The Self-Help Husband: Part 2

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 left one are involved in an abusive relationship, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-72334-support. Hello, hello, hello, happy dating detectives Monday and welcome back to part two. Hannah here, it's quite a busy weekend. Mackenzie is in root to Los Angeles as we speak. She's in this episode, but just not in this intro because Molly, our producer, is getting married, so we'll all be at the wedding. There are also no ads this episode because we didn't plan to do an episode. So for anyone that complains, yay, no ads. So everyone say, thank you, Molly. But if you would like to give Molly a wedding present, you can subscribe to Patreon, seamless transition, but for real, thank you to the people who subscribe to our Patreon because you make it possible to do everything that we do. And if you do Patreon, it's $5 a month and you get bonus episodes from us and you get a community of people to talk to in more depth about episodes. Sometimes you get inside information about episodes and stuff and early access to merch to live shows and book club. I know book club has been on hiatus, but we would like to bring that back. So let's get Molly married and stuff and everybody get their summer brew and then we'll talk about it. There's also a $9 a month tier that gets you all of that plus ad-free listening on every episode. Sometimes we call that the girlfriend experience. But guess what? Everybody's in the girlfriend experience this week. No ads for everyone. Happy wedding. I am so excited for the wedding. So look out on dating detectives podcast, social media, because we'll obviously be posting a ton from the wedding. But this is part two of Claire's story. So if you have not listened to part one, it came out last week and you definitely have to start there. It's a big one. And I know a lot of the responses already were so positive. First of all, you love Claire. She is wonderful and so clearly has gone through so much reflection and growth and whatnot as she tells the story. So I think she does such a good job of outlining the slow build of abuse. And in the moment, it doesn't always feel like it and it feels slow and it feels like how did I get here? But man, part two gets intense. So there are definitely some warnings. We're going to have rape, suicide, and stalking come up and it's intense. But Claire is here to tell her story as she's safe now. So that is the best spoiler I could hope for. Just a reminder, go back and listen, but Claire and Ethan met at AmeriCorps, which was definitely an intense place to meet where people are doing good work and service and getting close really fast. And as they get together and eventually get married, they have this kind of self-help mentality where he's always focused on getting better and improving themselves. But he uses that as a veil to criticize her and break her down really to become more submissive to him. He also suggests polyamory. So she talks about polyamory and explains how that does work for her in many ways, but also didn't work in this specific relationship. So that's kind of the foundation of their relationship as we get deeper and deeper into his dog fishery and abuse. I think that's all I have for you. So let's hand it back over to Claire. For about three years, a couple times a year, we would take Molly together and then we would have sex for hours. And we'd do all the things that I told him I didn't like that he just kept insisting if I did them more often, I would probably like them. And because I was dragged out of my mind, I showed up in ways that I didn't typically show up when I was sober, then re-emphasizing to him that, well, yes, these are things that I like. These are things that I would do with him. And he would always claim that the reason why he wanted to take Molly together before having sex was because that was when I was most sexually explorative and where he felt most connected to me. That's so twisted. Yeah, over time, like within a year and a half, I started to notice some reactions after this that made sex even worse for me. And so then every time we'd go into one of these Molly nights, I just had all of this anxiety going into it and didn't want to do it, did not want to take the drive, but felt like I didn't have a choice because this was something that he like, she put so much stock into it, right? He's like, this is the time that I feel most emotionally connected to you. And if we did it, then he would be happy for like a week. And so there was kind of this joy of like, okay, well, after this really connected moment, I can finally walk away from this and I'll be okay for a little bit before this all starts up again. It was, it was hard. He also, at this time, started to become a little physically threatening, which was not something I expected, because he had never once made me feel physically threatened. The very first time it happened, we were in a fight in our house. And I kept asking for a break. This is like a normal thing in our fights. Like I would ask for a break. He loved to drag fights out to be multiple hours long. But when I would ask for a break, he would often get worse. He would become really petty. He would follow me room to room. He would open closed doors and things like that. So, yeah. I had at some point walked into our closet. It's really tiny space. And he threw up in the door and he's tall. Like he's, he's a bigger guy. I'm like small tiny woman. He's like big Midwestern man. And he's hovering over me with a look in his eye that I had never seen before. And that I literally can only describe as like, he looked like he wanted to kill me. I had never been more afraid of him in my life. I was like, you are scaring me and tried to push around him. He wouldn't let me get out. I was trapped in the closet. I had nowhere else I could go. And finally, I got past him and then I just went to the bathroom and locked the door and put a ton of stuff in front of it so that he wouldn't come in. And he did end up leaving me alone after that. But that became a normal thing that he would do. And like a couple of years before I met my closest friends at the time, Hannah and Olivia. And we kind of became this trio of friends. And who's actually just yesterday, I was talking to Hannah. She's trying to help me remember some stories. She's been like my historian throughout the last eight years that I've known her because the relationship was so confusing, I sometimes forget things that happened. Well, we've locked stuff out. Yeah, yeah. And she was reminding me of this moment. We had at some point separated for a little bit of time. And he called me one day because he was having a really bad day. And he asked if he wanted to come over. And I immediately said, you're welcome to come over. But I want to be really clear that we are not talking about a relationship today. I'm here to hear how you're doing today. And that's it. And he freaked out because according to him, he was already planning on coming over to talk just about that and not the relationship. And now he was mad that I asked this instead of just trusting him. So I hung up on him because I'm like, I'm not getting yelled at on the phone right now while we're separated over this. This is ridiculous. So I hung up. And within five minutes, he stormed through the house door, hovered over me, looked like he wanted to kill me with screaming at me. And I told Hannah about this story that night and she told me yesterday that that was the moment she decided she would never be friends with Ethan ever again. She's like, I will put up with him while my best friend is married to him, but I will never be this man's friend again because she was starting to see those cracks. So he's showing up in more violent ways. And these were all things I was still writing off at the time because I was like, he had a really tough day. He's emotionally dysregulated. It's not about me. It's about him. But yeah, man, I made a lot of excuses for his behavior. And all this time, I'm continuing to still feel this intense pressure to improve myself. At this time, the biggest issue in our relationship is Ethan's sexual dissatisfaction. And the whole focus is on what do I need to do to make sure that we have better relationship with our mesex. This is where he started to say some things that really made that even harder for me. He started to suggest things that he believed could be true about me. Because I was already so primed to think about what he said through this lens of truth and really consider it with a lot of genuineness. It really messed with my ability to know myself sexually a lot better. And the big one was a couple of years he was insisting that he believed I was asexual. I guess for folks that don't know, and I honestly don't know too much about asexuality, but I know that generally speaking, it's like a lack of sexual desire with other people. So you may have sexual desire on your own, but it's just a form of sexual orientation where that intimate partner connection is not something that that turns them on. And so obviously, this narrative based on this whole relationship of like, you know, Claire's the one who's sexually inadequate. She's the one that has all these issues. She needs to work on. Maybe she's a lesbian. No, maybe she's just a sexual. And so for years then, I was like hearing him say this to me over and over again and having to contend with this identity of, well, am I just a sexual? And this is why there's so many issues in my sexual relationship. Meanwhile, all of my polyamorous relationships are great, all of my sexual relationships with my polyamorous partners aren't problematic. It's just this one. So that created a lot of confusion for me and got me right back on this track of questioning my identity, instead of questioning what was right in front of me and what was actually happening in our relationship. At this time, we were also having a lot of sex. We were having sex at least five times a week, and it was, it was an everyday topic for us. We talked every single day about sex. And I was just feeling so exhausted, literally begging him, can we please have one day where we don't talk about sex? Just one day where we don't talk about this. Yeah, it's so stressful, right? Like, it's not the fun, fun thing, unconnective thing. It's supposed to be. It's a pressure-filled environment that I'm responding to. And who wants to talk about sex every day in a non-sexy way? Like, it's not helping me be more interested in sex to be having all these depargue conversations on a daily basis. And when I would beg him for breaks from talking about it, he would build all this anxiety over it. And essentially spend that whole day that he was giving me a break, commenting about how he didn't want to mess up by saying the thing that I didn't want to talk about. And so instead of actually getting this break, I had sort of this, it was still back there because he was talking about it in this really indirect way. Like, I don't want to talk about sex because I don't want to piss you off or cross your boundaries or whatever. And so I'm never actually getting this full break from the conversation because then that 24-hour period would end and he would be right back to bringing him up all the time. And so I just never ever had a break from sex as a topic in my life. He was always comparing us to our friends and saying things like, yeah, we have more sex than all of our friends do. I guarantee it. And again, we're having sex like five times a week. But he's also saying things like, now imagine time where this is every day or even multiple times a day. Like how great would that be if our relationship looked like that where we had sex every day, like multiple times a day? How connective would that be? And I would always say that we need jobs. And hobbies and life, like other things than just sex. That's not the end-all-be-all for a relationship at all. And actually, in fact, I would say like, if that safety and security doesn't exist in the relationship, the sex is completely meaningless. Like, yeah, that had no impact for me because that connection and safety just wasn't there anymore. And so he'd say this all the time and often say to him, like, you know, I don't think there's ever going to become a time where I want that much sex. And then he'd come back to that argument of, well, I think that's because we haven't done that consistently. But you should do it a lot so that you start looking at exactly when we are having sex consistently. You seem so happy. I bet if we just keep having a lot of sex, things would feel a lot better. How do you know? You've never been a person who has sex multiple times a day. So that was the dynamic I was being met with every time I had, and like, you know, I'm like, we're having so much sex. Like, we're having sex five times a week. That should be enough. And he's then saying the all these things. So I just felt so lost. Like, the goal post was always going to be moving. No matter how much I worked to reach his expectations, what was going to make him happy, that goal post was going to continue to move every single time. So around this time, I finally was able to convince Ethan to actually go to therapy. At that time, I had been seeing my therapist for about a year. I loved her. I felt like there's so many things that she'd helped me work through in that time. And I was feeling a lot more confident myself in starting to see some of the cracks that some of this, some of this work that was being prescribed to me was actually work that Ethan needed to do. So he ended up starting to see my therapist individually. And then we went to two couples therapy appointments together and he saw her for about a year and a half. And then just cold turkey stopped one day because he said he didn't need it anymore. Oh, okay. Well, yeah. And one thing that happened during that time that really stands out to me a lot is that he told me after a year of seeing our therapist that he had still not told her about what happened to him in high school. And I asked why. And he said, because it doesn't affect me, I worked through that. I worked through that after it happened. And it hasn't been affecting me for years. But then through therapy, he also realized the pattern, this pattern of every time we fight, wanting to reconnect through sex and how that stemmed from what happened in my school. And this was the first time we were actually pinpointing an issue of Ethan's around sex, something that traumatized him in the past that was impacting us today. And I remember just feeling so mad about it. Because in my mind, I'm thinking, for years you have been making this my issue to respond to. You have been pushing me to repair with you through sex. And now you see that that was something you had an issue with because of your past relationships. And this is something only you can work on. And the fact that you did that to me and still can't even sit here and apologize for it. This is just information he's giving me. There's no emotion behind it. It just really hurt to see all of that at that time. And remember, if my closest friends at the time, Hannah and Olivia, while around this same time, Olivia and my relationship actually ended up turning romantic. So Olivia had broken up with her partner. And actually for similar reasons, there was a lot of withdrawing whenever there was a rejection around sex that would eventually lead Olivia to feeling like she had to say yes to sex. And for like a year, she had told her partner like if this keeps happening, we're done. And it kept happening. So she finally ended the relationship. And a couple of weeks later, our relationship started to escalate into being a little bit more intimate. And during my 30th birthday, we had gone down to a different town with some friends to stay at an Airbnb. And her and I were sharing a bedroom. And we ended up hooking up that night. And friends to lovers. Yeah. I was excited about it because I'm like, I already love Olivia. She's been a really close friend of mine at this point for four years. And I also think this could be really easy thing for us because we have such a deep understanding of each other. And I don't have expectations of this being a big deep relationship. Like we're just friends that now have some intimacy between us and how beautiful is that. But things quickly fell apart and boundaries were just very quickly eroded. She was ultimately at the end of the day. She was grieving her past relationship and unpacking all of that. And she just projected a lot a lot of that onto me. And I tried to patiently communicate how I was feeling with feeling to her whenever these moments would come up. But every time I did, she would just get really defensive. And she would throw like adult-sized tantrums and completely hijack the conversation until we were focused on how she was feeling. And then never actually circled back to the thing I brought up. And meanwhile, Hannah was actually having the exact same experience with Olivia. So eventually, Hannah and I both step back from our friendship with Olivia. And at the time, I literally just asked for a little bit of space. I was having the really difficult time just like constantly being dismissed every time I brought up my feelings. And I was like, I just need a little bit of time to adjust my understanding of this friendship, but we can still have fun. We can still be close friends and other capacities. But we live in a really small town, and she really struggled to be respectful of my boundaries. She kept showing up everywhere I was, she kept talking to me anytime she saw me. There was absolutely no space between us. And so I finally decided I just needed to offer her an opportunity to talk about how she felt. And we would see if, after doing that, did she now finally feel ready to move on in a different way instead of talking about this with everybody else in our community. So we sat down for about two hours. I gave her that whole space to just share with me why she was upset with me, what I did wrong. I apologized. I listened. And at the end, I asked, do you feel heard, validated, and understood? And she said, yes, yes, yes, I do. I said, do you feel ready to move on from this? And she said, yes, she's like, I think we maybe need to have a few more conversations, but I feel ready to move on. I was like, great, that's wonderful. I then tried to share one thing I felt about this whole thing, the fact that she wouldn't stop talking about it to whoever would listen. And she immediately dismissed me and put my feelings down and said, I'm allowed to talk to whoever some of these people are probably never going to like you again, because they just had that deep love for me, but that was appropriate for me to talk about it to whoever I wanted to. And the only thing she had expressed frustration with was just that I wasn't more patient with her while she was having these tantrums, but I didn't give her more time to be like falling out from the from her breakup. Okay. Which is like, I'm like, yeah, I could have been more empathetic, but you were also like crossing my boundaries on a daily basis. And it was everything changed when you went romantic, like it's one thing to be frantically, but as soon as romantic feelings get involved, it's like, very messy. Are you the one that's supposed to be her support system after a breakup? Like it's weird. Yeah. It's very weird. And honestly, should it never happen? I should have never pursued that at all. And what came of it was literally like, it has almost ruined my life for the last three years. Stop. So the week after this conversation happened, we were supposed to hang out. And then I had to cancel because my grandpa, he passed away. And he was actually my third grandparent to die that year and my final grandparent. Oh my god. Oh, yeah. So in a year, I had my whole grandparent generation just wiped out. And I really, like, I had really, really hard time with it because I loved my grandparents so much. They actually lived fairly close to me. So I got to see them quite a bit. And I just, I love them so much. So it was really, really hard for me. So of course, I had to cancel on Olivia. And then I ended up flying home for a little bit afterwards. And then I come back and I hear that Olivia has been spending that entire time talking about me to whoever will listen. And the things that she's saying are chick crazy. Like she's telling everybody that I'm upset because I'm I'm actually just in love with her. - Oh. - And she doesn't feel the same way. (laughs) - Yeah. - It's just stuff like that. And I'm so surprised because I haven't even told her why I was upset because when I tried, while we were having that to our conversation, she was an interested. And so I didn't try to communicate anything else that I felt. And here I was hearing from all corners of our community, all of the reasons that she perceived, I wasn't close to her anymore. And meanwhile, I'm like, we just had this conversation so that we could reconnect. And now you're doing things to show me that that's not what you actually want. So I just stopped, I just dead stopped hanging out with her. And what came out of that was for the last three years, she has launched what's called a relational aggression campaign. So if that's a term you're unfamiliar with, I learned a lot about this in the last year 'cause it's been an crazy experience for me. A relational aggression campaign is when somebody, typically like a past abuser, uses other people to continue perpetuating the abuse against you. So this can look like stalking, getting other people to stalk them for you, trying gillation, like pulling in people to become a part of a conflict that they're not involved in, harassment, ongoing harassment, bullying, like things like that. And that is what Olivia has been doing. She has a huge aggression campaign. - Aggression campaign. - It's essentially like a smear campaign, but there's, yeah. 'Cause they need extra people. The more witnesses you have, the more credible it looks. - Exactly. - There's this mentality that if I get my story out first, no one's gonna believe her story. And I actually, this entire time, we live in a very small town. I have this belief that when there's a conflict between people in this town, like you owe people some level of respect that you both have to continue existing here. And so I wasn't talking about this to whoever would listen. And in fact, Ethan wouldn't even let me talk about this because Ethan grew up with Olivia. He really wanted to sleep with her 'cause he told me throughout our relationship. - Well, he did. He told you that? - Yeah. He actually, he tried to get me to set him and her up while we were together. While Olivia and I were together, he kept trying to get me to set her, him up with Olivia. - And was Olivia polyamorous? - Yes. - Oh yeah. - She was not anymore. She was then, yeah, I was just like, post-breakup exploration that she was going through. But yeah, so when this all happened, Ethan would not let me talk about it at home. Every time I brought it up, he would get really annoyed at me. And so I just stopped talking about it and I only talked about it to Hannah. So me and while I'm having like tens and tens of people, like literally she has a group of like up to 30 people in this community and I'm peering from all of them, all these like wild things that are happening and being set about me. And this continued for, it's still continuing to this day. And this is back in 23. - Oh my God. - Oh my God. - Yeah. So at the same time, I become really close friends with this couple, Ryan and Megan. And Ryan and Ethan actually end up both bonding about having girlfriends from high school light of them about being pregnant. They both went through that, which is insane. - Oh. - Yeah. So over the course of like a year, Ethan and Ryan are getting pretty close. Megan and I knew each other before her and Ryan started dating, but as a group before, we're all getting kind of close and becoming couple friends. And at this time, Ethan started a men's group for men to talk about their feelings, which in essence is a really beautiful thing, but it quickly became a pretty toxic and unhealthy environment where there's a total lack of accountability within the group for things. So it's like meant just becomes a place where you could be like, yeah, she was mean to you. - Exactly. - Yeah. - Oh no. - So after this started, Ryan started to notice some weird things about the way that Ethan was showing up in the group because I was really close. Ryan's also from the West Coast. So we've built this connection of just like our roots. So roots are the same place. We feel really connected. We get along very well. And so I would go on walks with both him and Megan and unpack stuff that was happening in my relationship. And Ryan was noticing that when Ethan was at men's group, he would be raving about how great things were because of how much sex we were having. I was always the focus like we have such a great sexual relationship right now we're so happy. And then Ryan would talk to me and we'd go on a walk and I'd share, yeah, like this happened. I felt so much pressure to saying yes to sex. I didn't want this sex. And he was noticing this disconnect between the ways that both of us talked about our relationship. And at the same time, I start to notice pretty similar patterns between Ryan and Megan's dynamic compared to my dynamic with Ethan. Ryan describes Megan as being very reactive. And in fact, I see the reactivity too. I've watched her throw things. I've watched her say things that she should not have said. She's very projective. She asks me, it's conflicts a lot. And just like a total lack of accountability. So I'm watching this mirror of my relationship in my friend's life. And I am good friends with Megan at this time, but I started to try to distance myself a little bit after seeing some questionable behavior. Particularly, she loved to snoop through Ryan's computer, phone messages, journal, all of that. And at the time, Ethan was looking through my phone all the time and tracking all my information and reading my private journals when I wasn't home. So I was very sensitive to this. And so I started to take a step back. Around this time, we went on a vacation together. And during this vacation, we're seeing a lot of people or seeing some family members. But at the end of the vacation, the plan was that we were going to go to this Airbnb in a small mountain town and he wanted to take Molly and have really connective sex night together and then we'd go home. And at this point in the last year, the last three times that we had taken Molly together, the dynamic had been the same. We had sex for four hours. I was exhausted by the end. The next day, he would wake me up to have sex again and then proceed to continue initiating sex. Because, well, why can't sex just continue? We had such a nice connective time last night. So this is really mind-baffling to make some like four hours of sex is already a lot. Like, you don't need to be like continually proposing this. And so I said to him, like, after Molly night, I don't want you to try to initiate sex with me for a few days. Like, let me have some time to come out of this experience. - It's intense. - It's really intense. So at the time, I didn't understand. Like, I was just like, he just once long explored of sex. Molly's the facilitator to that. Okay, I get it. But shortly before this trip, he admitted that the real reason why he always pushed for four hours of sex was because the first time I slept with Jake, we slept for four hours. And he's now for the last three years of our lives been trying to push for that. Because he felt insecure that that was happening. - I did with Jake. - Comparing. - And he's jealous. - Exactly. - It also goes back to his like treating it like a sport. He's got to analyze it and give himself a score. He's like, I got to hit four hours. - Exactly. - Yeah. - What the heck? - I was so hurt by that because I'm like, you don't know the toll that's taken on my body. And it's all stemming from some insecurity from three years ago that you should have dropped by now. Like, we have so much sex. We have such long sex. Like, why is this the thing that you're still pushing me on all the time? So it did make it click a lot more, but then it also incited all that anxiety I was feeling about going into this night with him because I knew his expectations and I knew why it was there. So we end up doing this. And I end up getting so unbelievably sick. I'm throwing up for like 15 minutes straight at the very end of the night. So at this point, we had been having, we had like started at like 8 p.m. and it was maybe like two in the morning. And we had been kind of like on and off going that entire time. And then I get so unbelievably sick. I'm sorry, it was a little bit later at that point in the night. Before this had happened, I told him, if we're up until like 5 a.m., I don't want to have sex tomorrow morning. Just making that super clear, my expectation is that sex is not this thing that I'm being pressured to do. And he said, yeah, totally makes sense. I then get violently ill. I'm so nervous because we're in a different state. We're on an elicit substance. If we get in trouble and have to go to the hospital, it could be bigger repercussions than just being sick. And so I'm really panicking throughout this entire time. Finally stop throwing up, he grabs me some water, and he immediately says, okay, so you can take a little bit of a break and recover, and then we'll get started again. And it's like 5 a.m. at this point. We've been going out at 8 p.m. the night before. And I was like, it was like handmaid's tail. I was so devastated in that moment. I had made myself so clear what my expectations were. And I had made myself so clear that I didn't want to have him propose more sex. And all of that aside, the fact that I was just vomiting my guts out should be enough for him to not ask for that again. Like, he can see I'm really struggling. But he asked, I breathe. I was like, nope, we're going straight to bed. Claire, it doesn't sound like he asked, can I just say? Yeah, it sounds like he told. Yeah, he did more tell than ask. And fortunately for me, I finally had an, I don't know why in that moment, I had enough strength to just say no. And trust is that it was going to be worth the reaction to say no, the reaction ended up being different than usual. But equally hard to deal with, he, we went to bed. I couldn't fall asleep for another hour and a half. I didn't get to bed until about 6.30 that day. He woke me up at 9 o'clock to have sex, even though I had asked him the night day before not to do that. I then couldn't go back to sleep. And then he went in. into an intense shame spiral that lasted for weeks. - Him shame, like-- - Oh, sorry, go ahead. - Him shaming himself, like he felt shame that he had done this to me. And so instead of showing up apologetically or trying to repair with me, he went into all of his worst traits, defensiveness, argumentativeness, being withdrawn for the rest of our vacation. We had like a full day together. We got massages that day and went on a hike in the whole time. I'm just trying to like pull him out of his mood. I'm trying to support him. I'm essentially coddling his emotions about how he hurt me. - He wanted to change the narrative. He wanted to make himself the victim again. He wanted you to feel sorry for him instead of being mad at him. - Yeah, yeah. So then from there, we leave the next day to go home. And I work from home, and so I have a lot of flexibility to work while we travel. So we're driving home. I decided not to work remotely that day because he seemed like he was in such a tough spot. He was still on the shame spiral. And I thought what would be more helpful is if we spend time connecting on the road trips. We listen to podcasts, we talk, we play games, like try to have a nice time. And then we get home and I had said throughout the entire drive home, I have to go back to work in two days. When we get home, I just made the morning to get myself set up for the week. I just need you to leave me alone for a couple hours in my office so I can get set up for the week and make sure I'm ready to go back to work the following day. He, after 20 minutes of me sitting in my office started to come in to my office and talk at me. And one of the major things he kept saying was, when are we gonna be able to hang out? When are we gonna have time together? Because I actually would have preferred you to work in the car yesterday instead of hang out with me because today is the day that we can connect and now instead you're working. So I'm just wondering when are you gonna be done so we can connect? - When are you gonna get a job? You can leave me alone. - No, literally, literally. So the audacity, where did he find that audacity? - So annoying. - How was he? - He ended up doing this like four or five times before I finally snapped a little and I was like, I need you to leave me alone for just an hour so I can get my shit together for work. And he lived out. He got so upset because I raised my voice at him. And he escalated this into a three week long conflict. - Oh boy. - Every single day we were fighting for upwards of two to four hours. Multiple times a day. He was never leaving me alone. Every time I try to walk away and ask for a break, he'd re-initiate the conversation or he'd deepen the fight. And so for weeks, my nervous system is just shot, right? - And he's getting all the dopamine from starting fights. - Exactly. Like I just went through this experience of having a major boundary of my crossed after getting physically ill and being terrified. Now I'm having to coddle your feelings to make sure that you don't feel shame for what you did. And because you can't handle that, you're now turning it into a three week long conflict where you don't leave me alone. And like my nervous system was just, I could not for the life of me regulate. - Oh my God. There's a regulation. Like we need to cut that cancer out. Like he need to go. - Yeah, so that in the moment. - No, I don't. And actually at this time, I didn't even realize how bad it was getting for me because they're finally at the end of this three week period. I'm so emotionally reactive. And he followed me into my office. I tried to close the door and then he said something really, really petty. And I just couldn't handle it anymore. I went into the kitchen and I grabbed a knife while he wasn't looking. And I went back to my office with a knife with the full thought that I'm ready to be done. I don't wanna live anymore. Like I'm ready to be done with this. - Claire. - Yeah. - That is so, oh my God. He drove you to, he drove you that far. - That was the first time. He drove me that far many times, but that was the first time. And I remember when this happened, I was just like, I wasn't thinking nationally. Like I think I knew I wasn't going to do it, but I did have this feeling of like, I think this would be better. Like I think it would be better to not live this life anymore because this is all I experienced in this world. And like what else am I supposed to do about this? And he then came by and said another petty thing and I just freaked out. And he is was walking away at this point. I opened my office door. He is a room and a half away from me and there's a couch in between us. I'm standing at my front door. There's a couch right away and then he's in the kitchen, half way through the room. And I'm holding this knife to me and I'm begging him to leave me alone to actually give me a break. And that's when he starts to freak out about the knife and tell me that like, you know, I'm being crazy and he'd put that down. He's like trying to de-escalate the situation. - I can't wait crazy. - I know. Yeah, like a somewhat pretty quick shift in energy. Like it was weird. He did like jump and knock right away, but then he was like, actually rose to the occasion and got the knife out of my hand, got me back into a place where I was more stabilized. And then after that, the whole conversation is focused on the knife and what I did and how unsafe I was being and how unsafe the situation I was. - He's exhausting. - I'm tired of this conversation. Can we wrap this up? Like, he's exhausting. How are you, I'm surprised you didn't just fall asleep and just sleep forever and ever. - Lord. - I mean, exhausted. - Yes, I did. - And I get how you're like, oh my gosh, staying in this is so hard. Getting out of this is so hard. - I can't even imagine. Like your options are seem non-existent almost. - Yeah. It's like, yeah, the options were there. I just so couldn't see them because he had done such a good job at keeping me confused and looking to him for guidance. Like I looked at everything he had to say of having so much validity. - And for validation. And so it's like, tell me if this is right, just because this was the first question that popped into my mind. Why was that that thought you went to instead of man? I should leave this guy. It's, I don't deserve to be in this world. - Yeah. I've tried to figure this out for myself. Like, why did I stay? Why was that my thought process? Why did suicide seem like the more reasonable option than just leaving? And I like, I don't know what it was. I think it's just the manipulation was so strong. And I was so dysregulated. - He made you think that without him, you're nothing. - Yeah. - He really does. - He really does. - Yeah. - I'm so sorry. That's terrible. - Thank you. So after this knife incident happened, I finally convinced him to go to couples therapy, which was great. Ironically, it was not because of the knife incident. We ended up having another big fight like a week later that motivated us to go. But in the context of Claire needs to work through this because Claire is causing all these deep problems in our relationships. So yes, I'll go to couples therapy so we can have a space to talk about that with somebody else. And it was at this time that our therapist identified that you think kept changing the goal posts around sex, that every time I reached something he claimed was really important, he brought up something else. And this was finally the time that I started thinking, maybe I'm not the problem. Through therapy, I was able to identify what I was actually missing in our sexual relationship, which actually turned out to be a really, really simple thing. I wanted a needed physical affection without sexual expectations. - Okay, yeah. - I needed, yeah. I needed a little bit to, yeah. I needed him to like, want to give me a hug without saying the word sex. I needed him to like, wanna like play with my hair and cuddle me without then pushing for it to be sex. So I finally learned how to communicate this with him and my therapist worked a lot with me to figure out how do I frame this in a way that he'll understand. And then we had our couples therapy appointment together and he resisted so hard. He kept saying for three, yeah. For three weeks, his comment was, I can't do that because it doesn't turn me on. I was livid because I just had sex for like 10 years that I didn't wanna have, that didn't turn me on and all I wanted. - Wait, it's not to post a turn you on. - Yeah, it's supposed to turn me on. (laughing) - So then throughout this three period, he was like, quote unquote, trying to do this thing for me. But he would like come into the bedroom and stand over me with his dick out and talk about how pretty I looked and then like five minutes later come in and ask for sex. And then he would say things like, well, it just doesn't work. When I do that for you, it doesn't actually work. And I'm like, it's because you're trying and then immediately asking me for sex. - That's it, yeah. - I did it. Now we should be having sex because I did the thing. So for three weeks, I'm trying to get him to get this. He's saying all these things in therapy every single week. And our therapist at the end like, I said to him at some point like, this is so hard for me because I don't understand why you're not willing to try this. You've been asking for years for me to give you a playbook for how to connect with me sexually. Here I am, handing you the one thing and you're fighting it. And he goes, I'm not fighting it. I'm just telling you that it's something that I don't think will work well because it doesn't turn me on, but I'm willing to try it. And I was so grateful for a therapist because she jumped in immediately and said, no, no, no, for the last three weeks, you have been arguing that you can't do this. And we're wondering why you can't do this. And then he came in with an argument, of course, of like, that wasn't what I was saying and you two misunderstood me. - Oh, okay. - I was so grateful for my therapist in that moment 'cause I'm like, thank God, I needed somebody to hear this and validate that I'm not crazy. And she was like so willing to do that for me. So that was fantastic, but also, but the heck. Not that hard. - Oh, I hope that changed a little bit for you in your own mind. - It did because I was being shown [BLANK_AUDIO] my sexual satisfaction didn't matter to him. I just was having to show up for him. And like at this point, sadly, at least, 'cause this was last year, this was like the spring of '25. And so it's so interesting, 'cause I'm like, it took me that long to realize this, that my sexual satisfaction never mattered to him and that he was just hyperfixated on all the wrong things, which is causing all these issues. But that moment was definitely it for me, 'cause I'm like, this is such a simple ask. This is such a reasonable ask. - Yes. I'm making it this really big deal and big issue. That's, that is a major red flag to me. This all should have been a major red flag to me, that hindsight. - Hmm, don't blame yourself. You get deep in it. - Yeah, right after this happened, Megan and Ryan ended up breaking up. And Megan unexpectedly cut me off to, through a text message. Now at that time, we had been friends for three years and she said that she couldn't be friends with me because she didn't trust me with Ryan. I was really confused by this, but I was so deep in issues with Ethan that I was like, I'm not touching this. I sent her a text message back telling her that I was sorry that she'd been feeling that way and that I, I wish her best in her life. And I reminded her that I was always there for both of them, but that I understand this is how she feels and that is what it is and left it at that. And then shortly after, I find out that Megan and Olivia have become very close friends. - Oh. - Yeah. So this is all happening in the background. Around the 4th of July last year, I finally made the decision to leave Ethan and the moment that led to it is so embarrassingly small that I'm like, it should have been a bigger thing. But the day that I decided I needed a divorce, he, he works in construction and I went to one of his job sites. He walked me around, showed me the job. We had a great time. I was like pointing out things that I knew about because he had taught me, which he loved, he was like soaking it in that I had like learned all these things through him about construction. And then I go home and a couple hours later he comes home and he asks me how my day is and I'm just like talking about, I work in a very male dominated industry and I was talking about a gender dynamic I was experiencing that day through work. And then he jumps in and tells me that, well, the reason why women don't work in that industry is because they actually don't want to work in that industry. Meanwhile, I'm like, I work in this industry. I know that women want to work in this industry. I know women don't because of the sexual harassment they deal with because this is what I've dealt with. And so I'm trying to genuinely have a conversation with him about this. I'm not trying to like attack or anything and he got in such a bad mood about this because he's never correct about anything and I'm always telling him he's wrong. So he goes off to be in a bad mood, whatever. Ryan shows up about an hour later to go on a walk with Ethan. And when they got back, I had been working in the garden and we have a raspberry bush. I know that Ethan really likes raspberries. So I was like, great, I'm gonna take some raspberries and put them in a bowl for Ethan and Ryan to enjoy while they're hanging out. And then I'm gonna go back to gardening. So I do this. I wash the raspberries because we have dogs that run around our yard and peel over everything. So I'm like, of course, I'm gonna wash some fruit before I put it out. And I set them down and he proceeds to complain the whole time that the raspberries are washed because he doesn't like wet raspberries. Oh, my God. - It gets worse. - Well, this is the kind of thing where you're, but you know how people are like, oh, she just broke up with me out of nowhere because she's got about these raspberries. He's like, no, it's been years in the making. - It's been years, it's been years. Yeah. He ended up also getting upset with me that day because I was watching a show that he likes to watch without him and when I like offered to, when I offered to restart it so we could watch it together, he said I was being so sickly sweet that it was disgusting. And then he disappeared for the entire next day even though we had plans and then I made the mistake of saying something incorrectly according to some of our communication rules that we had. We basically had this rule that you shouldn't say like, if the rules were reversed, you would respond this way because it's kind of a projection. And I accidentally said that and he immediately would start yelling at me. We don't do that. We've agreed not to do that. So I immediately apologized and took accountability for it. And then he started yelling at me for like a full five minutes about how I never take accountability. - Oh my God. - All of those things combined that I was like, I'm done. I'm done. Like I literally can't do anything to make you happy. I'm being too sweet so you're mad at me. I'm giving you things that are wet and washed and you're mad about it. Like what am I supposed to do to get you to be a happy person? And so that was the day that I'm like, I'm done. I saw Hannah that night and I told her about this and I remember not going into that conversation being like, I'm actually done with this relationship. I went into that conversation just wanting to talk about it. And at the end, I honestly felt like I didn't have a choice. After saying all of this to my best friend who's been here for the last eight years listening to me talk about my relationship and all the hard things I'm going through, like I could not share all this with her and then go straight back to being with him. And I'm so glad that I felt that because I honestly don't know if I would have made that decision if it wasn't for Hannah and I talking through it. - We need our people. It helps so much to have that community. - It really does. And also what it helped was that through therapy, I gained a lot of clarity and confidence too. Like I started to really trust myself and understand that the things I was experiencing and the ways that I felt about them and interpreted them were real and valid and that I could trust myself within those. And a lot of that came from my first therapist really working with me on positive self-talk as this relational aggression campaign was going, it sometimes became hard to remind myself of my truth and my reality and who I am as a person because they're trying to share that I am this version that they believe. And so my therapist was really helping me come out of that and trust that what I experienced in life was how I experienced it and was real and valid. And I just in general is feeling this utility to continue taking accountability for moments that were not mine to take account for. So I asked for a separation and then Ethan ended up moving in with Ryan and he was there for about a week. And then at the end of the week, Ryan and I ended up hanging out and he begged me to switch with Ethan and move in with him because within that week, Ethan had started to be really such an asshole to Ryan. He told him that so Ryan has ADHD, pretty severe ADHD and he does take medication for it. And Ethan told him that he was a meth addict because his medicine is actually just meth. - Oh jeez. - And then, okay, well, call me a meth addict. - Great, come on, dude. Like people have, the brain's all operate differently. Like have some fucking empathy. And then he doubled down on that. And like Ryan was like that, really heard. I don't appreciate that. And also like it's not meth. I'm not a meth addict. I have a disability. - Is he a doctor, doctor Ethan? It's like he can't go into any space without seeming like- - Assuming authority. - He's in charge, he's the authority, yeah, he's right. And he has to put you down. - Yeah, so also, I should say too. So at this time, we were separated but Ethan was not giving the actual space. So I work from home. He was just storming into the house whenever he wanted and just yelling at me, trying to talk that relationship. So I actually wasn't getting any space at all. And so part of us switching was I needed physical space and to be in a home that he could not just walk into. And Ryan just desperately could not have even in his house anymore. So we ended up switching. So at this point, I'm separated. This is last summer July of 2025. I'm separated from Ethan. I'm living with Ryan. And things are starting to feel really good. I actually always compare this to like, so I don't know if you guys are familiar with a vicious disorder by another. I think that's what it's got. It used to be called a munchasm by proxy. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, that's right. - So I didn't notice. - There's like, called anything else. - Yeah, there's this like theory with munchasm by proxy that when you separate the victim from the potential abuser, things get better. That's how you then know that they are a victim of munchasm by proxy. And I kind of like, very, very different situation which to be clear, but like. - No, I can't even. - He was out of my life. And within three weeks, I stop shaking every day. - Yes. - My body, your body. - Yeah. - It's so crazy. - I only get out of that. - So crazy. The physical thing too, I've said it before on here, but like I had a ton of back pain and relationship and it ended when we broke up. And I was like, oh, it's not the pill. And Jenna Jean, she said she was getting stomach aches. - Yeah. - Similarly to, I had mentioned I was having some health issues at this point. So I had been chronically ill for five years at this point, which it mostly manifested in a lot of nausea. I was constantly nauseous and really struggling to eat as a result of that. And I had lost almost 30 pounds. And I'm already a really small person. So I was almost under 100 pounds by the end of our relationship. And I was just constantly sick. And yeah, when you left, I was no longer sick. I had to be gluten free for a while throughout this health crisis. The minute he left, I was finally able to start eating gluten again without any reactions. Like so many things started to like fall into place for me. So this was all great. I was so excited about those things. And starting to see like, hey, I can get to a place where I feel really stable. We're just separated at this point. So I'm using this as like, this is good information to come back together. Because if I can stabilize myself, I can jump in this relationship better and be more prepared to take on the chaos that is Ethan. Oh, so you simply that didn't happen. Don't you worry, the chance. Yeah. So as I'm living with Ryan, we are noticing that Megan is driving by a lot. And she, as far as I knew, was not aware of the fact that I was living there, but again, we live in a very small town. A lot of people are aged. They talk. I wasn't surprised that she would eventually figure out that I was living there. So one day, I go home to the house that I own to walk my dogs while Ethan is away. And as I'm walking back to Ryan's house, I suddenly see Olivia standing outside of my house and she's on the phone and she's pacing. And I'm so immediately confused. Olivia and I have not talked at this point in almost two years. And she doesn't live on this side of town. Her friends don't live on this side of town. There's no reason for her to be here. And I notice she sees me and starts walking away. And as she does that, Megan comes running out of Ryan's house with her arms just filled with stuff. And then they take off. They broke into the house while I was gone. Oh my God. Oh, I was shocked because at that point, Megan had come back to the house twice in the last like three months that her and Ryan had been broken up. But she always reached out first and she never came in the house. She always just picked up stuff from the porch. And there was no contact between the two of them. So I walked inside the house. I called Ryan immediately because I was really confused and just felt really uncomfortable. And he was at work. And so he started to like wrap up things so that he could come home and see what was going on. And suddenly I see she had ransacked the house. She had gone through multiple rooms, including the bedroom I was staying in. And my personal stuff, she had written messages all over the white boards in the house and on the walls and things like that. And then she had left her keys behind. So we now knew she didn't have a way to get into the house. I guess Ryan had never gotten her keys back in the breakup, which was definitely an oversight. And then when Ryan comes home, we realized she did actually steal some of his stuff, like knowingly things that his parents had given him while they were together that she knew was not hers. Oh my God. What were the messages on the whiteboard? The only distinct one I remember was this one that was vaguely threatening about how she won't be back. This is the last time that we'll hear from her sort of thing. Why is everybody pooping bananas? Yeah. Sometimes when I talk about this with people, I'm like, I really feel like I'm in a movie because a lot of these things are things that just shouldn't happen. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, they break into the house. And very shortly after, even just starts getting so much more bizarre and so much more intense. And I had remembered before moving in with Ryan, I had asked like, do you feel any discomfort about me living with Ryan? At that point, we had all been friends for over three years. And so I assumed that there was going to be no issues. And Ethan responded by saying, well, I expect that you guys might sleep together, but that's just as what it is. And kind of like written in office, like a you're going to cheat on me and not just as what it is. So I was a little confused by that. But I was like, what can I do to help you feel comfortable with this? I was constantly trying to keep it as an open conversation so that he felt comfortable with me living with another man. And you weren't poly at this moment? No, we had taken a break from polyamory shortly, like a couple of years before after Olivia and I had ended things. Seems like a good idea. Yeah, that was a good idea at that point. Okay, got it. So Ethan suddenly starts saying that he has evidence that I am cheating on him with Ryan. Oh, blessed. And I'm super confused where this is coming from. So at this point, we're not divorced. We're making the decision to get divorced still. And he now believes that I have cheated on him. And it takes us some time, but we finally realized that the story, the rumor of the Saul came from Winne-Meghan and Olivia broke into our house. Right after they had broken in, apparently they went straight to Ethan to tell him that they had hard evidence that I was cheating on him with Ryan. And Ethan believed it and then started to his behavior towards me started to worsen as a result of this. We eventually get any worse. I know, right? We eventually made the decision to get a divorce. That was two months after we separated. We made the decision to get a divorce. You say we, which means he he's okay with that too. He's like, yeah, this is fine. Funny enough, we both made the decision that we wanted a divorce in the same week. And I was waiting until couples therapy to do it, but he beat me to it, which he loves to tell people that he was someone who asked for the divorce, and I had actually decided to be extra. I mean, I had to wait. I didn't feel safe to do it unless there was somebody else in the room. So it's not really a brag on his part that his partner felt unsafe to end things with it. Yeah, literally. Yeah, that's not a flex buddy. Yeah. So we make that decision and then this whole issue of the Ryan and Claire stuff just gets worse at worse. I'm being told by Ethan that every single friend of mine is talking about this, that everyone believes that it's happening. And it's starting to make Ryan and I feel very alone. And like we have no one to to support us. And we're just completely alone in our friend group because we don't know who to trust. We don't know who's talking about this. Ethan's telling us everybody is talking about this. And I was just getting such such a like confusing time. And we were also seeing some of our close friends show up and just really bizarre ways, like one of our closest friends within two weeks, twice asked Ryan, who you was sleeping with. And Ryan's like, nobody, I'm not interested in sleeping with anybody. I just got out of this terrible relationship. I just want to be alone right now. And it was like a really good friend of ours. So we were so surprised by this and just felt like they must be asking this question on Ethan's behalf. Yeah. So the rumor continues to spread. Ethan's behavior gets worse. I eventually at this point moved back into the home that I own. I ended up winning the home in the divorce. And so he starts to storm into the house and accuse me of being like putting, I'm just going to pass to this. It's just it's not even worth anything into it. Just he was getting so much more erratic in his behavior while he's even storming into a house. He doesn't live in it. I know, right? Exactly. Yeah. And we're working through the logistics of the divorce and he's just getting more and more heightened. During the same time, the community pressure around the relational aggression campaign takes on a completely different life of its own. At this point, I had over the last three years that had been going on, I had asked people to stop sharing stories with me about things they heard Olivia say because they just didn't want to hear about it. But now I couldn't stop hearing about it. Like it was coming at me from all corners. I was constantly hearing stories about people trying to get information about Ryan and I to bring back to Ethan. In addition to that, sharing stories in ways that were not accurate to the truth, including the knife story. So the way that Ethan reframed that story was that I attacked him and called him. Oh God. Oh God. Yeah. And I don't know if you remember me saying like, I was literally a room and a half away from him with a couch in between us, begging him to leave me alone. And now at this point, late last year, I am hearing this story repeated in such a way. And it was so traumatizing to have like this deeply, deeply traumatic moment in my relationship repeated by people in an incorrectly, no less like over and over again to whoever wanted to hear it. It was just like that felt like such a cruel thing to me. But also, this is when I found out that it was Olivia and Megan who went to Ethan. And I don't know if you remember me sharing Olivia had told me that Ethan was abusive. Megan was actually my only other female friend who also told me that Ethan was abusive before we got a divorce. And both of them knowing that they actually had no evidence went straight to Ethan to give him information that was only ever going to make his abuse worse. And that is the part that I will never ever get over. Like I will work to be okay with their presence and who they are as people. But that part of them just like you're a bad person to do that. To take information that is incorrect and give it to an abusive person. Like I just can never get past that and the fact that they did that to me. So this is all still continuing in the background. And at this time, we actually start to experience some stalking too. So after the break in and the campaign, Ryan and I were both starting to get these like weird intuitive feelings. But we couldn't connect them to anything. We just felt this anxiety. Like something was happening behind the scenes that wasn't safe for us. And at the same time, my dogs were alerting. I have two dogs. They were starting to alert to weird places in the yard that they don't usually care about. Oh God. What in the yard? Oh, God. Exactly. And they're freaking out at times that didn't feel normal. Like one of my dogs, he's like, isn't that baby? I love this dog so much. And he he's always super calm with me at the end of the day. And he just would not let me go to bed until I let him outside to go look. And that was the first time he's ever done that to me. And I've had him for eight years now. So I was like, this is not something's wrong. Something is tangibly wrong right now. And we start to see footprints at Ryan's house. So in this time, Ryan had Ryan's house. So Ryan had actually just bought a house that's a block away from mine. So we live super close to each other. And he was finding footprints leading from his front door, all the way through the gate to the back door into his fence stuff backyard on towards all over his yard, like constantly finding these footprints. What? And then one night, I am with Hannah. Well, Ryan is at my house doing something with my dogs. And I get this feeling. I'm like something is wrong. I don't know what's wrong, but something is wrong. I go home and Ryan tells me that while I was gone, the dogs were in my bedroom perfectly fine. Nothing was happening. And then all of a sudden, he hears my gate slam closed. It's the middle of winter. My house, my sidewalks are very icy right now. And he hears this loud slam of the gate. The dogs perk up, they go to the window. And then they run through the house to the area of the house that they've been alerting to that like they never go to. So Ryan goes to look out the window and he doesn't see anything. It's like that's weird. So he waits until I get home. When I get home, he goes outside and he walks around. And he found right next to the gate, it looked like somebody had slipped on the ice and fell on their knees. So he sees it's raining. So it's raining and there's snow on the ground. So he sees fresh footprints with no rain in the footprint, but rain around the footprint. And he notices that there's no tread on the shoe print. It looks like they put like a bag over their foot. What is going on. Yeah. So I'm freaking out because I'm like, clearly someone was in my yard. This is a part of my yard that no one walks in, especially in the wintertime, I keep it closed to my dogs because it's a native prairie that I don't want them accessing. So do you think it was him when you saw these footprints or saw the. Yeah, first day assumed it was him and I assumed it was out of this like morbid curiosity of like am I sleeping with Ryan because Ryan was actually while he was trying to close on his house, we were like living intermittently with each other over the course of six months last year. So he was at my house quite a bit. Yeah. And I know that Ethan was paying attention because some of the times that he would storm on into my house, he would say things like, I know that Ryan's supposed to be working right now and his car is at your house. He's here when he's not supposed to. Yeah, he'd like say a lot of stuff like that. So I'm like, I know he was paying attention. So I assumed it was him. But the weird thing was that this final time that that happened, I had this weird sense that other people were involved. So anyway, this continued on for about two months and after about a month of it, I finally talked to my therapist who was seeing Ethan at the same time and she immediately told me to file a police report told me to take it seriously. I did go through all of that. And I think if she hadn't told me that I don't know that I would have because hearing it from his therapist, being like, I'm concerned for you was enough for me to be like, okay, I'm not taking this seriously enough like his behavior could escalate. And I need to take better caution. So after that. So it's been about five months now since the stocking has ended every now and then there's weird signs of things like I know he was in town this last week. And my dogs have been acting a little over the last week as a result, and I don't know if there's a connection there, if it's just something else in the air for them. And he also continues to try to contact me from time to time. We've been officially divorced since November, living in a small, beautiful thing, our divorces finalized in one day. It's exciting. So even more since then, and in December, when the stockings started, I decided to go no contact to make this, this image of if it's him even clear, there's no connection between us, no contact, like he's doing these things and it's clear. And I also decided to step back because of the whole knife story, seeing him try to like capitalize on this aggression campaign against me. I'm sure at the time that there was no remaining logistics between us that I could just walk away and there was nothing he was going to have to contact me for logistically. And he's continued to try to access me in all these weird controlling ways. Most recently, it was about social security numbers contacted me and March, like begging me to give him my social security number because he couldn't file his taxes without it. I then like, I had done some research back in December to figure out if that was true and learn back in December that he didn't need my information. And I told him, I didn't even tell him no, I just said, let me talk to my tax preparer to get more information than I'll let you know. And he just like flipped out and made it about how I hadn't contacted him since January and all these other things. So he's still spiraling quite a bit, but fortunately, he just moved out of town recently. I was going to say she's still around. He's not around. He just moved two weeks ago. I did have to see him last week, but it was actually kind of a funny moment. I, so I haven't seen him in person since like a brief moment in March and then a brief moment in January. So it's been like almost a half a year now that I've seen him or really talked to him. And we're recording this. We're recording this mid June. Yeah, yeah, so he moved out of town and then his youngest sibling graduated from high school. So he came back for their celebration and everything. And on Tuesday of last week, I went to the grocery store in the middle of the day. But honestly, like I, I don't even, something was aligning to just make this a really good day for me because I really loved my outfit and I felt really confident, felt really good. And I was like, man, I'm just going to go grocery shopping midday and do like a little bit of a break from work and like, this is wonderful. And I walk into the grocery store and I actually saw somebody right away that I don't love to run into. And I was like, I'm so glad that I look so good today. I just see me like being happy and smiling and happy over her. That's the best feel. I'm like feeling all this energy. And as I leave and put my card away and I'm holding my groceries, I'm like, I'm still going to walk with confidence because if she's still here and seeing me, I want her to have to deal with that. And lo and behold, Ethan pulls in right in that moment and parks his car to go into the grocery store that I was just in. And I was like, oh, my God, thank God on my timing, but also thank you universe for making me feel really good about myself in this moment. So that my ex-husband sees me. I'm not looking like slubbish with all these groceries hanging up. I mean, it's a really nice moment for me. And then I guess the last thing that I'll share about this that I honestly, when I first reached out, this is mostly to just give Hannah a love story because I thought she would really appreciate some sweet news. But ironically, all of the rumors of the affair ended up helping create the conditions that brought Ryan and I a lot closer. I thought me. I was like, you know, I get this is this is annoying of everybody else, but you have a lot in common. Honestly, that was like kind of a hard part about it. Like all of their rumors made it a thing that we didn't even want to open up to and be accepting up for the longest time. So we didn't end up talking about it until December that we had these shared feelings for each other. And that was at the point where he had moved into his own place, which was a big thing for me. Like I was like, I don't want to start anything with somebody that I'm living with right now, especially since he's recently. You're both recently out of relationships. Yeah. And then we just slowly things have really started up between us and I think honestly everything we went through really drew us a lot closer together. Because there were so many time periods over the last couple of months where we just felt like we had nobody because we were being told so many lies and rumors about the way people are showing up. And yeah, I am so grateful for him like he has rewired so many things even just the biggest thing for me is that I have always believed that sexual problems in a relationship and in a heterosexual relationship is just a given that there's going to be this like misalignment with desire. He struggles around it, and he is just completely rewired that for me and shown me that that's not true. And that I can be met with respect and consent and boundaries will be respected and I love him. Yeah, I'm obsessed with him. He's wonderful human way to how long has it been since you guys have been like dating. Yeah, so we officially started dating and March, but we had kind of had some things going on since January. So it's been like about six months, but I've now known him for, okay, we're inching up on four years that we've known each other now and we've been close friends for about three of those years. So yeah, it's been really fun to watch the relationship transitions. Also, my dogs are obsessed with him, which is just my older dog did not like Ethan. Ethan was actually a little abusive to him at times. And so being able to watch my like hyper sensitive reactive dog fully connected to someone like even if I was not interested in having a relationship with Ethan, I don't know that I'd have his choice because my dog is so obsessed with him. Well, isn't it crazy how you look back now and you're see stuff like that like how we treat your dog how he manipulated you like it hasn't been that long. I thank you for writing in and being so willing to talk about this now. I know you seem like you're doing so much better and I'm so glad, but still has it come up in your new relationship are there ways that you see Ryan like responding in different ways that affirm you like I want to hear. I don't know about how you how you heal while also falling in love, I guess. Yeah, that's a great question. So to be honest, I have been a little closed off to some of that, like I've been essentially like I think if I said to Ryan today, like, hey, I would love to be your partner, like he would be ready to go. I'm very like I need to be very slowly through this and I'm not ready to reach certain parts and so part of the healing is just allowing myself to move really slow and methodically. But honestly, just everything about the way that we communicate is different and so that alone has really helped with a lot of the healing. Anytime there's been something that's slightly stressful, we just work through it so much more seamlessly than I ever did with Ethan so that in itself is really healing and also. truly like the sexual relationship of it all. Like there was a moment where I had like a physical triggered reaction to something while we were having sex. That was not about him, not about us, it was about stuff with Ethan. And he noticed, he stopped, and he focused on what needed to happen to make me feel safe without sex being the objective of where we went back. And like, Ethan never did that. Ethan called me, this is associating through sex and would just continue to go. So there's stuff like that that's like naturally slowly helping me heal from some of those impacts. But I also think to like the relationship ended long before it actually did for me. And I think because I was going through therapy and because I had such a strong support system and network, I was really able to come out and be in a lot more stable of a place than I would have if I had chosen to divorce him two, three years ago. So there's some of that too, where it's just the joy of finally getting to be intimately connected to somebody who shows up healthier and me being a little bit more ready for it because you sit there and you stay for as long as you can and then you mourn the loss of them while you're with them. And then when they're gone, it's like, okay, when you're ready, you're done with it, then they're done, then you can move on pretty quickly, usually, because you've already gotten, you've already moved on. Yeah. I like that perspective. I feel like I've always kind of shamed myself for the times where I've stayed longer than I maybe wanted to, but now I think what you're saying makes sense. I'm so proud of you and inspired by you, honestly, just for prioritizing yourself in this and recognizing that's what you need. Yeah. So currently, I identify as polyamorous, but not practicing because I'm really just, honestly, after the divorce and everything, I was like, I don't want to be touched by another person for like a year or more and then Ryan just kind of fell into my life in the way that he did. And so I am interested in continuing to pursue polyamory in the future, but right now I'm just kind of taking things really slowly. I will say it was a little bit of, you know, a little bit of a mind-fuck to have a lot of the people that I connected with in polyamory be the people who are still terrorizing me today. And I have to really separate those things out in my mind. Like I recognize that Ethan and Olivia, like they are not polyamorous people at their court. Like they tried it because they were in life, they wanted to play around, they wanted to have fun, but it's not who there is people. And so the things that they did and the ways they showed up can't be how I look at polyamory as a whole. And so that's why I like have so much love and respect for people like Jake who've been polyamorous for a long time. They've been through a lot of hard things, and they still show up with this openness to explore relationships in a more radical way. And they kind of help remind me that like polyamory can be a really beautiful thing even though my experience that it was really treacherous. Well, I always think about just if you were not polyamorous with Ethan, it doesn't, like he would still be abusive. If you got into a relationship with Olivia, the traits that made her stuck you and harass you were there. Like I think it's easy when it's a non-traditional setup for people to be like, oh, well, gay people are caddy or poly people are messy. Like it's easy to throw those labels around, but they're just people. We're all just people. There's bad people in every bunch. Absolutely. So that's good. That's interesting to hear that you're still still open to polyamory. Just maybe, yeah, let's just like really have a long interview process for people to get through. There's a new vetting process. I still have to figure out what it is that there will be a vetting process. There will be a big one. Maybe Mackenzie will run a background check. I know. We need background checks. Can't tell us if they're an asshole. They can just tell if they were an asshole doing something stupid at one point that went bad. Oh god. Is there anything like, there's my final question. Is there anything that you would tell someone that's kind of in the middle of a situation like you were in? Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, really trust yourself. You guys talk so much about trusting your femtuition. And honestly, that is the biggest part of all of this that could have been avoided if I just listened. I was down to 103 pounds. That was my body telling me that something was wrong. Things didn't feel right because they weren't right. And I kept trying to accept the excuses that were given to me because I really wanted it to work. But the reality is, I really needed to listen to my body. And then I also, for people who have friends that are going through these things, I really think it's important to never tell your friends to leave their abusive relationship until they're ready. And you see that because I was never going to leave until I was ready to leave. And the ways that some of my other friends showed up for me were the reasons why I was able to come out and be okay. Hannah, especially like Hannah listened to every story like, oh my god, she's the most patient, empathetic, loving, person, and ever met. And her willingness to just be there and hear those stories and show up with love and support. She was essentially making sure she was ready and prepared to be there for me when I finally did make the decision to leave. And that was the type of friendship that I really needed. And those are the friendships that stuck with me. But also, if you see people who are dealing with senior campaigns, relational aggression campaigns, standing up and stopping the spread of that information, it is a really exhausting experience to have so many people talking about you and sharing so many things that are untrue and rewriting your entire story. And the people that I have felt the most gratitude for are the people in my life who see that happening and stand up and say something about it so that like, you guys shut up, this is stupid. Yeah, exactly. Don't let the drama just continue. And the last thing that I'll say is like, especially when you get out of it, have fun with that. I had so much like celebratory excitement about getting out of my marriage. Like, I had it back in January, I burned a ton of stuff out of friend's farm. We like set up, I'll have to send you guys a picture because I'm like, I would love it. I can't send it. I can't show it to you. A ceremony? Yeah. We set up our like ceremony arch that we got married at under. And I learned that with like a ton of other stuff. And we made like it a fun night where like, my friends will take something out of the box and be like, what's the story behind this? And I just got to share shady stories about Ethan. And we just got to be mad and angry and rage together at this fire and a great way to let it out. Yeah. I love that. A great way to get rid of everything because I was really wanting to change the energy in my home and get out anything that reminded me of him. And so that was a really cathartic way to do it. And then I'll just throw out this like funny little one that has helped me a lot, but emotionally separating while in a small town has been really hard. He's always around. Just people are always talking about him. And one thing that was getting progressively harder for me was seeing his name in my phone. So I did change his name to the DSM code for for narcissistic personality disorder. So every time he texts me, it's it's like 301.81 instead of it. It's true. It's weird like therapeutic to like see his name in my phone anymore and just be like, oh, the narcissist is reaching out. There he is. Yeah, just have fun with it because honestly, you kind of have to laugh at what you've experienced, right? Like that was such a shit show for 11 years of my life. And if I was just in this dark depressive place about it, like that just just continuing all of the the stress and hurt that I've experienced. And it's been really fun to find ways to really celebrate getting out of that with my friends and bringing them into my world to be like, this is a moment of celebration. This isn't a moment of sadness. My marriage didn't work, but I I survived because my marriage didn't work. And that might not have happened. It allows you to honor yourself in a way that's giving yourself permission to for all of the things to have happened. You're forgiving yourself, you're letting it go. So it's kind of a little bit of an honest with your friends, having more transparency now than there was when you were showing yourself grace too by saying like, hey, this is this happened, but now we're moving on. And you're just kind of setting that expectation for yourself in your mind. I love this. I want pictures. I know I know that you're doing well. I was definitely sending a picture. Shout out to the friends. Yeah, that were there for you. And oh, God, thank you for sharing because this is such a good story for all of the little things that he did that are hard to identify when they're in it. Yeah, I sometimes worry about when I share anything that happened, it's like this inevitable fear that people aren't going to get it and talking to your assistant producer and sharing this story. There's so many times where she was able to explain the thing to me. And it showed me not only am you guys been doing this for a long time and heard a lot of stories that people do get it. Like it may seem confusing to me because I was in it, but it's not going to be confusing to everybody. And yeah, I really can't say enough. I just love your guys' podcasts in the space that you've allowed women and people in general just share this. That's why community is so important because you might go to the grocery store and tell a random stranger and they're going to be like, that's crazy. That doesn't make sense to me. But when you get a community of people together like for instance, our audience, obviously they have something in common, they're either going to get it or have heard it or know somebody who's in it. So it's the community that's so important. That's why we're so grateful when you guys share. So we're really grateful. You thank you for sharing this story. We get it. No question. And you've also, you're just such a wonderful storyteller and you seem like a wonderful person and friend and Ryan's very lucky. Yeah, thank you so much. There was so nice to meet you. So nice to meet you. It was so nice to meet you, but thank you so much. Oh my god. I guess I can start by saying yay Hannah gets a romantic ending. I can't believe that she said she only submitted this to us to say, I ended up with a good guy. I like, what a story that led there. So I'm just gonna go through my notes. I set at the beginning. It's Molly's wedding this weekend. We're all over the place. So Mackenzie is sadly not joining me for this dogfish debrief. But the thing with these stories is that we really feel so invested and I know you do too. I just can't emphasize enough how our guests are so brave to come on and also very vulnerable. And I know that it's hard to share these stories and I just wanted to be a reminder always that these are real people sharing real stories and real mistakes. Like we're not asking our guests to come on and be perfect victims. In fact, we don't want them to be because no one is. And I know it's easy to just pick apart and if you haven't been there, be like, why would you stay? Why would you do this? And I'm glad she was able to speak to those questions and speak to some of the judgments that probably will come for the polyamory stuff in particular and I think it's really nice to have her perspective on it. She's been through the worst of the worst with a guy in a polyamory setting, but she doesn't blame the polyamory. Like I think it's great to have representation of something that can be used badly. You know if you've listened to us that we have a lot of people come in who started out in a religious context met their dogfish in a religious environment. We are not anti-religion, but religion, it's just something that's very easy to use as a way to manipulate someone. And I think that's the same thing with polyamory. Like it's just easy to take advantage of people when you build that kind of connection. So we just have to watch out for it, but definitely a big part of the story. And this guy's jealousy and control was on another level but actually it wasn't. I was about to say it was on another level. No, it wasn't because he is such a textbook rumor of user, emotional of user for a long time in a way that is so hard to see unless you're in it. We didn't get into it as much after part one because we wanted to wait until we got the whole story. But I just think the way that he first used that growth mindset in 10 self-help outlook to just like sculpt her and slowly make her feel like she was the biggest problem in the relationship is so seemingly minor. But I know that you've been there. I've seen your comments on the episode and a lot of you are like, oh my God, this sounds so much like someone I dated or someone I just got out of a relationship with. I see one comment right now. I just broke up with someone who behaved so much like this. It's helping reframe things for me. It makes me sad that you went through it but it makes me happy that you can see on the outside like how dangerous that can be because it just ruins your self esteem. It degrades your own femtuish about yourself and it made it so easy to get her to a place where she was just constantly, almost apologizing or constantly feeling guilty for anything. She was doing so much and he was just blaming her for not cutting onions correctly. But another comment was interesting where it was like, it's always funny how the person who suggests polyamory is the one that can't handle it. And of course, I don't think that's necessarily always true but he brought it up in a way that very much felt like he wanted to have his cake and eat it too and him calling the other girl his fun partner and she's not fun by comparison is just another one of his subtle digs. And I learned so much about the 101 of polyamory which I feel like you can learn from even if you're not doing it. You're not supposed to use polyamory to criticize your partner to compare them, comparing them is never going to end well. And I feel like we can use that with X's. Obviously it's important to talk about your past relationships and what you've learned. In fact, I have a friend I was just talking to her and her ex-boyfriend who could be an episode would criticize her body and make little comments. And she would say, I don't like when you tell me I should shave my legs better. Like he would say stuff like that, which is crazy. And he would say, what? None of my other girlfriends ever cared. All of my other girlfriends knew that I only told them things that could make them better because I loved them. And he also mentioned that all of his other girlfriends were 110 pounds, which why does that ever have to come up in a conversation? Anyway, he is not with her anymore, thank God, but he was so like this. I think comparing to anybody else, if anybody's trying to really hold that against you, it's so, so clearly manipulative. Specifically with sex, Jake, the guy she dated that was older, respectful, polyamorous, clearly Jake and that relationship was so emasculating for him. And then finding out that they had sex for four hours, the first time they were together and then comparing his sex with her to that and forcing it on her, raping her. And it's so hard to hear the story because any kind of sexual assault is obviously devastating. But just being with a partner, being married to someone, being in a relationship with someone, and feeling like you have to have sex with them is rape. And I know we say that, but our society still doesn't always say that, like it wasn't legally something you could crush charges for, I believe, until the '90s, like spousal rape. And it breaks my heart doing the drugs and pushing her into kinks that she didn't want to do. If you do it more, you'll like it more. It's just devastating. And it's also very clearly to me compounding. The more that happens to you, the harder it is for you to not only recognize it, but to fight back. And on the outside, it's really easy to say, how could you let that happen? And I think it's just always important to remember that it takes years to build you there. Also, he was breadcrumbing growth, like he would give her a little bit, you know, and say, like, you're almost good enough, basically. And she just always was chasing that carrot that he was dangling. It's just crazy. She also was going through so much, lost three grandparents in a year, like all of those little things matter. And he really just broke her down. And then as she's starting to get away from him and moves in with Ryan and starts to move on, just seeing him with Olivia and Megan stalk her, like rather than these relationships recognizing what's going on, he just found other peas in the pod that were equally manipulative and abusive. And we don't know what's going on in those conversations, but they certainly resulted in behavior that is not justifiable whatsoever, no matter what you went through in high school, no matter your relationship to sex, no matter your past relationship, I say sometimes gossip saves lives. And I do stand by that. I think there is a time and a place to put aside decorum and say, hey, we gotta talk about this because this guy sucks. But this is very much a consider the source. And I'm so heartbroken that she was in such a small town with people that were just dragging somebody that was already down. And I'm so proud of her too. Like the way that she was able to heal herself and thankfully connect with somebody who understood what she was going through, both through knowing him and also being in a relationship himself. It sounds like Ryan could be a guest on our show. And I'm sad that it was how she had to get to the relationship with him. But I am very, very glad that she is with someone like him now that can understand and grow in a real way, not in a stupid self-help of user kind of way. But at the end of the day, can I just add what ultimate revenge to have all of these people hating you and to get this beautiful love out of everything that they tried to do? I mean, they're thinking about her more than she's thinking about them now, it seems. And I excuse my friend, sorry mom, but like fuck them. And I'm sad for whoever else they go on to abuse and torment and to see your comments saying that you feel like you've been with people like this, breaks my heart. Let's find our Ryan's or just find ourselves. Both of those things would be better than Ethan. Oh God, she is a powerhouse. And obviously a wonderful storyteller and speaker and we're so grateful that she reached out. And you can comment on any episode or on social media or send us a message on Patreon or an email if you want to send her messages of support or solidarity because we try to pass that along to our guests because they read your messages and they hear your support. And she also is a listener and that was like special to give her the chance to be one of the people that's like changing your lives, our listeners lives. If this episode helped one person recognize that they didn't deserve what they were getting, then that's all I want. Thank you Claire, thank you you guys. Thank you for bearing with me as I did this debrief talking to myself, but it actually isn't so bad 'cause I feel like I'm talking to all of you. And would love to continue the conversation. Like I said, on Patreon, anywhere that you can do social media, we're dating detectives podcast and you can always send us your story via email, investigate at thedatingdetectivespodcast.com. I will report back after Molly's wedding. Cannot wait. It's theme. Old Hollywood glam. So we'll all be dressing our very best. I'm kind of picturing it like we're going to the Oscars and the 30s. It's kind of fine. My vision board. I made a Pinterest. If you want to see it, a lot of Grace Kelly. I'm so excited though. It's going to be beautiful and love sometimes works out, y'all. I still believe. I still believe. But hopefully not for you think. Thank you. Love you all. And as always, trust your fan tuition. [Music]