The Plastic Bag Theory: Easygoing Husbands Become Less Safe Over the Years | EP 52

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What if the same thing that made your wife feel safe when you met is the exact reason she says she does not feel safe now?

Being the easygoing, go-with-the-flow husband felt like a gift at the start. You did not argue. You did not make things heavy. You went with the flow. So why does she now say she does not feel safe around you?

Alessandro breaks down the Plastic Bag Theory. It is the idea that blew up across the internet and got picked up by news outlets before he ever sat down to explain what he actually meant. 

You will hear how easygoing slowly turns into exhausting, and how your wife ends up carrying a mental load you cannot even see. Alessandro walks through a study about two people named John and Jennifer that will change the way you look at a messy room for good. 

He names the two kinds of broken men. And what do you do when you finally step up and she is still angry? Alessandro takes that pushback head on and gives you no place to hide.

If you have ever been told to be more of a man and had no clue what that meant, this one is for you.

Press play and learn why growing a spine might be the kindest thing you ever do for your marriage.

Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy. Always seek qualified guidance for your personal situation.

Views shared by Alessandro Frosali and his guests reflect their lived experiences and opinions. Every listener’s journey is unique, and no therapeutic relationship is created.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My big fat claim of the day is that modern men have become like flaccid plastic bags. Welcome to the plastic bag theory. My name is Alessandra Fasali, and this is shut the fuck up and listen. This is my podcast where I help men go from boy behaviors to healthy men behaviors to becoming better husbands. Now, this whole plastic bag theory is actually not even coined by me. I started talking about the plastic bag or men becoming like plastic bags, or at least having the spine of a plastic bag. And all of a sudden, it started getting picked up in news outlets. I started seeing it on vice.com, I started seeing it on news.com.au, I started seeing this, and all of them quoting Alessandra Frasali, the men's coach, talks about plastic bags and how men are plastic bags. And I was like, well, shit. Let me actually talk about what I meant, number one, so that we can actually speak about it. And we can also then talk a little bit more than uh, you know, just what I did as a viral Instagram video. And I can actually get to the point of why I think this is happening and how the fuck we can get past it. So I want to take you all the way through it, and we're gonna go from the beginning. What was the actual thing that I originally read online or the script that I wrote online? And that's the thing that went viral, which created the theory, the plastic bag theory. Okay, I'm gonna read it for you, and then we're gonna talk about it. So started with easy-going husbands are safe at the start and then damnright exhausting for wives as the years go on. Here's why. Because at the start of the relationship, easy-going husbands feel like a gift, specifically if wives had shitty boyfriends. Because you in comparison, you're flexible. In comparison, you don't argue much, you're agreeable, you don't make things heavy, you won't abuse her, you will be kind and sweet. At the start, compared to those shitty jerk boyfriends, that is very safe. So why is it a few years into the marriage she's saying things like, I don't feel safe around you anymore? So here's what easygoing actually means. It means that you don't initiate things. It means you don't really decide on things, you don't mind, you go with the flow, you don't have any opinions, you wait to be told. So life keeps moving and you just drift down the proverbial river like a plastic bag. The thing is, she doesn't want to live like that. That doesn't sound like a life. So she ends up taking over, filling in the gaps, plans, decisions, logistics, emotional tone, what happens and matters in the relationship, what's coming next. You're feeling kind and chill and relaxed and easygoing, right? But to her, it's just more work. And she's starting to feel overwhelmed and she's feeling like she has to take care of everything because you just go, ah, we'll sort it out later. And it's not actually getting sorted before. So she's having to deal with the consequences of that. And to you, you feel justified because not everything needs to be solved in that moment. And everything that doesn't need to be solved in the moment, she is doing. She's doing it ahead of time. Now, they can start to feel like, oh my gosh, there's this uh magic fairy that solves everything. And there's no magic fairy, it's your wife. Okay, it's your wife. So welcome to the layers of mental load. And let's get back to the original thing. The peace that she had with you at the beginning that saved her from that jerk relationship, it's actually no longer peace to her. Now it's overwhelm and stress. And so to her nervous system, it starts to just feel unsafe because it's always unsafe. She always has to do things around you because you let things go. You're too busy floating down the proverbial river, the plastic bag. Okay. So that's why the word safety comes into it. It's not because you're a bad man or a jerk, it's because you're creating overwhelm within her nervous system. So the wife is not getting overwhelmed because you're too much. A wife is getting overwhelmed because she's doing too much, which should be shared. I get it that you're confused. All of these things that make you safe at the start is what makes you feel like you're a good husband. And so it feels like someone's pulled the rug out from underneath you. No one taught you that. That pleasing kind of kindness, the giving up and support, the easygoing and going with the flow attitude. Now they're not necessarily making you a good husband, these things. They're making you passive. And just because it worked at the start doesn't mean it's going to work any longer. So going forward, she's going to need somebody that doesn't just go down the river like a plastic bag. She's going to need someone with a little bit more of a spine, someone that thinks ahead. And can you be that someone? So that was the original script that I wrote. And I've done various versions of that on uh social media online. And, you know, whenever I post that, it gets anywhere between like 100,000 to 5 million views, right? And and what I see from this is just the wall of women going, oh my God, I feel so seen. How did you know my experience? Well, let me tell you first my story. Okay. I know that experience because I lived on the other side of it. My wife went through that experience with me. She had a man who was very, very kind and go with the flow. In fact, that was the kind of man my dad was. And I learned that from him. Ah, it's okay. Don't worry. I don't worry about it. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. But societally, it's not fine. The only person who makes it fine is the woman. She's the one who's gonna step up and do something about it. But men, we don't see that side. We don't see that side at all. And so all that stress, all that pressure, all of those things, they inherently go on to her. And that's what happened with my wife. It's what happened with my wife. And then she told me I need you to do more of a man or I'm leaving. And I was like, what the fuck do you mean? But at the core of it was understanding this. So you see, one of the big misconceptions that I get from men here, men are gonna come to the table and they're gonna say things like, Yeah, but but what if, you know, when I do things, things are like like she doesn't like that. We'll deal with that in this podcast episode, right? We'll talk about that towards the end. But, you know, how do I actually step up? Again, we'll talk about that at the end. But first we want to talk about how this happened for us collectively as a society, right? Why is this the way? Well, I truly believe that within society today, we've we we've been told different things. And and and what we get told goes through in trends, okay? Goes through in trends. So, you know, back in the 50s, you can see the strong trend was women in the in the kitchen and and and men are gonna go out and provide, and we get this real patriarchal sort of messaging, okay? And that I would say is a lot of where that jerk thinking comes from. And you would, if you want to classify this, I would call that all spine and and no heart. And it's completely like it's a system that was just awful, okay? So we can see that. We can see that system there in the in the 1950s or say or so. But then, you know, then we've got feminism that comes through. And in the moment that feminism comes through, it's like, okay, let's let's balance the scales a little bit. But something happened with feminism that I believe, which was very interesting. It sort of just made capitalism got bled into feminism a little bit because of course rights needed to be there, right? And I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about this idea that women also be bar girl bosses or going out into it, and and essentially stripped away anything that was of women and actually say women should be more like working men. And then everyone's out of the household, everyone's doing everything, and and it's becoming equal, equal, equal to the point where men then go, okay, well, now I can relax, I can not do as much. But societally, everything that was the roles of women still stayed in the hands of women. It's just now that women are also expected to work just as much as men. So the the scales not only tipped, they they sort of threw everything as time went on onto the women's plate. And how did men react to this? Well, I noticed that men get a lot more heart, right? They're sit a lot more in their feeling realms and they're they're like, okay, I'm gonna feel more. And then this created this era of heart men, but these heart men had no spine. So we had the jerk husband and that sort of thing would have all spine and no heart. And then now we have a whole bunch of men who have all heart but no spine. They don't actually see things that need to be done. They don't see their space in, like they're quite passive in life. They just give all decisions over because they're also a little bit too scared to to hurt their wives, a little bit too scared to to uh rock the boat, so to speak, right? It's like, oh, I don't want to be a jerk, man, so I'm just not gonna really be anything. I'm just gonna be the plastic bag that floats down the river. I just want peace. Why can't everything be peaceful? I don't have anything to stand for. So I I want to make the case that both that all spine and and that all heart, they're both wrong. Right? The opposite of crazy is still crazy. What we want is to have a healthy sense of both. We want to have spine and heart. We want to have spine and heart. And that is not too difficult to find. Now, I use those kind of terms to try and describe to men at least a story of how we can get there. I know I'm being quite, you know, meta with this because there's a lot of you can rip apart my arguments, and even women will come in and go, yeah, but what about mental load? What about, you know, the fact that men should just be adults and everything like this? Look, trying to describe a multi-layered and multifaceted thing through multiple different analogies and things like that is really quite difficult. So that's why I like the imagery of being like, look, the prevailing problem. If the prevailing problem is passivity, then let's imagine to vilify that passivity by talking about it like it's a plastic bag. So, how do we get away from the plastic bag? How do we get away from the plastic bag? Look, there are some really good books that I think that men can read on things like mental load and domestic labor and things like that, because I do believe that men need to understand what is actually happening on the sphere of women. I think that men don't get that women are actually elevated into a role where they have to do loads of different things. Uh, I'm gonna really screw up her last name. I think it's pronounced Rupana, Leah Rupana from the book Drained. Brilliant book for anyone who out there. But she runs the study, which is which is fantastic. And uh she's one of the world's like leading forethought thinkers of mental load. And she ran a study about John's and Jennifer's. So what do I mean by that? You've probably seen it on Instagram somewhere, and there's a lot of people making content about it, but it is a truly a like a brilliant study. Essentially, when we're gonna talk about mess in the home, so to speak, because this is one of the major topics I think people talk about passivity with men. It's like men just don't initiate change within the household. They just don't initiate things, they just don't see the mess, right? Women see the mess. That's her standards. Like the men, they just don't see it. That's that's that's something that's different with men and women, right? Well, in her study, she wanted to see if that was true, but then also go a little bit further and to work out why men are not initiating or picking up the slack, so to speak. Why are they, so quote unquote, these plastic bag men? So what they did in the study was they actually gave controlled subjects different different pictures. So the first picture was like a picture of a messy room. So they got the picture of the messy room, and in this messy room, they would um they would show uh men and women alike this room and see if they could identify it was messy. 100% across the board, both men and women could identify that it was a messy room. Great. So it's not a fact, it's not a fact that men don't see mess. They see mess just the same. But here's where it gets really fucking interesting. Men and women are judged differently if they make the mess. They are judged differently if they make the mess. So, what does that mean in practicality? Both control groups were told the mess was made by a different person. First control group, they were told that the mess was made by John. So let's ask you questions about John. Is John John's got a messy room. What do you think about John? Oh, he's probably just late to work. He didn't do that right. Okay. He's he's okay. It's John, right? Does it make him uh a worse father? No, no, he's just a little just a little uh he's just a little lazy today. Uh you know, it's not uh not a problem. Would you more or less likely to employ him? Neither. It doesn't matter. It's just John. John's room doesn't mean anything to us, right? It's doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Okay, cool. So you don't really think anything badly of John because of the messy room. No, not at all. Now Jennifer. Do you? What do you think of Jennifer? Or Jennifer really, this is a completely different control group, right? From both men and women. And across the board, over and over again, they would say that Jennifer would be lazy. Jennifer was actually maybe a little bit mentally unstable. And yes, they would be less likely to hire Jennifer. Yes, they would be more likely to judge Jennifer based on that room. So one thing that I see here, this is huge, right? So think about what this does to the psyche of men and women. So when somebody's gonna come over into a home and be a visitor, a woman knows instinctively, right? Studies have shown it. A woman knows that she will be judged by that person. She knows it. Now, what does the man think? The man has no fucking com like idea of judgment. He might say, relax, honey, calm down, just be fucking quiet over there in the corner. No one's gonna judge us. Kind of true. No one's gonna judge you, but they're gonna judge her. They're gonna fucking judge her. And that's your wife. Okay? You live in different worlds. So that's explaining some of the reason why there's passivity there. That's explaining some of it. Okay? That's a the mental load side of it. I'd say men just haven't seen it. They don't have stakes. They don't have the they don't have the there's like there's no fucking rolling Indiana Jones ball of death behind them coming to get them, which there is for women. Okay? So that's one part. The next part that I see is look, I think we have an epidemic of men really struggling with handling things that are hard. So let's imagine women do have this rolling ball of death behind them, which is the fact that they're gonna get judged, they're gonna have less jobs, they're gonna have more issues with family members telling them that they're they're not good enough, they're gonna have a lot more of the pressure and the judgment from the outside world. And men don't have that, right? So women actually start training their ability to do hard things. Men start training the ability of the opposite, of explaining away, letting it go, don't worry about it, okay? And so they become really good, they become really good at not facing hard things. Not facing hard things. When they need to do something hard, they ignore the call of doing something hard and they they go for instant gratification. You know, and I'm not saying it's only a male thing. Of course there are women who would do this as well, but I see this in there's a reason why when I talk about this fucking script, it gets flown across all of social media. There's a reason why people across the world are quoting it, is because it is a trend that we all are seeing, but we're too scared to admit it. Men are becoming more and more passive. We're not going out and doing the things we know we need to do. You know, I have coached over people in the last year alone. And in that time, and 200 men, not women, 200 men in that time. And I would almost boil that down to one of the most important things is that men know what they should do, but they're a little bit too lazy to do it. They would rather peace. It's just easier to play a video game. No one's gonna judge me on that. It's just easier to watch a watch the football. No one's gonna judge me on that. It's just easier to do this. The problem with that is within a household, within a shared responsibility life, who is going to do that stuff? The person that's going to be judged for not doing it. Your wife. So here comes that part about safety. Safety. Guys, easygoing guys, right? If a woman has had a jerk boyfriend, a guy who was all spine, a guy who was that just an asshole, right? At first she's gonna choose you. First, she's gonna choose the nice guy, the easy-going guy. Of course she is. Because he's not gonna abuse her, he's not gonna hit her, okay? But then as life goes on, he's just not gonna pick up any slack and she's gonna have to handle it. And over and over again, she will start feeling less and less secure because she's doing everything. And so that's where I truly believe that men need to start seeing is what's going on in their life as shared responsibility. There's no magic fairies around to do anything. So literally, if you have to men, draw up a fucking like list your write your own fucking list, but draw up a hole on a whiteboard, everything that gets done in the house. Notice your wife. If toilet paper is there, right? Sitting on the fucking side, did you put it on? No. Then who did? Your wife. Who did? Your wife. Right? Who then bought the toilet paper? Was it you or was it your wife? Who then knew that it needed to go on the list? Was it you? Was it your wife? There are a million of those micro decisions that happen every single day. Every single day. Let's imagine that you had uh like somebody, a worker at work, and you were a boss, okay? And you had somebody always coming in and they could never, they always needed a list for how to do things. They always asked you how to do their job every single day. There was a million questions all the time, you'd get really pissed off. And you'd say, what are they doing? That they're just getting like money for nothing living in this life? Well, that's you and your life if you're a plastic bag, man. If you're floating down the proverbial river going, I'll do the hard things later. I'll let my wife pick up the slack. And so how do we get back to this? Let's first deal with um, let's first deal with what men tend to hit me back with when I speak about this. They're gonna say things like, yeah, but but my wife will always be angry at me if I do step up. My wife will be angry at me if I do step up. There's some things we have to deal with within that line. Number one, she's probably angry because she's been in this situation a little bit too long. Right? So if she is angry, she's been in that situation for quite a long time and she's getting quite fed up. And so that anger is almost understandable. Because men might say, yeah, but I might do one thing and I might do the other thing, and if I do either of them, she's asked me to do both, and if I do either of them, then she's gonna be angry. Well, it's like you're actually not doing either of those, you're trying to do it for her. And that's another thing that gets uh wives angry is the fact that we're doing things for them or to help them rather than seeing that they are our shared responsibility of life. Okay, these are shared responsibility of life. And then the other part of it is if you if your wife is getting angry at you or getting angry at this, stop with this mindset that you're doing it for her. You're also then tying your sense of self into her emotions. You're tying your sense of self into her emotions. Look, I'm not gonna step up and grow a bit of a spine and do and actually be present and awake within my life because my wife would be angry at me. Jesus Christ, listen to yourself, buddy. Like, it's okay if your wife is angry. She's a human being. We all get angry at different things, right? We all get angry at different things. What you need to do is listen to that anger and hear if there is truth behind it. So if she's angry at the way you've done it, right? Look for the truth and go, ah, she's angry because I've done it wrong. Okay, let me spend some more time presence to do it better. Ah, she's angry because actually, this is a trigger from her past. Ah, okay, let's work together on that as a relationship dynamic. Ah, she's angry because um she's now seeing that I'm only doing it now after 10 years. Ah, let's give her a little bit of grace because that must feel fucking tough to only come at it now like that. Okay? So let go of these mindsets that you shouldn't be in control of your life, that life should just take you down the river like a plastic bag. That is the core of the plastic bag theory. I'll work on it as time goes on. I didn't know it was going to be a theory until I just spoke about it out loud. But I wanted to make sure that everyone knows this is not like I've also seen it misquoted out there online in some people's articles and things like that. They've gone ahead and spoken about it like low effort men for dating. Like, it's not about low effort men for dating. It's simply in relationships, this pattern of being nice and easygoing, specifically at the start of a relationship, that feeling safe, and then the nervous system not feeling safe because overwhelm mental load and drain has come because of passivity, lack of initiation, lack of follow-through, lack of presence within a life. When those things are present, that becomes the theory of a man becoming a plastic bag. Anyway, this is Shut the Fuck Up and Listen. I'm Alessandro Frasali. Make sure you subscribe, make sure you leave us a comment, tell me what you think about the plastic bag theory. Tell me if you think I'm a fucking idiot. I don't mind. Men, we need to engage with this. And if you tell me I'm a fucking idiot, I want to know about it. Because guess what? You will have actually woken up from your stupor and you might be able to express these ideas. We we pull them out and then we go, ah, are they right or wrong? Right? I don't know all the answers. I just know that we should stop being fucking passive. So if you hate what I'm saying today, please let me know. Because that way we can genuinely wake the fuck up. Cheers, guys. That's the episode. That's all I got for you today. I just want you to remember you're not alone in this. Make sure you subscribe to stay connected, of course, and comment your win, you know, because every time a man sees other men winning, they don't feel alone anymore. And I love that. Tools are in the show notes, starting with the better husband in two minute emails. Let's build this together. I'll see you next week.