The Self-Help Husband: Part 1

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 1-800-799-7233-4-Support. Happy dating detectives Monday! Hi Hannah! Hi Mackenzie! 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 the way 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, what that big silver thing 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 oh then 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 CrimeCon 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 five dollars a month you get extra episodes and nine dollars a month you get extra episodes plus add free listening experience for every episode. It's the girlfriend experience. 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. I think that you'll really love Claire because she really really I think that I think she'll touch her 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 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 and but there's also a partner into a partner issue that you don't think about I think often we're also going to talk about polyamory it's a polyamorous story and I'm 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 this 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 entity it's easier to process differently and so it might not be as easy as why didn't 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 weekend between we'll try to address those in next week's dogfish debrief where we 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 a player the floor thank you for being here player 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 yeah take a break 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 went into 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 to 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's a lot of really quick bonding and deep relationships that developed and because you're living and working with people they'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 yeah yeah 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 at 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 Ameri something to describe pretty much everything so like if you fall in love and you're dating someone in AmeriCorps it's AmeriLove or when we're traveling like two and from our project rounds we're traveling via the AmeriVan and so as I'm walking I overhear this guy who's talking to my friend say yeah and I just want to get AmeriLade and immediately I am just write this guy off like wow he's so mature 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 AmeriLade 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 when you had this really great sense of humor he was always the one that was making people laugh with some slight joke or he loved 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 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 through 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 one guys oh like 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 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 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 AmeriCorps 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 like young 20-somethings, I was really impressed at this confidence. And typically not, yeah, truly like I would never have done that at 18. I still probably wouldn't do that because I have an inevitable anxiety about inviting myself to spaces I'm not wanted. Sure. Yeah. He was like a horse that you 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. 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, he happened to live on the west coast as well. And a couple of months later, his uncle, when we were finally dating Ethan and call this 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 to 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 to, I've been to, I've backwards. What else would 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 he wanted to sit in my car so that we could again be off campus and not be like 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 met in high school and then dated all through college. And our sexual relationship was not great. It was, 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 re-framed 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 six to leave for our project rounds. And I was feeling really sick after taking a plane 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. Guys, we are nothing if not generous here at the dating detective. So we are giving away a ton of vibrators from Bellessa because why? Because they're amazing. And if you don't know Bellessa, they are a biwomen for everyone company redefining sexual wellness. 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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 US. 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/tdd. That's better H-E-L-P.com/tdd. So I sweetened on him quite a bit after that moment just because I felt really supported and like taking care of him 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. 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. Now looking back, 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 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 had 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. I just felt like I 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 wild and firefighting an 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 'cause we were 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 or 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. - But did that mess up your pack? - I know. - Again, I think being 21 was the olden reason I was at this place. - I thought I'd say I'm in my team right now. - This is why I didn't work this way when we-- - Yeah, I'm in my 30s now and there's just no way that I could do that. - I couldn't love someone enough to sleep in a hammock for two weeks, three weeks. How long was it? - Five months. - Five months! - Five months 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 America. - 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. I, 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 his phone catching up on messages that had 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-girlfriend 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 still in 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 sex. Yeah, that's cool. Can you imagine? Oh my God. We 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, you know, yeah, so for a year and a half, he was having unconcentral sex with her, non-concentral 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 that's what'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. 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, 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. So I still have 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 response is back. We're 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. OK, so you're hearing this. And you're like, where are you doing? Who's going to take a darn minute? Exactly. And obviously, I approached in this. 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. I don't want to-- 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 this 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 bad. 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 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 him before. It 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 is 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 weave 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, yeah. - Yeah, I put a lot into context about him as a person. And I actually remember him sharing, 'cause 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, I just had so much sadness for him that he had to go through that. And I 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, what a difficult thing to do. So. It's summer and I have been spending a lot of time in Las Vegas. We had crime hunt here. My family was here. Y'all, it was a hundred and seven degrees yesterday. And I had to put makeup on. And I was like, it's going to be cakey. It's going to be gross. It's going to sweat off my face. I'm going to look horrid. And then I remember, Joan's road beauty. Joan's road beauty is the perfect no makeup makeup look that does not feel heavy. That takes about half a second to apply. And I don't have to use a ton of products. So when I want that little extra move to make myself feel a little more awake, a little more alive. 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There's not a lot of infrastructure. So on hikes, for instance, there's like literally no signage anywhere to be found. Do 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. Then I was really wanting to re-initiate 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 of the persons. So the three of us set out that Saturday on our day off to go on this very long hike. 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. And 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 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 where 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 owing 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 caudal 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. I was going through something or 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 happen. So after AmeriCorps, like I said, we were only making a dollar 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 birdwatching 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, let's do it. 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 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 then he wanted to make sure that first and foremost, continuing to work on ourself 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 it right. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the first time I had really had a partnership like that. Friendship family member or intimate relationship like it 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 myself. 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 as with him being scolded like person. She's. 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 towards 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's awful who I had about experience with is like, kind of human, a very mild form. 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 internal izing that I needed to do more work than Ethan did. And even you're saying like, if you want to be worthy of him, yeah, that's what I was. That's what I got on. Yeah. 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. They're kind of lists of things that he observed about me, that he thought that I needed to work on. And the first, 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 expressed their emotions through anger. And I actually until recently, like I had never seen my dad express an emotion other than anger. 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 raised 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 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. Notice their insecurities. And then lovingly highlight them as a way to show you, I see you, and I still love you. 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. It, to me, it felt like he was annoyed. It felt a lot more. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's bringing up 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 those, because 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 was for real example. Yes, that's it for real examples that I don't really mad. Okay. 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 dishwash, 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. Yes. 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 bit for control. Okay. So if you stop cooking, basically. Yeah. I stop cooking. But just generally saying that these these constant criticisms about really minor things were just 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 miss perceiving him. I don't understand him. And that we're on the same team. And then I need to remember that we're on the same team. But your perception is your reality. And also he 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 new 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 moment, 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. 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 and 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, you know, 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 then 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 in Lingru, 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 for 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've 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. 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 know I 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, 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. Yeah, 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 relationships feel good, but not perfect, which of, 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 like, okay, things are all right. We have some work ahead of us. And that's great. Let's do it together. As we are 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 fully considered. And that there might come a time in our relationship where we need polyamory. Oh, to have this continue to work. Yeah, well, wow. That's like a very loosely veiled stretch. 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, notice 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 was 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 grab 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 longest 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, then you have to change your whole guy that I met exactly. I was just deeply afraid of finding that out. Yeah. And 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 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 about it. But then it 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 a 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 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 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 dating one person at this time. Essentially, the main thing is that there's this openness to wedding connections look the way they look and not being restricted to this monogamous contract where you're just with one person. But it's also I mean, I guess it's different for everybody, but there's 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 relationship connections. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a major difference between non-monogamy and polyamory. So some people look at non-monogamy and 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 at like 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, 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 of 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 are 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 at 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 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 the state on our last night there. We went up 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? Think it down on his knee, didn't have a ring, anything. And Yeah, it 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 in the school from the rest of the day. I don't want to see. I don't want to see it. 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 nonprofit. It's a national nonprofit with a local branch in the town that we're 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 loved the work that they do. And it just seemed like it would 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. Non-profits in general are very notorious for expecting a lot from people and that was definitely true of this place. It's been a couple of 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 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. It's always 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 me. 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 went 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. It was just like a 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 and 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 gotten 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 that 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 on 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. At this point, Ethan and I had bought a house. We bought a house in late 2019. We've been living in that house for about six months. And I remember shortly after I left that job, just a couple of weeks for standing in our 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 in libido quite a bit. And I always had any time 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 on adventures. 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. And there was two major ones that had been impacting me for quite 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. It was 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. He knew it would manipulate you too because he knew that you wanted 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. Especially in a relationship where there's already this huge, this match 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 in this relationship. So that was one major thing that I was starting to see some openness to like he, 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 withdrawal. And there would be silence, not a lot of connection over the next couple 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. 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 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. Yeah. But at least we were seeing 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. 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 and polyamorous. 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. And he was supportive of that. He said, like, he was like, okay, let's explain that. Yeah. Yeah. I guess 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 be different than out so that we know. And that totally made sense to me too because, you know, in the back drop 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 is definitely a mistake on our end. We believed that because we have been talking about this for five years, we were, we were evolved. We knew what to do. We could come into this and make it work. That 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 of a Korean person. Yeah, that 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 metamorphore. So when you're dating somebody, the person that other people that they are dating are your metamorphors. So Sophie was Ethan's metamorphore because they're both dating me. And so Brooke, she really understood how to do that. I've heard that word, but I didn't, I never knew what it meant or how it was used. That's cool. Interesting. Yeah. I actually metamorphors 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 metamorphore. And I did have a close relationship with some of my metamorphors. Brooke and I ended up never getting super close and you'll learn why I 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 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. 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 didn't turn off the fact. Oh, my gosh. That's not after care. 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, and by 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. And 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 after sex some of the time we didn't analyze how it went. Or try to make him aware of how the I wish statements made me feel within two months of dating breath. He did that and Brook 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, Brook 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 sight of me is like, oh, my God, thank you. Like, I'm sorry. I don't know. I'm like, I can, yeah, you can. You just spent like four years doing this to me with me begging you to stop. But then Brook wanders around and says it once and you finally get it. But also, thank you, Brook 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 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 Brook 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 Brook is his fun partner. He'd rather go out on the weekends with her 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 was our age knows each other. And now it's post COVID roll 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. Brook 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's 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, this 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 of 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 nose and pupils 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 very good at 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. 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 explore different sides of yourself and learn things about yourself that you might not learn with your primary partner. 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 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 might be your body and 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 empathy and love for the communities that they're in. And that was what it really drew me to polyamory. I love being in community with people. It's really important to me that I surround myself by community that feels good. And you have that growth mindset you guys always talked about. This gives you an opportunity to be like, okay, let me see how I navigate jealousy, how I navigate insecurity. It can definitely, I see how it can be a very valuable thing, but it's a fun 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, 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, why would you care? Like you don't want to sleep with younger women. I don't care you talking about wanting to sleep with 21 year olds. But I, I think I mentioned you realize 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. He's at the right who uses the 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 Jake's 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 four o'clock having sex. So it was a really long experience for me. And I, I came out of that just like feeling really open 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. And I'll talk more about that later. Another thing that he was becoming increasingly fixated on was masculinity, which. Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah, we 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. And then 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 turns. 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 did. 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 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. 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 impossible 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. 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 support boyfriend. And he doesn't want to take on any accountability. That was the 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 feelings and talk about his feelings. So now I'm like, I just like, maybe it's the fact that he gives you a score like it's freaking gymnastics. Yeah, 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. So every single time we fought, which was quite often, I was then 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 repair 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 me and that's not okay. But that was a tough situation because I at that time, I didn't really have enough strength to continue to say no because the reaction for the know 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 to deal with what you don't want to do. That's terrible. And they 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 when 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 that 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 and what he claimed were contradictions. So one of those contradictions was that I, 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 with Jake and we had sex, then he could use that as evidence that I, I do, in fact, have the capacity to have sex multiple times the 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, 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. So 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 here 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, OK, well, first of all, I'm not going to let our relationship influence how I show up with my other relationships. 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 unfair 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're letting that stress from your life impact your ability to have sex with me. Now you're not letting the stress in our relationship impact whether or 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 scoring, you're always going to lose. It's so true. Also, if we want to go into like, there's a big difference in sexual harassment and stress within your consensual relationship. That's just so unfair. Everything he's saying is you're right. He's just trying to catch you. And center himself. Yes. And he's jealous. That's jealousy. And he would never call it that he refused to admit that he was a jealous person. Yeah. what was happening in my just got so exhausted, always having to have a reason why there was a no. 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. And it just was like so, so exhausting. And 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 exploitive. 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 it. Yeah, the medicine is giving you diarrhea. You should take it more just as you 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 it and trying to push this narrative that like, we just need to start doing whatever that thing was more. Oh my god. She was an awful Stockholm syndrome, but for sex exploration. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I think you're like you said, you're just associating like you are worn down. I was in such a robbed 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 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? And I asked 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 and 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 tail 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, I kept just seeing the potential base. 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 breadcrumbing me the whole time. He was breadcrumbing 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. 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. - And it's so great. - I like 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. 'Cause 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 involved demeaning speech. Because the praise kink comes from the BDSM community. So if I have a praise kink, that also means that I wanna be called a dirty slut and be told that I'm a bad girl and that I'm doing this wrong. - Wait, that's opposite. - What? - 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 like this. - Yeah, right? Like, okay, I'm sorry if that's the textbook definition of what a praise kink in, but is that 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 feel like the longest time felt like I was being pushed into accepting more of a BDSM kinks 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 insects. I was just like constantly saying yes to sex that I didn't wanna have. I was always in a dissociative place. And he decided to take this desire for explored of sex one step further. And ask if we could start taking ecstasy and then have sex together. (upbeat music) - 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 gonna feel like a different story. The, you're not gonna believe where this goes. The elevation gets a lot higher, I think. But man, that the way that he is just able to tear her down, it's little by little, just to make her malleable and not for what he wants. I mean, it's just gonna 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 deep breath. This, say that three times fast. We love Claire. If you wanna 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 combo section going under each episode. So you should join that, share moments that we remind, share moments that we do have a question. We try to, we try to get in there and talk to you about it. And obviously on Patreon, Patreon where you always have 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, just your intuition. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)