A mentor once told a lovelorn young Orion Taraban to find a woman whose farts he could live with. He turned the line into a YouTube episode sorting couples into "holders" and "sniffers," and it plays as comedy. The advice underneath is serious. Everyone carries traits that smell bad to other people, and the working question in any relationship is which of those you can tolerate and which you can't.
That question runs through the whole of Taraban's sixth conversation with Mark Laita on Soft White Underbelly, an unscripted hour that wandered across addiction clinics, death-row girlfriends, empty-nest marriages and Buddhist ideas about suffering. Taraban is a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area who posts twice a week to a channel called PsycHacks. Laita, who says he watches every episode, mostly asked him to expand on his most provocative titles, and two of them gave the interview its name.
Taraban spends the hour attacking beliefs most people bring to relationships without examining them: that understanding a problem dissolves it, that everyone deserves a partner right now, that love is a feeling rather than a trade, that honesty gets rewarded. All four are popular, and in his account all four manufacture predictable misery.
Insight is cheap, and the frequent flyers proved it
Taraban trained for two years at an outpatient chemical dependency clinic, and the patients who taught him the most were the ones staff called frequent flyers. They had been through programs several times, sometimes court-mandated, and they spoke the language better than he did. They could walk him through their alcoholic family dynamics, their shame-based self, the chain analysis of their last relapse, the drinking passed down from a great-grandfather.
They still drank.
The same afternoon he might see a man with almost no insight who announced he wanted to stop. Why? "I don't know. I don't like it anymore." That man simply stopped putting alcohol in his mouth, and he got better. Taraban calls addiction one of the few corners of mental health where you can watch a person transform in three months, and the joke he repeats about quitting being easy because he's done it a hundred times captures the real difficulty: staying stopped.
The lesson he draws is blunt: insight isn't enough. Understanding where a problem came from doesn't remove it, and a culture that treats the archaeology of a wound as the cure has confused two separate jobs.
A broken leg keeps you off the field, and so should a broken heart
From there Taraban offered what he framed as a controversial take he'd never put on his channel: not everyone should be in a relationship, because not everyone is ready. His analogy is a varsity football tryout. Nobody objects when a player with a broken leg sits on the bench, does his physical therapy, and returns when he can contribute. Nobody proposes rewriting the rules of football so the injured can play.
Emotional injuries get the opposite treatment. Because the damage is invisible, people assume it should be surmountable by will, or they argue that wounded people deserve love too. Taraban grants the second point; his objection is to the timing.
He hears the pattern weekly in consultations with men in unsatisfying relationships. She's still working through trust issues from an ex who cheated. She had a narcissistic father and is processing it. Good, he tells them, and she's still in physical therapy. She's on the roster but on the injured list, and it isn't the man's job to redesign the game around her. Take six months, take a year, heal, come back.
Laita pushed back: if that standard held, would anyone ever have a partner? Taraban conceded that everyone is broken to some extent, then returned to his mentor's line. Some farts are easier to live with than others, and some people have healed more than others.
The slow lion hunts the gazelle with the limp
Laita's sharper question was whether people seek out damaged partners on purpose, hoping to repair them into someone they couldn't have attracted whole. Taraban answered from his own history.
As a young man with low self-esteem, he doubted he could compete with men who were more accomplished, more attractive, physically stronger. He wondered what a healthy, high-functioning woman would want with him. "I'm not the fastest lion, so I might have targeted the gazelles with the limp." His edge was his mind and his words, so the unconscious plan was to find a woman with visible potential, help her with what he knew about psychology, and collect sex, love and a relationship as her gratitude matured.
It doesn't work that way. He stopped doing it once he developed what he calls authentic confidence, and his read on the wider pattern is that people who privately believe they aren't enough select partners who are also deficient, then expect thanks for the arrangement.
Dysfunction works, which is why nobody quits it
Laita brought the most extreme version of low aiming he'd encountered in more than 8,000 interviews. A New York Post reporter, Phil Messing, described visiting hours on death row as a line of women waiting for their "death row daddy," many of them attractive enough to choose almost anyone.
Taraban remembered one of Laita's own subjects, a woman named Ivana who grew up in Bosnia during the wars that dissolved Yugoslavia and later attached herself to a condemned man. His reading is that her choice was rational, just for a different world. In wartime, bonding with a man who has a proven willingness to kill may be the safest thing a woman can do. He knows this from his own family: after the Second World War his grandfather, a soldier, walked his grandmother and a handful of civilians from Ukraine to Germany and got them onto boats to America. Those civilians followed him because he had a gun and knew how to use it. By family account he was also very hard to live with.
"You can take the girl out of war," Taraban said, "but sometimes you can't take the war out of the girl."
He generalizes the point to everyone. Most of what used to be called neurosis began as the most adaptive solution available to a child inside a particular family. Outside that family the strategy costs more and delivers less, but people who haven't, in his phrase, updated their browser keep running it for decades. The word dysfunction contains the word function. It mostly works. If it didn't, nobody would do it. Remember that before judging someone else, or yourself.
He was equally unsentimental about the alternative. Asked how many couples are happy, he cited the familiar figures, roughly 55 percent of all marriages ending in divorce and about 40 percent of first marriages, then refused to infer happiness from staying or unhappiness from leaving. Of the hundreds of relationships he has been invited inside as a clinician, he can think of one or two he'd want for himself. Humans need relationships, he said, quoting Aristotle's line that only a beast or a god lives outside society, but friendships may matter more than romance, and romance doesn't seem to make people happier. They chase it until exhausted and then chase it some more.
Nobody keeps paying the plumber
Why do stable, long relationships prove so difficult? Taraban's answer is a metaphor he says he has never heard anyone else state openly.
When your toilet is clogged, the plumber is in enormous demand. Once the clog is cleared, you pay him what he's owed and get him out of the house. Nobody keeps paying the plumber. People enter relationships because they need things from another person, and in supplying those things, Taraban says, "I'm complicit in my own obsolescence." A plumber who never clears the drain isn't a plumber, but the moment he clears it, his business is done.
The bind is exact. If getting into a relationship with you requires giving you what you want, and giving you what you want means you no longer need me, how does this last?
His answer is that couples must keep finding new problems to solve in each other's lives, new ways to be needed. This explains why marriages so often crack when the children leave. Two people may have chosen each other because one looked like a kind mother and the other like a loyal family man, and those qualities matter far less when the kids are 20 than when they were two. If there is nothing else on offer, the plumber has cleared the drain. Twenty years of raising children shouldn't be discarded like garbage, he acknowledged, but there may be 40 more years of life ahead, which is a long time with nothing to work on together. So he counsels couples toward a shared overarching project: foster dogs, build a house, start a business, travel and document it. There needs to be a new clog.
The corollary is that people who need nothing from their partners have the most precarious relationships. He recalled an older woman with independent family money who told him she'd be fine alone and didn't need her husband for anything. If that were true, he told her, never say it aloud and never let your behavior say it either, because the husband is still trying and still loyal, and having that effort go unrecognized will make him feel like the biggest schmuck alive. "We need to need each other," Taraban said. Strip need away and only desire remains, which is capricious. If desire is the whole basis, why not leave when it ends? We came for dinner, we ate, time to go home.
Women taught successful men to stop courting
The episode Laita most wanted revisited was the one about why successful men become jerks, though Taraban's own word in the episode was cruder. His thesis is that the behavior gets drilled into them over years, by women's responses.
He estimates that 90 to 95 percent of what an average man does is engineered to get or keep women; Laita thought the number was higher. This, Taraban said, is why nobody should be baffled when a CEO or a president throws everything away for an intern. Becoming the CEO was the means. Access to women was the brass ring, held out unconsciously, and men work themselves into their graves reaching for it.
What changes as a man succeeds is how women respond to him, without his personality changing much. A 20-year-old can give a woman his heart. A 45-year-old can give her a yacht, a family, travel, the option to quit her job, the ability to become a mother in a way the younger man's immaturity and finances can't support. Successful men tend to be rational and effective, so they notice what moves the needle, and what moves it is the ability and willingness to give her more than the other men in her life. Romance and courtship didn't work when they were unsuccessful and attentive; success without attentiveness worked far better. So they drop the behaviors that don't pay, and some grow entitled. "Women taught him what to value."
Taraban frames all of this through a stark exchange model: men trade resources for sexual opportunity, women trade sexual opportunity for resources, never the reverse. He states it as fact and offers no evidence for it in the conversation, and it sits inside a contested tradition in evolutionary psychology. The same applies to his claim that dating-app data show most women concentrating on the top 15 percent of men, which he cites as revealed preference without a source. His gloss on that number is at least consoling: the top tier is constantly renovated, the men there 30 years ago aren't there now, and a man who works for decades and gets a little luck can have his season.
He accepts that the whole framing is unromantic. Romance, in his view, exists so that the poor, sweet small-town guy has some chance against the accomplished man who can materially improve a woman's life. Notice, he said, that the movie is never the romantic CEO versus the practical small-town guy, because that guy has nothing and would lose. Romance is a tool for unsuccessful men, and successful men abandon it because women have shown them they don't need it. He compared Romanticism, the literary movement, to the 19th-century scientists who were willing to cut open corpses and split atoms; a mood is subjective and doesn't yield knowledge you can act on.
Beauty arrives before anyone has said no
The companion episode has, he said, a simpler mechanism. Beautiful women are nuts because nobody tells them the truth.
He asked Laita whether the women he's interviewed ever discuss puberty, the sudden shift when their bodies changed and the boys in class, then the boys' fathers, then the grandfathers, started looking at them differently. Laita said it comes up occasionally and that nobody wants to talk about it because it happened before 18. That attention is a form of power, Taraban said, and it's unearned. The girl lived a little longer and her body did what bodies do.
Then he turned the question on himself. Why did he become an actor, then a GRE test-prep teacher, then a psychologist? Because nobody was handing him money, sex, dinners or flights. He had to earn them indirectly by getting very good at something and outcompeting other men, which takes years. Had people been offering to pay his tuition and take him out every night from age 16, would he have worked as hard? "No. That's just too seductive. It's like the one ring of power." Most people struggle to get those things, and very few struggle because they find struggle inherently virtuous.
So entitlement is the sane response to a pattern that has repeated 10,000 times over a decade. He expects the sun to rise tomorrow on the same logic. The trouble is that almost nobody in history has gotten more of what she wants and less of what she doesn't than a beautiful woman, and even a totalitarian monarch hears no from his ministers more often. Learning to tolerate rejection takes time whether the lessons start at two or at 30, and anyone told no for the first time throws a tantrum. Tantrums look better on toddlers than on adults. What observers call nuttiness is often that first-time dysregulation in a grown body.
The second half of the mechanism is on men. They discover early that the truth doesn't get them laid. Taraban proposed an experiment any woman could run for free: build a fake dating profile with photos of an attractive man, set it to seek casual relationships, count the matches, then switch it to long-term and count again. He believes more than 90 percent of men on apps claim to want a long-term relationship and that nowhere near that many actually do; the number is his estimate, not a cited figure. Women, he argues, hold the power to remake the world by choosing which men to reward and under what circumstances. If women could detect lies and simply declined to sleep with liars, the population would get honest fast. But most people can't detect lies, and women often care about other things more. He couldn't even say where honest men congregate. Philosophy clubs and churches, maybe, over dive bars and nightclubs.
Laita blamed fathers, and Taraban agreed that's where the exceptions come from. The beautiful women who aren't nuts almost always had strong male figures, fathers and brothers, willing to tell them the truth and absorb the hatred, insults and outbursts that followed, because that's what lets a person become a full emotional adult. Such men are rare. Chronological age, he said, has nothing to do with psychological age, and most adults are functionally between eight and 12. Start from that assumption rather than from presumed maturity and the world becomes legible.
He is nonetheless hopeful. Fewer people live in poverty than at any point in history, more can read, and violence has declined. Understanding grows one step at a time, and if you get too far ahead of people they get frightened and attack you. It won't be finished in anyone's lifetime.
Pain teaches, but only light can be passed on
Taraban had written a script that morning on suffering, and he offered its core distinction. Suffering is pain plus judgment, and the judgment is usually that the pain is unbearable, unjust or unfair.
He pictures a thin, shifting path he calls the path of light, hedged on every side by pain. Humans learn either through light or through pain, and 99 percent of people learn 99 percent of their lessons through pain. Pain is a superb teacher because it never lies and doesn't care about your feelings. Your loved ones, your therapist and your priest will soften the truth; pain won't. You feel it whenever your mental model makes you act against reality. If you believe an outlet is dead and jam metal into it, the shock is the honest feedback that your model was wrong. Emotional pain follows the same rule: somewhere underneath is a belief that reality should be other than it is, and decisions made in line with that belief keep colliding with the world. Pain works like rumble strips on the road's edge, and the more sensitive you become, the less of it you need to correct course.
The asymmetry that matters is this. Pain can't be transmitted. If you've never broken a leg or lost a child, no description gets you there. Light, which he uses to mean knowledge, wisdom or revelation, can be transmitted, and the light any of us can pass on is our own transmuted pain. That's the collective defense against unnecessary suffering.
Even so, he never stops people from doing what he expects will hurt them. He'll counsel against it. He thinks there's something meek about a person who only ever takes good advice and never runs the risk, and some lessons have to be felt enough times before behavior changes. People who begin to suffer less rarely want to go back, and that becomes a cycle.
Stand like a horse in the rain
A student once challenged him: calling some suffering unnecessary implies that some is necessary, so what do you do with that part? Buddhism names old age, sickness and death. Nobody escapes them except by dying young.
The image that came to him was a horse in the rain. It stands there and gets wet. It doesn't dance between raindrops in a manic effort to stay dry, doesn't stamp its hooves at the injustice of rain falling here and not on the horses over there, doesn't plot against the horses in the stable, doesn't lie down and declare it will never be dry again. Those are human forms of suffering, and animals are spared them, which may be part of why we envy animals. Being cold and wet for a while is bearable. The conditions change, and eventually you may be so hot and dry that you miss it.
The complement is what he calls the jaws of life. Sometimes, through your own fault or not, you're the rabbit in the wolf's mouth. The rabbit doesn't struggle, because the teeth are right there and thrashing drives them deeper. It goes limp, nearly plays dead, spends no energy fighting what it can't escape, and waits. Wolves relax when dinner seems certain. In that lapse, the rabbit runs.
Don't make the situation worse than it already is. Wait for your moment. If you're lucky enough to get one, take it as well as you can.
