The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com

Dear Dr. Kenner,

I thought I was over my ex-boyfriend, John, but that's not the case. I don't understand why he left me and the way in which he did it. He was crazy over me. Then his roommates kept bringing a girl over that was flirting with him. I asked them not to do it. Two days before our anniversary, he tells me that he doesn't like me anymore and that he can't live a lie and he's not ready for a relationship. He even tells me that I can be with whomever I want, whatever guy I want. He ignores my phone calls. I was crushed because I did so much for him. I invested so much in this relationship. I helped him with his low self-esteem and his weight issues.

Weeks later, I saw him, John, at a party given by mutual friends, and he says, “I can't stop thinking of you, Marissa, I can't get you off my mind.” Two weeks later, he says, “You know, I loved you because I didn't like you.” This is online. A month later, he called me to tell me that he now works near me—as if he's reaching out to me. What's with this guy?

—Marissa

Marissa, it is exquisitely painful—exquisite probably isn't the right adjective there—but it is deeply painful to have someone whom you trust, whom you love, whom you've chosen as a potential partner or long-term partner, suddenly up and leave, and you don't have any reason why.

Now I'm assuming that's the case. I'm assuming that you guys weren't fighting every day, or you don't have alcohol problems. I'm assuming that you were just sideswiped. You were hit out of the blue with a guy—you know, you think he loves you, you think you love him, you're ready to celebrate an anniversary. You're not married, I know that, you're dating. This was a longer email, so there was more detail in it. I needed to cut it back a bit. And suddenly he just up and leaves you.

So how do you mentally manage that type of a situation? How do you internally manage what's going on within you? You have a three-letter word that's screaming at you—

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How do you internally manage what's going on within you? You have a three-letter word that's screaming at you: why?

Why did he do this now?

Why is that “why” so important? You're wanting closure. The “why” is important because you need to know that things are causal, that the world is causal, and that people's behavior is causal. It doesn't mean rational. He obviously acted irrationally.

If he loved this other girl, he could have said, “Listen, this is very sad for me to tell you. There's a lot I like about you. We've had a really nice relationship, and I'm really attracted to Betty Sue. I would like to date her.” Okay—painful, yes. You might be real angry with him that you invested so much time, yes. But you will feel really good about the fact that it makes sense. He's in love with another woman—or whatever it is, he's attracted to another woman.

But with him just abruptly leaving and going from hot to cold, loving you to suddenly not liking your character at all, leaves open a lot of questions. Can I trust other people? Will other people do this to me? Is this the norm in relationships? If you're early on in the dating, if you're still young—I'm assuming you are—you may not be. You know—will other men just leave me like this? Can I go through this type of pain again?

Was it me? Was there something that he saw in me over the course of time that he disliked? Was I helping him too much? Or was I getting too close to his character? Maybe there were things in him that would be alarming and would make me not love him, and the closer I got to him, the more afraid he was that I would discover these things—whether they were reality-based or not. Doesn't matter. If he was afraid of it, he might have jumped ship.

So all of those questions need answers. You can ask his friends—if you've got mutual friends—ask: Is he dating anybody else? What's up?

Not because you want to get back to him. Not because you're chasing him. Because it does not sound like he's a good choice for your life. A man that acts this erratically is not good for your long-range happiness—especially one who doesn't explain himself when he could have.

It sounds like you want a good relationship. You have the capacity to be supportive and loving. Maybe you want to pick someone with a little higher self-esteem that matches your own next time.

And here's a little more from Dr. Kenner.

I am Dr. Ellen Kenner, and my show is The Rational Basis of Happiness. I am a clinical psychologist, and my goal is to help you fight the ideas in your own soul that tell you you can't be happy—that the goal in your life is to sacrifice, to give up, to not enjoy the things that you personally choose, to do what others want of you, to be a martyr, to be a doormat.

I want you to be able to identify those ideas. That is a lethal, lethal philosophy that guides—that—there are many variations on a theme of that philosophy that tells you you don't own your own life, and if you do anything for yourself, you can fill in the blank—you're selfish.

Well, what if that’s not the case? That you're a brute, that you're running roughshod over other people, that you're out to hurt them? You just want to enjoy your life and not hurt anybody else and not step on anyone else.

If you want to recapture the view that you may have had as a kid or maybe as a teenager—that, “Oh my gosh, I have such wonderful ambitions for myself!”—and to be able to do that with moral certainty that it’s proper for you to lead your own life, then you can go to my website, DrKenner.com. You can listen to the show. You can ask me questions.

My website at DrKenner.com—I have podcasts of former shows that you can listen to. You can also pick up a book that may sound shocking—absolutely shocking, especially in this culture—a book called The Virtue of Selfishness. And that may surprise you, because selfishness is not what you think: self-valuing, self-esteem, self-respect. That’s what you want if you want to be happy.

Many people are just confused. Their mind is battered. And I would love for you to be happy—rationally—without ever taking advantage of another person. And that's not what we typically think of as selfish. We typically think of selfish as the person that's the “me only” person: “I'll get what I want, I'll do what I want, and I don't care about you. I can manipulate. I can defraud you.”

That's not the selfishness that Ayn Rand talks about. It’s A-Y-N R-A-N-D. You can look at my website, DrKenner.com or you can go to AynRandBookstore.com and pick up that book.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com—and please listen to this ad.

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

A major source of friction is when partners violate the trader relationship. The refusal of a partner or partners to trade, even in everyday actions, will be perceived as unfair—a breakdown of the give-and-take in the relationship. And the trade involves more than just love. It also applies to character and to everyday relations between partners.

Let’s say that partners need two incomes to pay the bills. Both have agreed to work, but one partner now refuses to seriously look for a job, preferring to live off the efforts of the other. In addition to being unjust, the partner’s refusal to work after promising to do so lacks integrity. When the trade of principle is violated, tensions quickly rise. There is a feeling of betrayal and injustice by the partner who is getting the raw end of the deal.

You can download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book at Amazon.com