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May 21, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:35
The TRUTH About Long Distance Relationships!
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So, got an email today from a call-in show.
I don't think it's going to happen, but I did want to talk about the reasons why this can be a generic response.
So, long story short, guy was traveling in Italy.
He think he's American.
He met a nice Italian girl.
They hung out together.
They did all cool things.
They went to dinner.
They went for walks.
They had sex.
They bonded!
He returns to America!
And then he's like, But Steph!
I love her!
And we want to be together!
And we spent two and a half weeks together!
And I want to bring her to America!
But she's having trouble!
Oh my God!
Oh my god.
Please, stop banging each other like pots and pans overseas and thinking that bond's gonna carry over into surmounting the vast cliffs and harrowing alleys and flaming-headed monkey attacks of moving countries.
Alright?
Please.
I'm begging you.
Stop meeting people!
In other countries and asking me how to make it work.
Spoiler!
It doesn't work.
It won't work.
It won't work.
Moving countries is insane for a couple of week relationship.
So you had your bang fest in a foreign country with all of the cool unreality of traveling, right?
Because there's no reality in any of that.
I mean, there's no reality in long-distance relationships as a whole.
It's just sex and yearning, conversation, and regret.
Even immortal human beings would consider long-distance relationships a total freaking waste of time.
The universe itself Being functionally in infinity of years long would look at long-distance relationship and say, yeah, I don't think we have got that.
We don't have that kind of time.
Like, that's too long.
You will waste many, many, many moons, years, even a decade or two.
That's a line from my novel, The God of Atheists.
Children who are careless We'll lose mittens, scarves, coats and hats.
Adults who are careless can lose entire decades.
And it be true, my friends.
Don't do it.
Don't get involved.
Don't waste your time.
Don't freeze time.
Because that's what long-distance relationships... Listen, I say this from experience, man.
I say that long-distance relationships are putting your heart on hold.
You might as well cryogenically freeze yourself Except that you still have the passage of time going on.
It's putting your heart on hold.
We can't be together.
We cannot end the relationship.
We are just treading water getting further and further out to sea until we drown.
It is unfair to each other.
It locks up your heart in the yearning burning.
for a buffet on the other side of 14 feet of ice that you will never be able to access in any consistent way and you will spend a lot of money talking to lawyers and she will consider coming to your country and then the reality will set in that she has to learn the language and the culture and leave all of her friends and family behind and maybe you're gonna have a family but she doesn't have any family to help her out and she's gonna be lonely and isolated and she might not be able to work and she's gonna get depressed and anxious and aggressive and My God!
Don't do it!
Do not do it, my friends!
Find somebody close by.
Find somebody you can be in some kind of regular contact with.
Find somebody who doesn't have to go through a dozen-year process to become a citizen.
Or, failing that, See if you can find a hot chick on Mars.
Date someone on Mars.
A literal Martian is better off.
Because it's more likely that we will move to Mars than you and the girl will move together.
Ah, but Steph, you say, oh, but I know a couple who started out in different countries and they got together and they're happy and it worked out.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I know people who won the lottery.
I actually do know people who've won the lottery.
Yeah.
Does that mean you should play the lottery?
It does not.
See, Satan, for want of a better phrase, what Satan does is he gives improbable odds
occasional success in order to deceive everybody into rolling the wrong dice!
It's virtually impossible is infinitely worse than probable or impossible.
Probable, you've got a likelihood of it.
Impossible, you don't try.
Virtually impossible, oh, I'll be the exception!
Yes, I will!
I'm gonna be the exception.
I'm gonna... I'm gonna jump out of the plane, land in the hay rick, and bounce into a duck pond and be fine, because I read that it happened once!
So I don't need a parachute because I'll just bounce in just the right way and I'll be fine.
You know, a lot of people have played Russian Roulette and still walk this earth.
Does that mean you should play Russian Roulette?
It does not!
As a man, and as a woman, the only reason that you have this bizarre fantasy that an intergalactic long-distance relationship would be more likely to be successful because you wouldn't even bother, an intercontinental, between countries, long-distance relationship, the only reason that people think that stuff is going to work is because they think of each other isolated, And in bed.
That's it!
That's it.
You think of croissants in bed with blowjobs.
That's what we think.
It's sex.
It's heart.
It's bonding.
It's fantasy.
It's restaurants.
It's walks.
You know, it's unpacking your heart without consequences because you're in a foreign land.
And in a foreign land you are foreign to yourself and therefore your defenses are down and you can splurge of your innards to the point where she's gonna drown in ball sacks and intestines.
It's not real.
Not real!
Imaginary lovers, you might as well have an AI girlfriend from Dakota.
Or a Dakota fanning AI from Swaziland.
Not real.
Everyone thinks they're going to be the exception.
Almost nobody is.
So what you do is you think of that person in isolation.
Isolation!
You think of that person.
Oh, it's just the person.
Just the sex.
Just the meals.
Just the chatting.
Building little tents under the covers and burrowing into your own boy scout of fleshy happiness.
There's nothing real.
Don't have to deal with in-laws.
Do you?
You don't have to deal with dentistry.
You don't have to deal with bills.
You don't have to deal with any of the random-based practicalities of actually living in the same environment and vicinity.
It's all a vacation.
It's all funsies.
Nobody has any birthdays that you might want to have to go to because obligation without pleasure.
And then, you're inviting her Into something rather bizarre, because you're saying, oh, yeah, okay, so you grew up in Italy, speaking Italian, in the Italian culture, with your Italian extended family that goes from here to Mars and back, generationally speaking, but don't worry, come to Butte, Indiana,
And live with me.
Deal with my family.
I'll never have to deal with yours or your friends or your culture or your history or your religion or your church.
You just come and you'll confirm to me and everything will be just fine because you are an isolated atom of an individual.
You're not embedded like a fly in amber into every other conceivable religious slash cultural slash linguistic slash historical slash extended family reality.
See, normally when you pluck an apple from the tree, you take the apple and wander off.
But when you marry a woman, for the most part in general, you marry the whole forest.
Not even the apple, not even the tree, the entire forest.
You're just hoping, um, pluck that apple.
What rhymes with hug me?
You're looking to pluck that apple, remove it to your vicinity, and she's going to be just fine.
Rip her out of her life, no friends, no language, no family, no extended family, no history, no familiar sights, you're just gonna plunk her down in your little cabin of isolation compared to her society of...
Intertwined tentacled connection is going to take her to you and she's going to be fine.
She doesn't really need a job because it's going to take her a while to learn the language.
Everything's going to be alright.
Take her 4,000 miles from her home.
Plunk her down in your cabin.
Everything's going to be fine.
She's not going to miss anyone.
She's not going to feel like a stranger in a strange land.
She's not going to feel like a fish out of water.
Everything's going to be fine because you're not living in reality.
She's gonna miss her family, she's gonna miss her friends, and she, my friend, is gonna wake up one morning when your beard has grown weird overnight, and your breath is smelling, and you've got three and a half nose hairs sticking out of your nose, and you're sleeping with your mouth at a weird angle, and she can see the yellow base of your teeth, and she's gonna look at you, and she's gonna say, what the hell am I doing here?
She's going to wake up from the fever-laced, fleshy-faced sex dream.
She's going to wake up and be like, what have I done?
This is just some guy.
Some guy who kind of yanked me through lust, out of my home, plunked me down on his distinctly non-Egyptian threadbare sheets.
What am I?
What am I doing?
What have I done?
What am I doing here?
I don't know what to do.
I got no future.
We're going to get married.
My family's not going to come over getting married.
I gotta get home.
I go back salmon up the waterfall and get back to my spawning grounds.
Oh, remember that nice Italian boy who chatted with me two weeks before I met this American doofus.
Oh yeah.
That guy was great, man.
He'd really fit in.
I could have my family.
I could have my friends.
I could have my history.
I got all this kind of great stuff.
She is going to wake up and look at you.
With ick eyes, my friend!
And she's going to resent you now.
Will she take ownership and say, well, I made the choice and I made the decision?
Well, maybe, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on it.
Because if she was that wise to take self-ownership, she wouldn't have jetted all across and abandoned everywhere she was going, without even A marriage commitment.
Hey, some guy on the other side of the world, I'll learn his language, I'll learn his culture, I'll learn his history, I'll blend into his family, I'll be like an atom floating around with no history.
Yeah, I'll do all of that, and I'll give up everything I've known, and everyone I've known, and everything I want to do in the environment I grew up in, all the momentum of my history, I'm going to give it up, and bro ain't even going to marry me.
Yeah, just come.
You know, we'll live together.
We'll sort it out, man.
We'll just make it.
We'll roll with it.
It'll be cool.
Right.
She's going to wake up.
And she's going to see the ring around your head because you haven't washed your pillow.
A little yellow ring around your head because you're a bachelor.
You haven't washed your pillow.
She can look a ring around your head.
And she's gonna look and see no ring around her finger.
I'm.
And she's gonna be like, this is a joke.
I gave up everything for a roommate?
No thank you.
How terrible for her.
She's gonna wake up from the fever dream.
And I guarantee you, I guarantee you, so the reason why, this is man to man, right?
So the reason why This is all theoretical.
I've never experienced any of this.
I say this from a purely fictional and theoretical standpoint.
So the reason why we need to put a ring on a woman's finger and swear in front of Almighty God our devotion and dedication to her life and happiness is because should she touch any of our pile of laundry she will find the inevitable underpants with the skid marks.
Theoretically I know nothing of this.
I've heard tell of this from the darkest recesses of the marital dungeons.
And she's gonna be like... Ew.
Man.
Ew.
Men.
Ew!
Don't you wipe?
Don't you?
She's gonna find those white t-shirts with the...
Smoker's tooth yellow armpits and she's gonna be like, oh god.
I'm living with a man and he's doing manly things that are incomprehensible.
We are sugar and spice and all things nice.
And they are sticks and snails and puppy dog tails.
How can they be so foundationally oogie?
And that's what you need the ring for and that's why you need to get the woman to swear to almighty God that she's going to stay with you because she stays with you and your fleshy effluent based man bod.
And she's going to see you atomically destroy your toothbrush and then reach for hers and she's going to have to hide it under the sink.
And she's going to see sediment backwash Into your mouthwash.
And she's going to have to hide hers.
And she's going to say, why do you smell like a gay flower?
Well, I just grabbed the closest moisturizer I could.
It was pink and frothy and laced with estrogen, but do you like my smooth skin and man boobs?
Bet you do!
And she's going to be like, please God, why couldn't I have been gay and lived with someone civilized?
Because she's going to go from Prince Charming to unwashed, ball-scratching Genghis Khan, and if she is not locked down, she will chew through those ropes of minor obligation and head for the hills as fast as she can.
And you will not have that in some long-distance thing.
Ladies, you know what I'm talking about!
That day where you're like, Oh my God!
I've buried a monster!
Why didn't I know?
Why didn't my mother tell me?
What is it like to live with a man?
This makes the opening of the movie 2001 look like the court of Marie Antoinette.
I'm living in an ape zoo.
Oh, God.
How can they smell this way?
How can they produce what they produce?
Why are they always itchy?
Why are they always adjusting something?
I've gone to hell.
And hell is terminally hairy and scratchy.
And you gotta have that woman locked down in the eyes of God.
Because when she wakes up, and she's in masculine hell, she has to have a god who'll threaten her with eternal hell,
just so she'll stay.
And you're not gonna have that.
If you yank her out from Italy, she's going to go back to Italy.
You see, because in Italy, the illusion remains, you see, that men are civilized, and clean, and not hairy, and not scratchy, and, you know, maybe a little fae, maybe a tiny bit effeminate, maybe a little bit Astarian-based, but she's going to want to return back to the fantasy of what men could be based upon what's in the Harlequin novels, not what she's actually living with.
Which is an ape that scratches himself and appears to sweat body odor and leaves discharges in his underpants similar to a World War I mortar striking a mud pit.
And she will have an extraordinary desire for salad tongs and other implements by which she can keep masculinity at a civilized distance.
And this is why you do not live with a woman before you marry her.
Because for a man, his life gets beautiful, and wonderful, and thoughtful, and nice, and lovely, and clean, and pretty.
And women sink into the male effluviant primordial sweat and stainy scratchy ooze from which few women Gross.
Again, I speak purely theoretically.
the threat of eternal torment from Almighty God. That is why he is invented
because we can be just a little bit gross. Again I speak purely theoretically
purely theoretically and I think that every woman knows that moment of
horrifying man oog where she realizes there is no escape from the testosterone
swamp which she has in the delusion of vampires and 50 shades of gray descended
And it's not pretty and it's going to require quite a lot of wet wipes to survive.
All right.
I hope this helps.
Thank you everyone so much for a wonderful question, for wonderful questions and conversations.
Love you guys.
Take care.
Talk to you soon.
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