Ask Yourself and Your Partner These Questions

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. You know, if you get the comparison right, you can say, "Well, here's where I'm headed, and it's worth going to." You have to ask yourself, "Is there a place I could head to that would be worth getting to?" And that's a question, right? It's a question like you might ask your wife. It's like, "Okay, if I could give you what you wanted..." It's a good thing to ask during an argument, by the way.

Really, really, it has to be an honest question. It's like, "You're arguing with me. I don't know who's right; neither of us because we're both clueless and confused." It's like, "If you could have what you wanted in this moment and I could deliver it, what would it be?" The general answer to that is something like, "If you loved me, you'd know," which is not a helpful answer. How come you know that answer? It's not a helpful answer. It's like, "No, I'm too stupid to know what you want; that's for sure. You don't even know what you want, so how in the world am I going to figure out?"

But it's a lovely gift to offer your partner, by the way, the conditions for your satisfaction. But then you have to allow yourself to know what they are, and you have to be acting in your own best interest. And then that exposes you to all these potential calamities that we just described. And that's a big risk, but it's not nearly as big a risk as never getting what you want and need.

And that is definitely the alternative, and that's a pathway to bitterness and cynicism and a wasted life. And bitterness and cynicism, that's just where that starts; it gets way worse as it compounds. And so, it's very useful to treat yourself like you're someone you're responsible for helping.

It is very useful to compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. There's no way of interacting with someone, including yourself, that's more productive than to give targeted reward where credit is due. You might say, "Well, how can I treat myself well, given that I'm nothing but the embodiment of serpentine, uh, what would you call it, errors and sins?" And the answer is, "Well, if you're a little better than you were previously, that's something, really."

And maybe that's what you want to see in your kids, right? I mean, you don't want to push them too far. You don't want to punish them if they haven't made huge leaps forward developmentally. What you want to see is incremental progress that requires some effort. And that's actually what your kids really love too. You know, if they're playing hard, they're on the edge; they're pushing themselves to develop their skills.

Maybe they're playing a sport; they're pushing themselves to move incrementally at the optimum rate. That's another thing that play indicates, by the way. And that's so cool to know too. Play signals that you're pushing yourself forward at the optimal rate because you can't stay static, and you can't absorb too much change at once. How do you know when it's right? Well, it's engaging; it's meaningful. But at the highest level, it's something like play.

You know when kids, when you're playing a sport, you want to play against someone who's approximately the same level of skill as you or maybe a little beyond, right? If you're playing a game with someone who's approximately your equal and you're pushing each other exactly enough to facilitate optimal movement forward.

And that's actually a very good conceptual scheme for apprehending the nature of a marriage. So, I found out from Ben Shapiro, interestingly enough, that there's a translation in the King James Bible of God's description of Eve before he makes her. It says, uh, the King James version says that God says he's going to make Adam a help meet.

And that's an archaic word, right? No, no, you don't call your wife your help meet; generally, or you're going to get a problem if you do. But my point is, it's an archaic term; the biblical language means something like beneficial adversary. And that's very nice, you know? It's very nice because a beneficial adversary would be someone that you're pushing against and that's pushing against you exactly the right amount.

And there's this phenomenon that's known neurologically called opponent processing. And a lot of the manners in which we make difficult, and calibrated decisions neurologically involves two systems working in counter position to one another. So, imagine I want to move my hand smoothly, as smoothly as possible. That's pretty smooth, but I'm shaking a little bit, and it's a bit jerky. So I'm using voluntary systems to move my hand, and they're a little imprecise.

If I want to move it perfectly, I go like this, and then I can calibrate it unbelievably precisely. And that dance that you have with your partner, that's what that's supposed to be—optimized opponent processing. So, imagine why it's like—it's the same as free speech in some real sense; it's a manifestation of the logos, that optimized adversarial process. Why? Well, think about it this way. Imagine you have a child, or you have three children.

They're all quite different because children tend to be quite different even if they're born in the same family. And so, then you might ask yourself, "Well, how should we treat our children?" And the answer is, "Well, they're different." So is there a rule? There are some guidelines and principles. I had one in my book: "Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them." That's a good rule to turn to.

How do you know if you're not being a tyrant? You know, your children act up and they annoy you. Maybe you're just mean, or maybe they never annoy you, but they annoy everyone else, in which case you're not mean enough. And I mean that definitely because if your children never annoy you but they annoy everyone else, then they won't have any friends, and then they're in real trouble.

But your children are different, so how do you know how to calibrate your response to them? And the answer is, well, you push back and forth against your wife or your husband. And you know, maybe want to use a bit more encouraging, and one of you is a bit more sheltering. That's often the masculine versus feminine roles, although that can intermingle, you know.

But generally, those are associated with justice in some sense and encouragement with masculinity and mercy and tenderness with femininity, probably because women have to care for infants, and so they tilt more towards that end. In any case, you have to calibrate that for each kid, and the only way to do that is to push against each other, right? Because how else are you going to do it? There's no rule, and it's a dynamically changing situation, and you're too clueless and blind on your own to do it properly.

But maybe the two of you ironing out each other's kinks, in some sense, in this constant dance, oriented as you might be to the optimal development of your children whom you hypothetically love. Maybe you can calibrate a moving target by pushing on each other back and forth. And maybe if you do that optimally, then it manifests itself as something like play.

And you know that happens because you take your kids out—hopefully, this happens at least sometimes—you take your kids out to the beach or something like that. You have a great day, and what does that mean? Well, it means you got the balance right, right? Because there's some freedom, and there's some principles; there's some rules. It's a game, and everything comes together in the right place at the right time.

And you think, "That was a good day." And you think, "Yeah, every day could—could every day be like that?" And maybe that's too much to ask for every day, but it's something to aim for and something to try to foster. And it's something to know consciously, you know, that that playful engagement—that's a marker of the highest form of being.