On Huberman

And on being the other woman

When I read the opening passage of Madeline’s Gray’s debut novel Green Dot, it felt alarmingly like reading my own diary:

“For some years of my twenties I was very much in love with a man who would not leave his wife. For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be.

Having done well in school but having found little scope in which to win things since then, it is possible that my dedication to this relationship was in fact a dedication to my belief in myself – that I could make a man love me so much that he would leave what he had always known, all his so-called responsibilities, purely to attain my company forever. I offered nothing but myself, you see. I did not have children or things that tied me to anywhere, really. Where he had all of these things – so settled into the couch of his life and just approaching middle age! I craved the stability he seemed to exude – I was intoxicated by the promise of ordinary happiness implied by his cargo shorts and his chemist-bought sunglasses. I was besotted with the way he combined a high-powered job with the nervous shyness of someone who was bullied in primary school and has since taken on knowing timidity as an endearing personality trait. My god, how I wanted him. And I just knew that if I did enough, put in enough energy, waited long enough, was understanding enough, kind enough, funny enough, horny enough, accommodating enough, I could have him. And then I could have a life which didn’t require me to make decisions anymore. I would adjust myself to snuggle in with him, into his life couch. No more anxiety about what to do or who to see or how to spend my evenings. I would be his, and that would be enough, and I could rest.” 

When several friends who were close with me during what we now refer to as “the dark ages” also sent me this passage, I realised the psychology of what I went through was quite glaringly obvious to outsiders. For me, on the other hand, it took a while to understand exactly what had allowed me to engage in a “relationship” that slowly ate me from the inside out like an autoimmune disease. 

I had friends caution me against reading the book, so similar was my story to the protagonist’s (it’s nearly beat for beat, save that in my story they weren’t married and there were no kids). And to be honest, it was difficult to read. I felt myself despising the main character, Hera. She’s so self-pitying, she’s so lost, she’s so unaware. I was trying to look for ways that we were not the same person, so that I could engage in the age-old sport of blaming the mistress and not the man. 

When I met a high-powered man in the workplace, ten years my senior, he was indeed in a relationship. However, unlike the relationship between Hera and her man, the one I was seeing confirmed, a few months after our affair began, that he had left his girlfriend to be with me. By that time, I was overseas (originally, this had been an attempt to escape my unrequited love for him, which conveniently precipitated his declaration: “don’t leave, I’m in love with you!”) and had zero visibility over his life. No social media connection, no mutual friends and thousands of kilometres between us. 

No prizes for guessing that he did not, in fact, leave his girlfriend. No prizes because it’s a story as old as water. It’s so painfully obvious what happened next, and yet, there I was: a young woman who earnestly believed in her own power, handing it away as though it were a garbage bag full of moth-eaten clothes. 

I know that there’s very little that is defensible about allowing the relationship to begin in the first place. When I met this man, I was 23 and he was 33. When the affair began, I was 26 and he was 36 (a year older than I am today). I’m not professing that the power dynamics of the situation were tilted solely in his favour. We both had things the other wanted. We both called it love when it wasn’t. Although when I consider the state of my consciousness today as compared with those messy years of my twenties, it does give me pause.

I have tended to berate myself heavily for my callous role in destroying his poor girlfriend’s life. She was just a year older than I was, and had also met this man through work, as a junior professional in our chosen field. I imagined that she held him in similar esteem to what I had. He had a big reputation, an incredible amount of professional prestige (particularly given his age) and a salary to prove it. More than all of that, he was widely and consistently considered an incredibly decent, kind man. 

And this is where my thoughts about Huberman intersect with my own story. If you don’t know who Andrew Huberman is, welcome back to the world from the rock under which you’ve been living! He is a Stanford professor of neuroscience and in recent years world-famous for hosting his podcast, The Huberman Lab. 

A recent article in New York Magazine by Kerry Howley was written about an incredibly intricate deception conducted by Huberman against not two, but six women – who all thought they were in an exclusive relationship with him. This is a man who people not only consider to be smart, decent and kind, but from whom they take incredibly important advice about how to conduct their lives. These parallels were not lost on me when I read the expose. 

As I read the long-form piece, I couldn’t help but think about how vicious the backlash would be against these women. The level of protection Huberman would likely receive from his supporters and, crucially, how little impact this story would actually have on his career or his life in general. I do not doubt that he will go on to find many more romantic partners and he will continue to make a lot of money from his podcast and all of its ancillary funding channels. Again, the parallels (albeit to a much smaller scale) were not lost on me. 

In one part of the article, there was reference to Huberman claiming that some women with whom he had been romantically linked were “crazy”, that another “tore out her hair with chunks of flesh attached to it”. The person with whom I was connected called me crazy more times than I can count, and always in relation to my suspicions that he was not free of his “ex”. Whilst I never tore chunks of flesh from my scalp, I did do some truly insane things during those two years in which my mental health unravelled like a skein of wool in free fall. But when you are being told the sky is green, that the world is flat and that you are fucking crazy, it’s little wonder you start acting like it. 

Whilst I’m deeply interested in the ethics of these situations– whether or not we should keep engaging with said alleged liar, or who we should believe in any he said/she said situation, it’s not actually what I came here to write about.

Yesterday I read an incredible piece by Elise Loehnen in her Substack Pulling the Thread on the topic of the Hubmeran furore. In it, she explores the cognitive dissonance we’re all subject to indulging in when it comes to continuing to support someone we suspect of having engaged in morally questionable behaviour. Here is an extract:

This is what it would/could look like to have an emotionally literate response to this if you’re a conflicted fan. There are other paths in this choose-your-own-adventure, but the healthy avenues are ones where you own and deal with your own feelings rather than taking to the keyboard. Here are a few:

1. Oy. I’m not comfortable supporting someone with my time and attention who treats women in this way. I’m out.

2. Ooph, this is really disappointing, but when I weigh this against the value of the information I get from him, I’ll stick around. I’m going to manage my ambivalence.

3. I don’t care, this feels irrelevant.

4. Etc

Pick your path. Contend with your own feelings. But don’t deprecate or devalue the women in order to justify your decision to keep engaging with him. Take some deep breaths and sit with yourself first. Question your need to defend yourself and/or him by attacking the women and making them bad. (It’s worth it, I promise, you’ll learn a lot.)

(I highly recommend reading the article in full if you’re interested in exploring the topic from a more politically nuanced, media-literate perspective).

What I’m more interested in exploring is why as women (hell, as humans) we are so quick to entangle ourselves in things that take such a long time to tidy up. I’ve been sitting with the proverbial pile of tangled necklaces that were the two years of my life lost to a web of lies, so intricate, it made the sistine chapel look like a finger painting. I want to understand how something can look so embarrassingly obvious from the outside and yet, it never feels that way on the inside. If it did, these things would simply never happen. 

I know so many women who have “been the other woman” in capacities less and more than my own story. I honestly think I am privy to such a volume of these stories not because I know lots of “bad” women, but because I’m open about my own story, and invariably it precipitates a response akin to a deep exhalation, as though these women have been holding their breath for an untold period of time. Finally they’re able to talk about it, without fear of being scorned in the eyes of society, or admonished for being ignorant of the obvious – the very insults being hurled at the women of the Huberman article. 

Whether you are someone who has taken part in an affair that involved a power dynamic that crystallised retrospectively, or the victim of an absurdly obvious deception. Or if you’re lucky like me, and have experienced a fun mix of the two! … The questions I have for you are not: How could you have done what you did? Or, why didn’t you leave? 

My questions are:

What wounds are you carrying that need to be tended to?

Why does love feel scarce to you?

What are you avoiding?

What did the little version of you not receive that it really needed?

And finally,

Does this person with whom you are entangled offer answers to any of the above?