Open Relationship Nightmares w Unnatural Vegan.

sex is a physiological need and women
who don't have sex with their husbands really shouldn't be surprised when they end up cheating i guess my ultimate point is that you know it's easy i think to feel sad for someone who's cheated on but i think often we should also feel sad for the person who has cheated these aren't like mental health issues this isn't something that talking it out is going to fix yeah i'm very concerned about men suffering through this because it is suffering we applaud women who leave or even cheat on men who don't satisfy them sexually but the reverse is not true we expect men to grin and bear little to no sex for years and shame them as deviants and selfish if they give in why don't they leave it's not so easy not having sex doesn't mean there isn't still immense love there and sharing a home and kids and grandkids if we aren't going to have sex with our spouses maybe we should one divorce or two let them fulfill their needs elsewhere does anyone really expect the average woman to go oh yeah sure go go ahead go have sex with someone else sure no of course not and it may not even be you know maybe the person who doesn't want sex is still like okay yeah we'll still have sex but maybe it's not so enjoyable for the other partner because they know that their partner is not into it they want to have sex with someone who's into it maybe again i i don't think this is necessarily an issue that therapy is going to solve i think the issue is pretty clear this person wants sex and they're not getting sex how are you going to fix that you know i think there are ultimately two i guess three options divorce let your partner fulfill their needs elsewhere or the partner decides to just grin and bear it there's a difference between being in a bad open relationship and entering into an open relationship for bad reasons it's that second category i really want to talk about here the first category is broad a relationship can be a bad relationship for all kinds of reasons like drug addiction alcohol gambling whatever you hate each other's parents doesn't matter right what i want to focus on here is entering into an open relationship or taking a closed relationship and making it open for the wrong reasons and i gotta say right off the bat in the 21st century some of our social problems some are exacerbated because we all grew up watching tv now that is not to say these problems just wouldn't exist at all in some you know ancient society that didn't have television sets they do they do i mean you can read the anthropological literature and you can go to papua new guinea and live with the last groups of tribal people who don't have tv sets and they still cheat on their wives you know i'm not making that claim one of the things i noticed growing up was that tv shows would have a regular cast of characters who appeared every week and then the viewers were really encouraged to kind of dehumanize the occasional characters you know on the sitcom jerry seinfeld he'd have a new girlfriend every week and the girlfriend didn't matter right the girlfriend arrived and departed like a prop on beverly hills 90210 it was the regular cast of characters some of whom were boyfriends and girlfriends amongst themselves whatever relationships they had but then if any of them ever had a new relationship coming in from the outside that person just served one purpose in the plot they in no way had their own relationships their own desires their own goals in life that that mattered they didn't have their own ambitions that would change the plot in any way they would just serve a purpose for the regular cast of characters when i listened to somebody like swayze somebody like a natural vegan if you heard the start of this video when i hear her talking about a closed relationship becoming open of the the couple who are the protagonists on this tv show opening up the relationship to allow in other people i think there's a real dehumanization of those other people and to me it just reflects that habit of mind that we all cultivated watching tv shows now there's also a very deep ambivalence about prostitution and she hints at it a few times a lot of this comes from i like reading about sex work um that's just my my quote of the year yes i like reading from sex workers particularly when they talk about you know having relations with married men and how often these married men talk about how much they love their wives and how they don't want to do this but they're not having their needs fulfilled and i i think it would be silly to just assume that all these men are lying and that really they don't love their wives and really they're just being [ __ ] you know i just i don't think that makes sense and that's not how i want to view a large portion of this world if the point is that a man wants to have sex with someone other than his wife and he wants this to be a completely one-sided uh emotionally null and void relationship he just wants to use someone else for sex and then discard them we're either talking about prostitution or some kind of very shallow relationship that resembles prostitution now let me ask you which is more disturbing to you whether you're a man or a woman listen to this whether you're gay or straight would it be more disturbing to you if your partner in a closed committed relationship of many years said to you one day hey you know what let's make this an open relationship so that they can go and just sleep with prostitutes and there's going to be no intellectual component of those relationships there's going to be no emotional component they assure you they're going to just have transactional sex sex that is paid for of course some people do develop deep relationships with prostitutes it's not one claim here but that this is what they're promising is that they're going to make it for an open relationship exclusively for the purposes of sex of the shallowest possible commercialized kind is that more or less disturbing to you than if they say to you that they want an open relationship for the purposes of actually having an intellectually engaged emotionally significant friendship with somebody that they also happen to have sex with that this other person is going to come over for lunch sometimes so sometime and not have sex you're just going to eat lunch together and talk about history and politics or business like that this is actually someone you'd want to know for the next 10 20 years life or when you're old people that maybe when you're in your 80s and maybe nobody's having sex i mean maybe you've all kind of dried up sexually but this is going to continue to be an emotional relationship or or that that's what they want to pursue like whether or not they accomplish that that they want to have those kinds of relationships that kind of possibility it challenges the beverly hills nano210 view of the universe it challenges the seinfeld view of the universe it challenges our assumptions that we and we alone comprise the recurring cast of characters that other people come into and exit our lives in this frankly disposable easily replaceable manner it's not like we don't have a culture that encourages this idea that there's one perfect person for you and when you find that perfect person and marry that perfect first person you're never gonna look at anyone else again right he won't look to anyone else because he's just gonna want you so maybe maybe that's why women are able to hold these two views simultaneously like yeah when men are super sexually driven but he married me and i'm his one special special person so it's fine it's fine if we don't have sex because he loves me so much right yeah i definitely agree with swayze on this and i think it's probably unhealthy to think that one person can satisfy every single need in your life and that's part of what goes into this belief that when you find your one special person that like you just need that one person that's all that you need and yeah i think that leads to a lot of dissatisfaction that you're not really willing to address i think one of the differences between me and 99 of people in this generation is that i don't really believe in needs that way like i don't think a painter needs to paint a painting i think there's something creative and arbitrary you know it's like okay i'm gonna take this canvas and make it into something special for some reason like there's something aspirational there that doesn't relate to necessity in the same way as hunger and appetite or cold and clothing or something and you know i don't think in this sense we clothe ourselves with our lovers against the cold of being alone and i definitely don't think we feed ourselves with our lovers against the starvation of loneliness i just can't see it that way i really see my relationships with women as being something creative and something i can do without and i i do have experience you know living in celibacy and so on you know um now i think and maybe i'm wrong i think that makes me value relationships more like seeing them as something creative and unnecessary i understand i assume i imagine that swayze as this kind of committed utilitarian would instead see my view as valuing sexual relationships less right and and in a sense i think we're probably both right like why am i hostile toward the possibility of just sleeping with a prostitute you know and i just said this doesn't mean i'm absolutely opposed to it i've made other videos talking about how difficult it is to be 100 opposed to prostitution living in the real world as we do but why do i have a hostility towards it it's i think it's because it's lacking those other components that i that i value and on the contrary if you do see this as a need in this way you know like if you if you regard this the same as eating at a fast food restaurant by the side of the highway because you have to eat and that's the only restaurant for the next 50 miles you know like real world highway conditions if that's how you view sex that's going to lead to a very different evaluation of prostitution and i think of other other personal relationships i guess my ultimate point is that you know it's easy i think to feel sad for someone who's cheated on but i think often we should also feel sad for the person who has cheated i'm starting at the end of this story and i will just say that while many stories of this kind on reddit that then get bandied about here on youtube are fictional or they are fiction masquerading as autobiographical effect in this case i believe this story to be true and one of the reasons for that is this guy protested that he's divorcing his wife he hates his wife he doesn't trust his wife anymore kind of again and again and again and then at the end he crumbles he did a final update where he turned around and accepted his wife back into his life and he got over it and got up with the marriage so i think if this had been kind of a fake story it wouldn't have had that overall character arc which is certainly shall we say human all too human quote i still think she is a great mother and life foreigner for those reasons i will try to work things out with her i decided that the best course of action would be to pursue an open marriage agreement so that way i don't have to have her drudge through sex with me that she likely doesn't enjoy and if she wants someone she can share her wild sex with she can do that as well and i can find someone who fulfills me sex as well do you see the problem i'm getting at here do you see how he's thinking about implicitly these other people and what it'll mean to them so him and his wife i mean obviously you don't have the whole story yet they're thinking about their problems in this relationship their mutual dissatisfaction distrust what happened and then they're gonna solve that problem by supposedly having these transactional relations with other people and these other people what do they want i mean if they're not prostitutes they don't also want to have a home a family children they don't want to have the intellectual and emotional aspects of relationship let alone the economic aspects or you know family building aspects oh so these people are just going to come to your life and solve your problem and you're not going to solve any of their problems and now look even if this plan works what if works too well what if you get a girlfriend and your wife gets a boyfriend and because those relationships work better sexually as you're suggesting they start to work better emotionally intellectually also this to me is an example of starting an open relationship for all the wrong reasons i do not have to go on and on about it but i do think that many of us were trained in our way of thinking by many years of watching television and it was on television that we first learned about how romance and marriages work we probably learned more from sitcoms and romantic movies than our parents ever taught us or ever could so as you will see this story is just as much about trust and self-esteem as it is about any of the other components of sex and romantic relationships quote i met my wife seven years ago she was extremely picky when it came to sex she told me she only had been with one other man before she would never perform oral sex she would only do certain positions and found almost every sex act degrading i was frustrated by this but i really liked her and hoped that over the years she would open up sexually over the years it never got any better but i learned to get over it well i ended up finding an old video from her college days of her engaging in group sex with six other people five guys and one girl in the video she has anal sex oral sex gets double-teamed and yells multiple times that she is a filthy wh word shall we say for the 21st century all of it she was enthusiastic about i ended up feeling really sad i can understand there are certain things people don't want to do but it was the fact that she didn't want to do them with him with her husband but she was willing to do it with these other guys so here we get his summary of his confrontation with his wife she continued to deny that anything of the kind happened and evade his suggestions that she had some history doing something like porn up until the moment when he confronts her with the fact that he has seen the video and he has the video in his possession different people would respond to this crisis in different ways but you can see here that his problem is on the one hand the loss of trust within the relationship and then the loss of self-esteem he feels because his sense is that she was more attracted to these men than she was to him that in a sense she had more of a gratifying sexual relationship with these complete strangers in college when he looks at this videotape and then he looks at the reality of what his sex life has been over these many years it is one thing to lie about sleeping with other guys it's not that you didn't like doing those things you didn't like doing them with me she replies i can do that stuff with you i am attracted to you you know that he says i don't want you to do it because you feel like you have to i want someone that actually desires me close quote so you see what a terrible dead end the relationship has come to before he thought the problem was that she didn't like sex now he feels the problem is she doesn't like him she doesn't have sex with him also she told him that she'd only ever had sex with one man other than him which is a very serious lie and something he'd born with him and it's something that justified her lack of sexual interest or lack of sexual ability in the relationship up to this point so the sense of dishonesty and betrayal is so at this point he's 100 set on divorce he thinks the relationship can't possibly persist but as you're going to see in a moment he comes up with this brilliant solution that they can have an open relationship as if having sex with other people is going to solve the problem that you're not having sex with your wife those are real really it's just you know more problems more people more problems you might say all right quote he ended up leaving his wife she kept trying to stop him she kept on begging him to stay uh promising that he could do anything he wanted to her it was truly pathetic and he lost all respect for his wife the way that she was trying to manipulate him with sex so again for him part of the problem is he doesn't want her to grudgingly or in a dutiful way do these things with them given that they've been together for seven years and she never wanted to do these things or found them repulsive or something or just generally was terrible in bed it can't possibly be that now that she's shamed and humiliated but the revelation of her real past from high school and college which as you can imagine was a lot more than just these particular six or seven guys in the video you know you gotta warm up to that that kind of thing i mean shovels had this impressive career which is starting to come out as he's interrogating her and snooping around um [Music] i don't know yeah i mean this is this is the case for a sexual psychologist i i don't know like you know if if maybe she saw herself as this person in in college like okay i'm going to use these years in my life to be a filthy wh word and then yeah i'm going to marry somebody and be seen as somebody respectful and prudish almost uh this this is a problem that was her goal or what or or if maybe she yeah she switched to a mothering role and they have a kid together where she and she just turned off that that side of her life but look i'd also say she chose this man and this is how she relates to this man and i think he is partly correct you know i'm not i'm not saying the problem is him it's not as simple as that but the problem is their relationship the problem is who he is for her and seven years is sure as hell long enough to know yeah right anyway yeah but he feels this is her manipulating him it doesn't matter how much she promises that she can now be as filthy or if she doesn't want to for some if she wasn't turned on by if she wasn't sincerely enthusiastic she wasn't drawn to him or drawn to this kind of thing he doesn't want her to honesty i think that's a big part of sex and that's a big part of attraction to somebody right well in yeah i mean it's all yeah i know i know how much how much honesty do you need for a one-night stand versus a seven year marriage i know but yeah yeah the fundamental thing is that he doesn't trust her anymore and nothing she would say is going to when that honesty is gone when that trust is gone what what kind of relationship can you really have but there's the further paradox of how could you solve that problem by sleeping with prostitutes and that's what we're talking about here it's either prostitutes or relationships that are so shallow and limited transactional that they're equivalent to process he's not saying he's going to have another woman who's like the mother of his children or is really meaningful involved with his life intellectually emotionally you know the agility one or two ways i mean i think you're going to continue but you know it could be that she admits everything she's honest about every partner he is already honest with her so that they're on the same page and then they can start you know moving forward like now that this is for whatever reason she was hiding it for so many years but he would still he would still have resentment because he's been committed to this relationship he's been honest for seven years of terrible sex yeah right yeah and and probably it's part of why you've been early in his life right like thinking right this is going to be the rest of my life i'm with this person that's bad in bed or attracted to me and it doesn't make me feel that's probably part of why she chose him he was that kind of dutiful stay at home and raise a kid kind of guy yeah you know homemaking kind of she was he was the guy she settled down with but she didn't think about it from his perspective she didn't think of what kind of deal he was getting yeah so yeah it's it's profoundly selfish it's perfect and i don't i don't even agree with his assessment that she's now trying to be manipulative towards him but the point is what she's offering can't solve the problem um you can't buy back trust with oral sex or anal sex or even three ways with prostitutes it's never gonna you know that's the wrong solution for this problem that you've created all right so maybe this is about trust and maybe this is about his loss of self-esteem but in either case the solution is not going to be sex the solution is not going to be sex to other people the solution is not going to be opening up and having an open relationship it's not going to be having sex with prostitutes which i'm saying implicitly is really what he's assuming because he's not talking about having meaningful relationships other people equal to his relationship with his wife he says he really believes that she just isn't attracted to him the way she was to those other guys that's why she felt liberated with them that's why she felt fine being their [ __ ] but won't even give her husband a [ __ ] here's the crucial part of the story where he confronts his wife with the option of having an open relationship the first paragraph here won't come as any surprise to you he's saying no matter what sex acts she performs for him now he's always going to assume that she's being motivated by guilt she didn't want to do these things for seven years the video showed that she actually had like doing those things in the past or perhaps all along so now she can't just change or if she does just change he's going to feel that this is phony that this artifice she's just doing it out of compulsion she says back that she still does want to do them they can work it out she asks for a chance to prove it to him he then replies that that can never work that instead he wants to have an open relationship and open marriage quote you can sleep with other people i can sleep with other people we can set ground rules but i don't want me or you to have to be sexually repressed anymore close quote the wife then argues back that she doesn't want to sleep with anyone other than him and she doesn't want him to sleep with other women for her this just can't possibly work note the role of the male ego here in the first paragraph note that he's again talking about his own insecurity validation need for self-esteem look guys if you want to get self-esteem this ain't the way to do it sleeping with prostitutes is not the way to do it cheating on your wife is not the way to do it this is just not the way to build up a meaningful sense of self-confidence or self-esteem from my perspective it's not that sex is wrong it's that looking for sex to have this alchemical effect in your life is wrong wrong wrong but he says i would like to know your reasoning but even if you tell me the truth i'll think you are lying there's the lack of trust issue which is totally fundamental totally a reason to get divorced if you get to the point where no matter what somebody tells you they you think they're lying get divorced that's a totally relevant you know totally sufficient reason to get the worst right there but he says he wants that validation for his ego he hasn't gotten that from her so he's going to get it from other people and she replies quote i am not going to go through with this this is going to ruin our marriage i don't want you to sleep with anyone why can't we try working on our marriage close quote isn't it interesting that she may really have more experience with this than he does right i mean given what we know about her background she may have been in some open relationship she may have seen the way multiple partners you know tears tears relationship apart you know but as you can see with what remains of this quotation he puts this to her as an ultimatum either she accepts that they're now going to have an open relationship he's going to have sex with their women or they're going to get a divorce well i now see why you included this story with the eclipse from swayze because i didn't know the story before you started recording i know now get a picture about it because yeah he's having the same kind of expectation that opening his relationship will help save the marriage which is what swayze is talking about in her in her video that when you are not having your sexual desires and uh expectations met in a relationship that if you open it up that somehow that'll save the marriage and it's it's seeing sex as transactional which i think is rather than seeing a sexual relationship as two people having a relationship right in addition to that it's first and foremost a relationship or you can even say a friendship right and then there's also sex yeah so let's let's keep it all the way real here it's possible i would have a car accident and be confined to a wheelchair and completely lose control of the lower half of my body and like sex just disappears from my life totally you know it's unlikely but it's it's possible you know i think you and i could still have a relationship that lasts until the day i die i think we could still be together right and i mean i think that's because we've worked very hard over the last four years to build up a meaningful relationship that's meaningful in a whole lot of ways other than sex right now then you got pragmatic questions about open relationships and and what have you you know but if you're in that position you have to think about those other people as whole entire people with their own whole entire lives yeah it can't you be like oh well i'm in a wheelchair so you're gonna go sleep with other dudes like and and that's it that those other dudes are just sexual pawns in a chess game that only really has two players so one part of human evil is people using the wrong solution to a problem and then trying to force the parts to fit a lot of human evil comes out of short-term thinking i've said that for years you're thinking very short-term in a very short-term self-serving way about what's really a long-term profound problem right and then i think yet more human evil comes out of a lack of imagination you know where you have to challenge yourself to really imagine how the other people in this relationship feel i i you know how is this guy gonna feel like oh yeah well she's married to some genius in a wheelchair that's pretty [ __ ] up for him too right i mean yeah what what is this situation that's in the totality of its circumstances uh how are you going to live with it how are you going to live with yourself so i closed the video by saying you know ultimately you don't choose to be happy you don't choose to be sad you get to choose what kind of person you want to be i mean ultimately like we live a life where the ethical decisions we make are the only decisions we can make you might you know you might think sleeping with a prostitute make you happy you might think getting a new girlfriend or new boyfriend a new husband or new wife is going to make you happy you don't know that the outcomes are very hard to know what you can know is what set of rules you're going to live by how you're going to become a better person or a worse person how you're going to commit to one or another set of rules so that you can be the person that you want to be