So I was watching Married at First Sight the other night, which for me counts as work, and one little moment stuck with me that I can’t shake.

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Last week I wrote about all the things I do as a dad. The responses were informative. A lot of people were joking. Some of them were not. The takeaway was the same either way. “Cool, Nick. And what does your wife do? Laundry?”

Here’s the part that should embarrass me more than it does. I get praised for being involved. I mention that I cook dinner and people react like I pulled someone out of a river. No one’s ever praised my wife for being involved with our children. It’s assumed. She’s the mom. The floor is the ceiling.

So I want to write down what she actually does, mostly for me.

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Somewhere in the last couple years we decided that a woman who likes making dinner needs a label: tradwife.

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The best thing a therapist ever did for me was suggest I might not need him.

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A few months into our engagement, my wife and I gave couples therapy a shot. Early on, our therapist asked us how connected we felt. Not how much we loved each other or whether we were happy. “How connected do you feel to each other?”

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I always wanted to be a parent. That was never a question for me. But I didn’t have any real sense of what it would actually feel like day to day. I never assumed it would be terrible. I just didn’t know, the way you can’t know a thing until you’re standing inside it.

When River came, loving her was easy. What I didn’t see coming was how much I’d love the parts I’d been told to dread. The dark early mornings, the unglamorous middle-of-the-night feedings.

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A Bachelor producer has a book coming out, and I spent a chunk of an episode this week explaining why I think what she did is so wrong. She was the lead producer on Peter Weber’s season of The Bachelor. Fans spent years theorizing if he was secretly caught up in a complicated romance with the woman producing him.

Her version is that the connection was deep and real and platonic, that she was more open with Peter than she’d been with a boyfriend of five years, that the lines got blurred. Peter, by her own admission, is not happy the book exists.

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I want to be careful here, because I don’t care much about the gossip. The dynamic between them as producer and lead is the real story, and it happens to be the single most fascinating and least understood relationship in all of reality television.

Ask any serious Bachelor fan what they actually want to know and they’ll skip right past who kissed who in the fantasy suite. They want to know what the producers were doing the whole time. How much of it was real? Who was steering the ship?

So let me explain it from the inside, because I’ve been the lead before.

A love competition show is stranger than it looks from your couch. Whether it’s a mansion handing out roses or a villa in Fiji where the whole cast re-couples every few days, the real product is a controlled environment geared toward romance. The moment you join one, you sign away an enormous amount of your normal life.

Your phone is gone, or filtered down to the texts production wants you to receive. Your family is gone. The friend you’d normally call at 2 am to ask, “Am I crazy? Is this insane?” is unreachable for the length of production.

You agree to all of it on purpose, the same way people agreed to walk into the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the producers become something like wardens. They control your time, your information, your sleep, and your access to other humans.

Here’s the part that’s almost impossible to explain to people who’ve never experienced this. You trust them anyway. You have to.

The closest comparison I’ve found is a whitewater rafting guide. You climb into a boat with a stranger and they deliberately steer you straight into the scariest water on the river. That’s not a malfunction. That’s the trip. You paid for the rapids. You let them throw you around because you trust that the same person aiming you at the danger is the person who’s going to get you out the other side, dry and laughing. The guide can do almost anything to you inside that boat and you’ll allow it.

That’s the relationship. On every Bachelor season, you get a producer assigned to you. For the leads and main characters, that person becomes your therapist, your strategist, your only honest mirror, and your lifeline all at once. They’re the last voice you hear before a rose ceremony or a re-coupling, and the first one after. When your gut says something is wrong, they are frequently the one telling you your gut is wrong, and because they’ve earned your trust, you believe them. You let them talk you out of your own instincts. You do it willingly. That trust is what makes the impossible stuff possible.

None of what happens on these shows is normal. It is not normal to date a dozen people at once and call it falling in love, or to share a bed every night with someone the same producers might split you up from next week by flying in a whole villa of new singles built to tempt you. It’s also not normal to spend a fantasy suite night with one person while someone else you’re falling for sits in a separate hotel room, fully aware of exactly what you’re doing tonight, mentally preparing for their own turn with you tomorrow.

And somehow everyone involved is more or less okay with it. You’re okay with it because the environment grants you permission to be. You’ve agreed to suspend the rules of regular life, and the producer is the one holding the permission slip.

This is why I love this conversation on the show, and why most takes on it are so bad. Almost all of it is gray. Producers manipulate. That’s the job. They withhold information, plant ideas, engineer scenarios, and nudge you toward the version of yourself that makes better television. People love to call that evil. I mostly don’t. Everybody in that boat wants the same thing, a show people can’t stop watching, and the contestant wants that too.

Some people come out of these shows beloved by millions. Some come out genuinely hated. And a strange number of both, if they speak honestly, wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. The manipulation is baked in, and most of us walked in knowing that.

The clearest example I have is my own. By the end of my second run as the runner-up on The Bachelorette, I had been through the finale before and I knew exactly how the last week would go. So I begged the producers not to march me all the way to the end if they knew I wasn’t getting picked. Don’t walk me out there to get my heart handed back to me on camera if the ending is already written. They looked me in the eye, and then they did exactly that. They let me go to the final, believing something that wasn’t true, and I got destroyed in front of the entire country when my proposal was rejected.

I was furious. I thought they were monsters for it. But they were completely right to do it. That moment was the first time the audience saw me as a person, instead of the villain they’d been sold for two seasons. It cracked me open in a way I never would have allowed myself to if I’d seen it coming. Without that night, there would’ve been no Bachelor in Paradise, no Bachelor season for me, no Viall Files, no essay you’re reading right now, none of the life I’ve built since. They lied to me and let me hit the bottom, all while knowing I would survive the fall. They were right about that too.

That is the trust. That is what you hand these people, the keys to your worst night and the faith that they’re aiming you at something better on the other side of it.

So here’s where I stop being generous, because there is a line, and it isn’t gray at all.

A producer cannot use that trust for their own benefit. Full stop. The whole arrangement depends on the contestant believing the person steering them is steering them toward the show and toward their own survival, not toward the producer themselves.

The producer’s literal job is to keep a lead’s heart open so he’ll keep pursuing the cast. If that same producer is quietly becoming the most important relationship in the lead’s life, the problem stops being a blurred line and becomes a broken machine. You cannot tell someone their gut is wrong forty times and then turn out to be the thing their gut should have been protecting them from.

The timing possibilities make it so much worse. Imagine if this came out in the middle of filming Peter’s season. It would have been catastrophic, and nearly all of the blame would have landed on him, because the public doesn’t know who these producers are. They have no name and no face to the audience, so they get to slip back into the dark while the lead stands out there alone, absorbing a scandal he had the least amount of power to control. For him, it would have been devastating.

That’s the part of her framing I can’t get past. “The lines became blurred” is a very passive way to describe something that, by her own telling, was already well underway. She’s said she was more open with Peter than she’d been with a partner of five years. That reads like a confession with the volume turned down.

There is no innocent version of this story. Once you understand what that producer-and-lead trust is actually like, the question stops being, “Was there a line crossed?” and becomes, “How far was the line crossed?”

The gentlest read on this situation is that genuine romantic feeling happened between a producer and the man she was paid to keep emotionally open for other people. That’s the floor. Everything underneath it is worse, and there’s a lot of room down there, depending on how intimate it got and how much of the story still hasn’t surfaced. You’re picking a degree of wrong either way.

She can frame it as a love story. It should read as a betrayal to everyone else, because the contestant had been stripped of every tool he’d normally use to catch it. No phone. No friends. No outside read. Just the one person he’d been told to trust above everyone else, who turned out to be the one he needed protecting from.

Forget the romance. What’s worth sitting with is how much power one invisible person holds over someone who agreed to go in blind and trust them. We spend all our time watching the people handing out roses and getting re-coupled in the villa. But the most powerful person on these shows is never on camera.

There’s a point I don’t want to lose in all the snark, my own included. While I’ve been building a case against one producer, there’s a villa in Fiji running this very week, full of people getting re-coupled and dumped and pulled apart for our entertainment. Casa Amor just detonated half their relationships a few days ago. And the moment any of them does something messy or dumb or human, we are merciless. We screenshot it, turn it into a meme, and feel a little better about our own lives because at least we didn’t do it on television.

I get it. I’ve done it. But every one of those people, the leads handing out roses and the islanders waiting to be picked, walked into the most controlled and exposed environment and handed a stranger the keys to their worst moments so the rest of us would have something to watch. They deserve to know how dangerous that trust can become in the wrong hands. They also deserve a little grace for being brave enough, or reckless enough, to let us see them that raw at all.

Mock the show all you want. Just don’t lose the human beings inside it.

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I’ve had writer’s block all week, which is a frustrating way to come into Father’s Day.

I sat down trying to find something profound. Some piece of fatherly advice. Some lesson I’ve learned in the two-plus years since River was born. I came up mostly empty.

I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I don’t have a tidy revelation to hand over this week.

What I do have is a realization that’s been sitting with me for a while.

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This season on Love Island USA, Melanie has quickly become one of the most important people in the villa.

There was a moment where she mentioned, more or less, that she worries people just get sick of her. She said it plainly, no dressing it up, on a dating show with cameras in every corner. A lot of us watching felt that one in the chest, myself included. It’s about as honest a thing as a person can say out loud.

In the first week, we watched Melanie realize she messed up with Sincere. Then we watched her do the harder part. Apologize. Listen. Actually take the criticism instead of swatting it away. In the span of a few episodes she’s shown the whole arc, the part where you do things, and the part where you catch yourself and adjust.

Plenty of people will tell you Melanie hasn’t actually changed, that the adjusting lasted all of one scene. Maybe so. But she tried, out loud, with everyone watching. Early as it is, that’s already more willingness to change than we’ve seen from Sincere, who keeps talking himself out of acknowledging the truth so he can keep everyone happy.

The reason Melanie matters more than the drama she’s generating is because she’s willing to show the second half on camera, where most of us won’t even show it to ourselves.

I’ve spent most of my adult life learning things about myself, and not in the inspirational-poster way. The realizations don’t stop. You figure something out in your twenties, refine it in your thirties, and have it overturned by something in your forties. And the people who tell you they’ve got it all sorted are usually the ones you’d least want to ask. Nothing I’m about to say arrived as an epiphany. It gets clearer slowly, and I’m still in the middle of working it out.

If the only version of me you’ve encountered came from a reality show, a podcast clip, or thirty seconds of footage with the context stripped out, you’ve got a slice. Even if you’ve listened to every episode of the podcast, you’ve still got a version, the one that shows up to interview someone or banter with a guest. That’s a real version. It’s just not the same one my wife sees, or my daughter, or the friends I’ve had for twenty years. People get a fragment and run with it. Some of those fragments were close to true. Some weren’t. All of them feel small next to my actual life.

My actual life looks more like this. I’ve always wanted to be liked. Thought of as kind, warm, a good guy. I’ve also been fortunate with the people who matter most. Close friends, family, the relationships you actually live inside of, the ones that count. I’ve usually had those, and held onto them.

The rest has been bumpier. I’m a tall guy with a resting face that doesn’t read as warm and an in-my-head personality that often lands as cold or aloof on people who don’t know me. There’s been a gap my whole life between how I want to come across and how I sometimes do. Reality TV didn’t invent that gap. It just amplified it. Suddenly the person across the room misreading my expression was a whole audience. Some of what they saw was unfair. Some of it, honestly, was fair.

I’ve spent years going back and forth between two ways of handling it. One way says, “Their opinion of me is none of my business. Be confident in who you are, in your decisions, in your boundaries, and let the rest go.” The other way says, “This matters, and there might be a version of me that lands differently if I’m willing to look honestly.” I’ve come to think you need both. The whole game is figuring out which one to reach for and when.

In high school I was the kind of confident that made people uncomfortable. I said what I thought, did things I wasn’t qualified for, and when someone told me I’d come on too strong, I usually heard “you don’t understand me” and kept going. Some of it was charisma. Some of it was the kind of confidence you only have before life has properly happened to you.

I’m not that person anymore, and I’m glad. Getting humbled helped. So did getting older, and therapy. What helped most was learning that “you rubbed me the wrong way” is information worth taking seriously, even when you’re sure you’re right. More self-awareness has made me a better version of myself.

Take that kid in high school. That was my baseline with the dial cranked all the way up. We all have a default mode, the meal you’d make if no one told you what they wanted for dinner, the thing you’d just naturally cook. Some of us run spicier than people would prefer. Some sweeter. Some are an acquired taste, or a lot to take in one sitting.

Here’s the thing about that meal. You’re really good at it. You’ve made it a hundred times. It’s where you feel most yourself, and there’s something almost sacred about it, the version of you that doesn’t have to perform for anybody.

But the moment you cook for one other person, the math changes. I love spicy pasta. My wife, less so. My daughter, less still. If I want the three of us to enjoy dinner together, I’m pulling back on the pepper. Not because there’s anything wrong with my pasta. Because there are two other people at the table.

Cook for ten, and the math gets harder. Cook for a hundred, and almost every original choice gets dialed back to something that won’t offend anyone. The cook ends up making something nobody, including the cook, can really taste anymore. That’s the cost of trying to please everyone.

And on the other end, there’s the chef who refuses substitutions, the one whose menu says “no modifications, the dish is the dish.” Maybe they’re right, maybe it really is art and tampering would ruin it. But if you’ve tried to order at a place like that and you’re allergic to something, you’ve probably walked out thinking the chef was a bit much before you ever tasted the food. Your boundaries are someone else’s inconvenience, and both of those can be true at once. The boundary protects something real for you, and the person bumping into it still isn’t wrong to find it annoying. They might stay in your life because they put up with it. Or they might quietly stop coming back. That’s the cost of refusing to adjust at all.

What I keep noticing, in myself, in the people closest to me, and in culture, is how good we’ve gotten at avoiding adjusting our behavior. We have more vocabulary than ever for why we are the way we are. Frames, labels, diagnoses, language for every behavior. And somewhere in all that abundance, a question that used to be hard to avoid got easy to avoid. The question is, “Am I the problem?”

Not in the dramatic, self-flagellating way. That’s its own kind of escape, and we’ll get to it. I mean it the practical, uncomfortable way, if you actually want anything to change. The relationship that didn’t work. The friendship that cooled off without a fight. The job that didn’t land. And then the same pattern shows up again, different people, different city, different age, and the only honest move left is to wonder whether the common variable is you.

I’m probably more prone to the question than most. I’m an in-my-head person. By my count, the person I’ve had the most conversations with in my life is myself. Imagined versions of conversations I’m about to have, post-mortems of ones I just had, late-night reruns of the past week. Some of it is useful. A lot of it isn’t. And the very thing I thought was helping me figure myself out, all the reflection, all the vocabulary, all the work, has sometimes done the opposite. It’s let me describe myself with more and more precision while changing less and less.

The vocabulary that helped me grow had, at scale, started doing something different. Boundaries, which used to mean “I won’t be treated this way,” became whatever you wanted them to be. Trauma expanded to cover any difficulty. “Doing the work” stopped being a verb and became more like an identity, something you are rather than something you do. It’s the language equivalent of truffle oil. Once it was rare and meant something. Now it’s on grocery store popcorn. The labels were everywhere. The change they once described was harder to find.

And that vocabulary works on each of us differently, depending on how we’re already inclined to avoid the cooking. There are at least four ways I see it go. Four kitchens I’ve stood in myself, or watched friends stand in.

There’s the cook with no baseline. The one who never just serves their own dish. Always asking “do you want me to make sure…”, anticipating preferences before anyone’s stated them, dialing the spice down so far that nothing offends and nothing distinguishes. The modern vocabulary fits this one neatly. “Service is my love language. I’m an empath. I just give a lot.” Sometimes that’s true. Underneath, though, it’s usually less love-for-others than discomfort-with-self, the kind of avoidance where you never have to find out whether your actual cooking would’ve been good enough.

Then there’s the cook who won’t substitute. The opposite problem. The dish is the dish. “Those are my boundaries. That’s a ‘them’ problem. I’m too old to change. I’m just being authentic.” Any one of those can be true. Stacked together, they make a really good raincoat. The more language you’ve got, the easier it gets to make sure no critique ever reaches skin. And fewer and fewer people come back to order off the menu.

A third cook means well and just doesn’t taste as they go. They cook with real care. They don’t notice the spice level is melting people’s faces off until someone reaches for the water pitcher, and even then they’re sometimes surprised. The defense, when someone finally says something, is almost always true. “I wasn’t even aware.” And they weren’t. That’s the actual problem. The new vocabulary is generous with frames here too. There’s a whole range of diagnoses now, most of them centered on how our brains work differently, and they’re easy to reach for to explain why we were too far inside our own heads to notice the people in front of us. A lot of those frames are real, and they’ve helped people (me included) feel seen instead of broken, which matters. But knowing the soup is over-salted doesn’t unsalt the soup. The label can be true and still not get you the friendship, the promotion, the partner.

The last cook can’t leave the kitchen at all. The dish is never quite ready. They keep tasting, adjusting, second-guessing, starting over. The seasoning at 2 a.m. is still wrong. This is the version of avoidance most likely to get praised right now, because from the outside it looks like depth. “I’m doing the work. I need to figure myself out before I can show up. I’m working on it.” Sometimes that’s all true. But often the work is standing in for the actual showing up, and the meal never makes it to the table. The people who were going to eat with you eventually find somewhere else to eat.

Most of us, on a given day, are some mix of these. They aren’t types you graduate from. They’re moods you fall into. And what they have in common, the part that’s hardest to admit, is that all four are the same avoidance in different aprons. They’re all dodging the boring middle thing. Serve your dish, taste as you go, take the honest feedback, adjust without disappearing, keep cooking.

I know the chef-who-won’t-substitute from the inside. The version of me that bulldozed through feedback at seventeen wasn’t free, he was just standing at the opposite end of the same avoidance. Sometimes the critique really is a “them” problem. It just can’t be your default setting. If everyone in your life keeps gently arriving at the same observation about you, take it in. Not as a verdict. As information.

I know the cook-who-doesn’t-taste from the inside too. A while back I ran into someone I knew loosely who’d just moved to LA. Making conversation, I asked where he’d landed and whether he had a roommate. I had roommates when I first moved out here, and they’d been pivotal. Kept me from feeling lonely, grounded me, helped me make the city work. That’s where the question came from. He didn’t hear it that way. He posted about it later, and I found out he’d taken it as a judgment, like I was implying a roommate was beneath the stage of life he should be in. But that doesn’t really matter. He heard what he heard, and to him, in that moment, I came across as condescending. He’s almost certainly not the only person I’ve left an interaction like that with. He’s just one of the few I found out about.

People have been telling me variations of this my whole life, that I can come across condescending, blunt, off-putting, weird. A girlfriend, fifteen years ago, called me socially inept, and I genuinely didn’t know what she meant. People have offered me labels over the years, and some of them carry truth. But the labels can’t fix the gap. The slow lesson, harder to learn than it should have been, is this. Intent doesn’t get the last word. Impact does, whether I think that’s fair or not.

And meanwhile, in all four kitchens, cooks are quietly getting lost in the sauce. The text doesn’t get sent, because what if it’s anxious attachment. The pushback doesn’t happen, because what if that makes you the toxic one. The thing doesn’t get written or applied for or said out loud, because what if you need to do more inner work first, what if your boundaries are being crossed. It’s always “what if.” A whole generation pre-screening every impulse through a clinical filter, instead of just living.

Here’s what I’d want to say to anyone who’s been recognizing themselves. The work isn’t the replaying, and it isn’t the vocabulary. The work is the thing you keep doing.

The people we envy, the ones who actually start the company or ask the person out or post the song, aren’t, on average, more qualified than the rest of us. They haven’t necessarily done more inner work, some a lot less. And a lot of us have spent real energy being quietly condescending about exactly that (“they’re not very introspective, they don’t really know themselves”). It’s worth asking what that condescension has been protecting.

What I’m reaching for is something more like this. Care how you land, and keep going anyway. Taste the food while you cook, fix the seasoning, and still get the meal on the table. Care and action were supposed to be working together the whole time.

None of this is “stop being self-aware.” It’s not “stop listening to feedback” or “skip therapy.” Self-awareness is supposed to make you more capable of acting, not less. When it starts doing the opposite, it slowly stops being self-awareness and turns into a very comfortable place to hide. Confidence can pull the same move. The version that lets you stop noticing how you land was never confidence. It’s refusal in a louder voice.

If I had to point to what’s actually worked, in the friendships I’m proudest of, in the relationships that lasted, I’d point to that balance. Believing in myself enough to show up and go after what I wanted, to give the tough love and say the hard thing instead of letting it sit. And in equal balance, the empathy to notice how all of that was landing, and adjust. Not as a performance. Because the people I cared about deserved the version of me that had adjusted, not the one that pre-screened itself into silence, and not the one that decided how it landed wasn’t their business.

That’s the only thing I’d really claim to know. And honestly, if my wife reads this, she’ll probably think it shows a level of self-awareness I don’t actually deserve. She lives with me. She’d know. She’s the one who notices when I’ve drifted back into the default I should know better than to keep landing in by now. In an intimate relationship, it’s the small things that wear people down. The same forgotten request, the same little pattern. What’s helped me most, when I can manage it, is trying not to hear her reminders as criticism. Because they almost always help. The whole dance of that is probably its own essay.

The balance is the difference between people staying close to you and people slowly drifting off. And it’s almost never an accident.

The places this matters most aren’t abstract. They’re the relationships you already have. The romantic partner. The friend who’s been quieter than usual. A parent you love and keep not calling. The kid you keep meaning to be more present with. That coworker you’ve quietly decided is the actual problem.

If you’re out of balance in any of them, tilting toward the version of you that’s stopped showing up, or the version that’s stopped noticing how you land, that’s the place to start. Not the work, in some abstract sense. The actual relationship. The actual person. Find the balance there. You’ll lose it and find it again. That’s just what the work is.

But the people who stay close to you over a lifetime are usually the ones who can feel you trying.

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Wanting them to care is the signal that you’re still stuck. But the way out is quieter than you think.

A few weeks ago, Ciara went to the comments and claimed West slept with Jen Fessler. Everyone got busy deciding whether the rumor was true. I went somewhere else with it. It reminded me of a time I’d been hurt by someone, and all the mental gymnastics I was doing. The reading-into of every post and every silence, the small ways I kept bending myself out of shape just to keep them interested, and the trying to convince myself they still cared.

That was the tell. And it’s something I think just about anyone who’s dated, or is dating right now, knows from the inside. It’s the feeling of being stuck.

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I have a two-year-old daughter. And I have twin girls on the way.

Which means watching the Ciara, West, and Amanda saga unfold hits differently than it might for someone just here for the drama. Less analysis, more, “I’m going to hear some version of this repeated back to me one day.”

On my podcast, we break these stories down. We react, we dissect. It’s messy, it’s entertaining, and sometimes the reactions get a little hyperbolic, probably because it’s relatable. But sitting with this one, I kept drifting away from the gossip and toward something more practical.

What would I actually want my daughters to understand when they inevitably recognize themselves in a story like this?

Because they will. At some point, each of them will meet someone who doesn’t choose them the way they deserve to be chosen. They’ll find themselves more invested than the person they’re seeing, whether that’s actually true or just how it feels, stuck in something that feels real but never quite gets named.

And when that happens, the specifics won’t matter. It won’t matter whether there’s an Amanda, whether it’s public or private, whether anyone ever called it a relationship or just “whatever this is.” Pain is pain. What Ciara is going through, the confusion, the exhausting effort to make sense of something that never settles, is something almost everyone who dates will feel in one form or another.

The Situationship Trap

At the center of this is something modern dating has completely normalized… the situationship. And situationships don’t start as situationships. They start as potential, two people taking things slow, not rushing labels, which in theory is healthy. But moving slowly toward something is not the same as standing still and telling yourself you’re making progress.

Because at some point (three months, six months, sometimes longer) something shifts. One person quietly decides, “I would choose this.” And that’s when everything changes. One person starts investing more, hoping for clarity, carrying something the other person isn’t.

Here’s the trap. All the things we say matter in relationships, consistency, showing up, being present, those aren’t advanced skills. They’re the baseline. What the internet has taken to calling the “bare minimum.”

So when you stop using those as the measuring stick just because nothing’s officially defined, you’ve quietly lowered your standard at the exact moment the situation deserved more of your attention, not less. And you’ve told yourself it was patience.

What Being a Good Partner Can’t Protect You From

Ciara, from what we’ve seen, is someone who shows up. She values connection, wants friendship as a foundation, and is willing to invest in something real without waiting for guarantees. None of that is naïve. It’s what being a good partner looks like.

But being a great partner doesn’t protect you from being in the wrong dynamic. When you combine genuine empathy with inconsistency on the other side, you don’t get balance. You get ambiguity. And ambiguity is where people stay longer than they should.

On West: A Certain Kind of Weakness

West isn’t really the point of this story. But he’s part of a pattern worth talking about.

He’s likable. He’s emotionally capable in moments. He can connect, he can show up when something feels intense or meaningful. He also clearly has options and moves through the world like someone who knows it.

There’s a version of masculinity that shows up constantly in modern dating. Not overtly toxic. Just weak. And I’m going to use the word “weak,” because I think we’ve gotten too comfortable calling it confusion.

It takes very little strength to say, “I’m not ready for a relationship right now.” It takes considerably more to act like it. What we see instead is something more convenient. Setting just enough expectation to protect yourself, while continuing to engage in ways that keep the other person invested. The emotional access without accountability. The flirtation that lives in the gap between what’s been said and what’s being implied.

I don’t think that’s confusion. I think it’s self-serving, and I think most people doing it know that on some level.

And this particular version is worth paying attention to, because these men don’t always show up the way you’d expect. They can be emotionally fluent. Therapy-literate. They know how to make their own emotional state the center of the conversation. For someone like Ciara, someone who genuinely wants to honor the feelings of people she cares about, that can be disarming. It can look like depth. It can feel like honesty.

And emotional intelligence can be faked, or at least borrowed. Sometimes what it looks like is really just selfishness that’s gotten good at talking about itself.

A grown man is allowed to be confused about his feelings. That’s human. What matters is the pattern, and the pattern here is hard to ignore. This dynamic never shifted. Ciara was always the one waiting, always the one with more on the line. West was always in control of the outcome, and yet somehow the framing was that he was the uncertain one. “I don’t even know if she wants to be friends with me.” That’s a way of holding power while appearing not to.

And the clearest sign of it is what he chose not to do. Even when West said the right words, his behavior told a different story, and behavior is louder than words. The flirtation stayed. The emotional intimacy stayed. So the words started meaning less than what was actually happening between them. That gap, between what someone says and how they actually show up, is where hope lives. And when hope keeps getting fed like that, a little at a time, it’s really hard to walk away from.

So instead of closing the door clearly, he said what soothed her, what kept it open, what protected his access without requiring him to choose. And at a certain point, especially as a grown man, that’s a choice.

What Ego Does to You After

If my daughters ever find themselves in something like this, the question won’t just be what happened. It’ll be how to move forward, how to take something painful and confusing and actually learn from it without getting stuck in it.

And part of that answer starts with something we don’t talk about enough, something that can either help you move on or quietly keep you exactly where you are.

Ego.

Ego gets a bad reputation, but it’s not inherently negative. It’s what makes you believe in yourself, what pushes you toward things that feel out of reach. But in relationships, it doesn’t just show up when you’re chasing something. It shows up when you’re not chosen.

And instead of saying, “This isn’t right for me,” it asks, “Why isn’t this working? What do I need to prove?”

Without realizing it, you stop evaluating the situation and start trying to win it. Most people who get stuck aren’t blind to the truth. They just can’t stand it.

And let’s be honest with each other for a second, because nobody reading this is innocent. We have all, at some point, taken a perfectly clear situation and spent an absolutely heroic amount of energy trying to turn it into a different one. We’ve drafted the text. We’ve workshopped it with friends. We’ve assigned meaning to a single emoji. I’m not above any of this. I once mistook “I’m just really busy right now” for a personal challenge. The ego doesn’t want the truth. It wants the rematch.

And eventually there’s nowhere left to hide, because West is choosing. Just not Ciara.

This is where it gets hard.

Someone not choosing you is one thing. Someone choosing somebody else, someone in your world, someone who’s supposed to be a friend, is a different kind of wound. It doesn’t just confuse you. It guts you.

And if that’s you right now, you already know what your head does next. You go hunting. What’s wrong with me? What didn’t I have? What could I have done differently? The mind decides you weren’t enough, then goes looking for evidence to prove it. Put another name in the picture and it gets louder, because now there’s someone specific to measure yourself against.

I can tell you from experience, it’s a dead end. Those questions walk you away from the truth, not toward it. The truth almost never has anything to do with who’s better, or what she has that you don’t. It’s just someone making a choice about where they are. And where they are has nothing to do with what you’re worth.

And here’s the part nobody really talks about. Moving on is a lonely road, even when people are around. Because if misery loves company, your friends love it even more. I don’t mean that cruelly. It’s just human nature. People show up for your pain more easily than your success. When something great happens to a friend, there’s that quiet internal comparison. When a friend is hurting, there’s none of that. You just pour in.

And that outpouring of love and validation when you’re down can get addictive, which makes moving on harder than it should be. Healing means giving up the spotlight along with the hurt.

There’s a moment in this saga that captures it perfectly. Andy Cohen publicly called Ciara one of the most beautiful women on Bravo. She should be told that all the time, but it’s also the kind of thing that only gets said out loud in a moment like this one. The pain created the opening for it. The praise is real, but part of you knows some of it only showed up because you were hurting, and that when you’re finally okay, a lot of it quietly goes away.

So the work of actually moving on almost has to happen privately. Leaning into the pain keeps people close and keeps the validation coming. Stepping out of it, choosing to stop performing the hurt even when it’s real, can feel like losing something all over again. But at some point, if you’re lucky, the question quietly changes. It stops being, “Why didn’t they choose me?” and starts becoming, “Why would I keep choosing this?”

If They Ever Found Themselves in Amanda’s Position

My daughters won’t only relate to Ciara. There may be moments when they relate more to Amanda. That’s a harder conversation, because judging someone from the outside is so much easier than understanding them from the inside.

Natalie and I will have eighteen years to try to instill values and self-respect, to help our daughters build a sense of who they are that holds up on its own and doesn’t depend on whether someone chooses them. And then they’ll go out into the world and make their own choices. Some will be great. Some won’t. And sometimes they’ll come back to us after a decision we wouldn’t have made for them.

So if one of my daughters ever found herself in Amanda’s position, maybe making choices that don’t align with the standards we tried to instill, I’d want to lead with curiosity before judgment. Because people don’t make those choices in a vacuum.

Sometimes it comes from wanting to feel seen again. Or from not really knowing yet what you need, but knowing exactly what you don’t want to feel anymore. Or from wanting to grab back some control over something that feels like it’s slipping away.

None of that makes someone a bad person. But it can put them in situations that don’t serve them, or anyone else, in the long run.

And I think the distinction, in those moments, comes down to where the standard is grounded. Is it internal, rooted in the kind of relationship you actually want to build? Or is it being shaped by the moment you’re in, by what feels better right now than what you know is true? Because when your decisions get driven more by how something feels right now than by what aligns with you long-term, you end up in patterns that are genuinely hard to break. And the longer you stay without being honest about why, the more of yourself you leave behind.

So if I’m having this conversation with one of my daughters, I’m not going to pretend the goal is never making a messy choice. She will. What I’d ask of her is to be honest about why she’s making it. The more honest you are with yourself in those moments, the less of yourself you lose in them.

What I Actually Hope They Learn

If I’m teaching my daughters anything through all of this, it isn’t how to avoid people like West. They’re going to meet them. What I want them to learn is how to recognize the moment they’ve crossed from mutual exploration into one-sided investment, how to hold onto their own standards even when their feelings are involved, and to understand that consistency isn’t something you wait for. It’s something you require.

Most of all, you will never regret walking away from someone who couldn’t choose you consistently, even if they were almost great, even if they turn out to be great for someone else someday.

I know that because I’ve lived the other version of it. The moments in my own life where I was the most hurt and confused are the ones that taught me the most, and I couldn’t have told you that at the time. At the time, I was just frustrated and disappointed and wanted it to be over. But looking back, they forced a clarity I wouldn’t have chosen on my own. That’s the part that took me a long time to learn. You show yourself what you’re worth in the moment you’re finally willing to walk away from something that isn’t enough.

This isn’t a lesson you can fully teach ahead of time. People usually learn it in hindsight, after they’ve stayed too long, after they’ve tried to make sense of something that never quite added up. But if this saga offers anything, it’s perspective. A chance to recognize the pattern instead of judging the people in it.

And when they find themselves in Ciara’s position, I don’t expect them to get it right the first time. Most people don’t. I just hope they get there eventually. Not because someone finally tells them they’re worth choosing. Because they stop forgetting it.

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Hi. Welcome to the slow version.

I’ve been getting back into art lately, as a result of high jacking my daughter’s sidewalk chalk. Which got me thinking about working with artistic mediums. Take the podcast. I love it. But it’s a spontaneous conversation. I can spend a whole weekend prepping, and still walk out knowing my point didn’t quite land.

That’s why I’m here.

Writing is different. Writing lets you sit with a sentence. Reread it. Ask yourself, “Is this actually what I mean, or is this just what came out first?”

We live in a time where everyone is quick to assign meaning to a sentence you said yesterday that you wish you could take back the next day. These essays will allow me to get specific and find the nuance in what I’m thinking.

I’ll get into the stuff that doesn’t fit into a podcast. The thought process behind the choices I make.

And yes, I’m talking to you, fans, critics, and people who follow me just to roast me. Hi. 👋

And like the pod, a lot of what I write here is going to use reality TV and pop culture as the launchpad. That’s always been the play. Use what we watch to talk about how we actually live.

Which is why, as snarky as we all get about reality TV, I’m genuinely grateful for the people who are willing to broadcast themselves to the world. Even the toxic ones. Especially the toxic ones. They give us something to reflect on, to learn from. So yeah, we’re going to keep talking about our favorite shows.

But this time, with more gray area. Join me in the nuance.

Now, relationships.

Which you know, if you’ve watched me for more than five minutes, is where I always end up.

The issue is we’ve watered down what the word relationship means. We use it like it only applies to romantic relationships, but meanwhile the whole structure of how we relate to each other is falling apart.

Technology was supposed to bring us closer, but in a lot of ways, it’s done the opposite. People are lonelier than they’ve ever been. We’re disconnecting in all the places we used to connect. We’re even getting more comfortable being alone.

And I say all this as someone who loves being alone. I’m an introvert. I’m good at boundaries. I’ve long been pretty comfortable with the idea that other people’s opinions of me are none of my business, and honestly, that’s done a lot for me.

But I’ve also seen how that same mentality can turn into something ugly. You know the type. The “I like dogs more than people” guy. The “everyone’s annoying” guy. I’ve been that guy. We’ve all been that guy.

But the truth is, even that guy needs people. Maybe not always romantically. It can be a sibling, a parent, a kid or a friend.

It’s easy to convince ourselves we don’t need the things we actually need. Our culture has gotten really good at calling disengagement strength, but I don’t buy it.

I need to recharge alone and I need that recharge so I can show up for the people who matter. Both can be true. And they’re supposed to be.

Just think about your most meaningful memories. I’ll bet most of them involve another person. Even the ones that are technically about you, like winning an award or getting a promotion.

What makes those moments land isn’t the spotlight, it’s the people in the room with you. The energy of being seen by someone who’s actually there.

A lot of what I’m going to write focuses on how to get more out of the relationships we already have. How to take them seriously and treat them like something we have to work on, instead of something that either happens or doesn’t.

Now, if you’re sitting there thinking, “Why would I take advice from this guy, the former Bachelor, the reality TV whatever?” That’s fair. You don’t have to. Glad you’re here either way.

If you’re curious though, here’s where I’m coming from. I’ve always prided myself on being good in relationships. But by every objective measure, I’ve struggled in a lot of them.

I’ve been cheated on. I’ve picked the wrong partner and been the wrong partner. I’ve gotten engaged on TV but it didn’t work out. That’s a lot of heartbreak for one person to learn from.

So most of what I know about relationships, I learned the hard way. Through tough conversations I had with myself, and even tougher ones I had to hear from people I loved.

I come from a place of empathy because I’ve been there. Many times.

And yeah. Some of you have watched a lot of it play out in real time. Hi. 👋

It took me longer than I thought it would, but I eventually landed in relationships that are the best I’ve ever had. Every relationship is thriving, and not just with my gorgeous wife. Whether they are work relationships, family relationships, or friendships, things have genuinely come together and these people have made me a better person in every measurable way I can name.

But nothing’s guaranteed. We’re going to have to keep working on it, fighting for it, showing up for it. That’s the whole thing.

Because in the end, it’s the people who consistently show you they’re trying, the ones who stick around, that matter. That’s what we can’t lose sight of.

So thanks for showing up.

Anyway, that’s the start. Glad you’re here.

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