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Feb. 19, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:36:07
988 Anatomy of a Relationship Part 2: Control
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Alright, so I guess we're all in.
And let me start off just by reading, I guess, the relevant part that has come on.
This is a guy who's talking about his girlfriend who he's been going out with for a couple of months, who he is very fond of.
And I asked about the values that he found in her or what he found to be positive about her.
And he said this...
They met. She was cute.
She had a steady, well-paying job and seemed to be on track in life.
She made me laugh.
He said we had a great time on our first date.
I was surprised at how open she was to some of the ideas I presented to her.
Concerning religion and the family, mostly stuff talked about on FDR. I didn't break into my displace for government.
I thought I should pace myself.
I'm not always the best at communicating these ideas.
Since the beginning, I was using what little I knew about RTR, specifically speaking about how one feels in the moment.
And it has worked really well.
Nothing but compliments about how different this relationship felt from others and how clear my communication was.
I guess that's from her. She was reciprocating to a slightly lesser degree, I think because the concept was fairly new to her.
She admitted that she felt reluctant at times for fear of being hurt.
I accepted that and tried to lead by example and also create an environment where she felt comfortable.
This girl is very thoughtful and fair.
I've had troubles in the past spending money on women because I felt they weren't appreciative or were taking advantage of me.
It's never been the case with this one.
It sometimes feels like there is a fight to treat each other to dinner movies, etc.
She does a lot of little things that I don't expect that make all the difference.
Showing up with a box of my favorite tea, sneaking out to buy my favorite chocolate for desserts, planning in secret special evenings for the two of us, etc.
Her generosity feels really genuine.
Communication has been exceptional.
She tells me what's on her mind and until this recent topic, no topic or issue is out of bounds.
She has explained family issues that she has gone through and when I spoke about some of the myths surrounding the family, she agreed.
It didn't feel like the ideas were that much of a stretch from her current thoughts.
I really feel I know exactly where I stand when it comes to how she feels about me.
I haven't spoken the words I love you to her yet, but I've been thinking about them for a while, blah, blah, blah.
I gave her a copy of Untruth early in our relationship, perhaps too early.
I would say she got through about half of it.
We discussed a few of the ideas, and she didn't seem to be in opposition.
She isn't huge on philosophy, and she told me she was having a hard time getting through all the material.
She indicated that she was having troubles digesting all of the content, and so on.
I remember hearing you describe how you run down the stairs to meet Christina when she comes home at the end of the day.
The first time I heard that, I thought that was kind of crazy, but when I meet up with this girl, I feel similar.
I can't help but smile, then proceed to run over and pick her off her feet with a big hug.
We recently went to my parents' house for five days.
Parents liked her, blah, blah, blah.
She is patient and caring.
She creates this environment where I feel comfortable disclosing really personal information.
She really takes time to sit and talk about things that bother me and helps me to seek solutions.
I feel amazing around her.
She really compliments my life.
We can be silly, goofy, hyper, but also calm, patient, and serious.
So the issue that he has is that she is...
Non-religious, insofar as she's not religious, but she's not anti-religious.
She doesn't mind. She doesn't think about religion.
She doesn't care about religion. She will occasionally go to church with her parents.
She wouldn't want her kids to go to church, but if her parents want to drag the kids to church, she doesn't mind hugely, and so on.
So this, my sort of on a close read of what this guy said about it, I wrote this.
I said... Begin.
Pushing your girlfriend to take a stand against religion will force an ugly confrontation with her family and your relationship is not secure enough for her to do that yet.
Be patient. If her parents are reasonable but uninformed people, they will come around.
If they are defensive and aggressive, they will attack her growing awareness and you won't have to lift a finger except to comfort her.
You can teach her by example without even trying over the long haul.
You don't have to force syllogisms on her and we are none of us.
Perfect. Enjoy the gift.
And this irritated some people, and so I would certainly be happy to hear what the feelings were and what happened.
All right. I was less interested in what he had to say about her than what she actually had to say herself.
Sure, and why don't you read the bits that you found objectionable?
Sure. Well, for example, two paragraphs in particular.
It bothers me that when you say that you thought, if I went to church with my mom, how you felt and that you said you would be disappointed, you said that you weren't sure why, but Well, I don't think it's right that you should be disappointed.
You chose to be an atheist.
You chose to think how wrong and corrupt religion is.
I chose not to think anything about religion, whether good or bad.
And then, in the next paragraph...
It bothers me, really bothers me, that you call me inconsistent.
I think that's just really rude.
Just because you believe everything has to be concrete, known, proven fact, and because I agree with some things, although I may have other ideas, faiths, beliefs about other things that are more abstract, does not make what I believe wrong or inconsistent.
And then also, she says earlier, she says, religion's not important to me, right?
Well, if it's not, then why all the bullying farther on down?
Sorry, can you read?
Are you saying she's bullying? I'm not sure that I saw that.
Well, in the previous two passages, she's clearly bullying him.
Okay, well tell me what you mean by bullying, because I'm not sure that I see it.
Bullying to me is emotional abuse, name-calling, and ultimatums, but perhaps you can tell me what you see as bullying.
Well, what would you say if I called you rude for calling someone inconsistent?
I don't think that's abusive.
If you genuinely feel that I'm being rude, then...
Then that would be consistent, right?
Rude is not a name, like asshole or jerk or dick or whatever, right?
Well... Now, I agree it's not RTR, but so what?
I mean, you know, that's...
I mean, she's talking about her feelings, and yes, she's drawing conclusions about them, but, you know, that's okay.
I mean... And telling him he has no right to his feelings.
Let me just read that bit where you said no rights.
I don't think it's right that you should be disappointed.
She's not saying you can't be disappointed.
She's saying I don't think it's right that you should be disappointed.
And from the premises that she has...
That makes sense, right?
I'm not saying it makes sense in a perfect sort of philosophical manner in any way, shape, or form, but I don't see that as bullying myself.
I see that as her expressing her opinion based upon her premises, which she's holding fast to.
But you may have a different definition of bullying than I do, so I'm certainly happy to hear it.
Well, she... Those two passages to me just seemed like she was finger-wagging and brow-beating him for wanting to express his own view of the truth.
Well, but is she not allowed to express her own view of the truth?
Like, what is she doing that he's not doing?
Well, sure, but we're not just talking about two people kind of just having a casual conversation over lunch or something like that.
We're talking about this guy talking about how this is someone he wants to spend the rest of his life with.
No, he's not saying that.
He's not saying that he wants to get married to her.
He hasn't said that he loves her yet.
They've only been going out for two months, right?
Right, but he did say that in his follow-up post that that was something that was on his mind.
But he did say, I'm going to propose to this woman and I want to...
Like, hey, it would be great if I could spend the rest of my life with her.
Of course it would be if it was a good love, right?
But this isn't an imminent proposal situation.
No, no, it's not.
But still, I mean...
What we're talking about here is whether...
I mean, we're talking about romantic relationship here, not just a casual conversation.
And so, of course, in any casual conversation, anyone can have any opinion they want.
But when you're choosing who to spend your time with, that's when it matters, right?
Okay, well, let's take it for a spin, right?
I mean, and I think it's perfectly reasonable that we bring up these objections and we can run through them.
Now, we don't know how he has presented religion to her, right?
We don't know. We don't know how he has presented the atheist argument.
He doesn't talk about that in his post, right?
That's true. So, we don't know if he's done a really bad job of talking about atheism, right?
But at the same time, he doesn't have to be Richard Dawkins in order to express his own opinion, right?
Without getting... Well, but I think that's what he's been doing, is expressing his own opinion.
Without being told that he's rude and that he's wrong and that he...
Wait, wait, wait, Greg. He's telling her that she's inconsistent, hypocritical, and wrong about religion, right?
How does he get to do that but she doesn't?
Well, and we could say, well, because he's right and she's wrong.
But that doesn't matter particularly because we don't know how he's presented religion to her.
He might have been hostile.
He might have been angry. He might have been negative.
He might have name-called religion.
He may not have worked from first place.
We don't know, right? That's true.
At least not according to his post.
All we know is what he says he did.
Well, we know that she doesn't understand religious, the atheism from first principles.
We know that because that's not what she's talking about here.
Right? She's saying, well, it's like he's saying, well, it's like the KKK. Right?
And then she says, well, no.
I mean, the way I see it is more like you're part of a team, like you're cheering for your team, like football.
Right? And all that means is that She doesn't understand...
And again, we're just going with the evidence that's in the post.
She doesn't understand the argument from first principles, and that's his job, right?
And because she doesn't understand the argument from first principles, it looks like intolerance.
You have an opinion that religion is bad.
You haven't made the case to my satisfaction.
Therefore, if you tell me that I should...
Undergo all of these horrible personal trials for the sake of conforming to your opinion, then that is rude in a big dictatorial, right?
It's like saying I should break up with my family because I don't like rap or something, right?
That would be kind of dominating a dictatorial.
Again, this is devil's advocate position, right?
But just based on what we have in the interchange.
Sure, sure. And she's actually fighting for what she believes in.
She's being honest about her perspective.
And from her perspective, she's right.
If he has not made the case from first principles about atheism, Then her perception would be that he just doesn't like religion and he's attempting to impose his dislike upon her and causing her to enter into a difficult and possibly perpetually fractious break with her family based on his particular opinions, right? Because she perceives them as opinions at the moment, right?
Yeah, I imagine she probably does.
Well, I mean, or she's like an incredible liar, right?
Which would show up in lots of other places in the relationship.
That's why I asked her about the general values.
Because if he has made the principles, the argument from first principles, and she's still able to manipulate it into an, quote, opinion without him noticing it, then that's, I mean, but there's no evidence for that, right?
I'm not sure I followed that.
Well, Let's say that he has made the argument from first principles, but she's able to manipulate that argument into, well, it's just your opinion.
Right? Then she would be corrupt, right?
If we make the UPB argument and people say, well, I can't disagree with the UPB logic, but morality is still subjective.
And that's the way I interpreted when she said, well, I just see it as a football game.
Well, but what's your evidence for that?
There's no right, no wrong.
It's just whose team has the highest score.
Well, sure, but we don't know.
She's just manipulating.
But we don't know. We don't know that.
We don't know if he's made a really bad case for atheism.
We do know that he values her highly and that this is a very scary place for him to go with her, right?
Well, see, and that's the other half of the problem is that I don't understand how he could, given what she's put in that letter.
Could what? Value her highly.
Well, I'm not sure what standard you have in terms of valuing people, right?
What percentage of perfection do people have to achieve for them to be valuable?
In your mind, right? Like if 100% is perfect perfection, which of course is impossible, let's make 90% or 95%, 100%.
What percentage of consistency in the moment, right?
Because philosophy is a process, right?
What percentage of consistency for you makes somebody valuable?
Yeah, but it's not just a question of consistency.
It's also a question of intent.
Well, we don't know her intent because we don't know the interchange that has occurred between them that has ended up with her having this perception of his atheism.
Right, which is also why I don't think that just sort of saying everything looks great, good for you, is to me a reasonable judgment because if we don't know, then how can we say that?
Who said everything looks great?
You said...
Let's see.
You said she sounds very special.
I wouldn't take a stand on religion.
You said, be patient.
Yeah, teacher by example does I say, don't give up your position at the moment, but teach her by example.
Lay the foundation and see what happens, for sure.
Right, and enjoy the gift.
Where did I say everything looks great?
Well, you didn't say that explicitly, of course.
Where did I imply everything looks great and there's nothing that needs to change?
In the phrase, she sounds very special and... she sounds very special and...
that does not imply that everything is great and nothing needs to change, particularly when I give a course of action that specifically involves changing her thoughts over the long run.
And the reason that I'm bringing this up, Greg, is that I think that you changed the narrative to suit your irritation, right?
Thank you.
All right. I mean, you're picking stuff up, to me at least, right?
This is just sort of my gut sense.
Could be right, could be wrong. But you're inventing things like intent for which there isn't evidence, and then you're inventing my response which says everything's perfectly fine and, you know, full steam ahead, no problems whatsoever, which has nothing to do with what I said.
Right? So you're not being, I think, particularly honest in this interaction.
I think that you're altering things to suit your irritation.
And so I have a hard time understanding if you're capable of that, and we all are, right?
It's not picking on you.
if you're capable of that and perform that, I'm not sure how you would justly be able to say to somebody else, you should dump this person because she's not acting with integrity in every situation.
Because you don't act with integrity in every situation.
I don't act with integrity in every situation, right?
That's why I said we are none of us perfect.
And since that is the case, and we both know that, and you and I have had a number of conflicts over the past week or two in this area, right?
Where you have not acted with integrity, right?
And again, I do it and it's not a big deal, right?
But given that you know that, your irritation cannot be because somebody else has violated a standard of perfect integrity.
Or even very high integrity, right?
But also, we're not talking about every situation.
We're just talking about this one.
I mean... Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.
Well... I'm saying, in this situation, she didn't act with integrity.
And you're saying, well, we can't judge her on every situation, so which one can I judge her on?
Well, can I cite situations where you have not acted with integrity?
Certainly you can. Okay.
So, in other words, then we can't judge her on any situation.
Well, see, here again, you're transposing a black and white situation, right?
I mean, she's obviously not a puppy stabber, right?
She's not a cop, right?
I mean, this is somebody who has obviously some objectively positive qualities.
You know, curiosity, concern, emotional maturity, stable job and education.
She is open and curious.
She's not specifically philosophical.
She's not religious. She's not statist, and so on, right?
So there are some objectively positive qualities here, right?
Okay.
Well, I mean, tell me if that's not the case.
Thank you.
I mean, she's sweet, she's considerate, she's thoughtful.
I mean, you know, things that are nice, right?
Well, those are things that he's telling us about her.
We don't know if that's true or not.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
So you can impugn all of these motives to her based on scant evidence, right?
But then when he provides evidence, suddenly it's not worthwhile?
Well, all I'm saying is...
If we can't believe him about her, then we can't believe him about her, and therefore we can come to no conclusions whatsoever, right?
Because he's reporting...
No, I'm so sorry, because he did copy the email.
Sorry, that's completely...
Right, the email is heard directly.
The email is heard directly. That's why I was...
No, you're totally right.
Forget it. My point is completely invalid.
But she does have some positive qualities.
I mean, we have to assume that. Otherwise, he's a liar as a whole, right?
She might be a man.
I don't know, right?
Well, again, as a whole?
I mean, why would we assume that he's a liar as a whole just because he's deluded about this one person?
Well, because I said she has objectively positive qualities, and you said, well, that's just his reporting of her, right?
Sure. So are we not to believe his reporting of her?
Well, all I'm saying is that we don't know.
So we can't believe his reporting of her?
If he can give us examples of the things he says.
Well, he did. She's nice and kind and blah, blah, blah.
No, he did. He gave specific examples, which I read at the beginning and which you read earlier, right?
That she buys him boxes of his favorite tea, that she runs out to get him dessert, that she plans special evenings for them together.
Yeah, but even you've said you can get that stuff at a restaurant.
No, you can't. You can't get a restaurant to set up a special evening for you, and you can't get a restaurant to go out and buy you a box of favorite tea.
No, you can get a runner to do that.
But he also says that she creates a warm and supportive environment where he feels safe and secure to talk about his thoughts and feelings, that she responds positively to the RTR stuff that he's been practicing, that she compliments him for his emotional skills and the intimacy that they're able to achieve.
I mean, these are things that are positives, right?
Sure. So, there is a number of positives and these things, of course, are not particularly easy to come by, right?
I mean, I've had lots of girlfriends and it's hard to come by somebody who creates that kind of environment.
So, there's lots of pluses and there is a negative here which seems to center around her relationship with her family more so than her relationship.
With religion, right? Because she knows her parents go to church, and she knows that if she accepts religious atheist arguments from first principles, that she's going to be on a collision course with her parents, right?
And that's a lot to ask somebody who's had no exposure to philosophy in two months of dating, right?
But she's also inconsistent about whether she really cares about religion or not, too.
I mean, she says at the beginning, oh, I don't really care about it.
But then later on...
She says, oh, but I need it as an emotional crutch for my job, and how dare you try to take that away from me?
Well, I don't think that she...
I mean, to me, there's a distinction between going to church and believing that the soul can live on.
I mean, there's spiritualism versus religion.
I mean, there's organized religion, and then there's just, you know, maybe the spirit lives on, that kind of stuff.
Of course, I don't believe any of that, but that is...
I don't think that you can cite that as a massive inconsistency.
Right, but she's using that as a rationalization for her going to church.
I'm not sure. I don't think that's the case.
I think she goes to church when she's with her parents and they go to church.
Well, that's probably true, but she says that, she brings that up as a sort of weapon against him, right?
Because he's trying to get her to see the fallacy in it, and she's rejecting it, right?
Right. So why didn't she just return to, well, I don't really care one way or the other, blah, blah, blah.
No, instead, she picks a weapon that she can bully him with.
Well, I need this as an emotional crutch.
Where did she put it here?
Now, do you think by bringing up the word bully again that you're being completely objective, Greg, or even remotely objective?
By when she openly and honestly says, look, I need this to get...
Well, what would you... Do you think that's bullying?
Well, it's putting him in the position of being the wrong and hurtful one.
No, she's saying...
Or just trying to speak the truth.
She's saying, I need this to get through today.
I face a lot of death.
That's honest. That's vulnerable.
That's true, right? I don't think she's bullying him.
She's just saying what she feels and what she thinks.
And if she was an alcoholic, would it be the same case?
I mean, I need this vodka to get through the day.
Right? I mean, at what point can he say...
Who thinks that the soul might live on to somebody who abuses alcohol?
Well, it's self-delusion, right?
I mean, at what point can he say this is wrong and not feel bad about it?
Well, that's his call. I mean, but she's not controlling him.
She's not got a gun to his head.
She's not calling him names.
She's not issuing ultimatums, right?
She's just... I mean, you've got to look at it from her side if you want, right?
I mean, you don't have to do anything, right?
But she has had no particular issue with religion.
She's probably never met an anarchist before, let alone an atheist before, let alone an anarchist or a philosopher or whatever.
She's obviously reached a kind of detente with her family.
Her family accept her non-religious side.
She accepts, at a perfunctory and formal level, her parents desire to go to church.
So they have a live and let live situation.
And this is the first time, probably in her entire life, that she's run into somebody who has intransigent beliefs about these things, right?
First time. That's probably true.
Well, it is true. I'm sure it's true.
And she said no training in philosophy.
She said never had any interest in philosophy.
And so this is all wildly new to her, right?
And unprecedented.
And of course, she's been told, as most relativists or people who are raised as relativists have been told, she's been told that absolute statements are bullying, right?
Sure. I mean, that's just the cultural soup she's swimming in, right?
It's the cultural soup that we all swam in before we got hold of philosophy, right?
Yeah, and Nathan's girlfriend was telling us all the same things too.
Oh, I'm not as advanced as you guys.
I've never read any of this stuff.
I'm not used to hearing these sorts of things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So why doesn't she get a pass?
Sorry, you're equating this woman to Nathan's girlfriend?
Yeah. Why would that not be fair?
Because, Greg, she's not calling him names.
She's not verbally abusing him.
He's not punching walls.
She doesn't come from a sick and dysfunctional background.
She's not entitled.
She doesn't go on about herself in an abusive manner.
I mean, where would you even start and where would you even stop, right?
She's not enmeshed in relationships with abusive people.
She's not... I mean...
Yeah, but we don't know. There's nothing that's close, right?
Her parents could be abusive.
We don't know. Well, again, you can make up anything you want.
Her parents could be lizard-like space aliens and we could go down that road.
All we can go is based on the evidence that's put forward, right?
Sure. Right?
You can make up anything, right?
Yeah, I agree with that.
Maybe her parents are cannibals, right?
I mean, but so what? We have to go with the facts, right?
At least as they're presented, right?
Yes, yes.
So, I mean, it seems clear to me, rightly or wrongly, that I don't think that you're being objective.
Like, I'm not saying I'm being perfectly objective.
I don't think that you're being objective about this.
I think that you have a really, really high standard.
And I think that the level of emotional aggression and frustration that you felt on my response was, I think, somewhat out of proportion to the situation at hand, right?
That's fair. I mean, it did bug me how upset I was getting.
I didn't think that that was reasonable.
But I still had questions about this email.
Yeah, yeah, but you didn't respond with questions about this email.
You responded with anger and frustration, right?
There's nothing wrong with that.
I'm just saying that that's... You didn't respond with curiosity, right?
Well, I don't think that's fair either.
If you look at my post, I think I was pretty...
I'm talking about this conversation.
Right? Like, you're using a lot of strong language, like equating her with Rachel, calling her a bully, this and that, right?
Yes, that's true. Right?
So, and that seems to me pretty strong.
And I had my tussles with Rachel, so, I mean, I have some knowledge of how far that went.
But I sort of, to me, that's strong language, right?
Relative to the information that we have before us, right?
Yes, that's true.
And so what that means is that it may not be that your frustration is rooted in whether or not this woman is a bad woman or not, right?
Okay.
Where are you going with that?
Well, are other people on the call?
Do they have mics or is it just you and I? Yeah, I've got a mic.
Oh, okay. And Ash, were you bothered?
You were bothered as well by this, right?
Yeah, well, the thing that I wasn't sure about is you told him to kind of lead by example and let her learn that way.
But the thing that kind of didn't fit for me is I posted that she was, you know, it was encouraging that she was kind of psychologically self-aware and she recognized her belief in the afterlife as a coping mechanism, but it's discouraging that she thinks being comfortable is a substitute for truth.
So I was wondering if Kind of reversing those values is something that you can teach by example or if you need to value truth above comfort as a starting point.
Well, I don't think she knows what truth is, really.
I mean, to take an example from my own relationship with Christina, she valued the comfort of conformity to culture.
Over the truth, right?
But that's because she didn't know that there was such a thing called the truth in relation to culture.
And she also didn't know the costs and benefits of the two approaches, right?
So for her, it was like, well, why would I want to get into a big fight with my parents?
They're not going to change, and I am Greek.
You know, once we got into an intimate relationship, then it became clear over time the cost that accrued to us as a couple when she conformed to her parents' cultural imperatives and her parents' will or wishes, right?
But in the absence of that, then it doesn't register, right?
That makes sense.
That was Christina consciously aware that what she was doing beforehand was a coping mechanism.
Because that's what seems to stick out for me.
She is aware of it consciously, but she still discards it, if you know what I mean.
If people just kind of go along with whatever, Right.
You know, they're not aware of it.
But in this case, she's aware.
And if she has, you know, puts comfort above truth in this situation, well, that's obviously what's leading to the conflict over the religious stuff.
Because I don't think it's about religion.
I think it's about comfort with her family versus truth.
And she obviously, in her current hierarchy of values, has comfort higher than truth.
Well, I don't think truth is anywhere on the radar.
I will certainly say that for Christina, there was no...
For me to say, go fight with your family would be like for me to say, go get a root canal without any anesthetic, right?
I mean, because conformity is an anesthetic to discomfort.
And... Who wouldn't want that if there's no particular consciousness of an alternative?
Now, Christina did say, I'm not particularly close to my parents, right?
I mean, we get along and, you know, they were good parents in many ways, but we're not close, right?
I mean, we get along, right?
And she didn't go to Greek dances and so on, right?
So her parents kept inviting her to these things and we would go to some family stuff and we went to church that one time.
But Christina said, you know, we're not that close, but it's nice to go over there and have some food and talk about stuff, right?
So, for me to say, well, you need to take all of that and upturn it completely, in the absence of any cost-benefit analysis or any abstract understanding of truth...
It was only after we kept going to her parents' place, we kept coming back and she'd be disassociated and we would end up having conflicts that we began to map out the effect that a lack of integrity was having.
And of course the humility that I had to have in that situation was that I was going over and I was I went to church, right?
So I couldn't ask her to have more integrity than I was capable of, if that makes sense.
And so for this woman to say, you need to do your job knowing that people are just falling down onto a flat mattress of dead meat and not going anywhere else, and you need to comfort people who are religious by saying, well, they're dead.
They haven't gone to any happier place.
They're just dead and gone.
It's like I'm plugging a radio, right?
That would be her job.
Well, that would be agony for her, right?
Well, I don't think he's saying that she should say that to other people.
I think it's more about what she believes herself.
Well, should she lie? Well, probably not, but she's lying to herself.
So, you know, lying to yourself and others, or just lying to others, you know, which one's worse?
Do you think she's lying to herself when she says, it gives me some comfort to believe that the soul might have gone to a happier place, and it also helps me to comfort the people that I have to comfort, which I've never had to do, and you've never had to do, so it's hard for me to get on a high horse with someone like that who has to tell...
Yeah, but she says that in defense of her own equivocation around religion, which is, in other words, implying that it's just easier for her to believe, right? So it's about her beliefs, not about what she's telling other people on the job.
No, she's talking about how difficult it is to comfort people.
The families that she has to reveal a death to on her job.
Right, but why is she talking about that?
Well, I don't know. I mean, I can certainly understand, I mean, just from a human empathy standpoint, I can certainly understand how it might help people in the moment to hear that a loved one has gone to a better place.
I can understand that.
And that's exactly it.
She's using that To imply that he's not being empathetic, that he's not being sympathetic in suggesting that religion is wrong, right?
And that's how she's bullying him.
She's not bullying him, Greg, because from her perspective, she's right.
From her perspective, based on the case that he's made, she's right.
It's a harmless belief.
It doesn't cause anyone to die or starve.
It's not like statism or being part of the KKK. It's a harmless little belief that provides some comfort to people in a time of great agony.
And I don't agree with that, obviously, because it's not true and there's costs and this and that.
But from her perspective, based on the case that he's made and based on the extraordinarily young side of their relationship, like two months or whatever, she's right.
So you want me to give up this thing which gives me some comfort and helps get me through the day, that gives an enormous amount of comfort.
Basically, you want me to operate without anesthetic.
Why would you want me to do that?
Just from her perspective, right?
But she doesn't ask him why.
But we don't know what conversations they've had.
She may have started off asking him why, and maybe he made a really bad case.
I'm just saying it's possible. Right, but I'm just working from what's in that letter.
Right, but we don't know what came before it, and he does say that he's not very good at putting these ideas forward.
Steph, can I ask, in an ideal situation, how would you see this relationship playing out?
What kind of steps would happen to turn it from what it is into something where they're both on the same page?
Well, I think the first thing that we have to recognize is that they are both on the same page in very, very many ways, right?
She's not a Christian. She's not a statist.
She's open to philosophy.
She's interested in reading it.
They discuss stuff. She's open to RTR. She doesn't go to church.
They are on the same page in a lot of ways, right?
Yeah. I mean, they're more on the same page than a lot of people who come to the board that we debate with, right?
Yeah, that's true, but I'm wondering, because there are some things in there, like when they're talking about the future with children and stuff, there are some things that I'm sure the poster considers deal-breakers, as I would like letting her parents take their kids to church and things like that.
To get over those, even if they're only 95% of the way there, they're fairly significant issues, I think.
So how would you see it playing out to get those last deal-breakers to get rid of them?
Well, I think that her objection...
Is not to his desire to not have their children go to church.
Her objection is that it is laid down in her perception as a commandment, right?
That's her objection.
Okay, that's fair enough.
So, the thing to do is to not lay things down as a commandment, right?
To not provide ultimatums, to not escalate and to increase the amount of conflict in the relationship.
But to lead by example, right?
So if they go to visit her parents and she becomes less of who she is because of that, because she has to conform to their culture or religion or whatever it is, right?
That inevitably is going to cause her to become less of who she is, to disconnect from who she is and to cause problems in the relationship.
That's inevitable, right?
Okay. And so, until she understands what it costs her to conform, Then asking her to change to her will appear to be simply inflicting a negative, right?
Yeah, I agree with that.
But I'm asking, you know, does he just kind of wait it out and talk with her after?
No, what he would do is, I mean, I would hope that he might sort of take a page from my book and Sort of point out to her, I would say not in the moment with her family, but on the drive back or something, you know, how did you feel?
Because this was my experience. It seemed like you were different around your family and what was your experience and so on, right?
And so that she can't wake up to the fact that it does cost her something to conform to her parents.
Because right now, she has no perception that it costs her anything.
So he's just saying, have a big blow-up with your family for no particular reason other than to conform to my ideological absolutism.
Which, of course, is not going to be considered nice or kind or benevolent by her, right?
Because there's no cost, right? Okay.
And do you think it's inevitable that she'll kind of realize the costs over time or not?
Oh, I don't know. I don't think there's any way to predict that.
It would have a lot to do with how empathetic he is in communicating this stuff with her.
Okay. And how curious he is.
That's fair enough. And so on, right?
So in some ways, it's kind of a waiting game in that sense.
Like, he'll have to see how that progresses over time.
Well, I don't think I'm counseling waiting.
Well... Not waiting, but it's not something that he can particularly sit down and just talk about and work out.
It'll have to be based on each time that she goes to see her parents and they talk about it afterwards and stuff like that.
So it'll have to be quite a gradual process.
Well, yeah, I mean, it certainly will.
And of course, he will have to live with integrity himself, right?
Because it's always so easy to see the flaws in other people, right?
To nag them for their flaws and so on, right?
But we all know how hard it is for us to live with integrity as well, right?
I mean, the real kind of integrity.
So, the best thing for him to do is to live with real integrity himself and that can include talking to his potential in-laws or her parents about their experience of religion and so on, right?
And being honest about his own convictions and gentle and open, whatever, right?
There's tons of stuff that he can do to bring the light of truth to this relationship that doesn't have to do with laying down absolutes to somebody who is not Who's not had any experience with this and who has been trained to view that kind of stuff as bullying.
Okay, that makes sense.
So, I mean, the question then arises to me, and I have a theory, but what does that mean, right?
The question then arises to me, which is why was there a strong reaction, right?
And it could be on other people in this call's part, but in particular with Greg and Ash, why was there such a strong reaction to the possibility of Continuing a relationship where there is a potential irrationality in one area that we know of.
I don't think I had Too strong a reaction.
I mean, I know that I'm completely inexperienced in terms of relationships and stuff, so I was more curious as to what was going through your mind and how you differentiated a potentially good relationship from a potentially bad relationship and stuff like that.
So I don't think my reaction was as strong as what Greg had.
I just wanted to kind of figure out what was going on in your mind so I could apply that Right, and the other thing to take into account is that he's enjoying the relationship.
I mean, that's not inconsiderable, right?
I mean, and it's not, again, from what we know, it's not the same as the way that Nate would sort of, quote, enjoy a relationship, which was the mere avoidance of, like, he feels active joy when he meets her.
It's awakening parts of his heart and parts of his being that he's not experienced before, and he's experiencing real joy in the pursuit of this relationship.
And of course, philosophy is to some degree about happiness, right?
Yeah. So to me, it would be kind of like, well, if we're on the hunt for the smallest inconsistency or even a medium-sized inconsistency and we just hit the eject button the moment that we see it, I don't see how our conversation could have developed if we'd applied that standard or if I'd applied that standard from the beginning.
Yeah, I agree. I wasn't really objecting to what you were saying.
I was just curious about how you got there, if that makes sense.
Does it make sense?
Again, this is just my opinion. This is what I would do.
There's no objective right or wrong answer here.
There's no medals or cardboard cutouts of absolute pure philosophy in this kind of stuff.
This is not strangling kids or anything like that.
This is a relationship that has lots of pluses and one red flag that needs to be negotiated, but there's no absolute right or wrong answer here, I don't think, unless I'm mistaking something.
Yeah, well, that makes perfect sense.
I mean, I don't think that we can, I certainly couldn't be the kind of person who says, well, this person has an inconsistency, so I'm not going to have them in my life.
Because, Lord knows, I'm not perfectly consistent, and I don't know anybody who is.
So, that would mean that I'd have to, I don't know, break up with everyone and throw myself off a cliff.
I mean, that just doesn't seem to me how things should progress.
Yeah, yeah. So, Greg, then I'll just put my thoughts about this on the table, and then you can let me know what you think, right?
Are you still interested in the potentiality of a romantic relationship?
What do you mean by that?
Thank you.
Do you want a girlfriend?
No. Because the last time we talked, you were interested in that.
Well, I was exploring the idea, but I don't know.
And is there any part of you that would take a positive romantic relationship if it came along?
Or would want that? No, I don't think so.
Well, I can't quite agree with you there.
I mean, just to be a complete jerk about it, and it could be totally wrong or whatever, right?
But I think that I don't know what would have changed over the past few months that that would have changed for you, right?
I don't think that women have become better or worse subjectively or whatever.
And you've seen more positive relationships on the FDR board than some of the stuff that we saw earlier, right?
Sure, sure. So what I would say, of course, is that if we look at what I talked about in this thread as a lowering of standards, let's say, right?
I mean, let's call it that, right?
If we look at the possibility that a very productive, happy, and benevolent relationship can arise out of lowered standards, right, then lowered standards would increase the chance that you could meet someone and enjoy that aspect of life, right?
Possibly.
No, not possibly.
This is a logical one, right?
Sorry. It tends to be annoying.
I'm not saying that this means that you want it.
I'm just saying that logically, if you lower your standards, then you can accept more applicants, right?
Like for a job, if you say, I only want somebody who's got a post-doctorate degree from Harvard, you're going to have like three applicants, right?
Whereas if you say, I'll take anybody who's got a degree, then you have, like if you lower your standards, there's more possibility to fill the position, right?
Yeah, but you have to have an ad out soliciting for applicants in the first place.
Oh, no, no, I fully understand that.
I'm just saying, right? Sure.
So, if it's possible to find somebody who's not already perfectly rational and to develop a productive and positive relationship, right, then this conversation, and if you wanted that, then this conversation would produce anxiety within you.
this threat, right?
Logically, that's true.
So, either that theory is totally incorrect, which it could well be, of course.
In which case, we need to find some other reason why you got so upset, right?
Or the theory is true, in which case we have some idea as to why you got upset.
Well, and why should I assume theory is true?
Well, you don't have to assume that this would just be a matter of honesty on your part to yourself, and I'm not saying you're being dishonest or whatever, right?
But this would just be a matter of honesty, that if there was any part of you that wanted a romantic love relationship, the possibility of being a husband and a father and being a family man or whatever, right?
To have that... If there was any part of you that wanted that, then there would be some understanding as to why you got upset.
And if that was true, I'd already be there.
Beware. If I actually wanted that, I'd already have it.
I don't think that's necessarily the case.
Everything I've ever really wanted, I just do it.
I don't think that's true.
Didn't you want to be honest in terms of RTR? Sure.
And that was one of the tougher parts of this conversation for you, right?
Yes. So...
It's not true that if you want it, you get it, right?
If there are defenses and if there are insecurities and if there are barriers or blockages, and none of this means that you've got to go put an ad on Lava Life or anything like that.
It's just a matter of knowing your own heart, right?
Sure, sure. And it would not be a good thing If you did want this, right?
Again, it wouldn't mean that you had to act on any of it, but if you did want the possibility of a mature and beneficial romantic or love relationship, if you did want that, that would be important information for you to have, right?
Again, it wouldn't mean you'd have to act on it, but in terms of self-knowledge, that would be important, right?
I would imagine so, yeah.
Well, I'm perfectly happy if that's not the case.
I mean, if you feel that there's a significant aspect of yourself that you shouldn't know about, I'm certainly happy to hear that.
You're fogging me a little bit, right?
Greg, I'm feeling quite frustrated in light of the recent conversations we've had around this topic.
I think anyway, based on those that we've at least established that this is something that you still have some anxiety around and that you haven't got a solution, like a final solution to, but you're presenting it here as if You know exactly what's going on, and it doesn't seem particularly like you're being very honest with yourself in this situation.
Wait, are you saying that Greg might be even a tiny bit inconsistent?
I'm just hovering over the head up button here, because we know what we do with people who are even a tiny bit inconsistent.
Sorry, go on.
We've had a couple of conversations around this over the last few days, I guess.
So to hear Greg come here now and talk about it like a foregone conclusion...
Well, I know that's not true, right?
I mean, with due respect, Greg, and I understand your anxiety around all of this.
I know that it's not true.
I know that it's not true that if you could have a positive and mature love relationship in your life, that you would not have that.
I mean, it's not true. It's not true for anybody because it's such a pleasant and positive thing.
And when you came up for Christmas, you mentioned a number of times how beneficial the relationship was between Christina and myself to both of us, right?
Sure, sure. Right, so again, I mean, I know this is a really, really stressful and horrible aspect of the conversation for you, but it's not true.
When I say, do you want a girlfriend and you say no, I understand why you would say that, but it's not true.
I mean, what you don't want is a destructive, horrible, soul-crushing relationship that's trying to make you want to open a vein, right?
And it's also true that you don't want to face the anxiety of your desire to have that kind of love in your life.
I mean, that's also true, right?
And it is the worst and most painful part of your soul.
And you don't even want to express hope in this area because it's kind of painful, right?
Thank you.
It's like staring for you. It would feel like staring at a severed limb saying, gee, I hope it grows back.
To me, that would just be a kind of self-torture, right?
Well, yeah. Right, but that's not the same as saying you don't want your limb to grow back, right?
It's just that that would be like saying, well, my limb's not going to grow back, right?
So I don't focus on that.
Well, right. Right, right.
Right, so if I'm saying that a woman does not have to be perfect to be lovable, that opens the net.
Because it could be that you have these high standards or these aggressively high standards for people in order to keep yourself isolated, right?
That's a possibility. Sure.
Well, you're saying that like it's a question mark, right?
Well, it's a possibility.
Well, do you think that you have high standards that keep you isolated for people?
I think I have high standards, but I don't think that they keep me isolated from people.
Okay. Do you think that your high standards are just?
Well, that depends on the situation, I guess.
And what I mean by that is, do you feel that the high standards that you have are high standards that you meet?
Not always, but I try to.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean when you say try to, right?
And just for the example, right?
So when we were in Miami and this guy was talking about his family that you had inside information, you were wrestling about whether to say that or not, right?
Sure. Yeah, that's true.
And then you didn't say it, but instead you kind of got down on the conference the next day, right?
Right, but I wasn't down on the conference per se.
I was sort of just kind of expressing my own personal dissatisfaction, which isn't the same thing as saying that the conference was objectively bad.
Okay, but when you didn't say what you wanted to say, and which you knew would be very helpful to say, and didn't then talk about it with anybody afterwards...
But instead talked about other things that were unrelated.
How is that you... I mean, I'm not saying you weren't trying.
I just sort of want to understand when you use the word that I try to meet my standards.
What would be the difference between trying to meet your standards and just failing to meet your standards without trying in that situation, right?
Like how is that when you know you want to say something and it's a conference about being honest in the moment?
And you decide not to.
And again, I understand. No, it was a clear failure, and I've already said that.
It was an absolute failure.
Right. And this, again, I'm just chipping away at what I think is a kind of unproductive vanity for you.
It could be, right? It's just my thoughts, right?
But the other stuff that happened with James and stuff that's happened between you and I, I'm not sure that's you trying to meet your standards.
I think that's you not meeting your standards, which, God knows, happens to all of us, right?
So this is not a picking fest, right?
But when you use the word, well, you say, I have these standards and I try to meet them.
I'm not sure, and I'm not saying you don't try to meet them, but it seems to me that there are times when you make decisions to not meet them, right?
Yeah, and then sometimes go in sort of the opposite direction, right?
Where you're obfuscating other things rather than meeting the standards, right?
I think I follow you on that one.
And in this example, where Ash is saying that you have not ruled out the possibility of wanting a girlfriend, but you say to me that you don't want a girlfriend, is that you trying to...
No, what he said was that I have anxiety around the issue.
That I'll admit up front.
Yeah, I have anxiety around the issue.
So what? Well, I have anxiety around...
But that means that you both want and don't want a girlfriend, right?
Well, does that also mean that I both want and don't want to skydive?
Do you feel a lot of anxiety around skydiving?
Well, if someone told me I should, well, I would.
But why?
I mean, you just say, no, I don't want to.
I don't think you'd feel anxiety about that.
Like if I said, Greg, we're going to set up the FDR base camp at the top of Everest.
I want you to come. You'd be like, thanks, but, right?
Well, right, but why would I say thanks, but?
Because the idea is anxiety-provoking, right?
I don't want to do that. Just get rid of that anxiety by not doing it, right?
Well, when I contemplate climbing to the top of Everest, I feel anxiety.
Therefore, I'm not going to go to Everest, right?
So there's no more anxiety. Right, right, exactly.
You just don't do that. But this is perpetual anxiety for you.
What do you mean by perpetual?
Well, what I mean is that if I said, Greg, let's go to the top of Everest, two years later, would you still feel anxiety about it if you just didn't want to go?
No, of course not.
And if you did, what would that say about your desire?
Hello?
Yeah, I'm still here.
or I'm thinking about it.
Well, you know the answer, right?
And, I mean, the impression that I get from this conversation is that we're playing a kind of game where you feel like I'm trying to fence you in and you're trying to sort of slither or turn into a fog or whatever, right?
And I'm not. I'm not trying to fence you in at all, right?
No, no, no, no. I don't think that.
But you feel a lot of resistance towards this part of the conversation.
I mean, you always have, right? Yes.
And there's nothing that we need to solve as far as that goes, right?
Other than that if you feel anxiety about something perpetually, it's because you both want and fear it, right?
right?
But if two years after not going to Everest you still felt anxiety about going to Everest it's because part of you really wanted to go to Everest right?
I guess I'll just sort of stay away from those threads from now on.
Thank you.
Well, now you're trying another defense, right?
Which is you jumping out of the conversation and framing it and saying that the solution to my anxiety is to stop thinking about Everest.
but it's not the solution to your anxiety because you don't have control over that.
Right.
You and I both know, and everybody knows, that avoiding the stimuli doesn't solve the problem, right?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Because the stimuli is internal.
The stimuli is not the threat.
It's your own desires, right?
Well, then why separate from your parents?
Well, because the thread isn't phoning you and yelling at you, right?
The thread's not intrusive, right?
Right, so I can just stay away from the thread.
Okay, well look, I mean, if you don't want to talk about it, I'm certainly not going to pursue you on it, and I'm just sort of pointing out that Given that you have an enormous amount of emotional defenses and barriers around this area that cause you to act with a lack of integrity and to not even try to have integrity because you're not even straining to have integrity here, right? And that's totally fine, but what it means is that you might want to think twice before accusing other people of lacking integrity and having these really high standards.
And I agree with you on that.
Right. And it's just a humility, right?
Where we have particular difficulties is where we should have empathy with other people for their difficulties, right?
Sure. I mean, where this woman has trouble getting through the day telling people everyone's died around them without an appeal to some sort of abstract superstition, saying that that is a fundamental break with integrity while...
You kind of slither around this particular topic.
It's just a matter of having humility, right?
Saying, yeah, hey, you know what?
Honesty and integrity can be really hard sometimes.
Well, I just don't have an answer for this one.
What do you mean? I don't know how to solve this problem.
But you're not trying to solve this problem.
You're actively trying to obscure and not solve the problem, right?
This is another use of the word, you know, with all due respect and affection, this is another use of the word trying that doesn't quite, and I don't quite understand, right?
Like if you run east and you're trying to go west, it's a little confusing, right?
I didn't say trying. Well, you said, I don't know how to solve this problem, right?
Yes. As if it's a baffling mystery, right?
But if you're actively obscuring the problem and not being honest in your responses, then saying, I don't know how to solve the problem is kind of specious, right?
It's like saying, I don't know how to get to Kansas.
Well, here's a map. Well, I won't look at the map, but I still have no idea how to get to Kansas.
It's a mystery. Well, if you're not going to look at the map, then you're not going to know how to get to Kansas, right?
Right, so what's the map?
Well, the map is just being honest about what's occurring for you, right?
And not coming up with all of this stuff, right?
Like about, oh, I don't really want to go, friend, and, well, I guess I'll just not go look at those threads, and just that kind of stuff, right?
And again, you don't have to do any of it, of course, right?
Totally up to you. But...
You injected yourself in a somewhat tense manner into this particular thread, right?
Which means that you have something that you want to talk about with it, and then if you don't want to talk about it, that's fine, right?
But then you just need to know that about yourself, right?
Because you've said also before, look, I just shouldn't get involved in relationship threads, right?
And what happens? How many times do we hear this cry for help before you're willing to listen to it, right?
Yeah, well, I, you know...
I mean, I've acknowledged it, so, I mean...
You know, that should have gotten rid of the anxiety, right?
Well, has it? There's no point asking me, right?
I mean, with all due respect, again, and affection, you know whether the anxiety is gone, and of course I know too, right?
It never does.
Well, of course it doesn't, because you're not being honest.
Well, I guess I don't understand... I guess I don't understand...
I mean, I've been honest about it before, and I'm...
No. No.
No, this has always been a problem, at least in the conversations that I've had with you.
You always dance around this and you spit out a lot of smoke and squid ink and, you know, I'll just eliminate myself from the stimuli and blah, blah, blah.
I've had exactly the same experience.
you've really put a huge amount of effort into avoiding the actual point of it.
So I definitely concur with that.
All right.
Well, um...
And you don't have to be honest about any of this, right?
There's nothing you have to do.
But you just recognize that the anxiety and the intrusiveness of your not so much with the honesty is going to keep disrupting things, right?
For you and for others. Well, like you have this thing where there's an alternative called, I don't think about it, and it has no effect.
And I'm telling you, that's not an alternative.
I mean, it's not a real alternative, right?
If I avoid posting in threads about relationships, all of this will go away, right?
Well, then what's the answer?
Well, the answer, of course, is that you really do want to be loved in that way.
And I don't think that there's anything with all empathy, right?
I don't think there's anything that's scary for you.
Well, in acknowledging that, why doesn't the anxiety go away?
Well, you haven't acknowledged it.
Well, I'm acknowledging it right now.
Okay, so again, sorry to be totally annoying as usual, but what is it that you are acknowledging in your words, right?
And you don't have to make it a one-sentence thing, because this is a big thing, so just tell me what it is that you mean.
Based on your desires, right?
Like, what it is that you want. Well, that...
I'm interested in a romantic relationship.
Well, I think it's more than an interest.
Like I'm interested in Middle East history, but I don't get particularly stressed about it.
All right.
All right.
I mean, I'm acknowledging that that's, okay, that's something that I want.
Really want. Alright, yeah, really want.
Well, I mean, is that true, or is that not true?
I mean, it's the only thing that explains the behavior, right?
Like, I mean, you want to lose weight, and you and I have talked about that, and you haven't gotten kind of weird about it, right?
Yeah.
So you've got to want it more than that, right?
Well.
I guess that's true.
Thank you.
But then, in acknowledging that, then why doesn't the anxiety go away?
Well, first of all, you've just acknowledged it in a semi-committed manner for the first time since the two years that I've known you, right?
So, your anxiety is going to increase now, not decrease, right?
Right? The prisoner is not digging more frantically when he's closer to the light, right?
And that's what's happening.
Sure. So, yeah, what's your physical experience of this?
And, again, this is with all real, you know, big hug and all that, right?
But, I mean, I know this is really tough, but what's your physical experience of this?
Are we going to hear, like, retching sounds in a moment?
And that would not be unprecedented, right?
But what is your physical experience of this?
I'm pretty close to there right now.
Okay, so we might have a bit of the audio to edit out if you do the technical yawn all over the microphone.
So I'm going to not get that.
that I really can't yes I'm a little a little queasy at the moment And what is that?
Is that like your stomach?
Is that your hands shaking?
You feel sweaty? Like what is a dry mouth?
What is the experience?
Sweaty palms, dry mouth, upset stomach.
Occasional sharp pains in the chest.
Can you move your left arm?
That's always important.
Have any of your extremities gone numb?
Do we need to hang up at 9-11?
Okay, well, I appreciate that.
Look, and I know, again, this is totally horrible, right, and all that, but, you know, why not?
You've had it easy for a while.
So... What is the thought or the feeling, I guess, that occurs for you if you think, and if you can really visualize this, like whatever you think of as an attractive woman or a pretty woman, beautiful woman, when you look into her eyes and say the word, I love you, if you can picture doing that, what emotions does that bring up in you?
Um... I guess...
I don't even know if it's possible, but sad and angry at the same time.
In a good way? No, I'm kidding.
Okay. And I appreciate that.
And when you think of a woman...
Leaning over you and kissing you on the lips and saying, Greg, I love you.
How does that make you feel?
Extremely anxious. Okay, and what is the thought that precedes that anxiety?
Um... What are you doing?
Get away from me? Yes, but why?
First of all, I mean, we can just start with the basics.
If a woman says, Greg, I love you, do you think that she's right or she's wrong?
Well, I don't know. Do you think she could be right or wrong?
Well, I would definitely question it.
Okay, so if a woman leaned over and said, Greg, I love you, would you question it or would you reject it?
Because the two seem to me to be kind of synonymous.
Like if I question a man's honesty, I'm kind of rejecting his honesty, right?
Well, sure. So you would be, if I understand this rightly, you would to some degree be rejecting her passion of love.
Well, it's rejecting the implicit expectation that you would just trust what they say.
Well, but you're capable of trusting what people say, right?
Sure. And I think, again, I'm trying to put myself in your shoes, and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth.
Just tell me what fits and what doesn't, right?
But the impression that I get, Greg, if the woman leans over and says, Greg, I love you, it's like the thoughts that rush through my head if I put myself in your shoes are something like this.
You're delusional. You're only saying this to hurt me in some way.
You're setting me up for something disastrous.
You're manipulating me. You can't conceivably be right.
You don't even know me.
You're really scary. You're really dangerous.
What the hell are you trying to do to me?
Does this make any sense? That's exactly right.
What do you want from me? Right.
How is this? It's like somebody putting a date rape drug in your drink or something.
You're going to wake up bow-legged, right?
Sort of like that, yeah.
Right. So the protestations of affection, right?
Because you said if you said to a woman, I love you, that she would feel sad and angry, right?
That's what I would feel.
And what that must mean is that you obviously don't feel that you love the woman, that you're saying, I love you too, right?
Well, I don't even know who I'm saying this to.
Well, whoever, I mean, just some attractive woman in your mind or whatever, right?
Right. Well...
I mean, I can't even...
Well...
I mean, I wouldn't say that to just some generic face.
Well, no, but that's why I put the word attractive, right?
Somebody that you did actually find attractive, right?
But that doesn't matter in particular.
It doesn't matter what the template is.
The fantasy object isn't particularly relevant.
The point is that it's general and not specific.
Well, but if it was general, then you would not feel much of anything, right?
But the fact that you feel sad and angry I think is important.
Okay. Because that must mean that you have an experience of having the words, I love you, extracted from you by a manipulative woman, right?
Hmm. Let's run through our list here.
M. Oh, wait.
An M? No. Hang on. Let's keep going.
M. Sorry.
Well, so what's your history with the I Love Yous?
Yeah, it was very much a ritualistic behavior in our household.
Well, I don't think that that's a particularly accurate, or what I mean by that, I think that's a parental description of it.
Alright? Like a ritual behavior could be, I don't know, like carrying your wife across the threshold after you're married, and that's not bad or damaging, right?
It's fun.
Well, I mean, it's like greeting my father when he came home from work.
I mean, everyone in the house got tense knowing that the time was coming, right?
But then when he came in, of course, it was all smiles and hugs.
Right, and why was that?
Why was that the case?
Why did you do that? Well...
I don't know. Sure you do.
What happened if you didn't do it?
Well, it would definitely be challenged.
Challenged? What do you mean challenged?
Like a Scrabble challenge? No, like...
Well, I guess when I got older, they didn't expect it so much.
Well, but we're talking about when these things or ideas were formed, right?
Sure. So what happened?
If you didn't respond to your mom with I love you and you didn't respond to your dad coming home with...
Oh, they'd get angry.
And then what would happen? And then what would happen?
Yeah. So they get angry, right?
Maybe they get angry and go to the park, but that's not what happens, right?
They get angry and play cards, but that's not what happens when they get angry, right?
Well, for something like that, it wouldn't have led to physical abuse or anything like that.
But it would definitely be sort of the threat would be implied, of course.
Like you were disrespecting them for not returning the reciprocating the phrase.
Right. You would not be paying them their just desserts, right?
You just owe them. Right.
And I guarantee you that you would have been physically abused for that, but it probably would have been under some other pretext, right?
Later. It would have accumulated in some manner, right?
Oh, my mom was good for that.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, it could be the next morning, you drop a plate, and then the result...
We all know this stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah. And then you get your ass kicked.
And that's even more anxiety-provoking, right?
The accumulation of little insults that your parent receives that result in the big, oblique punishment is the worst thing of all, because you don't know when it's coming, and it just makes you paranoid, right?
Whereas if you just get it over with, right?
Right, right, right, right.
Right, so not responding with a fusion when your dad came home or with the I love you when your mom wanted it puts you in a state of acute stress and anxiety, right?
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's true. It's the difference between there being a jackal in the room with the light on and a jackal in the room with the light off, right?
That's an interesting way to put it.
Well, you don't know where it's coming from, then you're just totally paranoid, right?
Right. Right.
Right. And that's kind of how they were.
Sure. Sure.
I never knew when something was going to end up being used as a justification or like a laundry list of them over time.
My mom was really good for that.
Like stew for a week over something and then just explode all over the house.
Oh yeah, and of course, that whole week, you're like, oh fuck, it's coming.
I don't know where it's coming from, but there's a jackal in the house and the light's off and I don't want to go to the cupboard.
No, and I remember when I was a kid, my mom would be, like she'd come into the room and you could see that she was mad and she wanted to dump and she'd scan the room.
She'd look for stuff, right? She'd look for things that would make her mad, that she could use as an excuse, right?
You'd leave a cup out or, you know, whatever, right?
Like anything, right? Right.
And she'd always find something, because there's always something, right?
Sure, sure. Even if there's not, there's always something.
Oh, yeah, there's always something.
Or she just, I mean, she couldn't find it, and she just made something up, right?
I mean, it's not like Stalin doesn't say, oh, I couldn't find any evidence that you're a spy, so we'll let you go.
Sorry. Right.
Beat the confession out of you then, right?
Right. Or you're just such a good spy that we couldn't find anything, therefore...
You're even more dangerous, right?
Right. Right.
No, no. That was definitely my experience of my mother, for sure.
Right, right. Now, have you seen a more positive female role model when you were younger or into your 20s among your sisters-in-law or other wives that you had or girlfriends or whatever?
Well, I've never had a girlfriend, but...
No, I mentioned girlfriends of other people that you knew or whatever.
Actually, no.
My mother's sisters were as batshit as she was, and my dad's brothers' wives were all insane in their own and my dad's brothers' wives were all insane in their own In fact, interestingly enough, the brother my dad is closest to, his wife is even more fucked up than my mom is.
And my grandmother on his side was insane.
He was institutionalized when he was 12 and she was plate-throwing crazy.
Hey, that sounds familiar.
Yeah, yeah.
No, absolutely.
So this is what, and we're going to be totally sexist and forget all of this political, but this is what women are to you, right?
That's true.
Like in your core, right?
And then my brothers go out and they find wives that are just exactly like my mother.
Of course they do. Why would they do anything different?
How could they conceivably do anything different?
I mean, that's horrifying. Sure.
Right. Right, right.
So, for you, women are crazy, destructive, exploitive, violent, degrading, scary, horrible, right?
You asked earlier, you know, like, this is some months, I guess about six weeks ago or whatever, you said core beliefs, right?
I'd be happy to subject myself as a guinea pig to the examination of core beliefs, right?
Sure.
So, core beliefs around women, right?
what classes do women bring to men's lives in the world in your inner world not a whole lot well if there's a few tell me Stuff that you feel would be true.
Not just stuff like, well, I guess they could, you know, set your leg if you broke it.
I mean, stuff that you feel would be true.
Because you say not a whole lot, but we need to be more specific.
And yeah, this, I guess, is going to sound pretty sexist, but...
Laundry and dishes?
Okay, look, let's be honest, right?
I mean, I can't get anywhere unless we're completely frank, right?
So they do stuff around the house, right?
Yeah. Got it.
Got it. Okay, so that is the plus, and as we can see, it's not a huge plus, right?
Right. And what are the minuses?
And this would be something like just say it all.
What are the minuses?
That was a costume for this laundry and dishes.
Everything. Got it.
Okay, so let's have the, so to speak, laundry list.
See how I worked that in there?
Anyway, go on. No, that's what I mean.
Everything. It costs you everything.
It costs you yourself.
Go on.
Go on.
Well, I mean...
You're pretty much...
I mean, and you've said this too.
You give up your autonomy.
You give up your...
You give up yourself to do that.
Right. Right. But that's pretty vague, right?
To me, right? I don't know.
Give up yourself. Well, how do you do that Thursdays at 4 o'clock, right?
But what are the exact things?
Well... You have to, uh...
You have to put your own sort of needs aside in order to cater to somebody else, right? Oh, Greg, you're being so nice.
Ha! You're being so nice.
That's not what you feel.
I'm sorry to get blunt here, right?
Put your own needs aside.
That's not what you saw your dad do with your mom.
Come on. I know the history here.
Stop being so correct. Well...
In the case of my mother...
She was basically...
I mean...
To a pretty significant degree, she was just a sort of...
She was kind of a ward.
A ward? Like a sick responsibility?
She didn't...
She didn't... She didn't drive.
She didn't work. She didn't have any...
She didn't have any personal interests.
She just... She was just sort of dependent on my dad for everything.
Yeah. You're like the worst woman hater I've ever listened to.
You've got to crank it up because this is nothing close to the truth of what you actually feel.
The problem is not that your mom was dependent and the problem wasn't that your dad had to sacrifice things.
That's not the antipathy that you have to the degree that you have towards women.
And I've got to just call you on this because you've got to stop this niceness, right?
You've got to get into the guts, the dark side of how you feel about this.
The problem, I mean, if your mom was a great woman and had gotten sick, I didn't say she was a great woman.
No, but what you are saying is that the issue is that she was dependent on your dad and she didn't have a driver's license and this and that and the other, right?
No, what I'm saying is that she wasn't anything worth respecting.
That's what I'm saying. That's not the root of the antipathy that you have towards women, that she wasn't worth respecting.
Because your mother was an active...
You're talking about neutral things.
Well, this was missing and that was missing, but that's not the problem that you have with your mom.
It's not what was missing that is causing the problem, right?
Oh, you mean how freaking brutal she was?
It's what she fucking did, not what she didn't do.
That was the problem, right?
Yeah, she kind of...
Not kind of, but...
liked to beat on us.
Yeah, she was sadistic, right?
Oh, sure. Yeah, she was manipulative, right?
Oh, yeah. Violent, cold, cruel, destructive.
Closed-minded, ignorant. Closed-minded, arrogant, right?
Know-it-all. We know all this.
Oh, yeah. So keep going.
What else? It's just a vile person.
But give it to me.
Come on. Dig it up, brother.
I mean, you fucking hate her, right?
And you're like the politest hating guy I've ever heard.
Well, she was deficient in this and that, you see.
And on the other hand, right?
Come on, you hate her, right?
You're right. You're right. So, give me...
You're absolutely right.
What, that I hate her?
What do you hate about your mom?
What don't I hate about my mom?
Stop hedging.
Give me the emotional content, the words of what you hate about your mom.
What did you hate about what she did to you?
Of course I hated being beaten, and of course I hated being manipulated, and I hated being bullied. and I hated being bullied.
Right.
Of course I hated those things.
Of course.
Right, but you don't hate them enough.
What do you mean? Well, first of all, this is some of the stuff that you were talking about now.
It obviously was clouding the discussion that we started an hour and 40 minutes ago with this, right, that you saw this woman as a bully, right?
Oh. Right, so she's showing up.
And she's conditioning your responses to stimuli which aren't directly hers, right?
They're right. You're absolutely right.
Which means that there's not enough hatred here.
Because you're not pushing it back.
She's still seeping in, right?
It's like a badly patched levy, right?
Water's still coming through, right?
Sure. And if you want love...
but your mother owns the word love, then you don't own the word hate yet.
Well, how do you do that?
Well, Well, you first of all got to start being so polite about what you hate.
The grim and hellacious apocalyptic agony that you suffered as a child based on the sadistic and brutal maltreatment of your mother and the sadistic and brutal maltreatment by your father and his complicity.
The two of them were a sadistic Abbott and Costello from hell, right?
That's a pretty good way to put it.
Because I know there's joviality and all that sort of stuff, right?
But behind closed doors, they were just a pair of torturers, right?
Yeah. Because women hook you in and it can only be their sexual desirability that hook men in because God knows they bring nothing other than a steaming pile of acidic shit to the table, right? As far as I could tell.
Well, this is... I mean, I'm just trying to sort of figure out what you feel, right?
Why on earth would you ever...
Why did your brothers get married, Greg?
Why did they get married? I don't know.
Sure you do. Well, in the case of my brother Tom, he was just sort of...
He was following the rules.
Okay, between Tom and his wife, who wanted to get married more, or first?
I think they both did.
And does she work?
Yeah. Well, not now.
Now that they have kids, right?
Yeah.
Do you think between your brothers and his, your brothers and their wives, do you feel, in your heart of hearts, do you feel that one side or one gender is getting the better deal out of marriage?
Or, sorry to interrupt, but to put it more directly, do you think that your mother got more out of her marriage to your father?
Do you think that your father got more out of his marriage to your mom, or was it about the same?
Well, if you'd have asked me that question like a year ago, I probably would have said my mom got more out of it.
But, I mean, obviously, my dad was getting something out of it.
No, but I'm not talking about your philosophical analysis.
I'm talking about your gut feeling.
My gut feeling?
Yeah. Is that...
My gut feeling is that I don't know what either of them was getting out of that.
They were both just so tense and rigid and just so vindictive toward each other and aggressive toward us.
And...
Okay, let me interrupt you for just a second.
Sorry to do this, but from the perspective of when you were younger, up to your 30s or whatever, from that perspective...
Clearly your dad bought financial resources to the table, right?
Yes. Right.
And your mom brought children into the equation, right?
Yes. Which she then did sweet bagger all to really raise, right?
Because you say she didn't do much, right?
Just kept us bathed in clothes, basically.
Right, but there was, again, from your younger perspective, there was an enormous amount of labor that your dad had to do to have a wife, right?
Because she was so, quote, Oh, yeah.
Got to work. Got to drive her around.
He's got to keep certain aspects of the household running.
He's got to put up with her complaining.
Like, it seems to me, and again, just let me know what works and what doesn't, but it seems to me that you would have, from your kid, from your childhood perspective, you would have seen your dad working a whole lot harder than your mom.
Yes, that is true.
Right. Right. I used to idolize my dad.
Sure, sure, sure.
So, given that your mom, like, without your mom, your dad would have been okay, right?
That's the way I would have put it at one time, sure.
But without your dad, what would your mom have been?
Totally helpless. Right, right.
Right. She would have been nothing, right?
Right. I mean, your dad would have had a career, he'd have had friends, he'd have done stuff, he'd have traveled maybe, played sports, whatever, right?
He would have done his thing, right? Right.
But your mom wouldn't have gotten anything done, right?
No. No, she wouldn't have.
Right. So, your mom is essentially, in your mind's eye, a kind of evil parasite, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So, what could she conceivably have brought to the table to get your dad to marry her?
Hmm.
Yeah, of course. So, where does sexual desire lead?
Down that road. Off a cliff, right?
Mm-hmm. With children falling down around you like rain, right?
Yep. And it leads to a repetition of the same parasitical behavior, right?
Yep. And I have empirical proof of that with my brothers.
Of course. Of course.
Right? Mm-hmm.
So for you, sexuality equals self-destruction, right?
Desire is a kind of death, right?
Yep. It's a weakness that allows...
It's the manservant that lets the vampire in, right?
Right. Right.
It's the one thing that has to be... ...controlled.
Well, more than controlled, right?
I mean, rejected. And I understand this perspective, right?
Again, I'm not coming here anthropologically.
I used to, geez, even in my journal when I was in therapy, my therapist assigned me to read a book called Man's Fear of Women, which is not a bad book.
But I remember writing in my journal something like, well, if women were attractive, why would men need such a high degree of sexual desire?
Right. Like if women were basically beneficial to men's life, then why is it we have these constantly high levels of sexual desire?
The degree to which we have higher levels of sexual desire is the degree to which women are not valuable but rather detrimental.
I mean, that makes sense, right?
Right. Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a good point. I had a slightly different approach, but it's basically the same concept.
What was your approach? I just conditioned myself not to desire.
Right, and also not to be desirable, right?
Yeah. Right, so you had some weight gain and you also have an image of yourself as highly unattractive, right?
The weight gain was sort of coincidental.
Well, yes, but it's not that I wouldn't say that it's that unrelated.
Right, but it wasn't like I actively was Making myself fat, right?
No, no, no. I agree. I agree.
I agree. It's just that, I mean, if...
Graduated high school and I was working in factories for two years, so it wasn't exactly like I was lounging.
But over that span of time, I just started automatically gaining weight.
I gained like, in a span of two years, I gained 150 pounds.
Right. But of course, there's a reason why you didn't check that process, right?
Sure. Right?
I mean, if you gain a few pounds, you notice your pants are tight and you say, oh shit, I'm about to scale back on whatever I need, exercise, whatever, right?
There's a reason why that was not a barrier for you, right?
And because... Right, well, I didn't care.
Yeah, what do you care, right?
It's like, why would I keep my resume up when I have your time?
Exactly. That's exactly right.
Right. Right.
But this is what I mean when I say that you don't have enough hate to love yet, right?
Because your mother still owns desire.
Your mother still owns love.
Your mother still owns sexuality.
Your sexuality, right?
Your romantic desires.
Your desire for love or your wish for a relationship of that kind, right?
Your mother still owns the definition of women.
And therefore, she is paralyzing your desire for a woman.
Well, I don't know if that process is reversible now.
you Well, you know that it is reversible.
Because if it was not reversible, you would not feel anxiety.
Like two days before you die of lung cancer, you don't feel anxiety about whether you should quit smoking, right?
Well, if you know you're going to die.
No, of course not.
So if it was irreversible, you would not feel anxiety.
People do get married after 40.
Thank you.
Lots of them. Sure, I realize that.
And where we don't have desire, we don't feel anxiety.
Like, when I was younger and I wanted to be an actor and I went to the National Theatre School and I did my acting thing, and I was okay.
I wasn't a bad actor. I had my moments.
But I don't, like, and even now when I look through the theatre section of the newspaper, I look for whether people I knew in theatre school are doing plays.
And not out of any particular jealousy.
But just out of, hey, it'd be cool if they were, right?
Good for them, right? But I don't feel any particular tension about it because I don't want to be an actor.
And thank heavens I didn't become an actor because then I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing here, right?
Sure. Sure, that makes sense.
Right, so where we have closure, where we genuinely don't have a desire to do something anymore, there's no tension, right?
I don't sit there and say, man, I missed my calling.
I blew it. I should have kind of...
There would be no tension, right?
Right. So you know that it's not irreversible.
Otherwise you would not feel desire.
We're not cruel to ourselves that way, right?
Well, I don't understand what you mean.
Well, what I mean is that you would not have a desire for a girlfriend if it were impossible for you to have a girlfriend, right?
We don't torture ourselves that way.
So there's a part of you that knows that you could And then it runs into the part of you, the no man's land, or rather the no woman's land that your mother owns, right?
Where your desire rushes headlong into the self-destructiveness that you saw coming out of your dad's desire for your mom, and you're like, well, I'm not going there.
That's like, well, in the same way that an ex-addict has to fight his addiction to heroin, you don't want him to go, why would I take heroin, right?
Yeah, it might feel good, but look where it leads.
Right, that's what I'm saying.
But it's not heroin.
We're not talking about heroin.
Right.
But because love is a beautiful thing.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And it's not destructive, right?
Potentially. No, love is not destructive.
That's like saying health is unhealthy.
No, I mean, it's potentially a beautiful thing.
No, love is a beautiful thing.
Love is a beautiful thing.
Relationships, quote, can be unhealthy, blah, blah, blah.
Or fusion or codependency or dysfunctionality of everything.
I mean, but love itself.
Is a beautiful thing.
Love of wisdom, love of truth, love of virtue, love of a virtuous person.
Sure, sure. Right, that's not a maybe, maybe, right?
Right. Love, like a virtuous person in your life, is the total opposite of what your mom was, right?
Your mother was corrupted, right?
Oh, man. Like, stone evil.
Corrupt. She was...
vicious.
Right. Right.
Right, but you haven't, and, you know, again, I really, really appreciate your honesty.
This is great stuff. But you haven't talked about the worst thing that your mother did to you, right?
Which has nothing to do with the past, right?
Really?
Okay.
Well, I mean...
Giving me an obviously bad example of womanhood, for sure.
Yeah, but that would...
That would not do what she did to you, right?
That would be something you might be conscious of and whatever.
What do you mean then?
Well, she put your heart in a box and swallowed the key, right?
Right? She stole your future.
So far, she's won, right?
She stole your future of love and romance and sexuality and all that stuff, right?
She owns that. Yeah, I guess that's true.
Right. She was corrupt, and that was horrible and awful.
But the worst thing that she did was to corrupt you, right?
Into believing that she was the gateway to femininity, that she was the definition of sexuality and where it leads, right?
That possession occurred, right?
And the swallowing the key to your heart is not an invalid metaphor because you literally have to get an axe and cut her open to get it back, right?
It's the level of anger and hatred that you have to get rid of this, expel this demon, this devil, right?
I see. Yes, right.
But you've got to be angry enough at this invasion and this hijacking and this overwhelming of an innocent, independent young boy.
That you've got to fight and push against this horrible invasion and occupation, right?
And say, fuck you.
I want my future back.
I want to have that chance.
I want to have that opportunity.
I'm not going to let you define love and womanhood.
Well, and I guess I don't know how you do that.
Well, I can't say for sure.
I can tell you what worked for me was just a series of murderous visualization exercises.
Are you serious? Everybody has their weapon of choice.
Yeah, everybody has their weapon of choice in this particular area.
Mine was a baseball bat. This may not work for everyone.
I was talking about what worked for me.
Wow.
But that is the level of aggression that we need to take our own...
Because you were aggressed against, right?
This is the level of psychological aggression that we need to push back this invasion.
At least that's what I think.
It may be different for you. I wouldn't have thought of that.
Yeah. Yeah, I know.
And it was not something that I was particularly comfortable with.
But when I was...
I wasn't comfortable with it at all because you know like you the violence, right?
Unless it's safely digitized with silly rocket launchers.
But for me what worked was when I was going through my insomnia, I was in, I remember this very, very vividly, I was in Morocco.
And I was with my friend John, who you met at Christmas, and we were touring around Morocco.
This was before I went to China.
I spent like a whole month with no Western or Christianity-based cultures whatsoever.
And I was in the backseat of a car.
We had a driver who was taking us around to show us the different sights, and I was in the backseat of the car.
And I was not sleeping on this trip.
I mean, the trip is... I don't know what the hell I was dreaming and what was real.
It was all so vivid and wild.
I've got photos which help differentiate it, but it was still pretty...
But I remember being in the backseat of the car and dozing and wave after wave after wave after wave of just unbelievably violent images occurred to me where I was literally smashing my mother's head open like a watermelon with a baseball bat and I hated it.
I hated it. It was so violent.
And it kept recurring and it kept recurring until I just said, fuck it, you know, I'm just tired of fighting all this stuff and I just embraced it.
It's like, okay, give me two baseball bats.
Have her come back to life. I'm going to knock her head off again.
And it worked. Wow.
I'll definitely give that some thought.
And the degree of anger that I felt, the rage that I felt, Was not actually mine.
Fundamentally, it was my mother's.
Right? Like, I mean, if we have to shoot someone in self-defense, the violence belongs to the person who attacks us, fundamentally, right?
That's true. So, this was not me being crazy and evil and violent.
this was like the degree of my anger was the degree of my violation that makes sense and I really got my history when I got how enraged I was
I really got how evil it was when I understood how angry I was.
And I did not Once I began to relax and accept that my rage was healthy, right?
Because we don't want to be like, you know, the people whose immune systems don't work, right?
Don't fight off infection.
The degree of your immune response is the degree of the infection, right?
We want that to be equal, right?
Right. So the degree of my anger was the degree to which I was attacked.
And so I couldn't understand, I couldn't get emotionally the degree to which I had been attacked until I felt the degree to which I was angry.
And I did not equate myself because I knew it was self-defensive.
I also knew it was psychological, so there was nothing I acted out.
But that's how I understood what had been done to me.
I could never fight back when I was a kid.
It breaks the cycle. To allow yourself to get angry and use whatever psychological tools help with that.
I didn't smash pillows.
It doesn't mean anything to me. But once we get that, then that not only helps us understand the degree to which we were brutalized, but it also breaks the cycle of not being allowed to fight back.
Well, I definitely remember feeling angry when I was a kid.
And you are angry, right?
I mean, that's what came across in that, what we started talking about, right?
Yeah, I was. I was very angry.
You were very angry, for sure.
For sure. And you have every right to be very angry by God.
You were brutalized.
There was a... It's attempted murder.
Soul murder, right? As my therapist said about my mother, she has...
She had an unlived life as a murderer.
That's an interesting way to put it.
Yes, I'm not sure of funny.
Yeah, I guess that's a good point.
Because there is a spiritual kind of strangulation in what we experience.
for.
Thank you.
a close to expiring waterboarding, right?
I mean, the worst torturers don't finish you off, right?
That's true.
Stop and let you heal and then come back.
That's sort of what it was like.
Thank you.
And when you get the hate, then you're worth defending, you break the cycle, you understand the depths of your despair and what happened.
And then you can begin the process of reclaiming what is meant by love, right?
What is meant by womanhood.
And then you may not have a girlfriend.
You may not want to, I mean, but it'll be a choice, right?
It won't be a reaction to a possession.
And then if you don't want a girlfriend or you don't, then there's peace with it, right?
And the anxiety will go down.
But for you, the anxiety is only going to increase probably for about 10 years, and then it will start to diminish as you get into your 50s.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Well, I mean, when you're 80, you won't sit there and say, I feel anxious about not having a girlfriend if you've never had a girlfriend, right?
Because then it truly will be too late, right?
Right. Right, but for you, you have at least a decade of ever-increasing anxiety, and what you feel now is nothing compared to what you're going to feel if you don't deal with this.
Because you're still a relatively young man, right?
You're in early middle age, early 40s, right?
Right, so it's only going to get worse, right?
Well, I mean, with the unresolved stuff, sure, but...
Yeah, if you don't resolve it, right?
Because at the moment, what you're doing is unjust, right?
I mean, that you're taking your mom and layering her over sexuality, romance, women, love, marriage, blah, blah, blah.
That's unjust, right? It's a kind of bigotry, right?
I'm not sure what you mean by unjust.
Well, it's unjust in the way that, you know, if you are beaten up by a black guy, you don't get to say all black guys beat you up, right?
No, that's true. So it's a kind of bigotry, right?
Because you're layering your mother's version and twisted, sick version of parasitical, vampiric, destructive, violent, sadistic, and evil femininity and saying, well, see, that's love.
That's romance. That's women.
Right, but here's the problem, is that every time I get sort of...
I mean, just acknowledging that intellectually is...
It doesn't get rid of the problem.
Well, no, of course not.
I mean, of course not. That's why I'm not talking about you getting it intellectually.
I'm talking about getting your hate on.
And that's sort of what I mean by maybe the process is not reversible at this point.
Because, I mean... Oh, yeah, of course it is.
I mean, look, you don't know that, right?
What do you know? Like, God, be humble, right?
Recognize that there's a whole bunch of shit that you don't know about this stuff, right?
Well, because why...
Just be guided, you know?
Just write down everything you hate about your mom.
Visualize stuff. Visualize the horrors that you experienced.
You know, just go to that dark, dark, dark place, right?
And reclaim it back to your...
Switch the light on. Why wouldn't it...
I mean, it should be sort of...
I mean, you can't will emotions, right?
Well, but you can court emotions, right?
You can keep a journal.
You can talk about your emotions with people.
You can write down things that you remember.
You can write down associations.
You can write down the smell of fear as you were being beaten, and you can describe that.
You have facility with fiction in particular, right?
So you can court emotions.
And once they understand that you're in hot pursuit, they'll come to meet you, right?
But right now, you're looking at them as an enemy.
Thank you.
So, of course, they're not going to come out, right?
I mean, if you scream at the squirrels, they don't come down from the trees.
You hold out some nuts and you're patient, right?
Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a very good point. But you say, I need you, right?
I need these feelings.
I need this. I need this.
Then you can start to have a beneficial relationship and you can get these feelings to come out, right?
right but I mean if you have this you get it but the first thing you have to say is that I'm worth it right Because that's the cynicism that you face, right?
What do you mean by that?
Well, the core belief that you may be working with is, I'm not lovable.
I cannot love.
I cannot be loved.
Well, um...
Or it could be more active, like love is death.
Love is disaster.
Love is destruction.
Love is whatever, right?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Right. And you yearn for the love and you fear the inevitable disaster that follows, right?
Right. So desire and fear are mixed in together, right?
It's like when Tennessee Williams, the way he got the idea for the play Streetcar Named Desire was he was living in New Orleans, I guess in the 40s, and there was a streetcar that used to rattle up and down the street.
And it had, you know, like the streetcars have their end destinations on the little text above the driver.
Right, right, right. And on the one way, it went towards Desire.
It was a stop named Desire.
Right. And when it came back, the stop was Cemetery.
I never even picked up on that.
Well, that's not in the play.
That's just in his...
I've read his biography.
He's a great playwright, Chris.
So, when he was thinking of this, it's like how he got the desire and death, desire and seminary, right?
This is how all too many of us have this constellated inside of our minds, right?
The desire equals death.
The desire equals self-destruction.
The desire gives other people who are malevolent power over us.
Well, yeah, and that's what I was saying earlier.
Sure. That which I want will destroy me.
Well, that's going to cause some anxiety, right?
Because you're saying that your desires are going to destroy you, which means that you're at war against yourself, right?
In the good old Catholic tradition, right?
Yeah, that makes sense.
So either your desire is unhealthy, or the belief that it's going to lead to self-destruction is incorrect and unhealthy.
And so far, you've been going with the former premise, and I'm saying maybe focus on the latter.
Right. The moment I want something, a woman will use that to drive me off a cliff and to lead me to a life of unrelieved misery, right?
And a hellish reproduction of exactly that which I escaped.
Right. Sorry, I can see why that might not be at the top of your to-do list, right?
It's certainly hard not to think that.
It is very hard not to think that, and you will continue to think that until you get angry.
And see, that's where I...
That's...
I mean, I'm angry in the sense that I kind of...
I mean, I realize...
What was done was wrong.
I'm angry in that sense, but I just don't feel like fist-through-walls type of anger.
Well, sure, I understand that, but that's because you define what was done to you as wrong.
But that's not the truth of the experience.
That is an intellectual judgment after the fact.
As a child, you did not experience what happened to you as morally wrong.
You mean...
just in terms of the...
The experience itself.
Yeah, I mean, what you experienced as a child was that what was done to you was not morally wrong, but horribly painful.
Right. So you have the intellectual and moral judgment down pat, but that doesn't help you, right?
Because that wasn't the original experience, right?
Right, right. The original experience was not, well, my mother is beating me and that's a problem because it's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
No, that's a good point.
And when you get the pain and the fear and the rage that occurred to you, being at the mercy of your parents' brutality, then you will get the anger and then you will get your future back.
To be a choice.
And not a reaction. Well...
But you have to say that you're worth it.
If you say, well, it's never going to happen, I don't care, it's not that bad.
If you minimize your desire, then you won't do it.
If you say, I don't want a gold medal, then you're never going to train, right?
Right. So you have to say, I want a gold medal.
I want to have a love.
I want to have the choice. I want to have that choice back.
I want to have that choice. I don't want it to be a reaction.
I don't want my mother to run the next 40 years of my life.
I want to be free from this history, and I want to be free to make a choice about my future, about whether I fall in love or not, about whether I pursue that or not.
But I want it to be my choice, not dictated by the brutality of a decades-old history.
You have to want that choice.
In order to do the work. But if you shrug and you take what I would consider the easy way out and say, well, you know, maybe later.
It doesn't matter. I got time. If you piss away the opportunities, then you will never end up with a choice.
But that's because you don't think that it could happen.
You don't think that you're worth it. You don't think it's achievable.
You don't think it's possible. But you know, it is possible, right?
You've seen it. Well, and I've thought all those things before, too.
Yeah, and you can take that choice every single moment of every single day.
But that's your mother's choice.
That's not your choice. That's what your mother wants.
Right? That's what that bitch wants, right?
She wants you to think that you're not worthy of love.
She wants you to not differentiate her.
She wants you to not get mad at her.
She wants you to judge all women as like her because that gets her off the hook.
Her curse, her evil then is not her, but her vagina.
Right?
The funniest thing about racists is then, I'm not saying you are, right?
But the funniest thing about racists or sexists is they actually are forgiving the people who they judge as bad.
Thank you.
By removing individual choice and putting physical characteristics as the determiner, right?
Oh, I see what you're saying.
As long as it's...
You see, as long as it's femininity, that was your mother's curse, then she's not to blame, right?
You understand? It doesn't benefit you.
It benefits her. This is her commandment.
Well, and it's interesting, too, that, I mean, my parents were not exactly...
They were not particularly affectionate.
I mean, not at all, in fact.
And sexuality was like non-existent between them in terms of what we saw as kids.
I mean, as far as we were concerned, they were living an entirely platonic life.
And you and I know what happened to your mother and you with regard to that, right?
Because you and I had the same experience of being mom's little favorite substitute boyfriend, right?
Oh, that was just gross.
Of course it was completely gross, hideous, ugly.
And that's even more reason to get angry, to be exploited in that pseudo-romantic manner by a needy, disgusting and inappropriate mother.
It was disgusting.
It was very disgusting.
It was. I completely agree.
That's all the more reason to be angry and to reclaim that back from the bitch, right?
Yeah. Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
You're right about that.
I am feeling a little bit upset.
I'm feeling a little bit upset.
Go on. About that.
I don't know, just the last couple seconds, it's just been like...
When I talked about the exploitation in a pseudo-romantic way from your mom.
Yeah. Sometimes not even pseudo, right?
Oh, yeah. I mean...
She was not very good at masking it.
Right. And that is a form of horrendous abuse, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, she was just kind of...
And your whole family threw you into this sick pit, right? .
You know what's really weird is, like, when I was eight...
They would sort of take turns, my mom and my dad, either needling me because I took an interest in a girl or needling me because I didn't take an interest in a girl.
Alright, so it was like a no-win situation.
Right, right, of course, right?
And they did that because they were preparing you to, without putting too fine a point on it, to stuff your mom's crazy mouth with you, right?
Yeah. I mean, they all like, they throw you, they throw you off the wagon because there's a bitch coyote after them, right?
Here, eat this! Yeah.
Yeah, I remember...
Actually...
When I was...
Oh, hell, I couldn't have been more than...
Maybe 10 or 11 or 12, maybe.
Actually... Getting so pissed off at that that I swore to myself that I wasn't ever going to have a girlfriend or date or anything, just to get back at them.
Right. But you realize, of course, that was their script, right?
Well, I do now, but I didn't then.
You get to be the single mom who takes care of mom.
Sorry, you get to be the single man who takes care of mom when she gets old, right?
And that's exactly what everyone was expecting, too.
Of course, yeah. I mean, look, in most Spanish cultures, there's one daughter who is not allowed to get married.
Well, that's creepy. Well, yeah, but I mean, this, you know, because someone's got to take care of the parents, right?
Right, right.
So there's one daughter who's just not allowed to get married.
Maybe she's stuck into a nunnery for her childbearing years.
Who knows? But she's not allowed to get married.
She's not allowed to court.
She's not allowed to date. Everybody else gets away, but she's got to stay back.
Too bad, so sad, right?
Yeah, I know a couple of my brothers are kind of pissed off that I left when I did.
Sure. Because my parents are right on that cusp, too.
They just turned 70.
Right. Right.
And you were supposed to be the one who was going to let everybody else leave and you get left behind, right?
Yeah, for a long time I just...
Sorry, because you're the moral one, because you're the sensitive one, because you're the one.
For a long time, I just sort of resigned myself to that.
Sure. Sure.
And that's the script. But you're playing out that script anyway, right?
You're not free of it. No, that's true.
Right. So they're still winning, right?
In this area, right?
They're still writing your future.
They're still driving the car.
You're in the backseat, right? Complaining.
Yeah, but I can't... I can't figure out how to get the locks open.
Well, this is not a get the locks open, man.
This is like risk-breaking your legs kicking open the door.
This is not something that you can think your way out of.
This is something you've got to fight and bite and tear and smash your way out of.
Right?
This is a ball exercise, not a brain exercise.
Thank you.
That's a very good point.
This is a fuck you, I'm worth it.
Right? This is like, you don't get to take the car without, a better metaphor is you don't get to take control of the car without kicking them out while it's moving, right?
And that's the level of aggression that you need.
You're right.
Fuck you, this is self-defense.
You're right.
Like, whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes. But you have to rouse from your own cynicism, right?
This is the challenge, right? You have to get off the despair that they gave you.
The impossibility of your attractiveness or your capacity for love and sexuality, romance, are you?
You have to start writing your own script, right?
If you want. It's up to you, right?
But it's always better to have a choice, even if you've got to fight and chew for it, right?
Well, is it always better to have a choice?
laughs It's always better to have a choice.
It's always better to have a choice.
Particularly when the choices that you don't make are made by evil people.
laughter Yeah, good point.
Yep. Yep.
Yep, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
So I'm glad we got a chance to talk.
I think this is useful stuff.
I mean, I think this is not...
I mean, you're certainly not alone in this.
I know it feels like you are, but you're certainly not.
I apologize for letting my defenses get the better of me, and that's red, too.
Well, I would say that you got what you wanted, right?
How so? Well, didn't you want to get cold on this?
I guess that's true.
Right, sometimes our true self sends a flare up over the horizon that we can't even see, right?
Well, and I kind of didn't want to drag you into another one of these discussions because I know we've been down this road before.
You absolutely did want to drag me into another one of these discussions.
Because we haven't been down this road before.
And you were ready, right?
Yeah, I guess that's true.
Because it's not like we haven't talked about this before, but either I was ready to keep going or you were ready to let me keep going, but you absolutely did want this, right?
Yeah, I did. I did, actually.
I'm always happy to help.
Slave to the listeners, that's me.
Well, I'll definitely be working on the anger thing.
Yeah, I think it can be really helpful.
And see if you can – I'll post a link to this on the board, but I'll dig up this Man's Fear of Women.
It's a pretty good book from that standpoint.
Because, again, this is not an unknown thing, right?
right?
I mean, this fear of menstruation, this fear of femininity, the vagina dentata, all of the kind of stuff that men are just afraid of women about is not, it's almost the default position of mankind, which says, you know, all that you need to know about the quality of mothering and fathering.
But this is not unusual, not unknown, not unprecedented.
This is, for many, many, many people, myself included, the default position.
Thank you.
Thank you.
default position?
For women, for relationships, for whatever, right?
What, fear?
Yeah, this fear of women, this belief that desire equals disaster...
I mean, that's religion.
That's Christianity. That's Islam, right?
That is the default position of mankind.
Yeah, you're right. You're right.
You're right. You're exactly right.
And that sort of explains a lot of early proto-religions, too.
Yeah. My God, if only it was early proto-religions.
I mean... Fear and motherhood were exactly the same thing.
Yeah. I mean, look at gangs in the black community, right?
I mean, what is that but terror of women, right?
Right. Right.
And a lot of those early religions were about the fearsome Mother Earth, right?
Right. Yeah, of course.
A lot of the goddesses of war are female in the Eastern religions.
Some of the most terrifying of the gods are female, the evil gods and so on.
Menstruation makes a woman unclean.
They're just terrified.
Of women, right? We control that which we fear, and the degree of control that has been exhibited upon women throughout history, and even in the modern world, is entirely right.
That's an excellent point.
That's a very good point.
Yeah, men are terrified. Yeah, seriously, the number of, I mean, when I was talking to my therapist, she said, you know, every husband who comes in to see me is terrified of his wife.
And it's true. It's absolutely true.
I mean, I've talked about this before, but never this sort of directly.
But yeah, men are...
Well, and that's why...
I mean, I don't want to live like that.
I mean, I don't want to be terrified of the people around me.
No, of course not. Of course not.
Your parents do want you to do that, right?
Because then you're easier to control to manage, right?
But you don't want that.
That's their script. No.
Right. That's what I'm saying.
And so... If that's the default position of humankind...
But so is statism, right?
So is religion. I mean, so what, right?
We just fix it. Right?
Oh, I see what you're saying.
I thought you were arguing that that was...
sort of...
a given...
Well, I think it is a given in the same way that we look at the world and think it's flat.
It doesn't mean that it's true. It's just what is immediately obvious based on our experience, right?
But it's not true, right?
I mean, I know it's not true because it's not consistent for women as a whole, right?
Now, of course, the good ones are rare, but the good men are rare too, right?
And we found those, so... Right, right, that's a good point.
And it couldn't possibly be that that's what you were suggesting, since that's not how things are between you and Christina.
I mean, you're not terrified of Christina, right?
Oh god, no. No, and I've tried to make her terrified of me, but so far, because I'm ultimately not frightening, right?
But no, no, I mean, but we see this with friends.
I mean, I don't know a single guy who's either, like, they're either not in relationships or they're frightened of their girlfriends or wives.
And that just says everything that we need to know about their moms, right?
But I mean, I have a selective self-filter, but that just seems to be the case, right?
Or they have this odd kind of silly dominance thing going on where, you know, they try and, you know, and that just comes from fear too, right?
It's just, if you can't be equal, it's because you're scared, right?
Right, right, right.
Somebody has to be the winner.
Yeah, and you cycle through it back and forth and so on, but no, I mean, where you're coming from is not, I mean, that's the default position of human beings, right?
Yeah. Yeah, which, well, I mean, that's why, I mean, it doesn't make sense that, um, that I would be,
I mean, if, being the default position, right, why, um, why then would, um, You know, my brothers end up married, right? Well, but that's the story of Simon the Boxer, right?
They end up reproducing that which they most fear because their only sense of control comes from the mastering.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's all.
They're just living out management of their own fear.
Yeah, I'm terrified of women, and the only efficacy I know is to manage my fear of women, so I'm going to choose the most frightening woman I know and try and control my responses to her my whole life.
I mean, that's one of the biggest things in that book, and that's applicable to so many things, right?
It's hard to see, though, right?
Right, but at the same time, you also argue that the degree to which we fear something is the degree to which we desire it, right?
Yes, that's – I mean, that's it.
I mean, we won't have to get into that now.
That's in a sort of slightly different context, right?
I mean, the degree to which we desire something that's healthy, right?
I mean, rather than the degree to which we desire that, which is the reproduction of our abuse.
So your desire for a girlfriend is healthy, and we know it's healthy because you haven't pursued it, right?
Because what you would have pursued would have been a Simon-the-Boxes scenario, as your brothers did, right?
Right. That's for sure, which is why I didn't do it.
Right, and that's entirely right.
And you may have taken every single possible best step to get where you are, to get the knowledge, to get the understanding, to get the independence, to get what you want.
You might have taken exactly the right steps, right?
Do not reproduce it, right?
You may have been totally right in that you needed to get to this spot today to ask me this, to go this, right?
This might have been perfect for you.
Rather than saying, oh my god, I was a chicken for 20 years.
No, I needed to get to here, right?
Like all the stuff that I did in business, fundamentally all of it was about giving me the money to go through a really, really, really long and intensive series of therapy.
Everything else was just nonsense, right?
Yeah, I guess that's true.
Right? So maybe everything you did was like perfect.
Maybe you needed the time, the reflection, the independence from a corrupt environment at work and, you know, away from family and so on.
Maybe you needed to get to here so that you could deal with this so that you could get what you wanted and you look back and say, well, man, I handled that beautifully.
Or mostly anyways.
Why not? Why not you just handled it beautifully?
Why not? Well, nothing's perfect.
If you dodge bullets that hit your brother, that's pretty good, right?
Even if you end up not getting married, if you dodge that bullet, right?
No relationship is better than a bad relationship.
Right, exactly.
And that's exactly where I'm at now.
Right, but now you're stepping over to the other fulcrum where you say a good relationship is better than no relationship which is true Yeah, that's true Yeah That's true. All right.
Well, I'm going to stop.
Is that right with you? Yeah.
And I'll give you a recording of this.
Obviously, I think this is good stuff, but I know that it's highly personal, so have a listen and let me know what you think.
Sure. Sure, sure. All right.
Thanks, man. Bye.
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