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Now, today the subject we're looking at is marriage, and marriage is the same as a long-term relationship, really. So if you're interested in a long-term sustainable relationship in the future, there's going to be a lot of really great content in the interview for you today. The interview is pretty long. It's maybe two hours long, and I guess that represents depth for the subject and its complexity. We also get into some pretty deep areas, so don’t worry if you don’t get all of this the first time through or if it's not so relevant for you today. Later on when you're in a relationship and you're looking for more long-term stuff, it will be. There's some really interesting material in that.

We also talk about different models of marriage, because today we have choice and it's not the same path for everyone. Before things used to be a bit more rigid back in our parents’ time, but these days it's really up to you what kind of marriage or long-term relationship you want. And finally, we also talk a bit about inner game of relationships and preparing for them because this is kind of also a lifelong development path, and there'll be more about that in the interview but I'd just like to say that this is a really important aspect of it that you shouldn’t miss out on. So pay attention to that part.

To talk about this subject, we have Alex Allman, who actually just got married for the second time last week, so it's really top of his mind. And if you don't know Alex already, Alex Allman is a sex coach who has been around since 2007. We actually interviewed him way back in Episode 7 of Dating Skills Podcast. That was a very sex-advice-focused episode, if you want to check that out.

Well, Alex is best known as a sex coach. Really one of his big strengths is relationships and relationship advice. And I know a lot of us who consider him a peer or like have looked to him in the past for advice on our relationships, so it's really great to have him on the show to talk about marriage and long-term relationships. So let's get this interview started.

Alex, big congratulations. I don't know if everyone knows yet but there's been a big change in your life. What is that?

[Alex Allman]: [Laughs] I just got married.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow. And we were just talking about how you weren't sure when it happened because it's been such a blur.

[Alex Allman]: [Laughs] Well, yeah, yeah, weddings are kind of a huge or, well, they can be a huge ordeal if you do the big one.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Alex Allman]: We did the big one.

[Angel Donovan]: That's great, that's great. Is it your first, by the way? I didn't ask before.

[Alex Allman]: It is not. It is my second marriage. My first one, however, was decades ago.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, cool. But anyway, you had to have experience like you kind of knew what was going on, but for the first time it must be like “wow, what the hell’s going on” a bit, but you kind of knew what to expect, I guess.

[Alex Allman]: I guess, you know. It was a different kind of wedding when I was… I guess my first wedding I was 28 and now I'm 47, so different man, different world.

[Angel Donovan]: What’s going on with your life? Like where are you… like you're roughly 49 years old, you said? Like where do you hang out and live? Where's kind of your life these days?

[Alex Allman]: My life is I split time between New York City and the Caribbean, I cut out the sucky months, and married to just an incredible, incredible woman who I adore and who has an intense, probably the most amazing capacity of any woman I've ever met to give and receive love.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Alex Allman]: She's just a remarkable human and pretty much my fantasy. We've been together for a lot of years. However, the marriage, I think marriage usually spiritually happens at the proposal, maybe even years before the proposal for some couples. It happens at that point where you spiritually internally, without any doubt, which by the way some people never get this part of it, of course. But there's this sort of internal cleanness where you just get that you're going to spend the rest of your life with this person and that it's the most authentic thing that you could do, that there's no sense of opportunity cost. It's the most authentic thing you could do and that it's just the absolute right thing when you look each other in the eyes and you see it and you realize it, and there's never going to be another inch of space in that relationship where you could ever be jealous or trying to play some power game or maintain your coolness in front of them because you're kind of at the point where it's clean. It's pure surrender with each other.

When you hit that spiritual moment, I'm going to call that like when the marriage really happens. Now, the wedding, that's a party. That's a different thing. That's for everybody else.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: Right?

[Angel Donovan]: Wow. So how long did you know each other for?

[Alex Allman]: We've been together two years.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay. And you've known her two years or did you know her before?

[Alex Allman]: I knew her for… yeah, I guess I've known her for two years. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: I relentlessly pursued her for a couple of months in there.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Alex Allman]: But, you know, our relationship is two years old.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: I originally met her in the Caribbean, and we… I had seen her out many times in this little weird expat town where I lived.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And I thought she was underage to be honest and, you know, it just didn't occur to me that I ought to talk to somebody who’s probably under 18. She looks really young for her age. Then I found out that she was actually 23 and it was just game on, you know.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Alex Allman]: I was relentless, just fucking… I was like the terminator. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: I love that word.

[Alex Allman]: I could not be deterred.

[Angel Donovan]: Relentless. It's excellent. Determination will have it. [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, yeah, it was funny. I just, you know… And I said to her, “Look, I literally…” You know, one of the reasons why I had planned to leave this island where I had been living for a while was that it was a small expat community and I'd kind of already, you know, been with every woman I was going to be with, every woman who I was attracted to who wasn’t already married to somebody else, you know. We’d already kind of hooked up, and that was fun but didn't work.

And then tourists would come through, so I mean it wasn’t like I was not getting laid. There was sex happening, but I was lonely. I really was craving a relationship. I hadn't been in a relationship in a couple of years. And so I was planning on leaving. And then I realized, oh, there's one that I haven't hit yet.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: So I was like, well, I got to hit that before I leave. And I’d been planning to leave. So, got to hit that before I leave. So I was relentless. I was a fucking terminator. I did not expect that we would fall, you know, madly head-over-heels in love. I mean, within weeks I knew I was going to spend my life with her.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay. Yeah, this is some of the stuff I wanted to get into in the interview because it's interesting how you get to the point where you're going to say “I want to get married.” So like you've obviously been around a long time and I know you've been around in the community a very long time too. How many women have you slept with? Is that a really, really big number? And how many women have you had relationships with?

[Alex Allman]: God, I couldn't guess how many women I've slept with. I remember… that'll be a tough one. I remember about eight years ago I was sitting and talking to Mystery/Erik Von Markovik and he asked me the same question.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: And I don’t think anybody’s asked me since. So you know, and at the time I kind of sat down with a piece of paper and I tried to work it out, and I…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: It's funny because right before we hit record on this we were talking about memory, and I have a bad one like especially for details. And I was, first of all, really impressed by how many people I was like coming up with for weeks afterwards, I kept kind of adding them…

[Angel Donovan]: Oh wow.

[Alex Allman]: …that I had totally forgotten the whole scenario and everything and certainly no way could remember her name and wouldn't recognize if she showed up in my soup.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: But I remembered that situation in Vegas whenever where I… And I came out with about 80 at that time.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: I guess, I don't know, in eight years, you know? I mean, I'm not… I'm no PUA, by the way. I just, you know, and for anybody who’s listening to this really needs to know, I'm super-bad at cold approaching and I don’t… I have no real capacity to walk up to some woman I don't know and be like, “Hey, let me get a quick female opinion and get some IOI’s and attraction and whoo,” you know, whatever. Yeah, that's not my thing at all.

But you know, I guess… and there are guys who are super-good. I mean, I know a bunch of them, obviously. But I'm not in that kind of PUA community. I'm just friends with a lot of PUAs and I'm business partners with a lot of PUAs because I teach sexuality and relationship. I'm kind of the guy you come to after you already figured out how to…

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: …how to meet women, how to de-shy yourself. But…

[Angel Donovan]: So if you've had mostly relationships, I mean, you said you hadn't been in a relationship for a while, but did you have like lots of… like over the last like eight years, what was it… are you traveling a lot and meeting kind of women very briefly or you have like mini-relationships? What kind of lifestyle were you living during that time?

[Alex Allman]: I'd say, you know, one-night stands, mini-relationships and kind of… I'm very open to relationships. I love being in relationship and I'm… I was going to say, in the eight years intervening, I had a three-year really.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Alex Allman]: I've had like I guess three three-year relationships and one seven-year relationship, which was my first marriage.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And so yeah, I've been in quite a few relationships. And then, I was going to say I guess in the course of the year I'm, you know, likely to have been with, hmm, 10 women maybe. You know, that would be a little less than one month sounds right. We'll date for a while, and then there will be a month where I hook up with a bunch of women and a couple of months where I'm in a relationship and, you know.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: But it's always been… it's pretty easy for me to end up in sexual relationships in spite of the fact that I'm terrible at doing this kind of like cold-approach meeting women because, you know, I'm an incredibly socially normal person.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And that's, you know… that could be one of the topics that we talk about, is that I… I remember having a conversation with some of these pickup artist guys when I first became aware of the community.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And you know, they had the world divided into the average frustrated chump and the natural, and then they have the pickup artist and the average frustrated chump who becomes the natural, and I was trying to explain to them that there's this whole universe of men who were neither. I mean, you know, I'm not a guy who's out every weekend banging babes. I'm not a natural. But I always have a beautiful girlfriend and I'm not like afraid of women. I don’t have a problem getting laid. I can get laid, you know, I'm just… but I don’t go out and do this thing. I'm just a normal dude, you know. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right, and as long as I've known you you've been very happy with your lifestyle.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: It seems like… I can't remember the first… you know, we were on that forum maybe 2005 or something, you seemed to already have your dating relationship like pretty much sorted at that point. So maybe it was already, you know, really well done before. But you know, so yeah, you've… it's just… we have many people on this show that always tell us like their lifestyle is pretty different. I think there's this expectation that people who are successful with women are all going to have the same lifestyle, but the reality is that it's very different and people have different motivations. They have different things that make them happy. So it's really good to hear like, you know, kind of how you crafted your life and what made you happy.

[Alex Allman]: I think that for a lot of men what would make them happy is sexual variety in their 20s and finding an amazing woman who kind of rocks their world on every level by the time they're in their 30s, and then craft something durable and beautiful. That would be, you know, I would hope the natural progression of things. I think that the pickup artist culture, which has really become very mainstream, I mean it's hugely mainstream, it's hard to find a guy who hasn’t read anything about how to pick up chicks from, you know, that is somehow not sourced through something that Neil Strauss was teaching 15 years ago, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Yeah. It's mainstream now. I mean, all the mainstream men’s mags are putting that kind of stuff in their content.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, exactly, and I think that it is… from the very beginning I think it was emotionally damaging men. I think it continues to do so. But what's interesting is that's now the norm, and I think that a lot of men really… they're being fed kind of what is supposed to make them happy and not necessarily what will make them happy, and then they get really messed up in that process.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it's the short-term versus the long-term, you know, and obviously we're always driven by the short-term and that can kind of sabotage what we really want in that long-term because it's more difficult to focus on the long-term, actually. I guess it's just harder. It's not as tangible for us. So guys aren't thinking about that. They think it's just going to happen somehow, I guess.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, I think there's other… it's not just short-term/long-term. There's a way of thinking about women that maybe… I mean, the short-term/long-term comes into play. There's this other element though that's like the whole process has kind of from its genesis been set in a motion that isn't what would've naturally happened to you.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And there's a lot of smart guys out there who are going to tell you about, “Well, you know, evolutionary biology suggests that we have to have a lot of women and that's going to be what’s natural and everything,” and it's actually… You know, I've looked at a lot of this research. It's not solid. There's really no reason to believe that we were particularly polyamorous. Ancient civilizations don’t show any signs of dramatic polyamory or Bonobo behavior. I think that it is really natural behavior for people to cheat on the mate that they want to…

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, I think that's kind of natural.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: And I think the monogamy has some difficulty, but there's… I've read as many case studies that says that were naturally polyamorous as case studies that have said that, you know, “No, in a tribe of 150 people, if you sleep with the wrong woman, then the guy who thinks of her as a possession is going to club you to death.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, it happens like in the Irian Jaya and stuff like… a lot of primitive tribes, you know, you don’t mess with another man’s woman. So there are a lot of different theories out there on how all this stuff happens…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, and there's a lot of different types of marriage today, I think, you know, too.

[Alex Allman]: Sure.

[Angel Donovan]: I think like maybe to an extent it's been influenced by some of the material out there, but I think also that, you know, obviously we're a more liberated society today and we're more individualistic, so people are following these different kind of paths. What kind of path like have you… so just to set the context before we kind of discuss this properly, what kind of path have you set with your marriage or…?

[Alex Allman]: We're monogamous.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: There's a real lot of unpacking that has to go into how we do monogamy versus the way other people do monogamy.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is something I wanted to talk about. Yeah, I think it's interesting.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah. Because I think that, you know, I don’t make any judgments on polyamory or monogamy and they're both super-valid choices, but they can both be played at many different levels, and I think that what ends up happening is a lot of people who choose a polyamorous lifestyle will look at people who are monogamous and say, “Your entire relationship is built on possessiveness, jealousy and fear,” you know, “and we're free and mature and we've dealt with our jealousy stuff.” And then you have a lot of people who are monogamous who look at people who are polyamorous and they're like, “You are just giant sluts and you're all going to hell.”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: You know? [Laughs] “You've sold yourself out,” is what a woman would say to another woman.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: “You've sold yourself out and you're…” you know…

[Angel Donovan]: What I like there is you're saying that even if you say you're monogamous there's like lots of different versions of it, right? Because I remember like a couple of I knew about five years ago, I was pretty shocked when they both told me that they'd never talked about any of their past relationships. When they hooked up they basically made this rule that they would never talk about any of their past relationships or anything. So it's this whole area that neither of them knows anything about, and I was amazed that you could do that. It just seemed insane to me. And they were like, “Well, why wouldn't you do it? You have to do it that way,” right?

[Alex Allman]: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. That's what I'm going to call pre-conventional monogamy and probably… Now listen, every human is unique and every relationship is unique. As a combination of two humans, you can really… it's impossible to make predictions about an individual relationship. But in a general case, not their specific case but in a general case, the couple of that's playing the “we don’t talk about that” game are really setting themselves up for cheating in the future as a very natural… it's kind of a very natural emergent property of setting up a relationship where a lot of what drives me sexually, intimately and stuff like that I'm supposed to keep as a secret from you.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: I'm supposed to. That's groundwork. So the emergent property of that is that the stuff I'm interested in porn might not be something that I share with you or the stuff that I'm interested in, you know, my dirty fantasies, those might not be your purview and I might not feel compelled to tell you about that because you might judge me in the same way you might judge me for my past relationships. And likewise, if I'm with a woman in a chat room and just masturbating, I wouldn’t tell you that. That would be like telling you about my ex-girlfriend or, okay, so that girl who I met in Houston when I was on the business trip and she sucked my dick, yeah, I wouldn't tell you about that. You wouldn't want to know about that because that would be like… you know what I mean?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: They're establishing something that will emergently create a relationship where cheating happens. And I guess, you know, to some degree, if we wanted to be really frank about it, if people are happy in their relationship, happiness is kind of the goal of life to some degree, and the excitement of cheating along with like a great relationship with my wife because she doesn’t know about it might be ideal for a lot of men, and for a lot of women. Of course, women cheat as much as men do.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. It's really the norm. I think it's the societal norm these days.

[Alex Allman]: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Of course, it's the societal norm. And if you look at the setups of the way sitcoms work…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: …which are kind of where we kind of see Joe America and Jane America, and most of the situations that are funny revolve around some flirtation that was caught or some lie that was assumed or that, you know, like “I’ll have to tell her this story because you can't tell your woman what you're really doing.”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, that's the normal relationship and I would call that pre-conventional monogamy. Actually, I guess I'd have to call that conventional monogamy. But there are a lot of other possibilities there.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. It sounds like the way you're talking about, like the way you set up monogamy, it's kind of like establishing boundaries about how open you're going to be with your sexuality, right? Some people are willing to go 100% and just go, “You know, I'm like this. This is exactly how I am,” and just open the communication floodgates. Whereas, as you're talking about, a lot of people are going to hold some aspect of that back to different degrees.

[Alex Allman]: Well, I think what happens is there's this model that I actually first heard from good old Eben Pagan, who's a very close friend of mine…

[Angel Donovan]: Yup.

[Alex Allman]: …and he was talking about it… It's a terrific model. I think that the guy’s name was Sullivan, but it was a psychologist who came up with this model of morality and he called it pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. And Eben overlaid it on business and all these different things, and I've begun using… I see it everywhere now.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: It's a really powerful model. And basically, pre-conventional morality is the teenager who baseline just doesn’t want to get caught and if they don’t get caught it's all good. So teenagers will shoplift, they don't think twice about it. They have no moral compunction about taking something from a shop, whether that's a six-pack of beer under the coat or piece of jewelry or whatever it is. Same with like doing drugs or whatever, like, “As long as I don’t get caught, I don’t really see any reason why I wouldn't do whatever I want to do that's good for me.”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: So that's pre-conventional morality. And conventional morality is social contract, like you don’t steal from people because you don’t want people to steal from you, and society works when we all kind of obey the social contract and understand there are consequences that are broader than just me here. And then post-conventional morality is where the social contract has nothing to do with you. You actually have an intuitive deep sense of empathy. You don’t steal from somebody because you have a sense of how horrible it would be to be stolen from.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: You don’t take a six-pack of beer from somebody’s store because you consider your own business and… So, for example, when people buy one of my books or rather steal one of my books on an online file-sharing service…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: …and then put it up even in more places where more people can steal it because they don’t get that they're taking food out of my mouth, my family’s table, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: Like that's how I make my living. And I equate, for me, stealing, shoplifting something from somebody’s store as the same when somebody steals something from me. Well, much worse really, because they spend money on it. I mean, I really get that there's no… that there isn't a clean moral equivalence there, but… But it's, you know, somebody was siphoning money out of my bank account and how that would feel.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: And I don’t want to make somebody feel that way because I have a deep sense of empathy, and that's post-conventional morality. However, the person with post-conventional morality has very little regard for the law as written. And so what happens is, you know, “I don’t mind smoking pot. I’ll do that all day long because I know I'm not hurting anybody else.”

So there was a time when social contract meant something to me. In fact, one of my old jobs was I train police officers in self-defense tactics, and I hung out with cops and I was in that moral space of, you know, “bad guys need to be put in jail” and that kind of thing. That's conventional morality.

And what’s interesting is that for those friends of mine who were cops, that person in conventional morality, they can't distinguish pre-conventional and post-conventional. They look the same. So the teenagers like, “I'm going to smoke pot because fuck you and your laws,” they see that person as equivalent to the old hippie in San Francisco who's like, “I smoke pot because I know I'm not hurting anybody else or I would never do it.” So the cop, to them, you're both lawbreakers. They don’t see that there's a moral nonequivalence there.

So this model overlay is everywhere, basically, and pre-conventional monogamy is the guy in every mafia movie who says, “Babe, you know it's you and only you and I would never cheat on you,” and then calls up his friends and says, “So are we on tonight with the strippers?” It's like he's literally like he never even thought that he was going to keep the monogamy thing. He just knew that he had to say that to not get in trouble with the wife before he went out and slept with the mistress.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: That's pre-conventional monogamy. It never even occurred to him that he was going to try and be monogamous. That wasn’t even… that never entered the conversation. He was just going to say what he had to say to get laid or to marry the right girl, and then of course he was going to cheat. That'll be pre-conventional monogamy.

And then conventional monogamy is kind of built on this fear and guilt and scarcity and jealousy and “I don’t want you to cheat on me because I'd feel like, ‘What if he was better than me or he had a bigger than me? I'd kill myself.’”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: You know what I mean? Or, “What if you like him better and you leave me? And that would be horrible and I’d be less of a man if you had an orgasm with him or…”

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: You know?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: So that kind of thing.

[Angel Donovan]: Egos.

[Alex Allman]: And so therefore, “Therefore, I'm not going to cheat on you because…”

[Angel Donovan]: Because I'm scared.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, right. “We should both be scared where we should be jealous and possessive of each other and…”

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: “And I'm going to really try and be a good boy.” And then, yeah, that guy who's off on a business trip somewhere, he knows it could never get back to her, he'll probably cheat. But if he thinks there's any way it could get back to her, he's not going to cheat. He's certainly not going to brag about it to his friends. He's really… he wants to do the right thing out of fear, out of fear and jealousy and guilt and shame and all those things.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: So that'd be conventional monogamy. And post-conventional monogamy is a totally different concept. It's a place where you've entertained the possibility that if your woman could have better sex with somebody else, she ought to because you love her and you're going to stand for her pleasure. And when you kind of arrive at this place where you're like, “I guess there's some natural animal part of me that would be like confronted by this, but I wouldn't stand in the way of your freedom to pursue your pleasures and your full sexual self-expression if that included other partners.”

And so I've kind of like I've dealt with that, and what I find now is that because of the intensity of our connection, and because the intensity of sex, the intensity of sex drive, the intensity of this like… you know, it's up there with fear of death. It's this very intense expression of our humanity, and I want to kind of concentrate it and focus it all into this relationship as a matter of devotion, as the sweetness of devotion, as the satisfaction of that devotion.

Now, you know, the truth is that the guy who’s in jealousy and monogamous, he looks at the guy in post-conventional monogamy and he goes, “Yeah, see, we're just the same. You and I believe in monogamy. We're not like these weird swingers. We don’t swing because that's weird, right (wink, wink)? You and I are in the same boat.” But we're not. We're not. Post-conventional monogamy is different. It really is different. It's a different beast completely.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: It's no challenge for me to be monogamous because it's an act of pleasurable devotion. But you don’t get there by accident. You need to pass through the other stages. You literally have to first be a cheater. You can't get there from here otherwise.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Well, this sounds like basically that post-conventional monogamy is monogamy because it's good for us, right? It's good for both of us.

[Alex Allman]: It's monogamy because it's my highest expression of my sexual freedom. That's why it's good.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: And by the way, it's not better…

[Angel Donovan]: It's choice. It's about choice.

[Alex Allman]: Sure. And it's not better…

[Angel Donovan]: We chose to be together because our lives are better together rather than the other ones where they had… actually not been 100% happy with each other, right? And those two of them were making each others lives better.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah. No, they're definitely not 100% happy. They might be happy enough, but they're definitely not 100% happy. A hundred percent happy is totally different from 99% happy, by the way. It's a different category.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: Like 99% happy in your relationship is like a little bit better than 98%, but 100% is a different animal.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, because if you don’t have 100% you've got that niggling thing in the back of your head, you know?

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, it's just not…you're not playing a surrendered game. It's a different game.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: It's just a totally different game because once you're at a 100% it frees you up for… like the whole bandwidth changes. It just frees you up to explore a whole new realm of what it is to be in a relationship, not just with your woman but with the universe that created this situation. It's a very… it becomes a very spiritual journey at 100%. It's a totally separate issue, and you know, we're getting in some really deep territory here.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: It'll be difficult to explore, but I’ll circle back and just say that polyamory works the same way. There's pre-conventional polyamory, which is exactly the same as pre-conventional monogamy, which is, “Of course I'm polyamorous and of course I'm not going to tell my wife. Only an idiot would do that.”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: Right? [Laughs] Likewise, the woman – but women are the same way. You know, “Of course I cheat on her,” but meanwhile he's paying the fucking bills. “You think I'm an idiot? I'm going to cut off the gravy train?” That's pre-conventional polyamory and it's like your average high school kid, right? [Laughs] They're all doing that.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, yeah.

[Alex Allman]: And hopefully they grow out of that into some conventional polyamory, which looks like swingers…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: …where we've made a contract that, “We're just too slutty to be monogamous, to ever… we're just going to deal with it,” you know? [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: “We're just too slutty.” But that has to feel kind of even. That almost always has breakdowns all over the place if she's getting laid more than he is or she's with a guy with a big dick. Like there are breakdowns everywhere in swinger culture and they usually lack intense intimacy.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. This is something I want to explore in later episodes, the whole world of swingers and polyamory, because I think they’ve got a lot of rules and contracts. Like they’ve looked a lot into boundaries. Like they’ve kind of had to look into some things in a lot more detail than other people because of the situation that they're dealing with.

[Alex Allman]: Totally. And it's an interesting subject that we can dig pretty deeply into, but I’ll just mention that there's post-conventional polyamory too.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: And post-conventional polyamory is, “My love for you and my commitment to you is that you will be the best you you can be and you will be the most fully self-expressed version of you that you can be in this lifetime. Life is short, terribly short, we're absolutely going to die, and we want to experience everything we can in this lifetime. And I'm going to stand for your freedom, self-development and growth, and I know that that self-development, freedom and growth is served by you really understanding in a shame-free environment everything that there is to understand about pleasure and sex that you can handle and that you probably can experience that through one person. And I get that, and so I'm willing to deal with my jealousy and deal with whatever else for that growth. And I’ll add into that, and I recognize the self-growth that can occur by my confronting my natural inclination towards jealousy and possessiveness and learning how to love in absence of jealousy and possessiveness.”

That's post-conventional polyamory. It's a beautiful structure for relationship. It's not the one that I chose, but it's not invalid. It's a beautiful structure for relationship.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right, right.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So what do you think makes the difference between… because, you know, I think especially guys who have had a bit of success, you know, they're going to come to this point where, “I'm not kind of really sure what I want.” Why did you choose to go the route of monogamy? Have you always been that way? Has that kind of been an inclination from the start or is it something that you kind of realize is right for you?

[Alex Allman]: You literally cannot inclination that from the start.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Alex Allman]: You can only start with fear and jealousy.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: You can't do it… You start with fear, jealousy and desire, and your desire is to fuck a lot of bitches.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: You know? Let's be clear. That is absolutely natural. I don't know that polyamory is the natural state of humans, but I know for fucking sure that jealousy and possessiveness is and I know for fucking sure that desire to fuck a lot of bitches is. I mean, that is definitely built into the animal, just like it's built into the animal to savagely beat to death anybody that cuts you off on the freeway.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: That's built into the animal. Now, we don’t do that and I think it's good that we don’t do that. It is not built into the animal to spend lengthy amounts of time solving mathematical equations. That requires discipline and some greater sense that my benefit is served and the benefit of my tribe, of my people, of my love for all humanity is served by creating art or by creating science or by digging into something that's even deeper that we're going to call self-expression and self-actualization. Like that shit doesn’t come online when you're not getting laid and that shit doesn’t come online when you're not eating, right?

It's kind of Maslow’s hierarchy. First, you have to be safe. If something is chasing you and about to kill you, you're not thinking about monogamy, right? You don’t give a shit. You just need to deal with the lion.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: Well, once you've dealt with like, “We're safe,” you have to deal with, “I need to be getting laid.” You just need to. I mean, when you're not getting laid, life is like at a full stop, you know? And once you're getting laid, then you're looking for intimacy, connection and friendship and that kind of thing. When you've got that, then you're ultimately looking for greater and greater self-actualization.

So these things don’t… so this mad desire, this kind of infantile mad desire for lots of chocolate and lots of sex, that's built into the beast. You can't start at some, “Yeah, I'm just”—nobody’s born the Buddha, you know what I mean?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: This is a developmental process. And I think everybody should enjoy every step along the way. I mean, you know, when you're 19 years old, yeah, indulge. Be authentic though. Don’t lie to women. You don’t need to lie. Hopefully you've gotten enough moral self-development to be in post-conventional morality at least where you're like, “I don’t want to hurt anybody,” and you can start building honest relationships that involve, you know, “Hey, we're just dating. I'm seeing other people,” and hopefully enjoy that stage. Women love sex too. Believe me, you're not hurting anybody by playing that game.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, there are people who do decide to go the polyamory way for the longer-term, you know, like even inside marriages. I've met young people doing this, I've met older people doing this. What do you think makes the difference between the people that move to monogamous marriage versus a polyamorous…?

[Alex Allman]: Well, there are two possibilities. Possibility one is at the conventional level, which is, “My desire for intimacy and deep connection is not as great as my desire for exploring a bunch of sexual opportunity,” or “My sluttiness is greater than my jealousiness,” you know? Or the other way around, “My jealousy is greater than my sluttiness. I'm slutty, but I'm really fearful and jealous.” So that's kind of it at the conventional level.

At the post-conventional level, what’s really happening is you're looking at the character of your love and what the values of that love look like. Like I said, every relationship is unique, just like every human is unique. And so we know that there are humans that really love to live out in the countryside where they can cozy up in front of the fire and play board games and that sounds like the paradise weekend for them, and there are other people who are like the paradise weekend is “Vegas!” you know what I mean?

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: So you get that there are like people who just have different character.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: And when two people come together, that relationship has its own kind of blossoming character, and it's just obvious that what is going on between my wife and I are served most beautifully as a devotional relationship. But there are… you know, I have friends whose relationships… they're explorers by nature. And I have a strong exploratory nature as well, but it's not my ultimate priority. Intimacy is my ultimate priority.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: If your ultimate priority is that kind of pushing the edges of what’s possible and you kind of… and your relationship with your woman really like meets at that level intellectually, emotionally and sexually, then polyamory is naturally just going to be where you evolve if you get there, you know? Like a lot of people never overcome the jealousy bug or the fear bug or the scarcity bug, and you know.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: But eventually if you were to follow it developmentally, if you took that couple and you kept them together for 200 years, they get to polyamory. Trust me, they get there.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: [Laughs] You know what I mean? Because some people just never developmentally reach that level in their lifetime.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. That's interesting you say that. Do you know a guy called Steve Pavlina? He's quite big in the self-development world.

[Alex Allman]: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So I don't know if you followed his story but he was married, he had kids, and he had the biggest self-development blog on the Internet at one point. I don't know if it's still the case. And he eventually actually got introduced to kind of dating advice by Eben with one of his programs, and from there he started exploring it more, and he decided with his wife that he wanted polyamory but that they were going to stay together. But interestingly, pretty quickly later, he decided he was going to split up from his wife, you know, and from his family, and he was going to pursue that life going another way.

So the way I kind of looked at that from an outsider perspective was in a way, like looking at your model as well, like he hadn't gone through that first period of having success with women and getting out there and everything before that marriage. So he wasn’t ready for polyamory in that sense. Like he was getting a taste or he decided like internally, subconsciously, I think when he was talking with his wife about this polyamorous relationship he was probably thinking like, “I haven't been with a lot of women,” or “I have really experienced that, so it's going to be good for me.” And then when he started to taste a bit he wanted more of it, right? So broke out of the relationship and obviously leaving his kids, and that's a bit… it's just a kind of a big decision to make, but he made that decision. So maybe…

[Alex Allman]: I don't think he made that decision completely without including his wife, by the way. His wife had a lot to say about that.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: I think the relationship completely melted down and exploded in his face, is what happened.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Okay.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, because he hadn't been through those stages. Exactly right. I mean, he saw… I think looking from the outside in—and I don't know Steve, by the way, but I know people that know him, [laughs] and so I got… By the way, I didn't even read any of his blog posts so I'm really talking out of my ass here.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: But let me just like kind of frame this because we're not trying to help Steve Pavlina – what we're trying to do is help the guy listening right now…

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Totally.

[Alex Allman]: …you know, the third guy in the room with us. And so I can just say that as a general case the Steve Pavlinas of the world, the way I understood it to happen, is that he was just really sexually bored in his marriage, but he wanted to be a good guy and didn't want to cheat. And then he heard about all this like cool polyamory thing that all these like really cool, evolved, smart people were doing in San Francisco and he was like, “Yeah, that's the way I'm going to get more pussy.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: And then he kind of sold it to his wife as kind of like, “Yeah, this is evolved and cool and it's going to take us to the next level of trust and intimacy, babe,” because this is the way those people talk. They talk that way because they actually are at the next level of trust and intimacy. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And then, you know, he kind of saw that and said, “Yeah, I can sell my wife this thing,” and smugly probably lied to himself too, “I can sell myself this thing. It sounds great on paper.” And the next thing you know he's fucking a lot women not his wife, enjoying that, not particularly enjoying his wife that much, “But hey, we're in love and you're my primary relationship.” And then one day she was like, “This fucking sucks,” or she was with some other dude and he was like, “Whoa, this hurts!” and the whole thing just exploded.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: And that's typical. Of course it's going to explode because they're not ready emotionally for it.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Right. Well, I think the whole, like as you said, I think the polyamory thing is definitely a lot more complicated and it's something… it's not something maybe you can work into, like having experience like in your 20s dating several women at the same time and stuff like that could give you some kind of basis. Multiple relationships is something that a lot of guys do for a while. I did for a while. I don't know if…

[Alex Allman]: Me too.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah?

[Alex Allman]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So that gives you some tasting of that kind of relationship, although it's not… I wouldn’t say it's polyamory in the strictest sense where you have this open relationship and telling each other everything, because normally when you're in multiple relationships you're not telling them all the details, because realistically most girls aren't going to want to hear that, so you have to kind of get closer to be able to reveal that kind of stuff.

[Alex Allman]: Right. It's like your friend’s marriage, “We never told each other about our previous partners.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Yeah, it's kind of the way… it's their…

[Alex Allman]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You both know it but you don’t talk about it, right?

[Alex Allman]: Right. I'm going to say that's very similar to conventional polyamory not post-conventional polyamory.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And conventional polyamory could work and it generally, like I said, works on low-stakes relationships. So you can marry somebody and can still be a low-stakes relationship because you're just kind of emotionally dead. I mean, it would be really easy for somebody—maybe I'm talking out my ass or I don't really know a whole lot about the condition, but people with Asperger’s I can imagine could just go into this. They don’t have a whole lot of emotional understanding anyway, so you know, “Yeah, sure, you fucked another guy, who cares?” You know what I mean?

But if there's… You know, when I was doing the dating multiple women thing in my 20s, I had nothing at stake in those relationships. I didn't feel like I, you know… I mean, I really cared about these women. I liked them and I wanted good for them, but I didn't have any sense of jealousy around it because I didn't feel like I was in some kind of a deep, intimate relationship with them. So, then that can be true for somebody who's married, you know? [Laughs] This can be very true for somebody that's married.

[Angel Donovan]: Unfortunately.

[Alex Allman]: You know, but if it works for them, it's great. Like I said, I don't think it's the highest high, but you know, not everybody’s going to get the highest high.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah, totally, but maybe we should aim for that, but yeah. Let's talk a bit about marriage and how motivation… first of all, like were you planning this? So I know some things happen in people’s lives, like myself. You know, often it's like I get to a stage of my life and I'm open to these ideas, these new ideas, these new ways of doing things in taking my relationships or whatever, right? So is that something that happened to you, you got to a stage of your life, you're like thinking, “Yeah, I'm looking to marriage again,” right? Because you said you got married earlier in your life. Or is it that you kind of met this girl and she started to make you think, “Hmm, this girl’s special. Maybe I should think about marriage.” Which kind of way does it work for you?

[Alex Allman]: I've never been close to marriage. I'm a romantic guy in general. I love romance and I love deep intimacy. I love that with my male friends too, by the way. There's no romance there but, you know, really dropping in with another dude and being deeply authentic in our friendship is a powerful experience for me. I dig deep relationship with humans.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And so, you know, naturally in my romantic relationships there's going to be that expression as well. You know, my first marriage, again it's decades ago, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: I mean, 27 to 47 – a lot of development happens in there, 28 to 47. But that was a seven-year relationship and it completed, you know. It was perfect. I loved being married. I loved every day of it. And so I didn't come out of that going, “Oh, marriage is for suckers.” I mean, I had an amazing, amazing relationship, and it kind of reached its natural completion where there wasn't anything else for us to learn from each other. We were done. We had grown apart in a lot of ways. And it was, of course, monstrously painful when relationships end even when they're complete.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: So I went through some shit, without a doubt. But, you know, in retrospect, had it not ended there were some universal experiences that I wouldn't have had with many other women who I've really loved and adored and, you know, none of those adventures would have happened. So it was, you know, totally appropriate, and I've never been close to marriage. I mean, I think I always knew that I would fall epically in love again. I was in another three-year relationship prior to this one that I really, really fought to create the ideal fully-surrendered 100% stake that it would take for me to want to get married again, and we didn't quite reach it and it was, you know…

By the way, the funny thing is the closer you get to 100%, the more painful it is, because that's why a lot of people turn back. A 50% relationship isn't that painful to be in. You don’t fight a lot. You're friends. The sex is pretty good. Then you meet somebody who’s better and you break up and the breakup’s not so painful, [laughs] you know what I mean? Fifty-percent relationships are easy.

Seventy-percent relationships are hard. You really get your heart stomped. In 80% relationships you're really vulnerable. Ninety-percent relationships are like, you know, that’s where the monster fights that leave you like crushed in a puddle exist.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Alex Allman]: Like the more committed you are to a relationship, the more pain you potentially expose yourself to.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: You're being much more vulnerable at that level. And that's why I say 100%’s a different animal because you're not vulnerable at 100% anymore because all that shit goes away. There's no pain in a 100% relationship. They're easy. It's the easiest thing in the world.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Alex Allman]: That's easy love.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay. But you're saying you have to work to get there. It's not like you met this girl and it was 100% from the get-go.

[Alex Allman]: No, no, you’ve got to face a lot of fear to get there, yeah. Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So where did you start, for example, in this relationship you are now? Do you start at a high level like in terms of your intimacy or do you have to kind of start from zero every time and build it up?

[Alex Allman]: I think you have to start from zero every time. I mean, you know, when I say zero I mean there's a… how much do you like a girl on that first date or even that first meeting? Like there are times when you meet a woman and you're talking and you get lost in conversation all night, and by the way she's the hottest woman you've ever seen in your life. She's so hot that there's like a piece of you inside this literally shaking like a leaf because you just like literally can't believe the level of hotness, and the fact that you're having this great conversation means you actually could end up having sex with her later, and that's kind of blowing your mind and making it almost impossible to even understand what the words coming out of her mouth because the animal beast inside of you is just so blown out by her beauty, and then you kind of make that sudden discovery that she's into you, you know? Like when you kiss her it's like that moment is like on fire. You realize like, “She's kind of horny for me too,” and then you could be like very, very quickly at like, “This is a high-stakes game for me. I'm 80% in.” And if it turns out that you have sex with her that night and then you text her the next day and she doesn’t return the text, “Aw, motherfucker, what?” you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: Like so you did kind of get emotionally invested and it's like you really thought, “This is my girlfriend. I'm crazy about this girl,” [laughs] you know what I mean? The next thing you know she's not into you. That's painful, right? We all know that's painful because you've invested a lot. You went 80%, 85, 90%, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: So you know, my current relationship, I really was crazy about her from the first day. I just got it. I was like, “She is extraordinary.” And I also knew I was leaving, which I think made me a little cooler than I might have been otherwise, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: But then the whole leaving thing kind of got swept under very quickly because we were… I realized that this was a special person who was going to be a pivot in my life.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Wow, so I was thinking there, like I think there's a difference between meeting someone and… you can tell because your wife is a pretty young girl, the girlfriend that I have right now is pretty young too. So they're at a different stage of their life and, you know, let me see what you think about this. When someone is more self-aware, like obviously all the stuff we do, all the relationships we live through, we're a bit older, 38, we've got a fair amount of experience and you become a lot more self-aware because you’ve just been through a lot more stuff, right? It just kind of happens naturally. It takes some work as well, you know. That's what we're here for talking about it now. But when you meet someone else who’s also self-aware, does that allow things to move quicker and to get clearer and to put yourself out there more to push more to 100%? Because that's an angle I was thinking about while you were talking.

[Alex Allman]: Well, yeah, of course. I mean, you can't really go to 100% with somebody who’s incapable of meeting you there.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: Like I… you know, they have to be at your developmental level. If they're not at your developmental level, you're going to know in your heart that this just can't fucking happen and you're going to… but that doesn’t mean you can't keep dating them and try and grow them and see where they go, that things could progress. But yeah, I mean if you're capable of doing a certain level of relationship and they're not, and then you lie to yourself about it, which a lot of men do, a lot of women do—I mean, I think women do it more than men. Women really want to believe this could be a great guy but, “He's really… he ain't there.” And all of her friends are like, “Dude, he's a douchebag. He's sleeping with other people.” And she's like, “No, he's a good guy.” Like, you know, when you deceive yourself you're screwed.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And you know, her age really was, along with the fact that I was leaving, informed me that this wasn’t going to be serious, but then I was wrong.

[Angel Donovan]: You were wrong. [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: I was plain wrong. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, that was… and I realized I was wrong within I would say it was about two weeks. I realized I was kind of wrong, and then probably in about three, four weeks I realized I'm in love with her.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: And like about two weeks later I was surprised to discover that I was pretty clear that I was going to spend my life with her at that point.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Alex Allman]: I didn't propose immediately but I was super-clear on… I can see that I had never met anybody like her before and that I had a great willingness to take this as far as it could go and make her my life’s project.

Now, that, you know, I couldn't have done that 20 years ago. I just… I didn't have enough self-knowledge. I was much more in the place of lying to myself and you know, “She's hot, she must be cool,” you know? Like that kind of thing, it really does take time to develop, but different people, you know, there are people who mature super-early and my wife is one of them.

You were talking about self-awareness. It's such a big quality. Being able to regard the self with perspective is one of the hallmarks of maturity that most people never get. They live in their life so they can never really look at their life.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: And this is the majority of people are kind of stuck in that conventional state. I remember very recently—actually it was part of the wedding festivities—a bunch of my wife’s friends flew in. She's from Moscow originally—we met in the Caribbean—and a couple of her Moscow friends flew in. She also happens to be in the art world—she's got a master’s degree in art criticism—and one of her friends from her same academic group was here and was talking about a third friend of theirs who I didn't meet, and the conversation went a little something like, “Yeah, he won't play this game of liberal politics, and if you're going to be in the art world you kind of have to be part of this liberal politics thing. And it's fun. It gives us good guys and bad guys. So you play that game. You have to be in that world and you have to be part of that conversation or it's going to be hard for you to be in the art world.”

And like I immediately got that we could be great friends because she's got perspective on her own life. She's living in the world of liberal politics and in fact is politically liberal. She is politically liberal but she's got that self-regard on it like, “Well, of course, I am. It's part of my world. I can't help not. That's the conversation that's around me, and so that's who I am. And the actual moral consequence of that is not something that I need to examine too deeply because I get that there are two sides to this coin and I'm just living in this world,” you know what I mean? Like she was able to have perspective on her own sort of social universe and not just be of it.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: So I mean that's… but when you can do that around relationship, when you can understand yourself around women, you're in a different place. You're in a different space than other men are. It's a mature space. When you get it, when you're like, “Yeah, you know, it's like I'm really jealous but that's because I'm just kind of like that's the animal inside me, but what’s really relevant here is that I'm lying to myself because she's actually going to cheat me. She's absolutely a party girl and pretending otherwise isn't going to change that.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: Like when you get it, you get it. You're like, “And I'm probably going to lie to myself and do some stupid things along the way.” [Laughs] You kind of have that conversation with yourself.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, yeah, and they're good conversations to have. So you touched on a few things about basically selecting the right woman for marriage, right? Because obviously there are a lot of people who maybe aren't making the best decisions. I think a lot of people may be settled for something, which isn't exactly what they want in this life. What do you think is important in a woman to make a good marriage, something that's going to last? Like you're looking really at the 100%. You're looking at something that's going to last for the rest of your life. Now, if you're someone who's looking for that kind of level, what’s important to look for in a woman?

[Alex Allman]: You know, I think women combine these traits a lot more easily than men, first of all, but emotional maturity and self-awareness and kind of… you know, a woman who can say, “Wow, I'm really attracted to that douchebag and it pisses me off that I'm attracted because I know it's like the douchebag switches that are working in me right now,” like that level of self-awareness in a woman is probably a good idea, you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: That level of maturity is probably an important piece before you settle down with a woman.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: But the reality is that a woman’s capacity to do that doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A woman who can do that is a woman who’s confident that she's loved. That same woman, you know, catch her post-breakup and watch her lie to herself and not realize she's doing it, you know what I mean? Like catch her in a bad emotional state, so there’s… I mean, listen, if you're settling, you're settling. If you're not wildly, wildly attracted and juiced up by the woman that you're with, then you're settling. Like don’t do that.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: It's your recipe for disaster. You know, recipe for disaster. Yeah, I think men know when they're settling, you know? But the possibility that I would like to put out there is that more often than not, it is literally your decision as to who she's going to be in relationship with you because of the way you're entering… like I said, the relationship is not her and it's not you, it's a beast formed by the two of you. If you are really not jealous, if you're really supremely confident that this is, you know, she's awesome and that you're, you know, when you've got your shit on lockdown and you really—

And the vast majority of guys who come from this kind of pickup artist background can never do this. It's a trick they will never do because they programmed it out of themselves. They literally think that to have their confidence on lockdown means they have to have power in the relationship, means they have to have their options open, means she better know that I could get another chick. Like the guy that lives in that space literally cat have the relationship I have. He can't. It's not available to him. He's got to literally unlearn everything he's learned, start over again, and then go through the stages. He's cheated him out of authentic relating. It can't happen because… But, you know, another conversation we had earlier before we started recording was about… can I name names?

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: [Laughs] I don't know. You can choose whether you want to bleep this out later but…

[Angel Donovan]: Sure.

[Alex Allman]: …we were talking about Vin DiCarlo’s product and Pandora’s Box. And it's a solid product. It's good. He sent me a review copy. I was like, “This is fucking solid.” This guy’s a genius and he's come up with something that I would endorse, you know? It's like a program for really understanding who a woman is, and then being able to then bring out those sides of yourself that mesh with her and, I think in general, more authentic sides of yourself. So instead of like really trying hard to pretend you're a nice guy, you get to actually go, “Oh, she's not interested in that. She's more authentically drawn to this.” And that might even scare you away. You may discover what kind of girl she is and be like, “I don’t want any fucking part of that.”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: But the basis of it is that you're going to have a conversation with her in which you really try and figure out what she's like, what she's about. And that process actually will build real intimacy versus, “Hey, let me get a female opinion of you and something that I'm going to run this routine on you,” right? It's like there's something much more authentic about this, more than like some kind of game where I'm going to play like that I have no scarcity or whatever. That little thing that you're going to do is much more authentic and potentially builds a real relationship. I like the product!

The marketing, however, is like the most misogynistic cluster fuck of craziness. Now, that's not because Vin DiCarlo is a misogynist, though he might be – I don't know the guy. He might be. But what I do know about him from what other people have said and from the fact that he makes as much money as he does is that he's a great fucking marketer. And a great fucking marketer is somebody who figures out what hook is going to make people be like, “I got to have that, I got to spend my money on it,” and that hook turned out to be this misogynistic video sales letter. And that says something about the men that are watching it, and what it says is they're very fucking angry with women “because the woman is stopping me from getting the pussy.” That's the mentality. That's the average mentality.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I think you also have to look at different products are pushed in different places, right? So the example there is it's being pushed on porn sites and adult sites, you know, versus if it was on Facebook – it's not going to work as well, that video for someone just cruising Facebook. Not that Facebook would ever allow [laughs] that kind of stuff to be on there or…

[Alex Allman]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: You know, but other examples like Men’s Health, if you're advertising in Men’s Health or wherever. I'm sure that doesn't convert as well. It wouldn't work as well and it wouldn't be so responsive. So I think it’s being selective in the audience and I…

[Alex Allman]: I wish that were the case.

[Angel Donovan]: Really? Okay.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah. I wish that were the case. I just happen to know a lot of people with relationship lists and with other lists that are mailed for them and have made a lot, a lot, a lot of money on referrals, and I think that the reason is that men really are that angry and that frustrated.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Alex Allman]: I think they are.

[Angel Donovan]: You know…

[Alex Allman]: I think they are. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: Not all of them. Not every man. Not every man. But the reality is that there's a lot of men out there and probably most, probably more than half who have some little boy who’s still fucking hurting from the first time some girl kind of…

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: It's like a girl pissed him off along the way and never got over that. Like, “If I could revenge fuck that bitch I would,” you know what I mean?

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right, right.

[Alex Allman]: They're not past that. They're not.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I guess like we were talking about this earlier, is like once you've got a bit of success with women then these kind of things fall away, I guess not for everyone actually, because you were making references…

[Alex Allman]: I wish that were true…

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right, because there are some people who get this control mentality, which has come a bit from the pickup artist community as you say…

[Alex Allman]: You betcha.

[Angel Donovan]: Like they kind of seem to get stuck in that mentality. Other people grow out of it. We know many people who have kind of evolved and moved on, and many of them are getting married now just like you. But yeah, there are some people who seem to get stuck in it. Would you say that some people, like it's good for them that they should remain single, that's the right thing for them?

[Alex Allman]: Sure.

[Angel Donovan]: And then there are others that marriage is going to be the best thing for.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that's the case. Yeah. I don't think that relationships are for everyone. I think that it really does come down to what… and again, I'm trying to play this out to the furthest post-conventional point, the point where we're really dealing now in self-actualization, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: The deepest path to yourself as a man and as a human and not just sort of your animal inclinations that you seem to not be able to control because you're still a child, right? [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: I mean, if you really look at your furthest maturity, you view your life holistically and you recognize your death and that you have a short time to experience as much as you can in this life, for some men that experience as much as you can means having the freedom to just explore on their own and experience a variety of women, and for some the deepest exploration of what it means to be a human and be a man is going to be in relationship to a woman and possibly children and all that stuff, though children isn't ruled out in the other path, but you get the idea.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, totally. I wonder sometimes if it's a biological thing too. Higher testosterone obviously leads to some things like more risk-taking, more promiscuity, right? So, on some level some of this stuff is programmed in us because our biological natures are different, right? So some people just may be more suitable for marriage because their biology is set up that way to be… work better that way. Whereas others, you know, they're either likely to cheat or, you know, because they're really drawn outside all the time by their hormonal setup and everything, and it's… So I'm not sure it's like something we learn either. It's actually something we're kind of born with.

[Alex Allman]: Maybe.

[Angel Donovan]: You can disagree.

[Alex Allman]: No, maybe. This is really a nature versus nurture question that a lot of scientists would argue for each side.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: Maybe. I mean, I'm kind of the case study on the opposite. I'm just a testosterone-poisoned, martial-arts-loving, incredibly horny motherfucker.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: But I'm, you know, very…

[Angel Donovan]: Refocused.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, very focused on one woman. Exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: But you know, for sure there are going to be exceptions to that on both sides which may not negate the general case, so it's hard for me to say.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: It's hard for me to say. But to kind of go back to, for a moment, the pickup artist community mentality, what it's done to a lot of men… and by the way, the community may literally be answering a proclivity that existed in men first. It could be in the men and then this is just where they naturally got taken. I'm not saying it's necessarily the fault of this particular community, though it has emotionally damaged an awful lot of men who traded shy for weird and they're just… they literally, by figuring out how to unwire the game, they fail to learn the lessons that come from playing the game. It's like they found a robot to play their tennis game for them and now they think they're a good tennis player. They missed a whole lot of emotional maturing in their… But I have noticed that if you look at the—you know, again, I'm just looking at the marketing copy, because the marketing copy is what tells us what is working in a way, you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: This is “what are men responding to?” And I've noticed—again, these are my business partners too, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And a great many of them are friends and some of them are acquaintances that I'd just as soon not have, like in any group.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: But I've noticed how many of them now feature some form of a statement early in their marketing that says “women hate this,” “women don’t want you to know this,” “women are angry that I'm revealing this secret.”

[Angel Donovan]: Totally. Right.

[Alex Allman]: The reality is, what’s true is that women are desperately dying for you to learn how to be cooler about walking up to them, having a conversation, and getting a date. They don’t want to be alone on Saturday either.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: Women don’t really like it when you have approach anxiety and don’t say hello. They would much prefer that you say hello and say something cool and charming even if you're a douche. They'd rather that than just nobody walks up to them tonight and/or you walk up and say something abortively stupid. They actually want you to be the charming guy who sweeps them off their feet. They're rooting for you to learn this stuff.

And by the way, women love sex. By the way, we haven't even touched on it, but like what I teach is sexual skills, right? Sexual intimacy skills and how to really create deep sexual chemistry with a woman – that's what I teach. Most of the guys that read my stuff are already in relationships. Some of them just want to be good for their next relationship, but I can tell—and I teach women too, so I have just as many female readers as male readers—I can tell you women love sex and it's highly, highly disappointing and frustrating to them when you're not good at sex, and they fucking hate it when you don’t go for sex. They want to feel attractive. They want to feel beautiful. They want you to try and have sex with them. They want you to succeed at charming their pants off because that's what they're programmed for.

So the idea that women don’t want you to learn this stuff is bullshit. It's not the truth. Why is everyone saying it? Because that's appealing to these men. It's appealing to them that women don’t want you to know this. Why is it appealing? Because in their shame-filled mind they're still seeing the woman as the adversary…

[Angel Donovan]: Enemy. Right.

[Alex Allman]: …to getting laid.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: She's the adversary, not the ally, and that little twist is fucking men up. It's fucking them up.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. This is some really deep knowledge. I hope people appreciate the… Marketing – marketing is really a reflection of reality. That's the skill set.

[Alex Allman]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: And this type of marketing, it teaches marketers a lot about what the real state of the world is, right?

[Alex Allman]: What the real state of men’s minds is.

[Angel Donovan]: It's actually better than a lot of the scientific surveys they do where people introduce biases by responding what they want, but marketers are actually looking at actions.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, real results.

[Angel Donovan]: Real results and the way people really are and react. So all of this stuff Alex is talking about is really interesting because it's talking about like a lot of the deep internal motivations that some of us may not be aware of all of the time but that are there. And you know, it may take a… I think this is a very difficult kind of deep subject to have on the podcast, but for you guys listening out there, maybe listen to it again and then try and think of situations and times when your thoughts may have aligned with this and try to understand how it could be damaging your potential to have future relationships.

[Alex Allman]: Yes, indeed.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: They shake and crack you open…

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: …if you take this deep enough.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, we're talking… this episode’s about marriage, so it's like deep going to like really fundamental stuff. We're talking about being able to have a relationship for 20, 30 years, so it was going to get a bit deeper and philosophical whether we liked it or not, right? [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So one of the things I really wanted to make sure we covered on this is like obviously there's a big problem with divorce today and marriages don’t work, and I know you have ideas about what makes marriages good and last for the longer-term, what stops people getting bored in those relationships. What do you think are some of the important things, if you're getting into a marriage or if you're in a marriage right now that maybe isn't going so well, what are some of the important things that you need for that spark to maintain it and grow that relationship rather than let it deteriorate over time?

[Alex Allman]: You know, I teach sex and you know that old adage that to a carpenter every problem looks like a nail to be hammered or something, so maybe I'm biased but I really believe that sex is the fundamental piece of maintaining a great marriage. If it's not the fundamental piece I’ll just say that it's a great crucible. It's a great place to work your marriage because it's a place where there's a lot of pleasure reward when you're getting it right, a lot of pleasure reward, and the pleasure comes in both dimensions – the dimension of being able to receive pleasure into your body but also the dimension of being able to push pleasure into the woman you love.

Now, we as humans love to give. We're wired to love to give. We love it when we give somebody an exquisite gift that just they're like, “Yay!” And we particularly love it sexually, like every man is really turned on by giving his woman an orgasm. When she's moaning and screaming, that's a huge turn-on. And it's not just a turn-on – it makes us feel powerful and manly that we gave her that orgasm. So there's a lot packed into that.

And when you love someone and you're pushing their body through this kind of symphony of pleasure, that's powerfully satisfying. I mean, if you really love a woman and you give her that level of pleasure, you're likely to cry from happiness afterwards. You could have a really powerful emotional response from having done that, from having given that gift and seen it received.

[Angel Donovan]: Something like that I think most guys haven't experienced crying after sex or even during sex. I've only done it a couple of times myself and it was when I started to… I went on a mission basically to explore sexuality with one of my girlfriends. This was a few years ago. And one of the things I wanted to touch on, like is part of this like keeping the sex alive, is it kind of continuously exploring and pushing the boundaries? Because I pushed the boundaries for myself and her and we both ended up crying, and that was really shocking. And of course that creates an incredible bond, right?

[Alex Allman]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: But is that something that you have to keep on doing? Because people talk about sex getting stale in marriages and stuff. Is that completely unavoidable or is this… can there be this constant exploration, like kind of pushing the boundaries? How do you see it?

[Alex Allman]: I think you need to push the boundaries until there are no more boundaries.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: Once there are no more boundaries, you don’t have to push them anymore because they're not there.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: I think the pushing the boundaries thing is something that people get wrong a lot. They think, “Well, now we need to try S and M. Now I have to melt some candle wax on her nipples. Now we have to dress up as furry animals. Now we have to…” [laughs] you know?

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: And the reason they think that is because they actually are getting bored and then they introduce some piece of variety, and that's interesting for a minute.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And it works as far as it goes, but it's a sham. It's a hamster wheel, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Alex Allman]: That's not pushing boundaries. Pushing boundaries is, should be, could be the process of finding every piece of your organic desire that you're currently ashamed of and then playing it, living it, talking it, de-shaming it, fantasizing it, whatever, whatever it requires in relationship. It won't happen alone. If you're not in relationship, you can never dissolve shame, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And by the way, I don’t just mean sexual relationship. It could be in relationship to your psychologist or your mom or whatever, but somebody’s got to hear it out loud or it's still living in the closet in the dark where you're ashamed of it. It needs to be out in the world for you to ever not be ashamed of it. It has to be in the sunlight, not in the closet.

And it doesn’t make sense to talk about that shit with your mom. That's weird, right? And of course, some people therefore take it to a psychologist, and that's a shame because the opportunity is to do it in your romantic relationship where it's appropriate and beautiful. So what happens is, when you… like I said, when I said sex is a crucible and a workshop, like I said, the half of it is there's this brilliant payoff, this incredible pleasure that you get in your body and that you can push into her body – her, the woman you love. Awesome!

And you also then get to work on your shit. You get to work on your jealous, you get to work on your “wow, I'm attracted to underage women,” you get to work on your “wow, I'm attracted to dogs” or “I'm attracted to poop” or whatever, feet. Everybody’s got like these things and they're ashamed of it. They think they're weird and aberrant.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: There's no such thing as weird and aberrant, but there are things that are illegal, for example. And this is like an important piece, that there are things that are illegal. You can't do them. It is really appealing to me to beat the living crap out of people who litter. I see somebody drop something on the ground, literally like I just want to beat them. And I feel like it would be good if I did, but you can't. And frankly, it wouldn't be good if I did. I sometimes have words with them, but you get that you can't beat people up for that, or in the same way, you can't have sex with underage women and you can't have sex with someone who’s screaming, “No, no, no, no!” if that person isn't involved in a little fantasy with you, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: [Laughs] I mean, rape is bad. And so there are things that… And by the way, if you're really turned on by the possibility of like murdering somebody while having sex with them, it's all okay. It's totally okay. You can't do it, but it's totally okay to think it, feel it and understand where it comes from and mine it and excavate it. But you need a really trusting, powerful, loving partner to excavate shit like that, like to really understand what part of your childhood, like what piece of you demands so much power that you could take a life and that that would be a turn-on, that that power trip somehow turns you on. And then you could explore in fantasy, by the way. She can play dead for you and it might even titillate the fuck out of her to play the victim, because it's just as likely that a woman has the “I'm getting murdered” fantasy as the…

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Alex Allman]: But you can't do these in real life, right? And maybe you don’t even want to play them in fantastic, but you can excavate them. You can figure out who you are and who you are in relationship.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: So this is not a game that ever gets boring, okay? And when you get to the bottom of it, it's not like there's… like so you don’t have to keep pushing the boundaries because the boundaries eventually go away. Eventually you're just all in.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: And that sex doesn’t get boring. That sex never gets boring because it wasn’t based on variety to begin with. It was based on real attraction. It's when you can trust your cock. Like most men can't trust their cock. Their cock’s, “Get on, yeah, yeah, do all kinds of weird shit.” But like you get to the point where you can trust your cock, and that's like… sex will not inevitably be boring unless…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: By the way, again, porn is one of the… we didn't get into the whole porn thing but porn fucks men up dramatically, and one of the ways that it fucks men up is that this need for variety, which is innately wired into us, we desire variety innately… That's wired in for sure, but it's not the only thing that's wired in. We desire a lot of things other than variety. A lot of things other than variety.

Variety is one of the things that are wired in, and it's an easy button to push. It's one of the easiest ways to get the cookie. It's like the sugar of the sex world. Sugar’s easy. Everybody likes it. You put it in, people are going to eat it, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that's a nice analogy. It's like a low-effort reward, right?

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Just introduce variety, a new partner, and it makes it easier to get that stimulation.

[Alex Allman]: Sure, yeah. You get bored with your woman - all you need to do is fuck another woman. I mean, everybody knows that that works, right? I mean, it works. It does work so it's an easy button, but it's not necessarily the most rewarding meal you're ever going to eat.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: And it's not necessarily the most powerful, and a lot of men don't know that it's not the most powerful because they don't know anything else and they’ve trained themselves to appreciate variety more and more and more by playing that easy button over and over again. You know, there's this thing called neuroplasticity – the more you do something, not only the more skilled you become at doing it but also it becomes part of you. It becomes part of the way your universe works, is that addiction process. And it's like when you start flossing your teeth, it's really hard to get into the habit. Once you have the habit, you feel filthy when you don’t do it.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: It's like it's this weird thing, but it's neuroplasticity. It's your brain carving a groove. When hockey players ice skate they don’t ice skate, it's just like it's the most natural thing on earth, and for me I fall on my butt all the time. And that's actually the neural network grooving down. So a guy who jerks off to porn for years on end, he's dug a neural groove of playing this variety button because you just click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, you know? And they get into the simplicity of variety, and then variety becomes king for them. That needs to be unwired, unlearned. Well, it needs to be unwired, unlearned unless you want your sex life to be about porn, which seems like… I mean, I guess it's a valid choice, but people that have done it both ways can tell you that there's a lot more satisfaction to be gained in relating to a real woman.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: A lot more satisfaction.

[Angel Donovan]: We we're talking about some really interesting problems around depression and losing willpower from over abusing with porn. So that's actually a detriment way beyond relationships.

[Alex Allman]: Way beyond, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so…

[Alex Allman]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: I think it's safe to say it's a negative thing. Even if you like that kind of very, very low-effort reward kind of situation, I don't think it's ever going to work out in your favor.

[Alex Allman]: It's magnificently addictive and it will definitely make you bad in bed. I mean, I can tell you right now that I make ridiculous amounts of money from men who are bad in bed and are bad in bed because of porn. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: Like they watch porn, they were like, “That's how you have sex.” And they have a wife who’s like, “You're not satisfying me,” and then they're like, “Dear Alex Allman, please help me,” you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: Got it. Clear. I'm super-clear on that. I got you, you know? I can fix you.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Alex Allman]: But you know, it's like dentists and sugar. Dentists are like they have a love-hate relationship with sugar, you know what I mean? Like they don’t want their patients to get cavities, but at the same time they're making money that way. That's me and porn. Everybody that watches too much porn ends up eventually needing my book, you know? [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So we've covered like some of the angles of like marriage, making it last longer. How about… I guess this is a big fear of some men, like especially if they do think that they’ve found this woman that they really, really do love and they want this marriage forever and they love her. Then they're worried about keeping her faithful potentially, right? And committed forever, like from her side, like what’s going to keep her in a relationship?

[Alex Allman]: I'm going to go into a little woo-woo stuff here.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Alex Allman]: I mean, and I guess you ultimately have to ask yourself the question, and the question is, do you think that love is just a biological reaction? We talked a lot about the stuff that's wired into the animal and the need for variety and then ultimately this need that becomes self-actualization, and somewhere in there we largely avoided the spiritual conversation. And I don’t believe in God who’s sitting up on a throne somewhere in a cloud. I certainly don’t have that inclination. But the question is, is there some divine nature of the universe? Is there some beautiful spiritual something that's bigger than those things that we understand through physics and science? And a lot of really smart people who would say, “No, I'm not spiritual. I don’t believe in that stuff,” the wiggle room, the place where you might get them where they might go, “Yeah, maybe,” is love.

Like a lot of people, when you say, well, is love just empirical? Is it just a bunch of instincts and wired in there? Is that all it is? Is it just pair bonding for the purpose of, you know, a child has to reach a certain age before July, after seven years a lot of infatuation wears off because the children have fled the nest and they don’t need protecting of the father anymore so you need to go off and fuck somebody else? Like is that all that love really is? And I think that most people who have experienced love don’t feel that way. They really feel like, “No, there's something magical and deep and spiritual and special and maybe divine, maybe even divine.” So there is some magic element here that I would bring into… because I do believe that love is more than just a bunch of science.

And whether you believe that or not, there is one other thing about the thing I'm about to say, which is it works. It's like it works. It just tends to be true over and over again. It's kind of… so from a science perspective, even if you don’t believe my rationale behind it, I can tell you it works and it's this: A woman will be like just exactly as in love with you as you are with her. The love that people share is the same love. It's not like you have the love you have for her and she has the love that she has for you and they're two different things. They're not. They're one thing. They're the lawn between two houses. She may be looking at it from her house, you're looking at it from your house, but it's the same grass. So unrequited love in my model doesn’t exist.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, because we're going to back to the model you were talking about at the beginning, right?

[Alex Allman]: Maybe, yeah. Maybe, maybe. Unrequited love doesn’t exist and it doesn’t exist, but people think it exists. And why do they think it exists? Because they're misappropriating strong emotion for love. So what happens is… I mean, I think many men have had the experience of having a woman break up with them and then discover they love them way more than they did the day before she broke up with them, right?

[Angel Donovan]: I'd like to intervene with a little story here…

[Alex Allman]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …because this was kind of what got me interested in the whole learning about this stuff 13 years ago, whatever it was, and it fits perfectly with what you're talking about right now. I was in a situation where it was the dot-com boom and I had this ridiculously well-paid job for how young I was. I was like 24 at the time and there was a lot of pressure with that. I lost that job because it was the dot-com crash. Boom! Right? So I kind of had this huge up and this huge down.

During that time I had this girlfriend, which I really did like, but to be honest I didn't like her that much. I liked her a lot but I wouldn't have said it was love or anything. What happened though was when the dot-com crash came, that kind of took some of my self-esteem. It took a lot of my certainty, my confidence. A lot of things, a lot of support… I didn't know what to do with my life. I kind of had this huge high and then this huge bust, and I didn't know where to really go with that and I kind of clutched to the relationship because I guess I didn't know what else to do at the time.

So I started to think I really liked this girl and maybe I loved her. And then maybe six months down the line—took a little while—she broke up with me and I was devastated, and I thought I loved her and everything. But looking back on that years later, I realize I didn't love her at all. I was clinging to her because I was at an emotional low of my own at the time because I had a lot of different stuff going on which had kind of manufactured the situation, which I ended up doing the wrong thing, which was grabbing on the relationship for support rather than going on and rebuilding my life.

So kind of I took a timeout. For six months I didn't do much apart from investing in that relationship, which actually wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway. But if you'd asked me before I probably would have said, “Well, we should probably part ways before the whole dot-com crash came and my life changed.” So that's really a situation where you think you love but it's not really love that you're giving. And the other person, I think she responded to that.

[Alex Allman]: Yup, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And if you ask your friends the way you were talking about her before that happened, they'd tell you, “Yeah, you didn't really like her that much.” [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that's what they told me, exactly.

[Alex Allman]: Your languaging around her has changed since she broke up with you and suddenly became a saint, yeah, and it's funny that… I guess what happens is, you know, you loved her to some degree and she loved you to some degree, and then there's other stuff that mixes in. So the classic example is, “I love her so much but she left me for the pool boy.” And the truth is he does love her but he's also, like most of it is shame and humiliation and possessiveness and feeling like you lost to this other guy.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: And so the pain of the humiliation of having her leave with the pool boy is so great, that pain is so great that he has conflated it with how much he must love her.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: Well, it's not how much he loves her, it's how much he hates humiliation, but it's hard to tell the difference at that point. Now, for her part, it's not like she doesn’t love him. She does love him. Why did she leave with the pool boy? Because she loved him just enough to be intensely pissed off by how much he was still withholding.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: That's why she fucked the pool boy, because she loved him enough to be fucking pissed with him. So to feel the emotional abandonment that had occurred, his inability to confront whatever those issues where, to be like, “I don’t want to talk about that relationship stuff,” because it was confronting and hard for him to admit the areas where he failed, or “I don’t want to talk about my premature ejaculation thing…”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: “Why don’t you sleep with the pool boy?” “Alright, I fucking will.”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Alex Allman]: It's like there's that implication. Like when men won't deal with relationship issues, whether they're sexual or not, women can't fucking understand that, [laughs] you know? They don't get that you're not dealing with this because of shame. They think you're not dealing with it because you don’t love them enough. That's what they think.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: They don’t get that it's your own shame. And why don’t they get that it's your own shame? For the same reason that you don’t get that they won't get that, which is we blame ourselves. She can't imagine that it's your shame. She thinks it's actually “like I'm just not good enough and you don’t like me enough.” She can't even imagine that actually you do like her that much.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: People have low self-esteem. And that's really the same thing. That's why you won't deal with it also, because you can't imagine that she would ever think anything but that it was your thing.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Alex Allman]: That's why you're ashamed. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So there you're saying like that we haven't dealt with our own stuff to enable us to love, and that's where I think it kind of connects with the model you were talking about at the beginning, which I’d forgotten the name of the state that comes at the back, the post…

[Alex Allman]: Post-conventional. Yeah, post-conventional.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, the post-conventional where we've worked on all that stuff, we're more self-aware and everything, and we're free to love just as giving. And then she can feel that, right? Whereas in this version you're talking about basically because we're still dealing with our own stuff, she doesn’t feel loved at all. We may think there's some love in there, of course, but we've got a lot of other stuff we're dealing with of our emotions and she doesn’t actually feel loved because we're not communicating it.

[Alex Allman]: Yeah, I mean, I remember my first girlfriend when I was 13, I think, 12, 13.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Alex Allman]: I mean, we kissed now and then. I don't think I had hit puberty yet, but it was kind of interesting and fun. I remember I told her I loved her, and I distinctly remember at the time wanting to tell her I loved her because I was curious to know what would happen, how that would feel, who that would make me, not because of a feeling I was feeling. I wasn’t really feeling much of anything, but I wanted to say it because I was really fucking curious and it seemed like that's what people say. And, you know, I watched some movies and shit, like Tom Cruise said that to… you know what I mean? Like that just seemed like what you're supposed to do.

So that would be like my earliest experience of “I love you.” And compare that to my latest experience of what I mean when I say “I love you,” I can tell you that it's not just that those things are different, it's that there was an evolution, steps along the way. There were a lot of stops and starts in between to get to the place where I'm 100% surrendered and it's easy and it's like there’s no… I hold nothing back. My life is hers, her life is mi