Asymmetrical Relationships: An Obligation to Break Up?

I mean is there a rule if somebody loves
you more than you can love them are you are you obliged is there a moral obligation for you to break up with a person I don't think that was ever covered by Aristotle or Plato or any of the philosophers you've talked about you know love and relations between the sexes many of you watching this video will feel that you have got to know Jaclyn Glenn over many years of her sharing her life on YouTube and you opening up that glowing window on your screen to see whatever she has to say whether she's joking about politics atheism vegetarianism you name it I first watched her channel many years ago when she was a med school student planning to become a doctor and when I just thought of her as a vegetarian who was on YouTube talking about her life and I thought oh isn't it interesting so in the future this is gonna be a channel for someone who's a vegetarian it's gonna be a you know doing her internships and so on and then becoming a full-time medical doctor that's what I thought was the direction of the channel she later divorced her husband she was married when the channel started I believe that's why it's Jacqueline Glen the Glen is not her maiden name booked up with her husband dropped out of med school moved to Los Angeles and her channel took on a very different direction that I gotta say is of no interest to me but obviously I'm a very very small part of her potential audience the new direction of your column was more interesting more amusing for tens of thousands people hundreds of thousands of people so of course I'm happy for nel you know today I turn on my computer and through this glowing window what do I see it's the image of Jaclyn Glenn weeping in deep personal misery and with the click of a button I can go over to her ex-boyfriend Channel and see his perspective on the break-up and yeah it's times like this that I gotta ask myself is this why we invented the Internet is this why Al Gore invented the internet is this why some group of brilliant software engineers sat down and made all this possible for us to share each other's live to share each other's misery and on some level I think we all know the answer is yes and on some level we may lament that this is the aspect of human nature that you technology amplifies put it that way um for me there's a kind of philosophically interesting point that comes up in her ex-boyfriends reflections on this and I think I hope you can tell you can tell the next couple of minutes I'm not making this video for the sake of gossiping I have no gossip to share with you I just add my own kind of philosophical response to what her ex-boyfriend said sir ex-boyfriend uses the YouTube name social repose and social repose does not do a very good job of stating his case but if you listen to his video for minutes and 15 seconds in and then for about a minute after that you can see that what he's saying is that he felt he should have broken up with Jaclyn Glenn about two months into the relationship because of the extreme asymmetry of the relationship this is a polite way of saying she was in love with him and he was not in love with her now it's a hard thing to say to anyone under any circumstances but I think the most fundamental thing here is that he realizes he says openly he should have broken up with her he says he felt he should have broken up there and that's itself a very interesting idea that if a relationship is asymmetrical that there's actually a moral onus on you to break up with the other person it's very interesting I mean I think many of you will say why what sense does that make why should it be I mean first and foremost all relationships are asymmetrical and they're asymmetrical in many many different ways right nobody really wants to date or fall in love with someone who's their identical twin if you know what I mean people fall in love with other people because they have counterbalancing qualities there's a dynamic you know discourse through the two of you there's something going on that sparks the relationship but we tend to love people for the ways in which they're different from us not necessarily the ways in which they're they're similar to us in fact I think that's why it's so easy to take people for granted once you're in love with them because you you tend to take for granted all the things you have in common but it's a lot easier to appreciate the differences look I think there's a really interesting pattern he relationships where decisions inexorably get made by the most fragile person because the other person the person who's stronger and within whatever context we're talking about the person who's less fragile the person is less likely to get hurt versus Lesley to get their heart broken they have to make decisions to try to avoid the more fragile party getting their heart broken now it's obvious that early on a social repose says a couple of months in the relationship he realized how fragile Jaclyn Glenn was he realized that Jacqueline really loved him and he realized that he did not love her back or at least if he did love her at all it was as he says politely extremely asymmetrical she wanted to get married and move into a house this was for her from her perspective this was the solution all her problems this was a you know hi can have an permanent relationship and that was not his perspective at all so I don't I don't think I've ever heard anyone discuss this I mean is there a rule if somebody loves you more than you can love them are you are you obliged is there a moral obligation for you to break up with a person I don't think that was ever covered by Aristotle or Plato or any of the philosophers you've talked about you know love and relations between the sexes yeah you know I don't I don't I can remember that ever being addressed I would say there's a much more there's an almost universal principle that in human relationships the person who is the least fragile ends up taking on responsibilities to make decisions to avoid hurting the other person who's more fragile