Open Relationships are NOT for Everyone.

but whose yen I was actually married for
20 years and was faithful for 17 yeah and then had a few like one-night stands and started to realize it took me a while to realize that actually probably shouldn't be doing monogamy particularly given certain aspects of my marriage which I keep private but there were there additional reasons to this and and so eventually yeah I did confess to my wife like look I think I've had some affairs and I just don't was a wick Delahunty what no what no I'm just curious because I just I just thought [ __ ] I would never you know what I mean not him oh no no I I have no idea what you're talking about there but the knowin s I just said like I understand if you want to get a divorce cuz I just I can't do monogamy in this relationship and she said well let's try an open marriage for a while and see if that works and so we did we did that for two years and it just wasn't for her that wasn't the thing for her but it was so basically that's when we decided to get a divorce and we had an amicable divorce we only needed a divorce facilitator we didn't even need lawyers because we all agreed on everything and so we were fine about that but and then you know once once we're divorced this is the beginning of 2015 then I could publicly declare openly that you know I'm non-monogamous I'm ethically not monogamous polyamorous I'm and I'm not going back and so then then I could be a much more open and honest and not have to ever be in that situation again tario was quite open about advertising for sexual partners on his blog when he announced that he was going off to a speaking engagement he'd also request people to write back to him for an evening of intimacy I winced a little bit when I saw it but it was okay it was entirely consensual so he had no complaint and were really not interested in policing all content on freethought blogs but then we saw another problem he was showing up in the comment sections of other people's blogs and prattling on about his sexual activities it was a bit obnoxious but he'd stop when requested so there was nothing actionable about it and then he was dropped from the secular Student Alliance a speaker's bureau force breaking a rule and that rule was speakers must refrain from initiating any and all sexual behavior with students with respect to speaker's bureau events he was hitting on students a behavior that was witnessed into which he freely admitted he insisted that he never violated the students consent which he thought was sufficient but he was defined the SSAS rules and then the final straw he was banned from a major conference for his repeated boundary-pushing behavior this was a thoroughly believable accusation because we'd already seen signs of it it's a well-known fact of me now that I'm an outspoken polyamorous man and have been for three years now though do you when you do the debates or talks you ever look at the crowd and do what van halen didn't in their heyday and talk to somebody and say I like to check ro7 talk to you know I would you know I know I don't that's not interesting I don't find that if I'm going to pursue someone it's got to be with more with the interaction like I got to know something about them rent and feel a chemistry with them I can't just pick someone visually and say yeah that person that doesn't really work great yeah no I know that's where we differ well granted I have a lot more experience with an ominous lifestyle so and I know that ever seen good sex and bad sex with lots of different people mostly good sex so I I know Loreena that van Halen style of pursuing sex is not actually it's not as much rewarding as you might think it is you have got to read some of his sworn Testament you know like we were just having this casual conversation and suddenly decides that what that conversation needs at that point was for the rest of the world to know that he had so much more sexual stamina since he had his vasectomy yeah polite civilized conversation who wouldn't think of saying something like that or propositioning somebody else's wife while their husband was passed out in the next room meanwhile in Korea's sworn deposition a polyamorous a love letter kaha you've gotta feel cringe in this okay so this time I'm just saying [ __ ] it and baring my heart you and being a little overly Frank and forthcoming and just flat-out hating on you you are unequivocally awesome and you know it which is unequivocally sexy although I am a little sexually intimidated by you which only makes me more nervous I didn't mean as a life partner I think you have your hands full there anyway and my wife's rules on our open relationship I'm not allowed to have any more of those right now but as a sexual partner even if just once I admire you immensely your bravado your power your honesty your intelligence your character your skill as a writer and for me admiring a woman is in the enormous turn-on competence is erotic and sharing sexual experiences with an incredible woman like you is so what I want out of life after reading his sworn deposition I wouldn't trust him alone with a vacuum cleaner oh and just a fill you and I now completely incestuous this whole thing was Richard Currier was dating the married head of kam quest but it turns out was married to the head of the secular Student Alliance and despite being married to each other they insisted that there was no connection between camp quest and the secular Student Alliance and that's a great star of the atheist social justice warrior conference circuit who is given some $10,000 to write a book on Islam which still hasn't been produced for after the due date and this is of course from dick sir polyamorous love letter you just radiate agency and that's like a brilliant warm light you just want to embrace and experience passionately I think it won admiring you from afar sir as a writer as an activist a colleague and a valuable asset to our movement and go on spending excellent time together with you as a friend when we happen to be around each other I won't be badly dejected by now but if there's any chance you want me I'm hoping to know of course she calls it immediately and blows him out the water hmm how can I say this you must have mistaken me for someone who is impressed by multiple accounts of multiple conquests and things uh are you down to [ __ ] email is a love letter and after pages of exchanged emails yes she just lays it down on the line you've been heavily hinting at this for months now if you want to feel awful feel awful for the months and me wanting to tell you know but not being asked in a direct enough way for me to just say no and get it over with she'll already have published how you cheated on your wife multiple times in some cases with a girl 16 years younger than you who now fighting there was no less than the conference organizer who we now know you were writing a favorable reference for in exchange for certain er favors well have you ever had sex with somebody and halfway through it you just sign this socks and just get up and leave Oh [ __ ] uh no I've been polite and stuck through it very rarely I mean very rarely does that ever happen where I I realize you know what we don't have chemistry this isn't that great but no if you if you do it you're gonna be polite to the person you're not gonna just like up and leave having the freedom to be honest about my relationships and my desires and things like that not have to conceal them not have to pretend they don't exist not have to lie to anyone like this is this is the way to live now that you became famous you kicked your weight to the curb you know and then this is what you know what and what it said and what what I you know in hindsight like if I knew then what I know now of course I was naive then but if I knew more about the acceptability of just admitting that you want to be nomina Gamez I would have done that first right rather than rather than cheated but I just didn't understand that about myself and I wasn't fully in a place of understanding that that was an option at the time so I it would have been better and is is what I recommend to people who are in the same place as me is if you want to do that if you are unhappy because of your forced monogamy the situation you're in you should be honest or if you think you're gonna cheat for example you should just be honest and say look I just can't do monogamy anymore and what does that mean for us does that mean we break up does that mean we have an open relationship what and just explore that honestly with your partner I think that's think that's the best way to go but it's it's never easy because you know you could think like that's gonna nuke your marriage and that's gonna transform your life and so it's it's difficult there's no simple easy solution in those circumstances you're gonna be there's gonna be some amount of unhappiness no matter which decision you make and it's just a question of which unhappiness lasts longer or is worse than all of the options above us Yin okay so the appropriately glib way to start this this recording look I was just saying to my girlfriend off-camera there's no point in me putting up a quotation from the Pope or what will be even more extreme the leader of Isis or you know uh some Muslim fundamentalist group and me just sitting here and and blanket condemning or you know obviously that kind of critique I just don't that where the gap between me and the person I'm criticizing is is so broad or so deep or so wide that nothing doesn't really matter what in particular I say what's challenging for me and maybe challenging for some people audience is for me to talk about interact with people where the degrees of difference are harder to measure out and of course that's what I did with in veganism on this channel for years and years and years right if I got back involved with Buddhists of intellectual crosscurrents that would be the same to where I'd be talking about other Buddhist intellectuals and criticizing them or politics of Taiwan or something um so I may just say I do this as a challenge and it is a little bit challenging for me okay so I'm divorced back when I was married you know my ex-wife and I used to this is kind of a recurring thing we we talked about it was like nobody wants to separate work and pleasure we so we knew this one couple and the guy was a professor and what do you know who did he cheat on his wife with he didn't want to walk three blocks tavin affair he cheated on his wife with his secretary and at that particular university the Secretary's like this is my experience but other people call the secretaries were never like professional secretaries so again you know some people actually go to school and study you had to be a secretary it really seemed like everyone who was in the position of secretary was just kind of a friend of a friend of somebody you know it was more like hiring a babysitter er the way at that university what we saw was live assembling a little bit vague so you know and of course his secretary was a younger woman and whereas he did have kids with his wife and so on and so on and we knew this other couple and we knew them during their breakup and the guy cheated on his on his wife and who-who did he cheat with did he want to have to take a bus trip or buy an airplane ticket no he was also a professor I don't know if you had the title of full professor or because you know there's lecturer and but he was on the professor side of things and it was it was a student it was one of his one of his students and she was I mean I she wasn't a it wasn't her age that was shockingly low however there is this you know ethical code you signed up for it's actually in the contract and so on you know she was she was old enough to to consent and evidently she did consent but that is decidedly not the point apart from you know cheating on your wife now what this example gets us into is a broader question let's say you're part of a movement let's say you're part of a political movement not a professor in university but you're a leader of public opinion or a discussant or you're a Socratic figure you're a gadfly who engages people in conversations and discussions which is you know what a large part of what Richard carrier does he's part of this secular atheist you know political movement who does he want to have relationships with hook up with and so on and so forth it's he's not walking real far out of his way it's the people who are coming to his talks people come to his lectures the people who are part of that part of that scene and it's a disaster and what can I tell you I really I mean honestly I mean I'm sitting here watching this and even some of it if you described it in broad brushstrokes in the abstract it might not sound that bad no it's it's really poisonous and destructive and corrosive and you could see that and there's a brief moment as I've edited this where it gives you a diagram of the different people inside the organization's at different levels and he's connected to them you know with this personal life or a sex life and so on no I mean it's it's again whether it's a workplace or a political movement I think it's it's really hard for people to face up to how corrosive that is and then what's the solution and what are you just gonna say like oh well you know I mean don't you know separate business and pleasure separate you work that's not what anyone wants to do because Ivy actually carrier just said it it towards the end there you know in a human and sympathetic way he said no he doesn't want to have relationships with random people just because they're good-looking he wants to connect with people he has something meaningful in common with those are my words not his he did not explain it that well and who does he have those meaningful connections with who does he feel that chemistry with as he put it it's exactly people inside these sorts of difficult and delicate political and social situations yeah so I make this video because it's not easy for me to harshly condemn this other microphone was just saying you said you'd get along really well with this guy you got to give me friends you need no he used to be a Taoist he actually lost faith in Taoism and then became a critic of of Christianity I used to be a Buddhist now a mile historical nihilist he has it's true though he has an approach to history in politics you know when I have been influenced by his work more than five years ago I think we're about five years ago now you know is when I was really interested in his writing and his lectures on YouTube and so on and I'm a little bit shocked now I just googled him a couple days ago to see what I've been missing last five years in terms of what what happened in his life but yeah it's it's a cautionary tale and I close with this note it's easy it's too easy for people to say monogamy isn't for everyone it's actually a lot more challenging to say open relationships are not for everyone I mean what is the everyone knows monogamy fails whether it's 60% of the time or what I mean a lot of monogamous relationships and in divorce mmm you know what does it even mean for non-monogamy to fail I'm Richard carrier he thinks his life is great he thinks is he seems totally satisfied and quite proud and I'm sitting here watching this thinking this is a disaster I'm sitting here watching this thinking look bro you're not cut out for this you're not cut out for this lifestyle that you prepared and you know that you're basically an activist for at this point and he doesn't see it that way and of course a lot of things in life are like that I mean there is no driver's license for being a parent we know we know a lot of couples may be best we do people may choose to be a parent and it's like choose again you are not cut out for being a parent nobody's gonna tell them that yeah well good for you know what there's no driver's license there's no blood test there's no eyesight test there's no you know being a parent is not even like joining the army and the barrier to join the army is not that high if you can do 200 push-ups you can get in anyway you know uh people choose themselves to be a parent people choose themselves to be a political activist to get involved a charity non-profit sector people choose themselves to get involved in non-monogamy and to play these games and to set up these situations and who is likely to make that choice maybe disproportionately it's the people who are at least able to handle the consequences of that choice and who are the most lacking in the necessary tact detachments maybe it's it's good and disproportionately be people who are not equipped to live that life we're gonna choose to live that life hey guys those are my thoughts I'm Richard [Music]