My younger sister just got proposed to.
And the hurt, the heartache that I feel, it's so overwhelming.
My partner of eight years is amazing.
After multiple, multiple conversations that we had.
He just doesn't believe in the institution, doesn't believe in the ritual, doesn't believe in the romantic side of it.
And he made it very clear that this is not the path for us.
And Most of the time, I'm okay with that.
I can't kill the hope, but I live happily.
And those moments when somebody close to me experiences something that I deeply, so much desire, I feel the pain really, really deep.
My other sister, I'm the oldest of the three, also got proposed about three years, four years ago.
And it was also a very difficult experience, and I remember processing it in a little bit different way.
I think I tried to just bottle my emotions and pretend that I didn't need it.
Today it's a bit different.
I feel like I want to let those emotions out.
Growing up as a child from a different biological father to my sisters created quite a deep wound for me of being somehow not enough or different or just outcasted.
Maybe this experience is kind of replicating this desire, because I had multiple relationships and we always had that same issue where the person would be against it and I would drop the relationship.
It's just without that ritual, without that jewelry, without that party, without that public declaration.
But that pain, like I feel now, it piques me.
I feel like maybe it will never go away.
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I'm all ears.
When I recorded the message, it was the peak of the emotion.
I still feel it like that.
I think it subsided a little bit.
But when I sent it, I don't even remember pressing the button to record it because it was so raw.
It just had happened.
And it took me by surprise.
What took you by surprise?
Her announcement?
Or how much it pained you?
How much it pained me.
Because I thought I had already resolved it within me.
And it just clearly showed me that I didn't.
Can I ask you a question about what you said?
When you say it hurts so much.
And there's something about it that taps into...
My need for belonging.
My fear that I'd want.
And what's the pain point for you?
It's embarrassment.
It's some kind of shame.
It's like a pain of being left out.
A pain of somehow being not good enough to get into this VIP club.
Somehow that there is something broken about me.
Right.
That's what I heard as well.
Why can't I join you?
What's it about me that I can't enter here, that I can't be legitimized in this way?
Will I always be one down, one out?
Yes.
That's the fear and that's the feeling.
Yes.
Have you brought this at all to your life?
Not with a request, but even just simply, has he ever heard that message?
Yes, he has, because I was resolving other issues of being different.
So I have made the connection for him.
Why is it so important? difficult for me.
And I think he does truly understand, but he doesn't really see how deeply it is affecting me.
Wanting something that is beyond him, and he has made it before that.
He said it will never be enough for you.
And he's not the first man that told me that the ring will never be enough for you.
The ring will not be enough for what? to be fulfilled or complete or feel like I've arrived.
Is that really the case?
I mean, do you experience that too?
It's not about is it true, but do you experience some of that?
Do you wonder.
Is there something deep inside of me that continuously questions my sense of belonging?
Or would this symbolically actually give you an experience of being welcomed into what you call the VIP club?
I think it does feel like probably both end, and also like I do feel that the public declaration that means quite a lot to me.
So when I imagine or dream about the event, it's usually what brings out the most joy sharing it with people and what so we will be sharing with my work colleagues or sharing it with my friends or my family, instead of something like two people experience together.
Because I feel like I have all that, like I have the marriage.
I feel like I have it.
The relationship is close and we feel connected and and we always think about growing old together.
So all that I feel like I have.
Right.
Can I ask you to tell me a little bit more about the family constellation that you grew up in?
Because what I'm hearing from you is there's a set of very deep and painful feelings that travel with you through life.
And they originated in your family of origins.
And then there is the relationship that you are in.
And then there is the meeting between these two.
And how one is telling the other, here are some things I need from you.
How did you enter the family you grew up in?
So it was always a taboo.
It was a secret.
I was never meant to know it.
Okay, let's hold on a second.
Just sit with this. because the secret is on the other side of the public declaration.
It's important that we understand why this matters in the way that it does.
Otherwise, it's just we're going to have.
I don't believe in marriage, I don't believe in the institution.
I want the ring.
I want the white dress.
There's a deeper story here that involves shame, that involves secrecy.
It's about that more than about marriage.
It's the stuff that marriage tries to cover up and sometimes succeeds and sometimes doesn't.
So you were not supposed to find out.
So there's a story here.
Tell me, can you tell me a little bit of the story?
Yes.
So my biological father left us when I was two years old because he had another family.
And my mom met my dad very soon after.
And he adopted me.
And they decided to never tell.
But we lived in a very small town.
Where people don't keep secrets very well.
Yes.
And I started to hear it when I was seven.
First from the kids, because they heard it from their adults in the neighborhood.
Then they heard it again in school.
But I never told them.
I wrote in the diary in a separate color.
And I remember I used to hate these pages, used to flick through them, but I told them what they told me.
You told who?
Just the diary.
I never really told my parents or anybody about, So you told your diary.
I know a truth that no one wants to talk about, but you did not approach mom or dad.
You called him dad?
Yeah.
You thought he was your dad?
Yeah.
And I didn't approach my parents to let them know that I had heard something.
And so how did you, as this little girl, seven years old, live with that discovery?
That must have been so heavy, so confusing.
It was very heavy and it was so embarrassing.
And I hated these people.
I can see their faces now when I remember them saying it in their car, childish way, really saying well, i've heard that this is not your dad and but i somehow just pushed it away.
Can you say it in the language it was said to you?
That's a lithuanian and they would make fun of you when they would say it.
I felt like they pitied me.
I felt like they felt you.
That was exactly the words for me.
Yeah, Those were children or adults.
Some older a little bit, some younger, some of my peers at different stages.
When I was seven and 12, I think I remember two occasions that really stuck in my mind.
But then over the years, I just never brought it up.
And...
I brought it up once to my grandmother, but she said, oh, don't listen to them kids.
You know, they talk nonsense.
And that was kind of brushed off.
So I felt good in the moment, but I still felt like there was something not right.
My dad showed me so much love.
I never, you know, felt excluded.
If anything, I felt like more probably paid attention to.
But then we had a big conflict when I was 18 and it kind of came out, was about to come out, and I just said to him I know what you're going to say.
And he was very surprised because he couldn't believe that I knew.
And I said, I knew all my life.
I knew it.
That's such a big thing to hold and carry all alone like this.
Even from people who wished that you would just have a normal childhood, that you would never feel excluded.
I mean, in a way, what they wanted so much to achieve by creating the secret is what they ended up creating.
Yeah.
They wanted you not to feel ashamed.
They wanted you to feel like you belong.
They wanted you to feel that your dad was your dad, that the man who raised you was your loving father.
And yet... because you knew it, then what did you do with those two realities?
I just I feel sometimes that I had these feelings that my dad wasn't good for me, that somehow I was creating conflict with him.
And I think over just past five years, when I started to uncover this and that the deep wounding that it has caused, I started to changed the relationship with him and started to say more thank you for what he has done for me.
And that I know he was not perfect.
He struggled to show love to any of us because of his own upbringing.
And he was a bit distant.
So the household was run by the women, by my mom, my grandma.
So my sisters came a lot later than me.
But now I just feel like our relationship got a lot better, since I have spoken about this openly, but not to him.
I spoke to my mom who still struggles to go back to that time.
I still try to piece together the narrative of what happened in those first two years, but it's like pulling and pulling, trying to get more and more information.
Unfortunately, my parents, My grandmother, who really wanted to tell me, I think, the story she passed away before I started to dig deeper into this five years ago.
So five years ago is when you were 18 and it all came out?
So I'm nearly 40.
So five years ago, I actually started to check.
What happened five years ago?
Well, first of all, what happened at 18?
What was this first revelation when you said to your dad, I know what you're going to tell me?
And he realized that you had lived with a truth or with a secret that they thought they had been able to keep from you, hoping to protect you.
But in fact, it inflicted a big wound.
If we had time, I would say what happened at 12, what happened at 7.
And what happened at 18?
And what happened at 34?
Right?
Those are four major milestones for you.
But we may not be able to get through all.
So let's start with the 18.
So after that, my parents were going through a very difficult time in their life, in their relationship.
I think I was always kind of in the middle of this conflict.
Obviously, he was distraught.
He thought that he was going to lose me.
And I just wanted to soothe them, say, it's fine.
It doesn't mean anything.
I know that you're my dad.
I don't want to know anything.
That was my 18-year-old talking.
I'll take care of you, basically.
Don't be sad.
I will take care of you.
Don't worry about it.
I'm not going to hold it against you.
And you were all focused on him.
And mom, maybe more, even.
And to mom you said what?
That I'm okay, that they don't need to worry about anything.
And I was soon after left and never came back.
So that moment of the 18 year old just was.
I never explored it.
I never wanted to go deeper, I just wanted to make sure that they are okay and they're not making.
I'm not making them feel worse, because making them feel worse meaning What happened.
Your parents had their fair amount of conflict.
But your mother always had to be thankful that her husband had married her when she already had a child.
Yes.
She had her own shame.
She still has, I feel, this big shame.
Because she was very, very young.
I think my dad maybe sometimes used this situation with her.
I don't know the full story.
But your mom had a relationship with a man who was married.
Yeah.
And she was a young woman and she got impregnated and he disappeared.
And she had the child alone with the help of her mother.
Yeah, and father.
And father and they welcomed you.
Yeah, it was so much love.
I feel like my grandparents were.
I adore them.
Well, they're not here anymore, but yeah, but they welcomed you, yeah.
Yes, we have to take a brief break, so stay with us.
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I know that the things I've worked for all my life will carry on.
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We lived in this very small household.
We lived in a very small space, a lot of us.
So I was always protected and felt very loved.
And was your mother loved for having gotten pregnant with a married man?
Or did the love come to you and the shame went to her?
And then she just had to find someone to marry her and not wonder if that was the man that she wanted to be with or loved or felt loved by that.
She just had to take whatever was going to be available to her or whoever would want her, because she no longer belonged to the VIP club.
Yes, and it was a small town.
It was a lot of shame in there, especially in those years.
She had big support, though, from my extended family.
I think they really protected me, all of them.
They protected you, and my question is, did they shame her?
Not that they needed to do anything very proactively, that behavior in itself.
She never expressed it, but when I tried to talk to her a few years ago about this, trying to find out the story and narrative, she feels so ashamed and she cannot go there.
She struggles and I mean, it's been nearly 40 years and she struggles to go there.
So I think she still carries this big guilt, or maybe shame shame more than guilt.
And how do you think her shame for what had happened to her influenced how she related to you?
I think you say everyone else protected you.
How about her?
I feel like I protected her a lot.
I feel like her emotional state kind of was declaring my safety.
So if she was safe, I was okay.
Or if she was okay, I felt safe.
And if she...
She was very emotional throughout our lives, tried to control a lot of the environment.
And I felt like it was very, we were very codependent.
So it felt like we were talking all the time.
We were very entwined in our together and separate from sisters more so.
And I just felt like I needed to break that connection and reconnect in a different way, because it felt too painful.
It felt unhealthy.
It felt really like she was living her life through me in many ways.
I was always supposed to be the perfect one to go to get a degree, to get to study, to be the first one to achieve things.
All things that she had not been able to do.
I think so, yeah.
So she was going to live vicariously through you.
I think she did until like these past years when we started to change the dynamic in the family.
So you started a journey of differentiation.
Yeah, it was very painful.
But I made really big steps since COVID.
COVID just opened the whole world.
The whole pot of it, really.
That's when I started to feel again that shame that I was getting into a relationship.
Another one, a third one, where the marriage was not on the cards.
And I felt again that I was going to drop and leave because that's what I always did.
I would get committed.
I would get to the point and I would leave.
And I didn't want to leave this time.
This time I wanted to because it was so obvious that it was happening again exactly the same story with a very different person.
And exactly the same story meaning?
That I get loving, I get in a very good relationship, we're very close, we are very happy, but then it's just not enough to make that step, to make that commitment, like that public commitment.
It would always be something that stops it and I didn't know why and I always felt like no, that's not working.
I'm going to try again.
I'm going to try with somebody else.
I spoke to my sisters and my mom and how was your conversation with them?
It was very painful, but I think they understood it.
My sisters especially, because they felt like my and mom's relationship were very odd.
It was the VIP club that they couldn't enter.
Yeah, There are many VIP clubs in this system.
So you and mom had a particular closeness that your sisters could not compete with and could not enter.
And you wanted to decide on your own terms if you want to be in a relationship that may not materialize or evolve into marriage, without having to feel that you are actually repeating what your mother went through.
So every time you left, you were basically saying I'm not going to experience what my mother went through.
I never thought it like that when I did, but... I know, I saw your face.
But it just adds another layer to this.
It's that she too started out her story with someone who wouldn't be public.
It's, you know...
It's not just that there was a secret inside of you, but you were a secret in this man's life.
Yes.
With mom.
You were not a secret, but there was a secret about who you are and where you come from and all of that.
And do you ever discuss the possibility of what you call the public declaration separately from marriage?
As a symbolic act of acknowledgement, celebration.
I have brought it up not long ago.
I think it's because I listened to many, many different ways of doing it.
But that's when he said, I don't think that will be enough for you.
But that's maybe not for him to decide.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a good answer to kind of say I don't want to do something, and it won't be good for you either.
So I want to do it.
But we don't know.
And even if it doesn't take care of the entire wound, there's something about the symbolic nature of just having a few people at the table or not at the table wherever you want, for that matter who recognize acknowledge celebrate, ritualize your relationship.
If you celebrate your birthdays, you may celebrate An anniversary.
You know it may not fill the entire gap of the original wound, but so what?
Maybe that's not the purpose either.
Purpose is to do small gestures that respond to the shame.
Shame is about hiding.
When we feel ashamed, we hide.
We don't want to see people.
We don't want them to see us and we think there's something wrong with me, rather than something happened to me.
When we make a public declaration, it's exactly the opposite.
And you can do little gestures like that.
They honor, they legitimize, they make it known, they're not hiding.
Maybe little things, maybe little things between the two of you too.
It doesn't just have to involve the community.
And because you grew up in a small town, you had the village, but basically you had the community at your doorstep, you know, and they came in, even if you didn't want to.
Here, you would get to invite them and you would choose who you want to invite, and so would he, and it would just, it wouldn't, it doesn't need to carry a name even.
It feels so strange, i don't know, it's um, it's like as if i am scared to do it, scared to It's not so much that he would not let me.
It's more like that I somehow don't want to do it.
Say more.
That's when I was thinking about this desire thing and obsession.
I feel sometimes that maybe it's me who doesn't want it.
It's that just thought that just came to my mind very quickly.
Like in the past maybe 48 hours.
Me that doesn't want what?
To declare it publicly.
Him?
Us?
It?
It.
Like the relationship.
That it's, I don't know.
I have this feeling that deep inside is what he actually wants, that he would like that, but not you.
Yeah.
And I know it sounds twisted, but I don't get it.
No, it's just the opposite of what you said before.
But it's, you know, I like twisted.
So tell me more.
So what's if you had the voice that is the master of ceremony and that just creeps up right now?
Where's the resistance?
That, It's just not me.
It's just not what I do.
It's not... I never dreamt about it.
I never imagined it.
I never had, you know, even... I never imagined what?
Any of these rituals.
I never imagined ever in the dress even.
I never imagined myself going through the rituals.
Because I imagined what?
How did I imagine myself?
Just being okay with things as they are, being unique and different, and kind of proving that I don't need this.
They call me the daughter-in-law.
So when your sister announces that she's getting married...
Your first response is loss.
Yeah.
Loss of a certain story, loss of a certain set of societal expectations that you won't be following upon.
Loss of the sense of homogeneity between you and your sisters.
And then it switches from the loss and the sadness and the pain into I'm different, not just because I had a secret.
But now I'm taking that difference and I'm turning it into how I choose to live and what I want to live by and which one of the rituals of our society I actually want to adhere to.
And so I turned the whole thing upside down, but that just happened 48 hours ago.
Yeah.
Like very recently, I just don't even know why that thought came to me.
Um, Because I was thinking I was preparing what to say and all of a sudden it just kind of came that thought.
It kind of came as a question, like, do you really want to do this?
Or is it just what you told yourself for the past 10 years?
And then you added to it, but I think he wants it more than me.
Yeah, because I said it's about he doesn't believe in institution, but he's writing the wedding speeches for his friends, you know, as if it was his full-time job.
And he loves attending all these ceremonies and all these.
It just seems a bit odd to me that somebody who doesn't believe in institution participates in it so wholeheartedly.
Everyone, their contradictions.
Yeah.
So when he says to you, This won't be enough.
What's he really addressing?
Because now you've conveyed, I say I want something that may not really be the thing I want.
But I want something.
So what is the it and the something that is not being properly named?
That he says, no ceremony will take care of it.
And you both seem to never name this it.
Or at least I'm not sure I capture.
But you seem to each know something that lies underneath.
It's not so much my worth, but it's like a prize.
It's like the final jewel in this whole thing.
It's like a final piece of the puzzle.
So I have this whole thing that works for me, but I'm missing that one little puzzle piece.
Maybe I thought that was that commitment, that ritual, that ceremony would kind of put that piece in.
But now I say it and I don't think that it would.
Can I suggest a thought for you?
Just came up for me and you tell me if that adds some clarity.
When you talk like that, I want to have a ceremony.
I want to get married.
I want to have a celebration of that because I think it would officialize me.
It would make a declaration and all of that.
On some level, you don't mention him.
It's like he's being recruited for a part, but it's not about him.
And I'm wondering if him saying, I don't want to do this, this will not add it, this won't fix it.
It's because you're asking him to do something that isn't really his role.
In a way, you're asking him to do something that your parents haven't done.
You're asking him to legitimize, to officialize.
And he's not the first person I asked that as well.
But he's the one where you decided not to go.
So there's a part of you that knows that there's certain things that you want from him, but it's not about him.
And it's actually not about marriage either.
No, I just don't know what I want.
What is it really that I want?
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The Pivot Tour is coming to Chicago.
That's right, the Midwest, the little New York.
Beef and bourbon.
Yes, it's true.
Scott and I were bringing our live show to the Chicago Theater on Wednesday, November 12th.
Yes, typically we only like to fly over Chicago, but it's time to rub a little Coastal Elite sunblock for those winters.
It's your chance to experience all the insight, all the banter, all the bickering of a pivot podcast, live and in person.
There'll be some surprises.
We'll be eating Chicago dogs, I'm sure, in some fashion, as many as possible.
If you're not in the Chicago area but you live in the Midwest.
I guess there's other cities there.
Please buy a ticket, or a train ticket or or a sled whatever it is they do there and get to Chicago.
Or you can go to PivotTour.com to get tickets in any of the seven cities we're stopping in.
Once again, that's PivotTour.com.
Should babies have phones?
That's a question senior Vox correspondent Adam Clark Estes asked a bunch of researchers recently.
It was personal.
He has a two-year-old.
I feel like I'm going to be facing a new hurdle every day for the rest of my life in some respects.
But when it comes to tech, I think the big challenge here is that it is constantly changing.
And these are new challenges.
We don't have clear answers on what the right thing to do is.
As a parent, it feels very scary.
The prevailing wisdom tells us, no, keep that screen away from your child.
But one expert wants us to rethink things.
This is something that my wife and I talked and thought a whole lot about.
And really kind of at some point between the ages of two and three, we decided to give our daughter her first phone.
This week on Explain It To Me, toddlers and tech.
What to do and what do we know?
New episodes on Sundays.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe even on your baby's phone.
If you turn to your parents now, not to your boyfriend, but to your parents and you talked with them about public declaration, turning shame into pride, acceptance acceptance that doesn't sit on a secret and primarily, releasing the secret so that you don't have to hold it in order to protect them.
That's the release.
They told it, but it was too late.
They said it no, they just said one thing what was the conflict you had with your dad at 18 that led him to let the cat out of the the hat, as they say?
I discovered his affair and told my mom about it.
He called me, he was very obviously he thought that that was it, that was the end, and And he was angry and he just wanted to hurt me.
I was in university back home.
I only went there for a very short time before I moved away.
So he was saying you want to hurt me by making me public to your mom.
Mm-hmm.
Let me tell you.
Mm-hmm.
And I know what I can use to hurt you.
But he couldn't because I kind of interrupted him.
But that wasn't he told me.
That wasn't him telling you.
No.
That was him basically exercising revenge.
You think you have one up on me?
Let me tell you one on you.
It's a different game.
And your mom, you still haven't had a conversation with her about it.
I had it in terms of when I had, five years ago, started to go through this.
I called and cried and said you know, this has really deeply hurt me.
So I did say everything then, what I felt, and I said... And was she able to hear you?
Not fully.
I don't think We had another conflict a couple of years ago where I She took it so badly that she said, you know, because I said I'm still she still wanted to have the same physical kind of connection.
You know where we were very close and I needed space.
And she took it very badly.
She took it very hurtfully.
She was hysterical.
And I, after she calmed down and I calmed her down, I said to her that it's, it's not that I don't love her.
It's that it's suffocating me and that's um that i need to disconnect from her and i need my sisters to step up into this relationship.
So i am not the one who is always looking after her emotional being, and you know all these conflicts with my dad that she had.
She used to share with me and i said no, not anymore, i don't want to hear anything anymore, And actually their relationship improved now because I think I stepped down.
I stepped down.
I stepped away.
I moved.
My sister stepped up.
They started to feel a bit more out of my shadow.
So you did a lot.
I did a lot for the family.
You did a lot of family restructuring.
Yes.
Beautiful um, but she still struggles to talk, to talk about it, but she's trying.
She wrote me a lot of letters to say how she doesn't know what comes over her, and i understand, because i know how these wounds work.
She's been very gentle and soft, you know, in in our conversations.
But also i feel like she downplays the the experiences of my sisters, which is not fair, because I want to celebrate with them.
They are beautiful experiences for them and important, and I want them to celebrate it.
But I feel like I'm just always in the way with all this, with my stuff, especially with the trio, the triangle of me, my mom and my dad, and the invisible man, somehow.
It's four of us there, and then they are on the sidelines.
Tell me if I hear this right.
I look at my parents marriage and it is official and it is sanctified by the church and it is legal by the state and yet it is filled with secrets the my secret of my origin, but also my father's affair and who knows what else.
I look at me and my boyfriend and my partner and we are not sanctified, nor legal, nor recognized by any public institution.
But we don't have secrets.
We grow.
We are open.
We're there for each other.
And here I am facing the opportunity, but also the falsity of what the official declaration presents and means versus what happens in the actual experience of the relationship, even if the titles are not there.
Did I hear it accurately?
Yeah.
Yes.
So I always wanted an opposite of the relationship.
That's what I always was going for.
I want truth authenticity trust honesty safety discovery exploration, growth all these beautiful juicy things in a relationship.
And I want that to be declared.
I can find ways to create rituals and celebrations and opportunities to bring in the community whoever I invite.
It's not sure that I want all the titles When in fact it feels that behind that there's a web of secrets and unacknowledged truths.
And I started this process five years ago.
And my sister's announcement of her marriage led me to the next step in this process.
Yeah, I feel like it's a big step. what happened over these past 48 hours.
Something shifted, I think, more than it shifted then, even.
How is this?
It sits.
It's landing.
It's landing better.
But I hope I'm not just trying to soothe myself.
It's.
You know.
Because I'm such a storyteller.
I'm just hoping that I'm not just doing it.
Because it sounds good.
It sounds better.
Yeah.
So that's what I think.
I want to start to see.
If this thought is taking.
Because it's quite fresh.
This is a story.
But so is the other version.
And you can. decide which story you want to live by.
It's not like there is one true story and the other is not.
At least not here.
This was an Esther calling.
A one-time intervention phone call. recorded remotely from two points somewhere in the world.
If you have a question you'd like to explore with Esther, it could be answered in a 40 or 50 minute phone call.
Send her a voice message and Esther might just call you.
Send your question to producer at estherperel.com.
Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise.
We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
In partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut.
Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destry Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristen Muller and Julian Hatt.
Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider.
And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker.
We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, and Jack Saul.
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