The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at Drkenner.com and Amazon.com.

Steve, you have a question for me about a dad who always refers to his child in the third person?

Yes, yes, I do.

Yeah. Tell me. Tell me the situation.

Well, my wife, now her mother is married to me, obviously, and they've been divorced.

Slow down again, your wife, your wife's mother, right? The little one's mother. And I'm trying not to use her name.

Okay, you can make up a phony name, then.

All right, we'll just say Jane.

Okay, okay. Jane is the little one, yes. And Jane is how old?

Two, two years old.

And two, okay, and her mother.

Her mother, my wife, is currently going through a custody battle. She has primary custody. We're actually fighting in court now to be able to take Jane with us to another state because of my work.

Okay, so, but every time her ex-husband calls, he never calls Jane.

Yeah, he always says the baby or the child. I think I've actually heard him say her name twice. And now this has been over a long period of time, but it's never using her name, yeah, and I was just, and it seems, you know, since I've gotten involved in this relationship, that he's more interested in getting at my wife than he is having Jane.

Okay? And I just wonder if that might, you know, have, you know, some bearing on, you know, how he's acting, you know, not using her name at all.

So you're thinking that he's not saying the kid, kind of like with a twinkle in his eye, meaning, you know, my kid, he's saying the child which has a very formal, emotional distance, or the baby, which, you know, refers back to when she was not a toddler, but she's still, I guess, a baby, in relative terms, and there is an emotional distance there.

So the question is, what does that say about him?

Well, you're the one that knows that relationship. You and your wife know that relationship much better. Is he a dad who just melts every time he sees his darling little Jane? Does he make an effort to go out of his way? Does he call her up on the phone? Does he spend time with her? Is he nurturing? Is she the apple of his eye? Does he carry pictures around and show them to his friends? You know, what type of a Papa is he?

Yeah, it's actually quite the opposite. He will call when we have Jane, yeah, and ask if he can talk to her. And he'll talk to her because, I mean, she's two and a half. She does not spend much time on the phone, right? You know, talk to her very, very briefly, get back on the phone with my wife, and then just immediately start badgering her about everything going on again.

Okay, what is the main reason for calling or not?

He makes it look like he's calling to talk to Jane, but he's not.

Okay.

So it's like a ticket of admission. It looks like he's calling for Jane. They call it a ticket of admission in therapy, when someone says, you know, I'm calling in because of my mother-in-law, and when they get into therapy, it has nothing to do with the mother-in-law. It has to do with their sexual problems, with the partner, you know. So it's called a ticket of admission.

So sometimes, if we apply that, there he may be that maybe just what you're saying, that he just wants access to your wife. And if he said, Listen, I want to gripe about the differences we have, whether it's child support, what?

What is his biggest gripe?

Hey, I got to interrupt this because we've got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that's it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance.

Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship.

Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want.

Where's that ad I saw?

Ah, here it is, The Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it at Amazon.com.

Hmm, The Selfish Path to Romance, that is interesting.

What is his biggest gripe?

His biggest gripe is the fact now that we are trying to take Jane to another state that we're in, okay, but if it wasn't that, it would truly be something else. Because before we decided that it was just something else, why did you leave me, you know? Why didn't this work? You know, I just got constant reason to try to get her on the phone.

Okay, so he, it's unresolved for him, the divorce is unresolved for him, your wife left him.

Yes, and what's the essence? One or two reasons why she the key reasons why she left him.

I started getting physically abusive.

Okay, so once you and so she. Did that protectively.

So when you say hitting her, bruising her, didn't hit, grabbed her by the throat and threw her against the cabinet first and last time, but she left.

Okay, well, that's I'm assuming that he didn't go from being a wonderfully cozy, warm husband to one day doing that.

Usually, signs when you're looking at signs of any abuse or domestic abuse, you get put down to get name calling, you get criticism, you get public humiliation, you get the person tries to control you more. They may not let you have a cell phone. They may want to know where you are all the time. They may try to isolate you from even your own family or some good friends. They start to get jealous. They start to destroy or threaten your belongings.

And recently found out about an affair. Very, very recently, long since after the divorce was over, the husband had an affair.

Now that he had had an affair, okay?

What I typically say this isn't good for the husband's new part does is the husband had, does he have a new partner?

Now he does not, and says that he won't because of the child.

Okay, there's a child.

Okay, okay.

So I wouldn't try to correct him on that, because if he's in court, if they're going to court on custody issues, and he keeps referring to the child, I think it's going to be telling to a judge there, if you I think you're naming it as an emotional distance that he just isn't very engaged with Jane.

He just used, uses two-year-old Jane as a way to get to your wife and to badger her, and to continue to have some control over her, and to get him the focus of her days when she's already out of the relationship.

So obviously, when I've heard people call their kids in a distant way, sometimes they weren't ready to have kids, and they're not quite used to it. Sometimes they didn't want kids. You know, people have that. We do have an emotional distance there.

I mean, I think even in my own husband's family, his father would call his wife, my mother-in-law, mother, but it was more endearing. It wasn't. It was more a term of endearment, rather than an emotional distance.

So that's why it's important to know the context.

But it seems like your wife made a very wise choice. If you're moving out of state, you want to make sure you have a very good lawyer.

We do, okay, to help you make that case. And I think that, you know, I wish you a lot of happiness, and your wife a very both of you a loving relationship, especially given what she went through.

So thank you so much for your call.

Thank you very much for your help.

And here's a little more from Dr. Kenner.

I don't actually date a whole lot lately.

Why not?

Well, when I'm with the boy I like, it's hard for me to say anything cool or witty or at all. I can usually make a few vowel sounds, and then I have to go away.

It's not that bad.

No, it is. I think boys are more interested in a girl who can talk.

And that's so cute.

That's from Buffy. Boys are more interested in a girl who can talk, and that's a problem in dating or meeting a new person, or maybe even going on a job interview, when you feel you need to please the other person. You need to know what to say, to make them like you.

When you frame it that way, in your own mind, you're setting yourself up for anxiety, and anxiety is paralyzing.

It's hard to think when what's going through your mind is, oh, my God, will they like me? Am I saying the right thing? Will I make a fool of myself? Oh, what if I don't know what to say? What if they do like me and I don't know what to do?

When you have that type of self-talk that's not helpful if you're dating or going on a job interview, and instead, you say to yourself, oh, let me observe this person. What do I like about them? What do I enjoy? How do I feel around them? Do I feel comfortable at ease, or do I feel on guard? What's causing that?

When you allow yourself to introspect, that's a much healthier approach to both introspect about what's going on, what you're experiencing, and to extrospect to look at them and say, What am I liking or not liking about them?

That's a much healthier approach to have in dating or job interviewing or any situation where it's you're meeting someone for the first time, or it could be a little bit awkward, like meeting your mother-in-law for potential mother-in-law for the first time.

For more Dr. Kenner podcast, go to Drkenner.com and please listen to this, Ned.

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Dr. Ellen Kenner.

The main virtue that makes you lovable is rationality. Attempting to have a romantic relationship with an irrational person is a living nightmare. You cannot reason with an irrational person, facts and logic. Magical arguments have no effect on this person. You cannot understand them because they are full of unresolved contradictions. They are unpredictable because they often act on a whim. You cannot feel fully understood because they don't consistently use reason to understand you. All this is anathema to romance.

Furthermore, irrationality will undermine all the other virtues, because they are all aspects of rationality. Irrationality at the deepest level amounts to the rejection of facts and logic, which means the rejection of reality.

You can download chapter one for free at Drkenner.com, and you can buy the book at Amazon.com.