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Nov. 4, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
01:19:37
Timeless Wisdom - The Problem of Happiness - Part 7
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November is National Family Caregivers Month.
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Hear thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
Your child may have a nature, a natural tendency to unhappiness.
It should be a very real help to you.
That way, if it is you, you no longer have to walk around thinking life is dumping on you.
You no longer have to walk around thinking that people are hurting you when they're not.
And you can realize this is me and make peace more with a subdued you.
You are not happy, go lucky, Susan.
Okay?
That's the way it is.
You are happy, go lucky, Susan.
Okay.
But that is, I believe it is of great help to people.
If your spouse is that way, you are not responsible for your spouse's happiness.
All right?
These are things I may have touched on in the beginning, and I feel very, I do get guilt feelings rarely, but I do if I repeat myself in a course that people are taking with me.
So I don't want to embellish upon these ideas if they have already been something that you are familiar with.
But it is very important in this regard to know that we come out with different natures.
Some kids come out of one way, others come out another.
Also, the number of things that can work on us in any event, in the course of our childhood or whatever, make us the way we are in many ways.
My belief is, otherwise I wouldn't be giving such a course, is that the brain can speak to your feelings, that the brain should be the center of feelings of happiness.
Obviously, there will be times when it is just the feelings process, but to rely on that is a recipe for unhappiness.
That's the whole point that underlies this course.
The brain must announce, I am happy, or at least I am not unhappy.
Or at least, if I am unhappy, nothing is inducing it, so I could take it easy.
It is not, it is just the way my nature is for whatever reason.
And by the way, if your nature is that way, there are a number of things you might want to do about it, if you want to do anything.
The first is to become calm about it.
There is no law in life, thou shalt be happy.
Okay?
But I'm very serious.
In fact, it may bring you some pleasure to be unhappy.
So then it really gets confusing.
What's happy?
I'm very happy being miserable.
Don't bother me.
That in and of itself is a quandary.
One thing is all the things that I will talk about next term about what fills a light with meaning, which will be the underlying source of the entire next term, the problem of meaning in life.
But in addition to that, I'm a very big believer in analysis.
And psychotherapy, they're not the same thing.
Let me say a few words about that because I have, on a course on happiness in the late 20th century, not to speak about psychotherapy, is like having the proverbial elephant in the room and never mentioning his existence.
It is the elephant in the room, psychology.
So a few words about that I think are appropriate.
I am a big believer in psychotherapy, which comes to surprise to many people who hear me, who hear only the values and religious side of me, because most people think that religious people think that religion is enough.
Religion is enough for some things, but religion does not answer the problem of what if your mother wasn't good to you?
Or what if your father died when you were a teenager?
Or what if your older brother beat you up every day?
What is religion going to tell you?
Love thine brother when you want to kick his ass in?
It doesn't help in that regard.
By the way, in the same thing, and that will be, again, that's part two of all of this.
Psychology without religion is even emptying.
That's the point that is lost on both professions.
They are both very jealous gods, the God of religion and the God of psychology.
Generally speaking, with some noble exceptions, and the emphasis is on the word noble, those in psychology think that that suffices, and those in religion think that suffices.
So most rabbis don't go to shrinks, and most shrinks don't go to synagogue.
And they're both the poorer for it.
That's the problem.
Now, the reason that I am for it very briefly is the best thing that psychology can do for you is to tell you about what is animating you that you don't know about.
In fact, that's all it can do for you.
But that's a big all.
Why am I walking around miserable is a very fair question.
Most people don't want to be miserable.
And if, in fact, you've been able to isolate in your life, you know, the truth of the matter is, when all is said and done, I have a decent spouse.
My kids are certainly no worse than other kids.
I have no worries really to speak of financially.
Why am I miserable?
You want to find out.
In this regard, it is up to you how you would do it.
I personally, I waver on this, but generally speaking, I can't imagine anyone who would not profit from seeing a psychologist.
It is inconceivable.
I mean psychologist, I mean anyone in psychotherapy.
The big problem, I shouldn't take that back, I can't imagine someone who would not profit, someone who goes to a dud.
And you have to know that just as with every other profession, from first basemen to plumbers to air conditioning fixers, repair people, to lawyers, to CPAs, most are mediocre.
And it is as true in psychotherapy as it is in every other profession.
And it is extremely difficult to know whether you've been with a dud.
How do you know?
It's like, how do you know if your auto mechanic is no good?
Very rarely do you know in the beginning.
He tells you, Mrs. Jones, your carburetor, it's clearly the carburetor.
We'll replace it for you.
Do you know if he's telling the truth?
You don't even know if he's honest.
I'm assuming psychotherapists are honest, and it still doesn't help.
Take the issue of a couple going in for marital counseling, which I think it's worth for any couple to do, even if they're getting along great.
Find out why you're not getting along great.
It's beautiful.
I was kidding.
I was kidding about that.
But I do believe any couple should go, and that's why they now even have premarital counseling, which is a very advisable thing.
Better to break up pre than post.
But you go there, and there are two types of marital therapists, at least.
One who announce at the outset, I'm here to make whatever decision you make as healthful, as intense as possible.
If you decide to split up, I will help you split up.
If you decide to stay together, I will help you stay together.
You may have read an article, was it in the New York Times or LA Times, about how it's changing?
Was it in the LA Times?
This is changing, and so a lot of therapists today, in fact, are taking the fact that the clergy have been taking, we would like you to stay together.
Our job is to try to help you stay together.
If you can't, you can.
But we're not here to just make the departure smooth.
We're here to make the same together more likely.
So you have to understand that therapists have philosophies just like anybody else does.
It isn't the body of science.
It's like saying, please understand the differences among therapists are at least as great as among clergymen.
If you're Jewish, you know how different a reform rabbi is from an Orthodox rabbi.
Yet they are both rabbis and they're both in the same religion.
So you can imagine how great, if the analogy holds, there is among psychotherapists.
That is why you need to know, in effect, their philosophy of life.
Same with psychoanalysis, which is not the same as therapy.
Therapy is behavioral.
You walk in, you say, you know what?
I keep yelling at my husband.
I want to bury him alive, and yet I love him.
I want to know why I'm burying him alive.
Okay?
Or, now there are at least three possibilities.
One, you go to analysis and find out over the course of years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And I'm not saying this is a joke.
I believe in analysis.
But that you've got to go three, four times a week for an hour.
Well, Woody Allen's been doing it for 30 years.
That's why he needs to make movies all the time to finance his therapist.
He finances analyst.
And you lie down and you talk.
And you talk and you talk and you talk till you get to the symptoms that are causing what you're doing.
And you may find out that it's, you know, the obvious, to give an obvious example, that's the way your mother treated your father.
I mean, the way we mimic our parents' relationship is painfully true.
90% of us grow up thinking that, and there's no way around it, that what we saw in our home is normal.
Abused children think abuse is normal.
It is a painful, painful thing.
What you saw between your parents and from your parents to you or one parent, whatever it might be.
Another type is you walk in, you tell this to your therapist, say, I want to stop doing this to my husband or my wife.
What should I do?
And a good one will say, we'll try to find out why, and also give you suggestions.
But then they all vary.
Some listen the whole time, and you wonder why you paid $150 to talk, since you could have done that into a tape for 90 cents.
On the other hand, talking is a very big help.
That was what Freud believed with analysis.
And one of the famous cases in Freud's history is of a woman who was practically paralyzed.
And when she started to describe events that led up to it, the limbs would start shaking.
Just the that's, in effect, part of the way he discovered the power of psychoanalysis.
Merely talking about the event, the causative psychotic event stopped the paralysis.
I mean, that's incredible.
Did you read the article in the Los Angeles Times about the Vietnamese women who were blind?
They saw such, excuse me, the Cambodian women in Los Angeles who were blind, the refugees, during the communist genocide there, they saw such evil that they wished they couldn't see it.
And they induced blindness.
Not physically.
It is purely psychological.
Their optic nerves work, their pupils work.
Everything's work.
The eye works and they can't see anything.
The power of the psyche is staggering.
You don't want to be a prisoner of your psyche.
That is why a healthy person, and ironically, it's only the healthy or the relatively healthy that can really be helped.
I mean, the truly psychotic probably needs stuff that can't be done at this time through psychology alone.
But the vast majority of you, presumably all of you, can be helped.
None of us, I mean, there is no such thing as the quintessentially healthy human being.
It's not possible.
Life impinges too many things upon us.
You want to know why you're acting in a way.
Say you gouge on donuts.
Do you think that it's physical?
Now, I admit that there are some people who are obese because of glandular and genetic predispositions to being fat.
There's no question about that.
But there's no genetic predisposition to eating a box of donuts.
The predisposition is psychological.
It gives you something that could not be gotten otherwise.
I could relate to that.
I have undergone this, and in fact, I'm even debating whether to do a degree in analysis.
I am so convinced there's so much to be learned there.
But I'll give you a very simple example in my own life.
I love apple pie.
No, no, that was for the stories.
In real life, I love apple pie.
Cheesecake is so filled with fat and cholesterol.
Disgusting.
No, no, no, no, I'm joking.
It's delicious, but I never eat it.
Apple pie, I really do.
Anyway, listen to this.
It came out when I was in high school.
I would eat out dinner very frequently.
It was just the way I preferred I was happier eating out during high school than eating at home.
Okay?
What are you going to do?
And I identify, you see, I am very, very passionate about freedom.
Very.
And I identified eating out with being free.
And my parents, thank God bless them, let me.
That was the beauty of it.
They said, you want to fine.
And, of course, I was home for the Sabbath.
I mean, I was home every night, but I frequently would go after school to Manhattan and go to museums and concerts and libraries and bookstores and plays and had a great time, and I'd eat out.
And that liberation from being a child at home under my parents was identified with eating out.
And even to my adult life, luncheonettes, diners, Howard Johnson's, Denny's brought me happiness because I associated them with freedom.
Apple pie is what I ate, and it stayed with me.
I can't give a damn about apple pie.
But apple pie was in here.
Not in here.
It's funny in here.
But it went from here to here.
But I identified it with freedom.
This freedom was eating apple pie out.
I don't even enjoy apple pie in the house.
That's the joke.
It is only enjoyable in a restaurant.
Now, can that be anything but psychological?
Now, I'm giving you something innocuous.
I don't gouge on it, it's innocuous.
But the point is: if psychology can have such an impact on your love of the food and identifying it with big things like freedom, can you imagine how you treat your children or your spouse or yourself are related to your childhood, to parental roles and so on?
That's why I must tell you, I think it's a mistake, if you can afford it, not to engage in it.
It's frightening, though.
It is frightening.
What will you uncover?
I can only say, though, that growth is frightening.
And one of the things that we'll talk about next term is growth and the conflict between growth and pleasure.
Growing is painful, but it is the only way to live, in my opinion.
And I will trade in painless sitting before a boob tube for painful discovery, including the discovery of self.
And that is why, in this answer to this predisposition that you may have, whether genetic or psychological or not fully determinable which it is, you find out what it is.
It cannot hurt you unless, as I say, you go to a jerk, and they exist.
I mean, my God, it was a terrible ratio even of analysts sleeping with patients.
I mean, talk about the ability to hurt somebody.
I mean, that is truly devastatable.
Those are terrible things.
By and large, you men don't have to worry about this.
And by and large, women don't have to worry about it.
Very few do, but a significant enough percentage for it to become an issue for the psychiatric profession.
But other than exceptional circumstances like those, you have to find out.
And what you do, by the way, if you do wish to take this advice and seek psychotherapy, psychotherapy sounds like you're a nut, but it's only those with an old-fashioned view of it, psychotherapy.
All it means is it's psychotherapy as opposed to physical therapy and as opposed to psychoanalysis.
That's all.
It's therapy.
It's a very simple thing.
You want to discuss your problems.
I knew a kid who went to one, and his parents did an interesting thing.
They said, we're going to go to the worry doctor.
It was a very good way of putting it, the worry doctor.
Why shouldn't you go to a worry doctor?
You got worries.
You know, it can only be, I can only imagine, either lingering, lousy feelings from the past when, what are you a nut?
You're going to a psychiatrist, which doesn't even exist anymore.
I mean, certainly in California, if you don't go to a psychiatrist, they'll look at you crazy.
All right?
Also, remember, your psychiatrist went to a psychiatrist.
You have to understand that.
In fact, most psychiatrists really need psychiatrists, which is what they would say too.
I mean, most people don't enter the profession for non-selfish reasons.
They want to know themselves, after all.
You can't be an analyst if you don't.
A friend of mine who's an analyst did six years of analysis four times a week.
I will also tell you he's among the healthiest human beings, kindest, nicest, Jewish, religious, not religious, I mean an active in Jewish life.
I don't want to use the term religious.
And it's remarkable.
Obviously, great, great deal of help.
So, what you do is you interview these people.
You literally interview.
Most will not charge you for a session.
You call up, you say, I'm looking for a therapist.
I'd like to see you.
Fine.
Will you charge, you know, ask, be very honest.
I mean, you know, you don't have money to burn.
Will you charge a one-time visit?
If you do, how much?
Very frequently, what you can do is you can tell them: look, this is the maximum I could pay.
They'll either say, okay, or let me give you names of people who will do it for that fee.
And then you interview them.
I mean, I don't think you just sit there the whole time and you ask questions.
Where did you go to school?
How do you feel about capital punishment?
Etc.
Okay?
What you do is you might want to, if it's a particular issue, if it's, let's say, marital problems, you might want to say, what is your view on divorce?
Are you here just to make divorce easier?
Or is it something you'd like to prevent?
And then you do talking and see how they treat you.
Is there chemistry?
Just like a date.
Is there chemistry?
You will know fairly quickly.
You can always leave.
You hear?
You can always leave.
And by the way, I get very suspicious of people who, after X numbers of years, don't leave.
That too can be a problem, I believe.
Where you end up, that's your best friend, your therapist, and it shouldn't be that way because it's entirely a one-way deal.
It's very important that you know that.
It's all one way.
It is not a friendship.
It's all one way.
When it becomes a friendship, usually it's not the healthiest of things.
But you don't know what makes you tick.
And by the way, I'll give you one way without a therapist to try to find out.
Try to wake yourself up the next time you have a dream.
Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious.
And I believe it is.
Dream therapy is particularly good, and the reason is very simple.
We always censor our subconscious because to look inside is too painful.
So we censor it.
When we're asleep, there is still censorship, and I'll prove it to you.
That's why your dreams sometimes are not decipherable.
You're still censoring what you really feel.
That tomato was not a tomato, obviously.
Tomatoes that talk aren't real.
So how could you have had a dream of a talking tomato?
Obviously, it represents something that even your dream, your consciousness within your dream, was not letting you at.
But somebody can usually figure it out.
I had a dear friend who gave me a free piece of advice.
She's a psychiatrist whom I knew from Brandeis Bardeen.
And I had a recurring nightmare since my childhood.
Maybe about twice a year since I was a child.
I told her the dream over lunch one day.
Within a half hour, she had totally, 100% deciphered it.
I never had the dream again.
And it was so liberating to find out what it was.
It was so helpful.
And I understood from it why I would have had it, why it would have been this and not something else.
I mean, isn't that interesting you?
These are very, very interesting things.
So I very strongly commend to every one of you, especially those of you who have no reason to do so, to do so.
First of all, you'll find plenty of reasons why you're sick once you go.
It's for those of you who have the futzpa to think you're healthy that you should really go.
The sick among you, you already know you should go.
No, it is a very good way to learn yourself and by extension to learn about humanity.
So I strongly commend it to you.
Anyway, that is to deal with these issues, to find out what is animating you, because you don't want to stay in your miserable rut.
There is no reason to be miserable, though obviously you don't have to walk around giggling.
All right.
Now let me get to the second thing that I had done in this course, which is human nature.
Now, under human nature, as an obstacle to happiness, I had listed four things.
The first was physical appetites, food, sex, creatures, comfort, creature comforts, etc.
The antidote to this obstacle is two words that have a very bad name in America since the 60s.
The words are self-control.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will go so far as to say blanketly.
I would put my credibility on the line on this.
Happiness is unattainable without a great amount of self-control.
There are so many simple examples that one could give.
Who's happier?
The person who is able to use his or her fingers to play a musical instrument beautifully?
Or the person who can't?
On just that basis alone.
All other things being equal.
They're equally happy in every way, except one can sit down with a violin, stand up with a violin, actually, or sit down at a piano and make gorgeous melodies.
One can't.
It's a richer life to be able to play a musical instrument.
But to have done so involves a great deal of self-control.
It's why it's very difficult to get kids to study a musical instrument.
I want to play baseball.
I want to dance.
I want to put on lipstick.
Don't bother me with musical instruments.
I'm sick of chords, cherney exercises.
They hurt.
They're a pain, and they are.
But that is exactly, that's it.
The world is built that happiness must involve self-control.
That is the way God or nature has created this world.
If you do all the time what you want, if you don't have self-control, you are finished.
The most obvious example is addictions.
It is amazing to me that self-control still doesn't have a great name in a society that is combating drug addiction, alcohol addiction, sex addiction, television addiction, and God knows what other addictions.
You see, part of the problem, this is a very important point, part of the problem with our calling all of these things diseases is that we have removed the element of self-control from it.
After all, it's not self-control that will prevent you from getting Alzheimer's disease.
See, a true disease comes upon you by calling, we don't even use the term anymore, but being a drunk, by calling it alcoholic, and I'm not opposed to it, but I'm telling you the price paid.
We have removed all the control from the individual.
I am susceptible to alcoholism, the disease.
I have the disease of drug addiction.
Don't we call it an epidemic?
The uses of these words are very instructive.
An epidemic is like the black plague.
That's a true epidemic.
When rats brought disease to Europe, there's no epidemic of addiction.
There's an epidemic of no self-control.
But people don't like to use that term.
But I submit to you, it's not only true, it is the only effective way to, in the final analysis, look at this stuff.
That is why when President and Mrs. Reagan had a campaign, Just Say No, everyone who had had a higher education laughed so hard, their stomach hurt.
Just say no, isn't that ridiculous?
Now, it may not be enough to just say no.
We also need policemen.
We also need employment.
We need a lot of things.
But just say no is pretty powerful.
That's right.
Just say no.
From cheesecake to crack.
Thing is, it's very hard to say no.
But it is not an epidemic of inability to say no.
There is no disease of non-self-control.
The human being is not built with self-control.
It must be learned.
Babies do not reflect upon their wants.
Nor do children.
It is something that must be taught.
That is why it is so terrible to give kids everything they want.
It is so terrible.
One author of a book on child rearing calls it vitamin N. Children need of all the vitamins, vitamin N.
An N for no.
It brings me great joy whenever I could give an honest no to the kids.
Very important.
And by the way, I tell you in my six-year-old, there is visible relief when I say no.
It goes crazy when I say I'll see.
I'll see drives them crazy because there's no firmness to their universe.
What's going to happen?
It's very tempting to say I'll see.
You think you get them off your head and you didn't have the alienating moment of saying no.
But it is amazing what can happen when a parent says no.
Nothing.
Nothing happens.
Okay.
After all of what you go through as a parent, you then say, no.
And it usually ends the issue.
They may beg, they may bargain, they may scream, they may rant, but it is a relief.
It is a relief to have controls first outside of you when you're too young to make them on yourself, and then to have them on you.
Self-control is a profoundly wonderful gift to give to yourself.
The ability to say no.
Don't we envy people who aren't tempted by the same things we are?
Excuse me.
They are tempted, but can say no.
That is why there's a beautiful statement in the Talmud Zoo Hagibor, Ezehu Hagibora Kobe Sha Kitzro.
Who is the strong man?
The one who could conquer his will.
That's strength.
That's self-control.
And in a country, as I said, with all these addictions, it should be so obvious.
The second antidote to this problem is to establish points of contentment.
Let me give you those words again: establish points of contentment.
You've got to be able to define at this time I will be happy with X amount of, remember, these were still under physical appetites, like I spoke last week about money.
Or better, just be able to say, I'm happy at this time with what I have.
If I have more, terrific.
That's terrific.
I'm not asking you to say, listen, I own, I don't have the desire for any more money.
I don't want another raise.
That's abnormal.
The trick is to be happy with what you have and aspire to more is fine.
Not a problem.
But establish points of contentment.
I will be content with half a piece of cake a day.
It's a simple thing.
A lot of people can't have nothing.
A lot of people can't have a little.
That's a problem.
Some people could have either a lot or a little.
That's why I say to cigarette smokers: have two a day.
Can you do it?
Some can.
If you can live on two cigarettes a day, I will go with you to your lung doctor and defend you.
Two cigarettes a day are not going to kill you.
The trouble is, for most people, it goes to four to eight to a pack.
Pack a day is not good.
It's so funny.
My wife is very hard on herself.
And she does smoke two cigarettes a day.
My brother is a lung specialist by sheer coincidence.
And he was visiting in from New York for the holiday of Sukkot, the festival that was in October.
And he was speaking to her about her smoking.
So he said, and she was saying how she tries to stop, but she can't.
She said, well, how much do you smoke a day?
So she said, two a day.
So my brother got quite alarmed.
And he keeps talking, he says, well, that's really serious.
And she goes, I know, it really is serious.
He's thinking pack.
She's thinking cigarette.
And I'm listening in, cracking up, knowing my wife really believes that this is serious.
When he finally heard, I said, Kenny, it's two cigarettes, not packs.
He thought she could not believe that she was taking it that seriously.
And he's a lungs, he's the lung specialist at Columbia University.
So the trick is, can you do it in moderation?
That's the issue of self-control, too.
An alcoholic has to end it, end of issue.
They can't take a sip.
For most people, it's not true about most other things.
A little bit, satisfy that craving to a certain extent.
You crave a candy bar, so set for yourself how much a week of candy you'll have.
But knowing you can't have any is going to drive you mad.
It will.
If you really love candy, you've got to have some.
If you really love ice cream, you've got to have some.
And non-fat yogurt won't do it.
Okay?
It's papier-mâché.
These are really things of advice that work.
They are really worth doing.
You leave it as a reward for yourself for the end of the day, perhaps.
That way, you know, what if you blow the one candy you want at 8 a.m.?
Then you have a miserable day.
But all day, oh, a Hershey bar, a clock bar tonight at 6 gets you through the day.
A cigarette tonight before I go to bed.
That's what I'm saying.
You leave it, you play with your own psyche in this way.
So self-control is not self-abnegation, but it is control.
And it's very key to have.
Now, the second part of the four things of the human nature was psychological wants.
And it was love of mother, father, spouse, child, and so on.
This is a tough one.
The reason it's tough is because we do need and want such love, usually.
But let me explain, therefore, a few things here.
Of all of these, we certainly need when we grow up our parents' love.
Children want parents' love, in fact, usually till the end of their days.
It is an ongoing thing of amazement to me how much children want love even later on in life.
And it amazes young people.
When young people, when kids in college realize that 40-year-olds want their mothers and fathers' love, also it's a harrowing belief because they think they'll graduate from it.
It is a common thing to think when you're an adolescent that you graduate from being a child.
It doesn't happen.
It doesn't happen.
Now, in this regard, what can one say?
If you didn't have it, you've got to make peace with the fact that you didn't have it, and you can't spend the rest of your life looking for it.
At least not from then.
In this regard, too, by the way, that's why it's so important to know yourself before you get married.
Most of you, this may not apply to, but actually, there are a fair.
How many of you are single, just by a show of hands?
Holy mackerel.
How many of you were married?
Holy mackerel.
I can't ask that publicly.
Well, I'll tell you what I want to do.
I want to do it on my radio show.
I would love to have, I already set up one couple.
A woman called in, and then a guy wrote me a letter and sent this picture, and I gave it to her.
So we'll see what happens.
Actually, you know, I'm just to talk Jewish for a minute.
Jews are raised with a matchmaking instinct.
Oh, it is true, and it is peculiarly Jewish.
One of my dearest friends in the world, truly one of my five closest human beings, is a priest.
And every time, certainly for the first year, I constantly wanted to set him up.
I would have to remind myself: A, he was the wrong religion, B, definitely the wrong profession.
Okay?
So finally, I got over it.
But whenever I bring him to a Jewish home, that's the first thing they start asking him.
They naturally introduce, oh, you've got a cousin, a daughter, a niece, or someone at the table.
It is just inevitable.
And whenever I meet a single, I have the same exact instinct is to set the person up.
So I have, so what you said about dating service, you have talked.
Okay, well, okay, I don't know how to do it, though.
Help me do it, and I'll figure out a way.
But I do believe in it very deeply.
There is no greater mitzvah in Judaism than setting up a couple together that lasts.
That works out, huh?
Oh, it did?
Oh, as what?
Oh, my God.
That is great.
Somebody did that in LA magazine once.
A guy wrote in and said, among his interests were something, and listening to Dennis Prager, he got no responses.
I think I appealed to men more.
I don't know why.
He did you.
He wanted some of his fingers and had some fun.
Forget it.
I'll tell you the truth.
I am Rob.
I'm going to write in the letters.
In the last Jewish week, I mean, I would love to Jewish journal.
I'm going to write in a letter that Sam touched.
And I have values Allah D. Prager, too.
I'm married and male, but I'd still be curious to know who he is.
What if he turns out to be a jerk?
Do you know how I feel?
Guy pulls up in a Porsche convertible with 52 gold chains around him.
Oh, well, who knows?
I'm not responsible for those who advertise in my name.
All right.
Anyway, so if so many of you are single, this is very important.
I'm going to tell you something that comes from painful personal life.
The better you know yourself before you get married, the more likely you are to make the right choice.
And this comes in the context of what I was just saying about parental love.
Here is almost a rule of thumb from my experience in life.
People marry to undo what went wrong as a child.
A major part of what brings them to the person they marry, especially the first time, and for many, second, third, fourth, and seventh, is an attempt to undo, to correct what happened.
For example, let us say your father didn't love you.
You're a girl and your father didn't love you.
You might marry a man very similar to your father to get that man to love you.
That way you've undone the damage of your father's not loving you.
But you married the wrong guy.
The last thing you want is a repeat of your father, that remote and distant, incapable of loving man.
But you have purposely married that guy because you want to get your father's love or a man of the mother's love.
That is a it's just a simple but very telling example.
That's why you must know yourself.
Those of you who are single, you must know yourself because otherwise, how on God's earth will you ever know why you're falling in love?
Most of you have fallen in love, I suspect, and I suspect that of those of you who have, 90% of you have fallen in love repeatedly with the wrong persons.
Now, why?
Why would healthy me fall in love with wrong guy, wrong girl?
You've got to find out why.
That's the whole point.
I am a big believer in parents not setting up marriages like in the old country.
But there is major danger in relying on falling in love to make your choice.
It's a lousy choice.
As indeed most are.
Not because he or she is terrible, just wrong for you.
How do you know what's right for you if you don't know you?
It's one of the things, of course, that marriage brings out is a massive amount of self-realization.
My dear friend has a great line, my friend Joseph Talushkin, my co-author.
He says, There are two things you learn after you get married.
How moody your spouse is and how moody you are.
It's a really good point.
First of all, people are on such good behavior during courtship that nobody's ever in a bad mood.
As I've often put it, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it is amazing how there is no premenstrual syndrome during dating.
It is unbelievable.
It should be studied by gynecologists.
How that happens.
What happens to those hormones during dating?
They're pickled.
They're removed.
I don't understand it.
So it's the sort of thing worth looking into.
But that is why I tell you, singles, that it is so important to learn who you are beforehand to know what animates you to fall in love with whom you're falling in love.
Because it is not, you know, it is.
Look, if 50% of marriages end in divorce, we can somewhat fairly assume the other 50% aren't all doing great.
Right?
I mean, a lot of people are together because they're afraid to divorce or values prevent them from getting divorced or whatever.
It's like the line, you know, one always hears these days, and we'll talk about divorce in the next term a lot more, but one hears a great deal.
Oh, people get divorced much too easily these days.
And as I said to the clergy who said that on the radio a few weeks ago, I said, do you all agree?
All three agreed, the priest, minister, and rabbi.
Then I said to them, okay, let me ask you a question.
Of all the people you know who divorced, can you think of any that divorced too easily?
And there was a sheepish grin on all three faces.
And they said on the air, no.
So in theory, oh, there are so many people marrying too easily.
In practice, nobody could name anybody.
It's so traumatic divorce, it is not something one wants to go through with tremendous ease.
I don't deny that there are some that are too facile.
But it is so painful, it is so traumatic, that when people start getting into it, it does frighten them and very often and it is a very bad thing to be stuck in such a situation.
But that's another subject for another time.
What I'm going back to here is parental love.
If you didn't get it, it is worth working through psychologically and philosophically.
But not to seek to undo it through whom you'll marry.
Now, what about other love?
Children's love.
My theory on that is mixed.
First, the more you rely for happiness on your children's love, the worse it is for all concerned.
The worse it is for you, and the worse it is for your children.
You don't want to be the source of happiness and joy in your parents' life.
So why would you want to put that burden on your children?
It is an unfair burden.
Also, do you expect to be the first parents in history whose kids are not ambivalent towards them?
It has not occurred in the history of the human species that a kid was not ambivalent in terms of feelings towards parents.
I will go further.
If there is no detachment, it's even worse.
Do you really want to raise a child who cannot detach from you?
Some of you might.
That's not good.
It's bad for you, and it's an injustice to your child.
You want to raise a child to be a full adult.
And there is a book that I recommend in this regard called Necessary Losses.
Life is a series.
The book is a little too somber in my opinion.
This is, I don't think, the happiest of people who wrote it.
But it is a brilliant book by Judith V. Orst called Necessary Losses.
And the point of the book, Vorst, V-I-O-R-S-T, the point of the book is that we go through series, all of life is a continuous series of losses, and they are necessary.
You grow up, you think your parents are the whole wide world.
You better lose that belief, or you're finished.
But the loss is very painful.
We don't want to leave the Garden of Eden.
We want to stay innocent.
In that regard, by the way, I've got a great letter from a woman on the insatiability issue after reading the article, which I'm printing in the next issue of my newsletter.
She wrote a very touching thing.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of your article on insatiability.
Women with whom I've shared the article appear to agree on two key points.
One, their ignorance of a man's need for sexual variety, at least to the extent you've reported in your article.
It's a scary concept for most of us.
One woman amusingly referred to it as another loss of innocence.
Innocence is a painful thing to lose.
It's painful when parents become real and cease to be in, you know, this idyllic world.
But if can you imagine a child who grows up to still think that way?
I think I've quoted it to this class, the great line in Genesis.
Therefore a man shall leave his mother and his father and cling unto his wife and they shall be as one flesh.
And the point has always been taught, you can't cling until your wife until you leave your mother and father.
And you can't cling until your husband until you've left your mother and father.
First you have to leave them.
Then you could build a new world.
But you know this as a child, and it's much more painful to know this as a parent.
My little kid's going to leave me.
It's very painful stuff.
It's another reason why that which will bring us the greatest happiness has to come from other things than, in this instance, a child's love, though obviously a child's love is a great bonus in life.
So it's a complex question with regard to it.
But I tell you this: a parent who lives to be loved by a child will not raise a good child because you will not do what you have to do to raise a good child because you'll want to be loved.
Incidentally, on the want to be loved, I will go further.
It is a very unhealthy thing to walk around life wanting to be loved.
It is not a good thing, and it is certainly not a good thing ethically.
People will compromise on what they have to do just so that everybody will love them.
You have to make peace with the fact that not everybody's going to love you.
Then you can be strong.
And then it's good to be loved, but not by everybody.
Anyone who's loved by everybody is usually a dish rag because they have bent and become so wet and wimpy that they are chameleons who change for everybody whom they're with just to be loved.
Just on a parenthetical note, one of my fears about our president, I suspect he likes to be liked by everybody.
That's not a good thing in all eater.
It's not good if you want to be hated by everybody either.
That was Stalin, who's a constant paranoid.
But in general, it is not a good thing.
It is good, however, to have your spouse's love.
That's what spouses are for.
That's the best.
That's the healthiest love.
Because it's the only one of all of these relationships, by the way, that is the love of a peer.
Parent-child in both directions is not an equal love.
It is a deep inequality in parent-child love.
You're not equals, parents and children.
But in the best of situations, spouses can be.
That is what is a potential in marriage.
Obviously, it has a lot of pitfalls, marriage, and we'll talk about it.
But that's the potential.
If there is a love that can be truly healthy, that shouldn't involve necessary loss.
There is a necessary loss in marital love.
I mean, you're not going to have the same degree of lust as when you first meet.
Not the same degree of infatuation, of blood rushing.
You see the person, but that's different from love anyway.
That's in love, or that's infatuation or whatever.
By the way, it doesn't mean that it should be gone.
One friend of mine has a very good thought on that, which seen me in 20 years to know really how good a thought it is.
But it struck me as a good one.
He said the issue is not whether or not a couple is always having making great love together and constantly excited to see each other, but that they know it's possible.
In other words, if they go away, for example, that there is the ability to get the adrenaline running again.
If that can never happen, it's sad.
I'm not saying disastrous, but it's sad.
But it certainly isn't to be expected that it's always there.
But nevertheless, love in the deepest sense, I think, is possible in the only relationship of peers that can be, which is the husband-wife relationship.
By the way, there is another area where I think that love that we seek can be obtained, and that is friends.
I've always been a big devotee of friendship.
It's funny because very frequently women would tell me that I was odd for a man, because I've had such close male friends, they say it's much more associated with women.
But I've got to tell you, I've never met women who have very close women friends like this.
It is not the most common thing.
I think it's somewhat of a myth that women have such close women friends.
I think it's true early in life.
I think it's true late in life.
But I have not seen it, maybe, and I'm admitting this is personal experience, but I have not seen it among the women that I, and I've known many women, 20s, 30s, and 40s, earlier than 20s, or singles, certainly.
Singles can have it.
Talking married women.
Now, it may very well be a function of the fact that there's so much to do at home that there is not the time to devote the friendship that you have when you're single, which is true.
I'm not saying this critically.
I am saying, though, that especially for those of you not married, it is worth cultivating friendship because we all need love.
The trouble, however, of course, with a friend is that your single friend may get married and give her love or his love then to somebody else primarily.
It's a very common, that's one of those tragedies of life that it's nobody's fault, but it just happens.
But it is a good thing, however, if your spouse helps you cultivate relationships with people of the same sex.
On the other hand, I am entirely skeptical of opposite-sex friendships, generally speaking.
Platonic friendships, generally speaking, somebody is being fooled in those friendships.
I am sure that on the face of the earth it has existed, but generally speaking, and this is 20 years of lecturing on this subject, that I am quite convinced from life and from others speaking to me, somebody wants more than a platonic relationship in every platonic relationship I have ever known.
It's either he or she.
There's no rule of thumb there whatsoever.
Generally speaking, your opposite-sex best friend should be your spouse.
That's what they're there for.
It is not a healthy sign generally.
I always add the word generally because there could be exceptions, I assume.
But generally speaking, it is not a healthy sign.
If a man needs to go to another woman than his wife to confide and speak and seek and get love, and I'm not speaking sex even, or a woman has to go to another man for those things.
It's not a good sign.
You can't just say, well, wow, we're not going to bed with each other.
What's wrong with that?
Well, it's not good.
It means that there is a very big part of you that is closed to the person you should be closest with of the opposite sex, your husband or wife.
That's what it means.
When I spoke to college kids for years, I always defined, I gave characteristics of friendships.
And one of the things I held, I still hold by.
It gets tough.
But the more you say, the better.
The more you hide, the worse.
It is a good rule of thumb for how close you feel to a human being that you're capable of saying just about anything.
I don't mean hurtful, deliberately hurtful.
Boy, you look ugly today.
I don't mean that at all.
I mean what's on your heart, what's on your mind, and facts about your life.
Obviously, you know, I'm not including exceptional instances.
I don't think if you've had a one-night affair that it is a mitzvah to tell your spouse.
I think, in fact, it's particularly foolish to do so.
But I'm not talking about very exceptional things such as that.
Generally speaking, you've got to talk.
Women know this instinctively, generally.
Men don't.
What's there to talk about?
We spoke last week at 3 o'clock.
Isn't it wonderful when you want to have a conversation and the other one says, what's there to talk about?
It's really encouraging.
It's encouraging.
You know you have their undiluted attention.
So I am a big believer in friendships of the same sex at all ages.
It is a very wonderful thing to cultivate.
And by the way, in that regard, too, couples need couples.
It's not just singles who need friends.
Couples need friends, both singly.
She needs her girlfriends, he needs his boyfriends, and each have to recognize that.
His night with the boys, if it's just with the boys, is a good thing for him to have.
And she should have a night with the girls, or with a girl, or one girl, or fly to the East Coast for two, three days with her college friend.
It's a good thing.
It is a good thing, I believe.
But couples need couples.
It's as easy for a couple to be lonely as for a single to be lonely.
You can be lonely as a couple.
Your spouse will not fill all human communicating needs in your life.
It can't be.
It doesn't make sense.
If for no other reason you've already heard all his jokes, you want to hear new ones.
I mean, it just works that way.
You'd like to hear new material for a change.
By the way, in that regard, it is a very good thing for you to consider, those of you raising children.
I know when I was a kid, and I know now as a parent, having company over is often the most relaxing thing in a family's life.
Family life is the most intense thing on the face of the earth.
There is nothing as intense as family life.
It is a very good cooling off period not to just have the three, four, five, six of you around the table again.
Bring in anybody else, even a jerk.
And you will find it relaxes a lot.
It relaxes the two of you.
It relaxes the kids.
It relaxes the kids in you.
It is a very nice thing to do.
Now, the third part of this stuff in the human nature's appetites, after the physical appetites and then the love wants, is the emotional wants.
such as being thin, rich, sexy, desirable, respected, bright.
My suggestion to you on these things is a very tough one, but unbelievably helpful.
Find out why you want them.
This is another example of self-knowledge.
Why is it so important to you?
I mentioned this in passing just last week on the issue of success.
Why is success that important to you?
It's painful.
But sit down.
Why is being thin so important to you?
Ask yourself, mercilessly ask yourself, because my husband won't find me attractive.
No, I mean, if that's the answer, that's the answer.
The odds are it's not the answer.
But maybe it is.
Find out why.
And I'm saying this primarily with regard to women, because just as the financial success thing was more a male trait, I think more, I don't think I know more women are preoccupied with thinness than men.
But you have to ask yourself why.
Now, by the way, again, these are always middle-of-the-road things.
If you don't care at all how you look, that's also something worthy of looking into.
It was so interesting.
I was in Baltimore this weekend lecturing and at a dinner.
My wife was with me and we both remarked on this.
There was a woman at the table.
I can't tell.
She could have been 21, 31.
I could not tell, which is, I'm usually good at ages.
I had no clue.
If this woman were made up by some beauty salon in LA, she could have been a cover girl for Vogue.
But she dressed and had her hair and wore glasses that were apt totally deliberately to undermine all the beauty she had been given.
Now, I don't believe in being obsessed with beauty, but I also don't believe in hiding it.
But forget what I believe.
What would be interesting is to find out what is it, what was it in her that so doesn't want to look attractive?
I mean, she did without being bald, she had done everything possible.
I mean, that would have had to have been the next step.
The glasses were those Coke bottle types in those ugly little round type things.
The hair was done in a manner that was, you know, like an old librarian would have done in a movie from the 1940s and buttoned up to the very top.
I mean, it was like a classic example from a psychological study.
So she was not obsessed.
She was obsessed in the other direction.
So that's what I mean by knowing what makes you tick.
You want to be healthy?
That's great.
But why do you jog 20 miles a day?
People don't jog.
Joggers, doctors of medicine who are in the field say, after, I think it's three miles or there are no benefits.
After three miles, it's not healthy.
You're running after or away from something.
I don't say this as a criticism.
God forbid.
I'm just saying, if you want to know you, these are questions worthy of asking.
That's what I'm saying.
What is the preoccupation, the obsession for?
Were you raised, being told by your father or mother the whole time, you're fat?
Are you still responding to the image from when you're a child?
Do you know how much of that is in us?
It's painfully true.
That's one thing to ask.
But take any of these.
It's very important to you that you be known as bright.
Why?
Were you raised and told by your older brother you're stupid?
That's what I mean.
Whenever any of these become so deeply desirable that they are blocking your happiness, blocking your health, you've got to know why.
Conversely, if you can't lose some weight and you want to, but you don't try to, what is blocking it there?
It's got to be psychological.
I'm obviously excluding the glandular and genetic issues.
Part of the thing, though, that animates people is the ubiquitous they.
In the list here of being thin, rich, sexy, desirable, respected, bright, you know what it is?
So that they'll think, Vel, Vel.
You know, the Vel.
Boy, do we live for Vel.
Arthur Z. Vel.
What?
They'll say, they'll think that how much of life is, what will they say?
By the way, that includes not only you, that includes what is important, God, when there are men, you know, their primary concern is what will they say about my wife who marry on the basis of I have to walk in with a certain type of woman so that they'll say women have it too.
This kind of guy, they'll say, or I'll wear this diamond, they'll say, how much of your life is determined by what they'll say?
And now let me tell you something about what they'll say.
This will be very helpful, almost as helpful as Helen Talushkin's statement.
That's the most helpful of all.
And there's nothing that comes close.
But this is second place.
It's worth writing down.
I learned this lesson.
I can almost date it.
I was 29 years old.
And the circumstances are just not relatable to you.
But I know it made a lasting impression.
A rabbi taught me this.
I'm a psychologist.
The statement is, what is central to you is peripheral to others.
Please know that.
No matter what happens to you.
Okay?
People will talk about it for up to four minutes and then think nothing about it and be consumed once again with their own monumental tsuras.
You have to know that.
It is true for good and it is true for bad.
You are not central to others' lives.
They are central to Vel's lives.
Do you get it?
You have to understand.
You know what they're talking about?
Them.
That's what they think.
What are you thinking of?
Do you walk around thinking about your neighbor, about the story you heard about X?
You're thinking about you all the time.
And that's right.
That's correct.
It's not an accusation.
It's the way it ought to be.
It's pretty sick if you're walking around the whole time thinking about so-and-so's diamond, so-and-so's kid, so-and-so's husband.
It's frightening to imagine that.
So when you know that, it's such a relief.
What a relief.
They're really not looking at me, thinking about me.
One of the divine gifts, I truly believe it is a divine gift, is that every single one of us thinks that we are the center of the universe.
It is a divine gift.
If we didn't, we would be crushed.
I'll give you a few examples.
If you, right now, unless you have some family there, Des Moines, Iowa is utterly remote to every one of you.
And did you ever think, how could people live in Des Moines?
It's so out of it.
Then you visit Des Moines, and somehow or other, people are managing.
Isn't that amazing?
And you know what?
While you're there, Des Moines becomes a lot more important.
Do you ever notice that?
And all of a sudden, LA is somewhat out of it.
Where you are, that's the center of the world.
That is the way God created it, and that's a great thing.
That is a protection from being crushed by our insignificance.
It's a very good thing.
It's like the old Jewish prayer.
God, why don't you give me these things?
You listen to total strangers.
Why not to me?
That's the whole point.
It is such a good thing to realize you are the center of your world, but you are the only one who holds that.
Both are true, therefore.
It's a wonderful thing to know.
Both are true.
You should be the center of your world.
Well, who else should be?
Of course you should be.
Imena nili me li.
Pillel said it 2,000 years ago.
If I'm not for me, who will be?
Of course you've got to be.
You can't only be for you, of course.
That's the second part of the statement.
But yes, you should be the center of your world.
Just know, though, you are the only one who is.
They are not talking about you tonight.
They were not staring at you today.
It is so interesting, though, how people, we do feel that way.
By the way, that is why it is so good to have the brain-centered realizations that I'm talking about.
Then, when you, it becomes a relief.
I tell you, even, you know, I mean, I'm somewhat public, and I realize how peripheral and so on.
You know, somebody just told me I was attacked on KGIL.
So, do you know what?
While that was happening, I was the subject.
The next call, it was as if I had died.
That is the way it works in life.
That's all.
Any of you thinking of Ronald Reagan or George?
He's president of the United States.
You're thinking of George Bush.
You see him on the news.
You think of him.
He's the president of the United States.
He really is sensual.
I mean, there's no way around it.
He's got a very important position.
He can blow up the world many times.
It's a very relieving thing to know.
They're not all leaving saying, Did you see the Markowitz's son?
Did you see his shoes?
I am convinced, God bless her, that my mother thought everyone in synagogue saw my shoes.
That as I would walk in, the rabbi would come over.
Whoa, Dennis Breaker's shoes.
Look at them.
There was a very deep sense of the kids reflected us, right?
Many of you were raised like that.
You reflected your parents.
If you had a dirty thing, look at what they'll all think.
You know what they're all thinking?
Is my kid dirty?
That's what you have to understand.
They're not thinking, is your kid dirty?
They're thinking, is their kid dirty?
So wondering what you're thinking about their kid.
But you're thinking about your kid.
That is what happens all the time.
And then when you finally see one of their kids dirty, you don't think, oh, that's disgusting.
You think, thank God, someone's kid is dirtier than mine.
Oh, what a relief.
That's the joke of Giselle.
And finally, part four was that we're insatiable of the human nature element.
And since this has been done with the men-women issue, and as you know, it is true generally speaking, the only thing to be said is, know that.
Just know it.
There is no point at which we will say, I am satiated, whatever it is regard to.
That is why you will want a better ring, a nicer car, a better stereo.
And by the way, that is a blessing.
Next week, no, maybe not, it may end up in next term, I am going to make the case for the beauty of tension.
You see, my friends, can you imagine the curse if we were satiable?
It is a curse to be insatiable, but it would be a bigger curse to be satiable.
We would cease moving.
I am fully satiated.
I will not budge.
Right?
So that's very important that you realize that.
With all of the problems that I'm raising, thank God for these problems.
What if we were fully satiated with any of these things?
They never would have gone beyond the wheel.
Hey, guys, we got a wheel.
There's no reason to develop anything else.
Hey, we made love last February.
Why push it?
You see, I'm not making the argument, folks.
I want you to say to yourself, I am fully satiated and act upon it.
No, I'm saying to you, no, you're insatiable.
So develop arbitrarily some point at which you can say, okay, I like the progress that we're making.
It's fine.
It's good.
That's the point.
It's this middle of the road, but it is a tension, a real tension.
My argument to you will be, you would not want it any other way.
The way we have been created, with all of its massive tensions, is the best.
Thank God we're the center of our universes.
But if we're the only thing in our universe, it's a horrible thing.
Thank God we're insatiable.
On the other hand, if all you live is to satiate it, you're finished, because you can.
And that's the beauty of human nature, even though...
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