Sunday Special: Un-Marry Me!

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today we’re sharing the latest episode of Modern Love, a podcast about the complicated love lives of real people, from The New York Times. Anna Martin, host of the show, spoke to David Finch, who wrote three Modern Love essays about how hard he had worked to be a good husband to his wife, Kristen. As a man with autism who married a neurotypical woman, Dave found it challenging to navigate being a partner and a father. Eventually, he started keeping a list of “best practices” to cover every situation that might come up in daily life – a method that worked so well he wrote a best-selling book on it. But almost 11 years into his marriage, Kristen said she wanted to be “unmarried.” Dave was totally thrown off. He didn’t know what that meant, or if he could do it. But he wasn’t going to lose Kristen, so he had to give it a try. For more episodes of Modern Love, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop Wednesdays.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Michael. Most weekends, we bring you the Sunday read, but today we're doing something
0:05.8	a little bit different, sharing the latest episode of Modern Love, a podcast from New York Times
0:12.2	audio that explores the complicated love lives of regular people.
0:17.0	Enjoy it and if you like it head over to the Modern Love feed for new episodes every Wednesday.
0:25.0	Take a listen.
0:27.0	From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
0:31.0	This is Modern Love.
0:32.0	Welcome to a new season.
0:37.5	If you listen to the show,
0:38.5	you're clearly into stories about relationships.
0:41.2	So you may have heard of a guy named Dave Finch. There was a time when a lot of people
0:47.2	wanted to hear his ideas about making relationships work because he seemed to have
0:52.0	solved a big problem in his own marriage.
0:55.0	As he tells it, the problem stemmed from his overpowering need for order and
0:59.2	predictability.
1:00.8	And it came out in all kinds of everyday situations with his wife Kristen and their two kids.
1:06.0	Take this for example. I had it in my head that nap time was 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock.
1:11.0	And if the 2 o'clock nap didn't happen because somebody dropped over for a visit
1:15.7	or because they were you know fussy and not going down for a nap I would start to
1:22.1	almost spiral in a way. It was this sense of panic and I would lash out and try to seize control and she would say, why are you freaking out, Dave? I already have two babies who won't
1:36.6	go down for a nap and now I have a husband who's freaking out because babies won't. They're babies. They don't
1:41.4	always take a nap. And I remember saying to her, you told me nap time is 10 and 2.
	...

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