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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:53
The Secret About Polyamory: What They Won’t Tell You!
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I'm a 27 year old in love.
The girl I love is into polyamory and has a hard time sticking to one guy.
She's only 21 and is therefore younger than me.
I refuse to degrade myself as a man, as her elder, by ending up as just another guy.
The logical experience side of me says she is a no-go, but I have a hard time restraining my emotions and desires.
Should I confess my true feelings to this young woman, or should I walk away with dignity and go my own way until she's either older and more mature, or until an opportunity presents itself to enrapture her?
Or should I write her off altogether as toxic?
That's from Jason.
Oh, Jason, I don't think you should walk away when you can, in fact, run.
Hello, Stefan.
Thank you for having me on the show, by the way.
I just wanted to say... My pleasure, Jason.
Am I talking to your penis or your brain at this point?
I'm not sure, because it seems to me that your penis was trying to cock-block your brain for writing me a letter.
Right, right, right.
Well, I mean, I guess in a way this is a broader It's kind of a broader discussion in dealing with the duality.
I do have a romantic side and I also have a logical side.
And the deal with this particular young lady is that we actually do get along very well.
I have kind of distanced myself very clearly from her in the relationship.
Realm?
If you know what I'm saying, like when I'm with her I make it clear that I'm basically, I mean...
You could almost say that, like, I've kind of friend-zoned her, but I still can't help the fact that, you know, I mean, she's a woman and I'm a man and I have these feelings.
Oh, dude, I gotta stop you because if I had a dime for every time I heard mealy-mouthed male statements when you've been dick-napped trying to justify what's going on, I'd be rich!
So, dick-napped is a phrase I use when your penis takes over and you can't think straight and you're just trying to justify everything after the fact, right?
Fair enough, fair enough.
How pretty is this girl?
Give me one to ten.
Um...
I would say somewhere like 7.5 to 8.5.
And you?
I actually, probably the same, 7.5 to 8.5.
I have a friend who calls me White Angel.
I think he kind of overestimates my attractiveness though.
All right.
Okay.
So you're of roughly similar physical attractiveness.
Would she be, do you generally date women more attractive, less attractive, or about the same?
I generally date, I've dated a few times in my life, you know, and generally it's been about the same.
And what is different about this girl that you're willing to even contemplate polyamory?
Well, here's the thing.
I'm not willing to contemplate polyamory.
I will say that I categorically have ruled that out.
And I guess I just... The problem is, I guess, that...
What I'm struggling to deal with here is that I do enjoy my friendship with her.
I mean, we have similar interests.
We hang out.
We work great as friends, is I guess what I'm saying, you know?
What are you... Okay, I gotta stop here because... Hang on.
Sorry.
Sorry to interrupt.
So, I just need more detail.
What are the similar interests that you share?
The same movies.
We play a lot of video games together over the internet, you know.
We'll stay up late playing video games, just talking about stuff some nights, you know.
Wait, wait.
Okay, so we got movies and games.
Now, you went to talking about stuff, and what stuff are you talking about?
Um, oh, let me, let me remember.
Oh, geez, I'm sorry.
I'm kind of on the spot right here.
You know, I'm trying to remember the last big conversation we had.
A lot of times we joke around a lot, you know.
You're flirting.
Um, I don't know.
Okay, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
No, let me ask you this.
It's a very, very simple test.
When you have conversations with her, is it like on the like the talk chat of video games?
Sometimes it is.
I would say it usually is.
I mean, every now and then we... Okay, that's fine.
Just give me the short answers.
I don't need the full spectrum.
So, would these be the kinds of conversations that you would have with a man?
Let's see.
Or are you sillier, goofier, more playful, more flirtatious, or something like that?
I wouldn't say flirtatious because I try not to come off as flirtatious with her.
I think, in all honesty, the most flirtatious thing I'll do is, um, I do have a tendency to turn my charisma on, you know, when she's around.
Um, you know, I pay more attention to my posture and stuff, you know.
I mean, I tend to do this whenever there are any women around, though.
So I clearly am very conscious.
Up go the shoulders, in goes the gut.
Okay, so you said that you love this girl and I'm asking, I guess what I'm asking in a roundabout but now direct way, is what do you love about her?
I need specifics, not we get along, we're compatible, we share the same bed.
This is all a description, right?
What specifically, what characteristics, what virtues does she exhibit that you love?
Okay.
She has a good sense of humor.
That's always been important to me.
Her sense of humor seems to line up well with mine, so we end up laughing a lot when we're together, you know?
I seem to do...
This is going to sound like...
I'm not a very spiritual person when it comes to dating, but, I mean, it just seems like...
Wait, are you dating?
No, no, no, I'm not.
Not at the moment.
No.
Okay, so.
Okay, so what what?
Okay, she's funny.
Not a particularly moral or virtue based characteristic.
You know, Lenny Bruce was funny.
Bill Cosby was funny.
So what do you love about her?
Well, I would say that one thing that is positive about her is that she does have a good work ethic, because I've been in relationships before with people who don't, and that was just... that ends very badly.
But, you know, she'll get jobs, you know, she'll save up money, you know, things like that.
So she is... I would say she's fiscally responsible.
Um... Okay.
She likes talking about big things.
I will admit, though, that, I mean, when it comes to realms like philosophy, you know, I grew up with a professor as a father, and he always loved explaining things to me, and I actually enjoy, uh... I guess a lot of times we'll talk and, um...
There's a lot of things that she doesn't know much about, you know, and she'll ask me to educate her, and she seems to like learning things from me, you know, so I have a good time with that, I guess.
Right.
Anything else?
Hmm.
Virtues, virtues.
She takes care of herself.
um...
What, are we going with food and hygiene?
Is that, come on, you can't, you can't lead me down to brushes and teeth and combs her hair.
Sorry?
I said her dating history, though, certainly nuttier than a fruitcake.
Okay, so I'm going to assume that she bathes, which is taking care of herself.
What is the story with her dating history?
And what is the story with her childhood?
I, uh, let me speak to her dating history first, I suppose.
Um, she is a very, um, what's, what's the word?
I mean, I think she says it, I can only speculate.
I think she says it for shock value, but sometimes she just calls herself a slut.
She just says, I'm a slut.
She brags about the number of men that she slept with sometimes, you know, And I just kind of roll, um, it was like, if I recall, it was eight and I just kind of roll my eyes and I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm polite to her.
I said, well, you can call yourself whatever you want, but I'm not going to shit on you.
You know?
Um, what I, what I've noticed.
She's, uh, she's had intercourse with eight guys at the age of 21.
Evidently.
I mean, that's what she says.
I don't know if she's inflated the number.
Well, I assume that part of what you love about her is she's not a liar.
Right?
So I'm going to assume that.
Yes, she does seem to be an honest person.
I will say that.
She is a straightforward, honest person.
All right.
And, um, why is it nutty, um, about the, uh, You know, we can go with the doubling, that whatever a woman says, we can double just like whatever a man says you might be able to divide in two.
But we go with the fact that if she refers to herself as a slut, then she's clearly not trying to pretend to be better or more conservative than she is.
So maybe it's eight, maybe it's more.
But did you know any of the guys she's been with?
Have you heard anything about them?
Actually, I do.
I remember one night I was gaming with her.
You see, I've And I suspect it might be because I've always distanced myself from dating her.
She always says that like, and she says it to me, she says, she said before, whenever one of my male friends confesses his feelings to me, I feel like I always need to sleep with him, you know?
And I've never confessed my feelings to her because I see, I've seen what happens to these other guys, you know?
And because I'm, I'm a realistic person and yeah, they go and sleep with her, but then like pretty soon she gets bored with them and then they're tossed on the pile.
And I don't want to end up, you know, a bitter, you know, bitter angsty like them.
You know what I'm saying?
So any man who says that he's attracted to her, she'll sleep with?
Is that what she's saying?
Well, her friends.
I mean, not any man, but not any man in my experience.
I've certainly seen people she's turned down, but she's, she seems to have a physical attractiveness filter, but I'm, I'm higher on the attractiveness scale than at least some of the people that I know she's dated.
Why is she not interested in you?
Sometimes, well, I've never told her that I was interested in her.
No, no, no.
Forget that.
Forget that.
Why has she not said, you know, you're a nice guy.
You come from a well-educated family.
I assume you've got a decent education and some decent prospects.
Why isn't she indicating some interest in you?
It might be because I can only guess personally, but there was a time early on in our friendship when I told her, you know, you're fun to be around.
I think you're a nice person.
But I said to her, but I think that any guy who would date you is nuts.
And I told her that.
Flat out.
But I do enjoy being here.
Wait, hang on a second.
You said this to a woman that you claim to love?
That is a very, very deep insult.
I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's deeply insulting to say that anyone who would want to date you must be insane.
I guess he got me.
I can't imagine saying that to someone that I love.
So help me square this circle if you would.
Well, I do have to admit that at that time I was in kind of a bitter place in my life because I had just gotten out of a relationship with someone else that ended rather badly and I'm guessing if you allow yourself to say these kinds of things, I'm guessing all of your relationships are going to end rather badly.
If you give yourself permission to say something like, it's not funny.
It's not funny.
If you give yourself permission to say, that's an, I won't say abusive, like it's, but it's incredibly nasty thing to say to someone.
Because if there is someone in your life like that, don't have them in your life, but don't have them around and tell them something like that.
Right?
If you give yourself permission, To say things like that to someone that you claim to love, how is anyone going to feel safe around you, given that you can come in with such a javel into the heart?
I didn't feel any love for her at the time, if that makes any difference. .
Have you apologized?
That might be a good idea, Stefan.
You think?
Also, I do want to apologize for laughing.
I'm just nervous.
This is my first time.
No, no, I get it.
I get it.
And I'm not pointing it out of anger.
I'm just saying I don't want to be discombobulated that way.
Now, why do you think she would hang around with a man who's told her that anyone who would date her must be crazy?
What's her childhood with her?
What's her history?
What's her family?
How could that be?
You want to know what I know about her family?
Well, I don't want you to guess.
Well, I'll be honest.
I haven't seen... I always hate it when people say that, because now I'm trying to think, well, what if you'd be doing up to now?
Okay, yeah, that was a redundant preposition, I guess.
I hope so.
I don't know all that much about her family.
From what I do know, um, when I've been over to her house, it's very strange that, like, it's, I've never had a friend, I've never been over to a friend's house before and not have their parents engage me.
I mean, she lives at home with her parents.
I've never been over to any friend's house before.
And I think it's especially peculiar, I mean, if it's me as a guy going over to visit a girl.
Her father says almost nothing to me.
Her mother says almost nothing to me.
I remember one time I walked in the house and I, uh, he was walking down the hallway past me and he didn't even look at me.
He just, I said, hello, sir, to be polite, you know, and he just, he turned his head for a moment and he just kind of flippantly lifted his hand and then put it back down and then just never missed a beat walking.
So I don't, it's difficult for me.
I don't want to speculate unfairly on what her home life is like.
on what her family life is like, because I'm not an expert enough in psychology or anything.
No, but I'm trying to, sorry, I'm trying to understand, like you say you love her, but you don't know much about her origins.
And given that she's 21, the origins are a bit more relevant than if she was 51, right?
Because she's right there living at home.
Do you not, you don't seem to know much about her childhood or like her history, uh, What have you been talking about?
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it seems I love this woman.
I told her this mean thing.
Incredibly mean thing.
And I really don't know anything about her history.
Well, I guess I know a bit more about her history than I do about her family.
I guess I would say that.
She's 21.
Her history is her family.
She's still living at home.
Right?
For the most part, I suppose so.
She doesn't seem to talk about her family very much.
I mean, if she's got a secret life with our friend from the last call, if she's got a secret life as a superhero, then okay.
But she's 21, she's living at home.
Her family, her history, her environment, that is most of who she is, right?
I suppose that certainly would be pretty much the entirety of what has produced her as she is.
Up to this point.
Right, especially if she's passive, right?
Which is, guy tells me he wants to sleep with me.
Open pod bay, open the pod bay doors, hell, open the pod bay doors.
And so if she's not, if she's isolated from her parents, right?
If she's not getting any attention from her father, if her father is, as they say, emotionally unavailable or depressed or whatever it is, right?
So he's not there, then it seems likely that She would be very hungry for male attention, which is probably why she mistakes sexual desire for personal interest.
It certainly seems plausible.
Now, who in your family is the person who may have taught you some of the mechanics of this language that you have for people that you say that you love, you know, like anyone who would date you must be crazy.
Like, is there someone in your family or your history that has that habit that may have kind of given you implicit permission for that kind of talk?
Probably my father, to be completely honest.
Again, I hope that you are being completely honest, hitherto, but in what way did he do that?
Well, this is a little difficult for me to talk about, you know, but I have had people in my family but I have had people in my family who actually are or were crazy, you know, and.
There's a lot of my family has like a history of some pretty serious mental illnesses and childhood traumas.
And my parents are divorced now, you know, and I guess my father didn't take the divorce very well, you know, I mean.
I mean, And I guess that that's a word that I've heard him use to describe my mother at certain points because of her family history and some of her experiences.
Right.
So when you said to me that you'd had a bad breakup and you were feeling kind of cruel or feeling bitter, I think you said it was in a bitter place.
Then is that similar in a minor way, similar to your father After the divorce from your mom that he was in a bitter place?
I would say it is similar.
Yeah.
Right.
This sounds surprising to you.
I guess I just never thought about this before.
Good.
Good.
That's, that's good.
I mean, that, that means that there's great value in the conversation, I hope.
So when you say crazy, you really know what you're talking about, right?
It's not like, oh, that's crazy.
I mean, the crazy is a very emotionally charged word for you, right?
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
In that circumstance, I suppose in that circumstance, I was implying that There was, I suppose I was implying that there was something wrong with her.
Something?
I mean, that's very much wrong with her, right?
I suppose so.
Anyone who would date you must be crazy.
Somebody would have to be crazy to date you.
Certainly.
Right.
Do you remember what led up to that statement with her?
Oh.
That statement was actually a while ago, so I'm trying to remember exactly what led up to it.
Um... I...
I believe that she was talking about...
There had been a gap in her and my friendship because she was actual, um, she was actual a mutual friend between me and my, uh, ex who I had broken up with.
So there had been a gap in our friendship and I had, I was talking to her and she was talking about, um,
Another guy she was dating at the time or something like that, you know, and this is when our friendship was starting to kind of reform, you know, hers and mine.
I basically said, I still want to be friends with you, even though, you know, I broke up with my ex.
And did she stay friends with your ex?
Not really, no.
I think that at first, like after we first broke up, my ex kind of dragged her over to her side.
And I was just like... And what was your ex saying about you?
I think she was saying that, um...
Let's see.
She was saying about me that, um...
I would be, um, excuse me.
I I would be getting two, um...
irritable and she thought probably I'm assuming she was saying that I drank too much as well.
And were those true Were you getting too irritable and were you drinking too much?
I don't like to make excuses for myself.
The fact of the matter is at that time in my life I think you would certainly say that I was drinking too much and that I was too quick to be irritable at that time in my life.
I think circumstances had a lot to do with it, though.
I don't like to make excuses myself, but circumstances had a lot to do with it?
I'm certainly to blame.
Do you want to hear what my circumstances were like at the time, or is that not of any interest to you?
No, it's all of interest to me.
Okay, well, my relationship with my ex, um, for about a year, everything was great.
And then, um... She quits her job, um... I get a job as a security guard, and I'm also in college.
So...
There would be certain nights when I would work midnight to 8am and then I'd have to be on campus by noon for classes, you know, and that was hard.
And she wasn't looking for a job at all.
So as you might imagine, things deteriorated pretty rapidly after that.
I'd get home, um, I'd start drinking.
I'd do my assignments, I'd get hammered, you know, and then I'd do it all again the next day.
day.
And I was bitter about those circumstances.
You know, I mean, my ex wasn't looking to help me out at all.
Why did you, you know, your father's a professional.
Why is it that you had to work while you were in college?
Well, actually, to be entirely fair, I didn't really have to, but I, um, I felt like we, uh, needed the, uh, the extra income at that time.
We?
What do you mean?
Um, I, by we, I mean, um, I guess I just, I felt like I wanted the extra income, you know, for me and for my ex.
Were you living with your ex?
Um, whenever, uh, let's see, we, um, for a while we shared a, um, apartment with, um, a friend of mine.
That would be the best way to... Okay, okay.
Yeah.
And why were you drinking?
I mean, that seems like an odd thing to do if you're working hard and studying hard.
Drinking is, well, expensive, right?
I mean, it's expensive to drink a lot.
And wouldn't that not help you get good sleep or be able to concentrate?
Like you say, well, I do my assignments and get hammered.
Those two things, you know, like every now and then I'll put on some, you know, like YouTube has these like classical mixes like a Mozart or Liszt or people like that.
And, you know, every now and then I'll scroll down to the comments just because I love to hear how people love the music that I love.
And people are like, yeah, this is the best study music there is, you know, so like Mozart in your ear, I can understand, you know, Jim Beam in your gut, I can't really.
Well, my best friend who usually is a pretty insightful fellow when it comes to me.
The way he put it is he said that... I come by it honest.
I get it from my old man.
That's his opinion.
So your father was a drinker as well?
Yeah.
Is he still a drinker?
I would say...
Maybe not as bad as at certain times in his life, but he still does have at least a few beers pretty much every day.
And was that instrumental in your parents' breakup?
I think that was one of a lot of factors that contributed to my parents splitting up.
Would it have been in the top three?
Well, it certainly didn't help things, but when I look at all the things that probably caused my parents' breakup, maybe top four, I think that the thing that really drove my mother away was that she, she was afraid that my father was going to die, actually.
Why would that drive her away?
Her father died.
My wife was afraid that I was going to die a couple of years ago.
It didn't drive her away.
My mom's father died in front of her when she was a little girl after a very long, very slow, um, battle with schizophrenia and, um, failing health.
And was your father ill?
Was he, I assume he didn't develop schizophrenia in his forties or fifties.
That's as far as I understand it, usually a late teen thing.
My father, um, my father did get ill, you know, um, and he got pretty bad and the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with him.
And there was a while where Neither of us were sure, you know, neither me nor my mother were sure if he was going to make it.
And I think that seeing him, watching him seemingly deteriorate like that over such a long period of time, I think it probably took her back to her childhood.
And I think that she ran away because she didn't want to live through that again.
And then I would assume that some of your father's bitterness came from feeling abandoned in his hour of need kind of thing.
Yes, certainly.
I'm dealing with the illness and now I have to deal with a divorce on top of this mystery illness, right?
Right.
Did he drink, continue to drink through the course of this illness?
Ah, yes.
Yes, he did.
And I suspect his drinking actually went on an upturn.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the reason that he did that was to kill the pain.
He was in a lot of pain around that time because of the illness, which ended up being a fistula, if I'm not mistaken, in his abdomen.
Which resulted in a big abscess and infection.
And your father's childhood, that he ended up with a woman whose father died of schizophrenia after a long battle with failing health in front of her, was...
What was your father's childhood like?
My father is, for the record, he's about 20 years older than my mother.
Um, And you're older than this girl, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
His childhood, my father's childhood, his mother was very abusive to him.
I guess she would sometimes beat my father and my father's little sister, my aunt.
That got better after, um, essentially my father, my father was born to my grandmother while my grandmother was single.
So she was a single mom.
But after my grandfather came back from World War II, um, my grandfather married my grandmother, the single mom, who, you know, they'd had A relationship before he left for war.
And he continued it and married her after he got back from the war.
And he made her stop physically abusing my father and aunt at that point, which I guess they were a couple of years old at that point.
But I guess that he wasn't very, um, he wasn't very present in the house in a lot of ways.
my father often says that he didn't really have any coaching growing up, you know?
And it just reminded me of this woman's father who's also not present in the house.
Your friend, your 21 year old friend.
Yeah.
And your father.
Yeah, so your father didn't have have coaching and was physically aggressed or abused by his mother.
Did you know if he ever did any Talk therapy to deal with these issues or was it pretty much the alcohol?
We did some, we did a bit of family therapy, like sometimes individual meetings and sometimes, um, on rare occasions as a family around that time because of the illness and because of my mother's struggling emotional status.
Um, We did do some therapy and I think that he did learn some things about himself from that.
I mean, that's how he learned that he had no coaching as a child.
And that's how he learned that his experience growing up was not normal.
But he never pursued it as far as, you know, He's got time off in the summers, but he didn't pursue it as a goal, right?
I suppose not.
I suppose not.
Right.
He changed the way that he parented me around that time, I suppose.
Certain things changed in the way that he treated me as a parent.
You know, he started giving me more coaching.
He started getting more involved with me and he started to kind of protect me.
Nice.
Now, if we were to go to your 21-year-old female friend, how much of this would she know about of you?
My family history, probably not much of it at all.
So this is what I'm talking about, Jason.
You're a 27 year old man.
You're in a relationship with a troubled 21 year old woman or girl.
You guys spend a lot of time talking back and forth But you don't really know much about each other.
You're skimming along the surface.
You're making jokes.
Maybe you're floating a bit.
Maybe you're not.
Talking about movies.
But you're not talking about who you are.
What shaped you.
The trials and challenges and glories and opportunities of everything you experience.
You guys aren't learning about each other.
You're not really there in a very sort of real open and vulnerable way with each other.
And I'm trying to move the needle of what you call love.
I'm trying to move the needle of the whole damn world of what it calls love.
And the reason that I'm saying all of this is because most times people avoid intimacy.
Because they wish to inflict cruelty.
In other words, if you knew as much about her history as I've found out about you in the last 45 minutes or hour, if you knew as much about her history, then you could not vent your cruelty on her.
Because she would be real to you, right?
Intimacy, knowledge of the other person, particularly of their childhood, is the best chance we have to avoid the temptation to be cruel.
And so you guys skim along at the surface, not really getting to know each other, so that you can continue to repeat childhood patterns with each other.
Intimacy, childhood dysfunction arises out of distance, arises out of alienation or abuse or neglect.
Out of a lack of presence of true and real and vivid personalities in the room, in the house, in your heart.
It is distance that creates trauma.
It is the distance that creates the trauma that also contributes to the capacity for nastiness, bitterness, meanness, viciousness, verbal abuse.
or even physical abuse.
We cannot hurt those we are truly close to.
And there's a reason why you haven't asked these obvious questions of her or shared these obvious answers of yours with her.
And that's because you need her around in case you're upset.
You need, I don't mean the whole time that she's around you just waiting to vent.
What I mean is that you need her to remain objectified in your mind so that she can be a punching bag if you're upset.
Because if you really, there's a reason why people don't really try to get to know each other.
And it's frustrated me my whole life.
Why, why don't we ask and answer these basic questions about ourself?
It's not a criticism of you because it's so common.
Jason everywhere in the world everybody's just flying past like mad jetpack helicopters in the middle of the night on lonely stretched unnavigated unmapped mountains and there's proximity and there's giggling and there's chit chat and there's shared interests and I like this band and wasn't that a cool movie and I've always liked Jason Sedaris and like there's all this froth and there's no time
At all, there are all these bubbles and there's no depth.
And when I use the word love, I use the depth and totality of knowing someone's history, of being inside their secret places, of being deep within the heart whose depth they didn't even know they had until you started excavating.
You know, we create depth through questions, through interest, through acceptance, through curiosity about who the other person is and what really makes them tick.
That's just not all about the dominoes of history.
I mean, it's, but it's, it's a great place to start, especially when someone's 21 years old or 27 for that matter.
And so my invitation to you Jason is share yourself.
My friend with people.
Be curious.
I dare say relentlessly curious, although that sounds more aggressive than it actually is.
But don't take fog for an answer.
Don't take I don't know for an answer.
Point out people's contradictory statements.
It doesn't have to be in a negative or hostile or difficult way, but you know, like earlier I said, well, you don't want to give yourself excuses, but you said it was circumstances that drove you.
It wasn't mean, but I'm just pointing it out.
But share yourself with people open your heart and work to massage the depth out of other people's emptiness through your curiosity.
Now once you begin to really do that with people to ask them questions to be honest and deep in your responses and the reason I'm saying this Jason is that you admirably did that during this conversation and as you said and I really listened to that you said This is hard stuff to talk about and I agree but it's harder to not have this level of intimacy.
When you have this level of intimacy with people you get certainty and you get safety because when you're really close to people you can't hurt them any more than you want to punch yourself in the face.
Cruelty requires distance.
Distance feeds cruelty which requires distance which feeds cruelty and this is why cruelty drives people further away and increases cruelty because people see the life raft in the endless ocean of isolation drifting away from them and they freak out and panic and they strike out and they swim towards it but every movement they make drives the life raft further and further away and it's an agonizing existence and you're young it has not fully flowered it's evil
seed in your heart, but I'm concerned that it will.
I don't want you to end up like your father.
I don't want you to end up like your mother.
But for that, you have to worry less about things like polyamory and less about self-management.
See, when you say, well, I have a hard time restraining my emotions and desires, part of me says this, part of me says that, all of that Self-management, all of that confusion, all of those contradictory impulses arise from a lack of intimacy.
A lack of truly knowing someone.
And truly having that person know you.
And one of the reasons we're scared to do it, and this is why it's tough to do in all but the newer or newest relationships, is that if there has been cruelty in the past, intimacy may cause her to lash out at you.
She's hurt.
She has to be.
If she has any heart at all, then what you said to her, that only a crazy person would date you, has to hurt her.
And that hurt is there.
It's in there like a red baby, crying, angry.
And so bring down her empty walls of distance, lower yours, there may be some backlash.
And that's the cruelty is another way of saying, well, it's now unwise for me to lower my defenses.
And I'm sure you saw a lot of what I'm talking about in the later phases of your parents' marriage and in the later phases of your relationship with the woman who was this 21 year old woman's friend during the breakup.
But this conversation, which I very much appreciate you engaging in, is a small example of the kind of conversations that you need to have before you can say that you love anyone, not least of all, yourself.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Thank you.
Will you try and have a chat about this stuff with this young lady?
I I, um, it seems like a good place to start at the very least.
I think one good thing to start doing or one good thing to start with, I think would be to say sorry for what I did, what I said.
Yeah.
I think so.
That stuff can define broken people like that stuff.
can be the container into which their fluid personalities pour themselves into it can define her for herself and she may not even know it and I may be wrong maybe she doesn't even remember it although that would be pretty crazy too but yeah I think that and and then you know at some point I would recommend you know talk to your your father and your mother and whoever else is in your life
about this kind of stuff, learn about their histories, learn what makes them tick.
Especially, you know, if your father is a drinker and has had some bouts of ill health, it might be worthwhile or prudent to do it sooner rather than later.
I think so.
Good.
I'll do my best.
Let us know how it goes.
And also you may want to engage a therapist if you're starting down this road.
I always recommend therapy to just about anyone, particularly those who are on the cusp of pursuing self-knowledge.
So I would certainly recommend that as something to look into.
But I hope that you'll let us know how it goes with these conversations.
And do give my best wishes to this young lady.
And I'm sorry that her father seems to be so in orbit when it comes to family openness.
I certainly hope we all try to do the best we can.
All right.
I'll have to take the platitude and run.
But thanks a lot for the call.
Thank you, everyone, so much for calling in tonight.
It was a very enjoyable and engaging show for me.
I hope it was that for you as well.
And freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
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So this is Sven Molyneux for Freedom Main Radio.
Thank you, thank you so much for listening, watching and watching as always.
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