Hurt People

Guest post by Isaac Simpson

This guest post is by Isaac Simpson, author of The Carousel on Substack. His work has appeared in Vice, IM1776, and Man’s World. His article There’s Gonna Be a War in Montana went viral and got him name-checked in Vanity Fair last month.

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I’m unlucky in family; I rolled a three or four out of ten. An only child sprouted, like a rose on a mountain of shit, from the unhappy endings of two classic American stories.

My mother's side are diaspora Jews; the men spineless workaholics, the women narcissistic hippies. They put their bare feet up on dinner tables and shoplift socks from TJ Maxx. The words honor, integrity, and loyalty have no meaning to them—they are “path of least resistance” people—and thus progressivism and pharmaceuticals have become their religion. The women control the family and the men are loyal to the women only—I've been ratted out and tattle told on in ways the men in other cultures wouldn't believe. This is Reform Judaism in a nutshell.

My mom is the poorest and the craziest of the bunch, the “creative one” who long ago blew her shot at any real status on a theater career and other boomer fantasies. She once disappeared for several days in Hawaii. I was twenty-six years old, midway through my law school final exams, when I received a string of garbled, nonsensical text messages from her. When I called the hotel where she’d been staying, they said she had been behaving “oddly,” and told me they no longer knew where she was; no one knew how to reach her. I finally tracked her down to another hotel, this one in Molokai. She was in the midst of a manic episode; she believed she was having a telekinetic love affair with Jim Jarmusch. She had never met him, but believed he was signaling his love with collections of rocks and sticks she found, and that he intended to fly out and marry her on the beach.

The episode lasted for several months, during which time she became a sort of satanic version of herself. She texted me that she rued the day I was born, poured an entire bottle of milk on her head, and was arrested for erratic driving. Finally, her semi-estranged father—the episode was in reality a cry for help from him—got her admitted and treated with lithium. As you may imagine, the incident (which she now refers to as the time she was “very, very ill”) did not do my career any favors. 

My father is the third of four boys from a suburban Chicago family, branches on a Mayflower Family tree. Like my mother, he and his brothers were poisoned by the sixties; the poison made them antisocial, and they rejected their parents’ trad values to the degree of self-immolation. My father was an actor with promise when he was young—he had an agent and appeared in respected off-Broadway productions—but he was incapable of handling rejection, so he took stranger and stranger roles, culminating finally in the transgender celebration Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack before hanging it up. If I say I understand Theater Kids, that’s how.

Out of both resentment over the fact my mother was more successful than he was and a belief that “people have sex with each other, it’s just what they do,” he cheated on my mother with a co-actress in an out-of-town production. He got caught, his WASP quietude crumbling in the face of her Jewish matriarchy, and their phony, selfish, Sexual Revolution values revealed themselves inadequate to the task of holding a marriage together. So when I was seventeen, they enacted the world’s cringiest divorce, replete with performative acts of self-sacrifice, including giving over my childhood home to a Northwestern University theater troupe (which included Zach Gilford of the NBC drama series Friday Night Lights), who left it littered with half-empty beer bottles and condom wrappers. My father now lives in Italy, with a southern Italian woman who refuses to talk to or have any relationship with me, my wife, or our new daughter. 

My point is not to garner sympathy. The point is to illustrate why  I learned much earlier than most everyone in my bourgeois class that I was to be alone on this Earth, unless I could bring on some help. 

God has a way of balancing these things out. Where I got unlucky in family, I got lucky in love. I met my wife in Amsterdam. Me a twenty-six-year-old Tulane Law student exploring international law, her a twenty-year-old Sarah Lawrence junior studying abroad. We both attended the University of Amsterdam (called“Oofa” by locals) and we were placed in the same ridiculously gorgeous dorm right next to the Anne Frank House along the Prinsengracht Canal—the same room, even, but one floor apart (me on the third floor, her on the fourth). She and her friends were the first real art hoes I’d ever met, which I found irresistibly hot.

I pursued her aggressively and insisted that we were meant to be, not just for the moment, but for life—quite a shocking proposition for the art ho of today. Pursuit of women, I believe, relies mostly on certainty. If you like a girl, find a way to get word to her about it or make an initial approach and don’t get phased when she rejects you, which she will  almost certainly do the first time no matter much of an alpha you are, and in fact your alpha-ness depends entirely on how you handle her rejection. You approach again, gently, and again, gently.

In this case, I told my future wife’s friend (who I had actually slept with before), that I had a crush on my future wife, knowing that word would get around. Then I asked my future wife to come to a concert with me. Overcoming twenty years of Los Angeles Private School Conditioning, which frames male jealousy as problematic and commitment as weird, was the difficult part. She was dating a German guy when we first met, and I had to wrest control from him by repeatedly and consistently declaring that she was my selected partner, not a fling. I will say, though, that for the first few years wrangling her meant wrangling my insane and insatiable paranoia and jealousy, derived surely from my parents’ infidelity. This was the monster, much more than anything about her, that I had to conquer in order to save the damsel.

We fell in love at the Rijksmuseum, cycling along the bay in the green farmlands just north of the city, dancing at dubstep shows (my excuse is that it was 2011) almost every night, smoking joints hanging out the window watching the canal roll by. It was pretty much the most idyllic romance you could possibly imagine; 10/10.

My wife is a happy, calm person who doesn’t care about money or followers. Had she not, by sheer chance, encountered a psycho like me, who refused to let her go, she would’ve ended up with a sweet outdoorsy high school teacher in somewhere like Bend, Oregon. She doesn’t take selfies and has never seen an episode of the Kardashians; she’d rather watch classic films or, more often, watch nothing. She loves libraries and art museums, where she reads every single placard, and where I’m the one pulling her arm to go get lunch. She has never taken SSRIs and stopped taking birth control even before we got married. She spends no time considering politics or culture war issues of any kind. Despite the wokest of all possible upbringings, she approaches motherhood, loyalty, and family in a deeply traditional manner; always insisting on quality time together and putting our daughter and I at the center of her world.

My friends complain about their wives all the time. The typical stuff, they’re airheaded, they watch trash TV, they don’t let me off the leash, they spend money, they’re high maintenance. One of my friend’s wives doesn’t cook or clean. Another whines constantly about male privilege. A third doesn’t let him out of the house without her. A fourth is the opposite—she never leaves the house with him.

I have none of these issues. I’m the high maintenance one. My wife lets me do what I please. Everyone talks about how lucky I am, how long a leash she gives me. I respond, of course, by denying the notion of leashes entirely! I stomp around the house, terrorizing her at the slightest attempt to reign me in.  I accuse her of mushroom poisoning—holding me down, preventing me from flying the way I could without her, of making me middling, of stopping my shine. I'm blackout drunk for most of our arguments. I wake up in the morning too proud to apologize, breath from hell, and demand hamburgers delivered to our marital couch.

So the question is, how does an emotionally-damaged, deeply-in-debt, right-wing alcoholic gonzo travel writer get such a wife when so much better husband material languishes in inceldom or eternal “cool uncle” status? Like so many things in life, having the beautiful things depends on how you handle its ugly neighbors.

There were two ways I could’ve reacted to being the neglected seed of checked out Theater Kid failchildren. Most would’ve read the environmental cues and doubled down on the pity party, embracing the degenerate artistic wasteland I inherited. I could’ve frozen off my desires for stability and numbed myself, let the world come take care of me. I would’ve ended up like Janice Soprano’s kid (and Janice Soprano’s kid I very much am), a “street person,” rebelling against my parents by taking their own shitty lifestyle and showing them what I could do with it.

I could’ve been a lecherous lefty cool kid, and in some ways that’s what I was before I met my wife. Or I could have let the jealous pressure from my personal trauma overcome me, taking it all out on my wife, attempting to control her through ultimatum and manipulation to become one of those glorified pimps who brainwash their wives and insist on inspecting their cell phones. Instead, I took the battle to the demons inside me. Instead of taking out my jealous rage on her, I fought my negative feelings about it. I created frameworks to understand it—didn’t I flirt, too? Wasn’t I free? What does getting angry at her for her attractiveness do for anybody? I fought my own damage and won.

Had I not done that, had I tried to make her responsible for my pain, I’m sure she would’ve left me long ago. Once, she nearly did. After a family feud where I felt she didn’t take my side against her parents, I disappeared to Tijuana for several days. She was just about done after that, but I somehow crawled back into her heart. The solution was, once again, certainty. Reminding her, over and over, that this was it, life partners, thick and thin, sickness and health, to the end. When you know this, and you say it repeatedly over and over, it can overcome almost any female resistance. Women by their nature cling to certitude of vision and dislike being dislodged from it.

Hurt people hurt people. The molested molest. The meanest girl in high school is always the one hurt most by rejection at a younger age. This is the challenge life throws at you, the test between an evil life and a good one. How do you handle the forces that hurt you while you were still innocent? Do you embrace them, reflect them, jealously seeking the same fix as the ones that harmed you? Do you give the world more of what was given to you? Or do you stand against not just the vague notion of evil, but your particular demon? Most choose the former, which is why our political landscape is full of the traumatized victims of progressivism reflecting and amplifying their harm onto the younger generations.

My luck in love comes from the ability to see, with clear eyes, the harm that came to me. I got a good wife because I needed one. But if I’d let my vision be clouded by anger, or resentment, or contempt, or simply the desire to get back at my parents, I would’ve never been able to understand how badly I needed one. My desire for it would’ve been so overwhelming, I would’ve eschewed the challenge. The challenge to overcome what I saw on TV, in the classroom, and from every voice that had my attention at the time, that making a lifetime commitment to a college student in her early twenties, and insisting she do the same, was actually a good idea.

But I was able to see the truth that commitment is an end in itself,and love is the product of this commitment, of this deal with ourselves, our partners, and with God. The Netflix longhouse gynocracy applies utilitarian benefit equations to everything. Are you happy in your marriage? Are you fulfilled? If not, question it, find alternatives, maximize your happiness, get away. Despite being taught this, I could see the evil in it. Love isn’t something that happens to you, it’s the product of righteousness. And the only thing it asks from you is complete and total commitment, a lack of doubt, an overcoming of oneself in service to another human. So I went for it, and it turned out to be exactly what we both needed.

Am I suggesting that everyone take my path? Not at all. In fact, my point is precisely the opposite. A good relationship requires its own morality. People criticize swingers or hyper-religious couples, but those couples understand marriage  better than most. The ones that fail are those where the eye of everyone else, where the notion of “should”—my husband shouldn’t criticize me for my weight, my wife shouldn’t watch the Kardashians—gets in between.  All of my divorced friends married women with deep ties to mainstream expectations, whether in the form of social media, family pressures, or career paths. My wife and I break most of the shoulds, as all good couples do, but we return always back to the fire burning between us, an agreement, our own table of values that no one else can touch. Failed couples are performances for the benefit of others. Successful couples are their own little cults. 

My advice to anyone looking for a life partner is to boil down your experience to the specific evils God has put in your path. For me, they were degeneracy, atheism, and rootlessness—I fought back by following a traditional path and insisting that a woman in a similar situation do it with me. What’s your version of this? What have you overcome? How have you overcome it? What morality has this left you with? Does it embrace what hurt you, or reject it? Answer these questions and a woman will gravitate to you. Once she does, tell her you’re absolutely certain that she’s the one for you, and mean it. She’ll sense that you can conquer the darkness that chases her too.

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