You know, I've been reflecting on my past relationship. I've been thinking about all the challenges I faced and despite my desire for a stable, fulfilling partnership, I find myself like repeating patterns that have led to pain and failure. I've been married four times and 46 now and each marriage ended in divorce. In my first marriage, I experienced physical abuse,
and in my third emotional abuse. My second and fourth husbands, they were good men, for my deeply respected and yet I still betrayed their trust through infidelity. I ended all my marriages by cheating on my husbands. I was not happy in my sexual life with any of them until my current relationship, which is with a married man who became my affair three and a half years ago when I decided to quit my fourth marriage.
Now he is on the way out of his marriage and it kind of gets serious between us. And I feel that I start to create problems for us because as I understand myself, I hear to make this relationship serious because I'm afraid that I will step into the same pattern as I had before. Despite my longing for a life partner, I question really my ability to maintain a healthy and stable relationship and I question why I end up all my relationships before by cheating.
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I also wanted to be able to share with you the follow-ups to the session. So often people ask me what happened to them. Did they stay together? Did they have the kid? Did they work it through? This allows me to share with you because I actually do know and get notices from the people. And then thirdly, for any of you for whom this matters, this is the way for you to get an ad-free listening of a session, the way that it really happens in the office.
So I want to offer any of you a 20% discount on the annual membership on my Apple subscription office hours with the Stair Pirell. I've realized that this is a pattern. Like maybe already when it was a second marriage because it always started the same and it continued the same with different, totally different men. What do you mean by it started the same? I mean started nicely bright and with feelings and like every time I was hoping that yes, that's the Mr. Right.
Looking back, I understand that I was choosing my next man as a contradiction to the previous one because the previous one didn't happen to be happy marriage. And it's really hard to say, but I feel I was always looking for love, the love which would give me. I feel that I don't have to fight for it or that I don't have to prove I'm good enough to be loved. My childhood was not easy. My mother was sick with cancer, all my childhood and my dad was always working. I was alone.
I had lots of hours every day entertaining myself and I escaped home when I was 18 so I ran away basically because I had more restrictions and things which were forbidden at home than those things which were allowed to do. So I really wanted freedom, but I didn't go free so I ended up in the relationship with a man who was older than me and basically I was going from one relationship to another.
And I started of course to question like is it something I'm desperately looking for and cannot find does it exist? What I'm looking for at all, something is wrong with me that I do not manage to go for like to search properly or I don't know how shall I say it. Like where am I failing and why can't I just see that it's not going to work within like a short period of time. Why do I dedicate years for such relationships, why do I go for marriage and why I choose going for a fair to end it up.
So it feels like I can't actually go and say okay let's divorce, it's not working or let's break up. So I'm making myself a bad guy at the end. So you find Mr. Wright but you become Mrs. Not Wright. Yeah, looks like it. And what comes first, extricating yourself through the affairs or deciding that you want to end and then finding the best sure bet to do so.
I think first I decide that it's going to end. Yes. And I think that for me I was catching myself on the thought that if I actually can look at another man it means that my feelings are over. Oh really. Do the lovers become your next husband's? No. So the lovers are just exit strategies. Yes. So it was always a very short term. Yes. So except for this last one. Yes, this last one is very special. Yes.
But you are basically if I understood you well saying to me as we now have a clear slate to be with each other. I am so afraid that I'm going to mess it up. Yes. That I would rather he not be available. Yes. Me choosing this relationship which I have now. I was very conscious when I was going for it. So basically I opened computer and I didn't know that such sites exist.
I was on the website for married people. So I really didn't know. And I just googled website for married people for sex or something. I don't remember how I did it. It suddenly appeared and I was shocked how many people are there. Married people looking for affairs. I spent just two days on that website because I became overwhelmed of the attention and amount of messages I was receiving. And on the day when I was already like on the way out, I just scrolled down and stopped and that was it.
I didn't have sex with my husband for three years before actually I went for this. And when I realized that okay, I just need to figure out E.M.F. Freigit like something is wrong with me. And I thought that I don't want to go find someone who is not married because it made me cause troubles for me and that it's better on the safe side that we both have married. So that was the idea which I had that in my head.
It started like very symmetrical. So we both wanted the same. And it was an escape for both of us. I have a very sick child. My second daughter is a handicapped child and my relationship at home was difficult despite of the fact that my ex husband is a very nice man. But we just didn't work between us. We were not talking almost at all. And as I mentioned, we didn't have any sexual life for years.
And it was approximately the same situation in his side. So when we were meeting each other once per week or once per two weeks, we just had a very great time escaping. Then in some months it started. So we started to establish feelings for each other and it became more and more serious. And that was very first long affair for both of us. I think we both somehow tried to fight this because I had my fears, he had his fears.
There where we are now, so it feels that it can become something. But I have this fear inside me that am I certain that this is going to work or is it going to fail again? Is it that or do you have it? I was waiting to see how you're going to finish the sentence because the four marriages, the constant factor is you. They may be very, four very different men, but there's four times the same woman.
And you probably can begin to identify what are some of the things that happen to you when in the relationships. I don't know how long they last. I don't know what happens when you check out, when you give up, when you start to feel like I have to escape, like you left and escaped home.
When you start to feel that you are talking to these men and experiencing them like you experienced your father, when you start to think, you know, will this succeed? You have no idea. You're right to think, I'm not sure of anything. You shouldn't be. But you have questions about, what's it with me? I mean, you don't seem to have a challenge finding people.
But every time you find yourself running and balding. That's probably the first question for me. Because what you're asking me is, what's inside of me that's driving me? Is there something broken? Is there something that I'm not aware of? Is there something I should watch out for? Because I'm my worst enemy at this point. Yes. I undermine myself. I could go on. I could do six, seven, eight. But it's not like I don't pay a price.
And I do meet and I do fall in love and I do go into Lala Land and I do marry every one of them. And of course they all marry me too. And I don't know what they think when I tell them about the previous ones. But every single one of them thinks that maybe they'll be different or I'll be different with them. And so everybody is in magical thinking land. There's a lot of fiction here. And now there's someone that you care about deeply who's leaving his family to be with you.
And you cannot say, I don't want him to destroy all of that for me if it's going to be another short term investment. We have to take a brief break. So stay with us. And let's see where this goes. Support for Weshud we begin comes from Babel. They say that immersion is a wonderful way to learn a new language. But if you and everyone you know only speaks English, immersion might not be the viable option for you.
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Those solaray's Paramanopause is not intended to address every concern mentioned here. It provides powerful support for this stage. Find out how it can help you at their website. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. So, what do you know? What do you know about your experience? Not so much about what you do. The affairs is the strategy. The affairs is the symptom. The affairs is not the cause.
What happens to you in those attachments that you form and in the way that you need to sever them very abruptly? I never had many relationships. These four relationships, they have been long, all of them. They took me years. So, it's been five, seven, five, and five. So, I've been really trying to save all of them despite of the fact that usually in approximately one or two years, it would be already obvious. It's not going to work. And when you see, it's not going to work.
Or even when you see, I'm looking for love. You're looking for what? What's the fantasy that every single one of these men is going to what? Rescue you from what? I don't think I actually was looking for rescue, but I think I was looking for freedom. Looking at all them for. They actually put me in prison, but in another type.
So, the first one was really dominating. Dominating badly, like he was eight years older and I was 18. I was trying to change me by all means. Like, change me what my mother made of me and change into something else. But I don't think I really knew who I am because I was not allowed to say, no, I was not allowed to say I don't want to do this or that. I was punished, I was bitten. I wasn't used to actually express my desires.
I'm not sure that I actually knew what my desires are. I was used to do what I was told to. And that's why this first relationship I felt even comfortable in it. Like, because, yeah, it was another person who was saying to me what I should do. Like you dad had done. No, my mom, my mom, my father was working a lot. He is actually a great person and I was, but I didn't know him really when I was a child. So, we found each other much late in my life when my mom died.
And we started to talk more and now we are quite close. But during my childhood, I didn't even remember him and not very long time ago, I asked him, like, where have you been? Like, why don't you remember you? And he said, well, yeah, he traveled a lot. He was working, basically constantly working. And my mom, she was dealing with cancer and with two children. And your mom is the one that put the restrictions.
Yes. So, every time I met a man, I thought I would finally experience freedom, but every time I found myself back in another version of the prison that was familiar to me, in which somebody dictates to me either through soft power, either through overt power, either through being a perpetrator, either through being a victim.
Exactly. Because if I take my last marriage, then my ex-husband became, basically, my teenage child. So, he was a very nice person, but he didn't manage to take care of himself really while we were together. And I had him. I had two my children, where my youngest one is a handicapped child, and he's sent from the first marriage.
The first wife died of cancer as well. And so I got suddenly many kids whom I had to take care of and I've been constantly working, I've been arranging activities for children by clothing for everyone, including my husband, ordering hairdresser visits for him as well. And then I realized that that's not life. I remember I came home after work late, and he was very good at cooking, so he loved taking care of kids and making food.
So I felt we switched the roles, and I stopped feeling myself as a woman, and maybe that's why our sex life stopped as well, because you cannot have sex with your son, basically. And that's a horrible, terrible, terrible feeling, and I remember I was on the couch in front of the TV, and I thought, okay, and that's it. So this is how my life is going to be, and I really loved all my life despite of everything that happened to me, all the challenges I had.
And I just wanted so much to at least allow myself to think, can it be different? But interestingly, you come to me asking me, why do I cheat repeatedly? Why do I leave my marriages with the affairs? Or why do I resort to affairs? Period, and then why do I resort to affairs as a marital escape? And I have another question.
I mean, it's actually quite obvious to me, and that doesn't mean it's true, but that's the thought that came to me, that if in every marriage you find yourself either the mother or the daughter, then leaving with an affair is leaving as a woman. Ah, that's so beautiful, is that? Now you suddenly made me not feeling guilty.
But my good is not about cleansing your conscience. My hope is to help you make sense. If there is a question, it is, why do I find myself continuously, hoping to leave the relationship I had with my mom, but actually recreating it in all its glory, in multiple colors? That's the question. The fact that I use sex and infidelity to leave, because it's actually more sex than anything else, is because once I become sexual, I feel free.
Once I am sexual, I am not in a child role, either restricted, beaten up, abused, clamored, and I'm not in a motherly role, because as a mom, I'm also not having sex. So it takes the form of the affairs, and your partners will experience it as such. But if you ask, what is the meaning? Why is this my strategy? Why don't I leave, simply saying, I want out, because I don't feel free enough to leave, so basically they end up saying, we're gone.
I mean, I am the one instigating it, but they're participating. And I leave, through the use of sex, because sex represents for me, being a woman, another child or a mom, and being free, even if it's short term. It makes sense. The real question is, why am I trapped in constantly putting myself with the same kind of people? They may be different in color, race, religion, language, etc. But the relationship I develop with each and every one of them always lands me in the same spot.
That's the question. Yeah. The question is about how do I enter, not how do I exist? What do you think of this? I think it's very, very true. You're absolutely right. In two marriages, I felt myself as a daughter, and in other two marriages, I felt myself as a mother. They all started that I felt myself as a woman, but when we moved together, so the situation started to change. But the question which remains is, was it me who influenced those men to become other, either children or my fathers?
Or it was something what I didn't saw in the beginning of the relationship. This relationship, which I have now, it hasn't been six months or one year, it has been three and a half years, when usually all my previous relationships would end, basically, almost. I've been really learning myself to, in the last two years, trying to work on my traumas, my childhood traumas, and such, I worked with therapies and spent time on learning what do I really like?
And what gives me pleasure, really trying to meet myself, because I felt that I've been trying to please everyone in my life. First, I tried to please my parents, then my husbands, my employers, and this relationship I don't have to. So we are in a very, quite amazing partnership, and that feels very good. And this is something that I'm so afraid to destroy by some move, which I will not even understand. So, Chess, that's a good question. What's your fantasy of the fatal blow?
It has always been a moment when feelings started to get weaker with everyone. And I cannot say what exactly happened, which brought me to the point that feelings started to fade away. It fades from what to what? I start stopping loving you. And I feel what instead? Ampitude, irritation. I want to isolate myself, to be on my own, to have my own space, to not be around. But very often, I, first, what I stop wanting is physical connection, physical, like sex, yes.
And what do you think that represents? I don't know, help me please. How old were you when your mom died? I was 30. 30? 30, 30. So she has been sick for 25 years, basically. So she had some remissions, but can't so it would come back. And like three times, I think, it has been three rounds. And what was the soundtrack that would go in your head when you would think of her? You are so sad, you are so angry, you are so grey, you never smile, you never want to celebrate a birthday.
You are never happy about Christmas or New Year's Eve. You never want to have presents, you never want me to be around. You like my friends more than me. You call them nice names and you never call me that. So I can continue. Keep going. Keep going. And I feel. I feel sad. I feel so sorry for small me because I understand that she had a very tough life, most of her life. Like many years of terrible sickness and to have into children to raise.
And we didn't leave in a very easy environment that time. Because I was 13 when the Soviet Union collapsed and we had no food for a period of time. So it was long use and just to get food home, that was a big problem. So and the sense has been through a lot. But I feel that it damaged me. I didn't learn how the love looks like. Really, I haven't seen that between her and my father. And I didn't experience how the love looks like between a parent and a child either.
And when you start to distance and to remove yourself and to shut down sexually and to withhold your own affections. What precipitates it? What inside of you predisposes you to that kind of love? Well, I'm, I guess I'm looking for calmness, like to be in my own world and to be safe. Like when I'm with myself, I'm safe. What is it that you notice a year into your marriages that is giving you the cue? Time to withdraw, time to cut off, time to shut down sexually. Disappointments?
Okay, that's what it is. One disappointment after another disappointment after another, I always give chances, hopes and especially in the last one, I learned to speak out. And talk about things which I find difficult or I don't like or I would like to have a different. But I believe I always had a, had hopes which may be not always have been realistic. Tell me more. Because the person who doesn't know what love is learns love from where, from books, movies.
And all that is artificial, somebody made it up. And then when you meet real people, you maybe want them to be that character. You see some features in them, but then real life happens and you start getting disappointed because the person is not as you imagined it from the very beginning. So that's the rescue. The rescue is you will pick me up and drop me into perfect love land. Without any boo-bos, no frictions, no fractures, never disappointment.
I'll give you everything I have and you'll transport me to this haven. Where I am cherished and adored and desired and made to feel valued. And when you start to become clear that that's not going to happen, I basically raise myself and off I go. Yeah. We are in the midst of our session and there is still so much to talk about. We need to take a brief break, so stay with us. Support for Why Should We Begin Comes From Shopify?
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The platform makes it easier than ever to sell everywhere. More than 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US turns to Shopify to power their growth. See why for yourself today. Sign up for one dollar per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Esther. Go to Shopify.com slash Esther now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash Esther. Support for Why Should We Begin Comes From Green Light? Some aspects of parenthood get simpler over time.
But other things become more complicated like talking about money with your kids. Green light is a debit card and money app for families. Parents can send money to their kids while keeping an eye on their spending and saving. Jesse, you use green light with your daughters, don't you? I do. I never ever have cash at home. Ever. And so this is a way to not have to go to the bank but can still give them an allowance.
It also does a cool feature which they can decide how much money goes into their spending account and how much they want to save. And there's even a way to put money aside to donate to charity. So it's a great way to have conversations around money. Millions of parents and kids are learning about money on green light. Sign up for green light today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com slash Esther. That's greenlight.com slash Esther to try green light for free.
Greenlight.com slash Esther. Look, Bumble knows you're exhausted by dating. All the must not take yourself too seriously and six ones and that matters. And what do I even say other than, hey, well, that's why they're introducing an all new Bumble. With exciting features to make compatibility easier, starting the chat better and dating safer. They've changed so you don't have to download the new Bumble now. I start by withdrawing sexually.
Why? Besides the fact that I have a sense I'm the girl or I'm the parent. I would hold sex because I see it as a currency for love. It's not just I deprive myself of my own pleasure on anything. It's simply you don't deserve this and I'm not giving you squat. Fuck you. You're not there for me and I don't give you because even though I like it and I enjoy it, in the context of marriage it's part of my little duty. It's the thing I do when I'm nice. That sounds very sad. That sex is a duty.
Well, not always. But it means that I do the things I do to be nice. You tell me if I'm thinking out loud and I may be off. But I'm watching you rise while I talk. I don't think I ever punished any of them with saying no if I'd really wanted. But I didn't want any more. But I said what? No, no. I'm very clear. The wanting goes the moment you start to withdraw. It's the alarm system. It's the place where I know that I'm open, that I give myself to you, that I invite you in.
And when I experience my disappointments, it's the first thing that closes up. But does it mean that I actually punished them with that? And that was in my power that I can give myself to somebody else. You tell me, you don't experience it as punishing. You're experiencing it. You're experiencing it more as lack of connection and self-protection. They may experience it as punishing. But for you, that's not the verb that resonates. No, that's true. I think it's more the feeling of you hurt me.
I protect myself. I protect myself by not wanting to be touched by you. Stay away. Don't come close. Is that resonate? Yes. That was surely an escape. This is how I named it for myself as well. I never had a fair, it's well for a very long time. So usually it would take months. And then I'm off out to the marriage. But when this last affair started, so that was, I called it an escape. Do your husbands know them? Do they know of the affairs? No. They don't know.
So one day you come and you just say, I want out? Basically, yes. Yes. After I did that, then I had enough energy or power inside me to say that, yes, now it's over. And then what would happen? They would say, ye ne, they would fight. They would hope to convince you to stay. They would say, go ahead. Most of them were trying to convince me to try more and stay and work on the marriage and such.
But usually it would be already like a couple of years after I started to express my disappointments or needs in something what they were not giving me. And I was trying, actually I was asking, let's work on it. And none of them would do that. And then we come to the point like in two years time that I'm saying, okay, it's over. And then they are willing actually to start doing something. And, but for me, when it's done, it's done already. So this is kind of no return point.
And especially if basically cheated already, I went for an affair. So for me, it's a no go for coming back because mostly because that I'm going for an affair already when it's totally empty. Right. I mean, I'm on my way out and I need something to strengthen me. So I'm not completely alone. So I have someone else who really is with me, even if it's just for the transition. And those are exit strategies to call them affairs. It's just a means to an end. Yeah.
And they may last for a couple of months afterwards and then that's it. They did their job. I feel empowered. I feel like they have a man by my side. I am not alone. And I basically accomplished my mission. And I escape. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To get out of there as fast as I can. To go where? To go for another round one.
Yes. With the same magical thinking, with the same fantasy of what romantic love should basically protect me from ever feeling alone, ever feeling disappointed, ever feeling needy or unmet, ever feeling those longings that I had my whole life. You get to forget something once, maybe twice by the third time, some very old feelings begin to come back up. And it starts to feel so familiar. And it's a kind of an emotional desert in which we are tied by what? By dependency? By need? By caretaking?
By duty? By responsibility? Yeah. That was a lot of. All words you used for a moment, you. And it's quite fantastic how scotch-free your father is. He's basically just seen as the man who worked. He's untouched. I think he was the one who actually knew what he wants, how he wants it, and how to live a good life. But he left her with the two children and is not held accountable.
He was providing the family. That was kind of normal, you know, that time in that country, it was a usual thing that man worked. He gave in money to the wife and going back to work. And women would be taking care of everything like children and household. My mother, she had her own traumas, her own childhood, her own issues, her troubles with her mother. I really don't know why she was coping with staying alone for long periods of time and being seeking and taking care of us. I mean, my sister.
I never saw them close. I never saw them loving. I never saw them like... I don't remember us sitting around the table and talking with each other, even. So it was a cool home. Did you see that your friends home? Oh yes. And we were often visiting each other and I was always... So I don't know if the word jealous is right to use in this particular circumstances. I really like... I was admiring how her parents were looking at each other.
And you know what's interesting here? Father, he was a pilot. My current boyfriend. He is a pilot too and he even reminds me a little bit how my friends father looked like. And what does that mean for you? I'm always happy when I think about it because that home... maybe that was the only real life, not books and not movies, but actually a real relationship, which is so where the love was so obvious.
Love for children, how they loved their daughters, and how they expressed their love, how they loved, how they celebrated all the holidays, and that was something what they definitely desired for myself. How are you with your daughters? Oh, I love them very much. I love them very much, but they do not control them. Well, the youngest one, she's a handicapped, so she's in like 50% home and 50% in the special institution. And she doesn't talk and it's not much of such communication with her.
But my oldest one, she's 19 and she's moving out this summer. I love her very much of course, and I've been very different with her comparing to how my mother was with me. And how has it been for her to travel these multiple married units? She is a daughter of my second husband. She has got to travel, I guess, because of that, especially because of my third husband, the father of my second daughter, because that relationship was extremely difficult.
But my first marriage, she was already a teenager when it happened, and it was easier, I guess, for me. I was always open with her. I don't know, but I've never been afraid of showing my feelings to her and explaining her things. And it can be that you will have to work with a therapist.
I'll leave it on as well. But you're saying I have been trying with the therapist to address how my relationship with my mother and the emotional desert that I felt I was living in has accompanied me in the course of my life, how it completely created idealistic expectations for me, in what love is. In a very childlike way that love should be a permanent state of enthusiasm, that it should have no ripples and no cracks.
And that in a way didn't prepare me, except for knowing how to live. I don't know much what to do when I have disappointments, when I'm sad, when I'm hurt. And it's not that I don't tell the partners, but I don't know how you told and I don't know who you chose to tell it to. So then I realize at one point I'm going to go and then I basically start preparing myself for a year or two, on how to extricate myself from here financially, emotionally, logistically.
And then I basically, the affair is just a fatal blow. I just bring the big gun to make sure that I succeed. And that there is no return possible. I am completely shut down to any of these men. They can talk to me anything they want, nothing enters anymore. I've opened another little window to another guy on the side, but to them husbands, I'm completely done. And now I am with someone and it's been a bit of a different pattern. And so here's the question for me, how do I learn?
Because once we are just us and we've cleared all the families, because it's families that are involved, what will happen to us? As long as there is other people, when he disappoints me, I can also think of it structurally. It's because he's not available, it's because he's flying, it's because we have still divorces to go through, et cetera.
But once it's just him and I, does this put me back in exactly the same situation where I put myself completely at the mercy of everything he says and does to prove our love? And then basically put myself in this most vulnerable place where I am just the recipient of what he will or will not. But still upon me, and that's the structure that needs to shift. As long as there are obstacles, I can kind of rationalize the shortcomings, the disappointments, the letdowns, et cetera.
But once we're just us, I don't want to put him in the same examination because I know he will fail, because everybody does, because nobody's perfect. No man will undo the legacy of your mother. You will. How? I'm not capable of answering that after one hour like this, honestly. What I did think is when they hurt you, the sadness and the anger that come up like a volcano, much of it doesn't belong to them. It belongs to you and her.
And if that rage, which is a combination of sadness and helplessness and anger, erupts inside of you, then in some interesting way she remains in control of your life. You may have left, you may have run five times, four times in marriages and many others, but in effect, she continues to have the control that you so ardently have hoped to escape. Still, even now.
In those moments, I hope so much that I actually already kind of worked through this mother thing connection and managed to cut it at least with forgiveness and to her. But it's the moment when the man that has been identified as the source of love, redemption and repair when he misses. And even when he misses again, that's the moment. But does it mean that it's all my fault that all my marriage is collapsed? No, that's all that.
But you came to ask me about your part. And when you are in them and you're about to leave them, you tell yourself the story as they let you down. They became abusive. They became infantilized. They didn't do their part. They made it impossible for you to tolerate this. When you're with them, you don't think what am I doing? You think what are they doing to me? And how am I reacting to that? When you're with me, you say, this is true, but it sits on a set of expectations.
So I'm basically escaping not them, but I'm escaping my feelings. What's hurting me? Unexpressed expectations are predetermined resentments. When you meet them, you idealize them and you put on them a host of things which they don't even know. And then they fall from grace. How shall I know? That's very... That's very... That's very... I don't know. I wish I could tell you everything like that after an hour. But I can't. I would be saying just generalities and that would be fair to you.
So here's a perfect example of a conversation that will end with a frustration. So you want to know, is it different? This is the moment you can make it different. You know, it's interesting because I kind of felt. It was a moment I felt so much lighter. And now I feel again like, welcome to life. Yes, exactly. You think that the heaviness is a disappointment. And it doesn't feel good, but it's not by definition a tear. This was an Asteria calling.
A one-time intervention phone call reported remotely from two points somewhere in the world. If you have a question you'd like to explore with Asteria, could be answered in a 40 or 50 minute phone call. Send a voice message and Asteria might just call you. Send your question to producer at esteraparell.com Where should we begin with esteraparell is produced by magnificent noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with New York Magazine and the Cut.
Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destry Sibli, Sabrina Farhi, Kristen Muller, and Julian Hanne. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are esteraparell and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, and Jack Saul.