Now What? Strained Relationships
This year, our summer series centers around our new book, Now What?: How to Move Forward When We're Divided (About Basically Everything). We brought together groups of listeners who were on our book launch team to discuss how they’ve seen political conflict play out in their own lives. Over these episodes, we’ll share these conversations with you, along with some thoughts and strategies for how to navigate division in many different types of relationship.
Today, we’re focusing on some of the closest relationships we have: romantic partnerships and friendships. Having conflict in your home or in your most vulnerable relationships feels scary and even threatening at times. We’re also often to sacrifice the most to sustain these relationships regardless.
Thank you for being a part of our community! We couldn't do it we do without you. To become a financial supporter of the show, please visit our Patreon page, subscribe to our Premium content on Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, purchase a copy of our books Now What? How to Move Forward When We’re Divided (About Basically Everything) and I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening), or share the word about our work in your own circles.
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EPISODE RESOURCES
We can’t know everyone’s situation. But we do know that these organizations and many like them are waiting to serve you.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
National Child Abuse Hotline: 1-800-4-A-CHILD (422-4453)
Family Violence Prevention Center: 1-800-313-1310
Families Anonymous: 1-800-736-9805
Gay and Lesbian National Hotline: 1-888-843-4564
Youth Crisis Hotline: 1-800-448-4663
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
The Trevor Project Hotline: 1-866-488-7386
These resources are all based in the United States. If you are outside of the United States, suicide.org will allow you to connect with hotlines in your country. Domesticshelters.org lists international resources to support domestic violence survivors.
TRANSCRIPT
Listener [00:00:00] For the last 26 years, my friend had trusted me and then all of a sudden nothing that I said mattered. She didn't believe me.
Sarah [00:00:15] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:17] And this is Beth Silvers.
Sarah [00:00:18] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.
Beth [00:00:34] Hello. We are so glad you're joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics as we work through our summer series based on our book. Now What? How to Move Forward When We're Divided (About basically everything). In our last episode, if you missed it, we talked with a group of listeners about our families and about the conflicts that exist in our families, about the power dynamics surrounding those conflicts, about what it means when we change our status and relationship to the family or someone in the family tries to change that status. Today, we're going to widen the circle out and look at the people that we choose to live with-- our partners. Whether they are partners in a romantic sense, in a marriage or roommates who we spend a lot of our time with. And we are also going to look at our friends, in another sense, our chosen families and how does conflict arise around politics in those relationships. Sarah, one of the stories that we share in the book centers around a big life learning moment for me in the 2020 election. I felt really strongly in 2020 that that year it was very important for every member of my household to vote the way that I felt was best, which was to support Democrats. Because I felt that the Trump administration, supported by so many Republican legislators in what felt like lock step, was really moving us away from a lot of foundational tenets and the rule of law.
[00:02:06] So I was very surprised and disappointed to learn that Chad had supported a number of libertarian candidates. Not surprised in the sense that I know that that is more his leaning, certainly more than mine, but dismayed because I guess I just felt that I had been talking about this so much on the podcast and in our house. I had a personal relationship with a couple of the candidates that I had supported in that cycle, and I just thought that we were together on it and it made me feel disrespected as a thinker and as someone who has some expertise on these issues. And I think it was even less about the impact of the vote and more about the way that I felt personally disrespected. It's kind of a hard story to tell because I did not handle this moment well. I got very angry and he got angry at me for being angry. And then I got angry at him for being angry about me being angry. And it kind of spiraled the way that conflict in marriages and partnerships can spiral because it starts being about a lot more than it was about. And I think that I disrespected him quite a bit in those discussions, and I have tried to make amends for that and reflect on how I handled it. But we share that story because it really demonstrates how expectations that are unarticulated within our relationships can get out of control pretty quickly.
Sarah [00:03:29] As we move through the series, I think, I just thought we were together in it is pretty much the underlying theme as we move further out of these connected circles. Now, as a reminder, what we did here is we reached out to our launch team and we said, does anybody have stories about political conflict inside these different levels of connection? And we hosted Zoom conversations with about 4 to 5 people about these different relationships, families, partnerships, work relationships. And then we have been selecting audio from those conversations to share here with you. And so today we're going to talk about partners and friends and we will share those conversations coming up next.
Beth [00:04:22] When we're talking with adults about their family members, we're often talking about people who no longer live in the same house. So bringing our discussion into partners that we currently share space with brings in this whole level of your personal safety. And your physical safety and your emotional safety become our paramount concern. So we're not sharing anything here that gets into the territory of abuse or neglect or the kind of toxicity that really requires intervention and professional assistance and support. Again, we're going to put a list of resources in our show notes for those situations. Here we're going to share some conversations, beginning with one that resulted in divorce to discuss the kinds of dynamics that our listeners are navigating inside homes.
Sarah [00:05:10] You wrote, My husband divorced me when I found my LGBTQ child and began voting for Democrats.
Listener 1 [00:05:16] Right.
Sarah [00:05:16] And that was his named reason. Like he was like, this is why we're done.
Listener 1 [00:05:21] Yeah, I think it was two different levels of things because I went through a faith deconstruction and that resulted in my politics changing and so he wasn't heavily invested in the faith side of it and heavily invested in what that meant politically. That to see me change was something that he couldn't deal with. And I think it helped me to realize that he was an Enneagram one and saw that there was one way of doing this, and so he could be okay with me doing things a way that was not one way of doing it. And so that's when he decided to divorce me. When my husband voted for Trump in 2016 and I voted third party with 2016 because I didn't feel ready to vote for a Democrat. I just said [Inaudible]. He was completely behind Trump. And I said, "Do you feel like he's a trustworthy person? Do you feel like he has integrity?" And he refused to answer those kind of questions. And as I continued to deconstruct my faith and change my politics to we need to care about other people, and we need to care about how this is affecting other people and vote in a way that helps marginalized people. So as we got closer to 2018, I was getting ready to vote for a Democrat for the first time. And he actually told me, "If I had known that you would vote for a Democrat, I would never have married you."
Sarah [00:06:55] What?
Listener 1 [00:06:56] And I knew that I was changing and I knew that we had disagreed on some key issues. But I thought that we believed in each other's values and character enough to last through those kind of changes. And we didn't.
Listener 2 [00:07:16] I mean, I will never forget a conversation that we had on summer of 2020. And he just had a real issue with the mandates and the lockdown and masking and all of that. And so we were outside working in the yard, and he out of the blue was like, well, you've just betrayed our marriage by becoming a Democrat. You're not the person that I married. You've betrayed all of our values, and all of this. And I'm like, I grew up religious. I still consider myself deeply religious, but I don't think that that's in conflict with voting Democrat. It's just caring for people in a different way. And he sees it actually like he's called it evil. And I've tried to seek counseling. He refused counseling for a year and a half. But his whole excuse for not needing counseling was he was like, well, I'm not the one who's changed. You're the one that's changed. And I just want to say changing is not a bad thing. Learning and growing is something that we should be doing. And if you're stuck in one place for your entire life, that is a problem. And thankfully, I have support from a great therapist. And that's the only way our marriage has not fallen apart, but I'm still debating if staying with him is the right thing because of the conflict. We have four children that are 12 to 22 and so two are out of the house, two are still in the house. And I don't know. I don't know what the right thing is to do on it.
Sarah [00:09:16] How long have you been married?
Listener 2 [00:09:19] It will be 27 years tomorrow.
Sarah [00:09:23] Oh, wow! I'm tearing up. Becky, you go. You wanted to add something? I'm gettng a little emotional.
Listener 1 [00:09:27] I wanted to say that I had a similar [Inaudible] and I myself took notes about how I wanted to vote. And there were so many things on the ballot and I've written myself the notes and emailed them myself and my husband went into my email and when he saw that, what I had written down, he messaged me and he said, "This is so sad." He said, "I should just give you a link to a place where you can kill babies right here, because that's what you're doing by voting for Democrats." And it's that same idea that you are evil because you see this in a different way, or you want to help babies in a different way, or you want to help families in a different way.
Sarah [00:10:10] I would like both your ex-husband and your husband's email addresses for later. But it's like going in your email like you're cheating. In families there's this like status, there's a status exchange. And when that status shifts or if someone who you feel is like lower in power and status to you tries to tell you what to do, that goes badly. Like, if you're a kid and you're asking a parent to wear a mask, I think there's a real sense of, like, you don't tell me what to do. That's not how this goes. In sibling relationships. And I feel like with marriages it's that, like, we promised to each other at this moment in time and so the promise is linked to how you were at that moment in time. And so you owe it to me to stay how you were when I made that promise. Our partners are not just our spouses. But you had total conflict over Covid with your roommates, which what an intimate partnership. And if there's no respect around Covid because you worked in a nursing home or a assisted living facility. Tell us about that.
Listener 3 [00:11:26] So it's interesting. I feel like I have a little bit of both sides of this. So I'm a therapist and a social worker by trade.
Sarah [00:11:35] Oh, my goodness. Can you fix it for us? Thank you so much.
Listener 3 [00:11:39] Part of me should be really good at navigating conflict and having hard conversations, because that's what I do 40 hours a week. But it was really tricky. I went to a very conservative undergrad years ago and then I stayed in the general area, and so I found myself in need of roommates a couple of years ago. There was a group of girls who were all going to their graduate programs at the same school. And all of them were deeply conservative.
Sarah [00:12:16] I already feel like the puzzle pieces are falling together.
Listener 3 [00:12:19] And some of them to the extent of thinking Covid is fake and that it's a hoax and that it's no different from the flu. I went into my living situation with a similar mentality of I'm just not going to say anything. They don't necessarily need to know where I land politically. We just share a living space. But then Covid hit and I was working among-- it was a memory care specific. So all the residents had dementia and it's like they were shut out from seeing any family members except for through a window from March 2020 onward. And so, for me, it was a really difficult personal struggle because I am trying to take every precaution because I figure if I get it, I'll be fine. But if I get it and bring it into this very tightly, protected, hermetically sealed environment it's going to spread like wildfire and people will die. A lot of people will die. And so when you go out, you try to be as protective as possible. But when you live in an environment with four other people who aren't, it was like I don't know if I can even go into the kitchen because they weren't taking Covid seriously because they don't think it's real. I have so much love for the folks who live at this assisted living. And it started to feel like, do you guys not care about them? Do you not care if they're going to die? Because that's what practically this looks like. I know that we're young and we'll probably get it and be fine with that, but that's not the case for everyone. For me, something that I feel like I noticed was a lack of proximity. When I started out as a social worker and when I was in grad school, it's like I am working with women who are making choices about whether or not to pursue terminating a pregnancy or working with teens who are trying to figure out how to come out to their parents or things like that. And so when you have that proximity, it's no longer just like an issue on paper. It's like a heart and soul in front of you. And while I have always leaned a specific way politically, that gave me so much more context. And at least in my roommate situations, it felt as though there was not a whole lot of proximity to pain.
Sarah [00:15:09] That's just so unbelievably hard, I think, and it speaks to everything. When you share your life with someone, be it a partner, a roommate, and particularly a spouse-- particularly if you share children, there's just this foundation of like, in some ways, beyond maybe parents and children, this sense of don't you want what's best for me? Like, is there this baseline of care? And so if it's missing, which I think it is in so many places, so many places unfortunately. And, I mean, I think a lot of the cultural messages we tell ourselves make the fact that the reality that we all know it's missing in so many places, like even more painful because we start to think there's something wrong with us and there isn't. Because we're seeing all these messages like this is what marriage is like and this is what romantic partnerships are like, or this is what friends, friendships and family are, all these messages we tell ourselves about deep connected relationships. So when fundamentals of care and compassion are missing, it just hurts. It's just so painful. As we had this conversation, we spent a lot of time on how painful our partners' reactions were to the ways in which we've changed. And I started to realize what a powerful player change was that people inside these partnerships felt like a bargain had been struck.
[00:16:47] And I think that gets wrapped up in the expectations we generally carry about marriage and partnership. But there's just this expectation that we are agreeing to this and that is not going to change. And so when things change, as they inevitably do, and it is about relationships between human beings, I think it's so fascinating and often heartbreaking to see how people react to change. Because we tell ourselves that when things change, that we can depend on the closest people in our lives. But really, intellectually, we know-- at least I know, that often those are the people we lash out at first. Those are the people that take the brunt of the change. Those are the people who when we're stressed carry the burden of the stress and how we're dealing with it. And I think that that role, that change and stress and sometimes trauma play into the relationship and burden the relationship. And then those things that you can't control and so you're depending on this other person to help you react to these things you can't control. And then you're stuck with this additional burden and heartbreak of they are responding in a way that is hurtful and in a way that you can't control. It's feels like this self-perpetuating cycle of, like you said, I get angry, you get angry, I'm angry, you're angry. It all feels like it comes from real fear and frustration and anger that the person in front of you is changing. Or maybe isn't changing and it is just the person they've always been and perhaps you didn't see it. You know what I'm saying? Like, I just think that that is very hard.
Beth [00:18:40] We just make such big commitments to each other when we share a house or a life that it's impossible to understand the scope of the commitment when we're making it. I think about one of the hardest moments for me, a few years ago when I was considering making a change in my career and contemplating making a lot less money and not having the title of lawyer, which has a certain amount of status attached to it. And I had a conversation with my therapist at the time and said I don't know how to tell Chad that I'm going back on what he thought he was signing up for here. That he thought he was signing up for a certain lifestyle, a certain amount of income and now I'm going to pull the rug out from under him. And my therapist said, "Oh, well, there's definitely an answer to that." And I was like, okay, awesome. And he said, "Shit happens, Beth. You cannot promise to stay the same person for the rest of your life to anybody for any reason. And the question is, can you love each other through that? And if you can't love each other through a change in income, how are you going to love each other through bigger changes that will happen in your life, some of them that will feel like choices to you and many that won't." And that really helped me sit down and have a conversation that sounded like, hey, could you love me if I am constantly changing careers? Could you love me if I'm never satisfied with the work that I do? Can we make it through these kinds of changes? And of course we can. But when I think about the stress I felt about that surface level decision because in retrospect, that sounds obvious, that was a hard lesson to learn. How much harder when you are announcing to your spouse pretty fundamental changes in how you see the world and what you think is appropriate in the world. And then you're supposed to be the recipient of that news as the other spouse and be totally supportive and have no reaction of your own. We're just asking the impossible of each other without often stopping to say, wait a second, we're asking the impossible of each other. So what's the most loving way we can get through this hard moment?
Sarah [00:20:49] Well, I think that's what's hard. Especially in the conversation we had with listeners, I don't think anybody was asking the impossible of their spouse, both of two people, that one stayed in their marriage and one has not. It's this paradox it feels like of change is inevitable. And also what my husband says all the time is you marry who you marry. They are who they are. I think it is the complexity of human relationships that we always hold that people do change. And also people don't always change, like, people are who they are. And so I think some people get to the moment where something comes into the marriage, something hard, something difficult-- oh, I don't know, like a global pandemic. And you see they were cruel and uncaring, and they've been cruel and uncaring about small things up until this moment, the entire time. Or they are loving and maybe this particular decision like Chad's voting doesn't align with what I want, but I can see the undercurrent that he is loving and supportive. And so I think the difficulty is no one else can sort that out for you. And I think that's what the heartbreak you hear in these partnership relationships is. When it's a one on one relationship, it's like no one-- your friends can tell you, we think he's been mean to you for a long time or we think he's selfish or we think she really doesn't care about you, but at the end of the day you have to decide what of that is true.
Beth [00:22:28] Yeah, I don't think any of these listeners are asking for the impossible. What I think is generally impossible in partnership is expecting the other person in the partnership to not be a person. And that's what we often do. To not react. To not change. To not have feelings about your decisions. And Covid just exacerbated this and in places where maybe some of that dissonance already existed. But it made it impossible to ignore. It brought it all to the surface and shined a big light on it and made the other person directly live with the consequences of your decision making.
Listener 1 [00:23:06] You want to think that your partner is on your side in all things. And that doesn't mean that you agree in all things, but that they are for you.
Sarah [00:23:16] Yes. That's such a good way to put it. Yes.
Listener 1 [00:23:19] And when you find out that they are not for you and that they don't have that kind of care for you, sometimes you're better off on your own. And I think, Jenny, one thing I know from going through two divorces-- which I don't have any shame to even say that, but one thing that I know is there you go through so long where you're like, what should I do? I don't know the right thing to do here. And then there comes a time when you do know what to do. And you feel it settle into your heart this is the thing I need to do. And when I have friends who are talking about whether or not they should get divorced, I always say there will come a time that you second guess yourself and you have to wait until you have that settling into you that says I know that this is what I should do. And so I'm going to be thinking of you as we go on from [Inaudible], waiting for you and hoping for you.
Beth [00:24:22] Sarah, I noticed that the Enneagram came up in a lot of these conversations, and so we know everyone's not familiar with the Enneagram. We tend to talk about it quite a bit here because it's been a really valuable tool for us, and it's clearly been a valuable tool for listeners as they think through, especially what motivates them in situations filled with conflict.
Listener 4 [00:24:43] A tipping point for me was when he said, okay, we just can't talk about this anymore. We can't talk about these certain topics anymore. I lead from an Enneagram four and I was, like, if we didn't talk about hard topics, what is the meaning of our relationship? It just feels void and empty. And so I was like, whoa, I've got to get serious. Like, how am I coming to this conversation? Because I want to be able to talk about hard topics and we just have to scale up.
Sarah [00:25:17] This is what we name in the book, is that as you are working through this change, as you are assessing what is this person, what is my unmet expectations, you just need tools to help annotate the situation. You need tools and skills to help you say, okay, right now I see this as stress. This is how I'm acting in my stress or you're depleted from your stress, whereas I'm needy from my stress and those two things are running into each other. And so I think that all these tools that help us describe how we're feeling, what's happening in a fight, just being able to see a fight clearly, they're incredibly powerful.
Beth [00:25:57] I think one of our listeners in this conversation summed it up really well in talking about what it is that we want from each other and why it hurts so bad when we don't receive it.
Listener 4 [00:26:08] Man, that was hard, too. That didn't come easy. And it still doesn't come easy at all for us. But I think it's that baseline and recognizing like, I'm on your team, are you on my team? Are we a team together? And being able to start from that place and remind ourselves to move out from that place as we've had issues with other extended family members and things like that. Because we would come at each other about it, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we want the same thing. We want our kids to be healthy. We want them to be loved. You want them to be in healthy relationships with their extended family. So let us pull this back and focus on that, that we are in this together and I want good things for you and you to have healthy relationships with your family and you want the same for me. And sometimes that means we have to figure out some boundaries or whatever.
Beth [00:27:00] We're going to take a quick break and come back and think about friendships. [Music] Sarah, we also gathered some of our listeners to talk about relationships with friends. And again, just a reminder to everybody, we did not set this up to be conversation about Covid or any particular political issue, but Covidwas the dominant refrain in talking about fractures and friendships. I wanted to start with you because you said that you lost your best friend of 26 years over Trump and Covid and vaccines. And I just wondered if you could tell us how that relationship started and then what it felt like as this conflict surfaced through a president and a pandemic.
Listener 5 [00:28:01] So we were 10 when we became best friends and we knew each other since basically birth, but that's when we decided we were best friends. Both raised in really, really, conservative fundamentalist Christianity. So from birth we were given the label you are a Republican and there's no other option for you. But also you're a woman, so you don't need to be involved in politics. She was just my person. I was closer with her than anyone really in my own family. She was so supportive and loving, but then the Trump presidency came and suddenly she was political. And I hadn't really shared my political beliefs with her because she wasn't ever really open to it. I knew we would be different, and so it just wasn't part of our friendship until the Trump presidency. And she started celebrating his presidency. And I was like no. But, again, we kind of just tried to keep it out of our friendship until the pandemic, which I think a lot of us experience, and my husband's business fell through. So I was a stay at home mom at the time, but he worked in aerospace and suddenly all of his contracts were canceled. So I went back to work and I worked as a telephone triage nurse for Covid patients. And the anxiety of doing that work was excruciating. Listening to 35-year-old people-- I was 35 at the time--- having strokes and having heart attacks and asking me but if I take my husband to the E.R., I'm I ever going to see him again. And I couldn't say. It was just excruciating. Every day felt so overwhelming. And at the same time, my best friend's husband managed a natural food store. So they got sucked in real hard to that, along with Trumpism and along with anti-vaccine. And she started telling me, well, you just need to tell your patients to take vitamin C and then they wouldn't be dying. They just need to be taking vitamin D. That's the problem. And I wish that you would do that so that people wouldn't die. And it was just so much victim blaming of the people that I was watching suffer and I could not tolerate it.
[00:30:31] At the same time, my family of origin, very, very conservative, very upset about Covid, and I set a hard boundary of I will not see you because you refuse to be vaccinated and I'm protecting my family. Before there was vaccines. So I was dealing with everybody close in my family of origin side plus my best friend-- who used to be my person when my family would reject me-- reject me as well. And so it was too much. At some point, we got to the point where she just said, "I don't know you anymore. I don't know why you've become like this." And I said, "Well, I don't know that I can go with your beliefs either." Because she was basically. QAnon and trying to get me to go to Sean Stewart concerts. And I was like, no, that's not been me for a long time, but now it's really not me. And she couldn't accept that. Actually since I've written that survey about a month ago, we had a good conversation where I feel like maybe there's a potential for healing. But for the last two years we've been no contact and we used to talk like every couple of days. I maintained the part where I still sent her kids birthday presents and I still reached out to her on her birthday and Christmas just to say hi and I love you. But it wasn't that deep into the friendship that we've experienced for the last almost 30 years. So it was really, really, devastating. And she also was very, very, against the vaccine and masks. And so me choosing to wear a mask and take Covid precautions was deeply offensive to her. And she told me that she couldn't be in relationship with me because I had such a spirit of fear. And so I was like, well, I can't listen to you tell the people that I'm watching suffer that it's their fault. So we just couldn't find a common ground there.
Beth [00:32:47] Katie, I wonder how this is landing as you listen to Amanda's story.
Listener 6 [00:32:54] Yeah. Very similar. My friendship started in college with a girlfriend and we had the same major, and we're really good friends for the last 18 years. But I work in health care. I'm a P.A. at a congestive heart failure clinic. And my girlfriend is a health coach, nutritionist, influencer just kind of in the alternative space. And she's always been against vaccines, or at least as long as she's had kids. So we've known that we felt very different about those things for much of our friendship. But, yeah, these past two years have been particularly hard. Amanda, I can relate to a lot of what you're talking about. I had a lot of patients that have died and have suffered. And and it's just a lot to carry when you're taking care of people who are really suffering. And that victim blaming is hard to listen to and it's hard to know how to process that going to work. And when this girlfriend doesn't believe that this is happening. And also I just struggled with a lot of anger like early on in the pandemic, having conflict over her belief that physicians are falsifying death certificates. And I think the thing I struggled with was my experience, my real life experience was very different than the things that she was talking about. And it was really hard to bring those two together to say, like, I have a different perspective. Like, I literally filled out a death certificate yesterday. I understand this process and what you're sharing, screaming from the rooftops about is just it's not true. And finding a way to have conversation there, it's hard.
Listener 5 [00:35:11] And not to interrupt you, but knowing that that is accurate and then watching them share information that you know will go on to harm other people. Other people will choose not to get the vaccine because they're telling them all you have to take, read this book about the cure of vitamin C. You don't have to take a vaccine that's going to cause all these things that don't actually happen. And for the last 26 years my friend had trusted me. And then all of a sudden, nothing that I said mattered. She didn't believe me even though I was like, no, literally, I talked to a person who walked her husband and then never saw him again. They die sometimes. Like, Covid is real. And just the complete denial of, well, you just keep making that up and I just don't know how you-- it's so hard.
Beth [00:36:03] One of the things that we talk about in this chapter is how a lot of what's happening in our relationships is unarticulated, that we have layers to the conversation. I think you said this really well just now, Amanda, like, it's not just that we see this differently; it's that you're communicating that you don't trust me anymore. And, Melody, as I read your response, I thought about how you have like a physicality, like a physical layer to what's going on because you had a friend from whom you contracted Covid. So can you talk about what happened there and how you might articulate to this friend the dimensions of the hurt.
Listener 7 [00:36:47] And everything you guys are saying it hits me so hard. Way back early in the pandemic when everything was like we really didn't know that many people. I mean, unless you're in health care, we really didn't know that many people around our area that were sick and we still all were kind of quarantining. My kids were still home and it was still really, I mean, still scary. It was in that, like, really unknown stage.
Listener 5 [00:37:17] We were still washing our groceries.
Listener 7 [00:37:18] Right. I made the choice to go to-- it was like a little Christmas party with friends that we've done this Christmas party for several years and I went back and forth and I really struggled with it. A lot of my friends were health care workers, firefighters, EMT, nurses, but they refused to wear masks. And they would wear them if they had to, but they were very, you know, Covid isn't real and it's not a big deal, it's like the flu, etc.. And it was hard to know what to believe at that point because I didn't know anybody who had it. So I went and I ended up getting it from a friend of the party. And I will never forget it was December 19th, I was watching my son's Christmas program on Zoom and I was making dinner at the same time. And I literally just-- I mean, I was fine and then, whoosh, like straight down and I was so sick. Like, I wasn't to that point where I thought as much of the hospital. I was breathing okay, that part was fine. But the fatigue. Like, my body temperature spikes. At one point my husband found me after taking a bath because I was trying to do anything that would make me feel better. And I had to crawl out of the bath. But I had to send out a text in December after I got sick because I had been at this [Inaudible]. Anyways, I sent out a text and I got no response. There was like 12 people on the text [Inaudible]. And it seems like the one thing as I was writing things down that will never leave me because nobody said anything.
[00:39:08] And then one of the other [Inaudible] I wrote a text didn't respond to mine, but sent out another text and asked if anybody wanted to go take shooting lessons at the gun range. And everybody was like, yes, great. I'd love to. It was so awful. I mean, and these were like my circle of people. These are my people or who I thought were my people. And it's just been hard. And I felt we went into this like individual retreat to your camp mentality and I just felt abandoned. So I had a really hard time parsing, like, people's political beliefs and their refusal to wear a mask or just the things they would say on social media from how they felt about me. I mean, that's not entirely fair, but it was really hard to separate. It's been really hard. I felt abandoned by my friends. I felt abandoned by-- I mean, honestly, it's going to sound dramatic, but I think you guys will understand the previous administration. I just felt like, excuse my language, I don't give a shit about you. I had a friend ask me to go for a walk. This is probably over a year ago. She wanted to know why we weren't in touch, and she asked me if it was because she was a Trump supporter. And it's just for so many reasons I thought, I can't believe you would think that of me, number one. That I would not talk to you because of your political affiliation, which tells me that you feel the same way about my political affiliation. Like, how [Inaudible] can you be? How many more ways do I have to tell you?
Beth [00:40:57] I want to ask you what's connected with you and where you've had a different experience. You describe seeing social media posts that just indicated that your friend had also kind of lost touch with reality. So will you tell us a little bit about that?
Listener 8 [00:41:12] Yeah, it's funny actually-- not funny haha. Listening to Melody, I feel almost on the other side of the coin a little bit from the perspective of I'm the one that completely pulled back. But for my own mental health, it was like a thing I had to do to not make things worse for me. So this friend we've been friends for-- oh gosh, I think in terms of places we've been stationed. My husband's in the Coast Guard and I was active duty for a lot of years, too. So most of our friendships centered around, oh, it's another Coast family and that's who we get to be friends with. So we've been friends for I want to say-- my oldest son is12, so probably about 11 or 11 years. And we became friends because of proximity, because of sharing Coast Guard lifestyle, that kind of thing. And then as we had kids together, her oldest is just a few months older than my oldest, we shared early motherhood things. It's kind of funny to listen to the vaccine part of it. I was one of those crazy not vaccinating people of my children until Covid. And I told my doctor it's funny how a global pandemic will really change your thoughts on a lot of things. So I think that that was-- I saw it with her and then also with a lot of people that I was in community with in an online Facebook group for moms that I was actually a moderator for. It centered around breastfeeding and feeding young children, and it was also natural stuff and that kind of thing. And I watched as I felt like I was looking at reality, watched my friends fall completely in the opposite direction down utter conspiracy rabbit holes. Where I was like, I guess this could have been me if I wasn't paying better attention. And so that was part of it. For my own sanity I had to be like, okay, I got to separate what I think is fact from fiction, and I've got to do what I think is right for my family.
[00:43:20] And I watched her just rail against everything that felt right to me and to the point where it felt like she was attacking me for trying to do these things. And not just me, but other friends that were thinking like me too. And the Facebook posts became things like those-- we probably all seen them, like those gotcha posts. Like the, oh, look, look at this thing I found that disproves the thing that you said. And four seconds of fact checking shows that what they're trying to gotcha on is not the whole story, because they either didn't read the whole story and they just read the headline or they didn't fact check the story or they didn't find out where the story came from or whatever it was. And it just got to the point where I tried to understand where she was coming from. And so I tried to give the grace to begin with and just the like eventually, eventually, something's got to change. Eventually something's got to change. And it hasn't. I mean, here we are two years later. And she started in right away with the this is ridiculous. We shouldn't have to do this. My family is fine. Why do I have to care about-- like, basically, why do I have to care about anybody else? And that was really hard to hear from a person that I thought shared a lot of the same values that I did. Not all the same. I knew that we had some differing opinions as far as politics and stuff. Her husband is very, very, conservative and she was not as conservative as him. But that hasn't changed. And I just I felt like at some point in time there had to be an off ramp and then the off ramp never came. And that it makes me feel guilty. But then it also makes me feel like I'm holding a boundary that I need for my own mental health. And it's all just hard. And part of me wants to find a way back, and part of me is like, well, maybe she's not the person that I thought she was, so maybe it's okay that we've drifted and that's fine.
Beth [00:45:19] Sarah, I was not expecting supplements to have such a dominant role in this conversation.
Sarah [00:45:22] Tell you what, I'm actually not surprised, and here's why. Often what seems to happen when friendships break apart, it's like we said, there is a person who says, I'm in pain and I needed you. And the response is obviously because of the conflict not enough. And so I think the supplements it's like that's somebody saying, well, I'm trying to be here so I'm trying to offer to fix it for you. But when someone's in pain, that's not what they need. They don't need you to fix it. But I think we do that a lot in our friendships. I think that we are-- look, we're already been through two pretty painful conversations before we got to friends. So we're dealing with complicated marriages. We're dealing with family dynamics, kids issues, hard work environments. And so I think we get to a conflict with a friend and we just want to offer a quick fix or something like that because in our minds, we're like, I can't take on one more thing. I mean, I had a lot with my friends and especially with friendships I sort of walked away from. It's just like I did not have the capacity to mend, tend, work through conflict in one more relationship space in my life.
Beth [00:46:39] And sometimes it's not even conflict, like, capacity is real. After we talk to Jennifer Senior, I heard from a couple of people who were saying, I really hate that so many people don't have friends out there. And also, I can't be everybody's friend. I have the friends that I can handle in my life right now. Attending to the relationships I'm already in is about all I can do. And so I feel like I'm contributing to the problem because I can't take on more friends, but there is a reality of it. So I'm going to love my people well, I'm kind of at my limit.
Sarah [00:47:07] Yeah. And I think that's hard. I mean, it's how do you do that calculus? How do you say I don't have any more capacity for this friendship, knowing how important friendships are, knowing how loneliness can take years off your life, knowing that we are spending a lot of time in American culture right now on the fact that we don't have enough friends, we don't take care of those friendships. So you kind of have this pressure to stay friends, to take care of the friendship. You have a lack of margin and capacity. You have inevitable conflict. You have a mismatch of how people handle their varying levels of margin and capacity. And it just feels like a big old mess.
Beth [00:47:46] And I have not worked out for myself yet when this kind of conflict should end a friendship. When I think about all of the supplement conversation and the approach to Covid, it does feel really significant to me and an incredibly hard thing to work through. Because at my stage of life, a lot of what I'm leaning on friends for when things are hard and when I need them to show up for me in that I need you and you're going to be there for me way, a lot of it does revolve around bodies. I was just in my friend's brand new house that she hasn't even moved into yet, crying on her brand new sofa about issues of caring for our family members. And so if I'm going to lean on my friends for that kind of thing, or if you're in a group of women and everybody's talking about their birth experience, which happens all the time, or talking about, do you have a good OBGYN recommendation. I mean, you do kind of need to be on a somewhat similar page about these big picture physical issues with your adult friends to feel the comfort of their friendship. And so I just don't know when we walk away. And I think a lot of that is thinking through what place can friendship have in my life in this season?
Sarah [00:49:05] I think the physical conversations are a manifestation of we really want to hear we're making the right choice. We certainly want to hear we're making the right choice when our health is on the line. But again, intellectually, I think we all know deep down that when it comes to something as complex as the human body there's so rarely a situation where it's 100% the right choice. And like an objective panel of medical experts would tell you that this is 100% the right choice. Now, Covid is a little different. I think a lot of people are going to go, well, of course, the vaccine is the right choice. And, of course, this is the right choice. [inaudible] masking was the right choice. But we've learned over time that masking was more complicated than we were giving it credit for in the beginning. And maybe we will feel like that about the vaccine. Y'all remember how defensive I was of the vaccine. I've had to reevaluate my sort of attitude about the vaccine over time. And I think especially when there's like life and death or even just health on the line, that desire for someone to tell you you're making the right choice, because that's what we want to hear. And that's certainly what we want to hear from our friends. You're making the right choice. You're doing the right thing. But another cultural value we have, we talk about all the time, is the importance of diversity of perspective. And so I think the paradox of friendship is like we're served by both. We need people when we're in pain to witness the pain and to say, I'm here and I'm not trying to fix it. We need people who will say, I know you think you did the right thing, here's something I'm thinking about when it comes to this. Like, we need both the people who will support us and the people who have different life perspectives and who will challenge us. And knowing when that's in right proportion, well, I think that's impossible to know.
Beth [00:51:08] Yeah. I think as I reflect on what I've learned about friendship recently, it is very much that I want people who are willing to get in my business. I think the only way you can have genuine, deep friendships as an adult is for no one to have the sense of, like, that's not my business. I want people to tell me I'm wrong. I want people to tell me I'm missing something. I want people to see me struggling and not take my cues on how to help me but to just jump in, and I want to do that back for them.
Sarah [00:51:36] I think that is true. And I think what reflects how true that is the most painful moments inside these conversations and really beyond just friendships, but even inside of families and partnerships is when there was ghosting or shunning. I think people would almost prefer a fight or a conflict to just the walking away. And so that tells you the idea that people just don't want you in their business. No, because when people just peace out, that is more hurtful than when someone's in their business in a way they find offensive, full of conflict, full of judgment. To me, it was clear that what was really hurtful is when people just walked away.
Beth [00:52:14] And that reminds me that the painful truth is when I have had too few friends in my life, it's because I wouldn't allow people to really be my friend, because I was trying to have everything together on my own. And my friendships are so much richer now that I don't do that. So those are some of our reflections on friendship in our lives at this moment. Let's hear from our listener group how they're thinking about it on the other side or close to the other side of these painful experiences they shared.
Listener 9 [00:52:41] It's really hard for me to find friendships anyway, but this kind of situation where someone who I thought was a person forever just turned so weird on me, for lack of a better word, it made me second guess how I read people and it made me also just nervous about trying again. [Inaudible]. It's made it harder. It's definitely made it harder.
Listener 10 [00:53:08] For me, I guess a couple of things. One of the things I feel like I've learned in this process is how to protect my emotional health. I was shocked at how much grief and heartache I've experienced over the last two years that I did not. I haven't experienced a friendship like this ending before. And goodness, I feel like I've learned the hard way just how painful that is, but have definitely learned to give myself grace in the midst of this. Just processing this over a long time and in recognizing the importance of friendships and being a safe place to land. In contrast to this friendship that has ended for now, I hope that that's not always the case. But I have another friend who's been such a safe landing place in the midst of these last two years. And I've been so grateful for that in investing in those relationships and then putting up boundaries where it just, you know, this other friendship [Inaudible] that just really sucked so much emotional space in the last few years that while I value having friends that think differently than me, that this was just a situation where I was like, I cannot keep doing this. I can't lose sleep weeks on end trying to fix a relationship that just is not meant to be right now. And that might not always be the case, but letting that go and just having the ability to say, like, not now. This isn't working right now has felt freeing. And it has also allowed me to just appreciate other relationships where I've found some of that comfort elsewhere.
Listener 7 [00:55:03] I think passing on to your podcasts where you were talking about the-- I listen to a lot of podcasts, maybe got this confused. Where you were talking about the LGBTQ community and the fluidity of gender. And I think it was you that said, "I wish we could just say, this is who I am right now." Maybe that wasn't you, but I love--
Beth [00:55:26] Yes, that's Sarah's big aha moment about discussing this with her kids right now, that she wants them to just be able to say, this is who I am now. And be open to what happens next.
[00:55:37] That's right. I loved that so much because I think most of you said some version of I thought this was going to be a friend forever. And I think back to your point about we don't have language for this, I think we always assumed that those deeper friendships will be there forever. Like, nobody really tells you that there's seasons of adult friendship. I never had no idea. So this is the first really like big break, and obviously for all of us going through this pandemic, we've seen things that we didn't know were coming. But I think for me, in terms of what it's brought to me, there's been multiple things. I've learned how to set boundaries around my energy, which I was always [Inaudible] again, an Enneagram seven. I struggled mightily with the fear of missing out. And so we did all of the things all the time. Never said no to anything. And I realized I was-- pre-Covid Melody is entirely different from post-covid Melody. And I feel like if I hadn't gone through what I went through, it would have taken me a lot longer to get there. But in all reality, I'm very happy with this version of myself. And it's come at great cost to my physical wellbeing and to my friendships, but it's deepened a lot of other things too. And it makes me feel like-- I don't know what the right word is. I feel truer to myself and I feel better about what I'm standing for than I'm standing for anything, I guess. It's changed a lot.
Listener 2 [00:57:16] I feel similar where I'm just so much happier being authentic. And I've found my voice; whereas, before I didn't know anything. And I felt like I didn't have anything important to say. Again, with the white privilege I was told that it doesn't matter how you vote as long as it's Republican and nothing's going to change anyways. So I think just the way I was raised was so problematic and I agree with that. That is my upbringing, but I'm doing everything in my power to change it now. And my family members, I've lost most of them and I'm on my own now and I've never been happier, which is a weird thing to even try to describe. But I've built my own community around me and they're the people that do show up. They're the people that love me, regardless of what I have to say even if we disagree. And they see who I actually am versus just like, oh, she believes in pro-choice, so that means she's not a good person. I have just found the most authentic, beautiful people just by using my voice. It's kind of weeded out the people that I thought were forever. But it has been really amazing.
Beth [00:58:48] We are so grateful to the participants in these conversations. This is a big ask. And as we spent time with people on these calls through a lot of tears and laughter and chunks of these conversations that you're not hearing, it's just was a big ask. And I'm so grateful and I find so much value in people sharing their stories. So thank you to all of our partners and friends. Conversation partners in this episode. Thank you to all of you for being here. In our next episode, we're going to talk about the subject that we got more stories on than anything else, and that is church. We hope to see you then.
[00:59:30] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.
Sarah [00:59:35] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.
Beth [00:59:41] Our show is listener-supported special thanks to our executive producers.
Executive Producers (Read their own names) [00:59:46] Martha Bronitsky. Linda Daniel. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hassler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs.
The Kriebs. Laurie LaDow. Lilly McClure. Emily Neesley. The Pentons. Tawni Peterson. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karen True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Vilelli. Katherine Vollmer. Amy Whited.
Beth Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Ashley Thompson. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Morgan McHugh. Nicole Berklas. Paula Bremer, and Tim Miller.