You're listening to a new segment, Dear Chelsea.
Call it Couple's Counseling with Chelsea, where we do couples counseling on all sorts of variations of friends, lovers, families. I'm here with my friends Jenny Mullen and Jason Biggs, and we are going to do some couples counseling. Welcome to my office. Okay, guys, on our last session together, I think we've made a lot of progress on our
last session, healed. I want to address the ex girlfriend factor, and I would like to recap that because that I think required a lot of patience and acceptance I think from Jason, because he could have really been like, this woman is unstable, you know what I mean, This woman's crazy, or any of the things you could attribute to somebody who would be that interested in his ex girlfriend.
Yes, so we were on a vacation.
We talked about this on your podcast when we went on a vacation together French Polynesia scuba diving trip and you brought Jason's ex girlfriend's kaftan and you wore it.
I think I even at one point when you'urinated on it. I'm not sure what happened to that cap town.
Someone someone got urinated on and something got urinated on on that trip.
Now, let's talk about Jason.
How did that when you found out Jenny was obsessed with your ex girlfriend?
How did that make you feel? Like? Did you think, whoaa who this might be problematic or you.
Already were so head over heels with her that you thought this is adorable.
Not the ladder, Not the ladder kills Rachel.
But there was a sense of I think it actually was sort of somewhere in the middle in so far as definitely struck me as weird and uncomfortable.
Can you just kind of recap when it came about briefly.
Oh my god, it's it's so blurry, and here's I can just give you a broad stroke on it.
Okay, Yeah, I mean the thing that I'll get into is that it it wasn't just once and and so my feelings changed over time. When I when I thought it, when we was like, okay, this needs to be done and I don't like it. And then it happened again. That's where it like, Okay, it's no longer adorable. I get that you're a story seeker. I get that you're
anything goes Jenny. You're wild and crazy, you're funny, you're hilarious, impulsive, all the things that I do find attractive about her to an extent, and this went too far.
The things he used to find attractive about me, or now the heated about me.
That's par for the course. That's what happens in every real.
And it's not entirely true. Maybe I still love you for those things. There just needs to be. When I felt like I wasn't being heard, it was like, Okay, this was cute, this is funny, it's it's crazy, yes, but like, okay, now we move on. Right now, we're done. And then when I learned that not just once, but not just twice, but that multiple times it wasn't done, then I then it. Then you dip into territory where it's like, oh, you're deceiving me, but let me.
Like give people. Yeah, don't know, let me just give you quickly. Okay.
So basically Jason had dated somebody prior to me that wasn't over him when we got together, and this person was doing things, making episodes about Jason breaking up with her, engaging with the family. The sister would cry to me about missing her. There was all this shit and I was like, this is fucking fascinating to me, Like who is this girl?
You're making me love her?
Like I want to know everything, and it was all these weird fucking facts. It was like, you know, I'm not gonna like expose things whatever right now because a couple of therapy I've agreed to not really talk about her, but like it'd be like things that this were incongruous to like what I did know. You know, it's like she traveled and was like a shirt but for a while, and then she did this, and you know, it was like she went to law school, like all these random things.
She was married, she was and so it became like the most the Doseki's man, she was like the most interesting person in the world.
I'm like, this is fucking crazy.
And she's still in love with Jason and now she was like commenting on my IMDb. So for me, I was like, oh my god, I'm with this famous guy. I'm invisible.
I'm twenty eight years old.
I feel so cute and like I'm fucking invisible everywhere I go because people are like, can you hold my baby while I.
Take a picture?
With Jason Biggs, and I have one fan in the world and it's the Josekis guy. So I'm like, fuck, I want to make myself like perfect for her. I want to know everything about her. I want to curate my online profile so that she's obsessed as obsessed with me and stays obsessed with me. But like when Jason I kept dating and she sort of moved on, I was.
Like, wait, we need her back, like I need my fan back.
So that's when I the table flipped and I started stalking her.
Does that make sense?
Anybody doesn't know. It doesn't.
But the stocking went on for some period right of time, and then it became problematic for Jason because you were lying to him about didn't you arrange to meet her?
And so when I was hiking Running Canyon with her behind Jason's back, I was regifting her things of hers that I'd find around the house, like as a way to like lure her into like a real life friendship. I might have set her up on a date with my acting coach and then gone on the date with them.
A lot of things happened, right, but you know how it ended.
No, I think you should tell us how so like it was because she was my Moby Dick and I was a app And guess where it ended?
Main Street in Nantucket.
Like is that's the ship, writes itself, Like, how can I not as a writer like I am in fucking May, I'm on main Street in Nantucket, on those cobblestone streets.
I'm a she is fucking moby and we are face to face. It is like made for.
And what happened?
Memoir like sitting in my lap, grant for it?
And this was this was after how many how much time of spending with her like the.
Course of I would say eight years. But it had ended.
It had ended, but it was just such a f the coup de gras, It was just fucking phenomenal.
It had ended, but you hadn't stopped writing about her. She was still a subject for your books. And well did she understand? Did she understand she was a subject of your books? Or she didn't make the connection? I told her necessary.
I just like it's such great fodder, and like it's so fucking funny and random. And to be honest, the reason I leaned so hard into it is because of the reaction I was getting online my Twitter personality or like persona became that of like this crazy wife who's obsessed with her husband's ex girlfriend. Unfortunately, all of Jason's ex girlfriends thought I was talking about them. So now
I've burnt a lot of bridges on accident. We were friends with many of them, and now they don't speak to us because they all thought I was talking about that, which she.
Was a tweet about. It wasn't just like the memoirs.
There was regular tweets about like like.
When you write a joke, it's like, it's not necessarily real, you're just fucking It can be. It could be based on something, it could be based on something a friended. It's just a fucking joke. It's not real. But unfortunately for me, a lot of people took it at face value.
So do you feel well?
First of all, what happened on main Street in Nantucket? What was the interest? Didn't speak to me?
Oh she did.
Spoke to Jason. My son ran straight into her arms, into her arms and said, Mommy, did.
You say hello?
I did you try spoke to her sister? I smiled, I must thank you. The parents were there. It was so bad, It was so bad.
It was so bad, and now my sister and her sister are like really good friends and they go to the same school and it's.
The whole thing.
Oh right, yes, yes, yes, I heard that. So now what have you learned from that lesson? If anything have you? Was it a lesson or so?
I wrote her like a crazy because it's.
Almost like you could never ever even not that you would have an affair, but like, it's so scared girl.
And I need to sleep with her and make her let me wear the Jason because I'm not competitive, that's what would happen. But no, I've written her several Amen's letters, and I'm just like, listen, I am so sorry, like the woman that the girl that I was, is not the woman I became. I'm I'm so sorry I did. Like I let myself just get so seduced by the story of it, and I just didn't want to stop because I was addicted to the plot, you know, I wanted more.
It's so interesting because I'm hearing this, I'm listening to this, and I'm thinking about my own personal experience with exes, you know, from like a young age to my reaction to exes as to when I'm older and like now in my present day moment, like I don't want to know anything about exes. I don't care, I'm not interested, I don't even want to. The less information the better.
I don't want to be thinking about them. But I do remember like dating someone when I was in my twenties, and when he went to England for a week, I went through everything in his apartment, every photo album, every piece of paper, just to find his past that he had before he met me. So there was no reason for me to have any sense of feelings of invidiousness
or you know, any of that. But I remember he came home from that trip to England and I was in a rage that he had even had a pack that he had met a girl before we dated, Like what was he thinking dating someone who was pretty before he met me? You know, like so irrational and so unreasonable, And his reaction to my behavior made me realize I could never do.
That day of this.
I know, I know exactly my British boyfriend when I was like young, young, yeah, yeah, but I remember being like, you know, just the overwhelming need for more information, like.
I need more, I need more.
I'm going to look and find everything, and it's like, and it's so irrational, right, Like it's so irrational that I was like, oh. Once I saw his reaction, I was like, I can't do that if I want him to stay with me.
Well, it's the Yeah, it's the need, it's the mine. Wasn't jealousy. It was like, I want there is a need. I feel like there's some overlap.
Perhaps I don't know, there's that thing you're describing, which feels like that sort of youthful naivete in thinking that everything needs to be about you and how could particularly when it comes the romance and love, Like, how could you possibly if there's any sort of indication that you ever had anything else going on, Like, it takes away from what I have with you.
I loved that Jason had other things before me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to know all of.
Yeah, that was probably a turn on for you and your sick brain.
But I feel like you're not able to see that there can be different things that can coexist at the same time. He can be in love with you, but he could also have loved someone else in the past. He could be in love with you, but he could also go to England for weeks at a time.
He could. It's those it's giving Chelsea therapy.
Okay, So what I'll say about that though, it's the idea that the story becomes one or the other person, like it belongs to one person or the other. Forget about oh it is my ex. It becomes like it's her story now, and then it's less about it.
I pirated his life in his story.
And that's where And we still get into this to this day, not about her necessarily, but more about like, whose story is this? You know what I mean, like even you know her getting stuff done? You know, a couple of weeks ago, it was like I had some feelings about.
It, stuff done, the surgery, my booms lifted, her boobs and stuff.
I had feelings about it, not about whether or not she should do it necessarily, but just in terms of like whether I should share it, about her sharing it, about how it affects our kid.
Just there.
I had other stuff, and it was we got into it because Jenny's like, this is my story, this is my story. I'm choosing to do this. It's my body, my story, Fuck you other things. And I get that. I totally understand the impulse for it to be like get your fucking opinion out of my face.
Here.
This is what I'm doing and it's my Instagram and I'm choosing right. But but and so we had a whole therapy session about this where, you know, it was interesting because the therapist asked Jenny how it went, and then very quickly after said, and Jason, how do you feel about this? And I was like, thank you for asking. I actually do have some feelings and Jenny was like, what the fuck, Like this is my thing. And so that's where we will butt heads some times, and it's like, no,
we can have feelings. I can do something that I feel is mine, you know, But I have to remember that Jenny can have a reaction to it, she can have feelings about it, and that doesn't take away from my feelings about it. We just need to be respectful and understand that we can each have feelings about it, even something that is ostensibly very personal and very like this is my shit. Fuck you for having a feeling
about it. And that's where we get in trouble. That's where the competitiveness happens more than any other place.
But why would I would say just to pat us on the back, we are the best in terms of Jason's sobriety. That's the one place like I've never been like I have feelings about this, I want to talk about this, like, I'm not for being so quick codefident. I'm in no way enmeshed in his sobriety, whether he's sober or not sober or when he was getting sober. That was really that has been Jason's journey entirely.
That's very true. That is true.
That is true when you bring that up, because I agree with that, Like, you never have been like that.
No, I was never like were you drinking or should you drink? Should you not? I don't know why. I can't tell you why. But for whatever reason.
You didn't seem to care about whether or not he was going to deal with the problem.
Yeah, yeah, he was gonna deal with it. And if he was going to drink. You were kind of fine with that too.
I was like, this is your journey, not my journey. No, you should absolutely pat yourself on the back. That is totally fun.
Oh, I don't know, I don't think I should pat myself on the back because honestly, like, it wasn't like I tried to do that. It's just right well, whatever reason, we don't, that's not been a struggle for us that that particular.
I also think the fact that you weren't aware of it, like you told me, right, but even that, like in other words, you weren't invested in me getting sober to begin with, because my alcoholism might not they totally, but you're not even a little bit. I mean, I think you are to it in a healthy place about it like you should be. I think you should be. I'd be upset if you weren't.
I don't worry about you the way that I feel like a lot of people who are with the sober person maybe like are concerned.
You know, I don't. I don't see people pouring.
Drinks and be like, oh God, because you're gonna have a drink, you know, somebody can offer him a drink.
I don't. I don't know why, but.
Yeah, right, no, I hear you. Okay. Well, on that note, I think this concludes our session. I mean, I think you guys should.
Do you have some parting words for couples out there or people that are looking for long term relationships? What would you say would if you had to give a piece of advice to people that were embarking on marriage.
What would your one piece of advice be for each of you to get it?
I would say, honestly, to be able to listen, you know, to really listen and not hear what that person saying as about you or a criticism view. When somebody's talking, they're talking about themselves, they're not talking about you, and that it is so hard to keep your ego and yourself out of it, but to be But I think like the biggest gift you can give somebody is to just listen to them and not personalize it.
Even when they're telling you you're a piece of shit, it's still about them, it's still about them. Still always good advice, that's good advice, And that's an unactualized person who's usually doing that.
Yes, and they're telling you, I feel like shit. I feel hopeless, helpless and out.
Of control, scared or insecure or unsure of the relationship healthy. Okay, y well, I think in celebration of this time together, you guys should either do anal tonight yes, or do it this afternoon?
How about right now?
I don't think this is an appropriate place for that.
Why there's no pillows right It.
Will make you feel like you're at home.
Could be fun for you. I'll fuck it.
Thank you guys for being here, Thanks for sharing.
Thank you Chelsea.
Okay, so you can check out Jenny Mullen substack The Best Friend Experience and her new side hustle The Shirts Off My Back, where you can buy fabulous vintage clothes.
And you can also check.
Out Jenny and Jason co hosting Dinner in a Movie on TBS. Okay, So upcoming shows that I have you, guys, I will be all over Maine, Charlotte, North Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina.
I'm coming to Texas. I'm coming to Saint Louis and Kansas.
City, and then I will be in Las Vegas performing at the Chelsea Theater inside the Cosmopolitan Hotel. My first three dates in Vegas are September first, Labor Day weekend, and then November two and November thirtieth.
I'm coming to.
Brooklyn, New York at the King's Theater on November eighth, and I have tickets on sale throughout the end of the year. In December, So if you're in a city like Philadelphia or Bethlehem or San Diego or New Orleans or Omaha, check Chelseahandler dot com for tickets.
Okay, if you'd like advice from Chelsea, shoot us an email at Dear Chelsea podcast at gmail dot com and be sure to include your phone number.
Dear Chelsea is edited and engineered by Brad
Dickert executive producer Catherine Law and be sure to check out our merch at Chelseahandler dot com