KevinD

Ben:

That must not be a recent pic in your profile. Clearly, you've had the word "SUCKER" tattooed across your forehead.


You do not know what another person is feeling; you only know what they tell you. (Read that statement 40-100 times until you get it.)

When a person demonstrates in action that they have no integrity — when they are willing to lie to and deceive people whom they claim to love — why would you believe them about anything?


It can be a challenge to remain in objective control when your feelings are overwhelming you.

If you heard the kinds of statements coming from this lady spoken by anyone else, would they make the slightest bit of sense?

What would it would mean to remain in a romantic relationship out of a sense of "obligation"?

I have a suspicion that this lady is a master of having her cake and eating it, too.


Don't tell me about a person's positive qualities when they're a deceptive liar — particularly in the romantic realm. Integrity is fundamental; to the extent she has brains and is likable, that only makes her more dangerous.

You're sexually gone over this woman and it's frying your intellect.

Ben:

That must not be a recent pic in your profile. Clearly, you've had the word "SUCKER" tattooed across your forehead.


You do not know what another person is feeling; you only know what they tell you. (Read that statement 40-100 times until you get it.)

When a person demonstrates in action that they have no integrity — when they are willing to lie to and deceive people whom they claim to love — why would you believe them about anything?


It can be a challenge to remain in objective control when your feelings are overwhelming you.

If you heard the kinds of statements coming from this lady spoken by anyone else, would they make the slightest bit of sense?

What would it would mean to remain in a romantic relationship out of a sense of "obligation"?

I have a suspicion that this lady is a master of having her cake and eating it, too.


Don't tell me about a person's positive qualities when they're a deceptive liar — particularly in the romantic realm. Integrity is fundamental; to the extent she has brains and is likable, that only makes her more dangerous.

You're sexually gone over this woman and it's frying your intellect.

I was raised with religion. Over time, as I developed and become more intellectually independent, I outgrew it.
For me, there has been no grief, only relief.
I'm tempted to say the grief happened when I believed. Life as an atheist is considerably more laid-back and enjoyable.

I was raised with religion. Over time, as I developed and become more intellectually independent, I outgrew it.
For me, there has been no grief, only relief.
I'm tempted to say the grief happened when I believed. Life as an atheist is considerably more laid-back and enjoyable.

I'm going to limit myself to a single idea, which I suggest you repeat over and over to yourself like a mantra: If you don't get this area of your life handled, sorted, managed and mastered, you are in for a very unhappy life.
You'll not only make yourself miserable, but crazy as well. From what you've written here, it seems like you're well on the way. You talk about driving past this girl's house to check on the cars parked outside? I don't know if that's immoral per se, but it sure is loony as hell.
You come across in your posts as very young, totally inexperienced (you admit as much), and utterly, absolutely naïve about women and relationships. This is not a crime, but also it's not a state you want to remain in for long.
While you're crushing on and obsessing over this one particular girl, the reality is she is of no significance whatsoever. You think (or rather, you feel) that she is someone extremely important, when in fact she is nobody, irrelevant to the big picture.
The important person here is YOU. You need to focus on improving yourself, bettering yourself, and above all gaining a mature sense of emotional perspective, particularly where sexual emotions are involved. In short, you need to make yourself into the kind of man who doesn't get irrationally obsessed with girls like this.
Now that I've beaten you up, let me say there isn't a man reading your posts who can't sympathize with you, at least a little. Fortunately for some of us, your story serves as a reminder of our distant past. For others, the pain you describe is like an experience out of the movie Groundhog Day, something to be revisited and re-encountered again and again.
The unfortunate reality is that most men never get this area of their lives handled, sorted, managed and mastered. They never really figure out sex. To the average man, sex — and its attendant features, such as attraction, masculinity and femininity, etc. — is always a bit of a mystery, which is why so many men make such humiliating wrecks of their sexual lives.

I'm going to limit myself to a single idea, which I suggest you repeat over and over to yourself like a mantra: If you don't get this area of your life handled, sorted, managed and mastered, you are in for a very unhappy life.
You'll not only make yourself miserable, but crazy as well. From what you've written here, it seems like you're well on the way. You talk about driving past this girl's house to check on the cars parked outside? I don't know if that's immoral per se, but it sure is loony as hell.
You come across in your posts as very young, totally inexperienced (you admit as much), and utterly, absolutely naïve about women and relationships. This is not a crime, but also it's not a state you want to remain in for long.
While you're crushing on and obsessing over this one particular girl, the reality is she is of no significance whatsoever. You think (or rather, you feel) that she is someone extremely important, when in fact she is nobody, irrelevant to the big picture.
The important person here is YOU. You need to focus on improving yourself, bettering yourself, and above all gaining a mature sense of emotional perspective, particularly where sexual emotions are involved. In short, you need to make yourself into the kind of man who doesn't get irrationally obsessed with girls like this.
Now that I've beaten you up, let me say there isn't a man reading your posts who can't sympathize with you, at least a little. Fortunately for some of us, your story serves as a reminder of our distant past. For others, the pain you describe is like an experience out of the movie Groundhog Day, something to be revisited and re-encountered again and again.
The unfortunate reality is that most men never get this area of their lives handled, sorted, managed and mastered. They never really figure out sex. To the average man, sex — and its attendant features, such as attraction, masculinity and femininity, etc. — is always a bit of a mystery, which is why so many men make such humiliating wrecks of their sexual lives.

I'll bet that those who've stopped thinking at 30 weren't exactly the epitome of thoughtfulness before that age.

Strictly speaking, this is a contradiction in terms. If you were fully aware of what you were doing, you weren't evading per se.
 
It might surprise you to know that many men who hire "escorts" have similar experiences to yours, even if they have never heard of Objectivism.
Ongoing sexual loneliness can be terribly painful. If you've never experienced sex, you can feel like you're missing out on an essential part of life. (You are.) Under such circumstances, the idea of paying for sex — if only to see what it's like — can seem alluring.
I don't think what you did is immoral, but I'm not surprised that it made you feel the way it did. You may think you wasted your money, but actually you didn't. You learned a valuable lesson that you should never forget.
It's easy to think of sex as a physical experience with a strong spiritual component. In fact, the inverse is true. Sex minus any spiritual aspect — sex which is the result of a commercial transaction and is divorced from any larger relationship — is unsatisfying because it's essentially meaningless.
We think we want the physical elements of sex, and we do, to a degree, but what we really want is the spiritual meaning that those physical elements convey and represent.

It's just a matter of time before a post such as the following appears on Objectivism Online:
I was listening to a lecture Ayn Rand gave at the Ford Hall Forum, and at one point she said: "Two plus two equals four." Huh? I can't for the life of me understand what she could have meant by this. If you have two … and two … I'm sorry, where do you get "four" from that? If anything, you have 22. Someone please explain this to me as I am utterly confounded by this bizarre statement.

Skeptic: My senses deceive me and cannot be trusted. This stick appears bent in water, but in reality it is straight.
Objectivist: How do you know that the stick is not actually bent?
Skeptic: [Pulls stick out of water] LOOK!

Someone had to say it, I guess, breaking the social rule that you resist giving harsh advice unless the person s paying you for the wake up call
Anyone who speaks of making 10 million dollars by following some fairly guaranteed business model is deluded. Worse still, you may be a patsy in a scheme being spun by your "friends". It sounds almost like an Amway opening pitch.
 

I would say that, to the extent that one intends to live an interesting and fulfilling life, he should develop within himself the soul of an artist.
Indulge greedily in works of art, yes — but more broadly, cultivate your personal values (what you like, enjoy, appreciate, etc.), and curate your life in such a way so that your daily existence reflects and embodies that which matters most to you.

I would say that, to the extent that one intends to live an interesting and fulfilling life, he should develop within himself the soul of an artist.
Indulge greedily in works of art, yes — but more broadly, cultivate your personal values (what you like, enjoy, appreciate, etc.), and curate your life in such a way so that your daily existence reflects and embodies that which matters most to you.

I agree completely with this. Aesthetics is a much more fundamental branch of philosophy than it normally gets credit for. I think hierarchically it should follow directly from metaphysics, and actually has implications in epistemology and ethics.
In the same sense that everyone has to be a philosopher to some extent, since man by nature must be guided by a comprehensive view of life, do you think in a sense everyone has to be an artist to some extent, since aesthetic principles also perform a necessary function in the guidance of life (when it comes to metaphysical value judgments and sense of life)?

Esthetics concerns itself with two issues which are essential to a fully integrated philosophic perspective: metaphysical value judgments and sense of life.
 
Qua branch of philosophy, esthetics studies the nature of art; its meaning and the role it plays in man's life. Esthetic principles, however, have application well beyond the evaluation of art works. Properly understood, they can shed enormous light on the way a man experiences himself, and how he sees himself in relation to the universe.
 
Esthetics represents "the soul of philosophy." A person could conceivably attain a high level of awareness of Objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics, but lacking a clear grasp of its esthetics, he is unlikely to make Objectivism his way of life. Philosophy will seem somewhat distant to him — somewhat removed from his moment-to-moment existence.
 
Ayn Rand was an artist, and in a sense she had to be. While you can learn a lot from her nonfiction (as well as Peikoff's OPAR and other works), if you haven't read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, you haven't yet experienced the full impact of the Objectivist vision. These novels are literary and philosophic powerhouses; they make their ideas real to the reader in a way no treatise or series of lectures ever could.

(This is an article I wrote for my romantic advice blog for men, The Leading Man.)
 
In her book The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden quotes from interviews she recorded with Rand about her life and career. Talking about her years as a teenager in Soviet Russia, Rand spoke of walking with a young man who made an indelible impression on her:
 
"I don't remember the conversation on the way home, we just talked, nothing romantic. But he had a manner of projecting that he's a man and you're a woman and he's aware of it."
 
"By the time I arrived home," Rand said, "I was madly and desperately in love."*
 
(Years later, Rand would name one of the main characters of her novel We the Living — Leo — after him.)
 
If there is a single idea which a man must grasp and master if he is to build a powerful romantic relationship with a woman, it's polarity.
 
Polarity is the recognition of the fact that romance — at least heterosexual romance — is predicated on the existence of two sexes; there is male and female, man and woman, masculine/feminine.
 
To a Leading Man, the fact of sex, and therefore of sexual differences, is an enormously good thing. We do all that we can to positively stress and to celebrate that women and men are not exactly identical in every way.
 
Unfortunately, many men ignore, minimize or attempt to downplay sex differences. In their efforts to be respectful and "modern," they treat a woman they are romantically interested in as a buddy or pal.
 
Instead of torrid passion, these men often find themselves caught in a tepid friendship.
 
Polarity is essential to forming a deeply erotic connection with a woman. In romance, a woman wants & needs to be seen and experienced by a man as a woman — not merely as a person, and definitely not as a sexless neuter.
 
To fall in love with a woman means falling in love with her feminine essence. It means being turned on by the challenge that her femininity poses to you.
 
When polarity weakens in a relationship, things get boring. When it isn't there from the beginning, relationships often don't get off the ground.
 
A sophisticated man is not threatened by sexual differences. He embraces, enjoys and appreciates them. To the man who understands romance, "I'm a man, you're a woman" isn't a put-down, nor does it represent an attempt to return to caveman days. It's a basic fact of reality, one which underlies and makes possible the most exciting kind of relationship between two human beings.
 
*I have a number of misgivings about Ms. Branden, and I do not generally endorse her biography of Ayn Rand. However I have no reason to believe that this quotation is inaccurate.
 
© 2013 Kevin Delaney

(This is an article I wrote for my romantic advice blog for men, The Leading Man.)
 
In her book The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden quotes from interviews she recorded with Rand about her life and career. Talking about her years as a teenager in Soviet Russia, Rand spoke of walking with a young man who made an indelible impression on her:
 
"I don't remember the conversation on the way home, we just talked, nothing romantic. But he had a manner of projecting that he's a man and you're a woman and he's aware of it."
 
"By the time I arrived home," Rand said, "I was madly and desperately in love."*
 
(Years later, Rand would name one of the main characters of her novel We the Living — Leo — after him.)
 
If there is a single idea which a man must grasp and master if he is to build a powerful romantic relationship with a woman, it's polarity.
 
Polarity is the recognition of the fact that romance — at least heterosexual romance — is predicated on the existence of two sexes; there is male and female, man and woman, masculine/feminine.
 
To a Leading Man, the fact of sex, and therefore of sexual differences, is an enormously good thing. We do all that we can to positively stress and to celebrate that women and men are not exactly identical in every way.
 
Unfortunately, many men ignore, minimize or attempt to downplay sex differences. In their efforts to be respectful and "modern," they treat a woman they are romantically interested in as a buddy or pal.
 
Instead of torrid passion, these men often find themselves caught in a tepid friendship.
 
Polarity is essential to forming a deeply erotic connection with a woman. In romance, a woman wants & needs to be seen and experienced by a man as a woman — not merely as a person, and definitely not as a sexless neuter.
 
To fall in love with a woman means falling in love with her feminine essence. It means being turned on by the challenge that her femininity poses to you.
 
When polarity weakens in a relationship, things get boring. When it isn't there from the beginning, relationships often don't get off the ground.
 
A sophisticated man is not threatened by sexual differences. He embraces, enjoys and appreciates them. To the man who understands romance, "I'm a man, you're a woman" isn't a put-down, nor does it represent an attempt to return to caveman days. It's a basic fact of reality, one which underlies and makes possible the most exciting kind of relationship between two human beings.
 
*I have a number of misgivings about Ms. Branden, and I do not generally endorse her biography of Ayn Rand. However I have no reason to believe that this quotation is inaccurate.
 
© 2013 Kevin Delaney

Esthetics concerns itself with two issues which are essential to a fully integrated philosophic perspective: metaphysical value judgments and sense of life.
 
Qua branch of philosophy, esthetics studies the nature of art; its meaning and the role it plays in man's life. Esthetic principles, however, have application well beyond the evaluation of art works. Properly understood, they can shed enormous light on the way a man experiences himself, and how he sees himself in relation to the universe.
 
Esthetics represents "the soul of philosophy." A person could conceivably attain a high level of awareness of Objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics, but lacking a clear grasp of its esthetics, he is unlikely to make Objectivism his way of life. Philosophy will seem somewhat distant to him — somewhat removed from his moment-to-moment existence.
 
Ayn Rand was an artist, and in a sense she had to be. While you can learn a lot from her nonfiction (as well as Peikoff's OPAR and other works), if you haven't read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, you haven't yet experienced the full impact of the Objectivist vision. These novels are literary and philosophic powerhouses; they make their ideas real to the reader in a way no treatise or series of lectures ever could.

The only appropriate response to this is: Speak for yourself.

Don't be an egalitarian. The owner clearly has faith in you as a tenant, and would prefer to have someone he knows inhabit his property, rather than gamble on a stranger.

To a great extent, success in life consists of taking cognizance of your "unfair advantages," and making the most of them.

I remember hearing of a study done many years ago, in which people around the world were asked: "How happy are you? Do you consider yourself to be a happy person?"
 
People in Russia could not understand the question. "You mean, am I happy right now? At this moment?" "No, generally, in your life."
 
The idea of living "a happy life" was apparently incomprehensible to most Russians. Happiness was — at best — experienced as a fleeting emotion, not a way of being.
 
I agree that any study which includes "ecological footprint" as an element of happiness should be regarded as worthless.

Ahh... Professionalism in the kitchen! The surest way to capture a woman's heart.

"Honey, are you a spineless wimp?"

"Me? Of course not!

"I knew you weren't! That Delaney guy is so full of crap…"

(This is an article I wrote for my romantic advice blog for men — The Leading Man.)

Imagine a giant checkerboard, with squares large enough to comfortably stand on.

Each of the squares is labeled. One is marked "Complexity." Another: "Confusion."

Others: "Weirdness," "Mixed Messages," "Inconsistent Behavior."

In the upper-left corner of the board is a square marked "Ambivalence." The square adjacent says "Ambiguity."

In the lower right: "Drama."

These squares represent factors which make romantic relationships impossible, and which deprive men of their sanity.

However, there's a "safe square" located directly in the center of the checkerboard. It's marked Simplicity.

The rules of the game are — appropriately enough — simple: Your mission is to stand solidly on the Simplicity Square at all times, never venturing so much as a toe beyond its borders.

Do this consistently, and you will win. Your prize will be self-respect. You will have earned the security of mind that comes with knowing that you are acting in a manner appropriate to your nature as a man.

Step off the Square, and you will suffer. You'll become disempowered, diminished, and your dealings with the opposite sex will likely bring disappointment.

Any woman will tell you that she doesn't want a weak man. What she might neglect to mention is the extent to which weakness in men repels her. If she is like most women, she is turned off and disgusted by a man who is pliable, easily dominated, who can be manipulated, swayed and controlled.

The idea of male strength is so essential in a woman's mind, that she will run tests on a man to determine whether or not he is a henpecked husband in training. (Or, if he is married, whether or not he has become one.)

All of a woman's tests involve the effort to persuade a man, in one way or another, to step off of the Simplicity Square — to accept confusion, complication, complexity and weirdness as if these were normal.

At some point in a romantic relationship, you can be certain that a woman will:
Raise a bizarre accusation, with the purpose of seeing if she can get you to defend yourself against it.

Attempt to incite an argument, to find out whether you can be suckered into fighting with her.

Try to change plans initiated and created by you, often at the last minute, effectively assuming control and placing herself into the dominant position in the relationship.

A woman's task in these moments is to try to make things complicated — to confound and agitate you, with the goal being to provoke you into reacting to her out of fear. Your job is to stand solidly on the Simplicity Square, politely declining all invitations to engage in unusual behavior, and calmly refuse to become embroiled in interpersonal conflict with her.

When you stand your ground in this manner, you maintain your dignity, and retain your personal power. This causes an extraordinary thing to happen inside of a woman: she experiences an erotic charge relative to you — the inevitable emotional reaction of her efforts to create drama, colliding with your backbone.

This won't make every woman fall in love with you. Some will decide that you are an inflexible chauvinist; the Erotic Charge will become converted into angry resentment. (A meaningful connection with this type of woman is impossible, so you'll have to let her go.)

A masculine man succeeds in his life, in large part due to his commitment to the principle of simplicity in all areas. Outstanding women applaud this, and are drawn to it.

Regardless of how a woman might act at times, at the end of the day she wants a man with the courage to keep things simple.

A good woman desires a man for whom the Simplicity Square is his home, and she longs to stand solidly on it beside him.

© 2012 Kevin Delaney

Grow up, stop drinking so much, and stop attending these ridiculous parties.