This is pod Populi Podcast for the People, the Great Love Debate. It's the Great Love Debate, the Great Love Debate. It's a Great Love Tobate. Hi again, Everyone's Brian Howie. Welcome to the Great Love Debate, the world's number one dating and relation podcast since twenty fifteen. I am back here in the very fine studios of pod Populi Podcast for the People. I
am at the one in Scottsdale, Arizona. And normally I say, oh, it's a big scots dazzle today, but I'm a little behind, a little tired, and I want to get into something a little, a little deeper, a little more serious today. So two things, this podcast is dropping hours, maybe even a full day later than normal, which I never do. And I already got a bunch of emails on this like where's your
podcast? Are you okay? Which I definitely appreciate. And I feel bad because in eight years of doing this show, I always get it out, whether whatever the time is that we release it. We used to release it on Sundays. Now we do Tuesday mornings, and it comes out, and you guys commit to me each week. I have to commit to you no matter what. And I have recorded this podcast in I don't know a dozen
countries. I recorded it on a phone in a Starbucks in Shanghai, and I recorded in a bar in Melbourne, and in a food court in Thailand, and on a beach in Tel Aviv and a casino in Vegas, everywhere I was no matter what, I made it work because I think it's important. So this podcast is not going to be a travelog, but that's is important. It's important that I get it out and I wanted to get it
right. So it's on a plane, and then another, and then one thing led to another, and so you're getting this podcast minutes hot out of the oven after I actually record it. But it is a bit late, and I hope it does not happen again. No excuses, but this episode is not about me. But it is just me because there's two things that I want to talk about and they're loosely related. So I'm gonna merge them
and we're gonna see where this goes. So let me start with something I saw in the news last week and it bothered me as much as any news story in quite some time, which is saying something because some of our news stories are a big pile of yikes. So let me just read the lead to this story. And I think you're gonna be bothered by this as much as me. And in a way, we're always trying to look at the lighter side and the brighter side of the love dating relationship sphere. But this
is the dark, dark end of the spectrum. And so I'm just gonna read it, and then I'm gonna talk about it, and then I'm gonna get a little bit deeper into what I want to talk about. So, according to penlive dot com, citing a criminal complaint filed by police, the messages between the two allegedly began on May fifth, twenty twenty one, when
Metzker on military training. With Metzker on military training out of town, Roisch allegedly messaged Metzker that she was in another relationship and the new man would be taking over as father of their daughter. I hope, for the child's sake that you do kill yourself, Roisch allegedly wrote. Penlive dot com reported she would be better off not knowing you. She also allegedly informed him that she planned to have sex with a boyfriend on Mother's Day while your daughter calls him
Daddy. Penlive dot com reported on another occasion, Roisch allegedly sent him a video of her having sex with a man after Metzker gave her two hundred dollars, which she told him was too little, according to penlive dot com. And the story goes on and on, so long, awful story short, and this is not the first time we have heard one of these awful stories. He killed himself and so she's charged with aiding suicide and misdemeanor harassment,
which seems really minor in the scheme of things. And this is such a horrific story, But to me, this is also a symptom of where we are as a dating culture and an overall society. People can't just move on, and people have to seek revenge and they have to inflict pain, and there is this culture of dating bullying on the way in and on the way
out, and it's just fucking gross. It's gross, and it starts out as manipulative, and it moves into a need to control a narrative, and then it gets into this really really terrible corner of controlling an outcome and a psyche and a will until we are all just broken. And I hate it. And so I had to think about how much am I a part of this awful cycle. Not nearly to that degree, but just an awful cycle
of what are we doing here? So you know, we've talked talked about a bunch of times on this show about what I perceive to be the fallacy of closure, and about how you really never going to get it, at least not in the way you think. But this story and what I'm talking about, it's not really about wanting closure, because this kind of thing is about not wanting it. It's about keeping something going for some twisted reason. How many of you secretly stalk your exes honestly or wish ill on them.
You're watching what they do, and you're sending bad vibes and all the jujus send out into the world. You're hoping for the very worst for them, and that's the very worst of you. If you want them hurt or sad or even dead, like in this extreme case, you are seriously seriously fucked up and you are dead at least inside, because you can't have it both
ways. You can't move on and you can't find happiness, and you can't be emotionally healthy if you harbor these feelings of resentment and revenge, and you want to still control their lives because the emotions about all this, and when they surround all this, they still control you on the way into the relationship,
while you are in it and while you are out of it. And we have this need to never let anything go, especially the bad, which brings me to why this is like I feel personally about this, and no, I'm not going to say I tortured somebody to that degree or anything like that is personal to me, and it gets into the handling and processing of emotions. Many of you guys watch Succession and I have been, and I
am a big fan. You know, the production value, no show ever looked more expensive, the clothes, the writing, the lines, all of it. And not to give any kind of spoiler alert, but one of the pivotal lines of that show, and it is said by Kendall who referred to him as the himself as the eldest son without actually being the eldest son,
but he said that maybe the poison drips through. Maybe the poison drips through, and the line, as he said it, was in reference to the sins of his father and all of the fathers who passed them along to the sons and the evil and the manipulation and all of it. And the line really struck me because how many of us let the darkness of the past relationships seep into the progress of any current ones. How much damage do we
pay forward personal relationships, family relationships, work relationships. And I've spoken pretty frequently, and I hopefully candidly about my own struggle with what I guess love, giving, receiving, recognizing all of it. And I have always said that because I never trusted the love my parents had for each other despite being married for I don't know fifty plus years, that meant I didn't trust their love for me, which means I didn't trust the entire concept. I want
to know in a nutshell why I never got married. Probably that and this whole show, not this episode, but this entire podcast and tour and brand of the great Love Debate. It's really about that, What is it love? How do I find it? How can I trust it? So you're like, how is this related to the horrific story that I lead with?
And I think it's because the pain and the poison drip through every interaction and every decision and every emotion for pretty much all of this is somehow couched and qualified in how much of that darkness is brought forward into your day and into your daily life. But my parents, does that mean I'm not capable of healthy love because they're not? I mean, I don't know. That seems like a lazy blame gain by me. It's sort of like children of an
alcoholic. Sometimes they drink a ton and sometimes they don't drink at all. Things can go two ways, and you don't always choose your path on anything, but I think you can certainly steer the destination. Path may vary. It could be this security circuitous journey to wherever you want to go. I think you choose your destination what do I want the outcome to be? So
there's this old therapy term I think it is. It's called hugging the cactus, and it means pretty much what it says that you bring the most painful parts of your psyche closer to you, and you confront them for the purpose of feeling them and acknowledging them and hopefully getting past them. And the needles of that cactus have to pierce that wall, no matter how painful that is. You have to pull them tight enough that they can get through that armor
that you have literally or metaphorically surrounded yourself with. So I've spoken before on this podcast about how I need glasses to read, but I don't need them for any other reason. But I wear them all the time. I always have my glasses on. It's like it's like a signature look of mine, even though they're really just progressive reading glasses. But I never take them off. And why do I do that? Because I feel too vulnerable without them.
And as I go through the journey that I think we're all on, I don't want anyone looking too deeply into my soul. And so this thin layer of glass gives me some perverted level of protection, at least in my mind. And another trick that I've used is that though I'm self described introvert, that I tend to lead with passion really overtly. And whether that's in a conversation or in an encounter or in a relationship. It could be a
work thing, could be a girlfriend thing. If I'm a little louder, a little faster, a little deeper, a little harder, if I can control the emotion of the dialogue, then I can control the emotion of the outcome and subsequently the interaction and or the relationship, which, if you think
about it, that is about as unhealthy and manipulative as it gets. And maybe it's a distant, distant cousin of that terrible example of being in this and any awful example you can give, because it's not only wrong, it's not fair. It's not fair to anybody in your life. People deserve the honest you. People deserve true emotions, and they deserve your actual thoughts and
your real feelings. And if everything you are giving is to control a narrative or to determine an outcome, or even to protect a true it is by
its very nature going to be hurtful and mostly to yourself. And I think we all have to recognize that, like from the moment you are trying to get into a relationship and doing everything you can to get them to like you, and moving into during the time that you're actually in a relationship and doing everything you can to get them to appreciate you, to the time the relationship ends and you're trying to process all that comes with that, because in a
way, the relationship ending, it is a bit of a death, and it doesn't matter how or why it ended or the circumstances behind it. This living thing that was the two of you. When it ends that died, your emotions for this person or this situation are no longer what they were, and love may have shifted into rage because they are can be caned emotions, and lust may morph into revel and none of that change is healthy because that
change is all rooted in some sort of pain. The poison has dripped through and you have to be aware of that, and you have to cut it off before it gets somewhere that you can't get back from, go to point of no return, or it takes too many of the best years and the best relationships of your life. These are not easy conversations to have. These are not things you can just bring up over brunch because they're layered in their
nuance and they're manipulative and they're painful. They're not easy emotions to understand. Why do I say these things? Why do I act this way? Why do I feel these feelings towards them or against them? And so I personally, I'm giving myself a little credit here. I've never been one of those people. I've never wished ill upon X's but if anything, I wanted them to find happiness immediately so that I felt no guilt over whatever substandard behavior I
had that led to the relationships ending the demise of it. I'm like, oh, thank god, you found somebody else. You won't be mad at me anymore. That is equally fucked up and incredibly sad. And I blame so much of my own shit on the stuff from my father and my mother, and then if that poison drips through, it's their fault, not mine. That's lazy thinking. It's never really, it's never entirely them. It's
still you, it's still me, because we're not embracing the cactus. You're wearing the glasses, you're controlling the narrative, you're fearing the honest outcome. That's me, and I think that's a lot of you, that's most of us. And that's why I think we have these conversations over and over in all kinds of places, in all kinds of ways, and most of them, most of our episodes here, if this is your first time tuning in,
they're not normally like this. Most of them are fun and we laugh, but sometimes we have to pause and take a harder look, Like let's just hold on a minute and say, is this where this love stuff goes to? That place? That police blotterer story that I read? So I want to take a harder look today, even if it dropped a few hours
late. I think because it matters, like all of it matters. So before the darkness snuffs out the light and takes down the possibilities, and before the blame and the revenge take a tragic turn, I think you just have to take a breath and maybe take a walk and figure out what it is that you are feeling, and figure out what exactly it is and how and why you feel about that. If you feel badly, try to feel better. If you feel good, still try to feel better. And in order
to feel better, I think you have to start by feeling. You've got to feel the pain, the poison, the cactus needles, the past and the present. We are very reluctant to feel or live in the present. I want to look to the future, I want to go to the past. But right here, right now, and again, I am just as
guilty as anybody on this. I hate what that girl did to that guy, and I hate what I believe my parents did or didn't do for me and to me, But I hate that I didn't take the time to acknowledge or process any of it or my own part in it, playing the blame game. You did this, you did this, You deserve this blah blah blah until now recently present. And that's why we do this, this show. We do it, and we have these conversations to process it and to
heal it and to grow from it. And I think to share it because it all starts with feeling it, and once you feel it, you know, I think it all begins because you can put an end to all that was and couldn't be. So thank you for bearing with me on this a little late. You're like, I turned in late for this. Oh that's so sad, I don't think so. I think there's a little bit of hope in all of this when we take a look at ourselves and what we
do and how we do it and how we can do it better. So shoot me an email Great Love Debate at gmail dot com with your own experienced thoughts, opinions, anecdotes, or whatever. Go to Great Love Debate dot com. I think our pickets are finally on for the handful of the store of shows I have been talking about for probably two months now. But most importantly like, share, follow, and please review this podcast. As always, your reviews mean a lot in the podcasting ecosystem. At The Great Love
Debate, we never stopped making love. See you next time. The Great Love Debate. It's the Great Love Debate, the Great Love Debate. It's the Great Love Debate.