Sept. 24, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:35:47
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Thank you so much for responding so quickly. | |
| That was very nice of you. | |
| It worked out. | |
| Actually, it worked out. | |
| So I'm glad we have the chance to chat. | |
| I'm glad too, because all of this is still fresh in my mind, so I'm in the best place to talk about it. | |
| It's unusual, but cool for me to be able to do a listener call without someone having to wait for months. | |
| Good, I'm glad. | |
| Your persistence paid off, just like I said. | |
| I didn't even have to persist too much, so that's very nice. | |
| I did tweet you, and then I saw you responded to my email. | |
| I don't even know if you saw the tweet, so I deleted the tweet. | |
| Anyway, here we are. | |
| Do you want to just read your message, and we'll take it from there? | |
| Yeah, is my audio okay? | |
| Yeah, let me pull up the message. | |
| Okay, so I'll read it. I said, I'll make this brief. | |
| I have to talk to you. | |
| I'm at a point in my life where I must decide the type of person I want to be. | |
| I can either carry on with the momentum of history or I can decide to be a different kind of person. | |
| I am desperate. I write that abstractly to catch your attention because I know you must get so many emails and I don't know how else to communicate the desperation I feel psychologically and spiritually right now. | |
| I will be more specific. | |
| For the first time in my life, I'm 27, I met a woman who is virtuous. | |
| Before I met her, I did not fully grasp what you meant when you described a virtuous woman, how intuitive they are, and how they seem to have a sixth sense for detecting a real character flaws. | |
| The woman I've met is exactly like that. | |
| She has shed a light on the way I am living that has jolted me into these feelings of desperation. | |
| We are both Christians, and to speak as a Christian for a moment, she has shown me aspects of myself which are deeply sinful and incompatible with living a sustainable life of virtue. | |
| If I want to be with a woman like her, if I want to live a virtuous life and have a good family, I need to get rid of these aspects of myself. | |
| There is no other option. | |
| My question is how can I radically transform myself so I can be worthy of a good woman? | |
| That's quite a confession and quite a tale. | |
| And I can sort of feel the blood of Christ pouring through your veins in this kind of revelation. | |
| I'll just call you Bob. | |
| It's not your real name. So I'll just call you Bob to keep you more anonymous. | |
| So hopefully you can feel more comfortable sharing some of the more challenging aspects of that conversation with the woman. | |
| So tell me a little bit about how you met and what struck you as virtuous about her. | |
| So, very simply, I met her on a Christian dating app. | |
| Before we met, we had been communicating via email for maybe a month, and she was very reluctant to meet me because she was sort of coming off a strange time in her life. | |
| Going through some things herself. | |
| And she sort of had the sense even back then that maybe I might not be sort of as mature as she is. | |
| You mean sort of she was in a bad relationship? | |
| Is that what you mean? No. | |
| Just a very strange situation with her figuring out sort of the nature of reality and things like this. | |
| She's sort of going through a tough time. | |
| Look, if it's philosophical, you could get a smidge more detailed, right? | |
| It's not like there are any demons in that aspect of the closet, right? | |
| She was reading a lot of Carl Jung and connecting things with Christianity, and it was a very strange time. | |
| I think she had a friend who she had a very strange relationship with that she didn't totally understand. | |
| This all happened a few months before she met me. | |
| But it's not exactly relevant to the issues she's having with me. | |
| Yeah, just by the by, Jung can be a bit of a reality dissolver, because Jung focuses so deep on the unconscious. | |
| That you feel like the world is a pale reflection of the treasures and wonders and worlds within your mind. | |
| And I mean, I get all of that. | |
| I mean, if you look at, I don't know, Lord of the Rings or, you know, that someone can create a whole world out of their unconscious, out of their mind, right? | |
| So there are worlds and powers and depth and beauty and terror in the unconscious. | |
| But Jung is like, you know, I kind of like the pearl diver, you know, like you grit your teeth, you go down, you get what you need for the unconscious, you work with it, but then you've got to come back up, man. | |
| Whereas Jung is like, we'll live down here. | |
| Let's just stay down here. | |
| And, you know, we can watch the world go by from the ripples far overhead. | |
| And he really does kind of suck you down to a very deep place, which is fine. | |
| I mean, I think it's great, but it's a one-way staircase, man. | |
| Like, you climb down, and it's one of these horrible things where you climb down using this rope ladder, and you get to the bottom, and you step off the rope ladder, and then you've got a big pile of rope ladder at your feet, because the whole thing damn... | |
| The whole damn thing came down after you. | |
| So anyway, I just wanted to mention that I kind of get where she's coming from. | |
| Yeah. She's a very deep thinker, which is one of the reasons why I like her so much. | |
| And she's very educated about these sorts of things. | |
| And she sort of went into Jung and it sort of had the effect that you mentioned, sort of scrambled her worldview and she sort of had to recreate it. | |
| And it was just a very jarring experience for her. | |
| And she's going through a lot with her... | |
| With her education and her career. | |
| And so it's just a transitioning period for her. | |
| So she's just in a strange place. | |
| But further than that, she was reluctant to meet me because through our texts, she started to get the sense that maybe I might not be... | |
| As mature in all the ways that she needs someone to be if she's going to be serious with them. | |
| And she's someone who wants to be serious with someone. | |
| So you're going to be very abstract with me in this call, right? | |
| No, I don't intend to be. | |
| I'm just trying to summarize it. | |
| No, no, don't summarize, man. | |
| Go deep. And if I need us to come up for air, I'll let you know. | |
| So what was going on with her friend? | |
| I think she had this female friend who she had a very strange relationship with that seemed to have sexual and romantic either undertones or overtones and she was very confused by it because typically she considers herself to be heterosexual and She's a Christian and all that. | |
| Although young girls are getting a lot of go-explore propaganda these days. | |
| I don't know that it's all too healthy and all that. | |
| Yeah, and she decided the same thing. | |
| So she cut it off with that friend of hers. | |
| But it was very jarring for her because they were close and so she was coming out of that. | |
| But she did cut it off with her because she acknowledged it was unhealthy and the friend was somewhat manipulative and The friend was one of these not sociopathic, but sort of cold, distant, play-with-your-emotions kind of people, and so it very much confused her, and she didn't like it, and she ended it with that friend, which I thought was a very good sign because it means she doesn't want that type of person. | |
| So that's what was going on with her friend. | |
| It's usually like the people who've faced down some kind of moral challenge in their life and succeeded, you know, those are the people that you kind of want around, right? | |
| Because there's all this thing, oh, I'm going to be so innocent. | |
| So those people, they usually get scooped up by evil like a worm with a kid looking to go fishing, right? | |
| And so you want to see people who've kind of faced down that darkness and made their choices. | |
| I mean, this is a Christian thing too, right? | |
| That if you dance with the devil, you know the music and you can steer clear of the next party. | |
| Yeah, and that's going to be a theme in this conversation is that she very much resists the dancing with the devil. | |
| And she thinks that I do some of that. | |
| Right, so I get that. | |
| That's why I'm bringing it up, because I get that she's got concerns about you, and I just wanted to get a sense of where she was in the mapping out of problematic behaviors and so on. | |
| Okay, got it. Yeah, so I'm sorry if I was abstract. | |
| I'll be more specific. No problem. | |
| No, because most people like to stick with abstractions, and I get it's a philosophy show and all that, but we have to build... | |
| In order to build beauty, we need material. | |
| You want a nice house, you need some bricks. | |
| So let's start with the bricks. So you've chatted back and forth with her for about a month before she met you. | |
| Is she far away? No, but she's in medical school, so she was sort of in the middle of a lot of So she sort of said, well, initially we texted a little bit and almost immediately she said she got the sense that it wasn't going to work out. | |
| I said, well, I said pretty much, how do you know that? | |
| We just had a brief text conversation and she told me some reasons why. | |
| And the reason she told me was based on how I was typing. | |
| I used a curse word and It was all kind of silly to me. | |
| And I think it may or may not have been silly of her. | |
| Maybe that was her intuition. But she later emailed me and she said she thought she overreacted and she's sorry because she was going through a lot. | |
| And we sort of exchanged emails about... | |
| Damn, see now that's quality right there. | |
| And I just want to pause on this. | |
| That's quality, man, right there. | |
| I agree. Because there's someone, right? | |
| She does something. And she reflects on it afterwards. | |
| She reflects on it afterwards, right? | |
| I mean, so when I was 15, I think I spent a summer in Newfoundland, in St. | |
| John's and other places. | |
| Because a friend of my father's was a marine biologist out there. | |
| And we just roamed all over the place. | |
| And it was really, really cool. And I remember spending an entire day swimming in the Atlantic Ocean in crazy cold weather. | |
| And I was driving with... | |
| Or his daughter was driving me. | |
| We were going someplace with some friends in the car. | |
| And, you know, it's pitch black in the way that country nights tend to be or country lanes tend to be. | |
| And there was a thump. And we were like... | |
| We were in a hurry. | |
| We wanted to get to a party. | |
| And it was like... | |
| Could be something, could be nothing. | |
| You know, so you try and make up this stuff. | |
| Like, oh, I'm sure, you know, like rocks don't just roll into the car. | |
| Like, we hit something, right? | |
| So anyway, we had a debate about it and, you know, we all agreed, well, we can't really go and enjoy the party if we think, right? | |
| So we went back and unfortunately we'd hit a cat in the dark. | |
| And so we had to then go and find the owner, and the cat was dead, and there was no chance. | |
| Like, the cat just jumped, you know, in the way that animals occasionally do. | |
| It just jumped out, hit, the car hit. | |
| And, you know, it was a drag, but of course we couldn't just leave a cat out there dead for the owner to find at some point, so we had to knock on a bunch of houses in this middle of nowhere, like a really remote area. | |
| And we did eventually find the owner and express our condolences and gave our sympathies and so on. | |
| And that was the evening, right? | |
| We then just went and got coffee or something because we couldn't really go to a party after that. | |
| So the reason I'm saying all of this is this ridiculously long-winded, as usual, way of saying that most people don't turn back. | |
| Most people, it's like, boom! | |
| So you've got two types of people. | |
| The people who obsess about it but don't turn back. | |
| And then they never let it go. | |
| The people who don't give a crap and just keep driving. | |
| And then the people who turn back and deal with the situation in a reasonably responsible manner. | |
| And so what happened was, I'm just pointing this out more to the audience than to you, right? | |
| This woman... She reflected upon her own behavior and she compared her behavior to a standard of morality or a standard of interaction that she had, right? | |
| That is a beautiful thing. | |
| That is someone you can already begin to trust because somebody who's self-reflective. | |
| And it's willing to come back and say, hmm, yeah, I was a bit strong there. | |
| I do apologize. Let's give it another go. | |
| That's someone who is self-regulating, right? | |
| Self-regulating. In other words, she's not expecting the world to regulate her own emotions, but she's willing to look at her own emotions, compare them to ideal standards, which means she has free will. | |
| Real free will. And she's not expecting you to manage your emotions. | |
| In other words, when she's upset, she's going to ask herself, am I being reasonable? | |
| Rather than, well, you made me upset! | |
| You know, all of this triggered modern garbage that's, I don't know, just terrible and wrong and false and manipulative and controlling and fundamentally totalitarian. | |
| If you can't control your own feelings, you end up having to control everyone around you forever and ever on amen. | |
| So I just wanted to sort of point that out. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I just got so many green flags from her like that. | |
| So it went like that. | |
| She emailed me. She actually sought out my email. | |
| Sorry to interrupt. What was she circling back for? | |
| I mean, because unfortunately, in the analogy, you were the dead cat. | |
| So I'm sorry. I just realized that now. | |
| That is not a very flattering thing. | |
| I apologize for that. So there must have been something that had her circled back for you, right? | |
| Yeah. I'm not exactly sure. | |
| It could be because after she... | |
| So we had our brief text conversation and I think that day I was... | |
| I had a very bad day that day. | |
| I'm having some trouble with my thesis advisor that day and... | |
| I was dealing with my unruly neighbors who keep accusing me of things that aren't true. | |
| So I was sort of complaining to her about it. | |
| On which round of texting with this girl when you complained about your life? | |
| This was the first one. Oh man, really? | |
| Oh dude. Put on a happy face a little bit, you know? | |
| Yeah. I don't care if you've got gas when you've got the job interview. | |
| Don't talk about your gas. | |
| Well, it was sort of like, how are you doing kind of thing. | |
| And I'm like, well, not very good. | |
| But, yeah, so... | |
| So, at the end of that conversation, she said, basically, I don't think it's going to work out. | |
| And I said, well, how do you know that after one conversation? | |
| And she told me the reason why. | |
| How are you doing, man? I got this weird little wart on my inner thigh. | |
| Can I send you a photo? Aren't you in med school? | |
| Anyway, sorry, go on. Yeah, so I said, how do you know that after one conversation? | |
| She's like, oh, you know, these reasons. | |
| And I said... I said, basically, okay, I can see where you're coming from. | |
| I'm not going to try to convince you, otherwise I don't want to argue with your intuitions. | |
| That's what I said. Because, again, I was having a bad day. | |
| I'm not about to chase some girl that I just matched with on a dating website. | |
| So I said, maybe you're right. | |
| You should trust your intuitions. | |
| And then a few days later, she had found my email, because I think she deleted my number, but she found my email address. | |
| She emailed me and she said, you know, I was thinking about it and maybe I did overreact. | |
| Maybe she didn't overreact. | |
| It wasn't the best first impression, like you said. | |
| I have to ask this question. | |
| She's not on the phone. | |
| No. Are you a good-looking guy? | |
| I'm a decent-looking guy. | |
| One to ten? What are we working with here? | |
| I think six to seven, depending on whose type I am. | |
| I have a sort of baby face, so that would shape it. | |
| You've got Neatney working for you? | |
| Okay. Well, it's better for women than for boys, but all right. | |
| So you asked why would she circle back? | |
| I think it might have been because during that conversation, the only thing... | |
| Sorry, I'm tripping over my words here. | |
| We didn't just talk about my bad day. | |
| We talked about a bunch of other stuff and we realized we had a lot in common. | |
| Namely, sort of philosophy, Christianity. | |
| Obviously, we met on a Christian dating app, but she's very interested in philosophy. | |
| Both have an interest in neuroscience. | |
| Carl Jung, we're both interested in. | |
| Both Peterson fans. | |
| Jordan Peterson. Right. | |
| I thought those were all pretty optimistic things. | |
| What do you think of this rehab situation? | |
| Oh, with Jordan Peterson? | |
| Yeah. It's tough. | |
| You know, I can't imagine what it's like to have someone that you love so dearly's life threatened. | |
| I mean, he's known her forever since they were kids, and I think I don't know if he's the best at dealing with his anxieties and his depression issues. | |
| I think, unfortunately, he ended up on some medication that's very addictive. | |
| And I would know that because I just had a problem with anxiety last month and I took a few benzos. | |
| And they're pretty magic. | |
| I can see how you can get addicted to that very quickly. | |
| Magic how? What was your experience? | |
| They just took away the anxiety. | |
| Like poof? Like just gone? | |
| Within an hour, yeah. | |
| Oh my god. And for people who struggle with anxiety, right? | |
| I mean, that's like getting a real monkey off your back. | |
| And it's very addictive because when I took a few, I was concerned about it. | |
| Wait, wait. You mean a few spaced out, not like a few at once? | |
| Yeah. No, I don't have a problem. | |
| I never had a problem with benzos. | |
| But I was concerned about it because I'm like, this is very powerful. | |
| There must be something. | |
| There must be some cash. So I looked up the... | |
| The subreddit for it, and there are people on there who are saying, I'd rather be addicted to cocaine. | |
| It's a very powerful drug, and the withdrawal symptoms are apparently very powerful. | |
| I got emails, honestly, after I tweeted about it, I got emails from people who were like, oh man, they left me suicidal for days trying to get off this stuff. | |
| It's really... Yeah, so I think it's probably for the best that he went to rehab because getting off that stuff, it sounded like he tried to quit cold turkey after he found out that his wife was going to be okay and that didn't really work out for him. | |
| But don't they, I mean, I don't know if you've, I mean, don't the doctor say, you know, careful this stuff is dicey and don't take too much of it, don't take it for too long kind of thing? | |
| I honestly, I don't know because I wasn't prescribed it. | |
| I got some from my mom who uses them on occasion. | |
| She doesn't have a problem with them either. | |
| She'll use them once in a while as sort of like a last resort sort of thing. | |
| And that's how I used it too. | |
| I don't really know what the doctors tell you when they prescribe them. | |
| I think they're supposed to be used for stuff like if you have panic attacks and you've got to get on an airplane, you can use it for the airplane trip kind of thing. | |
| As far as I understand it, I'm not a doctor obviously, but as far as I understand it, it's not supposed to be here's how you manage your anxiety for the next six months. | |
| I don't know, but then again, I think he has a history of Those sorts of issues. | |
| It's hard to put myself in that situation because if your wife, who you've noticed as a kid, is potentially dying, maybe I would do it too. | |
| She was traveling with him too, right? | |
| With his tours and all of that, she was traveling with him. | |
| Obviously, they have a very close relationship. | |
| It's a hell of a thing. I massively sympathize with that kind of news and all of that. | |
| I don't know. To me, it's not causal from the diagnosis, right? | |
| His wife's terrifying diagnosis and the subsequent health issues. | |
| The way it was reported was like, well, he's in rehab because he took benzos because... | |
| His wife was facing death, right? | |
| I mean, and it's like... Yeah, that's definitely a... | |
| That's not causal, right? | |
| There is still choice in there. | |
| And that's sort of, you know, I got some flack on Twitter for sort of, you know, like, gosh, I mean, I would assume he knows about this stuff. | |
| I mean, he's talked about... | |
| I know they're not specifically psychotropics, but he's talked about mind-altering, mind-saving mental health issue drugs forever. | |
| I assume he knows all about this stuff. | |
| So anyway, I have just a lot of sympathy, but I just didn't want to leave this impression. | |
| People say, well, you get really bad news like that, then you've got to take this stuff, and then you end up in rehab. | |
| And it's like this. | |
| Yeah, you've got to be careful. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| The guy has a lot of demons. | |
| I don't think he's as put together as... | |
| As people might assume. | |
| And neither do I think he pretends to be. | |
| I think he's been very honest with his problems. | |
| So it really comes as no surprise to me if this would happen, but I do hope he gets better soon. | |
| Well, I'm sure he will. I mean, he's a man of obviously uncommon intellect and willpower, and I assume that he's in the best hands possible. | |
| I mean, I think he's in a rehab facility in New York, and I just, you know, his wife had to flee to the States like I did to kind of save her life, and now he's doing rehab in New York, and it's like... | |
| I just hope he turns his attention to the deficiencies in the socialist healthcare system in Canada. | |
| That would be, to me, it would be a harsh lesson to learn, but it would be important. | |
| And if he does, right, because, you know, one of the reasons I talk about the evils of socialized medicine is like, oh, it's fine for Jordan Peterson. | |
| You know, I mean, not fine, but, you know, he's got the resources. | |
| He's very wealthy now, right? | |
| So he can fly his wife all over and get the best care, and he can check into a private rehab facility. | |
| It's like, Your average trucker in Cornwall, Ontario, is not going to have those kinds of resources, and he's kind of stuck with the system that, I don't know, does not appear, from what I've heard, does not appear to have done his wife a great deal of good, or himself, for that matter. | |
| Sorry, I just wanted to, since you mentioned Peterson, it's sort of on my mind. | |
| It is interesting. I'm actually, you know, it's pretty fun to talk with you about that, exchanging thoughts about something we both know about. | |
| Anyway, I forget where I was. | |
| Okay, so sorry. We were with the girl, and she's back with you, so she circles back to you. | |
| And how old is she? She's my age, so she's 27, too. | |
| And how close is she to finishing med school? | |
| Pretty much almost done. | |
| And then she goes into what she gets a job? | |
| Yeah, apparently there's like a matching process, which is some sort of sci-fi hellhole where you Apply to all these places and some algorithm sets you up with a place and you're sort of stuck with whatever they match you to. | |
| And that's an issue for a potential relationship too. | |
| And we both know about that. | |
| Isn't it just the internship, right? | |
| Or whatever it's called. I'm sorry for some reason. | |
| Residency. Residency. I couldn't remember the word for some moment. | |
| Yeah. But that's, I mean, that's pretty brutal. | |
| Not just on relationships, but on just your life. | |
| I mean, isn't this the crazy, like, well, you can't be a trucker on the road for eight hours, but you sure as hell can diagnose people after 30 hours with no sleep. | |
| And it's like, I've never, I've never understood. | |
| This is like, this is the most insane system that you could set up, but that's what she might be facing, right? | |
| Yeah, and she was worried about that too, because she kept telling me, well, I don't know if you can handle that or I don't know if you want to handle that. | |
| You won't see her, right? | |
| I mean, you won't see her. | |
| I don't know how long it is for. | |
| The way I kept seeing it is, if I meet someone of enough value, then that would be worth enduring. | |
| That's how I saw it. | |
| Right, right. And I kept thinking of calls that you had where people... | |
| Have circumstances that keep them apart and you're like, well, why don't you just move or why don't you just do this? | |
| And people are like, well, I can't just do that. | |
| But my thinking is, well, I guess if you meet someone who's valuable enough, then yeah, you just move. | |
| Just make it work. Well, I mean, if you love her and she loves you in time, right? | |
| You get married and you just go and support her during that process. | |
| Yeah, so I was thinking that. | |
| I was thinking, well, it's worth exploring and if it turns out that we're very good for each other, then I could be willing to do that, right? | |
| Because that's... That seems like the right thing to do if you meet someone of high enough value. | |
| And does she want kids? Yes. | |
| And when would she want to have kids? | |
| Well, she's aware that her biological clock is a thing, so I would assume within... | |
| Within the next, you know, some amount of time. | |
| I don't know, honestly. | |
| Okay, that's between now and the end of the universe, assuming it's not tomorrow and he returns in all his glory, right? | |
| If I have to assume, I don't really want to assume, but... | |
| I think if I was her, I would probably say sometime between now and like early 30. | |
| Sorry, not now, but sometime between like the end of residency would seem like a rational time and then early 30s, something like that. | |
| She's still only 27, so she still has some time. | |
| And does she want to stay home with the kids, or would she go back to work, or do you have any thoughts about that? | |
| Have you talked about that at all? | |
| I haven't talked about it, mostly because I can only assume she would go back to work. | |
| Perhaps she would stay home during the early years or during some time period, but... | |
| Because, I mean, it's just a frustrating thing. | |
| Just, it's a frustrating thing, and I'm sorry for, like, blech, you know, but... | |
| Yeah, I know. It's like, you know what it is, right? | |
| Like, so she's now poured... | |
| Well, society has now poured, you know, I guess, what, 13, 12 years of school, and then, you know, another seven or eight years for her to become a doctor, another year or two of this residency, and then it's like, oh man, sorry, I've got to have some babies. | |
| And it's like, oh man, that's great. | |
| Yeah, who needs healthcare? You know, it's fine. | |
| But... The question around work is important, right? | |
| It is. Is she going to breastfeed, which is good for the babies on just about every conceivable level, and recommended is sort of 18 months as far as I understand it. | |
| So is she going to stay home? | |
| And if she's not going to stay home, how are the kids going to breastfeed? | |
| Are you going to stay home? If neither of you are going to stay home, then who's going to raise your children? | |
| Personally, I would stay home. | |
| If I was with her and she was a doctor, I would stay home. | |
| Right, right. Yeah, and I mean, that can be cool. | |
| That can be cool. I speak from experience. | |
| That can be cool. | |
| But still, I mean, the breastfeeding is something that needs to be worked out. | |
| I guess she can pump in the toilet or something. | |
| She's very open to good arguments. | |
| So if I made her aware of the importance of breastfeeding, if she's not aware already, she may be aware already. | |
| I'm sure she would make it work. | |
| But in terms of the staying home I can't imagine that she would go through this just to quit her career. | |
| Well, not forever, right? | |
| I mean, if you have a couple of kids, sort of, you know, five, seven years kind of thing. | |
| This always sounds like a jail sentence, being sentenced to baby duty. | |
| You're in baby jail for five to seven years or whatever. | |
| So, I mean, if I was with her, I would definitely be open to staying home. | |
| But I do want to circle back to the whole timeline thing just so you can get an idea, unless you think that's not worth doing. | |
| Hey man, you're an equal participant in this conversation. | |
| If you want to do it, no! | |
| Whatever you want. Well, I don't know. | |
| You have more experience with the conversation. | |
| No, no. If it's important to you, it's important to me. | |
| Right. So she emailed me after that and she said, well, here were my concerns. | |
| This is what I was thinking, but maybe I overreacted and maybe we can meet after my test, which is at the end of August. | |
| This conversation was at the beginning of August. | |
| So she said, well, we can meet at the end of August. | |
| So I said, okay, no problem. | |
| We'll meet at the end of August. | |
| And then I got another email from her a while later saying, hey, I did some research on you. | |
| To me... Some people might say this sounds stalkerish. | |
| I think it was prudent of her. | |
| She just looked me up on a few social media sites because she's serious. | |
| She wants to know, is this guy worth... | |
| This is why I'm so glad I'm not in the dating world. | |
| Yeah. Can you imagine? | |
| So she's like, I saw your Spotify. | |
| I'm not sure about some of your music choices and among other things. | |
| And she's like, well, I kind of changed my mind. | |
| I hope that's okay. I hope you don't feel bad. | |
| And I said, you know what? Again, I'm not about to chase after someone at this stage. | |
| I'm like... If that's how you feel, we won't meet. | |
| And then she circles back again. | |
| Wait, why are you not? | |
| I mean, did you not care that much about her? | |
| At this stage, I barely know her. | |
| So it's like I just matched with this girl and she's going back and forth. | |
| To me, I'm like, you know, I can take it or leave it. | |
| I didn't really know her at that stage. | |
| And at this point, I'm kind of past chasing people if I don't think they're worth it. | |
| And at that point, I didn't know if she was worth it. | |
| I think the pendulum may have swung a little. | |
| Yeah. Now you're like, how can I get this girl? | |
| Okay, that's fine. No, I was just wondering where you were at, because if the woman is of quality, then, you know, you don't just say, well, you know, make your own choices. | |
| I mean, obviously she can make her own choices, but you get it there and you fight for her, right? | |
| At that point, I also thought, like, it's a little strange that she's so wishy-washy. | |
| She did explain that to me, and... | |
| She did give her reasons. | |
| Oh, she said, you know, I saw some of your social media, like maybe we're not spiritually on the same level because she saw my Spotify and I guess I listened to some music that isn't, it's not exactly Christian. | |
| I listen to a lot of music. I mean, what are we talking here? | |
| King Crimson? I mean, where are we at the levels here? | |
| Nothing so bad, just a lot of secular music, some of which is... | |
| King Kurt, sorry, King Kurt, I was thinking of King Crimson. | |
| No, like Billie Eilish is... | |
| Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. | |
| But still, some things with lyrics that are not exactly Christian appropriate. | |
| So I guess we say that. | |
| So she said maybe we're not on the same level and I don't want to waste anyone's time. | |
| So again, I said, you know, fine. | |
| And then she emailed me again and she said, you know, this is bothering me. | |
| I keep doing this and I'm sorry about it, but something tells me maybe I overreacted again. | |
| And then I basically said, I told her, this is very strange to me. | |
| I'm like, you haven't even met me. | |
| Maybe you should meet me before you're making all these assumptions about how bad or not I am. | |
| And she agreed, and then we eventually met, and we had a very good first date. | |
| And we had some good dates after that. | |
| And, yeah. | |
| So that was the beginning timeline. | |
| I think, does that... | |
| Yeah, yeah. So she said, it was the end of August, that she could meet you. | |
| So did you meet before then, or...? | |
| Yeah, we met around the second to last week of August. | |
| Okay, got it. | |
| So we had a good few first dates. | |
| Now, do you have any questions or should I continue? | |
| No, I'm good. | |
| If there's new stuff on the timeline looming up in the front, then let's switch on the headlights. | |
| So this is where... She started to get wary of me again and probably, maybe or probably for good reason. | |
| So I had her over my house. | |
| I didn't do anything inappropriate with her because I'm a Christian too. | |
| I'm not about to do that. | |
| But she didn't meet my best friend and my best friend did not make a good first impression on her. | |
| And my roommate and my best friend, I should clarify. | |
| So he's my roommate and he's my best friend. | |
| So he did not make a very good first impression. | |
| He curses a lot. | |
| He's very crude. And she thought, well, if this guy is his best friend, maybe that's not such a good sign. | |
| And honestly, that was a green flag for me because I'm thinking back to all the times you talk about this. | |
| And that's sort of what I meant by my opening message, right? | |
| How intuitive she is, right? | |
| She's just making these connections naturally. | |
| Now, did you tell your friend, I'm bringing over a nice Christian girl? | |
| I'm trying to remember if I did. | |
| Why is your friend ring-blocking you in this way? | |
| I definitely told him I was bringing over a girl. | |
| I'm trying to remember if I told him she was Christian. | |
| I think I might have, but I probably didn't make it explicit enough. | |
| But But even if I did tell him that, that is the way he is. | |
| So it would have came out eventually, even if he was... | |
| Hang on, hang on. What do you mean that is the way he is? | |
| Does he have a job? No, yeah, he has a job. | |
| Yeah? Does he regularly cuss at his job? | |
| No. Oh, look! | |
| We found an alternative way of being! | |
| Yes, but what I'm saying is, even if he was well-behaved the first time, eventually... | |
| That's how his behavior is. | |
| And to be frank, that's how my behavior is around him. | |
| No, listen, I get all of that. | |
| I get that. I get that. | |
| But, you know, you've had a job. | |
| I'm sure you've called in sick, but you don't call sick for the job interview. | |
| You don't call sick for the job interview. | |
| Over time, you know, you can let down your guard a little, right? | |
| Yeah. It's impossible to be a married man without passing audible gas from time to time, but you don't do it on the first date, right? | |
| Yeah. I mean, it's not like he was being incredibly offensive or anything, but he just drops a lot of F-bombs and things like that, and she didn't like that. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's just odd to me. I mean, I have a complicated relationship with swearing, so I want to get into all of that, but... | |
| Yeah. I mean, if this is a girl you like, then he should find out what kind of girl she is before he starts dropping F-bombs on her. | |
| I mean, that's just a basic... | |
| I know he's not the direct host, but he's like a part host. | |
| You have people over to your house, and you don't put on a tux, but you're not in sweats, right? | |
| You're right. He's not the best socially, but you're right. | |
| You're right about that. But, you know, that's what happened. | |
| Yeah, yeah. No, but the question is, I mean, I'd just sit down and talk with him and say, okay, like, we gotta, as your friend, right? | |
| Because this is going to limit him in his life, right? | |
| Yeah. So, if he's your best friend and you care about him, as I'm sure you do, and you want him to have a good life, as I'm sure you do, then you have to sit down and not give him the excuse of, well, this is just who he is and he's being authentic. | |
| It's like, come on. You know, there are social niceties that Yeah, you're right. | |
| If you're a friend, right? | |
| And you got to help them through this, like whatever this is, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, I mean, that was just one thing. | |
| But it is a big one for her because she kept... | |
| Well, it was the first thing, right? | |
| You swore in the text message. | |
| Yes. | |
| Right. | |
| See, here's the thing, too. This is my sort of question. | |
| Because I'm trying to sort of get myself into her pumps, so to speak, right? | |
| And so I'm sitting there thinking, okay, well, this guy, he knows I don't like cursing. | |
| And his best friend curses like a sailor who just hit his balls with a hammer, right? | |
| Accidentally. And... | |
| So that would be a red flag for me if I were in her situation, right? | |
| Because, you know, you sit there and say to your friend, hey, you know, this girl does not like swearing. | |
| So, you know, do me a favor. | |
| Do me a solid, brother. And, you know, cool it on the asterisks, so to speak, right? | |
| But you didn't do that, right? | |
| Yeah, I should have. | |
| Yeah. So, I mean, I'm just... | |
| Mistakes were made. | |
| No, mistakes were made. | |
| Oh, there's a grad student. | |
| But, no, this is... | |
| Because, you know, you're asking me a basic question. | |
| It's, okay, how to become a better person for this great woman, right? | |
| Well, this is one way, which is you take lessons from the past and you move them into the future, right? | |
| Yeah. Okay. All right. | |
| Because I'm with her on this one. | |
| You know she doesn't like swearing and you've got this casimatic roommate, right? | |
| Or best friend, right? So that means that either you have in process that she doesn't like it enough to tell him or you told him and he doesn't care or whatever, right? | |
| But somehow she ends up, even though she told you I don't like swearing, she ends up back in the presence of swearing again. | |
| Yeah. So I'm with you and I'm with her. | |
| Not with Hillary, but with the girl. | |
| Yeah, so that was, it is a red flag, and that's sort of the problem, is that I'm giving off all these red flags. | |
| I'm giving off a lot of green flags, too, by her admission, but also some red flags that are very concerning for her. | |
| Well, that's the problem, right? Because if you weren't giving off any green flags, you wouldn't be in any danger with the red flags, right? | |
| Yeah, and she's told me, like, I'm one of the... | |
| I'm one of the only people that she's even seen this much. | |
| Usually she won't go past the first date, so she always assures me that there's many great things about me, but she has a lot of reservations, and I understand where they're coming from, and that's why I'm calling you. | |
| Right, right, right. And what are you taking in school, my friend? | |
| I'm in neuroscience. Ah. | |
| And your job path? | |
| Right now I'm teaching as an adjunct in college, but I'm thinking of going into clinical psychology, but I'm not entirely sure. | |
| What do you make teaching as an adjunct in a college? | |
| What's your gross? Not too much, but I do support myself and I live... | |
| You have a roommate. Yeah, and I make more than I use. | |
| Like 30k? | |
| Less. 25k? | |
| Yeah, around 25. | |
| Is that full-time or part-time? | |
| Oh, it's part-time. They only give you a certain amount of hours because they have their bureaucracy and whatever. | |
| So like 20 hours a week, 15 hours a week kind of thing? | |
| Well, I do other things. | |
| I teach and I work other jobs and I do a bunch of things. | |
| So that's how I make my money. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. | |
| When I was a kid, I got a few irons in the fire. | |
| I got a few hooks in the water. | |
| Okay, I got it. So it's a bit of a hodgepodge. | |
| Now, what is your combined debt situation like? | |
| I have no debt. And I assumed that you were a pole dancer, or were you a sugar baby? | |
| Okay, how did you get no debt? | |
| No, I just went to a school that isn't very expensive, and... | |
| Got financial aid from the government, and that's why I don't have any debt. | |
| Okay, good. And her? She has quite a bit of debt, which is kind of to be expected for medical school, but her projected earnings are To me, make that a non-concern that she's going to be making a lot of money. | |
| And what kind of debt? | |
| 50k? 80? 70? | |
| Several hundred thousand. | |
| Several hundred thousand? Yeah. | |
| So she ain't staying home with the babies. | |
| No, I guess not. | |
| She's carrying around a pretty nice condo by the beach on her back, right? | |
| Yeah, but she, you know, her projected earnings are like, I believe, 70k for the first few years in residency, but then it's like 250k. | |
| So, in a few years, I'm pretty sure she'll pay that off. | |
| Yeah. No, come on, that's a lot of money to pay off in after-tax income. | |
| You might be right. I might also be overstating the debt. | |
| I think it was several hundred. I'm not exactly sure how much it is, but it's definitely at least a hundred. | |
| Because, you know, if you're thinking of dating this girl and getting your heart set on things, that's as important a question to ask about as about your musical tastes and cussing. | |
| Yeah, it is. Because, you know, you're going to co-sign on that debt, basically, as far as I understand it, when you get married, right? | |
| Yeah. All right. | |
| Yeah, I'm aware of that. | |
| And normally I would run from it, but seeing her path, I think she'll pay it off easily. | |
| None of this is meant to dissuade you. | |
| I mean, if she's a great woman, I mean, go for it, man. | |
| Like, lock and load. Lock on, right? | |
| Full thrust. Well, right now it's not exactly up to me, but we'll get to that. | |
| Well, it's to some degree up to you. | |
| Yeah, yes, it is to some degree up to me. | |
| I'm sure you can crank out the charm when necessary. | |
| Yeah, I'm trying to make myself into the type of person that she's less reluctant about. | |
| Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. | |
| So you could rein in the cussing, obviously. | |
| And you could switch to mid-80s Amy Grant, or whatever it is that would be more pleasing to her. | |
| You can go full-on Mormon Tabernacle Choir if you want. | |
| To me, that's not an issue. | |
| So what is the issue, right? | |
| What is the big beast that she's staring down here in you? | |
| She sees that I'm very ingrained in all this in terms of my friends, my friend group. | |
| Very ingrained in all that. Things that she finds unbecoming and very un-Christian. | |
| Okay, but like what? So cussing, music, what else? | |
| Smoking weed on occasion. | |
| That's another thing she doesn't like too much. | |
| And I think I'm willing to give that up for her as well. | |
| Oh yeah, of course. I mean, come on. | |
| Who's going to want to choose a joint over a great woman? | |
| That would make no sense, and that would have you hate both the drugs and yourself. | |
| I know you say it's on occasion and so on, but that's like a no-brainer, right? | |
| Yeah, I don't really have that much of a history. | |
| I've been doing it more lately. | |
| I only started doing it like a year ago, and to me... | |
| You got in a pot when you were 26? | |
| Yeah. That's like taking out smoking when you were 70. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I just sort of discovered it. | |
| Through your roommates? Yeah, yeah. | |
| Hang on a second, hang on a second here. | |
| I'm sensing sabotage. | |
| No, there's no sabotage because I definitely encouraged it with him too. | |
| Wait, but he smoked weed before you, right? | |
| Yeah, he did it before me, but... | |
| I wanted to try it with him and then there were definitely times where I was the one who proposed that we do it. | |
| So it's not that he was forcing it on me. | |
| How is his life trajectory going? | |
| He has a girlfriend. | |
| His prospects right now aren't that great but he does have a job and he's taking care of himself. | |
| Is he also in grad school land or post-grad land? | |
| Yes. He's finishing up his thesis as well so he's In a similar field? | |
| No, I think he's animal behavior. | |
| Animal behavior? Yeah, so very different field. | |
| And is it a doctorate he's working on or a master's? | |
| A master's. And I hate to sound like that guy, but I'm going to ask anyway. | |
| What does one do with a master's in animal behavior? | |
| I don't know. I also do not know. | |
| Does he know? No. No, he's not on a very clear path. | |
| Well, he kind of is, in a way. | |
| That's one of the things that the girl sensed almost immediately, and she knows nothing about him, really. | |
| But she told me, you know, I think your friend is holding you down. | |
| That's exactly what I was just saying with regards to sabotage. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, I don't think he's sabotaging me, but... | |
| I really do not think there's any intent, especially because I've also enabled some of these habits with him. | |
| Hang on, I'm not sure what you mean by intent is necessary for sabotage. | |
| I mean, I guess it's not. | |
| There are crimes of action and then there are crimes of negligence, right? | |
| So, you know, like manslaughter is a first-degree murder, right? | |
| You plan to kill someone. | |
| These are strong examples, right? | |
| But, you know, involuntary homicide is, you know, just kind of careless and didn't take proper precautions and somebody ended up dead, right? | |
| You don't mean to kill the person, but it's still a problem, right? | |
| So intent is only as far as severity. | |
| A lack of intent, I guess, contra James Comey from a couple of years ago, a lack of intent does not mean exoneration from wrongdoing. | |
| I agree with you. I guess I just associate sabotage with intent. | |
| But if you're using that word and it can function without intent, then we can use that word. | |
| Okay. So the real question comes down to, with regards to your roommate, what do you think of his girlfriend? | |
| Okay. His girlfriend is... | |
| I like her. | |
| She's not in a great place either. | |
| But I do like her as a person. | |
| I have a lot of affection towards her, I think, in terms of being a friend. | |
| But she's in a very bad place. | |
| She doesn't really come from a great family. | |
| She's very depressed because her prospects aren't very good. | |
| But I do like her, but she's not in a great place, is I guess what I'm trying to say. | |
| And she's depressed at the moment? | |
| Yeah, I would say so. And why are her prospects not great? | |
| That's something I've been trying to learn more about. | |
| I'm trying to learn more about her, but she's not the most open person. | |
| Is it school? Is it career? | |
| She majored in something like art or something, and as you can imagine, it's not a very... | |
| Not a very lucrative field, and she has a lot of self-confidence issues. | |
| Her parents were not the greatest, from what I understand. | |
| You mean she had an abusive childhood? | |
| I believe so, but honestly, I don't know the details. | |
| And how long has your roommate been going out with her? | |
| A year and a half or two years, maybe. | |
| And why is he interested in this lost soul? | |
| I think it's because... | |
| Hold on one sec. | |
| I'm just making sure my phone doesn't kick me off here because I have screen time enabled and it says... | |
| I only have five minutes left on screen time, I guess because Skype qualifies as social media. | |
| I'm just making sure that doesn't... Oh, you've got a nag bot on your phone? | |
| Yeah. All right. | |
| You might as well get married. I'm just making sure it doesn't kick me off Skype. | |
| All right. So why does... | |
| If I do get kicked off, I'm sorry. | |
| I think I disabled it, but I'll call you back, or you can call me back if that happens. | |
| So you asked, why is he with her? | |
| Yeah. I think part of it is he likes the feeling of taking care of someone. | |
| So he needs a broken person, so he can avoid his own brokenness by pretending he's a healer, right? | |
| I think that's a big part of it. | |
| There are obviously other parts as well. | |
| Personality, compatibility, and affection. | |
| Isn't she depressed? Yeah, but she has a personality even through the depression, which is one reason why I have a lot of affection for her. | |
| You can see who she is even through the depression. | |
| But I think a large part of it is the caretaker instinct and Again, there are other reasons. | |
| So their relationship relies upon her being dysfunctional. | |
| If she becomes functional, he's not going to have much interest in that, right? | |
| I mean, just based on the dynamics of the relationship, right? | |
| Honestly, not sure. I mean, that's just my hypothesis. | |
| I think it has some credence to it, but I doubt that he would lose interest with her if she was doing better, but I do think he would maybe have a struggle with that. | |
| Well, what is he doing, or do you know, if anything, to help her? | |
| It's mostly emotional support. | |
| I mean, he'll pay for dinners and stuff. | |
| It's not like he's subsidizing her financially, but emotionally he's... | |
| There for her. Now, I'll tell you something. | |
| There's a piece of information that I have, which I will reveal now, that I've always had in these calls. | |
| And this is why I'm poking around your friend and his girlfriend, right? | |
| So, there's a reason. | |
| There's a reason, and you probably know what it is deep down, but there's a reason why you're talking to me and not your friend. | |
| Oh, yeah, of course. And what's that? | |
| Um... I mean, there's many reasons, so I don't even know which one you're thinking of. | |
| But one is that he's not really... | |
| First of all, he's not really good at these kind of conversations. | |
| Second of all, it's hard... | |
| You know, if I get better and he stagnates, that's threatening for him, of course. | |
| That's another reason. There's another one I was thinking of that kind of slipped my mind... | |
| I mean, have you ever seen the film With Nail and I? No. | |
| You should watch it, man. | |
| You should watch it. It's a very powerful film about sabotaging a relationship, and Richard E. Grant's Hamlet's simbiloquy at the end is magnificent. | |
| You can just find that bit online. | |
| But, yeah. | |
| A friend who can't move forward. | |
| Because, you know, you're asking, how can you get the great girl? | |
| Well, you know, you've got to map anything around you that's going to pull you down or keep you down. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. | |
| You want to be in contact with people over the long run, I mean just in general. | |
| You want to be in contact with people who get shit done, who are on the move, who are building things, who are powerful or moving in a direction of power. | |
| Yeah. Right? | |
| Because people can fritter away I wrote this in a novel many years ago, a novel that I wrote called The God of Atheists, where I said, you know, careless children lose socks, mittens, scarves. | |
| Careless adults can misplace entire decades. | |
| And if you have people who are stuck, if you have people who are paralyzed, if you have people who are in the mud... | |
| There will be a powerful resistance to you rising. | |
| Yeah, I'm aware. Okay, just as long as you're clear about that. | |
| I've been listening to you for a while, so I'm aware of that. | |
| Okay, good. But, you know, a lot of the problem is it's hard for me to let him go if that's what I had to do. | |
| And I'm not entirely sure if I have to do that, but let's say I did have conversations with him. | |
| No, no, no. Hang on, hang on, hang on. | |
| See, you're jumping straight to action. | |
| Right? What if I have to let him go? | |
| I don't know any of that. Well, neither do I. No, hang on. | |
| All I'm trying to do is give you a map of the bay. | |
| I'm not trying to tell you where to sail. | |
| I'm just saying, you know, here's where some rocks could be. | |
| You know, here's where there's a hell of a rip current. | |
| And here's, you know, whatever. | |
| And you're saying, well, I don't know where I want to sail. | |
| I'm like, no, I don't know either. | |
| I know you're not. It's something I've thought about. | |
| Okay. Yeah. | |
| Because part of being a Christian is you've got to be willing to give up anything for God, let alone a girl, but for God. | |
| And is he a Christian and is his girlfriend a Christian? | |
| No, neither of them are. | |
| And where are they in terms of moral beliefs, philosophical understanding, and so on? | |
| Yeah. Let me think about that. | |
| I would say he's very confused morally and philosophically. | |
| Very, very confused. | |
| Well, why don't you bring him to Christ? | |
| You think I ought to try? | |
| All right. Just check it. | |
| Just check it. And what's his resistance? | |
| So, you know, in the history of philosophy, there's been these schools of thought. | |
| I'm not getting abstract on you for no reason. | |
| No, that's fine. That's fine. The sophists, and there's a few others I forget the names of, but these people who think that you can't really discover truth because of rhetoric. | |
| You can make any argument appear good, so how do you know it's true? | |
| Well, actually, the sophists were people who Used all the tricks to make the worst argument appear, the better. | |
| You could talk about the skeptics, the human skeptics, but the skeptics as a whole in particular. | |
| You could talk about post-modernism, subjectivism, relativism, but yeah, all of this stuff, which is like, the truth is an illusion, man. | |
| It's just trying to drag you out to murder you with thirst in the desert. | |
| Yeah, so that's sort of where he is, but it's not like he doesn't struggle with that. | |
| He's not like hardcore with that, but He's always like, well, maybe this is true. | |
| Maybe that's true. How do you know? | |
| You should have him. | |
| Just tell him to call me. We'll sort it out. | |
| Maybe I will tell him to call you. | |
| Tell him to call me. No, tell him to call me. | |
| I'll sort him out in half an hour. I don't know about that. | |
| Oh, I know. Oh, I know. | |
| I mean, a sort of out doesn't mean get him to believe in the truth, but it means get him to stop with this bullshit subjectivism, or at least know that it's false. | |
| If he wants to continue doing it, that's fine. | |
| Then it's for emotional reasons, not these pseudo-intellectual reasons. | |
| But anyway, the office out there. | |
| And has he listened to what I do, or have you talked to him about this? | |
| You know, sometimes I've exposed him to you, but... | |
| He's not an avid listener, but he's seen some of your stuff and listened to some stuff if I have it on. | |
| Oh, that's interesting. | |
| Yeah, okay. It passes through his mind like a bird going from one window of a room to another. | |
| Yeah, I mean, he did your hoaxed speech at the end, which is a very great speech. | |
| Thank you. So, his girlfriend, no. | |
| I can only imagine... She's a moral relativist, but I haven't had that conversation with her. | |
| I guess I will. Probably because I already know the answer, and that's probably why I haven't. | |
| So this woman, she has reservations about friends swearing music off and on. | |
| Is there anything else? The smoking. | |
| Smoking, yeah, yeah. Anything else? | |
| The type of... | |
| Art that I'm into. | |
| Not art, art, but art broadly. | |
| So this is what prompted this call. | |
| So I'll tell you about that. Yesterday we had a very good date, for the most part. | |
| But I later found out she was very upset about something, which she told me today. | |
| So yesterday we went to church together, which was very nice. | |
| Then I brought her over again. | |
| This time no one else was there, so it was just me and her. | |
| And I showed her one of my favorite movies, which is Ex Machina. | |
| I don't know if you've seen that. Ex Machina. | |
| I haven't seen that. | |
| I think I've seen it. It's like a half-woman robot face. | |
| Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. | |
| I've not seen it, but I've seen these. | |
| It's about artificial intelligence and consciousness and what is consciousness and all that sort of thing, which I thought she would be interested in because we're both very interested in ideas like that. | |
| So I wanted to see what she thought of it. | |
| Yeah. I didn't know this at the time, but she told me today she really didn't like the movie. | |
| And it's not like she didn't like it because of her personal taste. | |
| She thought it was a very dark movie. | |
| And she's right about that. | |
| It is a dark movie. And she's very concerned about what that says about me, that this is one of my favorite movies. | |
| It's not as bad as that Johnny Depp movie about consciousness. | |
| What was it? Transcendence or something like that? | |
| Oh, man. That was wretched. | |
| I had to... Anyway, that's a whole other story. | |
| Okay, so she found the movie kind of dark and it's trouble to her, right? | |
| Yeah, it's trouble to her because I kept telling her, I love this movie. | |
| This is one of my favorite movies. And she watched it and she was like, this is very nihilistic. | |
| There's a lot of rated R stuff here. | |
| And again, I know... | |
| I know she doesn't like that sort of thing, but it wasn't gratuitous, right? | |
| I don't watch gratuitous stuff either. No, no, no. | |
| Hang on, hang on. Just let me tell you this from the female perspective, right? | |
| Yeah. Defending the film is irrelevant. | |
| Yeah, yeah, I know. I didn't defend it with her. | |
| No, I know. Defending it with me is even less relevant, because I'm not going to bang you, right? | |
| No, I'm just saying it wasn't gratuitous, but there was... | |
| In the movie, there is a certain degree of... | |
| How do I say it? Depictions of sexuality and darkness and stuff like that. | |
| So, not gratuitously so, because I don't like that either, but I thought it served the film, so I don't mind watching it. | |
| Wait, hang on. I mean, this isn't Travis Bickle showing porn to Faye Dunaway in Taxi Driver, but I mean... | |
| No, no, no. The first film, the film that you loved, that you showed to your Christian potential girlfriend, has nudity and sex scenes in it? | |
| There's no sex scenes. | |
| But there are depictions of nudity, but very fleeting. | |
| Most of the movie is not about that. | |
| Okay, all right. So there's nudity, and what else did it bother her? | |
| I guess what she thought was the message, and I don't know if the message she took is the message of the movie, but I did think it was very interesting what she thought about it. | |
| She said it was very nihilistic. | |
| I never thought of it as nihilistic. | |
| I never thought of it as great either. | |
| The reason I like it is because I like the ideas being discussed in the movies, and that's why I showed it to her. | |
| It's thought-provoking. | |
| Yeah, for me, very thought-provoking. | |
| But what she took out of it is that it's a very dark message. | |
| Jeez, man, you should do what I do. | |
| I mean, the first movie I showed to my wife that I said that I loved, which I still do, is Merchant Ivory's Room with a View. | |
| It's a lovely adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel. | |
| Yeah, I guess not the best decision-making on my part. | |
| No, no, no, but this is you, right? No, no, listen, you're being honest, right? | |
| This is you. I am being honest, yeah. | |
| That's part of it. And she's being honest, too. | |
| So what troubles... | |
| What troubles her, this is from the female's perspective, right? | |
| So what troubles her is not that you showed her the movie. | |
| It's not that the movie is nihilistic. | |
| It's not that there's nudity or anything. | |
| That's not what troubles her. | |
| It's that it's one of my favorite movies. | |
| No, that doesn't trouble her either. | |
| I can tell you exactly what troubles her, and this is a great insight and window into the soul of a woman. | |
| Are you ready? Are you bracing yourself? | |
| Are you in a crash position? | |
| Are you under the desk, 1950s nuclear war style? | |
| All right. This is what troubles her, and if you get this about women, you will have a great time with women, and if you don't, you won't. | |
| So this is a very, very big spotlight. | |
| Are you ready? What troubles her about the movie is not that you like it, not the nudity, not the nihilism, not the... | |
| What troubles her about the movie is that you didn't know she wouldn't like it. | |
| That's the only thing fundamentally that troubles her about the movie. | |
| That you should have known that she wouldn't like it. | |
| You're right. And if you get that about women, man, you will have a great time in this world. | |
| And if you don't, it'll just be one misery pit to another. | |
| Because you're like, I want to talk about the ideas. | |
| No, no, no. In the same way, and this is why I was harping on earlier about your roommate who swears. | |
| You knew that she didn't like swearing and you brought her over to a guy who swears. | |
| So she feels invisible. | |
| Interesting. She feels, and she's right, that you don't know her well enough to create for her an environment where she feels visible and understood and seen. | |
| Yeah, you're right. Okay, so if you showed her this movie at some point saying, okay, listen, this movie, it's kind of dark. | |
| It's got some nudity in it. | |
| There's stuff that you're really not going to like, but I'll tell you what I like about it, and we can kind of meet in the middle, right? | |
| Then she can watch, she can relax, right? | |
| Yeah, she's prepared for it. | |
| She knows that I understand her reservations in advance, that I understand her. | |
| Right. If the woman feels understood, her heart opens. | |
| If the woman feels visible, her heart opens. | |
| Because that's how women trust. | |
| You know, men trust from like, hey man, that time we were almost in a bar fight, you totally had my back. | |
| You know, that's men, right? | |
| But women can trust when they're not blindsided, when they're not surprised. | |
| In other words, when you're like, hey, I love this movie, you're going to love it too, and she hates it, she can't trust. | |
| Yeah. Because she wants you to know her. | |
| She doesn't want you to abandon your own personality. | |
| She doesn't want you to appease her or to become her or to bend yourself into a nothingness to please her. | |
| She doesn't want that because if you do that, she won't respect you, right? | |
| But she wants you to know her well. | |
| Yeah, you're right. And thinking on it, it's just so silly that I wouldn't see that, but When you point it out. | |
| Yeah. It's the casuality. | |
| Is that a word? The casualness. | |
| Yeah, I get it. Casuality and casualty, right? | |
| Very, very close to your name. It's the casualness with which I just said, hey, you know, here's one of my favorite movies. | |
| I didn't prepare her for it. | |
| I didn't give any caveats. I mean, looking back, you'd have said, hmm, you know. | |
| And again, it's not like you can't show her the movie. | |
| It may not be the first movie you show her. | |
| It's not like you can't show her the movie, right? | |
| But, you know, if you're gonna say, you know, like I like the movie Fight Club, although it is bloody black and dark and nihilistic and all kinds of messed up, right? | |
| Yeah. But at least they talk about some important ideas. | |
| It's sort of like the American beauty situation. | |
| At least there's some discussion of gender and gender roles and masculinity. | |
| I'll even do disclosure with Michael Douglas because somebody talks about gender relations in there for like 30 seconds. | |
| I'm like, oh, Oasis in the desert of Hollywood. | |
| But on a first date, you don't necessarily want to expose a Christian girl to a movie where the key line is, I haven't been fucked like that since grade school. | |
| Yeah, it's so silly that I did that. | |
| I'm not going to beat myself up over it because I see it now. | |
| No, it's great. It's great that you did that. | |
| Honestly, I'm telling you, it's great. | |
| You should pat yourself on the back for having the brilliance to do that. | |
| Do you know why? No. | |
| Because it got you into this conversation and I just passed you the pearl of wisdom on how to genuinely enjoy your life with women. | |
| It is a pearl of wisdom, but there is still the issue that I enjoy things like that. | |
| And I know we established that. | |
| No, I'm telling you. I'm telling you. | |
| This is the mistake that men and women make. | |
| And it's the mistake that men make and women maybe are not great at articulating it. | |
| It's fine that you enjoy that movie. | |
| It's totally fine. You just have to know that she's going to have trouble with it. | |
| And that doesn't mean you can't show it to her and it doesn't mean you can't talk about it. | |
| Although, again, maybe not early in the relationship. | |
| You have to know that she's not going to like it. | |
| You have to know that stuff. | |
| So I can see that that definitely is probably the biggest factor, but she did explicitly express to me that, and maybe what you're saying is she's not conscious of what her issue is. | |
| I'm not sure if you're saying that or not, but she did explicitly say sort of the fact that this was one of my favorite movies did concern her because what does that say about me? | |
| That's... I do acknowledge that the issue you brought up is probably huge. | |
| Here's my question. | |
| Given that you'd already troubled her with the music, given that you'd already troubled her with the swearing, given that you'd already troubled her with the roommate, if you had known she wasn't going to like this movie, would you have shown it to her when you did? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| Right! So that's what I'm saying. | |
| When you show it to her, You are saying, I have no clue who you are. | |
| No, I completely understand that. | |
| I'm just saying, I think there might be an additional problem above that issue, which I acknowledge is a very big one. | |
| And I think that is a big pearl of wisdom that you've given me. | |
| But I think in addition to that... | |
| No, no, it's the same problem. | |
| Because she wouldn't know it was your favorite movie if you had known... | |
| How much she wouldn't like it, because you wouldn't have shown it to her. | |
| But at some point, I would have to be honest about what I enjoy, no? | |
| Well, see, here's the thing. | |
| I'm not talking about censorship. | |
| I'm not talking about faking things, right? | |
| It's the same as what I said earlier. | |
| You can phone in sick on a job after you've been there for a while, but don't phone in sick... | |
| Right. On the interview. So, too early. | |
| It's too early. She's got to get to know you, and what she wants to know is that you understand her. | |
| Okay. I see that. | |
| That you understand her. Women have this need to be understood that men find generally incomprehensible. | |
| No, I find it... | |
| Sorry, go ahead. I find it comprehensible. | |
| Good. I just overlooked it, but I get it completely, because I want to be understood, too, so... | |
| No, no, I get it. But for a woman, see, a woman is in a unique position of incredible vulnerability. | |
| And we could say, oh, but there's the welfare state, there's Alan, but her genes don't understand that yet. | |
| That's like 60 years. | |
| I taught evolutionary psychology. | |
| Okay, so you know all this shit, right? | |
| So just for the audience, right? | |
| The woman is in a situation of almost unbearable vulnerability. | |
| Because she's short, she's weak physically, and just about everyone wants something from her. | |
| Now, this is a pretty powerful woman, right? | |
| I mean, she's going through med school, she's handling all of that stress, she's doing all of this cool stuff, right? | |
| And, you know, I assume she's attractive, and so she's smart, she's reading Jung like this, she's... | |
| She's got it going on, right? | |
| Like, on every conceivable level. | |
| It's like, I don't remember much of the movie The Fisher King, other than Kristen Lutty's great conversation about the devil, but I do remember there was one flash of an achingly beautiful blonde reading Nietzsche, to which, of course, I'm like, oh, hallelujah! | |
| But it is... | |
| Because of that vulnerability, she... | |
| Needs to know that you're going to protect her. | |
| And we don't have any lions or tigers in the world that we have to deal with. | |
| So what she needs to be protected from is unpleasant surprises. | |
| Right? Shocks to the system, so to speak, right? | |
| Because if you don't fully empathize with her... | |
| Then you're with her for the wrong reasons. | |
| In other words, if you don't fully understand the depth and complexity and beauty of her character, then you might just be there for sex. | |
| You might just be there for status. | |
| You might just be there to have someone to watch TV with or whatever, right? | |
| But you're not there for the beauty, depth, and complexity of her character. | |
| Now, if you're not there for the beauty, depth, and complexity of her character, if you're there for some more surface and shallow reason, Then you know what she is, man? | |
| Which is the most terrifying thing for a woman? | |
| She is replaceable. | |
| She is replaceable. | |
| She's interchangeable. Yeah, and that's also something she's expressed. | |
| She's expressed to me... | |
| She kept saying something like, you know, I think maybe I'm too old for you. | |
| Maybe you want someone younger and more fun. | |
| And I said, I don't... | |
| That's not what I want. | |
| I want someone who's a good person. | |
| But what she perceived is that maybe I want someone more fun. | |
| Well, so, yeah, she's saying, because a woman, I mean, I say this to my wife from time to time, like I said, look, there's no upgrade for you, like from you. | |
| For me, there is no upgrade from, there's no one like, oh, well, this person would be better, or this person, there's no upgrade. | |
| She's not upgradable to me in any way, shape, or form. | |
| There's nothing I'd change. Not a thing, right? | |
| Yeah. And there's nobody more perfect, right? | |
| So people say, oh, you're going to get divorced. | |
| It's like, nope. Never going to happen, right? | |
| Yeah, you already have all the history. | |
| Yeah, plus you've grown together like two trees and all that. | |
| And she feels the same about me, that there's no upgrade. | |
| So she needs to feel that there's no upgrade for her, right? | |
| Sorry, it's an awkward way to put it. | |
| There's no upgrade from her for you. | |
| Yeah, I understand. And so because of that, she needs to feel completely irreplaceable. | |
| And when you don't understand her, or you don't know what she likes and doesn't like, but you're still there, then her great fear, right? | |
| Men's great fear is that women are just there for the money, and women's great fear is that men are just there for the sex, right? | |
| Yeah. Because if it's sex, right? | |
| And I'm not saying you're Christians, you wait till marriage, I'm sure, right? | |
| But in general, right? If you're there for sex, well, younger models are coming along all the time, right? | |
| And, you know, to put it coarsely, a whole is a whole is a whole. | |
| Mm-hmm. No, seriously. | |
| No, I know. | |
| Right? I mean, so you need to, she needs to know that you have connected with her, as you would say, on a spiritual level. | |
| The uniqueness of her soul, of her personality, of her character. | |
| And that means that if she experiences unpleasant surprises based upon you not knowing her, then it triggers all her, he's here for the flesh, he's not here for me. | |
| Right. So, it's not the movie. | |
| And it's not that you like the movie. | |
| It's that you don't know her. | |
| And that sets off all kinds of alarm bells. | |
| Now, the good news is that she's willing to talk to you despite all these alarm bells, which means that you've got something going on for her too, right? | |
| Yeah. I mean, right now, we had a long conversation earlier today where we talked about a lot of things. | |
| And she wants to have a little break from me because she doesn't I don't exactly know what to think. | |
| Her parents are telling her something. | |
| She's not sure what she feels. Wait, wait. | |
| What are her parents telling her? Do you know? | |
| I'm reluctant to say it because I know she's not identifiable, but I guess some part of me just feels bad that I would go in public. | |
| Is it fair to say that her parents are not number one fans of Bob? | |
| Of me? Yeah. Oh. | |
| You forgot your pseudonym. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. We broke character. | |
| Yeah. It's along those lines, yeah. | |
| Okay, so listen. I don't know if they're exactly not... | |
| I don't know how... I don't know how opposed to me they are. | |
| I don't think they're that opposed, but I think their inclination is against me. | |
| Right. Okay. Okay. Right. | |
| So now is the time, I think, for the reasonable apology. | |
| And whether that rescues you with the girl, I don't know. | |
| But I think it's your single best shot. | |
| And the apology goes something like this. | |
| I'm very attracted to you for a variety of reasons, but I have not been thinking about you deeply enough. | |
| I have not been thinking about your character, your personality, your likes and your dislikes deeply enough. | |
| I massively respect that you're enormously committed to Christ and Christianity, and I have been skating. | |
| Like you're two inches deep when you're two miles deep. | |
| I've been skating along, right? | |
| And I'm going to make a list of all of the ways in which I've been, because I've really thought long and deeply about this, and I'm going to make a list of all the things I've been skating along on. | |
| So, I dump my bad day on you the first time we chat. | |
| Not the end of the world, I'm honest, right? | |
| But, you know, not necessarily the best first impression. | |
| I curse in the chat. | |
| And I know you're Christian, and we met on a Christian dating site, and that should be something that I should ascertain your level of comfort with before bringing it to the table. | |
| So, I'm kind of intruding, right, in that way. | |
| And then, what happens is... | |
| I invite you over, and my roommate curses up a storm, even after you have told me that you don't like swearing. | |
| So what are you supposed to think? | |
| Well, there's only a couple of options, only a couple of possibilities. | |
| Either I don't remember or care that you don't like swearing, in which case, what am I doing, right? | |
| I mean, I'm just not sensitive at all, right? | |
| Not thoughtful at all. Or I know you don't like swearing. | |
| I know my roommates swear, but I didn't care enough to tell them to stop, at least while you were there, right? | |
| Or, I did ask my roommate to stop, but he just decided to continue anyway, because that's the quality of my best friend, that they're willing to make a woman I like uncomfortable, just because they like to drop the F-bombs on a regular basis, like a carpet bomb, into the conversation, | |
| right? And then, compounding those errors of insensitivity, what I do is I drop ex machina on you, And apparently I'm really surprised that you didn't like it. | |
| Although in hindsight, it makes perfect sense that you didn't like it. | |
| And I'm not going to sit there and say, well, it was wrong for me to show you the film. | |
| I mean, that's fine. We can show you the film. | |
| You can show me things I might not like, and I can learn from them. | |
| But... I didn't know that you wouldn't like it. | |
| And in hindsight, there was every reason to understand that you wouldn't like it. | |
| And so, my concern is that, I mean, you have reasons not to trust me based upon the fact that I don't seem to have a clue about what you like and don't like, and don't seem to listen. | |
| When you tell me what you like and don't like, and that makes me untrustworthy in your eyes, and that's not a subjective thing, I would actually agree with that assessment based upon how I've acted. | |
| That's the minus, right? | |
| Because you've always got to give the minus. You've got to acknowledge the minus, man. | |
| If you're in a conflict with someone, acknowledge the minus. | |
| Acknowledge the minus. If you can't acknowledge the minus, people won't listen. | |
| They can't relax and listen to any of the positives until you acknowledge the minus, right? | |
| And then you say, but here's the pluses, right? | |
| I'm smart. You're smart. | |
| We're both interested in the human body, the human mind. | |
| You're interested in self-knowledge. | |
| You read Jung. I'm interested in self-knowledge. | |
| I listen to Free Domain. And... | |
| I care about you enormously, but I'm not thinking deeply enough about you to have you not be consistently negatively surprised by me, my movies, my friends, my texts, or my environment. | |
| Now, I understand that now. | |
| And I understand it's not important that I like a movie you don't like. | |
| Look, we are two individuals. | |
| That's going to happen, and that could be great opportunities for learning. | |
| That's not the issue. The issue is I need to know and truly understand what you like and don't like so that you're not constantly bouncing off these negative experiences like a pinball. | |
| I will commit to doing that To really learning about what you like and don't like and internalizing it and processing it. | |
| Not to be a slave to you and your likes and dislikes, but just to understand them so that you're not surprised by my blindness. | |
| Now, if we do that as friends, great. | |
| If we do that as boyfriend-girlfriend, even better. | |
| But this relationship, you've got to give her the honor of deepening you. | |
| You can say this relationship, although it has lasted for a month and spare change, has fundamentally changed how I see things. | |
| It's fundamentally changed me. | |
| Yeah, I spent a lot of time earlier telling her that. | |
| But you need to... | |
| I mean, saying that is great. | |
| Yeah, I understand. I have to acknowledge the real issue. | |
| No, but you have to acknowledge how it's changed you, right? | |
| Like, it's one thing to say, hey, man, I just wrote this great song. | |
| It's really fantastic. It's got a great tune. | |
| It's got great lyrics. It's a great song. | |
| And at some point, you're going to say, hey, you feel like playing me that song? | |
| Yeah. Yeah. So, in terms of saying, oh, you've changed me, that's great, right? | |
| But you have to give specific examples. | |
| Listen, you're being invited down to a depth of care and concern that you have hitherto not even suspected. | |
| Can you elaborate on that? | |
| Yeah, so you're being invited down to a two-way street, right? | |
| Because everything happens in the first few minutes, right? | |
| She asks, how are you doing? | |
| And you kind of dumped your day, right? | |
| Yeah. Which is, again, it's not the end of the world or anything like that. | |
| You didn't really know her at that point, right? | |
| And she swore in the text without figuring out how she stands on swearing. | |
| And what that means is that you're kind of impulsive, and what that means is it's hard to feel safe around you. | |
| And then they're like, oh, I've got to share this great movie with you, right? | |
| But you don't stop and sit and think it through, right? | |
| Oh, you've got to come over and meet my best friend, right? | |
| But you're not slowing the fuck down and planning and organizing things. | |
| So when you said I'm being invited down into a level of care and compassion, you mean up until this point I have not really needed to think so deeply about someone's Well, listen, to her, you are not a very safe person to be around. | |
| And I don't mean, obviously, that you're waving around machine guns or machetes or anything like that. | |
| But nothing chills the woman's heart more than feeling she is fundamentally not understood. | |
| And also, that the man doesn't even know he doesn't understand her. | |
| I mean, we all don't understand each other to a certain degree. | |
| That's why some of these conversations go on so long, right? | |
| But this... | |
| Nothing chills the woman's heart faster than... | |
| Than feeling that the man not only doesn't understand her, but doesn't even know that he doesn't understand her. | |
| Yeah, I can definitely see that. | |
| She'd be very insecure about that, very reluctant to commit to someone like that. | |
| Right, right, because you're not committing to her yet. | |
| You're committing to your relationship to her. | |
| In other words, I want to show you this movie, and I had this bad day, and here's my roommate. | |
| But you're not relating to her. | |
| Right. Which is, tell me more about you. | |
| Tell me what you think. Tell me what you feel. | |
| Tell me your first memory, your last dream. | |
| All this is really work to get a mental map of who she is. | |
| I should say I've definitely done that, but obviously I have not set it to motion because as you pointed out, I know these things about her and I do ask about her and we do talk to each other about self-knowledge things, but Apparently I've not internalized it or considered it enough to take it into account when I'm showing her a movie like that. | |
| Well, okay, so if I accidentally stab myself in the leg and I say to you, hey man, I've got a knife in my leg, and you look at me and you shrug and you say, yeah, I can see that, and you go back to playing your Xbox, how am I going to feel? | |
| Yeah, yeah. So you've acknowledged, oh, you don't like swearing. | |
| And then I show her a movie with swearing. | |
| You show her a movie with swearing. | |
| You swear in the text. | |
| You bring her to your friend who swears all the time. | |
| So it's like, yeah, that's quite a knife you got in your leg there. | |
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | |
| You're right. Now, the caring is if you care about the woman. | |
| Listen, I mean, Jesus, God could be speaking through her saying, dude, let's deepen it up a little here. | |
| What does it mean to really care for someone? | |
| That's why I asked about your friend. | |
| And are you trying to help him? | |
| He should not be swearing in front of people he doesn't know. | |
| Yeah. That's very interesting because I think she brought up something similar. | |
| Not just that that's my friend, but that I have not intervened to help him. | |
| So you're right about that. | |
| Yeah, listen, every now and then I do professional engagements, right? | |
| In so far as, and I don't mean like go to give a speech or whatever, but I mean, I will go out with somebody who's in, quote, the business and, you know, we'll have a lunch or whatever it is, right? | |
| Now, this may be somebody I'm just meeting for the first time. | |
| And I'm just not going to say... | |
| I'm just not going to start dropping F-bombs. | |
| Now, occasionally, I will swear. | |
| I've sworn in this show itself, right? | |
| Because I don't want to have a relationship where I can't swear. | |
| Because every now and then it floats up in my brain and I don't want to self-censor that way. | |
| At the same time, if I'm in a business meeting or a professional environment, I will not swear. | |
| Now, if the other person is, you know, this was some MFing good tea. | |
| No, I'm just kidding. They wouldn't say that, right? | |
| But if somebody, you know, lets loose an expletive or two... | |
| Oh, that's okay, right? | |
| Then if the mood strikes it... | |
| But you've got to suss these things out a little bit, right? | |
| You've got to be wise and reasonable. | |
| Now, you could say this other person, well, they don't know if I swear, but of course they kind of do, right? | |
| Because it happens in the shows, right? | |
| Or it happens. I do it in the shows, right? | |
| Yeah. So your friend should not be swearing in front of people he doesn't know. | |
| Yeah, and the fact that I... Have not intervened to make sure he doesn't do that is also not a good sign. | |
| Yeah, you're saying, listen, dude, you have a degree in animal management. | |
| You can't be swearing, too. | |
| Listen, Brad Pitt can go in and cluster bomb as many Fs as he wants because he's going to get a job, right? | |
| Because he's Brad Pitt. But... | |
| Your friend is kind of behind the eight ball as far as education goes, right? | |
| And his girlfriend is depressed and lost and doesn't know where her life's going. | |
| These should all be emergencies for you. | |
| This is why I say this woman is inviting you to a deeper level of interaction than you've experienced. | |
| And this is why she's saying you're too young for me. | |
| Yeah. This is like teenage shallowness and hedonism. | |
| It's hedonism, right? Well, it can be difficult to help your friend. | |
| Yes. Yeah, so what? What are we here for? | |
| Just to have fun? No. Yeah, I agree. | |
| I mean, I might say that. | |
| I'm not a Christian, but you should, right? | |
| I wouldn't say that, but you should, right? | |
| You're here to make the world a better place, and you don't do that by enabling people's drug habits and letting them drop F-bombs all over the place. | |
| I'm living with one foot in, one foot out, and it's maybe even worse than that. | |
| Does your friend have a drug problem? | |
| Um... I'm not sure if he does or not. | |
| He may. All right. How often does he smoke? | |
| A few times a week. | |
| Okay. He has a problem. | |
| Yeah. Right? | |
| Yeah. Marijuana these days is very strong, and he's probably doing it to manage anxiety about his life. | |
| And you're sitting down with him saying, yeah, let's blaze up, man. | |
| I mean, that's a goofy way of putting it. | |
| I'm sure you put it in a slightly less Beavis and Butthead cliched way, 420, blaze it, Vag. | |
| Right, but you're sitting there saying, hey, man, let's do some drugs. | |
| What would Jesus do, man? | |
| Come on. Jesus is big on enabling drug habits? | |
| No. This is very eye-opening. | |
| That's what I'm saying. And this is why the woman is skittish around you. | |
| Man, you've got to be pretty. | |
| You've got to be more than a seven. I'm just kidding. | |
| I'm sure you're a great guy and all that, but there's something that's drawing her to you. | |
| Maybe it's the potential of depth that you have. | |
| Yeah. I'm not the most attractive. | |
| I am attractive, but like I said, it's... | |
| Look, if she's a quality woman, she's looking for your character, and she senses these depths, but you're in the way. | |
| Yes, she's told me something like that. | |
| And that's why you're calling, right? | |
| Yeah, because I am stuck between this. | |
| There's part of me that's still an adolescent. | |
| No, it just means that no one has taught you, sadly. | |
| And there's nothing bad about this. | |
| There's nothing wrong with you. | |
| This is not a criticism. | |
| This is an observation. I'm there with you. | |
| At your age, I was... | |
| It's shallow and more, probably. | |
| That sounds like a stupid, oh, it was more shallow as a competition, right? | |
| But no, listen, I'm going to be 53 tomorrow, man. | |
| Happy birthday. | |
| Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. 20 minutes, right? | |
| You're in the same time zone as me, I'm pretty sure. | |
| Yeah, you're right. You're right. Okay, so you weren't taught how to care for people. | |
| Correct. Neither was I. And this is all a really hard-won, stupid, brutal lessons, right? | |
| Yeah, and it really freaks me out. | |
| I don't think I've conveyed the desperation that I feel. | |
| I feel strangely calm. | |
| But when I do think about the ways that I can go, it's like... | |
| Well, this is definitely a crossroads. | |
| Oh, seize this, man. | |
| This is not going to come around again. | |
| This is why you feel desperate, because this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. | |
| Yeah, and I really sense that, because I'm like, well, if I screw this up, what does that mean? | |
| That means that I... Because you don't even come across a woman like this too often. | |
| No, you will end up avoiding the regret, which means avoiding intimacy, which means in 20 years you'll have some other roommate, but it'll be the same damn situation. | |
| Yeah, and... And that's why I took the call, right? | |
| That's why, because I saw the email, I'm like, okay, this is DEF CON 5, right? | |
| This is Priority ER, right? | |
| Thank you so much for that, honestly. | |
| Because that's exactly what I felt. | |
| It's like, well... I'm either going to be stuck in this situation forever or I'm going to get out of it. | |
| And this is like the point where I got to get out of it. | |
| You know, I'm 27. Maybe I can screw around when I'm 23, but it's not, you know, I'm 27 now. | |
| It's time. Yeah, no, it's time. It's time. | |
| It's time. I mean, you're almost a decade an adult, right? | |
| I mean, it's time. Yeah. | |
| Okay. So listen, if we had more time, we would get into your childhood, and perhaps we can talk about that another time. | |
| But I think if you look at these patterns, you simply have not had modeled to you what it means to be there for someone and to care for someone. | |
| You think it has to do with having shared values, and that's not unimportant, right? | |
| Or you think that has to do with shared activities, and that's not unimportant. | |
| Okay. Being there for someone, loving someone my friend, is stepping over discomfort to do what is best for you both. | |
| Yeah, that's what I feel like I need to do. | |
| Like, it's very uncomfortable and it's painful, but there's no other choice. | |
| Like, I don't have another choice. | |
| You just, you gotta do it. | |
| You gotta be a man. Well, you know you have another choice, which is why you called, why you emailed, right? | |
| And so, another reason why it's hard for you to care for people, and I'm not saying you don't care for people, obviously you do, so I'm speaking in absolutes that are just for the sake of efficiency, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. But the reason why it's so tough for you to care for people is that once you understand what it's like to really care for someone, it's going to hurt like hell, man. | |
| Yeah, because no one's cared for me like that. | |
| That's right. It's going to rip open a whole series of wounds and it's going to destabilize your entire life. | |
| That's why people don't do it. That's why people don't do it, because it really is tough. | |
| Yeah. I mean, my wife came along, and I was like, holy shit. | |
| What the hell have you people been doing in my life all these years? | |
| It ain't this. That's very similar to what I feel with this woman. | |
| Yeah, it's a grenade, man. | |
| But it's a grenade of light. | |
| It just scalds a little, that's all. | |
| Yeah. Can I just ask you a practical question? | |
| Sure. Although I'm telling you, count down. | |
| I mean, much so I'd love to spend my first bit of birthday with you, but go on. | |
| You gotta go. Yeah, yeah, it'll be quick. | |
| So today, we agreed that I'd give her space for about two weeks. | |
| Now, concerning this apology, do you think I should violate that and send her an email with that, or should I wait for the two weeks to be up? | |
| Well... If you were in her position, what would you like? | |
| I think I would like to receive the email. | |
| Yeah. You've got to stop being indifferent, right? | |
| All of this, well, you know, I can take it or leave it and so on. | |
| Bullshit. Well, it's because I told her I wouldn't contact her for two weeks because I want to give her space. | |
| So the first thing you do is you acknowledge that you're breaking the rule. | |
| Yeah, of course. Again, you get past the negatives, so you can get to the positives, right? | |
| So the first thing you do is you say, I really had to wrestle with this, because, man, I know. | |
| I know I said I wasn't going to contact you for two weeks, but I have been thinking and thinking, and blah-de-blah-de-blah, and here's what I understand, and all of this, like, oh, my God. | |
| You know, like, you are literally sent from heaven above to deepen my heart beyond its current crusty ice-skating rig surface, right? | |
| And so whatever it is that you're going to put in, but all you have to do Is acknowledge that you're changing the deal, right? | |
| And that way, she knows, because her first concern is being like, hey man, I'm contacting you. | |
| I know, like I said, I wasn't going to, but here's why I think it's so important. | |
| And then you've got to, you know, you've got to just need someone, man, because the way that the woman feels secure is not just that you know her, but that you need her. | |
| You need her, right? It's back to the Jordan Peterson thing. | |
| He needs her. And she needs him. | |
| And I have a feeling that you... | |
| Because you've said a couple of times, and I know it was earlier on, but still only a month, right? | |
| You know, oh, I could let her go. | |
| You know, I could take it and leave it. It was just some woman on her dating site. | |
| No, it's like, come on, man. Don't be that guy. | |
| Just need her. No, at this point, I don't feel like that. | |
| That was back when I... Barely exchanged that many messages with her. | |
| I get it. I get it. But it's still only a month. | |
| So I'm just saying. | |
| You know, it's funny, you know, because it's interesting. | |
| It's an interesting challenge to say you need someone without being needy. | |
| Right? And that's, you know, a topic for another time. | |
| Something to mull over, right? To say you need someone without being needy. | |
| If you need someone without being needy, that's a great tribute. | |
| If you need someone because you're needy, that's kind of like an insult, like you're just grabbing at them because you're drowning in their piece of wood or something like that, right? | |
| So that's, you know, your second assignment, young Skywalker, is to figure out how you can express to her that you really need her without seeming needy, without being needy. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. I think I can manage it. | |
| All right. A useful conversation? | |
| Very, very much so. | |
| And I hope I was emotionally connected. | |
| I think maybe I got a little distance. | |
| No, no. Listen, you're the kind of guy. | |
| You process things intellectually and then they drop down like a boulder into the Mariana Trench. | |
| I get it. I get it. So, no, I think you were just perfect. | |
| Thank you. And really, thank you for taking the call and especially going this late with me. | |
| Happy birthday. Oh, thanks, man. | |
| I appreciate that. And you'll let me know what happens, right? | |
| Yeah, I will. | |
| All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. |
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