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April 19, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:00
2364 How To Kill or Save Love - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio and Dr. Warren Farrell

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses couples communication with Dr. Warren Farrell.

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Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Overjoyed we are, as Yoda would say, to have back with us Dr.
Warren Farrell, who, in his honor, I have grown a beard.
As you can see, it's going to be a beard-off.
And unfortunately, I didn't get time.
He's actually 28, but he uses icing sugar to give him the air of wisdom.
I didn't get a chance to do that, so I just have a record roll.
But thank you so much for taking the time to come back.
The only thing I can say there is I'm being realistic.
My age is my age.
I'm afraid that the wisdom may or may not go with it.
We can only hope.
We can only hope.
So this is going to be a couple's communication in which we basically use a role-player gay couple having a fight.
No, actually that was my intention.
I think we steered away from that.
So why should people listen to you about About couples communication.
I think that's an important question.
I mean, establish some credibility.
So I've been, you know, joyfully married for 10 years.
Does that make me an expert?
You know, with my wife, I hope, you know, hopefully we can sort of broaden the generalizations a little further out.
But when it comes to relationship advice, couples communication, why should anybody listen to us?
That's an important question.
Well, the real answer probably is I've never had a relationship in my life, and therefore I have a bigger view of things.
I'm joking, of course.
Let's see.
No, I've been with my wife for 19 years.
But the important thing is I've started some 300 men's groups and some other 300 women's groups and have been doing couples communication workshops for years.
My work and male-female issues, as you probably know, started being deeply involved with the women's movement on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, and speaking all around the world for 10 to 15 years on the importance of women's issues to men and men being secure enough to support independent women.
And then I started to see that there were I think that certain things that were being left out that weren't being said accurately by the feminist movement and that the portions of the feminist movement that were demonizing the family and demonizing men were not serving the process of the family effectively.
And that even...
So, I had spent many years, 10, 15, 20 years, trying to get I started to begin to articulate what men's point of view was.
And as I did that, I was trying to get women to understand men as well.
And I did a great many role reversal experiences where I would do, for example, Mass audiences of men participating in what I call the women's beauty contest of everyday life that women participate in just because they're female.
And then also had the women participate in the role reversal date of everyday life that is risking the sexual rejection That frequently, men are much more likely to take.
The person that takes the first kiss is almost always the male in a heterosexual relationship.
It's the person that does first genital touching is almost always male.
So, the male usually does the initiation of the asking out and then continues with often up to 150 risks of potential rejection.
I tried to get the women to understand those risks of rejection and the fear that happens.
And, usually, women can't really get it unless they actually do a role reversal experience or they have a son of their own, as they have a son of their own that goes through high school.
And they see that son, if he's heterosexual, reach out to a female and fear rejection.
They get a little bit of the understanding of that.
So I then began to understand that, really, what I needed to do was to get people to know how to communicate, that the common denominator between All human beings was the Achilles heel of not being able to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.
And so I started to work on how do I get that across to couples.
And I found that that was an extremely complex challenge and that no psychologist had done that well.
And so that interested me when I saw that it hadn't been I've done effectively and that's what I've begun to do a great deal of my work on in couples communication seminars that I do at places like Esalen and Big Sur and other places around the country.
Let's just take a moment.
I think it's important, particularly for younger listeners and watchers, to understand, which is not something we get a lot, I think, from our culture these days, except I think in Christian circles it's very, I think, very nobly and positively put forward, just what an essential building block to a civil society the family is.
And I think that's something that you don't see a lot of in popular media, you don't hear a lot about it in rap songs, at least not my rap songs.
One of the things that's surprising when you dig into the data is you understand that the safest place for a woman to be is in a marriage.
The safest place for a child to be is in a marriage.
The most economically The most advantageous place to be is in a marriage.
The most healthy place physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally to be is in a marriage.
So when we're talking about long-term couples communications, we're talking about something that is the bricks by which you simply cannot build the house we call civilization if these things don't work.
So I wonder if you could expand upon that point so we can, I think, understand the gravity of what it is we're trying to hold together with these ideas.
Yes, first of all, you really did an extraordinarily good job in a very brief period of time of explaining some of the really crucial dimensions of a family.
Another dimension of it is that we now know that, when we have a lot of crime, when we have a lot of children doing badly economically, when we have a lot of children doing badly in terms of academic skills, we almost always invariably have a single-parent family.
A family that's broken up, usually a single-mom family.
And without father...
So, if you wanted to do one single thing, the boy crisis, when I was writing about that and still am, has probably nine major causes.
But of those nine major causes, the single most important cause is lack of father involvement.
When the father isn't involved, oftentimes the child doesn't get the postponed gratification because it doesn't get the boundary enforcement that it needs.
But in order to have postponed gratification be communicated to the mom as important a parenting component as the mom's greater propensity to nurture and protect, There has to be communication between the mother and father to have that happen.
Otherwise, what the man tends to do is to withdraw into the earning of money, which is the one thing he knows he can get love and approval for.
And he then...
And he begins to withdraw from the family.
The result of the withdrawal from the family is almost as bad As the father not even being there.
But that cannot happen until men and women both do what neither gender is good at, which is being able to handle personal criticism from the other gender.
Let me make it clear first that nobody perceives themselves as criticizing the other.
If I said to you, Stefan, I like your beard a lot.
You should have put a beard on sooner.
Or I don't like your beard.
No matter what I suggested, I would perceive it as being an idea to help you communicate more effectively with the world because I loved your message.
You would perceive it, if you were the normal human being, As my saying, some version of, you know, a criticism.
And so you may or may not become defensive.
But most human beings in loving relationships, where you would have, if you had more of an investment in me than you do in reality, then the more you love the person, the more likely you are to become defensive.
The more you love the person, the more likely you are to become angry.
Because if your son or daughter does something that, like, stays out late, You are more likely to become angry at him or her because you love them more than if you hear from me that my daughter stayed out late.
Because you'd have more perspective on that.
So the most important thing is that we work on that.
And what I discovered as I was doing workshops all over the place...
was that people were hearing my content, but they were remembering the content for only so long.
But if the man or the woman tried to communicate what they liked about it to the other one, the other one would often become defensive about it.
And so I saw that psychology was doing a really good job in helping people communicate their ideas more lovingly, not blaming Speaking from feelings, speaking from I, not throwing in the extraneous matters.
And the result of that was that's...
But the result of that wasn't as good as psychology thought it would be.
So, for example, if you were my son and I said to you, you know, Stefan, you should really...
You know that mom and I love you more than anybody else.
And you know that our whole life has been devoted to caring about how well you do.
The more that I said that, those loving things to you, the more you would hear what coming.
Exactly.
We're going to hear like a butt coming around.
We all have this enormous butt detector.
Shields up, Captain.
Shields up, Captain.
Incoming, incoming.
The butt train is coming around the corner and it's coming to me.
And the more I continue with these loving things, the more fearful you would be that this must be really a big one coming.
Yeah, that's the praise.
It feels like the roller coaster being winched up.
You know, here comes the drop.
Right, right.
That's very, very good.
That's a really great analogy.
And so the fear on the part, so no matter how well we express and lovingly we express our feelings, if it has any suggestion that we want an alternative attitude or behavior, the listener handles it as criticism.
So I'm saying to myself, okay, what can I do to get the listener to, in an ideal world, experience what is normally considered criticism to experience it as love?
Then, in researching that, I began to realize that's a really major job, because, historically speaking, when you got criticism, it was often criticism from maybe a local, you know, a kinship network that was nearby, a neighbor.
And the fear of that criticism was that that would become an enemy tribe or an enemy, that they could attack you.
And so your job, in order to survive, was to get up your defenses.
To defend against possible attack, or even better yet, to organize yourself and kill the enemy before the enemy killed you.
And so we did that to survive, and ironically, and not ironically, as a result of, we do that also in love.
But the problem is that in love, that's the way to kill love, is to not listen to your partner.
So the process that led to the survival of the species It's exactly the opposite of the process that leads to the survival or the sustainability of love.
And so that was the job I had to overcome in my couples communication workshops.
Now, here's a challenge I think that a lot of people face when it comes to love relationships, which is, I remember many years ago, towards the end of a fractious relationship, the woman was, you know, I mean, take out the sandblaster and, you know, the Michelangelo, chip away at you until you're perfect.
You know, it always kind of confused me that women would sort of say, I need a means of transportation, and they'd You know, they'd go to a boat show and they'd choose lots of different boats and lots of vendors would come up and say, oh, here's a boat.
Would you like this kind of boat or this kind of boat?
And then they finally decide on a boat.
They bring the boat home and they say, right, now we're going to turn it into a car.
And that was always kind of confusing to me because it's like, well, if you wanted a car, why didn't you just go get a car?
But I remember at the end of this relationship, and this really struck me, I spent a lot of time pondering, I haven't talked about it quite a bit in therapy, was she was telling me all the things that, you know, were problematic, you know, and I mean, some people, when they criticize you, they do want to help you, even if they do it badly.
But other people are just, you know, they're sniping from bell towers.
But what happened was she got the wrong meal.
They brought her the wrong meal or something like that.
And she was, you know, at me.
And then she turned around and very sweetly said to the waiter, listen, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind.
This is not actually what I ordered.
If you could return it, that would be...
And he was like, oh, no, but she's like...
And I'm just like...
Why are you so nice to the waiter who's just passing through your life like a bullet and I'm here and we've been going out for years and you're not...
That's kind of confusing to me.
When you're this close, you need just the lightest touch.
This is what I keep telling to people as well.
When you're really, really close.
But it's suddenly like I whisper into your ear and out comes an air horn.
You know, you need an air horn when you're like an airplane hangar away, but when people are so close in relationships, it's when they get the most aggressive, and it seems the complete opposite of what we should be doing.
You know, when we're close, we need the very lightest touch, but we save our lightest touch for strangers who don't matter to us, and we save our heaviest, you know, thudding touches or strikes, in a sense, for the people we're closest to.
I hope that's not too much spittle on my webcam, but that's something that was always a paradox for me when I was younger.
Yeah, it certainly is true, and that's certainly what we do.
And the best thing that can be said about it is that we have multiple parts of us that are operating multiple levels of feeling, and most of it, you know, about...
Things not happening the way we want to have them happen, like the meal coming cold or whatever, is negative at that moment.
And so we feel relaxed enough with our partner that we can let all that negativity and vitriol come out.
And so in some ways, it's the greatest compliment to our partner that they can let that out to us.
And it's the lack of trust of the waiter that allows the And the feeling like you have to be very conditional and guarded with the waiter that leads you to that type of thing.
That said, what you're saying about it, which is, you know, how deeply sad because, you know, we do when we constantly complain.
And the first opening night of my couples groups, I asked the men, you know, to share what they feel that their partner has as the biggest problem with them.
And then I ask the males to share what your...
the females to share what your partner has as the biggest problem with you.
And the great majority of the women say that their partner's single biggest problem with them is that they're always critical, that they're critical too much and complaining too much.
And women do seem, when they get married, to become very relaxed And to let out all of their complaining and their criticism.
But the challenge is that oftentimes it diminishes the reservoir of love that we need, the reservoir of goodwill in a relationship.
And there's research being done, that's been done, saying that the most secure people need from their loved one About a 4 to 1 ratio of compliments and appreciations versus criticism.
And many of us need a lot more than that ratio to sustain love, just to keep it at an even level.
Alright, so when it comes to criticism, I mean, this is sort of back from my days as an entrepreneur.
I would sometimes get very detailed letters from clients about things that were wrong with what I was doing or with the software that I was producing and so on.
And, you know, of course, it's, you know, we all want to think we're perfect.
Of course, we're not.
But that, to me, the way that I sort of reframed it, which actually turned it into kind of a positive experience, was thinking of like Michelangelo making a lion.
You know that old saying, people say to Michelangelo, how did you make those beautiful lions?
He says, well, I took a block of wood, see?
And I took a hammer and chisel, and I just got rid of everything that wasn't a lion.
And I mean, that's kind of true.
When people are criticizing you, they are chipping away things, hopefully, that are extraneous or problematic or negative or getting you...
If you're in your own way in terms of insecurity or over-aggression or something in terms of trying to gain your goals, then somebody can help you get through those and get to your goals and get to your bliss sort of happy and faster.
And so for me it was like, okay, so this is a chisel, right?
And some people are skilled chislers and some people are not.
Mm-hmm.
How is it that we can, so to speak, chisel and help turn people into the beautiful art that hopefully they are deemed out inside, chip away the extraneous stuff in a way that is more inviting to them?
Because a lot of times when I was criticized when I was younger, I always felt there was a sort of finger wagging from on high and that people felt that they were perfect and they needed to sort of reach down these hooks of criticism to make me perfect and bring them up to their level.
So what can people do to become more adept at helping other people to receive their criticisms?
Yes.
Well, there's three things that need to be worked on simultaneously.
One is building up that reservoir, meaning that reservoir of appreciation.
And so you have no incentive to sort of hear criticism if you're feeling like that's all you're going to get.
And so the first job is to build up that four to one ratio and make sure that's in your reservoir.
So The way I train couples to do that is to, first of all, know what I call the art of criticism and then also the discipline of criticism.
The discipline of criticism is like making sure you do it at least Three or four times a week, not criticizing, but appreciating.
So I said the art of criticism and the discipline of criticism.
What I meant to say is the art of appreciating and the discipline of appreciating.
So the first job is to make sure you do those appreciations three or four times a week.
So what my wife and I do is we...
My wife is Christian, and I'm not.
I'm more of a Buddhist.
And my wife will sort of say a grace to open up the after-our-dinner conversation, and then I will usually suggest that we do an appreciation for each other.
And so, sometimes, she works extremely hard, and she can be pretty exhausted and almost sort of too wiped out to do the appreciation.
But she'll do three appreciations of me, and I'll do three appreciations of her.
And we don't even know where we pull them out of.
But somehow or other, when we pull out what we don't think even exists, we do manage to pull it out of the recesses of our psyche.
And invariably, when we do, we're feeling like, wow, we just rejuvenated.
And it feels so much better toward each other and toward life.
It just pulls us up there.
And now we have an investment in anything we want to hear from each other that's there.
But now, the appreciations, most people do things they can't imagine coming up with three appreciations during the course of a day when they hardly saw each other during the day.
So part of the training is of the discipline of appreciation.
It's to learn how to be specific with it.
So if I were just to make believe that I were doing appreciations with you now, I'd say, you know, I really like your selection of clothes.
I really like the salt and pepper in your beard.
You know, I really like the way your beard pulls me to your beard, and especially the way it's framed with your You know, with your skull.
You know, that type of thing.
I really appreciate the way you articulate things about the roller coaster very well.
So what I'm putting my fingers on are very specific things that just happened.
And within a half hour, I was able to garner, maybe if I really thought about it, 20 or 30 things that I could appreciate about you.
And now, why can I do that?
Because part of my life, I've trained myself to see the good in people And then willing to articulate those things directly to the person.
So this is really important for men to hear, because we men tend to be really good at saying wonderful things about our wives in public.
So we'll say, you know, my wife is one of the best mothers possible.
Or, you know, my beautiful wife.
When I met her, I thought she was the most beautiful woman I ever had met.
And so those are things that are all accurate from the man's point of view.
But once the woman's heard them 30 or 40 times, they lose their effect of her being seen.
They're just repeated.
And so women want to be seen, and they're seen by being caught doing little things right.
My wife likes her orange juice cut with water.
So, if she tells me, I really appreciate that you put the right amount of water into the orange juice, when you prepared it for me this morning, I feel seen that I did something very specific that she likes in the way that she likes it.
And so if she can leave alone when I don't do it right and focus on that, then that's really very helpful.
So the discipline of appreciation requires frequency.
Frequency that is set ahead of time like doing it even Monday, Wednesday and Friday or doing it twice a week or doing it once a week is usually once a week more than most people do it.
So people have the security of knowing that there's going to be an appreciation time coming up once a week.
Second is the discipline of setting aside time to handle Personal criticism without it being experienced as criticism and that's so I usually have people set do what I call a a complaint free zone during the week and set aside one hour or so during the week where they can take one issue that is bothering them and and the and share that issue with their partner at
that point in time.
It's what I call the Harry Truman approach to criticism.
Harry Truman used to say, when there's an emergency, I take it and I stick it in the drawer for a week.
At the end of the week, I pull it out, and the things that are still left, which are hardly any, I take care of them then.
And so at the end of the week, so when you know ahead of time that if something really bothers you, that you have an opportunity to bring it up at the end of the week, that reduces your feeling that you need to interrupt the moment To bring up that criticism.
And then I train couples to do the toughest part, which is developing seven mindsets that, in the aggregate, allow them to handle, to do a workaround To the biological natural defensiveness that all of us have toward criticism and to do a mental association,
it's like a self-hypnosis, where you're associating your partner's criticism with being loved.
So, for example, you'll basically say to yourself as one of the mindsets, what I call the love guarantee, and you're saying to yourself, every time my partner criticizes me, she or he is feeling What they need more than anything else is a safe space to express their feelings.
If I create that safe space for them to express their feelings, then they'll feel more loved by me.
Anyone who feels more loved by me is going to feel more love for me.
So basically, the only thing I have to do is create a safe space for this, and I'm going to have more love come my way.
So the angrier she is or he is, the more amazed they will be that I'm creating a safe space for their anger.
I've never in my life had anger be safely received before.
So if I can do that for my partner, my partner is going to feel this enormous gratitude for when they lost it with me, that I could see the vulnerability behind their anger.
I could see that anger is basically vulnerability's mask.
We get angrier with the people that we are most, that we love the most because we have the most investment in them.
And so if I can provide a safe space for my wife's anger and she feels at the end of being upset with me that she's had that safe space, she feels this enormous feeling of security and protector that I've been for her.
And that just, that makes her feel so loved and that therefore makes her love me a lot more.
So that's an example of that.
Right, okay.
I think that there's some of the things that I think are fairly common knowledge but probably worth reinforcing is Especially if we have a sort of backed up set of complaints that have been expertly deflected for quite a long time.
What happens is, you know, it's like trying to get through a door with a battering ram.
It's like, oh, if I'm not through the door, clearly what I need is a bigger, stronger battering ram and more huns to power it through the door.
And I think it's one of these kind of weird opposite things.
So much in life, and I guess this is part of paradoxes, so much of life seems to be opposite.
That if a strong hand isn't working, a softer hand is the most likely to work.
And so if people have a lot of backed up criticisms, what they generally tend to do is they tend to make the extreme statements.
You always do this.
You never do this.
Every time this happens, oh, here we go again.
And all that kind of stuff where you feel it's a broken record.
And that is, of course, an invitation to be dismissed because it's one of these logical statements, right?
If I say, you know, you always go out of the driveway too fast.
And then they say, well, no, yesterday, if you remember, there was a skunk there and I went out too slow.
They have one exception and your whole point is thrown away.
And so, avoiding the absolute statements and avoiding the conclusions about the other person's behavior, but simply talking about subjective personal experiences.
You know, when you did this, I felt upset, I felt angry, I felt frightened, I felt whatever.
And I think that one of the things that couples don't do enough is have room to explore.
We like to come in with the false security of conclusions.
You know, well, you did this because, or I did this because, or you're like this way because, or I'm upset because you did X. And it's like, boy, if only we had such self-knowledge.
I've been working on self-knowledge for 30 years.
I'm still constantly confused by things that I think and feel.
It's like a scientist saying, I have all the answers to the universe.
Well, you just know that person is not telling the truth.
So I think having the humility to say, well, I felt this and I don't actually know why.
Let's explore it.
Curiosity and exploration seem to me to be kind of the opposite of that win-lose confrontation that seems to take place so often.
Okay.
This is really important what you're talking about.
What you are focusing on now is the criticism being given better than it normally is.
People not using words like always or never or not being accusatory, not being not exaggerating.
And so but what I'm saying is that that is very positive and everybody should learn that.
The good news is psychology has really been trying to is working with people to to learn that portion of communication.
And most people have improved on that.
In relation to where our grandparents were when they fought with each other.
But still, everyone, when they don't feel heard, it is biologically natural for them to resort to the exaggeration, to the overstatement, and so on.
And so what I'm saying is, our job is to do that, but for the listener not to be dependent upon the giver of criticism doing that.
And to see the opportunity, and the worse your partner is at doing that, the more of an opportunity you have to provide a safe space for them that they will, in the long run, appreciate, because they will diminish their need to exaggerate.
So, if you're telling me that, you know, I have been your brother, and I'm the older brother, and Dad always paid more attention to me than he did to you, And I was the color TV. You were the black and white TV, so to speak.
And I'm saying to you, oh, man, you were young and you got away with so many things that I got away with.
Well, you feel totally unappreciated because you're asking me at that moment.
So you may say, so having not appreciated you, you may start exaggerating.
The degree to which you felt like you were the neglected brother.
And that will then of course get me, but now if I can stop and as the listener start saying, my goodness, tell me more about that.
And you start seeing that my eye contact is really inviting you to tell me more.
And now how can I do that genuinely?
I can do that genuinely by knowing that when my brother Stefan It feels a safe space for me to speak his mind about what his experience was of childhood.
It doesn't make any difference how many contradictions he has.
It doesn't make any difference whether I believe his story is accurate or not.
It is his story.
I love my brother.
I love my brother Stephan.
And when my brother Stephan shares his story, I don't expect it to be his story.
I will immerse myself in his story.
And the man that I love, the precious brother that I love, I want to hear the way he experiences it.
And I'm assuming it's going to be exaggerated.
I'm assuming it's going to be because the degree to which he feels insecure that I will It's the degree to which he has to shout it and exaggerate it to get me to hear it.
So as I hear him, he'll find slowly that he has less need to exaggerate, has less need to do that.
And so I imagine you being like a river filled with pollution, and that I can provide the ability to be a filter, and I catch that pollution.
And then after I've caught that pollution, the river is much purer, but it's going on.
Do I expect you to be consistent?
No.
A river isn't consistent.
It passes by us.
And it's new all the time.
It's a new aspect of itself all the time.
Different dimensions of it are shining in the sun or reflected by the trees.
And so I expect nothing from you but you feeling safe enough to hear your story.
I assume it will be your story, therefore distorted from my story's perspective, my memory, because we all create memory selectively, which is why I never work with anyone who's a couple without the other partner being there, because I'm only working from a mythological story.
Right, right.
And there are these two poles.
Yeah, I think that's great.
I think the poles I think that you're talking about is one of my favorite two-line quotes from one of my favorite novelists, E.M. Foster, it's only connect, connect, connect.
It's the essential thing in life.
We confuse our personalities or identities with positions.
Right?
And then if the position changes, we don't know who we are.
We're disoriented.
And we do this with religion, we do this with ideologies, we do this with nationalities, we do this with youth or attractiveness or money.
We have these positions and this is our identity.
But a position is really the opposite of connection.
And I think if we can reshape our thinking so that our identities and our essential selves are defined by connection, then somebody who What undermines a position that we have is not undermining our identity because our identity is bound into our connection with other people.
And in a sense you can just say, okay, so I want to know what your experience is of my ideology, of my philosophy, of my whatever it is going to be.
And it's not about proving or disproving your position which feels like, to robotic people, it feels like being disassembled or reassembled or putting their leg on their forehead or something like that.
It's something that needs to be bitterly resisted.
But if we reframe our sense of identity so that we are Most ourselves, when connected with others, then we can keep asking questions of other people without feeling like we're going to get knocked or blown away if they, quote, disprove a position or have a feeling that is the opposite of a position that we have.
I hope that makes some kind of sense.
Not only does it make sense, but it's really an enormous amount of wisdom in the sense that it truly, and particularly people who have an ideology or religion or a strong, you know, they're cheering for their side, their team, It is amazing that I live in San Francisco and the San Francisco Giants and the 49ers are the two teams there.
And it's amazing how if you give a perspective different, then their team is the best.
It is amazing how they start taking that seriously.
You know you're cheering for sweaters, right?
You're a fan of clothing.
And you're attached to something that was very useful thousands of years ago, which was the degree to which you could...
Identify with your God or with your team or with your ideology was the degree to which you could unite forces to combat an enemy.
But in terms of love and in terms of affection, what the issue is is the degree to which I can hear the other person's ideology, the other person's attachment to whatever they care about, their child, their parents, their point of view on money or anything.
Is the degree to which they will feel heard by me.
And the degree to which they feel heard by me is the degree to which it appears that that person is committed to connecting with me.
And that is the greatest gift you can give anyone.
Almost every man in Western cultures gives a woman a diamond ring.
Well, if you only give her, if you don't give her a diamond ring or you give her a diamond ring, The diamond ring is very secondary to listening to her.
And the diamond ring is even more...
And the greatest gift any woman can give to a man is the gift of listening to him.
It's even more important for a woman to hear the man's neuroses and anger and hurt and distorted stories because when women are frustrated with men, women can go to other women to talk to And women are programmed to agree with the complaint that the woman has about her man.
Whereas when a man and a woman get into an argument, men are not able to easily talk about those problems with a man and with another man.
And when they do talk about the problems with the other man, the man who's listening usually glazes over after a two- or three-minute period.
Gives him advice and then starts criticizing him or taking his wife's point of view.
So very different.
We have almost, men have almost no support systems for sharing the problems in their life.
And that's said by itself and that needs to change.
But it also is, it's helpful, I think, for women to hear that, to know that the reason men give up their primary fantasy of access to a variety of attractive women without feeling rejected, which is represented either in pornography or in being single, and they get married, is because they hope that they will get their primary need met through you.
And their primary need is intimacy and love, because that's what gets left out of a typical man's life, except from his parents.
And so, unfortunately, we live in a world where most men put Most of their emotional eggs in the basket of the woman they live with or love.
And that is very sad, and it's something we need to change.
But it also helps women to understand the degree to which they have, to which their ability to handle and hear a man express himself is crucial to his feeling loved and, therefore, to his loving her.
Right.
Right.
Now, we mentioned this before on the show, but it's such a Glowing disco ball of a great idea that I wanted you to go over it again, which is the tragedy of traditional sexual selection, where a woman, of course, will choose, for biological reasons of reproduction and breastfeeding, to have a man who's got oodles of resources, you know, whatever he's got, you know, sackfuls of pigs and barnfuls of cows or whatever it is, so he can provide for her while she's disabled by raising children.
And a man, of course, wants Yono Young Long hair, clear skin, you know, busty figure, whatever it is, the sort of physical attractiveness because that's the greatest mark of fertility and that's what he trades his resources for to get babies and so on.
And you've talked, I think, very eloquently and powerfully about the tragedy involved in this kind of reptilian base of the brain sexual selection mechanism and how it does set us up for reproductive fecundity but an emotional barrenness.
Yes, exactly.
And of course, so basically both sexes are biologically programmed to fall in love with the members of the other sex who are the least capable of loving them.
Men tend to fall in love with 13, 14, 15, 18-year-old women.
13, 14, and usually in developed countries, but probably something starts there in terms of hormones, getting ourselves.
Testosterone tends to go up around early adolescence, and we fall in love with women who are in the teenage years.
Yet teenage women, as a rule, tend not to be as capable of loving us as a woman who's older.
The woman who is the most beautiful, the cheerleader, she spends her life fending off invitations and saying no to men who are asking her out or coming on to her.
And they tend to be less inclined to knowing how to think of other people's needs than women who are less attractive.
So we tend to fall in love with the members of the other sex who are the least capable of loving.
We don't fall in love with the older, more mature, A less attractive female.
Women do the same thing in reverse.
They tend to fall in love with a man with a lot of resources.
But learning to get those resources, let's say becoming a really successful lawyer, requires a process of, let's say you and I are both lawyers, it requires me to be a really good lawyer to listen for a couple of seconds to pick up the gist of what you're saying and begin to form in my own mind's eye An assessment of something I can contradict you on.
Begin to figure out a way that I can interrupt you to cut your flow off.
Come out with that contradiction, get the good judge to support me.
And so the degree to which I can be critical of you and interrupt you is the degree to which I can be effective for my client.
And if I were to say to you instead, you know, oh, Stephan, I didn't realize that you were...
I hadn't thought about that point before.
That's an excellent point.
Can you elaborate on that a bit more?
And, you know, gee, you know, client of mine...
Jane, we hadn't thought about that perspective.
Do you think maybe we can reassess our case and think about it from Stephan's point of view?
If I were to represent my client that way, I would be a lawyer not very long.
But if I go home and I listen to my wife and she's having problems during the day, And my mind is operating with, let me see if I can find the flaw in what she's saying and interrupt her with the first opportunity to solve her problem for her or correct her or tell her where she's wrong thinking about the problem.
I've taken the same skills I've used to become successful at work and used them to become unsuccessful in love.
And the same thing with my daughter or my son.
If I tell them what's wrong with what they're doing, they tend to not come to me to share more things with me.
And so the process that made me very admired, maybe even in my own family, as being the most successful person on the block, leads me to be alienated from my children and my wife to be alienated from me.
So the process that it takes to be successful at work often is inversely related to the process it takes to be successful in love.
And yet we have biologically...
Program women to fall in love with the most successful men, not the most successful at listening, facilitating, and a couple's communication work, but most successful in terms of resource gathering.
And that's something that this is really the next evolutionary shift that we need to do to make our emotional lives as satisfying and filled with opportunities as our technological lives are.
Yeah, I mean, one of the differences, too, is that men are now much more involved in child racing, at least those men who are there, than they used to be, which, of course, would give different standards.
You can't lawyer an 18-month-old.
I generally lose fairly regularly trying to out-reason my four-year-old.
She's good, man.
She's like this little Socrates with nunchucks.
But let me ask you, I guess, one final question, a bit of an existential question, but it's something that I'd really like to get your thoughts on.
When I stop people who are having problems and I say to them, if this continues, what's going to happen?
They know the answer like that.
We're going to get divorced.
We're going to break up.
I'm going to lose this job.
I'm going to blow this opportunity.
This business is going to fail.
It's weird that everybody can look down the train tracks to where the bridge is broken and the fiery dragon-infested chasm they're going to fall into.
And they know that if they continue doing what they're doing, and science bears this out, right?
I mean, the presence of contempt in marriage is like 97% certainty of divorce within five years.
And if you stop people doing what they're doing, say, if you continue doing this, what's going to happen?
So we're not sailing blind.
We're not driving with no sense of headlights.
We can see very clearly the disasters that we are driving ourselves towards.
And it seems to me, shouldn't we panic a little bit about that?
But it seems people just keep going.
And your second, third marriage, they'll just keep going, doing the same thing.
How do you think it's possible that we are so immune to the knowledge that we already have about the consequences of our actions?
That's something that's really, really puzzled me for many years.
I mean, when I was younger, I had some bad relationships, but I freaked out about them.
I'm like, oh my god, this is terrible.
I've got to get some therapy.
I've got to read some books.
I don't want to do this again no matter what.
I did years of therapy.
I did three hours a week of therapy.
I did dream journals.
I worked my tail off to become more functional in relationships better without losing some of the stuff that I liked in business competition and so on.
I don't mean this to be a yay me kind of thing, but I freaked out.
And at the time, a lot of people were like, hey man, why are you freaking out?
Relationships are tough kind of thing.
And then they ended up in these terrible relationships that just keep on going.
Why isn't there a panic eject button that knocks people out of these circles?
That's always been kind of confusing to me.
Yeah, I think it's for a number of reasons.
One is that we...
We all know we want the same thing.
We all know we want love, we want intimacy, we want respect, we want approval.
But no one has taught us how to get it.
So it's like...
We just don't know the pathway there.
So we then start doing a couple of things, that it must be my partner that's the problem, because I know I want it this way, and I know she or he distorted my perspective on that.
And I know I need to be listened to, but they always argue with me.
And I know eventually that I'm beginning to start feeling like every time I'm coming home, And the garage door opens.
I wish their car wasn't there, so I'd have some time for myself, which is a great litmus test to know that you're in trouble.
And so, because we don't teach in school anything about how to really facilitate the point of view of somebody else.
We don't teach the most important single life lesson in We should be taught from kindergarten on, and by the time the children get to kindergarten, they should have learned it by good role modeling from their parents.
But I have never met anyone in my life that knows how to handle personal criticism effectively.
And so that's the skill set that is the next step we need to know.
So everybody knows and feels like if I just get the right partner, I can just, you know, and then they begin to start It's undermining feeling good about this partner because in some part of them almost wants to be out of the relationship with this partner so they can have freedom to get into the right relationship.
And it's usually, it's only about 25% the right partner, about 75%.
It's about creating, knowing how to Make any human being you're involved with feel heard and understood.
And when you discover if you have enough chemistry to fall in love with somebody and you have enough to go to the place where you are with them six or eight months to marriage, the chances are fairly good that you can return to that love if you discover the part of the person who has been repressed in the process of defending yourself and not hearing them.
Yeah, I remember part of the wedding vows that my wife and I wrote when we got married was to say, and the love that we felt on that day, that that was the reality.
Everything else might be this Socratic, you know, cave shadow wall illusion, but that was the reality.
That's the sun we're going to orbit around.
And whenever we wander off path or wander off track, the only way we can continue to wander off track is to call our marriage day a lie, an illusion and a delusion.
And, you know, we made that commitment to never, ever imagine in our wildest dreams that our marriage day was anything other than the truth of our relationship.
And that's what we've always tried to return to.
And I think what you're talking about, this idea that there's the one, you know, the jigsaw puzzle, you fit together and everything's great.
There are certainly people who have more compatible values, less compatible values.
But the one is not a person.
The one is a process.
The oneness is a continual process of connection.
And when you are connected, something in your life is going to change.
And that's part of growth.
You know, there's no just, you know, you sort of stick together like… Like glue and then that's it, right?
I mean, you'll be close and then something will happen.
Somebody gets sick or somebody gets a new job or you have to move or something's going to happen that is going to, or you have kids of course, your kids have problems or your kids are doing really well and that's something that you have to figure out how to handle.
So this idea that there's this one that you find that you glom together and then everything is great.
Boy, what a recipe for disaster.
That's like somebody selling you a car and saying, the oil never needs to be changed.
You never, ever need to bring it in for a tune-up.
And it's like, well, you know that thing is just going to drive itself into a brickness of unusefulness.
Absolutely.
Alright, so first of all, it's great to chat with you again.
It's always a real pleasure.
Please go ahead.
No, I just really wanted to say it's really a pleasure for me too.
It's always amazing with you more than almost anybody else that when I say something that you always add some deeper level of wisdom and insight that I always appreciate hearing.
So I always feel I learn from you as well as hopefully impart a little bit of knowledge myself.
Oh, absolutely.
So where are your current projects?
Where can people, if they're interested in your courses or affiliate courses, where can they drink deep from the well that is Dr.
Warren Farrell?
Where can they get you?
Hopefully the period in spring will be of a little bit of help.
And the best thing to do is just go on warrenfarrell.com.
And the Farrell is F as in Frank, A-R-R-E-L-L.com.
And go to the section where I talk about where I'll be.
And, like, for example, on Memorial Day weekend, I'll be doing a course at a place called Esalen.
Esalen is in Big Sur, California.
And it's really a wonderful, you know, if I never showed up, you'd have a wonderful time there.
It's just one of the most beautiful places that you can imagine, and with hot tubs and stuff like that.
And so I take couples through A weekend of learning how to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.
And it takes that full weekend to do that.
This is not something you can, you know, I wrote a book called Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.
And there's a good portion of that book that has communication skills in it.
And you'll get something out of that.
But the truth is that even when you read Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, it's a little bit like reading a computer manual to learn a computer.
You really, it's one of those things you really have to do Well, that's great.
And I think there's only one of your books that I haven't read yet which is on my list.
And thanks a lot for, of course, everything that you're doing in the world.
Everybody, you know, looks at the world.
I mean, there were these terrible bombings in Boston in the marathon today and, you know, Syria and North Korea and all these terrible things that are occurring in the world today and so often we're drawn into the world of the media and we want to do these big things to change the world.
And I think those things are fine to pursue in their own way but let us not You know, pour our essence into the stratosphere where we can't do much.
The stuff that I think you're talking about in your books, in your seminars, being able to communicate, being able to listen, being able to connect.
You know, connection, you don't even know until you're drinking that you've lived In a desert when you really connect with someone, it's hard to describe to people who haven't been there.
I think we all know that we're missing something.
You know, the old line that most men live lives with quiet desperation until you connect.
But the connection, I genuinely believe the connection between parents, particularly parents and children, connection cures the world.
You know, we can wave signs and we can vote whoever we want.
But without that connection, I think we're just going round and round.
So I really, really appreciate the work that you're doing to help people to connect.
Because that is, I just finished a book by Simon Baron Cohen called The Science of Evil, where he says that the greatest resource in the world that nobody talks about is empathy.
And without that, we're wasting all of our other resources.
And so thank you so much, of course, for being on the show and for everything that you're giving to the world.
Thank you very much.
It's really totally a pleasure.
Take care.
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