You Can’t Undo Who Dating Turns You Into - Bret Weinstein

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]I'm lucky. I have an excellent marriage and I've been with the same person since I was 18 years old. So, I can look at this with a bit of a remove and say a lot. I can say something about how a marriage that does not look traditional but does honor those traditional values that are important, how it works. Right? Heather and I have a renegotiated deal where um there are certain traditional things that each of us do and then there's a lot of stuff that you know just doesn't look traditional at all. So there's a lot about there's a lot that can be done but the key thing is for young people to understand a that when they are playing around in the landscape of mating and dating they are shaping themselves and many of the things that one might do with the pseudosophistication that well I'm doing this now and at some point I'll do something different. Right? If that's the modality you're in, you don't understand that you actually can't go back because you are going through a developmental process.

[00:01:22]And what I tell my own kids and I have two boys both in college. Um what I tell them is for example with respect to something like porn that if you are consuming porn you are robbing your future partner right you wouldn't do it if you understood that. And frankly I believe neither of my kids watch porn. They've they've heard this message. Um, but you know, most consumers of porn think, well, this is just something I'm doing and I can not do it and then it will not matter. And the answer is no. No. It's teaching you. It's creating your sexual self, which is the person you're going to take into the bedroom with the person you ultimately fall in love with if you're lucky enough to have that happen. Used to be everybody fell in love, right? it was automatic. Um, now the market has provided so many distractions and men and women have been induced into behavior that makes them unattractive to each other. And those things have caused lots of people to treat the idea of a romantic life as an option rather than a central modality at the core of human purpose. So anyway, yeah, it's bleak, but unlike the case of the universities, a small group of people who said, you know what, I can see that we are hurting ourselves and I can pretty well guess at a better set of rules. So here are the rules I'm going to adhere to, and I'm not going to date anybody who doesn't adhere to them. also a small group of people who did that would suddenly discover a radical improvement in their lives. And if those people, among other things, were to understand that the job of your romantic partnership is to discover an equilibrium that is rewarding and healthy and stable for the purpose of rearing children, right? But that that is possible. If you know that that's possible, then you're motivated to the extent that your current version of that relationship is not functioning to figure out how to alter it. If you think, well, you know, nice relationships are a cool story.

[00:03:59]It's not really true. Marriage kind of sucks. You know, that's what being an adult is about. You're supposed to accept that. Um, if that's what you think, then you're not motivated to change things because who knows? Maybe you have it about as good as it gets, even though you don't like it. Um, so anyway, I would I would encourage young people to understand it is possible to have a great marriage.

[00:04:25]It is not something that will happen if your version of the model is you're looking for the person that when you get together the relationship will be great because that's not how it works. You forge it together. Um, and it's well worth doing.

[00:04:43]The the it's the most important choice you will ever make is who you will be with and under what sort of agreement.