Stefan Molyneux – The Philosophy of Marriage & Dating

Stefan Molyneux – The Philosophy of Marriage & Dating

Hello everybody, it’s Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. Hope you’re doing very well. Ah, sadly the tomcat is no more, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Katie Holmes has filed for divorce. Oh yes, oh yes, it is the world’s largest philosophy show! Right here, ladies and gentlemen, and we’re doing celebrity gossip! Deal with it!

So. I mean, everything is a learning opportunity, and in all seriousness, I think it’s very important to have some significantly important discussions about values before you start dating, before you move in together, before you get engaged, and certainly before you get married. Why should you listen to me about marriage? No particular reason, I had a whole number of failed relationships before, I met the woman who I have married and our tenth-year wedding anniversary is coming up in a couple of months. I am overjoyed, I get happier and more in love with my wife every day and we are never getting divorced. So. Hopefully a few things I’ve done right, which I can share with you.

Okay. So. You’ve got to have discussions about values. Sexual attraction, the frisson of romance and pursuit and all of these things are great and fun and exciting, but they are building your castle on sand if you attempt to make those the foundation of your relationship. You’ve got to have the conversations up front, very first date I had with my wife, y’know, obviously she looked at my forehead and she said, based upon than expanse of skin, I can tell you’re a total player. And so she said, I’m looking for, not a fling, not dating, I want something serious, I’d like it to lead to marriage and so on. Perfectly valid, we had great conversations about it. So, make your needs known up front.

Number two. It’s really really tempting to fall into the stereotypes of the genders. Really really try to avoid them. There’s a ‘men are just afraid of commitment.’ Men are not afraid of commitment, I guarantee you. Men are afraid of the court system and of getting divorced and they’re afraid that things are just going to go turn really bad. I mean, divorce is bad for everyone. For men, you may not end up seeing your kids that much, half your income or more is going to go, you’re not going to get a chance to get remarried very easily, it’s just a huge catastrophe. Men aren’t afraid of commitment, men are afraid of divorce. It’s 50% likely that you will get divorced, and it’s not like the remaining 50% of marriages where there’s not divorce are all perfectly happy. So, really work to raise your odds. Women are not shallow and manipulative. Whatever clichés you have in your head, really try to turn them aside and open up the possibility for greater, deeper, and more honest communication.

Let’s say that you have met someone, you really really love this person, you want to get married and so on. Don’t even think about it before you have discussions. Have these as soon as possible. People fill up their first dates talking about all kinds of annoying, humorous anecdotes and trivia and ‘I backpacked through Queensland’ and ‘I went to pick grapes in the northern steppes of the Thailand wastes’ and ‘I went to this school’ and it’s nothing! Who cares? This is nonsense. Who cares about that stuff? Just let it go. This stuff doesn’t matter at all. You don’t spend a job interview talking about the weather. And, as Seinfeld has said, a first date is just a job interview that lasts all night.

So talk about your values. Talk about what you want out of life, what you want out of a relationship. Do you want children? If you do want children. how are going to raise them? How are you going to discipline them? What’s your approach to religion going to be? What’s your approach to conformity going to be? Because these are really really important things. There’s this continuum, we all live somewhere on this continuum, there’s practicality on the one side, which is just conformity and getting along with people, going along with the general nuttiness of society, and on the other hand is pure principle. And we all oscillate. I try to cluster around the principled side, other people are more around the pragmatic or practical side, and unfortunately we live in a society where principles and practicality are not even on speaking terms. So where do you sit along that continuum?

If you are not a religious believer, how are you going to handle the religious beliefs of other people in the extended clan, or the in-laws and so on? How are you going to raise your kids? How are you going to educate them? All of these kinds of questions really really need to be answered. A question I asked my wife on our first date was, hey, what was your childhood like? How were you disciplined? Do you like it, do you think that’s okay, do you think it could have been better? What would you have changed? And so on. These are all very very important questions for two reasons: one is that they will predict to a large degree how the person is going to behave in the future, and two, they also give you a real insight, a window, into the level of self-knowledge that the other person has. I mean, to take an extreme example, if my wife-to-be had said, ‘I was beaten every other day and I liked it, it was good for me, it made me a better and stronger person, I’m with Nietzsche on this one,’ well, it would have been great. My next phrase would have been, “Check!” And these are important things to know, whether the person has insight and knowledge, is willing to correct, and so on.

Now. Another very very important discussion to have before you start dating anyone is the acceptance of conflicts. Sexual desire and the frisson of romance will overwhelm conflict for the first couple of months, usually four to six months is when the endorphins are racing madly through your system saying, let’s merge, minimize all discontent! But you’re going to have conflicts, you’re going to have disagreements. You need to have a methodology for resolving them. Come on, of course you do. So, ground rules, right? We don’t raise voices. We don’t call names. We don’t walk out on conversations. We don’t slam doors. We don’t throw things. You’ve got to just have those basic rules. Just those basic rules. I mean, to win a coffee cup, before you’re asked a skill-testing question, you have to agree to all these rules. How much is a coffee cup worth relative to your entire relationship, the future of your children, your genes, your offspring, your primogenitor and your genetic future? So the acceptance of, look, we’re going to have disagreements, is very important. How are we going to resolve our disagreements? What’s our approach going to be? Well, we’re going to talk it out, we’re going to try and find win-win and so on. Is it going to be more on the pragmatic side or more on the principled side?

And you also have to have a failsafe mechanism. So we’re going to have disagreements, and we’ll work on them. If we cannot find a way to resolve our disagreements, what are we going to do? Is there a third party that we consider very wise who we’re going to sit down and talk with and agree to abide by his or her judgment? Or at least, take that as input. Do we agree to go to counseling if we really hit a roadblock? But of course the whole point of having these conversations ahead of time is you don’t end up with these roadblocks. There’s so many things that can be avoided and evaded and never become issues if you discuss them up front. If you blindfold, cross your fingers, rub your lucky rabbit’s foot, and then hit the gas, you’re going to crash. Just open your eyes and stop driving looking in the rear-view mirror facing backwards while in the trunk, and you will have a great chance of avoiding obstacles. But you have to talk about these things ahead of time.

Money money money. And this is very very important. Money, sex, and housework. The big things – and parenting, of course – that rupture marriages and relationships. What’s your approach to money going to be? Are you a spender? Are you a saver? What, how much do you want to, do you want to retire early? Are you the kind of guy who likes to burn through his money as it comes in and live for now and this and that and the other? Very very important.

What about health? What about exercise? What about a commitment to be there for the long run for your partner and your children? What is going to happen if there’s weight gain? What is our approach to that? All of these kinds of things, you can just discuss this ahead of time. And the amazing thing is, if you discuss this stuff ahead of time, it generally tends not to come up as significant issues in the long run. If you’re older, what if we want to have kids? Like, if you’re mid to late 30s, what if we want to have kids, and we can’t have kids? What are we going to do? Would you like to adopt, do we do some other approach or whatever, are we going to go without kids? All very very important.

How are you going to manage the finances? The money? Are you going to merge and blend your paychecks, is it going to be one big pile of goo-money that we all scoop out of? That’s very important! Who’s going to actually pay the bills? Who’s better at financial management? Who’s better at managing all of those complicated biting swirling sparky monkeys called regulations and taxes and all this kind of stuff? Who’s going to be really good at that? One of the things that’s great about marriage is the division of labor. Some people are really good at some stuff, some people are really good at other stuff. The division of labor is one of the things that makes marriage so amazingly effective at just helping to move your life forward. But there have to be these kinds of discussions ahead of time. So, so, so important.

Do you want to buy a house? Would you like to rent? Do you want to live in an RV? Do you want to fold newspapers into pirate hats and stand outside in the rain? All of these things have to be discussed ahead of time if you want to avoid these kinds of problems. And nobody’s saying these things are written in stone, can’t ever be changed, but it’s really important to have the discussions ahead of time, just as a basic starting point.

Alright. In-laws. In-laws are another huge problem in marriages. Not all in-laws, I’m sure some are wonderful, but in-laws can be kind of important. They can be kind of intrusive, they can kinda get into the marriage, they can be kinda bossy. If you don’t have a good relationship with your parents, or if your girlfriend or fiancée doesn’t have a good relationship with her parents, if there’s not good boundaries, mutual respect, and all this kind of stuff, you need to figure out how you’re going to deal with that stuff ahead of time. If you have a difficult relationship with your parents, and you spend a day or two with them and then you come back like a smoking heap of childhood incinerated wreckage, it takes a little bit of time to rebuild. How are you going to deal with that kind of stuff?

And that comes back to, how was your childhood? Was it good? Was it bad? I mean, it’s all a mix for everyone, right? What was the good, what was the bad? What have you learned? What kind of relationship do you have with your parents now? Is it one of these perpetual they’re-the-boss, they-know-better kind of relationships, or has it flowered into a mutual respect of equals where they give you the wisdom of age and you give them the freshness of youth? These kinds of things can all be resolved ahead of time.

How are the children going to be disciplined? I touched on this before. Very very important. How are the children going to be disciplined? All children are going to do stuff that you don’t like. You’re going to do stuff that your children don’t like. How is this stuff going to be resolved? Absolutely essential. Are you a spanker? That would be a deal-breaker for me, because I’m on the principled side of the non-initiation of force, so, no yelling at children, no name-calling of children, no threatening of children, no spanking of children, nothing like that, not even a whack on the hand, not anything like that. In fact, we are now at the point as parents where there’s actually no negative consequences for my daughter and that’s working out just beautifully.

Now, when it comes to parenting as well, how are the children going to be raised physically? Not just philosophically, but physically? Who’s going to stay home? Is it going to be the husband, is it going to be the wife? How are you going to deal with childcare if you both want to work? And please, please, people, if you’re going to try and make these decisions without your children’s input, which I think is a bad idea, but, y’know, when they’re infants they can’t give you much input other than crying and peeing in your eye, so what you need to do is look at the science. Look at the science of what is most beneficial for children, at least have one person home for the first couple of years. I think that’s very, very important if not downright essential. So, how is that going to work?

When it comes to money, again, I’m sort of jumping around, when it comes to money, it’s also important to remember that if you’re going to merge body fluids and you’re going to merge DNA, going to produce a child and live together and all that, the idea of separate bank accounts and I’ll pay the mortgage this month and you pay it next month, to me this just seems like withholding. To me, if you’re going to get married, for God’s sake get married all the way. Just merge and blend and become the two-headed hydra monster with one grabby body. I think that’s what’s worked for me, it’s certainly what’s worked for my wife. There is no mine and yours in a marriage. I think this is really important.

Okay. Housework. Housework, again, a continual bone of contention for many, many couples. You always hear about how women do more housework than men and I think that’s true, but you don’t often hear about how men generally bring in more income than women. It’s a balance, right? Housework is absolutely essential, bringing in extra income is also very helpful. So, that’s just something you don’t hear of as much, but this to me is very important to recognize. Both parties contribute. If you’re a guy who’s bringing home less money and your wife is doing more housework, then get off the couch and help her out. I think that’s really important. Also, it’s not generally considered housework, all the stuff the guys do outside the house, y’know, barbecuing, mowing the lawn, fixing the driveway, the gutters, and all that kind of stuff, and that counts. But I think, standards, right? So if you’re going to marry a woman and she’s like, well, there can’t be a speck of dust in the house, everything has to be perfect and you’ve got to crap in a plastic bag on the golf course far away, that may be something that you want to negotiate a little bit ahead of time. Life creeps up, chaos overtakes, and standards inevitably falter, particularly when you have children. I think that’s really really important.

But have a discussion about what is to you a good house, and if a good house is like, Architectural Digest and Martha Stewart on a PCP anal binge could come in and find no fault with my house any time day or night, that is going to be a huge amount of work. Which means you’ve got to get a huge amount of money and pay people to clean up, or expect to never see your wife because she’ll be doing a Ray Bradbury covering the crime cleanfest from morning till night and morning again. That’s not where you want to go. You want to have discussions. Some people like little things. Some people are comfortable with the dishes in the sink, they’ll do it in the morning. Some people are like, well, I can’t go to bed with the dishes in the sink. These are the kind of things that need to be discussed ahead of time, because if you can discuss them a head of time, then they don’t become these bones of contention. Marriage is like one of those Newton machines, y’know, back and forth with the clickety clackety balls? And not in the fun robot sex way, but in the incessant conflict nag nag nag way, that’s not good.

The other thing I think that’s really important… How do I put this? I used this metaphor in one of my early podcasts, so, in the interest of environmentalism, I will recycle. One of the things that I experienced – and remember, it’s all about MY experience – one of the things I experienced when I was younger and dating – even younger and still dating – I always got this feeling, like, some woman would fall in love with me, because she had excellent taste, and she was, ahh, you’re great, you’re a great conversationalist, smart guy, you’re caring and all this, sensitive and all that, and then we would get into a more serious relationship and then it would feel like a lot about me needed to change. And I would always have the same conversation, like, I don’t understand this. I mean, you had your pick of all the cars around, you had 20 car dealerships, you had hundreds of different models of cars, and you test drove all of these different cars and then you settled for the bald sporty red tour-of-the-colonies-accent-guy me. And you said, okay, well, I’ve test-driven all of these cars, I’ve reviewed all of these cars, I’ve read Lemonade from cover to cover, I’m going to choose this car. And then she would take me, this car, home, she’d take out her welding goggles and her clamps and her change monkeys, and she would say, great! Now, I’m going to change this Stef-bot car into a boat! And I always feel like, well, if you wanted a boat, why did you bring home a car? That is something that you have to give up. You have to give up the desire to change the other person. The reason we have such a strong desire or incentive to change other people is we don’t have these conversations ahead of time! If you have the conversations ahead of time, first date, second date, deal with it! Have the conversations and then you know what you’re getting and you won’t have as strong a desire to change it. That I think is really really important. The moment I began having these conversations up front, my dating life got incredibly more efficient, both for me and for the other people, and then I found the right person, it’s clicked, and it’s worked perfectly ever since. That’s really what I’m trying to share. Romantic love, passionate love, marital love, monogamous love, is the best thing in the world (in my experience), and I’d really like to help share all of that good stuff with you.

So, these are just some brief ideas and thoughts, I really really welcome your comments. Also, it’s the last day of the month, June 2012. I just wanted to remind you, this show, it doth require the donations. And, y’know, I ask for 50 cents a show, not much. I’ve put in tens of thousands of hours learning about all of these various topics, I’ve worked really hard to become a good communicator, my wife takes off time from running her career to come with me to various speaking engagements with my daughter, which is fantastic, it’s the only reason I really can do them, otherwise I wouldn’t spend that much time away from either of them. So, this show does require your support and your donations. It’s really really important to be able to exchange value for value, be reciprocal. Especially since I’ve done a bunch of Peter Schiff shows and bunch of other speaking engagements, we are getting, oh my god, I mean, 200 gigs, 300 gigs of downloads of the shows. We have to upgrade the server, which costs a couple of thousand bucks. We’re always running out of bandwidth, but we’re going to really overbuy, get 20 terabytes of bandwidth a month just to keep up with the demand.

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