Lessons from the Train Wreckage

Not to worry … She’s an outlier, nothing for me to be concerned about …

Readership: All
Reader’s Note: This post is a commentary on the true story conveyed in my previous post, The Slow Train Wreck — A Cautionary Tale (2021 January 18). Readers may want to read this post before continuing.
In these posts, H=Husband and W=Wife.
Length: 2,300 words
Reading Time: 8 minutes

What Was Once an Outlier is Now Normal

In reflecting on the sad tale of H and W recounted in my most recent post, it seems to me that there is a significant temptation to dismiss the story as being too outlierish to be of interest to upstanding, moral Christians like the reader base of this site. A curiosity, perhaps, but nothing of greater interest in our own lives or in the lives of our adult (or soon to be adult) children. We just aren’t people like that.

The problem is that the more closely one looks at the situation of H and W, the less truly outlierish it appears.

While there were various rubicons crossed that in hindsight should not have been permitted, or at least should have been raised to the level of confrontation at the time, it is, of course, much easier for us now to spot these in hindsight.  It is much, much easier than in real life and in real time, until it gets to the point where it is so egregious that it needs to be stopped – which is what H did when it did, in fact, get to that point. 

H discusses at length in his interview with Rollo how W presented no major red flags during the pre-marital and early marriage phases of the relationship.  W comes from a solid family of origin – religious Baptists, but not fundamentalists, was college educated but not careerist, was interested in having kids, generally happily married to H (at several points in the earlier years of the Instagram feed, she specifically remarks about how much she loves her marriage), and so on.

While W did have some N count prior to marriage, and while most of our readers would agree that N=0 is the ideal, many of our readers were not N=0 when they themselves married, and no N count at all is simply not something most Christians have today when they marry. According to what W has said, most of her N count happened in high school and not in college and beyond and so was less of a red flag for H (whose N count was also not 0) when he met her when she was 25. So while N count is typically a red flag for people who see any N higher than 0 as a red flag, W was not in a situation where her N count was an outlier for Christian women, even for religious Christian women of her age, at that time (2009).

Flipping the Switch

When we look at the accounts of the early years of the marriage, and see this reflected in the early years of W’s Instagram feed, it seems clear enough that this simply was not a case of a careerist “carousel rider” who married at 30 wanting to hop back onto the carousel after tiring of her “Betabux” once having birthed 1-2 kids.  This was a woman who did a true 180-degree turn right in the middle of her marriage.  Like a total U-Turn, where everything she wanted and pursued and organized her life around was trashed and replaced with another set of values and other things that then served as her new “north star”. This new set of values was, of course, totally different from what she was oriented around when H met her, and therefore totally incompatible with remaining married to H.

H says in his interview with Rollo that the critical point was when she came to see herself as LGBT.  I do not see very much evidence of this in W’s posts outside a smattering of things around the time of that specific event, and her current life seems mostly not on the LGBT side of things as far as she has disclosed, but H’s explanation of what happened seems quite on target to me nonetheless, even as an outside observer. 

The reason is that when she started to identify in that way, she must have reached out to the related world on the internet, and when she did so, she would have encountered the entire ideology of that world and would have imbibed it.  The female side of the LGBT world, which is the side she would have been interfacing with, is thoroughly feminist to its core, in a very extreme way typically.  It’s all patriarchy this, heterosexism that, etc.  She seems to have coupled this together with the general sex positive feminism that lies at the basis for sex worker movements and the like (and which is hated by the more “traditional” radfems) to arrive at a new set of principles for her life.  And to me that’s likely the key to understanding when and how the “switch flipped”.

Switching Teams

At some point, W had her mental computer undergo an operating system change.  Specifically she was changing out a faith – which comes complete with a worldview, a moral code, and a set of values, norms, and behaviors – for an ideology – which also comes complete with a new and different worldview, moral code, and set of values, norms, and behaviors.  Both before and after she had a “team”, a “tribe”, a group she could identify with and which could form a core basis of her identity.   She could share a worldview with this group, a moral code, a set of values, norms, and behaviors, and have it all supported and reinforced.  Of course, this new set didn’t involve the Christian faith, but it appears that W had moved to the “spiritual but not religious” group of people who want the goodies of a spiritual life without the pesky moral rules, especially moral rules about sex.

More fundamentally, W appears to me to have moved to a view where she sees life as being about pursuing self-determined goals, and that her self-determined goals, as she openly states in several of her Instagram posts and in her various interviews, are getting rich and using her sex appeal to do that by virtually sharing her body with the masses as she does on Instagram and monetizes as a model and on the private porn site she has hosted on OnlyFans. 

This, which would normally appear to be a rather narcissistic approach to life at the intersection of attention seeking and grifting, is, when coupled with certain ideologies and worldviews that arise from feminism, instead repackaged as an act of rebellion against the patriarchy, an act of personal feminist liberation through softcore porn and pay-per-view grift, whereby the heterosexist wannabe patriarchs are literally made to pay for their relentless “sexism” and “exploitation of women”, to the satisfaction of the liberated empowered woman who heroically turns the exploiters into the exploited by the means of her alluring digital nudes.

Beware Discovery of the “Real Me”

Ultimately, the endgame for W has been spectacularly ugly from a moral perspective, but the key takeaway for us is the following:  ideas are important.   Do not think that they are essentially harmless.  They are not.  The contemporary ideas that are in broad circulation in our culture point in one direction only – away from God and towards the self and the gratification of our appetites and desires.  This is all of feminism.  It is much of the modern world besides.  Be wary of it, in the extreme, in your own views and certainly in those of your wife. 

Yes, when vetting, and after marriage, you should pay attention to little changes in her behavior and appearance and the like, because over time these can and do add up in many cases. But in reality, the main takeaway here is that when W made her self discovery and told H about it, this was not a time to take it lightly and accept it. It was not the time to be forbearing and forgiving. It was a time to challenge it, to question it, to try to disrupt it, and at all costs, to steer her away from the rest of the corpus of ideas that array themselves under the larger LGBT rubric, virtually all of which are fundamentally corrosive to any heterosexual marriage. Because permitting it to continue and grow is a sure path to marital disaster.

That is not a criticism of H, by the way – not at all.  As I say, hindsight is 20/20, and my heart goes out to H here – it was very hard to know what to do in real time.  But for us, having the benefit of hindsight here, we can be more deliberate about how we understand what happened here, and how we can learn from it.  Ideas matter.  They seep into everything.  They may seem harmless at first, but then they grow and lead to bigger ideas, and soon enough, they are replacing other ideas wholesale… and the entire person’s conception of who they are and what they are about changes utterly as a result of being oriented around an utterly different set of ideas.

In the context of a marriage, this kind of transformation is typically fatal, because the person who is transformed in the way they view themselves generally asks themselves, at some point in that process of transformation, whether the “new version” of themselves would have ever decided to marry their current spouse to begin with, or whether their current spouse is simply a poor fit for the “person they now know themselves to be”. The core logic, which is entirely self-centered, asks whether “this marriage makes sense for the Real Me”.

In other words, if you allow someone to redefine themselves in a significant way during the marriage, without being challenged, although you may think you are being supportive of their “journey of self-discovery” (something the culture and even many churches will blare loudly in your face 24/7 today), all you are really doing is creating a ticking time bomb that could very well blow up in your face once the transformation is fully in place.

And it makes perfect sense — she has changed, and you have not. She has a different perspective, now, on almost everything — she sees the entire world differently. And that will almost always include how she sees you, how she views men, relationships, sex, and the kinds of men she desires, and seeks for relationships, and so on. (Jack would say that this kind of change “de-sanctifies” or defiles the marriage.)

When someone fundamentally changes, such that their worldview itself changes, there is simply a substantial risk that you, having been selected under their prior/”false”/old worldview, simply do not fit into their new vision of themselves, into how they see their “Real Me” and the kind of life that their “Real Me” really wants. And when that happens, in our culture it is only a matter of time until the marriage ends — Christian, kids, or not.

What’s Next for W?

I do not know what will happen with W.  I have no crystal ball. 

Having now looked at the last several years of W’s online history, and the recent trajectory as well, including the velocity of change, and the general direction of it, I honestly do not think it is predictable where W will stop at this point.  She seems to me to be in utter thrall of a combination of powerful demons – open, crass, celebrated greed; a virtual bottomless pit of attention-seeking; an addiction to the related ego boosting; and raw sexual lust, which I am certain is playing a substantial role in the proceedings as well. 

At the end of 2020, W disclosed openly, in a post on her Instagram feed, her 2020 OF earnings. The reveal was in the form of screenshots of the earnings numbers from the OF site itself, so it is not “made up”. In the 4 final months of 2020 (i.e., after the viral exposure following the New York Post article), her OF earnings skyrocketed! She earned, rounded, U.S. $138,000 in those 4 months alone! Prior to that, W had not earned more than U.S. $600 in any one month, so she has definitely “blown up” since her viral exposure.

As others have noted, W is a “performer”, and she likes to be the center of an audience more than anything else. I do not think that OF will deliver to her the audience size she ultimately wants. (She will never be a Belle Delphine level phenomenon.) So I expect she will look to other lines of larger-scale attention-getting where she can parley her unique combination of titillating history, comely appearance, and speaking skills into some kind of new gig. My guess is that she is now planning to use this new level of exposure to parley that into some kind of post-OF gig — reality TV, talk show host, junket talk sage, a pop personality, or something like this. The other possibilities that come to mind — such as traditional porn or the actual courtesan route (W mentioned in her interview with the New York Post that she was ready to do this before Covid happened) — now seem far less likely for W given that her OF has now reached critical mass financially. These kinds of efforts would not yield anything close to the kind of ROI she is getting from OF, so they really just don’t pencil at this point for W. Even if she fails to parley her OF virality into another gig, she can still cultivate her OF base quite nicely for quite some time for substantial cash without expanding into one of those other areas.  

Ultimately I think all we can do is pray for God’s transforming grace for W, and for his continuing strength and support for H and their kids.  W, for all of the tawdriness and narcissism, still has 3 kids 10 and under and an ex-H who has been through things almost no men have to live through, even those of us who have lived through divorces.  Prayer and compassion is all we can offer, I think, as well as the determination to learn what we can from this unfortunate situation, so as to avoid making similar mistakes in our own lives.

Related

• Spawny’s Space (Deti): It’s going to get really bad for men (2017 September 1)
• Amerika (Brett Stevens): Psychological Fallacies (2019 June 13)
• Jim’s Blog: The Three Magic Words (2020 August 7)
• Spawny’s Space (Jack): A Lot of Men are Trash — Part III (2020 August 10)