Chapter 1: What is the soulmate myth and how does it affect relationships?
What do you think about the story of the book Eat, Pray, Love?
You know, Liz Gilbert's book obviously got a lot of attention, a lot of popularity among women especially. And, you know, it's kind of first glance really attractive and appealing. But what's, I think, striking about the book is that she kind of ends off by, you know, this sort of storybook romance in impossibly romantic Bali in Indonesia.
She meets what seems like the perfect guy who's a feminist, a great cook, a great lover, et cetera, et cetera. They have this incredible connection. But then you learn 10 years later, Chris, what do you think happens?
I already know how this story ends, unfortunately, because I did my research. Yeah.
Yeah, she leaves him for another soulmate. And so the point I make about this story in my own book is that we have this soulmate myth out there. There's the perfect person that will complete us, with whom we'll have really no major problems, and with whom we'll have this incredible romantic and emotional connection on a pretty regular basis.
And, you know, I think the Eat, Pray, Love book and the last kind of, you know, storybook romance that she gives us in that book is kind of emblematic of this whole way of thinking and approaching relationships, love and marriage.
And yet the problem with it, of course, is that by making feelings the foundation of love, feelings the foundation of marriage, you're kind of putting things on a very insecure footing. And that's why we see in the real world is that Liz Gilbert seems to go from one person to the next on a regular basis, including the guy that she meets at the end of, again, Eat, Pray, Love.
I noticed that you degendered a person because she pivoted from the guy in Bali to a woman for, I think, about five years. And then, really sadly, that person passed away. And then she started dating the woman's best friend, who was a guy, and then recently announced that she was happily single at 55 and had broken up with that. So, look...
Elizabeth Gilbert, fantastic book, did very, very well, super successful. But I do think it's fair to say that she makes for a tenuous role model for happy marriage and love. I don't think that that's a particularly controversial thing to say.
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Chapter 2: What is a better foundation for marriage than feelings?
One of the mistakes that many of us make, including me, Chris, is that we tend to think about a lot of our problems unfolding kind of in a linear fashion, kind of things getting worse in some way or moving in this direction in some way.
And yet I think at a certain point, oftentimes, at least the successful societies or the successful subcultures figure out a way to build up a new institution or pattern. And so I do think we're going to figure out Or some subcultures, Chris, are going to figure out how do we get kind of dating on track again?
Because they recognize either explicitly or implicitly that this is so vital to adult flourishing and to the future of our society as well.
Yeah, there's a... It is interesting to me whenever I see women, particularly liberal women, sort of castigating men for falling behind, sort of, oh, poor whining patriarchy, sort of... almost scolding men for not performing the way that they should. And women are doing it. You can too. Look at all of the advantages you used to have.
And then within the next couple of weeks from the same Twitter account or the same publication, asking where are all of the good men at when it comes to dating prospects. And you think you do understand that we're seeing cause and effect occur here, that men falling behind and them struggling in this new world in terms of the workforce are
is creating precisely the dearth of eligible partners that you're going to complain about in future. So, you know, it is of benefit to both sexes for both sexes to flourish. And it is of detriment to both sexes for either sex to fall behind.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it is kind of ironic. Some of the critics of my own book, Get Married, have kind of made the point, well, how can Wilcox argue for marriage if it's so hard for me as a talented or decent young woman to find a good guy?
But they're kind of making this argument from the left, and they're not kind of, I think, appreciating how so many of our institutions have gutted boys and young men's chances of flourishing, and they're not attentive to the ways in which, again, in education,
in even some ways in the labor force today and in the larger society, we're kind of not giving our boys and young men the kinds of supports and the kinds of challenges and the kind of cultural identity that would allow them to be the kind of man that they would want to date, mate, and marry later on in life.
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