The Matt Walsh Show - How To Deal With Your Smoking Spouse - Matt Walsh Advice

00:00:00.000 All right, we're going to do a little bit of advice today.

00:00:03.560 Jennifer says, hi, Matt.

00:00:04.720 I'm married to a wonderful conservative man,

00:00:06.580 and he and I are on the same page on almost everything

00:00:08.660 and share the same values.

00:00:09.840 We're both in our mid-20s and getting ready to have kids,

00:00:12.260 but I have one problem I'd like to try and solve before we do.

00:00:15.400 My dear husband smokes weed,

00:00:17.400 and I really don't want him to be doing that once we have kids

00:00:20.720 or while we're trying for that matter

00:00:22.000 because I know smoking can impact fertility.

00:00:24.340 He doesn't smoke very frequently, a couple of days a week,

00:00:26.520 but it's enough to bother me.

00:00:27.720 I know he used to smoke in his teen years,

00:00:30.120 but he stopped and didn't smoke for most of the time

00:00:31.940 we were dating and engaged.

00:00:33.340 So I didn't really think it was a problem before marriage.

00:00:35.500 How should I go about approaching him about this

00:00:37.500 without potentially causing issues?

00:00:40.220 There's no way to approach it

00:00:41.240 except to just tell him everything you've told me.

00:00:43.820 The only issue, he might not want to hear it,

00:00:46.300 but I think it's perfectly valid for you to raise it,

00:00:49.880 especially if, from what you're telling me,

00:00:53.340 when you knew him and you were engaged

00:00:55.000 and you first got married,

00:00:55.800 he didn't have this weed habit.

00:00:58.820 So he can't say,

00:00:59.960 oh, this is something that you knew about

00:01:01.160 and now you're switching up on me.

00:01:03.680 So this is a change that apparently,

00:01:05.860 from what I'm getting from this,

00:01:06.820 he has made since you got married,

00:01:09.020 which gives you all the more reason to object.

00:01:14.380 And I'd feel the same way about it.

00:01:16.180 I know that there are plenty of people

00:01:18.160 who smoke weed and they get very upset

00:01:20.400 if there's any criticism made against it.

00:01:25.020 And generally, what you'll hear from them is that,

00:01:29.400 well, it's no different.

00:01:30.200 What's the difference between smoking a little bit of weed

00:01:31.960 or having a drink at the end of the day,

00:01:33.700 having a beer?

00:01:34.240 What's the difference?

00:01:35.680 I think that there is a difference,

00:01:37.540 you know,

00:01:38.280 on a few different levels.

00:01:39.900 One is like the psychological effect

00:01:42.140 that marijuana can have

00:01:43.340 and it can have it in a more sort of potent way.

00:01:46.500 Now, obviously, alcohol,

00:01:48.080 if you overdo it and you get drunk,

00:01:50.380 then that has all kinds of physical

00:01:51.460 and psychological effects

00:01:52.300 and that's no good.

00:01:53.520 But I think that the psychological effect

00:01:55.220 of marijuana,

00:01:56.060 even used casually,

00:01:57.720 is much more potent and pronounced.

00:02:00.060 And there have been plenty of studies done

00:02:01.500 linking marijuana to things like schizophrenia

00:02:03.100 and those sorts of things.

00:02:04.380 Those studies are out there.

00:02:05.720 And I also think it's like,

00:02:06.540 it's less of a social,

00:02:07.980 you know,

00:02:08.280 if you're in a social environment,

00:02:10.380 you're all sitting down,

00:02:11.320 you have a couple of drinks,

00:02:12.720 it's like a,

00:02:13.520 it's a social thing

00:02:15.180 and it opens you up to be a little bit more so.

00:02:16.760 Again, as long as you're not overdoing it,

00:02:18.700 kind of is a social lubricant.

00:02:20.920 Whereas marijuana is not that,

00:02:22.800 it kind of brings you into yourself.

00:02:24.860 It's a very,

00:02:25.200 it's a more of an isolating thing,

00:02:26.920 which would make it all the more of a problem

00:02:29.840 in the context of a marriage

00:02:31.160 or if you have kids.

00:02:31.960 And so I think

00:02:33.560 all you could do

00:02:35.480 is just communicate this to him

00:02:36.960 and say that this,

00:02:38.620 that you're not comfortable

00:02:39.600 with this in the house.

00:02:42.760 And you have every right to say that.

00:02:44.140 It takes a special kind of company

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00:03:45.520 All right, here's one from Reddit.

00:03:49.880 Interesting one.

00:03:51.080 It says,

00:03:51.400 I've been divorced from my ex-wife

00:03:53.060 for seven years.

00:03:53.760 We were together for eight before that

00:03:55.260 and married for four years.

00:03:56.960 We have two children together,

00:03:58.000 ages 14 and 12.

00:03:59.100 We co-parent and each get our own week

00:04:00.860 with the children.

00:04:02.240 I love my wife deeply,

00:04:03.420 but the sad truth is that

00:04:04.340 she couldn't stay away

00:04:05.140 from the male attention.

00:04:06.400 She's a very beautiful woman.

00:04:07.500 She has been her whole life.

00:04:08.800 Men would always look when they walked by 0.99

00:04:10.340 and I used to think how lucky I was

00:04:11.860 that she was mine

00:04:12.520 till I found out

00:04:13.600 she was entertaining these men as well.

00:04:15.780 I had found texts in her phone multiple times.

00:04:18.220 I let go of that

00:04:19.260 because it was over the phone.

00:04:21.340 That was a mistake.

00:04:22.480 Then I find out that she allowed them 0.74

00:04:23.720 to take her on dates

00:04:24.860 or to bars secretly

00:04:26.340 after her work shift ended.

00:04:27.740 She promised it was never sexual.

00:04:29.600 Yeah, okay.

00:04:30.480 And I never had any proof that it was,

00:04:32.060 but who knows?

00:04:32.680 Well, no, we know.

00:04:33.560 We all know.

00:04:34.300 It was.

00:04:35.580 She said that she just liked the compliments

00:04:37.460 and the idea of how many guys

00:04:38.800 like to pay attention to her

00:04:39.740 and it gave her some weird high.

00:04:41.800 That wasn't my cup of tea,

00:04:42.840 so I ended the marriage.

00:04:45.440 I'm already seeing some of the problems here.

00:04:47.560 The way that he's even phrasing this

00:04:48.800 is so passive.

00:04:49.840 It wasn't my cup of tea.

00:04:51.300 You know, having a wife cheat on me 0.91

00:04:52.420 wasn't really my cup of tea.

00:04:53.300 It wasn't my thing.

00:04:54.280 You know, I tried it out

00:04:55.400 and didn't really like it.

00:04:56.700 That just makes you a beta cook. 0.92

00:04:58.780 She spent the last years in therapy

00:05:00.440 in which she has been diagnosed

00:05:01.500 with histrionic personality disorder

00:05:03.280 and OCD.

00:05:04.180 She claims she's doing really well.

00:05:05.660 At our last drop-off with the kids,

00:05:07.040 she told me that she told her therapist

00:05:08.480 that she'd like to reconcile

00:05:09.500 her marriage a year ago

00:05:10.640 and she hasn't been on any dates

00:05:12.480 or tried to be flirtatious.

00:05:14.240 She said that her goal was to fix us,

00:05:16.140 that she wanted to be a family again,

00:05:17.780 if I was willing to try.

00:05:18.700 Knowing she has a diagnosis

00:05:20.280 for why she wants this attention so badly

00:05:22.120 and her actively getting help

00:05:23.480 to contain these behaviors

00:05:24.600 opens my mind up greatly

00:05:26.280 of the possibility of a happy marriage,

00:05:27.860 but I'm also not fully sure

00:05:29.840 that I can trust her.

00:05:30.800 I want nothing more than my family back,

00:05:32.580 but I don't want a repeat of the first time.

00:05:35.380 Yeah, this is an interesting one

00:05:37.300 because, you know,

00:05:38.280 first of all,

00:05:39.560 I would never discourage someone

00:05:41.680 from trying to repair a marriage,

00:05:43.840 especially when you have kids.

00:05:44.760 And if there's a way to repair a marriage

00:05:47.200 and reconcile,

00:05:48.420 then, you know,

00:05:49.700 that's always ideal

00:05:50.920 and it's a beautiful thing.

00:05:52.560 But there are a bunch of red flags

00:05:54.460 in this case,

00:05:55.500 aside from the obvious ones

00:05:56.600 that she was cheating.

00:05:57.340 But, you know,

00:05:58.780 some of this is like the timing of it.

00:06:00.480 So they've been divorced for seven years

00:06:02.180 and while they were together,

00:06:04.840 she was out, you know,

00:06:06.260 it wasn't sexual,

00:06:07.200 I was just flirting with other men.

00:06:08.440 Yeah, sure.

00:06:09.000 But what that tells me is that

00:06:10.340 she says she's 37 years old now

00:06:12.100 and so she's getting older

00:06:14.280 and, you know,

00:06:16.200 as you get older,

00:06:16.940 I'm 37, you're still young,

00:06:18.040 you know,

00:06:18.240 it's like I'm only 36,

00:06:19.600 but as you get older,

00:06:20.600 your looks start to fade a little bit.

00:06:22.080 You don't have the same kind of

00:06:23.440 youthful beauty that you once had

00:06:25.600 and so this tells me

00:06:26.920 that's something,

00:06:27.980 that's part of what's going on here,

00:06:29.860 which would mean that

00:06:30.740 it's like it's less likely

00:06:32.480 that there was a conversion moment.

00:06:35.920 People can be reformed,

00:06:36.920 they can change.

00:06:37.900 That seems less likely here

00:06:39.520 and more likely that

00:06:40.640 the attention is drying up

00:06:42.500 from all the random guys

00:06:45.140 and she was getting a lot more attention

00:06:46.840 in her 20s

00:06:47.460 and she's not in her 20s anymore

00:06:48.520 and so now,

00:06:49.720 and she's starting to feel lonely

00:06:50.680 and so that's why she is going back,

00:06:53.300 crawling back to the ex-husband,

00:06:55.500 which would tell us

00:06:56.000 that there's a good chance

00:06:57.440 there wasn't any actual

00:06:58.860 personal reformation that happened.

00:07:01.940 And then the other big one,

00:07:03.060 the other big red flag,

00:07:04.160 this kind of hiding behind a diagnosis

00:07:05.880 and the diagnosis makes her feel better

00:07:08.660 and it makes the ex-husband feel better

00:07:11.060 because they say,

00:07:12.280 oh, well, that explains it.

00:07:13.700 That's why you were,

00:07:14.720 that's why you were,

00:07:15.860 you were a disloyal liar. 0.96

00:07:19.280 You were a horrible,

00:07:20.520 disloyal, unfaithful woman. 0.99

00:07:22.660 Bitch, bitch, bitch, dirty bitch. 1.00

00:07:24.740 But it's only because you were,

00:07:25.720 it's because you had

00:07:26.180 histrionic personality disorder

00:07:28.120 and OCD.

00:07:30.520 And so you just, what,

00:07:31.360 you get some therapy,

00:07:32.300 you take some drugs for that

00:07:33.100 and you're fine,

00:07:33.780 you're cured.

00:07:35.300 No, that's not the way it works.

00:07:36.420 You know, we cannot medicalize everything.

00:07:39.140 All right.

00:07:39.760 Well, we can.

00:07:40.640 I mean, we have medicalized everything,

00:07:41.900 but we shouldn't.

00:07:43.260 And people make choices,

00:07:44.880 they make decisions,

00:07:45.780 they do things.

00:07:47.420 There are things called character flaws.

00:07:49.660 You know, there are sins,

00:07:51.620 there are evil choices people make.

00:07:54.080 All that exists.

00:07:55.860 And that's what happened here.

00:07:57.860 It's not, it's not,

00:07:58.440 flirting with other men

00:07:59.400 is not a symptom of a mental disease.

00:08:02.560 It is a choice that you made.

00:08:05.720 It's a symptom of a character defects

00:08:07.840 and your own choices.

00:08:10.200 You don't see,

00:08:10.600 you had reasons that you chose

00:08:11.940 to act that way

00:08:12.700 because you like the attention.

00:08:14.180 You know, there's,

00:08:14.760 there were actually kind of

00:08:16.360 bad reasons,

00:08:17.600 but rational,

00:08:18.580 there was a rationale behind it.

00:08:20.240 It's not like it was psychotic behavior.

00:08:22.500 You like attention.

00:08:23.420 That's why you acted that way.

00:08:24.840 And the fact that she goes

00:08:26.300 and goes for the diagnosis

00:08:28.340 and takes some comfort

00:08:30.620 in being diagnosed that way,

00:08:31.780 that only tells me

00:08:32.680 that actually she has not

00:08:33.940 been willing to confront

00:08:34.980 what she actually did

00:08:36.020 because she doesn't want to admit

00:08:36.920 that she did these things

00:08:37.920 and she made these choices.

00:08:39.120 She wants to,

00:08:39.600 she wants to believe that,

00:08:40.480 oh, it was all the,

00:08:41.160 it was all the mental illness doing that.

00:08:43.400 So, I don't think that there's a,

00:08:46.560 there does not appear

00:08:47.380 to be at this point

00:08:48.380 a chance of any real reconciliation

00:08:50.140 for those reasons, unfortunately.

00:08:52.100 And that'll do it for us.

00:08:52.820 So we'll talk to you tomorrow.

00:08:53.940 Godspeed.

The Matt Walsh Show - June 20, 2023

How To Deal With Your Smoking Spouse - Matt Walsh Advice

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