening to this story and all of them, but really this one is a good example of it, when you're listening to the story, it's easy to cram a story into like one hour or whatever, and then it's easy for you to process that one hour and say,

oh, why didn't she get out? But when it's dragged out for so long and there's space and time in between each incident, it's easier to process differently. And so it might not be as easy as why didn't you? and she just leave when you're processing everything at one time within like an hour time span. This is a two-parter. So if you want to comment, support for her or questions about the episode in the week in between, we'll try to address those in next week's dogfish debrief, where we will go further into discussing the episode and what we can learn from it.

But until then, you got to wait a little bit, but it's worth it. We love our two-partners. I know. Thank you for being here. We love you. and let's go ahead and give Claire the floor. Thank you for being here, Claire. Hi. Thanks so much for having me. Hi. It's so nice to meet you.

We hear you've got a big one, a big story for us. So without further ado, hand you the mic. All right, yeah. So my story starts out in 2014. I had just graduated from college. I was 21 years old. and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And I decided to apply for a service year program called AmeriCorps.

It's pretty similar to the Peace Corps, but it's a domestic program. So I was really excited to go off and do this. It was my first time moving somewhere where I didn't know anybody and really being entirely on my own. But I was also really excited to be around a bunch of young people who wanted to volunteer and spend time outside and just do good things for their community. And when I showed up on the campus, there was only about 180 of us on the campus. And we're in this really, really small town in the Midwest. And so really quickly, you were able to get to know a lot of people. And there's this really intense, almost like camp energy through AmeriCorps.

There was a lot of really quick bonding and deep relationships that developed. And because you're living and working with people, you're really with people like 24-7. So there's just like a lot of intensity to that space. I went to camp and we always used to say a day is a week and a week is a month. Yes. It's like how fast it feels. That is so true. A time in AmeriCorps really didn't feel like time in the real world.

It just, it moved really quick and everything felt very intense at all times. So one day I was walking back from a training to my dorm and I saw a friend of mine in a hammock over by the stand of trees and he was talking to two other people. And I didn't know the two other people, but one of them, was this younger guy who was really loud, he was really hard not to notice. And the only thing that stood out to me in that moment was, so quick context for AmeriCorps, similar to camp, I'm sure, like everyone kind of forms their own particular language in AmeriCorps and slang and things like that.

So in AmeriCorps, we say Amera something to describe pretty much everything. So like if you fall in love and you're dating someone in AmeriCorps, it's AmeriCorps. Or when we're traveling, like, to and from. our project rounds, we're traveling via the Amera van. And so as I'm walking, I overhear this guy who's talking to my friends say, yeah, and I just want to get Amera Laid. And immediately, I am just right this guy off. Like, wow, he's so immature.

He's really obnoxious. I'm not interested in getting to know him. So we go through that whole training program. It's about 11 weeks of training, and then we're supposed to be sent off on our project rounds. And at the end of that 11 weeks, there was a group of 18 of us who were dismissed from this program and transferred to a different AmeriCorps program to restart all over again. And we were obviously pretty upset because we had just bonded really intensely with all these people. And we had spent 11 weeks going through training to get ready for this moment to leave and actually go do

the work that we were there to do. And now instead, we were picking up to go do eight more weeks of training in a completely different area of the country without all of our teams and the connections we had built. So as we transferred, of course, that group became very close. We just bonded really intensely, really quickly. And in that time, I finally got to meet Ethan, who was the guy who had said 11 weeks ago that he wanted to get a mare laid that had completely written off at the time. Sure. And at first, I was very open to getting to know him because we were all going through the same thing. And he was starting to grow on me in ways that I didn't expect. As I was starting to get to know him, I was seeing things about him that I really liked. He was really confident

and he had this really great sense of humor. He was always the one that was making people laugh with some slight joke or he would love to poke at people from what he said out of love. And at that time, it genuinely felt like fun loving poking. Everyone found it really silly. And he also had this really adventurous spirit. He had done a lot of really cool things while he was in high school while I was younger and had a lot of really big ambitions for travel and things that he wanted to do with his life. And it just really resonated with me in the ways that I wanted to live. So throughout that a really good person that's not shallow. I would like to know if he's hot. Okay. So we're asking important questions here. Good job, Hannah. Yeah, journalism. So it's funny because I've been told

actually later by Ethan that my type is overweight pessimistic blonde guys so that's how he would describe himself and so physical treats weren't what I was attracted to right away and I tend to be more attracted to people when I get to know them so there wasn't this immediate physical

attraction and that kind of was like the progression of our connection like the physical nature of it wasn't there until it was there and it surprised us both when it finally came but sometimes that's the best Yeah, that was actually a part of kind of what drew me to the connection was like it wasn't this obvious thing we had been building up towards. It kind of just happened. So the way in which it happened. So when we were transferred out to a different program, we were transferred to the West Coast. So I was suddenly back where I grew up. And I ended up learning that a friend of mine from high school lived very close to where we were on campus for the program. And so he one weekend offered to drive me home so that I could pick up my car. And I asked if some of my core friends wanted to come with me because I wasn't close with Ethan at the time. I didn't invite him and he ended up hearing about this trip and inviting himself. And for an 18 year old to invite himself on a trip with a bunch of young 20-somethings, I was really impressed with his confidence. I'm typically not

yeah, truly. Like I would never have done that at 18. I still probably wouldn't do that because I'd have an inevitable anxiety about inviting myself to spaces I'm not wanted. Sure. Yeah. He was like, Of course they want me to come. Yeah. And there's something about that that I was like, wow, I love that energy. I kind of wish I had more about myself. And it just really dawned on me. Like, you know, I like to be around people who have this confidence.

There's something really empowering and exciting about it. Absolutely. I agree. So on that trip, we got a lot closer. And we actually ended up later on the way back to our campus. We ended up meeting his uncle and getting lunch because he happened to live on the West Coast as well. And a couple of months later, later, his uncle, when we were finally dating, Ethan had called his uncle to talk to him,

and his uncle said, I thought you guys were dating when I first met her. There was such an obvious connection between the two of you. And it always really stood out to me that people saw this natural energy between the two of us before we even could see it. So that eight weeks of training finally wraps up. And it's the last night before our project rounds where we are all going and go away from each other for six weeks and go work with our teams and then come back to the campus after. And our group of 18 are all hanging out. We aren't allowed to do anything on campus. You're not allowed to drink on campus. You can't like share a bed with somebody on campus. And so, of course, as young hoodlums do, we would always hang out in the parking lot behind a gas station

across the street. I've been there. I've been to, I've hung out with you probably. Yeah. What else the kids do? So we're hanging out in the parking lot and slowly, everybody, is kind of leaving to go back to their dorm, get themselves ready to leave the next day. And suddenly it's just Ethan and I in the parking lot. And it's getting pretty late, but we're not tired yet. We're not quite ready to go to bed. And so I asked if you wanted to sit in my car so that we could, again, be off campus and not be beholden to the rules that they had for us, but still stay up and talk and hang out.

And one thing led to another, and we ended up hooking up that night. And before Ethan, I had been in one six and a half year relationship with a guy that I'd met in high school and then dated all through college. Wow. And our sexual relationship was not great. It was pretty unhealthy and just it always left me feeling like I didn't like sex. Like I had this kind of concept that sex was just not something that was for me. And so being able to have sex with somebody actually enjoy it, see that there's a different world out there than what I knew. before this was really exciting for me and kind of reframed how I was thinking about sex at the time.

Absolutely. Yeah. So after we had sex, we did realize that the condom broke. And so instead of going straight to the dorm to go to bed and get ready for the next day, we ended up having to drive around this town that we didn't really know super well, trying to find a Walgreens that was open 24 hours so that we could get some emergency contraception. And yeah, it was definitely a very stressful experience. We were up literally until 3 a.m. and had to get up the next day at 6 to leave for our project rounds. And I was feeling really sick after taking plan B and was just having a hard time sitting in a van full of 12 other people for 10 hours the next day. And the entire time Ethan was handling it just was so much grace and so much kindness. He was really sweet and empathetic and checked in a lot on me. And then even throughout the 10 hour drive, he was making sure to text me throughout to check in and see if I was doing okay. That's amazing. Yeah.

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And maybe that means taking care of that overwhelm with a little bit of therapy with better help. Therapy can help you better understand your needs, feel more confident, setting boundaries, create a version of summer that actually feels good. So you're actually taking advantage of it. in a positive way and not feeling so overwhelmed by it. BetterHelp has over 30,000 therapists, and it's the world's largest online therapy platform, and they've served over 6 million people globally. I use it, and it works. They have an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. That's amazing. And of course, their therapist work according to a strict code of conduct and BetterHelp therapists are fully licensed in the U.S.

They'll match you with a therapist and you can talk about your therapy goals and decide if it's a therapist you want to stick with. You can always change that at any time. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash TDD. That's better h-elp.com slash T-D-D. So I sweetened on him quite a bit after that moment just because I felt really supported and like taking care of in that. I even think honestly, I think he probably even bought the plan B, which like in it in itself is a big deal because in AmeriCorps we only make a dollar 50 an hour for the full year. And so money is definitely a thing. And so even that was like a small sign to me. He's responsible. He's like taking responsibility for this moment. Good. Yeah. So we then left for our first project round and we were apart from each other for about six weeks. We did talk throughout that time, but we didn't have any expectations that we were together.

or that we were necessarily going to get together. We were just kind of letting this be the connection that it was and see where it goes. But when we got back from our first project round, it was actually the day before his 19th birthday, and we were hanging out in his dorm, catching up from the project as he unpacked. And we started talking about whether or not we wanted to date and decided that we did. So we officially became partners and kind of started our relationship in that moment.

Cute. At the same time, we were actually just entering into our, winter break. So we had about two and a half weeks off before we were supposed to be back on campus to continue doing the work that we were doing. And I was thinking about maybe going home, maybe traveling wasn't quite sure. And Ethan had decided that he wasn't going home at all. His family was flying to a different state. He didn't want to spend the money on plane tickets. So we decided very spontaneously instead that we would just go on a two-week road trip across the United States together. And we kind of deemed this our first real.

date because we left like three days after we started dating. Oh my gosh. I'm now looking back and like, yeah, you know, I think that's the time period that that would have worked. We were like young and in this program and had time off and. Yeah. And it's not like you didn't know each other. It's not like you just met three days ago.

Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, we took off on this two week road trip. We went from the West Coast all the way to East Coast and back. And we had a really great time. And the whole time I remember feeling like, wow. this is everything I'd been looking for. My relationship before was not very adventurous. So I was really looking for somebody who was adventurous, who wanted to travel and be spontaneous and do fun

things with me. And so this being our first date was hitting all of those boxes for me. It just felt like I had finally found somebody that had truly matched my energy and had some of the same passions and excitements in life that I did. Of course. We come back and then we go off to our next project round. So we end up spending about 10 weeks apart during this project round. And then we come back to campus after that. And we had both separately applied to be on a specialty team that would be doing wildland firefighting and emergency medical response. And we were both accepted onto the team. And so for the last five months of our program, we were actually living in the same community and working on two teams that worked together. I was obviously really excited about this because we had just spent about four months

dating but at a distance. And then we would have these moments where we'd have two weeks in between a project and it would just be really, really intense because we're trying to get as much time as we possibly can with each other before we're distance again. And now it felt like we could kind of have a stable relationship and really see what it's like to have a more day-to-day relationship with each other. And then also it just sounded fun to live in the high desert with my partner and with some friends, like doing cool outdoor work. And I was just very excited about this project. So we ended up going out. There was 18 other people, 20 of us in total there. And the rules still applied. So we, because we were dating, they had actually put us on two separate teams so that we

wouldn't be in the same house. We weren't allowed to sleep in the house together, anything like that. And so we would always set up a hammock just outside the property line of the house and sleep in a hammock every night. So like for five months straight, we were sleeping in a hammock together. Did that not mess up your back? I know. Again, I think being. 21 was the only reason why this is good work. I was about to say, I'm in my 40s now and there's just no way that I could do that. I couldn't love someone enough to sleep in a minute for two weeks, three weeks. How long was it? Five months. Five months. Oh, good for you. Yeah. Yeah, we were just having a great time. Ethan and I ended up building a really close group of friends and just enjoying our

time outside of the actual work with our team while we were there. And during this time, Ethan, revealed a story to me about something he had been dealing with for the years leading up to AmeriCorps. Oh, boy. Yeah. I actually had to dig this story out of him a little bit. So where we were living, we didn't have any service for the most part, depending on who your provider was. So Ethan didn't have any service unless he connected to Wi-Fi. There was three stores in town that you could go to, one that did have Wi-Fi sometimes. It was very infrequent that he was actually like on his phone talking to people back home. But every time we'd go into town, his phone would suddenly be just blowing up with messages. And it was a two and a half hour drive down a mountain to get to town, so we only went

every other week. And so I always just assumed it was this phone catching up on messages that have been sent in between. But then we'd be in town for hours, and his phone would still be going off like crazy. So finally, after a couple of weeks of this, I asked, you know, what's going on? Is there anything going on back home. And that's when he told me that he was receiving messages from his ex-boyfriend from high school. They started dating early his junior year. And they broke up a couple months later. And then she reached out a couple weeks later to say that she was pregnant. He was selling like 16 at the time. And he was hoping she wouldn't want to keep the baby. But she decided that she did want to keep the baby.

And a couple of weeks or months later, she said that she had a miscarriage. And so Ethan had actually given her money, about $500 worth while he was 16 or 17 years old, to pay for some of the medical procedures that she needed. And then shortly after this, he started to receive messages from his ex-girlfriend's doctor and lawyer via email saying that,

Because of her mental health, he needed to continue having sex with her to make sure that she did not go into a psychosis and commit suicide. So obviously, there was a lot to the story that didn't make sense to me. And even just the doctor and lawyer piece of it all, I was like, no doctor in their right mind is going to force an underage person to have sex with somebody else. And also, they would just never do that in general. Yeah. That's cool. Can you imagine? Oh, my God.

But also like 17-year-old boy, I get, he was just afraid of his family finding out, and she was threatening to tell his family. And so he was kind of in this haze of like, okay, this is what I have to do to protect myself from being found out for what happened. Which now, yeah. So for a year and a half, he was having unconsensual sex with her, non-consensual sex with her. Oh, my God. She would call him, pick him up in her car. They'd get in fights for hours. just with her screaming at him in the car. And then they'd have sex. Everything would be fine. She'd drop him off.

And then it would just happen again whenever she called next. Yeah. Yeah. And as he's telling you this story, is he emotional? Is he past it? Like, where is his state now? Yeah. So that's one thing about Ethan is that he is not an emotional guy.

He actually, over the course of our entire time together, never cried. He had a story about a time that his brother made fun of him for crying, and so he was never able to cry after that. But he just was never a very emotionally forward person that he primarily coped through jokes and dark humor. And he also talked very matter of fact. Like, this is just the information. This is just the facts. No emotion behind it. So that was kind of how I was receiving this story was, you know, this is what I'm going through. And this just is what it is. It's just something I have to do because this is what is happening. And so I started to still has to do? Well, at this time, because he wasn't living there,

he was states away. He was trying to get out of this situation. His responses back were saying, I don't live in the Midwest anymore. I can't do this for her anymore. And the doctors were still saying that he needed to keep reaching out to her to keep that communication open so that she still felt that. Okay. So you're hearing this and you're like, honey, where you're doing? Who's going to tell him? Right a darn minute. Exactly. And obviously I approached in this. I, I wasn't sure how he was going to take it. And also I was like, I want to make sure that I'm right. You know, I don't want to like. Yeah, let me confirm this. Yeah. I don't want to just say that this doesn't sound right and then find out like it actually is right. Because I'm also young. I'm only 21 at the time. Right. So I'm like, I'm still young. Maybe there's something about

the situation that is right, but it all sounds just wacky, not correct. So I started to pay attention to the messages. He was showing them to me now at this point. And I was starting to clock some inconsistencies. And so I finally did bring them up to him to just be like, hey, this doesn't sound right. Can we talk through this? And over time, he became aware that these inconsistencies were just that. And he decided to go no contact. This then made her contact even worse. And so after maybe a month or two of this, he finally responded and he said, I know that you're lying to me. I know the doctor's not real. I know the lawyer's not real. I know the baby was probably never real too. I'm not doing this anymore. And she owned up to it. She emailed back and she said that she had just discovered and been

diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, BPD. Yeah. And that she also had some sort of issue with her thyroid that caused these really intense emotional reactions, question mark. And that, that she was really sorry and that she would leave him alone. But she actually ended up not leaving him alone. She was still a fixture of our relationship for six years until we finally stopped hearing from her one day. Yeah, six years, she was still calling us constantly. She would always call from different numbers.

There was one night where it was like 2 a.m. And Ethan's phone was ringing and he picked it up. And I just remember he was more scared than I'd ever heard. heard him before. Suddenly he just went, no, no, no, you promised me you would never call again and hung up. And then she called 23 more times from different numbers. And this was like two years into us dating. So yeah, this is like a big thing that followed us around for quite a while. And the impact, of course, for me was like, the story really deepened my empathy for him and my sense of protection for him. Because I at this time saw him as just this really sweet,

funny guy who is trying so hard to leave his home and actually start his life and get away from this experience. And now I'm learning just how much manipulation and blackmail and coercion existed in his life. And it just made me want to protect him so much, you know. Yeah. I could also see how that makes him more stoic, like you said, if he'd been dealing with that for as long as he was and just kind of shutting his body down to, I mean, be assaulted repeatedly. Like, that's crazy. Yeah. It really is a man like, oh.

Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I put a lot into context about him as a person. And I actually remember him sharing because, yeah, him as a man. Like, that was the whole thing too. Like, his high school friends just didn't get it. They would say to him, like, why are you complaining about getting laid? Like, you should be happy that you're getting laid.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's messed up. Yeah. Yeah. I just had so much sadness for him that he had to go through that. And understood, you know, this is probably why he's so stoic because he's literally never been able to share this story and feel like people actually see how messed up it is. What a difficult thing to do. It's summer and I have been spending a lot of time in Las Vegas.

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There's one specific story that I always come back to. So we're in the high desert and we're in a really, really tiny town. There was about 60 people who lived there full time. And it was a tourism destination for outdoor recreation. But it's so far away. It's so rural that it's just not very well traveled to. There's not a lot of infrastructure. So on hikes, for instance, there's like literally no signage anywhere to be found.

You have to just generally know where you are or be able to find rock stacks to direct you and things like that. So on my team, there was five women, and I used to be really close with one of the other women on my team. And our friendship had slowly started to strain. And I was really wanting to reinitiate that connection, but also grow a deeper connection with the women on my team. Because we're working in such a male-dominated environment, and I just really wanted to feel a lot of strong female support throughout the time that we were there. So one day this teammate asks if all of the girls want to go on a hike together on one of our days off. And I said yes, and so did one other persons.

So the three of us set out that Saturday on our day off to go on this very long height. And we ended up getting ridiculously lost. After like an hour, we could not find a single rock stack to show us where we're supposed to be. Oh, no. Again, we're in an area with really rough service. So we couldn't even pull up a map to be able to look at where we are and find a road. So we're stressing out. We're trying to find our way out.

And eventually we find a place that has service. We're able to look at a map, find out. a road, get out to the road, and then call our team leader to come pick us up. And we were like almost an hour away from where we lived at that point. So she came to pick us up. And I don't remember exactly how this happened. I believe that I had some emails from Ethan, which he would have been able to send throughout the day down at the firehouse and down in the town where the places were that had Wi-Fi. But the messages were kind of insistent that I come over to talk to him. And I had this weird feeling like something's not right about this. Like something seems

off about the way he's reaching out right now. I want to believe that he's just anxious and nervous because I was just gone for somewhere between 10 to 12 hours, completely lost. I mean, we almost had to call search and rescue from the fire department that we work at. So everyone on our team knew about this at this point. So I show up at his house. And instead of expressing any concern, he gets really upset that he wasn't invited on the hike. He starts to go on and on about how that wouldn't have happened if he was there. We never would have gotten lost. And it's really unfair and unkind that we didn't consider inviting him to this hike, which was knowingly pulling the women on our team. And I was so caught off guard by this response that I just

went straight into people pleasing mode, apologizing that he didn't, wasn't invited, trying to kind of coddle his feelings and like help him feel heard and supported. But I do remember at the end saying, I'm kind of a little surprised that you didn't express any concern about me or two other teammates that were lost all day. And he just came right back to how he was feeling about it, that he was just really hurt that he wasn't invited. He knew ultimately we were fine because there's the fire department right there to come find us, all of that.

And looking back on that many years later, I started to realize that this was the beginning of a pattern that I noticed in our relationship where he would always center himself in my own experiences or whatever it was that I was feeling. If I was going through something or if I was explaining something I was feeling, he was the complete center of that. And this was sort of the first moment that I saw that happened. So after AmeriCorps, like I said, we were only making $1.50 an hour and we were out on the West Coast. So there was no way I was going to stay out on the West Coast because I could not afford to be there. And one day Ethan had asked if I would be interested in moving to his home state to this town that he used to go to a lot because his mom really likes to go birding there. Ethan's mom was really into going birdwatching and she used to take him up to this place in northern Wisconsin to go bird watching every year. And he thought it was a really cool town and he was like, do you want to move there? Like, let's just give it a try. And I thought that was the most whimsical, cute reason to move to a place ever. So I was like, yeah, of course, let's do it. Yeah. So we ended up moving to his home state and started building our life after AmeriCorps together. And also because it was relatively new to him, we both got to explore it together. And so it really added to that adventurous spirit that I was really seeking out in the relationship from the start and helped.

me feel like that was going to continue after AmeriCorps in this more structured life that we had now. So AmeriCorps is really focused on personal growth. The program has a lot of trainings that everyone has to go through on conflict resolution and communication. And this was something that Ethan and I both really liked about AmeriCorps. We really enjoyed this energy behind always working on improving yourself and becoming a better version of who you are. And so after AmeriCorps, Ethan continued to emphasize that this was a really important thing for us in our relationship and that he wanted to make sure that first and foremost, continuing to work on ourselves was at the forefront of our relationship at all times. I was really excited about this idea. It felt like I was finding a partner who wanted to grow with me. And if there were conflicts or issues that arose, that we would be really working together and as a partnership to move through that and get over that. Yeah. And that was the first time I had really had a partnership like that, friendship, family member, or intimate relationship. Like, I had never had somebody who really wanted to work as a team with me. So, of course, I was really excited about this idea of continuing to work on ourselves. But I started to feel, how do I say this? I started to feel rather inadequate in comparison to Ethan. One of the first times that this came up was maybe a year or two into our relationship. We traveled back out to the West Coast to visit my family. and we had brought some of his high school friends with us that I had now become friends with too.

And I was sharing a story about somebody that I had gone to college with. And I said something like, oh, she's awful. And Ethan immediately interrupted me and said, ew, that's gross. We don't talk about people like that. And I felt so much shame in that moment because I was with his two friends from high school. I was with him. Being scolded like a child.

Yeah, yes. And I just felt so uncomfortable. I was like, wow, I honestly, what it did for me in that moment was, okay, Ethan is a really good person. He doesn't talk about other people like this. And if I want to be worthy of being with Ethan, I need to learn how to be kinder to people that I don't connect with or who I feel hurt by. I need to be able to be more empathetic to others. And of course, all those things are really good things to want in your life. But I think that the moment that brought this out was not the right moment, right? Like I'm an empathetic person on my own. Me saying that somebody is awful who I had a bad experience with is like kind of a very mild form. Yeah. But the impact is definitely there because I thought about that moment for a long time. And it really started to push me into this place of internalizing that I needed to do more work than Ethan. did. And even you were saying like if you want to be worthy of him. Yeah, that's what I was, that's what I got on to. It's a tough mindset. So one other thing that was kind of coming from this

self-improvement philosophy, I was starting to notice that the areas of growth for myself were always coming from Ethan. So they were never things that I on my own was noticing and wanting to work on. There were kind of lists of things that he observed about me that he thought that I needed to work on. And the first big one was actually very valid. We had had some moments where emotional reactivity was hard for me. I grew up in an environment where all of my major authority figures express their emotions through anger. And I actually until recently, like I had never seen my dad express an emotion other than anger. Wow.

That's hard. Yeah. And so I was really used to being around people that couldn't communicate appropriately, couldn't find that way to ask for somebody to understand how they were feeling. And so I also was really struggling with that when we first got together. Conflicts would typically eventually escalate to raise voices on my end. And then Ethan would express like, this is an ongoing issue. I really need you to work on this. And I just felt this deep concern. And again, coming back to that worthiness, like I was like, wow, I'm not worthy of being with him because I can't control my emotional reactions. This is really

something that I need to work on. He also was starting to, I had mentioned in the beginning that he, he, it, he loved to poke at people and he would say that this was his love language. Like, this is though if he's poking at you, that's how you know that he loves you. Because he loves to observe people. I've heard that my whole life. Notice their insecurities. And then lovingly highlight them as a way to show you, I see you and I still love you. This is great.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is something that he had said a lot. And again, in the very beginning, it genuinely. did feel fun, silly, loving. I never felt deeply offended by any of the ways that he poked at me. But after we started living together, the ways that he did that really changed. He would find something to comment on, and then he would comment on it a lot more. So instead of bringing it up

like every couple months, it was suddenly something we talked about every month and then every week and then every other day. And he also would then start to bring in other people. So instead of poking at me and in the privacy of our home, he would bring up some of these things while other people were around. And the tone behind them was beginning to shift. To me, it felt like he was annoyed. It felt like he was not as well anymore. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Contempting things that were actually frustrating him, but he didn't have the tools to actually just communicate that directly. And these were like really small minor things. Like the big one when we first started living together, like I feel even ridiculous even telling you guys this.

it's just so minor. He started to comment that I cut onions wrong when I'm cooking. And then it progressed into not only do you cut onions wrong, but when you cut them the way that you do, it actually ruins the meal because the onion is so overpowering. And then it just became a thing that he talked about. I'd be like, great, you cut the onions then. I'll get out of the kitchen. You can do it. That ended up being the case because so he did this. for like a year and a half and I was so fed up of hearing about onions, right? And that wasn't it for real example? Yes, that's a for real example. He was like genuinely mad. Okay. He, well, according to him, he wasn't mad. He was just lovingly poking at me because I cut onions wrong. So for a year and a half,

he did this. And then by the time it was like at the end of the year and a half, I was like, I'm fed up. I'm not cooking anymore. This is not the first time that we've heard people use cooking or food or Or dishwasher. Just as a way to be like, oh, I'm doing this because I care about you or I'm trying to help you. But in reality, they're just trying to control you. Yeah. And it sounds like that was like a, whether it's conscious or not, like he just needed to be in control of you in little ways. Yeah.

That is a perspective that took me until the last year to finally realize how many of these things might have just been a bid for control. Okay. So you stop cooking, basically. Yeah. I stopped cooking. But just generally saying. these constant criticisms about really minor things, which is getting a lot more intense.

And when I would question them and say, hey, this seems like something that you're actually annoyed about. If you're annoyed about it, can we have a conversation about it instead? Because poking at me doesn't feel good. And he would say that I'm misperceiving him. I don't understand him.

And that we're on the same team and that I need to remember that we're on the same team. But your perception is your reality. And also that's so funny that he is like telling you that you're doing things wrong. And then when you kindly bring up something that he could work on, he's like, no, no, no, no, no. This is a you problem. Yes. The irony of all that is that in the moment, I didn't see it. And now being out of it, like especially looking at the outline that was made of my story, I'm like, wow, this is so obvious.

Like, it's so clear that this is what was happening. But in the middle of it, you don't see it. Yeah. My whole focus was, what do I need to do to continue to become the partner that deserves to be in this match? And I thought genuinely that he was doing the same thing. What do I need to do to deserve this? Like what will make me worthy? What a position to be in where you have to ask yourself that?

Yeah. I know some of that stems from my own childhood stuff, but it's definitely in reflection of the relationship. Like I see how much he helped create that environment. where I was not capable of seeing myself as a worthy match to him. And because of that, it kind of allowed me to enable him through a lot of these behaviors. Because then a lot of these things, you know, when he's saying, you're misperceiving me, I'm then going to a place of empathy. You think you're an idiot.

Yeah. And I'm like, what do I need to do to make sure that I see him clearly and that I'm not misperceiving him, even though in my body what you just said feels really gross and icky to me. But if you're misperceiving him, then he's your victim. Yes, exactly. And that was a big fear of mine, right? Like, I don't want to be an abuser. I want to make sure that I'm treating my partner with love and fear. He's telling me that I'm not hearing him, that I'm misperceiving him. So that's a big issue. I need to work on that. And it entirely made me stop trusting my own judgment. I looked to him for the understanding of what reality was entirely at this point in our relationship. And all of this really pushed me into this period of self-development. So generally speaking over the next 10 years, I was constantly doing something to be working on myself. And it started with, I did yoga teacher training. And through that training, there was a lot of work that we were doing internally to question our shadows and the parts of us

that kind of get triggered and reactive to things. And all of that work was really helping me come out of some of the trauma and past pains that I was still holding on to from AmeriCorps from before that. I also went to graduate school and got a master's degree. I also started going to therapy. So I was doing all of these things to really learn more about myself and continue to develop as a person. And during that time, I was also actively working on overcoming some of my triggers and doing this, quote unquote, self-development work that had been ingrained in our relationship. So I started working through some of that reactive responses that I was having. And through all of this, I came to really understand that I react the most when I feel misunderstood or dismissed. And that

I have a very hard reaction with anger. And I tend to suppress it because I view it as a bad emotion that we're not supposed to have, and that I had all of the tools through the things that I had done over the last 10 years to actually work through those things and come to a better place. And during that time, I genuinely grew, like the reactive responses became so much better. I felt like I was having an easier time communicating my feelings directly and was also seeing, in return, people understanding them a lot better. And I just generally was feeling better about who I was as a person and more confident in myself. But our fights were still reflecting this narrative that I was the one that had to continue to do the work.

Every time we'd get into a fight, he would be bringing up some of these things that had been issues in the previous years. And I would be asking for acknowledgement that I had changed and grown around these issues. And his response would be, I'm always the one to acknowledge your growth. I'm the one that sees that you have grown the most, but there's still work that has to be done because this is still an issue in our relationship. It just felt so demoralizing how much work I was putting into being a better person. You're like triggering me a little bit. Just know you're not alone. Yeah.

Because really all these things that he was saying were doubling down the narrative that I am an angry person and that anger is a bad emotion. And I now have such a different relationship to anger. So once I came into a better relationship with anger and understood, you know, it's okay for me to feel angry. I just need to make sure that I communicate that in a responsible way. It changed a lot. But Ethan never let that go. Like through the very end of our relationship, the narrative was Claire is such an angry person. She's always so mad.

And it didn't matter when he got angry. Like his anger was not comparable to my anger. My anger was the problem. So yeah, he like completely, I mean, he fucked me up on that one. He's the reason for years that I thought anger was a bad emotion. and put me in a place where I wasn't able to use anger effectively because I felt like I was just supposed to push it away and never express it. Wow.

So at this time, we are about two years into the relationship now. We are living in northern Wisconsin, and I am about to move away from that town, our first town together, to go work a seasonal job on the West Coast before we go and do this long five-month backpacking trip together. At the time, things in our relationship feel good, but not perfect, which I'm sure it's easy to understand that that feels weirdly comfortable to us both because of this dynamic that we have to always be working on ourselves. It's good that there's still room for us to work on ourselves. So it kind of feels at this time like, okay, things are all right. We have some work ahead of us, and that's great. Let's do it together.

As we were driving out to the West Coast for this seasonal job, Ethan brings up the idea of polyamory. he asked if it was something I would ever consider or be open to. And I was completely blindsided by the question. I kind of rejected the idea right away very quickly. And on that car ride, he said, if I've never thought about it before, I should be cautious to being closed off to it now because it's not something I've fully considered.

And that there might come a time in our relationship where we need polyamory. Oh. to have this continue to work. Yeah. Wow. That's like a very loosely veiled threat. Yeah.

And a weird thing to say just two and a half years into the relationship, right? Yeah. What do you mean we might need this to make it work? Is it not working now around this? Like I was just really surprised by that. But also, weirdly, I had been so conditioned to like give so much validity and thought process to the things that he said. So when he's saying this, I am starting to think about it. I'm going, well, you know what?

I have never thought about it. And it is pretty closed off of me to just say no to something that I've never considered. And also, like, yeah, what if there comes a day where we still love each other so much, but the sexual connection isn't there? What if we do want to open up our relationship? And so these are the things that he's trying to get me to think about. And then he also is pulling on like our adventurous lifestyle. Like we both travel, well, I travel separately from him quite a bit. and we generally have pretty independent lives as well.

And so we're talking about this adventurous side of our relationship as we continue to go out and travel and explore independently. Maybe that's something that we would want and that would align really well with our relationship already. So I started to be curious about it and just let myself actually consider the idea. And over the course of the next three years, I do become open to the idea of being polyamorous. But a major reason why is because for the long, time. I've been questioning if I'm a lesbian and I was too afraid to go explore because I was worried that I'd find out I actually only like women and now I have to like separate from this guy that I'd met. Exactly. I was just deeply afraid of finding that out. Yeah. And it was it was something that

had weighed on me for a long time and I had at this point not talked to Ethan about this. A couple years later I would say this to him like, hey, I think I might be gay and I'm afraid that I'm actually a lesbian. And he was always very supportive about it. But then it'll allowed polyamory to be a little bit more of a consideration for us because that would be my opportunity to explore and discover more about myself. Just in case anybody listening is like not 100% sure on polyamory, do you want to give a quick definition and also a definition based on what the two of you understood it to be? Yeah. Yeah. So polyamory is a, it's a relationship structure where and you don't have just one partner. You can have multiple partners or and even within polyamory,

there's a lot of different dynamics. Like there's something called solo polyamory where you are generally independent by yourself, but you might occasionally go and date other people, but you're kind of focusing on just being an independent person. You might be polyamorous and dating multiple people. You might be polyamorous and only dating one person at this time. Essentially, the main thing is that there's this openness to letting connections look the way they look and not being restricted to this monogamous construct where you're just with one person.

But it's also, I mean, I guess it's different for everybody, but it's one thing to be like, you can hook up with someone one time and whatever. This is kind of allowing for potentially other emotional connections. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a major difference between non-monogamy and polyamory. So some people look at non-monogamy in the non-monogamous community as like this is people who are going and hooking up with other people. They have an agreement in their relationship that sex can exist with others. But polyamory is typically way more focused on that actual relationship. building and connections. So it's not uncommon, polyamorous people to have multiple boyfriends, multiple girlfriends, multiple partners. So three years after we started dating, we set off to go do a five-month backpacking trip together. And during this time, the topic of marriage came up a lot. By him? By both of us, actually. I was definitely really excited about the idea of being married when I was younger. And we had been dating, I think, like three, three and a half years at that point. And so I did see him as somebody that I wanted to be married to. I thought I saw that future with him. And he was a little bit less sure. He never really explained exactly why. He just kind of had this

attitude of, I guess, I mean, if I'm just like cheapening it, it's like a commitment fear. Like, he was just a little afraid to commit to that, which I understood. Like, he was really young. And so I wasn't pushing it, but I was saying, you know, I moved across the country to live with you. I completely started my whole life with you across the country. And if this is where it's going, that's great. But if this isn't where it's going, like, I kind of want to know because I don't want to just be living in the Midwest with somebody who doesn't intend to eventually marry me. Right. And so we talked on and off about it for the whole five months that we were traveling. And in that conversation, it also came out that Ethan really wanted us to blend our finances.

I was a little anxious about this idea because my high school college boyfriend and I had blended our finances towards the end of college when we were living together. We just had one shared bank account that we transferred money into. So we still had separate accounts as well. But when we broke up separating that account, it was just so messy. And I was like, I never want to do that again with somebody ever. Like I am not willing to blend my finances with somebody unless we are married. And so I told him this, and he kept pushing the idea the entire trip that we needed to blend our finances, didn't move forward on the conversation about getting engaged. And when we ended the trip, we did end up going ahead and blending our finances together.

I think at the time, there's kind of two major motivators for me behind this. One, we are going into our second season of farm work out on the West Coast after our big backpacking trip. And we were making all of this money together, so it just kind of made sense. for us to also keep it in the same place and use that for our future together. And that money ended up becoming the down payment on our house. So it did make sense in that time. But also, I was kind of looking at this as like, Ethan seems to believe that we need to take this step to then be able to get to the next step. And so if we can show that we are ready and able to work on having finances blended together, then he will be ready to move to that next step of us

actually having a married life together. And that was sort of how he was framing it. And that was sort of how he was framing it to me as well. We got back home. We blended our finances. And then actually a couple of months later in December of that year, we got engaged. And we ended up getting engaged when we traveled back up to our first town that we had lived in together. And we went on this date on our last night there, went out to dinner, and then we're walking around the lake together. And he was just standing behind me. And we were just staring off into the lake silently. And suddenly he just asked, do you want to get married, didn't get down on his knee, didn't have a ring, anything. And he kind of told me that this was how it was going to be, that he was just going to wait for the moment that felt right and do it.

And weirdly enough, so we were actually staying with a friend of ours that lived up there. And we went back to his place and we didn't even tell him. We were both just quietly hanging out with him and his girlfriend the rest of the night. I don't honestly. I'd be like, oh my gosh, we got to engage. Now that I look at it, I'm like, that must have been some sort of sign that we both didn't say it to anybody. And like this wasn't our closest friend in the world, but he was a good friend of ours. And so I don't know if maybe we were both just feeling like we needed to tell other people before we told anybody else first. But regardless, at this point, we're living in his hometown. And I start my first big adult job. I started working for a nonprofit. It's a national

nonprofit with a local branch in the town that we were living in. And I was really excited to work for this place because I had heard a lot of really great things about them. I've always loved the work that they do. And it just seemed like it'd be a really great first step towards a career working in the nonprofit industry and specifically working on community projects that really help create a lot of strength and resilience in the places that we live. But that environment ended up being insanely unhealthy for me. Nonprofits in general are very notorious for expecting a lot from people. And that was definitely true of this place. There was multiple weeks where I was working over 70 hours. and my boss told me that that's just what the job required sometimes.

Oh, my God. Yeah. And actually, funny enough, that wasn't even the worst thing that was happening to me at the time. About four months into me being on the leadership team, we hired this guy who was about eight years older than me. And he eventually became a little bit of a mentor to me. He had been working in nonprofits for a while. And so he took me on a little bit as a mentee.

and we also developed a pretty close friendship. And eventually the behavior started to escalate into sexual harassment and eventually insult as well. Yeah. So obviously, that was a really, really hard time for me. He was deeply influencing the way that I thought about myself because at that time, I'm so afraid of making people angry. And obviously, the impact on my marriage was pretty intense.

Yeah. This all happened within the first year of me being married to Ethan. So how did the wedding go? What kind of, I want to hear how you got married. Yeah. So we initially wanted to have a really small wedding, just us and a couple of friends. And then both of our moms ended up throwing tantrums about that. So we ended up hosting a very small wedding of about 55 people. We rented an Airbnb in southwestern Wisconsin and then got married at a state park and then went back to the Airbnb.

And 35 out of 55 of the people were staying there with us. So it was just this big party weekend. And it was really nice, really relaxing. Anyway, so that was how the wedding went. We got married. And then I'm working at this job within the first couple months of me working at this job. I'm being sexually harassed. And it's really impacting our marriage.

And in my mental health in general, like my mental health was down in the dumps. I was struggling so hard every day. My libido was just zero. I had no interest in sex whatsoever. And my sense of safety was also completely gone. Like, everywhere I went, I just felt. so uncomfortable and on edge at all times because this guy was popping into my life unexpectedly at all moments. Ethan's really supportive throughout this entire time. He's being really patient

with me, especially around sex and not having an interest in sex. And he's trying his best to show up and just be like a stable presence for me. And then I finally am able to leave the job in 2020. COVID hits. We are all furloughed for a little bit. And then I'm asked to come back to work. And after a couple weeks of this, I'm like, you know what? I don't want to do this. anymore. I had been working on this project behind the scenes to found a nonprofit. And so I'm like, I'm just going to quit my job and focus all my attention on getting this nonprofit up and running instead. So I'm finally able to move away from this guy that I was working with. And at this point, Ethan and I had bought a house. We bought a house in late 2019. We'd been living in that house for about

six months. And I remember shortly after I left that job, just a couple of weeks, we're standing in her kitchen. And Ethan has this conversation with me that he really would like for us to focus on working on our sexual relationship. At this point, sex had been a pretty common topic between us. We talked about the mismatch and libido quite a bit. And I always had, anytime sex got brought up, this huge wall would go up for me. And I'd feel so much apathy and anxiety and just not want to talk about it. So as he's saying this, I'm realizing this is not a healthy response to this topic. So there is something here that I need to dig into to understand about myself if I want to have a healthy relationship to sex. And also on Ethan's end, he's describing that he's pretty unsatisfied with our sex.

He's saying it's unadventurous, it's pretty vanilla. And he just wants more openness exploration and a sense of desire between us. And to me, that all makes sense, especially given the context of where I had been for the last couple of years with my job. So I start to work through that. And slowly but surely I started to feel safer to talk about sex and some of my guards started to go down. And we actually started to see a lot of improvements in our relationship. Our communication seemed a lot better.

And we were having a lot more frequent and more explorative sex with each other as well. And on the positive for me, I was finally able to start seeing some openness to change on his end about things that were deeply impacting me. There was two major ones that had been impacting me for questions. a while that I had tried to talk to Ethan about a number of times and just never was able to get anywhere. And the first was about expressing disappointment when there was a no to having sex. If I said I didn't want to have sex, he would say, I'm disappointed. And that was always really hard for me to receive because it made me then feel like there was something wrong with me saying

no because it elicited a negative feeling for him, right? And then I was stuck in this place of not really feeling confident. He knew it would manipulate you too because he knew that you want to to please him. Exactly. It was manipulation for sure. Whenever you don't feel like it and your partner does, you're already feeling guilty. Like it's just kind of, I feel like an aid.

Exactly. Especially in a relationship where there's already this huge mismatch in libido, right? Like that's already such a huge issue for you. And now when I do say no, I'm hearing that you're disappointed. And so now I have to carry the weight. Being strong enough to say no and also being strong enough to hear that that impacted you negatively.

So this had been a thing that. had been happening for years. And the way that he would always frame this when we talked about it was, well, that's how I'm feeling. So I should be able to express how I'm feeling because in our relationship, there needs to be, you know, openness to hearing that. And so I was trying in my head to be like, how do I create space for him to say, I'm disappointed while also knowing that doesn't feel good to me, but apparently I'm just supposed to work through how that feels to me because the healthier thing is for him to be able to express that this is how he's feeling. Mental gymnastics all day every day in this relationship.

So that was one major thing that I was starting to see some openness to. Like he started to understand and stopped saying it as often. And then the other major thing that I saw was when there was a no, sometimes he would just completely withdraw. And there would be silence, not a lot of connection over the next couple of days until sex finally did happen, which was not helpful for me, right? Because I'm like, if I'm not in the mood for sex right now, and then you spend three days not talking to me because I said no to sex,

I'm definitely not going to be in the mood for sex. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And he never got that. He would always just withdraw and then reinitiate sex when he was ready to connect with me again. And I was just left in this place of like, but what just happened in between to make me want this? Nothing. And I didn't have the words for that piece of it at the time. I was only focused on the pattern of withdrawing and how that made me feel. I didn't realize that underneath this, there's also this context of you're now making it even harder for me to want to come back to this later. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But at least we were some movement now of don't withdraw, that's really hard for me. And he was starting to kind of get that. So we were feeling a lot closer at this time. And this, of course, what a great time to finally open up our marriage and become polyamorous, right? Of course. Of course. So in late 21, at this point, we had been married for two years. We decided to become polyamorous. A part of the reason was because things were going so well that we felt like we were finally in a place where our relationship could handle that. Our communication was better. Communication is huge in polyamory.

So we're like, we can, we can probably pursue this. And finally, also have the opportunity for me to explore what my sexual orientation is and discover that about myself. And see if maybe that's a factor in some of our mismatch of libido as well. Like, is it truly that I am a little bit more gay than I am straight and not this is a hard thing for me? I mean, he was supportive of that, you said. Like he was like, okay, let's explore. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think he was coming from it from this perspective too of, well, I don't want to be married to a lesbian if you're actually a lesbian. Like, I would like to find that out for that we know. And that totally made sense to me too because, you know, in the backdrop of our relationship was this disconnect

between us sexually. And so, of course, that was a question we were trying to understand, like, is this, is this just that I'm a lesbian and I could not be any less interested in a man? Maybe that's all it is. So we didn't have any tangible rules for entering into polyamory, which was definitely a mistake on our end. We believed that because we had been talking about this for five years, we were evolved. We knew what to do. We could come into this and make it work.

And at first it did work pretty well. I ended up meeting somebody Halloween night that year. Her name is Sophie. Our connection was incredibly immediate. Like every time I talked to a lesbian, they're like, yeah, this is a very classic lesbian love story. Like we locked eyes and we could not stop talking to each other the entire night. And then immediately after we're inseparable at the hip the whole time we were dating.

And for me, this is really fun because I was starting to like, I realized very quickly, I'm not a lesbian. I'm pansexual. Like, that is not a fear I need to hold on to. Wow, I can't believe I just spent the last five years being totally afraid of this. And like finally now I'm seeing the reality where I am as a person. Yeah, that exactly. Yeah.

It doesn't have to be. Exactly. So that was the very beginning of polyamory. and Ethan about a month and a half into Sophie and I dating met Brooke. And initially, everything felt very manageable between us. I really liked Brooke a lot because, one, she'd been polyamorous for a really long time. So she kind of understood this dynamic of having what's called a metamore. So when you're dating somebody, the person that other people that they are dating are your metamores.

So Sophie was Ethan's metamore because they're both dating me. And so Brooke, she really understood how to... I've heard that word, but I never knew what it meant or how it was used. That's cool. Interesting. Yeah. I actually, metamores are like a part of polyamory I really love because if you can be really respectful and responsible in that relationship, you can also develop a really close

relationship with the metamore. And I did have a close relationship with some of my metamores. Brooke and I ended up never getting super close and you'll learn why pretty shortly here. But yeah, I really liked her at first quite a bit, especially. some of the ways that I saw that she was changing Ethan and helping him kind of understand certain things about the ways that he showed up in a relationship with both of us. She was really helping him see, like,

that's not great behavior and you need to change some of these things. A really specific example. So at this point in our relationship, nearly every time we had sex, Ethan and I, Ethan would either afterwards say, I wish that this happened instead. Oh, God. Yeah. Or he would immediately start, while we're naked in bed, immediately start trying to analyze how sex went. Did you like this? You reacted this way to this. So it seems like you might not like it. If I did this and stand.

Oh my gosh. That's not aftercare. That's for sure. No. It's not. It makes it like a skill. It's not about your enjoyment. Like suddenly it's like, oh, did I do a good job? Yeah. Which I'm sure as you have heard me say, like, am I worthy enough to be with Ethan? Like, that was so hard for me because I'm like, wow, you're analyzing this really vulnerable thing we just did together. Now I'm feeling like I didn't show up enough in ways that you would have liked or desired. So that was really, really hard for me. And that was something that he had been doing for years, literal years. And I had told him many times, like, I don't really like this.

I would mean a lot to me if after sex some of the time, we didn't analyze how it went. Or I'd try to make him aware of how the I wish statement. made me feel. Within two months of dating Brooke, he did that. And Brooke shut him down so fast and was like, that is so toxic. Don't ever say that to me again. Good. Good. And he came home that day and he was like, wow, Brooke said this to me today. And it really hit me. That's really unfair of me to be saying those things. And I should, I should work on not doing that. So the side of me is like, oh my God, fuck you. Like, I'm sorry, I don't know. You can, yeah, you can. You can press, girl, go nuts.

You just spent like four years doing this to me with me begging you to stop. But then Brooke wanders around and says it once and you finally get it. But also, thank you, Brooke, so much because I was so sick of that behavior. So in a lot of ways, I really loved polyamory for that because it seemed like he was finally getting a different perspective that he would listen to because apparently he didn't want to listen to my perspective on these things. Did you guys have any jealousy early on or were you both kind of like, wait, this is actually really helping us? So Ethan had no jealousy at first of Sophie because Sophie is a small brunette woman. We look very similar. He's like, I can't compare to her.

We're not the same. I did not have any jealousy of Brooke until about two months into them dating. At this time, it was January of 22. And Ethan kept telling me repeatedly for over a month that Brooke is his fun partner. He'd rather go out on the weekends with her. Ew. And that I'm better suited for his weekday life. Oh my God.

That would destroy me, first of all. Yeah, it did destroy me. I already felt really deeply insecure about whether or not people found me fun. You know, like I'm kind of shy. I'm kind of quiet. And it takes me a while to connect with people. And so we had been, this was like still kind of post-COVID. And so we're meeting a lot more people because we live in a very, very small town.

Everyone who is our age knows each other. And now it's post-COVID. We're all coming out and socializing, meeting each other. And it was a hyper-intense environment for me at the time trying to start to go out by myself and on my own as a polyamorous person and meet people. And then here he was telling me, you're better suited for my weekday life. Brooke is the person I would like to go out with on the weekends. And I just, I felt so low about myself. And as a result, some of that emotional reactivity that I had when I was, when we first started dating, started to come back. And I was really struggling to keep it together. And I ended up actually having a lot of panic attacks that month. And the panic attacks were kind of twofold. It was like the situation with Ethan and the things that he was saying, but also things with Sophie weren't going great. We have very different attachment styles. And she ultimately wasn't super comfortable with polyamory. And so we were having some trouble because I think Sophie didn't want me to be polyamorous. She wanted me to be her primary partner. And then there'd be these really big withdrawals when I was going home and being done with our date.

We'd go like, there was one day we were driving back from a date. We had about an hour drive together. And we had a great date. And then we get in the car and she's just dead silent for the whole hour. And it was because she was remembering and realizing like Claire is going home to her husband. Yeah. And so that was causing some panic attacks for me too because when we would go out together, there was just this really intense, like she had to be right next to me at all times.

And I just felt really, really overwhelmed. And so I ended up breaking up with her. So after Sophie and I broke up, I met someone named Jake. Jake is slightly older than me. He was in his mid-30s. And I was really drawn to him because he was very respectful. I had known him for a couple years at this point, but we had never been close. And he had always been very respectful of my relationship with Ethan. I watched the way that he navigated the dating scene. And he was always really good at respecting knows. And he was always really good at respecting knows. people's boundaries. And I also just really loved his confidence. Like he, he's an attractive man. He has a beautiful accent and he uses that accent for good. He's like very like, it's very good of just coming in and talking to women and just like creating an environment that at least for me, I felt very comfortable in. And I just generally felt pretty safe with him. And Jake had been polyamorous for years, like as long as I had known him. And he was currently with a couple of people, but he didn't have any really significant deep relationships that he was pursuing at the time. And this was also kind of a reason why I was drawn to him because I was still new to polyamory.

I hadn't been with somebody who was also polyamorous. And that was something I really wanted to experience because I had just had this horrible experience with Sophie. And so I was like, it would be really nice to experiencing with somebody who also has a lot of openness to this relationship structure. And because he was well known for not having any problems, getting ladies to come home with him, I also sort of like had this knowledge that like it would be a really fun experience to start seeing Jake. Sure. And that was going to be something that I really enjoyed because like at that point I was still sort of trying to figure myself out sexually. I still felt this huge wall of like I feel a disconnect between myself and sex.

And I don't know where that's coming from. I don't know what it is that makes me like sex, not like sex. And this is something about myself I would like to better understand. And in polyamory, the beauty of this is that you can be with other people and experience. explore different sides of yourself and learn things about yourself that you might not learn with your primary partner. Sure. So yeah, I was excited about the idea of spending more time with Jake, but this quickly set off a chain reaction for Ethan that deeply, deeply led to what I believe was the end of our relationship. I think this moment of meeting Jake was kind of the beginning of the

end for us. Ethan became really obsessed with comparisons. And it's a really big thing. in polyamory that you don't compare your partners. Like, everyone is different. Everyone does that comparison trap in general. I can't even imagine it in a polyamorous relationship. Yeah, it's an act of practice for sure. Polyamory is not for the faint of heart. Like, you have to be willing to consciously and constantly confront how you're feeling and the things that want through your body in question, you know, is this is this feeling or this thought that I have a valid thought and feeling? And it is really, really hard. But I've seen people do it with so much grace and so much, like, empathy and love for the communities that they're in. And that was what it really drew me to polyamory.

Like, I love being in community with people. It's really important to me that I surround myself by community that feels really... And you have that growth mindset you guys always talked about. Like, this gives you an opportunity to be like, okay, let me see how I navigate jealousy, how I navigate insecurity. Like, it's, it can definitely, I see how it can be a very valuable thing, but it's a fine line. Yeah, it's a very fine line. One of the ways that Ethan was constantly comparing himself to Jake, he would always say that it's a little,

he would say it's ridiculous that Jake can go out and sleep with younger women and that women are super into that. But if he was to try to go out and sleep with younger women, he would be labeled a pervert and creep. and he would bring this up all the time to kind of paint this picture that Jake only slept with women in their young 20s, which wasn't even true because at that point I was in my late 20s and I was like the youngest person he was dating. Oh, that's not true. And I one thing that really struck me as odd about this was like, why would you care? Like you don't want to sleep with younger women. I don't hear you talking about wanting to sleep with 21 year olds. But I think I eventually realized like it was this jealousy about. how he was desired by others. He saw that everybody was really attracted to Jake. He felt insecure that Jake and I had that connection with each other.

And so all he could do is bring up these things that were meant to, like, degrade Jake as a person and make me question his morality, his ethics. Right. Who he is as a person. The first time that Jake and I ever hooked up. So Ethan always wanted to hear about what happened. And so when I got home the next day, I ended up sleeping over at Jakes that night because we had gone out to the bar. Neither of us were really drinking that much that night, but we did stay up pretty late. And then we went back to his place, got there around like midnight, whatever.

And we ended up staying up until about 4 o'clock having sex. So it was a really long experience for me. And I came out of that just like feeling really over the moon excited about this connection, about where it might take us. and Ethan asked what happened. And so I told him, yeah, we were intimate for like about four hours last night. And I had a really great time. And at the time, this seemed really insignificant. But in hindsight, that became a really defining moment for our relationship.

That would end up coming up a lot in the future. Oh, no. I'll talk more about that later. Another thing that he was becoming increasingly fixated on was masculinity, which... Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

go. This, yeah. He was constantly making comments about all of the reasons he believed women don't pursue him. According to him, women only want very masculine men, but because he's such a nice, emotionally intelligent man who comes off as more feminine, women aren't interested in him. He's getting into some in-cell talking point territory. Yes, yes. There's so many things about this in-cell energy and kind of the ways that he talks about other people that just, like, didn't, it just surprised me. It just shocked me the way that he, like, kind of turned. And back in January, when Ethan was saying, she's my fun partner, and I was having these, like, really deep emotional reactions, I did end up at one point, like, crossing a few lines for

myself while out. I saw them together. Ethan was spending every second with her at the bar. And whenever we would go to the bar together, it was like, peace. He'd dip. I wouldn't see him the whole night. he'd want to be with everybody else but me. And so it was really triggering for me to be in this small bar watching the two of them together the whole night on a date, hanging out with friends, having the type of night that I had been craving with Ethan. And I ended up like escalating the situation. We got into a fight at the whole thing.

And so after that, I had actually reached out to Brooke to sit down and talk with her and just apologize, explain some of the ways in which I was struggling. And just let her know, like, I am here to support your guys' relationship. I'm just having a little bit of a hard time. And after that moment, I never once felt insecure about their connection again because Brooke handled it really well. We had a really great conversation. And I just left feeling like, okay, there's respect here between us. I don't need to worry about this.

So I was able to work through my insecurities over the night and any jealousy I felt over the next four months really well. And then when Brooke and Ethan ended up breaking up, Ethan blamed me because he said that my insecurities six months prior had made it really important. possible for him to get comfortable in the relationship and he was never able to actually settle into it. But at that point, he had also been talking for two months and complaining about the fact that Brooke was not having sex with him and that he was just her emotional support boyfriend. And so I could clearly see like, it's not about me. It's about the fact that you guys don't have that. And he doesn't want to take on any accountability on that.

That was his whole thing was that he's the emotional support boyfriend because he's not hypermasculent. So women only want him because he's a good listener and can talk to you about your feeling. and talk about his dealings, which now I'm like, I just laugh. Maybe it's the fact that he gives you, maybe it's the fact that he gives you a score, like it's freaking gymnastics after you guys have sex. It's the score. It's the scoring system that kind of isn't everybody's cup of tea. Yeah.

He also at this time started to develop a pattern of after fights, always initiating sex as a way for us to repair. Oh, no. Yeah. So every single time we fought, which was quite often, I was then a. immediately being like pushed to have sex with him. And that didn't work well for me because I am not, I do not have spontaneous desire. My desire has to be built over time through connection and intimacy.

And when we fight, that's not there. And he would always come out of these and say, well, that when we do have sex, it helps us feel so much more connected, so much faster. And don't you want us to be able to move through this fight by like reconnecting in this way? And it was just such a hard thing for me to explain to him like, I need more than that before we can get to that point. Otherwise, this sex doesn't feel like repaired to me. It feels like something I'm doing for you so that you can get to a place where you're actually ready to repair with me. And that's not okay. But that was a tough situation. Because at that time, I didn't really have enough strength to continue to say no, because the reaction for the no was awful. And I just didn't want to deal with it. And after fighting so much, it was like, let's just reconnect. Because if we reconnect now, at least we won't be fighting after. It's easier than just fighting and it's less hurtful than fighting. So you just deal with what you don't want to do.

That's terrible. He also started to get really manipulative about the times that he would initiate sex. So this is, it's, I always have a hard time explaining this because like some of the things that he did were meant to keep me in a place of confusion. And I didn't understand that until well after the fact. And I was like sorting through some of the things that were said and realizing like, this doesn't add up at all. You were trying to keep me confused so I couldn't identify

what was actually wrong here. So he would always try to initiate sex right before I went on a date with Jake. And the reason was because Ethan had this habit of he would constantly make me explain myself in an effort to try to catch me in what he claimed were contradictions.

So one of those contradictions was that I would continually say to him, like, I'm not the type of person who wants to have sex multiple times in one day. Like, I just don't have that much desire for sex. So if he would initiate sex before my date and we had sex and then I went on my date with Jake and we had sex, then he could use that as evidence that I do in fact have the capacity to have sex multiple times a day. I'm just not doing it with him. And these were things that he would say to me later. Like if he caught a quote unquote contradiction, it was then used as evidence that I just wasn't having sex with him because I didn't desire him. It happened with the initiating sex.

It also happened with sex after fights. So another thing he would try to do is before I would leave on a date with Jake or with any of my other partners, he would, if it wasn't initiating sex, he would try to initiate a fight. And then I would go off to my date. we would have sex and I come home and he'd be like, well, you always say that you don't have the capacity to have sex after we fight. And yet here you are going and having sex with somebody else after we fight. So clearly that's not the actual reason. You just don't have sex with me. And I remember the mental gymnastics. I remember the mental gymnastics of coming prepared with all of the things that he was going to point to his contradictions. Because for me, I'm like,

Okay, well, first of all, I'm not going to let our relationship influence how I show up with my other relationships. That's not fair to Jake. You fight with me every time I go on a date with Jake. If I showed up in a bad mood every single time, Jake wouldn't want to see me. That's not fair to our connection. So I'm trying to set that aside. And then his argument would be when you were being sexually harassed at work years ago, you weren't having sex with me. You were letting that stress from your life impact your ability to have sex. sex with me. Oh, here we go. Now, you're not letting the stress in our relationship impact whether not you and Jake have sex. So clearly, it was never about actually not being able to. It was just that you didn't want to have sex with me. If you keep score, you're always going to lose who this. So true. Also, if we want to go into, like, there's a big difference in sexual harassment and stress within your consensual relationship. Like, that's just so unfair. Everything he's saying is, you're right. He's just trying to catch you. And, and, and,

center himself. Yes. Yeah. And he's jealous. That's jealousy. It was always jealousy. And he would never call out that. He refused to admit that he was a jealous person. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the backdrop of what was happening. And I just got so exhausted always having to have a reason why there was a no. You know, like just saying no to sex was not a valid answer. I had to have a reason. And then if my reason didn't make sense to him, I had to justify that reason over and over again. It just was like so, so exhausting. I was getting to a place where I was just having to disassociate through sex because I literally could not show up with the desire to intimately connect with somebody who was saying all these things and making me feel this way every single day. So that was all within the first year of polyamory. And for the next couple of years, things just continued to really escalate specifically around sex. So the new expectation became that sex was always as long as it could possibly be. He, always wanted to have like marathon long sex sessions that lasted hours on end. And he was also always asking for sex to look more explorative.

And if it was something that I had done before and knew I didn't like, if I expressed that I didn't like it, he would say pretty similar to the polyamory argument in the beginning, if you haven't tried it, I think you just need to do it more consistently. And then you'll like you'll like it. Yeah. Oh my God. You should take it more just as easy. Just take it more. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So this is constantly. And it was like these were things that I had done before that I knew 100% I did not like doing. I didn't want to do it again. I wasn't going to be interested in doing it with him. And he would just continually push, push and push. And so I would do those things with him even though I really, really didn't want to. And even though it never felt good for me. And he just kept saying if we were doing it more consistently, you would start to like. and trying to push this narrative that like we just need to start doing whatever that thing was more. Oh my God. He was awesome Stockholm syndrome but for sex exploration.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I think you're like you said, you're disassociating. Like you are worn down. I was in such a raw place. And so like my body was in such survival mode that I think even if somebody like handed me a playbook on all of this and was like, here's exactly what's happening. It still would have been hard for me to believe.

believe it in that time. And I was also still so focused on like, what do I need to do to make this work? Like how can I meet him where his needs are so that we have a better relationship? Can I ask one other question really quick? Just because, I mean, you listen to the show so you know that sometimes it's when we listen to this whole story in one episode, we forget sometimes that you were also in love. What were the moments that you were still seeing glimpses of Ethan that you fell in love with, if any? Yeah. It was getting progressively harder because we were going weeks or months at a time in conflict. And my therapist later identified this as our cycle of abuse.

And so for me, the thing that kept me there was when the cycle of abuse was starting over. He would show up with so much commitment to working through things and being a genuine partnership. And usually it was coming off of the tale of him finally having something click in his head that I had been saying. to him for quite a while or through a moment where I showed up really well for his feelings and he felt very hurt. He felt very validated. And suddenly he was able to get to a more balanced place where he didn't seem like he was just constantly in survival mode either and like meet me in that partnership. So that was like, I think what really kept me there was like I kept to like, we get excited for the potential, right? Exactly. Yes. The potential like I married him and

stayed married to him for his potential. And that was like truly the thing that kept me there the most. Like I saw enough change to make me believe that he was capable of continuing to change. But the reality was like he was just, he was breadcrumming me the whole time. He was breadcumming me with a little bit of growth here and then pulling back and going right back to his habits. So over time, it really did become really hard for me to want to stay. But I think honestly, I was just, I was too much in survival mode and not enough in my body to even really fully question not being with him as a reality. It's just this isn't working.

This feels intense and scary. And we're going to figure it out because we have to. It makes so much sense. So in addition to always pushing for more exploration, I had at that point worked hard to understand what my kinks were, the things that I'm attracted to, the things that I needed in a sexual relationship and try to communicate that to him. And one thing that we had come to learn was that I have a little bit of a praise king. I love when people are like very kind and loving and want to like amp me up.

Good girl. It's so great. I love it. Exactly. And this is like a part of myself that I was discovering for the very first time. And I was kind of excited about that. Because I was like, wow, this thing that helps me like sex a lot more that I never knew about myself.

How exciting. And then Ethan quickly turned it into a really bad thing because he kept insisting. that praise kinks also involve demeaning speech because the praise kink comes from the BDSM community. So if I have a praise kink, that also means that I want to be called a dirty slut and be told that I'm a bad girl and then I'm doing things wrong. I know, right?

Right? Like not the same thing. Also, it's like we are not textbooks. Just because he thinks something is the way it is in a certain, like you can just be like, well, I actually like it like this. Yeah, right? Like, okay, I'm sorry if that's the text books. textbook definition of what a praise kink in is, but that's not for me. And we can adapt to that

and have this be a thing that works really well for us because you're not pushing me to do this. So I for like the longest time felt like I was being pushed into accepting more of a BDSM kink than I really wanted to because he just literally wouldn't hear me and accept that that wasn't something that I wanted. This over time just generally made boundaries a lot more difficult to maintain in sex. I was just like constantly saying yes to sex that I didn't want to have. I was always in a disassociative place. and he decided to take this desire for explorative sex one step further and ask if we could start taking ecstasy and then have sex together. Okay, this one, man, this part one is a lot to process and, I mean, I guess they always are.

Wait till part two. Wait till part two, it really takes a turn. Literally part two is going to feel like a different story. You're not going to believe where this goes. The elevation gets a lot higher, I think. But man, the way that he is just able to tear her down little by little just to make her malleable enough for what he wants. I mean, it's just going to get crazy.

So we won't say too much. And we'll talk about it. Like we said at the beginning, at the end of next week, we'll do a very in-depth dogfish debrief. Say that three times fast. We love Claire. If you want to send her any messages of support, you can comment them on Instagram or Facebook or dating detectives podcast or TikTok.

I shouldn't leave out TikTok. And also you can comment on Spotify. Like we have like a little convo section going under each episode. So you should join that. Share moments that blew your mind. Share moments that made you have a question. we try to get in there and talk to you about it. And obviously on Patreon,

Patreon, we always have, like, conversations going about the episodes. Always. I love our Patreon. Thank you to our Patreoners. And thank you for listening. We really love and appreciate you. And until next week, as always, trust your self-tuition.