[Divorce] How & why I fell in love with my (ex-)wife.

I have had the possibility in mind for
one full year now to make a video talking about how I first met and fell in love with my ex-wife I had it in mind because I was speaking to my mother somewhat acrimonious conversation and I said to my mother you know Gayle you never asked me this neither my mother and or my father who's now deceased neither you ever asked me now do you show any interest in how did I meet this woman why did I love with her and for me that reflects the kind of strange pattern in my relationship with my parents and that they just showed really no sincere interest in hearing my side of the story sort of in different fraught situations of conflict whether that was a relatively trivial conflict between myself and my sister or I don't know well the question like this something that really matters a complex high-stakes series of negotiations are running my divorce so this is probably going to be the first of a series of videos probably spaced out over a couple of months on a No where I look back on and reflect on my relationship with my ex-wife and our decision to get divorced and the situation I'm in now legally personally and otherwise which is a lot more interesting than anyone could reasonably imagine some of you guys have been long-term fans of my channel so my old videos that probably just took way too many hours to explain this stuff I think all those videos were minutes long and this video is relatively positive relatively upbeat and I think will be interested in my own daughter in the near future my daughter is now five years old but when she's getting closer to 15 years old I can definitely imagine her one to see a video like this it's relatively positive relatively up because it's basically about the positive qualities my ex-wife had how we met and fell in love we didn't get married by accident and I tell you there are things I really valued about her so it's not just telling that story but inevitably it's also telling you a bit about the kind of woman she was her personal qualities or characteristics or how she cultivated or developed them I definitely think would be meaningless to tell the story with the kind of blank placeholder but the crucial character of my my wife might be so in terms of her character in her character formation I really think the crucial thing to understand is how she emerged from and reacted against her father's personal philosophy or ideology now this is true of many of us I could describe my own character as something that emerged in contrast to things my parents believed in things my parents taught me most obviously communism you know up to a certain age I'm listening and learning to what they say about politics I'm listening learning to what they say about economics and history and then after a certain age I'm becoming more and more skeptical and doing my own reading I'm challenging those ideas and discovering the extent to which things they've taught me are really wrong so not everybody goes to this path but you know if you were raised a Christian or Mormon or something and became an atheist similar pattern so on and so forth now to my knowledge I may be wrong to my knowledge my ex-wife's father has actually been diagnosed as having narcissistic personality disorder a narcissistic personality disorder one of the first things they tell you in textbooks and academic articles is to disregard the colloquial meaning of the word narcissism because they say well you know narcissistic personality disorder it ended up with this peculiar name for different cultural and historical reasons by the way narcissism goes back to the the myth of narcissus and one particular poem actually an ancient Greek about narcissus so I mean you know it's ended up with this term appended to it but it really has nothing to do with narcissism and in the you know popular imagination how we understand the meaning of that word um however my ex-wife was raised being told again and again as a child that she was special that society's rules did not apply to her one of the things her father said again and again to her and her brother often both of them collectively was we're not like other people we're not like normal people that we that somehow the three of them were special and were superior to Society standards and normal rules and this was in some ways part and parcel of her father's rejection of academia and higher education and by the way when I first met him and he first start to get to know me he was one of the few people who saw it really positively that I didn't have a PhD that I had gone out and become a scholar of Buddhism blazing my own trail so to speak my research that I've done all this research and humanitarian work making my own rules and not being a part of the academic system cuz I was just some people the first thing they say if they read my resume was why aren't you in a ph.d program good question squirrely there's some ways in which I relate positively myself this guy's philosophy and I can also see that you know he came out of that kind of golden generation in computer programming when you could have a great career in computer programming even if even if you dropped at a high school when formal credentials didn't matter that much in computer science computer programming especially in software he learned if you taught yourself how to do computer programming you'd have a career to what extent that's still true today is debatable it's not what we're talking about in this video but you could see the way that sense of specialness and I don't know anti-establishment independence fit very well with being a successful computer programmer in the era when the internet was first emerging in the era when systems like UNIX and Linux and those kinds of independent anti anti-establishment vaguely anarchic projects were taking off he was really part of that that golden generation that's now now come and gone so he raised his kids with these expectations of themselves in this perception of society and he imparted to them his cynicism about the prospect of getting things like a like a PhD because what was interesting about this is when I met my ex-wife when we met for the first time she was precisely enrolled in a ph.d and it was specifically a PhD in anthropology before she entered into that ph.d program I think exactly what she was struggling was the contrast between this sense of specialness exceptionalism and the mundane reality of being a waitress I think already at that time she was a jazz singer as a hobby she had some other interests in the arts but she did waitressing she worked in a bookmark Factory she went through various long-term relationships with boyfriends who became ex boyfriends she had a very normal life in many ways so this idea that she's not normal that she's extraordinary and that she didn't need higher education to distinguish herself and so on obviously um you know there was an incongruous contrast between the etiology of her childhood and what had to be inevitably the etiology of her for adult years and she had a series of conversations with someone at work as I recall this is when she was working as a waitress and I forget if it was just one of her regular customers her co-worker well the diet had a series of conversations with her and he said to her one day based on her interests and her character based on I've been God to getting to know her a little bit he said well look you know I know you're interested in going back to university and getting a PhD in something anthropology anthropology would really suit you and she looked into it a little bit I assume with a few Google searches what have you and that was the path she decided to take now I mean we live in a very peculiar world this way the decisions of just a few people created that opportunity for her and I later met some of the professors who made those decisions and in case you think there's any higher power or grand scheme or divine plan or what have you know I mean it's it's really random it's really arbitrary it's not that it's random it's that it's arbitrary comes down to a face-to-face meeting with one professor on one day and whether or not he's in a good mood of whether or not you tell what he wants to hear about your research interests and so forth um it's a little bit scary just how arbitrary that that can be and she was ultimately given the extraordinary opportunity to get a PhD at Cambridge University now when I met her she was already at the stage of being totally disillusioned with that PhD having lost all faith in the institution all sense of direction and motivation in terms of the content of the research she was doing and she had more or less made up her mind to drop out of the PhD or to delay it for many years and again this probably partly reflected you know her own upbringing that she was armed with cynicism going into this but I think that really is a mass phenomenon definitely in in British academia that people make serious sacrifices and devote themselves to higher learning and then when they arrive in the institution [Music] it is simply not what they were expecting there it falls short of their hopes and that may be that they're disappointed in the content of what they're learning it may be that at this point with the particular people who are their professors in positions of authority and there's no negotiating with the authority figures in these cases either you have to conform or we have to get out that's definitely how it is in elite British you have a British education whether or not it's a little bit different where you are if you're watching this in Greece or similar South East Asia that's that's not more time to talk about Cambridge and Oxford and they're there in some ways a particularly extreme form of Western English language academia that does indeed rely on a lot of flattery and bootlicking and what-have-you it's an ultra conformist atmosphere at the same time that it ostensibly praises and valorizes kind of Socratic values of free discourse and questioning my ex-wife and I both receive an email that was about one sentence long and it was an email from a gray-haired why man living in Kunming China he did have a PhD he had a PhD from Hong Kong University and he had inherited enough money to survive at least in China indefinitely he did not live in wealth at all he had a small apartment in Kunming and I'll always remember his apartment in a parallel life this could have been me he had almost no furniture in the whole apartment so it is an apartment large enough to raise a family and in China and several of the rooms of the apartment yet no bookshelves he just had books lined up along the wall the edges of the walls all the way around the apartment so he could walk through the apartment and find the book he needed for his research so he was like he was an eccentric intellectual doing his own research and working on some combination of books he was also to some extent a true believing communist or Marxist which made him a bit of a natural enemy of mine this guy had met us both and he sent a one-line email to both of us and said hey you two should get to know each other you shouldn't beat up some time and later on we actually met him face to face and we think that we said of an email because later on when it was clear we were gonna get married and so he said well it's all it's all thanks to you know that we we met up and started talking so that was the start of an email correspondence with her at a time when my life was going through dramatic changes and I think what's really worth emphasizing is that in the months that followed immediately I became the motivation and direction for her research for her putting her effort back into that PhD seriously and I mean you know obviously if she were telling her side of the story she might remember that differently but most people have known not just my girlfriend's like not just intimate friendships and lovers it's not as if they've grown up around a whole lot of examples of what it means to be an intellectual you know and the examples you have in front of you might be really peculiar people on television it might be Connie West you know seriously what what does it mean to be an intellectual they're probably a few figures you've seen interviewed on the news like you know for me playwrights and artists I mean you okay Pablo Picasso it's a horrible example what does it mean to be an intellectual if you think it's living like Pablo Picasso that's a terrible example so in meeting me um I became an example and a symbol of a lot of things that she had been looking for in her own life and she was hoping to find in that ph.d program she didn't find I also became the answer to a lot of questions that she had about communist I'm sure because she was doing research on Communist China but also the Buddhism about of a lot of meaningful questions that were going on in her mind and that she wasn't getting answers to within the hothouse of of Western academia so from the first time we met there was a lot to talk about it was a romantic and dramatic meeting we both she actually ended up taking an even longer bus journey than I did I think I took the bus from Bangkok Thailand all the way to the end chan laos and then from Laos all the way up to China up to up to you nan China we met in the small town of Jing Hong and her trip even though it was all within China she took a trip from extremely remote mountainous area of me giong to come in and then took a bus from Kunming down to Jing Hong and why did we both make this extraordinary sacrifice of time and in those days riding long distance buses in China and said that it was not comfortable it was really heroin to go this distance she thought in terms of the schedule of her PhD that she only had a brief window of time would it be possible for her to meet me face to face then she'd have to fly back to England and fly back again a significant time later so we thought we had only a brief would have opportunity we ended up having couple of months together so you know we met we fell in love we had tremendous physical chemistry you know I'm sorry but to be blunt I think this is part of the story that has to be included I was the best sex she'd ever had in her life by far it really changed the way she thought about herself not just as intellectual but also you know in terms of her sexuality in a row you know relations with men it gave her a new perspective on all that stuff and you know from the very first week we spent together there were a lot of red flags about what was wrong with her and how this relationship would inevitably end there were a lot of red flags in her behavior there were things she said and did that were frankly crazy and they didn't just go on for five minutes or 15 minutes in many cases they went on for hours and hours and why did I overlook those red flags um someone from the outside might say well I Zoll you thought this woman was kind of good on paper that's a that's an old-fashioned and evening you know she's in a ph.d program she has a respectable education therefore she can't be crazy or she can't be dishonest which is the real one of the real problems here or she can't be a malignant narcissist so these feather earth he's other issues that were to come up in the the course the relationship and the divorce you know you must have just been kind of seduced by the idea that this woman was exactly what you were not this woman was formally enrolled in a PhD and getting the credentials that you yourself lack and that's still now in 2018 I lack that she was a sort of she was a formal intellectual and scholar whereas I was an informal autodidact self defined self masculine that was not what it was at all there were really serious red flags from the first week we spent together but I chose to overlook those red flags because I could recognize that from the first day we spent together this woman was falling in love with me she gave us a while she completely fall in love with me that she was in a situation where she was in a state of extreme emotional distress or whatever did the pressure she fell Thunder I could see that I mean for example the first time we talked about Buddhism she was trying so hard to say what she thought I wanted to hear about Buddhism and you know again this is something that's happened repeatedly in my life there's a moment I'm certain she remembers it also where we were both sitting on on the couch we've been together for a few days but it was definitely still the first week the relationship and she said to me you know when she was really being sincere looking in my eyes she said to me you know I feel like we should just kind of get rid of the you know we should get rid of the pretense of having a you know a period of of dating or something you know I want to marry you I think you know thank you and make sure you should get married and I laughed in a kind of cool and detached way I said you know there are some questions that I think you should leave until the second week of the relationship that was our first week together and she was completely head over heels in love with me and you can tell even from that anecdote it's not that there was a big gap in age between us you know we have three years difference in age it wasn't there was a big gap in experience between us if anything I think she was more experienced in love and relationships than I was but I was more detached and clear thinking about the relationship and she was you know completely utterly in love with me so the positive side of how I met and fell in love with my ex-wife is precisely that from the first day from the first week there was the potential there for a partnership to get so much done in terms of research education learning having a life where each part of the relationship each partner is stimulating the other to accomplish more to get more done in their lives the level of debate and mutual scrutiny we could have where I could read her world and criticize it and tell her productively how to improve it and vice versa you know the potential for us to be in that sense a power couple not obviously not in terms of making making money I think both of us really felt it and each of us provided for the other what we had been looking for in our friends and colleagues for years but that our friends and colleagues in reality had utterly failed to provide us with so with the with the significant caveat that from the very first week there were red flags there were really serious red flags that I was putting my trust in someone who was not trustworthy someone I could never trust and should never trust and that I chose to overlook those red flags with that footnote having been stated the relationship started off on this incredibly positive and optimistic note and with all of the bad and terrible things you're gonna learn the other videos in this series I can say that for both of us it was tremendously intellectually stimulating a productive period of our lives a lot of misery a lot of heartbreak a lot of other negative things to say but for me I made the transition from being a scholar of Buddhism to you know switched from learning lotion to learning Chinese to learning cambodian to learn increase flirting a jib way First Nations university and all these other transitions all these other dramatic reversals of fortune for me I wrote and presented the lectures that I did at Cambridge and Oxford in England I did all these all this original research it was also a period of time for me bringing together and writing and publishing the research had done in the years leading up to it is it tremendously and for her it was the period of time when she brought together and wrote up the research that was in her PhD thesis that in brief is the story of how I am i exploit met and fell in love