I (35F) have been with my partner (35M) for about 2.5 years. We’re thrilled to be bringing a baby into the world together and I have no doubts about him as a partner or a father.
Recently though he has expressed some VERY concerning beliefs that I did not realize he held. He says he likes to talk about these things in the spirit of being “open minded” but for me it is incredibly scary.
He started to watch videos of flat-earthers and even sent me a few, to which I suggested we both take a break from social media. I guess YouTube doesn’t count for him because he is now watching a lot of lengthy videos about “evil cabals that are running the world and intent to destroy us.”
I could laugh a little at the whole flat earth idea because who cares? But EVIL CABALS? Come on, man!!
He didn’t hold or express any of these beliefs before I got pregnant.
I have been very vocal with him that I want him to keep talking to me bc I don’t want him to feel isolated. But I also have told him I disagree wholeheartedly. These conversations go on and on in circles. He wants to convince me of his new beliefs and I listen, but encourage him to stop thinking about things on a global level (if I’m even allowed to call it a globe anymore, ha!) but to focus on our own family and the community in which we live. He can’t do that. He “needs answers.”
He believes we’ve been completely lied to our entire lives and that him “researching” is giving him some feelings of control over it. And he says he’s “just searching for truth.”
I am not trying to isolate him at all. I want him to keep talking to me, but I am not budging. I am not raising my kid with conspiracy theory parents. My own parents were anti-vaxxer religious nuts on the verge of wearing tin foil hats my entire life. I will not live like that.
At a recent doctors appt he brought up vaccines and I was mortified. Why can’t he believe science that has been proven for decades?! Why do I feel like I’m fighting with my parents all over again?
I told him it scares me because he seems less in touch with the world around him as he is doing his “research” and I don’t know why he puts trust in these YouTubers who are making money off his views and the algorithm is made to keep people angry or scared so they keep returning. It is all for money! It is not to “reveal truth!”
I’ve told him that I know it starts with the intention of understanding but that I’ve seen people (including a former close friend of mine) go down this path. It leads to paranoia and isolation and it is not healthy at all. He asks “what do those people have to do with me?” I try and remind him I know he’s smart, but to think we have something all figured out is just blatantly wrong (and no, I don’t think I have it figured out, I just also know that the algorithm is not where we will find “truth”).
There are so many more fulfilling and enriching ways for us to spend our time and energy. I’ve encouraged him to spend more time around his real-life friends and for us to do more things within our community. I want us to remain grounded in reality rather than looking for ways the world is potentially out to get us. He says he’s on board, but almost every conversation comes back to these conspiracies. I’m exhausted and scared.
How do I help turn this around???
(There are other conspiracy theories that I didn’t mention, but you get the idea)
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No. Hard no. How far along are you? I understand this is a wanted baby and this is all coming to light now that he thinks you’re trapped.
Do not have a baby with someone that you fundamentally disagree with about basic science/how to raise your kids. This will not get better magically.
You’re correct that a lot of people fall into consipiracy theory rabbit holes because they feel lost and lonely. You even said he told you how he “needs answers”, and lacks control over his life. I can kind of understand that last part, given how he’s venturing headfirst into parenthood, which is both scary and new.
Point is, I’m super glad that you already recognize the emotional component here, and are willing to be considerate of his feelings. Props to you for that.
It’s worth noting that you should NOT address his claims head-on with logic. Conspiracy thinking isn’t logical, and there’s no end of made-up explanations for anything and everything.
Instead, prompt him to reflect on his feelings and motives for why he’s seeking out these answers, and acknowledge and validate those feelings. Let him know that it’s okay to be confused about the state of the world – the world’s changed a lot for a lot of reasons, and it IS confusing! It’s okay to feel like he doesn’t have full control – especially during such a significant transition to a new phase in your lives!
Encouraging him to find peace with uncertainty could help reduce his likelihood of seeking out simple answers.
And all the while, as you’ve already been doing, keep establishing and enforcing boundaries for what behaviors from him you’re not willing to tolerate, and what the consequences will be if he follows through anyway.
Best wishes, OP.
Oh well… this can happen. First off, the prospect of becoming a father made him, perhaps for the first time, look at the world with the eyes of having to care for someone – and he is scared. There is evil and corruption and a lot more. Certain theories resonate. I could elaborate, but no need. This is about YOU and the baby arriving soon. Your focus needs to be on this child, and your mental state matters. Some ways, if I may suggest, are: acknowledging you heard what he said but asking for time out for yourself, always bringing it back to your pregnancy and the need to focus on that. Your need for calm, for peace, for upliftment. He ought to understand that and leave his theories elsewhere. It’s one thing to not tell him off right away but another to suffer through a whole lecture on it.
At this point it might be transitory, and once the baby arrives healthy and whole, his focus might shift to helping and taking car of it. Should that not happen, you have to look to keep yourself mentally clear of that sort of stuff.
For now, wishing you a good pregnancy and a healthy baby – children have a way of turning our world upside down, in a good way and I hope the same happens to your partner
Oh boy, I’m sorry. I almost wonder if the opposite would work- instead of shutting him down, keep digging in. When he starts talking about his theories, dig in and have him point every detail out. “Why? Why? How? How does that work?” This is how a lot of people get out of spiraling anxiety thoughts- following them to the bottom.
Follow his theories to the bottom and it will disprove them.
You can’t turn this around. He’s choosing the validation he gets from feeling superior in knowledge and intellect over being a rational thinking adult. This is a choice he’s making.
You can only decide how much you’re going to enable him versus protect your kid from him. Staying with him is enabling and validating his beliefs and you will be fighting him every step of the way. I’ve seen it in my own family. You’ll be telling your kids to keep it a secret that they received vaccines or asking them not to argue with their teachers about the earth being round. That’s if he allows them to go to school.
He’s too far down the rabbit hole to convince. The algorithms will keep confirming his beliefs; the more he clicks, the more he gets. You know this already.
I don’t know the magic recipe either. I’m sure there are support groups online, also on Reddit. If you want to stay in this relationship I would recommend joining these groups. Don’t budge.
In a way, conspiracy theories are very comforting. If all the bad things track back to one cabal, then all we need to do is defeat it. There’s an order and reason to it. It’s way scarier to accept that sometimes bad things just happen, and there’s not always a way to prevent it. People of above average intelligence are sometimes at higher risk to fall into conspiracies, because their brains are better at spotting patterns (which may or may not exist) or the inconsistencies/absurdities of real life (the truth can be very weird, there’s a reason for the saying “stranger than fiction”.
I don’t know if it would help or not, and I’m not sure where to begin (I’m an occasional listener and they have put out a TON of content) but the podcast Knowledge Fight does a very approachable, very thorough and often funny job of debunking Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists, both by going through their arguments and all the changes/hypocracies and by demonstrating their bad faith and motives. I think tgey’ve done episodes on most/all of his movies, if those are something your husband holds in high esteem.
Has he spoken to a doctor or would he be willing to?
Please make sure you and your child stay safe!
> him “researching” is giving him some feelings of control over it
That was an unusually candid admission.
I don’t have any great answers. Unfortunately, he’s headed down a path where soon you will be the enemy, the conspirator, the lizard person, etc.
My only advice to you is to keep an emergency fund, that you control, and keep personal papers and key identifying documents safe. He may be headed down the path of burning your government IDs and such because they use capital letters to enslave you to the secret corporations that control everything.
> I know he’s smart
With respect, he started with flat Earth. It’s not “smart” to ignore centuries of scientific evidence.
r/QanonCasualties is full of stories like yours, people that started with Joe Rogan and similar “mainstream” media and got radicalized more and more over time.
I heard on a podcast (Skeptics Guide to the Universe) the idea that conspiracy theorists have an overgrown sense or skill at pattern recognition. Like some people are good at it, and some people are so attuned to it that their brains show them patterns that aren’t actually there.
They gave the example of seeing tall grass moving when you are out in nature. It could be the wind, but evolutionarily, it made sense to assume that grass was moved by a tiger. So the first thought is to assume danger to protect oneself. Some people assume danger and then can’t come down from it with even with more input.
If your husband is particularly smart, I wonder if it would be worth mentioning something like that to him. He will be less secure and in control if he’s allowing his brain to ignore contradictory explanations.
Sadly, many people are sucked into cult like mentality. It’s very rampant in the US. Trump and Kirk and others have a godlike status to their followers. I’m expecting a new religion to be born from them. Science is taking a backseat and critical thinking is becoming lost.
If the earth is flat, why haven’t the flat-earthers run any trips to the edges of the planet to take pictures and gather data?
YouTube is the worst! You watch one video on a topic, and the algorithm automatically plays another video and another endlessly, but each one is a little more extreme and concerning than the last.
For example, you search for a video about homeschooling, the next one that automatically plays is about vaccines being unsafe, then the next one is a flat-earth video, then comes the chem trails, until pretty soon you’re sucked into the “great white replacement” theory. All because you looked for some info about homeschooling. But the algorithm figures you don’t trust the government to educate your child, so here are a whole bunch of other things you shouldn’t trust regarding the government.
My brother is all the way down the rabbit hole with this shit, and I can barely talk to him anymore. He keeps sending me videos, too. So now YouTube is sending unsolicited videos to my phone. I don’t even have the app downloaded. The latest one was about how marrying first cousins is perfectly fine. It’s just a myth that there’s anything wrong with it.
Not only are a lot of their videos AI-generated slop, YouTube recently admitted to taking popular real videos and altering them to make them look like AI slop. They had no reasonable explanation for doing this. The only thing I can think of is they want to make it even more difficult to distinguish what’s fake and what’s real.
Annnnnnd this is why I tell people that 2 years is too soon for big commitments like marriage and/or babies. You barely know someone after being with them for 2 years. You’ve only scratched the surface. Now you’re tied to him and learning he has some batshit beliefs.
Take it from someone who has a family member just like this – there is nothing you can do to fix this. I’ve been trying to pull my family member out of the alt-right deep state crunchy granola fluoride is killing us bullshit pipeline for the better part of 10 years. She simply doesn’t believe me. Data doesn’t convince her. Experts don’t convince her. She is beyond rationality.
Do yourself and your baby a favor and cut your losses now. Start planning a custody agreement. I’m so sorry.
I could NOT be with someone that…ummm…intellectually challenged.
OP, I would encourage him to start therapy and couple’s counseling. There’s more going on here, and you want to be confident that he’s stable before that baby is born. I would also go on his Youtube account and view a ton of videos about cute babies and parenthood and try to change his algorithms, so he’s not just seeing crazy theories all day. I’d also ask him to take a break from Youtube too. Tell him that you’re worried about him.
If it’s too late to abort, you’re fucked. This will only get worse.
Idk how you can hear him question vaccines and still stay with him. Especially when you’re pregnant with a child that will NEED those vaccines.
That alone should have been a dealbreaker. He won’t listen to anyone because he’s in the rabbit hole.
Is your plan to keep staying till it becomes unbearable?
Because what he did should have been an instant dealbreaker. That’s the only way to protect your child from his craziness. He’s going to start feeding it to the child eventually.