The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart-sick.
Sugar is here.
The both of us.
Speaking straight into your ears.
I'm Cheryl Strayed.
I'm Steve Almond.
This is Dear Sugar Radio.
Oh dear song, won't you please Share some little sweetness Hi, Steve.
Hi, Cheryl.
We're going to do a rapid fire today.
It's a rapid fire.
Yeah, you do it better.
Some of these rapid fires, as listeners of the show will know, we have a theme.
Today we're going to be talking about letters that essentially ask that question should I stay or should I go?
And as we go through these questions today, there will be a sort of ever-escalating buildup to the harder questions about staying or going.
As we know,
Sometimes it's a fairly light decision.
Other times it's incredibly complicated.
Well, you're in the middle of this maelstrom because of you and your big mouth.
You're kind of like Grand Central Station of ambivalence about whether people should stay with the status quo or get out of usually a destructive relationship because of that column you wrote.
That's right.
And there's a quote from that column.
Which was titled?
This column was called The Truth That Lives There.
I also touched on this issue with my column Tiny Beautiful Things.
A quote from Tiny Beautiful Things that people have bandied about the internet.
As they will.
Wanting to leave is enough.
And I think that's certainly the heart of this column.
So I received essentially a chorus of letters from people who were in one situation, and that is I love my partner, I respect my partner, but I just have this feeling that there's something else out there for me and that I want to go explore other things.
Now, some of these letter writers had been dating the person for a few months.
Some of these letter writers were married for years.
And what I, you know, my answer was really, I answered via a story about my own struggles.
When I was married to my first husband, I was in that exact situation.
I loved him.
What was so painful about my divorce is I had to break my own heart.
That's again.
You have to be brave enough to break your own heart is something I wrote and something I learned the hard way.
Because I kept waiting for there to be a sort of outside reason to leave my husband.
Oh, he was abusive or he cheated on me or he did this or that or the other thing.
And honestly, I think that that's ultimately why I cheated on my first husband, which I really regret because it very much is against my values.
It's a bad way to get out.
But I finally you know, I was so young that I didn't have the strength or the internal sense of knowing that like it was enough for me to say I need to end this relationship, simply because I feel like there's something missing in my life and I need to go seek it.
And I need to seek it on my own outside of the confines of a committed relationship.
And so to do that was revolutionary for me life-changing, a great decision and an incredibly painful one.
So in this column, The Truth That Lives There, what I was speaking to is not the idea that the minute you have any doubts or struggles in a relationship, you should leave.
Now, sometimes it's been misinterpreted in that way.
And I think that's really unfortunate.
I am all for you know, grappling with your feelings and staying in those difficult moments in relationships and seeing what's going to happen on the other side of your fears and your doubts.
So I don't advise people, and I'm just going to say it for the record.
I said it in that column, but it got overlooked.
Of course.
You know, it is important to know that in every relationship, we're going to have doubts.
In every relationship, we're going to have struggles.
But in my experience, there was also this burning core of truth.
And what I said to people is, when you have that feeling, the only question left is are you going to do it later or are you going to do it now?
And almost always when you have that kind of truth that is driving your decision, the truth that lives there.
The sooner that you can see to it, the better off you're going to be and also the better off the people in your life.
I wasn't doing my husband, my ex-husband, any favors by staying married to him, because when I was in so much turmoil and doubt,
And the minute I cut myself free of that, we were both liberated, essentially, from this struggle and allowed to go off and have the lives that we've come to have.
And so many of the letters that we get have to do with that fundamental feeling.
There's some force that's telling me I've got to change my life.
I've got to get out of a relationship, a workplace, whatever it is.
And yet we know that, even though the constant condition of life has changed, people are terrified, and justifiably.
And they sort of crave, as children do, routine and stability.
And that's how our homeostatic mechanisms work.
So there's this war inside of all of us.
And so that's what we're going to get into.
We're going to battle.
Put your battle gear on.
Let's do it.
The first letter.
He has a troubled marriage that's been on rocky ground for a long time and it has survived his infidelity.
My friend and his wife have children and are trying to make their marriage work.
While my intentions are not sexual, I care very deeply for my friend and I still crave the closeness and emotional intimacy of our relationship.
Hmm.
Hmm.
What do you think, Steve?
It's a very complicated letter.
So totally in over my head.
The first thing that is really just confusing.
It's unclear to me why you are referring to this relationship as an emotional affair rather than a friendship.
If your intentions are not sexual, but there is deep intimacy there, why wouldn't it be a friendship?
Why do you categorize it as illicit?
And my suspicion is because, as Esther Perel reminded us in our infidelity episode, there isn't this sexual alchemy necessarily, but there's something that feels secret and covert and that occupies a space, a kind of emotional intimate space that really is appropriate for a partner.
And I say this all the time in the context of relationships, you know, you know a friendship is over when you're talking more about somebody than to them.
And you know that a marriage is really in trouble when your partner isn't the person with whom you have the deepest, most intimate conversations.
It feels to me like what you're saying is that you are in a relationship with this guy that occupies the space and the emotional energy and attention that should be going towards this guy healing his relationship with his wife, which is what he says he wants to do.
I think, if we apply Cheryl's complex rule of thumb, this letter is an expression, an awareness that you are occupying a space right now that you feel really appropriately belongs to this wife and husband until they can figure out whether the marriage is going to sustain itself and be rehealed properly.
And then your friendship doesn't have to be something that's an emotional affair.
It's what we need in life.
Outside of our central partnership, if we find a partner, is good friends.
There's a suspicion that you're casting on yourself.
And I would think less about his life.
Think about your life.
I think this letter comes out of an expression that you know that you're in a relationship that's unhealthy for you at the moment.
My hunch is that your hunch is you need to step back from this friendship until he figures out whether his marriage is going to be healable or not.
Yeah.
I think that you know the answer totally in over my head.
You don't sign a letter totally in over my head unless you're totally in over your head.
You're in a relationship that's not right, that doesn't feel right to you.
And so you need to bow out.
And we all crave closeness and emotional intimacy.
And you can find that in a relationship that feels right, that feels good.
And so you need to let this one go.
All right, dear sugars, I have an agonizingly American dilemma.
After I had an ugly and protracted affair, my husband decided that our marriage wasn't tenable anymore.
We've been together for eight years and married for two, but for the past four months we've been living separately.
Despite my many pleas to reconcile, I've finally begun to accept that my husband no longer views me as his life partner, for reasons that are extremely valid.
He has drawn up very equitable divorce papers and has displayed a lot of patience about me wanting to take some time to sign them.
I'm currently reliant on my estranged husband's health insurance to control an intense anxiety disorder and, ironically enough, to control my distraught feelings about our split.
While I'm not ready to give up on him, I understand that he no longer wishes to be married to me, and I want to set him free to pursue someone that can be more faithful to him and can appreciate him fully.
On the other hand, divorcing him will mean losing my health insurance, and I don't want to be saddled with crippling financial burdens in order to maintain my precarious mental health.
Is it moral to delay the divorce process until I can secure employee benefits?
Should I be looking for another job, even though the stability of a job I love is one of the few bright spots in my life right now?
Help.
Yours truly, unspoused and uncovered.
How's that for a... She's right.
That's a modern American dilemma.
It is.
I'm sorry, unspoused and uncovered.
It's a hard one.
But...
I feel very clear it is moral for you to delay your divorce to keep your health insurance benefits.
But of course, to me, that's not the question.
Does your husband want to do this?
I do think that it's reasonable for you to make a case with him to say listen, I understand and respect your decision for us to get divorced, to end our marriage.
I'm not trying to make any claims on your emotional sexual, romantic life, your personal life, in any way.
But for this one reason, I'm asking you, could we delay the divorce for a certain period of time?
And it might be... a good idea to actually get really specific about that.
What is a reasonable amount of time that would allow you to take care of what you need to take care of to figure out this health insurance situation?
And I think that's really a negotiation process that you're gonna go through.
Obviously, your husband might say no.
He might, for his own personal reasons, say listen, this was painful for me and I need to put closure on it, and closure means actually filing those papers.
The sad thing about a divorce is it really is, at the end of the day, a business negotiation.
And these health insurance questions are really common, sadly in this society that we don't have access to health insurance.
And so I think it's a reasonable claim to ask them to delay it.
And I think we find ways in life to remain tangled up with people with whom our feelings are not resolved.
If that's not the case and really does boil down to, I really just can make this agreement cleanly and then you're free to pursue your life and I'm free to figure out what I do next, okay.
But I think the larger crisis that's underneath all of this is that your life is in chaos right now and it feels deeply disrupted by the end of the marriage, by your feelings of responsibility about that, by your regret and desire to want to be back with this person and not incidentally, your life as a freelancer.
You're provisional at work.
You're being told you're next in line, but we all know that.
You know that, and a nickel will buy you a gumball.
So in asking him, you need to be sure that you're not further casting yourself into the role of somebody who's leading a provisional disrupted life.
Because it sounds like that anxiety disorder that you speak of a couple of times is exacerbated by this feeling that you don't really have a stable base at home or at work.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, Steve, I know this is a little different question.
Staying means delaying the divorce.
Going means just signing those papers now.
What's your vote?
Well, I think the husband has the central vote.
That's right.
But that you certainly have the right to ask to stay in the marriage.
And get insurance.
You know if that will help you find some security within a life that right now is pretty insecure.
Yeah, that's my vote too.
Stay if your husband will allow it and staying just in that sense.
And good luck.
Good luck to you.
Okay, next letter.
Hi Sugars.
My boyfriend just left for an extended period of time to bike across the country.
He's really cool.
We talked a lot about how things were going to be after he left and I felt comfortable with it all.
I trust him.
He left two days ago, and now I'm in a panic.
I feel much sadder than I thought I would.
I've always been on the other side of things, the one leaving for adventures and having fun while my loved ones cheered me on.
Now I'm watching him fulfill a dream, and though I'm happy for him, I miss him incredible amounts.
Signed, Blue Without You.
So Blue without you, the sentence.
That's really for me sort of illuminated.
Here is he left two days ago and now I'm in a panic.
And, you know, it's a simple statement of fact, but he left two days ago.
And you love him.
And you're also envious of him.
And you also feel that he's sort of appropriated the role that you usually have.
So you have this complicated relationship, bolt of feelings, some of them which are jealousy and envy.
And those are ones that are complicated but very real in a relationship where you know you're staking out a certain ground as the adventurer.
And he's saying, hey, I'm for real.
I'm the cool.
I'm going to do this stuff that you usually do.
I'm the guy who's going to get cheered on.
So that's a complicated thing.
But the central thing is, hey, you love him more than you thought.
And I think what you need to do right now is consult with yourself and try to really discern how much of this is I miss him, I'm sad without him, and how much is God damn it.
He gets to do this and I don't.
My hunch is that it's a complicated mix of those two, but I can guarantee you, if your central question is how do I start making the most of this, that wallowing in feelings about his departure, especially feelings of envy, is exactly the wrong thing to do if you want to start to, you know, enjoy his time away.
And, you know, he's on a bike trip.
I imagine they still have phones there in Iowa or wherever he is and maybe even the internet.
Write each other letters.
That's what people used to do.
It sustained their relationships.
It deepened their relationships.
So my sense is this is a great opportunity.
Sometimes growth in fact I hate to say it, always growth is uncomfortable and queasy, and sometimes painful.
And I think that it's really valuable to ask these questions that you're asking, especially if this relationship does end up being one that sustains over time.
And even if it doesn't, you take it into the next relationship.
And that is how do you keep that kind of envying your partner for the cool and fun things that he or she does?
And also, how do you nurture yourself when you see them going off and nurturing themselves?
And you're responsible for your life.
Do something cool yourself.
Yes.
And that doesn't mean then you try to one-up him and you plan your bicycle trip or your hiking trip, but that you sort of think more deeply about what makes you feel like you're seeking and having adventures.
When I first was dating Brian, who's now my husband.
He's a documentary filmmaker and he was in this era of his career that he was making a series of documentary films in Southeast Asia.
And so he went, you know, all over Southeast Asia, for maybe gosh, he took maybe five or eight trips where he would be gone for a month or six weeks.
And I was back in Portland, waiting tables.
And then the other piece of it is, like, is he having bigger adventures than me?
You know one of the things that happens over the course of life.
Now, in the last few years, I'm the one who's gone off and he's been staying home with the children and keeping those home fires burning.
And I think that that early kind of initiation, where we respected that we would have adventures together and separately, ended up really nurturing us both individually and as a couple.
Yeah.
So think of this as an opportunity.
This is where I'm going to vote stay in a way that seems that word stay doesn't seem to apply to you.
But I think if you think of it literally as like sitting within yourself with these feelings.
And it's about you going further down the path of finding who it is you really are and what you really want in your life.
So I'm going to vote let him go and he's fulfilling his dream and support him in that, like Cheryl did with Brian.
But also your opportunity is find out what your dream is.
Yeah.
And then he better damn well support you in that.
Yeah.
When you head off.
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Dear Sugars, three months ago I relocated from my long-distance boyfriend.
I left my dream job, my beloved city and great friends and took a significant pay cut to move to a new city to live with him.
When I first made the move, we were incredibly happy to finally be ending our long-distance relationship.
Now, things are markedly different.
We've been fighting almost daily and my usually sunny disposition is dimmed so dramatically.
My friends and family are starting to worry about me.
The main reason we fight is because of the cats.
Two adorable, sweet, and loving cats I adopted five years ago long before I met my boyfriend.
My boyfriend has never been fond of my cats, but he told me he would do his best to get along with them once I moved in with him.
He hasn't.
His only interaction with them has been to yell at them and chase them into a tiny powder room where we keep their litter box.
They've become so scared of him that they hide in a crate to avoid him.
They won't come out while he's home, even to go to the bathroom.
To make matters worse, he has a dog whom he treats like a king and expects me to do the same.
He now says he doesn't think he can live with cats and he wants me to send them away to live with my parents.
While this is an option, I feel like this is incredibly unfair to me and diminishes the importance of my cats in my life.
If the tables were turned, I feel he would absolutely choose his dog over me.
Part of me wonders whether this goes beyond just a hatred of cats.
Is he simply unwilling to compromise in general, whether it's about cats or anything else?
He says that's not the case and that without the cats, things would be back to normal.
I'd love to give this a fair shot, since I've already sacrificed so much, and it does seem silly to end a two and a half year relationship over cats.
But I'm 30 years old and I don't want to waste any more of my time on this relationship if he's going to be stubborn and selfish forever.
I'm so torn about what to do.
Please help.
Signed, Crazy and Confused Cat Lady.
Oh, dear.
Steve, you know, this one is not complicated for me at all.
Okay?
We kill all the animals?
What happens?
From one cat lady to another, Honeybun, you should absolutely go.
Absolutely.
This is not about cats.
Okay, this is you're saying it's.
Does it seem silly to end a two and a half year relationship over cats?
You're ending a two and a half year relationship over the fact that you're in a relationship with somebody who's not kind and somebody who's not considerate and somebody who's not respectful.
And those are big, deep, important things.
You sacrificed a lot.
You gave up this life you loved to move in with this guy.
And guess what?
You learned something you didn't expect that you had fallen in love with somebody who really, you know is pretty selfish.
It's one thing to say.
You know I'm not really in love with your cats, but I love you and respect you.
And so I'm going to do my best to live with these cats.
I'm going to make my best effort.
And what your boyfriend did is he showed you what his best effort was.
And it was terrible.
It was actually to be abusive and mean to these cats.
There's a reason they won't come out of their crate.
You've witnessed the ways that he's treated them.
Who knows what's happened when you're not around?
But really, if you're dealing with somebody who at core isn't kind and respectful to me, those are deal killers.
And when I read this letter, I see him killing that deal over and over again in really core ways.
I have no reservations whatsoever.
I think you should end this relationship.
I'm a little vague on your answer, but the sense I get if I read between the lines Cheryl, is that she should go.
Go.
Okay.
Let me give you a few more just little hints as to why you might want to heed Cheryl's advice.
Quote we've been fighting almost daily and my usually sunny disposition is dimmed so dramatically that my friends and family are starting to worry about me.
Or I'll do you one better.
If the tables were turned, I feel he would absolutely choose his dog over me.
Yeah, that's a warning sign if you choose.
Now look.
One of the things that I love about this letter is that it is about the way that pets and our relationships to animals are kind of their relationships.
They matter.
They have emotional weight.
And, you know, just golden rule this sucker.
That's right.
You know, you would never say, get rid of your dog.
I can't stand him.
There's just a power balance that's out of whack.
Because you know that he loves his dog and his dog is important to him.
Correct.
And that's it.
Right.
It always is a great thing.
Right.
And do unto others cats too.
And Aaron brought into the marriage two cats who were both very fond of her and had no interest in me or the kids.
And I wasn't a great owner, but I got that those were important relationships that mattered to her.
Mm-hmm.
Now, part of what might be keeping you in this relationship and causing you to ignore all these glaring symptoms that come leaping off the page to us is because you've invested two and a half years in this relationship.
You're 30 years old and you've just made a big sacrifice to go and disrupt your life.
Dream job, beloved city, great friends.
You gave up a lot.
And it's disappointing sometimes to face that and to say oh, now I have to step back from this because I made it work in this place and I'll make it work with this guy.
It's humiliating and it's frightening, especially when you're 30 and you're wanting to find somebody who will be a partner.
But it's so abundantly clear to me that the only way that this relationship could work is if the terms of it were radically reinvented.
He doesn't need to be bearing a little velvet pillow with the cat food for your beloved cats, but he needs to understand that the things that you love and the creatures that you love, and even the city and the job that you love,
And your friends matter to you and therefore that they should matter to him, until this relationship is significantly reinvented.
That's the only way that there's a possibility.
And that really is only going to happen if you go.
And even still, it might not.
And you'll find somebody who loves you and your cats.
That's right.
Go, go, go.
By the time you hear this, I'm going to guess actually you're already gone.
Okay, next letter.
Dear Sugars, my husband is emotionally abusive.
We have a two-year-old daughter.
I know I need to leave him, but I'm so completely stuck.
I look at apartments I could rent every day.
I know how much better my life will be away from him.
I know I will be fine, better than fine, in fact, once I go.
But I still can't seem to get the ball rolling.
It's not money that keeps me here or security, although both of those things will be challenges.
It's shame.
I'm ashamed that I picked such a bad father for my daughter.
I'm ashamed that I knew he was a bad choice, but I still had a baby with him.
I'm ashamed that I've put up with his abuse for 10 years.
I'm ashamed of how I have let him treat me.
Oh, my.
I'm ashamed that I picked such a bad father, da-da-da.
And so how are you punishing yourself?
Stuck feet for that shame.
By staying in an emotionally abusive relationship which, by the way, isn't just bad for you, it's bad for your child.
And the first piece of advice would be get off the island, by which I mean that there are millions of women and men who have to get out of relationships like this.
And it's the toughest thing you'll have to do, but you're not alone in having to do it.
And there is a vast network of people and books and narratives and professionals who will help you.
As frightening as it is, as destabilizing as it feels.
There are many paths and you have to start walking down one of them.
Right.
I first want to say stuck feet, that shame is the number one thing that people feel who are in abusive relationships.
And part of that is steeped in this idea that people who find themselves victims in a relationship.
It disrupts our self-concept.
We think, well, I would never be that person.
We have this idea of what a victim looks like or somebody who's made these bad choices in relationships.
You know, it brings up all those feelings of shame when we find ourselves in that situation.
You know, the first thing I would say is that you need help.
You don't have to do this alone.
Yes.
And as the child of a woman who did that herself when I was six, I'll tell you it's powerfully important that you do make that choice, for yourself and for her.
But what we have now, what my mother didn't have 40 years ago, is really all of these resources that are available to you locally and nationally.
I don't know where you live, so I can't advise you about where to reach out locally.
But I think a lot of people think those domestic violence resources are about physical violence.
But we've expanded our definition of what abuse is in these intimate relationships.
And Emotional abuse can be as painful or more painful, frankly, than physical abuse.
And so you get to tap into those resources.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline, you can find it at thehotline.org.
Go there and they can connect you to local resources who are going to be there to help you make those first steps.
Even sometimes provide a place to go, a safe shelter in those first dangerous days, when you make that leap.
There are so many people who have been down this path before and the minute they make that move that you know you need to make life becomes easier.
It doesn't become harder.
The hardest part, Stuck Feet, is right now.
You must go.
And I really just beg you to reach out to every resource that will help you do that.
Get off the island.
Go now.
Go in mercy.
Okay, we promised people or maybe we threatened them that these letters were going to be of an increasing intensity.
But in this case, we'll wind up with a letter that's of increasing brevity.
It's short and barbed.
Dear Sugars is quote wanting to leave enough, even when you have a sweet and precious one-year-old love mama.
Wanting to leave.
This brings us back to the beginning, when I talked about that quote.
Wanting to leave is wanting to leave enough.
Yes.
And I think, obviously, the stakes are higher.
When you have a child with a partner who you want to leave, the consequences are also felt by the child.
I think many of us have this idea that the ideal scenario for our children is that if you had that child with a partner, that you and that partner will stay together and thrive.
But what happens when you aren't thriving?
And it sounds to me like mama wanting to leave you aren't.
OK, if you have that feeling, if you have that persistent feeling that you need to leave, you probably need to listen to yourself.
And what that's going to lead to is probably some pretty great things for your child too, because your child will have
A parent, two parents maybe, who get to have more fulfilled lives, right?
You know you are never doing a partner a favor by staying with them out of pity, by staying with them out of guilt.
Or fear.
Okay?
So, you know, I think that leaving doesn't mean that you don't continue to co-parent with somebody.
We have so many amazing models of people who co-parent beautifully.
And you know, I think that listening to that true voice is also a great way of you know, setting an example for your child about how it is that we find fulfillment in our lives.
Right.
Yeah, you know, we don't have a lot of information here.
So it's a go, but with the proviso both for you and the last letter we talked about.
You know, stuck feet.
Your partner is also a parent.
And that means that your job now, especially for Stuck Feet, is to find a way out of a relationship in a way that recognizes that, even though the partnership didn't work, the parenting relationship in the ideal does.
You know, that's a profound consideration.
It is not a reason to stay, but it is a reason to go in a way that is deeply considered, you know, bearing in mind that the person who you needed to get away from remains your child's father in both of these cases.
And is there a way for that relationship to work out better, frankly, than the partnership did?
I think so often.
We think of this idea of going as abandonment.
Like that, we're like running away from somebody and leaving them high and dry.
And what you're doing really, when you say I'm going to end this relationship, is you're actually saying I'm going to change this relationship?
The nature of our relationship needs to change, because the relationship we're in right now is not fulfilling.
And so what I said to my ex-husband and we really did come to this place we said we're going to become friends.
Now not friends who call each other up every week and that kind of friendship, but meaning that we're not disavowing everything good that exists between us.
And I think this is really powerful when you do have children and you are leaving that person that you've raised this child with.
Right.
And that's not going to be easy.
There's a lot of conflict and turmoil and pain that's often involved in that transition.
But it can be made.
And what's beautiful about that is that there's more to come.
The way that that relationship can change can actually be incredibly healing and nurturing and powerful, over time too.
Sometimes going makes a relationship better.
That's right.
This is what life does.
If you're leading a meaningful life, you reach these places where you have to figure out is the compulsion to somehow reinvent my life strong enough that I need to listen to it and disrupt my life in a short-term way on behalf of finding hopefully, something you can live with without wanting to head for the door?
So let's do a tally.
How many did we stay and how many did we say go?
Well, let's cheat a little bit and say I'm going to say you gave a very eloquent spin on Blue Without You.
That's staying.
That's staying, as is Unspoused and Uninsured, which is, I think, the name of our next memoir.
That's it.
I love it.
So that's two stays, which isn't bad.
I think sometimes we have this especially.
I have this bad reputation for being like the go go go.
I know you have a bad reputation.
I'm like the go person.
You are, homewrecker.
But that's not true.
I'm also such an advocate for sticking it out and doing the hard stuff.
Let the record show that Cheryl Strait recommended that two of these letter writers stay.
And we agreed on all of them.
We did.
That's troubling.
Yeah.
You know, that's the signal that we need to go out of this relationship.
That's right.
We're becoming one person.
That's right.
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We are produced, edited, and at all times controlled by Lisa Tobin.
We're recording in my hometown, Portland, Oregon.
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Whether you want to stay, whether you want to go, cats, dogs, we want your letters.