[00:00:00] Degan: The Little Door. 
As I watch from the train, the sun unlocks the doors of trees. I left your apartment before dawn. Only the lights of Montreal street lamps and a few dive bars left awake. I still sense you. Thyme. Mint. The weight of your head on my chest. The clouds from the window moving southeast.
I am in the centre of my life. I am held in the palm of the oldest story. Mark me, I said last night, and in the centre of my life, you entered. Now there is a little door of pleasure and pain. If nothing else is possible, may the wind be kind to your weather vane heart. And may I remember that I asked for this.
Is the key the body? Is the door the mouth? The passage beyond is bare, sunless, requires slow walking, hands passing along unseen edges. Nobody knows where it goes. Nobody has ever been there. You bring dawn, fields, fear, lavender, brazenness. I'll bring the rocking of trains. You bring spring, fire, your mother's knitting needles, your heart's comfort with the dark.
I'll bring snow from winter mornings, kerosene, tall pines listing in the dark, a bow, an arrow, iron, and a willingness to bend. 
[00:01:47] Chris: Hello, and welcome to What Kind of Man Are You? The podcast about men and masculinity, and the podcast that just can't stop talking about love. Degan,we had our last episode on love, and we're continuing in this one, and maybe talk about how this poem relates to love. 
[00:02:09] Degan: Yeah, so this is a poem about the early moments of falling in love, and the stanza that I am in the centre of my life. I am held in the palm of the oldest story. To me, the oldest story is love. When you fall in love and really think this is a person I could be with, possibly for the rest of my life, and we often don't think possibly when we fall in love.
We think, this is the person I can be with, so it's the oldest story coming into the centre of our lives. And it's terrifying, but we don't often feel the terror, sometimes, not at first, sometimes we do though, right? There's a lot of that sense of how many songs are about, I was just listening to that old REO Speedwagon song, I can't fight this feeling any longer, pure cheese from the 80sand yet I'm still afraid to let it go.
There are tens of thousands of songs of the moment toward falling in love that there's fear around, and one of the lines in the poem says, the passage beyond is bare, sunless, requires slow walking, hands passing along unseen edges. Nobody knows where it goes.
Nobody has ever been there. 
And no one has been. In the particularities of the love, you feel for another person and they feel for you. Yeah, there's gonna be fear there. 
[00:03:40] Chris: It's both the oldest story in the world and brand new when you experience it. 
[00:03:45] Degan: Yes, absolutely.
[00:03:48] Chris: I like the idea of a little door in your chest.
Probably. I imagine it being right in front of your heart and it's got both those feelings that you described, like the, both fear and excitement and, potential For joy and potential for hurt and all those sorts of things. 
[00:04:07] Degan: Yeah, the bite of love, the bite of pain.
 
[00:04:10] Chris: Men in love, it's, I wonder are you love am I in love? Yes. Yes, I am. I'm married and I am happily married. And how do you, and I actually mean that. 
[00:04:24] Degan: Yeah. I believe you. How do I keep it happy or, yeah. Or how, yeah, how do you, that's one of those questions that comes up, right? Like when you are married for while, 
[00:04:32] Chris: what's secret to a long marriage?
 I suppose, sure. 
[00:04:35] Degan: Give us the secrets, but I don't have secrets, . There are no secrets. , the secret to a long marriage is probably not really a mystery. And I think we'll probably get into it in this podcast, actually.
We better, this is what they're hungering for. 
[00:04:50] Chris: You're the therapist. You got to fix us all. So I'm not going to pretend I have a secret. I'm not even going to pretend that my marriage is necessarily a model for everyone else. I like it. 
[00:05:01] Degan: What do you do that, you know, keeps the vibrancy, keeps the, 
[00:05:06] Chris: first of all, you stop worrying about wanting to be the way you were in those first two months where everything was like hot and sexy and,the other person was all you could think of.
 That is a fun, fun time, but it was just, It is unsustainable. 
[00:05:21] Degan: Huh. 
[00:05:22] Chris: And so, you know, I, you always see TV shows where like the, there's a Friends episode about this, where, we're still hot. We still got to keep the fire alive. Blah, blah, blah. And it's like, just stop worrying about that.
You know you're going to have moments where it's hot. but a long game is a very different thing than a torrid affair. 
[00:05:50] Degan: They're both true though, right? I was just thinking about this the other day. I am not partnered at the moment. I have just been dating for the last couple of months, so I'm absolutely new to this world. So love feels like I'm sort of looking at it from a bit of a distance. I certainly love my friends. I love even my ex the two big partners that I spent the last 25 years with.
 I love them. They're, they're absolutely wonderful. And I'm friends with both of them and I'm very, very glad about that, but I'm not in what you're in. I'm not true in the partnership and I, I haven't been for about four years or so. And so I'm coming at it from this distance, and I remember that moment of meeting when you fall in love.
I've just been writing about it and it was, it's like nothing on earth. 
[00:06:34] Chris: Yeah. You know, You feel like you feel like it's life changing. And, and it is changing your life, but at the same time, you bring all of your expectations and start to put them on that other person.
And for two months, your relationship will be fine with that because 
[00:06:54] Degan: It can be longer sometimes. 
[00:06:55] Chris: Well, yeah. Okay. Yeah. But if it's going to go from hot and fun and, can't wait to see the person every single second to, go into that deeper level where you think, oh, maybe I want to spend my life with this person. Yeah, you got to start toplay roles, right? And so you're going to have that first moment of disagreement and sometimes you're shocked that this person feels this way because they never exhibited that before.
Yeah. Maybe they did, maybe you just didn't want to notice it at the time 
[00:07:33] Degan: IWe're talking right now about the beginnings, we're talking about the falling in love and I'm even outside of that because I'm not in a partnership.
I'm going on dates, right? 
[00:07:43] Chris: Yeah, although you have experienced 
[00:07:45] Degan: I've experienced it but in my life at the moment We look at this falling in love or even being outside of it and in the process of finding And move through because I know a lot of the thoughts I have are I work as a couples therapist.
I work in therapy i'm very interested in what helps couples reallybe vibrant and, and alive with each other. 
[00:08:09] Chris: Right. And yes, that's, that's a good way to put it. 
[00:08:13] Degan: When you say about the two months, I think we change, right? Yes, you know, there is something in those initial months that we don't replicate. 
We don't have that again. But how do we pull through something, you know, this is a little aside, but I've worked with people who have done, you know, ayahuasca, right? Or MDMA, there's a lot happening right now, of course, in the, in the psychedelic therapeutic world. When I work with someone who's done ayahuasca, which is quite, can be quite similar to to the initial phase of falling in love, or it can be kind of nightmarish. What I do with them is to say, how can you pull this, in that case it's often this wisdom through, this incredible sense of what's possible in life.
And I like the idea of saying, how can you pull that through a marriage? Those pieces that are still fundamentally there in, and that could change over time, but what are they. 
 
[00:09:10] Chris: This, early stage of excitement and sexiness and everything. One thing you have to realize is you, you can't keep chasing that high. I think what you're saying is, is What did you, you know, you're talking about this ayahuasca experience. You're saying what, what wisdom, 
What from the good parts of it can you take? Huh. That will, as you say, pull you through. Now the thing about long term love, I think. Yeah. And I, again, I am never going to claim to be an expert on this, but
 in my experience and, and my tendency, I've dated but the shortest real relationship I've ever had was four months, so I've tended to be a long term kind of person. Yeah. And what I. I think is,you got to stop thinking about that other person as the person who's going to solve your problems.
[00:10:14] Degan: Right. Complete you. 
[00:10:17] Chris: Right. I don't like that movie much at all from the love story side of it. 
[00:10:20] Degan: I want to read something that absolutely speaks to that. This is Esther Perel.
It's from Mating and Captivity. We turn to one person today to provide what an entire village once did. A sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity at the same time. And at the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling.
 Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all? It's hard to generate excitement, anticipation, and lust with the same person you look to for comfort and stability. But it's not impossible. 
We look to the other for in a sense, our culture, our sense of spirituality, our sense of attachment, and our sense of sexual intimacy and excitement. So it's a lot to ask another person. 
 And I certainly see that in couples here. In couples counselling, people get stuck in particular ideas. So how then do you pull that thread through? 
[00:11:14] Chris: That is the paradox of longterm relationships, right?
 You want stability from it, right? Like if you don't want stability, then you're not going to get into a long term relationship. But when you get that stability, it can start to become a bit of a cage. Right. And so then you think about, oh, we got to shake things up. And I don't think it's that so much as like reminding yourself, like you talk about this that you are a person with your own needs and here's what I need.
 It's not this simple and I'm not prescribing a process, but understanding what you need and understanding the difference between what you can get for yourself and what you need from your partner, I think is really, really important. 
[00:12:01] Degan: With this idea of, you know, going inward, right? Like what's actually down there. So you can say, I'm feeling really tired and I need 24 hours to myself, but if you don't know you need that, then you're sitting in the kitchen and someone drops a fork and you scream or you get so angry and it's like, Whoa, it wasn't about the fork, but what was it about?
[00:12:24] Chris: Yeah. 
[00:12:24] Degan: Just to add to that, I think that idea of living our own lives, and then coming back into the partnership. So, it's not what Perel has said there, you look to the other for everything. We cannot do that. 
[00:12:38] Chris: Yeah, but we do.
[00:12:39] Degan: But we do. And we get, we get absolutely caught into it.
And also, the nuclear family itself, right, that's a whole piece. Someone once said, the nuclear family is a form of insanity. And I think in a way it's true and relationships are a part of that insanity. Not only that, I think in the sense that says, we need a village.
 Right. And we don't want to make the past just this glorious place. Right. Because, 300 years ago when you had a toothache it wasn't glorious, right? Right. That got in the way of love. 
[00:13:05] Chris: You were dead. Very directly.
 
[00:13:07] Degan: But this idea that we want to have uncles and aunts around and we want to have, you want to have yourself, your kids reflected in the eyes of other people. So they grow up not just in this kind of small box of a, house, with the only energies being mother and father, and sometimes a sibling, sometimes an aunt comes to visit, there's something about that.
I think partners also get caught in, you know, 
[00:13:31] Chris: Oh, yeah, for sure. And I mean, I don't know, the nuclear family is the model we are forced to
 just like capitalism is the economy we are forced to contend with parliamentary democracy is the government we're forced to contend with. So here we are. But what's interesting is that all the things that are considered normal when you're a kid. Are your, are only your experience. And if most of your experience is inside the box of your home then you are going to meet someone that you are attracted to, and they're going to have a different box, and you're going to have to find ways to, make those boxes come together in a healthy way.
[00:14:21] Degan: I want to tell you my idea for a play. 
[00:14:22] Chris: Sure. 
[00:14:23] Degan: So it's very much about the boxes. 
 which would be on stage, you have two boxes at the bottom, and that's two sets of grandparents in each box. And you have two sets of parents, like, on the second boxes, and at the top, you have the couple. And the play would reveal all the patterns, all the frustrations, the historic theatre of, each of the partner's families, but you'd actually see it on stage.
 So you'd see, the wounds of World War I from this, and you'd see the patterns And on the other side you'd see the perfectionist impact of this or that and it goes up through the house and you end up with the top couple reliving the theatres of their past 
And that's why I think you should probably go see a couples therapist if you're having a lot of trouble. Because it's really hard to be able to dig down and say, where is this coming from? Sometimes you don't even know it and we talk about intergenerational trauma things being passed on in this way I really think when I work with a couple I say we are working with your histories. We're working with your theatres and let's try and get a little sense. I always ask tell me about the atmosphere in your house growing up. Tell me about the atmosphere in your parents house growing up if you knew it. Let's take a look at that and see what you're bringing because sometimes I think people are fighting about or having difficulty about things that are literally 80 to a hundred years old, or at least 20, 30 years old.
[00:15:58] Chris: Yeah. So okay. So I'll I look forward to producing that play with you. 
Great. A big thing in terms of bringing these boxes together: in my life my wife is Macedonian and she's a first generation Canadian.
So her parents were born in Northern Greece. Some Macedonians would say Macedonia. She's one of five sisters. She grew up with her grandparents in the house and they were always visiting other families. Other families were always coming over. 
[00:16:34] Degan: A village, a village passed through.
[00:16:37] Chris: They, the village and both her parents grew up in small villages and that kind of village, every, you know, there were aunts and uncles who weren't blood aunts and uncles, right? They were, they were, well, there were, but there were also people who were called aunt or uncle. And you see that with a lot of a lot of immigrant families, 
 where one family begins and the other ends sometimes has some fluidity to it. 
[00:17:05] Degan: It makes me feel both like longing for it and terrified. I want this and I want my space. It's a very North American response. 
[00:17:15] Chris: So I grew up in North America. My parents grew up in North America. Three of my grandparents grew up in North America.
And if you go back in my mother's side, seven generations or something. So I grew up in a nuclear family in a small town. Everything but the white picket fence, I guess. More than 2. 5 children. 
[00:17:37] Degan: Fishing with your father. 
[00:17:38] Chris: Fishing with my father refer to episode one.
And so, when I moved in with my wife, members of her family would just walk in the front door and I was like, what is going on? like, doesn't anybody knock? 
[00:17:53] Degan: Busting down your North American fortress . 
[00:17:57] Chris: Like, it's funny because they are Macedonian, but a very popular movie in that family is My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Right. And this addresses that whole cultural difference where, this guy, I think he was an only child, which I'm not, and he's very North American, very European descent WASPy, all that kind of thing. And here's this huge Greek family where everybody's in everybody's business.
[00:18:22] Degan: And what does it have to do with love? 
[00:18:24] Chris: Well, look, it's this idea of you fall in love with the individual. Right, but you marry the family, right? And sometimes that's not true. Butthat is a huge part of how you are going to negotiate your future.
Has it changed you in a way? Do you mainly resist it? Is there something in a way that it's altered this kind of revolving door kind of thing? I would like to think that I'm not the same person I was when I first got married, for sure, that I've learned to navigate it. It hasn't changed my difficulty with large groups. 
[00:19:02] Degan: Yes, you are more of an introvert, right? And that's the simple way to say, yeah. 
[00:19:07] Chris: And, and it is a source of tension with my wife, my partner. Having said that, they're great people. I really like her family. I like to think we all get along pretty well.
I just, don't love the big holidays where everybody gets together, cause I just, 
[00:19:25] Degan: You don't like holidays anyway. 
[00:19:26] Chris: No, I'm not crazy about holidays. You know, we were over for dinner at one of her sister's places, just a few of us. And that was nice. Right. And so, 
 it was a long, long way to say when you get together with someone, you get together with all those boxes of experience that come down the line. 
[00:19:48] Degan: See, in your play. There are trapdoors, right? And it's like my play was the nuclear family. Right, right. They were all in their own boxes. 
So you're saying a family tree of nuclear families.
Yeah, but you know, and I was even imagining like different time periods, but you've got slides and ladders, right? Coming up and down, right? 
[00:20:10] Chris: Well, I have thoughts on dating myself, but I am interested in,
your experience we're in our fifties we have both been married and separated. And so it's different from dating when you've never been through a long term relationship. 
What is it like for you? 
[00:20:40] Degan: Well, you know it's early days. I am noticing that I'm 53. I'm dating people between the age of 45 and 59, It's kind of renewed my sense of just how many wonderful people there are out there. And I'm using Hinge it's set up in such a way that there's some talking points about,how you can connect with someone, so you end up connecting with people that you have some interest with. People in their 50s, at least from my perspective, and you could really,do a sociological study, of what people are looking for. Particularly in this age group, this is generally post having children, right?
And what people are looking for. The pace is slower than when you're in your thirties. You know, there's a lot of people who've had children younger, are moving out into the world. And they want a partner, they've separated and maybe their children aren't with them.
And so there's that sense of, okay, you know, who am I wanting to build a life with? 
 I was thinking the other day, around the idea of attraction. 
In terms of what people are asking for. There are, there seem to be two almost polarized desires for what talking heteronormatively here, generally what a woman is looking for in a man. 
 They are either, I'm looking for a gentleman, chivalrous, knows how to take care of a lady, fixes things, you know, very traditional in a sense. All fine. And they don't often come together. The other piece is often someone who is emotionally centred, someone who knows what they feel, someone who can have emotional intelligence, someone who knows who they are and has done their work. You rarely see those together. This idea of masculine feminine energy is a real interest to me.
Mm-Hmm. . The idea that feminine energy is this kind of moving creative expressive force in the world. And, needs or desires protection from a masculine force of solidity, calm, boundary, strength. And my sense of what health is in an individual is someone who has brought up these pieces.
 To me, it seemed perfect to say, I want, I want an old school man. And I, and I want them to be strong in this way and that way, or an old school woman, it doesn't matter. I want an old school person, someone who's going to honour chivalry or my, myself in this way.
And who's done their work. And I think that combination would be really interesting
 
[00:23:23] Chris: There's women looking for the traditional gentlemen and there are women who are looking for a guy who's really done the work and thought about what he 
[00:23:33] Degan: Yeah, in general, those camps seem to exist.
Right. Yeah. And you know, when someone says like, I want someone who can like fix a toaster or something, I mean, it's like X right away, right? Like, like I can fix the odd thing, but the idea that that would be of deep importance is, but I've got my things, right? I want, I want to be able to talk about literature and music and, that's to me interesting, 
[00:23:57] Chris: Sounds to me like, women in their late 40s to 50s
 they're kind of clear.? And yes, and the things they're looking for are also solid and real. Yeah. Like I think about even when I was dating aftermy first marriage ended 
 this was a long time ago, but 
what I found was that
what we would write about ourselves and what we were looking for, and the same with the people I was trying to connect with, were kind of vague and the specifics were kind of trivial, right? Like what they wanted, right? So you'd have a, you'd have a woman who wanted a man to kill spiders for her.
Right. I would have to say no to that because I will take a spider and put it outside, but I, I think it's bad luck to kill spiders. Right. I mean, I'm not afraid of spiders. I just think they're, they bring more benefits to the world. 
[00:24:57] Degan: Do you know, do you know the Bo Burnham song five years?
[00:25:02] Chris: No. 
[00:25:03] Degan: Oh, it's just brilliant. We'll have to, we'll quote it on another episode. I'm sure some of the listeners know it. It's you know, your whole feminist thing goes out the window whenever there's a spider.
 The whole world collapses whenever there's a spider. 
[00:25:19] Chris: Yeah, we have centipedes in our house and that's what I get called to deal with. Yeah. 
 Buttell me about the, actual, like, How is that now compared to what you, do you do the same things? You go for coffee, 
[00:25:38] Degan: Yeah, I think a lot of it is similar.
You know, talking first, coffee, maybe a meal, something like that, going for a walk. I think the pacing for sure. is really different. And I think you're absolutely right. People after the age of 40, 45, they know what they want. And it's clear and it's slower burn 
 And there's a lot, there's a lot to talk about because we, everyone's been through a lot. 
I've had remarkable conversation with someone who had grown up in Poland and, and, she had just shared her family history and both of our fathers had been communistsand yet not hardliners. So these very, humanistic, artistic communists, the opposite of what you'd think of with some Stalinist hardliner, a kind of gentle men who really believed in a system to stand opposite capitalism with a human face and people over profits but really lived it.
And what a beautiful thing that was this could happen at any age, I suppose, but to share our histories. We kind of imagined our fathers, around the same time where they would have been. And that was kind of beautiful. 
 I'm just outside the door of it. And so thinking about love, I feel loved by my children and my friends, but it is strange to have been a number of years without a daily partner. It's not quite an ache but I think it's an ache forthe wonderful parts of what that was that dailyness. 
 
[00:27:08] Chris: I do find there are some people I know who are quite happy being single. It does seem that most people want a partner. Mm hmm. And yeah. What is that? I mean, I see the biological historical, keeping the species going and all that sort of thing.
But, where's the nature nurture on that? Like how much of that is like a human need or something that we're told we have to get? 
 
[00:27:44] Degan: Another piece of this is we are living way longer than we used to. And I think that ultimately radically changes what we want when we can be with someone for 40, years.
That idea that we change through our lives in this and we're in an age certainly where gender is being questioned and is being sort of exploded outward into so many glorious possibilities. And we're also in an age where where we're rethinking relationships profoundly.
And the idea of open marriages, polyamory. This is happening more and more in my couples. This is being spoken about younger generations and older. I think these are responses in a way to, partially our age, living much longer. But I think also, I believe in many ways we're seeing the ascendancy of you could say women and feminine energy, but I think women in many ways, and I know that that's controversial because we can still say we don't have equality in the way that we want, and I agree with that, but I think in a lot of ways, women are coming into their power, and I certainly see this in relationships.
 There's been this steady sense of, partially it is economic, what work possibilities there are. And every woman I speak with, when I say, I feel like this is the time of women, they're like, absolutely.
There's a, there's a lot you could point to, to say that we're actually moving backwards in women's progress. These rules that society tries to create to limit women's options is a desperate attempt to get back to something that they think existed in the past.
Yes. 
[00:29:36] Chris: I don't think it even existed, And I honestly think thatthe ascendancy of women is inevitable, but that doesn't mean that we allow those who are trying to stop it with violence and laws we don't want to go through the Handmaid's Tale in order to get to the point where women are, are finally, 
[00:30:02] Degan: I mean, we're really looking at a crossroads.
 We have these forces. They're absolutely in the midst of this ascendancy, which I believe is happening.
You're right. It's, a very concerted fear based effort to bring back time. 
 It's a crucial time in historyand it's terrifying to think particularly around access to abortion in the United States.
I mean, what we're seeing feels like we've gone back 50 to 100 years. 
[00:30:32] Chris: Yeah, and there's no doubt that that's a step backwards. Yes. 
 These laws it's horrifying because I want to be in a world where everybody feels that the government doesn't have a right to tell you what to do with your body.
People have a right to their decisions about their reproductive futures. This is not a job for the state. It's not even a job for the church. 
 
[00:30:58] Degan: Talking about dating for a moment. So this morning I was on a date and we were talking about, our pasts and 
 
Here's, here's the quote. Men want to control everything, but they can't control anything.
I want to talk about control, this idea. And I think in terms of healthy relationships, I think control is often what becomes unhealthy in a relationship. And, I think that idea about having time for yourself and living your own life and, coming back to the partnership with renewed energy and your own sense of self.
That is actually quite a risky thing to do, if you haven't done it. And I think that dissolves that kind of desire to control the other. Because, I think we have a very old concept. Like the idea in the institution of marriage, does set up a sense that death till you part.
 I mean, and that's an old institution and those words also really represented a time where we probably lived till 50s and 60s. so that death till you, you part, we have this sense of this concrete institution that we honour. And if we are going to make that work, and there's nothing wrong with marriage.
I think it can be absolutely beautiful thing, but what do we do with it under its roof,This sense of control comes out of fear, so how do we dissolve that? And I think part of it is saying, I feel deeply confident in my own self, deeply worthy in my own self. And I think this is a huge threat to, we were talking about the forces earlier, right?
 That is a system very based on control. That's what patriarchy is, a control of men over women, literally. It almost feels like a sense of DNA in some people, sense of this is the right way.
So we are disrupting something here that's profound and coming back to men and love I think men are called for in this age where patriarchy is being made porous andshaken, is to say, how are we doing with this?
What is it like to be in a position where the institutions are not fully supporting your sense of control anymore? How do I feel in it? And how can I be me in it? Because I don't feel at all like I'm in a descendancy. People think, well, if there's an ascendancy here, there's a loss.
 I feel like let's all of us go up, right? Let's all of us take our masculine feminine energies to as far as we can go. Be tough here when we need to be empathetic and listen here when we need to.
But that is a journey. And how do we do that? We have to sit in the unknown of that. And I think men have to sit in the unknown of that as much as anybody. 
[00:34:03] Chris: Patriarchy sucks for everybody, except for maybe like a few rich guys, right? You want to marry someone you respect. You want to marry someone who you can talk to someone who will listen to you, someone who cares about you.
But if you think they're lesser than you, or if they're treated as lesser than you, then you've got this weird partnership where, on the one hand, how much respect are you going to have for this person? And on the other hand, how much work do you have to do to maintain this thing that's going on?
 I actually don't think patriarchy really works for men. However, it's a story we tell ourselves. And you talk a lot about the script of being a man. It's very hard to break the stories we were told when we were kids. There were certain things I learned as a kid. And to change that in my relationships with women was work. So my choice is adjust or resist. And if I want to resist then I have to go hard at that too. And that's what I think is happening right now.
[00:35:17] Degan: Yeah. 
[00:35:18] Chris: We have been privileged to live through a time where we've seen women able to do that and it's so much better. And it makes relationships better A source of tension actually is old attitudes and that kind of thing.
 Like who wants to order for other people at the restaurant 
[00:35:39] Degan: But you know, in dating, it's very de rigueur right now.
And I have been not ordering for, but paying for the tabs consistently. 
[00:35:51] Chris: You're answering the question I was going to ask you. 
[00:35:54] Degan: That was it? 
[00:35:55] Chris: Like on a date. 
[00:35:56] Degan: Yeah. 
[00:35:57] Chris: Do you pay? 
[00:35:57] Degan: Yeah. Yeah. The first one and maybe the second and then you see where it goes. But, yeah, so there is something there that's kind of in the air, you know and I think it's, no one has said no. 
 
[00:36:10] Chris: It's interesting to me too, because we, I think we've actually seen a decline in the number of women who keep their maiden name. 
Yeah. More women are changing their name to their husband's name. 
 That's somethingI am interested in these sort of, you know, and the man getting down on one knee to propose that's still a huge thing. it is interesting how we move forward and hold on to certain things.
And yeah. Some of them. Just seemed weird to me. And some of them are just harmless, like, bride and groom not being able to see each other before the wedding, like, okay, whatever, who cares. But the man paying, I always figure the person asking out should do the paying and, But who does most of the asking out?
[00:36:59] Degan: Yeah. And that's mostly still mostly in this. Yeah. I don't really have any problem with, traditional forms of masculinity, traditional forms of being, I don't have a problem with this.
 just feel if we can bring up both, if you can fix a stove and protect your loved one, it's also going to behoove you, to be able to know what's happening inside of you. And I do think we become polarized. 
You're a wuss if you go to therapy. And, but if you're a big, strong dude, you're gonna be fine. That is absolute BS. I love working with men. I work with them all the timeand they are in trouble, and they can have a lot of masculine qualities.
And I respect them for it. And it's these other pieces, what you might call feminine energy or feminine exploration. The way this becomes serious, when we lean on one side too much, and we don't go in, and here we are talking about the movement toward addiction.
 The movement toward anger or emotional abuse or physical abuse. These kinds of rages that absolutely can come when it's often a man, statistically, is feeling trapped, feeling they don't knowwhat's happening internally And these forces are great and they react and it's devastating for the partners, for the children. We know this. And so when I talk about the heroic task of going inward,it can literally save people.
Your life and other people's lives. 
 In these moments, that move is into these places. and that's where I deeply believe that, going to see a couples therapist, seeing a therapist, for the places that are that far under the sea. The places where the pain is so great, you're not going to be able to work it out with your partner.
You're not going be able to name it. It's hard for some people, to name that you're feeling hungry. Yeah, right. To name that you're feeling tired. To name that there's something that is so unformed, unseeable, and potentially devastating. 
We need as a society to look at that 
 This idea that you complete me and therefore I am nothing without you.
[00:39:20] Chris: Yeah. And that goes back to that. Right. If I put myself in that position and I have invested my identity into my partner. Yes. And this is why you say, have your own life. And then I become so blinded to the fact that that's me controlling my partner.
Yeah. And my partner decides they can't take it anymore. Yeah. Then I'm in a rage. And I'm at a loss, and I think that I'm completely unless she comes back. 
[00:39:53] Degan: And also experiencing terror. Terror, yeah. Because probably the most important, the closest person who you've ever been with, besides the mother or father figure, but as an adult, is considering leaving you.
Right. And that's what we sometimes talk about divorce being this unscripted ceremony of ink, of life changing proportions. 
[00:40:12] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And, when you say therapy saves lives and you're saying it literally, I agree with you, and maybe, maybe it isn't always therapy, but some sort of 
[00:40:24] Degan: mentorship, mentorship, or digging.
[00:40:28] Chris: Like you are more willing to hurt someone else than to look inside of yourself. And so we need to normalize internal exploration just for the sake of, our own sanity, our own safety, and our own sense of enjoying life. 
[00:40:48] Degan: I've probably worked with thousands of men.
in groups and individually in couples and, 
 98 percent of the men I work with if they have expressed rage, if they have expressed anger, it's almost as if, you know, like the next day after you get drunk and you're hung over and you're like, 
what happened And there is shame, there is guilt. So there is this incredible desire in men, to be good fathers. 
[00:41:16] Chris: Yes. "I don't want to be like that." 
[00:41:18] Degan: Yes. Yeah. Good fathers, good mothers, good sons good caretakers of parents.
It's incredible and it's beautiful. And that's why I take the work so seriously. And that's why we're doing this really. What kind of man are you? At the heart of it is, it is about men's healing, right? 
 
[00:41:34] Chris: Even if you feel like everything is everyone else's fault, if you go inside, first of all, you'll find out that some of it is your fault, but also that instead of lashing out with, with harsh words or fists or whatever.
You can just tell them, I need you to stop doing that. Or I need this from you. I need that. That's the demands again. That's life changing. I'm not a violent person, but there have been lots of times in my younger years where I'd just be like, Oh, why can't they treat me better?
[00:42:06] Degan: A partner you mean? A partner? 
[00:42:07] Chris: Yeah. Or anybody I love, you know, a family member or whatever. Yeah. Andthe truth is it's all about the love . You know, I remember I had a, I don't even know if my sister would remember this, but I had a big argument on the phone with my sister and at the end of it, I was like, you know what, let's hash this out over a beer.
And we got together for a beer. And the moment I saw her, I wasn't mad at her anymore.And that didn't even take a lot of inward looking. I was lucky there because I just, I like my sister. 
[00:42:38] Degan: But you trusted your intuition to not keep it on the phone. 
[00:42:42] Chris: And I didn't need to hang on to the rage, which is exhausting and painful.
I was set free, right? Like that's freedom. 
 
[00:43:01] Degan: I'd like to address something around the masculine and feminine energies. I think that they're crucial to the life of a of a partnership. And I want to tell two quick stories about about how the balancing or the bringing up of these energies can be so healing in relationship.
 I worked with a 22 year old woman who was what you would call the epitome of feminine expression. Beautifully painted nails, very attractive, hair done 
 kind of a giggling presence., She's in my therapy office, and she begins to talk about who she's attracted to. And they are always hyper masculine men. Some of them were in gangs.
Some of them had had prior criminal records. She was deeply drawn to them. And she said very clearly, they protect me. I'll never be in danger around them. And as the sessions progressed, she described one relationship where the man was beginning to assert a different kind of control.
The chivalry was turning into what we were talking about earlier, and it began to encroach session after session, and at first she had difficulty speaking about it, and then she said at one point, he called me C U N T in public. In front of his friends, right?
 And so I said all of the things I could around, you need to be treated with respect.Can you feel this sense of respect in yourself? Took this way of attempting to have her feel her own power. What she came back to was this incredibly concretized sense of but he is my protector, right? And she had disowned so much of her masculine energy And that the energy of the men were completing in a sense this other side, which I know you said is a dangerous thing and I think it is. But it was, the pressure was building.
 And I'm trying my best to say, I think you're in danger. And I'm saying this, you are in danger. I came to a point where I didn't know what to do. And we're sitting there and she ends up talking about seeing a Raptors game.
And we're kind of shooting the shit at the end. And she's talking about Lowry. 
[00:45:23] Chris: Kyle Lowry, yeah. 
[00:45:24] Degan: Who, not with us anymore, not with us in Toronto anymore. 
[00:45:27] Chris: Not in Toronto, he's alive. 
[00:45:28] Degan: Yes, he's alive, he's alive. Yes. Anyway, and she was talking about, oh, you know, you got 34 points it was great.
 and she said, I drove there in my, it was a Mazda. 
And I said, oh, do you like to drive? And she goes, oh yeah. And her chin raised a little bit. And her eyes narrowed a little bit. And I said, do you drive stick? Oh yeah, I wouldn't drive anything else. And her whole body began to change And I said, can you imagine sitting in your Mazda right now?
And so she's like, yeah, I love this car. So, I said, you're driving right now. And I want you to feel the leather steering wheel. The trembling vibration of the stick. And she got into it. She got into the car in her mind I said, you're driving fast.
And the feminine expression was gone. The look on her face is serious and she's feeling it. And I say, keep driving. And I want you to imagine the man who called you that right there. And she turns to him and I said, what do you want to say? And she says, get the away from me.
 And then, for a moment, this feminine expression comes back, right? Almost like this other force, I can't believe I could never say that. And I said, you just did say it. And she goes, I guess I did. She does have this other side.
We all have this other side. Men have a feminine energy in them. We maybe don't have a lot of access to it. Maybe we disown it for this reason. She had it and she ended up leaving that man. And to be fair she left the original person, 
And a month or so later, I said, you know, who are you dating? And she said, I've met another beautiful wall of a man. And it was okay. Do what you, do what you do, and honour that other section of you. Because this idea that we will just be protected by another, is dangerous or the idea that we are just a protector.
 We can't sustain one role. I'll tell one more. I was working with a man who had been in a car accident, and he himself was very strong, he'd been weightlifting for a long time, 
 In the accident, his mother was in the front seat. After the car crashed, he froze. And when we went to do the work on the trauma, the mom was fine, he was fine in the end. But the trauma for him was that he had not acted.
He had frozen. And when we started to explore what his life was, he was very passive. And he had difficulty taking agency in his own life and passivity. So he hadn't brought up in a sense that masculine energy of action, taking control. So a lot of the therapy I do is reenactment.
We created the car in the therapy room andhe put himself in the back seat and we slowed it down and I said, who is a strong, clear figure in your life? And he said, my grandmother right away.
And I said, can you become her for a moment? So he had been relaxed on the couch, his hands kind of flying everywhere and, and just talking And as soon as he became her, he was still. And I said, look around the room as your grandmother.
 He said something like, your desk is messy. Before that, he'd been kind of pleasing, right? You know, how are you? You know, your desk is like, yeah, it is messy. Yeah. And when we reenacted to go back to the car accident, what would you do now?
And it was almost like he was pushing himself through a wall, acted, and took the phone from the front seat, which he didn't doin the actual accident, and called 911, and tears in his eyes, said, we're in trouble. I need you to come. And it's this idea of masculine feminine energies, not being connected to male or female because we have them in us.
We can draw them from our ancestors. We can find them, bring them up. And in subsequent sessions talked about how within his own partnership, he made more clear decisions. 
And he had made these moves to, to say, I'll show up for you. So it was, it was changing slowly. Anyway, I'm not saying these things aren't Hollywood. They don't happen in two or three sessions. They happen over time. Our subconscious chews on them. 
 
[00:50:05] Chris: These moments of overnight success are like months, years, decades in the making. 
[00:50:13] Degan: Absolutely. For sure. 
Okay. Welcome back to what kind of man are you? This is the time when we tell a joke a bad dad joke. Although I think dad jokes are bad, so that would be a good joke. So just tell a dad joke, Chris. 
[00:50:33] Chris: I was going to say don't be anti dad on me here. 
[00:50:37] Degan: We love that. 
 
[00:50:38] Chris: I have a question for you. What's the best thing about Switzerland?
[00:50:49] Degan: I don't know. 
[00:50:49] Chris: I don't know either, but their flag is a big plus.
Got it. Yeah. Oh, I'm not even a dad and I feel like I'm killing it with these jokes. 
[00:51:03] Degan: You're an 
uncle. That was an uncle joke. Uncle jokes aren't allowed on this podcast.
[00:51:12] Chris: Okay. There was a time, Chris, where you taught me about fashion. 
What? 
[00:51:19] Degan: Yeah. Yeah. Now unless I'm completely imagining this, And I wanted you to go back to when I knew you in the 90s tell me something about your look. Tell me something about, because this is, we perform masculine, we perform everything, right?
And, we choose our clothes. Tell me a little bit about what the look that you crafted.
[00:51:45] Chris: I think most of my friends would find this hilarious. They would find this to be the joke of the week. 
 What I will say is I was grunge before grunge was cool. But that was because I had long hair baggy clothes and I even had a lumber jacket for a while.
 if you look at my yearbook picture from journalism school, I have this long hair unshaven this very grungy look and every now and then someone from my journalism class will pull it out and laugh at me.
Butthat was me at the time. 
[00:52:22] Degan: So you were pre Seattle, before Seattle. 
[00:52:24] Chris: Oh, yeah they must have got hold of a picture of me and said, yeah, that's what we're going to look like. 
[00:52:30] Degan: Eddie Vedder is now I know what my life is going to be. 
[00:52:33] Chris: Yeah I created Pearl Jam. And so for those of you who love them, you're welcome.
For those of you who hate them, I'm sorry. 
But 1st of all, I don't put a lot of a lot into what I wear. I will say that in the 90s, early 90s, I bought myself a black lambskin biker jacket, and I love that jacket so much. I have 2 articles of clothing from those days, and one of them is that black biker jacket, and the other is a rage against the machine T shirt.
Those are the only things that have lasted from that era. 
[00:53:14] Degan: That's exactly the jacket I was thinking of when I was thinking about your long hair in a ponytail and that jacket. 
[00:53:22] Chris: Oh, that's funny. Yeah I don't think I thought about style a whole lot. And I started working in an office, I did this thing where instead of trying to choose my clothes every day, I put my clothes in the closet and then just take them out in the order they were there and then put them back at the bottom or at the other end so that I wasn't repeating myself.
[00:53:51] Degan: I think Einstein did something like that. so you were like post einstein pre grunge 
[00:53:56] Chris: pre grunge. Oh, yeah. Einstein's my boy. 
 Apparently Barack Obama did that with his suits too. He would just put them in his closet. Take them out of his closet and, the first one that was there, he would put it on and then he'd take the next one out and wear that the next day.
I don't know. I've never certainly I lean towards the casual. I will wear a suit to formal occasions. And I like wearing a suit. I don't love wearing a tie.I don't really think of myself as stylish in any way. 
[00:54:31] Degan: That's the image I had of you.
[00:54:33] Chris: Oh, okay. You're in my, you're in my memoir coming up. And that's exactly how I describe you with the black leather jacket and that blonde ponytail. Yeah. I always tell people that there was like this very brief time in the early to mid nineties where I was cool. It was very brief.
[00:54:53] Degan: You're always cool to me, Chris, no matter how casual you get in your in your fifties. 
[00:54:58] Chris: Thank you, Degan. I I'll send you the check for saying that. 
[00:55:03] Degan: All right. So you got a question for me? 
[00:55:05] Chris: I do have a question for you. On the theme of love do you remember the first time you fell in love, and what was that like?
[00:55:13] Degan: I'll answer it going way back. sexuality begins really early. There are some that say they've even noticed touching, even when you're in the womb. 
Sexuality, procreation, pleasure, all of that goes way back. I don't remember the womb very well but I do remember being in grade three and a teacher saying, Hey Degan, can you bring this note to the kindergarten teacher? Now this kindergarten teacher, the vision I have in my head is that she looked like Daisy Duke from Dukes of Hazzard, and here I am, grade three, and I'm looking up at this woman who is wearing this low cut top and these, jean shorts and almost like in a cartoon it would be like hubba bubba or something like that, 
[00:55:57] Chris: Your eyes popping out of your skull. 
[00:55:59] Degan: Pure field of sexual energy and oh my gosh. I'm not saying that was love But it was certainly interest That is sexual attraction and it's so immediate.
 But love, almost like someone standing on a beach and a slow motion image of a wave coming. In grade six. And I won't mention her name.
 I'll call her Stephanie. And Stephanie comes from another school. And one of the things about that was that she didn't know my history at that point, because I'd started to get more confidence in grade six and seven. And so I was just me. And she was beautiful and had these sweet freckles.
And I remember once she came to my house with a group of other friends. We were probably in grade seven now and we played hide and seek. And I had this huge wood pile. And we were playing hide and seek and we were in teams and I said, I've got the best place.
And the two of us crept into this bushwood pile enclosure, and people were calling, Stephanie, Degan, where are you? Where are you? And just to be in this enclosed space, smiling with her, close to her, I felt like in that moment it was different than that incredible attraction when I was in grade three.
It was this sense of, Oh, I love being beside this person. I could just be in this woodpile forever, 
[00:57:30] Chris: Yeah, you, you had a secret together. 
[00:57:32] Degan: Absolutely. We had a secret. We were hiding from the world, which is like what you do when you fall in love anyway.
And, it turned out that one of my close friends fell in love with her and I'm very proud of this. I really backed off. Not that I thought that I could have necessarily, had a love affair with her but I backed off because he actually said. To me, I love her so much.
[00:57:53] Chris: He expressed in words. I love her so much. And it was like my, my love feelings were in Kuwait and early and his were like, he knew the storm that was approaching him.I remember a girlgrade two, maybe developed a crush on me and started like kissing my cheek all the time.
[00:58:16] Degan: Ah, and I was like, Oh, I guess I have a girlfriend now. It's amazing grade two you just say what you have to say, my twins are in grade two. They're going into grade two and they're all dating. They're all talking about getting married.
They all have friends or crushes and they're talking about we're going to play soccer tomorrow. 
[00:58:34] Chris: I can remember the summer when I talked to people who weren't in my school and it would be like, yeah, I have 3 girlfriends.
Basically, you're saying there's that 1 that kisses me on the cheek. And then there's 1 I talked to once in a while.just like you play cops and robbers, you play love, right? 
[00:58:52] Degan: I was just going to say, there's the one that chases you with the baseball bat because she loves you so much. How often did that happen? You hit the person that you love the most. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like any kind of contact. 
It's both silly and adorable. 
Yes. Is that it for this episode? Is there anything else? 
[00:59:08] Chris: We haven't exhausted the topic of love, but I think we are exhausted. So it's time for us to move on.
[00:59:15] Degan: Maybe we'll revisit love and finish it off completely for all humanity. But right now, two episodes, we've covered a wide swath. 
[00:59:21] Chris: I think so. Maybe in a future episode, have a guest on to maybe someone who does love for a living. Oh, that didn't sound right.
[00:59:31] Degan: Who knows what's possible, but we thank you all for listening and we will see you again next week. 
[00:59:37] Chris: What Kind of Man Are You is hosted by Chris Garbutt and Degan Davis. Produced by Chris Garbutt at VQC Media. You can support us at buymeacoffee.com slash Chris Garbutt. Music composed and performed by Degan Davis. You can buy Degan's book at brickbooks.ca. 
 Thank you to all our supporters and listeners.