On men, relationships, and self-discipline

Some lessons from a failed marriage and healthy partnership.

Background: mutual failings

I wish I had understood what marriage requires when I tried the first time. I divorced during the pandemic and found someone who inspires me to improve in all aspects of life. Without him, I wouldn’t be myself today, nor would I have risen so far in my career. We are intellectual equals, and we both value self-improvement. Most importantly, our views on morality and approach to life align. He helped me get over my extreme emotional volatility and provided the stability I needed to move past depression in his approach when the waves came. 

Having a partner who pushes you to be better and rises to the occasion is imperative. My ex-spouse did not value self-improvement and was complacent in his approach to everything. He did not work out and constantly complained about various physical issues that would have been improved by exercise and some discipline. He did not maintain friendships or a social life, nor did he have hobbies. By the way, gentlemen, video games are not a hobby. They are akin to entertainment, no different from watching TV.

He also never resisted my volatile emotions at the time. Had he done so, I might have examined my behavior sooner. Yes, this is ultimately on me, but everyone needs to push to be a better person.

I knew something was off when my ex and I married, and I should have seen it before. First, we had only lived together a short time when I impulsively proposed. I thought this was the relationship worth committing to because I had strong feelings for him through much of my twenties. We had become estranged after college, and I reconnected with him. I’m not sure why. Maybe because my life at the time was not going according to plan, I needed some other source of self-esteem because I was trapped in underemployment in the wake of the financial crisis and never thought I’d have an actual career. 

I must note that I did not attach myself for financial support because I did land a far better job before we moved in together, which took me to Austin. I finally left Florida and took him to a city he loved. He put in effort early on and moved from Austin to Florida for me. When we moved back, we set up a household, and everything seemed fine. In the end, I was too emotionally volatile and depressed. 

We both were addicted to cannabis, which was a large contributor to the relationship ultimately not working. The addiction prevented us from improving several areas of life even though we worked hard in our careers. It made us both lazier, and we fed off each other. I didn’t even smoke that much until getting with him, and I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until years later. I ended up surpassing him in consumption. I cannot stress enough the importance of being with someone who doesn’t have your vices. My current partner is sober after several years of alcoholism, and I’m now mostly able to resist the call of weed. I’m still working on it, but I could not have dealt with the addiction without him (a deep dive for another time). We support each other in maintaining temperance, and not being addicted to the same drug led to progress.

 

Enda Harte, “The Cardinal Virtues of Stoicism”

Discipline and rigor

Ultimately, the difference between the two relationships is the presence of temperance. My ex and I did not maintain discipline, so we couldn’t encourage it in each other. I was emotionally volatile, blamed him for things outside his control, had often unreasonable demands of life, and wasn’t good at expressing my needs.

Discipline is the foundational pillar of a life well lived. Indulgence leads to unhealthy behavior that can strain the relationship. As anyone will tell you, a partnership takes hard work. While ‘doing the work,’ I was inspired to act virtuously toward everyone, not just my partner. Without the four virtues—courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom — one cannot find a life of depth and meaning. Cultivating them means being able to call yourself on your selfishness and choose the honorable path. It means putting others first and often denying yourself what you want to do. It means dealing with addictions and self-regulating - emotions, food, drugs, and the phone are the four horsemen of self-indulgence. All the major philosophical traditions teach moderation in all areas of life for obvious reasons. Without it, you are a slave to your desires, which carry a person away like a ship is carried out to sea by a storm.

I don’t mean virtue in terms of political opinions but those that help a person develop a philosophy of living. We’ve distorted the meaning of virtue to something surface-level - we think it means the correct views about how society ought to be organized. But these are not virtuous; they are largely unexamined beliefs on which reasonable people can disagree.

Contrary to liberal beliefs en vogue, conservatives can be virtuous in their approach to their life and toward others. The four virtues help you connect more meaningfully to others. Liberals criticize American hyper-individualism but still adhere to it in our insistence that we owe nothing to anyone. To a certain extent, there is no good life without tying oneself to others and caring for their welfare. Self-focus is heavily encouraged in our culture, especially among liberal women, and it leaves us impoverished in our relationships. It is a hyper-capitalist society telling us to be more selfish, and this is ironically fomented among the same people who reflexively blame capitalism for all their life’s ills (as I once did). It’s now well established that the most important indicator of life satisfaction is the quality of relationships. 

There are, indeed, superior ways of living. Doing whatever you want is the opposite of discipline and an excuse to indulge in everything, particularly emotional reasoning. Our emotions should be felt but shouldn’t determine our behavior. We should not act on every feeling, as it can lead to relational strife. Our emotions are an interpretation of events, not the source of truth about how to approach living. I’ve written before at length about how modern feminism encourages emotional indulgence, which should be resisted at every turn. This exact indulgence contributed to my first marriage failing. We were both at fault because we lacked discipline in multiple areas of life. This allowed the other person to let themself off the hook. 

Chasing the four cardinal virtues improved my life in all areas: work, domestic sphere, hobbies, and health. Doing philosophy, meaning chasing knowledge, solved my depression in the end. This comprised reading primary sources on how to live like Marcus Aurelius, Plato, the Bhagavad Gita, Thoreau, Emerson, and others, along with related secondary sources. Additionally, I developed the ability to focus well to do complex tasks, which is hard-won in our modern age. We must resist the temptation of dopamine residing in our pockets. A critical method is to develop a reading habit. What do you want from your limited time on earth? Indeed it is not to scroll constantly. 

A deep life requires discipline because it is born of doing difficult things. I have challenging hobbies that satisfy and give me meaning outside my work, allowing me to let go of my career as an identity. I’ve also created a program of study for topics that once animated me in graduate school, and the pride I feel in reading those difficult texts surpasses any I might have in work accomplishments.

Have at least one activity that takes you out of the home and makes you accountable to others. I’ve been a part of a dance company that provides a structured social outlet while creating an obligation to a community. The camaraderie built during practices and performances creates lasting bonds. Contrary to what passes as discourse, responsibility to others is a source of fortitude and meaning rather than a burden.

One’s social life is the strongest indicator of overall health, especially later in life. I recognize that introverts might find this advice repellant, but we must undertake it so we actually have friends. I know many men without strong friendships or community. It’s unhealthy always to be alone. I can confirm this from being alone and friendless in a new city and being my ex-husband’s only source of socialization. He never moved past his social anxiety because he refused to sit with the discomfort of talking to strangers and wouldn’t even talk to my friends. In therapy, we’re taught that getting over our anxiety requires consistent exposure to the thing we fear.

Finally, the benefits of physical exercise cannot be overstated. I don’t care how this sounds - everyone should exercise. The endorphin release cannot be replicated with any other activity. This one habit allowed me to regulate my emotions more than therapy or psychiatric medications. Paired with reading, my mind became sharper.

Along with having benefits for depression, exercise was an easy avenue through which to develop the identity of a disciplined person. It also guards against chronic pain that begins in one’s thirties. If your back or knees hurt, it’s likely because your legs and core are weak. There is no substitute for strengthening one’s muscles to guard against the inevitable degeneration of the body after thirty. When you go to physical therapy for an injury, you’re told to do basic exercises, but you’re supposed to strengthen those muscles through more rigorous work after building some baseline strength with the therapist. Social media culture among women likes to call this sort of advice fat shaming against all logic.

Both parties in a partnership must maintain a basic level of discipline and some form of physical and mental exercise. Even if one claims to be satisfied without these two things, life is guaranteed to be better if one exercises the body and brain. We’re a society that has forgotten to think and exercise restraint.

Everyone can be disciplined, no matter their station. If you are economically stable, I don’t think there’s much of an excuse to sit around and do nothing for your body and brain. I’m not trying to sell you a Horatio Alger story. We should stop associating the call to personal responsibility with a political party. Republicans did not invent the concept, and it’s not inherently evil or heartless to expect people to self-regulate. This is even more urgent if you have a laptop-based job and sit all day staring at a screen. Staving off emotional and physical problems as individuals means fewer problems as a couple and more room to work on your most important goals.

Some advice for relationships and lessons from divorce

Women - the need for emotional discipline

I encourage questioning the idea of career success as the source of life satisfaction and freedom. I recall being taught that liberty and equality meant having a successful career and your own money. It is well-known that Americans obsess over work at the expense of being present for their relationships, which leaves us impoverished at the end of life. A recent longitudinal study of happiness found that the most significant indicator was the quality and quantity of relationships, especially friendship. The cost of unending ambition is not worth it. We should be content with what we have at any moment, or we will always be unhappy and envious. Instagram is powerful because it taps into our natural envy for others’ success. Men play the status game, but it’s gone on steroids for women through the phone because popularity can now be quantified in likes and followers.

I must also emphasize how immoral it is to cut people off because they have the wrong political opinions and to filter out conservative-leaning men. Not only are you profoundly hurting people, but you’re ensconcing yourself in an echo chamber of similar views, which precludes questioning what you believe. All beliefs should be examined constantly.

I recognize that it’s difficult to accept a conservative as a romantic partner, but we’re only narrowing our already small dating pools by being ideologically rigid. At least give the guy a chance to see if your values might align; values and political beliefs are different, and we conflate them. Men are diverging from women politically for understandable reasons. Because fewer men than women are getting degrees, our pool is already small, and competition is high. Making it even smaller only hurts us. Not every conservative man is a Trump supporter. If I were single, I’d at least give libertarians a chance.

No one is correct about everything, and it is incumbent on us to question the dominant ideas of the zeitgeist to be able to think for ourselves. Women’s culture is exceptionally resistant to critical thinking and argument among ourselves. Debates become personal and emotional instead of being a source of sharpening our thinking. We should get comfortable with debating ideas, especially among each other, and stop accusing men of being assholes if they question what we believe or ask us to back it up. This will also improve romantic relationships because it’s crucial to know how to argue without encouraging strife.

Marriage and commitment will enrich your life. I understand that it’s been framed as a patriarchal trap, but this is another example of feminism being simplistic in its application. Yes, there are plenty of lazy men (I married and divorced one), but the most important economic decision you can make is that of your life partner. Even if you don’t want children, it is not a failure to rely on someone else if it means less pressure on yourself to maintain a career that may not even be satisfactory. Work isn’t freedom. Dependence on a man’s resources to raise a kid doesn’t mean you lack worth. Capitalist measures of success have become those by which we measure our worth as humans. I knew this to be wrong even when I was an adherent of social justice ideology, but I still used my career success as a stand-in for my self-worth instead of how I show up for others.

We’ve come to expect compliments from our partners, but we are also responsible for building their confidence. This costs us nothing and makes them more attractive because it’s a feedback loop. Everyone needs their partner to encourage them, and compliments serve the crucial function of building self-esteem for everyone. I’ve heard from several men that compliment-giving is lopsided, and they rarely get compliments from their partners.

It is easy to criticize men because they will never be as conscientious as us. This trait is prevalent in women and lacking in men. That doesn’t make them bad people, and I’ve now come to accept that my partner will never know what’s in the pantry or fridge off hand. He will not know what needs to be replenished unless it’s put in front of his face. He will never be able to fold a fitted sheet or make the bed according to my standards. And that’s ok. It’s unrealistic to expect perfection from anyone. I learned that my standards are too high for my relationships and myself. We’ve been raised to be highly neurotic and conscientious, which makes us very good at school and other structured activities. That doesn’t make us superior to others, though I hear a lot of sanctimonious dismissals of men who also can’t do these things. It can often get in the way of empathy for those who don’t meet our high expectations.

Finally, it’s important to admit when you’ve been wrong to your partner and to not use them as a punching bag, as tempting as it is. I know far too many women who blame their partners for uncontrollable things or otherwise unfairly evaluate them because we tend to be more neurotic and conscientious than men. I’m not saying to excuse laziness but to recognize when we engage in emotional reasoning. The culture encourages us to reason emotionally by exalting it over critically examining our feelings. Emotions are an interpretation of events, not the facts of the event. Emotional reasoning is also symptomatic of depression, and any therapist worth their salt should discourage us from it. It is a cognitive distortion, and yet it’s essential to the feminist view of the world. But our feelings are not anyone else’s responsibility and are also not a trustworthy lens for evaluating reality. Others are not responsible for them, though social justice ideology would have us make everyone else the villains when we feel shitty.

Men - the need for conscientiousness

I encourage you to be ambitious. I've met too many unambitious men with college degrees, including my ex-husband. There is a dearth of marriageable men with degrees because women are outpacing men in educational attainment. Unfortunately, women are evolutionarily wired to date horizontally and up and men horizontally and down. You can’t compel women to date down, and I don’t blame them for refusing.

I’m not saying that couples among whom the woman makes more than the man cannot succeed. But, the divorce rate in this context is far higher than if the man makes the same or more than the woman. Once my income jumped above my ex-husband’s, I realized I didn’t need to tolerate his domestic laziness and lack of ambition. I could rely on my own. I still technically make more than my current partner and have the whole time, but it has never mattered. The difference is that I believe in his ability to succeed because he is ambitious in all areas of life and values self-improvement. He doesn’t need me to tell him which chores to do when, though he cleverly ensures that I see him perform them regularly to maintain my positive perception of his domestic behavior (he has admitted this).

Lots of women complain about lazy men who don’t share housework. Don’t let that be a reason for a relationship ending. I know these men exist because, again, I married one. He wouldn't touch his clothes if I didn’t finish folding the laundry. He didn’t pick up the slack on chores or notice the little things that could have been cared for, like folding the towels after I had done four loads of laundry. I finally decided to cut the cord for good when I was visiting one day and found him casually folding the towels in the morning before work after I had moved out for a separation period. He never did it while together because he knew I would do it eventually. I don’t need to ask my partner today to fold the towels or put away his clothes. He does a terrible job, but he still folds his own. I often go back into the drawers and refold them, but I don’t mention it. The point is that he tries!

My ex never cooked for us both, only for himself. I’m a vegetarian, and he isn’t, so it was for both of us when I cooked but only for himself when he did. I don’t know why I tolerated it for so long. You (and your partner) must know how to do basic cooking. It gives you something to share and is the more fiscally prudent thing to do. It’s even more crucial that men know how to cook because it counteracts the stereotype that women should tend to the food and kitchen. I guarantee women will deeply appreciate it and find it hot. Also, everyone should resist the urge to be a picky eater.

Women often say one thing but expect something else. There’s no changing this, so you have to use intuition. If we were direct, there would be no mystery to unravel. You ought to unravel her psychology if the relationship is to succeed. I often think my partner knows me better than I know myself, and he’s come to predict what I will think and say to a scary degree. He understands the emotions behind my behavior. It is also incredibly difficult for many women to talk about sex or what they need. You’ll have to coax it. A woman’s orgasm is more important to the health of the relationship than your own. 

I also cannot stress enough the need to find social activities separate from your partner. To make her the center of your universe is stifling. I married a person who refused to maintain friendships, using social anxiety as an excuse. I also once suffered from social anxiety, but I got over it because I forced myself to talk to strangers in work and personal contexts. It’s imperative to make friends because that determines the quality of your life. And if you avoid it, it’ll be extremely difficult to do in your thirties and forties. Find something to do outside the house to ensure your partner has alone time regularly, and treat video games as you would treat TV.

And for the love of god, push back if you’re being unfairly evaluated or if feelings are ruling the day, even if your impulse is to shut down in the face of a hurricane of strong emotions. Emotional reasoning must be countered. The culture encourages women to do it by default, and we’ll keep doing it unless someone holds us accountable for treating others fairly and reigning in the main character energy. I know it’s hard to push back when a woman is sure she’s correct. But if you argue calmly and logically, you can encourage her to examine her feelings and assess their validity. There’s a joke in the culture about men telling their wives they’re right even if they’re wrong or smiling and nodding instead of pushing back to avoid fighting. This is treating women like children, so please don’t do it. It will be unpleasant, but it won't bode well for the relationship's longevity if you can’t have a healthy discussion about disagreements. Both parties must learn to argue without destroying the other person’s self-esteem.

There is an epidemic of lonely men, likely because men’s social skills are less emphasized in earlier life. Loner nerdy boys become lonely men. How you were in high school or that you were bullied matters not. Your ability to make friends as an adult will affect your romantic relationship because no woman wants to be everything to her partner. A woman is likelier than a man to have many social contacts. My attraction to him faded as I realized my ex and I were highly divergent in our social abilities. Charism, confidence, and social awareness are essential tools for attracting a woman. These matter far more than looks.

Some measure of discipline and rigor is required to do all of the above that I mentioned: ambition, domestic work, food, and emotional regulation. Building a life together is far more complex than moving in together, though I naively thought it was just that in my twenties. Knowing and mastering yourself is crucial for building a partnership that can withstand time, and all that culture throws at you. We’re sent messages from everywhere to do whatever we want, but the more you both can resist this urge, the stronger your bond will be. I’m curious to know what other advice you have, dear readers. Please share in the comments.