On Relationship Advice

Last week, Jonah Hill’s ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady began posted screenshots of the couple’s texts on Instagram as a “warning to all girls.” The couple dated for a few years and broke up a year ago. In the texts, Brady accused Hill of being a “misogynist,” a “narcissist,” and “emotionally abusive.”

Who Is Right?

Online commentators were split. Half of them chose Sarah Brady’s side. She was a pro surfer and model when Jonah Hill met her and her career is reliant on her posting pictures on Instagram wearing swimsuits. His demands look like he wants to destroy her career and put her in a box. They reasoned that he was using her attachment to him to irreparably shape her life. They also say he comes across as controlling and manipulative when he writes “take some accountability and operate with respect.” I can see her side of the story. That makes sense

The other half of the online community took Jonah Hill’s side. They argue he was just putting boundaries on his relationship. They say a man should be able to request that his girlfriend not post bikini photos online for strangers or not hang out with people he feels are unhealthy. That argument is persuasive to me as well.

So who is right in this situation? They both are. It’s difficult for an outsider to determine what is correct in a relationship. The whole point of a relationship is it is a special domain where the decisions of the two people inside of it determine what is right or wrong. It’s the last frontier. It’s all subjective.

But during the past 20 years there is an emerging trend to standardize relationships and govern them using a vocabulary and objective standard. Which is why you see such intense online

In This Newsletter

Your relationship status is not some minor thing. It determines your freedom, personality and the way you live your life. The Single Domain

• The Relationship Domain

• The Family Domain

• How Therapy Culture is attempting to create one singular objective standard for how relationships operate and why this poses a danger to the subjective world that the couple creates.

The Single Domain

There’s a common notion that being single means you have absolute freedom.

Well maybe that’s true if you don’t intend to ever get into a relationship and stay celibate. For most people, they prefer to be in a couple or at least have a healthy dating life. To do that you need to attract a potential mate.

To attract a potential mate you have to have something to talk about. That means engaging with the culture of the wider world. You can’t just sit at home and watch Youtube videos of the 16th century Habsburg-Ottoman wars or completely obsess yourself over a super niche subject to the point you can’t communicate. You have to watch shows or listen to music or read books that other people engage with. You have optimize your dating profile.

You need to be able to signal you are a fun person, maybe you book some travel dates to other countries to take pictures. You need to showoff depending on the environment you live in. In a state like Texas that may mean owning a nice truck.

In a place like New York that may mean a nice apartment in a desirable neighborhood. You have to be “fit” for your environment because there is a dating market.

Then there are the details of dating itself. Picking a place to have a conversation can be tricky. There are lots of invisible rules in the single domain.

You can be weird as a single person but you can’t be too weird. Women can accept some eccentricity if its fun and playful but not a lot. Especially if you’re an average person. People who are too eccentric signal that they are not good at holding down jobs, staying in long term relationships or are emotionally stable. So if you do have weird opinions or thoughts you need to keep them to yourself, at least in the beginning.

There’s an exception to this rule. Males with boring professions do not attract females as much as artists do: musicians, painters, & novelists are more interesting than mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, or lawyers.

Many of these artists are eccentric but not at all rich. Is there an evolutionary explanation for this phenomena? Perhaps it’s connected to creativity with language & artistic ability. We have been playing with linguistic prowess and cave paintings for tens of thousand of years.

So how free are you really when you’re single? Well, you’re free to date any number of women (or men) at the same time but outside of that, there are real restrictions on how much you can be yourself.

The Relationship Domain

Once you start dating a person that you really like, you’ll want to get into a relationship with this person. What does being in a relationship mean? It means creating a world with a person. This world encompasses its own culture. That means the movies, books, songs, or food you consume will be between you two. The opinions of the outside world do not matter anymore. You don’t have to be in touch with pop culture or mainstream trends in order to make conversation. You create your own subjects for conversation together.

All of a sudden your freedom has increased. You are free to do whatever you like in a relationship as long as the other person does not object. There is only one person you have to please. When you were single you had to make sure to please this concept called the “dating market”. You had to stay environmentally fit. That’s all gone now. You can be as weird or eccentric as possible. The only limit to your freedom is you cannot date other people (unless you get permission). You can be a more authentic version of yourself.

The relationship domain is highly subjective. It’s not governed by any objective standard. There are no book of rules for relationships. If you do not feel like being in it you can just leave.

Most relationships are complicated and based on previous decisions that the couple have agreed to abide by. From the outside, it is difficult to understand the connection two people have.

The Family Domain

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