My Dating Experience With ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’
By: Ellen Mcrae
Tags: Personal Development, Relationships, Life Lessons, Dating, Love

“There’s no nobility in poverty.” ― Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

I met Anthony before he became a stockbroker’s assistant.

That’s how it usually works in stockbroking. You start by being the slave to the licenced and successful broker. You then work your behind off in the hope they like you enough to cut you in.

This is where Anthony started. At the bottom.

They promised him a life of wealth, easy riches, and a career that would never fail to get him whatever he wanted. Women, houses, cars, a sense of purpose. The stockbroking life was the only life he needed, the flourishing brokers promised.

But the moment he started working as a stockbroker’s assistant, our entire relationship changed. The dynamic shifted. His attitude towards me turned. Before I could wrap my head around it, there were three of us in the relationship.

“The easiest way to make money is — create something of such value that everybody wants, and go out and give and create value, the money comes automatically.” ― Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

Anthony thought becoming rich was easy.

His friend got him the job, his very rich, successful stockbroking friend. His friend had all the clients. He could afford overseas holidays every year, and never needed to worry about payday.

Anthony started comparing his life. he wondered why after six months he was still living with his parents, and still in debt. He also wondered why the promotion to broker hadn’t occurred yet, either.

I learned that to compare is dangerous, for both you and the people around you. As Anthony doubted, I felt the seeds of doubt about my own life creep in. As he analysed every inch of the way we lived and who we spent our time with, I felt like I wasn’t good enough either. I felt like all my achievements meant nothing because we didn’t have a mansion like his colleagues.

We need to be careful about how we drag our partners into our own insecurities. It’s very easy for our partners to become trapped where we are. We can spiral together.

But our own issues need to be separate from relationships issues. This is because our personal insecurities aren’t necessarily relationship insecurities. When we become fixated on our own issues, we need to be careful to focus on “me” and not “we”.

“Act as if! Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and then you’ll surely become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence and then people will surely have confidence in you. Act as if you have unmatched experience and then people will follow your advice.” ― Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

Dressed in a three thousand dollar suit, I watched Anthony preach to one of my closest girlfriends about investments.

What she needed to do. What she was doing wrong. How she could get into the stock market and become “rich like him”.

Later in the evening, my friend pulled me to the side. “I like his confidence. But why is a man so rich still living with his parents?”

I felt embarrassed. I was stuck in the middle of his lie and her confusion. If I told her that his Dad had bought the suit for him, and that he was only an assistant, I would be selling out my partner.

Yet, if I corrected her, I would be feeding into a lie. Because he wasn’t rich. He was projecting confidence, as all the other brokers had told him to do.

I didn’t want a relationship filled with lies and keeping up with appearances. Though it was necessary for him, I learned that the burden of carrying around his secrets was too much for me.

It meant I couldn’t be myself either. I felt trapped in a world that wasn’t where I belonged. I felt like a fraud, and my conscience couldn’t handle it.

We shouldn’t have to live a lie if we don’t want to. Our partners may want to project confidence by twisting the truth, but we don’t have to be complicit. We also don’t have to agree with their behaviour.

Equal relationships should exist without comprising our values. And if we find ourselves in this situation, it has to be alright to honour our values. Our values are what make us unique. Lose them in a relationship, and you’ll end up losing yourself.

“…inside the restaurant young Strattonites carried on their time-honored tradition of acting like packs of untamed wolves.”― Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

The more I asked him not to go to the strippers, the more he did.

Anthony wasn’t a “man’s man”. He didn’t own any tools, and he didn’t get his hands dirty. He liked sport, but he only drank beer because that’s what his friends were doing. Yet, when he discovered the office Friday night ritual in the office was to go to the stripers, he couldn’t refuse.

I expressed my displeasure. I expressed that I didn’t trust him, an that he was succumbing to influence. I also expressed that I found his actions to reflect an unwanting of me.

Yet the more I expressed how I felt, the more he went pushed the limits of my fury. He went more often. He lied about his antics, poorly I’ll add. And he continued because “it angered me.”

Relationships should be a place where people listen and respects what their partner is saying. Your partner’s opinion should be a commodity of value, not something to ridicule, torture or ignore.

And when the spite creeps in, we need to evaluate our ‘why’. Why do we want to spite the person we love?

We also need to be wary of influence. As the word of colleagues became more powerful than mine, I learned where his priorities lie. It’s important we acknowledge who is in our relationship. Are we letting a third party decide how our relationship functions? Are we letting something else become the wedge between us?

“People don’t buy stock; it gets sold to them. Don’t ever forget that.”― Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

Anthony wasn’t a salesman, nor could he ever be.

To charm people, to sell stocks and investments was outside of his intelligence and skill set.

He realised this, with the addition of the long working hours, that he would never make it as a successful broker. He would never make the millions every broker hoped for. With the realisation, he experienced a midlife crisis before reaching thirty.

That’s when he took it out on me.

Anthony’s bruised ego needed mending and he needed to feel better about his own failures. Instead of finding a way of making the situation better for himself, he started picking on me.

He mocked my choice of career. He laughed at my ideas. He became so unsupportive of my endeavours that he borated me into quitting my creative dreams and to take a job in retail. He didn’t quit until I was as miserable as him.

We can’t be the ones to give our partner validation in their life. We can’t be the thing that they compare themself to, that makes them feel better about their life. We can’t be the emotional punching bag for their professional issues.

“Without action, the best intentions in the world are nothing more than that: intentions.” ― Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

By the time Anthony quit as a stockbroking assistant, the damage was done.

His dreams of becoming the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ were long over, and our relationship was over too.

My experience isn’t typical of all stockbrokers. Not all relationships with brokers become a battleground of ego, jealousy and manipulation. It a lot of ways it had nothing to do with stockbroking at all.

It had everything to do with expectation.

Anthony lived his short yet intense career in stockbroking with the expectation his entire life would transform into a movie. A fairy tale. He forgot about all the hard work, the discipline, the sacrifice needed to live the movie dream. He only believed in the exception and not the rule. He lived by intentions, and not action.

When we become fixated by expectation, we set ourselves up for the ultimate failure. And that failure will likely resonate to all facets of all life. Our relationships with others will suffer. Our expectations will transfer to the people we care about. Whether we want it to or not, in my experience.

When we set expectations for our life, based on the glory of others, we need to expect disappointment. And we can’t expect the other people in our life to share these expectations.

Looking back at it, there’s no surprise we broke up.

I was never going to live up the wolf’s fairytale.