Transcription
So, one story that I found to be really interesting was the pattern of behavior of women that were seemingly traditional and did the traditional wife, you know, they were a stay-at-home mom and one day they just end up divorcing their husbands, breaking up their entire family. And I know I've had the content where we say, you know, it's wrong to do that, maybe it's selfish, that sort of thing. But today, I'm not really trying to prescribe morality to it, but maybe understand why the women did what they did.
So, I got a lot of flak last episode because I said something that may be surprised the audience. I said, it is not better or worse to have a family, have children. Maybe a guy wants to be a bachelor, maybe a woman wants to be Oprah, call her Daddy, whatever. And I said, one isn't necessarily better than the other. Now, what did I mean by that? Obviously, we know that women that have family and children tend to have better relationship outcomes, um, the sooner they do that, and they tend to be happier. Like, single women over the age of 45 have the highest anti-depressant rates, right? So, I'm not going to pretend there's no trends and patterns and things that I see in that regard.
But the interesting thing that I saw when I interviewed so many people was that it didn't really matter what race, ethnicity, or background people had. People or people regardless of religion, race, or social class. And some of the rudest or maybe meanest women I'd ever met were, were from a more conservative background. And then you would meet a model who is really kind, caring, and compassionate to everyone in the room. So, it made me realize that people maybe aren't as black and white as I thought.
So, what we see now is an increase in femininity content, and there's a whole sector of YouTube dedicated to femininity. And during this journey, I guess, or you could say process, I really pondered a lot about what femininity is. I never really considered myself particularly feminine. I grew up a tomboy, I was really into sports, I never considered myself a girly girl. But I had a friend during this process that told me she became feminine. And the interesting thing was, I would have femininity coaches on, I would have all of these different women that said they specialized in femininity, but none of them could really describe what it was. None of them could really explain it. And when someone says, "I became feminine," they would never give me an in-depth, detailed explanation of how they got there, right? So, many women made it about hair, makeup, and nails. And, you know, maybe that was part of it, but I didn't think it was as simple as maybe throwing on a flower dress and getting in the kitchen, taking off your shoes, being bar. And you see that on TikTok a lot.
And so, I started to think about the women that I considered to be the most feminine. And I, you know, you think of maybe a grandma, an old aunt, and they just made you feel very warm, I guess, is the way to describe it. And what I concluded is that femininity at its core is being selfless. It is thinking about others before yourself.
So, what are some examples of this? One of the most feminine women that I, actually the most feminine woman I met in my year of shows, she comes on the show and she just starts like baking in my kitchen. And at first, you think, what is this woman doing just baking in my kitchen? But she saw that I was really stressed out because we had a ton of people there, and she just figured that people would be hungry and anticipated it. No one had to tell her, and she made the best dessert. Oh my gosh, these desserts were so good. And I thought to myself, that is a prime example of femininity.
Now, this woman, it wasn't like she wasn't even married, right? So, she was divorced, she wasn't married, but it taught me that there is a difference between being married and being a wife. Many women get married, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're a wife. And that's, that's actually something that, you know, she said to me.
Okay, so what is a wife? A wife means being a support system to a man. A wife means thinking of others before yourself. Many women sign up for this role and are not prepared for what it entails. It means eating his food every day instead of yours. It means living where he wants to live instead of where you want to live. It means not traveling or going out because you spend too much time away from your kids. It means getting married on his timeline, not yours. Remember, the most feminine woman I met out of a thousand women was a divorced, unmarried woman in a relationship, but she had that or that makes you feel at home. And that's how I learned there's a difference between being married and being a wife.
So, what I noticed the most about the feminine women that I met is they were always looking to be assets and seeing how they could help. They never had to ask, they would just do, and they'd always think of ways to make their man's day better.
So, what does this mean? And I saw this clip or this thing on TikTok, right? And I thought it kind of, it's not this simple, right? But, but this woman said, this is her routine for being a better wife. She said, "I want to be a better wife. This is what I'm going to do to improve myself to be better. Wake up at 5:00 a.m. to prepare breakfast for your husband: eggs, bacon, toast, coffee. Make sure everything's ready by 5:30. Gym from 6:00 to 7:00. Keep in shape, no excuses. Clean the entire house, 7:30 to 9:30, including vacuuming, dusting, mopping the floors. Laundry must be done daily and folded by 10:00 a.m. Prepare your lunch for your husband by noon, even if he has work. Pack it the night before if necessary. Dinner must be served 6:30 sharp, a fresh home-cooked meal every day, no takeout. Allow be available for snacks and drinks whenever your husband or his friends are around, especially after eight. Snacks must be homemade. Ensure that the house is quiet after 9:00 p.m. for your husband's relaxation. No distractions during his TV time. Go to bed by 10:00 p.m. to get enough rest, but only after making sure everything is ready the next day."
So, what I realized is, is I think people have a core of who they are. And, you know, one time a couple of years ago, I asked my dad if he thought that people changed over time. You know, I was dating a guy my dad didn't like too much. And so I was like, "Dad, do you think people change?" Right? And he said, "Yeah, you know, they do change. They get worse." So, whatever bad quality you see now, you better be okay to live with it because it's going to be worse in 20 years. And my dad just has like wisdom like that that just sticks with me. He's just a very wise guy. I think it's 'cause he was born before the social media age, they just tend to pay more attention.
And so, it made me think, most women today, and men, but especially we in particular, are encouraged, and I don't want to phrase this as a bad thing, 'cause it's not necessarily bad. We're encouraged to be very self. And we wake up and every decision we make is thinking about ourselves first. Now, I'm going to give you guys an example where this can be a good thing. A lawyer is not going to become partner at the firm without thinking about hisself or himself first. He has to make sure, or she, that they wake up every day and they are the most energized they could be in order to pursue their career. Going after a career that is, you know, that high-powered, you have to be selfish to some degree because every decision you're making is to better your career. And that, that's not necessarily a bad thing. In some ways, you can't help others before you help yourself.
But many women, you, you guys saw what I just read. That's not really typical in 2024. And part of my process of interviewing a thousand women was I learned what the role of a traditional wife was, and I realized how few women actually fulfilled that. And I could probably count on maybe one hand the amount of women that I know that are obedient to their husbands, right? That don't nag him constantly. Like, it's almost the norm to use backhanded compliments or that sort of thing against men or against husbands, like, you know, "You're just like your father." And there's other small things I noticed, like the father's side of the family always had a tendency to be demonized. I saw a TikTok of a girl saying, "I realized that I am going to be Dad's side of the family to my brothers," and it went super viral because everyone, because it was so common for the Dad's side of the family to be trashed because women, in order to survive from an evolutionary point of view, reputation destruction is our biggest weapon.
And what I realized is, a lot of women do not, and not all, but a lot of women do not know themselves, and they are not aware that they are selfish people signing up for a selfless role. And what happens is, they get married and they play pretend. And in my opinion, you can only play pretend for so long. There are people that genuinely do change and get better, but I would say that's the exception, not the rule. So, they sign up for this role, and every day they have to think of their husband's needs and their kids' needs first, and it's just not who they are.
So, why did I say that, you know, there's no better or worse choices? Because through this experience, and at first, I really did, I thought that every single woman, it would be better for them to have children. I thought that until I met so many women that destroyed their families because they did not know their role. They would leave their husbands because they outgrew them. There would be mothers that I would see at every event in London, just on their stories, or and I would just think, "Who is watching your children?" You can't be an involved mother and be out four days a week. There's just no way. Who's cooking your kids' dinner? And you see this online a lot, you know, you see the looking on women looking on Instagram. I've seen women looking on Instagram for a nanny. That's crazy. You guys are trust, there are people that trust strangers with their children. So, and it just made me have the thought that if these women were honest with themselves, they would know they just were never meant to be mothers because they were too selfish for that role. And I didn't necessarily think they were bad people. Sometimes they were kind people, they were nice enough, but you could just tell every decision in their life was for themselves.
And I saw this with Lauren Southern. She spends years traveling the world, building up her career. Not a bad thing, right? And then signs up for a role where you have to think about everyone else's needs first. And if you haven't practiced for that role, a lot of women get overwhelmed or they get sick of playing a role that they weren't built for for after 20 years and then end up leaving their husbands and their families. And you see this in a lot of their videos. The funny, the interesting thing is, I tell you guys this stuff, and you can go on TikTok and find a woman just admitting this. And the phrases that they tend to use is, "I lost myself." And when you first hear that, you think, "That sounds crazy. What do you mean you lost yourself?" But what you come to understand is what they're actually saying is, "I was a person before I got married. I got married, and part of getting married is giving up parts of yourself." Um, if, if you were a woman and you used to go to the club every weekend, part of getting married is giving that up and watching your kids. And they miss that old version of themselves. And maybe they had friends, and they watched their friends do all the things that they wished they could do. Maybe it's pursuing hobbies, maybe it's going to the club, maybe it's that. And then at 40 or 45, but you see they were fooling themselves into thinking they were something they were not.
And the other issue is, we are attracted to 10% of men. So, a lot of the, you know, if you go higher and higher up the success hierarchy and the options hierarchy of men, the less, I guess, BS the guy is going to put up with because you can be easily replaced. So, some of women were pretty good-looking, but if you go after, say, a corporate attorney, and you get to marry him or you get to be his wife, right? A guy like that isn't going to, you're not going to get your way as much as say, if you married, I don't know, a more laid-back job, maybe an engineer, something, something like that, right? Those guys tend to be a little more laid-back. But the problem was, as women, a lot of times we don't think a lot of this stuff through. Where maybe they like the guy, but they didn't, they were not realistic about who they were and what kind of lifestyle they'd want to lead.
Okay, now I'm going to pull up a couple of examples. Single mom in your 40s pipeline, yes, that's being exposed. So, what do you all know about how I spent my 20s? This is a conversation that's being had. But a lot of the stories right now are like, "Well, he left me with four kids, whatever, whatever. So, I left." But let's talk about how I, yeah, welcome to Coffee Talk with your host Linda Richmond. It's like 2 in the afternoon. So, today we are actually having a Dr. Pepper talk. So, that's all right. All right, all right. You know what I mean? She thought I was going to come with receipts. Wait, see, this is why the guys will say vetting women doesn't work because one day you get the left, one day you get the right. You would, that's the other thing. You would be surprised how much people's opinions change in their lifetime. So, obviously, the environment I was raised in was fairly conservative with a lot of gender roles and a lot of stuff like that, right? But I was raised by essentially a single mother, even though, you know, she was married sometimes and stuff like that.
Okay, so this is another phenomenon I saw. I would meet people from traditional countries, and I would meet a lot of second-generation immigrants that were like, their parents were from a more traditional country. And I couldn't count the number of times that I heard them say that the traditional mother who was married to her husband for 30 years told the daughter not to get married or to delay that as soon as possible. Or another one is that the stay-at-home mom is a single mother. And so, when I grew up and had my own kids, my trauma response to things that I was lacking in my childhood was to go completely the other way. Like, "I'm not going to work. I'm going to be the president of the PT. I'm going to be there 24/7." All of that stuff, which I was happy when I was. Okay, so her early childhood is what it's very selfish, not bad, right? There's nothing wrong with doing that stuff. But all the decisions she's talking about are for herself. It wasn't this thing that I was like, "Oh my God, you know what I mean?" But looking back, there was no me in there.
Now, I started working really young, so I already had quite a career. So, when I met my second ex-husband, we decided to get married. We decided we wanted to do things old school. We wanted to do the traditional gender roles. He went to work, I stayed home with the kids. And all of this stuff. And at first, it was amazing. And I got to do everything I wanted to do. And I could make the kids, you know, my, my kids never ate baby food that wasn't something that I made. And stuff like that, which was an amazing part of it. But as time went on, I realized she reverted back to her original self because you can only put up an act for so long. I was not in any way an equal part of our home. It started with like smaller things that, you know, you wouldn't necessarily just like, "Oh, okay, well, it's his job and you know, I am the one who stays home and this is for me and I need to figure this out." Like, you know, "I need you to watch the kids for me once a week so I can go to therapy." No. Okay, now she's starting to get entitled and resentful. "I want this. You're not giving me this." And again, when you meet the super feminine women, it's just a different experience. They make you feel so warm, and they would never throw it in your face if they do something nice for you. I know I might have to work. I, I can't commit to that. Okay, I want to go to college. I never, you know, I never got to do that. I started working real young and did all that stuff. Oh, well. So, she saw her friends go to college and she thought, "Wow, I want to go to college." Starts to resent the husband even more. Who's going to pay for it? Who's going to pay?
Okay, and one of the biggest wakeup calls I got was when my son was going through his diagnosis journey. And because of the values that we're rocking on, it was, "Oh no, there's nothing. You just want him to, you just want that." Like, wouldn't even go to appointments with me, wouldn't entertain, even though things were pretty obvious, things were, you know, doing a thing. And, and so it just really over. The mindset, a more traditional woman would have is that she's happy to help. Where a woman that's a bit more modern is going to resent her husband for not doing the things with her time. It was really, really clear that even though I had someone paying my bills, I was completely on my own. And I also hadn't created any nest egg. I hadn't done anything for myself. Like, I started cosplaying to put away a little money and doing stuff like that. But the more and the more I got out into the outside world and started saying things or repeating things, I realized this is not kosher. But once I started trying to work more outside of the home and put away an nest egg and do that sort of stuff, guess what? No one's sharing domestic duties with me. So, then you're in trouble all the time and getting baskets of laundry dumped on your head because this is your job. And you know, it, it was really a traumatic time. But then after all those years of suppressing who I really was, guess what happened? I lost my ever-loving, lost my absolute ever-loving, had a complete nervous breakdown. They crash. They, I mean, think about how exhausting it's got to be to be someone you're not. And that's, I guess, sometimes why I poke fun at the cornstar overnight preachers. I mean, this, this is why we roll our eyes at that kind of stuff because a conversion story is great, and I'm sure it happens. But there's a saying that a tiger never changes his stripes, or something like that. Maybe it's a leopard never changes his spots, hides. I don't, you guys have to remember in the chat. And so, it's exhausting to them because they're trying to be something that they're not. And then 20 years later, they say, "I wish I missed who I was before all of this." And that's why I say, know thyself, know who you are. I was not anyone that I wanted to be for a couple of years. And all because I spent a long time really suppressing who the hell I was. What the. So, sometimes guys, when we say mumbo jumbo and they're like, "That makes no sense." I can decipher it. You're welcome. I can decipher it. I needed and not taking care of myself and not setting up a future for myself. Yeah. So, again, she has a more selfish mindset. She's saying, "I did not set up a future for myself and I didn't take care of myself." So, she did not know the role that she was signing up for.
Now, people of modern marriages, they figure out all different types of stuff. We have air fryers and Roombas now. There's different ways of living, right? People come up with all different types of solutions. But this was just one pattern that I saw in the women that opted for something, but they were not that. Again, it's not to say right or wrong, it's just saying if a woman like this knew herself a little bit better and was honest about what she wanted, you know, maybe she would just go get the equal partner that she was looking for, and they could go do that. But that's not the type of woman that's really qualified for what he was asking for. And trust me, there's a lot of, there's a lot of guys out there, they, they wanted to do the 50/50. They're like, "I'm not, I'm not saying all." But there's, there's enough. I mean, this would be like a perfect cougar woman. She totally would be. This is like the type of woman that would date a guy 20 years younger, and it would be a win-win for both because the young guy would get the kinky stuff, whatever the girl's his age don't want them, and then the old lady gets the attractive guy and she doesn't have to listen to him. Boom, problem solved. Lady. Now, they would obviously end badly, but, you know, it could keep her entertained for like a decade. I think that's a win-win. No, I'm not saying don't do this, but what I'm saying is, is just make sure you're going to therapy, deconstructing your stuff. And I'm talking somewhere outside of like church and stuff like that, 'cause that's who I was talking to too. And there's more women who have my story or who have similar stories or even heat left or whatever than there are that have the other one. And that's why like this video had said, which I strongly suggest, just go watch it. Yeah. And I would agree. That's why I said out of a thousand women, how many would I say were traditional or feminine? Maybe 10, 15. One, our society does not encourage people to be selfless, and we're told being selfish is a good thing. And two, I think emotions are something that people struggle with, and they're very difficult to overcome. So, I would say it's more the exception than the rule to find truly selfless people, people that think about everyone else before themselves. And it's not a bad thing. It's not one, one's not necessarily better or worse, they just have different outcomes. You don't see women my age really advocating for this lifestyle. Like, I think it's cool if that's what you want to do, just make sure that you c ya. And when someone my age says something like that to you, don't first go, "Oh my God, she's bitter." Maybe, maybe we've seen some, you know what I mean? I mean, you are bitter, but let's not. I mean, you're not going on TikTok airing out your husband's dirty laundry without being a little bitter, let's not. And good luck, and I'm proud of you, no matter what you do. Oh, but here's the kicker. Would I do it again? Absolutely. Absolutely 100%. We'll never regret the time we never learn. We never learn. Got to spend with my kids. I just probably would have put away a little money or maybe asked for more when I got divorced.