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Sept. 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:18
429 Masculine Mastery

A perspective almost *designed* to offend your inner feminist

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. Oh, God, I'm 40!
Oh, my God!
Hope you're having a great day.
I had a very nice weekend.
Christian took me to a hotel downtown, and a slight, aside from a minor mishap, wherein the masseuse, the massage that I was supposed to get, I didn't get because the masseuse called in sick, and, um...
Aside from that minor mess, it was a wonderful, wonderful weekend.
And I bought a cappuccino maker.
For those of you who are tracking my caffeine intake, this is going to be a bit of a boost.
So, I thought that I would chat this morning about a nice, juicy, contentious topic, which will doubtless get many hackles erased.
If it's any consolation, I've had a couple of chats with Christina about it over the weekend, and she concurs, which doesn't mean at all, that it's right.
All it means is that at least one woman is not offended by it, so maybe that will help.
But I'd like to talk this morning about mastery.
And it is a topic that is particular to men, which is, again, I'm going to put one or two caveats in at the beginning and then to hell with it.
I'm not going to do any more. But just for those of you who are sort of, since this is doing the YouTube thing as well as the Free Domain Radio thing, those of you who are new to some of my ideas about gender relations, I'm going to put a few caveats in.
Just at the beginning, so that you don't think that, or you don't jump to conclusions about my perception on these areas, my beliefs in these areas.
Women are magnificent.
Women are completely equal to men.
But men and women are different, not just in the fun naughty bits part, but in other sort of significant areas.
And for marriages, heterosexual marriages to work, a division of labor needs to occur, and It doesn't mean for me that it's always the man or it's always the woman, but typically there are some ways in which it works.
And if you're curious about whether men and women are different, you just need to go to a libertarian conference or a conference of professor-level physicists or economists or all of these sorts of things and have a look at the gender distribution.
And then you need to go to a conference of social workers and nurses and have a look at the gender difference.
And I do believe that women are equally as intelligent as men, as creative as this, as that, as the other.
But there are differences.
And I think that to suggest otherwise is to live in an ideological bubble and, frankly, to live in fear of radical feminists, in my view.
But, you know, this is...
Okay, enough caveats.
Let's get on with the theory of mastery.
When I went, as I mentioned last week, I went to go and see Natasha Atlas.
She's a British slash Moroccan singer who does this sort of Eastern-Western fusion.
And she was not the most gripping of entertainers, which I was a little surprised at.
I thought there'd be more belly dancing.
There was a little, but I thought there'd be more.
And she was, it was a little bit what we in the theatre world used to call, or when I was in the theatre world, we used to call a phoned-in performance.
You know, it's like, you know, I don't really feel like doing King Lear tonight, but just put the phone on the stage, I'll call it in from home with my feet up.
And it was a bit of a phoned-in performance, but she does have a magnificent voice, and the musical choices are interesting.
Although the problem, of course, with some of the Moroccan or Middle Eastern or Eastern influences is that...
The problem is with melody, in the way that we in the West would look at melody.
So she is, you know, it's a little bit like jazz, insofar as the minor tones and the ramblings and the noodlings and so on are very interesting and technically very difficult.
But at some point, it's kind of nice to have a melody, like if you hear those jazz, those jazz grates, you know, it's like, here, we're going to do a version of All of Me, right?
And they start off, and you can sort of vaguely hear the song, and then just go into these Rampant noodling sax fests, so to speak, and you can't even recognize the song anymore, then that to me is just a little bit too far from building on the original melody, and it's a little bit too much like tuning or doing scales very rapidly and in a very ingenious manner.
Technically very difficult, but not necessarily good, right?
I mean, there's a big difference between the two.
So, anyway, enough of the concert review.
If you get a chance to listen to her, it's well, well worth it.
It's Natasha, I think it's N-A-T-A-C-H-A, Atlas.
But when I was at the concert, for some reason that I can't quite recall, Christine and I don't go to, we don't go downtown that much anymore, because it's a pain in the neck to drive around.
You know, if you live near a city, you know what I'm talking about.
But, and we don't go to clubs anymore.
I mean, I'm, as I said, 40.
We did go to a club shortly after we were married, but we didn't really like the music, and occasionally we'll go to sort of all these dance clubs or whatever, and we've taken some dance lessons at the gym.
Believe it or not, I was at the front row of a hip-hop dance class, and I mean, I looked white and I moved white, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.
And so we were at this concert, and for some reason that I can't recall, I was looking at the men First, I was looking at the audience, and I don't know if you're like this at all, but every now and then, I'll sort of be in a crowd, and I'll sort of say to myself, okay, if I was single, what would it be like here?
And it's not because I'm...
Well, anyway, I don't even need to talk about that.
So I'm sort of in the crowd, and I'm looking around, and I thought, gee, if I was a single guy, what would I think?
You know, who would I talk to?
What would I do?
And... I just was looking around, and the women were...
Odd. A bit volatile, I'd say perhaps a little on the bitchy side.
They had a bit sort of sour looks on their faces.
One woman who was standing in front of me was when there was a bit of feedback.
She turned around and she's like, come on, sound guy, do your job!
You know, and had this sort of...
Face on. And they just seem to be a little bit testy.
And I was just thinking, like, boy, you know, that'd be fairly unappealing to talk to.
That would be a fairly unappealing person to talk to.
And so then I started thinking, okay, well, what if I was single and I was a woman and I was sitting here looking at the guys?
And Oh boy!
It just, and it took me quite a while and quite a bit of conversation with Christina to figure it out.
But what I really got from these guys, and yeah, there was a little bit of the metrosexual thing going, and yeah, there was a little bit of this, and there was a little bit of that.
But what I really got from the guys other than...
A little bit of over-attention to dress.
And I don't mean sort of like...
I'm sort of a little bit more used to the 80s thing for that age group, like the 20s, where the...
I guess the 90s thing, where there was a little bit of...
It was sort of pre-grunge overload, and there was still a bit of the preppy influence, and you had to sort of, you know, you looked kind of haircut 100 plus 100.
And these guys were a little bit grungy, a little bit mangy, you know, like low-hanging pants and shaggy hair and so on.
And there's that thing that's going on, which I always associate with a drug user, that sort of blurry-eyed, kind of the hair sweeping in front of the forehead, down the forehead of this low fringe that's sort of curled off to one side that goes over the eyes that, you know, the person constantly has to.
I think that comes from one of the monkeys, the band, not the species.
And I was just sort of looking at these guys, and I got a real sort of feel.
I got a real feel for them.
You know, rightly or wrongly, this is sort of what came up for me.
And the feeling that I got about these guys at this club was that they were weak.
Weak, weak, weak.
And that wasn't even the problem.
I mean, God knows I've spent chunks of my life being weak, and that's not the end of the world.
But they don't know that they're weak.
For them, their weakness is a virtue.
We'll sort of get into that. And you know what was really bizarre?
Was that I have written a novel called Almost, which is about a German family and a British family, from the close of the Second World War to the opening of the first it ends in the Battle of Britain, opening of the Second World War.
And In it, I have a very decadent...
There's a scene where there's a very decadent party going on in Berlin in the 19...
I guess it's 1936, 1937.
And I felt like I was at that party.
It was really strange. I felt like I was in a scene that I'd written about decadence and foppish men and...
Aggressive women. And I really felt, it was a very, very strange feeling.
It's like, wow, I finally have climbed into my own literature.
How fascinating. And then I started talking about it with Christina afterwards.
She was like, oh God, you have no idea.
If you're a woman out there looking around at the kind of men that you can go out with, it's really depressing.
It's really depressing.
And I said, well, what is it?
And she said, yeah, well, it's a little bit of the mangy thing.
It's a little bit of the scruffy thing.
It's a little bit of the...
And I said, but, you know, what I'm getting from these guys is that they're sort of tentative.
They're sort of desperate in a way.
They're kind of really totally deferential to women.
And... I just thought, wow, you know, like, there was some good dance music, and so we were bopping around a little bit, and I noticed that the women were really getting into it and throwing themselves into it, and the guys were kind of standing back and looking vaguely,
like, embarrassed, but vaguely like, well, that's her thing, and it seemed when the women were dancing that it was a little bit showy, and it was a little bit kind of, look how free and uninhibited, and oh, so Middle Eastern I am, and And then, actually, the only thing that was startling was the woman who made the comment about the sound engineer.
She actually started, well, she and a couple of her friends started ululating, you know, that kind of thing.
And that was really startling.
I mean, that's got nothing to do with cultural sensitivity or not.
That was just... I've never been in that situation before, but when Natasha was belly dancing and this ululating was going on, I did get a real sense of joy, and that was really nice to feel, and it gave me a sort of appreciation for some of the more liberated joys of the Eastern culture, at least in her interpretation.
The men, they just seemed so weak.
They just seemed so colorless, so pale, so deferential, so kind of not there.
And the relationship then between the sort of aggressive men and the deferential, sorry, the aggressive women and the deferential men seemed like quite close and quite tight.
So, from there, I began sort of talking about or thinking about ways in which This was a problem for women.
I can't imagine that...
I've got to think that for a woman, just about the worst thing in the world that can happen psychologically when she's an adult that's not involving sickness or death, is to look at the man, to look at her man, and to say to herself, he is weak.
That's got to be just an absolutely terrible thing for a woman to experience.
Very, very bad.
And it's going to, I think, raise her level of aggression considerably.
Now, there's no doubt...
That it's primitive, and there's no doubt that it may be considered uncivilized, but there's also no doubt that it's true.
I was watching a Boston Legal last week, wherein this Alan Shaw character, played very, very well, was in a bar, and he got punched by a guy, and he ended up paying these other guys to go beat him up, the guy who hit him, and so on.
And he said, yeah, it's primal.
You get punched in front of your girlfriend, then you feel diminished, right?
And it's humiliating in a sort of very primal, masculine way.
And I was talking about this with a friend of mine and Christina, John, if you've heard his participation in the audio cast.
We couldn't record it because it was a restaurant, but it was a good conversation.
But, uh, I was asking Christine, I said, you know, like outside of the politically correct mantras, if I got punched in front of you and we ended up walking away, would you not feel deep down that I couldn't, at some level that I couldn't protect you or that I was weak and wouldn't that be tough?
And she said no originally.
And I sort of just kept asking and said, you know, because I've got to tell you, it would be tough for me.
And if it was tough for me but not tough for you, it would mean that a certain amount of empathy would not be there.
Not that I'm causing it. And she did say, you know, yeah, I think there would be a feeling like to watch you get humiliated physically and not defend yourself that...
That could be, like she said, I would sort of feel a little bit of disrespect.
Now, of course, this is all nonsense, because I've never been in a fistfight in my life, and never will be, because they're about as easy to avoid as lightning.
But there is a sort of primal thing around it, in terms of the man must be able to protect the woman from other men, and from predators, and these sorts of things, and he must have a certain kind of physical strength, and he must have a certain kind of mastery,
is sort of what the word that I was using, which is just for men, I'm a mistressy for women, I don't know, but But a woman needs a certain kind of strength from a man, just as a man needs a certain kind of strength from a woman, which we'll talk about when maybe when Christina's in the car and can talk about it from a woman's perspective.
But these men were weak, were deferential, were laughing too hard at their date's jokes, had an air of desperation about them, you know, and Just seem kind of weak.
And that's really, really tough for a woman.
A woman needs to respect the strength of a man.
A woman needs to...
I mean, this is at a basic biological level.
As soon as you start to get involved in heterosexual relationships where there is a significant possibility of children, or even if there was at some point, then biology is kicking in and it's worthwhile to examine and understand these kinds of different experiences.
Just to be aware of them. You don't have to let them run your life, but you need to be aware of them that the woman needs the man to be strong in a different way than the man needs the woman to be strong.
And if the man is not strong, then the woman, however much she might protest to the contrary, is going to end up not respecting him.
And that is going to result in either passive aggression, in other words, depression and needling and nagging from the woman, or sort of outright aggression.
And the reason that the outright aggression occurs is she wants to provoke the strength in the man.
And, this is, it's all very primal, and I make no apologies for these observations, because I do believe them to be true, and I do have some anecdotal, personal experience from women.
Like, when you sort of talk to them about things honestly, yes, they want to look up I mean, not just figuratively, but literally.
If you talk to a woman honestly, she wants to go out with a man who's taller than she is because she wants to feel, some women call it, pocketed, which is that when a tall man is holding a woman who's shorter, she feels enveloped and protected, and women feel safe and secure.
And of course, women do experience a kind of danger from the world that men don't, except if the man is sort of small and weak and in prison.
Which is the threat of assault or rape or theft.
I mean, women are, you know, imagine if you were around a society filled with guys twice your size, who were, you know, interested in rape from time to time.
So women do feel a certain kind of physical fear of the world, and that physical, not unjustly or unreasonably, like I'll go for a walk at three o'clock in the morning, my wife never would.
And so she wants the man to feel safe and protected around the man.
And that doesn't just mean that he goes to the gym and is big or anything like that.
It has a lot to do with prevention.
It has much more to do with prevention than cure, which is why money is important, right?
Because if you have money as a man, then you can help the woman buy a house in a safe neighborhood because the poorer you are, the worse the neighborhood you generally will live in.
And so there's lots of sort of convoluted, wrapped-up things around a woman being afraid of the world.
Not that women are paranoid or fearful, but there is a fear that women have around the world, which men don't.
The sort of basic primal need to be protected and secure, this is all very wrapped up in male-female relations.
I think that ignoring this or pretending that men and women are totally the same, except for genitals, and the capacity to have children and breastfeed and so on, this is all a huge, massive, dangerous mistake.
And what's happened is that men have been kind of turned into emasculated women.
Like, men have been viewed, if you look at, in general, popular culture and also in modern education, Men are viewed as sort of broken women, right?
So women are the standard of the perfection, not just for women, but for everyone.
And that men are, they don't come up to the standards of women, and therefore, wherever they're deficient to women, they are deficient.
Deficient as a whole.
Not just in terms of masculinity, femininity, but a whole.
The norm, the standard is certain aspects of feminization.
And men are perceived as broken if they don't meet those standards.
So they need to be fixed, in other words, turned into women.
But that, of course, doesn't make women happy because women want a man.
So it's all very complicated and messy.
But I'll talk about a short anecdote from early on in my marriage, and if I have time, I'm trying a new route, so I might, but I will talk about a short anecdote from early on in my marriage, and then we'll talk about this concept of mastery as I worked it out in chatting with Christina, and see if it is of any use or help to you.
So, early in our marriage, and I didn't remember this, the amazing thing about having a great marriage is that when you have problems and you clean them up, you absolutely, literally, and totally forget them.
The problems that you don't clean up, that you leave unfulfilled and unfinished, that you clamp down because you're scared of conflict or whatever, those things constantly recur to you and build up.
You want to floss with your conflicts, not just let the plaque build up, so to speak.
But Christina remembered this, and I'd forgotten about it.
I remembered a few other incidents, but this one was very emotional for her.
And I'll talk about it.
It's a pretty innocuous incident, but it was very important to the start of our marriage.
This occurred within a couple of months of us getting married.
We were in a grocery store, and we were piling the food onto the grocery conveyor belt, and Christina forgot, or we forgot, something to buy.
So she ran back, and she thrust her wallet into my hands, and I sort of packed up the groceries and got the bill and so on.
And then Christina came back, and the cashier rang that stuff up.
And then we were going to leave and the cashier said, Miss, you have to pay.
And Christina...
Kind of, I mean, she kind of, not quite rolled her eyes, that would be a little bit unfair, but she did say, oh, you know, my husband, you know, kind of as if I gave him, like, to try and communicate to the cashier that, you know, I gave my husband the money and he forgot to pay, and isn't he silly that way?
You know, he would, you know, the old thing, he would forget his head if it wasn't attached, blah, blah, blah.
So she almost rolled her eyes and totally sided with the cashier, because the cashier had a critical tone, like, you need to pay, kind of thing.
And I felt kind of stung by that.
And I said to her in the car, I said, I said, I think that's a problem.
Like, I think that's a problem for us.
I said, I'm not going to go into a big thing about how I feel, because that doesn't matter hugely, but what is important is that something occurred wherein we, as a marital team, were criticized.
And what happened was, you sided with the person who was criticizing us against me.
You stepped over to his side, and you both sat there frowning and disapproving of me.
I don't consider that the height of loyalty, and I consider that to be a kind of problem that we need to talk about and work on.
Because I need to know that you're going to side with me.
I mean, I'm not saying that if I'm shoplifting, you side with me, but that's not stuff that I do.
But that you chose me as your husband, that we are marital partners.
You need to side with me.
You can't choose me as your husband and then...
Sort of betray me at a grocery store.
You can't say, logically, I think, or even ethically, you can't say, well, this is the greatest man ever.
I'm going to spend the rest of my life with him.
I'm going to have children with him.
He is going to be my one true love and best friend from here to the end of time, or the end of our time, anyway.
And then when a grocery store criticizes, then side with the grocery store and kind of put me down as well.
I said, and the reason that I'm telling you all of this, yes, it hurt me, but much more importantly, if this were to continue, it's going to hurt you terribly.
Like, if I let this happen, and if I didn't say, you know, this is not the way that the marriage is going to run, this is not what our vow, and it's not because I'm bullying you, it's because this is what your vows were.
And you need to live up to your vows.
You want to side with me, right?
You want to respect me.
You want not to end up being afraid of the disapproval of a clerk and then siding with him against your noble, all-loving, supposedly virtuous, chose him out of all others' husband.
That's not... How you want your marriage to be.
I'm saying this to you because you will end up very, very unhappy if you end up acting in ways that cause you to continue to disrespect me.
And I'm not saying that you should respect me because I'm your husband.
We're not putting the cart before the horse.
I assume that you chose me as your husband because you respect me.
Because I've earned that respect and I've earned that loyalty.
I certainly don't expect it to spring out of the ring or the vows or the signatures or the ceremony or anything like that.
I assume that those things were there because you respected me.
And so if you then, at a grocery store, side with a grocery clerk and turn against me, then it seems that the bond that we have, or the bond that you have to me, then it seems that the bond that we have, or the bond that you
Because, like, we're a team and we're building a life together, but if an inconsequential clerk that you may never see again in your life says something in a mildly disapproving manner, you jump over to his side out of the marriage and act in a manner that is disrespectful towards me.
Anyway, I still won't go into the whole speech.
But I think that...
What I was trying to do was not say, as some guys do, I'm hurt.
You shouldn't have done that.
I'm hurt. Because when you say to somebody, I'm hurt, therefore you should change, it is totally manipulative and controlling.
Because there's no moral content in I'm hurt.
Let's say I was putting on weight and Christina said, you know, you kind of need to go on a diet.
You're putting on some pounds. Well, I'd be a little hurt by that, but I want her to do that, right?
She's watching my back fat to make sure it doesn't grow.
But, because, you know, 40 in all.
So, the fact that you're hurt by someone, it gives you no right to ask them to change.
Because being hurt could have as much to do with your issues as their issues, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
So, I could not say to her that...
I was hurt, therefore you should not do that.
I mean, she probably would have said, oh, I didn't mean to hurt you and changed and so on, but it would have been, we wouldn't have got to the principle behind it that would have motivated her to want to not do that, right?
I mean, when you're involved in a relationship with someone, there's zero, it's hugely negative.
To try and get them to change based on, oh, I'm hurt, or you should do this, or that's a bad thing to do, or anything you need to appeal to their self-interest to get them to change, right?
I mean, that's absolutely crucial.
If you can't appeal to their self-interest, if you can't find a way to make it worthwhile for them, Because I said, you know, how would you feel if you observed this?
I think this was later on in the conversation.
I said, how would you feel if you observed this?
How do you feel when you look at a wife who rolls her eyes at her husband?
And she's like, oh, I think, man, what a bitch.
Like, what an unhappy wife.
What a sad, sad situation that she can't really, that she doesn't respect her husband.
And I said, so you don't really respect women who roll their eyes at their husbands, so you don't want to be one.
Now, of course, I said, if there's something that I'm doing that is causing you to feel that you should roll your eyes at me for whatever, whatever, then I'm certainly happy to change, right?
I certainly want to live up to your high ideals and high expectations of me.
That's number one in my life.
This marriage is number one in my life.
So if there's something that I'm doing that you feel is not worthy of respect, then you tell me that and I will change that.
Because that's my main goal, is to win your respect.
You can get to be a total second-hander in the Randian sense once you get married, because you've already made that commitment.
I mean, I totally am a slave to my wife's good opinion of me.
Does that mean I'm a second-hander?
Well, yeah, maybe. But so what?
Because if I didn't trust her enough that her opinion mattered to me...
And was realistic? Then why the hell would I have married her in the first place, right?
Once you marry someone, you become a union of two souls.
You are totally dependent on the other person.
You're incredibly and exquisitely and permanently vulnerable to that person's good or bad opinion of you.
And you are totally lashed together in that way.
It doesn't mean you're codependent.
It doesn't mean that you're total slaves to each other.
But don't for a moment think that if you're married, that your wife or your husband's opinion doesn't mean everything in the world to you.
It totally does. And you can either accept that or not, but you did choose that person and then you can't choose that person and then say, well, their opinion doesn't matter to me, because then why would you choose them, right?
Get out of the marriage or make it better.
But anyway, I don't want to turn this into a talk about marriage, but in that conversation I had to find a way to appeal To Christina's self-interest.
She didn't want to turn into that kind of wife.
I sure as heck didn't want her to turn into that kind of wife.
But that's not enough.
The fact that I don't want her to do it is not enough.
She has to recognize that it's going to be deleterious to her interest to become that kind of wife.
And so, when we were talking about that, I was able to sort of get her over to the point or the place where she understood that...
She, in doing that, she was eroding a sort of pretty fundamental part of the marriage.
I said also, I don't want to be the jumpy husband guy.
Like, I don't want to be the jumpy husband.
And I said, this is, again, this is not a reason for you to change.
This is just sort of my perspective.
I don't want to be the jumpy husband guy...
Who says, oh my god, if I forget to pay for the groceries, I lose my wife's respect.
Right? That's going to make me kind of jumpy.
Because I said I'm totally desperate for your respect.
And that doesn't mean that you grant it to me at all because of that.
But it means that I assume that I had it based on our conversations and our vows.
I assumed that I had it when we got married.
We're now a month or two into it.
I don't think I've changed to the point where I've totally lost all the built-up respect.
That we had before we got married, which is why we got married.
But I said, I don't want to be the jumpy husband guy who's like, Oh God, what could happen next?
Did I clean the bathrooms and miss a spot?
Did I clean the pot lid and miss a piece of crud?
Did I sweep the floor but forget to sweep up every single patch of dirt?
Did I vacuum?
I don't want to become that guy who feels that everything has to be perfect or he's going to be disapproved of.
And I said, and last but not least, I couldn't pay for the groceries because you were off getting something until you came back.
I couldn't pay for them.
And so it was in that moment we were kind of both responsible.
I was carrying the cash, but it was your cash, and so on.
So to me it wasn't as clear, you know, that it was totally my fault we didn't pay for the groceries.
But even if it was, I said even if it was, that's not the kind of thing that I think should cause you to lose respect for me.
And... So I really did try to appeal to her self-interest, that she could be the kind of wife that she really wanted to be and could be and was capable of being and is.
I mean, and is why I married her, because we could have these conversations.
So the question that sort of was asked and answered in this area, to me, was one of mastery.
And I view this only as a male trait because I'm a man, and because Christina and I talked about it, she concurred, but this is not to say that it is, it's just my sort of perspective.
That... What a man can bring to a relationship that I think a woman really, really needs.
I've talked about this briefly in the podcast, actually not briefly, but I'll talk about it very, very briefly here.
That women need the capacity to blend and merge with children, right?
When a woman has a baby, it's symbiotic, right?
She's got to be totally merged with this baby, right?
That's sort of the nature of the beast.
She has to sort of feel its moods and understand the baby's requirements because the baby can't talk yet and she's got to get up three times a night to breastfeed or whatever, right?
So the woman really has to merge and this is something that a man just doesn't have to do.
Unless the man is the primary caregiver, which is totally fine, in which case the man's got to do it, but Women are, I think, biologically a little bit more attuned to wrapping themselves around a relationship, and that's because that's pretty required when the baby is very small, right?
You've got to be able to tell the difference between a baby that's crying because it's a little bit tired and a baby that's crying because it's, you know, being gnawed on by a rat or something, right?
I mean, you kind of have to know these things as a mom, and there's a certain amount of symbiosis that goes into early childhood development between a mother and a child, and that to me is perfectly healthy.
But she needs the man to bring her back from that.
She needs the man to bring her back from that merging with the children that is so essential when they're very young and then is claustrophobic when they get older, right?
I mean, we've all heard of or had moms like this who like, you know, you take a deep breath and they exhale, right?
You sneeze and they blow their nose.
Totally bound in, totally enmeshed, totally symbiotic with the children, that's not a very good situation at all.
That's extending the symbiotic nature or relationship between mother and child far beyond its due date.
And the reason that women end up in that situation is because they can't, I mean my view, they can't climb out of the pit of children on their own.
They need a man to help them.
They need a man to sort of help pull them back from the children.
And the way that a man does that is he makes interacting with an adult so pleasurable that the woman then starts to interact with him as the children get older.
In a different way and a little bit more than she's interacting with the children, which gives the children some breathing room to grow and lets the children see an adult relationship that works and so on.
So there's a man who is essential to a woman when she's...
When she's got children, she's essential either way, but when she's got babies, essential care protections surrounding security and so on, but then also to help her to get out of the symbiotic phase, which doesn't really occur.
And you can see this if you know people who've been raised by single moms.
You can see this quite commonly.
You can think of the mom in As Good As It Gets and the mom in Oh, Jerry Maguire or something.
These moms have resonance because there's some truth in it that they grapple their children and hang on to their children and try to get endless amounts of emotional sustenance from their children because there isn't a man around.
And this can happen in a marriage if the man is absent or not involved or whatever.
Or not appealing in some manner.
Because then the woman doesn't feel like, oh, okay, I forget how much fun it is to talk to an adult, so I kind of need to go and talk to this.
I want to talk to my husband.
I want to go away with my husband. Kids, we're going out for the evening, and kids, I'm going to help you with your homework, and then I can sit down and chat with your dad.
The man has to be appealing so that the woman veers away from This endless pit of symbiosis with children, but in far too many marriages that doesn't occur.
The woman stays locked in with the children, much to the detriment of the children.
That's not a phase that we're at yet in our marriage, but women do really, really need men, and the mastery stuff that I was talking about earlier...
To me, it's sort of centered around this idea that you need two things.
And as a man, maybe that's the case as a woman, I don't speak as a man.
You need two things in your relationship with your women.
The first is that you need access to principles.
Not just access to emotions, but you need that too, but you need access to principles.
And what I mean by that is that The fact that Christina disrespected me in front of a grocery clerk is completely inconsequential in the big scheme of things, but it's very important relative to the principles that our marriage lives under.
You have to have principles in your marriage, in your life, of course, but they have to reflect it in your marriage.
And the principle is, you know, respect.
You have to have that.
I mean, if you don't have that, then you are incredibly jumpy and vulnerable, and there's going to be a problem with aggression on both sides, because it's either going to be disrespect in an active, humiliating, nagging way, or in a passive-aggressive kind of withdrawal way.
It's going to show up in the bedroom, it's going to show up in chores, it's going to show up...
Couples are going to end up fighting about stupid little details rather than the big picture, right?
So, if Christina didn't respect me and it came out as sort of nagging or hostility or a little bit like I had to be perfect or I could be criticized and eye-rolling and so on, Then we would end up fighting about, I dripped down the hallway when I was taking the garbage out, or I didn't close the lid of the coffee cup properly and dripped some coffee on the carpeted stairs, and oh boy, that's so bad, and how come I don't close it, and how many times has she told me?
All of that kind of stuff. We'll be talking about this inconsequential bullshit.
Rather than me sort of sitting down and saying, you know, it feels like you don't respect me.
Is that the case? Because that's painful, right?
That could be really painful. If she sort of says, you know what?
I don't respect you.
And that's a real problem.
That's really painful, right?
If we can continue to fight about the groceries and the cleaning and the sex, that's a lot safer, right?
We can pretend that the issue is about whether there's a coffee drop on the carpet rather than are we in a marriage with mutual respect, right?
The first one feels like it's fixable, although it's not, because you're not talking about the real issues.
In the second one, do we live in a marriage of respect, then that's a little bit harder to solve.
You've got to go to the root and the core of these kinds of issues at all times, but it's really scary to do that.
It's why people don't. So, in terms of mastery, you need access to principles.
So when a little thing occurs, like a new eye-rolling with a grocery clerk in a store, and you as a husband...
You need to have access to principles.
And once you have access to principles, then you don't need access to being offended.
You don't need access to being upset.
Because that's not going to help you in your case.
And frankly, that's a little bit of a feminine way of dealing with conflict, is to say, I'm upset.
I'm hurt. I feel bad.
Therefore, you should change. And that's a bit of a traditionally feminine or mom-based way of trying to resolve disputes.
And it's really not a very noble approach.
For either gender, right?
But you definitely don't want to do it as a man.
Because it might work, but it'll work totally in the short run, and you really don't want that situation if you can at all avoid it.
But the issue then is, what does mastery mean?
Access to... Principles.
So the principle is we want a marriage which is full of respect and we don't want to end up eroding that respect with little betrayals.
Because a little betrayal is a big violation of principle.
A little betrayal is a big violation of principle.
And, you know, the old appeasement thing, right?
As Churchill said, appeasement is the hope that the crocodile will eat you last, right?
So if you say, well, I'll let this go because it was such a little thing.
And, of course, certain types of women will feel more or act in a more disrespectful manner if you bring up something this small because they'll basically, and certainly if you bring it up because you're hurt.
Then they'll basically say, what's the big deal?
It was like a tiny little thing at a grocery store.
Are you that insecure that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
Well, don't get involved in those kinds of conversations, right?
That's just a ball breaker. But those little things are big violations of principles, right?
I mean, if I'm away on a business trip and just have a little kiss with someone who I'm attracted to, that's a big violation.
It's like one second, I didn't sleep with her, blah, blah, blah.
That's a huge violation of principle.
Right? So, an eye roll at you in a public place, or even in a private place, is a big violation of principle.
And that's something that you don't want to let go unaddressed.
And you don't want to get angry.
Like, if I got angry at Christina and said, you know, I can't believe that you rolled your eyes at me in this grocery store, humiliated me in front of this grocery clerk, that is totally unacceptable to me.
Well, I'm bullying her if I do that, right?
That's not how you want to resolve your disputes in your marriage.
There's nothing wrong with getting angry.
But you have to get angry at the fact that she is endangering both of your happiness by acting in this manner.
And she is undermining the quality of your marriage and the nobility of your love and the joy of your interactions by performing certain actions or having certain behaviors.
And you're angry that your pleasure and happiness and joy in her company and joy in the marriage is being taken away.
There's nothing wrong with being angry.
But you don't ever ask anyone to change because you're angry.
And you don't ever tell anyone they have to change in an angry tone.
It's never going to work. You might get immediate compliance, but you will never ever solve the actual issue.
And you will never motivate the other person to change Because of their own desire for happiness and pleasure.
And that's the one thing that you can count on.
Is that if you can understand, or if you can get someone to understand, that their own happiness and pleasure is going to be compromised by their behavior, then they will be motivated to change.
And this never happened again.
And we talked about it for hours.
I don't remember the incident when Christina reminded me.
I began to sort of remember about it a lot more.
We talked about this for hours.
I mean, it's very, very important.
That's the foundation of our marriage. This is, you know, what happens at the beginning defines the whole deal.
So... We talked about it for hours and hours, and you kind of need to work this out.
Because you kind of need to see the argument for morality.
Well, what kind of marriage do you want to have?
Do you want to have a marriage where we both support each other and treat each other with incredible respect at all times, where we always side with each other?
Because the other thing that's true when you start talking about principles or acting on principles is that whatever is okay for her is okay for me.
Right? And this is not a threat sort of situation.
It's just that we don't want to go down this road where things deteriorate in this kind of manner.
Right? This is not the kind of marriage that we want.
This is not the road that we want to go down where...
If you can sort of turn on me because a grocery store clerk frowns at you, then I can turn on you because of X, Y, and Z. And I said, that's going to make you pretty jumpy.
And she's like, of course it would. I don't want to live in that kind of situation.
She said, you want to totally trust that I'm going to be there for you under all circumstances and in all situations.
And she's like, well, yeah, of course I do.
And... So, I said, well, yes, we both want that.
Like, if we could both snap our fingers and have that kind of marriage, where we are both totally there for each other under all situations and all circumstances, and we can totally rely on each other to back each other up, then if we could snap our fingers and have that kind of marriage, is that the kind of marriage you'd want?
And she said, yeah. I said, yeah, me too, right?
That's what was in the vows, right?
The respect thing. And that's what we want to have, and stuff like this we can't have in the marriage if that's the kind of marriage we want.
If we want the other kind of marriage where we don't trust each other, we're wary, we feel like we can be criticized or disrespected or attacked at any time, that's a different kind of marriage.
That's not too appealing to me, and I know that that's not too appealing to you either.
In that sort of circumstance or situation, we don't want that second kind of marriage, but in order to get the first kind of marriage, in order to get the kind of marriage where we are backing each other up, each other's best friends totally believe and trust in each other, And in the odd time where we fall short of our own behavior ideals, then we can talk about each other privately and so on, right?
But if that's the kind of marriage we want, there are certain actions that we have to follow.
One of those is not to roll our eyes when somebody criticizes on a minor thing outside the marriage, like from outside the marriage.
To have a common front, right?
I said this is particularly important training for having kids, right?
So... So in that kind of circumstance, I was able to sort of give her the big picture and to help her to understand that she really didn't want that kind of marriage where there was snippy and disrespect and betrayal, even in these sorts of minor ways.
That's not the kind of marriage that we would want.
And she wants that glorious supporting, always there for each other kind of marriage.
I mean, who the hell wouldn't, right? That's sort of a no-brainer.
Nobody's going to want to say, yeah, I could have that kind of marriage, but I really prefer that snippy one where we tear each other down over time.
And so by giving her the big picture of the kind of marriage that we wanted, I was able to help her to understand how acting in that kind of manner, which is just something she learned from her mom.
She's not innately that way at all.
But by acting in that kind of manner, she was going to undermine her own happiness and the kind of marriage that she could really have with me and that we could really have together.
So, that was good, right?
So, she recognized that.
We talked a long time about the genesis of that kind of behavior, how her mom did it to her dad, how her mom was a bossy know-it-all, and blah, blah, blah.
And that was great. So, it required that I had access to principles and recognized this as a deviation from those principles, those ideals of respect and honor and so on that we had talked about prior to marriage and was part of her vows.
I took the vows very seriously.
These weren't just sort of made up.
Like, yeah, you know, respect and love and blah, blah, blah.
Those, to me, were creeds that we live by in the marriage.
And if we deviate from them in the marriage, it's something we really need to talk about pretty strongly and pretty closely.
Because that's a pretty significant problem, right, if that deviation occurs.
So... Access to principles, recognizing a deviation from principles, and talking about that deviation in terms of principles and the self-interest to your wife or your girlfriend, that is essential.
And this is something that men bring to the relationship, in my humble opinion.
Talking about a deviation from principles not in a way that is a blame.
Not in the way that is humiliating in turn.
Not in the way that is you being hurt or you being angry or you wanting her to change because it disrupted your day or anything like that.
But just saying, we both of us have these principles that we want to live by because we want to be happy.
If we deviate from these principles, it's not the end of the world, but we need to have that correction.
We need to have that... We really need to have that conversation where we remind each other about our principles and we sort of dust our stuff off and we march on back to this sort of shining marital city on the hill that we're going to live in.
So access to principles and talking about a deviation from those principles, not in a way that is humiliating or blaming or condescending or resentful or manipulative or any of those sorts of things, absolutely essential.
And I think this is something that men can bring to the relationship.
Again, if you have any doubt about this, about a man's ability or a man's ability to work a little bit more easily with principles, then go look for women in non-relationship-based disciplines.
They're there, but they're rare.
So go look for women economists and women physicists and women philosophers and so on, and you'll find them, but they'll be rare.
Whereas relationship-based occupations, therapists, social worker, nurse, you know them all, right?
Even doctor to some degree, you'll find a lot more women there.
Go look at engineers, right?
As a principle-based discipline, go look at relationship-based disciplines and you'll find a lot more women.
So I'm not sort of making this stuff up.
You can go and look at this stuff statistically and you won't have any trouble finding correlation.
So that's sort of the first essence of what I would call mastery, which is access to principles.
Now, the second aspect of what I would call mastery is, for God's sake, don't be afraid of your wife or girlfriend.
For the sake of all that is holy in the rational libertarian heart, do not be afraid of your partner.
Do not be afraid of your partner.
If you are afraid of your partner, you're living in a prison, you're living in fear, you're living in shame, you're living in latent hostility or outright hostility, and it's going to come out in one way or another.
But do not be afraid of your partner.
And if you are afraid of your partner, sit down with your partner and say, I'm really scared of you.
I'm really scared of you.
And say, I don't want to live in fear.
And I'm not going to accept that this fear is simply my issue.
Oh, stop being afraid. I'm not a bully.
It's all your issues. The only reason that you're afraid is your childhood, blah, blah, blah, this, that, and the other, right?
It's the other great danger about getting involved with someone, is that they learn about your history, and then they can blame your present on your past.
Right? So, in the after chat from the show yesterday...
Michael, the British professor or teacher or whatever, was saying, oh, you're not really an anarchist, it's all about your childhood.
And I said, yeah, yeah, I've heard that theory before, and of course I've thought about it myself.
It was one of the first things I thought about, that the state is my mom and dad, and that the educational system or the bureaucracy is my brother, and blah, blah, blah.
I said, yeah, that's certainly possible, and we can talk about it next week.
But when somebody knows your history, they can end up diminishing or denigrating your experience and pinning it all on your past, right?
That's one of the things you have to really watch out for when you get to know someone and they learn about your history is that they can, right?
Christina could have, because she knows everything there is to know about my past, she could have when in this incident with the grocery store, she could have said, "Oh yeah, well, that's just because you were humiliated when you were a child.
You're oversensitive to it.
I don't think it's fair to try and control my behavior, to manage your own symptoms based on your history, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And what could I have said?
I could have said, well, I don't think that's the case, which isn't a very strong argument.
I couldn't have said, well, I wasn't humiliated when I was a child because, of course, I was.
And I couldn't have said, no, it's not that I feel that our bond is weakened by this kind of stuff.
She could have said, well, that's because your bond with your own family is very weak and blah, blah, blah.
The tenuosity of that bond is one of the reasons that you're afraid of bonds being broken now, but it's not the case.
I love you. I respect you.
Blah, blah, blah. It was funny, right?
I was just trying to be funny, right?
This is the big thing that people say, right?
It was just a joke, right? It's like, well, you know, that should really require some laughter.
It's from someone, right? But you don't want to get down that road where you say to someone, if you are scared of them, I'm really scared of you.
I'm jumpy. I feel that I can be criticized.
I feel that I can be disrespected.
And this is not to say that you should change.
This is a very important thing.
When you are talking with someone, and I've done it a number of times on the calls that I've had, Right?
So when I say, in the call yesterday, when I said families should not be judged according to blood, and this guy says, oh, my father is a drunken, criminal, argumentative, fighting guy, but we love him, right?
I'm not going to say to him, well, you can't do that.
You have to change because of my philosophy.
No, of course not, right?
He doesn't have to change at all.
It's just that if he's going to start talking about things like love, then he's going to open himself to questions, right?
Because you can't say that you love somebody who's corrupt or bad or whatever, right?
At least it wouldn't be very logical to say that.
So I said, you know, I just got some questions you don't have to change, right?
You don't have to change your opinion at all.
It's just questions that I have.
And of course, he was open to the conversation and didn't change at all because for him it's a virtue.
So, right, the argument for morality totally predicts that he's not going to change because for him, loving his father is a virtue and nobody is ever going to talk him into being evil, right?
And so...
So, you have to not be afraid of your partner.
And it's scary to say, you know, it's a lot easier to say we've deviated from principles rather than you should change because I'm hurt.
I don't like the behavior because it hurts me.
But nonetheless, it's what you've got to do.
You've got to not be afraid of your partner and you've got to appeal to principles.
And the two are kind of interrelated.
So I'm going to stop now because I keep forgetting that the video takes a while to compile even before I end up...
The video takes a while to compile, even before I end up having to compile it down to a YouTube size.
So thank you so much for listening.
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