Hey, fellow travelers. I'm Lari Gottlieb. I'm the author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I write the Dear Therapist advice column for the Atlantic.
And I'm Guy Wench. I'm the author of Emotional First Aid, and I write the Dear Guy advice column for Ted. And this is Dear Therapists.
Each week we invite you into a session so you can learn more about yourself by hearing how we help other people come to understand themselves better and make changes in their lives.
So sit back and welcome to today's session. This week, a young woman tries to break her pattern of seeking out relationships with older, unavailable men.
Yeah. I was dependent on him because of my dad and his illness and him dying, and so I came to rely on him, and I told him how much I cared about him, and how I grew to love him.
I guess I think I said first. A quick note, Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical or psychological advice and is not a substitute for professional health care advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding
a medical or psychological condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let iHeartMedia use it in partwor and full, and we may edit it for length and clarity. In the sessions you'll hear, all names have been changed for the privacy of our fellow travelers.
Hi Guy, Hi Laurie. So what do we have in a mailbox today?
We have a letter about someone who is stuck in a relationship pattern that isn't serving her, And it goes like this, Dear therapists. I'm single. My career could not be going better, but I keep falling in love with men who are at least twenty years older than me, sometimes married with kids. It's a painful cycle that I keep repeating, and I'm exhausted by it. I started in my senior year of college when I fell in love with my professor, who was over thirty years older than me.
We'd get dinner every week and have the most intimate and intense conversations about anything and everything. Our conversations were raw and vulnerable and felt like an honest exchange. At the same time, my father was dying of cancer, and this older professor comforted me throughout the harrowing experience. At least he was single, so not totally unavailable. Now, three
years later, I find myself in a similar predicament. I'm completely smitten with a man that I work with who is twenty years older than me and married with children. I feel seriously head over heels in love with him. Our relationship is different than the one with my professor. Instead of being vulnerable and intimate, it's light hearted and fueled by mutual admiration for the work we do. He flatters me, constantly, flirts consistently, and all I want to
do is please him. I would do close to anything for him. I haven't felt this way since my professor three years ago. I can't stop thinking about him, and all my friends are, of course, sick of hearing about him, and sick of my typical trajectory towards self destruction with older men. I tried to get over this guy by
dating a different guy who was ten years older. After all of the loss and grief I've dealt with, anyone remotely in my age range doesn't seem to have the depth of understanding or feeling that I have, and I can't stand the thought of being with someone my age. I don't feel like I'm looking for a father figure, but the idea of an older man just feels comforting and alluring. How do I get over this man in particular, but even more importantly, how do I break this habit? Thanks Emma.
The research tells us that we tend to go for similar patterns of relationship, even if not with exactly similar people. It's actually quite common that when you lose a parent, you tend to seek out someone to give you that kind of comfort that you've lost. And I've heard a lot of stories over the years of people who fell in love with people who are much older than them coincidentally around the time their parent passed away, And it can really form a certain pattern and a certain kind
of imprinting, especially when you're young. That then sets you up to be into the older person, and that of course has its dynamics and complications of its own.
I think you're right, guy, and I think there are two things going on here. One, of course, is that she started dating this much older professor around the same time that she was going through this huge loss with her father. But I think even for people who haven't gone through that loss. There is something that happens to people, which is that they tend to date someone that feels familiar to them in some way that hasn't been resolved
in the past. So even if you haven't literally lost a parent, if you had a parent who maybe wasn't available to you or maybe didn't see you or understand you in a certain way, we tend to go after partners who will replicate that dynamic until we're aware of it. There's this saying we marry our unfinished business, and it sounds like Emma maybe has some unfinished business that is causing her to again and again go after men who
are much older than her. And she has this idea that it's because she's experienced loss and grief that people her own age can't understand her. But I think it's more complicated than that.
Yeah, I agree that it's more complicated than that, because she seems to dismiss younger men as being literally incapable of having the level of maturity that she does at twenty five. And by younger men, she's saying men who are even ten years older. And when you hear a blanket statement like that, it sounds like it's a little bit defensive that there's an agenda there, even if she's not aware of it. So I'll be very curious to hear a little bit more from her.
Yeah, let's go meet her. You're listening to Dear Therapists for my Heart Radio. We'll be back after a short break.
I'm Laur Gottlieb and I'm Guy Winch and this is Geotherapists.
So, hi, Emma, Hey, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Of course, so we read about your dilemma, and we want to start off by learning a little bit more about your relationships prior to the one with your professor.
Can you tell us a little bit about those.
I was in one romantic relationship, but it was kind of short and really intense, and it was my sophomore year of college. We met at the end of our first semester, and then the school that I went to has a very long winter break, and so we started texting a lot, which turned into like texting every day for like six weeks until we got back to campus. And then when we did get back, we started dating immediately, really intensely, and because it started so soon and so
intensely it kind of like imploded on itself. And so we dated for a few months, and that was kind of the only relationship I had been in prior. And then I had other like short term things or flings or whatever, but nothing really serious other than that.
So this person was your age. He was a fellow student.
Yeah, he was a FELLO student who was two or three years older than me.
And did you have that feeling with him that you described in your letter, that somebody your age couldn't possibly understand the depth of your feelings or had this sort of emotional maturity that I think you're looking for.
He was very empathetic and really smart. I felt connected to him in a lot of ways. And he was like a good listener and empathetic, but wasn't as open or as emotionally intelligent, I guess as other people.
With the professor, you said that that happened around the time that your dad was dying. I think could you tell us a little bit about that period, what was happening on the dad front and how things about with him.
Yeah. I mean that's another thing too, Like when I was dating that other person, my dad was still sick and was kind of slowly dying, but it wasn't the same. So then my senior year of college, the treatments that my dad had been undergoing, like radiation therapy and immunotherapy stopped working, which we found out like on September fourteenth of my senior year of college. And then a few weeks or maybe a month later, he started hospice care
and that's when he really started to decline. And that's also when I met that professor as well.
I would love to hear more about your relationship with your father. Can you tell us more about him and what it was like between the two of you growing up, and then also at the time when he got sick.
Yeah, I think we kind of went in and out of being close. So it was hard because he became sick like my freshman or sophomore year of high school. So I kind of lost like a huge part of my dad when I was in high school. But prior to that, he was always like the really goofy one and was super smart and I don't know, like we played sports together. He taught me how to play baseball,
He taught me how to ride a bike. We did a lot of like candy things, together too, and then it was also kind of hard, like slowly losing him while I was also going through the classic teenage years of when I was supposed to be kind of pulling away from my family and becoming more and more independent.
Who told you and how did they tell you that your dad was sick? And and how clear was it to you at the time that this was serious?
Well, my mom, I'm sure told me. And then throughout high school and even college, there was always kind of a negotiation and battle between I having an older brothers five years older, and so there's always a negotiation between us and my parents of like how much they would tell us and how much we wanted to know, and we always wanted to know as much information as possible,
but my mom kind of wanted to protect us. But also throughout the years, like my dad never wanted to know his prognosis, so that wasn't anything that him or his doctor or my mom would know or talk about. And it became more serious probably my sophomore year of college, because I guess that's when it became stage three, where it had spread to his lymph nodes and it had become more serious, and my mom would kind of make like a fan somewhat like hysterical remarks about him dying.
What did those sound like? Those reks?
I just remember this one time, my mom saying like, this is the last thing that we can do, and if this doesn't work, then like this is it, He's going to die.
And that felt hysterical to you because on the one hand, you were saying, my brother and I really wanted to know the truth of what was happening. And on the other hand, when she says, this is the last thing. If this doesn't work, he's going to die, that felt hysterical to you.
It felt a circle in the moment because it was like incredibly passionate and high pitch and had a specific tone with it. And at that time it wasn't true either. This was three years before he died, and he underwent countless treatments in those next three years, so it wasn't quite true, and it wasn't really what the doctors were saying. It was felt more of just like I'm totally understandable, like a moment of weakness, kind of just like breaking down.
I mean, she had to deal with this for the longest and most intensely out of all of us.
How did you support one another in the family because your older brother and you were not privy to all the information, so you didn't know everything. They didn't know everything because they didn't want to know everything. But how did the support go? Who was the person that was trying to be more supported? Did that flip around? Who supported you? Who supported your mom?
Your dad?
Your brother?
Yeah? I think it changed over the years. I mean I was a teenager and just like very far removed from anything that was happening. I just wanted to be a kid, and so we were all kind of in our own planes. I guess later on my brother really supported my dad in a lot of ways. They were really really close.
In what ways did your brother support your dad?
Well, my brother ended up in the last year or two of my dad's life, my brother working, He lived with my parents off and on, like a few days a week to just kind of be there and hang out with my dad and spend time with him throughout the whole time. Like, my dad definitely had a lot of trouble, like talking about his feelings, and he was suppressed in a lot of ways, and my brother would always kind of push him and push him as much as possible to talk about those things.
Who did you talk to, Emma? Your brother was there for your dad, and they were talking to each other, But who were you talking to?
In high school, I didn't tell anyone about it or talk to anyone about it. Actually the first the first person that I told was my high school english teacher because I had to write a college essay and I used to play ping pong with my dad all the time, and I wrote about the first time that I beat him, and he would always play me lefty because he was a lot better than me, and I could never beat him, but I won because he was sick and he just
couldn't play as well as he used to. And then one of my friends from high school found out because she went to my house looking for me and I wasn't there, but my dad was there and he just got back from maybe the hospital or something, and so he told her what was happening. So that was the first person I guess that I talked to about it,
which was this summer after my senior year of high school. Yeah, and then when things started getting worse my sophomore year of college, I started just valing my friends about it and the person I was dating at that time. I would talk to him about it too, whenever my dad looked like a scan and we were waiting for insults.
And I was worried when your friend in high school found out and reached out to you. What was that like for you, for somebody to know, and what were those conversations like?
I guess it was a relief, but it was really hard for me to talk about it. Yeah. I remember we just like drove around in her car and she was trying to talk to me about it, and yeah, it was kind of a relief to know that she knew. But I I was pretty emotional in crying and yeah, it's really hard for me to process it. And at that time, also at that time, his illness was getting visibly worse, so things were also becoming a lot more
real and right in front of me. And it was also when I was like getting ready to leave for college, but now it kind of felt like his life was a lot more fragile, so it was tough to leaving during that time too.
It sounds like you were very close with your dad in some ways, and clearly it's a affecting you. Yet I'm not hearing that you were reaching out to friends to get support, and I ask.
Why I was, I don't know, kind of similar to my dad in a lot of ways and like very stoic, and I guess I didn't think that I needed help, and I kind of just coped with it in the ways that I knew how. I guess I wasn't ready to talk about it either, because I mean it more real, I just started running a lot and biking a lot, and that was kind of like my way of dealing with it.
I'm wondering about what was going on between you and your brother, because you said your brother, at least in that last year, was able to really talk with your dad and be close with your dad. Were you able to talk with your brother about what was happening and how you were feeling.
Yeah, we I think became a lot closer because of it. Later on, when I was in college that summer this summer after my senior year of high school, we didn't really talk about it. We were kind of in two different worlds at the time, and I think because I suppressed a lot of it. When I got to college my freshman year, I had a lot of trouble integrating, and I was like very homesick and sad, and my brother kind of talked me through a lot of that and we became a lot closer because of that.
So in your sophomore year, your dad is now apparently quite ill and you start dating this person at school, and you said that it kind of imploded, I think is how you described it. Can you tell us about the implosion?
Yeah, So when we first started dating, we were in a relationship. I like essentially moved into his dorm room, and for me, I was going really well, but it was really really fast. It just too fast, and that really freaked him out because he had been in a relationship that started too quickly and then ended really badly, and he didn't want to do that again. So he kind of hit the brakes on us and wanted to kind of pause and go back and take it slow and just kind of date and not sort of be
in this like intense relationship from the get go. And I didn't want to do that, and I felt like he was just kind of like moving slower and slower away for me, and by the end of the semester, I just like couldn't really deal with it anymore. The previous semester, I was just like a total mess and a nightmare and all over the place and failed in my classes. Then this semester I bit off more than I could chew.
I was wait, hold on, I want to step you there. So you said it. You kind of threw that off, like you kind of tossed that off. You know. I failed all my classes and I was a mess.
No, No, I just failed one class, just.
One, okay. But was that related to what was going on for you in motion around your father's illness or what was happening for you? I mean, was that unusual for you?
Yeah? I was definitely unusual. I was a really good student. Freshman year of college was fine, but I was like very very unhappy. But I did okay. And then sophomore year of college, I was just kind of consumed with getting as many friends as I could so I could be happier, and like, my dad was doing worse and I wasn't handling it particularly well. And I also kind of just stopped talking to my parents that semester, to both of them, both of them. Yeah, why, I don't know.
So what was the circumstance in which you just speaking to them, Like, how did that come about?
I just like wouldn't call them, I wouldn't really pick up their calls. I kind of felt like I was like trying on this personality that was like much more outgoing and fun, and that didn't align with time my parents a lot.
It also didn't delign with the fact that your dad was doing very badly, And I'm wondering if that was a real attempt to run away from that reality.
Probably, Yeah, it all kind of felt like an escape. For sure. My parents were not happy about it.
How did those conversations go where they told you that they weren't happy about the fact that you weren't communicating with them.
I think I would hear it from my brother. Probably. They were definitely like very disappointed when I ended up feeling one of my classes, and I remember my dad saying, like, we're not sending you to college just to like drink and party. But I don't really remember much more than that.
You Know, what comes to mind in that conversation with your dad is that it's almost like sometimes when we're losing someone that we care so much about, it's almost like you can't fire me. I quit you failed the class, which you knew would be disappointing, and it's almost like it might have even been a relief to have your father be disappointed in you, that you could at least
have that barrier between the two of you. And I think it's hard to see those things when they're happening in the moment, But in hindsight, I wonder if now, when you look at that period in your life, there's a flavor of it's so hard for me to move closer to the pain of this, that I'm going to move as far away as I can and I'm going to recreate my personality and I'm going to drink and I'm going to party, and I'm going to not talk to my parents, and I'm going to fail a class.
Not that you consciously did any of that, but as you look at it now and you try to understand that period in your life which was so out of character for you, does any of that resonate now?
Yeah, I think it does. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, like, I wonder if it was also just kind of like a cry for help. But yeah, I definitely think it does. And I think that's kind of an interesting way of looking at it. Yeah.
The other part of that that stands out is that it's during this time that your dad was getting sicker, you were pulling away from them more, and you were also trying to attach more intensely to other people. In the first case, that guy that you were dating that you said it was very intense and very fast, And again it strikes me that you were really trying to create your life elsewhere to run away from it as much as possible because it was just too painful to
deal with that reality. So you were living these two lives. On the one hand, at home, things were going poorly with your dad's health. You might have had a sense that you're losing him soon, and yet you're trying to create this party life or this fun life and romance and friends and all that college and it just seems that there were really two different worlds where you aware of that at the time.
No, not really, I haven't really thought about it that way, but that also does definitely resonates.
Can we actually move on to how you met the professor? I mean, you think he was your professor, but how did you meet him? How did that relationship again?
Yeah, so a little bit of backstory, just going into my senior year of college. So when I was dating that person that was really intense for a few months my sophomore year, he ended up not really wanting to be in a relationship with me, and then I kind of fell apart and I withdrew from all my classes I could finish them. When I went home and I was really depressed, and then I took like a year off from college.
What did you do that year at home with your ailing father and you're probably very sad and anxious mother.
And sad and anxious brother.
Yeah. My brother was, Oh yeah, I graduated from college. He was living in the city and was working. I came home and was like severely depressed, like stay in my room for probably like two months.
What did your parents think when you came home severely depressed? What were those conversations like in your family?
They were really concerned and worried.
Did they suggest that maybe you go talk to someone or see a therapist?
Yeah? Yeah, I was talking to someone like twice a week when I first came home, and then eventually once a week, and then eventually not so much.
What were you talking about? If I may ask, Because there was so much going on.
I was like prepherally talking about my dad, but it wasn't at this like forefront of what was happening. I think then I was probably most concerned with and talking about this person that I had been dating. And then I was also like consumed with feeling like a failure for leaving college, and so those were the most pressed in issues that I was dealing with, just trying to figure out how to get back on my feet and feel like a normal person again.
I'm hearing so much loss in what you were experiencing, and maybe you didn't think of it that way at the time, but to me, you were grieving, and you were grieving the end of that relationship with the guy you were dating, and that at first you felt incredibly attached to, and then you saw him move farther and farther away from you, just like your dad was doing because he was sick and he was going to die.
And so you had these two men in your life who you couldn't quite reach because they were both going to move away from you, both for reasons out of your control. And then you were grieving the loss of your life as a student that you had never been that kind of student before you had always done well in school, you failed a class, and you withdrew from your classes, and so everything that was familiar to you, that was comforting to you had gone away or was
going away. I think for all of us, it can be so much easier to deal with the thing that feels the most concrete, which is there's this guy. We were in a relationship. He was pulling back. I'm deeply wounded by this, and that might have been the focus of your therapy at the time, but I think that whether you realized that or not, you were grieving these other losses too.
Yeah.
I've definitely drawn that connection before, and I think the reason why that breakup was so painful was because it felt so similar to kind of that slow loss that I was dealing with my dad. Yeah, So I ended up. Then I took a full year off from college. I worked at home, and then I went abroad for about
six months, and then I went back to school. And then there was this class that I really wanted to take with this professor who was like pretty wellcomplished in his field, and I knew that I wanted to try and build like a professional relationship with him because I thought it would help me in my career. I was doing that over the summer and I would go to
hospital appointments with him. And so then I got back to school and I started that class and our first assignment in the class was to write about someone you really cared about and someone who you were really close to, and the assignment was to render them in words. I wrote about this story about my dad. Me and my family had gone on in vacation that summer in the Berkshires and my dad was really really not doing well. He was pretty sick that summer, so we spent most
of his time pretty weak in bed. But there was this one day that we went into town and we met up with my brother's girlfriend and her mom and they had a house up there, and my brother's girlfriend's dad had just died like a few months before that from patriotic cancer was really quick, and my dad walked into the store with my mom and he found this little stuffed animal. My dad was like so frugal, he
never bought anything. He like hated buying things, but he saw this little stuffed animal and pointed it out to my mom and said, like, I really want that, And so my mom bought it for him and he had it with him in bed. It was kind of like it felt like this protector of him, And so I wrote about that for this assignment, and I wrote about my dad being sick and this little stuffed animal that
gave him comfort. It was almost this like for a full circle story of when you get older and sick and dying and you kind of become childlike again you just want your stuffed animal. And the professor read each one of our stories out loud to the class. I remember after my professor read my story out loud, it was just kind of silent, but he kind of filled that silence with a story about his own dad being really sick, and he was like empathizing understanding my story. So that's why I met him.
How did it move from him being your professor to him being your boyfriend?
He wasn't ever my boyfriend, and nothing ever happened like physically between us. We had like a really intimate emotional relationship, but it wasn't physical.
That you had feelings for him.
Yeah, I did develop feelings for him.
Yeah, And when did that happen? Did he know?
The way things changed was I was seeing him out for after a class and he was like, yeah, but I'm about to leave, like I'm hungry, I'm gonna go get a bye to eat, Like do you want to join me? And I was like sure, yeah, I just have to call my mom back and he was like okay. And then I got a meal with him and we were talking and he asked me about my family and my parents and how they met, and about my dad
and how he was doing. And then that kind of turned into this like almost ritual where we would get dinner every week and have these contents and intimate conversations, and then over time I just kind of developed feelings for him because of that.
Did he know that you had feelings for him?
I think he must have because of how I acted. I think he also did things to kind of egg me on, and by the end, our friendship or whatever it was or relationship or whatever just kind of ended strangely. And so I of him this letter and left it at his house before I left college after I graduated, and I basically told him in that letter. I think it was kind of clear.
When you said he did things that egged you on. What do you mean by that?
He would talk about like his ex girlfriends pretty frequently and like, tell me about that history when I wouldn't like ask him about it or tell him about my own dating history.
So when that ended, you said, it ended in a weird way.
Yeah, I had considerate After I graduated, I considered staying in my college town and working for him. I could stay there, and he was going to be away for the summer, but potentially I could stay in his house and take care of his dog while he was away and work for him. But then right after I graduated,
we had this barbecue in my backyard. He came and like other like a bunch of friends and family, other professors there too, and we had this talk where he was like, you know, we need boundaries in our relationship and you can't stay in my house over the summer. And I kind of asked him what he meant or what he was talking about, but he had to leave and then he just kind of ignored me and was like,
hang in there, and that was it. So I decided that I was going to leave, and when I did, I wrote him an email saying like, hey, I'm not going to work for you. I decided I'm leaving, and then I wrote this page long letter and delivered it to his house and then I left, like a day or two later.
What did the letter say?
Oh, I remember too when we had that talk and he said we needed boundaries. He was like, y're two dependent on me, And so in this letter, I guess I was explaining why I was dependent on him because of my dad and his illness and him dying, and so I came to rely on him, and I think I apologized for that. I think I like told him how much I cared about him and how I grew
to love him. I guess I think I said and that maybe I had become dependent on him, but also like the way he acted and treated me like he was dependent on me too, and it wasn't just a one sided thing, and I wanted him to take responsibility for that.
Did he respond to the letter.
He did respond to the letter, but it took him a few weeks. Then it was very professional and buttoned up, and it was the email he basically said, like, you know, I'm so glad you took these classes with me. I wish you all the best.
But he didn't address the fact that you said you grew to love him, or that you felt he had also crossed some boundaries with you.
No, not at all. He basically kind of invalidated or just ignored it, like I was any other student who took classes with him and wished me all the best or whatever. And I confronted him again, probably a year later, and so I asked him to meet up, and I was like, do you know what I want to talk to you about? And he was like, I think you feel like I let you down in some way, and I was like, yeah, I guess so, but it was
more than that. I said, I also feel like you made sexual advances towards me, and we're kind of inappropriate, and it was really confusing, and he like very defensively and firmly denied that and got like pretty upset.
Did you give him examples of what you felt were sexual advances?
Yeah? I said. I was like, you told me about all of your ex girlfriends, you talked about your sex life, You told me that you thought it was okay for professors and students to date as long as students were seniors. And he just fought out denied it.
Okay, what's happening with your dad at this time? Is he still alive when this is going on?
So he had died a couple of months before I wrote that letter, and when I confronted him it was like a year and months afterwards.
It just sounds like it was dealing with a lot of loss. It sounds like you got closer with your dad again and spent a lot of time with him, and that makes it really difficult when he passes away. And that's around the time that you were with this professor that you know he was perhaps pulling away. I mean, it just sounds like you had those losses truly back to back at that point.
Yeah, it was hard too, because he was someone who encouraged me to talk about my dad, and other people wouldn't really ask me about him because they were didn't know what to say, or they didn't know if they should ask about it. But he always did and wanted me to talk about it and was really supportive. And so then to like a couple of months after my dad died, to have him then just like completely what felt like kind of like completely breaking ties was. Yeah, it was really hard.
It just seems like such a painful double when me to go through losing these you know, your dad obviously, and then this person who seemed so significant to seem like the person who would be there to help you through it.
Yeah, definitely, that summer was so hard because like, not only had I lost my dad, but also my mom was just like kind of a wreck, like totally understandable, but I didn't really know how to deal with it, and it felt kind of like losing two parents. And I think I emailed him. I reached out to him and said something to that effect. Did he respond He responded that. I think he expressed some empathy or more sort of I think he asked me if I had a therapist.
Emma. In your letter, you indicated that one of the reasons that you are attracted to older men is because the maturity and stability and they get things. And I can see in the relationship with a professor why you would feel that way, because he actually asked and he was curious about what was going on with your dad, and he seemed very supportive for the time that he was there. But then the way it ended didn't sound like the most mature way to end that situation, and
it was very disappointing and hurtful for you. With that in mind, I do want to hear about this current relationship that you have that you wrote about, can you tell us about that?
Sure, the professor was like over thirty years older than me. This other person is so only twenty years old, and I met him through work and I just like developed these really intense feelings for him. And the nature of it is so different, Like it's super lighthearted, it's like really fun and easy. But he's also married and has children. But he also like leaves me a lot of attention
and showers me with compliments and it feels amazing. But it's super different, and it's not burdened by my dad dying or some really dark thing happening in my life.
Does he know that you have these feelings for him?
I think on some level, when someone has a crush on you, you always know.
It's funny that you say that, because it sounds like in your family there was a lot of assuming what was going on with other people, but not directly talking about it, And so for you that might seem like, well, that's the norm that people into it what you're feeling, even if you don't say it directly, because that's what you grew up with.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I want to open you up to the idea that maybe if you don't communicate directly with people, they don't know exactly what you're feeling. So when you say he showers you with compliments, I assume those are professional compliments. They're not romantic compliments. Is that right? Yeah? And so it's almost like a lot of these relationships are taking place in your head. And I don't mean that you're
making them up. I mean they're very real to you, but that the other person isn't involved in the sense of you have sat down and been vulnerable with this person. You talk a lot about being vulnerable with the Professor about what was going on with your dad, but you weren't vulnerable with him in terms of what was going on between the two of you until the very end.
And with this guy, it sounds like he doesn't really know what happened with your dad because you probably haven't opened up to him about it and it's not happening at this moment. And I really wonder whether he has any idea that you feel the way you do about.
Him he does know what happened with my dad, And maybe he doesn't know, but he might know. The reason I think he might know is because I mean he also like flirted with me a little bit.
One of the reasons that you seem to believe that you're attracted to older men is that they have more life experience and therefore are emotionally deeper and can understand you on a deeper level. And yet you haven't really engaged in any kind of deep I thou reallylationship with either of them, And by I thou we use this term in therapy, meaning how I relate to you, how
you relate to me. And you said that you did try to date someone who was about ten years older, and that you felt like this person didn't have that level of emotional depth, and so I don't really hear a lot of emotional depth happening with the current person. It sounds like you joke around a lot that you have a fondness for each other, but I don't really hear anything romantic going on necessarily from his end. You know what draws you to him more than maybe the person who was ten years older.
The person I was ten years older actually was really great and it was going super well, and I didn't think that he couldn't relate to me. I felt like we could relate to each other super well. But it turned out he had just gotten out of a relationship and wasn't ready to enter into a new one, and that's why it ended. It was pretty brief.
Interesting is that to me, the relationship that sounds like you were most in it is the one in your sophomore year with the guy who was your age. That's the one where you entered into it very quickly. The two of you kind of moved into his dorm room right away. That he felt it was a little too quick and he was putting on the brakes, But you were in it, you were interested in it, you were going for it, and that was your first real relationship.
And then since then it's been real safe choices for you. In the sense that you know the professor, he's thirty years older. There was a lot of disclosure going on, and that felt very intimate. But nothing happened between the two of you and the guy at work. He's married. He doesn't even know that you have these feelings. The guy who was ten years older was right out of
a relationship and not ready for a new one. And I have this feeling that there's a part of you that really wants to just actually be in a relationship, to have that part of your life because you're almost you're entire of that life was taken up with your dad's illness. And then you meet the guy who's ten
years older. Even that felt good for a while. What doesn't feel good is that when you're with the older guys, with the professor, with this guy from work, you are pining for someone who's older, but it's almost collegial or mentorish. It doesn't feel or seem romantic, but it does feel safe. And I wonder if that early experience and all the turbulence of your adolescent years, after all the losses you've had, you're playing it safe.
Yeah, I think that's definitely makes sense too. There is also there's something a warring about someone who's unavailable and kind of unapproachable, and it's easier that way because there's not really in the realm of possibility, and therefore there's also not a lot of room to get hurt or be rejected or left or whatever.
But they occupy that emotional space in a way that doesn't leave you free for someone else perhaps who might be there, who might have something to give back.
Yeah. Probably true.
I've noticed that even in our conversation with you today, you haven't really looked at us very much. That when you start talking about something that feels very tender or delicate, you look down, and when we're talking like right now, you'll look right up at us. But then when you're responding to us about something that feels maybe vulnerable to you, not once in this conversation have you looked at us.
And you think that there's something about getting close to people or really being seen that feels terrifying to you. And part of it might have to do with the fact that, starting when you were in high school, you were dealing with potential imminent loss with your dad. But part of it might also have to do with the style of communication in your family, where things weren't really
directly talked about. Everybody seemed to love one another, but they didn't really talk about the things that needed to be talked about in a direct way. And so part of it is that you went through this experience of losing someone that you were very close with. But the other part is that I don't think that you ever really learned how to get close in a way that felt safe, that speaking up felt terrifying in your family.
Yeah, that definitely resonates. I was also like a very quiet kid, and I didn't really start talking a lot until Honestly, like even in high school, I was pretty shy, and I didn't really start being more open and vocal and putting myself out there until I was in college, until like my sophomore year of college, when I kind of just let everything go in a lot of ways.
You might be shy, or you might have been shy, but that doesn't mean that you don't have a circus going on in your head. Okay, it's very loud in there. There's a lot going on there. It's not as though there's an absence of intense feeling of lots of things swirling around there all the time. This relationship that you have right now to the person that you work with is very alive and very active in your mind, even though you haven't vocalized anything to him.
To echo Lorre's point, you mentioned that I think in your letter that your friends are like, you know, roll their eyes a bit or something like that, oh you and your older men kind of fixation kind of thing. But I think that that's also that maybe you're not opening up to them, to really talk about how you're feeling, what your needs are, what your hopes are, what it would be like to be in a relationship with someone
who could reciprocate. And I think it's easier to talk about, oh, the professor and the married guy than talking about and yet I'm really lonely and I really want someone, and I don't know how to go about it because it's very, very scary out there in the dating world. Do you have those kinds of conversations with your friends where you talk about that, Yeah.
I mean we talk about dating and stuff, But.
Do you hear the difference between talking about dating and having the kind of conversation with your friends about you not dating in general and the kinds of general stories people talk about about being in the trenches, but about something specific to you, which is I really struggle with putting myself out there emotionally. I really struggle with with getting close to someone and risking having that go away.
I really struggle with the possibility of rejection. I really struggle with the fact that my dad died and I haven't quite dealt with it in a way that I think would be helpful for me. Did you ever talk to them about that? Not so much.
Now.
I really struggle with the fact that not only did my dad die, but then my mom was really dealing with this, and I felt very alone. I didn't feel like I had a parent anymore.
Yeah, not really.
How much emotional real estate goes toward thinking about the different men that you have been really interested in, and particularly right now with the current person, what do you think would replace that if you weren't thinking about him? And it sounds like you think about him quite a bit, You talk about him quite a bit, to the point that your friends are saying enough already. What do you think you'd be thinking about if you weren't thinking about him?
I know that when I was thinking about the professor a lot, and I would stop doing that. I would think about my dad a lot, and now I would probably think about my brother who's been having a really hard time.
And so when you hear yourself say that, can you hear that these distractions conserve is almost like a drug, like I'm going to put the needle in because I don't want to think about these other things. I'm going to numb myself with thoughts about people I don't have to get that close to. But it feels good to fantasize about it or imagine it. When you take the needle out, you start to say, oh, what's there that's about my dad or my brother? And I think underneath
that even is this intense loneliness. And we don't want you to have to feel so lonely. So, Emma, we have some advice for you, and what we'd like you to do is we would like you to call your mom and we would like you to start a conversation with her by saying, you know what, Mom, there's this guy that I can't stop thinking about. And I realized that if I stop thinking about him, what I would be thinking about would be Dad. And I would like to be able to talk with you about what this
experience has been like for our family. And I'd like to be able to share with you a little bit about what has been like for me. I know you've certainly struggled with it, understandably so, and so do you think that I could share a little bit with you about what this has been like for me to go through Dad's illness and to lose Dad. Could we start maybe opening up those conversations and I want to be clear that it's not like you're going to go through
the last ten years in that one conversation. It will probably be dipping your toe in and letting your mom acclimate to what it's like to have these kinds of conversations in the family, because your family wasn't a family who had these kinds of conversations even before your dad became ill, and just sort of gauge her reaction and be able to tell her maybe a little bit about you know, I realized that I haven't really dealt with it, and it would feel so good to be able to
talk about it with you because we've been through it sort of in the family together, and see what that's like, see what happens for her when you open it up in that way. And we'd like you to have a similar conversation with your brother, and you might open it up with him and say, you know what, there's this
guy that I think about a lot. And I realized that if I were to stop thinking about him, I would be thinking about Dad, and I would also be worried about you, because I know that you're struggling a lot too, and I would love to be able to talk the two of us as siblings about what we're struggling with and what we're going through, and maybe have more direct conversations about that, because I think it would be really helpful for both of us and see what
that conversation is like with him. And we also feel like that would help you do some of your grief work that hasn't been done yet. How does that sound to you?
Sounds hard but manageable.
Okay, good Emma. There's the second part you wrote to us about dating, and we have some advice for you there as well. You probably spend many hours a day thinking about the guide from work, and those are in essence a bit wasted hours because there's nothing that's going to really happen there. Would like you to convert at least an hour of that time where you would be thinking about him, to thinking about more likely suspects for dating. And are you on any dating apps?
Yeah?
Great. We would like you to spend at least an hour a day talking with age appropriate people. Now, we had a debate about what that is for you, and I suggested be cappy with thirty. Laurie said thirty five. We're going to agree on thirty five. We would like you to try if you can within this week set up a FaceTime date or a socially distanced one with
somebody within that age range. You've spent so many years dealing with loss and grief and illness and not being able to really have that young adulthood that you really want to have in part, and we don't want you to waste too many more years on the unavailable older guys who can't give you that, So we would like you to spend this time trying to get at least one, and just to remind yourself of those options and that there are people out there and that age range who
are mature enough and open enough for you that you can have a relationship with.
Potentially, And we want you to make sure that the age range really is twenty five to thirty five. You are considering people who are your own age because I think there's a story that you're telling yourself, particularly about the person that is the object of your affection right now, that somehow he's deeper and can to understand you better than someone in your own age range. And yet nothing
deep has transpired between the two of you. There has not been one hint of the depth of his inner life in anything that has transpired between the two of you other than that you admire his work. So we also are giving you the ticking clock of the week because you have all kinds of excuses for you know why, nobody is appropriate. We are forcing the issue, and we are making you choose someone. We're not looking for perfect. We're making you choose someone that you think you might
have a nice conversation with. That is the extent of it. As part of this exercise, we would like you to tell your friends, who are so tired of hearing you talk about this other guy, Hey, I am really making a concerted effort to meet someone my own age. Is
there anyone you can think about introducing me to. Just making it clear to your friends that, hey, I want you to know that instead of spending all that time talking to them about Oh my gosh, and here's what happened, and we had this interchange and he looked at me this way, and here's what happened at work. To say, you know what, I'm not going to spend my time talking about him with you anymore. So we want you
to stop talking about him with your friends. We want you to talk about the things that you would be talking about if you weren't talking about him. Talk about your dad, talk about your fear, talk about this new idea of I'm going to be open to meeting people in my age range. Talk about movies that you saw, talk about books that you read, talk about the things you would be talking about if you weren't on the drug. Okay,
all right, all right. So we look forward to hearing how the conversations go and how the dating goes, and we will hear back from you shortly.
Thank you. What became clear to me in this conversation with Emma was the extent to which these infatuations with the older men are truly distractions from dealing both with the pain of losing her dad and with a fear of finding someone whose age appropriate, of entering into her own relationships, of dealing with loneliness, of dealing with the risk of rejection. And I hope that our homework for her will help her break out of that.
Yeah, I think we're trying to redirect her and help her to deal with what's really going on. When people ruminate like that, when they sort of ruminate and obsessed. She said she thinks about him all the time, that's all she can think about. Studies show that in order to break that, you need to focus on something concrete for a specific amount of time, just to kind of
reset your brain. And so I think giving her that hour where we're saying, Okay, you want to obsess eight hours a day, that's fine, do what you need to do, but on this ninth hour, we're going to have you do this task. It will give her the opportunity to take the needle out for an hour and to access all that she is trying to distract herself from, because I think what she will find is that her fear of her feelings is a lot scarier than the feelings themselves.
You're listening to Deotherapists from iHeartRadio. We'll be back after a quick break. We did not receive a voicemail from Emma. This is the first time that we haven't received a voicemail from one of our guests, one of our fellow travelers. We asked our producer to reach out to Emma and inquire about it and remind her, and she did and to ask if there was any reason that Emma didn't
send the voicemail. And Emma actually said no, that she just was busy and didn't have a chance to get to it that she would, but again she did not. Even after she said that, we still didn't get a voicemail. And so we're going to discuss a little bit about what that might be and why that might be going on.
Right, and so something like that happens when we have that happen in the therapy room, for example, and somebody says they're going to do something and then they don't follow through, and then we talk about it and they
say they're going to follow through and they don't. We didn't have the opportunity with Emma to really understand more about what was going on for her, but based on our conversation with her, it did seem like there was a lot of avoidance going on of really dealing with the impact that her father's long illness and death had on her all through her teen years and then through her college years. And what we were asking her to do was to really go to places that maybe she wasn't ready to go to.
What happens often is that when somebody comes and tells us their story, and here the story was I get
into these relationships with older men. It doesn't work well for me with the younger men my age, and we as therapists, our job is to tell them, often a different story than their story, and in this case, the story was you had a lot of trauma and loss with losing your dad, and you had a lot of hesitation about getting hurt, and so it was safer to go with older men who didn't really have a relationship with you had crushes on than to deal with the
fear and the anxiety and the hurt and the potential loss of somebody more in your age bracket than somebody who's twenty or thirty years older. And that is what she then had to confront And I think that it wasn't just the task she wasn't ready for, but it was the narrative that we were proposing that she was struggling to accept.
I think you're right about really embracing this other part of the narrative, and maybe she's having some trouble with that, But I also think that those relationships served as an escape for her from really dealing with the grief and the loss. And when we talked to her about what would you be thinking about if you weren't obsessing about the current guy, and if you hadn't been obsessing up about the professor, and she said, I'd be thinking about
my dad. And I think that when we asked her to talk to her mom and talk to her brother about maybe opening up these conversations in the family about the impact that this experience has had on all of them, that maybe that was something that she's not ready to do yet. That it feels so good in a certain way to hold on to Well, let me think about the guy at work and what does that mean that he said that, and was he flirting with me? And is he ever going to leave his wife for me?
Then to say, hey, mom, hey brother, we have a lot of stuff that maybe we should talk about.
I agree. And I think the other part of that is it also was safer to think about the married guy at work than it is to deal with the potential hurt and disappointment of taking someone that actually reciprocate and have a real relationship with all the fears that go with entering into that.
Yeah, And I have a lot of compassion for Emma because I think by not reporting back to us on how these tasks went, and I think that means that she didn't do them that she was sending us a message. But again there's that avoidance of instead of saying to our producer, you know what I thought about it, but I just I'm not really ready to do these things yet. I'm so sorry, and just being direct about it, she just said, oh, yeah, I'm going to have it by tomorrow.
I'm going to have it by this day, and then radio silence. We just never heard. So I think there's that question about you know what makes it hard for her to actually be direct instead of avoiding something that might be difficult.
And we know from our practices that people have to be ready to make the changes that we try and help them make. And I hope that when Emma feels ready, she'll know the path that she has to take.
Next week, we'll get updates from last season sessions to find out how our advice worked out a year later.
I was always taught that your parents will live with you and you take care of them for the rest of your life. There's no other option. So when you both presented something else to me and gave me permission of a sort, that that was life changing.
Hey, fellow travelers, if you're enjoying our podcast each week, don't forget to subscribe for free so that you don't miss any episodes, and please help support Dear Therapists by telling your friends about it and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews really help people to find the show.
If you have a dilemma you'd like to discuss with us, Bigel Smooth, email us at Lorian Guy at iHeartMedia dot com.
Our executive producer is Noel Brown. We're produced and edited by Mike Johns, Josh Fisher, and Chris Childs. Our interns are Dorit Corwin and Silver Lifton. Special thanks to Alison Wright and to our podcast fairy Godmother Katie Couric.
We can't wait to see you at next week's session.
Dear Therapist is a production of iHeartRadio.