The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at Dr kenner.com and@amazon.com

I recently read a book Loving Life, and with me now is the author of this book, Craig Biddle. Craig, welcome to the show.

Hi, welcome.

Oh, it's wonderful to have you here, Craig. You know Loving Life, I think of the title of that book and imagine that I'm a housewife, and I'm sitting home and I'm trying to enjoy my life, and I putter around in the garden and do a few things, but I gotta tell you, I am depressed, I'm bored, and you've written this book Loving Life. What are one or two ways in which I could benefit from your book, probably?

The most important way you could benefit is by understanding the theme of the book, which is that the moral purpose of your life is the achievement of your happiness. And that is very liberating knowledge to understand why that is true, because what it means is that what you should be doing at any given time in life is improving your life, pursuing your values, making your life wonderful and worth living. So it would free somebody who was caught up in the idea that what one should be doing is, you know, sacrificing one value, one's values, and giving up one's goals rather than pursuing them.

Yeah, but yeah, I don't think you understand it. I mean, I'm a housewife. I do housewifely things, and I just, you know, I try to enjoy them. You're telling me to enjoy it. You're telling me to achieve my happiness. But I don't know how. I thought this is what's supposed to make me happy? I always dreamed of being a housewife, but I'll tell you, it's dull and boring.

From that perspective, what the book will do is make clear that the requirements of happiness are two things in the context of your question. And that is, purpose—you've got to have life-serving goals that you plan and pursue—and you've got to have principles by which to pursue them. So what the book will do for someone in that position is explain and demonstrate that life does not consist of just pursuing any old goals that you happen to have chosen in the past, or that you happen to have sitting before you, but analyzing your goals and analyzing the things that you choose to do in life and determining on an ongoing basis whether this is what's really going to, you know, lead to genuine happiness in your life.

You know, but that sounds so boring. I mean, if I have to sit and analyze goals, it just sounds dull, and I don't get what you mean by principles.

Well, let's concretize it a little bit. If you find yourself gardening, and this is something you've been doing on an ongoing basis, and you're bored by doing it...

If I see a marigold, I'm going to eat it.

Yeah. So, you know, in life, at any given time, we're doing one thing and not all the other things that we could be doing. Life is limited in that way. So the question is, if you're bored gardening, why on earth are you continuing to do this? And what my book would suggest is that you take account of your other alternatives in life. You need to introspect, and you need to extraspect. You need to look inside at the things that are important.

So what questions should I ask myself?

You should ask yourself, what if I could be doing anything other than gardening? What would I like to be doing right now?

I would love to be a dancer.

There you go.

Now, take a concrete goal like that, but my husband doesn't dance. How am I going to do this?

That's, that's your husband's choice, and you ought not be dictated by your husband's choices. If you want to dance, you can ask your husband if he'd like to go pursue this with you. But if he doesn't want to do that, and that's something that really means a lot to you in life, I suggest setting some time aside to go investigate. If you are talking about, you know, ballroom dancing, go check out, you know, look in the Yellow Pages. Check out the local organizations that provide that. If you're talking about ballet dancing, or salsa, or whatever, tap dancing, tap dancing, or whatever, you know, whatever suits your fancy. The thing to do is investigate. You can't act on something if you don't know the first thing about it, so you need to look into it. And it may well be, in fact, I like ballroom dancing myself. My wife and I spend a lot of time doing that, and I can tell you from first-hand knowledge, there are a number of people who get into ballroom dancing when their spouse or their partner is not interested in getting into it, and down the line, the spouse or partner gets turned on by the idea when he sees what kind of fun it is and how interesting it is, and winds up getting into it.

So you're saying I could entice my husband into this, possibly?

Quite possible. That doesn't change the value, you know? It doesn't change the fact that it's a value to you, and you ought to pursue it anyhow.

Okay, so let me back up a little bit, or just take an overview of this. Craig, you've written this book Loving Life, and the goal of it, you're saying, is to help a person really identify what each individual loves in his life. If it's the housewife and she loves ballroom dancing, why not pursue it? Why let her life drift by another day, another month, another year, without having that pleasure in her life, or at least giving herself a shot of seeing if she really enjoys it?

Exactly. So it's identifying her goals, and my guess is that they'll be more than ballroom dancing, because once you give yourself permission to say, "What do I love in life?" Many times people have never asked themselves that question.

Go ahead.

Yes, I think very few people permit themselves to get so personal with the way that they plan their life as to say, everything else aside, not concerning myself with other people, not concerning myself with what, you know, the minister or the teacher tells me—what do I want? And that kind of questioning is very important, because you live once, and every day that passes, every moment that passes, is irretrievable. So the question is, are you going to find out what you want and go after it, or are you going to let life pass you by?

Okay, and I'm talking with Craig Biddle, who's written a book Loving Life, and the goal of this book is to help you break off the shackles, the traps, the suffocating cocoon that you've put yourself in, and to say, "What do I love in life?" It's not that you mean to hurt anybody else, it's that you mean to pursue your own goals for your own pleasure. And when you do that, do you end up being at war with other people, or do you end up not being at war? What would you say to that, Craig?

Well, you certainly wouldn't be at war with anybody else who had the same philosophy. You know, if you're pursuing your values and I'm pursuing my values, as you and I do in life, we have no conflicts with each other, just like I have no conflicts with the grocer down the street. He is pursuing his values by running his business, and I can go in there and buy groceries because he makes them available, and he can read my books because I make them available. So, you know, there's a trade. It is a wonderful trade.

We're almost out of time. Can you tell us in 30 seconds how to get your book?

Yes, you can buy it practically at any bookstore, or you can order it from any local bookstore, or you can go to Glen Allen press.com, which is the publisher, and there are links there for ordering it.

Okay? And the book, again, is Loving Life by Craig Biddle, and it's the type of book you would want to get yourself if you're just feeling down in the dumps and you don't know what mistakes you've made in your life, what errors you've made, and what's within your control, what's not within your control, and how to put your life back together. And as you say in one chapter, to live purposefully, to really enjoy your life, to milk it for all it's worth. So you don't get at the end of your life and have that very sad situation of saying, "Oh my god, I missed out on my own life."

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to Dr.kenner.com, and please listen to this. NAD,

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Dr. Ellen Kenner.

Suppose you've caught your wife in so many lies and she's broken so many promises that you can't believe anything she says, or you discover your husband is cheating on you, spending money on things you would agree to decide on jointly and only pretending to look for a job. What does dishonesty do to romantic love? It kills it. What do flaws like this in your partner do to your sense of feeling visible, valued, and cherished? Can you trust or feel emotionally close to your dishonest partner? Could you desire intimacy with a person with a bad moral character? You might be thinking, but I have a friend whose husband is a cheat and she loves him anyway. Is this love or dependency? Perhaps fear keeps her in the marriage? "I'm afraid to be alone or on my own" or "Self-contempt: he's all I deserve." Whatever it is, it is not a happy, intimate, romantic relationship.

You can download chapter one for free at Dr.kenner.com, and you can buy the book at amazon.com.