celebrity gossip
Like many people, I'm uncomfortable with whatever I've heard about Dax Shepard's podcast, simply because he's so willing to talk about his marriage to Kristen Bell. It can often feel like he's finessing the narrative by triangulating with a third partyâwhere the third party, in this case, is "anyone who will listen." ("Everything I know about this couple is against my will," people regularly comment on the Internet.)
And if one person is constantly pushing to bring in a third party, "let's take it to the judge," their goal isn't to repair, reconcile, or collaborate; it's to win. "Winning" is a finite gameâall due credit to James P. Carse. Fighting to win automatically puts an expiration date on the relationship.
One might say that Lily Allen's new album is essentially a podcast: that, feeling comparatively powerless with regard to her very visible ex-husband, she has taken her case to the court of public opinion. Which is triangulation, too, but I do have a little more empathy for her because she's been gaslit to fuck, plus she's apparently wrestled with songwriter's block for the past 7 years. "When your career stalls out," I suggested to my friend group, "maybe you start to believe the most you can aspire to is a pinterestable house."
The new album is a hit. I don't plan to listen to it, I told my friend group, but I consciously, actively hope she is able to ignore all the validation she is currently receiving and, instead, "go on the Alanis-adjacent spiritual journey she was always born to go on," I said. That she go inward, that is my hope for her.
The handy thing about celebrity gossip is, it gives us a map of the territory. Professionally speaking, I only covered celebrity gossip for six monthsâI quickly realized I didn't want to write about people who don't want to be written aboutâbut when people do put it all on the line at risk of being publicly analyzed, I'm like, "oh, sweet." Anyway, here is a transcript of a slightly self-congratulatory, slightly self-deprecating interview with Dax Shepard, which the Internet has been eyeballing with renewed interest (and to D.S.'s credit, he prefaces his answer to an interviewer with the warning that his response will be "off-putting"):
I have this very weird mix of not thinking I'm good-looking, general low self-esteem, chip on my shoulder that I'm dumb because I was dyslexic, all these thingsâYET unbridled arrogance in relationships. Have always been that way. I don't know how to explain it. I've just... I've always felt very confident in relationships. So I never, EVER was like, "Oh I hope I can keep Kristen!" I was going, Do I wanna be with a Christian, who has eight people living in her house for free, who has to get out of a car when there's a dog that doesn't have a leash and ruin her whole day to rescue this dogâdo I wanna be...? That's great, she's good, but that's not what I want!
What happened, which could've only happened the way it did, is that she never ever said to me, "Y'know, you could be a little better of a person." She never ever suggested that I should do that. Instead, I just slowly through time watched what FRUIT she bore out of the way she moved through life. I looked at the... the results of how she lived, and they're pretty undeniable. So here's me [who], like, thinks she lets people take advantage of her, and live for free off of her, and maybe she pays this manager too muchâor whatever the thing the cynical, protective part of my brain was sayingâI could also acknowledge, "She's bringing in a lot more money than YOU. She's getting ahead! For all these people that are making a fool of HER, she's doing a lot better than YOU are!" I just couldn't deny the reality of how her life... unfolds. There's something charmed about it! And I think it's charm because it starts with her being just endlessly generous and loving and, uh, and giving people the benefit of the doubt, and believing in people and believing the world's a wonderful place, and all these things. And then downriver it proves to be all these things to her! And me on the other hand, I'm like, "No one's gonna take MY wallet," you know, that's all I'm thinking about! And I miss all this other stuff, and then I, I, I... Y'know, over time, it doesn't really matter what case you can make intellectually, you can't deny what the outcome is, and it's so DRASTICALLY better for her. You know? More people care about her, more people will be there for HER, more people... it's just a BETTER LIFE. And then I WANTED that, and so I chose to move more in her direction. You know? She didn't ASK me to, I WANTED what she had, and I... replicated it. And conversely I'll pat mySELF on the back: a lot of the things I think she could've done better?, I never said.
She's the first person I dated I made a real conscious decision that I wasn't gonna try to make her into the person I wanted to date, 'cause I know what happens when I try to make them the person I wanna date: I don't end up liking that person! And so I didn't do that and, lo and behold, she has come the same exact distance towards me as I've come towards her. You know, without me, she's never on your show admitting she has depression. She's never doing that! That's, like, something she got from me. And then THAT has added this level to her life that... these people reach out to her and say, "I was... I've been with this guy three YEARS I haven't admitted I have depression! I'm so ashamed of that!" And she's seen the results of, like, what HER being honest and flawed, and all these things, what IT cultivates. And so, um, it happened to her, and it happened to me, and neither of us were saying "you gotta start doing it this way" or "you need to be this way." It's like some magic osmosis happened.
I definitely appreciate what D.S. is saying about two people, representing two philosophical extremes, attempting to rebalance each other and both shift themselves toward the 'middle'. But this is presumably why their marriage is also so contentious, why goddamn everything has to be an ongoing negotiation. (They argue a lot, Bell has said. Of course they do; it's a constant balancing act.) So although they aren't telling each other to changeâgood! great!âthey are absolutely controlling each other's behavior.
Something I think about a lot is this tendency people have, going out of their way to marry their own shadow selvesâwhere a "shadow self" would be defined here as the subconsciously rejected or repressed parts of oneselfâand then, rather than learning more about what they admire or what they wish they could nurture in themselves, they instead go to war with their own shadow, which has now been projected and externalized in the form of a separate person. I'm pretty sure this is what is meant by the Internet's refrain of "are the straights okay?" because people are seemingly at constant war with spouses they clearly dislike or are fearful of.
And maybe as a married person you start to not like yourself anymore, either, because you're perpetually being pushed into this ill-fitting role of the counter-weight, the foil. If you're forever reacting and counterbalancing, you're no longer really in charge of your own behavior anymore, are you?
I think a lot, too, about a newer concept to me, which is this idea of a "golden shadow": that is, the traits you utterly fail to notice in your own self, but fully see and recognize and appreciate and admire and support in other people.
What gets me about D.S.'s account of their marriage is, despite his description of "pulling each other toward the middle," I don't think it sounds like they are shifting toward the middle. He does claim that she's integrated some of his traits, like discussing depression with greater openness and vulnerability. But if two people are constantly clinging to their own philosophical positions, that isn't complementary or collaborative at all; that's war.
I have, at times, shambled through life in the way D.S. describes of his spouse K.B.âit's colloquially known as "lucky girl syndrome"âand in my very early 20s I really infuriated some dark-tempered, smoldering boyfriends who were very much not on my side. Those guys will resent when anything works out for you, they'll convince you it's all unearned just because it was unstrategic and, if you spend enough time with them, you will start to feel ashamed that anything ever worked out for you even once. "How dare I!" And now you're effectively cursed, because you've internalized someone else's resentment toward you. Lucky no more! (And let me update this blog to add that K.B. isnât âcharmedâ; she is a hard worker, great comedic instincts, with a long list of credits, on top of being a pretty, accessible white lady. These are neutral statements.)
But here's the other thing: Despite being such a lucky, lucky girl, I'm secretly antisocial and deeply distrustful of others! You think I'm not cynical? It's all I worked on in EMDR!
I think back, often, to a horrible teen experienceâthis was at Rotary Youth Leadership campâwhere we were sitting in a large circle with Xerox worksheets in front of us. We were hypothetically in the wilderness, with limited hypothetical space in our hypothetical rucksacks, and we were supposed to rank a list of hypothetical survival gear, prioritizing items from most important to least important. Afterward, we were supposed to argue our cases and convince the group of our worksheets' accuracy. Well, there was some gorgeous blonde in our group, an athlete, who had successfully convinced the circle of teens that the most important thing to pack was salt tablets. I began to argue more and more adamantly against herâmore vehemently, more unlikeablyâwhile this girl kept fake-smiling and calmly doubling-down on fucking salt tablets.
I take survivalism games very seriously! We're presumably supposed to think of this as a life-or-death situation! So I thought to myself, "Great! Thanks to an incredibly charismatic leader, we're all gonna die!" I might've even said this aloud! I probably did!
At this point, an adult referee interrupted. She pivoted in her chair to face me. "In my experience," she said, "the person who is loudest is usually the most wrong." I think I'm actually minimizing what she said; she probably said the dumbest, or the least competent, or the most uninformed, or the most death-prone. Then she said she'd bet a million dollars that I had the worst survival gear ranking worksheet out of anyone in the group. To this, everyone in the circle turned and gave me dirty looks. My credibility was destroyed. I shut up.
I DID NOT HAVE THE WORST RANKING. In fact, I had the BEST ranking. 100% correct! Objectively, I'd "won" the survival exercise. Objectively, salt tablets came dead last in terms of importance. Objectively, our group had filled our bags with salt tablets, and now we were dead.
This was not vindicating at all! All it did was emphasize to me that, if you attempt to survive as a group, you'll die. But before you die, an authority figure will intervene to announce to everyone you're an idiot first. Public humiliation and then death by collective stupidity! Terrific! (I read Lord of the Flies soon after this, and I was shaken all over again. Life will remind you over and over that you're not a charismatic leader, you're Piggy, andâspoilersâyou're dead!!)
"Why salt tablets?" my best friend asked me recently. "Like, why was she so intent onâwhy were salt tablets her hill to die on?"
"Oh, you know," I said, "electrolytes. 'Make the most of a limited water supply.' She played a lot of sports, so she was very convincing. I'm sure she talked about Gatorade." I shrugged.
So I am antisocial at heart, because I believe that large groups of people will kill me. And I donât like that about myself, and of course I want to be accepted and I donât like that about myself either! Superficially this looks like fearful-avoidant behavior.
But I also dwell on other people, trying to understand their points-of-view and circumstances in order to extend grace. Emotional generosity, the real kind, is a hard-won trait. We compulsively extend grace if we rarely received it as kids ourselves, and we often end up overcorrecting, overextending, harming ourselves and others in the process. And then the entire second half of our lives goes toward learning how to not vacillate between these two extremes. How do we integrate these two competing impulses?
What I'm saying is, I understand perfectly well why Kristen Bell chased down and married Dax Shepard. Unfortunately, her brand of Christianityâwith its deep-seated sociocultural programmingâhas bleak roots in internalized misogyny and its romanticization of self-annihilation. By getting married, her internalized misogyny was reflected back to her as externalized misogyny. Sure! Easier to be at war with your spouse than to do any interior work! So he's just the externalized representation of what she secretly, subconsciously believes. Instead of integrating herselfâinstead of acknowledging that her generosity can be misguided, or that her empathy and nurturing are coming from a wounded place, or that going too hard on self-sacrificial Christianity keeps endangering herâshe is depending on her spouse to fight her. He's her counterbalance. He keeps her safe from her own impulses. She could learn to trust herself, to build better judgment, but integration is hard work, and time is expensive! So she's outsourced the job instead.
The argumentative nature of the marriage is reflective of the nonstop argument inside of Kristen Bellâwith the puritanical Christian ideal in a battle to-the-death with her repressed instincts for self-preservation, with selfishness, and with all the other forbidden 'ego' stuff that is important for survivalâand one half of her psyche is hellbent on 'winning' while the half trying to keep her alive only fights back harder. Christianity tends to frame this inner conflict as a non-negotiable spiritual battle; in actuality, K.B. is forcing a triangulation between herself, her spouse, and her evil twin.
It honestly leaves me with very little to say about Dax Shepard! He's just there. Okay, he's self-aggrandizing, always looking for how something might benefit him, which is mildly predatory but, also, reflective of the water in which men are conditioned to swim. I think he probably gets more out of marriage than his wife does? He has enough ego for the both of them? He gets to feel invulnerable? She gives him a sense of purpose; she's his pet project. Uncontrolled, it might feel a bit like one twin is trying to eat the other in the womb.
And I just feel like this is such a dark interpretation of the idiom "your better half," because it's pushing the rejected parts of oneselfâincluding the âgoodâ partsâonto someone else. So one person gets to be the dreamer while the other has to be the 'grounding force', overly responsible for both people's actions. One person gets to be the 'fun parent' while the other person has to be a cop. That's refusing to be held accountable for both wolves, and that's hell.
Obviously I don't think anyone should be trying to change their partner, but I do think we should probably individually strive for growth and evolution, like PokĂ©mon. And although I should've gone into therapy "for myself," I fully, fully went in at the outset because I felt like my husband deserved a better, healthier, stabler spouse. That isnât the ideal headspace from which to approach self-improvement, but our loved ones can assuredly be important catalysts for growth, and that is romantic, and that is why Jason Ritter is Melanie Lynskey's spouse but the Internet's boyfriend.
P.S. I think I prefer thinking and talking about what it looks like when two people are proud of each other.