Latest / The Dr. Psych Mom Show with clinical psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten / Puberty And Menopause Are Two Normal Stages Of Life

Transcript

Puberty And Menopause Are Two Normal Stages Of Life · The Dr. Psych Mom Show with clinical psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten

• 0:05
  Hi everybody and welcome to this episode of the Doctor Psych Mom
• 0:08
  Show. Today we're going to be talking
• 0:11
  about puberty and menopause as two sides of the same coin.
• 0:15
  And this is often lost in the discussions on menopause that I
• 0:19
  see on the Internet. And if you if you change your
• 0:23
  frame, it can be very adaptive to look at it through this wider
• 0:27
  lens. And before we get there, please
• 0:30
  do subscribe. My upcoming subscriber episode
• 0:34
  is in. You can find deep meaning and
• 0:36
  unconditionally loving your partner.
• 0:38
  And that one is going to be great and kind of targeted
• 0:42
  toward men. Because women are a little bit
• 0:45
  more familiar with this idea. I often hear.
• 0:48
  I more often hear women say that the meaning of their life is
• 0:51
  unconditionally loving their children, and men frequently say
• 0:55
  their career more often. Of course they love their
• 0:58
  children. Nobody's doubting that, but it
• 0:59
  is. It is different than what I see.
• 1:02
  And so this talks about unconditional love for your
• 1:05
  spouse. And of course, unconditional
• 1:08
  love makes people act very different when they receive it.
• 1:11
  So. So that may actually be
• 1:13
  something that could be transformative for you.
• 1:15
  But that's not why I I talk about it anyway.
• 1:19
  Subscribe and you'll hear that one and 138 more.
• 1:22
  It's a pretty good deal for 899. All right.
• 1:25
  So moving on. Everybody thinks it's totally
• 1:29
  normal and great when their kids go through puberty.
• 1:32
  It's not great because then they start to act like assholes.
• 1:35
  Yes, you know, their hormones turn on, they activate.
• 1:38
  Everybody says it's the hormones, It's the hormones.
• 1:41
  That's why my kid is in their room all the time.
• 1:43
  That's why they are spending a million hours getting ready,
• 1:46
  begin and caring how much they look.
• 1:48
  You know what they look like so much more.
• 1:51
  That's why they're getting acne. That's why their voice is
• 1:53
  changing. That's why they like girls,
• 1:55
  slash boys and whatever. Everybody understands this.
• 1:59
  It's coming up. It's around 12, it's like 11 and
• 2:03
  on. And you know, it's it's a couple
• 2:06
  years different for boys and girls.
• 2:08
  It's different and, you know, for different people.
• 2:10
  But everybody's supposed to go through puberty.
• 2:13
  And if your child is saying, Oh no, I'm scared of puberty, I
• 2:18
  don't want my hormones to change.
• 2:20
  Oh no, Oh no. And getting very upset about it
• 2:23
  and thinking about ways that they could still act like a
• 2:26
  little child even as they get older and older and their home
• 2:30
  hormones have obviously changed dramatically.
• 2:34
  If they are still trying to act like like somebody that is 10
• 2:38
  years younger, then that would be you know, something that most
• 2:42
  parents would be concerned about is that their child is so
• 2:46
  ambivalent and so anxious about an upcoming normal life change.
• 2:53
  And while it may be cute, certainly if your 13 year old
• 2:57
  girl still plays with you know her Barbies a couple times or
• 3:00
  something and you know, everybody says don't rush the
• 3:04
  kids getting older too quick. Of course that's due to our
• 3:07
  tremendous levels of anxiety as parents and I don't, I don't
• 3:11
  necessarily agree with with all of that, but but what?
• 3:14
  Whatever, everybody thinks, you know, that's cute.
• 3:16
  It's not cute if your child is 18, right, And still wants to
• 3:20
  play with dolls and doesn't want to, you know, go learn to drive
• 3:24
  or go to college or engage in any sort of relationships or be
• 3:28
  independent or cook a meal or really have a job or anything.
• 3:33
  Then. And as the child gets older and
• 3:35
  older, parents would get more and more viscerally worried and
• 3:40
  anxious about how is this child going to do in life because they
• 3:44
  are not doing well with normal life transitions that happened
• 3:49
  to everybody and for many are a source of great excitement.
• 3:52
  Oh good, I'm going to become a teenager now.
• 3:55
  Yes, of course I'm anxious, but oh, I'm going to have my first
• 3:58
  kiss and I'm going to have a boyfriend or girlfriend.
• 4:00
  And eventually I'm going to be able to do things on my own like
• 4:03
  drive and work and have this job and and spend my own money, do
• 4:07
  my own things. And you know what?
• 4:08
  My parents are kind of idiots and I know best and you know
• 4:12
  that parts annoying. But you know, in general it's
• 4:15
  considered to be great, a fairly adaptive, normal response.
• 4:19
  Oh good, something new is happening to me, right?
• 4:22
  Same sort of reaction. You would want for your children
• 4:24
  to go to college or to get their first job.
• 4:27
  You wouldn't want them to get their first job and be like, Oh
• 4:29
  no, I'd rather sign up for another year of college.
• 4:33
  Instead, please, please give me 60,000 more dollars so I could
• 4:38
  be a super senior and I'm going to just study whatever I want
• 4:42
  because I'm not ready for the real world.
• 4:44
  Most parents would be like, no, get out of there.
• 4:48
  I have spent enough. It is time for you to become an
• 4:50
  adult. Now go go forth and do something
• 4:54
  that is developmentally more appropriate than pretending that
• 4:57
  you are still in a stage that you are not in.
• 5:00
  Now contrast all of this with how we act on the other end for
• 5:05
  menopause. It's crazy when you think about
• 5:08
  it like that. It's like a bell curve, right?
• 5:11
  So our hormones, they they're, you know, the children have some
• 5:14
  levels of sex hormones, right. But they're very low.
• 5:17
  And then old people also have very low levels of sex hormones
• 5:21
  and that's just two sides of that, that curve.
• 5:24
  Then they start to ramp up, then they stay high, high, high, and
• 5:27
  then they start to go down in the 40s, they change a lot, 40s,
• 5:31
  fifties and beyond. So that's normal.
• 5:35
  That's a normal life stage. And so the exact same guys that
• 5:40
  would tell their wife. Oh no, don't tell him that.
• 5:43
  He can just stay in his room and play video games at age 16.
• 5:47
  I want him to go get a job. He has to learn how to engage in
• 5:50
  the world. He can't even make eye contact
• 5:53
  with people. He needs to get up the whole
• 5:55
  summer. Can't just be sitting there on
• 5:57
  the couch. That's what many men would say,
• 5:59
  correct? About a 1615 year old boy.
• 6:03
  Get him up. Even a girl too, right?
• 6:05
  As much as men love their little girl, why is she just laying
• 6:09
  around? Doesn't she want to go do
• 6:11
  something, get a job, volunteer, or do something with her time?
• 6:15
  She's growing up right? Most people would want the kid
• 6:18
  to want to go to prom, whether it's with friends or a date or
• 6:21
  whatever. If if, if your daughter, if
• 6:24
  you're like a 50 year old man listening to this and your
• 6:27
  daughter wanted to go to the prom and your wife said no, no,
• 6:31
  I would rather take her to a special mommy and me day at the
• 6:34
  American Girl doll store like we did when she was 10, you would
• 6:39
  say don't be crazy. What's wrong with you?
• 6:42
  She's growing up. Why can't you deal with that
• 6:45
  right? Let her go to the prom now.
• 6:48
  Contrast that. It's almost satirical how how
• 6:52
  different the response is if the woman says, you know, as I get
• 6:56
  older, I really prioritize sex less and less.
• 6:59
  I feel very different. I it's less easy for me to have
• 7:03
  an orgasm. It's less easy for me to
• 7:04
  experience even responsive desire.
• 7:07
  And my priorities are really shifting.
• 7:10
  You know, I'm thinking about going back to work or I'm
• 7:12
  thinking about volunteering, or I'm I'm thinking about doing
• 7:15
  something different with my life.
• 7:16
  You know, it's not really around taking care of you and the kids
• 7:20
  anymore. It's it's something different.
• 7:22
  I don't feel this, this same urgency and caretaking.
• 7:26
  He's like, what the fuck? No way.
• 7:29
  I wish that you, you know, didn't say that.
• 7:32
  It makes me very, very uncomfortable and anxious and
• 7:35
  perhaps there's some sort of hormone that could help.
• 7:38
  I mean like what? You know, it's the same thing.
• 7:42
  It's the same thing. It's a natural part of life.
• 7:46
  Am I saying that the so so it's it's exactly equivalent.
• 7:50
  So let's say the mother really wanted to go to the fucking
• 7:53
  American Girl doll store and she's this is her only child,
• 7:56
  her only girl. She's really not doing well with
• 7:59
  the girl growing up. Yes, she's in therapy, let's
• 8:02
  say, hypothetically. But you know, she just really
• 8:05
  likes the fucking American Girl doll store.
• 8:07
  If you don't know what that is, it is.
• 8:08
  A cursory Google will show you. And I have a soft spot for it
• 8:13
  because it's the only place in my life where I was recognized
• 8:15
  by multiple doctor psych mom fans in real life at one time,
• 8:19
  making my then very small daughters think that I was
• 8:22
  actually famous. Anyway, so so let's say that she
• 8:27
  really wanted to go to the American Girl doll store and
• 8:29
  look at the new American Girl dolls with her daughter, who is
• 8:33
  16. Should the girl go?
• 8:35
  Sure. Should she go on prom night?
• 8:37
  Fuck no. She shouldn't go on prom night,
• 8:39
  right? Because that's crazy.
• 8:42
  So she wants to progress and do these normal things.
• 8:44
  Should she go every week like she would have loved to do as a
• 8:47
  10 year old or an 8 year old or a five year old girl?
• 8:50
  It's really not even 10, it's more like 5.
• 8:53
  So should she act like an 11 years younger girl for the sake
• 8:57
  of her mother very frequently? No, that's crazy right?
• 9:02
  She wants to move on and move forward.
• 9:04
  She has different priorities and values now, and her father would
• 9:07
  very much support that usually. But what if the mother wanted to
• 9:11
  go quarterly? And what if the mother wanted to
• 9:15
  have lunch and go to the look at the new American Girl dolls and.
• 9:18
  And that's their special thing. And they do that for an hour,
• 9:21
  you know, and then they go get a manicure or get lunch, something
• 9:24
  much more developmentally appropriate for the girl.
• 9:27
  And they kind of do this like forever.
• 9:29
  And then one day in the cycle of life, the daughter brings her
• 9:33
  own child to the American Girl doll store.
• 9:36
  And then it's one of those pictures you always see on
• 9:38
  Facebook of people and functional families, where it's
• 9:41
  3 generations and everybody's smiling.
• 9:44
  Would that be normal? Sure, that's normal.
• 9:46
  That takes everybody's needs into account, right?
• 9:51
  So then why is it not the same for the woman who is whose sex
• 9:55
  hormones are decreasing? Now let it also be said that
• 9:58
  without Viagra, men would understand.
• 10:00
  That's a hell of a lot more as they used to because many, many
• 10:04
  men could not perform after a certain age.
• 10:06
  They stopped getting morning erections in their 40s or 50s
• 10:10
  forties. It's not every morning 50s, it's
• 10:12
  not many mornings, you know, then it goes away all together
• 10:16
  and without Internet porn. And Viagra men were much, much
• 10:21
  more tolerant of their wife aging because they were aging
• 10:24
  too. And they, yeah, sure, they see a
• 10:26
  pretty girl and they feel like a flutter, but they don't get a
• 10:29
  super huge hard on. So it's understood that, like, I
• 10:33
  can't do that anymore. Neither could she.
• 10:36
  You know, I could probably do it a little more than her.
• 10:38
  But you know what? Neither of us can really do it.
• 10:40
  We're growing together. We're getting older.
• 10:42
  This is a different phase of life.
• 10:43
  What's happening in this phase of life?
• 10:45
  Oh, well, we're going to retire. And then we're going to spend
• 10:47
  more time with friends. Maybe we'll travel.
• 10:49
  Maybe we will take care of grandchildren.
• 10:52
  Maybe we'll be more engaged in the church.
• 10:53
  Maybe we'll be more engaged in politics, political
• 10:56
  volunteering. Or maybe we'll do those lifelong
• 10:59
  learning classes or finally have time to read books, go to plays,
• 11:02
  cultural events, what have you. It's a totally different stage
• 11:06
  of life that people could be in together.
• 11:08
  That's completely normal, where everything is not focused on
• 11:12
  either making more children or caring for the existing ones,
• 11:16
  which are why people have the sex hormones in the 1st place.
• 11:19
  It's to have babies, as I've discussed numerous times, from
• 11:23
  the evolutionary and biological perspective.
• 11:26
  So what's the equivalent? The equivalent of going to the
• 11:29
  quarterly American Girl doll store with mom who, you know,
• 11:32
  kind of misses? When I was a little girl, it
• 11:35
  would be sex every so often, let's say for a woman in her
• 11:39
  60s. Every other week, let's say,
• 11:42
  let's say it doesn't have to be intercourse.
• 11:44
  If that hurts, it could be something else.
• 11:45
  Let's say it's a bunch of cuddling, which would be the
• 11:48
  equivalent of the girl giving back and forth American Girl
• 11:51
  doll memes with her mother whenever she sees one, because
• 11:54
  mom really likes that stuff. So I'm really going to send her
• 11:57
  an American Girl doll meme whenever I see one about
• 12:00
  American Girl dolls. That would be the equivalent of
• 12:02
  maybe cuddling, you know, whenever your husband wants
• 12:05
  instead of never. Which is, you know, what the
• 12:08
  girl would probably do is never send an American Girl doll meme.
• 12:12
  But she wants to be a good daughter.
• 12:14
  She's getting older. Mom really still likes those
• 12:16
  things, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
• 12:18
  So it's it's completely normal for men to see a girl aging into
• 12:24
  her hormones, her hormones activating as normal and healthy
• 12:28
  and something that should not be obstructed with.
• 12:30
  But what about on the other side, when it's completely just
• 12:33
  as normal and healthy for the hormones to go down?
• 12:35
  And as I say all the time, and I'm so proud of this joke, so
• 12:39
  I've repeated it a couple times. But at any time now that anybody
• 12:42
  in Facebook says you're telling me that sex drive goes down with
• 12:47
  age, I say wait till you hear about death.
• 12:51
  Because it's funny to me. I mean, it's as though, like
• 12:54
  like what are people thinking? And I do not blame individuals
• 12:58
  for being stupid. It's the society, it's the
• 13:01
  society. It's it's the constant
• 13:05
  technology and biotech and all this medical stuff that
• 13:10
  everybody gets bombarded with that makes people think that
• 13:12
  they could remain there is somebody, I think I mentioned
• 13:15
  this one even on a podcast, but somebody said on my Facebook.
• 13:18
  So there's no reason why a man who's 72 can't have the hormones
• 13:22
  of a 25 year old man. These are all public comments.
• 13:25
  I hope that I I hope people, people see them because some of
• 13:30
  them are real funny, of course what?
• 13:34
  You know, like what are you saying?
• 13:36
  Like of course a 72 year old man should not have the hormones of
• 13:41
  a 25 year old man. And then somebody linked to some
• 13:44
  article that said that there's increased cardiovascular events
• 13:47
  in men who take, you know, a lot of testosterone.
• 13:50
  No shit. Because we are mortals, right?
• 13:54
  We are all going to die. And that's really, really hard
• 13:57
  and sad, especially in this post religious era post religious for
• 14:01
  many. So it's increased recently
• 14:03
  secular. I have more and more clients
• 14:05
  that are not religious. I myself am not religious.
• 14:08
  And yes, people definitely try to find meaning in their lives
• 14:12
  and it's really hard to think that all that work of finding
• 14:16
  meaning and love and purpose and career and children, it just all
• 14:20
  goes away when you die. But that is what happens.
• 14:23
  And so while we're here we don't want to make our loved ones
• 14:28
  anxious and upset and feel horribly pressured and and not
• 14:33
  accepted for just literally growing older and having changed
• 14:38
  priorities. In the same way as we would not
• 14:41
  want to guilt trip our children into going to the American girl
• 14:43
  doll store with us all the time. Or a man would not want to make
• 14:47
  his you know 18 year old son play catch with him every night
• 14:51
  when the boys saying but I want to go see my girlfriend.
• 14:54
  I want to go to my SAT prep course.
• 14:56
  I want to go to my, you know, lawn mowing job.
• 14:59
  And he's like, no, no, you know, and we have fucking cats in the
• 15:02
  cradle playing in the background.
• 15:04
  This is not good, right? That's not good.
• 15:07
  That boy's not going to come home from his college break to
• 15:11
  deal with dad who can't fucking accept that he's getting older.
• 15:14
  And this is how women feel a lot when the guy is like, why don't
• 15:17
  you just take a hormone cocktail?
• 15:19
  So then you are like me. Look at my erection.
• 15:22
  It hasn't gone down in weeks thanks to Viagra, a modern
• 15:26
  medicine miracle. And she's like, leave me be.
• 15:29
  I am trying to go into a different stage of my life now.
• 15:33
  It is normal and healthy. I just read an article in the
• 15:36
  Times about I talk frequently about the grandmother hypothesis
• 15:39
  of why women live longer than men and it was to take care of
• 15:43
  their children, their children's children rather, and their
• 15:47
  grandchildren survive at greater rates.
• 15:49
  With the grandmother being involved.
• 15:51
  And this article that it talked, it was you could probably look
• 15:55
  it up with the New York Times. Menopause Monkeys, right?
• 15:58
  Chimps. And it said that some chimps
• 16:00
  don't have any grandchildren and they go through menopause and
• 16:02
  they got all this blood from these chimps.
• 16:05
  I assume, I hope in a nice way, that the chimps are still alive.
• 16:08
  That's what they said, yeah. So they were actually taking
• 16:11
  'cause they were continuing to take blood from them.
• 16:13
  So you know, they didn't hurt them too much.
• 16:17
  I am a vegan, so. So this is a little bit of a
• 16:19
  rabbit hole for me. But anyway, I watched Chimp
• 16:21
  Empire and some of the ones that they were talking about were the
• 16:24
  chimps on Chimp Empire. So anyway, they saw that some of
• 16:27
  these chimps they measured their hormones, went through
• 16:29
  menopause, but they didn't have grandchildren, so then why do
• 16:32
  they live longer? And then they went to whales,
• 16:35
  and apparently whales go through menopause too.
• 16:37
  You would learn about that if you read the book Flash Count
• 16:39
  Diary by Darcy Steinke, which is about menopause in people but
• 16:43
  also in animals and pretty good book.
• 16:46
  And basically the older grandmother age menopausal
• 16:53
  whales that do not actually have living grandchildren or or they
• 16:57
  don't actually help the ones that they have.
• 16:59
  They help the whole pod to figure out where to go.
• 17:02
  They have memories of places that they had found food and
• 17:05
  they can direct the whole pod there.
• 17:07
  So they are actually helping society.
• 17:09
  They are helping their whole group, these older females, So
• 17:13
  that perhaps is their purpose as they are no longer fertile, no
• 17:16
  longer having babies to take take care of.
• 17:19
  What their purpose is not is putting on lingerie so that
• 17:23
  their husband could pop a pill and pretend that he's 35.
• 17:26
  That is not going to be the purpose of the whale, and it
• 17:29
  doesn't seem to be the purpose that many 65 year old women want
• 17:32
  to have in their life either. And while that is a very nice
• 17:36
  gift to do every so often, expecting your wife to have the
• 17:41
  same priority as you do around sex, particularly if you are
• 17:47
  partaking in Internet porn, testosterone or Viagra is is not
• 17:53
  fair and it does not allow her to be who she really is at this
• 17:58
  next stage of life. There are all sorts of
• 18:00
  compromises, and if you are at different stages, then your
• 18:04
  compromises around sex could be something equivalent to my
• 18:07
  American Girl doll thing or the boy who plays catch with his dad
• 18:11
  every so often. But he's not playing catch with
• 18:14
  his dad every night because that's not normal anymore for
• 18:16
  him, right? And and if the dad would be a
• 18:19
  bad dad if he continued to tell the boy no, you have to
• 18:23
  prioritize playing catch with me.
• 18:26
  And you can go back to my sex and freeze tag analogy too.
• 18:30
  So a child wants to play freeze tag.
• 18:32
  A a kid in puberty doesn't. And you pretty much never want
• 18:36
  to play freeze tag again, although you will do it to be a
• 18:39
  good parent, but not all the time.
• 18:41
  And so if you want to really be in a mature and loving
• 18:45
  relationship between two humans that don't have to lie to each
• 18:48
  other, have more open discussions about how you could
• 18:51
  come closer at this stage, understand each other more, and
• 18:56
  each person work on who they want to be in this stage of
• 18:59
  life. It is never, ever good to cling
• 19:02
  to a prior biological stage, you know, and to get angry at people
• 19:07
  who who don't engage in the Emperor's new clothes with you.
• 19:12
  Because I also have so many women who say, but he's not how
• 19:15
  he used to be in bed. How could he want me to act so
• 19:19
  excited? He doesn't look the same.
• 19:21
  He doesn't act the same. We are older.
• 19:23
  His erection isn't the same, even with help, you know and and
• 19:27
  it hurts me and and I don't really know, like why he can't
• 19:32
  see that, that we are older now and guys are all over how, how
• 19:36
  terrible this is for the woman to abandon them in this way.
• 19:39
  But she hasn't abandoned them. She has changed.
• 19:43
  She has physiologically changed, and as I discussed with Internet
• 19:47
  porn, many men think that they have a much higher sex drive
• 19:50
  than they really do because of the artificial fluffing of
• 19:53
  Internet porn. So a lot of guys who tell me
• 19:55
  that they still jerk off every day in their 60s when we try to
• 20:00
  have them do that without Internet porn, it doesn't
• 20:03
  happen. They can't.
• 20:05
  They can't finish, they can't, they can't pay attention the
• 20:07
  same way. Unless they're on a fuck load of
• 20:10
  testosterone, which is of course muddying the waters.
• 20:13
  Right. I mean, this is as though you
• 20:14
  were somehow, you know, given one of those puberty blockers to
• 20:18
  your kid, you know, you, you. That's that's not considered
• 20:23
  something that you would want to do to your child, right, In
• 20:27
  order to keep them at a stage that you were more comfortable
• 20:29
  with. Now, on the other hand, are
• 20:32
  there women who love to go on hormones and who benefit from
• 20:35
  them? Sure.
• 20:36
  And if you are both compatible in that domain and you both want
• 20:40
  to do that, great. And there are many, many women
• 20:44
  who take estrogen for like their the vagina literally hurts.
• 20:48
  They can't sleep. They take progesterone, there's
• 20:50
  like hot flashes all sorts of things when you're going through
• 20:53
  menopause and people can try whatever helps them testosterone
• 20:57
  for drive. If the Dr. bothers them, you
• 21:01
  know that it's not there. But there is no free lunch, As I
• 21:04
  say so many times. Sometimes people do not react
• 21:07
  well with these hormones. And sometimes people just don't
• 21:10
  want to. They want to.
• 21:12
  They have their own life. They want to see what the next
• 21:14
  stage is. Don't forget, many women saw
• 21:18
  their mothers go through menopause and come out on the
• 21:20
  other side happier doing something, having a different
• 21:24
  sort of purpose. Not always having, you know,
• 21:27
  their period and headaches and tired and depressed, but moving
• 21:30
  into a different stage of life. People have grandmothers that
• 21:33
  they very much looked up to that, that were very much
• 21:36
  helping with their development and their growth.
• 21:38
  They don't remember those grandmothers, you know,
• 21:41
  obsessing over the next time they were going to have a loan
• 21:43
  time with their husband of 40 years because that wasn't a
• 21:47
  priority. Yes, they were happily married.
• 21:49
  And yes, they both did many, many, many things outside the
• 21:52
  home. And probably we're not having
• 21:54
  that much sex, to be honest, sometimes, OK, all the time.
• 21:58
  Unlikely. So what I'm saying now is
• 22:02
  something that you know, decades ago would have this would be
• 22:06
  crazy, this podcast that I would have to say anything like this
• 22:10
  because this is, that would be before the time of all the
• 22:12
  advents of you know, hormones and Viagra and Internet porn and
• 22:17
  and whatever. Sure, some men continue to have
• 22:20
  a a genuine high sex drive beyond when their wife does.
• 22:25
  And if that, if if the woman totally cuts it off, I've said
• 22:29
  numerous times that's not being a team player.
• 22:31
  That's not being very nice. That's not going to the American
• 22:34
  Girl doll store sometimes now is it?
• 22:36
  That's saying fuck you, mom, I'm never going back to the American
• 22:39
  Girl doll store again. Fuck you.
• 22:40
  And that's not nice. That would not be a good teenage
• 22:42
  girl. It would not be good for the boy
• 22:44
  to never play catch with his father again, etcetera.
• 22:48
  But you're not gonna go to the American Girl doll store every
• 22:51
  week. God damn it.
• 22:52
  You know, I mean, you're just not.
• 22:54
  Not at a certain point. And so if that is beyond what
• 22:57
  you can tolerate as a man with a higher libido, and you've
• 23:01
  thought about going off Internet porn on all of your
• 23:03
  pharmaceuticals in order to stop literally making it worse, you
• 23:09
  know, it's like as though you were not romantic enough.
• 23:11
  And all she did every morning, whenever you take your pill or
• 23:14
  whatever was obsess over a romance novel.
• 23:18
  No, you would want a therapist to say stop reading romance
• 23:21
  novels. The man isn't very romantic.
• 23:22
  You're making things worse. You're exacerbating a problem by
• 23:27
  making yourself primed with this romance porn, and he can't ever
• 23:32
  approximate it. So that's the equivalent of
• 23:34
  purposefully looking at Internet porn when your wife has a low
• 23:37
  libido. As I discussed in a podcast,
• 23:39
  looking at watching Internet porn when your wife has a low
• 23:42
  libido is the opposite of a good idea, or the opposite of
• 23:44
  helpful, or something like that. I have a podcast on that.
• 23:47
  But anyway, so if you were to get to the place where you're
• 23:51
  not doing any of these extra things and your drive is still
• 23:54
  far beyond hers and she really, really doesn't ever want to do
• 23:58
  it again and you don't and and you're unhappy with that, then
• 24:02
  separate. The kids are long out of the
• 24:04
  house. You know, you can't no free
• 24:08
  lunch. You can't be considered a good
• 24:10
  guy and a good grandpa and like all these things like a perfect
• 24:14
  man and and whatever, but also leave to go screw somebody else.
• 24:18
  Like, you know, somewhere, somehow somebody's going to get
• 24:21
  upset with you for that, but that may not matter.
• 24:24
  Could you have one fucking life? And if you want to be, you know,
• 24:29
  having sex for the rest of it, then go find a younger woman.
• 24:32
  That's just something that you can do.
• 24:35
  Or many people have arrangements.
• 24:37
  Many women give so little of a shit about sex at this stage of
• 24:41
  the game that they would be happy for you to go get your
• 24:44
  happy ending massage or possibly to have a girlfriend.
• 24:47
  Because many, many of my female clients suggest this and the guy
• 24:51
  will not do it because it hurts his feelings.
• 24:54
  And that is not being a big compromise because of the
• 24:57
  teenage girl found a niece who was eight that wanted to go to
• 25:01
  the American girl doll store with her mother and her mother
• 25:04
  said no fucking way. I'm not taking her because
• 25:06
  you're supposed to want to do it with me in perpetuity.
• 25:09
  And you told me when you were five, mommy, this is my favorite
• 25:13
  place and I want to go here forever for the rest of my life.
• 25:15
  And I believed you. So that was basically a
• 25:17
  contract. Well, you know, she starts to
• 25:20
  sound crazier and crazier, doesn't she?
• 25:21
  Shouldn't she just go with the niece?
• 25:23
  So anyway, go to couples counseling.
• 25:25
  Talk about all of the actual options that you could come up
• 25:30
  with, including you recognizing that this is a normal stage, the
• 25:36
  mirror inverse of puberty. And on that note, I will leave
• 25:40
  you guys hopefully with a lot to think about and I will talk to
• 25:44
  you all soon. Please do subscribe.
• 25:45
  Bye guys.