Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel - Esther Calling - My Brother's Wife Ruined Our Relationship

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

In this Esther Calling, we meet a woman who feels that her brother's wife is standing in the way of her relationship with her brother. For years, she has compared the closeness she shares with her brother to all of her romantic relationships. And because of it she has found herself single, time and time again. Esther talks her through the question she came with about her brother, "If you really understood and loved me, why would you choose her?" Esther Callings are a one time, 45-60 minute interventional phone call with Esther. They are edited for time, clarity, and anonymity. If you have a question you would like to talk through with Esther, send a voice memo to [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, one thing that I had, I've been facing for a while, maybe for the past six, seven years now, is that the problems I have with my sister-in-law. I mean, she is a lovely person and she is my brother's love. But I have so difficulties to accept her and to connect to her and somehow I see her as something between me and my brother my brother and I used to have a very strong connection before her and I come from a culture where families are you know how connected we are and for example this year they they called me to say happy birthday to me and I couldn't even talk to her and I just tried to be polite and I texted her and I say, I'm sorry, I'm out. I cannot talk on the phone.

However, I just cannot let her in. Metro links and cross links are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe.

Hello. Hi Esther. So when I listen to you, I'll tell you what goes through my mind with questions, right? Okay. Is it this particular woman or would it have been any woman that you would have experienced is severing the tight bond that exists between your brother and you? Or how can my brother, who loves me so deeply, choose someone so different from me? What does that say about his love for me or about how he sees me, that he could choose someone who is so not what I am.

Yes, exactly. Which one? I have one more, but you can start with those two. I think, to be honest with you, he had like other girlfriends, but this particular one, I think this is the person that she is, is that she's so different from me. In what way? She is quite loud. She is, to me, she is a complete attention seeker.

She somehow has drinking problems. I haven't been in social activities with them anymore because every time we used to go to parties together, I used to get a terrible headache and I used to leave the party. She has some certain behaviors that I feel that they hurt my brother. To me, it's so painful, but at the same time, I cannot talk about it to him because he has made his choice. And I have to respect that. Where is he in the picture?

Because this is a triangle. So where is he in the picture? Well, he tries to avoid everything. We just had one conversation about this triangle as you said you put it and he said listen I don't want to get between you and her whatever you feel that is happening you need to talk to her straight and tell her everything and I tried it once and it had a very bad I mean it was it became like a disaster so it ended up in a consequence where we stopped talking for maybe eight nine months and we didn't see each other because I told her frankly that listen these, these certain behaviors, they hurt me.

And it's just because of the love that I feel for my brother because I know him and I know that it hurts him too. First, she started denying them all. And then at the end, she said she feels so sorry for me that I feel like this. Do you have a partner? Me, no. You both have parents? Yes. And your brother is close to his mom or you are close to your mom? My brother is a little bit closer. I don't say very closer, but he shows, yes, he shows more tendency towards my mom compared to my father. But you have the sense that you have been the closest to your brother. You know, my mom was a career woman and she was a hard worker all her life. And all I can remember was that I was always taking care of him.

And by the time we were in our young adulthood, we were so close. All my best friends are his best friends. And I mean, he was so close to me. He was more than a brother. More than a brother made him what? I don't know. Maybe like I felt like he's the only person who understands me. More than a brother made him what? exactly as you as you put it i doubted this this uh judgment of mine so it all became so hard difficult and then i try to forget everything and just accept the fact that it is what it is and i

have to like her and i have to she she really wants to act as if she's my sister, but I cannot believe it's just, it sounds like a whole fake scenario to me because she's been, she's been, she's been lying a lot since the beginning and I cannot just believe what she says. If we were so close as I thought we were, and if he understood and admired me in the way that I thought he did, how could he have chosen this woman? Exactly. And it becomes a kind of a competition. Or it becomes maybe he never really understood me. Because if he likes what I am, how could he like her? And then it becomes a kind of a standoff.

But it is actually not really about her. It is about the loss that you experience vis-a-vis your brother, that you interpret as being related to who he chose. It's the fact that I assume he puts more energy at this moment in his relationship with her than with you. That doesn't mean that his feelings for you have changed, but he needed to make room inside of him and around him to be able to be married and then maybe have a family and basically bring other essential people. And you raised him and you feel a sense of ownership over him. And you feel that the two of you have something unique and unknown to most people. And that an intruder, basically, an intruder that you don't particularly,

that isn't according to your taste, has come in between and is slowly transforming him, A, taking him away from you, and B, turning him into something different or someone different than the person that you have known and with whom you were so tightly, tightly attached. But the story is about you and your brother. When you go to talk to him about her, he's going to say, go talk to her. If you go to talk to him about you and him and how much you miss him and how much you don't have your own partner at this moment. And so it feels like the partner that you had, which was your brother, is moving on. Well, to be honest with you, I tried talking to him in this way as well.

But I don't know, maybe he doesn't get it. Maybe every time I said something that I'm missing you, we used to be so close, you don't even ask how I am. He's like, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to do? I can understand what he's going through as well. He's between these two powerful women, apparently. But for me, to be honest, it's not that I need anything from him. It's just, I don't want to lose this tiniest tie we have at the moment. And I feel like it's going away.

I feel like it's disappearing slowly by slowly. Because a part of you goes to him with a reproach, as if you are the jilted lover. Why are you not calling me? Why don't you ask me how I lover. Why are you not calling me? Why don't you ask me how I am? Why do you not miss me? You're going with a reproach. You're not just saying, I miss you, or how are you,

or let's celebrate together, or come visit me together, or, you know, and they can come together for a visit, and you can take an afternoon alone with him i know she doesn't let him she doesn't let him come every time he used to come visit me he used to for example to go to the balcony and talk to her she doesn't like him to be with me no she knows that you don't like her and she is marking her territory. Yes. But, you know, it's like two women fighting for the same man here,

except that one is a brother and one is a husband. But Esther, how should I fix this? The big thing is that your brother and you were very close in a particular context. Now that context has changed. He has other people with whom he's going to feel close. And maybe as close, even though differently, as he was with you. And you feel that you had an exclusive lease on him it helped you both it helped you both to grow up together you gave each other enormously but there is something over overly you know you react uh you're allowed not to like this person and all of that but what what is happening is that you you're upset you resent your brother for not choosing you over her there is a competition and if you want to preserve your brother and if you want to keep a relationship with him,

you will have to find a way to accept the reality of your brother's life and your brother's choice. It's both. And you can be curious about it and you can ask him questions about his life and you can be inquisitive about, you know, how she's different and what brought him to choose her. But what is happening now is that you see her as an attention seeker, but so are you. You want his attention too, and you were used to getting it above everybody else and I don't know to what extent you don't have a partner because in some way you want actually the same intensity and closeness that you had with your brother true and so you go around and you say nobody I feel

with nobody do I feel what I felt with him. In a way, we had not just a sibling love, we had a love that became something else. And it became the standard that I either will find again or I will be married to my brother symbolically for the rest of my life. Wow, you think so? So all these problems of mine are because of that. I tell you what I think. That doesn't mean I'm right.

My mind goes in many directions and you are the one who then picks up on one and says, that rings true. There's something about that. But I told you you i thought three things when i was reading your question and this was the third there is an intensity and a symbiotic tie in the love that you have for your brother that has also entered into your relationship with other men or women, whoever it is. He is the beacon. You together created the standard. And in a way, you see him choosing this woman as a betrayal of your standard. I thought we had something unique, different,

exclusive, better than anything else. And by you choosing this other person and the kind of person you chose, you betrayed our chart. And when you don't meet other partners, it's in part because you are loyal to that contract, that invisible unspoken contract that wove itself over years of very tight sibling caretaking reciprocity mutuality you're the older yes yes five years that's right okay when you meet other potential partners how much do you think about the quality of the relationship that you have with your brother? Well, to be honest with you, it was, yes, maybe 10 years ago, I used to make that relationship as something that I would really like my partner, that bond I wanted with my partner.

But then I realized it's not going to happen. So it's for the past. And then? And then I tried to accept the fact. And I had a relationship for like five years, but we broke up because of you know his commitment issues since then I didn't find anybody who could actually fit into my life but I don't compare anymore you know it's I used to do that long ago yes that bond was very special but it's it's it's

been a while that it's not anymore that special. So I think I've kind of passed that. Don't you think so? No, I don't. Oh my God. I think consciously, you probably don't think you are comparing anymore because you're upset at your brother and therefore you no longer hold him as a beacon. But I think internally, the measurement stick is the uniqueness of the relationship that you had with your brother. And when you meet people, now it's easier to say they don't fit into my life.

I'm not so sure. Let's put it like that. I think that on the face of it, you no longer compare on what lives inside of you, deep inside of you, on what you learned was the kind of seamless harmony that you had with your brother and all of that. Many men could appear as having commitment issues in comparison with the tightness of the bond that you had with your brother. True.

That's true. And to be honest with you, I've stopped looking even for the past maybe one or two years. I just said, okay, it's not going to happen. So I stopped looking. I beg you not to stop really because you're going to stay married to your brother for the rest of your life if you don't do that if you do that symbolically you'll be you it's like your brother will have been the husband you never had and meanwhile he will have a family and a marriage with someone else and you

will feel like he kind of is no longer in your life because you got estranged from each other because every time you come to him, you are feeling critical and wistful as if he's depriving you of something which should have come to you that he's now giving to her. So this issue seems to be very more much more important than what i was thinking i just thought this is the reason why i feel so alone but i mean

so what is the next step if we get practical after i accept everything i stop comparing people who come to my life with him i think you have to know that you had a powerful, powerful connection with your brother that basically helped both of you grow up and that will forever remain a very, very special bond. But there is a difference between that sibling relationship and living an adult relationship with another person. You don't have to emulate what you had with your brother because in some way what you had with your brother was a compensation

for what you didn't have with your mother. And you were put in charge of your brother and you were there to raise him. And in a way, raising him made you feel less lonely and less needy of mom. So instead of thinking what you were missing, you thought about what you can give. And that was wonderful. Take it, harness it, and now use all of that elixir and allow yourself to be loved by another man. And allow yourself to open up to another man and allow yourself to open up to another man and love someone else in return. It won't be the same.

It need not be the same. You were a child, you are an adult now. And the relationship with your brother will evolve and what will determine it more than anything is the degree with which you accept him versus the degree to which you constantly make him feel that there's something he should be doing that he's not doing. So he's constantly falling short because you're asking him a kind of defendants and devotion that he used to have that now is no longer fitting. So the challenge with your brother is to transition into adulthood.

And the challenge for you is to allow yourself to be a woman with another man without holding that relationship with your brother as the symbol, the centerpiece of what you should replicate. Okay. It's too bad that you're depriving yourself because it won't bring you closer to your brother. In fact, to the contrary, the more he feels responsible, the more there will be distance.

The more he knows that you are having a full life elsewhere with others, etc., the more he can freely come toward you without thinking that he's owing you something. There's a part of you that feels he owes you. Yeah, but, you know, since I left, left i mean i left the the country it's everything is um i'm being blamed kind of about leaving everything behind all of this is internal you can be in any other country you know he he doesn't owe you. He loves you. You're very important to him.

But he also has entered another stage of life. And so do you. And that will be a little process of mourning about, you know, the love of your life, so to speak. It will be the love of your life, so to speak. It will be the love of your childhood, and then there will be another love in a different stage of your life right now. If he remains the love of your life, you will more likely forever be sad and resentful

that you lost him, angry at his wife for having taken him, and you will have become a character in a play that is not nearly as inevitable as it seems to you. This is not the triangle you have to live in. Yeah, you gave me a lot to think about. Thank you very much, Esther. You're welcome. Is this helpful? Yes, yes. Amazing, as always.

Thank you. I'm a big fan of all your podcasts. So thank you very much for the time. Okay. Let us know what happens, okay? Definitely. Thank you so much. This was an Esther Calling, a one-time intervention phone call recorded remotely from two points somewhere in the world.

If you have a question you'd like to explore with Esther, it could be answered in a 40 or 50-minute phone call. Send her a voice message and Esther might just call you. Send your question to producer at estherperel.com. Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Eva Walchover, Destry Sibley, Hyweta Gatana, Sabrina Farhi, Eleanor Kagan, Kristen Muller, and Julian Hatt.

Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, Jen Marler, and Jack Saul.