Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Love isn't just an emotion, such as this feeling that strikes you. It's an action. It's something you can learn and get better at.
And although philosophy might not seem like a guide to a good love life, especially Stoic philosophy, it actually is. Stoicism isn't this lone wolf philosophy. I think it holds exactly what you're looking for. And in fact, two people together could make you both more stoic.
So I've written a number of best-on books about Stoicism and self-improvement. Like I was just a regular human being, I've been happily married to my wife now for over a decade. We've been together for almost 20 years. And I am also the proud father of two young boys.
And in this video, I want to give you some stoic lessons that will help you choose the right partner, become a better partner, how to love more intentionally and live a better life. It's got to start where I think all philosophy has to start. This is actually inscribed the Temple of Apollo, which has the Oracle of Delphi. And it's this idea that we must know ourselves.
Right? How can you be with another person? How can you have a happy life? If you don't know what makes you happy?
You don't know what you want out of life if you don't understand yourself. One of my favorite characters in Wisdom Takes Work is the French writer and thinker Montane. And Montane had a, you know, he has this unusual education, he's fluent in all these different languages, he's read all the great texts. But he was taught from an early age that he had to understand himself.
That even when we are studying, other people when we're studying history, the purpose of this is to better understand ourselves. What makes this tick? Why we do what we do? What are our pitfalls?
What are our blind spots? What are our predilections? He famously said, I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero. And I think by the end of his life, he knows something about his virtues and his vice.
That's what his famous essays are. Right? He knows about the monstrosities and the miracles and the mundanities that are all inside him as they are inside all of us. It's a sad fate, Seneca said, for a man to die too well known to everyone else but unknown to himself.
Most of us have met many smart people, but how many self-aware people have we met? Actually, Blaze Pascal would say that one must know oneself. He says, even if it does not help in finding the truth, it helps in running one's life and nothing is more proper. How do you know what you want in a person?
How do you know what you're good at? How do you know what you bring to the table? Obviously, this is the journey of a lifetime, but it's also the secret to good relationships. So much of the practical problems that can come up in relationships are rooted in who we were as a child.
Assumptions we have, aversion we have, attractions we have, things we like, things we don't like, scripts that are running in our head that if you're not aware of, if you're not clear on whether they're positive or negative, whether you want to be acting this way or not, you're just going to get yourself into trouble. Just knowing yourself is going to help you choose the right person and it's going to also help you get away from the wrong people. It's going to help you stay with the right partner. And I think this is something that Shakespeare actually cribs from oncane.
This idea of to thine own self be true. I think so often in relationships people are pretending to be someone they are not for someone else's sake and that's not going to work either. Both you and your partner or your partners are going to be evolving as you grow and you have to be aware of this and able to articulate it and understand it. And ideally help each other on that journey.
Epic Tetus is riffing on Socrates. He says, look, some people are trying to cultivate land, some people are trying to breed horses. He says, me, I cultivate my own improvement day to day. People want to find the right person, but how many of us stop and ask like, are you the right person for anyone else?
Are you really the catch that you think you are? And so if we can think of philosophy and stoicism as a guide to self improvement, how to be better than you are, how to delight in your own improvement. And here we don't mean like, do you have a perfect six pack? Do you have broad shoulders?
Do you make a lot of money? But like, are you a good person? Are you working on yourself? Are you getting better?
That's how you make yourself attractive to others. That's how you make a good match. That's how you are a catch. Now, once you're in a relationship, this doesn't stop.
You can't just let yourself go. You can't just be like, well, I did it and you're stuck with me. No, you should be wanting to get better. This is why I go to therapy.
This is why my wife and I have lots of conversations about, hey, I could use more of this or have you thought about this? We spur each other to be better to work on ourselves. And I think the work my wife has done on herself is really inspiring me to get better. I would hope the converse is true.
The stoic is working on them. So that's what works through this is doing in meditations. He's trying to be more patient. He's trying to be more understanding.
He's trying to be kinder. He's trying to remind himself what's important. He's trying to be less judgmental. Stoics would say no one is wise or good or virtuous on accident.
It's work. It is constant dedication and commitment. And if you want to have a good relationship, if you want to be the kind of person that people want to be in a relationship with, you have to do this work. All right.
So this seems obvious, but a lot of people mess this up. Like 50% of people mess this up, right? You have to pick the right person. And this arguably might be the most important choice that you ever make.
Winston Churchill, who makes a lot of critical decisions. He says that the most important decision, the decision that most leads to his success, was his decision to marry his wife. That his greatest good fortune was finding Clementine, his wife. There was a person behind the scenes, often in front of the scenes, all along the way.
Clementine Churchill is strong and charismatic. She's incredibly intelligent. She makes Churchill better, personally, professionally. She balances him out.
She builds political allies. She mends relationships. He's an emotional, erratic person. He's fits of depression.
He's fits of ego. He fits of anger. And she's the one, especially during the war, who's like his sort of emotional ballast. She stabilizes him.
She prevents him from doing reckless and irresponsible things a lot. She doesn't always get credit for this, but people who know them knew the role that she played. And she also didn't just agree with her as a support him like unconditionally. No, she calls him out.
She challenges him. Some of her most famous letters are prompting him to stop doing this, start doing this. She is a critical sounding board and advisor to him. Much in the same way that Pericles' life is one of the primary advisors and stabilizers to Pericles in the midst of that clash of civilizations, the Peloponnesian War.
I think a lot of people think that being married will tie them down. It will negatively impact their career. And I would argue, yes, it will tie you down. It will hold you back.
It will tie you down to reality. It will hold you back from making sometimes fatal errors. There's a stoic that most people don't know, but was actually critical in the development of stoic. I talked about him in Liza's name is Antipir.
He was a couple hundred years before Marcus realized. He's one of the first stoic to talk about the importance of relationships and marriage. To Antipir, like a successful city, a successful world could only be built around the keystone of family. He says that among the primary and most necessary of appropriate actions was finding your life partner and marrying him.
Actually, Luca, the 20th century French philosopher, would credit Antipir with pioneering like a new, more modern concept of marriage, not just a legal arrangement, not just a financial arrangement. He's talking about a relationship of marriage where souls are blended, where they both become better for being together. The stoic word, which means home, it was perfected in marriage. It was about creating a sanctuary, a citadel that could withstand the blows of fate and facilitate the good life.
And as I've said before, I think my wife is much more naturally stoic than I am. And she's been with me through my business as a business of being created together, the books that I've written, raising our sons together. None of the things I have achieved or managed to do, do I think would have been possible on my own. I was just in positions that I as a 20 year old was not emotionally equipped to handle.
Like the bookstore, the studio where this is happening, not only was it her idea, but it looks the way that it looks because she designed it. I guess what I'm saying is that one of the first and most essential things you can do in your life is find someone who makes you better, who you in turn can do the same for. Being an effective leader is difficult, right? You've got to keep your ego in check, you've got to know how your business works, how the team operates for peak effectiveness.
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For a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at CheersHealth.com What he loved about this was that it was an example of two people sticking with each other through adversity who inspired and called each other to greater virtue. I guess what I'm saying is that you can't give up on your partner when things get tough. You can't give up on your relationship when things are tough. You can't expect them to be perfect.
You have to love them unconditionally. There's basically nobody different than Cato and his brother. But Cato's the strict stoic. He's disciplined.
He's committed. He's austere. And then his brother is much more of your typical woman. But Cato loves his brother.
And most importantly, he loves him unconditionally. I think about that Bruce Springsteen song, Highway Patrolman. He says sometimes when you're your brother, you look the other way. He's talking about unconditional love.
Obviously, it's important to siblings. It's important to kids. But like with your spouse, this is your person. And you have to accept them for who they are.
You have to love and support them unconditionally. Some people ask me about the secret to a long, successful marriage is. And I do have a secret. I say the secret to staying together is not breaking up.
It was on her wedding day that Ruth Bader Ginsburg's mother-in-law gave her a piece of advice that not just shaped her 56-year marriage, but also her three decades on the Supreme Court. She said, in a marriage, it helps to be a little deaf. By that, she meant sometimes you just got to let things go. Sometimes you just got to pretend not to hear certain things.
Because if you lock on to everything, if you hold on to everything, if you give everything a great weight and seriousness, you'll never be able to get along with someone. Because if you can't do this, not only will you constantly bog down in fights and arguments over things that don't really matter, but you're going to miss all the things that you do agree on, that you should hear, that you should hold on to. So part of maintaining a good relationship is going to be letting things go, pretending not to see or hear certain things. There's also a famous story about Cato in the Roman Bats.
He's walking in and he gets bumped and shoved and ends up devolving into a fight. Then afterwards, he realizes how silly and foolish it was. When the man comes to apologize, he says, I don't even remember being hit. And this is a secret to a good marriage, to a good life, to a life with less conflict and grudges and grievances.
You have to be able to let things go. It helps to be a little deaf. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got is that love is spelled T-I-M-E. If you love someone, your relationship with someone, you owe them your time and your calendar doesn't lie.
There's a letter that Marx really says writing to his teacher, Fronto. He says, I call the gods to witness that I would now live in exile with Faustina, that's his wife, rather than without her on the Palantine. He's saying that he'd rather be with his wife anywhere than in a palace by himself. And it's a beautiful idea that the tragedy of Marx realizes his life is that he didn't do that.
He spends enormous amounts of his reign away. He says, you know, somewhere else in meditation is that life is warfare and a journey far from home. And that was the reality of the job. And he seems to have thought that he had no choice in the matter.
I guess what I'm saying is that your calendar doesn't lie. Your choices don't lie. Again, we want to see these virtues as verbs and not nouns. If you say you love someone, if you say you care about someone, if you say, oh, I do everything for my family, I do everything for my kids, for my wife, to me, I'm happiest at home, the proof is in the pudding, right?
If you're gone all the time, if you're interrupting your time with them, always for the phone, for the computer, for opportunities, that says something. Like your priorities are clear. It takes a lot of work, though, especially again in today's noisy, busy world, to be present, to be available, to prioritize the things you say that are your priorities and not the other things. That's why on my wall, in my office, I have a picture of my youngest, and the picture of my oldest in between them.
I have a little sign and it just says no. It's a reminder that when I'm saying yes to things, I'm saying no to them. And conversely, when I'm saying no to other things, I'm saying yes to them. So look, one of the realities of the human experience is change.
Change is everywhere all the time. In meditation, Marcus really returns to the idea of change, like over and over and over again. He says, constant awareness that everything is born from change. Does nature love nothing more than to alter what exists and make new things like it?
Does all that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it? Then one of my favorite passages, he says, oh, you're frightened of change, or you're fighting against change. It would exist without it. Right?
Who I am who my wife was when we met 20 years ago, I can barely even wrap my head around through those people. Or if you want a relationship that lasts, you're going to have to come to terms and have to assent to use the stoic word to change. You're changing, they're changing, you're constantly being remade all the time. Right?
The stoics are talking about how we never step in the same river twice. You're not in the same relationship with the same person. What I'm talking about is not just accepting change, not just embracing change, but loving change, loving that you're both on this constant journey, that you're becoming new people and you have to fall in love with that new person. It's not about fighting to keep things the same, but fighting to continue to be with that person as you both evolve and change.
Today we talk a lot about passion, right? Your relationship has to have passion, you have to follow your passion. The stoics are actually a little bit suspicious of passion, maybe more than a little bit. They were actually opposed to what they would call the passions.
Being passion's slave was something they were quite worried about, something they thought led to a lot of mistakes. What stoicism is, is philosophy, you have this emotion, you have this opinion, you have this urge of its desire, and it's the ability to stop and question it, to think about it, to to go, hey, is this something that I want to do? Is this something I'm going to regret doing? Is this something I want to say?
Is this something I want to say? Is this something I'm going to regret saying? What happens in the heat of the moment, I guess, is something the stoics were concerned about, and it's something we have to be concerned about. The stoics want it to be aware and rational, not in the throes of passion or emotion.
We can say this is in contrast to the hopeless romantic, who's, you know, after unrequited love. I think the stoic is approaching emotions, love included from a more philosophical, sort of reflective place. They're concerned about not being overwhelmed, about not being caught up in the moment. Arias Dittemus, another stoic was talking about being wary of those excessive impulses he said, which are disobedient to reason.
People blow up their lives, they blow up their relationships. It's usually over a few seconds of pleasure or a thing that in retrospect they wish they hadn't said, a decision they made at their lowest ab or their most overwhelmed. And again, what stoicism is is not not feeling those things, but not letting them make you do something that you're going to regret or that can't be undone. So look, it's good to be in love, it's good to feel love, it's good to love deeply, but you don't want to be a slave to it, you don't want to be overwhelmed to it, you don't want it to overwhelm you.
Look, all good things come to an end, relationships and life included. I know this might sound a little weird to end this video on, it might even be a little depressing, but the stoics did meditate on love ending, they meditated on life ending. This is not just a pre-meditatium lorem, the idea that things could happen and that it's the refusal to consider what percentage of marriages end in divorce, that people grow apart, that people have affairs, that people make mistakes, that life can take us in very different directions, right? To be utterly stunned and surprised by this, the stoics would say is to make it hurt all the more, because it says the unexpected, blow lands have you.
Like look, the one thing we know for certain is that every relationship will end, right? Either in a breakup or one person and then eventually the other will both die. That is the human condition. And the stoics want us to meditate on this, to be aware of it, to not be surprised by it.
Epictetus said that whenever there's things that you love, or that bring you pleasure, enjoy. He says remember to tell yourself of their general nature, which is to say they decay, they fall apart, eventually they leave you. He even says, and marks through his quotes to this in meditation, that when you kiss your child at night, when you say good night to your wife at night, he says, see to yourself that you are kissing something human, and that they may not make it to the morning. Now the purpose of this was not to detach, to disconnect.
I think it was to be present, to say, hey, this bedtime matters. Hey, this conversation in the car matters. Hey, this walk matters. Hey, this phone call, this text message matters.
It's not supposed to be grim. It's supposed to make you present. It's supposed to make you connect it. And yeah, it's hard marks through this.
It feels like tempting fate to contemplate such a loss. It feels almost sacrilegious as a parent to consider that something could happen to your kid, but fate can't be tempted. Fate isn't in our control. What happens is outside our control, how prepared we are for it to happen is in our control.
And it isn't just about being able to shrug off something bad if it happens. No, it's designed to make you live and be present and love in such a way that you have less to regret on the other side of that.