Nov. 19, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:44
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I left one question above on how to try to reach people about peaceful parenting. | |
| I think this is my deep purpose of my life, to share knowledge and try to help the world. | |
| Thank you, Stefan, for the kick in the metaphorical but helping me define my life's meaning. | |
| Well, I mean, in my experience, the best way to reach people about peaceful parenting is to remind them of what they dreamed about. | |
| So different from this hell, I'm living. | |
| So, when people become parents... | |
| They have a dream. | |
| They have a dream of cuddling, of glowy kids, of burbling, of breastfeeding, of playing. | |
| They don't have kids with the dream of screaming and yelling and insulting and hitting, right? | |
| They don't have that. | |
| So the first wedding that I was someone's best man at... | |
| Gosh, that's a long time ago now. | |
| Yeah, it's 30 years ago. | |
| So the first time that I was best man at a wedding, I gave a speech... | |
| Which went something like this. | |
| I said, look, over the course of your marriage, you're both smart people, you're wonderful people, over the course of your marriage, there's going to be times when you wake up and you don't like each other. | |
| There's going to be times when you look across the table and you're just having an issue and you're not getting along and you just feel like you're at sixes and sevens, everything rubs raw, everything goes the wrong way, everything feels like cheese graters and sandpaper and it's just rough. | |
| That's going to happen. Over the course of a long relationship, a lifelong relationship. | |
| Now, there will be people who tell you that marriage is work. | |
| There will be people who tell you that you have to pour heart, soul, and gritty effort into a relationship in order to maintain it. | |
| Now, there are times when everything is work. | |
| There are times when you play a sport, you injure yourself, and the rehab is work. | |
| There are times when sports becomes frustrating. | |
| But sports, in its essence, is something that you pursue because you enjoy it. | |
| And it's good for you as a side benefit. | |
| So there will be people who tell you that marriage is work, that marriage is a part-time job, that marriage is a tent that's constantly falling over and needs to be propped up with willpower and therapy. | |
| And I'm here to tell you that those people are completely and totally and utterly wrong. | |
| You know what marriage is? | |
| My good friends. Marriage is... | |
| Bob and Sue. | |
| Not their real name. Bob and Sue. | |
| Marriage is... | |
| Exactly, exactly what you feel right now, today. | |
| The glory and the beauty and the eye contact and the physical connection and the affection and the beauty of the love that you feel for each other, the commitment and the joy and the steps that you're making towards a life together. | |
| That is the marriage. | |
| That is marriage itself. | |
| Everything else is nonsense and a distraction. | |
| Everything else, you're driving down this glorious highway of life. | |
| There are rainbows and flowers popping up on either side and slow unicorns are jumping across and flying pegasi are floating across the sky and there's a pot of gold on every street corner. | |
| That is your marriage. | |
| And the disagreements and the fussing and the fighting, which is going to happen from time to time, that is like a little bug on the windshield. | |
| Gone. Wipe it. It's gone. | |
| This is your marriage right here and now. | |
| Now when you get lost, as life distracts you and pulls you in all these different directions and tangents to the point where you feel like your life is a tangent and everything else is, like your actual central purpose is a tangent and your tangent is the main journey. | |
| When you get distracted, when you get tempted by pettiness, you have just one job in this life, one mission in this life. | |
| To have a joyful marriage. | |
| And that is to return back in your mind to this day, this feeling, this commitment, this love. | |
| That is the only way forward, is to return to today. | |
| Maybe you need to replenish, maybe you need to refill, maybe you need to fuel up. | |
| You come back to this day, to exactly how you feel about each other on this day. | |
| You drink deep of that well and you go forth back into the world refreshed, With the unicorns flying and the pegasi flying and the pots of gold landing and everything being wonderful. | |
| And yes, there'll be occasional bugs on the wind field, spray them off. | |
| But this is your marriage today. | |
| This commitment, this love, this beauty, this is your marriage. | |
| Everything else is a distraction. | |
| Now go forth and multiply. | |
| And yeah, it kind of works. | |
| So what I'm reminding them is that they have a dream of being married. | |
| And when you start to fall away from a dream, the temptation is to realign the dream. | |
| Right? So you see a lot of parents who complain about being parents. | |
| Complete bullshit. It's embarrassing. | |
| Because when you decided to become a parent, or you accepted the responsibility of being a parent by having a child, you had a vision and a view of what that was going to look like. | |
| And it was not yelling. It was not screaming. | |
| It was not hitting. It was not insulting. | |
| It was playing and laughing and chasing and giggling and tickling. | |
| That's what it was. That's what parenting is. | |
| Everything else is a distraction. | |
| Everything else is a fly on the windshield on the glorious journey of parenting. | |
| So you get to people and you say, and I've said this directly to parents who I see mistreating their children in public. | |
| I've said, look, I don't know you. | |
| I don't know what your life goals are. | |
| I don't know what your journey or your purpose is. | |
| I'm absolutely positive that you did not become a parent because you saw yourself doing this. | |
| I mean, isn't this a big deviation from where you wanted to be as a parent? | |
| You just have to return to that place where you loved parenting, you loved the idea of parenting, you loved the image and the view, and say, well, my kids were doing this, that, and the other. | |
| It's like, yeah, I understand that. | |
| But in your vision... | |
| Of what you were going to be and who you were going to be as a parent, did you just have a little asterisk and say, well, but if my kids are difficult, I can just yell at them? | |
| No! You had an image of yourself as a strong, competent, generous, benevolent parent. | |
| And you've fallen away from that, and that happens in life. | |
| That happens in life. The question is not, do we fall off our ideals? | |
| Do we fall away from our ideals? We do. | |
| We absolutely do. Can we get back? | |
| Can we get back to them? | |
| Well, if we lose our vision, you have a vision of parenting as peaceful and wonderful and joyous and happy and tickling and some conflict and all that, but warmly worked out. | |
| You had that vision, and now you're falling away from that vision. | |
| Now you're just dragging your vision down with you. | |
| Say, well, all parents are like this and all kids are difficult and all families fight and all marriages. | |
| Are you just dragging down your vision with you? | |
| Or are you letting the vision reorient yourself? | |
| You lose that vision, you lose that ideal, you lose everything. | |
| Then you just fall, and you don't even know that you're falling. | |
| There's a terrifying line in a terrifying book about childhood sexual abuse that I reviewed many years ago on this very show. | |
| You can find it at fdrpodcast.com, the famous terrifying book. | |
| Catcher in the Rye. R-Y-E. It says... | |
| There's a teacher who's kind of creepy who says to Holden Caulfield, he says, you know, I see you as a guy like in a corner of an office shooting paper clips of people or like you're a guy who's falling, who doesn't even know that he's falling. | |
| That's terrifying. You're falling. | |
| Everything is relative. You know, this is the Einsteinian revolution, right? | |
| So you're falling, but what are you falling relative to? | |
| If you're dragging down your ideals with you, then you're falling, but you still feel like you're close to your ideals because you drag them down with you. | |
| If you keep your ideals high and you drag down, the difference becomes really clear. | |
| Then you get a chance to bounce back up. | |
| You drag your ideals down with you, which is a lot of what social media does, is help you drag. | |
| Like the wine moms saying, I've got to have wine with my kids because they're so difficult. | |
| You're just dragging down. | |
| You didn't have kids so that you could drink wine and complain about them on Facebook. | |
| That was not your ideal. | |
| That was not your goal. | |
| That was not what you planned. | |
| It's not what you dreamed of when you decided to have kids. | |
| So just remind people, they've got these ideals. | |
| They fall from their ideals, as we all do, but you do not drag your ideals down with you. |
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