Tiny Betrayals

time as if it's infinite like sand. And whether you are partnered with or without children, or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you for all family structures. We're here to take a time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim our time. We've been talking about this for a while, me together to not just be our professional personas, but really talking about why it's so hard for women to treat their time as if it's finite. And so today

we're gonna be talking about all of that. We're gonna be talking about burnout, We're gonna be talking about how it starts with really, really small things. Like blueberries that are much bigger things. As a mediator, one of the first things we're taught add is that the presenting problem is never the real problem. So today we're gonna be

unpacking the presenting problem, which is tiny betrayals. And so I wanted to start with us telling our stories about where we are, what struggles have you had to put fairness into place. So even my tiny betrayal came one month into my motherhood journey. So I'm a physician and I married a man who also had a career. He

works in finance. When we were dating and through the courtship, we just assumed it was never just discussed, but we assumed that it would be equal because he is a progressive man and in many ways a feminist, and so am I. Then we got married and had our daughter, and wow, I couldn't believe it. So I had three months of eternity leave. He had two weeks, and that first month, when I was breastfeeding and just so deep in it, he had to travel. He was in London

for an annual meeting. He had met up with all of his business school classmates one evening after the meeting, and they were talking about being dad's and parents and how great it was, and he was sending me pictures of being in this nightclub. It was just like really cool place, and he was like, you'd love it. Meanwhile, I'm at home. Wait wait, wait, at nightclub, at nightclub when you were postpartum. I would let me, I would die.

He's amazing. But it was a night that they all met up, and I remember thinking, God, that would be a fantastic split frame movie where there's this dad talking on how great it is he's had an infant for a month, is traveling and here I am with a burp cloth and breast milk all over my shirt and trying to just get through another day. So that for me was the huge wake up call I had never even imagined. I mean, the reason your work resonated so deeply with me is because these are things that we

never talk about. We marry men who are feminists, who are progressive, who have all of the shared values that we do. But somehow somewhere in there, once you have children, there is such a split and it's almost the societal pressures. But it was just shocking to me. It continues to shock me when you go into a marriage have certain ideas of how it will be, but then the realities are so so different, often with forces that are not

necessarily in your control. Absolutely, you made me think of my good friend who's a law firm partner, very successful like you as a physician, when she had her first child and a partner meeting her partners said you know, how are you going to be a good mom and still be a law firm partner? And she looked at them and said, well, I don't want to be a good mom. I just want to be a great dad. I love it, And it was so good because that's

what they are. And so you can still be dancing on tables with old friends when your baby is one month old and still be considered a great dad. But we are shamed into oblivion until the day we die. And so I think what we're gonna be unpacking is a lot of the unsaid things that I wish I knew. And I will say that I feel like I want to dedicate this episode to the women that are coming

up behind us. This is, of course a place for you to come stay and hang out with us if you are partnered with children, but this is also a place if you are in any career where you want to eventually have some boundaries one day, regardless of your family structure. So your nightclub is my Blueberries. I want to tell you a story about my tiny betrayal moment that crystallized everything for me. It was right after my

second son, Ben was born ten years ago. Today it's my Blueberries breakdown anniversary, a d D thank you, thank you, where my husband sent me the text that started me on my fair play journey, and that text said I'm surprised you didn't get Blueberries. That text I got from Seth changed the trajectory of my life. So I was postpartum like you were talking about, definitely had burke cloths all around. I had a breast pump and a diaper

bag in the passenger seat in my car. Seth had sent me the I'm surprised you didn't get Blueberries texts out a minute before that as I was getting into my car, So I was now automatically texting and driving through seething resentment. So the breast pump and diaper bagger there. I have gifts for a newborn baby to return in the backseat in my car. I have a client contract in my lap. I'm a lawyer. I had opted out of the traditional workforce. I started my own firm because

I thought flexibility came with entrepreneurship. That's also a fallacy will unpack. But I remember I had a pen in between my legs that day, d D and I remember I was racing to pick up Zach, my older son, he was three at the time from his toddler transition program.

But you know, in America, costs our entire salaries. And I still remember that every time I would hit the brakes as I was texting and driving, as I was starting at the breast pump and diaper bag and all the ship in the back of the car, that this pen would stab me in my vagina. But I remember the thoughts in my head that day where I cannot believe my marriage is ending over being the fulfiller of

my husband's smoothie needs. Like if my marriage is going to end, it was going to be like a dramatic fight in the Caribbean, or I don't know, an affair with an NFL player. But something so cliche as offseason blueberries led me to this place of a reckoning for myself that I did not have the career marriage combo I thought I was going to have, and more importantly, I had become the defaults or as I call, as you know in fair play, the she fault for literally

every single household and domestic task for my family. And that was a surprise. I did not think I was going to be there, and I wonder what was happening to me? Then for me to sob on the side of the road over this text, Gosh, what a poignant story. And I'm sure nearly every woman who is postpartum and partners can relate. You know, biologically, it was postpartum, so there was, of course the hormonal shift happening, but also

you were highly stressed. You had a newborn, you were running to go get another child, and then you have these demands. He did it in a very innocuous way. It was a very simple request, but it was just the straw that broke the camel's back. We are all wired for survival and self preservation. Under periods of stress, we are on high alert and there's a sense of hyper vigilance. So even something small like blueberries can feel

very triggering. It's a normal reaction to an abnormal situation and gosh, I can tell you so many instances where that I have felt the same. You know, knowing the science behind stress doesn't always change your relationship to stress during those moments. Well, that's such an important piece versus awareness knowing that relationship to stress. And then there are other things we have to do. We can't just acknowledge

that we're in stressable situations. And I think over the season, we're going to give people a lot of practical tips and solutions to take agency in your own life. And so I think the other thing I wanted to ask you is what happens when the presenting problem is not the real problem. So I want to say, as a mediator, to get to the real problem, It's something that I've

been taught. I've taken all continuing legal education and mediation and difficult conversations and still a d D. The presenting problem wasn't like, oh wow, I should speak to Seth about the fact that the gender division of labor is showing up in our marriage. It wasn't anything like that. It was just sobbing to myself on the side of the road, blaming myself that I had done something wrong. I didn't connect it to any of these broader issues, and I have the privilege being trained to use my

voice for difficult conversations. So what tools do we have to fight against this? Even I'm saying like someone who should have had all the tools didn't even have one in my toolbag. Then to move forward, my only option I thought at that time was to leave my marriage. It's so interesting because ultimately, regardless of our education or experience,

biology is biology. So when we're not very stressed, we are in resilient mode, governed by the prefrontal cortex, and that has been highly highly developed with your education, organization, planning, memory, things we call executive functions. But under periods of stress, our brains are no longer governed by the prefrontal cortex. They're governed by the amygdala, or the limbig part of

our brain. The amygdala is our powerhouse and it's our emotional center, and during periods of stress, we are governed by the amygdala we often called the amigzilla and the underlying structures around it the lizard brain. It is our primordial reptilian brain that just hasn't changed. So we are no longer cave people running away from a tiger in

the forest, right, we still have that stress response. They are no more tigers, we aren't necessarily living in forests, but we have lots of tigers, metaphorical tigers all around us. When you were driving that day, the blueberry was the tiger. Your stress response was on overdrive and it was the amygdala that was taking over. So even as a Harvard trained mediator, with all of this knowledge and background and incredible ability under periods of duress and stress, we go

right back there to that amygdala. There's many things we can do to help modulate that stress response over time, which we'll talk about. But it's not you. It's your biology. It's not any of us mythology. And when we learned to work with our biology rather than compete against it,

that's when real change can happen. Well, I love that so much because one of the early mediation phrases I learned was you don't want to take actions or mediate through a family when emotions are high and cognition is low. And so I think the beauty of today is Our guest is Matthew Frey, and he had a viral article that was called My wife left Me because I left dishes by the side of the sink, and again, I think that the stress response of seeing that dish there

for the hundredth time. These small things and how we react to them are really what we're talking about today. So we're gonna be talking to Matthew after the break about all of these things, and I cannot wait for you to hear what he has to share. We're so excited to welcome Matthew Frey. Matthew currently works as a relationship coach as well as writes and speaks about marriage and divorce. He followed this path after his wife left him, as he said, because he left dishes by the sink.

His experience forced him to examine what went wrong and how he inadvertently sabotaged his marriage. He recently finished writing his first book that comes out in March, titled This Is How Your Marriage Ends and Adity. I love that title. He recounts the story and all that he's learned so that other people don't make the same mistakes. Hi, Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you

so much for having me. Adda has some great questions for you, but I did want to start off, if you'll let me, this great couple of sentences from the beginning part of your book, which touched me so much. You right, even though I barely touched my wife in the previous two years, the thought of someone else doing so wrecked me. My young son, not yet in kindergarten, would now be raised by a dick bag, or this

dick bag, the guy she was dating. I thought I would no longer have any agency over who gets to look after my son. I imagined a future where he would run off the field after little league games and jump into the arms of his mom, an evil stepdad who would look to everyone else like a beautiful little family, and I'd be some distance away, forcing a polite smile

as if everything were okay, but secretly wishing I were dead. Wow, So that I don't think and encapsulate how much we make short term decisions that end up having long term consequences, And so I would love if you could just start out telling us, Jesus, how did you get there? So that paragraph largely summed it up. I had to figure out the story of my marriage, and I went to work on it, and you put it together one bit at a time, and it took many years, and I'm

still not there. But we're approaching the nine year mark of my marriage ending next April, and um, I still don't know all of it, but I think I have a much closer understanding today. And then as I discovered some of these answers, I realized, Wow, a lot of people don't know this. A lot of just like guys like me out in the world, don't know this. And I thought I discovered a subtle and nuanced explanation for how it happens, which to me, is the most logical

explanation for how half of all marriages can fail. As I read your work, I want to quote you here. You say, I don't think the average guy wearing his college football sweatshirt and drinking canned bud light on a Saturday afternoon while his kids play in the backyard and his wife does all of the work required to keep a household afloat is going to spend much time reading

the Five Love Languages. Can you talk a little bit more about why you're the perfect messenger for this story and how can we reach both men, women and other family structures to do this kind of reflection and work, And why do you think this kind of work is so important to do? During a marriage rather than at the end of a marriage. I think I'm an adequate one.

I sort of average out to be like so many of the guys that are in situations as I was, And when I talked to them, I don't trigger that defensive, resentful feeling that a lot of men report having in their relationships, this notion that their wife's always complaining about him, or like moving the goalposts further or finding some new way to point out how he's failing her or the family. And there's a lot of really really deep, painful feelings

that a lot of men possess about that. And I have those conversations a lot, But when I talked to them, they just don't have that experience because I was in that same situation with them. You know, you talk a lot about judgment. You say that men invest their enter g in one of three ways. They dispute the facts of the story their partner just told, or they agree with the facts but believe their partner is overreacting, or defend their actions by explaining why they did it. In

all three cases, the partners feelings are invalidated. Talk to us a little bit about that. You know, we've all felt it. I mean, as a married woman, I have felt it. Eve writes a lot about this, but from your perspective, can you talk to us a little bit about judgment and the invalidation of feelings? I can try so, right, It was early during the pandemic, and it was when like a lot of restaurants had shut down. It was March, and so a lot of businesses were closed, including restaurants.

And so I had a client who was a real estate guy, and he had a work emergency and he hadn't been able to eat that day, and so he went and got a fish sandwich for lunch. But because none of the vegan restaurant were Hope and him and his wife were vegans, and his wife sent him a text while he was on his afternoon call with me, asking him what he'd had for lunch, just checking in, just being his wife, and he, you know, immediately got

really defensive and he didn't answer her. And he's on the phone with me and he's like, Matt, what do we do? He's like, if I told me the truth, she's gonna get pissed. He's like, because I ate fish. I'm like, why is that a problem? Because we're vegan. I'm like, where are you? Vegan? Goes, well, we have this a goog agreement to be vegan. It's like a

health decision that we made. And he was like spazzing out because his wife was going to get mad at him for eating a fish sandwich, which he perceived to not be a big deal. So his thought process was, you're going to yell at me for eating a fish sandwich. You know that that's crap. That's a gross misunderstanding of the situation A and B. It's like an unfair emotional reaction to the crime committed, which so many men feel this notion of like an overreaction, and then they, you know,

get defensive. It's like I had a work emergency. All the restaurants were closed because of COVID, and he was talking about how he's going to go home and feel his wife's wrath because he ate a fish sandwich. And that's when I had to have a conversation with them about this notion of perspective. And the thing that I said to him is, your wife is not mad at you because you ate fish. It's the same thing I might have said about my wife leaving me because I

left the dish by the saying it's it's nonsense. His wife was upset with them because he broke a promise to be vegan with that was a promise hed and then he didn't even have the decency to like check in with her and be like, hey, here's the situation if I do this, is this like dishonoring the code we have. You hear stories like this all the time, People who cheat on their partners by like watching like two episodes ahead on the Netflix show they're watching together.

Went through these like tiny betrayals that happened all the time, And it's so easy for us to write off having an emotional reaction about it. But betrayal can be betrayal, even when it's about Netflix shows and even when it's about fish sandwiches. And I think it's a really important idea that people can't trust you when you don't keep your promises to them, and it's not really relevant what

the promises. And I think that's a reasonable question for for someone to ask in a marriage, and it's about this is important to that person. I love them, Therefore I'm going to treat it with importance. And it's not a skill. I possessed in my marriage, and I fundamentally didn't know how to calculate for what that betrayal would mean to my marriage over time, done over the course of a twelve year relationship, These tiny trust betrayals they

paper cut you to death, you know. But there's that moment right before that betrayal, right, Like with this fish sandwich story, the guy could have sent his wife a text saying, Hey, there are no restaurants open, I'm gonna bind I'm going to eat this fish sandwich. But he didn't, and then he kind of got himself into a hole. So why do so many people feel like they can't share? Why is it not easy for that particular person to just say, hey, heads up, I want to let you

know what I'm thinking. I mean, why does everyone do this? That's a great question. The guys that I've talked to, there's like a fear of not not literally, they resent that they have to be afraid of it, right. They believe they won't be allowed and they don't ask permission to do an adult thing that they should be allowed to do, and so they just do in like this like sneaky way, calculating that the thing isn't harmful. I

don't know where that comes from. I'm assuming the condition exists because of a fundamental lack of trust and respect in the relationship, which is sort of the thing I'm advocating in the first place, because this is exactly the sort of decision making that produces the lack of trust and intimacy in a relationship where two people are going to respect one another and not feel any sort of anxiety about Hey, if I were to do this, how

would it make you feel? Because I want to factor that into my decision making process, and that really feel like, foundationally needs to be a condition in a relationship designed to go to the distance. But many relationships aren't. They have these tiny secrets that the people that have them calculate it's not a relationship breaking secret, and the idea eludes them that having the secret in the first place is what breaks the relationships slowly over time. What I

love about that is it's like the what's the big deal? Right? And and it's so invalidating to hear that. One of the ways it came out when I spoke to men who are married to women. So many men said to me, well, I'm not sure I can get on board with your fair play system and the hundred cards because my wife does so many unnecessary things and it was so invalidating to hear that, and I would get triggered on behalf of these women be like, what's unecessary? Okay, let's meeting

your children? Is that unnecessary? I think fun and playing is that unnecessary? What about hard questions? And I would literally just start attacking. And I apologize to the early interviews I had because if you're out there listening, I was highly triggered by what you were saying. But ultimately,

fair play is a love letter to men. Your fundamental distillation, Matthew that this is not about bringing home the wrong type of mustard or forgetting to pick up a glue stick, but this idea that fundamentally this is about accountability and trust as the foundations of good strong non Cortisol as a deity would say, relationships. You know, this reminds me of a quote you have written about this. You say, most guys don't know that she's not fighting about the glass, right,

You talk about the dishwasher and the glass. Eve talks about blueberries, So she's not actually fighting about the glass. She's fighting for acknowledgement, respect, validation, and his love. And I love that formula that you present cared for equals and this idea that it's like these very little things that what when the partner, when the woman says, hey, this is what it means to feel cared for. It's these small things that really add up, and when those

promises are not met, that's when the problem arises. You'd use a big word like betrayal, which to me, I don't think of not putting a glass in the dishwasher as quote unquote a betrayal, but over time, you know, it sure as hell feels like it when it's happening, though it doesn't necessarily match up that small event and

those big feelings of what betrayal means. I didn't mention it in the book at all, but I found myself using this term a lot, This notion of leaving breadcrumbs, like leaving evidence that you don't respect and consider your romantic partner. And can I be mindful of the evidence that I leave that she's not loved, cared for, considered, respected, all these things? And I talked about it in that way, this notion of let's not concern ourselves with whether someone

should or shouldn't be hurt by something. Let's not get caught up in an intellectual debate about whether something is harmful or not harmful. If somebody's reporting pain because something happened, regardless of what it is, can you accept responsibility for not leaving evidence that you're not going to be there

to support and or protect. I think the mission in order to have healthy, sustainable relationships that, regardless of my thoughts or my feelings and how closely they mirror yours, I am going to accept responsibility for not leaving evidence or leaving anything that will hurt you. And the work is deciding ahead of time you're not going to allow

anything to inadvertently harm that people you care about. Can you talk to us a little bit about this concept which we've loosely already discussed, but really pin it down, accidental sexism. I don't know if I'm going to take credit for for coining necessarily, but yeah, I do use it, and that's because the word sexist is really ugly to me. It sounds like other is ms that I don't want to be associated with. And I was really defensive about this notion of being sexist. It's like, I don't think

men are better than women, and I never have. My mom was a single mom for a long time and she did an enormous amount. But it turns out when you have ideas in your head about men do things this way and women do things this way, and if either does things in a way that my brain doesn't calculate to be normal or correct, that it's weird or wrong.

And you know that shows up in a million ways and male identity, and I think most significantly in the context of this conversation have shared domestic responsibility, everything related to the second shift, emotional labor, invisible work, parenting, and undoubtedly my greatest failing was coming home and just putting my hands up waiting for my wife to tell me what to do all the time. Right, you were so good at this. I thought you are amazing at this.

I'll just wait and you can just be the board of directors aroun on here and let me know what needs done next. And I feel really awful about that. And now I see it. It's so obvious to me the people that check out of the process either of shared domestic responsibility in the context of logistics at home or the parenting process. And I'll call that accident on

a sexism. We were talking earlier about the idea of the executive brain, that prefrontal cortex, which is the frontal lobe that governs organization, planning, memory, all of these things which are highly skilled in the workplace. But why is it that when men walk in the door of their home all of those skills that have been so highly refined for decades and decades in the workplace just fall to the side. I think some of it is probably laziness. Some of it is I'm tired and stressed. I had

a long day of work. I'm coming home and I'm going to do with my father and my grandfather and all my best friends. Dad's, my uncle's and everyone else did and that's what you do when you come my I really do think this is changing. It's just what we saw. I don't know how to say it better than that. As you're talking, it's kind of bringing up for me, is this sense of blaming the individual, But instead it's really a systemic issue. We're not talking about

the individual. It's a whole system. It's what your father did, what your uncle's did, what your grandfather did, so how can we shift that on a system wide level. I've thought about this a lot, and one of the ideas, do you remember the DARE program totally? I was like, could I try to involve myself somehow and in some like grassroots program that we tried to make big that got into schools and had age appropriate messaging. Can we start having these conversations sooner? I think it's less about

what we're taughting what we're not taught. If you had the foresight to understand that some of these subtle ideas about emptying a d humidifier or flipping the clean dirty sign on a dishwasher, or eating a fish sandwich when you agree to be vegan with your wife, there are countless tiny examples that any one of them we all calculate to be so benign that there's no way that

should end a marriage. But it's this steady paper cut betrayal and yes, and if we can somehow find a way to get that idea implanted inside the heads of young people prior to forming their long term relationships, and it's just taking more care. I just think we stave off so many things. Thank you, honestly, thank you. I really believe that you leaving a dish by the sink was probably a really good thing for society, even though it was not great for you personally. So thank you

for what you're giving back. I really appreciate that. Thank you. Hi, it's me Eve, and I want to tell you about my latest book, Find Your Unicorn Space. So you're playing fair and have established equity in your home, but now what it's time to find your Unicorn Space. My new book will help you set personal goals, rediscover your interests, and reclaim the creative expression of self that makes you

uniquely you. Find your Unicorn Space is a mix of research space, how to advice, and big picture inspirational thinking. I hope it can show you a clear path to reclaim your permission to be unavailable and manifest your own unicorn space. Find your Unicorn Space is available now wherever books are sold. So every episode of this podcast will be ending with an action item for you. Are listeners that we call a time out. This is really a time for you to focus on yourself and reflect on

what you're hearing today. And we're starting the conversation first with ourselves and then ultimately with our partners and others. So one thing I wanted to ask you that would be really helpful to have through our entire season is a time out journal. So what I'd love for you to do is to go to Target or whatever your big box store is and start to browse browse some

of the journals. I did find a journal that I loved, a d D that I use for my own time out exercises, and the front cover had a radio head lyric on it that said, for a minute there I lost myself. And why I thought that was so important is because we're here to take the space to communally find ourselves again and to tell the stories that we often don't get to tell when we pretend they were

all perfectly productive and perfectly perfect, which we're not. And so I'm excited for you a d D to tell our list and ners what they will be doing this week once they have their journals. You know, as human beings, we all just want to be seen, heard, understood, and loved, and as Matthew taught us, when we are faced with tiny betrayals, we often feel none of those things. So what was your tiny betrayal? How did you not feel seen or not feel heard, not feel understood, and ultimately

not feel loved. How could that have been changed? Write down your reflections, think about what's going on underneath the surface of that tiny betrayal, that huge, big thing that you're trying to unpack, And think a little bit more about your tiny betrayal and what the huge ramifications of it are and what it actually means. Because we know, in truth there's no such thing as a tiny betrayal, And I will add to the d D and say, in truth, there's no such thing as tiny issues around marriage,

unpaid labor, women doing more in the home time. And so we'll keep unpacking these things throughout the season. But the most important thing to recognize is that if it feels tiny to you, it's probably because somebody shamed you to make it feel that way, or because society has shamed you to not care about these issues, or to feel that these shouldn't matter, or that you should be

able to be perfectly perfect. And we're not, and we're going to be here to unpack the fact that nothing, nothing about what we're talking about this season is tiny. Thanks so much for listening, Thank you Eve for all your wisdom. Next week we're going to dive a little bit deeper into time, what it means, what it stands for, and how we can change it to serve us better. We hope you join us. Thank you for listening to Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine.

I'm Vrodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social media at ev Rodsky and learn more about our work at fair Play Life. And I'm Dr Addi Narukar, a Harvard physician with a specialty and stressed resilience, burnout, and mental health. Follow me on social media at Dr add Nerucar and find out more about my work at dor add dot com. That's d R A d I t I dot com. Our Hello Sunshine team is Amanda farrand

Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker. Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett, and Jessica Krinschitch. We hope you all love taking a much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.