The Self-Help Husband

Summary

The Dating Detectives (Dear Media)

Episode: The Self-Help Husband (Part 1)

Airdate: June 22, 2026

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Episode Overview

This deeply engaging episode unpacks the first half of Claire’s ten-year odyssey through an intense, ultimately coercive relationship with her “self-help” husband Ethan. Hosts MacKenzie Fultz (PI) and Hannah Anderson (comedian) help Claire dissect the gradual manipulation, psychological abuse, and the complex journey of navigating polyamory, self-worth, trauma, and the insidiousness of “growth” weaponized as control. The episode stands out for its slow-build storytelling, providing rare insight into how seemingly supportive, growth-focused partnerships can become quietly dangerous over time, especially when the red flags aren’t obvious, persistent, or easily named.

Trigger warning: Discussions of coercion, grooming, rape, sexual harassment, emotional abuse, and intimate partner violence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context and Introduction to Claire’s Story

• [02:40] MacKenzie: “When you're listening to this story...it's easy for you to process that one hour and say, ‘Oh, why didn't she get out?’ But when it's dragged out for so long...it might not be as easy as ‘why didn’t she just leave?’”
• [03:05] Hannah: Claire’s story is a “slow build” of years-long coercion and intimate partner issues, including polyamory, without an anti-polyamory agenda.

Memorable Quote:
[02:20] MacKenzie: "I think she'll touch your heart, and there’s gonna be a lot of parts where our audience is like, 'Oh my gosh, that has happened to me and I never thought of it like that.’"

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2. The Beginnings: AmeriCorps, Instant Bonding, and Meeting Ethan

• [04:49] Claire describes arriving alone, immersing in AmeriCorps’ high-intensity “camp” atmosphere, and first overhearing Ethan making a crude joke: “I just want to get a Mara-laid.”
• Initial impression of Ethan: “He’s immature...I’m not interested.”
• [08:21] After a forced program transfer, deeper bonds formed in shared upheaval, leading Claire to see Ethan’s "confidence, sense of humor, and adventurous spirit" in a new light.

Memorable Quote:
[09:19] Claire: “My type is overweight, pessimistic blonde guys. That’s how Ethan would describe himself.”

Becoming a Couple

• [13:15] First sexual experience was surprisingly positive for Claire after a difficult previous relationship, reframing her view of sex.
• Ethan handled a broken condom situation “with grace and kindness.”

Early Red Flags or Not?

• [17:56] “We had no expectations... just letting this be the connection it was and seeing where it goes.”

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3. Moving in Together and the “Growth Mindset” Enters

• [21:50] Five months sharing a hammock outside (due to AmeriCorps rules), deep bonding, and “adventurous” living.
• Ethan’s personal trauma revealed: a prolonged psychological and sexual manipulation by his ex, with faked emails from “doctors” forcing him into non-consensual sex for a year and a half ([22:12–29:23]). Claire’s empathy and protectiveness for Ethan deepened, and their connections appeared stronger.
  • [24:27] “He was just afraid of his family finding out and she was threatening to tell his family...”

“Self-Help Husband” Foundation

• [34:04] Post-AmeriCorps, Ethan insists: “First and foremost, continuing to work on ourself was at the forefront of our relationship at all times.”
• Claire, eager for “genuine partnership,” throws herself into this shared self-improvement ideal, excited for teamwork but increasingly feeling “inadequate in comparison.”

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4. Subtle Undermining & Behavioral Control

• [41:06] Public shaming: During a visit with friends, Ethan shames Claire for calling someone “awful,” making her feel “scolded like a child.” This, for Claire, cements her sense of needing to be “worthy” of Ethan through extra self-work.
• [43:53] “Lovingly poking” escalates: Gentle teasing about Claire’s habits (cutting onions “wrong”) grows into persistent, public, and critical commentary—Ethan reframes it as affection, Claire feels controlled and demeaned.
  • [45:35] “For a year and a half, he did this, and then...I was fed up. I’m not cooking anymore.”

Memorable Quote:
[47:34] MacKenzie: “What do I need to do to deserve this? What a position to be in where you have to ask yourself that.”

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5. Redefining Reality & Eroding Self-Trust

• [48:28] Claire details how needing to “see [Ethan] clearly” and doubting her perceptions led her to let him define reality, undermining her confidence and identity.
• Relentless self-work—yoga, grad school, therapy—always returning to the idea she needs to change, even as Ethan repeatedly fails to acknowledge her growth ([50:53]).
• [51:53] “He fucked me up on that one. He’s the reason for years that I thought anger was a bad emotion...”

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6. Polyamory as Evolution or Escapism?

• [52:57] Ethan, two years in, suggests polyamory as essential to “make this [relationship] work,” shaping Claire’s response as “reasonable openness” for personal growth—despite her initial total lack of interest.
  • [53:23] “If I’ve never thought about it before, I should be cautious to being closed off to it now because...we might need polyamory.”
• Claire’s anxiety about her own sexuality (possibly being a lesbian) makes polyamory appealing as a means of self-discovery.
• [56:08] Clear, positive definition of polyamory vs. non-monogamy—focused on meaningful emotional relationships.

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7. Marriage & Financial Enmeshment

• [57:48] Tension around merging finances—Claire is reluctant, Ethan frames it as a step toward deeper commitment.
• [60:19] “He asked, ‘Do you want to get married?’ No ring, no knee. We didn’t even tell anyone right away.”
• New job becomes a source of trauma (sexual harassment and assault by a mentor, while Ethan appears supportive), followed by burnout and collapse ([61:27–64:00]).

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8. Sexual Manipulation, Withholding, and Polyamorous Complexity

• [64:38] Post-job, Ethan presses to “work on our sexual relationship,” expressing dissatisfaction and a desire for more adventurous sex.
• [66:10] Criticisms include Ethan expressing disappointment whenever Claire says “no” to sex, and withdrawing for days after rejections. MacKenzie diagnoses this as “manipulation.”
• “Mental gymnastics all day, every day in this relationship.”

Memorable Exchange:
[66:14] Claire: “He would always frame this as ‘well, that's how I'm feeling, so I should be able to express it.’”
[68:11] Claire: “We were feeling a lot closer, so...of course, what a great time to finally open up our marriage and become polyamorous, right?” Hannah: “Of course.”

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9. Polyamory, Jealousy, and ‘Comparison Hell’

• [69:07] Polyamory begins with hope—Claire connects with Sophie (“classic lesbian love story,” [70:33]) and realizes she’s pansexual.
• [73:18] Ethan only changes certain negative behaviors (e.g., “I wish” sexual analysis) after new partner Brooke directly rebukes him.
• Polyamory brings out Ethan’s jealousy, controlling behaviors, and incessant partner comparison ([74:41] “Brooke is his fun partner, I’m his weekday life”). For Claire, this is “destroying.”
• [78:09] Ethan fixates on perceived inadequacies, especially compared to Jake (“it’s ridiculous that Jake can go out and sleep with younger women and if I did, I’d be labeled a creep...”).

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10. Sexual Coercion Escalates & Emotional Fallout

• [85:08] Post-fight sex is used as “repair” by Ethan against Claire’s wishes:
  • [85:18] “Every single time we fought...I was then immediately being pushed to have sex with him. And that didn’t work for me...”
• [86:33] Ethan weaponizes Claire’s explanations (frequency of sex, desire, etc.), trying to “catch her in contradictions” and further eroding her autonomy.
• [91:51] Persistent pressure for sex acts Claire doesn’t enjoy, with Ethan insisting: “If we were doing it more consistently, you would start to like it.”

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11. The Cycle of Abuse and the Illusion of Growth

• [92:27] Hannah reminds listeners: “You were also in love. What were the moments that you were still seeing glimpses of Ethan that you fell in love with?”
  • [92:45] Claire: “I married him and stayed married to him for his potential...he was breadcrumbing me the whole time.”
• [94:21] Exploiting Claire’s “praise kink,” Ethan insists it must include demeaning speech, pushing her beyond her actual preferences.
• [96:30] Ethan proposes taking ecstasy to enhance sexual exploration, as Claire’s sense of self and boundaries is near collapse.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On long-term coercion:
  [02:40] MacKenzie: “When you're listening to this story...when it's dragged out for so long and there's space and time in between each incident, it's easier to process differently.”
• On self-worth and blame:
  [41:06] Claire: “If I want to be worthy of being with Ethan, I need to learn how to be kinder...”
• On control through ‘growth’:
  [43:53] “He would always center himself in my own experiences...this was the first moment that I saw that happen.”
• On sexual coercion:
  [85:18] Claire: “After fights, [Ethan was] always initiating sex as a way for us to repair. And that didn’t work well for me...this sex doesn’t feel like repair to me. It feels like something I’m doing for you.”
• On polyamory as a tool for self-discovery (and manipulation):
  [53:23] Ethan: “There might come a time in our relationship where we need polyamory...”
  [69:07] Claire: “Part of the reason [for polyamory] was...for me to explore what my sexual orientation is.”
• On the cycle of manipulation:
  [93:55] Claire: “He was breadcrumbing me the whole time. He was breadcrumbing me with a little bit of growth here and then pulling back...”
• On the fallout:
  [91:39] Claire: “I was always in a disassociative place...He just kept saying, if we were doing it more often, you’d start to like it.”
  [92:27] Hannah: “You were also in love. What were the moments that you were still seeing glimpses of Ethan?”

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Important Timestamps

• AmeriCorps beginnings: [04:47–11:02]
• Ethan’s traumatic past & blackmail: [22:12–29:23]
• Weaponized self-improvement: [34:04–51:53]
• Introduction to polyamory: [52:57–56:08]
• Marriage, finances, and boundary issues: [57:48–64:00]
• Sexual coercion/manipulation ramps up: [64:38–69:07]
• Polyamory & jealousy dynamics: [69:07–74:00]
• Comparison, resentment, and sabotage: [78:09–85:08]
• Eroding boundaries, dissociation, and cycle of ‘change’: [91:39–96:30]

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Tone and Atmosphere

The conversation is candid, reflective, and occasionally laced with gallows humor (“Stockholm syndrome, but for sex exploration” – [91:53] MacKenzie). Both Hannah and MacKenzie are empathic, validating both the absurdity of some of Ethan’s tactics and the very real pain of why leaving is so hard inside slow, psychological manipulation. Claire’s storytelling is clear, emotionally forthright, and laced with hard-won insight—but the mood remains ominous, as the full extent of the abuse is clearly still to come.

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Conclusion: What’s Next?

The episode ends on a note of escalation—Claire is at her psychological and emotional breaking point, her boundaries worn to nothing, still trying to “grow” for Ethan’s approval. The hosts warn the next chapter will be even more shocking, inviting listeners to process and support Claire’s story, and reminding everyone: “Trust your intuition.”

(For reactions and further discussion, listeners are encouraged to join the next “Dogfish Debrief.”)

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If you or a loved one are involved in an abusive relationship, please reach out for support: National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-6723.

Transcript

[Hannah]

The following program contains names, places and events that have been anonymized or fictionalized for the purposes of protection and safety. The following program is provided for entertainment purposes only, and any commentary from the

[Claire]

hosts are strictly conjecture and should not

[Hannah]

be held as making any definitive statements about the truth or identity of any particular individuals or circumstances. If you or a loved one are involved in an abusive relationship, please call the National Domestic violence hotline at 1-800-799-6-7233 for support.

[MacKenzie]

Happy dating Detectives. Monday. Hi, Hannah.

[Hannah]

Hi, MacKenzie. How are you? Are you excited about our show?

[MacKenzie]

Oh, my God, the tickets are going so fast. I'm so glad. It's kind of cool.

[Hannah]

It's like a little less than a month away that we are going to be in Chicago doing a live show and the tickets are available in the show notes. And then in August, we're going to be in Orland and Tampa.

[MacKenzie]

I've never been there. All I heard is that you have to visit the Bean. What, that big silver thing and the. And they said it's very, very windy, so you might break your umbrella. That's all I know.

[Hannah]

All right, well, I think I've heard that the summer is the absolute best time to go to Chicago. So even if you're not from there, but you're nearby and you've been like, oh, I've been. I've been meaning to do a trip into the city. This is the time.

[MacKenzie]

And I'm, I'm so, like, it's so cool to know how many listeners we have in the Midwest. That's so neato.

[Hannah]

Thank you all who are getting tickets already. And thank you if you're on our Patreon.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah. And we, by the way, we had some really amazing success with the merch at dating at that Crimecon. So we'll have some more of that for, for the live shows, too. So that's really cool.

[Hannah]

For sure. We should post them on Patreon, too, because we love our Patreon. Or $5 a month you get extra episodes and $9 a month you get extra episodes. Plus ad free listening experience for every episode. It's the girlfriend experience.

[MacKenzie]

Girlfriend experience.

[Hannah]

We're so silly. But seriously, thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting us. And enough about that. Let's get into the episode. We have a two parter, y'. All.

[MacKenzie]

Yep.

[Hannah]

But it's so good.

[MacKenzie]

I, I think that you'll really love Claire because she, she really, really. I think that she. I think she'll touch her heart and I think there's gonna be a lot of parts where our audience is like, oh, my gosh, that has happened to me and I never thought of it like that. And so I think that's always really interesting when we have those moments.

[Hannah]

Yeah, no, Claire is fantastic. And this is a slow build, if you will. I think we. I don't know if we've had stories that obviously touch on coercion and grooming, but this one really makes you feel like you' in that long years, long journey of being coerced into abuse. So there's definitely some trigger warnings of rape and coercion and.

[MacKenzie]

But there's also partner. Intimate partner issues that are. You don't think about. I think often.

[Hannah]

We're also going to talk about polyamory. It's a polyamorous story. And I'm. She talks about that in such an amazing way, in a clear way. So if you're new to that or skeptical about that, she'll be a great ambassador, in my opinion, because she definitely doesn't come out of the story anti polyamory.

[MacKenzie]

And I want to also mention when you're listening to this story and all of them, but really this one is a good example of it. When you're listening to this story, it's easy to cram a story into like one hour or whatever. And then it's easy for you to process that one hour and say, oh, why didn't she get out? But when it's dragged out for so long and there's space and time in between each incident, it's easier to process differently. And so it might not be as easy as why didn't she just leave? When you're processing everything at one time, within like an hour time span, this

[Hannah]

is a two parter. So if you want to comment support for her or questions about the episode in the week in between, we'll try to address those in next week's Dogfish debrief where we will go further into discussing the episode and what we can learn from it. But until then, you gotta wait a little bit, but it's worth it. We love our two partners.

[MacKenzie]

I know. Thank you for being here. We love you. And let's go ahead and give Claire the floor. Thank you for being here. Claire.

[Hannah]

Hi.

[Claire]

Thanks so much for having me.

[MacKenzie]

Hi, it's so nice to meet you.

[Hannah]

We hear you've got a big one, a big story for us. So without further ado.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Hannah]

Hand you the mic.

[Claire]

All right. Yeah. So my story starts out in 2014. I had just graduated from college I was 21 years old and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, and I decided to apply for a service year program called AmeriCorps. It's pretty similar to the Peace Corps, but it's a domestic program. So I was really excited to go off and do this. It was my first time moving somewhere where I didn't know anybody and really being in entirely on my own. But I was also really excited to be around a bunch of young people who wanted to volunteer and spend time outside and just do good things for their community. And when I showed up on the campus, there was only about 180 of us on the campus. And we were in this really, really small town in the Midwest. And so really quickly you were able to get to know a lot of people. And there's this really intense, almost like camp energy through AmeriCorps. There was a lot of really quick bonding and deep relationships that developed. And because you're living and working with people, you're really with people like 24, 7. So there's just like a lot of intensity to that. That space.

[Hannah]

I went to camp and we always used to say, a day is a week and a week is a month.

[Claire]

Yes.

[Hannah]

Is like how fast it feels.

[Claire]

That is so true. A time in AmeriCorps really didn't feel like time in the real world. It just, it moved really quick and everything felt very intense at all times. So one day I was walking back from a training to my dorm and I saw a friend of mine in a hammock over by the stand of trees, and he was talking to two other people. And I didn't know the two other people, but one of them was this younger guy who was really loud. He was really hard not to notice. And the only thing that stood out to me in that moment was so quick context for AmeriCorps similar to camp, I'm sure. Like, everyone kind of forms their own particular language in AmeriCorps and slang and things like that. So in AmeriCorps we say America, something to describe pretty much everything. So, like, if you fall in love and you're dating someone in AmeriCorps, it's Amer Love. Or when we're traveling, like to and from our project rounds, we're traveling via the ameravan. And so as I'm walking, I overhear this guy who's talking to my friend say, yeah, and I just want to get a Mara laid. And immediately I am just write this guy off, like, wow, he's so immature. He's really obnoxious. I'm not interested in getting to know him. So we. We go through that whole training program. It's about 11 weeks of training, and then we're supposed to be sent off on our project rounds. And at the end of that 11 weeks, there was a group of 18 of us who were dismissed from this program and transferred to a different AmeriCorps program to restart all over again. And we were obviously pretty upset because we had just bonded really intensely with all these people. And we had spent 11 weeks going through training to get ready for this moment to leave and actually go do the work that we were there to do. And now instead, we were picking up to go do eight more weeks of training in a completely different area of the country without all of our teams and the connections we had built. So as we transferred, of course, that group became very close. We just bonded really intensely, really quickly. And in that time, I finally got to meet Ethan, who was the guy who had said 11 weeks ago that he wanted to get a Mary laid. That I had completely written off at the time.

[Hannah]

Sure.

[Claire]

And at first, I was very open to getting to know him because we were all going through the same thing. And he was starting to grow on me in ways that I didn't expect. As I was starting to get to know him, I was seeing things about him that I really liked. He was really confident, and he had this really great sense of humor. He was always the one that was making people laugh with some sly joke or he loved to poke at people from what he said out of love. And at that time, it genuinely felt like fun, loving, poking. Everyone found it really silly. And he also had this really adventurous spirit. He had done a lot of really cool things while he was in high school, while I was younger, and had a lot of really big ambitions for travel and things that he wanted to do with his life. And it just really resonated with me in the ways that I wanted to live. So throughout that period of a really

[Hannah]

good person that's not shallow, I would like to know if he's hot.

[Claire]

Okay, so we're asking important questions here.

[MacKenzie]

Good job, Hannah.

[Hannah]

Yeah, journalism.

[Claire]

So it's funny because I've been told actually later by Ethan that my type is overweight, pessimistic blonde guys. So, like, that's how he would describe himself. And so physical traits weren't what I was attracted to right away. And I tend to be more attracted to people when I get to know them. So there wasn't this immediate physical Traction. And that kind of was like the progression of our connection. Like the physical nature of it wasn't there until it was there. And it surprised us both when it finally came. But all the. Yeah, that was actually a part of, kind of what drew me to the connection was like it wasn't this obvious thing we had been building up towards. It kind of just happened. So the way in which it happened. So when we were transferred out to a different program, we were transferred to the West Coast. So I was suddenly back where I grew up. And I ended up learning that a friend of mine from high school lived very close to where we were on campus for the program. And so he one weekend offered to drive me home so that I could pick up my car. And I asked if some of my AmeriCorps friends wanted to come with me. Because I wasn't close with Ethan at the time, I didn't invite him. And he ended up hearing about this trip and inviting himself. And for an 18 year old to invite himself on a trip with a bunch of like young 20 somethings, I was really impressed with his confidence. Typically, yeah, truly, like, I would never have done that at 18. I still probably wouldn't do that because I have an inevitable anxiety about inviting myself to spaces I'm not one in. Yeah.

[Hannah]

He was like, of course they want me to come.

[Claire]

Yeah. And there's something about that that I was like, wow, I love that energy. I kind of wish I had more of that myself. And it just really dawned on me, like, you know, I. I like to be around people who have this confidence. There's something really empowering and exciting about it.

[MacKenzie]

Absolutely. I agree.

[Claire]

So on that trip we got a lot closer and we actually ended up later on the way back to our campus. We ended up meeting his uncle and getting lunch because he happened to live on the west coast as well. And a couple of months later, his uncle, when we were finally dating, Ethan had called his uncle to talk to him. And his uncle said, I thought you guys were dating when I first met her. There was such an obvious connection between the two of you. And it always really stood out to me that people saw this natural energy between the two of us before we even kind of could see it. So that eight weeks of training finally wraps up and it's the last night before our project rounds where we are all going to go away from each other for six weeks and go work with our teams and then come back to the campus after. And our group of 18 are all hanging out. We aren't allowed to do anything on campus. You're not allowed to drink on campus. You can't like share a bed with somebody on campus. And so of course, as young hoodlums do, we would always hang out in the parking lot behind a gas station across the street. I've been there, I've been to, I've hung out with you for probably.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

What else would kids do? So we're hanging out in the parking lot and slowly everybody's kind of leaving to go back to their dorm, get themselves ready to leave the next day. And suddenly it's just Ethan and I in the parking lot and it's getting pretty late, but we're not tired yet, we're not quite ready to go to bed. And so I asked if he wanted to sit in my car so that we could again be off campus and not be like beholden to the rules that they had for us, but still stay up and talk and hang out. And one thing led to another and we ended up hooking up that night. And before Ethan, I had been in one six and a half year relationship with a guy that I'd met in high school and then dated all through college. And our sexual relationship was not great. It was, it was pretty unhealthy and just, it always left me feeling like I didn't like sex. Like I had this kind of concept that sex was just not something that was for me. And so being able to have sex with somebody, actually enjoy it, see that there's a different world out there than what I knew before. This was really exciting for me and kind of reframed how I was thinking about sex at the time.

[MacKenzie]

Absolutely.

[Claire]

Yeah. So after we had sex, we did realize that the condom broke. And so instead of going straight to the dorm to go to bed and get ready for the next day, we ended up having to drive around this town that we didn't really know super well, trying to find a Walgreens that was open 24 hours so that we could get some emergency contraception. And yeah, it was definitely a very stressful experience. We were up literally until 3am and had to get up the next day at 6 to leave for our project rounds. And I was feeling really sick after taking Plan B and was just having a hard time sitting in a van full of 12 other people for 10 hours the next day. And the entire time Ethan was handling it just, just with so much grace and so much kindness. He was really sweet and empathetic and checked in a lot on me. And then even throughout the 10 hour drive. He was making sure to text me throughout to check in and see if I was doing okay.

[MacKenzie]

That's amazing.

[Claire]

Yeah.

[Hannah]

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[MacKenzie]

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[Claire]

So I sweetened on him quite a bit after that moment just because I felt really supported and, like, taken care of in that I even think. Honestly, I think he probably even bought the Plan B, which, like, in it in itself is a big deal, because in AmeriCorps, we only make $1.50 an hour for the full year. And so money is definitely a thing. And so even that was, like, a small sign to me. He's responsible. He's, like, taking responsibility for this moment. Good.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

So we then left for our first project round, and we were apart from each other for about six weeks. We did talk throughout that time, but we didn't have any expectations that we were together or that we were necessarily going to get together. We were just kind of letting this be the connection that it was and see where it goes. But when we got back from our first project round, it was actually the day before his 19th birthday, and we were hanging out in his dorm, catching up from the project as he unpacked. And we started talking about whether or not we wanted to date and decided that we did. So we officially became partners and kind of started our relationship in that moment. Cute. At the same time, we were actually just entering into our winter break, so we had about two and a half weeks off before we were supposed to be back on campus to continue doing the work that we were doing. And I was thinking about maybe going home, maybe traveling. Wasn't quite sure. And Ethan had decided that he wasn't going home at all. His family was flying to a different state. He didn't want to spend the money on plane tickets. So we decided very spontaneously instead that we would just go on a two week road trip across the United States together. And we kind of deemed this our first real date because we left like three days after we started dating. Oh my gosh. Now looking back, I'm like, yeah, you know, I think that's the time period that that would have worked. We were like young and in this program and had time off and.

[Hannah]

Yeah. And it's not like you didn't know each other. It's not like you just met three days ago.

[Claire]

Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, we took off on this two week road trip. We went from the west coast all the way to the east coast and back, and we had a really great time. And the whole time I remember feeling like, wow, this is everything I had been looking for. My relationship before was not very adventurous. So I was really looking for somebody who was adventurous, who wanted to travel and be spontaneous and do fun things with me. And so this, this being our first date was hitting all of those boxes for me. It just felt like I had finally found somebody that had truly matched my energy and had some of the same passions and excitements in life that I did. Of course, we come back and then we go off to our next project round. So we end up spending about 10 weeks apart during this project round and then we come back to campus after that. And we had both separately applied to be on a specialty team that would be doing wildland firefighting and emergency medical response. And we were both accepted onto the team. And so for the last five months of our program, we were actually living in the same community and working on two teams that worked together. I was obviously really excited about this because we had just spent about four months dating, but at a distance. And then we would have these moments where we'd have two weeks in between a project and it would just be really, really intense because we're trying to get as much time as we possibly can with each other before we're distance again. And now it felt like we could kind of have a stable relationship and really see what it's like to have a more day to day relationship with each other. And then also it just sounded fun to live in the high desert with my partner and with some friends, like doing cool outdoor work. And I was just very excited about this project. So we ended up going out. There was 18 other people, 20 of us in total there, and the rules still applied. So we, because we were dating, they had actually put us on two separate teams so that we wouldn't be in the same house, we weren't allowed to sleep in the house together. Or anything like that. And so we would always set up a hammock just outside the property line of the house and sleep in a hammock every night. So, like, for five months straight, we were sleeping in a hammock together.

[MacKenzie]

What, did that not mess up your back?

[Claire]

I know. Again, I think being 21 was the only reason why I was about to say, I'm in my fort. Like, this is why it didn't work. This is why it wouldn't work. Yeah. I'm in my 30s now, and there's just no way that I could do that.

[Hannah]

I couldn't love someone enough to sleep in a hammock for two weeks, three weeks. How long was it?

[Claire]

Five months. Five months.

[Hannah]

Perfect for you.

[Claire]

Yeah. Yeah. We were just having a great time. Ethan and I ended up building a really close group of friends and just enjoying our time outside of the actual work with our team while we were there. And during this time, Ethan revealed a story to me about something he had been dealing with for the years leading up to AmeriCorps.

[MacKenzie]

Oh, boy.

[Claire]

Yeah. I actually had to dig this story out of him a little bit. So where we were living, we didn't have any service for the most part. I depending on who your provider was. So Ethan didn't have any service unless he connected to WI Fi. There was three stores in town that you could go to. One that did have WI Fi. Sometimes it was very infrequent that he was actually like on his phone talking to people back home. But every time we'd go into town, his phone would suddenly be just blowing up with messages. And it was a two and a half hour drive down a mountain to get to town. So we only went every other week. And so I always just assumed it was his phone catching up on messages that had been sent in between. But then we'd be in town for hours and his phone would still be going off like crazy. So finally, after a couple of weeks of this, I asked, you know, what's going on? Is there anything going on back home? And that's when he told me that he was receiving messages from his ex girlfriend from high school. They started dating early his junior year and they broke up a couple months later. And then she reached out a couple weeks later to say that she was pregnant. He was only like 16 at the time, and he was hoping she wouldn't want to keep the baby, but she decided that she did want to keep the baby. And a couple of weeks or months later she said that she had a miscarriage. And so Ethan had actually given her money, about $500 worth while he was 16 or 17 years old to pay for some of the medical procedures that she needed. And then shortly after this, he started to receive messages from his ex girlfriend's doctor and lawyer via email saying that because of her mental health, he needed to continue having sex with her to make sure that she did not go into a psychosis and commit suicide. So obviously there was a lot to this story that didn't make sense to me. And even just the doctor and lawyer piece of it all, I was like, no doctor in their right mind is going to force an underage person to have sex with somebody else. And also they would just never do that in general. Yeah.

[Hannah]

Med school, can you imagine? Oh my God.

[Claire]

Wait, so like 17 year old boy, I get, he was just afraid of his family finding out and she was threatening to tell his family. And so he was kind of in this haze of like, okay, this is what I have to do to protect myself from being found out for what I. What happened. Which now. Yeah. So for a year and a half he was having unconsensual sex with her, non consensual sex with her. Oh my God. She would call him, pick him up in her car, they'd get in fights for hours just with her screaming at him in the car and then they'd have sex, everything would be fine. She'd drop him off and then it would just happen again whenever she called next. Yeah, yeah.

[Hannah]

And as telling you this story, is he emotional? Is he past it? Like, where is his state now?

[Claire]

Yeah. So that's one thing about Ithan is that he is not an emotional guy. He actually, over the course of our entire time together, never cried. He had a story about a time that his brother made fun of him for crying. And so he was never able to cry after that. But he just was never a very emotionally forward person that he primarily coped through jokes and dark humor.

[MacKenzie]

Okay.

[Claire]

And he also talked very matter of fact, like these are, this is just the information, this is just the facts, no emotion behind it. So that was kind of how I was receiving this story was, you know, this is what I'm going through and this just is what it is. It's just something I have to do because this is what is happening. So I think something he still has to do well at this time because he wasn't living there, he was states away. He was trying to get out of this situation. His responses back were saying, I don't live in the Midwest anymore. I Can't do this for her anymore. And the doctors were still saying that he needed to keep reaching out to her to keep that communication open so that she still felt that, okay, so

[Hannah]

you're hearing this and you're like, honey,

[MacKenzie]

what are you doing?

[Hannah]

Who's gonna tell her?

[MacKenzie]

Wait a darn minute.

[Claire]

Exactly. And I, obviously, I approached in this. I. I wasn't sure how he was going to take it. And also, I was like, I want to make sure that I'm right. You know, I don't want to, like,

[MacKenzie]

yeah, let me confirm this.

[Claire]

Yeah, I don't want to just say that this doesn't sound right and then find out like it actually is right. Because I'm also young. I'm only 21 at the time. Right. So I'm like, I'm still young. Maybe there's something about this situation that is right, but it all sounds just wacky, not correct. So I started to pay attention to the messages. He was showing them to me now at this point point. And I was starting to clock some inconsistencies. And so I finally did bring them up to him to just be like, hey, this doesn't sound right. Can we talk through this? And over time, he became aware that these inconsistencies were just that. And he decided to go, no contact. This then made her contact even worse. And so after maybe a month or two of this, he finally responded. And he said, I know that you're lying to me. I know the doctor's not real. I know the lawyer is not real. I know the baby was probably never real, too. I'm not doing this anymore. And she owned up to it. She emailed back and she said that she had just discovered and been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Bpd. Yeah. And that she also had some sort of issue with her thyroid that caused these really intense emotional reactions. Question mark. And that she was really sorry and that she would leave him alone, but she actually ended up not leaving him alone. She was still a fixture of our relationship for six years until we finally stopped hearing from her one day. Yeah, six years. She was still calling us constantly. She would always call from different numbers. There was one night where it was like 2am And Ethan's phone was ringing, and he picked it up. And I just remember he was more scared than I'd ever heard him before. Suddenly, he just went, no, no, no, you promised me you would never call again, and hung up. And then she called 23 more times from different numbers. And this was like two years into us dating. So yeah, this is like a big thing that followed us around for quite a while. And the impact, of course, for me was like, this story really deepened my empathy for him and my sense of protection for him because I at this time saw him as just this really sweet, funny guy who is trying so hard to leave his home and actually start his life and get away from this experience. And now I'm learning just how much manipulation and blackmail and coercion existed in his life. And it just made me want to protect him so much, you know?

[Hannah]

Yeah. I could also see how that makes him more stoic, like you said, if he'd been dealing with that for as long as he was and just kind of shutting his body down to, I mean, be assaulted repeatedly. Like, that's crazy.

[Claire]

Yeah. It really is.

[Hannah]

A man, like.

[Claire]

Oh, yeah, Yeah. I put a lot into context for about him as a person. And I actually. I remember him sharing because, yeah, him as a man, like, that was the whole thing too. Like, his high school friends just didn't get it. They would say to him, like, why are you complaining about getting laid? Like, you should be happy that you're getting laid. Yeah, yeah.

[Hannah]

Constantly messed up.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

Yeah. I just had so much sadness for him that he had to go through that and understood, you know, this is probably why he's so stoic, because he's literally never been able to share this story and feel like people actually see how messed up it is. What a difficult thing to do. So

[Hannah]

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[Claire]

During our time in Americorps. Otherwise, generally speaking, things are really good. But I did start to notice some small cracks that later would stand out to me quite a bit. There's one specific story that I that I always come back to. So we're in the high desert and we're in a really, really tiny town. There was about 60 people who lived there full time, and it was a tourism destination for outdoor recreation. But it's so far away, it's so rural that it's just not very well traveled to. There's not a lot of infrastructure. So on hikes, for instance, there's like literally no signage anywhere to be found. You have to just generally know where you are or be able to find rocks, stacks to direct you and things like that. So on my team, there was five women and I used to be really close with one of the other women on my team. And our friendship had slowly started to strain and I was really wanting to reinitiate that connection, but also grow a deeper connection with the women on my team because we're working in such a male dominated environment. And I just really wanted to feel a lot of strong female support throughout the time that we were there. So one day this teammate asks if all of the girls want to go on a hike together on one of our days off. And I said yes, and so did one other person. So the three of us set out that Saturday on our day off to go on this very long hike. And we ended up getting ridiculously lost after like an hour. We could not find a single rock stack to show us where we were supposed to be. Oh, no. Again, we're in an area with really rough service, so we couldn't even pull up a map to be able to look at where we are and find a road. So we're, we're stressing out, we're trying to find our way out, and eventually we find a place that has service, we're able to look at a map, find a road, get out to the road, and then call our team leader to come pick us up. And we were like almost an hour away from where we lived at that point. So she came to pick us up. And I don't remember exactly how this happened. I believe that I had some emails from Ethan which he would have been able to send throughout the day down at the firehouse and down in the town where the places were that had wires WI fi. But the messages were kind of insistent that I come over to talk to him. And I had this weird feeling like something's not right about this. Like something seems off about the way he's reaching out right now. I want to believe that he's just anxious and nervous because I was just gone for somewhere between 10 to 12 hours, completely lost. I mean, we almost had to call search and rescue from the fire department that we work at. So everyone on our team knew about this at this point. So I show up at his house, and instead of expressing any concern, he gets really upset that he wasn't invited on the hike. He starts to go on and on about how that wouldn't have happened if he was there. We never would have gotten lost. And it's really unfair and unkind that we didn't consider inviting him to this hike, which was knowingly bulling the women on our team. And I was so caught off guard by this response that I just went straight into people pleasing mode, apologizing that he didn't wasn't invited, Trying to kind of coddle his feelings and like, help him feel heard and supported. But I do remember at the end saying, I'm kind of a little surprised that you didn't express any concern about me or two other teammates that were lost all day. And he just came right back to how he was feeling about it, that he was just really hurt that he wasn't invited. He knew ultimately we were fine because there's the fire department right there to come find us. All of that. And looking back on that many years later, I started to realize that this was the beginning of a pattern that I noticed in our relationship where he would always center himself in my own experiences or whatever it was that I was feeling. If I was going through something or if I was explaining something, I was feeling he was the complete center of that. And this was sort of the first moment that I saw that happen. So after AmeriCorps, like I said, we were only making $1.50 an hour, and we were out on the west coast, so there was no way I was going to stay out on the West Coast. Because I could not afford to be there. And one day, Ethan had asked if I would be interested in moving to his home state, to this town that he used to go to a lot, because his mom really likes to go birding there. Ethan's mom was really into going bird watching, and she used to take him up to this place in northern Wisconsin to go bird watching every year. And he thought it was a really cool town. And he was like, do you want to move there? Like, let's just give it a try. And I thought that was the most whimsical, cute reason to move to a place ever. So I was like, cool bird. Yeah, of course. Let's do it. Yeah. So we ended up moving to his home state and started building our life after AmeriCorps together. And also, because it was relatively new to him, we both got to explore it together. And so it really added to that adventurous spirit that I was really seeking out in the relationship from the start and helped me feel like that was going to continue after AmeriCorps in this more structured life that we had now. So AmeriCorps is really focused on personal growth. The program has a lot of trainings that everyone has to go through on conflict resolution and communication. And the. This was something that Ethan and I both really liked about AmeriCorps. We really enjoyed this energy behind always working on improving yourself and becoming a better version of who you are. And so after AmeriCorps, Ethan continued to emphasize that this was a really important thing for us in our relationship, and that he wanted to make sure that, first and foremost, continuing to work on ourself was at the forefront of our relationship at all times. I was really excited about this idea. It felt like I was finding a partner who wanted to grow with me, and if there were conflicts or issues that arose, that we would be really working together and as a partnership to move through that and get over that.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

Yeah. And that was the first time I had really had a partnership like that. Friendship, family member, or intimate relationship. Like, I never had somebody who really wanted to work as a team with me. So, of course, I was really excited about this idea of continuing to work on ourselves. But I started to feel. How do I say this? I started to feel rather inadequate in comparison to Ethan. One of the first times that this came up was maybe a year or two into our relationship. We traveled back out to the west coast to visit my family, and we had brought some of his high school friends with us that I had now become friends with, too. And I Was sharing a story about somebody that I had gone to college with. And I said something like, oh, she's awful. And Ethan immediately interrupted me and said, ew, that's gross. We don't talk about people like that. And I felt so much shame in that moment because I was with his two friends from high school. I was with him being scolded like a child. Yeah.

[MacKenzie]

Yes.

[Claire]

And I. I just felt so uncomfortable. I was like, wow. I honestly, what it did for me in that moment was, okay. Ethan is a really good person. He doesn't talk about other people like this. And if I want to be worthy of being with Ithan, I need to learn how to be kinder to people that I don't connect with or who I feel hurt by. I need to be able to be more empathetic towards others. And of course, all those things are really good things to want in your life. But I think that the moment that brought this out was not the right moment. Right. Like, I'm an empathetic person on my own. Me saying that somebody is awful who I had a bad experience with is, like, kind of human. A very mild form. Yeah. But the impact was definitely there because I thought about that moment for a long time, and it really started to push me into this place of internalizing that I needed to do more work than Ethan did.

[Hannah]

And even you saying, like, if you want to be worthy of him, yeah,

[MacKenzie]

that's what I was.

[Claire]

That's what I got on Tough mindset. So one other thing that was kind of coming from this self improvement philosophy, I was starting to notice that the areas of growth for myself were always coming from Ethan. So they were never things that I, on my own, was noticing and wanting to work on. They were kind of lists of things that he observed about me that he thought that I needed to work on. And the first. The first big one was actually very valid. We had had some moments where emotional reactivity was hard for me. I grew up in an environment where all of my major authority figures express their emotions through anger. I actually, until recently, like, I had never seen my dad express an emotion other than anger. And so, yeah, and so I was really used to being around people that couldn't communicate appropriately, couldn't find that way to ask for somebody to understand how they were feeling. And so I also was really struggling with that. When we first got together, Conflicts would typically eventually escalate to raised voices on my end. And then Ethan would express, like, this is an ongoing issue. I really need you to work on this. And I just felt this deep concern. And again, coming back to that worthiness. Like, I was like, wow, I'm not worthy of being with him because I can't control my emotional reactions. This is really something that I need to work on. He also is starting to. I had mentioned in the beginning that he. He loved to poke at people, and he would say that this was his love language. Like, this is the. If he's poking at you, that's how you know that he loves you, because he loves to observe people. I've heard that in my whole life. Notice their insecurities, and then lovingly highlight them as a way to show you I see you, and I still love you.

[MacKenzie]

All right.

[Claire]

Yeah. Okay.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

So this is something that he had said a lot. And in. Again, in the very beginning, it genuinely did feel fun, silly, loving. I never felt deeply offended by any of the ways that he poked at me. But after we started living together, the ways that he did that really changed. He would find something to comment on, and then he would comment on it a lot more. So instead of bringing it up, like, every couple months, it was suddenly something we talked about every month and then every week and then every other day. And he also would then start to bring in other people. So instead of poking at me in the privacy of our home, he would bring up some of these things while other people were around, and the tone behind them was beginning to shift. To me, it felt like he was annoyed. It felt like, exactly. Yes, he was bringing up things that were actually frustrating him, but he didn't have the tools to actually just communicate that directly. And these were, like, really small, minor things. Like the. The big one when we first started living together. Like, I feel even ridiculous even telling you guys this, because it's just so minor. He started to comment that I cut onions wrong when I'm cooking, and then it progressed into, not only do you cut onions wrong, but when you cut them the way that you do, it actually ruins the meal because the onion is so overpowering. And then it just became a thing that he talked about.

[Hannah]

I'd be like, great, you cut the onions. Then I'll get out of the kitchen. You can do it.

[Claire]

That ended up being the case because. So he did this for, like, a year and a half, and I was so fed up of hearing about onions. Right.

[MacKenzie]

And that was a for real example.

[Claire]

Yes, that's a for real example.

[Hannah]

Genuinely mad.

[Claire]

Okay, well, according to him, he wasn't mad. He was just lovingly poking at me because I cut onions wrong. So For a year and a half, he did this, and then by the time it was like, at the end of the year and a half, I was like, I'm fed up. I'm not cooking anymore.

[Hannah]

This is not the first time that we've heard people use cooking or food or. Or dishwasher just as a way to be like, oh, I'm doing this because I. I care about you, or I'm trying to help you, but in reality, they're just trying to control you.

[Claire]

Yeah.

[Hannah]

And it sounds like that was like a. Whether it's conscious or not, like, he just needed to be in control of you in little ways.

[Claire]

Yeah. That is a perspective that took me until the last year to finally realize how many of these things might have just been a bid for control.

[Hannah]

Okay, so you stopped cooking?

[Claire]

Basically, yeah, I stopped cooking. But just generally sharing that these. These constant criticisms about really minor things were just getting a lot more intense. And when I would question them and say, hey, this seems like something that you're actually annoyed about. If you're annoyed about it, can we have a conversation about it instead? Because poking at me doesn't feel good. And he would say that I'm misperceiving him. I don't understand him, and that we're on the same team, and that I need to remember that we're on the same team.

[MacKenzie]

But your perception is your reality.

[Hannah]

And also, that's so funny that he is, like, telling you that you're doing things wrong, and then when you kindly bring up something that he could work on, he's like, no, no, no, no, no. This is a you problem.

[Claire]

Yeah, the. The irony of all that is that in the moment, I didn't see it. And now being out of it, like, especially looking at the outline that was made of my story, I'm like, wow, this is so obvious. Like, it's so clear that this is what was happening. But, yeah, in the moment, you had no idea. Yeah. My whole focus was, what do I need to do to continue to become the partner that deserves to be in this match. And I thought genuinely that he was doing the same thing.

[MacKenzie]

What do I need to do to deserve this? Like, what. What will make me worthy? What a position to be in where you have to ask yourself that.

[Claire]

Yeah, I know some of that stems from my own childhood stuff, but it's definitely in reflection of the relationship. Like, I see how much he helped create that environment where I was not capable of seeing myself as a worthy match to him. And because of that, it kind of allowed me to enable him through a lot of these behaviors. Because then a lot of these things, you know, when he's saying, you're misperceiving me, I'm then going to a place of empathy.

[MacKenzie]

You think you're an idiot?

[Claire]

Yeah. And I'm like, what do I need to do to make sure that I see him clearly and that I'm not misperceiving him? Even though in my body, what you just said feels really gross and icky to me.

[MacKenzie]

But if you're. If you're misperceiving him, then he's your victim.

[Claire]

Yes, exactly. And that was a big fearbine. Right. Like, I don't want to be an abuser. I want to make sure that I'm treating my partner with love and care.

[MacKenzie]

Absolutely.

[Claire]

He's telling me that I'm not hearing him, that I'm misperceiving him. So that's a big issue. I need to work on that. And it entirely made me stop trusting my own judgment. I. I looked to him for the understanding of what reality was entirely at this point in our relationship. And all of this really pushed me into this period of self development. So, generally speaking, over the next 10 years, I was constantly doing something to be working on myself. And it started with I did yoga teacher training. And through that training, there was a lot of work that we were doing internally to question our shadows and the parts of us that kind of get triggered and reactive to things. And all of that work was really helping me come out of some of the trauma and past pains that I was still holding onto from AmeriCorps from before that. I also went to graduate school and got a master's degree. I also started going to therapy. So I was doing all of these things to really learn more about myself and continue to develop as I person. And during that time, I was also actively working on overcoming some of my triggers and doing this, you know, quote, unquote, self development work that had been ingrained in our relationship. So I started working through some of that reactive responses that I was having. And through all of this, I came to really understand that I react the most when I feel misunderstood or dismissed, and that I have a very hard reaction with anger, and I tend to suppress it because I view it as a bad emotion that we're not supposed to. Supposed to have, and that I had all of the tools through the things that I had done over the last 10 years to actually work through those things and come to a better place. And during that time, I genuinely grew, like, the reactive responses became so much better. I felt like I was having an easier time communicating my feelings directly and was also seeing in return people understanding them a lot better. And I just generally was feeling better about who I was as a person and more confident in myself. But our fights were still reflecting this narrative that I was the one that had to continue to do the work. Every time we'd get into a fight, he would be bringing up some of these things that had been issues in the previous years. And I would be asking for acknowledgment that I had changed and grown around these issues. And his response would be, I am always the one to acknowledge your growth. I'm the one that sees that you have grown the most. But there's still, still work that has to be done because this is still an issue in our relationship. It just felt so demoralizing how much work I was putting into being a better person.

[Hannah]

You're like triggering me a little bit. Just know you're not alone.

[Claire]

Yeah. Because really all these things that he was saying were doubling down the narrative that I am an angry person and that anger is a bad emotion. And I now have such different relationship to anger. So once I came into a better relationship with anger and understood, you know, it's okay for me to feel angry, I just need to make sure that I communicate that in a responsible way. It changed a lot. But Ethan never let that go. Like through the very end of our relationship, the narrative was, Claire is such an angry person. She's always so mad. And it didn't matter when he got angry. Like his anger was not comparable to my anger. My anger was the problem. So, yeah, he like completely. I mean, he, he fucked me up on that one. He's, he's the reason for years that I thought anger was a bad emotion and put me in a place where I wasn't able to use anger effectively because I felt like I was just supposed to push it away and never express it.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah. Wow.

[Claire]

So at this time, we are about two years into the relationship now. We are living in northern Wisconsin, and I am about to move away from that town, our first town together, to go work a seasonal job on the west coast before we go and do this long five month backpacking trip together. At the time, things in our relationship feel good, but not perfect, which I'm sure it's easy to understand that that feels weirdly comfortable to us both because of this dynamic that we have to always be working on ourselves. It's good that there's still room for us to Work on ourselves. So it kind of feels at this time, like, okay, things are all right. We have some work ahead of us, and that's great. Let's do it together. As we were driving out to the west coast for this seasonal job, Ethan brings up the idea of polyamory. He asked if it was something I would ever consider or be open to, and I was completely blindsided by the question. I kind of rejected the idea right away very quickly. And on that car ride, he said, if I've never thought about it before, I should be cautious to being closed off to it now because it's not something I fully considered and that there might come a time in our relationship where we need polyamory. Oh, to have this continue to work.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

Well, wow.

[Hannah]

That's like a very loosely veiled threat. Yeah.

[Claire]

And a weird thing to say just two and a half years into the relationship, Right?

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

What do you mean? We might need this to make it work? Is it not working now around this? Like, I was just really surprised by that. But also, weirdly, I had been so conditioned to, like, give so much validity and thought process to the things that he said. So when he's saying this, I am starting to think about it. I'm going, well, you know what? I have never thought about it, and it is pretty closed off of me to just say no to something that I've never considered. And also, yeah, what if there comes a day where we still love each other so much, but the sexual connection isn't there? What if we do want to open up our relationship? And so these are the things that he's trying to get me to think about. And then he also is pulling on, like, our adventurous lifestyle. Like, we both travel well. I travel separately from him quite a bit, and we generally have pretty independent lives as well. And so we're talking about this adventurous side of our relationship as we continue to go out and travel and explore independently. Maybe that's something that we would want and that would align really well with our relationship already. So I started to be curious about it and just let myself actually consider the idea. And over the course of the next three years, I do become open to the idea of being polyamorous. But a major reason why is because for the longest time, I've been questioning if I'm a lesbian, and I was too afraid to go explore because I was worried that I'd find out I actually only like women, and now I have to, like, then you have to

[Hannah]

change your whole life.

[Claire]

Exactly. I was just deeply afraid of Finding that out. Yeah. And it was. It was something that had weighed on me for a long time. And I had at this point, not talked to Ethan about this. A couple years later, I would. I would say this to him, like, hey, I think I might be gay, and I'm afraid that I'm actually a lesbian. And he was always very supportive about it. But then it allowed polyamory to be a little bit more of a consideration for us because then that would be my opportunity to explore and discover more about myself.

[Hannah]

Just in case anybody listening is like, not 100% sure on polyamory, do you want to give a quick definition and also a definition based on what the two of you understood it to be?

[Claire]

Yeah. Yeah. So polyamory is a. It's a relationship structure where. And you don't have just one partner, you can have multiple partners or. And even within polyamory, there's a lot of different dynamics. Like there's something called solo polyamory where you are generally independent by yourself, but you. You might occasionally go and date other, but you're kind of focusing on just being an independent person. You might be polyamorous in dating multiple people. You might be polyamorous in only dating one person at this time. Essentially the main thing is that there's this openness to letting connections look the way they look and not being restricted to this monogamous construct where you're just with one person.

[Hannah]

But it's also. I mean, I guess it's different for everybody, but there's. It's one thing to be like, you can hook up with someone one time and whatever. This is kind of allowing for potentially

[Claire]

other emotional connections and relationships. Yeah, yeah. So it's a major difference between non monogamy and polyamory. So some people look at non monogamy in the non monogamous community as like, this is people who are going and hooking up with other people. They have an agreement in their relationship that sex can exist with others. But polyamory is typically way more focused on that actual relationship building and connections. So it's not uncommon, polyamorous people to have multiple boyfriends, multiple girlfriends, multiple partners. So three years after we started dating, we set off to go do a five month backpacking trip together. And during this time, the topic of marriage came up a lot by him, by both of us, actually. I was definitely really excited about the idea of being married when I was younger. And we had been dating I think at like three, three and a half years at that point. And so I did see him as somebody that I wanted to be married to. I thought I saw that future with him, and he was a little bit less sure. It. He never really explained exactly why. He just kind of had this attitude of, I guess, I mean, if. If I'm just, like, cheapening it, it's like a commitment fear. Like, he was just a little afraid to commit to that, which I understood. Like, he was really young, and so I wasn't pushing it, But I was saying, you know, I moved across the country to live with you. I completely started my whole life with you across the country. And if this is where it's going, that's great. But if this isn't where it's going, like, I kind of want to know, because I don't want to just be living in the midwest with somebody who doesn't intend to eventually marry me.

[MacKenzie]

Right.

[Claire]

And so we talked on and off about it for the whole five months that we were traveling. And in that conversation, it also came out that ithan really wanted us to blend our finances.

[Hannah]

Ooh.

[Claire]

I was a little anxious about this idea because my high school college boyfriend and I had blended our finances together. Towards the end of college, when we were living together, we just had one shared bank account that we transferred money into, so we still had separate accounts as well. But when we broke up, separating that account, it was just so messy. And I was like, I never want to do that again with somebody ever. Like, I. I am not willing to blend my finances with somebody unless we are married. And so I. I told him this, and he kept pushing the idea the entire trip that we needed to blend our finances, didn't move forward on the conversation about getting engaged. And when we ended the trip, we did end up going ahead and blending our finances together. I think at the time, there's kind of two major motivators for me behind this. One, we are going into our second season of farm work out on the west coast after our big backpacking trip, and we are making all of this money together. So it just kind of made sense for us to also keep it in the same place and use that for our future together. And that money ended up becoming the down payment on our house. So it did make sense in that time. But also, I was kind of looking at this as, like, Ethan seems to believe that we need to take this step to then be able to get to the next step. And so if we can show that we are ready and able to work on having finances blended together, then he will be ready to move to that next step. Of us actually having a married life together. And that was sort of how he was framing it to me as well. We got back home, we blended our finances, and then, actually, a couple of months later, in December of that year, we got engaged. And we ended up getting engaged when we traveled back up to our first town that we had lived in together. And we went on this date on our last night there, Went out to dinner, and then we're walking around the lake together, and he was just standing behind me, and we were just staring off into the lake silently, and suddenly he just asked, do you want to get married? Didn't get down on a. On his knee, didn't have a ring, anything. And he had kind of told me that this was how it was going to be, that he was just going to wait for the moment that felt right and do it. And weirdly enough, so we were actually staying with a friend of ours that lived up there, and we went back to his place, and we didn't even tell him. We were both just quietly hanging out.

[MacKenzie]

I don't honestly got engaged.

[Claire]

Now that I look at it, I'm like, that must have been some sort of sign that we both didn't say it to anybody. And, like, this wasn't our closest friend in the world, but he was a good friend of ours. And so I don't know if maybe we were both just feeling like we needed to tell other people before we told anybody else first. But regardless, at this point, we're living in his hometown, and I start my first big adult job. I started working for a nonprofit. It's a national nonprofit with a local branch in the town that we're living in. And I was really excited to work for this place Because I had heard a lot of really great things about them. I've always loved the work that they do, and it just seemed like it'd be a really great first step towards a career working in the nonprofit industry and specifically working on community projects that really help create a lot of strength and resilience in the places that we live. But that environment ended up being insanely unhealthy for me. Nonprofits in general are very notorious for expecting a lot from people, and that was definitely true of this place. There was multiple weeks where I was working over 70 hours, and my boss told me that that's just what the job requires sometimes.

[Hannah]

Oh, my God.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

And actually, funny enough, that wasn't even the worst thing that was happening to me at the time. About four months into me being on the leadership team, we Hired this guy who was about eight years older than me, and he eventually became a little bit of a mentor to me. He had been working in nonprofit so for a while, and so he took me on a little bit as a mentee, and we also developed a pretty close friendship, and eventually the behavior started to escalate into sexual harassment and eventually assault as well. Yeah. So, wow. Obviously, that was a really, really hard time for me. He was deeply influencing the way that I thought about myself, because at that time, I'm so afraid of making people angry. And obviously, the impact on my marriage was pretty intense. Yeah, this all happened within the first year of me being married to Ethan.

[Hannah]

So how did the wedding go? What.

[MacKenzie]

What kind of.

[Hannah]

I want to hear how you got married.

[MacKenzie]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Claire]

So we initially wanted to have a really small wedding, just us and a couple of friends, and then both of our moms ended up throwing tantrums about that. So we ended up hosting a very small wedding of about 55 people. We rented an Airbnb in southwestern Wisconsin and then went got married at a state park and then went back to the Airbnb, and 35 out of 55 of the people were staying there with us. So it's just this big party weekend, and it was really nice, really relaxing. Anyway, so that was how the wedding went. We got married, and then I'm working at this job. Within the first couple of months of me working at this job, I'm being sexually harassed. And it's really impacting our marriage and my mental health in general. Like, my mental health was down in the dumps. I was struggling so hard every day. My libido was just zero. I had no interest in sex whatsoever. And my sense of safety was also completely gone. Like, everywhere I went, I just felt so uncomfortable and on edge at all times because this guy was popping into my life unexpectedly at all moments. Ethan's really supportive throughout this entire time. He's being really patient with me, especially around sex and not having an interest in sex. And he's trying his best to show up and just be, like, a stable presence for me. And then I finally am able to leave the job in 2020. Covid hits. We are all furloughed for a little bit, and then I'm asked to come back to work. And after a couple weeks of this, I'm like, you know what? I don't want to do this anymore. I had been working on this project behind the scenes to found a nonprofit, and so I'm like, I'm just going to quit my job and focus all my attention on getting this nonprofit up and running instead. So I'm finally able to move away from this guy that I was working with. And at this point, Ethan and I had bought a house. We bought a house in late 2019. We had been living in that house for about six months. And I remember shortly after I left that job, just a couple of weeks, we're standing in our kitchen, and Ethan has this conversation with me that he really would like for us to focus on working on our sexual relationship. At this point, sex had been a pretty common topic between us. We talked about the mismatch in libido quite a bit. And I always had anytime sex got brought up, this huge wall would go up for me, and I'd feel so much apathy and anxiety and just not want to talk about it. So as he's saying this, I'm. I'm realizing this is not a healthy response to this topic. So there is something here that I need to dig into to understand about myself if I want to have a healthy relationship to sex. And also on Ethan's end, he's describing that he's pretty unsatisfied with our sex. He's saying it's unadventurous, it's pretty vanilla, and he just wants more openness, exploration, and a sense of desire between us. And to me, that all makes sense, especially given the context of where I'd been for the last couple of years with my job. So I start to work through that, and slowly but surely, I started to feel safer to talk about sex, and some of my guards started to go down, and we actually started to see a lot of improvements in our relationship. Our communication seemed a lot better, and we were having a lot more frequent and more explorative sex with each other as well. And on the positive, for me, I was finally able to start seeing some openness to change on his end about things that were deeply impacting me. There was two major ones that had been impacting me for quite a while that I had tried to talk to Ethan about a number of times and just never was able to get anywhere. And the first was about expressing disappointment when there was a no to having sex. If I said I didn't want to have sex, he would say, I'm disappointed. And that was always really hard for me to receive because it made me then feel like there was something wrong with me saying no because it elicited a negative feeling for him. Right. And then I was stuck in this place of not.

[MacKenzie]

He knew it would manipulate you, too, because he knew that you wanted to please him.

[Claire]

Exactly.

[MacKenzie]

It was manipulation, for sure.

[Hannah]

Whenever you don't feel like it and your partner does, you're already feeling guilty. Like, it's just kind of. I feel like an aid.

[Claire]

Exactly. Especially in a relationship where there's already this huge mismatch in libido.

[MacKenzie]

Right.

[Claire]

Like, that's already such a huge issue for you. And now when I do say no, I'm hearing that you're disappointed. And so now I have to carry the weight. Being strong enough to say no and also being strong enough to hear that that impacted you negatively. So this had been a thing that had been happening for years. And the way that he would always frame this when we talked about it was, well, that's how I'm feeling. Feeling. So I should be able to express how I'm feeling, because in our relationship, there needs to be, you know, openness to hearing that. And so I was trying in my head to be like, how do I create space for him to say I'm disappointed, while also knowing that doesn't feel good to me. But apparently I'm just supposed to work through how that feels to me. Because the healthier thing is for him to be able to express that this is how he's feeling. Mental gymnastics all day, every day in this relationship. So that was one major thing that I was starting to see some openness to. Like, he. He started to understand and stop saying it as often. And then the other major thing that I saw was when there was a no, sometimes he would just completely withdraw and there would be silence. Not a lot of connection over the next couple days until sex finally did happen. Which was not helpful for me. Right. Because I'm like, if I'm not in the mood for sex right now, and then you spend three days not talking to me because I said no to sex, then I'm definitely not going to be in the mood. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And he never got that. He would always just withdraw and then reinitiate sex when he was ready to connect with me again. And I was just left in this place of, like, what just happened in between to make me want this? Nothing. And I didn't have the words for that piece of it at the time. I was only focused on the pattern of withdrawing and how that made me feel. I didn't realize that underneath this, there's also this context of you are now making it even harder for me to want to come back to this later.

[MacKenzie]

Yes. Yes.

[Claire]

Yeah. But at least we were seeing Some movement now of don't withdraw. That's really hard for me. And he was starting to kind of get that. So we were feeling a lot closer at this time. And this, of course, what a great time to finally open up our marriage and become polyamorous, Right?

[Hannah]

Of course.

[Claire]

Of course. So in late 21, at this point, we had been married for two years. We decided to become polyamorous. A part of the reason was because things were going so well that we felt like we were finally in a place where our relationship could handle, that our communication was better. Communication is huge in polyamory. So we're like, we can. We can probably pursue this and finally also have the opportunity for me to explore what my sexual orientation is and discover that about myself and see if maybe that's a factor in some of our mismatch of libido as well. Like, is it truly that I am a little bit more gay than I am straight? And that's why this is a hard thing for me.

[Hannah]

I mean, he was supportive of that you said. Like, he was like, okay, let's explore.

[Claire]

Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I think he was coming from it from this perspective, too, of, well, I don't want to be married to a lesbian. If you're actually a lesbian, like, I would like for you to find that out so that we know. And that totally made sense to me, too, because, you know, in the backdrop of our relationship was this disconnect between us sexually. And so, of course, that was a question we were trying to understand, like, is this. Is this just that I'm a lesbian and I could not be any less interested in a man? Maybe that's all it is. So we didn't have any tangible rules for entering into polyamory, which was definitely a mistake on our end. We believed that because we had been talking about this for five years. We were evolved. We knew what to do. We could come into this and make it work. And at first, it did work pretty well. I ended up meeting somebody Halloween night that year. Her name is Sophie. Our connection was incredibly immediate. Every time I talked to a lesbian, they're like, yeah, this is a very classic lesbian love story. We locked eyes, and we could not stop talking to each other the entire night. And then immediately after, we're inseparable at the hip the whole time we were dating. And for me, this is really fun because I was starting to, like. I realized very quickly, I'm not a lesbian. I'm pansexual. Like, that is not a fear. I need to hold on To. Wow, I can't believe I just spent the last five years being totally afraid of this. And, like, finally now I'm seeing the reality.

[Hannah]

Yeah, that. Exactly. It doesn't have to.

[Claire]

That's who I am. Exactly. So that was the very beginning of polyamory. And Ethan, about a month and a half into Sophie and I dating, met Brooke. And initially, everything felt very manageable between us. I really liked Brooke a lot because, one, she'd been polyamorous for a really long time, so she kind of understood this dynamic of having what's called a metamorph. So when you're dating somebody, the person that other people that they are dating are your metamors. So Sophie was Ethan's metamorph because they're both dating me. And so Brooke, she really understood.

[MacKenzie]

I didn't. I've heard that word, but I didn't. I never knew what it meant or how it was used. That's cool.

[Hannah]

Interesting.

[Claire]

Yeah, I actually. Metamoras are, like, a part of polyamory I really love, because if you can be really respectful and responsible in that relationship, you can also develop a really close relationship with the metamorph. And I did have a close relationship with. With some of my metamoras. Brooke and I ended up never getting super close. And you'll learn why pretty shortly here. But, yeah, I really liked her at first quite a bit, especially some of the ways that I saw that she was changing Ethan and helping him kind of understand certain things about the ways that he showed up in a relationship with. With both of us. She was really helping him. See, like, that's not great behavior, and you need to change some of these things. A really specific example. So at this point in our relationship, nearly every time we had sex, Ethan and I, Ethan would either afterwards say, I wish that this happened instead. Oh, God, yeah. Or he would immediately start, while we're naked in bed, immediately start trying to analyze how sex went. Did you like this? You reacted this way to this, so it seems like you might not like it.

[MacKenzie]

That's like, turn off after the fact.

[Hannah]

Oh, my gosh. That's not aftercare for sure.

[Claire]

No, it's not.

[Hannah]

It makes it, like, a skill. It's not about your enjoyment. Like, suddenly it's like, oh, did I do a good job?

[MacKenzie]

Yeah.

[Claire]

Which I'm sure, as you have heard me say, like, am I worthy enough to be with Ethan? Like, that was so hard for me because I'm like, wow, you're analyzing this really vulnerable thing we just did together. Now I'M feeling like I didn't show up enough in ways that you would have liked or desired. So that was really, really hard for me. And that was something that he had been doing for years, literal years. And I had told him many times, like, I don't really like this. It would mean a lot to me if after sex, some of the time we didn't analyze how it went, or I tried to make him aware of how the I wish statements made me feel. Within two months of dating Brooke, he did that. And Brooke shut him down so fast and was like, that is so toxic. Don't ever say that to me again.

[MacKenzie]

Good, good.

[Claire]

And he. He came home that day and he was like, wow, Brooke said this to me today. And it really hit me. That's really unfair of me to be saying those things. And I should. I should work on not doing that. So this side of me is like, oh, my God, fuck you. Like, I'm sorry. I don't let it go.

[Hannah]

You can.

[Claire]

Yeah, you can. You can.

[MacKenzie]

Cuss girl. Go nut.

[Claire]

You just spent, like, four years doing this to me with me begging you to stop. But then Brooke wanders around and says it once, and you finally get it. But also, thank you, Brooke, so much, because I was so sick of that behavior. So in a lot of ways, I really loved Polyamory for that because it seemed like he was finally getting a different perspective that he would listen to because apparently he didn't want to listen to my perspective on these things.

[Hannah]

Did you guys have any jealousy early on, or were you both kind of like, wait, this is actually really helping us?

[Claire]

So Ethan had no jealousy at first of Sophie because Sophie is a small brunette woman. We look very similar. He's like, I can't compare to her. We're not the same. I did not have any jealousy of Brooke until about two months into them dating at this time, it was January of 22. And Ithan kept telling me repeatedly for over a month that Brooke is his fun partner, he'd rather go out on the weekends with her, and that I'm better suited for his weekday life.

[Hannah]

Oh, my God, that would destroy me.

[Claire]

First of all, it did destroy me. I already felt really deeply insecure about whether or not people found me fun. You know, like, I'm kind of shy, I'm kind of quiet, and it takes me a while to connect with people. And so we had been. This was, like, still kind of post Covid. And so we're meeting a lot more people because we live in a very, very small town. Everyone who is our age knows each other, and now it's post Covid. We're all coming out and socializing, meeting each other. And it was a hyper intense environment for me at the time, trying to start to go out by myself and on my own as a polyamorous person and meet people. And then here he was telling me, you're better suited for my. My weekday life. Brooke is the person I would like to go out with on the weekends. And I just. I felt so low about myself. And as a result, some of that emotional reactivity that I had when I was. When we first started dating started to come back, and I was really struggling to keep it together. And I ended up actually having a lot of panic attacks that month. The panic attacks were kind of twofold. It was like the situation with Ethan and the things that he was saying, but also things with Sophie weren't going great. We have very different attachment styles, and she ultimately wasn't super comfortable with polyamory. And so we were having some trouble because I think Sophie didn't want me to be polyamorous. She wanted me to be her primary partner. And then there'd be these really big withdrawals when I was going home and being done with our date. We'd go like, there was one day we were driving back from a date. We had about an hour drive together, and we had a great date. And then we get in the car and she's just dead silent for the whole hour. And it was because she was remembering and realizing, like, Claire's going home to her husband. Yeah. And so that was causing some panic attacks for me too, because when we would go out together, there was just this really intense, like, she had to be right next to me at all times. And I just felt really, really overwhelmed. And so I ended up breaking up with her. So after Sophie and I broke up, I met someone named Jake. Jake is slightly older than me. He was in his mid-30s. And I was really drawn to him because he was very respectful. I had known him for a couple years at this point, but we had never been close. And he had always been very respectful of my relationship with Ethan. I watched the way that he navigated the dating scene, and he was always really good at respecting no's and people. People's boundaries. And I also just really loved his confidence. Like, he. He's an attractive man. He has a beautiful accent, and he uses that accent for good. He's like, very, like, very good at just coming in and talking to women and just, like, creating an environment that at least for me, I felt very comfortable in. And I just generally felt pretty safe with him. And Jake had been polyamorous for years, like, as long as I had known him, and he was currently with a couple of people, but he didn't have any really significant deep relationships that he was pursuing at the time. And this was also kind of a reason why I was drawn to him, because I was still new to polyamory. I hadn't been with somebody who was also polyamorous. And that was something I really wanted to experience because I had just had this horrible experience with Sophie. And so I was like, it would be really nice to experience being with somebody who also has a lot of openness to this relationship structure. And because he was well known for not having any problems getting ladies to come home with him, I also sort of, like, had this knowledge that, like, it would be a really fun experience to start seeing Jake.

[MacKenzie]

Sure.

[Claire]

And that was going to be something that I really enjoyed because, like, at that point, I was still sort of trying to figure myself out sexually. I. I still felt this huge wall of, like, I feel a disconnect between myself and sex, and I don't know where that's coming from. I don't know what it is that makes me like sex, not like sex. And this is something about myself I would like to better understand. And in polyamory, the beauty of this is that you can be with other people and explain, explore different sides of yourself and learn things about yourself that you might not learn with your primary partner.

[MacKenzie]

Sure.

[Claire]

So, yeah, I was excited about the idea of spending more time with Jake, but this quickly set off a chain reaction for Ethan that deeply, deeply led to what I believe was the end of our relationship. I think this moment of meeting Jake was kind of the beginning of the end for us. Ethan became really obsessed with comparison. And it's a really big thing in polyamory that you don't compare your partners. Like, everyone is different.

[MacKenzie]

Everyone does that. Comparison trap in general, I can't even imagine in a polyamorous relationship.

[Claire]

Yeah, it's an active practice, for sure. Polyamory is not for the faint of heart. Like, you have to be willing to consciously and constantly confront how you're feeling and the things that run through your body and question, you know, is this. Is this feeling or this thought that I have a valid thought and feeling, and it is really, really hard. But I've seen people do it with so much grace and so much like, empathy and love for the communities that they're in and that was what it really drew me to, polyamory. Like, I love being in community with people. It's really important to me that I surround myself by community that feels.

[Hannah]

And you have that growth mindset you guys always talked about. Like, this gives you an opportunity to be like, okay, let me see how I navigate jealousy, how do I navigate insecurity? Like, it's can definitely. I see how it can be a very valuable thing. But it's a fine line.

[Claire]

Yeah, it's a very fine line. One of the ways that Ithan was constantly comparing himself to Jake, he would always say that it's, it's a little. He would say it's ridiculous that Jake can go out and sleep with, with younger women and that women are super into that. But if he was to try to go out and sleep with younger women, he would be labeled a pervert and a creep. And he would bring this up all the time to kind of paint this picture that Jake only slept with women in their young 20s, which wasn't even true because at that point I was in my late 20s and I was like the youngest person he was dating. Oh, that's not true. And I. One thing that really struck me as odd about this was like, why, why would you care? Like, you don't want to sleep with younger women. I don't hear you talking about wanting to sleep with 21 year olds. But I, I think I eventually realized, like, it was this jealousy about how he was desired by others. He saw that everybody was really attracted to Jake. He felt insecure that Jake and I had that connection with each other. And so all he could do was bring up these things that were meant to like, degrade Jake as a person and make me question his morality, his ethics, who he is as a person. The first time that Jake and I ever hooked up. So Ethan always wanted to hear about what happened. And so when I got home the next day, I ended up sleeping over at Jake's that night because we had gone out to the bar. Neither of us were really drinking that much that night, but we did stay up pretty late. And then we went back to his place, got there around like midnight, whatever, and we ended up staying up until about 4 o' clock having sex. So it was a really long experience for me. And I, I came out of that just like feeling really over the moon, excited about this connection, about where it might take us. And Ethan asked what happened and so I told him, yeah, we were intimate for like about four hours last night. And I had a really great time and at the time, this seemed really insignificant. But in hindsight, that became a really defining moment for our relationship that would end up coming up a lot in the future.

[MacKenzie]

And I'll.

[Claire]

I'll talk more about that later. Another thing that he was becoming increasingly fixated on was masculinity, which.

[Hannah]

Oh, great.

[Claire]

Yeah, there we go. This. Yeah. He was constantly making comments about all of the reasons he believed women don't pursue him. According to him, women only want very masculine men. But because he's such a nice, emotionally intelligent man who comes off as more feminine, women aren't interested in him.

[Hannah]

And then he's getting into some incel. Talking point territory.

[Claire]

Yes. Yes. There's so many things about this incel energy and kind of the ways that he talks about other people that just, like, didn't. It just surprised me. It just shocked me the way that he kind of turned. And back in January, when Ithan was saying, she's my fun partner, and I was having these, like, really deep emotional reactions. I did end up at one point, like, crossing a few lines for myself while out, I. I saw them together. Ithan was spending every second with her at the bar. And whenever we would go to the bar together, it was like, peace. He'd dip. I wouldn't see him the whole night. He'd want to be with everybody else but me. And so it was really triggering for me to be in this small bar, watching the two of them together the whole night on a date, hanging out with friends, having the type of night that I had been craving with Ethan. And I ended up, like, escalating the situation. We got into a fight, whole thing. And so after that, I had actually reached out to Brooke to sit down and talk with her and just apologize, explained some of the ways in which I was struggling, and just let her know, like, I am here to support your guys's relationship. I'm just having a little bit of a hard time. And after that moment, I never once felt insecure about their connection again because Brooke handled it really well. We had a really great conversation, and I just left feeling like, okay, there's respect here between us. I don't need to worry about this. So I was able to work through my insecurities over the next and any jealousy I thought felt over the next four months really well. And then when Brooke and Ethan ended up breaking up, Ethan blamed me because he said that my insecurities six months prior had made it really impossible for him to get comfortable in the relationship. And he was never able to actually settle into it. But at that point, he had also been talking for two months and complaining about the fact that Brooke was not having sex with him and that he was just her emotional support boyfriend. And so I. I could clearly see, like, it's not about me. It's about the fact that you guys don't have sex. He's a support boyfriend, and he doesn't

[Hannah]

want to take on any accountability.

[Claire]

That was his whole thing, was that he's the emotional support boyfriend because he's not hyper masculine. So women only want him because he's a good listener and can talk to you about your feelings and talk about his feelings, which now I'm like. I just laugh. Maybe it's the fact that.

[Hannah]

Maybe it's the fact that he gives you a score. Like, it's freaking gymnastics after you guys have sex. It's the score, it's the scoring system that kind of isn't everybody's cup of tea.

[Claire]

Yeah. He also, at this time, started to develop a pattern of, after fights, always initiating sex as a way for us to repair.

[Hannah]

Oh, no.

[Claire]

Yeah. So every single time we fought, which was quite often, I was then immediately being, like, pushed to have sex with him. And that didn't work well for me because I am not. I do not have spontaneous desire. My desire has to be built over time through connection and intimacy. And when we fight, that's not there. And he would always come out of these and say, well, but when we do have sex, it helps us feel so much more connected, so much faster. And don't you want us to be able to move through this fight by, like, reconnecting in this way? And it was just such a hard thing for me to explain to him. Like, I need more than that before we can get to that point. Otherwise, this sex doesn't feel like repair to me. It feels like something I'm doing for you so that you can get to a place where you're actually ready to repair with me. And that's not okay. But that was a tough situation because I. At that time, I didn't really have enough strength to continue to say no, because the reaction for the no was awful, and I just didn't want to deal with it. And after fighting so much, it was like, let's just reconnect. Because if we reconnect now, at least we won't be fighting after.

[MacKenzie]

It's easier than just fighting, and it's less hurtful than fighting. So you just deal with what you don't want to do. That's terrible.

[Claire]

He also started to get really manipulative about the times that he would initiate sex. So this is, It's. I always have a hard time explaining this because, like, some of the things that he did were meant to keep me in a place of confusion. And I didn't understand that until well after the fact when I was like, sorting through some of the things that were said and realizing, like, this doesn't add up at all. You were trying to keep me confused that I couldn't identify what was actually wrong here. So he would always try to initiate sex right before I went on a date with Jake. And the reason was because Ethan had this habit of. He would constantly make me explain myself in an effort to try to catch me in what he claimed were contradictions. So one of those contradictions was that I, I would continually say to him, like, I'm not the type of person who wants to have sex multiple times in one day. Like, I just don't have that much desire for sexual. So if he would initiate sex before my date and we had sex and then I went on my date with, with Jake and we had sex, then he could use that as evidence that I, I do in fact have the capacity to have sex multiple times a day. I'm just not doing it with him. And these were things that he would say to me later. Like, if he caught a quote unquote contradiction, it was then used as evidence that I just wasn't having sex with him because I didn't desire him. It happened with the initiating sex. It also happened with sex after fights. So another thing he would try to do is before I would leave on a date with Jake or with any of my other partners, he would, if it wasn't initiating sex, he would try to initiate a fight. And then I would go off to my date, we would have sex and I come home and he'd be like, well, you always say that you don't have the capacity to have sex after we fight, and yet here you are going and having sex with somebody else after we fight. So clearly that's not the actual reason. You just don't have sex with me. And I remember hear the mental gymnastics. I remember the mental gymnastics of coming prepared with all of the things that he was going to point to as contradictions. Because for me, I'm like, okay, well, first of all, I'm not going to let our relationship influence how I show up with my other relationship. That's not fair to Jake. You fight with me every time I go on a date with Jake. If I Showed up in a bad mood every single time. Jake wouldn't want to see me. That's not fair to our connection. So I'm trying to set that aside. And then his argument would be, when you were being sexually harassed at work years ago, you weren't having sex with me. You were letting that stress from your life impact your ability to have sex with me. Oh, here we go. Now. You're not letting the stress in our relationship impact whether or not you and Jake have sex. So clearly, it was never about actually not being able to. It was just that you didn't want to have sex with me.

[MacKenzie]

If you keep score, you're always going to lose. Who, this guy?

[Hannah]

So true. Also, if we want to go into, like, there's a big difference in sexual harassment and stress within your consensual relationship, like, that's just so unfair. Everything he's saying is, you're right. He's just trying to catch you and center himself.

[Claire]

Yes. Yeah.

[MacKenzie]

And he's jealous. That's jealousy.

[Claire]

It was always jealousy. And he would never call it that. He refused to admit that he was a jealous person. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the backdrop of what was happening. And I just got so exhausted always having to have a reason why there was a no. You know, like, just saying no to sex was not a valid answer. I had to have a reason because it. And then if my reason didn't make sense to him, I had to justify that reason over and over again. It just was, like, so, so exhausting. And I was getting to a place where I was just having to disassociate through sex because I literally could not show up with the desire to intimately connect with somebody who is saying all these things and making me feel this way every single day. So that was all within the first year of polyamory. And for the next couple of years, things just continued to really escalate, specifically around sex. So the new expectation became that sex was always as long as it could possibly be. He always wanted to have, like, marathon long sex sessions that lasted hours on end. And he was also always asking for sex to look more explorative. And if it was something that I had done before and knew I didn't like, if I expressed that I didn't like it, he would say, pretty similar to the polyamory argument in the beginning. If you haven't tried it, I think you just need to do it more consistently. And then you'll like. You'll like it. Yeah, the medicine is giving you diarrhea.

[MacKenzie]

You can Take it more. Just as. Even.

[Hannah]

Just take it more.

[Claire]

Yep, yep. Yeah. So this is constantly. And it was like, these were things that I had done before that I knew 100% I did not like doing. I didn't want to do it again. I wasn't going to be interested in doing it with him. And he would just continually push, push and push, and so I would do those things with him even though I really, really didn't want to.

[MacKenzie]

To.

[Claire]

And even though it. It never felt good for me. And he just kept saying, if we were doing it more consistently, you would start to like it. And trying to push this narrative that, like, we just need to start doing whatever that thing was more.

[Hannah]

Oh, my God, she was awesome.

[MacKenzie]

Stockholm. Stockholm syndrome. But for sex exploration.

[Claire]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Hannah]

Well, yeah, I think you're, like you said, you're disassociating. Like, you are worn down.

[Claire]

I was in such a raw place, and so, like, my body was in such survival mode that I think even if somebody, like, handed me a playbook on all of this and was like, here's exactly what's happening, it still would have been hard for me to believe it in that time. And I was also still so focused on, like, what do I need to do to make this work? Like, how can I meet him where his needs are so that we have a better relationship?

[Hannah]

Can I ask one other question really quick? Just because, I mean, you listen to the show so you know that sometimes when we listen to this whole story in one episode, we forget sometimes that you were also in love. What were the moments that you were still seeing glimpses of Ethan that you fell in love with, if any?

[Claire]

Yeah, it was getting progressively harder because we were going weeks or months at a time in conflict. And my therapist later identified this as our cycle of abuse. And so for me, the. The thing that kept me there was when the cycle of abuse was starting over, he would show up with so much commitment to working through things and being in genuine partnership. And usually it was coming off of the tale of him finally having something click in his head that I had been saying to him for quite a while or through a moment where I showed up really well for his feelings. And he felt very heard, he felt very validated, and suddenly he was able to get to a point, a more balanced place where he didn't seem like he was just constantly in survival mode either, and, like, meet me in that partnership. So that was like. I think what really kept me there was I kept secretary.

[MacKenzie]

We get excited for the potential, right?

[Claire]

Exactly. Yes. The potential. Like, yeah, I married him and stayed married to him for his potential. And that was, like, truly the thing that kept me there the most. Like, I saw enough change to make me believe that he was capable of continuing to change, but the reality was, like, he was just.

[MacKenzie]

Just.

[Claire]

He was breadcrumbing me the whole time. He was breadcrumbing me with a little bit of growth here and then pulling back and going right back to his habits. So over time, it really did become really hard for me to want to stay. But I think, honestly, I was just. I was too much in survival mode and not enough in my body to even really fully question not being with him as a reality. It was just, this isn't working. This feels intense and scary, and we're going to figure it out because we have to.

[Hannah]

It makes so much sense.

[Claire]

So in addition to always pushing for more exploration, I had, at that point, worked hard to understand what. What my kinks were. The things that I'm attracted to, the things that I needed in a sexual relationship, and try to communicate that to him. And one thing that we had come to learn was that I have a little bit of a praise kink. I love when people are, like, very kind and loving and want to, like, amp me up.

[MacKenzie]

Good girl. It's so great.

[Hannah]

I love it.

[Claire]

Exactly. And this is, like, a part of myself that I was discovering for the very first time. And I was kind of excited about that because I was like, wow, this thing that helps me like sex a lot more that I never knew about myself. How exciting. And then ithan quickly turned it into a really bad thing because he kept insisting that praise kinks also involve demeaning speech, because the praise kink comes from the BDSM community. So if I have a praise kink, that also means that I want to be called a dirty slut and be told that I'm a bad girl and that I'm doing things wrong.

[MacKenzie]

What?

[Claire]

I know, right?

[Hannah]

Right.

[Claire]

Like, not the same thing.

[Hannah]

Also, it's like, we are not textbooks. Just because he thinks something is the way it is in a certain. Like, you can just be like, well, I actually like it like this.

[Claire]

Yeah, right. Like, okay, I'm sorry if that's the textbook definition of what a praise can. Can. But is. But that's not for me. And we can adapt to that and have this be a thing that works really well for us because you're not pushing me to do this. So I feel like the longest time felt like I was being pushed into accepting more of a BDSM kink than I really wanted to because he just literally wouldn't hear me and accept that that wasn't something that I wanted. This over time just generally made boundaries a lot more difficult to maintain in sex. I was just like constantly saying yes to sex that I didn't want to have. I was always in a disassociative place. And he decided to take this, this desire for exploratory of sex one step further and ask if we could start taking ecstasy and then have sex together.

[MacKenzie]

Okay, this, this one, man, this part one is a lot to process. And I mean, I guess they always are.

[Hannah]

Wait till part two.

[MacKenzie]

Wait till part two. It really takes a turn.

[Hannah]

Literally. Part two is gonna feel like a different story. The. You're not gonna believe where this, where this goes. The elevation gets a lot higher, I think. But man, that the way that he is just able to tear her down little by little just to make her malleable enough for what he, he wants, I mean, it's just gonna get crazy. So we won't say too much and we'll talk about it like we said

[Claire]

at the beginning, at the end of

[Hannah]

next week, we'll do a very in depth dogfish debrief. Say that three times fast. We love Claire. If you wanna send her any messages of support, you can comment them on Instagram or Facebook or Dating detectives podcast or TikTok. I shouldn't leave out TikTok. And also you can comment on Spotify. Like, we have like a little convo section going under each episode, so you should join that. Share moments that blew your mind. Share moments that made you have a question. We try to, we try to get in there and talk to you about it. And obviously on Patreon Patreon, we always have like conversations going about the episodes.

[MacKenzie]

Always. I love our Patreon. Thank you to our Patreon and thank you for listening. We really love and appreciate you. And until next year week, as always, trust your intuition.

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