https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=oPE1LCdvG5o
Well, why get married? Well, people want a partner. Half the dialogue that you hear between people, especially if they’re single, is related to their desire to have a partner. And of course half the dialogue you hear from people who are in a relationship is how to deal with problems in their relationship. But it’s a very rare person who doesn’t need and want an intimate relationship. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what does intimate mean? And the cheap interpretation of intimate is sexual, but that’s a pale reflection in some sense of true intimacy, even on the sexual front, because true intimacy means getting to know someone. It’s interesting that the biblical term for sexual congress is knowledge. And I think that’s because the intimacy that brings about the highest level of sexual fulfillment, all things considered, has to be nested within a much more profound and properly integrated and oriented intimacy. And I think that most fundamentally that’s to be found in the state of marriage. People often think about marriage as the death of sex, let’s say, but permanent singlehood is also, by the way, the death of sex. And one of the things that we’ve seen as the sexual revolution has continued to pace is that young people are, in some sense, more disturbed in their sexual orientation rather than less, turning to pornography and masturbation, or and for swearing intimate relationships entirely, or for swearing sexual interaction of all sorts, even self administered entirely. And that doesn’t seem to be a plus. So, you enter into marriage as an act of faith. You fall in love with someone, which is a grace, a gift of God in some real sense. You see what it would be like to care for someone. You see what it would be like to have someone care for you and value you. You get a glimpse of that in love, and then you have a challenge set before you, which is, Can you arrange your life with this person that you fall in love with so that that state of love permeates the entire relationship and everything you do together all the time? And so that would make a marriage the perfect date that repeats endlessly. Now, obviously, that’s an extraordinarily high goal to hit a high mountain to climb, but you need something to do, and it might as well be that. And in an intimate relationship, when things are going as well as they can go, I think you’re hard pressed to find anything better in life. So why not attempt to achieve that? Well, why do you need marriage? Well, you need marriage just like you need other social institutions. Marriage is a great burden and responsibility, as well as a great opportunity. It’s a burden and responsibility because as a married couple, you’re going to face together everything that life can throw at you. And so the difference between a casual affair, let’s say, and a marriage is that the casual affair is all milk and honey. Let’s say it’s all pleasure, although it very rarely works out that way. But that’s the theory where is in the marriage, you have to contend with the harsh realities of all the dimensions of life. But you want to take that on voluntarily and you want to share that with someone. And if you do that properly within the confines of a marriage, then you have someone to weave together the rope of the narrative of your life. And you have someone to bounce yourself off and you have someone to improve yourself in relationship with. And you have someone that you have to take into consideration like you should take yourself into consideration. And you have someone that you have to take into consideration over the longest possible span of time. And what that means is that you’re forced in a real sense to perform the kind of sacrifice of impulsive hedonism that produces a true maturity. So let’s say, imagine that you’re only out for yourself. And maybe you are willing to use other people instrumentally, sexually, and your motivation is hedonism and pleasure come what may. It’s like, OK, let’s think about that. Well, what do you mean by pleasure? Do you mean pleasure in the next 30 seconds? Do you mean pleasure in the next three minutes? Do you mean pleasure tonight? And I’m asking because you might say, well, why not cocaine and hookers as a nonstop diet? And the answer to that seems to be something like, well, it might be good for three minutes or one evening, but the hangover the next day isn’t to be desired. And that gets worse the more you walk down that hedonic route. And then there’s the call of conscience that comes a knocking at three in the morning when you’re hung over and dissolute after your idiot promiscuous rampage. It’s a bad medium to long term strategy. So so when we’re talking about hedonism, we have to specify exactly what we mean. Are you doing what makes you happy in an impulsive way? Or are you doing what’s best for you in the multiplicity of your iterations across the broadest span of decades? And then we would say, well, if you’re acting properly in relationship to you and all of your future selves, then you’re sacrificing the idiot, impulsive hedonism of the present to a medium to long term strategy that’s preferable in all regards. And I would say that’s part of developing an adult vision. And so and then you might say, well, I want to be free to pursue my hedonic demands, desires whenever I want to under what conditions, whatever conditions prevail. And I would first say, well, do you really think that’s possible? Like, how is that going to work? Second, aren’t you just going to use other people for your own pleasure? Third, aren’t you just going to use yourself for your own short term and counterproductive pleasure? Fourth, how is that different from being a two year old? There’s nothing in that that’s a mature vision. And so you could imagine, and this is a technical argument, that the nature of moral behavior is constrained by the fact of your repetition across the hours and days and weeks and months and years of your life. You have to act in relationship to yourself like you’re a totality stretched across time. And so that means that and this is why conscience bothers you if you betray yourself is because your conscience is an indicator of behavior in relationship to the medium in the long run. Now, that means you have to treat yourself like you’re a community that extends across time. And one way of learning how to do that that’s very profound is to shackle yourself to another person, say within the confines of a marriage, because then you know that, well, you’re going to be with that person for the minutes and hours and days and weeks and years of your life. And so you have to treat them in a manner that’s reciprocal and productive that grows positively over decades. And then you can imagine that there’s a complex optimization problem that emerges out of that, which is, well, how do you treat someone in your moment to moment interactions so that the relationship blossoms into, well, let’s say, continual love? And that’s a good thing to aim at. And there’s no difference between doing that and treating yourself properly. They’re the same thing. And then you can imagine if you treated yourself properly and your partner properly and you really learned how to do that. This is a deep problem. It’s a deep problem. And you have to be challenged to do it constantly. If you did that properly, first of all, there’d be nothing better that could possibly happen to you. And second, you’d have the perfect platform for having children, because now the children come into the world and there’s two of you and you’re side by side and you’re treating each other like your extensions of each other, which you are because you’re stuck with this person forever. And so, and then the child has the amalgam, the joint amalgam of two personalities that have had to bargain and negotiate to produce a unity. And the child’s introduced into the fact of that unity, which is the higher order structure that governs the marriage. So that’s Christ himself in the Christian marriage tradition, let’s say. Or you could think of it as the law and the prophets in the Jewish tradition. It boils down in some sense to the same thing. Now the child enters a world where a negotiated solution between two mature partners has been established and his or her behavior can be calibrated in relationship to that joint union. And that union is wiser than either of the two individuals would have been on their own.