20 Years of Marriage with Sarah and Nicholas Holland

TOPICS DISCUSSED

• LIV / PGA Golf Merger

• Mike Pence and Chris Christie join the GOP Primary Field

• CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht is out

• 20 Years of Marriage with the Hollands

• Outside of Politics: Everyday Carry

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EPISODE RESOURCES

Save the Date: Pantsuit Politics Live in Paducah October 21, 2023

Be sure to sign up to get the Pantsuit Politics Newsletter delivered to your inbox every Friday. We’d love to share your thoughts in our June newsletters, send submissions to hello@pantsuitpoliticsshow.com

• PGA Tour agrees to merge with Saudi-backed rival LIV Golf (CNBC)

• Saudi-backed LIV Golf envisions franchises in its future, executive says (CNBC)

• DeSantis signs Bible, Pence hops on motorcycle at 'Roast and Ride' event in Iowa (AP News)

• Chris Christie Announces ’24 Run, Taking Square Aim at Trump (The New York Times)

• Inside the Meltdown at CNN (The Atlantic)

• CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht is out after a brief and tumultuous tenure (CNN)

• Why Chris Licht Really Failed at CNN (The Atlantic)

NICHOLAS’S EVERYDAY CARRY RECOMMENDATIONS (affiliate links)

• 4ALLFAMILY Medicine Cooler

• RovyVon Flashlight

• Spyderco Delica 4 Lightweight Folding Knife

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:08] And this is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:10] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics. Welcome to Pantsuit Politics, where we take a different approach to the news. Beth is currently out enjoying her summer break, so I am joined today by an exceptionally special guest, the one and only. Mr. Nicholas Maxwell Holland.

Nicholas Holland [00:00:42] Hello, everybody -- esquire.

Sarah [00:00:44] Oh, excuse me. Mr. Nicholas Maxwell Holland Esquire. I'm so glad you're here, babe.

Nicholas Holland [00:00:49] I'm thrilled to be here, as always. I love it when I get to the podcast. It's always so fun.

Sarah [00:00:54] Is it that you love talking to me?

Nicholas Holland [00:00:55] I love talking to you. I love talking to these wonderful people.

Sarah [00:00:58] Love it. Today, you guys, we're going to talk about some headlines. We're, of course, going to talk about LIV Golf and its merger with PGA. Couple other headlines, and in the main segment of the show we are going to talk about (drum roll please) marriage.

Nicholas Holland [00:01:14] Indeed.

Sarah [00:01:14] We have been married for--

Nicholas Holland [00:01:16] Almost 20 years.

Sarah [00:01:17] 20 years on July 5th, y'all.

Nicholas Holland [00:01:20] 2023.

Sarah [00:01:20] Twenty years. I've been with Nicholas Maxwell Holland Esquire since I was 19 years old.

Nicholas Holland [00:01:24] I wasn't Esquire then.

Sarah [00:01:25] True. And then Outside of Politics, we're going to talk about everyday carry. Did you hear my sigh?

Nicholas Holland [00:01:31] Why? Why are you sighing? You agreed to this topic.

Sarah [00:01:34] I did agree to the topic. It's going to be fun. We do have an exciting announcement Nicholas is going to share about the Pantsuit Politics Paducah weekend related to everyday carry. Get excited about that. Okay, Nicholas, this is where the co-host does the call to action. What do you want to ask our audience?

Nicholas Holland [00:01:48] I would love your audience to do literally anything that is positive for Pantsuit Politics. That can include the free stuff you guys can write and review on iTunes. That helps the podcast. You can recommend the podcast to your friends, to your family. That's a fantastic podcast still to this day. Most of their growth is through word of mouth. True. We hear all the time about how people found out about it from so-and-so or so-and-so, my aunt, I told my aunt, whatever it was. That's great. You can also join Patreon on any level. Helps to feed my kids, keep my kids in shoes, all the things that's helpful as well.

Sarah [00:02:22] Feed Nicholas's kids.

Nicholas Holland [00:02:25] Feed your kids too. I'm being serious.

Sarah [00:02:29] That's actually true. So, yes, anything you can do, super helpful and supportive of the podcast. We love it.

Nicholas Holland [00:02:34] I hate to be not specific, but if you've ever been thinking maybe I should do that, go and do it.

Sarah [00:02:38] That's right. All right. Next up, we're going to talk about first up, LIV/PGA merger. Nicholas. The PGA has merged with the Saudi Arabian backed rival LIV Golf, which just mere moments ago they were in knockdown, drag out, legal litigation over. But everybody's made nice because.

Nicholas Holland [00:03:08] Money.

Sarah [00:03:11] Money.

Nicholas Holland [00:03:13] Probably money.

Sarah [00:03:13] Money please. There's some real Mona Lisa Saperstein energy here for you.

Nicholas Holland [00:03:18] And I disagree with you that everybody's happy because not everybody is happy.

Sarah [00:03:22] Money doesn't make you happy. I wish the people of Saudi Arabia understood that.

Nicholas Holland [00:03:25] Well, yeah, I don't know about that. But I think it was interesting.

Sarah [00:03:30] Let me say the leaders of Saudi Arabia.

Nicholas Holland [00:03:31] Sure. The first I heard of this was from you, which is strange about sports, because you usually hear from me about sports. And it was a bit shocking and it remains a bit shocking to, I think, a lot of people. And just to give you like the basic outlines, because that's really all we have, is that the PGA Tour--

Sarah [00:03:49] You mean that something involving Saudi Arabia is not filled with transparency?

Nicholas Holland [00:03:53] It's not so much transparency as it's like it's not even really clear kind of how it's going to work. We have a rough idea that there is going to be a board of a for profit entity that has done--

Sarah [00:04:03] I think I read the head of LIV is going to be the head of the board and the head of PGA is going to be the CEO.

Nicholas Holland [00:04:09] Right. And I think mostly it's going to be controlled by PGA Tour named directors, as I understand it. But the actual PGA Tour events are still going to be put on by the existing, what I believe is a nonprofit, which is, again, is a bit shocking in ways. This was basically news to almost everyone except for the major players, the principals of Saudi Arabia. Is it PIF? Is that what it's called?

Sarah [00:04:36] It's called the Public Investment Fund.

Nicholas Holland [00:04:38] And basically this the chief of the PGA Tour, which is Jay Monahan, most of the players had no idea. Greg Norman, who has been the chief cheerleader of LIV Golf says he had no idea. And even now what we've been told is a very rough outline. And I actually had a conversation today with several people, people who are much more involved and interested in golf than I am. It's not one of my least favorite sports to watch and follow honestly. It's just kind of like a sense of no one really knows where it's going. There's a decent chance that it may actually not happen. And because of regulatory reasons, anti-trust reasons, the PGA Tour players revolting any number of things, I think we need to remember and it's been reported that a lot of PGA Tour players were recruited by LIV Golf for big giant sums of money, some in the nine figures.

Sarah [00:05:37] And some took them and some did not. A loyalty to the PGA Tour and now they look like dummies, right?

Nicholas Holland [00:05:42] People like Rory McIroy.

Sarah [00:05:44] If they look like dummies. I don't want to say that. I don't think it means you're dumb because you turn down buckets of money. I don't think that's dumb. I think they stood on their principles and I respect that. You know how during the end of Succession I said the problem with Succession is it makes it sound like when rich people behave badly unethically and stupidly that they reap consequences for that. And often that is not the case. They just throw money around, act poorly, and it never really catches up with them. This is a perfect illustration of that.

Nicholas Holland [00:06:17] I think that's right. But I think there's a lot of mad people who thought I was encouraged to be loyal, I was loyal and now instead of me getting $100 million.

Sarah [00:06:27] They need to channel that Kendall Roy energy, you're already rich. You're fine.

Nicholas Holland [00:06:30] Not all of them are. That's not a fair assessment. I think that's based on a misapprehension of what some of these guys make. You give me a stare, but there's some people who were not guaranteed to make $20 million in the PGA.

Sarah [00:06:43] Okay, but what are they making?

Nicholas Holland [00:06:45] I can't say for sure, but they're making it based on what they're winning. [Crosstalk].

Sarah [00:06:49] I bet it's still a lot of money. It's not generational wealth, but it's still a lot of money.

Nicholas Holland [00:06:56] Sure. Some of them turn down generational wealth.

Sarah [00:06:58] Right. But that's okay, because you know what that'll do? Ruin your life. Go watch Succession. You didn't make a bad call. It's fine. And I just feel like not only is this a statement on wealth, I think what the Saudi basically NBS crown prince is doing here with this fund-- because here's the thing, this idea of like, oh, it's a tenuous connection between LIV and Saudi Arabia, no, it's not. It's an absolute monarchy. The connection is strong. The connection between LIV Golf and LGBTQ rights abuse or LIV Golf and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, perfectly straight line as far as I'm concerned. Give me a break. They are one and the same. And it is gross. I mean, they are estimating that the investment fund their wealth because they really leaned in Covid and blew it up. That fund could be worth three or $6 trillion in like a decade. I mean, it's like double. It was like 300 billion. Now it's 600 billion. It's wealth you cannot fathom. They are throwing it around to gain power and to obscure their countries awful practices. I just feel like-- not to get on my soap box about sports again-- but we pretend or we tell ourselves that sports is some higher pursuit. But it is just like everything else. It is about money. It's about money. And I can cordon off a part of sports in a way that I can cordon off a part of music and art and movies and TV and say there is something pure there if you scratch deep enough, depending on what you're talking about, that is about the pursuit of excellence or the pursuit of expression. But dang, I just feel like the money is so polluting. It's just so, so polluting.

Nicholas Holland [00:08:59] So I would say I guess I'm a respondent to two things. First, I definitely agree with you. None of this agreement resolves any of the issue about Saudi Arabia using golf in the United States and Europe to sports watch their money, so to speak.

Sarah [00:09:15] But that only works because we treat sports like that.

Nicholas Holland [00:09:18] And two, I agree with you to a large extent that the truth about sports is that we as consumers of sports, our nostalgia, our respect for athletes, our reverence of athletic ability has been cultivated, and now it's being used against us to accept certain things which are maybe revolting.

Sarah [00:09:43] And that's not new.

Nicholas Holland [00:09:44] Certainly not.

Sarah [00:09:46] O.J. Simpson, anybody. You know, there's a long history of this.

Nicholas Holland [00:09:49] I mean, listen, the idea of a student athlete has been used, it was used, and it continues in some degree to be used to permit people to put their labor to work for not enough pay.

Sarah [00:10:03] I just think it's so gross. I think it's gross in a way that's like you just cannot put lipstick on this pig. I guess people will continue to love the people who love pro golf, will love it, I guess, and twist themselves in knots making sense of it or not. Maybe it won't, maybe it'll really hurt professional golf. I don't know.

Nicholas Holland [00:10:26] It's really hard to say I think at this point. It's really hard to say if this thing is even going to go. But for today, it made a lot of people mad. It was a big surprise. And here we stand.

Sarah [00:10:36] Whether or not it'll make a go is a good transition into the Republican primary.

Nicholas Holland [00:10:39] Well, it's going to go, but it seems like is going to go the way it went last time to me.

Sarah [00:10:44] So we have two new entrants into the field. You want to talk about your birthday buddy first? Mike Pence.

Nicholas Holland [00:10:48] He's not my birthday buddy.

Sarah [00:10:49] He's your birthday buddy. His birthday's a day before yours, you're birthday buddies.

Nicholas Holland [00:10:53] That's false. Tomorrow is my birthday. We're recording on the June 7th.

Sarah [00:10:57] Your birthday Eve, also known as Mike Pence's birthday because he's your birthday buddy.

Nicholas Holland [00:11:00] You can send belated birthday gifts to me if you feel the need. Mike Pence entered the race [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:11:09] I did think his motorcycle ride was cute.

Nicholas Holland [00:11:10] I didn't see this. He had a motorcycle ride?

Sarah [00:11:12] He motorcycle ridded. Is that how you say it?

Nicholas Holland [00:11:17] No. He motorcycle rode?

Sarah [00:11:19] He rode a motorcycle. It was maybe an Iowa thing and there's like a motorcycle ride. He mostly came near the end. But he actually rode in that thing.

Nicholas Holland [00:11:28] He actually drove a motorcycle.

Sarah [00:11:30] Yeah. You didn't see the pics of him on his motorcycle?

Nicholas Holland [00:11:33] [Crosstalk].

Sarah [00:11:36] No, he didn't ride on the back of somebody else motorcycle. If you're riding as a former vice president, that would be the worst.

Nicholas Holland [00:11:41] The way some of these launches of these campaigns have gone, ahem, DeSantis.

Sarah [00:11:47] DeSantis.

Nicholas Holland [00:11:48] Whatever.

Sarah [00:11:48] You've got to say it different every other time. You say DeSantis and then you say DiSantis, and then you go back to DeSantis.

Nicholas Holland [00:11:53] It would have not shocked me if he had some kind of (pardon the analogy) Michael Dukakis moment where he was holding onto the back of some motorcycle rider and hops off. So that's good.

Sarah [00:12:04] Don't you talk bad about Dukakis, history has held that man up. I'm just saying.

Nicholas Holland [00:12:08] It's not about him. I mean, so Pence entered the race.

Sarah [00:12:12] I'm more excited for Chris Christie who came in a very different way. Mike Pence didn't talk about Trump. Chris Christie was like, I'm here to take about Trump. I don't know what y'all doing. I don't know why you want to be president. I barely want to be president. Mainly, I just want to take out Trump.

Nicholas Holland [00:12:24] I mean, he definitely has--

Sarah [00:12:25] Some real New Jersey honesty.

Nicholas Holland [00:12:26] I'm here to be the kid and the emperor's new clothes.

Sarah [00:12:29] He's right.

Nicholas Holland [00:12:30] This man has no clothes, except he doesn't really have the moral high ground in a lot of things.

Sarah [00:12:36] It's not about moral high ground. It's about authenticity, and he does have that.

Nicholas Holland [00:12:40] I guess so. But at the same time, I think people expect it some Bon Mott or something he says about Trump is going to like just make Trump shrivel like he did to Marco Rubio or like Elizabeth Warren did to--

Sarah [00:12:55] But there is something about a prosecutor coming along when all his legal troubles continue to mount. That could be a thing.

Nicholas Holland [00:13:01] It's a prosecutor whose own lieutenants did bad things.

Sarah [00:13:06] That's not when he was an a prosecutor. That's when he was the governor.

Nicholas Holland [00:13:08] Yeah, exactly. But you understand what I mean.

Sarah [00:13:10] Don't make me defend Chris Christie. The point is, it could work. It could happen.

Nicholas Holland [00:13:17] Conceivably. I think there's a very small option.

Sarah [00:13:19] Let me say it this way. If anybody could do it, I actually think Chris Christie could.

Nicholas Holland [00:13:23] But I think that the broader and wider--

Sarah [00:13:27] Because I think he understands Donald Trump and most importantly, he is not afraid of him.

Nicholas Holland [00:13:33] Yeah, but I think the broader and wider of the field comes with the Republican Party, the more likely it is that Donald Trump becomes the nominee.

Sarah [00:13:42] How could it be with these mounting prosecutions [inaudible] is wrapping up his case. Donald Trump got on Truth Social and he was big mad, all caps mad, when he left the meeting at the Justice Department.

Nicholas Holland [00:13:50] You and I care about that. We just raise our eyebrows about it. And the people who actually vote [inaudible] primaries do not care in the main.

Sarah [00:13:58] I don't know. I still think it's too early.

Nicholas Holland [00:14:01] Maybe. It's promising. I think it's good. I'd rather have Chris Christie in the now.

Sarah [00:14:07] There you go. I'll take.

Nicholas Holland [00:14:10] I think.

Sarah [00:14:10] Don't say you think. I was happier before. Okay. And lastly you want to talk about your-- I don't know why-- favorite news source, CNN. It's not your favorite news source, right?

Nicholas Holland [00:14:23] I can't remember where we ended on this when we last talked about it on the More to Say. But it definitely is a source of news. If I am blindly typing in things to the into the into the URL bar in my browser, the first four news is New York Times, the second is probably our local paper for whatever reason, and then the third is CNN.com

Sarah [00:14:45] You go to our local paper?

Nicholas Holland [00:14:49] In the morning if I'm trying to find out what's going on in the world, that's the second place I go. You don't read the local paper at all, do you?

Sarah [00:14:56] No. Former city commissioner never reads the local paper.

Nicholas Holland [00:14:59] And then CNN.com, it's just sort of an autonomic response I think [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:15:03] You know why I don't read the local paper? We can get into this in the marriage segment. It's because I know you're checking that stuff. I don't need to. You're doing it.

Nicholas Holland [00:15:10] I'll give you the highlights.

Sarah [00:15:11] Right. Exactly. Something major happens, you'll tell me.

Nicholas Holland [00:15:12] The highlights of the highlights because I only read the headlines most of the time.

Sarah [00:15:15] Okay. So you love CNN. Well, there's a lot--

Nicholas Holland [00:15:18] It's not that I love CNN, but it's something that I definitely follow.

Sarah [00:15:20] It's a habit.

Nicholas Holland [00:15:20] And, of course, what we found out today was it Chris Licht, who has has replaced Jeff Zucker as head of CNN.

Sarah [00:15:28] Thirty months. That's a really long tenure there.

Nicholas Holland [00:15:29] Shut down CNN Plus, which was their streaming service that everybody kind of was pinning their hopes on. Zucker left because he didn't disclose a relationship with another employee.

Sarah [00:15:41] An underling.

Nicholas Holland [00:15:41] An underling. I guess what you said, it sounds gross.

Sarah [00:15:43] It does.

Nicholas Holland [00:15:44] Even though everybody knew about it and they may actually bring him back, I think.

Sarah [00:15:48] I think he might come back.

Nicholas Holland [00:15:50] But Chris Licht was out following a very scathing in-ed.

Sarah [00:15:55] Which he gave full access to.

Nicholas Holland [00:15:57] Scathing Atlantic article about him, where he came off incredibly gross and also came off as not really understanding how to cover it all.

Sarah [00:16:04] He just came off as more concerned with his own PR than the success of CNN.

Nicholas Holland [00:16:08] I think that's part of it. And I also think the Donald Trump thing and especially the way that it was [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:16:12] And that actually I think is great because I think what will keep the press in line as far as covering Donald Trump is not as much as I wish it was concern for our democracy, but fear for their jobs. And so, somebody got fired for allowing that to happen. I'd say that's probably the last one.

Nicholas Holland [00:16:31] Yeah, I certainly hope nobody gives Donald Trump a town hall where it is 95% as Trumpy as it comes, and they ask him softball questions and don't do any follow ups and basically allow them to tear down the station on which he--

Sarah [00:16:45] I get that and I don't think they should have done it. You cannot follow up. He is slippery. Not unless you practice to the level of Hillary Clinton. I mean, she did a hell of a job on the debate, pinning him down and not letting him squirm away. But still doesn't matter. She won all three debates, even though more people voted for. I just want to take us all the way back and get the PTSD in full effect. Why are you looking at me like that?

Nicholas Holland [00:17:07] No, I'm not.

Sarah [00:17:09] [Inaudible].

Nicholas Holland [00:17:10] That was a lot of crosstalk. I feel like we've crosstalked over a lot. So I just wanted to-- smash that like button if you agree. I got to make a point, I just can't [inaudible] immediately.

Sarah [00:17:22] Anything else about CNN?

Nicholas Holland [00:17:24] No, it's just it's interesting. I guess I think that we'll see who ends up in that position. I think Trump is hopefully in for a harder time than he got last time.

Sarah [00:17:33] Yeah, for sure.

Nicholas Holland [00:17:34] I really pray that the mainstream, so to speak, media covers him in a more honest way that is not so much focused on just the outrage machine and the things that he does.

Sarah [00:17:47] Okay. I think we tackled the major headlines.

Nicholas Holland [00:17:50] Sure.

Sarah [00:17:50] Next up, 20 years of marriage.

Nicholas Holland [00:17:54] Yes. We'll talk about 25 minutes

Sarah [00:17:56] With Sarah and Nicholas Holland. Nicholas, we have been married for 20 years.

Nicholas Holland [00:18:11] Almost. Yes.

Sarah [00:18:12] Close enough. July 5th is less than a month away.

Nicholas Holland [00:18:15] It is.

Sarah [00:18:16] And we've been together for 23 years.

Nicholas Holland [00:18:20] Almost. Yeah.

Sarah [00:18:21] I thought the best way for us to talk about this was sort of break it down, because one of the most interesting things we read about marriage today was that people don't feel like they know what's coming. They don't feel prepared when they get into marriage.

Nicholas Holland [00:18:34] My understanding of what it was, like what you said, it's that they don't appreciate what it means to be married in terms of the things that you share in a lot of ways. And the things that you're totally or jointly mutually responsible for. And I think that probably starts with money, living space, etc.

Sarah [00:18:54] Well, let's back up, because what starts with, I think is your marriage background, which I think is just as important. So, first things first, your parents are still married.

Nicholas Holland [00:19:06] My parents are still married. They were married in 1969 on the same same day Sarah and I were married, July 5th. This year they will be married 54 years. They married pretty young. My dad was 23 and my mother was 21 or 22, I think. So similar in age to us, actually, now I think about it.

Sarah [00:19:29] My parents are divorced. They got divorced when I was three years old. And then my mom married my stepdad. I grew up basically inside that marriage. But still I think one of the marriage tenets that you articulated and have articulated over the course of our marriage and that I think your parents set you up very well for, as you say, I learned from my parents that you marry who you marry. You don't expect them to change.

Nicholas Holland [00:19:53] In the main, you marry who you marry. You shouldn't expect them to become a different person especially. But 20 years on, they have the background they have, they have the parents they have, they have the experiences they have.There's a certain part of them that you're never going to fix, so to speak. If you think there's something to fix about your partner, then maybe you shouldn't be trying to marry them. Because fixing somebody means that you think something, in my opinion, is fundamentally wrong with them. Now, people can change in margins. People can get more tidy.

Sarah [00:20:33] He brought it up before I could.

Nicholas Holland [00:20:35] They could be more helpful. They can be more responsible with certain things. They can see things in a different way. But a lot of a person's personality, I think, is set by the time they're in their twenties.

Sarah [00:20:45] And I think you had a much healthier perspective about this from even the very beginning of our marriage. I think you were very good about not seeing everything as the end all be all of importance, that understanding there was going to be conflict, but you could get through it. The stakes were always lower inside our fights in like let's say the first couple of years of our marriage. It took me a long time to figure out like we could fight and it wasn't the end of the world. I mean, I wrote a blog post like 10 years in our marriage where I said it took me like seven years to figure out that when we fought, it didn't mean that we needed to get a divorce. I remember fighting and you would not care that I was upset about something. I would be like, he doesn't love me. We should get divorced.

Nicholas Holland [00:21:29] I definitely want to say my parents married 54 years. That doesn't mean they never fought.

Sarah [00:21:34] No.

Nicholas Holland [00:21:35] I don't recall seeing a ton of knock down drag outs. I mean, no knockdowns. There was no physical violence in my parents marriage. There never has been, to my knowledge. But definitely there were occasional screaming matches. And there's a few core memories of things being broken, but nothing major. A coffee mug where someone got kind of pissed off and just put it down a little hard. You know what I mean? I think maybe from seeing that, although. I don't know, maybe that's not really necessarily color that idea, but it just seemed like to me marriage was not something to be taken lightly. We did it. It took a lot to do. It takes a lot to undo. And so just fighting over whatever it was we were fighting at the time didn't seem like it was...

Sarah [00:22:23] There was lots of fighting in the first several years.

Nicholas Holland [00:22:27] Yeah. I think that we struggled with what a lot of young couples struggle with in the first few years. First of all, we were--

Sarah [00:22:33] Poor.

Nicholas Holland [00:22:34] Basically broke. We got married the summer after my second year of law school. So for the first year you worked at Planned Parenthood for basically minimum wage, you had health insurance.

Sarah [00:22:48] That's true.

Nicholas Holland [00:22:49] But not a ton of money. And I was basically making nothing..

Sarah [00:22:53] The rule was no dog until I got a job. I remember that from our first year of marriage.

Nicholas Holland [00:22:57] That's that was true. [Inaudible]. But, yeah, we definitely thought about money. I think we do have different conceptions of money.

Sarah [00:23:05] I'm a spender, you are a saver generally.

Nicholas Holland [00:23:07] Yeah, I think I have a scarcity mindset. I have a saving mindset, I think you have a--

Sarah [00:23:13] Life is to be lived.

Nicholas Holland [00:23:14] Live is to be lived. And also I think you grew up with more of a sense of safety net for some reason. My parents had five kids and--

Sarah [00:23:22] Not a lot of family around.

Nicholas Holland [00:23:23] Not a lot of family around. We were not denied anything that we wanted to, but I always had a sense of it's expensive to live. Save your money when you can, you know.

Sarah [00:23:35] Well, I think we definitely thought about money once we made a budget and decided how much each person-- because we've had joint checking accounts for all 20 years of our marriage. When we finally decided this is how much each person gets to spend each month without the other person judging their spending.

Nicholas Holland [00:23:51] Like a fun money thing.

Sarah [00:23:52] We call it fun money. We still have it.

Nicholas Holland [00:23:55] We do.

Sarah [00:23:55] What the budget for fun money and at first you remember, I want.

Nicholas Holland [00:23:59] To say like 50 bucks a month or something like that. I was really next to nothing.

Sarah [00:24:04] Less.

Nicholas Holland [00:24:06] It was pre-inflation, I guess.

Sarah [00:24:06] Pre-inflation.

Nicholas Holland [00:24:08] It was the 2000.

Sarah [00:24:09] We were rolling deep with that $50. The other thing I think we fought the most about was sex. Yes. And I was thinking about this today. And I think I tell a story that I grew up Southern Baptist, where virginity was like peak of importance. And I think I told myself that my mom was so good about sex and she really was like lots of good, open, honest conversations about sex that that didn't really affect me. But really what I was thinking about today in our first two years of marriage, that's not really true. I think it did kind of weigh on me. I remember one time where I was like, I don't want to fight, think, talk anymore about how often we should have sex. I don't want to have sex at all. And I want to think about sex. And in my mind, it was like 3 to 6 months when in reality was probably like 10 to 20 days where I was like, I'm out. I'm not doing it anymore.

Nicholas Holland [00:25:01] I don't remember.

Sarah [00:25:02] You don't know remember this?

Nicholas Holland [00:25:06] I'm not even sure what the issue was now that I think about it. It's been so long ago, but I remember as having very different conceptions of how we're supposed to be initiated, who was responsible for it. I think that's kind of [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:25:19] That's true. I think that can still come up from time to time.

Nicholas Holland [00:25:21] I think you're right. I think it does. I think we had different sex drives or maybe just different sex drives at different times. I think both of us kind of felt that way. It felt like a burden.

Sarah [00:25:36] A burden.

Nicholas Holland [00:25:37] I had to figure out when to do it. I don't think it's gotten better over the years, and I agree that it still can come up from time to time. I think it was particularly pronounced then because we were the only partners either of us had ever had, and we were young, and I guess both of us thought that we were kind of failing at it in a way. And it felt bad.

Sarah [00:25:59] There's probably an amount of pressure inside a marriage in your first two years, generally. You just want to get it right. Everybody spent all this money on the wedding.

Nicholas Holland [00:26:05] We should be having sex in just the right amount of time. We should just have just enough money.

Sarah [00:26:09] Our house should look great. Our social lives should be great. We're dating. The dates should be great.

Nicholas Holland [00:26:13] As if anybody else is keeping track of how frequently we're having sex or someone needs to know It felt a little pressure packed.

Sarah [00:26:21] I felt like once we moved to D.C. also because we had a lot of other demands on our time outside the marriage. So it took some of the pressure off the marriage. I was in law school. You were in a high pressure legal job in Washington, D.C. And then after I was done with law school, we were double income, no kids. So we had more money. We were in a bigger city. We had more to do. We just had an enormous amount of time watching television.

Nicholas Holland [00:26:46] We watched so much. I wish I had it back.

Sarah [00:26:49] I wish I had it back.

Nicholas Holland [00:26:50] To do literally anything else with my life.

Sarah [00:26:53] Anything else.

Nicholas Holland [00:26:54] We also--

Sarah [00:26:55] We traveled. We had fun.

Nicholas Holland [00:26:57] I think we also had more close couple of friends.

Sarah [00:27:00] Yes, we did

Nicholas Holland [00:27:01] I think when we lived in North Carolina, we maybe had three or four close couple of friends. But with you being in school, it was a lot easier to make friends and have a friend group. And with my group at work too, I think that was easier. We had more relationships to kind of maybe compare and contrast and get a sense of like, oh, we're doing this okay.

Sarah [00:27:22] That's really important. One of the most interesting things we read today about like divorce rates and marriage rates and culturally what's going on, is that they think divorce can be a social contagion and that you are more likely to get divorced if you have friends that are getting divorced.

Nicholas Holland [00:27:36] I think no matter how you slice it, even to this day, even in the year of our Lord 2023, there's still stigma around divorce. And that first divorce in a friend group can lead to a sense of, oh, well, they did it. It sucked, but they came out the other end and maybe they're happier for it or whatever. And I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong. I think maybe there's a sense that it's social contagion. But also if you've only got the divorce, that means there's probably something wrong with your marriage in the first place or [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:28:13] Well, there is always interesting statistics that we're like people just feel like the other person didn't want to try. The lack of commitment was the number one cited reason for divorce.

Nicholas Holland [00:28:23] Right.

Sarah [00:28:24] I think in my head I thought it was like infidelity or abuse.

Nicholas Holland [00:28:31] Maybe it's kind of a joke. I think it's become kind of a trope, but I definitely think there can be a sense among women towards men that they just don't care. Kind of like what you said, which is they don't really want to try. They don't change. They don't listen to me. And so maybe that's perceived as a lack of commitment. I don't know if that's really what they meant, but I definitely think there's a lot of reasons for divorce. And I think the reason people stay married is because they're willing to overlook those issues that some people aren't. And to continue to try to do--

Sarah [00:29:05] Well, what makes me really sad about it is the most common time frame to get divorced is about eight years.

Nicholas Holland [00:29:17] Seven year itch.

Sarah [00:29:18] Seven year itch. So we were married for five years before we had kids. And I really value that time looking back and see that we had--

Nicholas Holland [00:29:26] The most sex.

Sarah [00:29:26] Together to hang out, get to know each other, learn how to fight, calibrate our ideas about sex and money and all that kind of stuff. Now that we didn't, we, like, fixed it all right.

Nicholas Holland [00:29:40] But before we had the stress of kids. And with all that said, some people that we know who are still married as long as us had kids seconds after they got married.

Sarah [00:29:48] Mere seconds.

Nicholas Holland [00:29:49] But if I was [inaudible] generality, I would say find time, make time in your marriage if you can, especially if you get married young enough to just be married as a couple.

Sarah [00:30:01] I can't imagine having those fights about sex and money with toddlers in the mix.

Nicholas Holland [00:30:07] Here's what I wonder, though. I wonder if that's a function of a long marriage or just age, because I think there is definitely, as we talked about, looked at, and all these statistics, people are getting married later. And typically those later marriages last longer than the marriages that get together early.

Sarah [00:30:25] No, that's not necessarily true.

Nicholas Holland [00:30:27] You disagree? Okay.

Sarah [00:30:27] It's complicated.

Nicholas Holland [00:30:29] It's complicated. Again, I think it's an interesting question, which is, is the reason that we stayed together, just because we managed to get to a point in maturity together where we were willing to accept certain things, worked through certain things, whatever it is, mold shape, how everyone is.

Sarah [00:30:48] That's what I think.

Nicholas Holland [00:30:48] Or was it the marriage age or was it just our age?

Sarah [00:30:53] I really think that it was an overall benefit to get married so young.

Nicholas Holland [00:31:01] Yeah. I mean, listen, I wouldn't do it any other way. I wouldn't do it with anybody else.

Sarah [00:31:07] And the way it shakes out is like if people are getting married because they got pregnant in high school and they feel forced to, well, then no that's a terrible reason to get married. But the higher you move up the educational ladder and socioeconomic ladder, which are linked to your educational levels, college graduates have bananas marriage rates.

Nicholas Holland [00:31:27] Absolutely.

Sarah [00:31:30] And college sweethearts who get married have crazier marriage rates.

Nicholas Holland [00:31:33] Yeah. I think there's a function of all of this and all of what works that is probably very dependent on your socioeconomic status. We're talking about our marriage, but again, our marriage is two people growing out middle class, white, south eastern or middle America. So our conception of what a marriage was and our ability to see good marriages and see good positive interactions with people [inaudible] above a lot of other people's. But to get back to our point, which was should you have kids right away? I think the answer is if you can avoid it, no.

Sarah [00:32:10] And also if you should get married young because I would not be sad if our kids got married right out of college. I would be delighted because I think there is something about as long as I felt like they were getting married for "the right reasons". I had basically every aunt and uncle that I grew up with, my parents are both one of four, they all got divorced within like three years of us getting married. Surely it was wild.

Nicholas Holland [00:32:33] They all had kids, though.

Sarah [00:32:34] They all had kids. They all had been married for a while and they all got divorced.

Nicholas Holland [00:32:37] But also a lot of them got divorced once their kids were--

Sarah [00:32:40] Older.

Nicholas Holland [00:32:40] Almost adults.

Sarah [00:32:43] Even my own parents, the reason they got married we're just like, I got married because I didn't want to see her with somebody else. Well, that's a bad reason to get married. I got married because we thought we were pregnant, but it turns out it wasn't. What?

Nicholas Holland [00:32:55] Again, I think we're talking about heterosexual marriage. Is there really much to be gained here? Is there is there a general rule we can apply? I would say don't do anything that's going to put a huge strain on your marriage until you feel pretty comfortable in your marriage. And kids are number a one.

Sarah [00:33:11] The finances will be a strain on your marriage if you get married younger.

Beth [00:33:15] Sure.

Sarah [00:33:15] But I just think there's an aspect of we grew up together and we worked on each other and we grew up around each other. It's like a tree growing up around a stake.

Nicholas Holland [00:33:28] And I do think marriage between people who already have their own lives that are not young, I don't know if it's hard, but it's different.

Sarah [00:33:36] I can't imagine it.

Nicholas Holland [00:33:37] I think they're less likely to share finances. I think they're more likely to probably live separately lives [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:33:45] Well, let me just be 100% vulnerable. I just think there's an aspect too of like-- now, this is a very fine line because you can see where this becomes dangerous. But there was a level of commitment to me-- not that I ever thought I want to get divorced or I want to leave, but there is a sense of like I wouldn't even know what adulthood would look like without you. There's just a sense of, like, you stay in it because of habit. That sounds terrible. But let me just say, in a long term, we're talking multi-decade, what I hope to have in our marriage, sometimes habit is going to carry you through. It's not all going to be romance every moment or decades.

Nicholas Holland [00:34:26] For sure. I think I understand what you mean, which is to say, I think that sometimes young marriages stay together because they just don't know what they do. Otherwise, I think that can be a bad thing.

Sarah [00:34:39] Definitely. Not only bad, dangerous.

Nicholas Holland [00:34:42] But sometimes I think like what you're talking about with our fights, you thought, what would I do? Am I really willing to blow it up over this? And maybe that decision was no. But, again, I agree. I think that's a dangerous kind of conversation. A dangerous rabbit hole to go down.

Sarah [00:34:58] You can really only say about how it worked on you. You can't say how it would work for other people.

Nicholas Holland [00:35:01] And I think there's a power imbalance. And I think there was a power imbalance in our relationship.

Sarah [00:35:04] For sure. For a long time.

Nicholas Holland [00:35:05] Because I always made more money than you did.

Sarah [00:35:07] At some points you made money and I did I didn't.

Nicholas Holland [00:35:09] And when we moved to Paducah, the theory was you're going to get a job. And then we kind of looked around and we thought, it doesn't really make sense.

Sarah [00:35:17] So it was a definitely a big shift in our marriage. We moved to Paducah in 2009. I was pregnant with Griffin. So we upended our careers, our locations, and became parents all at the same time.

Nicholas Holland [00:35:29] All at the same time.

Sarah [00:35:30] We went big.

Nicholas Holland [00:35:31] We put stress on our marriage.

Sarah [00:35:33] This is a fun story. When Nicholas was like, "That's insane; we cannot do all that," because he is an Enneagram Six and he's envisioning the multiple worst case scenarios, I wrote on a little index card that this is all we have to do. I don't remember what order I wrote them.

Nicholas Holland [00:35:46] It was sell our house. I remember we were selling our house in 2009.

Sarah [00:35:52] Eight.

Nicholas Holland [00:35:53] Eight. Well, no we moved--

Sarah [00:35:54] I think we finally sold in 2009, but we put it on the market in 2008.

Nicholas Holland [00:35:57] So we're selling our house in 2008, which was, of course, a terrible time to be selling a house, apparently anywhere except for Washington DC.

Sarah [00:36:03] Washington DC.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:06] Because we did not lose our shirts on it. I think we had to bring $1,000 to closing if I remember correctly for transport tax.

Sarah [00:36:11] Of course you'd remember that.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:11] As a real estate lawyer I do remember that very clearly. And then we were to buy a house.

Sarah [00:36:15] Yeah.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:16] Which we didn't actually do before we moved back.

Sarah [00:36:18] No, we lived with my parents.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:19] We had to buy a car because we did not own a car.

Sarah [00:36:21] Yes.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:22] We had to pass the bar. I had to find a job prior to passing the bar..

Sarah [00:36:26] And have a baby.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:27] And then we were going to have a baby.

Sarah [00:36:29] Short easy list.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:31] Somewhere in our house we have this list checked off.

Sarah [00:36:34] Yes. I have it framed. Easy breezy. We checked them all off.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:36] We felt so proud of our easy, breezy, beautiful.

Sarah [00:36:37] Checklist. Worked like a charm. So we had kids. And look, I don't quote Will Smith a lot, but one of the wisest things I ever heard him say on the Oprah Show is when you have a child, just tell yourself this is a new marriage. This is a new marriage. I'm entering a new marriage. I think that's true with every child that you bring in that marriage.

Nicholas Holland [00:36:55] I think you've told me that before, and I'm not sure it ever stuck. But I agree to some degree for sure.

Sarah [00:37:01] Everything changed when we had Griffin, I feel like.

Nicholas Holland [00:37:03] I don't know if I feel that way.

Sarah [00:37:04] Really? Tell me more.

Nicholas Holland [00:37:06] I think the responsibilities became greater. I think there was a shift in what we were responsible for. I don't know. I didn't really feel like it was a different marriage in the sense that, like, I didn't feel differently about you. I didn't think that our roles really particularly changed that much. Maybe that's just my perspective.

Sarah [00:37:27] I feel like I was a totally and completely different person. I mean, I went from a like married working lady in the big city to a stay at home mom in Paducah, Kentucky. Everything about my life was different. So maybe what I mean is everything about me changed.

Nicholas Holland [00:37:49] Yeah, I think that's probably more closer to the truth. Because I think for me it was still I'm the primary breadwinner. I go to work every day. Now I have more responsibility. And I'm talking about my own personal cycle.

Sarah [00:38:03] And I think that you being a primary breadwinner, especially when we had two children and you lost your job when Amos was six months old, and I had a teaching job at a college that paid $8 and some change, I look back and I think I see the strain that put on you when you were the primary breadwinner.

Nicholas Holland [00:38:23] Yeah.

Sarah [00:38:25] Being an Enneagram six and a primary breadwinner is not a great combo.

Nicholas Holland [00:38:28] I'll take your word for it. I think it changed my perspective. The whole situation changed my perspective about a lot of things. I think that was probably more impactful than a lot of the other things that I experienced moving here.

Sarah [00:38:40] Do you think that it's fair to say that me having Griffin changed me and you getting fired changed you?

Nicholas Holland [00:38:48] A hundred percent. And it's funny I think about it now we're talking about it, like the biggest failures in my life have resulted in some of the best things in my life.

Sarah [00:38:55] Absolutely.

Nicholas Holland [00:38:57] That is so trite. Thinking back on-- like, this is like the silliest, dumbest thing. But the first time I took the LSAT, I had prepared for the LSAT, it was like the end all be all for me. I had to get a good score on it. And I walked in there and just from the second section on-- and as we were taking the LSAT, now these logic games they have on the LSAT, which they're getting rid of apparently.

Sarah [00:39:24] I don't know, I blocked it off.

Nicholas Holland [00:39:26] It was just this brutal section and it was always my weakest section. And I just panicked and I literally walked out and canceled my score. And then I took it the next time and I did great on it.

Sarah [00:39:34] I'm sorry. You're missing something in between.

Nicholas Holland [00:39:37] Sarah and I got together and then she--

Sarah [00:39:39] Then he fell in love with me.

Nicholas Holland [00:39:40] And so that changed everything. It made my mind clearer.

Sarah [00:39:41] Absolutely. That is what happened.

Nicholas Holland [00:39:44] But also with this job thing, it was just kind of a recognition- both times of recognition, like, okay, you can fail at something. And I think still this sense is going to come up and people that love you are still going to come to your aid. And hopefully if you have that support system, at least in my life. Failure is not the end of that.

Sarah [00:40:06] So those were some some transformative years 2009 to 2012.

Nicholas Holland [00:40:11] Yes, indeed.

Sarah [00:40:12] Big years.

Nicholas Holland [00:40:12] Total change in our marriage.

Sarah [00:40:14] And then in 2013 that was halfway through. That's the 10 year mark of our marriage. It feels like the first 10 years were so much longer and bigger than the second 10 years.

Nicholas Holland [00:40:25] I think that's just how time works.

Sarah [00:40:27] Just you get older and everything goes...

Nicholas Holland [00:40:28] That's just the time.

Sarah [00:40:29] I I told you every time we fought I thought he doesn't love me because when I would cry he would not say, "Oh my God, you're crying. Your sad. What do I need to do to fix it?" Still, that's not your reaction. Just really makes me wonder sometimes why do my tears not melt your heart?

Nicholas Holland [00:40:45] Honestly, I can't remember the last time you cried in a fight.

Sarah [00:40:47] It's been a long time. But why would I? Doesn't matter. You're like, "Get over it. We're arguing logic right now. We're having a debate. I don't care if you cry."

Nicholas Holland [00:40:56] Here's what I would say.

Sarah [00:40:57] This is my biggest beef insider. You would want to like debate and I would be like, my feelings are hurt.

Nicholas Holland [00:41:03] Definitely. But I thought that meant, oh, your feelings hurt and that trumps everything we're talking about. And instead of logic and reason and whatever it is, all you used to do was turn on the water works.

Sarah [00:41:10] Of course it does. Do you see the tears? My feelings are hurt.

Nicholas Holland [00:41:18] Maybe that's just a sign of what you're talking about, which is now when we fight, the stakes are lower, right? And you'll say you're being ridiculous and just walk away from it.

Sarah [00:41:29] Yeah. I got out of the car and walked the rest of the way to the hike like two weeks ago.

Nicholas Holland [00:41:32] You're being silly, you're being crazy or whatever it is, and this fight is not worth it. I think both of us to some degree do that, and I think we both also come around to the apology a lot faster.

Sarah [00:41:42] Yeah, a lot faster.

Nicholas Holland [00:41:42] And recognition of, yes, I'm being silly about it.,

Sarah [00:41:46] I will say the moment when I realized-- I don't mean this the way it sounds. It's not like I was wondering up until this point. I wasn't. I knew I loved you. I knew when I was in college and we sat in the educational library and talked philosophy. I can't imagine how ridiculous those conversations would sound to me now, but at the time they were mind expanding.

Nicholas Holland [00:42:11] We were wise.

Sarah [00:42:11] We were so smart. And I thought, I know for one thing that I will always be interested in what this man thinks about things. And that's when I fell in love with you. Because I was scared to get married. I didn't expect to leave college engaged. I know lots of girls do, but I did not.

Nicholas Holland [00:42:29] What? Explain that to me because you had a long term boyfriend coming into college.

Sarah [00:42:31] I did.

Nicholas Holland [00:42:32] Definitely told people you were getting marry.

Sarah [00:42:34] That's true. But that felt different to me. I wasn't there to hook a husband. I thought I was going to marry Devin. And then when I wasn't with Devin anymore I thought--

Nicholas Holland [00:42:40] I'm going to get a degree. And I'm going to see the world.

Sarah [00:42:43] See the world, be Sex and the City. I don't know.

Nicholas Holland [00:42:45] I skewed the whole plan up, didn't I?

Sarah [00:42:47] You did. But I do remember feeling in college like, oh, my God, I've met this guy. This is it. I'm not ready for this. I'm so young. Is this what I want to do? But I just couldn't imagine life without you. You trapped me.

Nicholas Holland [00:43:00] Okay. I hope this has been interesting to you people.

Sarah [00:43:05] Anyway, so it's not that I didn't love you or didn't to be married to you. Obviously, I know that's true because we definitely had two kids by the point that I'm going to describe what happened next. But between Amos and Felix, we lost a pregnancy pretty far along. I was 20 weeks pregnant. It was very sad. And I remember you saying, "This is not happening to you. It is just happening."

Nicholas Holland [00:43:29] The beginning of Sarah's understanding of the chaos lottery.

Sarah [00:43:32] It's true. That is the origin of the chaos lottery. Because I think I'd always thought he's so negative and there's a lot of big differences in our personality. You are very pessimistic. You've gotten better. You generally are allergic to enthusiasm. You've gotten much better about that. Self-growth and personal habits and products, all the stuff that I love, that's just like the woo woo stuff, I live for it and that's not your jam.

Nicholas Holland [00:44:03] And it's funny because you say that I said that to you, but even to this day sometimes when it rains too much or it's too sunny, I think it's actually happening to me

Sarah [00:44:11] You just do it about the weather is so dumb. Well, you did a little bit about diabetes. Sometimes you think like diabetes is happening to you.

Nicholas Holland [00:44:19] No, I don't think that's right. Maybe you perceive it that way. I think with diabetes, it's just a hard thing to deal with.

Sarah [00:44:27] So we've dealt with a lot of hard things in these last 10 years.

Nicholas Holland [00:44:29] And it's just very much like a recognition of-- it's the feeling of just a difficulty. Not that it's happening to me, didn't happen to me at all. It happened to our son. We have to help him through that. And it's just a new thing to deal with. It's difficult and sometimes it manifests as anger right at the.

Sarah [00:44:48] At the universe. When we first fell in love, the sense of like, oh, this person is so much bigger; there will always be something to sort of explore and learn from and let work on me, that's the other moment I can really point to and say, "Oh man, this is going to make me a better person over the long run. This person has a lot to offer me." I felt that.

Nicholas Holland [00:45:15] I'm glad to her that.[Inaudible] expressed it that way.

Sarah [00:45:18] I feel that way about you, babe. I really do.

Nicholas Holland [00:45:20] I'm glad you do. And I feel that way about you too.

Sarah [00:45:23] And that's why I think back, I look over these last 10 years in particular and think like losing a baby, definitely like Felix's initial stroke diagnosis, then Felix has diabetes, traveling a lot, dealing with the Trump presidency, such bad [crosstalk].

Nicholas Holland [00:45:43] Yeah, that was not fun. But also dealing with different-- your job has changed a lot.

Sarah [00:45:49] Being a city commissioner was hard on our marriage.

Nicholas Holland [00:45:50] That's true. And now your job has changed a ton. What you do for a living is so different from what you started out doing, even as smaller potatoes social media stuff or when you were teaching at the college or whatever, you're gone more. I'm much more now than ever. I'll do the single parent thing. So it's changed for sure. I think Beth always says we have our own language, and I think that's true. I would say exactly that way, but I think we have a shorthand with each other. We can cut to the chase about certain things.

Sarah [00:46:33] Well, that's my favorite thing about being married a long time, is they say if you put married people in an experiment and you test them, they can remember more because they have-- and honestly, Beth and I do this too. You just understand what the other person is good at so you don't even bother. You save space in your brain for the stuff you're good at.

Nicholas Holland [00:46:50] Right. And that can be aggravating for the other spouse. How many times you get mad at me? How many times I ask you about when is our vacation? But then you'll be like, what's the password for... Or remind me what this is or whatever it is. We definitely store information that we need..

Sarah [00:47:09] For sure. I think as we've entered this last-- not last phase, I hope we have many more phases of our marriage. But what feels like a more stable phase, in that a phase that has lasted longer. I mean, we got in some of the worst fights recently that we've ever gotten to about diabetes management in the very beginning when we were very tired and stressed and upset. And I still feel like we wrote it out and we handled it really well.

Nicholas Holland [00:47:32] Yeah, I think this is not anything magical. Some of it's about learning to communicate and communicating more. It's about being vulnerable and expressing how you're feeling and trying to understand why you're feeling that way. And I think both of us have worked on that, not just together, but individually in therapy and several different phases of our lives of understanding, okay, this is happening. I'm upset. Why am I upset? And trying to focus back on yourself and not so much on what's going on in the other person.

Sarah [00:48:09] And it just makes me sad because I think marriage has bad branding right now. I feel like particularly post-COVID.

Nicholas Holland [00:48:15] I think you mean heterosexual marriage has bad branding right now. That's true. First of all, we just had in the last year a whole law about defending marriage, for marriage equality and protecting marriage for everybody.

Sarah [00:48:27] That's true.

Nicholas Holland [00:48:27] To some degree I think marriage itself is still very important and more people want to have the protection of marriage.

Sarah [00:48:33] But it's so funny to me we have all these conversations about loneliness and I feel like marriage never comes up inside those conversations. We have a loneliness epidemic and nobody says, "Well, how are marriage rates?"

Nicholas Holland [00:48:44] Because you don't have to be married to not be lonely. We have lots of friends who are in long term committed, non-married relationships that I would say are effectively, for all reasons except for taxes, marriages.

Sarah [00:48:58] Okay, but this dance we're doing right here inside this conversation is what happens, right? Is that you want to articulate what's positive about your marriage or your relationship or what you want, but you don't want to feel like you're judging someone who doesn't have it or assaulting other people's choices. There was all this polling and everybody's like, it's not that important to be married if you're going to have kids. It's not that important to be married if you're going to be in a long term committed relationship. And then you go, how important is it to you to get married? And the numbers are super high. So it's like people identify it as something they want, but they don't want to say it's important globally. And I just think that's hard. We are social beings inside social institutions. It's like when we all fill out those forms and say fame is important, but not to me. I think that's a struggle.

Nicholas Holland [00:49:51] I understand what you're saying. I think it's fraught because I think when you say marriage is important or marriage is a more stable relationship that comes with all the things we were talking about, which is yes it's harder to undo and also there are greater expectations placed on it. And there are toxic marriages that don't end because it's harder to undo. And yada, yada, yada. I mean, yes, it's definitely a fraught conversation. I don't know if it would be better if more people got married. I think it would be better if more people had marriages like ours.

Sarah [00:50:26] For sure.

Nicholas Holland [00:50:27] But I think, again, that's very contentious.

Sarah [00:50:31] But I think it's it's hard because it is a social institution and we can't all just hold our desires for the institution as individuals. At some point there are politics and there is this sort of community aspect. And I do think we have to find a way to talk about things that are positive without all of us reacting. Honestly, it reminds me about any conversation I've ever had about birth. If I say I had a natural birth and then someone says, well, I had to have my C-section. Well, that's fine. I'm not talking about your C-section. I wish there was a way to have these conversations. And when we're sitting down to talk about our 20 year marriage, believe me, I think the reason you got divorced, whatever it is, was great and awesome and fine and I'm not here to judge it. Let me tell you this. I'm so damn glad my parents got divorced. Holy shit. I'm glad my mom woke up when I was three years old and was like, I'm not waiting until this kid's grown. I'm getting the hell out of here. And there wasn't abuse. My parents were just ill suited to one another and they should have gotten divorced.

Nicholas Holland [00:51:34] Your dad was a spender and your mom was a saver.

Sarah [00:51:34] And there's a long list of things. They should not have been married. They shouldn't got married the first place. Glad they did. But I wish there was a way to say it's desirable and also not attach all this weight if it doesn't happen for you. I don't want to make single people feel bad. I don't want to make divorced people feel bad. We don't have a lot of ways, I think, inside our society about all kinds of things, not just marriage, to say this is great. To really celebrate it without making people who are not inside the institution feel like crap.

Nicholas Holland [00:52:11] So I think what you're suggesting is that it's nuanced.

Sarah [00:52:14] Shut up.

Nicholas Holland [00:52:16] And that we should bring some nuanced conversation. I don't think it has bad branding. Necessarily, because obviously some people still want to engage in it. I think you think it should be more promoted and revered maybe.

Sarah [00:52:41] Or how about just supporting parents? Which is one of the biggest strains on those particular years of marriage.

Nicholas Holland [00:52:50] Yeah, absolutely.

Sarah [00:52:51] Let's just find some policies that like-- not that we don't have lots of policies that.

Nicholas Holland [00:52:55] Medicare for all, daycare for all.

Sarah [00:52:56] Word. Support marriages. I don't want to go back to where people thought if I got had a baby outside marriage, I'm going to hell. I don't believe in hell. I'm not looking to go back to where people felt judged or shitty. And I keep bringing up this podcast, but I was listening to Jane Fonda on Julia Louis Dreyfus podcast and she had this great moment where Louis Dreyfus was like, "Do you have sex?" And she's like, "No, I don't want to be naked in front of a man anymore." And then she said, "But if I'd been married for 50 years and I'd been with this person, which I really wish I could have had that, I would feel differently." And I just love that she said that. She didn't have that. She does not have it. And she's just saying it sounds really lovely and I'm sorry I missed out on it. But she just said it without judgment, without grief, without regret, which is that's just the beauty of being 84 and not giving a shit anymore. But I wish we had more of that posture. I can't articulate this and there's no judgment. You know what I mean?

Nicholas Holland [00:53:55] I get you. I think we all feel the need to condition our feelings and condition our opinions because we don't want to make people feel bad or feel like we're judging them just by having said opinions or saying something is good because that suggests something else is not good or not as good. And that's not necessarily true. I mean, I think universally people would say that most marriages that last eight years is a good, sweet thing. That is great.

Sarah [00:54:18] Eighty years. You got big goals for us.

Nicholas Holland [00:54:21] It could happen.

Sarah [00:54:22] It could happen, baby.

Nicholas Holland [00:54:23] How long were your great great grandparents married? 70.

Sarah [00:54:26] Yeah.

Nicholas Holland [00:54:27] Listen, means it gets better all the time.

Sarah [00:54:29] That's right. Let's do it. I want to just articulate like that there are hard aspects, and that those are to be expected, and that those are normal, and that sometimes just the commitment in the habit carries you through. And I'm still so happy to be in this marriage with you.

Nicholas Holland [00:54:47] I thought we had it licked.

Sarah [00:54:49] And I just feel like especially a lot of reading about women leaving unhappy heterosexual marriages, that just made it sound like particularly all heterosexual marriages are imbalanced and the women are exploited inside the relationship. And that's just the reality. And I thought, that's not how I feel. And it just made me sad. I guess my Instagram algorithm got, like, hooked on it [crosstalk].

Nicholas Holland [00:55:17] Well, you get on TikTok and it'll tell you how bad husbands are [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:55:21] And there are some truly, truly crappy husbands, but you're not one of them. And I would like to thank you right now publicly for that.

Nicholas Holland [00:55:27] Wow, you're wonderful. I wouldn't trade you for anything.

Sarah [00:55:30] Even though I don't cook.

Nicholas Holland [00:55:32] Particularly cause you don't cook.

Sarah [00:55:35] It's so true. That's the way to have an egalitarian marriage, is have a man who cooks.

Nicholas Holland [00:55:40] And also grocery shops.

Sarah [00:55:41] And also grocery shops because that is solidly half of the household labor.

Nicholas Holland [00:55:44] It's a big part of the household labor. Truly. It's not quite laundry, but we all do own laundry.

Sarah [00:55:48] That's right. Any final thoughts on marriage or marriage to me or how amazing I am. I wish y'all could see his face.

Nicholas Holland [00:55:59] Yeah, wish this was a video medium. I've loved all 20 years of it. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Let's do it again. Do another 20.

Sarah [00:56:08] Yeah, let's do it.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:09] At least.

Sarah [00:56:10] I got big plans for us. We're going to be married a very long time. We're doing Fit Dad Summer because I want you to be around. This is why married man lives so much longer because their wives are like.--

Nicholas Holland [00:56:22] Go to the doctor.

Sarah [00:56:23] Go to the doctor.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:24] Exercise.

Sarah [00:56:25] Do some planks.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:26] Don't eat that.

Sarah [00:56:26] Don't eat that.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:28] Smack it out of your hand.

Sarah [00:56:29] Smack it out of your hand. Make fun of you for months.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:32] She never smacked anything out of my hand.

Sarah [00:56:33] I did make fun of him once.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:34] Except occasionally my cell phone for giggles.

Sarah [00:56:36] That's actually true. I did one time and still continue two months later make fun of you for ordering a full blown banana split on like a Tuesday afternoon.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:45] It was a delicious banana split. It was nostalgia.

Sarah [00:56:47] I get it was your birthday.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:48] I needed that dairy cream banana split.

Sarah [00:56:49] Or Mike Pence's birthday.

Nicholas Holland [00:56:53] No, we do not share a birthday.

Sarah [00:56:55] Birthday buddies. All right. Up next, we're going to talk about what's on our mind Outside Politics. Nicholas?

Nicholas Holland [00:57:10] Yes.

Sarah [00:57:11] What is on your mind? Outside politics is always the same. And it is this. This is always on your mind.

Nicholas Holland [00:57:19] Everyday carrys.

Sarah [00:57:20] Everyday carrys are always on your mind.

Nicholas Holland [00:57:22] So everybody who doesn't know what that phrase means, it basically is just a catch all for man ship and a lot of way.

Sarah [00:57:31] It's little baby man purses.

Nicholas Holland [00:57:32] Carried from the front. It covers things like backpacks, pouches. Primarily, it started I think with kind of pocket jewelry. We talk about pocket knives, pens.

Sarah [00:57:45] Flashlights.

Nicholas Holland [00:57:46] Flashlights, watches, especially expensive watches probably was like the very first everyday carry.

Sarah [00:57:51] Some real patriarchal energy here. It's like I'd call it my everyday carry lipstick..

Nicholas Holland [00:57:56] I think if you read some of the coverage of it, it's like how is this different from just a woman carrying like the stuff that she needs.

Sarah [00:58:03] Like Band-Aids and hand sanitizers.

Nicholas Holland [00:58:05] I don't think it is. I think it's just rebranded and now it's masculine. Now it's like tough, I guess.

Sarah [00:58:11] I'm willing to let y'all have some things. It's fine.

Nicholas Holland [00:58:13] It's also different.

Sarah [00:58:16] As long as it's not a concealed carry, I'm happy to go along.

Nicholas Holland [00:58:19] Well, that's part of it for sure.

Sarah [00:58:22] Is that were the language came from?

Nicholas Holland [00:58:24] No. But there's a darker side to everyday carry I think-- at least to community. There's definitely a very close-- closer than I like a lot of times, to a Second Amendment kind of branch of it and also connection to law enforcement, first responders. Law enforcement in particular, which can be a little uncomfortable in which there's parts of the community, so to speak, kind of pressed back on each other. So there's definitely Second Amendment part in particular is is definitely closely related.

Sarah [00:58:56] Well, let's not [inaudible]. Share your important announcement about the Paducah Pantsuit Politics weekend..

Nicholas Holland [00:59:03] So Beth’s teaching her yoga class which everyone should take part in. In fact, I think I'm going to do yoga for the first time when Beth teaches it. Not first time, but the first time in a long time when Beth teaches it. But anybody who wants a 5 to 10 minute conversation about everyday carry, whether that be a knife, ballpoint pen or replaceable pen, fountain pens, I'm not big on, but I can give you an idea. Flashlights, wallets, watches. I do watches but I don't do anything big.

Sarah [00:59:31] You're going to do everyday carry consultations.

Nicholas Holland [00:59:33] Consultations.

Sarah [00:59:33] For the husband to get dragged along to the...

Nicholas Holland [00:59:35] Husband's who get dragged along or [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:59:38] Husband listeners though.

Nicholas Holland [00:59:39] If you want to talk knives, you want to look at knives. That is where this all started for me.

Sarah [00:59:43] He has so many knives.

Nicholas Holland [00:59:45] And it was funny because I actually probably like five years ago or six years ago, I got down to like two knives and I've given like all of them away and I thought, I'm going to buy the one knife. And I bought a Spiderco Delica 4. And I thought, this is it. I have figured it out. And within a year I had 10 other knives. You have a problem. And they were all more expensive than the knife I had previously..

Sarah [01:00:12] You have a problem. They knives do come in handy occasionally. I was most skeptical of the flashlight because every phone has a flashlight. But I will say the flashlight is probably what I asked to use the most.

Nicholas Holland [01:00:22] And it's interesting you say that because I think the knife--

Sarah [01:00:25] Because they're like little baby flashlights like the size of your pinky.

Nicholas Holland [01:00:30] My use of knives is lesser than my use of the flashlight or the pen. Which I came to realize about a year into [crosstalk].

Sarah [01:00:39] I don't like the pens. They pens are all too heavy.

Nicholas Holland [01:00:41] But for a person who does what I do... The theory of a lot of everyday carry is like a lot of the guys who carry everyday carry, they carry it because they're working in machine shops, they're working in warehouses where they need to cut boxes down there working. So a lot of people that's why they carry an everyday carry knife and everyday carry box cutter or whatever. Well, in my own life, like what do I really need every day?

Sarah [01:01:06] A pen. Esquire.

Nicholas Holland [01:01:09] Because I had to sign things I'm asked to sign.

Sarah [01:01:12] There's always a pen nearby in an office setting.

Nicholas Holland [01:01:14] But who wants to use crappy things? That's like saying there's always a shirt sale, why would you buy a nice blouse?

Sarah [01:01:19] How dare you so.

Nicholas Holland [01:01:21] You have one pair of pants. How could you possibly need another? And it's definitely pocket jewelry. There's definitely an aspect of that. I'm into pens, but I didn't get deep in the pens. I don't buy a pen. I probably buy a knife, I would say judiciously every eight weeks probably since I've started this. So every couple of months. I've slowed down periods. I've sped up periods. It just depends. With pens I think I bought over the course of three or four years, probably five.

Sarah [01:01:51] You also have prepping tendencies, right?

Nicholas Holland [01:01:53] Right.

Sarah [01:01:54] You told me the other day that at any given moment there are six ways to start a fire in our car.

Nicholas Holland [01:01:58] It's true. I think it was four.

Sarah [01:02:00] But why?

Nicholas Holland [01:02:01] Well, I mean, I think for one thing, because a lot of things can start a fire. And that was more of a joke than than anything. We were conversing about pouches and whatnot. And then I just told you, like, oh, yeah, in our car, there's five ways to start a fire.

Sarah [01:02:14] Because you're an Eagle Scout.

Nicholas Holland [01:02:15] That's 100% part of it, was that be prepared. There's a prepper aspect to it. But I am getting to a point where I feel like I'm refining and getting to where I don't feel like I'm I need to buy to research and know what I want. Because I think, again, part of this is just pure consumerism and you get told you need this or this is better or this is better. You know, this is the next thing, that's the next thing. The steel is better, this cut is better, the way this looks is better. This flashlight has more functions, whatever. I do feel like I'm seeing the forest for the trees. I guess I'm not just consuming as much.

Sarah [01:02:54] I just want to say I'm pulling some threads together and I feel like there's a real gendered component of this that connects with our conversation about sports. And when it's like a thing mostly men are interested then it's like higher level, when really it's really just consumerism.

Nicholas Holland [01:03:09] I'm not denying that a lot of it is consumerism. I mean, these knife companies have to sell you something new and so they have to bring out what's the next thing, what's the next lock making this thing.

Sarah [01:03:20] There's so much prepping that's just consumerism.

Nicholas Holland [01:03:24] The more you get into the community, the more you start seeing that. The period time I've been paying attention to it, you see, like, well, in 2018, this was the number one steel and it was the end all, be all. And then we have a new one this year. So you start seeing again the forest for the trees.

Sarah [01:03:48] They're playing you.

Nicholas Holland [01:03:49] To some degree they're playing you. And, yes, certain things are better. But with flashlights, you said every phone has a flashlight. That's true. But really, when you use your phone as a flashlight, it's a really crappy flashlight.

Sarah [01:04:01] It is a crappy flashlight.

Nicholas Holland [01:04:03] It will do in a pinch, but it's not very bright. It's not very useful to get into small spaces.

Sarah [01:04:09] You guys, when we are out in the world and he saves someone else with his flashlight, it's like not even pleasant to be around him for, like, a week. It's ridiculous. You are so proud of yourself.

Nicholas Holland [01:04:26] I think that part of every day caring for a lot of people, including myself, is a sense that you can help other people too.

Sarah [01:04:34] It's very sweet.

Nicholas Holland [01:04:35] And sometimes that means showing them how foolish they are for not caring a stinkin flashlight.. But also other reasons you carry a flashlight is that your eyes get old and you can't actually see things.

Sarah [01:04:44] That's true. You have flashlights that like send out emergency flashes.

Nicholas Holland [01:04:48] Those things are useful. Like can imagine if your car broke down on the side of the road and you need of some kind of a flare.

Sarah [01:04:51] Do you know how many times my car has broken down on the side of the road in 41 years?

Nicholas Holland [01:04:58] I don't know. There's a first time everything.

Sarah [01:04:59] It's like zero.

Sarah [01:05:01] I do think where you've come along to accepting that the Enneagram is real and that you are an Enneagram six.

Nicholas Holland [01:05:06] Yeah. I mean, it's definitely [crosstalk] worst case scenario all that bit.

Sarah [01:05:10] But since having a diabetic child, it's come in handy. The worst case scenario. The sort of prepping the gear, you just were you were ready to shine.

Nicholas Holland [01:05:25] Yeah, definitely. I mean, whether it be the backpack or this gear, the research that I'm going to do.

Sarah [01:05:30] Or the mini fridge that carries insulin, you would not believe it.

Nicholas Holland [01:05:33] That's true. They should sponsor us.

Sarah [01:05:35] It's like the size of a thermos, but it's a refrigerator.

Nicholas Holland [01:05:38] I would 100% give a huge, huge shout out to [inaudible] family because it's really the greatest. I also like things that I already owned. We have these little mini thermometers and like the zipper pull thermometers.

Sarah [01:05:49] Why did you have those?

Nicholas Holland [01:05:50] I think at the end of the day it was just like, it was ThermoWorks. And you know I love thermal works. You know, they do the [inaudible thermometers. ThermoWorks does not sponsor this podcast, but they could. And so they put out this new product, again, consumerism. And it was just a small thermometer that was like a zipper pull thermometer. Like, if you need to know how cold it gets on a camping trip or how cold it is in your cooler or whatever it is.

Sarah [01:06:13] To make sure your insulin has [inaudible].

Nicholas Holland [01:06:15] It's a little teardrop thermometer. And so I bought a couple of them and basically it was just curiosity sake. I hung them in the tent at night when the boys camped in the scout trip and oh, it got down to 36 degrees last night. And then lo and behold when you have a child with diabetes, you have to keep insulin cold. It's helpful to know how cold a thing is. [Inaudible] because you don't want it to be too cold or too warm has to be between 36 and 46 degrees preferentially. You go to hotel refrigerators, they can be very, very cold, especially closer to the freezer, little parts that they have. Or that can be very warm in that function. So that came in handy. So, yeah, I mean, it probably fed my worst instincts, but.

Sarah [01:06:55] I mean, I say all the time, I love that you're an Eagle Scout. If the zombies get you fast, I'm in so much trouble, I have no capacity to take care of myself.

Nicholas Holland [01:07:03] But you have five ways to start a fire to ward them off.

Sarah [01:07:05] I have a half an Eagle Scout on his way. A couple of getting started. I'm training up some backups in case [crosstalk].

Nicholas Holland [01:07:17] They'll get there.

Sarah [01:07:18] They'll get there. Well, I think that about covers everyday carrys. Do you think?

Nicholas Holland [01:07:23] 100%.

Sarah [01:07:24] Or do you want to just launch off into your whole podcast on everyday carrys?

Nicholas Holland [01:07:28] Listen, we talked about it. We even recorded an episode with a friend of mine about a couple of things I thought maybe would make a go, but I think I've missed that. I think now it's all on YouTube. And it's kind of a saturated market.

Sarah [01:07:43] Well, you had to come on Pantsuit Politics. You're like the Steve Martin of Pantsuit Politics. You might be the most often appearing guest.

Nicholas Holland [01:07:51] I think that's probably true. It's also very kind of you to keep me on here.

Sarah [01:07:54] Is that on your LinkedIn?

Nicholas Holland [01:07:55] I hope this was interesting to any of you. God love you all.

Sarah [01:07:58] Every time we record a podcast he's like, that was boring. Are you sure that wasn't boring? How could you doubt how interesting I am? I can carry us both. That's how interesting I am.

Nicholas Holland [01:08:10] I listen to you guys in your [inaudible] and I get on here and I just feel like I'm blabbing and it has nothing to do with politics. It's just the history of our marriage, apparently to day.

Sarah [01:08:19] I love you. I'm so glad you came on the podcast.

Nicholas Holland [01:08:23] Thanks. I love you too.

Sarah [01:08:24] You're like my most favorite person in the whole world.

Nicholas Holland [01:08:28] Ditto.

[01:08:28] Well, thank you for listening to another episode of Pantsuit Politics. Of course, we'll be back in years on Tuesday. We're going to rerun one of our favorite episodes of the year with Jennifer Senior. And then on next Friday's episode, I'm sharing finally my conversation with Richard Reeves. Are you excited about that?

Nicholas Holland [01:08:43] Yeah, for sure.

Sarah [01:08:43] It's all about men. You're a man.

Nicholas Holland [01:08:45] It's about boys and men.

Sarah [01:08:46] Boys and men. And you have been a boy and our man.

Nicholas Holland [01:08:49] I wish it was about boys to men.

Sarah [01:08:50] That would have been amazing. All right. So I hope you guys will join us. Thank you so much. We hope you have the best weekend available to you. And until Tuesday, keep it nuanced y'all.

Beth [01:09:16] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.

Sarah [01:09:21] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.

Beth [01:09:27] Our show is listener-supported special thanks to our executive producers.

Executive Producers Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. Emily Neesley. Tawni Peterson. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Danny Ozment. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago.

Beth Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller.