How To Avoid Destroying Your Relationship - Matthew Fray

1. 0:00 – 0:25

   Intro

   1. MFMatthew Fray0:00

      I believe trust usurps love, that it ranks higher. If you had to, like, rank the conditions that need to exist for relationships to thrive, to survive, to last, I just think trust ranks number one. I think people routinely end relationships with people they love all of the time. (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:17

      Matthew Frey, welcome to the show.

   3. MFMatthew Fray0:19

      Hey, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. Appreciate your time.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:23

      How did you end up

2. 0:25 – 5:31

   Matthew’s Divorce

   1. CWChris Williamson0:25

      being here talking about divorce?

   2. MFMatthew Fray0:28

      In 2013, my marriage ended, and I don't want to say that I didn't see it coming because there was an 18-month lead up to it where it was sort of like a slow decay and it was pretty awful and we were in different bedrooms. But there still was nothing that had prepared me for the experience of my wife literally, like, moving out, packing a suitcase, taking our little boy... I always want to make sure that people don't imagine, like, an angry woman kidnapping our child. She very peacefully an- and- and promising me that I'd see him tomorrow or the next day, you know, drove and said, "I'm going to be at my mom's." Th- that's what it was. I don't want to make it seem like she was a kidnap- kidnapping our son. But- but she left and it was brutal and I had a really difficult time with it. We'd been together for 12 years, married for nine of them, and I- I was 34 at the time, just about, and I don't know. I- I never had, like, a frame of reference for anything that sucked that bad before, that was that sort of awful. And that was it. It was- it was my personal crisis. The... Everybody can only know what they know, everybody can only have experienced whatever, um, adversity or pain that they've experienced. And I don't want to make excuses for my relatively non-resilient, fragile life up to that point, but it was simply the most difficult thing I'd encountered. I- I hated it and I had to get to work on figuring out what I'd done to contribute to it. I needed to selfishly protect my future self from having this happen again, and in that process, I believe I sort of evolved and came to some valuable insights and conclusions about ways in which I had a lot more power and influence in my relationship than I believed on the day she drove away, where I felt like a victim and I- I don't feel like a victim anymore.

   3. CWChris Williamson2:13

      It's interesting that you talk about the exit being, uh, unceremonial, unspectacular, you know? It wa- it- there- there wasn't... It wasn't a, someone threw a glass and then she stormed out and this, that and the other. And I think you mentioned about how you think most relationships end with a whimper rather than a bang.

   4. MFMatthew Fray2:34

      Yeah, I think that there is... I mean, I don't, again, I don't like to try to speak for everybody. I'll speak for me and trust that lots of people also thought and felt this way. Growing up when marriages ended and I heard about it, I always assumed somebody had done something sort of overtly horrible, sexual infidelity, physical abuse, a crime, you know, just major deceit. Something- something really bad that we would all, like, sit around a table and agree, man, they definitely should have ended their marriage because of that awful thing that person did. And what I've come to believe in my work and in my personal life is that- that the great majority of relationships do not end that way, that they end from things that people want to fight about whether they should end over them. And those are conversations around somebody leaving a dish by the sink or a piece of laundry on the bedroom floor or the state of the- the bathroom when somebody walks into it, you know, after somebody got ready and brushed their teeth in the morning. And these are the little things that are so easy to write off as benign, as inconsequential, as no big deal, and because one person cares about it and because the other person insists that it's not a problem, the... It never gets repaired. The- the disharmony never heals, never gets repaired, and it's my strong belief that those pile up hundreds of times, thousands of times over the duration of a relationship, they erode trust in a way that I think of as like a paper cut each time and that the accumulation of these paper cuts compromises the stability, the integrity of the relationship. And then, you know, often it's something da- really overtly bad does happen. And I don't necessarily mean infidelity or something, but, like, an external trauma, like, uh, o- often the death of a loved one or- or, um, sickness, you know, somebody gets diagnosed with, like, a really scary disease and those break relationships in which the foundation of, like, safety and trust has been eroded.

   5. CWChris Williamson4:30

      The resiliency has already been damaged and then something heavy enough comes in that can snap that.

   6. MFMatthew Fray4:35

      That's what I believe the most common story in relationships are, but again, it's often not... It doesn't even require the big thing, it doesn't require the- the health diagnosis or- or the death in the family or anything like that. It... We can absolutely destroy, you know, relationships in these super slow ways. And finally, somebody has enough. Somebody has enough data points to say, "This is going to happen forever, so I either have to voluntarily agree to stay in it or I have to leave." And I think... And I hate to say this because so many people take it as if I'm blaming men. I'm not blaming men. I- I think most men are exceedingly decent people. I think they miscalculate for how much pain their partner experiences because of things they do or don't do that they're not even really aware of. So often I think men are sort of inadvertently putting their wives or girlfriends in a position, in heteronormative relationships, um, to... It's like, to make that decision and, um, it's, and it's a tough spot for people to be.

3. 5:31 – 11:13

   How the Sexes Interpret a Situation

   1. MFMatthew Fray5:31

   2. CWChris Williamson5:31

      Yeah, it's... The blame game, which kind of is very common on the internet, is something that I- I really try to steer out of a lot. Um, you know, the sort of manosphere/red pill-

   3. MFMatthew Fray5:41

      (laughs) .

   4. CWChris Williamson5:41

      ... and then the kind of whatever most recent wave of feminism/women going their own way movement. Uh, both of these are...... they, they have kernels of truth in them, but the problem is that they look at the problem through a too reso- it's low resolution, uh, viewpoint, right? It's all women are X or all men are X, or this is the way to deal with the situation. Nobody should get married because it's a complete waste of time. The entire institution of marriage is skewed against men. Or you need to be completely, uh, never open yourself up to men because men are going to be this sort of using, abusing force. And you go, okay, like, look, uh, uh, to me, that doesn't seem like it moves us any closer to a, a, a useful outcome. And I think that one of the fundamental things I learned from David Buss, who's an evolutionary psychologist, one of the fathers of evolutionary psychology, is that he... There are different ways that men and women can interpret the same situation. And this isn't something conscious, right? Uh, there's an overestimation and an under e- uh, uh, estimation bias when it comes to attraction. So you can have the same interaction go from a man to a woman and a woman to a man. They're both experiencing the same thing. In terms of self-report afterward, the man presumes that the woman was way more interested in him than she was, and the woman presumes that the man was way less interested in her than he was. And you can scale this out replicably. It's been done at speed dating competitions, so on and so forth. That's kind of like a, I don't know, like a funny, relatively harmless example, but roll that clock forward, that kind of starts to explain how the boss might have seen the receptionist as actually having ling- her eyes have lingered on him a little bit too long. And then that signal begins to get confused. She thought she was being polite. He thought she was being sort of flirty. And you go, okay, so who's in the wrong here? And you go, well, kind of not really anybody because-

   5. MFMatthew Fray7:33

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson7:33

      ... both people acted on the situation that they saw, right? And this is what we're talking about, or how I'm inferring that you're talking about, the, uh, symbolic significance of leaving glasses on the sink. That to one person, the language of leaving glasses on the sink doesn't mean anything at all. And to another person, what th- how they interpret that situation is it's a, it's a really, really big deal. And understanding that men and women see the same situations in different ways is just such a great hack for dissolving conflict because what we presume is, hang on, this upset me, how can you not see that this would upset you too? Well it's like, because I'm not seeing the same thing that you're seeing.

   7. MFMatthew Fray8:16

      Yes. Yeah. I, I posit that at the root of trust erosion in relationships is one person saying, "Hey, this upsets me or hurts me on some level," and the other person indicating that they shouldn't think or feel the thing that they do, essentially saying, "That shouldn't matter to you. That shouldn't be as painful or as important as you're making it out to be." And so and when it's something that I did or didn't do, I just believe over time our partner doesn't trust this anymore. You know, I liken this scenario to the analogy or the metaphor that I use in the book is the idea of the field of optometry back in the 1700s. We hadn't scientifically proven colorblindness yet, so it's conceivable that two people, one person with color correct vision, one person with colorblindness, could be standing there having a very honest debate about the color of a painting or a bushel of vegetables or a field of flowers. And both would be telling, like, the whole truth, but you can just sort of in your own mind, like, see how these two people could come to, you know, fight and call each other names and have an enormous amount of conflict because you believe that this person has to be intentionally, like, screwing with you in order to have arrived at this conclusion. And it's, you know, feels deeply insulting to say that thing's orange when I know it's green. I know it's green. I see it right now. It's, it's there. And it's funny, right? 'Cause there's all sorts of like funny little things on the internet where people hear different things or they see a different color and there's been sort of like famous examples of that in the last, I don't know, 10 years in pop culture. But I, I like to imagine like the optometry fairy, this like Wizard of Oz like good witch of the north shows up out of the sky and like hands the people the glasses that would allow them to see the color that the other person saw, or hell, just be there for optometrists being able to verify in whatever scientific method they use to verify it that people literally see different colors, because nobody had a frame of reference for that possibility and I essentially think that's what we're talking about in relationships. I do think it manifests as like men do this, women do that a lot. I, I, I think there are examples where it's not always that way, where so I, I try not to like exclude people. I try really hard not to say men are always like doing, saying, thinking, feeling this and women are doing the opposite.

   8. CWChris Williamson10:29

      E- ev- everything should be caveated with on average beforehand.

   9. MFMatthew Fray10:33

      Yes, sir. Absolutely. And that's how I think about it. It's sort of like statistically observably true most of the time.

   10. CWChris Williamson10:38

       (laughs) That's a good way to put it.

   11. MFMatthew Fray10:40

       And, uh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's just like how I think about it and I, and I think it's really important. It is... That is the idea that started me on this path, uh, was, was that framework, was that there are other humans literally see and think and feel different things. And that sounds so ridiculous to emotionally intelligent, naturally empathetic people, but when you're me where I'm from, that is a foreign concept that another person could describe something 100% differently than me and both could be true-

   12. CWChris Williamson11:09

       And still be telling the truth. Yeah.

   13. MFMatthew Fray11:11

       ... yeah is not something that I understood.

4. 11:13 – 16:20

   Trust’s Impact on Love

   1. MFMatthew Fray11:14

   2. CWChris Williamson11:14

      How have you come to see the relationship between trust and love?

   3. MFMatthew Fray11:21

      I believe in the context of a romantic relationship that a lot of people think love is, is the, the end all be all, is the thing that you need that if you have enough love in place, everything's gonna be okay. And I don't believe that. I believe trust usurps love, that it ranks higher. If you had to like rank the conditions that need to exist for relationships to thrive, to survive, to last, I just think trust ranks number one. I think people routinely end relationships with people they love all of the time. I think every-

   4. CWChris Williamson11:51

      Because of a lack of trust.

   5. MFMatthew Fray11:52

      Yeah, bec- yes and again and it's not... And I think a lot of people hear that word "trust" and they think, well gee, I don't lie, I don't cheat.I'm, I'm a reliable person that goes to work and makes money and comes home, and I don't gamble it away. W- what are they talking about? And it shows up in these really nuanced, subtle conversations where one person sees orange, the other person sees green. They're like, "I see this differently than you." More importantly-

   6. CWChris Williamson12:15

      Give us, give us an example of that.

   7. MFMatthew Fray12:16

      Well, okay, so it's, let's just... The, my most famous example is the dish by the sink. And I insisted that it was ridiculous for my wife to make a big deal out of a dish laying by the sink. Essentially, and I don't wanna... A lot of people think this is a literal conversation about dishes and that I was some slob and that she had to pick up after me all the time, and that's not true. It was a drinking glass that I put water in so I could take, like, vitamins and sh- (laughs) stuff in the morning. And so I'd set it there just because it felt like an efficient way to go about it, and I didn't think it was this... I, I just thought it was ridiculous that she, like, kept, like, sort of, like, getting on me about it. The thing that hurts is not the dish being there. It's not. Th- the thing that hurts is when somebody feels as if you've promised to love and care for them and be their adult partner always, and you simply have no respect and do not value what they think, what they feel, what their experiences are, the dish communicates, "I'm going to choose me, my beliefs and my feelings, my wants, my needs. I'm gonna choose them over you. Every time our experiences don't align with one another, every time I don't agree with the thing you're asking for or the thing that you want, the thing that you wish I'd do different, if I don't approve of the message, if I don't concur, I'm gonna do what I want, even at the expense of what you think of what you feel." And I think that you can get away with that hundreds of times probably, but I believe these are the subtle paper cut moments that destroy trust, intimacy, and relationships. And finally, a person says to themselves, "Okay." This, let me just make it about my marriage. My wife finally learned that if I didn't agree with whatever she believed or whatever she felt, that I was always gonna choose me over her, and that's where the trust, like, goes away. It's, it's not trust in the, in terms of honesty, it's trust in terms of reliabil- reliability, sustainability, consistency. It is, "I don't trust this relationship's going to last, or even if the relationship does last, I calculate it's gonna be even worse for me down the road than it is today." That is a dangerous place to put people in. People will... People, people that have a healthy amount of self-respect and self-love will exit a relationship in which they predict a year from now is gonna be worse than today, five years from now is gonna be worse than today. Anyway, and I think we inadvertently put people in that situation a lot.

   8. CWChris Williamson14:41

      What about the archetype of the person who knows that the relationship is already doomed to fail, but then doesn't have the bravery to leave?

   9. MFMatthew Fray14:49

      (laughs)

   10. CWChris Williamson14:49

       That seems to be, that seems to be a very, very common, uh, uh, situation that I see.

   11. MFMatthew Fray14:55

       Yeah. No, f- fair enough. The one I imagine, and I'd love to hear different ones that you imagine. The one I imagine when you say that is, and this is pretty stereotypical, is because seven out of 10, at least in the United States, seven out of 10 divorces are filed by women. So statistically, you know, women are being fed up, in my estimation, because of these sort of, like, subtle moments of trust erosion. And eventually they work up the courage to file for divorce, but there might be a number of months or years prior to that decision, right, where they hold on. And I- I'm pretty generous about it. I think it's usually, "I'm staying together for my children." Um, "I'm staying tog-" It could be fear-based. "I'm staying together because I don't know what his reaction's gonna be." And-

   12. CWChris Williamson15:41

       I think, uh, uh, for me-

   13. MFMatthew Fray15:42

       Right.

   14. CWChris Williamson15:42

       ... one of the ones that I would definitely see in the modern world, uh, financial reliance. Uh, you know, it's increasingly difficult to be a single person supporting a, a household potentially with kids or without kids, sticking together for the children, sticking together because of a fear of what comes next, you know. "I don't have the support structure that I should do." You know, we've got a world which is connected more than ever before and yet more isolated than it's ever been as well, so people... You know, you can't go and live with your Facebook friend.

   15. MFMatthew Fray16:13

       Right.

   16. CWChris Williamson16:13

       And I... Yeah, you're probably right. When we're talking about this, given the fact that seven out of 10 divorces

5. 16:20 – 29:45

   Good People can be Bad Spouses

   1. CWChris Williamson16:20

      are instigated by women, if we're talking about somebody that kind of knows the relationship should end and doesn't, on average, that's probably going to be women as well. And I'd be really interested for the women that are watching to throw it in the comments below or do whatever, because, you know, if you've stuck about in a relationship, I, I, I'd be very interested to work out what compelled you to stay and what, what didn't compel you to go. Um, but one of the interesting things that I quite like that you come up with is that, uh, even good people can be bad spouses.

   2. MFMatthew Fray16:48

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson16:48

      And that's such a, like, a, a lovely way to frame it. And it also highlights the fact that th- this is why I think a lot of the men in some of the sort of manosphere movements feel particularly embittered because they didn't do anything wrong in their vision, right? They got up-

   4. MFMatthew Fray17:08

      Sure.

   5. CWChris Williamson17:08

      ... they went to work-

   6. MFMatthew Fray17:08

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson17:08

      ... they didn't cheat on their wife, they came home, they tried to pay the mortgage, they tried to be a this, that, and the other, um, and yet it still didn't work. And yet there was maybe the paper cut syndrome, the glasses left on the side, the lack of validation, the lack of sense of belonging that, that was needed to keep this going. Uh, and i- i- that sucks, man. Like, that's hard, for me to hear men-

   8. MFMatthew Fray17:29

      Absolutely.

   9. CWChris Williamson17:30

      ... going through a situation where they were doing all of the things that men were told that they were supposed to do. You're supposed to work hard, be right by your woman, da-da-da-da-da-da. And then there's what? There's, like, this, th- th- I don't know, translation error that's occurred which has meant that men are now, uh... The good man still wasn't a good husband somehow, and, uh, squaring that circle, it's, it's tough. And it's tough for the woman as well, you know? I think that a lot of women are, are probably pretty empathetic and they know, "Look, this is a man who's working."This is a man who's trying to provide for me, and yet slowly over time, the way that I feel about him just isn't working. And there isn't anything... He didn't cheat on me. He didn't abuse me. He didn't spend all of the money down at the casino and then tell me that it was on something else. (laughs) You know? It, it's, it is this whimper, not a bang. And this is... I don't know. It, it's so, it's such a bourgeois, luxurious way to f- to do something catastrophic. Does that make sense? Like, it's so comfortable, it's so convenient, and yet it's completely, completely atrocious and painful.

   10. MFMatthew Fray18:42

       I, I, I, I wish I could, I wish I could prove this with data. I really believe it's the most common story of relationships that end. And I, I hope that that's a hopeful message. What I'm trying to do when I say good people can be bad spouses, can be bad partners, it's, it's I'm trying to disassociate character from, like, the behavior. I, I don't think the harm that's caused in relationships is a result of anybody with ill character or ill intention. And what I really would hope guys will learn to do collectively is, is stop with the defensive responses. Defensiveness is inherently invalidating. And when somebody says, "I hurt," and then we make it about us, (laughs) we make it about our good intentions, the person's pain never gets repaired. Trust never gets restored. And I know it might seem like a minor, inconsequential moment, and I know a lot of these guys might say, "Well, what about my pain? What about my mistrust?" It's my belief that we're the first domino to fall most of the time. I will defend every guy in the world in which I don't believe he's the first domino to fall. A, a man inadvertently does something, he thoughtlessly, not... and I don't mean thoughtlessly, like carelessly. I mean it doesn't even occur to him because he's trying to do what he perceives to be his role in this relationship and his family, doing the right thing, often, uh, as a provider, often. It's like, "I'm a provider and I will not cause harm," is more or less (laughs) like the two pillars on which he leans. And he's always believed that would be enough. And he had every reason to believe so based on the feedback of this person that said, "I do," and that "I want to be with you for the rest of my life." And then he goes and does it, but then, right, while he's, like, not paying attention, in his blind spots, these little sort of pain points are occurring, these little, teeny-tiny moments, and they don't get repaired. And when they pile up over the course of five, 10, 15, 20 years, the other person feels so hurt by this idea that I can't trust this person to behave in a way where the math result of their behavior isn't painful for me. And even worse, if I try to say something to about... say something to him about it, if I try to recruit him to help, like, the painful thing stop, he gets really defensive or he implies that I'm wrong, that I'm crazy, that I'm stupid, that I'm weak, that I'm hypersensitive, that I'm too emotional because he doesn't know how to see the orange thing that I see as green or whatever, you know what I mean. (laughs) And, uh, I just think that's a really tragic story. I, I really do. And I just think we need to learn how to value the idea of repair and safety and trust in our relationships. Even if the other person is saying something we don't calculate to be dangerous, to be harmful. Th- that's, like, the great lesson, uh, doesn't matter what our beliefs are, it doesn't matter what our intentions are. The math result of things that happen in this world or things that we do absolutely can still result in pain for other people. And we can deny that if we want. I just posit you won't have healthy relationships with those people that feel pain. Feel free to disagree with, with other people if you don't approve of the pain that they're claiming to feel. I think if we wanna have healthy relationships, we absolutely have to acknowledge that person's suffering, even if it seems really small, even if it's presenting, like, (laughs) really small, like a dish by the sink or a conversation about laundry. And, um, the people that learn how to see that and to acknowledge that and to repair this teeny-tiny moment and not allow them to accumulate, I believe they'll never have the trust erosion. They'll never do the fall out of love thing.

   11. CWChris Williamson22:11

       You talk about invalidation and consideration as two pillar habits that people need.

   12. MFMatthew Fray22:17

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson22:17

       Dig into that for me.

   14. MFMatthew Fray22:19

       Um, all right, so I think the low-hanging fruit of things that we do in our relationship, the, the easiest thing to practice doing habitually, like, like mechanically to, to make things better, is to learn how to validate instead of invalidate. And a lot of guys think that I'm advoc... they hear that I'm advocating for agreeing with your relationship partner no matter what. And I promise I'm not doing that. And so what that looked like in my marriage, there's the three distinct ways. I refer to it as the invalidation triple threat, this idea that there are three specific ways we invalidate somebody even if our intention is not to invalidate them. I think we think of it as disagreeing, honestly, and that we should be allowed as adults to disagree with other people. And I think we can get away with this with virtually everybody in our world. I think it will destroy trust and intimacy with our romantic partners and probably with our children too. Um, my wife would come in the room and she'd say, "Hey, Matt, this bad thing happened. I feel bad about it." And version one of this invalidation triple threat was I disagreed intellectually with what my wife is saying happened. She'd tell some story and how it made her feel bad. And I'd be like, "That's not even what happened. This is what happened." So version one is I corrected the mental, intellectual experience she had. Version two, wife walks in the room, says, "Hey, this thing happened. I feel bad about it." And this time, I'm fully on board that the event happened exactly as she says it did, but now I'm like, "But why are you feeling that way about it? Why are you allowing that to affect you that much? A more normal or fair or appropriate reaction to that incident is to feel this way about it." And I try to correct her feelings this time, instead of whatever she thought. And then version three is just defensiveness. "Hey, Matt, this happened. I feel bad." And I'm like, "Wait a minute, let me explain. Let me just try to explain to you what I was doing, and I feel like once you understand, you won't be mad at me anymore. You won't feel like I did anything to cause harm."And I just believe that the math result of those three patterns, uh, uh, those three habitual responses that I think are patterns in relationships. It- the other person never gets told, "I understand that this situation affected you, even if it didn't affect me. And you can trust me to, like, do something about it moving forward. You can trust me to cooperate. That if it's something that I have the ability to influence, that I'm gonna do it differently moving forward. 'Cause I would never allow you to feel hurt just because I was too comfortable to, like, change my ways." And I just... That's the thing, is I don't think any of these guys would do that. I don't think any of these guys would truly know that the wife, girlfriend, whoever they love, hurts in a measurable way and say, "I'm too comfortable that s- to do things differently." Th- they literally don't believe (laughs) that the scenario is as painful as they say. So, a lot of guys are like, "So, what do you want from me? You want me to agree with her?" I'm like, "No, let's go through this thought exercise." And I, I, I love it when people are fathers because they identify with this really easily. I'm like, "Let's please imagine a small child being afraid of a monster hiding under their bed." So, I imagine my son, he's 13 now, but he used to be 4. And he was a threat when he was 4 to wake up crying hysterically because he was afraid of a monster under his bed. This didn't literally happen, but it could have absolutely happened any day. And this does happen in lots of families. And we, as Dad can run up to that room, open the door, survey the scene, find out he's upset because he thinks there's a monster under the bed. And I think the easiest, most logical way to try to solve that problem is to convince him he's mistaken about the presence of the monster. It's what I used to do. "Dude, there's no monster under the bed." (laughs) "The reason you're crying is isn't even real. You know, you're overreacting right now. You don't need to cry this much. Everything's fine." And I might say something thoughtless, like, "Go to sleep. You're fine. Your bedroom's safe." And if I'm not being my best self and I want to go watch sports on TV or go back to sleep if it's the middle of the night, "Go to sleep. I don't have time for invisible monsters right now," and I might leave. I think there's some really important ideas here. One, I'm right. In this scenario, there isn't a monster there. I'm correct. So, I, I think logic and reason are on my side. And I think that's where a lot of guys land in these conversations, this belief that they're the logical or the reasonable ones. I think there's a real danger in, in leaning on logic and reason in the context of trust in relationships. Um, also, fact two and three that I can't prove but I hope you'll believe, I love my son intensely. He's my favorite person on Earth. And I would never behave in a manner designed to inflict harm. I would never intentionally do something to hurt him. And I think almost every husband in world history that truly loves his wife would say that same thing about his relationship partner. "I love her. I, I'm, I'm right about this. And I would never intentionally do something to hurt her." So, I'm just saying, "There's no monster under the bed. Like, relax." There's... What's the math result of that situation though, as the dad of this kid? Um, my son is still in- afraid of the monster, but he still feels fear. Whether, whether he believes there's still a monster there or not is sort of irrelevant. He's afraid, he's still crying, but, but now he's abandoned, alone in the dark. Dad just implied he was dumb, he was crazy, he was weak, he wasn't good enough, he wasn't behaving the right way when he's afraid of a monster under the bed. And now what I'm saying is not that he's right and I'm wrong, or vice versa. I'm saying my relationship just took a hit. My relationship suffered, and I don't think that kid, if that's how I always show up when he's suffering on some level, when he feels bad about something, whether it's fear or anger or sadness or whatever, and that's always how I respond to him, "Nah, it's not as bad as you're making it out, son. Toughen up. Everything's gonna be okay." Uh, I don't think I'm gonna get to have a healthy relationship with him after three years, after five years, after 10 years. So, this is a choice. And so, what's the alternative look like? I think it's, I go in that bedroom, I hug my son, I say, "Buddy, I don't think there's a monster under the bed. But I'm really sorry that you're afraid right now." I mean, remember, we're talking to a four-year-old in this instance. I, I, I'm really sorry that you're afraid right now. Let's turn a light on. Let's make sure there's no monster under the bed. And I think the, the great lesson and the one that applies most symbiotically or whatever with our adult relationships, is the final idea. It's, "Son, uh, whenever you're afraid, whenever you're hurt, whenever you're sad, whenever something's wrong, I want you to know, you can always call mom, you can always call dad, and we're gonna show up for you. We might not be able to fix what's wrong. We might not be able to, like, solve your problem for you, but you never have to feel like you're the only one alone, like, dealing with this by yourself, suffering in this way. We're always going to be by your side during life's, like, crappy moments." And I think that's a profoundly simple yet powerful idea that we don't communicate to our adult relationship partners when we paper cut them with arguments about dishes and laundry and the state of the restroom and all sorts of things. Like, I can't even begin to calculate for all the little fights (laughs) different couples have with one another. But I think it's more or less the equivalent of, "There's no monster under the bed, so you shouldn't be afraid, and you shouldn't be this upset with me." It, it, it's not useful who's correct or incorrect. It's not. What's useful is responding to somebody in pain in a manner that restores trust, that increases intimacy, that increases safety. And if we can apply that monster under the bed principle and think about wanting to have good relationships with our children, and we can apply that same idea to our adult romantic relationships, I think we can practice a habit of responding to people in a way that's useful for relationship health instead of a way that's inadvertently not useful.

6. 29:45 – 39:29

   Overcoming Divorce

   1. MFMatthew Fray29:45

      Sorry this was so long.

   2. CWChris Williamson29:47

      There's a, (laughs) there's a guy, uh, Adam Lane Smith, psychotherapist from the Midwest, and I had him on the show last year. And he was talking about how, uh, male depression and female depression both get treated like female depression. So, female depression, the way that that's supposed to be fixed is by women being made to feel safe and comfortable and like they belong and like they're loved. And male depression gets treated the same way.... but that's not what men want. They don't want that sensation. What they want is to feel like they have a purpose and the ability to achieve it. And this is, uh, borne out in the way that men and women bond as well. So women bond through oxytocin, right? You have sex, that's, uh, what the hormone that's released heavily for women, and it is for men too, but that's not one of the primary, uh, bonding drugs. For them it's vasopressin, and vasopressin is released when there is a challenge to overcome, and that men can overcome it as well. And you see this get borne out in, you know, the meme about women like people and men like things. Like women are interested in people, uh, and men are interested in things. So with all of this, one of the conversations, and for women that are listening as well, like think about how he sees the situation. The immediate knee-jerk response is going to be to try and apply some sort of rational logic to the situation, to, uh, highlight the hypocrisy, or the irrationality, or the illogical nature of whatever it is that's coming up. And for the men, you need to think, look, it's not even about that. It's not about... You, you can't fix this feeling problem with things logic. What you need to do is say, "Look, I understand. I hear you. I am here." You're validated. "I, uh, I'm, I'm listening. Now, let's slowly step you through this." And then if the reverse happens with a man, you know, making him feel like he's safe and loved and belongs, that might not be the best approach. Perhaps for, to stress test some of the things that he's got going on, to hear him, to validate him, but then to step through bit by bit with some logic. And again, this is women need to speak men's language and men need to speak women's language in order to continue to move forward. Um, it's interesting to me as well, the way that your marriage actually ended. I think that that, that story is, is probably pretty useful for people to hear. Can you go through that?

   3. MFMatthew Fray32:11

      Um, you might need to provide some clarity about exactly what you're asking. The situ-

   4. CWChris Williamson32:15

      What... Was it her dad's who'd passed?

   5. MFMatthew Fray32:16

      Yeah. Thank you.

   6. CWChris Williamson32:17

      Yeah.

   7. MFMatthew Fray32:17

      Thank you. No, you took me back the right way. I appreciate it. Yeah, approximately 18 months prior to our marriage ending, should go back a little further than that, I don't remember the timeline exactly, but we lost, we lost my father-in-law, my, my wife's father out of nowhere, completely unexpectedly. We'd had dinner with him the night before, and, and the family, they were, they were watching our son, was with his grandparents. He was only maybe two years old at the time. And so the five of us, the grandparents, and my wife, and I, and our son in a highchair, were, were having dinner and it was great. And then the very next night, I come home and I get a call from her cousin saying, "He had a heart attack and he's gone." And I'm like, "Oh my God." So I have to go, like, drop this news, um, to her. And then, you know, the world was insane for several months, because you're dealing with sort of the grief, and the shock, and the loss, and then there's all these sort of cr- like, logistics things that you have to do. We, we had to, like move her mother, you know, somewhere else. And, and, and my wife at the time was responsible for that. She was like the manager of trying to clean out and sell the home that she grew up in, (laughs) that she was born and raised in, and that we still went to on weekends and things like that. And that had to go away. There's so many layers of sort of trauma, and grief, and loss that she was experiencing, while also trying to be a good daughter to her mother, while also trying to raise our son. And here she is married to a guy where every time she's requested that something be done to alleviate her of some level of pain or to honor some, some, you know, pain point for her, that was designed to say, "I'm, I'm respected, I'm safe, I'm loved because of this thing here she- he's doing," you know, he didn't do it for, for the better part of a decade. And I just think when a person is put in that situation, that that's the outside trauma that, that breaks the relationship, at least it was for us. She told me at dinner one night, "I'm not sure I love you anymore. I'm not sure I want to be married anymore." And I, I pouted and took it really hard, and I moved into the guest room, because I thought she was being unfair. I thought she was betraying me. I thought she was, uh, s- uh, implying that she might be, you know, thinking about quitting on our marriage. And I thought, you know, I hadn't done anything wrong. "So you get your, you know, you get it together. I'm gonna go in the guest room and, and once you straighten up and figure out what you want, you come tell me about it." (laughs) And, uh, 18 months later, she packed a suitcase and left. It, uh, that was just the 18 most miserable months of my life where nothing positive happened in any way, and it's exactly the most wrong approach about anything that I've ever done.

   8. CWChris Williamson35:05

      How does it feel to have your life direction upended so much from where you were expecting to go?

   9. MFMatthew Fray35:15

      Well, I actually think, other than the literal loss of the two humans that, you know, once lived with me every day, there's, there's a real shock when, when people just disappear, when they go away. I used to dis- I used to talk about how loud the silence could be, how loud a house that used to be full of life just felt so still and empty. It's really shocking and really unnerving, but I think that's a really powerful question that you just asked. I felt like divorce had robbed me of my past, meaning I'd wasted 12 years of my life in a relationship that was now gone. And it's like the thought process at the time is, "Well, hell, if I knew then what I know now, I would have invested in a different relationship and I wouldn't have wasted all this time, all these years." But I think maybe the most significant loss, aside from the physical, aside from the literal humans, is this notion of like, what's gonna, what's tomorrow gonna be like? What's next year, five years, 10 years from now? Every single thought I'd ever had, every daydream about imagining the future...... involved my family, involved she and I being old together on a front porch or whatever. You know, watching grandkids run around potentially. Who knows what it would be? It's sort of not relevant what it was. What was relevant was the idea that it takes all of that away. You, you, everything gets taken away. At least I think people who really truly value this idea of their marriage and or their family being intact. And it was, I mean, it was a tremendous loss for me. I, I don't wanna whine about it and act like other people don't have greater traumas and greater losses. They certainly do. But for me, in a relativism way, it was the worst thing that I've ever known. And I think for a lot of people, it's the worst thing they ever know. And I think it's really tragic that the reason they get there is through a series of things they're not even paying attention to.

   10. CWChris Williamson37:02

       What did the process of, uh, reintegration into a somewhat normal life look like over the period after the divorce?

   11. MFMatthew Fray37:10

       I was just drinking for a while to try to numb it all. And I called... I'd never talked to a therapist in my life. I was sort of somebody that was like anti-therapy. I thought that was something like weak or crazy people did. Uh, I was a special guy. Like I, (laughs) I needed a lot of help and didn't know it. And I call this therapist on a 1-800 number, y- you know, half crocked on vodka. And she's like, (laughs) she said, "Matt, you should write. You should write this stuff. You should write your feelings." And I'm like, "Okay." And she obviously meant journal like an adult. Um, but instead I just put it on the internet and I didn't think anybody would read it. But once the feedback started rolling in, I got really serious about not being like... I got really serious about not wanting to just be another jerk off on the internet, badmouthing marriage and my ex-wife, and I, I, I needed... If, if I was gonna literally have an audience that was paying attention to me, I wasn't gonna take that lightly. I was gonna be committed to trying to do something positive, do something meaningful. So finally I started writing what I perceived to be vulnerable stories about like the really, like the true process I was going through mentally, emotionally as I try to a- assemble the story of my marriage because the one I believed was obviously not true, uh, or, or at least, or at least my, my wife's version of the marriage I didn't understand. I needed to understand some things because I needed to protect myself from having this happen again. I was so afraid I would end up another 12, 15 years from now and the same thing would happen again. I was like absolutely terrified that that could happen. So I needed to get it. It was, call it an insurance policy, and it was extremely empowering to discover that all along I could have made radically different choices. Th- they would, they would have been subtle though. You know, to me they weren't obvious, but they were radically different that I think would have had like significantly different outcomes, um, for the relationship. And that's essentially what my work is based on today, is trying to help people identify these little everyday moments that they don't think are a very big deal. I frankly think are informing the direction of the relationship and they maybe just don't hurt enough to realize it yet.

7. 39:29 – 50:55

   How Do You Build Respect in a Marriage?

   1. CWChris Williamson39:29

      You say that feeling respected by one's wife is essential to living a purposeful and meaningful life. How is respect built up over time if you're a man that wants to be respected? How do you do that? Is it given? Is it earned?

   2. MFMatthew Fray39:46

      I mean, I certainly thought I was entitled to it. You know, and the, and the men do this, women do this often dichotomy, as we've talked about, right? There's this idea of women wanting to be seen and heard and understood and cared for and, and the, and the, the quote unquote man side of the equation is this idea of having purpose and, and, and respect. And I, I'm, I glad you talked... I'm glad you talked about this idea of, um, what did you say? A challenge to overcome. This idea of having something to achieve, um, I think is really important. I, I think maybe men believe what I believed that I don't, I don't, I don't know that I can answer this in the spirit of the way that you're asking it. Uh, I believed I was entitled to respect because I never, I never associated these so-called little things in relationships with the idea of being respected. It didn't... They would have never ever been connected. I thought she was wrong-

   3. CWChris Williamson40:44

      Yeah.

   4. MFMatthew Fray40:45

      ... to elevate-

   5. CWChris Williamson40:46

      It would have been-

   6. MFMatthew Fray40:46

      ... a dish by the sink, right? To a marriage problem.

   7. CWChris Williamson40:48

      I have a job. I'm working hard. I'm being loyal. I'm doing the things. Like that's what you're told that respect comes from. Yeah, it seems like, you know, the, the common arc that we're finding here is the big things are still the big things, but the little things can also be the big things too. And, you know, you need to, as a man, cover that base if you want to ensure that your partner is going to feel happy and that you're going to continue to be respected. And I understand, man. Like I get why there is a, uh, culture on the internet of men that feel like, well, look, women's standards are just ridiculous. Like, why is it that I should have to do all of these things in order for me to just get the basic human-

   8. MFMatthew Fray41:35

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson41:36

      ... uh, like value of respect, right? And you think, yeah, well, f- fair enough, man. Like maybe that's a really good question that I don't particularly have an answer to, but this is... these are the rules of the game. You go, well, why should I have to change my behavior? Why can't she change hers? And it goes, well, maybe she is. Maybe there already are concessions that as two people with penises, we can't really-

   10. MFMatthew Fray42:02

       (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson42:02

       ... like dip into working out how that happens. But I'm sure that there are lots and lots of things that women do as well that they have to make concessions on. And I do understand, I understand why it feels hard for men. And then you also see the seven out of 10 divorces are instigated by women thing, and then you hear these stories about, oh, well, because you've got an international dating market that's facilitated by Tinder and OnlyFans and, and Instagram-

   12. MFMatthew Fray42:23

       (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson42:23

       ... it means that what women are doing is they're just, they're, um, finding the, the beta and then moving on to the alpha and doing all this sort of stuff.

   14. MFMatthew Fray42:30

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson42:31

       ... I simply haven't had that experience reflected in the real world. Like, I, I understand that there are men out there who have had traumatic situations with women that have used them, that have left them for people that w- were able to offer them more resources or status or wealth or comfort or whatever it was that they wanted validation in life.

   16. MFMatthew Fray42:48

       Sure.

   17. CWChris Williamson42:49

       I haven't seen that with the women that are going out, with the friends that I, I have around me, with the women that I've been out with. It simply doesn't map onto my experience. And I, I, I... Th- that gives me hope. And i- unfortunately, it sounds like, um... I don't know. It's, uh, like a, a rich kid saying, "Don't worry about money-"

   18. MFMatthew Fray43:11

       (laughs)

   19. CWChris Williamson43:12

       "... because I, I, I haven't encountered this problem," and I don't disagree that other people have, but my point is that there are tons and tons and tons of very healthy, very well-balanced, very lovely women out there that would make fantastic wives-and the same goes for men- and this is... I've had so many of these conversations recently, man, like, you know, imbalances in the dating market, the evolutionary psychology that underpins why increasing female achievement with status and resources and education is making it ever diff- more difficult for them to find men that they're fundamentally attracted to. Like, this is-

   20. MFMatthew Fray43:43

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson43:43

       ... you know, the, the most interesting dynamic that I've discovered probably over the last year. Uh, and like the, the real core of what I'm trying to get to is, look, this is a, um, ancestrally, limbically, psychologically, evolutionarily, psychographically novel situation for us to be in. It is a new type of environment for everybody to be in. And yet, maybe it sucks more for some people than it does for others. But, like, this toothpaste isn't going back in the tube. Like, we're not undoing women outperforming men in college. Like, what are you gonna do? They've, they've just got equality. What? Are you gonna take it away from them?

   22. MFMatthew Fray44:24

       (laughs)

   23. CWChris Williamson44:24

       And then, like, you know, what, what politician's running on that? Like, "Women, we're gonna put you back in the kitchen to make your relationships better." And then on the flip side of that, you go, "Well, why is it that men are the ones that seem to be suffering in this?" You know, w- women are kind of wistfully chasing after the guys that are across and above hypergamously and men are the sexless underclass that don't get to, to have any attention at the bottom. You know, you look at the stats on Tinder, where 80%, the bottom 80% of men compete for the bottom 20% of women, and the top 80% of women compete for the top 20% of men. And you go, "Well, look, if you're in the bottom 80% of men, which almost all men are-"

   24. MFMatthew Fray45:00

       Sure.

   25. CWChris Williamson45:00

       "... because it's the bottom 80%..."

   26. MFMatthew Fray45:02

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson45:03

       "... how's that fair?" And you go, "Well, it's not. I understand that it's not." "Well, why can't women fix their hypergamy?" And you go, "Well, dude, I, I... Why can't I fly?" You know?

   28. MFMatthew Fray45:13

       (laughs)

   29. CWChris Williamson45:13

       "Why am I, why am I afraid of heights?" You know, all of these things. Like, there are certain parts of our biology which are maladapted to a modern environment. And this, for better or for worse right now, is the situation that we're in. And I think that the message I'm really, really trying to get across to people is that a hopeful view of relationships is going to be the best thing that you can do because there's a, an easy cope here, right? Like, the cope is modern relationships-

   30. MFMatthew Fray45:40

       Mm-hmm.
8. 50:55 – 59:08

   The Pain of Seeing Your Ex with Someone Else

   1. CWChris Williamson50:55

      Taking responsibility in that way seems to be... I don't know, it's just the more hopeful way of looking at relationships. So I had the, uh, director of behavioral science at Hinge on the show a couple of weeks ago, a lady called Logan Ury who's just written a new book, uh, How Not To Die Alone. And, uh, she said she had, she had some really interesting insights about, she called it, uh, intentional dating. And, um, there, there's something still icky about that, right? That, uh, men that take how to date courses, like, both for men and women, that it's a little bit like, well, hang on, is this not supposed to be, like, emergent and natural and part of your sort of male charisma? Like, the musk that comes out of you is just supposed to exude from you normally. And there's something, I think previously, it might be slowly being degraded now, that felt... It was presumed to be a little bit icky somehow, that this felt, not manipulative, but deficient in some way, right? That it was highlighting the fact that this man wasn't enough as he was, so therefore, he would need m- to become more when it's a very sort of... It's, I think there's something about the fact it's only one step away from a narcissist who's sort of playing the game, but not, not loving the game, so to speak. He's not invested in the game, but he's just learning. You know, the pick-a-party sort of community of 2000, the early 2000s kind of laid the, the foundations for this. But do being deliberate and intentional about the way that you date. We're deliberate and intentional about everything else. Everybody that's listening to this show is deliberate and intentional about the time that they go to bed and about the macros that they eat during the day and about their hydration and about their training and the people that they spend time around and the type of Breville sandwich maker that they use and what note-taking app they decide that they're going to optimize their Kindle highlights with.

   2. MFMatthew Fray52:42

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson52:42

      And then you get to something like dating and you're like, "Oh, well, we'll just leave it up to mother nature." And you think, well, maybe not. Maybe, maybe there is a degree of where you could be over intentional and kind of so deliberate that all of the love and, uh, and presence and grace gets taken out of stuff. But definitely, with this, you know, one or two principles away from something really important happening. Um, one of the things that I thought was really, really interesting that I wanted to discuss was that you talked about how having not been with your wife for quite a while and not being intimate with her for a long time even before that, that there was a, a, a, an extra level of existential pain to think about another man touching her. And this is something that I think is very, very difficult for men to explain to women what, how this feels. The fact that you can have someone who you are no longer intimate with, or maybe don't even particularly have a desire to be intimate with anymore, and yet there's something in your programming that causes you to feel like this sort of guttural pull that something or someone that was once yours now isn't.

   4. MFMatthew Fray54:01

      Sure. I, I mean, I think if it mattered, I, I, I cared a lot less today that we're nine years out now, literally, mathematically. It was April 1st, 2013 when she drove away. Um, it's... I, I really, it's not a thing I think about very much anymore. And I even go so far as to say I like the dude that she's been with for, like, five or six years. He's a good guy. I, I had the experience of her dating somebody I, I wished would die. (laughs) And I've never wanted anyone to die before, and I mean that. (clears throat) And I didn't really want him to die so awful. I, I, I don't even think that that's true. I just kind of wouldn't mind if, like, an accident had befallen him.

   5. CWChris Williamson54:42

      (laughs)

   6. MFMatthew Fray54:42

      Right? That was it. But so much of it was about, was about my son. So much of it was about, like, somebody I calculated to be an awful human being in my son's sphere. And yes, I was offended by the idea that you're talking about, that, like, this gross person, like, got to be with her because that was...... what I perceived to be relatively soon after the marriage ended. And I think there's an important idea here. For her, she'd probably been done for like-

   7. CWChris Williamson55:08

      She checked out quite a while ago.

   8. MFMatthew Fray55:09

      ... 12 to 18 to 24 months. And for me it was like immediate and right now. And, and people need to understand that that is like a radically different experience. Once again, it's the orange, I see orange, they see green. It's all of that. (clears throat) But yeah, it's pretty bad, and I think a lot of people probably feel really awful about it when, when relationships end. And maybe even like a current dating partner that perceives you to, like, still want your ex because you're ... I mean, I've, I was, I've been accused of that, um, early, years ago, that, you know, I was, you know, dated a couple people, they were like, "He's still hung up on his ex." And I'm like, "I'm really not." I hung up on the idea that I messed up, I feel like, in my relationship, and that it was the single greatest sort of misstep in my life. And by misstep I really mean millions of them, you know, day in and day out. It was like, what you don't know can't kill you.

   9. CWChris Williamson56:03

      Also, that's an important learning experience, right? Like it's, it's difficult maybe, again, this is the what do women see, what do men see thing not working, that what you're looking at in retrospect now is a very valuable learning experience, a strategic learning experience from which you hopefully can, um, again, expedite success (clears throat) and, uh, and avoid pitfalls. But from perhaps a woman's perspective looking at you still ruminating about situations and stuff like that, it's not about logically, rationally, what can you pull out of this situation, it's about, w- it must be the emotions. It must be that he's still in love with his ex. And you go, "Well, no, there's a difference." And again, on average, I have tons and tons of female friends that are way, way more logical than some of my guy friends.

   10. MFMatthew Fray56:48

       (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson56:48

       But my point is that I, I could see how that would be, uh, an interpretation.

   12. MFMatthew Fray56:53

       Yeah, I think it's really interesting. So yeah, it was. I wrote about that at the beginning of the book, that I was having a really tough time with thinking about ... I mean, I thought about it, like, every day. It was really awful. (laughs) I was, like, sitting around miserable, drinking vodka, just upset and imagining her doing God knows what with, you know, this person that I thought was awful. And that was th- the value of it, is I don't believe growth, change, evolution, if you will, occurs until ... standing pat, until inertia, the pain of inertia, I, I, I have t- ... The discomfort has to be, I can't sit still anymore. (laughs) Forgive me for not being able to get this out. J- I need t- ... Change is uncomfortable, but the discomfort from the change is less severe than the discomfort of doing nothing, because this feels so bad, I can't stay like this ever again. That was the only thing in my life where that had ever been true about, where I'd been motivated to action because it felt ... the idea of being stuck, of being still, of not doing anything different was too impossible to imagine. I'm like, "I'm not going to subject myself to this identical thing happening again." What's so interesting to me is how (clears throat) I went this way, and then you talked about, like, right, the manosphere, like, red pill guys, and, and they're who I get, like, the greatest amount of criticism from. If, if I have, like, intellectual critique of my work, it's from them. They believe that I'm advocating, like, men being effeminate and taking blame, and I promise I'm not. I'm, I'm just ... We better give a shit about the experiences of someone else. I don't really care who we're with. And also, I'm not a marriage advocate. Don't get married. Don't date. Don't, don't do anything you don't want to do. If, if the mission is (laughs) a relationship with another human being, I don't care who they are, you better value what they value, th- the requisite amount, or they're gonna choose to not be with you anymore. They're not gonna trust you anymore. They're not gonna perceive you to be reliable anymore, and then they're gonna wanna go away. And I don't understand why that is a uncomfortable concept for people. I, I invite everyone to test that idea out for themselves.

9. 59:08 – 1:03:30

   What it’s Like to Be a Woman

   1. MFMatthew Fray59:08

   2. CWChris Williamson59:08

      I think it puts a lot of the onus on the guys-

   3. MFMatthew Fray59:11

      It certainly does.

   4. CWChris Williamson59:11

      ... if you do that, which is one of the problems.

   5. MFMatthew Fray59:13

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson59:13

      So I had Geoffrey Miller on the show. Uh, he was basically the father of the sexual selection, sexual dynamics movement when it comes to evolutionary psychology. So he's the guy that began the red pill movement, uh, from an academic standpoint, right? So everybody that's in the manosphere now that is sort of promulgating these ideas, they're quoting Geoffrey's own work back to him. You know, he's the guy that did the studies, and he was writing this in the '90s. And then in 2004, he released a book, and then in 2013, he released another book called Mate with, uh, Tucker Max, which-

   7. MFMatthew Fray59:44

      I, I have that book. Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson59:45

      Yeah, so Geoffrey's the, the academic, uh, rocket power behind that, and Tucker's kind of like-

   9. MFMatthew Fray59:50

      (clears throat)

   10. CWChris Williamson59:50

       ... the, the, uh, real world, (laughs) uh, uh, stress testing-

   11. MFMatthew Fray59:54

       (laughs)

   12. CWChris Williamson59:54

       ... I guess you could say. And, um, and, and dude, they say it in Mate. They're talking about it, and I, I asked him about this, that they spent so much time i- in the first chapter of Mate explaining to men ... This is a book for men, how to, how, uh, what women want and how to give it to them, something like that. Like, the most picked apart it's the title ever, but it's, it's a fantastic book. And it, in the first chapter of it, they spent, like, five or ten pages explaining to men what it's like to be a woman in the dating market, like, in real graphic detail, like, explaining what it feels like to be physically weaker than the people that you're choosing to go out on a date with, and what it feels like to have to tell your girlfriends, uh, "If I don't message you by this time, then, uh, you know, here's where I'm gonna be," or leaving Find My iPhone on, and all of this sort of stuff, just passively, bro. Because again, there is a nonzero number of men out there that are assholes-

   13. MFMatthew Fray1:00:49

       (laughs)

   14. CWChris Williamson1:00:49

       ... and women therefore need to have a particular protection mechanism in place.

   15. MFMatthew Fray1:00:53

       Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:00:53

       What does it feel like to be judged-

   17. MFMatthew Fray1:00:55

       (clears throat)

   18. CWChris Williamson1:00:55

       ... primarily on your looks, that being the fundamental source of value that you have on the dating market? What does it feel like to be in competition where there is, um-... a, uh, the, the cash value or the price of sex continues to be degraded because women are increasingly prepared to have sex with less and less commitment from men because sex has now become decoupled from having babies. And then norms around casual sex has continued to be degraded and blah, blah, blah. So if you're a woman who wants to wait for a few dates, that means that you're playing a game against the women that don't want to wait for a few dates 'cause he can go and get sex on date two, but you'll wanna make him, make him wait till date four. All of these things, pages, pages and pages and pages of these guys explaining it. And I asked Jeffrey about it and he said, "Well, yeah, this is the thing that the sort of modern dating movement that's helping men is missing, which is if you want to be effective in the dating market as a man, maybe spend a nanosecond thinking about what it's like to be a woman." Uh, what are you optimizing for here? Are you optimizing for yourself or are you optimizing for the person that you're trying to attract? And yeah, I- I- I can understand why the position that you put across is, uh, triggering or, uh, makes men feel, s- some men in the, in the manosphere feel, feel dissatisfied.

   19. MFMatthew Fray1:02:08

       Me too.

   20. CWChris Williamson1:02:08

       Because for them, any, uh, any advocation that it's not women's fault-

   21. MFMatthew Fray1:02:16

       (laughs)

   22. CWChris Williamson1:02:16

       ... is unacceptable, right?

   23. MFMatthew Fray1:02:18

       Sure.

   24. CWChris Williamson1:02:18

       It is almost always about the fact that women are overly hypergamous, that they're gold diggers, that they're pre- prepared to leave the beta to fuck the alpha. Like, that's the, that's the, the, um, rubric that, that just kind of gets thrown at whatever the situation is. Um, and yeah, I think, you know, again, like this is the more... To me, this is the more hopeful view, man. Like, that there are solutions out there, that there are ways to optimize your dating life, to be intentional, to be deliberate, to find somebody that's good for you. That seems far more hopeful.

   25. MFMatthew Fray1:02:49

       Yeah, I hope so. And again, I, I heard everything you just said, and I am sympathetic/empathetic to those guys. But, uh, y- the, the, the part that that leaves out is personal responsibility for partner selection. I, I just... That's a non-starter in a conversation with me. I- if you can't accept responsibility for the person you're gonna share space with and share resources with and potentially share children with, I don't know how to have, like, (laughs) a conversation about that. That's... Because that, if, if it's all women's fault, then that means you bear no responsibility in, like, who you choose to spend your life with. And I, I don't understand that.

   26. CWChris Williamson1:03:29

       You

10. 1:03:30 – 1:07:02

    Work for Contentment & Peace

    1. CWChris Williamson1:03:30

       said when talking about what constitutes a good life, that a better word than happiness might be contentment or peace or balance.

    2. MFMatthew Fray1:03:38

       Yeah, maybe.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:03:40

       I think you're right. I think when I try and think about what I optimize my life for, it's peace. I don't try and necessarily optimize it for peak experiences. Uh, and this is one of the things that I try and tell my friends. "Look, dude, like, there is no value that you can place on your sanity when you have the decision to make between cheating on your, on your girlfriend, uh, because there's this, like, hot chick in a bar or whatever, um, and then going back." Like, look, if you're going to spend the next three weeks turning yourself inside out because you can't believe the person that you were did the thing that you did, that, th- there is no... W- what? £100,000? £200,000? What would you pay to get those three weeks of your life back? Remembering that time is something that you're never going to be able to, to reclaim. You know, you're in the prime of your life, and you've spent all of this time obsessing over some terrible situation that you put yourself in.

    4. MFMatthew Fray1:04:36

       Yeah.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:04:36

       So optimizing for sanity, for peace, for contentment, for balance, that's what I think people should be moving toward. And then from there, you have the opportunity to build towards something that's better. But that's, you know, you can't put a price on sanity. And, uh, I think that that's what we should be protecting as much as we can.

    6. MFMatthew Fray1:04:52

       That's an incredibly valuable insight. You know, my experience with that was when my marriage was falling apart and I was sleeping in the guest room for 18 months, or the nights afterward where I'd be up for two, three, four hours in the middle of the night, just simply unable to sleep, feeling the most miserable I've ever felt. And there's nowhere to hide from it. There's nowhere to run away from it. Comes to work with you and rides in the car with you, and it does all the things. And, um... Right. I- if there was some economical way to, like, exchange money to make that stop, I would have absolutely traded financial resources for it. Um, but there isn't. And I think there are probably many, many wealthy people out there that have experienced that, that have had the three, four hours of being unable to sleep in the middle of the night, of trying to concentrate in a high level executive meeting, um, but can't think about anything but, like, the horror show at home. And right? It doesn't matter how many zeros are in their bank account, there's no peace because it's awful.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:05:52

       Well, that's the thing. Forget, uh, you know, whether it is that we couldn't pay our way out of it, neither can Elon Musk.

    8. MFMatthew Fray1:06:00

       That's right.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:06:00

       You know, there isn't a way to, to fix this. The, the ultimate cash value of sanity is infinite.

    10. MFMatthew Fray1:06:08

        Yeah. No, I think that's really important to think about. And I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm not perfect. (laughs) I haven't achieved some incredible state of zen where I feel good about myself all the time. I- I- I don't mean to imply that. But in the... I believe strongly that healthy relationships are huge for providing stability in our lives. And so being mindful of how we might be inadvertently, like, jeopardizing its integrity, jeopardizing its longevity, is a really valuable thought exercise and something to consider and practice new habits for, because that is one of the things that will, like, just really mess up your life if you value the stability of the marriage and family. I don't wanna place my values on other people. But if that's... I think most people care about their home life, uh, being some sort of oasis from, you know, the shit out in the world.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:07:01

        Matthew

11. 1:07:02 – 1:07:50

    How to Find Matthew

    1. CWChris Williamson1:07:02

       Frey, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with what you do online, where should they go?

    2. MFMatthew Fray1:07:07

       Um, thank you. My home on the internet's matthewfrey.com. Just Matthew with two Ts, Frey, F-R-E-Y. And, uh, yeah. I mean, there's every social channel and email address and things like that. If anybody wants to participate in these conversations to say, "Oh yeah, that's really great." Or, "You're a moron." I'm, uh, I'm open to either conversation, I promise.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:07:28

       Thanks, man. I appreciate you.

    4. MFMatthew Fray1:07:30

       Yeah. No, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:07:31

       What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:07:50