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July 11, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:45
The Truth About Dating and Marriage!
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Please help support philosophy at freedomain.com.
So there's a funny thing that's going on online.
It's been going on for quite some time about relationships.
It's a sort of twofold thing.
The first is, you know, if you want a woman to want you, then you need to do these tricks.
If you want a woman to lust after you, to want to sleep with you, then you do these tricks.
You nag her.
You pretend that you're not interested.
You talk about other girls.
And all of this is supposed to sort of program her like some deranged, deterministic sex bot to want to jump your bones.
I found this just repulsive as a whole and highly manipulative, cold-hearted, sociopathic in its essence, that you just appeal to women's insecurities and that you are kind of like an advertising slogan or some sort of frozen yogurt Kim Kardashian ate here, bunch of associative, kind of pathetic nonsense.
If a woman will sleep with you because you have manipulated her, then you haven't got a very high-quality woman.
That's all.
That's all.
People who are susceptible to that level of manipulation tend not to be enormously intelligent, tend not to be enormously self-confident, enormously well-raised, and they have the mental challenge called a lack of self-knowledge, easily able to be manipulated, and no particular free will.
Trying to program a woman into sleeping with you through various cold-hearted manipulations is viewing her as a robot, right, that you can, a particular keypad, right?
If you know the combination, you can get into the safe.
And it's funny in a way, not that I would go nearly as far as the feminists do, but it's kind of funny in a way that people say, well, you know, if you don't have voluntary consent, then the sexual activity is morally problematic.
To put it by me, you can't use the word these days.
So, and it's funny, of course, consent is important for everything except statist power.
Consent is essential, except for coercive transfers of property.
And apparently consent.
See, a lack of consent with regards to the state is just reframed as a social contract.
It's a social contract.
Did I consent to the social contract?
No, it doesn't matter.
You're still bound by it.
It's crazy.
Anyway, so if consent is important, but you are programming the woman through cold-hearted manipulations to have sex with you, well, is it really consent?
I just find it very desperate.
It's very sad.
Because it is, of course, saying that the woman will not last after me unless I trick her, unless I program her.
And for the most part, it doesn't work.
There's a somewhat cold-hearted character in my new novel who talks about how foolish it is for men to try to out-manipulate women.
He says it's offensive the word man is even in manipulative.
It should be woman-manipulative.
He's a funny character.
So to trick people into liking you is to say, by definition, that you're not likable in and of yourself.
So that aspect of things I sort of see floating around.
It's a bit in the manosphere, the pickup artist community and so on.
And it's really terrible.
It's the flip side of the men who don't approach women at all and then the women who are approached by men using these imaginary geppeto, transparent fishing twine to the panties manipulations.
It's really gross.
It's gross.
Just be yourself and see who likes you.
Really, there's nothing.
Be yourself and see who likes you and have some courage to talk to people.
Oh, I don't want to impose.
Well, civilization in the modern world lasts only in the West because we're willing to talk to people who might not want to talk to us.
I mean, everything you see that is created around you was created by people willing to talk to people who might not want to talk to them.
I mean, you look at your house at the bricks.
The bricks were sold by somebody who probably called up someone and tried to sell them bricks, even though the person hadn't asked them to call up to sell them bricks.
The bricks around you, electricity, the internet.
Everything around you, everything that you use, is created by people who talked to others without prior permission.
I mean, I've done some cold calling in the business world, and I've designed entire marketing campaigns and sent out like a thousand letters and prospectus by mail.
So, I mean, all life is about talking to people who might not want to talk to you.
And literally all life in the modern world is largely created by talking to people who might not want to talk to you.
And in general, it's men talking to women who might not want to talk back to you.
That is what all life is.
Men going up and talking to women who might not want to talk to them.
And if you bow out of that, if you flake out of that, if you chicken out of that, then you have stepped out of the giant roaring current of life that has been going on for 4 billion years.
You just stepped out of it.
And you're kind of like a thief from your ancestors.
Because your ancestors stayed in the roaring river of life, fighting currents and predators and piranhas and logs and rocks, storms, depth, and half drowning.
Your ancestors did all of that so that life could continue.
And if you allow your fears to prevent life from continuing, well, that's really tragic.
And honestly, they wouldn't have bothered, right, had they known you would not talk to girls.
They wouldn't have bothered.
They wouldn't have buried half their children, endured smallpox and diphtheria and rheumatic fevers and all other kinds of barely treatable or non-treatable, or going to the doctor made things worse diseases.
They wouldn't have endured tuberculosis and black wang.
They wouldn't have endured all of that.
Having sex with people who bathed once a year, can you imagine?
Holy crotch rock, Batman.
They wouldn't have bothered.
And they struggled through all of that so you could do what?
Stare at a screen and avoid women or men.
So if you don't talk to girls, get dates, get married, have children, then you're stealing from the suffering of your ancestors.
You know, there was some nurse who got convicted of going through the pockets of a man who died because she wanted a snack.
And it's just not you when you're hungry.
You are a grave robber.
You are scavenging through a battlefield filled with the bodies of great men and stealing their rings and coins.
I say this without reservation.
They suffered so that you could live, and what they suffered is a thousand times greater than maybe trying to talk to a girl who rolls her eyes at you.
Think of your ancestors who still had children over the course of the Black Death, which was the waves of bubonic plague that took down a third or more of European life.
They survived all of that and flourished.
Think of all of the, I mean, the baby boom was men and women.
The men had endured years of war.
The women had endured years of fear and separation and bombings in France, of course, Germany, Italy, England.
So they came back after years of trauma, slaughter, murder, injury, watching friends die, terror.
They came back and had scads of babies.
They created a baby boom out of the furnace of the greatest suffering the world has ever known, which was World War II.
And you can't talk to girls.
Come on, man.
You're only alive because your parents and your ancestors were willing to suffer to give you life.
And their suffering was infinitely greater than your fear of rejection.
And of course, not talking to girls out of a fear of rejection is being rejected anyway.
And if you're so, I mean, you know, girls want to be talked to, right?
I mean, there's this whole psyop about don't talk to girls, right?
That's just depopulation agenda, right?
And it's aimed to target the reproductive abilities of the most moral and intelligent and sensitive.
So everyone's, oh, I didn't fall for the propaganda about COVID or whatever.
And it's like, well, but if you are frightened to talk to girls too much to the point where you won't talk to girls, then you're just falling for a different propaganda that's even more dangerous.
People say, well, I didn't take the COVID jab because I was concerned about its effect on the reproductive system.
You know what the effect on the reproductive system is of you not talking to girls?
It's 100% kill shot.
You don't get to reproduce.
You might as well not have testicles or a penis.
Infinitely worse than any other fear about survival.
If you were to go to your ancestors and say to them, hey man, thanks for all your struggles, but I'm just going to play with myself and not talk to girls and it's the end of the line for our entire genetics, imagine how enraged they would be, how contemptuous, how angry, how frustrated they would be.
And, you know, they're all, our ancestors crowd our minds.
You know, the East Asian idea in some cultures that ancestors float around and cheer or curse at what you do.
It's very real because culture exists because our ancestors live in the holes of our minds.
And they have very strong judgments.
And those occur whether we will them or not.
Part of the conscience is the eternal voice of our ancestors trying to guide us to justify the sacrifices they made.
Or if you were to be given a choice of where you wanted to be born, I'd say, well, you can be born in the Middle Ages, and you face plagues, famines, wars, diseases, political control that's impossible really for us to even imagine.
You might not be able to read, probably wouldn't be able to read, wouldn't have any access to books, and might be tortured to death for taking a rabbit from the king's land.
Or you could live in the almost infinite comforts of the modern world.
And or but you have to talk to girls who might say no, who might roll their eyes.
It's that picture from the meme video of the girls as if looking at the guy holding their little red cups of debauchery.
Yeah.
Well, who would you uh who would you rather be?
The guy in the Middle Ages?
Living in fetid, squalid, uncomfortable, lice-ridden straw mattresses, never having access to a dentist or antibiotics?
Well, I guess you had a dentist who just pulled your teeth.
Or would you rather be you with the infinite freedoms relative to them and the infinite comforts of the modern world?
And this is my character Roman's argument in my novel, The Future.
People are only as hard as their circumstances.
If you have tough circumstances, you become tough.
If you have easy circumstances, you become soft and tremulous and frightened and cowardly and nervous.
And of course, we're not particularly designed for the kind of freedoms that we have.
We're not designed to be able to say challenging and contentious things in the public square or the public sphere, because in the past, that would just get you killed, well, tortured and then killed.
And it might be the end of your line.
Being outspoken, being frank, being direct, being honest, being controversial, is for kings and nobles, of which only 1-2% of people were.
Not designed for it.
I might be a little designed for it because my ancestors were nobles, lords.
Who would you rather be?
Medieval peasant or you?
We wait for courage to make that which we are afraid of easier to bear, which is like looking at a gym and saying, I'm going to wait for my muscles to grow so that the weights are easier to lift.
Once my muscles have grown and the weights are easier to lift, then I will start working out.
But of course, as you know, this is not at all how it works.
How it works, you see, is you go to the gym, you're soft and flabby, you start lifting weights, it's uncomfortable and painful, and then you get stronger.
That's courage.
Courage is do what terrifies you, find you survive, find you flourish, find your fears diminish, and the musculature of your courage grows through resistance, through overcoming fear.
Waiting to be courageous is like waiting to be wealthy.
Say, well, I'm going to wait till half a million dollars falls into my lap at home, and then I'll start a business.
No, you start the business, you scrape by, you get by, you work like crazy, and then hopefully eventually you become wealthy.
Every time you don't go to the gym, your muscles get softer.
Courage is a continual process of doing that which is difficult so that you weaken your cowardice.
Courage is not a one-time process.
There's that fantasy in the movie Back to the Future that you just do one courageous thing and your entire life changes thereafter.
Nope.
That's like saying you go to the gym once and you have ripped muscles forever.
Nope.
Courage is a continuous thing.
Courage is like holding 20 pounds above your head.
The moment you stop acting courageously and taking on that which is challenging is the moment that your courage weakens and your default state, which is cowardice and mine, which is cowardice, returns.
So that's the first thing I wanted to say.
The second thing I wanted to say is this.
There's a funny thing about marriage, that it is about romance and sex, basically, right?
You got to have your date nights, and then you should greet your wife with rose petals and hot bubbly water, not in the sink, but in the bathtub.
That's two different things.
And you've got to make her feel special and loved.
You've got to romance her.
And I'm not foundationally opposed to these ideas.
I think that they're kind of fun and cute.
But it's not what marriage is about.
Marriage is about birth and blood and life and death and the long process of dying.
It is about rooting yourself in the cycle of life so that you can withstand the storms of the everyday.
Marriage is about a deep connection so that you can shepherd and navigate yourself through the storms of any worthwhile life.
Easy live and quiet die, it's a song from my favorite movie, Room with a View.
It's tempting.
It's tempting, but it's a living death.
There's a cafe I sometimes go to with my daughter, or my wife, occasionally.
And it's like a gaming cafe, and we'll see men and the occasional women in their 30s, you know, playing board games or some sort of role-playing game and so on.
And it's not that there's anything particularly wrong with that.
It's just that there's no rings on their fingers.
They're hunting plus one or plus two rings of protection in the game, but they have no actual rings on their fingers.
There are no children, and it is a life of eternal adolescence.
And I've talked to enough people who get older who've taken that approach of hedonism, searching for distracting pleasures to avoid the larger pictures of the cycle of life that we are all bound and determined by like it or not.
Easy live and quiet die.
The chilling regret of quietly discharged atoms, as I talked about in a poem of mine from my teenage years.
A woman who lived small, found no heaven or salvation at the end of her life, only the quiet regret, the silent regret of quietly discharged atoms.
The atoms will outlast you.
The life evaporates like morning dew as the sun rises and the world turns.
Marriage is about keeping the fragile, flickering flames of children's lives on this side of the ground.
It is about nursing children through illness.
It is about helping someone recover from surgery, helping them stand, helping them walk.
It is about helping to Navigate the sometimes unbearable pain of decaying and dying parents and grandparents.
It is about having someone to hold your shaking shoulders over the scar in the earth they put your loved ones into when they're dead.
It is about somebody bringing you room temperature soup and a cold compress when you're too sick to get out of bed.
It is not about petal paths and date nights.
It is about holding on to another human soul in the sometimes unbearable storms of suffering that regularly cross our paths as we age and eventually consume us completely.
It is about finding someone who can help you laugh as the gray tide of aged suffering begins to overwhelm the sunny beaches of your youth.
It is a foundational, soul-based connection to resist and find joy in the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, as Hamlet says,
and most fundamentally, because animals have their primitive pair of bondings too, most fundamentally, it is about finding someone who stands with you steadfast, unwavering, when the bladed swords of injustice come flying down from the sky because you will not bend the knee to the endlessly corrupt and powerful.
The shield of love is what is required to survive the reigning arrows of cruelty and injustice.
And it's nice to take your spouse to his or her favorite restaurant and it's important to tell your loved ones that you love them.
But it is foundationally important to have loved ones that you love and to be a loved one that someone loves and there's no way to achieve that without the base virtue called courage.
Talk to the girl you're interested in.
Talk to her honestly and deeply.
Show her a life of meaning and purpose and virtue and strength and show her that you are going to suffer no matter what in life.
And there are great sunny periods when there is great joy and no clouds on the horizon.
I remember as a kid, my best friend and I used to go to visit his single mom's boyfriend in northern Ontario.
And we would be driving and there would be trees by the road and it would be sunset and so the trees would cast long shadows on the road and I remember sitting in the back seat looking at the road ahead and all of the dark and sunny patches, long stretched shadows by the lowering elbow of the setting sun.
And we would drive through the dark patches and then there would be long sunny patches and even then at the age of 13 or 14 I thought isn't that kind of like life now?
The way that I viewed it in my own mind was I imagined an alien occupation of Earth and how you would fight back against it.
There would be sunny patches.
There would be dark patches.
And it has just struck me now, as I'm talking, that that is a good analogy because it was never sunrise.
We never left early in the morning.
We always left after school on a Friday and stayed for the weekend.
I remember this guy was a baker, and he's the one who taught me about the word fresh.
He says, well, if your bread is a day old, you say it's a day old fresh.
If it's three days old, you say you say it's three day fresh.
I said, well, what if it's ten days old?
Is it ten day fresh?
You commit.
And of course, the reason why the light in the dark of the shadows of the trees on the road was so powerful for me at the time.
And now is because the sun was setting, which means you have patches of light and dark over the course of your life.
And eventually, the sun is gone, and it's all dark, and you have disappeared.
Well, the sun is gone, but the sun doesn't disappear.
Only you disappear.
The sun sets on the patches of light and dark that characterize the joys and sorrows of your life, and then the sun winks out and you are gone.
And of course, it was particularly powerful for me, in hindsight, that I was in the backseat of the car because I was not in control of my destiny in my early teens.
Of course, like who is, right?
Except maybe Joan of Arc.
Well, even then, she was following divine commandments in her mind.
Now, the sorrows of life are less visible to the young, because the sorrows in life that accrue to the young, I'm talking about people who are adults but youthful, late teens, early 20s, maybe into early, mid-30s.
The sorrows that accrue to the young are largely self-inflicted or chosen.
So if you choose not to save your money, but you choose to spend it, then you will have the sorrows of having very little choice in getting or keeping a job.
If you avoid talking to girls and get addicted to screens of the gaming and sexual variety, then the sorrows and loneliness that you have is the result of your choices.
Now, your choices influenced, of course, by what happened in your childhood, but you still have infinitely more free will as an adult than you have as a child.
So the sorrows that you have as a young man, as a young woman, are self-inflicted or chosen.
They're the result of your choices.
And so we get this funny impression when we're young that because our sorrows are largely the result of our choices, we can choose to escape all sorrows.
If you're lonely, right, then you can choose To make friends, you can choose to find people to date, and you can fix it.
So, because your sorrows are chosen, you have the impression that all sorrows are chosen, and if you choose better, you will avoid all sorrows.
And I'm sort of going through this process a little bit at the moment because I thought, well, I make good choices with regards to health.
I exercise, I eat well, I've lost 40 pounds, I, you know, like I've made decent or good choices with regards to health.
I get my checkups, I see the dentist, you know, these kinds of things.
And when you're young, if you make good decisions regarding health, it keeps you healthy.
But of course, when you get older and you make good decisions with regards to health, all that happens is you slow down your dying.
There is no amount of sit-ups that will make you immortal.
And quality of life improves when you exercise and eat well.
And I don't have any painful chronic health conditions and no back issues, no knee issues.
And I can still sprint and I can still go rock climbing and all of that.
I still can play like an hour, hour and a half of hard pickleball with my wife.
That's not an analogy.
That's real pickleball.
So I'm pretty good for late 50s, but all it does is slow my dying.
So when you're young, your suffering is largely the result of your choices, and therefore it's easy to think that all suffering can be controlled by better choices.
False.
Not all suffering can be controlled by better choices.
As I age, I have maybe 20 to 25 years on average if I'm lucky.
As I age, there will be suffering that is not part of my choices, that I will simply have to endure.
If you have old people in your life, you know the litany of complaints that they have.
And that is simply beyond free will.
So, you want to make good choices until your suffering is beyond your choices.
Root yourself in someone else's heart.
Act in a noble, productive, and positive manner.
Be someone who inspires affection, loyalty, love, connection, reality, truth.
Shackle yourself together with someone because the storm will blow one person away.
Two people dug into the institution of marriage can weather the storm and the storms and they come and they sometimes come in waves and they will often be beyond your capacity to choose or unchoose and must simply be endured.
People can take five to ten years to die.
Loved ones, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents.
And you don't choose that, and they don't choose that.
That is simply the inevitable decay of the imminently quietly discharged atoms.
So your children will suffer.
You bring them up rationally.
They will suffer trying to navigate a world that is pathologically hostile to facts, reason, truth, and evidence, inoculated by parasitical propaganda of the state and semi-private kind, education and the media, respectively.
You bring them up rationally, they're going to suffer in a world of anti-reason.
You bring them up to conform with the madness of modern culture, and they suffer too.
Even more, I think.
I hope.
So marriage is not about tingles, dating marriage.
It's not about tingles.
It's not about chemistry.
It's not about getting your rocks off.
It's not about sex.
Tingles, chemistry, lust, and sex are very important ingredients in marriage, and marriage is founded and required because the consequence of sex are children that need decades of investment.
But tricking women into sleeping with you by nagging and ghosting and talking about other girls and pretending to be too busy and tricking women into having sex with you is not shackling yourself together in the two-person team it takes to survive life's storms.
The deeply rooted oaks can survive the crazed storm.
The saplings cannot.
The smaller trees can only survive the storm if they grow together as one.
And you need the weight and ballast and strength and feedback of a loved one whose virtuous to stay sane.
Sanity is conversation.
It is not introspection.
Introspection doesn't hurt and may help.
But fundamentally we find the truth in conversation with others because the truth is out there and other people's perspective looking at us is also out there.
And having someone by your side when the storms of life come to take down the tremulous dwelling of your happiness, someone who can patch the roof and hold up the beams and help repair after the storm passes is essential.
And we have shielded the young from the perspectives of the aged, right?
This has been a constant process of propaganda for years and decades and decades, that the old are foolish and racist and bigoted and out of touch, out of tune.
Now, a lot of that's true with regards to the boomers, but we shield people from the second half of life so that they do not attach to each other with the deep shackles and roots that allow people to stand against the accidental tyrannies of nature and the conscious tyrannies of man.
People who are isolated are easily conquered by fear or political power or injustice or addiction or avoidance, cowardice.
The union of two loving and moral souls puts roots into the ground that reach, it feels like, almost to the center of the earth and can withstand everything except death, which cannot be withstood as the course of time continues.
So this idea, well, you know, it's about you've got to have your date nights and you've got to do this and you've got to sleep, those are fine.
Those are fine.
It's about getting laid.
It's about getting a hot girl.
It's about this whole very shallow, very foolish.
And I am not at all saying this from a place of superiority.
I constantly want to reinforce this.
These are hard-won lessons.
I did the hedonism thing when I was young, because I was shielded from the consequences of hedonism, which is what allows hedonism to flourish and undermine and destroy, as hedonism does.
Hedonism is the addiction to pleasure, regardless of morals, regardless.
And morals are what allow pleasure to continue.
Making life about pleasure is setting yourself up for the almost infinite suffering of the last half of your life if you have not put the foundations and the roots and the compromises in necessary to have a companion.
You see, the way to survive a battle is back to back because we do not have eyes in the backs of our heads.
And life is periods of peace and periods of war.
War against others, war against injustice, war against falsehood, war against despair, if the suffering that you experience is beyond your control.
If the suffering you experience is within your control, you can act, and that's how you combat despair.
But there is significant suffering that is beyond your control, which, if you had a bad childhood, when you get older, mirrors the bad childhood.
When we are children, if we have bad parents, we are unable to control what our parents do.
When we are adults, as we age, we are equally unable to control the effects of our prior bad choices.
Our bad choices become like the abusive parents that dictate the suffering of our daily existence.
If you are a woman and you did the pseudo-Dubai hedonism path of sexual excitement and roller coaster relationships, well, you pass 40 and all that hedonism is now paid for.
Life is suffer now to a lesser degree or suffer later to a greater degree.
And focusing on the future suffering is how we reduce that suffering by embracing suffering in the here and now.
Last night, at 10 p.m., I did 20 minutes of hard weights and 30 minutes of hard cardio.
Did I want to?
I did not.
I mean, it's not like horrible, but it's, you know, it's suffering.
If you, especially cardio, you know, the first five, 10 minutes is like, there's no way.
And then after that, you hit your zone and you're fine.
But if you had the experiences of cardio without doing cardio, you'd think you were dying.
My God, my heart's racing.
My chest is pounding.
I can't breathe.
So you exercise now, which is small suffering, or you suffer later with bad bones, bad muscles, bad joints.
And then it may be that you cannot recover.
So prior bad choices become the cause of suffering you cannot negotiate with just like bad parents or bad teachers.
So marriage is an ancient powerful institution designed to give comfort and succor in the inevitable storms and suffering of pain, decay, and injustice that characterize a life of wisdom.
Because of course, when you're young, you have hope.
When you get older and you understand the intransigence of people's mindsets and their baked in deep-rooted spinal bone marrow hostility to reason and evidence, you realize that there may be hope in the world, but not for this cycle of history.
As you gain in wisdom, it becomes abundantly and brutally clear to you, to me, to everyone, how scant the practice of wisdom is in this world, and that people, most people, would much rather use violent means, deception, hypocrisy, manipulation, propaganda, to gain their resources rather than rational productivity and honest trade.
The majority of people in the West gain their resources through corrupt and immoral means, and they will ride that into the ground, deep into the ground, into hell itself.
They will not give up their ill-gotten gains, though it costs them everything, and their descendants, everything.
That's just a fact.
And as someone who has done more than a small amount of reasoning with the world, I tell you this, as a challenging fact.
I mean, it's important to accept the facts, though they cause a suffering because the avoidance of accepting facts is even more suffering.
The cost of avoiding facts is an endless repetition of futility.
I can punch my way through this wall.
This brick wall is false.
And if you don't accept it, you end up with destroyed hands and no path through the wall.
Life is deep, my friends, and you need people with you to navigate that depth.
There's a lot of suffering in the second half of life, and you need someone with you to assuage and comfort that suffering as you assuage and comfort their suffering.
The world is hostile to truth and reason, and he who increaseth in knowledge also increaseth in sorrow.
And the other side of sorrow, what's on the other side of sorrow, is acceptance.
I'm going to die, you're going to die, and the only comfort we can have on our deathbed is looking back on a life well lived.
Stop following your balls, stop following your hormones, root yourself into someone's heart through the grim practice of consistent virtue.
Love and be loved.
And that is the only antidote to the suffering that is inevitable.
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