In This Relationship What Is "I" And What Is "We"? | Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel

They're a gay couple that moved together from the Dominican Republic to the United States and they've established their base. They found new friends, housing, work, neighborhood, habits. They got the base and now they're in a transition point. They're in an inflection point. One of them wants more freedom, more autonomy, wants to go out and about and play and explore and the other is basically afraid because they find their partner to be irresponsible and not to be trusted. And so we find ourselves in that tension where one person, as is often the case in a relationship, is more afraid of losing the other and the other is more afraid of losing themselves. Listen to this network of projections in this classic episode of Where Should We Begin? What you are about to hear is a classic session of Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel. None of the voices in this series are ongoing patients of Esther Perel's and each episode is a one-time counseling session. For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, names and some identifiable characteristics have been removed, but their voices and their stories are real. This next session briefly describes an instance of domestic violence and may not be appropriate for all listeners. Please take care while listening. I am pretty outgoing and I can be a little loud sometimes. He's much more reserved than I am. The first time that he got in my radar, I was really annoyed because he wouldn't be quiet. They're two men in their late 20s. They both grew up in the Dominican Republic and came together as adults to the United States. We had a very similar upbringing, which is I think one of the reasons why when we first met, we connected so well. They grew up with very little. They grew up with violence, with neglect. We had nothing, literally nothing. So now everything that we have, we've built it up ourselves. And they've built a beautiful home together, a stable relationship, and each of them have quite thriving careers. We have dated more seriously, but very few people, maybe two or three that we've really dated and like spent time with them. And those experiences were fun, but ultimately we decided it wasn't working for the both of us. Sexually, they play with others. They play safe and they play well, but they struggle with a different kind of intimacy. From the beginning of our relationship, we've struggled a lot with friendships. I wouldn't say he's a loner, but he's a very shy, reserved person. And so he has a really hard time opening up to friends and having like a bond with people. Whereas for me, I sought out friendships and I sought a lot from my friendships. I wish that somehow someone could help me to be a little bit less controlling. I would like to be a little bit more relaxed. They held on to each other for dear life. And after 10 years, the togetherness has been secured. Can there be room for the separateness? We both come from families that are quite dysfunctional. And in many ways, we are our parents' parents. Tell me more. Give me a bit of the background. My dad is in the D.R. and my mom is in Florida. My dad is a very smart man who is very manipulative and very, he's always been in a financial place that's not healthy, but he also refuses to do anything about it. And he just relies on me a lot financially and that puts a strain on relationship. Who did you grow up with? My dad. You grew up with your dad in the D.R.? In the D.R., yeah. My parents split when I was 12. My mom is a victim of domestic violence and we witnessed it. With him? Yeah. She picked up everything and she left. And she wanted us to come with her, but my dad twisted things to make it seem like my mom was the villain. So we grew up thinking that she abandoned us and that she didn't want us. And then with time, as an adult, things made a lot more sense. And I just have a hard time letting go of the fact that he, he just played the victim so well that made me believe that he was a victim and that when, objectively, my mom was in many ways a victim to many things. Did you hold him responsible for severing your relationship with your mom for that many years? Yes. She would reach out and he would block? A hundred percent, yeah. And then you thought she was not trying to find you? Correct. And so it was, after all that, it's really difficult for me to just have a good relationship with my dad, even if I tried. And I just have a hard time. You just saw something now. Just, it's just a lot. But you just saw something. Yeah. What did you see? Um, just like going into my parents' bedroom and my dad strangling my mom, basically, like having to see that and obviously freaking out, but not really being able to do anything about it. It was just hard. And so now. Stay with this one, son. At some point he kind of like let her go and settled down because my brother and I had walked in and we were crying, obviously. We were saying like, stop, what's going on? And she like ran to the corner of a room and we were standing at the door and then he stepped into the bathroom and in the door of the bathroom, he like grabbed the Bible and he read like a verse from the Bible and he was trying to find a justification for what he was doing. That's when I was like, wow, that's just insanity. Even as a child, I mean, I was 12. I can still remember thinking this makes no sense. I just have a hard time understanding how I even then stayed, even though I was able to rationalize that, I still stayed with him. So yeah, it's just, it's hard to move faster than that with him. Just wait two seconds. You're a talker. Just let it sit for a second. This is way too much to carry for any 12 year old who then has to hold the hand of his little brother. When did you come out to your father? I never officially came out. He would constantly bring it up as in, you know, he would go on these random rants. He would come into my room and just yell and make all these insults and comments about it. But he wouldn't just come out and say, hey, are you gay? What's going on? While he lives with a sense of himself as a happy, upbeat, optimistic person, it doesn't take much to realize that right underneath the surface lives a lifetime of abuse, of manipulations, of put downs and violence. And so as he talks about his background, he squints with his eyes and he takes one squint just to know that he just chased away an image. And so I go for the image. What did you just see? And then I feel that he's not just seeing things, but he's hearing things. Speak to me in Spanish because that's the language that you heard it in. And even if I didn't speak Spanish, I would still ask him to speak in his mother tongue because that's the language in which the wounds were seared into his skin. It's weird how I don't like him. I don't get along with him, but I still, he's my dad. I want to please him. How do you make sense of that? I don't know. It's a question that I think we often have, right? How is it that as children, we want the love of parents, even when they did not know how to love us properly? Why do we feel such a sense of duty and obligation to people who may have been cruel to us, from whom we still want to love? And I'm assuming this is not just a question to you alone. Do you have a similar experience with my family? I've actually never had a problem of seeking people that like me back. So I have lost aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, because I find that if you truly care about someone, you're not going to treat them in a manipulative way. Manipulative, relationship with my mom growing up, it wasn't the greatest, especially because she had quit her job and she had this idea that she would never again have a boss. So she would try to get income in really random ways that never really worked. So money was an issue. And I felt a little bit wasn't able to live my childhood to its fullest. I feel that I had this double life because I had my household life, which was with my mom, which was in really precarious conditions. And then I had my school life, which I was lucky enough that my father, which I don't really have a relationship with, he covered all of the school expenses. So I was able to go to a really nice school in the DR. I was really focused on my studies because I look back now and I feel that that was my scapegoat just to study. I'm able to live this life because I put so much effort in the past and now I'm past that. I don't even remember my life in the DR anymore after I moved to New York, or I try not to remember. But yeah, so that was my growing up. You know what's so funny? And it's not funny at all. Is that you just said, I tried not to remember. And then you laugh. When people describe really painful situations, but they're doing it with infusion of laughter to make it palpable. I, the listener, start to feel the stuff that you're pushing aside. I'm thinking these two kids, because they were kids, had to navigate a shitload, period. And it's not about making it, it was nothing. It's not about making it, there is no worse. It is what it is. They learned codes. They learned to move from one neighborhood to another, from one social class to another, from one parent to another. They learned the map. And all these experiences probably are part of your resources today that allow you to do what you do as well as you do it. Because we learn and we develop our resources also in the most painful of our experiences. It may have been good now that you see how studious you were, but at the time it may have been very lonely. You learn to be responsible for your dad, but you deal with a big gap where you just feel like there was such a hole and I missed my mom and I missed her, period. Both of them were what we call parentified children. Children who became the parents of their own parents. Both of them were thrown an enormous amount of responsibility way before they were ready to assume it. And both of them grabbed on to each other for their life. What you have is that for a while you learn to grow up together and you learn to become families for each other in the full sense of the word. And the people with whom you're going to go from eating junk or eating nothing to eating well, to having the first paycheck together, to moving in to the U.S. together, that whole thing. And now comes a phase where it is, can we still be together and equally strong together but have a little bit more differentiation between us? And this issue of how this I is going to emerge in the context of a strong we, is I think where you are at developmentally. I think we've sort of recently been trying to work through it. So just for instance, if you want to stay home a Saturday afternoon, but I've been working a lot this week and I want to see some friends, I'll say, I'm going to grab a coffee with X friend. And he would say, well, I don't want to go. And it becomes tense. It becomes tense in the sense that I don't even feel comfortable bringing it up as a possibility because I feel like it will lead to an issue. And so it's things like that, that we have been struggling with. And it's always in that direction? It's always usually me. Not necessarily. What do you mean? So he works a lot and therefore I do things without him. And most of the time he expects that if he's out of work, I'm just going to drop everything that I'm doing and I'm going to teleport next to his side. So both of you experience an anxiety and a tensing up when the other one wants to go do something on their own. And both of you end up being worried about saying, I want to go do something on my own because you're trying to avoid the tension between the two of you. See the tension inside one or tension between two. What you've done is you have used a very strong together in order to give a lot of security to two selves. And now these selves would like to emancipate themselves a bit without triggering all kinds of abandonment issues, which you both have. We mostly do everything together. So I feel that by you not allowing yourself to ask for the things that you want and you need, it's an issue because you don't allow me to experience the process of you being independent. You just come out one day and say, I'm fully independent. No one's going to tell me what I'm going to do, period. And I feel that you do that a lot because that's how you deal with issues. You're either, you're really binary. You're either hot or cold, yes or no. It's never un proceso paulatino. It's never a slow process to get somewhere. I don't feel that you should have the power to say, no, I don't want you to go out. You should stay with me, especially when it doesn't really affect you in the sense that we'll still spend the night together. We'll have Sunday together. I'm not stripping away significant time from us because I do know that I work a lot. And so when we have free time, I know we should, we try to be together and spend it together. But at the same time, I want to use that free time to do things that I want to do and be with my friends also and just do things. And so it's a little frustrating. Can I? Yeah, please. When you talk to him like this, I hear you talk to your father like you have no, you have no right to have this kind of power over me. He's just said, I don't want you to go. That's, you can say, but I'm going anyway. Or I understand you don't like it and then have a conversation about it. But you're in a power thing. And in the power thing, you will do what the other person wants you to do until one day you say, now, **** it. So you keep it in, you keep it in, you keep it in. And anger motivates you. What? That's just very accurate. I understand that he, he can say, I don't want you to go. And we can talk about it. But ultimately, I end up not going. I mean, when we talk about it, we try to figure it out in a way where we can talk about why not or how it could be more comfortable. The reality is that the result is that I end up not doing what I want to do. Why? Because if I do it, then it upsets him. And then even if he at some point just says, okay, fine, you can go. I'll go. But he will be calling me every 10 minutes or texting me nonstop. And then I'm not really enjoying what I'm trying to do. It's not even like I'm saying, I want to do this big event weekend thing without you. It's very small things, for sure. The first thing I will, I will highlight for you is that your little selves, the children that live inside of you, they don't make a distinction between a small little coffee with friends, or a big event of the whole weekend. The little child inside of the two of you experiences the whole thing constantly. Are you with me? Am I alone? And reacts from that degree of insecurity. So if the adult you are trying to have a rational conversation over, but it's just a two hour coffee, you're talking to the wrong person. Because the one who says, I don't want you to go or the one who calls you every 10 minutes is not that adult. And the one that ends up not going, because if he's anxious, I'm anxious. And I can't have a boundary by which I'm fine, even if he is not or find a way to reassure him or to tell him my phone will be off for the next two hours, or I won't answer and begin to learn to regulate and calm ourselves when we are not with each other. Because we have so much learned to co-regulate. I just want to step in for a second and say that it's never that he wants to have a coffee for two hours with someone because you have a coffee during the daytime. Typically this happens if he went to a work event at night and alcohol is involved and then he suddenly stops answering me or responding or whatever and then suddenly more plans come out of that one work thing and then it becomes a full night out and that is when I'm triggered. What's so interesting in this reaction is that he's trying to tell him if it was really coffee I would actually be okay with this. The reason I'm not okay with this is because it's not coffee rather than the reason I'm not okay with this is because this triggers an intensity of emotions that roil inside me that is exactly what that child used to feel. I'm sure that there is more evening involved than just coffee but that doesn't mean that if it was only coffee there would be no trigger. It's more about nighttime activities where alcohol and people and and the fear is he tends to be a people pleaser so if he's out with a friend and the friend wants to bar hop 20 bars even though he doesn't want to even though he's tired even though he wants to go home he will do it. So that's what makes me anxious because I know that he will not say no. Can I be really psychological with you? Yes and I'm not gonna like it. Go ahead. You what? I'm probably not gonna like it but go ahead. Please I'll watch. Go ahead. You know how I said to him that when he talks to you he's talking to his dad? Yeah who am I talking to? Your mom. Oh god. With her impulsivity and her bad choices. Yes. And her being influenced by other people. Yes. And when you talk to him you talk to her. Yeah it makes a lot of sense. It works in both directions right and so you do just enough for it to trigger in him this is what used to happen between me and my dad and he does just enough of the impulsive people pleasing not not thought out behaviors etc for you to think I have to buckle down I have to be the responsible one I have to be the controlled one I have to be the one who measures all the dangers of a situations because obviously he doesn't and when we begin to re-experience with our partners things which we experienced with our first partners which is our parents or our caregivers it doesn't just come from nowhere we pick a person who does just enough to ignite inside of us the memory the cellular visceral memory of those interactions so that we then start to respond to them from that place you want to have a conversation about respect he has a conversation about power so now we need to change the conversation and that starts probably with you talking about what gets evoked for each of you and then you can talk about friends and you can talk about sex and you can talk about because it's the same dynamic I think this is the core yep yep you are extremely correct every couple has to negotiate separateness and togetherness it's probably one of the core tasks of a relationship what is I and what is we but as we all need connection and independence what sometimes will happen in the relationship is one person is afraid to lose the other and the other person is more afraid to lose themselves that's definitely how I experience it and that's certainly why I react the way I react to it it is true that you are much more constrained and in control than I am and it is true that I enjoy having four drinks if we're out I do like to have a good time and if that means getting a little bust and dancing I do it and I enjoy it a lot it doesn't happen often but when I do it I that's a way that I have fun and you certainly don't do that and you don't see that I'm also not a person who drink to a point where I'll black out or I don't know what's going on or I do reckless things before you try to reassure him I am not like your mom see if you can stay with him about how you understand how it makes sense that he would experience you the way he does okay because if he experiences you as more solid he actually may one day allow himself to let go more part of why he's to do this tightness is because he constantly thinks that he has to do it for two which may not be the case at all so it's not about the alcohol it's more about me seeing that you have the power of your own self and not letting not letting other people influence whatever you want to do or whatever is best for you and can you add to that and this is an anxiety or an awareness that I bring with me as well yes this is not just all produced by him no it's not all produced by him I'm a really anxious person in general I just can't blindly trust that people are going to be trustworthy in the way that you can't tell me trust me this is not going to happen and then every single time that the same situation comes along it's the same result it's the same situation it's like either work or friends or whatever or health which is a major issue for him I need to be there and be like you need to do this you need to do that and if I was able to see that you are a little bit more independent not independent but if you just take a little bit more care of your of you it would be easier for me to be more chill I I mean I hear you and I appreciate that you care so much that you feel that you have to do all that but you and I'm happy to do it because you're taking care of me but I also feel that you kind of have to also let me figure out where what what I'm comfortable with and what are my you know my breaking points and what are because because in the end we we do have different different level of risk taking and I think overall we also approach things like work and friends and all these things very differently in a sense and and you have to be able to just like step back and trust that I I'll be fine and if I'm not I'll trust me I will yell help I'm not just gonna drown yes that is correct but I feel that you know interesting thing is that each of you says yes but this is I've now waited three times yes but yes but you want him to become more responsible so that you don't have to feel so responsible for him but he won't become more responsible because you're always there and he's trying to tell you let me find my own threshold and that is way too anxiety producing for you you want him to trust you but then you act in a way that doesn't allow him to trust you because every time he has to step in because you didn't do what you said you were gonna do so if you try to say I will change when you do it will sound nice but it won't be effective no it doesn't work it's a vicious circle so the best way you have is to say what you can do part of the anxiety about does he know where to stop is slightly related to how he acts and part of it comes because you have decades of that as your marker there will be the challenge of accepting that he has a different threshold which in part is why you picked him in the first place he's looser he's more open to the world he's more what you call people pleaser he's more trusting in that way that's that's accurate and those are the very things that probably drew you to him but they also are scary for you and this is the law of attraction what is initially attractive because it's different is also the source of conflict later because it is different you know you wished when you had your mom that you didn't have to be that responsible all the time and be the one who thinks about her limits so that you could be the child who goes and explores and does and plays and discovers and makes mistakes rather than you be the studious kid who never breaks a single rule because she does all of that and part of your reaction to him is that you know you both are the responsible achiever but as a result he became more constrained and you became more like I do all the right things I haven't I'm entitled to some fun yeah that's basically how I see it I'm just hoping that we would change sort of at the same rhythm but I think that's not possible because obviously we've been trying and it doesn't really work and yeah the way you've been addressing this is not helping and another discussion about it was one o'clock it was three o'clock it was 11 15 no I did call it I mean you can enjoy it I don't think you do but in any case it's not working and it's not working because there's a deeper conversation that has to do with the way you learn to adapt what are you really saying when I say trust me about this or you have got to trust me it's kind of you know it's it's almost basically you have to trust me because ultimately I should be able to set the threshold of what's enough or what's and what's okay and I feel like for many years you've been the one setting the threshold because it makes you feel uncomfortable if I if I'm past your threshold and maybe mine is a little further down the road yes but what part of you accepted his threshold as yours it almost felt like it was like it was a take it leave me kind of thing like this is just how you are and it's just kind of like the prize of admission like I I have to deal with this if I want to be with you and and you know ultimately I'd rather be with you and and you know work around your anxiety and wouldn't work around what makes you feel comfortable when we're not together because I because I'd rather be with you than not at the time I didn't know that you were putting up with anything and then suddenly I don't know when it suddenly exploded and you said that you lost a friend because I made you lose a friend and I'm like what are you talking about that's not what I said that's not what I meant it's a pattern that keeps repeating because whenever I get close to a friend and we get very very close where we we you know we check in maybe not every day but we chat often we check in about work stuff we share some stuff we have common interests he has a hard time seeing that it's just a friendship and that it's okay for me to have a friend who I share things with and I have common interests with that maybe we don't share it's also that when you get close to people with your interests you tend to get close to people physically as well and I have a hard time with that because to me there's a really straight line where friendship and more than friends is divided and I feel that your line is a little bit more blurry and that makes me extremely uncomfortable because I feel that it suddenly becomes this constant person there that I might not want them to be so constant there or I feel that you focus too much on the person and then then that person becomes your person and it just makes me really uncomfortable okay I think just just just for like the sake of clearness when you say physical it's not like I don't have sex with my friends and I and we don't make out oh no it's not it's not intimate it's simply that I am in generally and also just not with friends just in general I am physically affectionate with people that I feel comfortable with I don't go around hugging every single person in my office but I hug some of my co-workers you keep saying it's not intimate and I think that's exactly what it is it may not be sexual okay but it is intimate yes and what I'm hearing you say is that it's the intense intimacy it's the kind of infatuation it's the sense that you're being replaced or pushed aside that there's somebody else who suddenly becomes his primary focus and then you feel basically excluded I held these sessions in a pre-covid world when people could still talk about how they are physical beings who go to work and hug those that they feel close to who knows which world we will come back to at this moment the question of physical closeness is going to take on new expressions but the categories won't necessarily change the discussion about how it is the friendship the intimacy of friendships the closeness that triggers him because he experiences the energy being siphoned out of their relationship and being directed to those friends I want to have the intimacy with him and that's it or whoever we decide to have intimacy with together in not a platonic way there I don't have a problem if it's a friend that he has his focus on that friend and I we sort of have to live with each other in a way I wouldn't say compete it's co-existing because after nine years no one is competition and I'm not competitive but it's true I don't feel threatened that my relationship will end I don't feel threatened that you don't I do not I do not feel threatened but mindful that multiple relationships can happen at once and that is what I'm afraid of it's not that I'm going to lose him it's that I'm going to have to share him with someone that I don't want to share my life with I don't want to share my experiences with a form of loss in that way yeah it may not be a definitive loss but it is a form of loss there is sharing that makes you feel that you have more and there is sharing that makes you feel that you have less yes interestingly he doesn't think you would leave him he just he just thinks he would have less of you because you you would have others and then he starts to feel that that means he's not enough and you will need to convey to him that others don't mean compensation that others mean a richer life for us all that there can't be one person for everything which is what you have been till now you have been for each other an entire community now when you play together and you're sexual with a third or you know you're together so it's a very different experience that's why it's not the sex that is threatening here it's the closeness it's the intimacy reverse often reverse some straight people actually true imagine that you pick a night a week first of all you start with that during the week where you go and do your own thing whatever it is you don't invite each other the point is that those are your nights off your nights to yourself so that you have a you start to cultivate a different balance between separate and together and imagine you don't have a curfew on those you may actually come home a lot earlier when you don't have a curfew you'll be surprised i was perfect with the idea until you brother i was like yeah that would be perfect until you said that i'm like it has to be saturday morning because i know that if he hangs out with someone saturday morning by two he's gonna be back but i would like you to have an evening as well the point is that you actually get to be away without having the other in a constraining force you need to be able to be away without worry the worry that he will come back or the worry that he will experience more important things than you elsewhere and the worry that you have to protect him because he's going to be upset or depressed or angry the challenge now is how do you make that space so that there is more room for the eye in the midst of the way even in a world of social distancing the balance between connection and closeness and freedom and independence will remain a primary task of relationships so i'm leaving it to them to see how they're going to do it now if it's not about going to dance with other people and sweat in the club what form will it take the importance of this principle does not change from a pre-covid to a post-covid world you just heard a classic session of where should we begin with esther perel we are part of the vox media podcast network in partnership with new york magazine and the cut to apply with your partner for a session on the podcast for the transcripts or to sign up for esther's monthly newsletter go to estherperel.com esther perel is the author of mating and captivity in the state of affairs she also created a game of stories called where should we begin for details go to her website estherperel.com