(TRANSCRIPT) Episode 17 - The Dan Hentschel Podcast

I want you to close your eyes.

It's your wedding day.

You're standing at the altar, and there is your soul mate.

The one person you know you've loved more than anybody else in your time on this earth is standing right there.

Now, somebody just popped into your head. I know they did. Even if you reflexively tried to push them away and say, No, no, no, no, no.

It's not them. It's actually this person. Shut up and stop lying to yourself. Whoever that was at first is who should be standing there. And that's who is standing there.

They're staring back at you with tears of joy in their eyes because they love you so much.

Keep your eyes closed.

You lean in and you kiss.

And then you hear a scream.

They clutch their chest. Stumble back. And gurgle.

You look down, and in your hands is a bloody butcher knife.

What have you done?

When you look back up, you realize you're looking in a mirror. And your eyes are two empty black sockets.

[intro music]

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Dan Henschel podcast. Today is February 15th, so thank you for taking the time to listen to this. Even though I know you're probably a little hung over from drinking all that wine last night. [laughs]

And staying up until 3:00 in the morning comforting your partner. Who was crying. Again. Because that's what I was doing.

You wouldn't believe how much my partner cries. About nothing.

The other day my friend asked me what my partner and I were planning on doing for Valentine's Day, and I just laughed in their face.

Last Valentine's Day was our first Valentine's Day together, and I had made a really nice reservation at a nice restaurant. I get to their house, I walk in the door and I see sweatpants. Red, puffy eyes. I see messy hair. And I realize we're not going anywhere.

So I just said, Nope. Walked right out the door, got back in my car, and I went home to my actual partner, who I was still dating at the time, and I just went with them. Which I'm happy I did in retrospect, because— you might remember this— last summer they very tragically died.

And that was fine. You know— it was an ordeal when it first happened, of course, but that gave me and my current partner the opportunity to finally officially date, which was nice. I had just kind of had them simmering in the background for a while, kind of warming up in the bullpen. So I was able to promote them to prime time.

I moved them in and that was really easy because remember, my ex is dead, so all their stuff is already there. So from my perspective, it was kind of like nothing had happened because they just made themselves right at home. They started wearing their clothes, wearing their deodorant, using their toiletries, which I of course, encouraged.

And at that point, what's the difference? It's kind of like in a sequel to a movie when they cast a different actor as the same character. It's weird at first, but then you just forget about it and eventually you start kind of liking what they're doing with it a little bit more than the original.

The downside to that is, having two people at the same time you can kind of ping pong back and forth between is nice because the two of them together give you things that separately you probably couldn't get.

It's a lot like being polyamorous. Except you don't get the weird jealousy and emotional ordeal that typically comes with that type of arrangement because they don't even know it’s happening.

People who are dating me a lot of times feel like they have to compete with other people for me. Which is true. And so I kind of like to assure them that everything is fine and I create this little fantasy world kind of snow globe for them to live in where I can control all the elements. And that way I know that they're happy.

I went to the zoo recently with my brother and he was the whole time whining about how, you know, it's so sad seeing all these animals in captivity in cages instead of in their natural habitat. And I said, well, honestly, this is probably better for them than the outside world. All these zoo people probably take better care of them in here than they would take care of themselves out there.

If they took all the animals in the L.A. Zoo and released them into Griffith Park, they would be dead in four hours.

In the zoo, they’re safe. They're probably getting Wendy’s. I saw one of the sea otters playing with a beach ball! Which, if you ask me, kind of defeats the purpose of the whole antipollution message, because it makes me think I should just start throwing random plastic shit into the ocean so they can play with it.

But nevertheless, they're safe from predators. The zoo people are monitoring them 24 seven and if they have any need at all, an entire staff of people rushes to help them.

And I know a lot of animals are in the zoo in the first place because they got injured or hurt in some way. And so now they're being rehabilitated in here. That's exactly like my relationships.

Now, some of you are probably listening to this and saying, Dan, it sounds a lot like what you're describing is Stockholm Syndrome. And of course you would say that. Because it makes total sense that you would be one of the mindless sheep who actually believes that Stockholm Syndrome is a real. Spoiler alert. It's not.

Stockholm Syndrome was invented by the police to cover up the very real reasons why people didn't feel safe with them. They would rescue people and the people getting rescued would literally, objectively be in more danger with the police than there were wherever they had been before.

So the police saw this and said, it's not that we are a roving gang of serial killers terrorizing our streets with complete unilateral authority and people are actually less safe with us than they are in a hostage situation. It's that they're just crazy.

If Stockholm syndrome is real, then every single long term relationship on earth would be considered Stockholm Syndrome.

My relationship is very good. If you believe every single thing you see on Tik Tok, then you probably don't think so. I had several videos go viral about my relationship in the past week that I believe were very misleading because people on the Internet love to see things that they don't understand and create an entire false narrative of in their heads that fits their personal agenda. So I want to talk about this and I want to explain the truth behind what happened.

Last week, I don't remember exactly when it was, but I was sitting in my car in the dark. I had just gone to Target— really for no reason. If anybody listening lives with their partner, you'll understand immediately what I'm talking about.

And there’s no better feeling for me than under the cover of night for driving to the store alone and then walking through the store. Everything's all nice and organized. I don't know what it is, but there's something so peaceful about that.

It's completely different than if I were to say, Honey, I need some alone time. I'm going to go walk around in the park for an hour. Then it would feel like I was in the prison yard and the guards were letting me walk around outside for a minute, twirling their nightsticks, watching me.

So I'm driving home, listening to my music— I have very good taste in music. And I start kind of getting sad that my little errand is about to come to an end. I get home, I park at the curb, and I just kind of sit there for a minute because I want to take in this moment. I want to soak up that last little bit of this time that I have to myself.

I'm a creative person. I am an artist at heart. I truly am. And what makes me successful at this is my ability to take my own lived experience and channel it through a medium that communicates it to another person in a way that maybe they wouldn't have thought about before. It's one thing to tell somebody about a feeling you have and have them say, Yeah, I understand that feeling.

You see a good piece of art and it makes you discover something about yourself that you did not know was previously there. And I think that this is a key distinction between art that simply tells you something you already know and gets you to kind of nod your head in agreement.

This is the problem these days with quote unquote, “relatable content.” Every content creator and their grandmother is trying to churn out this crap because the algorithm goes feral for it.

And it makes sense why. You see a video that says, you know, “your one friend who's a little crazy!” You're going to look at that and say, I do have a friend who's a little crazy, so you're going to send it to your friend who's a little crazy. They're going to send it to their friend who's a little crazy.

But it's not really giving you anything. It's not showing you anything new. It's just kind of like you're looking at a mirror and saying, Hey, I know that guy, that's me. But as a content creator, I have to keep my thumb on the pulse. I have to look at these things and I have to see what about them is resonating with people.

Everybody around me is doing this crap, and you have to constantly tread water on social media or else you're going to sink. So I say to myself, I'm going to get relatable. I'm going to try to tap into this artery that's giving all these other morons six figure sponsorship deals, all for having rocks for brains.

So the question becomes, how do I relate to people? I come up with this process where when I'm feeling something, I will interrupt myself and I'll ask: Could this be a TikTok?

This takes me back to sitting in my car. I'm sitting there in this very odd moment where I am transitioning from one emotional space to an entirely different one, and I don't really know what I'm supposed to feel at this moment.

And this is interesting to me. When I don't know how to feel, I look for answer. We all do that. I have a question. And who else am I going to ask besides other people?

I can't ask an iguana. [laughs] It doesn't know how I'm feeling. So I say, Let's post this. And I record myself in this very vulnerable moment and I just type out exactly what's going through my mind. No filter, no afterthought, no second guessing myself, just raw human experience. And I post it.

Now I will admit, perhaps my phrasing maybe did not indicate exactly what I meant. I said, “waiting in my parked car while I muster up the strength to go in and pretend to love my partner.”

This says more about you than it does about me, because clearly this did tap into something very powerful. The comment are very divisive, really split between people saying, “This is the most insane thing I've ever seen,” and people saying, “this is me.” There is something here. I'm touching a nerve.

So I decide to go a little deeper. I explored this emotion a little bit more.

Now I want to say one thing before I get into this.

It's not that I don't love my partner. But in every healthy relationship, if both people are so overwhelmingly consumed by passion that they are not in touch with reality, they're going to destroy their lives. Somebody has got to be the one to take their tongue out of the other person's mouth and say, I gotta pay the power bill.

And I am that person in my current relationship. I have an objective view of what's going on. That's not often how we see love represented in our media. We usually see the fairy tale version. We see the version where both people are equally in love with each other, and everything's great all the time, and it doesn't matter because it's a fantasy. It's not real. Cinderella doesn't have a credit score.

So we delude ourselves into thinking we're supposed to be 100% in love with people all the time.

If you ask me to quantify exactly how much I love my partner on a scale from 1 to 10, I would probably say a solid 6.

That's not zero. Why should I break up with them if they're still some love there? If my gas tank is 60% full, I'm not going to stop and get gas because that's enough gas to get me where I need to go. If my plans change and it turns out I'm going farther than I thought, then I'll stop and get more gas. Because there's gas stations everywhere.

Everything I'm saying makes sense. I am not wrong. But for some reason, people constantly, willfully misinterpret what I'm saying and act like I'm some huge asshole.

What doesn't make sense about what I'm saying? I want you to tell me. Because if you don't understand what I'm talking about, it's not because I'm wrong. It's that you don't know what I'm talking about. That's different.

Of course you're shocked by the idea that love in a relationship is an equal between both people. Because you're the one who's always been loved less. And you don't want to accept that. You don't want to accept that you've been wandering around your whole life fawning over people who don't give a shit about you, and then at the same time not just sucking it up when someone says, Fine, I'll be with you, but don't expect me to be like you. Don't expect me to be a complete lunatic who loves me more than they love breathing air.

So you make it a big fucking deal, just like my partner. As soon as I got home from Target, I walked in the door and my partner starts screaming at me. “What is this you just posted on TikTok,” blah, blah, blah. Gee, I wonder why somebody would be dreading leaving the piece and quiet of their own nice car to go immediately get screamed at by a crazy person.

You don't know how good you have it. Because this sucks. Having someone love you more than you love them is awful.

I wish I loved you more than you love me, believe me. You should be happy that I'm giving you something to do all day. If you didn't pace around the room worrying about whether or not I love you as much as you love me, then you'd be in an empty room listening to the stone cold silence of your own failure. You're welcome.

I said all of this verbatim. Which is why my partner was crying on Valentine's Day. And it's why I made up the fact that we had a dinner reservation, even though we didn't have one. Because I knew I was just going to get all dressed up and get ready to leave like I was doing a community theater show about what would have happened if we had actually gone to dinner and our whole night didn't get blown up by you having a needless breakdown about nothing.

I don't know why I keep ending up in this situation where the person I'm dating tricks me into thinking they're normal and then turns into a loony tune who doesn't listen to reason. Who doesn't understand the very simple things that I say in plain English.

And the most infuriating part is that they all see all these morons on my social media feed, and they'll say, “Look, I'm not crazy. Everybody else agrees with me, and they're validating my side of the experience and saying you're the problem.”

Yeah, you're right. You're all stupid. I bet if you asked every single person in that comment section to find their own state they live in on a map, they would all point to the middle of Antarctica. They don't know what they're talking about.

I am smart. I'm smarter than you. I'm smarter than all those people. I'm better than all those people. That's why I have 2 million followers, because 2 million people acknowledged the objective truth, that I am better than them.

I'm so sick of talking about my own relationship, I'm going to gouge my eyes out. My partner's been sitting here listening to me record this whole thing from across the room and looking at me like I just killed somebody.

This isn't even what I wanted to talk about today anyway. The whole reason I wanted to talk about Valentine's Day in the first place was because I was going to do more relationship advice. So it looks like this is thing number 1526 that's been ruined by my partner.

You can ruin my dinner plans. You can ruin my public perception on Tik Tok, whatever. But if you ruin episode 17 of my podcast, we're going to have a fucking problem.

I was so excited to do this episode because finally, after a year of posting every episode of this and getting maybe three likes, I posted a free episode on YouTube and everybody told me how funny it was. I got so many more people subscribed and I said, Maybe I should make this next one actually good.

But nope. Maybe next episode,. Maybe next Valentine's Day. Maybe my next life will actually be good.

***

Okay. I want to apologize to everybody for getting a little bit kinetic earlier. I do want to still do some relationship advice today, because we are still in the Valentine's theme.

And honestly, I think that that would be a good idea because I know how idiots work. I know that they're going to hear the last portion of this episode and think that I'm some huge prick. So I think it would be good for me to show you people that, believe it or not, it could be much worse. I could be a much worse person, but I'm not.

So without further ado, let's get into some advice now.

I've used a few different sources in the past. Sometimes I use messages people have actually sent me. But the problem with those is that they're almost always really bad and boring and about stuff nobody cares about.

So I'm going to use a Reddit again, but with a little twist. This time I'm going to be reading the top upvoted entries on the relationship advice subreddit. This will give us the unique opportunity of not only analyzing the story itself, but also the responses to the story. Because oftentimes the people trying to give the advice are dumber and more harmful than the people asking for it in the first place. It's just like I was saying before, just because a lot of people are saying the same thing does not mean it's right.

So here's one called, “My boyfriend completely disappointed me this Valentine’s.” And I'm sure it's not rocket science why I picked this one.

I'm really at a loss on what to do. A week ago, I made plans to go to this restaurant—spelled wrong—for Valentine's Day with my boyfriend, and I was really looking forward to it. We live in different cities, but it's only about 2 hours away by bus.

He said he bought his ticket and everything was planned. He was supposed to get here before the place closed at 9 p.m., but he missed his bus because he got wasted the night before. I was super pissed because we would obviously not be able to do what I planned, but he insisted on making it up to me and said he got another ticket.

Well, guess what? He missed that bus too. He said he got distracted talking on the phone with a friend.

What do I even do in this situation? I'm so hurt. He picked the worst day to be inconsiderate.

Okay.

I really don't think he did anything wrong. And I'm going to explain why.

It's pretty clear to me from this story that he is trying to sort of goad her into breaking up with him because he doesn't want to be in the relationship.

That is an incredibly kind thing to do. Because getting broken up with is the worst pain on the face of the planet.

I've been broken up with plenty of times before. It's horrible.

Being mad at somebody because they're an asshole and they clearly did something wrong, is such a better feeling than being rejected by somebody who's really nice and did everything right.

Let's say the day before Valentine's Day, he had called her and said, “Honey, listen, my heart's not in this anymore. You're a wonderful person. But I just can't do it anymore.”

That would be so awful from her perspective, because that would mean she just has to suck it up and hate herself.

He did everything right. It's not his fault. So there's nowhere for her to channel those feelings of rejection. So she's going to feel like crap. And we've all felt that before. It's horrible.

But if he acts like an oafish buffoon, then instead of feeling rejection, she gets to feel righteous anger. She is empowered to realize, I don't deserve this. I am better than this. So I'm going to break up with him and I get to know it was because he was an asshole. And she gets to tell everybody what happened and they'll gas her up and say, “Wow, what an idiot.”

And it's funny. It's a funny story. Missing two busses in a row is funny. What he did was bad. In a funny way, that's relatively innocuous. If he had traumatized her or did something horrible, that's a totally different story. But this way it's honestly a pretty selfless act.

I would say a lot of people are probably going to agree with me when I say this: There’s nothing worse than getting broken up with by somebody who's really kind and perfect. It's so much easier to break up with somebody who's just a cartoonishly stupid moron.

So he's right. She's wrong. Moving on.

Here's one called, “Girlfriend said she should be invited when I go on holiday with a friend.”

So we know that this is probably some British cunt who doesn't understand American social cues, but nevertheless.

My best friend and I have been friends since the age of ten. From around when we were 18, we planned a holiday we wanted to go on when we could afford it. It's something we've mentioned throughout the years.

We're 28 now and can actually afford it. We were looking at doing late spring, early summer for this year and when looking at accommodations and we found our best options were either going to be an Airbnb or a hostel. The hostel would be a small private room with two beds as opposed to a large shared room.

I've been with my girlfriend for three years and she has knows (sic) about the trip we wanted to take. I mentioned to her that we were looking at taking it this year. She asked when we were looking at it for and I told her. She asked if she was coming and I said, No, it'll just be me and my friend.

She got annoyed at this and said she should be coming with me. I explained that it was a trip we had planned for the two of us for years. She said, I shouldn't be going away without her. She said, We're going to be going out, drinking, etc. In another country and it's wrong to do it when she's not invited to join.

I mentioned that she's known about the plans for years and hasn't said anything. She just repeated that she should be coming and that I should tell my friend it's the three of us going. I refused to do that and pointed out we'd still be going away later in the year.

She said the trip is somewhere she's always wanted to go, and I just said that we could still go together, but she just said she should be coming and that I shouldn't be looking at hostels to stay in either.

How would you handle this?

Number one, don't ever be friends with somebody for ten years. That would be so miserable.

At that point, you know you have nothing in common anymore. You're only still friends because there hasn't been any excuse or opportunity to end the friendship.

I am of the belief that you should completely nuke all of your friendships after about two years. Because it takes about two years to fully know someone. And after being friends with somebody for more than that amount of time, they start to get boring.

You've heard all their stories, you know, all their personality quirks. What's the point then? It's like watching the same movie over and over again.

I was hanging out with a friend of mine the other day who I've known for a long time, and I just kept thinking, Can you shut up already?

I was listening to them tell me a stupid story that they've told me at least 20 times before this. We both know they've told me this story 20 times before this. And yet for some reason they are continuing to say it. Because they have nothing else to say.

And I'm listening to them talk and I'm looking at their stupid face and I'm thinking, why did I make the mistake of agreeing to do this? I could be at home right now looking at the Internet.

People have nothing to offer you after a certain amount of time. So you should discard them and move on to somebody else.

I'm on the girlfriend side. Why does he want to hang out with his friend he's known for ten years AGAIN? What are they going to do or talk about that they haven't already done?

If I were the girlfriend, I would say, okay. You go on your stupid trip. Because you clearly don't care about me. So why don't I just do what you've made clear you want, and leave you?

Or maybe even better, I'll just take myself out of the equation for good so that you don't ever have to be inconvenienced by my existence again.

Better yet, I’d let him go on the trip and act like everything's fine. And then while he's gone, I'll jump in front of a bus. Since it won't even matter to him at all I might as well.

The love you feel in a relationship is so much better than the love you feel for your stupid friends and your stupid family. That's just the truth. That's why so many people get in relationships and abandon all their friends. And then once the relationship is over, they come crawling back.

You don't need friends if you have a relationship. They’re boring. If you have OxyContin, you don't need to take a vitamin B12.

People talk all the time about this idea of love versus infatuation. And the idea that, infatuation is the very surface level feeling of attraction before you actually know the person, and love only comes when that dies down and you have a deep bond that maybe isn't necessarily as intense, but it's more sustainable. That is such a stupid concept.

In that scenario I just explained, guess what? The infatuation is the love and the love is just nothing. The word infatuation was invented by people who were in loveless relationships and couldn't cope with the fact that their partners did not care anymore if they lived or died.

So they said no, actually, my partner being completely ambivalent to my existence means we're MORE in love. And the real actual love that we had once is just a surface level thing that passes normally.

I love my partner. I know I do. They're very, very hot. But one day that feeling is going to die. I can already kind of feel it going away right now.

There’s still some left, but I would say when we started dating, using the scale that I used earlier, I was probably at about 7 or 8, and now it's a six.

A relationship is when two people enter a contract to mutually use each other for happiness. And then when one of them can no longer provide that, they can be discarded.

When I get to zero, I will dump them, no question. If they dump me first, that's their prerogative. But I'm not going to waste them if they still have some juice left.

This Valentine's Day was horrible and maybe it took me down to a 5. I'm not sure yet. But these things you can get over TOGETHER. They don't make you stronger, but if you can ignore the bad things enough to still get the good things, then you have a great healthy relationship.

I know I have a good, healthy relationship and I don't care what you think.

[outro music]

So I think that's where I want to leave it today. But thank you so much to everybody for listening. Thanks. Of course, as always, for your patronage.

I hope you had a lovely Valentine's Day and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye bye.