Love Without Sex; Sex Without Love.

[Music]
we've got a question from a longtime member of the audience that is in some ways 180 degrees the opposite of the kind of question we're used to dealing with in our own private lives and to some extent in our public lives uh as as leaders of public opinion here on youtube um you know i'm joking but the stuff we talk about both melissa and i it does have a really deep really significant impact on the lives of a small number of people that wouldn't have it any other way you know what i mean i would i would rather have a profound impact on the lives of a small number of people than have a shallow impact on the lives of a large number of people i think you're going to see that in my writing if you read my book if you read my essays you don't mean that's what i'm going for if you watch my youtube videos and as i now make the transition to being a filmmaker i may make films that reach a large audience but still there's this question of like them that have ears to hear let them hear it's going to be a small number of people in the audience who really get really get some kind of profound inspiration or get some kind of have a life-changing experience watching the film you make now sorry we're going to get to the question and you could guess what the question is about from the title of this video already um but i got some fan mail just yesterday a guy wrote into me and said that he's 37 years old and it had never even occurred to him that he would quit playing video games he watched my recent video uh talks about china and the legal changes in china that are discouraging people from playing video games for more than three hours and he said you know the way you reasoned that through in that video it was totally convincing to him it presented it from a new and different angle that he never thought about before and he's now he's now basically made up his mind that he's going to change his life very fundamentally and quit video games and that it kind of means more coming from a 37 year old man he can probably look back at the last 20 years of his life and think about the impact that playing video games has had on him and now he's looking forward to the next 20 years of his life of becoming a middle-aged man and an old man and he's he's making a serious decision that he's really he's really almost by so you know i realized that for some of you these kinds of discussions they may seem flippant and shallow and if that's all you can get out of them that's fine too but you know whether it's videos i've made talking about you know smoking marijuana talking about antidepressant drug use criticizing other youtubers people like anissie and jacqueline glenn like kind of mainstream seemingly shallow i can guarantee every single one of those videos reach just one or two people for whom it changed their life profoundly whether there were whether it reached a total audience of one thousand two thousand viewers in some cases my videos have reached ten thousand people you know there are just a few people in the audience for whom that's really the right message being delivered at the right time in the right terms that they can really relate to and they they change their lives accordingly so yeah one of my old catchphrases around here was you know it's shallow and it's deep at the same damn time and with talking about this stuff you know title is video we're talking about love without sex and also sex without love we're talking about decisions people make that really do have a deep profound influence on their life even if regarded in the short term regarding a very narrow sense even if they may seem uh like the shallowest thing in the world it changes your life forever the way you think about these issues and what you feel about these issues okay so i'm now going to read the question from the audience okay uh question from a member of the audience and okay even the first few words here you know will resonate with the intro i've just offered so this is a woman who writes in we're going to make this completely anonymous not going to use anyone's real name we're also not going to use their real jobs or geographic location she writes it and says quote hi heisel i've been watching your videos for over six years and they have had a major influence in my life in some sense i have seen you as a paternal figure as in some sense i have never had a father in my own life for the past 12 months i've been in a relationship with a man who has all the admirable qualities i could ever dream of and she here mentions some details about his education his profession his career it's not actually telling me directly what those admirable qualities are but nevertheless she then goes on to say he wants to marry and have children with me i enjoy his company greatly but have zero physical attraction to him in some ways you could say that i am repulsed by him physically new sentence i don't know what is the right thing to do any advice would be much appreciated now look i'm happy for melissa to say as much or as little as she wants to but like at this juncture figuratively handing the mic over to you i you and i have laughed about this so many times i think a lot of people presume that the position you're in like they presume that you're someone who admires me intellectually but that this is a kind of dry intellectual romance with an older man whom you feel no attraction to or very little attraction to and it's it's that's really the opposite of the truth you know so i just say like no a lot of people would not be bold enough a lot of people in your own life they wouldn't be bold enough to say that to you like to my knowledge trigger but your parents have never laid that on you and your parents do interrogate her about this relationship no and fine sure but like i i do think that you like one of the misperception about about you is that you're a woman who chose to be with a man you found intellectually admirable but who you don't feel attracted to and no this was a tremendously passionate romance where i swept you off your feet the first day we met and you know right yeah i just said that that's also part of the public perception versus reality in like setting up your your commentary some autobiographical details so you know we we got to know each other uh and we had some conversations and because i had read an essay that you wrote yes that influenced you into thinking yes like we should meet because i had admiration and respect for his writing that gave him some sense that i had respect for who he was as an intellectual when that's right true but i first saw him speaking you know i first saw him on youtube and uh you know i had an attraction to him just yeah naturally it wasn't it wasn't based on your writing explicitly and sexually yeah naturally it's a little too big we're going yeah yeah yeah yeah definitely the sexual attraction was there and still is there i'm not replaced by you it's not like i'm overcoming repulsion right by being in a relationship with you it's that very much inspired by that and yeah i remember somebody at the time when i was planning on meeting you was saying that i was just thinking with my vagina yeah you know um i had a lot of criticism from people for various aspects okay whether it was just that seriously but the people the people who said that you at that time they were at least acknowledging that this was for you like primarily or overwhelmingly sexual attraction that it wasn't the fact that you you know had read my books or read my articles and like related to me in a dry intellectual sense as a oh yeah i know for me it was like okay i'm i'm actually like for the first time in my life like going after somebody yes because i'm sexually attracted to them because i right because i want to you know be with them um in this way yeah right so yeah it was like very much a sexual awakening for me so yeah i mean i i that that people obviously they find it uncomfortable to talk to me about it probably uh but you know just your work that is the reality this could be a three-hour livestream guys hit the thumbs up so i have so much to say about this like inside out and backwards and upside down like from many different angles really doesn't relate to this this question yes yes you know it's not that i was i had sex with my former boyfriend you know like i i was sexually active and i i really enjoyed you know like i wanted to have sex but it was just like i did any different in a different way because like i hadn't pursued that relationship that was somebody who had really pursued me right and this was this was a man like a different situation where i was i felt like for the first time i was like okay no i'm going after somebody you know um that i really want to be with well i think too i mean maybe this is very hard for you to think through but like i don't know if you could imagine what it would have been like if you only admired me intellectually and didn't feel any attraction toward me now like like look but i mean to give a real world example i don't believe you're attracted to gary yourofsky i don't believe you're attracted to gary francione all the top gary's like we could mention yeah we could mention other like quote-unquote intellectual leaders in the vegan movement that you you know i mean you could have met up with at least they might not have been interested in you you know what i mean but like uh i i you know one of the questions is like so i think you could tell me wrong if you had only been interested in me intellectually if there was only lecture admiration then i think you would have just tried to be friends with me yeah no like isn't that isn't that fair to say you would not you would not have tried to pursue a sexual or or even deeply personal relationship if it was just so that's how it started yeah when i first sent you a message i actually had like a longer message in mind where i was like you know what i like i feel like such an affinity to you like i want to be friends like i want to do you know it felt kind of weird though given that i was 24 and he was in his 30s you know i could tell from the from the first email she ever sent to me the like sexual interest was bubbling through the keyboard you know what i mean just mention but that's the reality was from the very first message she sent to me i thought this one was translated yeah yeah i know i didn't know how serious she was going to be about it but you could absolutely get the vibe coming through go on yeah okay yeah yeah that's yeah interesting and get your perspective on that because yeah i know you you have told me that but um still at the time i was just like you know oh i mean it's in a similar way like that you've that it's just been inspiring to to hear you speak on so many issues and yeah well look with such you know uh i look i'm totally i'm totally happy to just talk about our own autobiography for two hours but you know the the question from the audience though the parallel i'm trying to strike is this for this woman who's in this situation she can ask herself wouldn't my life be so much better today wouldn't everything be better today if i had just become friends with this guy now i'm saying so you dear viewer person who wrote this email you may have never thought about it this way you may have never stopped and reflected what if this guy was just my friend and if you've been together for one year you've probably gotten used to him doing your dishes and going grocery shopping together like you've probably become accustomed to many many things and sharing your life that you would never do with a normal friend it's not that it's forbidden but if someone's just your friend you don't cooperate that that closely but if you respect someone intellectually or ethically you know we're left to fill in the details here and you respect their career and education but you find them repulsive or completely unattractive of course you should just be friends and of course for the past one year with this guy you could have just been friends and then you could be sleeping with someone else and he could be sleeping with someone else who you actually have mutual chemistry with you actually find attractive so i just yeah take it yeah no i i think there's a lot to that that that needs to be said you know if you aren't if you are actually repulsed by somebody that's a huge factor and and you know like how much of that can change but um well okay but that's so i'm gonna jump in there that's where i feel i'm very different from other people and so you tell me you guys can write into me from the audience you know if i really feel intellectual admiration for someone i think in most cases i would then start to find them attractive now i'm i'm completely heterosexual so this could never happen with a man and you know obviously there's some limit where a woman could be you know so hideously ugly that that's impossible but with a woman who's uh mediocre looking or a little bit ugly i've talked about this in other videos in the past um you know it's very easy for me to imagine and i've kind of felt this happen when you're let's say you're in a workplace relationship with someone someone who isn't who isn't your type who isn't attractive to you at first glance but you work with them and you see that they're intelligent you see that they're honest you see they're hard working you see that they're not crazy i'm especially interested in women who are not crazy you know i mean you start to see the redeeming qualities and then for me you perceive them differently you feel differently about them and then you start to feel sexualized that's that's my experience you know empirically of life is that i mean this is not mind over matter it's that your attraction to someone reflects your totalizing judgment about them your judgment about them in their totality mind body and soul everything known and i know and i would say the opposite i remember when i first got together you were uncomfortable with me talking about this but there have been women who kind of started flirting with me or took it to one extent or another who were gorgeous and where i was so attracted to them um but then as i found out more about who they were intellectually or ethically i was i was completely turned off and i and i turned them down uh so i've had that it so it's obviously it's the same mechanism it's like well okay i know who you really are and that could be that could create my attraction for someone who's unattractive at first glance unattractive on the surface but then also it can completely undermine my sense of attraction you can demonstrate me that i'm not attracted to someone whom i otherwise would be attracted to you yeah i'm just thinking about where to go with this because i got 10 different directions it's shallow and it's deep at the same damn time yeah well i don't know i mean part of me is just inclined to talk autobiographically because like from my experience uh i've talked to you about this but i have as i've gotten older gotten used to accepting when i'm just repulsed by somebody when i'm not attracted to somebody and being frank about that being honest about that um whereas in the past like i really struggled with this where i don't want to to make the guy feel bad like i don't want to reject somebody this is something that i have like just felt guilty about um and actually like i know it's it's uh so yeah i mean it it might be painful to reflect on this but like how i see what you mean now right right right right so so you mean in terms of the crucial step i alluded to before of we should just be friends having the strength to say to someone i like you intellectually or maybe ethically or maybe politically there's something we have no but no you're not attracting them no right yes so but this was my how my first like relationship started where i was she's had two i'm the second one go on yeah yeah so uh he he's he was a very tall very like large imposing person but he was she has a type yeah yeah in some ways yeah yeah um when i met him he was he was uh like a normal weight you know like he was he later became very fat yeah but he was a good looking guy you know like i i had reasons to think he was cute and think he was like funny you know uh and nice like he they were charming you know like there were things about him that were positive like that i liked about him a lot but i like looking back on it i know based on the attraction that i felt to other people like it wasn't there initially that i was like i wanted i wanted this guy you know like so uh but for a long time i grew to love him you know like i really love this person uh over time like when you get to know somebody so it is i really like the title of this video because it's reflecting on like this love and appreciation for somebody versus sex and sexual attraction right and like but let's be clear in our culture in this period of time it's very difficult for people to have non-sexual relationships or non-sexual friendships and like i it just i'm sorry but it is and like so you've now been with me for four and a half years of the friends i have who actually talk to me who actually make time to talk to me during those four and a half years a huge percentage of them were women who either had tried to have sex with me in the past and gave up like they were like failed suitors or something women who wanted to be with me and gave up and then we ended up as just friends or they were women who to one extent or another were concealing the fact that they were still actively trying to have sex with me and some of those friendships ended that way where the woman like freaks out and like they reveal i mean i feel it would be an exaggeration to say that these women reveal that they're in love with me but they they reveal that they're they're trying to sleep and they're trying and failing to have a sexual relationship with me and it's like oh well when i said we were just friends i meant it you know i mean like no like to me these women they were just my friend you know so like you know but this is not a humble break it's not the point is like you know i made videos talking with us recently i wish i had colleagues still today from my years being a scholar of buddhism i wish i had colleagues for my years being involved in humanitarian work i would say i wish i have colleagues still from my involvement in anthropology uh first nations politics first nation you know first nations languages even just language teaching you can meet really interesting people working in teaching english as a second language teaching chinese learning chinese these are all interesting walks of life i've been in and no like most of the people who talk to me like they're either women who wanted in the past to sleep with me and they still have that kind of tension and motivation or like covertly or overtly they still are and sorry let's be let's be real so at different times my life has come up the men who talked to me like in my life as a whole a significant number of those men were homosexual or bisexual and they like that was a suppressed element of their interest in me and believe me i had absolutely no interest in them that way like there was no i'm completely heterosexual but where that's that's partly more than that so this is this is a digression but it's not really because the point is you know well melissa was talking about the kind of strength of of character you need um to say to a dude like look we should just be friends like you know whatever no matter how much you like him or admire him however much intellectual compatibility there is that there isn't this kind of attraction there isn't this basis for a romance or a marriage or raising kids together that that takes a kind of strength at that moment and i mean i think it's fair to say if you wait if you wait until after you've had sex with them it's too late you can never yeah very few men would be able to transition from a sexual relationship to being just friends and i have i knew okay when i've known women who did that especially like our culture i mean if you talk about some totally foreign culture you know i don't know but like i've always been like like really is that really what's going on or are you still meeting up with this guy and sleeping with him once in a while like what you know like to make the transition to being just intellectual colleagues and friends um after the fact if not if not impossible it's almost impossible once this line has been crossed it's very difficult to un okay to get right to retreat yeah and to me no and to me the exceptions so to me the exceptions prove the world my mother had a friend and he had been her boyfriend like back when my mom was like 20 or 21 or something and then like they became friends again when she was like 65 no at least the dude like like when they were all like decades had passed and they'd like like okay like there are some exceptions where like in your 60s or something somebody you used to be a sexual connection comes back into your life as just a friend like i admit like you know legitimate i think also in business that can happen but whoa so so if the woman doesn't have the strength of character to to friend zone the guy you know that's that's the german okay you know early you know at the right juncture then probably she is facing uh a fork in the road where it's like either this person is a sexual connection or sexual partner forever or they're cut out of your life and you never hear from them again and that's i think that's this woman's situation the you know dear viewer uh the person who's writing in uh asking for this i think you know there is probably have so she says she's lived with him for 12 months right and he's wanting to get married and have kids i don't think you can go from that to let's just be friends right or if you do it's decades later like maybe just one decade maybe he goes and gets married to someone else and has kids with them you you get married to someone else and then you can be maybe still incredible in our culture you're incredible okay you got you got a whole you say anything you don't have to follow up with us because there are a lot of different directions yeah say whatever you want to say but you know but no i think that that probably is the case like even if you once yeah uh okay i'll read it i'm gonna read some stuff from the audience you guys by the way with 32 people in the audience if we have 32 thumbs up that'll help more people discover it and join it well it's what's going on uh so brendon williams says this is one of my favorite topics isil helped me to quit drinking be hyper critical at the time i spent playing video games and has had a profound lasting influence on his life so thanks for thanks for writing in brendan um you know i said before that there's this small small number of viewers like if two thousand people watch one of my videos there might be just one or two people for whom this is the turning point but there are more people for whom watching my videos is deepening and reinforcing their reflections on these things there are people who already had quit drinking alcohol before they watch my videos but then watching the videos and really kind of philosophizing about it they realize how significant it is and what the commitment means you know so there is this reinforcing effect for people quitting video games quitting alcohol all these all these things reflecting on it in this way and realizing how much it means and how much in a sense it's worth it's worth the price it's worth the cost because there is a cost there's a real sacrifice definitely i mean you know to use this example if you quit drinking alcohol that may cut off your access to in our culture it cuts off your access to a lot of sexual partners just the scenarios in which you meet people and so on and so forth you know um okay so nacho nacho's a female viewer says quote repulsion in my opinion usually only occurs if it's someone who's either morally or ethically repugnant or if they have poor hygiene i really disagree i really really really disagree um this gets down to the question of what is nature and what is artifice in a very disturbing way i just read a bunch of different perspectives on the marriage of lee harvey oswald you know so lee harvey oswald he is famous for his involvement in the assassination of jfk as he put it he was a patsy but he is remembered in history because he was somehow involved or implicated in the shooting of the president united states uh jfk um but every single detail of his marriage his dysfunctional marriage was recorded for history for this reason uh including we saw the transcripts of russian spies who had recorded his conversations like you know they had audio recordings and and you got to read them fighting yeah fighting about oh did you mop the floor today no he didn't like really this kind of detail about about this relationship now one of the things that his his wife or his widow says because she's interviewed after after lee harvey oswald is dead she said you know um he wasn't a bad looking guy but she always hated his scent she couldn't stand the smell of him you know she felt repulsed by him um she hated the fact that he had narrow shoulders uh she couldn't stand the sight of his body when he was naked and you know this thing about the smell that he had this distinctive or bad smell about him and so on and uh you know there were other things she mentioned some of the things were more intellectual or what have you that she really just never felt it was a good match they didn't she didn't feel that they were compatible now a lot of people will leap to claim that that's nature that that's biology right but subjectively in your real life you can never know right you can never know am i taking something that's actually like an intellectual um analysis or perception of my part like is this something i'm are there are there intellectual not even just intellectual qualities that person has that i'm perceiving and analyzing and then i'm i'm kind of emotionally you know experiencing this through their scent you know but the way okay the way i think about somebody is the way i feel about somebody right and it's even the way i perceive them and the way i smell them and you can never really extricate these things you know now i'll give you an example not all women feel this way but we talk about this in relation to some youtubers there are some men on youtube who admit openly that they pay to sleep with prostitutes you know now uh ladies we got some ladies in the audience here i don't know how would you feel if you're in love with a man you're pursuing a man and then you find out that he's been sleeping with prostitutes not every week but he occasionally sleeps with prostitutes and that during your courtship with him even he has sometimes met up with and had sex with a prostitute like during let's say during the first two weeks you were you were dating him or getting to know him that he was me i can see from the expression to your face right oh maybe you never thought about this before now i i can totally imagine from a woman's perspective like okay i used to feel attracted to you i used to find you attractive and intelligent and even kind of morally good and now i feel repulsed because i know something about who you are ethically and i know something who you are intellectually i know something about you that makes you to me seem untrustworthy now guys so you you may notice i there are all kinds of things i would love to abolish on planet earth i'd love to abolish alcohol and gambling and eating meat you know i'm vegan i think everyone should be vegan i have never talked about abolishing prostitution i do think it's inevitable that we have to have some prostitution on planet earth um like that's that's a anyway it's it to me it does not belong in the category of things to be eradicated uh from the human experience however you know like i can imagine the way you perceive someone and even what they smell like to you completely changing when you find out about this side of their character the side of their behavior and that it's you know and it relates to how he treats you as a woman you know what i mean like so i to me there's a lot there's a lot there you know now you could probably talk to some women who would say they're completely comfortable with their husband uh sleeping with prostitutes and that that he slept with prostitutes before he got to know her or that he still does now that he spices up his sex other way maybe maybe someone would feel that way you know but again i'm i'm saying this as a man and i understand everything that everything that goes into it you know um i see oh that could totally change the way you the way you feel about somebody and you know anyway and the the competitive instincts that are there and the evaluative instincts so look this is a response to what nacho said will you say you know revulsion only occurs if it's someone who's either morally or ethically repugnant or if they have poor hygiene i i don't think so and again nacho i don't know how many partners you've had i don't know what what experience you've got there's yeah so frida freda's comment is following up so might as well right now frida says quote i don't know if there's something biological about having repulsion for someone sometimes you don't like how someone smells and they could be nice but it's just difficult to understand the smell i think also i look see i don't know to what extent this is my rational mind like creating the illusion of something that's instinctual or biologically real but you know i made a video about a year ago talking about inbreeding sorry maybe it's only been six months feels like a year ago uh talking about uh the genetic problems that arise from you know getting married to your own cousin this kind of thing i always felt that i was repulsed by women who look like they could be related to me and for me growing up that was mostly italian women who genetically probably have nothing in common with me but there were italian women around who looked like they could be my sister or looked like they could be my cousin you know like the just things about their appearance and i always felt you know i felt like this and and there were other guys for whom italian women were the the height of of beauty and whatever but again you know like i can try to reify that i can try to rationalize that as if that's an instinctual and genetic reality it's a response but dude you know i would i you will never be able to know yourself that way you'll never be able to pin that down and you know to what extent is it instead you know that i felt repulsion to these italian women because for example they weren't intellectual enough for me you know what i mean like they no offense in my neighborhood i did grow up around an italian community they mostly watched football and soccer i mean you know and ice hockey it was not was not the most erudite you know subculture you know um to what extent is that just a rationalization of other things that are going on when you when you evaluate someone you know anyway sorry babe uh you wanna again you do not have to follow up on what i'm saying you do not have to follow up on what the the people in the audience are saying you can take it in any direction you want to take it or respond to the original question i see yeah i think you covered that pretty well i mean i i could i could go on to talk about yeah scent and repulsion that way like i do think there's something to that you you can tell me though i mean you know do you feel you have a type and that i'm your type because uh yeah i think that's yeah i'd just say like uh when when i mentioned you know features of my ex you said like oh yeah there's some things in common right uh some things in common right um but i guess this kind of ties into what i was saying earlier too where uh when i was younger like i had a really difficult time rejecting people and um especially like rejecting somebody who was expressing like romantic interest in me like this was even going back to like middle school like when i was 13 like a guy asked me to be his girlfriend and like i felt bad saying no so i said yes and then like later on that day or like the next day i was like you know what no i'm not actually interested in being your girlfriend you know like like and i had never you know i was i was very i was just i was just a kid you know i was like 12 or something but yeah even at that that starting point like i remember like afterwards thinking like what's the matter with you like why can't you just say what you actually feel um why can't you just like reject somebody um whether it's but that's some middle-aged [ __ ] seeing what you actually feel that's like that's what's so great about being middle-aged bro like when you're middle-aged you go through life saying what you feel okay when you're 15 years old saying what you feel is a [ __ ] mountain to climb no like for real bro no before we i love i love being middle-aged i'm [ __ ] you know my life is wonderful as a middle-aged person but oh yeah yeah yeah okay no i mean even even for me i know people like perceive me as super self-confident because i am but like what do you think you think for me at 15 it was really easy for me to articulate like even to a friend in private or to my parents or something how i feel about a girl or what i think no man i mean you know you struggle and struggle and struggle and then at some point in the struggle it becomes easy but no i mean even even being honest in your own thoughts about these things you know is you know yeah so i mean you asked the question about do you think i'm your type like i think that there's a lot of what you've talked about recently about sexual attraction about attraction to somebody has to do with feeling like you trust the person that yeah you know like a tattoo yes somebody that you feel comfortable like if you're hurt they'll be there for you and like they'll care about you yes like that really matters fundamentally like i think of you as somebody who's very caring yes you know you care about me and um i can tell you care about you care about people like people that you know right so that's that's really attractive so like i know that's not a type so i mean like no no no no no no but it is it's a typology i mean it is it is a type of type right well for me i mean one of the biggest changes in my life so again this has to do with perceiving things as biologically real so you know melissa has met my ex-wife i'm i'm divorced you guys don't know i had a wife before melissa and and melissa is my presumptive next wife in case yes we'll see how it goes i think she likes me but we've been together for four and a half years we might as well be married but we're not we're not legally married um but you know it's just been it's been going on for so long so but there was a stage many years ago when melissa actually met my ex-wife face to face and melissa didn't pick up on it at the time because my ex-wife didn't say it in a gauche way but my ex-wife seeing melissa in person melissa did look gorgeous on that particular day like just her her style of dress you know i mean it was it was uh it was a good face day it was a good hair day it was a good body day and you know she was she was in a nice outfit but i remember my ex-wife like said to me you know politely but she was like defying like this girl isn't your type at all you know what i mean like you know so again she didn't say it it really wasn't improper melissa didn't feel insulted or whatever but mom yeah you know i really remember it yeah no no we talked about after we talked about after yeah i know i pointed out she was like you know when she said this that was that was what's going on and again i'm not faulting my ex-wife for saying that that was just her being sincere but it was like what like you chose you chose this girl you know because it just was she she had a sense of what my type was and what it was after she was like oh like this girl isn't your type now of course you can now list off a bunch of ways in which like intellectually morally and like there are and even culturally by the way so culturally is another interesting category in which melissa is exactly my type but like what i've been able to experience now now i'm 42 years old is that what you think is your type actually changes and it actually changes in response to your own positive experience and and i'm gonna be blunt it changes in response to your sexual experience not movies not watching uh rap music videos no it's changing response to the actual sex you have had so like what i find now and this has been true this has been true since like the first couple months we were together is that now in real life the women i am most attracted to literally are women that remind me of melissa right which like no like in us like in a sense this is like biologically counterintuitive like you know you might think oh well don't you want to compensate by being with a fat woman or something like something that's just really different like oh well if you're going to cheat on your girlfriend why wouldn't you cheat with something that's you know just a totally different type of beautiful woman or something something that's like the opposite extreme but no i'm really aware of that and it feels like biological reality it feels like oh yeah this has always been my type this is always what i'm what i'm after uh but it's i mean again you can't extricate what's instinctual from what's intellectual and from what's empirical like now empirical i just mean that you've actually experienced this so like you know i'm just being real with you like before i was with melissa how many people had i ever met who has melissa's hair color like she has this kind of rare hair color it's not blonde and it's not brown it's kind of a halfway in between it's an unusual hair color and whether or not you can pick it up on the on the camera you know i mean i would have never said that like oh yeah this is my hair color but like now that i've been with melissa like for real i i respond to and i'm like interested in like with like you know i feel myself like perk up like on this instinctual level when there's a woman who has this this kind of hair color no i've said this you also even like the shape of your nose because there are other women who have this kind of shape and it's like oh so like dude when when you get to my age and you've been through what i've been through and and you know let's be real i can remember being in thailand and laos and feeling like none of these women are attractive to me which was which is true it was incredibly rare for me to see a woman who was even a little bit attractive to me there like i've never been into asian women and thinking like well i've got to like try to train myself to find these people attractive you know what i mean like i've got to kind of change my mental because this is it like now i'm living out here permanently like this is like you know i don't you know i'm not able to i'm not able to date black women you know what i mean i think growing up where i grew up i did you know i i did like you know black women i did like women who were also like latina or something or all kinds of growing up where i grew up she's seen my neighborhood in toronto we had you know we had we had a lot of uh immigrants from brazilians and people from the caribbean and stuff one of the first girls i i got involved with was um uh from trinidad you know so she was of mixed ancestry from the caribbean and stuff so you know like you know you come out of that background and you know i know there are all these white guys who are in thailand especially because they idolize you know the way thai women look at i don't at all so like my point being when you go through that it feels biologically real it feels instinctual but instead a lot of it is empirical and is intellectual it's more intellectual than you than you think it is so i just say we've been saying this almost as like a critique of the question but like no no which is which is meaningful like it is in part like a response to the question but like i think the point is if you really know this dude and in a perfect world you would have gotten to know him just as friends not sleeping with him not you know living the same part with him but like if you've gotten to know this dude and you do have intellectual admiration for him and you have some kind of ethical appreciation for me phil is a good person as well as a smart person right and you still feel repulsed you're still not attracted like you haven't kind of you haven't started to perceive him as attractive because of those redeeming qualities then then like it seems to me you're 100 certain this could never work you know what i mean because like if you just met someone if you only known somebody for one week two weeks something like this and it's like well i'm not really attracted to them but i totally understand you could say well let let's give it a chance let's see what goes maybe as i learn to appreciate them i'll start to feel attracted because those qualities okay go jump on the wall yeah no no i i want to jump on that what you're saying like maybe over time like i'll start to feel like attraction to this right so i think there is a kind of narrative in our culture that if you work really hard that you'll win somebody's heart oh yeah the hard work narrative yeah right like if you are very that's the in-cell narrative oh boy that's the in-cell trap go on yeah okay this is the narrative if you're kind enough if you're sweet enough like you know right but look okay so in terms of like physical characteristics right the first person i like was like just heart heartbroken over in high school like he was he was tall but he was blonde and blue eyed like you know like this it's not like i have a type for like dark hair you know right i might think that because like i don't know i'm super attracted to isil so i have a thing for guys that have dark curly hair like i don't know well that's i don't think that's really it um it had to do with his characteristics it had to do with uh just how he presented and and that kind of thing of course like totally different person now and i'm totally different person now but um you know like i'm just thinking of that idea where um like he didn't even have to do anything for me specifically it was just that i was attracted to him for whatever you know combination of reasons that i wasn't able to really analyze at that time and i was i was young but uh you know being a teenager you don't you don't really you don't have the self-reflection and it's very rarely actually talk to somebody about about this stuff like you know people might say like oh you have a crush on this guy like why what do you like about him or something but it's it's not the same thing as is like having this kind of philosophical attitude to like actually discussing physical attraction between people right and and being honest with yourself about who you find physically attracted because and there's a lot wrapped up going into it too like what so like i feel a lot of judgment on me if i were to say that like there's a lot of of this in the in cell culture like oh women are only interested in men who are wealthy like what if i said like yes i have a thing for wealthy men like right so there would be a lot of hate directed towards me if that were the case like if that if that was my type you know so being honest about that right or if my you know any any number of things that they say like oh well women don't date anyone under six feet like that's that's tinder like if you if you are under six feet tall then this is men feel like they're at a disadvantage biologically but i don't think that's true because you know i have i have been attracted to people who are shorter yeah and you know like but but look you know i do think we have to be kind of warm-hearted and good-natured and good you know have generosity of spirit in making judgments about other people however i do legitimately think you can judge someone by their sex life by the choice they make in life and i think a great example this is napoleon bonaparte like if you want to draw conclusions about the ethical and political character of napoleon his sex life is a great window into who he really was as a man and and you know it also explains things about him politically and religiously you know so on and so forth so you know i would be a complete hypocrite if i sat here and said like oh you can't judge someone because this is what they're into sexually or this with it no it's a really meaningful really worthwhile way to judge someone and to understand someone is to look at the choices they make in in their sex life now again you do have to be you know have generosity of spirit you have to be warm and understanding and and think about them charitably and think sympathetically and think about if you were in there in their position you have to kind of you have to give them the benefit of the doubt and think through you know charitable interpretations not just the most harshly condemning interpretation of why they've why they've done what they've done but you know the title of this video has two parts talking about love without sex we're also talking about you know sex without love and you know we both do judge people harshly for that and we we talk about that a lot because it comes up in life like you know you're after this person just for the sex just for their body just because they're hot just because they're attractive we're dealing with the opposite in this video primarily but again you'd be a hypocrite if you're like a critique of if you if you criticize only that side of the coin and you don't deal with the other side of the point the other side of the coin is yeah yes yes we have talked about that and definitely i i really appreciate having having gone through this with you because the very like immature view of sex and relationships too like i don't think that i don't have respect okay how can i say this better so if you are just interested in somebody because of their physical attractiveness you know that that shouldn't be the only basis that that can't really sustain a relationship and that you know if you want to live the rest of your life with this person if you want this person to be a part of your development as in your career and your educational background and everything like that um it's not just going to be about their physical attractiveness right and um you may feel very very uh strongly attached to somebody in an interested in them in this way but if you don't like connect on these other levels then yeah it's it is and ultimately i mean there's a pragmatic critique of that behavior like you can look at the life of lee harvey oswald and say well you got with this woman just because she was attractive right and you were totally incompatible in every other way including just cigarette smoking he was trying to get her to quit smoking she never she was a chainsmoker you know okay so like there were really obviously you only cared about the fact that she was a hot blonde and you oh you overlooked all of these terrible you know warning signs that you were not going to be able to work as a marriage at all uh there were numerous you know with that with that thing okay so there's a pragmatic critique of that but i think there's also a more profound personal critique which is this tells me something about you if you are someone who only cares about how hot somebody else is how physically attracted they're whether objectively or subjectively whether it's that they're hot you know in a sense that's socially recognized like on instagram a lot of people think they're attractive or it's just subjective like you you may personally be attracted to very fat people who are not popular on instagram it's not a socially endorsed form of beauty it's not the social beauty method beauty standard but for you personally and then that's all you care about you know that this again we're going to we're willing to criticize napoleon for a sex life we have to be willing to criticize ourselves you want to jump in so you simply go outside yeah well okay the thing that we have talked about before that i'm trying to express is that um you know what do you view do you view people just as prostitutes basically is this how you use romance and love somebody that you can use for your own sexual gratification um used in a kind of selfish way that like this you know i have this desire desire to right have sex with somebody and it could be anybody that i find beautiful rather than like is there something more to that person that you admire and so yeah this is you know i don't i don't want to seem stuck up for this but yeah like if there isn't something deeper than just sexual attraction then i don't view it as positively and and i've had to get over that because you know in contrast to what you were saying like where some people think that we just haven't uh yeah an intellectual relationship and i'm not sexually attracted to them obviously that was a huge part of why i you know our romance is that i was you know very much interested in you sexually and uh you know i'm not going to be ashamed of that i'm not going to pretend like that didn't play a role because it did especially at the beginning you know well right so i just want to say i had a friend some of you will remember this youtuber there was a friend of mine who was called american unicorn and she was a member of the mormon religion she's not anymore she lost her faith she quit but she was like super serious about the mormon religion right up until she cracked and quit but i remember even her talking about this about sexuality in marriage and she said she talked about it with her own father and her father said to her look if you don't want to have sex with someone then they should be your roommate not your husband like no like you know even within that repressive religious context it was like no like you know marriage is about sex love is about sex wow sexual attraction yeah yeah sexually oh yeah yeah and she she had considered marrying a guy uh who was a lawyer he was so he was quite successful and he was apparently i mean according to her account he was intelligent and he had other redeeming qualities but she did not feel attraction towards him you know it didn't and no she didn't have sex she was part she was part of a religion where there was no sex before marriage anyway i don't know if she even kissed someone before she remembered she had very very little to zero experience but she had to consider that seriously as a suitor as a possible match and uh you know she that's the thing why she was having this conversation with her dad she really decided no she should wait for someone who was really sexually compatible with her now the actual marriage that ensued was a complete disaster which you know there's a lot of material about that in the internet actually so i'm i'm not outing her when i say that actually there was a lot of discourse about how how rocky her marriage was that ensues you could still if you really want to google around you can find out about her her struggles in marriage but she did she did make that make that resolution now i mean that you know you know if you wanted to you could just have a mic drop on that on the video there or just say look you know is this about friendship or is this about you know love and marriage and what have you but of course you know reality is much more complicated than that so you were just talking about the obverse obverse meaning the other side of the quran you know yeah okay you know you and i both agree that people shouldn't treat one another like prostitutes right you know um you know i try to be i try to be sex positive you know what i mean i mean we can still say you know isn't it a wonderful thing if people can come together and enjoy having sex with each other when maybe that's all there is to be enjoyed you know what i mean or that's that's all you got you know what i mean that's all you've got to share that's all you've got to you know take from whatever it's you know even if you just look at that as a non-optimal if you've got lemons make lemonade you know kind of thing well here's the flip side what if all you've got in your life is love without sex what if all you've got is a you know is a marriage with or a relationship with someone where you know so i look my point is even if we're going to say it's bad we still have to kind of admit it there's a kind of legitimacy to it um in an imperfect world you can have love without sex you can jump in here i've got some more to say but i can i can hit up i can hit pause yeah well i i just want to say in addition to that um there is in sexuality and human sexuality there is a certain amount of objectification that is just that i i for a long time didn't want to accept i wanted to accept that uh love and sex were part of some higher spiritual um [Music] unreal kind of unreal thing like that there was something really connecting you to this person that's not just the body not just physical um and in this way like i i wanted like i think some people will like try to overcome this this repulsion and getting back to the question that was asked you know like that oh well am i really that shallow that because i'm not i don't i don't get this very uh strong sexual attraction to somebody or i'm actually repulsed to them that even though they have all these other characteristics that i admire even though they have all these other positive things about them am i that shallow that i'm going to ignore those things and instead focus on uh this one thing that's one part of our lives the sexual thing so yeah but it has taken some getting used to that like yes there is a certain amount of objectification that just happens like you you have to be like um sexually interested in them like in their body in in who they are as a person um is some amount of some amount of that i i mean you can tell me if you disagree with it it would be interesting to hear like i want to respond with an anecdote now i'm intentionally changing some of the geography and details here and you'll you'll see why but there was a woman and let's say she was 32 years old and married and let's say she's been married for five years like she'd been married for a significant length of time but not forever so let's say she's 32 years old she's and let's say she lived in colorado so some of these of course some of these are details i don't actually remember i don't remember exactly how many years uh you know and you know she started talking to me because she was vegan and she was a fan of the channel and i just say from my perspective she was a really good friend and i really appreciated having a friendship we just talked about normal real life stuff uh we talked about some of the things i was researching and making youtube videos about and we talked about just normal real life stuff and i but i really did value her as a friend but she and i were just friends now we stopped talking she decided to stop talking to me when she basically admitted to herself and admitted to me that she was falling in love with me but she was really obsessed with me and this is like for her this was really a kind of sexual obsession which for me it wasn't but you know that's that's okay um but her situation was this and the relevance to this conversation and by the way i don't know if i'll ever hear from her again i you know again just as friends whatever i i really i really would like to hear from her but for her i think she felt that this was destroying her life um she was sinking into some kind of obsessive set of behaviors towards which which by the way i couldn't perceive like i mean you know it's at her end of the wire like you know i don't know what's going on her head uh but you know as far as her conversations with me or something there wasn't there wasn't anything disturbing or obsessive about it you know for my that i could see from my perspective but you know when people tell you that believe them for all i know she's got a voodoo doll stabbing a voodoo doll or something you know um you gotta take those things seriously when people when people share that with you okay but this is her situation okay uh she was married to a guy who in my opinion looked better than john venus okay so we had john venus which i'll just use he was a really good-looking male bodybuilder type now it wasn't his career but that's what he looked like so obviously a lot of people looking at this scenario if they knew all the people involved would say why is this woman even interested in isil mazard let alone getting obsessed with them or falling in love with him or something when you are married to this this unbelievable example of uh male fitness a male you know male people he had a handsome face too but i mean obviously from the neck down this guy's body was the product of a lot of a very hard work um i so if you're my friend in real life some people watching this are my friends i very rarely ask questions um i i'm not nosy with my friends i don't ask questions that dig into their their business i kind of let my friends uh tell me these kind of personal things in their own time and by the way that sometimes creates tension with my friends because they ask like oh well why aren't you interrogating me and asking for details because they expect their friends to be to be nosy but you know um what she said to me about her marriage simply was there is absolutely zero sex and you know i i said i said something like well come on what's what does zero mean do you mean once a week do you mean once a month like like zero means different things to different people she was like no zero zero times per month there is zero sex in this marriage okay so what i'm getting at here and this is a vivid way of of describing it how attractive someone is to you how attracted you are to them as well as how objectively attractive like i'm sure i'm sure if they show off together as a couple in public people say oh wow what a good looking couple and what a good looking guy and whatever they can go to the beach and you can show off his muscles she may be the envy of other women like other women might think oh wow it must be amazing to be married to this this bodybuilder type guy okay and the reality is zero sex um the point is how attracted you are to someone uh is a completely separate variable from the quantity of sex and it's a completely separate variable from the quality of sex right this is true both from a man's perspective and from a woman's perspective i think there's there are a lot of stereotypes like this is only a problem women have respond no sex can be bad for men too you know what i'm saying so how attractive someone is to you whether you feel attracted to them separate categories separate uh set of questions separate criteria now just i'm just going to close this anecdote by saying you know like i was amazed to hear this and also i mean in my mind i mean given her rage so again this is a made-up number let's say she was she was 32. i honestly don't but you know whatever she wasn't she wasn't some young kid in this in this marriage my perspective was like oh well it's just a matter of time until you divorce him like you know i never i didn't say that to her i didn't ask her i didn't ask her like so are you getting divorced but like in my mind so i just think oh okay well you know like again it's just like well if there is actually zero sex you know you didn't get married to live like a buddhist monk or something like this can't this camp you know i take it that is not her perspective i take it even though again she became kind of infatuated with me or whatever became obsessed with me i take it she feels that she can make this marriage work and that is love without sex or some kind of relationship uh without sex two things really briefly so that my most recent video was talking about bodybuilders and the side effects they get i mean two theories about why that relationship had no sex one one theory is of course the guy could be a repressed homosexual it could be that he's a very good looking guy but he doesn't want to admit to himself that he's actually homosexual whether that's of course that exists it's possible but another possibility is that he's uh he's a bodybuilder with experience using testosterone boosting drugs drugs that mess with your hormone levels as a man is very very common a lot of bodybuilders refer this to being shut down being shut down temporarily or permanently meaning they can't get an erection at all and uh i i read recently when i was doing some fact checking for one of my videos i read a guy's account of just being on sarms sarms sarms it's a type it's a competitor with steroids it's an alternative to steroids another class of this type of drug and he was just describing completely matter-of-factly losing the ability to have an erection at all for for months at a time and so on and these guys they get used to you know playing those games with those girls so just say that is it is possible that was a biologically real problem the guy had and hey coming back to the title of this video it's possible he wasn't attracted to her it's possible for him also it's maybe not maybe he's not gay maybe he's not you know shut down from using testosterone boosting drugs whatever maybe he doesn't want to have sex with her maybe you know like for all the reasons we've been philosophizing about in this video so we we gotta humanize and sympathize with his perspective too because it takes two to tango it takes two people to to not have sex yeah no i was just i'm not related to this part of yeah any direction yeah but no i was just i had a thought when you were talking about how um somebody who's with a bodybuilder like they just wonder how they could become infatuated with somebody like isil uh right and other people have directed this to me too like oh well you were with a younger man like me and you're now going to be with the not not younger than me but a man who was relatively young and you're you're going for somebody who's who's so much older than you like what is what is the deal here um and like you know a lot a lot of people will try to just like generalize and say like oh my type is i'm into older men or like my title is i'm you know i'm into this or that um a lot of people just want to make assumptions about you and and um you know it's it's fine you know it's kind of human nature to kind of wonder about these things like where uh where these things come from but like so yeah in this response like you know if you're with somebody you know why are you attracted to this person and yeah it's just a very like i think not it's just a not understanding not very understanding of human nature that like right yes you can be in a relationship with somebody but be sexually infatuated with somebody else you can be interested in somebody else for various reasons and then you become sexually interested in them like it's it's just it happens that's that's human nature you know um so yeah i i i think that especially you know given that i'm i'm in this position where i'm attracted to you like i can understand how somebody would would become infatuated with you even sexually obsessed you know like it's it happens like yeah so yeah um it's sometimes it's it's not really like something that can be explained just by type or because of you know a logical reason there's a lot of us that is just illogical and um yeah and for that reason i think it messes with people's heads like well if this is so irrational so logical to me i can't understand why you do this and um yeah it's it's it's frustrating for like both sides then like for for that person that is being interrogated like how you could be interested in this person right it's also like frustrating for the other person that seems to be so confused it's like well sorry like i mean it's it's it's attraction you know like you can't help it it depends on i mean of course there's one thing to be attracted to somebody but it's another thing to act on it right is getting back to this point of like look i i wouldn't compare so you're really vaguely alluding to the people who kind of judge and dismiss this relationship either in your life or random people on the internet yes but there is a big difference between not understanding something and refusing to understand something because you don't want to understand it and i think the easiest way to illustrate that is racism so you know when i was studying first nations people so first nations is our politically correct term in canada for what are otherwise called native americans indigenous people american indians etc you know but you know obviously a huge percentage of those people are in interracial marriages or relationships there aren't that many indigenous people around because it's due to genocide so a lot of the a lot of them are indigenous people married to white women or white men traditionally like it's just it's very common and you know one of the main responses those people got from their families was oh why would you choose to be with someone who's non-white when you could be with someone who's white you know i just don't understand i mean and this is this is just racism it's not i mean it's not that they don't understand they're choosing to understand and i know depending on where you live there are people would be like this if you're a white person getting married to a black person or black person getting married or if you're crossing any of these um you know more or less imaginary boundaries between ethnic and and racial groups and of course what's really going on there is a refusal to evaluate this person as a unique human being you know now you know i i i just don't believe i mean if anyone just watched this one video the video we're recording right now you don't think you can see what melissa likes about me like really you can't imagine what the redeeming qualities are that i have that that other men don't have just within this one conversation really you know even if i were ugly even if i were 100 pounds fatter than i am or something or even if you subjectively feel them ugly you can tell what the qualities are that she responds to or you know what some of them are admittedly you can't you can't but you can see enough about what makes this person you know uniquely appealing or important to her uh where even if she had an aversion to dating someone who was 10 years old than her and i'm more than 10 years old but you know i mean even if you had some aversion to that in theory that that would overcome that aversion and a lot of people do a lot of people have an aversion to marrying someone from a different culture or ethnic different ethnic group but this particular person has redeeming qualities that are more important than that you know again my point being they may be racist themselves they may be prejudiced themselves or they may just have personal preferences that go against the particular the particular pairing but you know there's some quality this person has that's that's much more that's much more important so i want to respond this is a really short comment but scarface uh comments uh shout out to scarface uh is being sexy important to you so the point here is the person you're you're pursuing the person you're you're going to follow is it important to you that they're that they're sexy so look um it's really easy to talk about this stuff as if we design the person we're going to fall in love with on a chalkboard you know as if you're like oh well this is the kind of person i want and then they materialize and by the way a lot of religious groups and like new age cult groups they make that out to the case oh you know ask the universe for what you want to probably visualize what you want a partner then manifest them there's a lot people pay money for that [ __ ] people want to live that lie you know i mean that's a that's a fantasy people really act out you know what i mean um you know so the shout thanks oliver don't try to steal melissa from me all over that would be an age gap relationship if melissa leaves me for all of her that'll be down to the age gap going the other way anyway um uh uh uh okay so look you know my ex-wife when i met her was a a european woman enrolled in a phd program at a european university doing research in asia okay so i was sexually involved with a woman immediately before her it would be an exaggeration to say she was my girlfriend like it was kind of like the the try and see stage and we spent some time together and stuff uh i i feel it would be an exaggeration to say that she was an ex-girlfriend of mine but we you know we did sleep in the same bed a couple times you know and uh you know the woman i was involved with immediately before my ex-wife was a white european phd candidate doing research for her phd at a european university in in china like on a research trip now anyone could look at that and say oh well that's your type or that's you could you could you could uh impose all kinds of analytical frameworks on that you know no i don't work from a chalkboard i didn't write down what i'm looking for yeah you know a certain age certain height certain you know you must be getting a phd no no no like the the point is who who am i gonna date who am i going to try to fall in love with who's going to fall in love with me what's what's available to me now they're two totally different women in millennials but there are obviously there are some striking similarities and we ended up meeting her and um you know it was it was upsetting for my ex-wife i obviously weren't married yet then it was at the beginning of a relationship we were just in our house but it was upsetting for her to meet someone who you know seemed to be in love with me i mean however deep rochelle was you know some there's still some feelings there you know and to see this other woman who was kind of in the same position she was in in life and you know what i mean you could see the kind of paths you know parting ways here so look you know either one of those women um did i choose them because they were sexy no did i choose them over other women because they were sexy no were they the most beautiful or the most sexy women available to me at that time no look i could tell you about women who were who were taking a swing at me in those same few months kind of thing who were gorgeous you know who were much better looking objectively and subjectively no that's not what i'm looking for you know like what i want is to have a meaningful life and i'm looking for women who can share that meaningful life with me and you know a certain kind of dignity a certain kind of a certain kind of relationship together you know what i mean a certain certain kind of cooperation to put it bluntly in the relationship right and that is way more important to me than how sexy someone is right now i mean melissa knows this this is a funny story i think i've never told this on on youtube before it's a very short story there were several really beautiful women pursuing me at the time uh you know melissa first was coming into my life so we didn't have any commitment yet you know um but one of them was a was a professional model at that time she wasn't a retired model she was doing modeling at that time and uh that included swimsuit modeling and she did she did not do pornography but she did you know she did modeling that was showing off her body uh i think also like like four four fashion magazines she did modeling where she was wearing lingerie like to sell them to advertise the lingerie right and you know uh i'll remember the special like that my that was my father was literally on his deathbed you know and i was trying to get along with him because my my father and i did not have that greater relationship what are you going to talk about my father was a very shallow guy and i remember uh i chit-chatted with my my father about it he's literally lying down to die and he died only a couple weeks later really this is his last couple weeks away wow and i remember uh sending my father pictures of maybe the three women who were kind of front runners you know it's like well you know they're three different women who were talking to me and you know at that time it wasn't clear when i would meet or if i would meet melissa but like it seemed reasonable that time i suppose like maybe i was gonna meet one of these women like six months or three months down the road like it's just it's just not that easy to arrange meeting people flying around the world anyway and uh you know i sent the i sent some of the pictures to my father of who these women were typing what was going on in my life that way and my father was like oh oh oh choose the lingerie mom i was like oh the the swimsuit no no no no no no don't don't be hasty you know you show up it's over you know you'll regret this later you know what i mean so you know um now you know that woman i i am not saying she was only sexy i'm not saying that's her only redeemer i could say all kinds of positive things about her otherwise but you know at every stage of my life i could say to you no that's not the most important factor um uh and you know there have been times when i didn't even feel it was in the top ten like when i felt it was such a low priority you know and that and and you know part of the reason why this video is as philosophically nuanced as it is is that i feel conflicted about that you know and i think there's some other person who could look at my life and say i'm living completely the wrong way for that reason right but you know what i am pursuing is not a beautiful woman and it's not the most beautiful woman and i'm not even pursuing sexual gratification and i'm not pursuing sex i'm pursuing a meaningful life and if there is a woman who can be a part of really leading a meaningful life with me right then i want that woman to be with me and if not get the [ __ ] out i don't need you i'd rather be alone no matter how beautiful you are no matter how sexy you are right so i was just gonna say my self-confidence doesn't come from having an enormous penis it doesn't come from being great in bed it doesn't my self-confidence is i'm leading a meaningful life with or without you so are you with me or what that's how i live my life with everybody you know and like there's no way no matter how good you are at sex no matter how good you are in bed no matter how good you are giving women orgasms and you know admittedly these are my my advantages like no matter how handsome you are or how ugly you are no matter how tall you are like i think most people they don't realize this because they've never thought it through know the most important form of confidence comes from the fact that i'm leading a meaningful life period and like at this stage right now i'm i'm 42. you could talk about when this was true because this can't possibly be true when you're 16 years old like you can't you cannot be living a meaningful life on your own terms at 16. i think it's impossible at that stage you know like when it's really possible whether that's 22 or what like you know maybe for some people it is already at 18 or something but it's really when you're young it's really hard to be living a meaningful life your insurance because you're still living in your parents shadow like even if financially even if you're earning your own money almost everything you know is just [ __ ] your parents told you [ __ ] your teachers told you you haven't read that many books you have nothing like to really be leading a beautiful life in your own terms i think it's completely impossible at 16 exactly when it becomes possible people's is another is another story but you know whether you're whether you've got that at 25 or 35 or whenever you've got it that the most important form of confidence is i know how to lead a meaningful life and i'm doing it with or without you i'm doing it with or without money if i have to work at mcdonald's i'm still me i'm still living a meaningful life on my terms i'm not afraid to look at work at mcdonald's i'm not afraid to join the army i'm not like you know what i mean i go to join the army i bring my meaningful life with me you know what i mean i'm not like uh say this real because we talked about this from a lot of different perspective at this stage in my life i'm not afraid to do porn i could do hardcore porn and my self-esteem is not gonna suffer i'm not gonna feel like i'm a person of no intellectual substance you know what i mean i'm not going to feel like you know i just make my my living in this crude way now if you go into hardcore porn at age 18 right that's that's really different right like whatever denigration i have to suffer in my life i have that confidence of really leading a meaningful life so like that is that is the way like i relate to women and of course it's on a way lower level of intensity but in as much as men are going to be my friends or colleagues right that's how i relate to men also and by the way i'm heterosexual but you know like so there's no seduction there but like no i'm only friends with sexy guys no no no no but but but but keeping it all the way real uh uh uh you can have a heterosexual friendship a totally non-sexual friendship right but where you're needy where one person is needy you know what i mean and of course you can have a sexual relationship but it's like no no bro i'm leaving this moment you you want in or not you with me or what you know what i mean i don't need you like you know i don't need you [ __ ] i don't need you bro like whatever man you know that's it you know so that's also yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah now she's been with me four and a half years she knows i know yeah i know it yeah i know it that's true so no like i know that was a long answer to a one sentence thing but like a lot of people would not be able to comprehend just how [ __ ] true that is to me you know and yeah you know in terms of the role of sexuality and attractiveness and sex you know in life and i'm i'm totally willing to sit here and say you know maybe i'm wrong and maybe my philosophy wouldn't work for you you know what i mean like i'm i don't think i'm handing down something here like the law of gravity that's true for everyone in all circumstances you know what i mean but this is this is what i know to be true and these are the rules of the game as i play it when i take on all the advantages and disadvantages that come with that like you know okay if this is the first time you've seen a [ __ ] video on my channel if you've never heard my voice before maybe there's some people in the audience hit thumbs up we've got 42 people in the audience we should have 42 thumbs up bro come on give me the thumbs up somewhere if this is the only video you've ever seen in my channel you know this i used to live in thailand laos and cambodia i could have slept with 100 women just in thailand you know easily it would have been no challenge for me to sleep with 100 women when i was in thailand and like aside from like the the girlfriend i brought with me i slept with zero like i had a white canadian girlfriend i brought with me i slept with zero right so there are a lot of people who will listen to this philosophy like oh yeah you know that's really that's really philosophically interesting oh gee that's interesting and then they will say they would prefer to sleep with a hundred hoebags you know they'd rather they're like yeah well all this profound stuff being taken they'll take 100 you know anonymous shameful one-night stands instead right but not me you know and those dudes who sleep with 100 women they they have to live with uh they have to live with a different kind of burden than what i've got you know do you want to jump in at that point i mean sorry there's so many aspects to this yeah no i think that's that's real that i know you really well now i mean i know you better than probably anybody else and what you say is is really true that you are devoted to living a meaningful life all the time and if somebody is not bored then yeah you know i know that sounds very um it's not it can sound kind of harsh but and like i don't know i've seen some evidence to the contrary that like you you do reach out to people to try to get try to get them on yeah yeah like people in your life yeah like hey i'm leading a meaningful life how about you too right yeah it's different when you are like this this idea that relationship shouldn't be based on neediness or like you know i need somebody to to be there for me but that's not how you are and like people might criticize you for like saying like oh like not being the type of guy that will say like to me like you know melissa i need you you know yeah right it's true yeah whereas other guys like really have been like that like yeah i need you or like you know i you know right okay so look i think that neediness is a concept that way okay like there is such a thing as love out of strength and there's such a thing as love out of weakness right and that culture of neediness that is just taking you know love out of weakness and putting it up on this on this bed oh yeah yeah it's not good as opposed to like hey i have the strength i have the surplus to share with you what i've got to share i can bring you into my life and i you know we can both benefit from it but out of strength as opposed to out of weakness like oh what would i do without you or so like but a lot of people will criticize you and say like oh well it's your perspective is it's my way or the highway like you know sure absolutely right no but i think i think smoking cigarettes is a great example right yeah like look obviously there is a sense in which i could have exactly the same relationship with melissa but three times a day she goes outside to smoke a cigarette like you know what i mean like there's a sense you know what i mean which you say and obviously with some other woman or like you could say this like well what is the big difference but sure there's all kinds of stuff where it's like no you know like these are kind of hard minimum requirements hard limits either you're either you're living a meaningful life my way you'll get out it's better to have that yeah right rather than saying well i will take whatever i can get or i you know this kind of attitude of being needy and needing needing somebody's love and affection and admiration all the time like that you are not that way right you know like you are somebody who's like it's not like you were even like compliments like a lot of the times you were just like no no like you know i'm not looking for i'm not fishing for compliments yes right right this stuff i'm just talking about my life i'm just talking about what i've been through you know i'm not sharing sharing what i'm about to share right no and that's that's that's awesome you know that's great yeah um a lot of people you know i was just talking to you earlier about this like um you know a lot of people live kind of ashamed of their lives and they don't want to talk about people or if you do have accomplishments in life or if you do feel like you live a meaningful life and there are things that you do that you're proud of like talking with other people the kind of reactions that you get like are oftentimes like either out of a sense of a lack in their part like they lack your kind of confidence they lack your kind of sense of like drive you know like that this is the life that i have and and i'm working towards something whether or not anybody's with me yeah right a lot of people don't have that and they might respond in a negative way when you share that so you know you remind me of an idiom that i used to say like 20 years ago maybe 19 18 years ago i remember i said to people what if you are an elvis impersonator and you live in a culture where nobody has ever heard of elvis like you can get on stage at the county fair you can perform in front of other people and they have no idea how well or badly you're trying to you know imitate or emulate the distinctive sound and style of elvis they just know that you're dressed up in strange clothes you know what i mean so i mean obviously what culture you'd have to imagine you know remote island in papua new guinea or something because elvis is so famous there are very few you can at least imagine hypothetically there's some town somewhere where nobody's seen a picture of elvis nobody's heard his music nobody's whatever and you are an elvis impersonator i can remember saying to people doing what i do as an intellectual this is like being the only elvis impersonator in a town where nobody else has heard of elvis so like i think that's actually sorry i haven't said that definitely for more than 10 15 years i've never said that but i used to say people face to face you know um i think that gives a really good sense though of how it's not that i feel unappreciated in a needy or resentful way you know what i mean it's not like i need your approval science like look i'm aware that what i'm doing as an art form is something you can't relate to you can't appreciate or that you like like the vast majority of people you can only respond to on this really strange surface level that's irrelevant to the point of the art form like you know again people who've never heard of elvis they just know like oh wow that's a really strange you know outfit he's wearing like he's wearing really strange clothes and oh gee you know like there were a lot they're kind of peering at the distinctive aspects of this but they don't know why and they don't know what the purpose is and they also maybe don't know the the sentiment the emotional significance of what it is you're you know you're you're doing so yeah i mean that's um you know it i i've got to say honestly i think if you're not at peace with that you'll commit suicide like if you live your life wanting approval from people that way you know like dude we've i think i've never said this on the channel but like really i mean this in any walk of life not just being an artist or a performer not just being an author or a creative person or a youtuber but i think if you are going around expecting the crowd to appreciate your elvis impersonation like the distinctive art form you've got that way and you know if you've mistaken that for the meaning of life or a meaningful life that is really going to lead you to to suicide so yeah i i i had already committed to this you know disciplined but reckless path of being like look i'm going to be the best elvis impersonator in my generation even if nobody here has heard of elvis presley yeah yeah yeah yeah and the reality is i mean bringing it back to this this the topic of this video women see that and they want to [ __ ] you like you know well you know what i mean like just say yeah yeah yeah no no no no no but i mean it is i mean i think it is true and a lot of my other videos about sexuality have talked about that some people get it and some people don't but most people don't so you guys might remember a couple months ago or something i talked about look if you get out and you start putting on uh william shakespeare it's a great idea you can steal this idea from say hey we're going to do william shakespeare's julius caesar with an all black cast and we're gonna call it black caesar we're gonna do live theater you know and then you have all these actors and all these people involved and you're the director and producer for an all black cast you know reinterpreting william shakespeare as some kind of political commentary on donald trump or something whatever you're doing with it you know like i know it may not be obvious to you that this will lead to people falling in love with you and having me having meaningful friendships with you also having relationships with you but yeah it does you know what i mean like this taking on this kind of ambition and really the pursuit of excellence you know women who don't understand what it is you're doing they don't understand what the excellence is that you're in pursuit of but they they pick up on those characteristics and they think hey they want to have a child with you they want to raise a child with you you know that's these are the deeper sources of attraction like it's not just a one you know you may have a one-night stand but they're people who are going to be really reacting to you that way that's that's my self-centered you know uh advice on that and somebody else can now write in some hopeless in-cell come right in and say no no no that's not true and they've had they've had some terrible experiences to the to the contrary yeah so look you know um the title of the video i mean it seems to me that you and i both are kind of at a consensus on this that love without sex we won't go quite so far as to say it it doesn't exist right but like if you're you're talking about getting married to someone you find unattractive or repulsive like what what is your what is your conclusion on this i mean you can disagree with me but i think there are many examples in history and literature and culture cultural studies if you if you look back of on many different sure couples in history that they weren't attracted to each other but you know this is relatively new the fact that everybody has the freedom to choose their partner based off of their sexual attraction to that person um and i remember just recently you recorded a video where you know talking about just having pride in being a housewife or something like or men that will be proud to this kind of this kind of pride and just like they're taking on the role of being a wife or a husband like some people might live for that you know but um living i think generally the dream is for a lot of people is to to be with somebody that they're sexually attracted to yeah um but yeah i mean even that it's kind of tragic because everybody gets old and like even if you think that you'll always be attracted to the person that you're with right everybody gets old or some people might oh okay but look you know so we have talked about this before but like if i am struck by a bolt of lightning and then i'm in a wheelchair for the rest of my life you would still have the memory of four and a half years of amazing sex in this relationship and look i've got to say the same melissa could both of lightning might not be a good example but some bizarre and unlikely accident could uh make her paralyzed from the waist down or something right and then the sexual aspect of our relationship disappears but i would have forever the memory of the four and a half years of really great sex before that that's totally different from being in a relationship with someone you never were attracted to you never had the great sex with you know what i mean and we've we've talked about i mean we're not planning to get struck by a bolt of lightning but i think both of course we can make it work of course there's so much else besides sex in this relationship that makes work but that's still not the same as committing to you know love without sex you know now i'll just say this guys i think it is nacho says don't jinx yourself right um yeah anyway thanks for the comments guys you know if it's on topic i'm happy to uh no look i think it's very rare that it's useful to talk about a perfect world what we would do in a perfect world you know what you do under optimal conditions but sometimes sometimes it's worth it's worth talking about you know to compare to the compromises people make and what's pragmatically possible sometimes it's worth talking about now you know for the woman who wrote in asking for help in the first place i think it's actually really important to say look in a perfect world you would just be friends with this guy and based on my knowledge i don't know that much we had a few more messages back and forth talking about the details but based on my understanding the situation you [ __ ] up because you [ __ ] up what could have been a good friendship and turned it into a horrible sexual relationship and sorry to take it that far but like you know that's what it is this is a bad sexual relationship this is a horrible sexual relationship and apparently it's not that bad for the guy apparently it's just that bad for the woman but you know it could be it could be it's also bad for him like based on because there were some more details about the actual sex in this relationship i've got to be real with you it does not sound to me like it's good for him either i don't know what his perspective is but like objectively based on what you told me about the actual sex in this relationship you know it's bad for you it is it is at least not great for him it could be mediocre to bad for him also and he may be a guy for whatever reason that's not his priority that's not definitive for him but i i think in this case we have to hold up the perfect world scenario and say look in a perfect world you would just be friends and that that itself when you hold that up to them the reality you're stepping into no from my perspective it's open and shut you would be better off now just completely ending this relationship even if that's it involves terrible hardship for both of you i think you'd be better off ending this relationship even if you were then celibate for the rest of your life if there is no next relationship i'm being real with you that's how i feel about i would rather be alone i'd rather be alone for the rest of my life than be in a bad relationship and guys i got divorced like i was married to someone legally and she was totally in love with me when she's obsessively in love with me i was i was married to someone who was obsessively in love with me and it's like i would rather be alone for the rest of my life than wake up with this person and deal with this person like this is it was that bad it was a horrible relationship for me you know what i mean you and you get to that point where it's like look i don't know what the consequences are you know however bad the consequences are this is the decision i i have to make now that's that's a lot harder because my you know you get into the details of what my situation was and what the it was a tremendous sacrifice tremendous you know getting divorced was inconvenient to say the least and it's had knock-on effects including financial costs just having to employ so many lawyers it's missed in my life in a lot of ways but bro i never regret it every every day i wake up and i am so glad that i do not have to put up with that woman that i do not have to endure her abuse for one more day in my life or one more minute in my life you know what i mean i am so glad i have that woman out of my life you know what i mean that all of the terrible costs involved i'm you know of course i'm happy to endure them i'm happy i'm i'm just so happy i got divorced right so look i gotta say from my perspective you know that's completely clear i don't know baby you mentioned the historical fact that in many cultures for many centuries people regarded marriage instead as a matter of duty matter of honor and and a matter of economic convenience i mean there was money involved do you feel that's a counterweight don't say how do you take wherever you want to take it i mean i think those are examples of love without sex yeah right i guess or sex without love right probably sex without love in that situation but no i i think what you said earlier where somebody might ask is a different topic but where somebody might ask why did you marry a white man if or why did you marry a native person like some people who are directly racist about this you know this is in some ways been directed toward me you know in this relationship like you know um because i'm jewish yeah oh yeah right um yeah but so i guess first i forget that from the perspective of millions of people i'm considered non-white i forget that sometimes yeah yeah for some people maybe that is their primary goal they yes they like you said they work from a chalkboard they're looking for somebody who is there from their cultural background their race and a whole a whole country like a whole like millions and millions maybe even perhaps a billion people they they still are tied to this system of arranged marriage you know like you know in a sense those sometimes you do get a choice but it's still this is still fairly common in the world right that people aren't choosing the person that they they want to be with right but i mean look there are there are two or three very simple criteria to hold after that okay getting married to someone where your relationship is going to be love without sex or sex without love or both you know this is kind of bad okay it's one thing to say that is a fate worse than death some people would take it that far okay it's another thing to say that is a fate worse than marrying someone else you still got a choice you could marry some other dude you know what i mean you could just pursue another like which is a really low criterion oh well that's worse okay and then there is that is a fate worse than celibacy worse than being alone like what's so bad about being alone you know different people feel about this different ways but you know after i broke up with my ex-wife i was not in a hurry to get into a new relationship and i i did i had all kinds of different women after me and when i was not pursuing them at all and it's each woman was unique it's a different story in every case i can't i can't generalize about it but you know no like i think also you have to be at peace with if i turn this person down maybe i'm never going to find love maybe i'm never going to find a relationship that works for me in all these different ways whether sexually intellectually economically you know so on and so forth you know what i'm saying yeah so you know you don't have to take it as far as claiming this is a fate worse than death and there's another dude involved here there's the woman and there's the dude who wants to marry her and have kids with her right he could marry someone who is attracted to him he could marry someone who really enjoys having sex with him he could marry someone he does have that chemistry and does have that compatibility with there's no reason to assume that he is going to live in celibacy for the rest of his life if you if you break off this relationship now again i think it's worth saying that it's still the right thing to do if you break up with him and he never finds another woman he's in love with he never gets married you got to say look i'm still doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do right yeah that goes back to no something that um you were talking about earlier definitely like you might feel that it is on you like that this is if you break up with this person right like to the original person who wrote in like like it's your problem horrible for for you if you broke up with him because of this you know one issue that you have in the relationship but if this is if this is the issue and you don't see that there's something that can change fundamentally about this propulsion to uh your partner then yeah i do think it's kind of your responsibility and i like i like your view of feminism um and i i embrace it more and more as i get older because i can look back at different times in my life when i should have seen myself as the rather than the passenger seat in my life i am the driver in my life like i am the person that's making these decisions when at the time it felt like i was just yeah you were just doing this yeah i was the witness to this thing happening to me um so yeah that that really needs to be a cultural shift in in the lives of women because women do have the same rights as men like we have the same capabilities and and intellectual potential as as men and also the responsibility has to lie with us too so like you know when you say that this woman [ __ ] up by starting this relationship when she wasn't attracted to them like i feel that i've i've freaking been there it's terrible and like you know you feel like once you've gotten to this stage and once once you have gotten far enough it's like what do i do now and you have to make these really hard decisions and yeah it can lead to heartbreak so i am just going to say this to kind of affirm our conclusions here but i think it's an important like affirmation of or extension of these conclusions which is that i think like what you and i have just said at the end of this discussion i think it's still true and it is neither more nor less true if you're talking about an open relationship if you're talking about polygamy polyandry uh polyamory whatever you want to say because you know right some people would say that it's okay to have this kind of loveless or sexless marriage uh because you can supplement it with other partners and i feel like no that makes it worse because okay it's one thing to be in a relationship where you are in love you are attracted to the person you do have great sex with that person and then you also once in a while invite someone else into the bedroom whether that's for three ways in four ways or um you know or whatever you go and meet up with them when you have a positive sexual connection with your husband or wife and then you supplement that with some kind of polyamory or open relationship okay that is totally night and day different from being in a relationship where you're not attracted to the person you're like all these problems we just talked about right you're not sexually compatible and then you're compensating by having affairs or relationships with people you do have that connection with like to me that's you know that's like the worst nightmare and it's i think that's bad for everybody like i think that's bad for all of the partners in in the constellation yeah so okay yeah but i feel like it's the same conclusion but even worse if we're going to include open relationships yeah yeah i just want to say i used to find it funny because we would talk about like different political leaders like for example napoleon right he was married yes right um but in effect like you used to say things like oh well they had a swinging relationship or something right because the original the original appearance was prostitutes that is like the original just other women too yeah he was sleeping with you right yeah yeah not all of them were prostitutes yeah yeah also there was somebody else recently yes you're talking about um so lee harvey oswald oh yeah right well not only was he like maybe having an affair with somebody that he met at a party but like lee harvey oswald's wife marina like she was in effect she was having an affair with somebody else right yeah so like this this happens way more than you might think and like historical examples like uh you would like paul pott you told me about like ho chi minh oh yeah before we invented these fancy terms like polyamory and open relationship there always was quote-unquote screwing around i mean there were there always was screwing around everyone had you know there always were couples that were that were relaxed about it i mean in french culture especially you know that you know yeah having other partners under some circumstances or whatever this has always existed yes it has always existed and it's different i agree with you it's completely different if you're in a relationship with somebody and it's like ethical non-monogamy where you're oh you're all consenting partners of this versus you're hiding something you're making it secretive you're uh and also you know you're not satisfied with the first relationship you know like whether it's these historical examples or just any you know any person any couple you might see on the street you know like you don't know what their yeah their story is but you know affairs are so common and yeah uh because in any culture even the most permissive culture people can't people can't be honest about it so i knew a guy i knew a guy in toronto um so this was in my last year of high school and i forget if he had failed one grade or two grades but he was older uh so by the way at that time in canada high school was five years long not four years long so i was already a year older than what you today would think about his last year of high school everyone was because the system was different and then this guy i knew i forget if he was one or two years older because he had hid in effect failed grades it wasn't his fault his you know his parents moved around whatever you know he had missed some years and had to make them up afterwards so he was he was more of a college age guy but i remember he described to me uh going to a house party that time was run house parties were a lot of the thing and this girl who had a boyfriend um taking him outside the door of the of the party the party was inside an apartment this was the hallway in the apartment building and she had sex with him leaning against the front door of the apartment while having her hand on the doorknob so that her boyfriend the other side wouldn't open the door she was cheating on her boyfriend at the house party and this was not the only story or experience he he had this way during the time i knew him like i knew him for one year and he was a bit of a notorious character i mean other people might remember him but he also described to me a girl who arrived at a bar with her boyfriend she was there to drink and go dancing with her boyfriend and he went upstairs and had sex with her at the nightclub while her boyfriend was waiting for her she told her boyfriend she was going to the bathroom and they went and had sex upstairs i knew i knew the bar i knew the layout of that car it's a place i've been it was a bar and live music venue and you know this guy he had a number of these number of these experiences already as quite a young man i i don't know ten i mean he hadn't had a hundred experiences like this but he really knew the extent to which married women and women in committed boyfriend girlfriend relationships were willing to cheat you know without really knowing the guy without like pretty much just based on a on a first impression and i have heard i mean it's mostly i've heard african-american celebrities talking with us guys who are rappers or uh somehow involved in the hip-hop african-american world but you know um [Music] yes you know the the the capacity of people to cheat um that's something that very few people are honest about very people we're willing to reflect on very few people want to talk about their own lives oh yeah and then when they are honest you can imagine a lot of people responded that'd be like oh you're making that up or something or oh you know there must be something else the story must be that there was money involved like you paid the person no you have to you know and you know sorry i won't say but you know i'm not not a big deal but it's always say with me that you know like when i was in cambodia um so this i'll just tell this one particular end up you can imagine this is an anecdote that had parallels at other times in cambodia laos and thailand i remember um there was this one bank i went to again again i was a regular at the bank and on the last day i went to the bank i went to close my account because i was leaving i was like well look i got to close the account and take the money out of it i was i was giving up on living in cambodia and um all the girls working at the bank suddenly freaked out they had obviously been talking about me for weeks or months or a year or something they'd all been talking about like oh you should flirt with them you should ask them out of the date like it was it was revealed there was the sudden flurry of activity because they realized this was their last chance to finally do it that's going to take so you can imagine i'm kind of saying i'm not i'm i'm i don't experience jealousy and i don't have ego attached to this like yeah well you know sour grapes you missed you missed a chance but it was a funny story at the time that i'm standing there trying to close my bank account and all of a sudden there's this flurry of activity amongst the all-female staff of this bank who are trying to take their last swing at bat and none of them none of them had flirted with me before like i just gone in to get you know normal banking i didn't have any complex conversations with any of these women and i remember then i went back to my apartment building and a bunch of the guys were standing around it's not worth explaining but my why why i chitchatted with these guys and i was like well they all knew i was leaving cambodia i was like well i just went to the bank for the last time and you know basically the the women working at the bank they they showed their cards they were all like you know trying to get me you know so i was just telling it as a funny story but for me there's really no ego involved and um i remember the response from one of the guys he was a white man married to a cambodian woman he was like oh no that's just because they know how much money is in your bank account you know of course it's like here it's the exact it's like dude i've been living on 300 a month like i've been living in poverty like do you have any idea how little money i make even compared to cambodian people like like i wasn't it's not only i am not rich by canadian standards i was not rich by cambodians like are you you know you know so i just say like when you're honest about this stuff when you really talk about it um again we were talking about about cheating specifically and the way in which people compensate for these things and their their motivations and so on you know there is this tremendous human capacity i mean now this this guy's experience in life i could say more describing him his experience largely is either prostitution or he's had a long string of relationships with asian women that resemble prostitution like it's you know he's paying for things in their lives and they're sleeping with him like you know um that's that's his experience and he's trying to foist his framework of analysis onto my experience he's trying to force you know my experience in life to resemble his own which it doesn't at all you know but yeah um [Music] you know you know the the this sounds trite but it's really serious you can never compensate for something lacking in one relationship with another relationship you know that's true of co-workers that's true of colleagues that's true of friends and it's true of your sexual relationship like your marriage or your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever it is like okay so like let's keep it all this is this is really easy to understand if i am in love with i am sleeping with someone who is not smart enough for me like they can't have intellectual discussions the way i want to have i can never compensate for that by having a friend let's just say a male friend a heterosexual male friend uh who is intellectual enough who has a decision never never one does not compensate for the other like the the black stain in your life of waking up in the bedroom and eating breakfast every day with someone who can't relate to you intellectually will never be compensated for by a male friend you have who does have that intellectual compatibility with who is involved never never and like sorry i'm preaching to you because a lot of you [ __ ] are kidding yourself but a lot of you and people people get married and they don't even have a [ __ ] language in common you marry a russian chick because she's hot you marry a woman from vietnam because she's hot and like even if she's intelligent in some sense you have no common language like you have no intellectual compatibility even if she's intelligent in some way like she can do math or something but you know she's not it will never compensate for that so like to me it really is the same thing to say like if you have a husband or you have a wife and you don't have an emotional connection you don't have a sexual connection whether that's in terms of attraction or actual sex actual orgasms you can never compensate for that by by getting it elsewhere you know what i mean um never and like i think it only makes it worse to try to compensate for it um and you know so again i think the intellectual thing is easier for people to visualize like if you haven't been through any of this [ __ ] like you know let's say you're a novelist you're writing novels and you marry this bimbo who can't can't even read that language can't relate to what you're going through as an intellectual as a creative artist or the research you're doing and stuff the fact that you have friends maybe you have friends who are also novelists who are also in the publishing industry or something and they are reading your work and they are interested in what's going on and they're they're engaged they're asking you questions that only makes it worse it's only going to make it more intolerable that you wake up every day and have breakfast with someone who can't appreciate that you know the level of resentment you know uh like it it makes it worse you know not not better so like what i'm saying is compensation is not compensation and then again like it's hard to visualize okay let's say you have a loveless marriage a sexless marriage an orgasmless marriage or someone you're not attracted to it all and then there is somebody else you're going and meeting up with and you do have that chemistry and you do relate that way right whoa you know to me it's the same thing it's the same thing it's the same pattern as with the compensating for the intellectual deficit but um yeah my point is compensation is not compensation you know yeah yeah yeah compensation is not compensation yeah compensation is exacerbation you know what i mean yeah and and to me that's totally different so i just want to say explicitly melissa is intelligent enough to be with me she is that doesn't mean it's effortless for her no i yeah right it's his effort too right right i know that i can like i know that i can talk to you about these right philosophical issues it's just it's taken effort which a lot of people don't put into their intellectual life into their relationships you know like and but like we had we had lunch with a university professor the other day now it was a male university professor but imagine that was a female university professor he or she would never be intelligent enough to be with me you know what i mean like so i just say there's a concept of enough like you can be intelligent enough doesn't mean it's no effort for her she has to put in she has to actually read books you know i mean she has to make make an effort but when you make that effort it's enough i mean you know come on there are so many people where it's you know you lead a horse to water it doesn't matter they can read the same books you've read and they're it's never going to work it's they're never going to no i mean yeah look i mean we've talked frankly about this that we're at different we're at different intellectual levels right it makes sense we're a different we're we have a lot of different experiences and you're 14 years older than me you know there are a lot of things right but but there's the concept of enough but i wanted to yeah yeah yeah and um over time i've become like a lot more excited about like learning and and wanting to have this relationship with you and it's like it's not something that like um like it's something that you have to continue to work on and it's something that like i'm i'm looking forward to because i do want to be like that i do want to be enriching that part of your life as well like i don't want to just be somebody that you have sex with or somebody that you like watch a movie with like that's right a lot of relationships are just like okay we have sex we eat dinner together and we have a kid together and that's like that's our relationship like we watch tv together right that's we play video games that's that's our relationship like we consume the same media right so like but in a different way like if you're a creative if you're trying to create something like you know it could be just having the respect for the other person's creative potential respect for the person what they're trying to do in life like a lot of people just like you said with i know it's an imperfect comparison somebody said who are you impersonating with this idea of like you know being in comprehension or something right the younger generation or like anybody like you could be in a culture where people don't even know who elvis is i don't know where in the world nobody would know who elvis is but um it's possible like you could be an impersonator of elvis somewhere in the world where people just don't get it right so but when you come home to your wife yeah your wife has to understand your act she has to understand your music or whatever it is oh yes your wife has to get you yes right right right right right right right i suppose but what if what if your wife doesn't get you what if your wife hates elves or has never heard about your wife doesn't understand but you're cheating on her with a woman who does so that's screwed up oh yeah and then you talk to the person who appreciates all this impersonation oh my wife just doesn't right well why are you right there you know like a lot of people right right right and i think you'd even be better off alone maybe you can't be with someone else but maybe you can be alone maybe you can have your own meaningful life on your own terms you know with its with its own dignity but i would just say look like the the premise of having a working open relationship or polyamorous relationship and maybe 99 of people this is impossible for maybe it's only 89 maybe it's only 79. but like for a lot of people this is totally impossible but it's got to be i have a positive intellectual relationship with my wife or with my husband and i still have more positivity that i can share with someone else i have a positive emotional connection with my wife with my husband and then i have more positivity that i can share with someone else you know and you have more sexual energy or whatever you know what everyone's more sexual positivity that's good to put actually really i know it sounds corny but like sexual positivity is a good way to to say and then you can share that with someone else it's not that you're in mourning for the death of your relationship or in mourning for how bad your sex life goes with your husband right and you're compensating with someone else so you know i think that like all the same issues with uh with a closed marriage the monogamous marriage they're just repeated but like on another level of like danger when you got more people involved yeah yeah and more more propensity for self-destruction and and people getting hurt uh and so on but yeah no it's it's great that you have this self knowledge you have the self-reflection like you you have stated to me and probably you've talked about in youtube videos but that like you have lived where you've wanted to live like you don't live with this kind of sense um yeah sorry i'm not saying this to flatter you i'm just i'm saying this is like a you know a reflection on this that like a lot of people do live their lives feeling like they never went out there and and tried to get something it's super shallow that the one thing that i did in my life that i find extraordinary is that i flew to china to meet isil and like that's but it worked it changed your life forever okay i flew to china to meet isil which you could say is a shallow sexual desire that i had but it led to a lot of non-shallow things though yes right and it's it was kind of yeah a shame that a lot of people that i tried to share these things with just didn't care like and they would have rather me you know just stayed in this kind of life of mediocrity like like it's not easy for people who haven't done something like that they find they were really going out and pursuing something pursuing some passion that they found meaningful at a certain time yeah you know that kind of thing like yeah if you have that on your own that's what i find that's what i want to get back to like that you're you're finding that on your own like you don't need somebody else to bring that into your life and that's that's that's a wonderful thing um but a lot of people don't have that and they hope that a relationship will be that thing right so okay so this is i think i felt like on a deep level there's something implicit that you're saying here it's not explicit at all but i'm not going to say it explicitly and it comes back to the question we're answering from from a long time viewer okay why the [ __ ] do you need to be married at all right like just really straight up really direct like what is the assumption that you need to be in a relationship at all because if this dude doesn't [ __ ] you if this dude doesn't give you orgasms if you're not in love with him on that level right why are we even having this [ __ ] conversation you know what i mean like for real for real and you know like sometimes there are answers that people don't want to be honest about sometimes it's economic it's hey this dude pays my rent this dude financially makes my whole life possible if you break up with them you'll be different for the man too right sure yeah if you and you can talk to guys who are like hey this woman does my laundry like even if it's not direct you know this woman makes my life possible in all these ways they don't want the inconvenience but like you know i i do think like on a really deep level you gotta face up to what the [ __ ] is the point of having a relationship because you're talking melissa is quite correctly talking about daring and risk but what are you daring like the fundamental dare the fundamental risk is being alone right now are you such a piece of [ __ ] are you such a terrible person that you would feel bad about yourself being alone i'm not i'm completely happy being alone and again if melissa gets hit by a bolt of lightning or something like you know like there's a sense in which my life wouldn't change that much i'm gonna live she knows that like if she suddenly dies you know some some an airplane crash or something like she can imagine very well what the rest of my life would be like and i don't feel some need to be like you know i i really don't care you know i i like i think that fear of being alone it's actually a really profound form of low self-esteem you know what do you need other people for what do you want other people what's the point of a relationship now honestly honestly and obviously part of it is to have orgasms part of it is to feel like you're in love is to appreciate someone and be appreciated by someone and it's someone you're attracted to and it's someone you you know you you have all these intellectual and emotional components of course but like if you're writing to me saying that you have gnostic certainty that's gnostic spell gno by the way gnostic sir this is something you know it's not something you doubt something you're uncertain about you've got 12 months of experience with this guy it's different if it's the first two weeks you're like well maybe okay then you don't have gnosticity you have gnostic certainty of what this relationship is and what this relationship is not so what the [ __ ] is the point why would there even be any any question and i i do think for i'm not i'm not reading your mind the person who sent in this this particular question this may not be the reason at all but for a lot of people it's going to be that fear of being alone it's not daring it's not taking that risk and it's not seeing your own life as something meaningful that doesn't rely on any man that doesn't rely on any woman and something that's all on you and it's all your own responsibility and doesn't have anything to do with whether you have kids or not it doesn't have anything to do with whether you're rich or poor you can work at mcdonald's you can live in a one-bedroom apartment you know there was a level at which you know if you're actually starving to death that's different but within the spectrum of moderate poverty like that doesn't change your ability to have a meaningful life you can get books for free on the internet you can get them at the library you don't have to own a bookshelf i've gone for many years without owning a table or a bookshelf and being a real intellectual you know like whatever it is you're gonna do um yeah i i do think like on a really deep level there's this question of like how can this even be uh how can this even be a question and to me you know that is to quote my famous catchphrase that's deep and it's real at the same damn time