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May 30, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:36
THE CULT OF ROMANTIC LOVE!
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So I've really been thinking a lot lately about why people have such a difficult time with romantic love.
Why it comes on like a storm and leaves in a whimper and there's rage often, recrimination, there's punishment, there's rumor spreading, there can be allegations.
I mean, why does it come in so sweet and end up so sour and explosive?
And this tempestuous nature of love or the great passion of love that seems to be an excuse for some truly awful behavior on the part of people.
What is going on?
Now, I mean, there is the idea, of course, it comes from the sort of French and Italian tradition that love is l'amour, it is passionate, you know, you fall together in a meatloaf of flesh and you fly apart like fireworks.
And that's not it.
Yeah, that's not it.
And... It couldn't have evolved that way, because those kinds of fireworks, that lithium-based, uppy-downy stuff, I mean, that's not the basis for any kind of stable pair bonding, for raising children, for the continuance of culture and values.
And the tempestuousness of love is, to some degree, or at least has become much more exacerbated as a modern phenomenon.
And whenever you talk about modern phenomenon, you really have to talk about post-Christian.
It's one of the really distinguishing characteristics of being post-Christian.
And there are some pluses, and there are some significant minuses.
And the atheists, of course, only look at the pluses, and the Christians only look at the minuses.
And I hate to be one of those fence-rattlers, because it's not my natural position, but I think we kind of have to look at both sides of the equation to get a balanced view.
So, I'm going to put forward an argument here.
It's not conclusive. It's not decisive.
It's not proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.
We're talking civil, not criminal.
Standards are proof here. Preponderance of evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt.
So, in the past, men and women loved God, and as a result of loving God, respected each other.
A godly man, a good husband, a good church-going man, son of a preacher man, a good Christian woman.
You loved God, and as a result of loving God and obeying God's commandments and being a good person in the Christian tradition and so on, you then evidenced behavior that had people love you.
It's something that I pondered many, many years ago when reading about Mother Teresa.
When she said, I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like, I love the Jesus in the poor.
I love the God in the poor.
And when you have a standard of piety and faith and morality, which is loving God and obeying his commandments, then the people who meet that standard, who achieve that standard, I mean, I guess it's kind of impossible to surpass that standard, but the people who meet and achieve that standard end up being loved and respected in the community.
They have a stability of behavior, a predictability of behavior, and a conformity to an abstract standard of virtue that generates love in those around them.
Man loves God, therefore woman can love man.
Woman loves God, therefore man can love woman.
Now, if you look at that as an inverted pyramid, right?
I mean, if it's a pyramid, it's the same thing.
It's an inverted pyramid. So, at the bottom, you have God, and angling up to the top left, we have the man.
Angling up to the top right, we have the woman.
Although politically those would probably be reversed.
But now if you take the bottom of the triangle out, the whole thing collapses.
Even if it's the other way up, it collapses, right?
So both men and women need to love virtue, and if they love virtue, they can be loved by each other.
That you aim at virtue as the necessary but not sufficient requirement for being loved.
Now that was how we evolved.
Now, it's not just God.
You can also look at things like patriotism, civic duty.
You could look at various kinds of altruistic behavior, if we take sort of common parlance of altruism.
But you have to love virtue and behave in a virtuous manner, and only then can you be, doesn't mean you will be, but only then can you be loved by a woman.
Like if you eat well and you exercise, you have...
A good chance. If you don't do those things, you can't be healthy.
If you do those things, you're more likely to be healthy.
You're most likely to be healthy. Accidents and bad luck.
Remove from the equation.
So, and this conforms to, or I guess I conform to since I came after, though it wasn't in my mind when I formulated the definition many years ago, that love is our involuntary response to virtue if we are virtuous.
So if you take virtue out and you put godly or faithful or pious in, then you get love is our involuntary response to the love of God in another, to the love of virtue in another.
Now, not just the love of virtue, but the actions of virtue.
It is deeds, not just faith, because a man who professes faith but doesn't actually do any good deeds, doesn't do anything material to manifest his belief in virtue, is not someone who's virtuous.
That's the shell of virtue.
That's the fakery of virtue.
That's paint, not a building.
So, a man or a woman who acts in conformity to abstract and universal virtues is capable of being loved by another.
That what we love is the God in the man, the God in the woman.
Or, in philosophical terms, we love the virtue in the man, we love the virtue in the woman.
When, for significant portions of the population, God was removed, what happens?
Instead of loving the virtue in the person, instead of loving the God in the person, What is left?
To love the person independent of virtue.
To love the person independent of goodness.
Independent of conformity to abstract and universal moral ideals.
Romantic love replaced or attempted to replace the love of virtue.
How's that going?
How's that going?
Divorce rates through the roof, family crackups, recriminations, people can't settle down, people can't fall in love, they can't stay in love.
So, breakups, a lot of notches in the lipstick cases, so to speak.
To attempt to love someone independent of that person's manifestation of conformity to virtue, to abstract and universal values of virtue.
To attempt to love someone independent of virtue is to attempt to love something that is neither admirable nor consistent.
You can be admired, but not consistent.
I mean, you can go, the first time you play golf, you can go and thwack and hit a hole in one, and people will admire that, but it can't be consistent.
You can't be a golf pro because it's not consistent.
You can be consistent, but not admirable.
Somebody who's consistently selfish or mean or uses people or whatever, right?
But if you are admirable and you are consistent, then trust grows, reliability grows, and what is being loved within you is your willed commitment to manifesting abstract and universal virtues.
Now, when I say necessary but not sufficient, you can be a good person and not lovable.
Sorry to say. Because otherwise, in a sense, all good people would be interchangeable.
All good people would be interchangeable.
Because, let's say, you manifest the non-aggression principle, you respect property rights and so on.
Okay, well... Then you're like that old Jerry Sunfeld joke about men being interchangeable at a wedding because they all kind of look the same, they all have the same tux on and so on.
And that's why if the groom doesn't show up, everyone just takes a step over and that's why the vows say, do you take this guy?
So then we would all be interchangeable.
So if you are virtuous, consistently virtuous, then you have what is necessary but not sufficient to be loved.
Now, to be loved, and I don't want to give characteristics that are somehow universal because they would be different to everyone.
You can be virtuous and a crushing boar.
You can be virtuous and have no sense of humor.
You can be virtuous and jumpy or jittery or anxious.
You can be virtuous in a teeth-gritting way and you do it out of fear of self attack, self criticism, self laceration for not being virtuous.
You can be virtuous While professing a love of virtue and an understanding of virtue and a commitment to virtue and manifesting it, you can do so out of mere conformity.
Now, are all these things real virtue?
Yeah, you can be virtuous and boring.
You can be virtuous and dull-witted.
You can be virtuous and humorless.
You can be virtuous and emotionally inaccessible.
A spark, a statue.
A stone-faced mutterer of the incantation of goodness.
So you can be good without being someone that someone else can love.
You can shoulder your way through life's challenges like a dog shouldering its way through chest-deep snow, but not admire any particular love.
You can also be virtuous and I was going to sort of say, well, you can be virtuous and really fat, but I think that, again, unless you're suffering from some very rare medical condition that causes you to gain weight...
Then, I mean, a friend of mine has Crohn's and was complaining about gaining weight, but, you know, he said, oh, it's the medication.
And I said, you know, we've been out to dinner a couple of times.
Maybe it's a combination, some weird combination of the medication and the veal parmigiana that you regularly order along with the basket of bread and the cheesecake after, whatever, right?
So... Love certainly involves trust.
And trust requires consistency.
And it is impossible to achieve consistency of positive behavior without a commitment to abstract and universal values.
You cannot achieve the good without knowledge of the good.
And the good is something that traverses time.
It's not spiky up and down like some sort of racing heart rate EKG monitor.
So to trust someone, that someone has to behave in a consistent manner, which means that they have to have understanding and practice In the field of virtue, if you are playing doubles in pickleball or badminton or tennis or something, then your partner, so that you can trust their play, has to play consistently.
And to play consistently, you must have some training, you must have some knowledge, you must have some practice.
It doesn't mean you'll be perfect, but it means that you can be trusted to hit the ball back in a reasonable amount of times.
So, when we took God out of the equation for most people, How is it possible for them to act consistently in a virtuous manner?
Well, the answer is it wasn't possible, which is where you get the rampant hedonism and selfishness and hypersexuality and all of this stuff, right?
As I talked about in the sort of school shooting stuff when If school shootings started in the 90s, you have to start looking in the 70s or late 60s and 70s for when things began to go awry.
And this is where the real assault on religion was and the expulsion of God from the public square and so on.
So when you take away God from people, they're upset, right?
You have to give them something else.
So the case I'm sort of trying to make here is that God was taken away and in its place, or in his place, in God's place was put romantic love.
In other words, you can love each other without virtue.
Without virtue. And he's a godly man.
He's a pious man. He's an upright man.
He's an upstanding citizen.
He's a good man.
All of this was replaced by the mantra of the younger set, which is, for girls, cute and funny.
For guys, hot. Cute and funny and hot.
There's no moral qualities whatsoever.
You could say funny has something to do with intelligence, but it certainly doesn't have anything to do with morality, foundationally.
I mean, the nihilistic, drug-addicted, hedonistic ways of comedians are extraordinarily well-known and don't need any exposition here.
So you take away God...
But you give people romantic love.
But romantic love without God is absolutely unsustainable.
Because romantic love is what we do when we attach in a trusting manner to consistent virtuous behavior on the part of another.
And, of course, other characteristics that we find appealing about the person, good-humored, good-natured, optimistic, or pessimistic if that's the way you roll.
So something else, right?
So, you know, virtue is the cake and personality is the icing, right?
You can't just eat a pile of icing and you certainly can't make a cake without icing.
You could just make a pile of icing.
So virtue is the cake and personality characteristics, you know, the big five or whatever, that's icing.
So God was taken away, which caused us to be unable to love each other.
Now, UPB could have resurrected that, but UPB is struggling to find its way in the world, as you would imagine from a revolutionary moral theory.
It's only been 12 years, and in the life of philosophy, well, that ain't much, right?
So, take away God, and you are now asking people to trust each other without virtuous consistency.
Or consistency and virtue.
But you can't trust anybody without consistency and virtue.
If you just meet some guy at a party, can you trust him?
You don't know. Now, if that same person is a guy you grew up with, you've lent each other money, he's stood by you in massive conflicts, he's got your back, he's honest, he's rigorous, he's, you know, okay, then you meet him, hey, you can trust this guy.
He's exhibited virtuous, consistent, positive behavior over many years.
Which is why people tended to marry who'd grown up together in the church.
And those marriages tended to work very well, because they were loving the virtue.
And you love the virtue, you enjoy the personality.
You love the virtue. You enjoy the personality.
Again, love and enjoyment together is the best.
Enjoyment alone will not last because it can't be consistently virtuous enough for you to trust.
Virtue alone may not be enough because you may not enjoy the personality of the virtuous person.
So, When God was taken away, what was given to people as a substitute was, oh, you could just love each other.
Romantic love will be what you get in the substitute.
You can't go to the church, but you can go dating.
You can't go to the church, but you can go to the altar.
You can't go to the church, but you can fall in love.
But it was a lie. Because you can fall in lust, you can fall in hormones, you can fall in infatuation, you can fall in fusion, you can fall in temporary bonding, you can fall into bed.
So you can fall in love, but that's not the issue.
The issue is not falling in love.
The issue is staying in love.
That's the problem. The problem is staying in love.
The only thing that allows you to stay in love is consistent virtue.
But without God, without...
Philosophical virtues that are abstract and universal, like UPP, without these things, you can't stay in love.
You can't possibly stay in love because the person cannot act in a consistently positive and trustworthy manner to the point where you can give them your heart without reservations, without fear, without danger.
I mean, there's always danger in love.
The person you love more than anything in the world can get hit by a bus, can get cancer, can whatever, an aneurysm.
So, the offer of love without virtue is a devil's bargain.
It's a false offer. All you can do is fall in love but you can't stay in love.
Now, When God is taken away and romantic love is offered in its place, which in the absence of God cannot be sustained.
And please understand, when I am talking God here, I'm also talking about UPB, philosophical moral virtues.
I just don't want to say the same thing twice.
If so, you know, forgive me and just hopefully you can go with it.
There's just an awkwardness and exposition if I have to keep saying A, B, A, B, A, B all the time.
So God is both.
God gets ripped away. But don't worry.
You can have romantic love instead, but romantic love without God is impossible to sustain.
It cannot be sustained.
It literally is like saying, we're going to remove all nutritional knowledge from you, all capacity to process nutritional information.
You can just eat what you want, and that's how you'll be healthy.
You'll be happy for a short amount of time, and then what will happen?
You'll get fat, you'll get sick, you'll get...
Heart issues, whatever.
Your joints will hurt, you'll get diabetes, right?
Taking away the discipline, taking away the restraint, taking away the commitment, taking away the knowledge, knowledge of virtue, means that people can't behave in a consistent manner.
And what do you hear from women in particular?
What do you hear all the time? He changed.
He was so nice to begin with, and then he just changed.
Well, of course he changed.
Because he does not have consistent knowledge of how to reliably achieve virtue over time.
There's no knowledge of it.
I mean, if I happen to sink a bunch of holes the first time I go out and play golf, and people are like, oh my god, he's like this fantastic golf pro, right?
And it was just luck. Okay, well then the next time I go out and I do really badly, people say, oh, he just changed.
It's like, no, I didn't change.
I didn't change. I was just lucky.
Or people can sustain, you know, call this the chameleon, and this is the term for the woman who appears sane and can keep it up for maybe two months, maybe three months, maybe four, and then the cracks start to show and the craziness starts to pop out and so on, right?
Did she change? No, she didn't change.
She doesn't know how to reliably sustain rational, sensible, positive, virtuous behaviors.
She can fake it for a while, but she doesn't know how to sustain it.
So think of somebody who has no knowledge of how to gain and keep money, how to earn and keep money.
What do they do?
Well, they put on the appearance.
Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes, they put on the appearance of competence in monetary matters or productive matters, entrepreneurial matters.
But it's all juggling credit cards and borrowing and scamming and lying and pretending.
So this is a person who can fake being wealthy or being competent or knowledgeable or productive for a time.
There's nothing behind it.
There's no facts behind it. There's no real thing behind it.
And it falls apart.
It's the same thing. You can fake reasonable.
You can fake virtuous. You can fake rational for a time.
But you can't sustain it.
If you don't have the habits in place before, right?
Somebody who's not trained in running can run quite a long way if they have reasonable heart health, but it will hurt like hell the next day.
Whereas somebody who's trained in running can run the same distance and because their muscles have been trained, their tendons and their joints have been trained, it won't hurt the next day.
I mean, you've probably seen these tragic videos of obese men sprinting.
Yes, they can sprint. And they may not be able to walk the next day.
They can fake it for a short time.
They can do it for a short time. Not sustainable.
You get the idea. And somebody not trained in singing can sing really well.
The first night. But then they wreck their voice because they don't know how to sing properly in a way that is sustainable.
I had a friend of mine who was still a great singer and is a singer for many years.
He said he just, until he learned how to sing properly, like took proper singing training, he just wrecked his voice.
In fact, he said that he wrecked his voice more talking to people between sets because it was so loud where he was doing his sets.
But yeah, so you can do it, but you can't sustain it.
So you understand, right? So it's not that the person has changed, and you see this in particular.
The reason I've been puzzling about this is I was talking to a friend recently about The experience he had with someone who was, a friend of his who was married, and the marriage went really bad, and the woman moved states in order to be able to get more alimony and child support, took him to court, and charges were flying at him, and I get these, you know, I mean, it's, everybody's heard these stories, right?
These just Dave Foley stories, just brutal stuff that happens.
The Brendan Fraser stories, just brutal stuff that happens in the divorce courts.
You've got to look and you've got to say, my God, the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp.
You've got to look and say, my God, how is it possible that these people cared about each other so much?
Sorry, my voice is coming across okay, but I did like an hour and a half of very high volume.
I did part 19 of my novel, The Future, which is brutal on the voice.
It's tough inhabiting the mind of an abuser to that degree.
But, you look at these people, and you've known them, I mean, my parents were the same, right?
You've known people like this in your life, where it's like, they love, love, love, you're the best, you're the greatest, you're the best thing since sliced bread, you're the crowning glory of my life, and let's get engaged, and let's get married, and I love you, and I love you, and I love you, and then, a certain time later, they hate each other.
Okay, how does this happen?
How do you go from love to hate?
Well, You fall in lust.
You fall in infatuation.
You fall in fusion.
But there's no consistently virtuous behavior to maintain that emotion.
There's no consistently virtuous behavior to sustain that emotion.
So then, You feel that the person has changed.
They betrayed you.
They faked it.
They hid who they really were.
I thought I knew this person.
It turns out they were someone else completely.
And you get really angry.
And why do you get so angry?
I mean, I've had breakups in the past.
I dated before I got married.
And I've had breakups. I've never hated anyone.
I was hurt sometimes.
But I never hated anyone.
And I think, for me, that's because I was on this path of getting to more consistent virtues and so on, right?
But when you look at the people who hate each other, you have to say, well, why?
How could this possibly happen?
I'll tell you how it happens.
It happens because you get this really satanic lie that you can just love someone and no other ingredient is required.
Just love. Romantic love, independent of virtue, independent of God, is what is offered.
So then you get the high, you get the drug, the euphoria.
It's genuinely euphoric when you fall in love, right?
And you believe because of the new Cult of romance, right?
You believe that this is it, man.
You just got it. This is how the rest of your life is going to be.
And you fall in love. And what do you do when you fall in love?
Well, you go to all your friends and you say, oh, this is the best person.
They're the greatest person.
I love her so much. She's wonderful.
She's cute and funny. She's smart.
She's successful. She's ambitious.
She's, you know, thoughtful.
She's great and wonderful.
And your friend's probably a little skeptical because they've probably heard this before.
And you're like, no, no, no, this time it's different, man.
We're going to go the distance.
I love him forever. He's the best guy.
Right? And you're both keeping up appearances.
Like a con man and a con woman who both think each other is going to make them rich.
It turns out they're both horribly in debt and being chased by the mafia, right?
So, you fall in love, you're euphoric, you tell all your friends, this is the best thing ever, and the one, the one-itis, right?
This is the one, he's the one, he's the one, right?
And it's going to be effortless, and it's going to be wonderful, and these feelings are going to be great, and you get addicted, and all of your form of depression or anxiety or alienation or nihilism, all of it gets blown away in this unbelievable spring wind of petal-laced romance that blows into your heart, right? And in this euphoria, you're on top of the world, plus you have the sex, the bonding hormones, and the cuddling, and the physical contact, and you have everything soft and fixed.
It's beautiful, blah, blah, blah. But you can't consistently...
Be virtuous. You can't act in a way that is trustworthy for long.
So you're in this incredible high because you've been told the lie that you can just love someone.
You just find someone.
You click. What does it say? You click.
We just gel. We jive.
We get each other. We understand each other.
We like the same bands.
Yeah, like that. That might have a certain aesthetic icing to it, like it's something that you like, but you can't love that.
And so, what happens then?
Well, the unsustainability of the behaviors cracks the happiness.
And the first couple of cracks, the first couple of fights or snaps or maybe even storming out or whatever, Like, well, you know, ups and downs.
You know, he was stressed. She was concerned.
She was whatever, right?
She had trouble at work, PMS, whatever.
Ah, you know. Right?
But the cracks begin to widen.
Why? Because you don't know how to sustainably act in a trustworthy and virtuous manner.
Because you believe that you can love the person, not love the consistency of virtue in the person.
It's the only thing you can love.
The consistency of virtue in the person is the only thing you can love.
And virtue by its nature is consistency.
Virtue by its nature is consistency.
Over time, like trust is consistency over time.
Virtue is lengthy.
It is not instance-based.
There's no instance of virtue.
There's no instance of health.
Healthy behaviors over a long period of time.
You can't eat three cheesecakes and then say, well, for the next five minutes, I didn't eat any cheesecake, so I'm healthy.
No. It's not how it works.
I mean, you can't just go to the gym once and say, I'm now healthy.
It's consistent behavior over time.
Now, we all know this deep down.
And I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for the people who run towards this cult of romance and believe that they can just get all the effects of virtue with none of the trouble of virtue.
I can get all the effects of virtue.
Love. Love is the effect of virtue.
I can get all the effects of virtue with none of the work of virtue.
It's like saying, I can get all the effects of working out without working out.
I can get all the effects of good diet without dieting well, right?
No, I don't know. It's boring, and it's lazy, and it's fundamentally unwise.
You know, like, Ayn Rand was very concerned about gaining weight, so she took amphetamines, which I think half-fried her brain for decades, and she smoked like a chimney.
Lost a lung, and...
So, the arrogance, of course, of also lecturing your friends that you found the one and it's perfect and everything's great, you feel then very humiliated when cracks begin to show in the relationship and those cracks begin to widen.
You know, like if you're some con man and you say to all of your con man friends, oh, I found the perfect mark, this woman, she's wealthy, she's this, she's that, and people are like, I don't know, man, she thinks she's a con woman too, I don't think it's going to, no, you're wrong, she's perfect, she's going to make me wealthy for the rest of my life, and she's perfect, and she's the perfect mark, right? So if you brag and lord it over your friends about how right you are and how wrong they are to be skeptical, and then it turns out they're right and you're wrong, it's pretty humiliating, it's pretty humbling, and it's pretty tough for people.
So they get high on this drug because they think, oh my God, I've been freed of all cause and effect.
I can get the effects of virtue without having to be virtuous.
Oh my God! I mean, imagine if you could just be around someone and never get sick and have like rock-hard washboard abs and a great...
Shoulders and muscles and pecs and delts and whatever, right?
Just being around them.
You could eat whatever you want.
You could lie around at the couch. You had perfect muscles and perfect digestion and perfect health.
You'd say, oh my God, just being around this person, I get all these incredible benefits of good diet and strong exercise and everything's fantastic.
My hair grows back, you know, my joints are rejuvenated.
I can do cartwheels.
Just being around this person.
And you see all these other people going to the gym and eating well and denying themselves delicious food to stay healthy.
And you're like, ah, you're just idiots because you don't have the right person.
You have the right person. You don't have to do any of that stuff.
So you get the effects of virtue without having to be virtuous.
That's incredibly delicious.
Now, deep down, deep down, deep down you know it's bullshit.
Come on. Deep down you know it's bullshit.
But it's such, you know...
The devil clearly tells you that it's bullshit, right?
Because everybody knows these statistics in the up and down.
And usually, you know, when people get married, based on this love, love, love, they've been through it a bunch of times before, so they have experience, they know, right?
So, then...
People think they've escaped all their problems.
They don't have to be virtuous. They've lorded it over to their friends.
They believe they get all the effects of virtue, which is love, without actually having to be virtuous.
And they're on a high. Oh my God, I've escaped the trap of virtue.
I've broken the back of reality and I've vaulted.
I've become a god. I'm immune from cause and effect.
I'm immune from reality and logic and dominoes, nothing.
And you get a huge high out of that.
A huge relief.
And you're flying high, man.
And you're lording it over others and you're just the greatest power couple that's ever lived.
And then when things fall apart, when they fall to shit, you go from an unbelievable high to an absolutely crashing low.
Now that's a moment when you could learn something.
I mean, if you genuinely believe, I just have to hang around this person.
And I'm lean, and I'm ripped, and I'm healthy, right?
And then you go to the doctor and he says, yeah, step on the scale.
My God, you've gained 100 pounds.
And you realize there's some weird delusion that happened where you thought you weren't gaining weight, you thought you were perfectly healthy, you thought you were actually losing well and getting lean.
Oh, it turns out you gained 100 pounds.
That's a crash. From thinking you've escaped cause and effect.
Oh, I can eat all the cheesecake I want, because as long as I'm around Kristen, oh, I never gain a pound.
I've freed myself of cause and effect.
I've surmounted the biological.
I'm now in the realm of platonic perfection of form, and I don't have to lift a weight, and I don't have to restrict my eating, and I say, ah!
You're lording it all over your friends who are counting calories and going to the gym.
You're just not as good at it as I am.
I found the right person. Then you go to the gym and the doctor says, you know, you're pre-diabetic, you've got heart problems and you gained 100 pounds.
That's from like a way, almost psychotic, deluded, demigod-like high to an unbelievable crash and a grounding.
Man, that's like a stuka going down on a French village.
Boom. So you've been wrong.
You've been greedy. You tried to take the effects of virtue without having to be virtuous.
You're unbelievably greedy, and you know it's bullshit anyway, but you went for it anyway.
And some people learn.
I'm not sure how many.
I don't think it's a huge amount, but some people do learn.
They learn from that. But most don't.
Most people go from that incredible high of thinking you can get the effects of virtue, which is love, without being virtuous.
They get this incredible high, and then what happens?
They crash and hard and bad.
And they look at this person, And they say, you're making me unhappy.
You used to make me happy, now you're making me unhappy.
We went from a high to a low, and it's your fault.
You're the one who has created this misery within me.
Not my own delusions, not our shared delusions and our fantasy that we can get the effects of virtue without being virtuous.
You've changed. You've betrayed me.
You are not the man I thought you were.
You have taken away my happiness.
You have made me miserable.
You've humiliated me in front of my friends.
You're disgusting. You pig.
You bastard. Why can't you make me happy like you used to?
Why are you taking away my happiness?
Why are you inflicting this misery on me?
Boom. Divorce, lawyers, allegations, punishment.
Punishment. The devil wins when he gets you to believe lies.
Well, he doesn't win when he gets you to believe lies.
That's only one part of it. The devil wins when he gets you to believe lies and then blame other people for those lies not being true.
That's the key. It's not just that you believe lies.
We all do that from time to time, even our own, right?
Especially our own. It's when you blame other people for those lies not being true.
So they took away your God.
They said, no, no, no, you get the cult of romance in its place.
Totally fine. You could just fall in love.
You don't need virtue. You don't need God.
You don't need consistent behavior.
You don't need any of that stuff.
You just fall in love. Can't work.
Doesn't work. And it's a drug.
It gives you an incredible high An unbelievable crash.
Like, way worse than you were before.
And that crash has you hysterical and terrified and angry.
Are you angry at yourself for believing lies?
No. Angry at your partner for changing, for betraying you, for not being the man you thought he was.
And all the things you used to love about him now drive you mad.
Oh, I used to love that he was so fit.
Oh, I hate that he spends all his time at the gym.
Oh, I used to love her laugh.
My God, she's never serious at anything.
I love his sense of humor. He can never be serious.
I love that he spends so much time with the kids.
Oh my God, he has no ambition.
He doesn't get ahead, won't move ahead.
I love that he makes so much money.
Oh my God, he's never home. He doesn't spend time with the kids.
Boom, boom, boom, right? Now, the other person must pay for making you miserable.
That's the devil whispering in your ear.
Not, well, how could I expect to have consistent love without consistent virtue?
I chose someone based upon lust, on status, on envy, on Instagram, on appearance, on looks, on money, on whatever, right?
Not virtue. Of course it's unsustainable.
It's like choosing somebody to be on your basketball team just because they're tall.
It doesn't mean they're any good at basketball.
So take away God.
Substitute the cult of romance, which is unsustainable.
That's the devil's work, right?
It's the switcheroo. Take out God.
Put in something that's going to make people hate each other, which is the love high followed by the crash low.
And then empower a legal system that allows that hatred to rip people's lives apart.
And then, because of the absence of virtue, they fell in love.
They fell out of love.
They fell into hatred and destroyed people's lives.
And now they can never be loved again.
They can never, ever be loved again.
Once you've destroyed someone you claim to care about in the past, I mean, that's the price.
You'll never be loved again. Certainly once you've moved beyond restitution, like the capacity for restitution, right?
If you've falsely accused your husband or your wife, it's usually the husband, but it can be the wife, then this is what happens, right?
The cult of romance gave you a short burst of ridiculous happiness and Followed by decade after decade of loneliness, isolation, and an inability to move past the smoking crater of somebody else's heart that you thought you could hold in the absence of the physics of morality.
So I hope this helps.
Let me know what your thoughts are about this topic.
I've really been mulling it over.
For a while now, and I hope that this is illuminating and useful.
And yeah, freedomain.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show.
I'd really appreciate it. And thank you so much for listening.
As always, lots of love.
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