Chapter 1: What makes modern marriage fail?
When you say to someone, okay, I'm signing up for you. Like there's 8 billion options and I'm picking you. It's big. Do you think there is still wisdom in getting married? We're talking about a technology that fails catastrophically 56% of the time.
Staying together for the kids even though you hate each other or staying together because you don't want to give away half your things is also a failure. So what's that, another 10%? Okay, now we have a technology that 76% of the time fails. Marriage is a legal status. It's a contract between you and the government, essentially. Like, you and Lisa have a prenup. No. No, no, you do. You do.
It was written by the government.
Chapter 2: How do evolving gender roles affect relationships?
It's written by the government and they can change it without your permission. The truth is all marriages end and when they end.
James Sexton, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tom. It's good to be here. It's been a while in the making. Yeah, it is. I'm very glad that we were able to put it together.
Yeah, yeah.
The intersection that you live at is endlessly fascinating to me. You approach love marriage in a way that I find extremely unique. You've called love an economy. Yeah. in the way that people are exchanging value. And I'm curious, what is it exactly that people are trading, whether they realize it or not?
Chapter 3: What role does social media play in modern relationships?
It's very funny because people find the term economy, describing love as an economy or relationship with economy, like a little profane. I love it. Yeah, I don't mean it in a negative way. I mean it in like a really honorable way that it's about a sharing of value, like a trading of value. And we're very much now in the zeitgeist of talking about equality.
you know, and that like women are capable of working, men are capable of working, men should be caregiving with children, women should be caregiving with children. No one should be doing 100% of the labor in any sphere of relationship.
I understand that argument and I think it's because there was an imbalance for so long, you know, where it was like women are, this is what you do, women, you are at home with babies and that's your job. Men, you get out there and, you know, put the women and children to bed and go out looking for dinner, like this is your job, you know? And there was no option other than that.
And now we kind of did what we do, which is, you know, we treat dandruff with decapitation. Like we went so far in the other direction that now we said, no, everyone has to do everything. And how dare anyone suggest that, you know, you do my laundry or how dare you suggest that the man has to do this. And so for me,
An economy, you know, how many apples is worth how many apples is not an interesting question.
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Chapter 4: How can couples effectively communicate their needs?
One, that's the answer. One apple's worth one apple. How many apples is worth how many coconuts? Now we're having an interesting conversation because this comes down to what value do you put on apples and what value do you put on coconuts? Like we have to figure out how many of these is how many of these. In relationship, I've seen a lot of unsuccessful relationships in my line of work.
And a lot of them, there's this tally being kept, like unspoken or spoken, of look at what I'm doing for you, you know, and look at how hard I have it and look at how, and what's interesting to me is we're also now as a society, particularly on social media, where like girls versus boys content is huge.
Like if we wanna go viral, like let's just say some real misogynist stuff or some real misandrist stuff and we're just gonna, we'll get millions of views on that one because in this war of girls versus boys, everybody loves being like my team's winning, you know, but we all know, that like a world in which men are flailing is not a world where women are thriving and vice versa.
So I like to really look at in relationship, we're agreeing to be together and to both bring value to this, right? If there was no value, we just wouldn't, we wouldn't connect. We would just keep moving.
Chapter 5: What actionable insights can improve a marriage?
So when you say to someone, okay, I'm, I'm signing up for you. Like I'm, there's 8 billion options and I'm picking you. That's big. Like that's a big, big commitment. I can't really think of any commitment in life that's bigger than that, other than maybe having kids, right? It's comparable. But really what you're saying is you give me something.
Like you give me something and I give you something. And ideally, it doesn't feel like much of a sacrifice to give. If anything, I take pleasure in the giving and you take pleasure in the giving. But we've made this idea that we have to give the same things. And if you look at the greatest partnerships in the world, like look at Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak.
Without Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak's just an engineer. And without Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs just has a lot of interesting ideas, but he doesn't know how to code, he's not an engineer. Together, they change the world.
Chapter 6: Why is it important to define roles in a relationship?
And so what they both did is that, and which one's more important? I don't think you can say. And why would you wanna know? They're both together, they made the music. They made the thing perfectly. The chemistry of the two of them made the thing and changed the world. See also Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Which one's more important? I don't know that you could say.
So that's what I mean when I say it's an economy is that we're bringing to the table different things, maybe some of the same things, but the question is not how hard would it be to replace what you do? Well, how many women would sleep with me and be nice to me? Well, how many men would pay all my bills? You know, we can do that math probably.
Like if you're young and gorgeous, there's probably a lot of men that pay your bills. If you're rich and successful, there's probably a lot of women that would sleep with you because they want.
Chapter 7: How can couples prevent routine from harming their connection?
But the question really becomes like, okay, long-term, short-term. If both people in this equation, Neither one feels shortchanged. Neither one feels like they're being taken advantage of. Kind of whose business is it, right? Like the economy of a relationship is not like counting the totals all the time and creating an Excel worksheet of what do we owe each other? It's more, is this working?
Do we both feel like we're giving and receiving value? Do either of us feel deeply taken advantage of? And I think that that is an economy and that's what we need to look at.
So very much agree. The thing that I find interesting about the economy, never thought I would think about it, never thought I'd be drawn into it. And now the vast majority of my content revolves around like traditional economies. Yeah. What I find so powerful about it is that it is cause and effect at its core.
Chapter 8: What is the significance of rituals in marriage?
So it is how humans work, and you can just see the nature of humans manifest in how economies work, how to incentivize people, what they'll say yes to, what they'll say no to, how they price themselves, how they price the things that they want, all of that stuff. So in a relationship, I think it's equally as, it's not a metaphor.
It's literally just, okay, there are things that you make me feel, I presume, is a big part of what you mean by this. So how do we ground it? So if somebody right now is getting into a relationship, maybe they've had failures in the past, or maybe they're brand new. But either way, they need a way to ground around what this exchange is.
So if we were gonna strip away the metaphor, like is it, like when my wife and I founded a company together, we expressly stated, these are my roles, these are your roles, this is how we will handle conflict. There's only two of us, so it's one V one in terms of a vote. We can hit a stalemate, how do we deal with stalemates?
We talk through all of it with very concrete, this is what happens when we collide. how should couples in your experience encounter that moment of agreeing like beyond the love of this all, what is the exchange in a relationship?
The great presupposition in there or the unspoken piece that I think you have to start with is we don't even get close to that analysis in modern society for most couples. Because it would be- Because people just wing it emotionally or? It would be untoward. If you're a friend of mine and you've been in a relationship for a period of time and you say, we're getting married.
If I said, really, why? That would be an incredibly rude question. Why is that a rude question? Like, we're talking about a technology that fails catastrophically 56% of the time, meaning it results in divorce. That's a catastrophic failure.
I'm gonna say staying together for the kids, even though you hate each other, or staying together because you don't wanna give away half your things is also a failure. So what's that, another 10%? I'm being nice, 20%? Okay, now we have a technology that 76% of the time fails. To me, asking why is a really good question, right? Because there are good answers, by the way. There are good answers.
My religion, my religion dictates it. My parents, it would really disappoint my parents if I didn't. There's tax benefits to getting married. There's lots of answers. we don't even start by asking the question. It's just assumed this is a thing we're going to do. And largely it's because it's what we do. Like it's a tradition.
And you know, I've said before that tradition is in one way, the wisdom of the people that came before us and the things that they've experienced and what we can learn from it. And in another way, tradition is peer pressure exerted by dead people. and we're just succumbing to it.
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