Our Boys Are Falling Behind. Why? Asks Warren Farrell

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]  It has been six years since Warren Farrell and John Gray published their groundbreaking book, “The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.”

A prominent feminist for many years, Farrell shifted his focus when he started noticing major gaps in the conversation about men and women’s issues. He’s written multiple books, including “The Myth of Male Power” and “Why Men Earn More.”

In “The Boy Crisis,” the authors detailed how boys have been falling behind in many key metrics of success and happiness. Boys dropped out from school at higher rates, died from suicide and drug overdoses at higher rates, and committed school shootings at higher rates than girls.

In this interview, I wanted to get an update from Farrell on where things have progressed since they wrote their book.

We also dive into some key wisdom for strengthening relationships and communication from his latest book “Role Mate to Soul Mate,” in which he compiles his findings from decades of counseling couples.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Warren Farrell, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Warren Farrell:
It’s my pleasure also. You’re such a good question asker, and you really listen so well.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you very much. When we first interviewed back in 2019, we interviewed about your book, The Boy Crisis. Where have things come with The Boy Crisis? Actually, even before that, what is The Boy Crisis?.

Mr. Farrell:
The Boy Crisis is about boys falling behind in more than 70 different measurable metrics, basically. Everything from being far more likely than girls to commit suicide, about four times as likely when they’re between 15 and 19, five times as likely when from age 20 to 24. They’re far more likely to be addicted to drugs, to die of drug overdoses, to be addicted to video games. The average boy playing video games begins to get into the addiction mode. Boys are far more likely to drop out of high school, far less likely to go to college, and when they go to college, they’re 10 percent more likely to drop out of college than girls are.

So we’re now moving close to where there’s a two-to-one ratio of females to males, probably 10 years from now in college. And many people say, oh, this is terrible for boys. It is terrible for boys, but it’s worse than just terrible for boys. It’s a girl’s issue and a female issue also.

Females who go to college don’t want to be in a minority position where a large number of females are competing for a small number of men. That doesn’t give them any leverage at all. Women who are looking for future husbands aren’t going around searching their parents’ basements in their homes or unemployment lines for future husbands. They want men who are achieving and are successful and are productive and are not failures to launch.

And then our children are being brought up often after divorce, or in the United States 40 percent of women who have children have children without being married. And what that often means is the man that they had the sex with to produce the child may be involved for a few years if they live together. But the average couple that lives together that has children only lasts, the relationship only lasts three and a half years. And so oftentimes what happens is that there’s a divorce and the children do not have access to their dads.

And so when I submitted my research for The Boy Crisis, my proposal to the publisher, I had 10 causes of the boy crisis outlined that I was going to have a chapter for each. And then I kept finding that most of those causes were correlations, but the only one that sort of met the standard of a cause was I found that the boy crisis to a larger degree than any other single reason The Boy Crisis resides where dads do not reside.

I saw this enormous power of lack of father involvement so there’s no greater correlation between suicide and any other thing than lack of father involvement. When we have mass shootings it’s not about girls and it’s not about guns and not about family values predominantly. They’re all players. But I saw that to a large degree, the school shootings in particular were very likely to be done not only by boys, but boys whose family had been through divorce and were in very high conflict situations and often boys that did not have father involvement.

And so I began to see this enormous amount of dad deprivation, and this has not changed the amount of people dropping out of high school who are boys, the amount of them graduating from college who are boys, the amount of drug overdoses. The life expectancy between males and females has increased in the last couple of years, it’s now to 5.9, It was down about 5.2 some years ago, about the time that The Boy Crisis book came out.

Mr. Jekielek:
This also complements the research that shows that children that come out of complete nuclear families, whether they come from affluent families or poorer families, Left or Right, are set up for success. That’s the single best predictor of their likelihood of being successful in life and changing their economic realities and life realities in a positive way. It’s interesting that this is very complementary.

Mr. Farrell:
Absolutely. The lack of father involvement was the deepest cause that I sort of had articulated when The Boy Crisis book came out. Now I’ve seen, for the last 30 years I’ve been conducting these couples communication workshops that I call Role Mate to Soul Mate workshops, and I saw that there was one deeper prediction. That is if a couple could, I saw that the Achilles heel of all human beings is our inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.

I’ll advise people in my workshop to not become defensive when they hear criticism. And everybody agreed, but they got home and their real life and the moment that that criticism appeared the wisdom disappeared. And so I realized that I really had to develop a method that people practiced over and over again so their brain changed until they could associate criticism with an opportunity to feel more deeply loved. And the question was how to do that. But the value of how to do that, and I can get to that in a little while.

But the value of how to do that in relation to The Boy Crisis was the real way to prevent The Boy Crisis is to have good parental communication so the children see good parental communication and mother and father knowing how to resolve differences constructively and be able to hear each other and move closer together in their love than they were before. And when children see that, they know how to communicate with their friends and they will know how to communicate with their children. And there will be fewer divorces. And when there are fewer divorces, there are fewer children raised predominantly by mother and with what I call dad deprivation.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is particularly relevant in these fraught times that we’re in because it strikes me that the ability to take criticism without feeling defensive or worse, which I think we see that a lot, we’re going to play a very valuable role in society at large, not even just in these intimate relationships, which, of course, your new book, Role Mate to Soul Mate, is all about. We’ll talk about that in a moment.

I wanted to kind of talk about how things have shifted. There’s this recent Wall Street Journal article, America’s Young Men Are Falling Even Further Behind, right? It made me think of you, part of the reason we’re here today. The pandemic policy resulted in all these scenarios being exacerbated. Do I understand that correctly? Can you kind of flesh that out for me a bit?

Mr. Farrell:
Yes. One of the reasons is that girls are very good at, you know, you get a Zoom course and girls are very good at taking information down, absorbing it, remembering it, and feeding it back on a test. Boys for the most part have to do things physically or they have to be engaged in projects. And when they’re engaged in a project, boys do very well. When they have to do something physically, boys do very well. But when they have to sit at home and listen to something over Zoom, they tend to be distracted and bored and they become passive aggressive in terms of going back and learning more and they basically tend to fail to a much greater degree.

Women are very good about reaching out to women friends and sharing their feelings and their fears. And the women friends are very good about supporting them. Boys are not as good about expressing their feelings and their fears to their male friends or to women. And the reason for that is when boys express their feelings to women, especially if they’re involved romantically with those women, women often lose respect for men who are complaining or who are, you know, sort of vulnerable in that way. And when men express those feelings of vulnerability to other men, men tend to give the men about a one-minute, okay, yes. And then if the man keeps going on, the other men lose respect for men.

So men realize that if they express their fears to women, women will potentially lose respect for them. They realize that no woman can love a man that she doesn’t respect, so why express your feelings of vulnerability to a woman? And why express your feelings of vulnerability to men? Because they’ll lose respect for you, so you better keep your feelings to yourself. And if you have a lot of feelings, you start drinking, or the feelings pile up and pile up, and you come out with this volcano of anger that’s been pent up. And so it’s a very dangerous period for men to be isolated during the pandemic and in general.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, and it’s very interesting because everything you’re talking about, you know, go back a few generations, and it’s just kind of much less of an issue, right? Men weren’t thinking about their vulnerabilities so much. Do I have that right?

Mr. Farrell:
Yes, but this doesn’t mean the process it took to make a man a hero is the exact opposite of the process it takes to make a man healthy. The process it took to make a man a hero meant repressing your feelings because if you expressed your feelings to your sergeant in the army, you were a squeaky wheel. And the war machine does not run well considering everybody’s feelings and fears. It runs well by people going out there and doing what they need to do, repressing their feelings and being willing to die.

Don’t make too close friends with somebody else because if you start really caring about a brother, the fear is that you’ll lose that brother, you’ll be holding him in his arms while he’s killed and you’ll experience enormous amounts of trauma. So the way we created men to be our protectors and be willing to kill and be killed was to make them feel like they were more of a man when they didn’t express their feelings of vulnerability. When they didn’t say to their sergeant, oh, officer, that comment was anti-Semitic and I’m Jewish. Could you please refrain from making anti-Semitic comments? The response of the sergeant would be, do 30 push-ups and shut your mouth.

Mr. Jekielek:
When you’re not in a time of wartime, that changes. But of course, that itself could change.

Mr. Farrell:
When you’re not in part of a wartime, oftentimes a higher percentage of boys will be raised without such a strong mandate. Historically speaking, every generation’s had its war and large numbers of men were drawn into that war and they were considered heroes when they when they weren’t were in that war today we have smaller numbers of men who are at have to go to war and that’s combined with 40 percent of women who have children have children without being married and then a very high percentage of people who are married divorce and those children are often left without father involvement, which has a negative impact on our daughters, but it also has a more negative impact proportionally on boys.

Mr. Jekielek:
So basically there’s kind of two elements. There’s a change in the male role, right? And that itself needs some kind of mitigation, right? And the other thing is this fatherlessness crisis. And the combination of these things is the boy crisis. Do I have that right?

Mr. Farrell:
That’s very right on. In the old days, men had two senses of purpose. You were willing to be disposable in war or you were willing to be disposable in the workplace. To this day, 93 percent of the deaths in the workplace are deaths to men. And so that still is pretty much an important variable. But so to a large degree, men’s most traditional sense of purpose has experienced because of the need for fewer men to fight in war, men have experienced a purpose void. And so that purpose void has left men feeling like, what do I do? What’s my role? And that leaves a lot of men not knowing the answer to that.

Now, there are potentially good answers to that. For example, high schools could have a lot more vocational training so that boys would have an alternative role. But in fact, what schools have done is cut back on vocational training, not increase it. Second, there is a need for more recess. The CDC finds that once you do a certain amount of homework, the amount of time that you’re physically active, each minute spent being physically active, once you’ve done a certain amount of homework, is more productive to doing homework better than time spent focused just on the homework.

This isn’t true for girls and boys, but it’s especially true for boys. Boys have to have more of their physical outlet taken care of, but in schools, they’ve often cut back on recess, and then within the framework of recess, they say, oh, no dodgeball like you used to do. No tagging each other too hard, otherwise you’re bullying, and so on. And so if you tease too roughly, that’s not good either. And so a lot of things that are boy-style playing have also been minimized on the playground.

No one understood the value of boy-style playing. All these things are not being considered by schools. When it used to be that most school teachers were female and it wasn’t so bad. What I found when I did the research for the boy crisis is that if a boy grows up with an involved father and an involved mother and goes to a school with mostly female teachers, not a big problem.

But if a boy grows up without dad involvement, or what I call dad-deprived, and goes from a dad-deprived home environment into a male-deprived school, then he often feels like there’s no real male role model for him.
And so the male role models become a gang that invites him to be part of their family. Without the dad’s involvement, he doesn’t have the boundary enforcement, he doesn’t have the postponed gratification, the single biggest predictor of success. And so he’s often a failure to launch.
He’s flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s or someplace, not making much money, and some other guy is out there with a brand new car picking up the girls. And so he says, well I can, if I had more money I could do that. So he’s offered an opportunity to deal drugs. And this becomes extremely tempting because without dealing drugs, he doesn’t get the money.

Without the money, he doesn’t get the car. Without the car, he doesn’t get the girl. So he feels. And so that’s an example of what’s been happening lately for many boys who are dad-deprived at home. Of course, there’s this other dimension, which is the movement for equality of women.

Mr. Jekielek:
You yourself have described yourself as a feminist. And then also the movement to equality possibly turning into something else. How does that fit in?

Mr. Farrell:
Yes. So at the beginning of my career, I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City. I suppose I was the world’s leading male feminist, and spoke all around the world on the importance of feminist issues. And that was the period of time when there was a lot of anger toward men, even among the early feminists and there was a lot of put down of the nuclear family even among the early feminists.
But by and large I felt the positive part of feminism at the beginning was saying something like, I am a woman, I am strong and trying to empower women.

Today a lot of feminism has moved increasingly from I am woman, I am strong to I am woman, I’ve been wronged #MeToo. Here’s a thousand ways that I’ve been wronged. And I’m actually a supporter of #MeToo, but I want #MeToo not to be a monologue, I want it to be a dialogue. Both girls and boys, women and men, have had tough experiences. There are many, many fathers that have lost their children in court battles that were very much oriented toward the tender years doctrine. And if other things are at all equal and a woman says something, she’s more likely to be believed.

We’re in a situation where the woman has the right to the children and the man has to fight for children. And that’s part of the #MeToo for fathers, for men. There’s a reason that men are killing themselves much more frequently. We’re not asking why. We say it’s mental health in a sort of broad sense, but it’s something much more specific than mental health in a broad sense.

It’s something that happens with men oftentimes when they get married and they may, and they have their, and especially when they have their first child. When a man has his first child, what he often realizes is, you know, being an elementary school teacher was very fulfilling. It was exactly what he loved. He loved kids, but it didn’t pay a lot. So he has to become a principal or a superintendent of schools. And he hates administration.
So he gives up love oftentimes, what he loves to do, for what he feels he needs to do so he can give his children opportunities that he never had. But then he’s more likely to be the principal or the superintendent of schools.
And what did we as feminists say? We said that’s male privilege.

Well, it’s not male privilege to give up doing what you love to do to earn more money so somebody else can benefit, so you can die earlier. That’s not power. That’s not privilege. And as I started forming men’s groups, I started hearing these stories from man after man. I was a musician. I wanted to be the next John Lennon. I really wanted to. I had a wonderful small amount of gigs coming on, but there weren’t enough to support me and children, they were just barely enough to support myself.

They were artists, writers, actors, the same story. So I started seeing in my men’s groups man after man who had this fulfilling job until the first child came and then he felt he needed to give up the luxury occupation. The more fulfilling your occupation is, the more people want to have it. The more people that want to have it, the more the demand is in relation to the supply.

Mr. Jekielek:
It also strikes me that it’s a noble thing to do.

Mr. Farrell:
It’s absolutely a noble thing to do. And men live off of being thought of as being that, oh, this man is an honorable man. He’s a noble man. But what we as feminists were doing, I’m afraid, is we were then taking that man’s increased status as principal or superintendent of schools and saying, ah, see, even in the school system where there’s a majority of women, when it comes to the principals and the superintendents, the men have the control, the men have the power was about forfeiting control and forfeiting privilege
in order to do something that was as noble as giving their children better lives than they have and giving their wives good homes and good neighborhoods with good schools.

Mr. Jekielek:
What strikes me with all of this, ultimately, we’re talking about a kind of a shift in the social structure, really, right, that’s creating this, I don’t know, problem or lack of clarity, lack of sense of purpose, which is exactly what happened during the pandemic. Whatever changes in social structure existed were, you know, kind of put into overdrive in a sense as people, you know, as we had these shelter in place policies and, you know, different all sorts of businesses dying out and everything else. in the San Francisco area and in the LA area haven’t even come back to school since the school closures. I mean, in LA, it’s some astronomical amount, right? I mean, this is kind of like a dramatic shift.

SMr. Farrell:
Yes, absolutely. To a large degree, and this is not the only answer, to a large degree, the ones that don’t come back are either the ones that are dad-deprived, usually dad-deprived, or dads that start parenting the way moms parents. Normally speaking, when you have both parents involved, on average, and there’s some people that are the reverse of this, on average, moms will say, you know, sweetie, get to bed at a certain time.

But the studies show us that moms set earlier bedtimes when they’re the primary caretaker. Dads set later bedtimes. So that would sound on the surface that dads are more lenient. But when the measurements occur as to when children actually get to bed, they find that children being supervised by dads get to bed sooner than children being supervised by moms.

Why? Because moms tend to set bedtimes a little bit earlier, like 8.30, let’s say, and then the child comes at 8.30 and says, oh, mom, you know, I didn’t do my homework. And mom says, well, you could have done your
homework before. You had plenty of time to do it. You were playing that video game instead. But okay, I definitely don’t want you to go into school without having done your homework. So you go ahead and do your homework. And when you’re finished, let me know.

And then half-an-hour later, maybe the kid finishes and says, oh, I finished my homework. Can you read to me? Well, you know, it’s already a half hour past your bedtime, but okay, I’ll read to you, but since you got your homework done. Second story, third story, and then mom is very proud of herself, maybe after the second story, she puts her foot down and says, okay, that’s enough, but now it’s 9.30.

Whereas the dad is more likely to say the first time, he’ll say a lot of what mom just did. He’ll give a warning and say, you need to do your homework during this period of time that you have free, not come to me at the last minute but if and if you do that again you will go to school without your homework done. That’s your responsibility, got it? Okay dad I got it.

But dad is likely to enforce that when the child procrastinates it doesn’t do the homework and dad will is much more likely to say on average that you know I gave you the warning before now you’ve you’ve done it again so you’re going to have to go into school tomorrow without doing your homework or get up earlier and do your homework. They will say Mommy doesn’t make me do that. You know, sorry. I’m not mommy—get to bed.

The studies show that the children being supervised by the dad actually get to bed earlier. It’s the difference between the boundary setting that moms do more frequently and the boundary enforcement that dads do more frequently. And many people don’t even know the difference between boundary setting and boundary enforcement, but it’s crucial.

Because moms will be more likely to say you get to bed at 8.30, but then when the child can manipulate a better deal getting to bed at 9.30, the child not only doesn’t get as much sleep, that’s the secondary issue, the child ends up not respecting the mother for what she says, as opposed to dad says, you’ve got to get to bed by nine o’clock, and if you don’t do your homework by such and such a time, that’s your problem. The child ends up respecting what the dad says.

Also what happens is the child ends up experiencing postponed gratification when the dad is involved in a typical traditional dad mode. That is the child realizes it wants to play that video game but if it plays that video game it won’t get to be able to do the homework, it will fail in school or something it’ll be deprived of something else and dad’s going to enforce that.

When boundaries are enforced it requires the child to postpone gratification from doing what she or he wants to do and do instead what needs to be done. Postponed gratification is the single biggest predictor of success or failure in life. And postponed gratification comes from a parent who’s good not at boundary setting, but at boundary enforcement.

Mr. Jekielek:
When I think about our society writ large, I see a lot of lack of boundary enforcement, let’s say. I don’t think it’s just around boys. So that’s interesting. That might be an impact.

Mr. Farrell:
Yes, the wealthier people are, the more they are not worried about survival, the more they are likely to be more lenient with their children and give them what they want to have and want to do as opposed to what they have to do to survive. When survival is the controlling issue, parents are much more likely to teach their children what they need to do to survive. The emphasis being on the word need to do and survive. When you have plenty, you can give more and be more generous, but then your children don’t become as resilient.

Mr. Jekielek:
It reminds me of that saying, which I keep seeing popping up in my social media feeds. Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. So what do we do here?

Mr. Farrell:
First of all, it’s helpful to understand history and understand that pattern and understand both for fathers and mothers, there are many fathers that are not as good at boundary enforcement as they used to be. And especially if they’re in fear of conflict with their wives, they just back off. And what they don’t learn is how to share what the value of postponed gratification is with their wife, and they don’t learn the core thing that I teach in the Role Mate to Soul Mate book, which is about checks and balance parenting, how to give the children the best of their father and the best of what the mother has to offer.

Mr. Jekielek:
The bottom line is you kind of want strong men. I mean, ultimately, this is what you’re telling me here, right? And how that manifests might be different. And the challenge is there’s a lot of men that aren’t strong.
Is that right? Am I reading that right?

Mr. Farrell:
No, I’d put it a little bit differently. You want strong men who are also sensitive and caring and can listen effectively and are willing to go to couples communication workshops and read things on relationships and be connected to their wives because the mothers of today don’t need big muscle building men who are willing to die as much as they used to. And now that women today can earn their own money, they’re looking for men less for money and more for some combination of financial independence and competence combined with the ability to listen, the ability to hear her, the ability to be able to express feelings not just to her women friends but be, you know, I can’t even bring this up to my husband. They want a husband. They are able to demand a husband who is more than just a breadwinner because they’re taking care of the breadwinning to a greater degree.

Mr. Jekielek:
So a different kind of strength. I mean really that’s what we’re talking about. But that’s different from weakness.

Mr. Farrell:
Yes, we are definitely talking about a more multifaceted type of strength where men have the best of heroic intelligence and health intelligence.

Mr. Jekielek:
But our society, you’re telling me it’s kind of wired in a different way. It’s kind of basically creating weaker men, which is, you know, it creates a kind of a vicious cycle. That’s how I hear it.

Mr. Farrell:
We haven’t really dealt with how we’ve spent 50 years now, half a century, focused on women and women’s issues and how, you know, whatever combination of being full-time mother, full-time workers, part-time mother. When men and women get married and the first time they become pregnant, oftentimes they’ll discuss at a dinner party, you know, what do I, the woman, want to do? Do I want to be full-time involved with my career like I’ve been? Do I want to be full-time involved with the children or do I want to do some combination of both? So that’s a set of three options.

The man also says, well, you know, I have three options too. Option one is I can work full time. Option two is I can work full time. Option three is I can work full time. And so women, rather than saying, I am a woman who wants to be a have-it-all woman, which means that I want to have a top notch career, I want to have children, I want to have a happy marriage, I want to have successfully raised children. So what type of man should I look for? Maybe if I really focused on my work, I should look for the type of man who is oriented toward being a nurturer-connector rather than just a provider-protector. But women very rarely marry that type of man.

If they see a man who’s really a sweet, caring, loving man who’s this kindergarten teacher and could be a great father, her women friends say to him, but how much does he earn? You’re a top-notch executive. You’re marrying a kindergarten teacher. And the woman becomes discouraged from that. And there’s a biological component to it.

Women have not been biologically programmed to marry men who earn less than they and will continue earning less than they and women haven’t been trained to value the kind that nurturer connector side of men any more than men themselves have been trained to value that so we’re in this transition now but we’ve spent a half century parsing and taking care of all the different types of women to please them and to make them more effective in the world but we haven’t done, we haven’t paid attention to the boy crisis, to men, to men’s issues. And so the result of that is that we have both a boy crisis and a man crisis.

Mr. Jekielek:
If things change dramatically and suddenly there is war upon us, all this goes out the window.

Mr. Farrell:
You’re absolutely right. The Vikings are often considered the most vicious, cruel war makers, obviously. That’s arguable. They invaded England and just messed it up in major ways. But the war is over. The following generation, many of them married some of the women in England that previously had been killing the families and became a wonderful nurturer-connector type of man, so the reports go. Margaret Mead said that men have to be adaptable and respond to what the culture needs. You need to go out and fight. Sorry, we need all men, as Ukraine has said. Every man in the Ukraine from 18 to 60 has to go to war. All of the women,
it’s up to you.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t be.

Mr. Farrell:
It is hard to imagine how it wouldn’t be, but it is.

Mr. Jekielek:
Because women are the birth givers, right? Ultimately, which is such a critically important part of any society, right?

Mr. Farrell:
It is. And it’s also more, I think, another dimension to that that isn’t being considered. There’s no real reason why at the age of 18, when men register for the draft, that everybody shouldn’t register for some type of service. So to be able to contribute to the country in many ways, as many ways of contributing to the Some men are much more prone to go out there in the trenches and kill. Some men are much more prone to be wonderful nurses and caretakers.

The great majority of women are not oriented toward going out into the trenches and being killed. But there’s many, many roles that need to be served in wartime. And we don’t require anything from the women in the United States.at the age of 18, men must register for the draft, period. But women don’t need to register for anything. And that’s something that hasn’t even been talked about.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to talk a little bit more about communication. And I think, you know, of course, the book focuses on couples communication. This is something you’ve been doing for decades, and from what I hear very effectively. But let’s talk about communication a bit more. How can some of these principles be applied in a broader sense? Right now, we’re living in a society where it’s difficult to communicate with people, for example, a different political orientation, even when you have reality on your side, right? You’re like, how can this person believe these crazy things? A lot of people are thinking exactly this, whatever your orientation is, something like that, right? So there’s a lot of this lack of communication, sometimes even in couples, even that exact thing, right? So what do we do here?

Mr. Farrell:
So what I outlined in Role Mate to Soul Mate is a way that we can hear people that we love, that we have the opposite political opinions of. And almost every family that has more than eight or nine people in it is experiencing this. I’m going for Thanksgiving. I will be meeting with my family. I’m going for Christmas or Hanukkah. I will be meeting with my family. What’s my desire? We all want to love each other more. We all want to be a stronger support system.

But so-and-so believes in Trump and so-and-so believes in Kamala Harris. And how can I possibly even tolerate dealing with that awful way of looking at the world with those types of values. So what I’ve found does work and what I do in the Role Mate to Soul Mate workshops is the first thing that I ask people to do is to use alone power. That is, you don’t ask the other person to hear you. You volunteer. You say, you know, Jim or Jane, you know, I’ve been, I know in the past we’ve had sort of real disagreements and fights about these things.

And we have two options here. One is we can completely not discuss religion or politics, but that’s kind of a shame because religion and politics are about values. And if I really love you and care for you, I really want to know your values and be able to respect your values. And so let me use what I call a lone power to volunteer to do this for you. If at the end you want to also do this for me, that would be terrific, but I’m not going to put that on you as a necessity.

So you volunteer to be able to listen to them alone. Now, what do you do? How do you start that listening process? Let’s say you’re brother and sister that have come from different political perspectives. The next step is you spend some time appreciating that person. So when you know, when you grew up, my sister, our brother, I really respected the fact that, you know, you stood up and so what you’re doing here is appreciating.

Before you start talking about the differences in politics, you appreciate them as a person, because when somebody feels appreciated as a person, they don’t feel as heavy a burden to feel that you’re not appreciating their politics is not appreciating them. So you first want to make it clear that you’re appreciating them. And you don’t just appreciate them in generalities. I teach people in the Role Mate to Soul Mate book how to appreciate it with five levels of specificity and with very clear examples.

So you might say to your brother, yeah, I remember when we had dinner discussions and you would not be afraid to speak up and disagree with dad. And I so admired that because when dad said something, I just sort of shrank if I disagreed and didn’t say anything. But you spoke up and you had the courage to do that. And then at school, you had the courage to do that. And you did that without, and people rejected you and some people ostracized you, but you were resilient. I always admired that about you.

So you’re not just appreciating them and saying, you know, I’ve always liked you when you were, I’ve always appreciated you when we grew up. Vague. But you’re giving a concrete example. You’re remembering something that you’ve experienced somewhat together. You’re making it very clear what you appreciated, your resilience, your ability to speak up, your courage, and so on. So that person is feeling, all right, you know, I feel, you know, We may disagree, but I’m really feeling sort of appreciated here. Yes, go ahead.

Mr. Jekielek:
I remember reading somewhere and maybe even you were involved in this research. I’d love to know, but apparently, you know, eye rolling, right, is a huge predictor of the death of a relationship because it’s sort of it’s kind of contempt right for someone’s ideas even if it’s not intended that way that’s how that that’s how it comes across right one is this is the opposite the reason I’m thinking about that is what you’re describing is the opposite you’re making someone understands no I actually value you whatever you think I don’t care what you think, I value you, right?

Mr. Farrell:
Yes, and then you search for the virtue in what the person believes. Almost everything that we disagree with started out with the other person having a good intent of virtue. And that virtue took the virtue train so far it went into vice land, if you will. Every virtue taken to its extreme becomes a vice. So what you and your brother or sister are arguing about is the vice that you see. But go back to their original intent and find that virtue.

So let’s say somebody disagrees on the feminist issue. One person feels that somebody is an ardent feminist and anti-male, and the other person feels that they’re, you know, the only way to look at the world through a feminist lens. So let’s say you’re the anti-feminist, and you say to the person, “‘Okay, what’s the virtue in feminism? Okay, I do remember I want my daughter to be able to do whatever she wants to do.

When I grew up, girls oftentimes didn’t think that they could do whatever they wanted to do. And my wife is doing something that the generation before would never have thought of. Oh, okay, I can see that one of the contributions of feminism is that my wife and my daughter are able to live a life more fully than they might have been before feminism erupted. And so instead of going to feminism is now part of saying that women are good and men are bad, it talks about the patriarchy and every man is part of the patriarchy that made rules to benefit men at the expense of women and cancel cultures in every college and DEI excludes white males and so on and going on about the vice, go back to the virtue of where feminism in its best portions was because that’s what your brother or sister is focusing on, the virtue.
And when she or he hears that you see the virtue rather than just arguing about the vice, they feel like, okay, at least I see that you get the virtue inside of me. And then you go to the areas of what the two of you have in common. What does the brother and sister at that Thanksgiving dinner have in common? Neither one is apathetic. They both care.

What’s a democracy made of? It’s made of people who are not apathetic, who care. Without people who care and without people who are involved, there is no democracy. So this is what we have in common. We’re disagreeing so much because we both care so much. That allows your sister or brother or whatever to feel more like, oh, well, I do see we have this in common. And then the next thing is by far and away caring and sharing practice. So it is biologically very challenging to hear personal criticism, and political criticism feels like personal criticism, without becoming defensive.

Because historically, if somebody had a different political opinion or was criticizing you personally, they were a potential enemy. And so therefore, it was functional to get up your defenses in order to kill the enemy before the enemy killed you, or just kill the enemy before the enemy kills you. And so though that was functional for survival, it’s just dysfunctional for love. And so, but if we’re going to get away from something that has that type of history, that type of deep insight of our biology, how are we going to do it?

And that was the big, that was trying to discover the answer to that question was the primary motivation for writing Role Mate to Soul Mate. What I experimented with for 30 years, meaning with everything I did in the workshop, I had to follow up with phone calls about two months later and ask, how did that work? What worked? What didn’t work?

And what I found worked the most was setting aside two hours a week that I call a caring and sharing practice. And before you do the practice, you share two specific, two types of specific appreciations of your partner. When you end the practice, you do two more appreciations of your partner. You both do this for each other. But in between, you’re allowed to share one concern that your partner will experience, think of it as a criticism. But before you experience that one concern, you meditate into a series of mindsets.

So you say out loud to your partner, for example, what I call the love guarantee, which is the first mind, one of the mindsets. And you say, if I provide a safe environment for you for you to say whatever you want to say in whatever way you want to say it, even if I completely disagree with that picture, even if you say it sarcastically, when I provide a safe environment for that, you will not feel you’re walking on eggshells. You’ll feel secure with me. When you feel secure with me, you’ll feel more loved by me, more safe with me.

When you feel more loved and safe with me, you’ll feel more love for me. So even as I am experiencing that criticism, I’m realizing that the angrier they are, the more shocked they will be that I provide that safe environment. At the end of that process, they will feel, my goodness, I don’t have to walk on eggshells. I can really take this once a week and begin to share what I really feel.

I’ll give you one more mindset. I have every couple in the room sit back to back. And on a piece of paper, they write, if you were about to be killed by, let’s say, drowning or a car accident, and I knew with 100 percent certainty that you would be killed, except if I interfered, and I knew with 100 percent certainty that I could save your life, but I would have a 50 percent chance of losing my own life in the process. Would I do it?

I tell them to not consider it, make believe you don’t have children, so that’s not a factor. And so then I ask them to write down the answer, yes, no, or uncertain. All the men write that down. All the women write that down. And gay couples, each partner writes that down. And then I have them read out the findings without seeing their partner’s choice. About 90 percent of men say that they would be willing to take a 50 percent chance of dying for their partner in order to save their partner’s life. About 80 percent of the women say the same thing. So the first mindset is, if I would die for you, well, the least I can do is listen to you. It puts listening to your partner’s feelings in perspective.

Mr. Jekielek:
This whole way of thinking strikes me as a kind of feminine way of thinking. Would you agree with that or not?

Mr. Farrell:
The truth is that both women and men have an equal amount of problems being criticized. When women are criticized, it violates their feeling that my husband is my protector. When men are criticized, it violates their feeling of like, I intuitively know that when I’m criticized by a woman, that means she doesn’t respect me in this way. And I know that no woman who doesn’t respect me can really love me. So it’s really a problem that in gay couples, gay females, gay males, they all say they have, everybody acknowledges having this problem.

Mr. Jekielek:
What you’re describing makes sense to me, but I’m thinking about the man. I can imagine the wife telling men, hey, I want to do this couples workshop with Warren Farrell. And he’s like, what are you talking about?

Mr. Farrell:
Yes. Very good question and very good point and also accurate. I remember one couple saying to me, they arrived at Esalen, which is one of the places in Big Sur that I teach. The woman says, well, you’re part of this workshop, aren’t you? The woman at the gate and letting people in says you’re part of the Warren Farrell workshop right. The husband goes, wait a minute, you told me Esalen was a spa. So there’s a lot of truth
to that.

But more frequently the women drag the men there than the other way around but it’s worth it basically well what happens is that the men don’t want to go to a workshop like this because their experience of the past is when they told a woman the truth and she interpreted it as criticism, she withdrew sexually. She withdrew emotionally. She was angry. She held it in. She remembered it. She talked to her female friends about it. And they all talked about how bad he was. And so many men have sworn off being honest to women.

But when a man feels heard, he has the same experience that a woman has when she feels really heard and seen. It’s like, oh my god, there is a way of doing this. And the reason I created this Role Mate to Soul Mate workshop was because I had never seen this happen effectively before. People got the wisdom of everything I said in the workshop, they just didn’t do the practice.

And when either a woman or man not only feels like prepared to see and hear but then says to their partner the next things that I require what I heard you say is and then after she or he finishes saying what I heard you say is asking the partner did I distort anything and when the partner says, yes you distorted this, not arguing, but keeping working at it until the person who was talking feels completely heard and not distorted. Did I miss anything?

And then the same pattern repeats. Do you want to add anything? And then if you want to add anything, go back to listening in that same way. When that process is finished, it is long. It is laborious at first when you’re first learning it. And at the, but at the end of the process, so many couples that had already filed for divorce said that they were going to their lawyer on Monday and withdrawing the following.

This serves women, men, heterosexual couples, and gay couples equally as effectively. There’s no one that is free from that feeling. Then after that process finishes, I ask people to do two more appreciations, and then I make it clear that everything you’ve learned in this workshop, everything you learned from reading the book, none of it will be that effective unless you practice it again and again, because your brain has to change.

Mr. Jekielek:
Warren, a final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Farrell:
What intrigued me about Role Mate to Soul Mate was that there is even something is having dad and mom being able to communicate in such a way that no matter what their issue is, that they each felt heard and seen by the other one, and that the children could pick up the fact that there was a disagreement and dad and mom did this for each other, and there was a way of solving the problem and both hearing and seeing each other, even if they still disagreed on what the outcome is.

Yes, dad said it was okay to climb the tree. Mom said it wasn’t, but dad heard the reasons mom didn’t want me to do it. Mom heard the reasons that dad did, and together they came to a compromise that I could climb the tree to a certain degree. Dad had to be underneath the tree to protect me. But dad’s point is that when you climb that tree, your IQ actually increases as you learn how to negotiate the difference between what’s safe and what’s risk-taking. And so knowing what the value of dad parenting is and the value of mom parenting is, and then being able to negotiate, it’s about the best role model you can ever give your children.

Mr. Jekielek:
Warren Farrell, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Farrell:
It’s a pleasure to be interviewed and talk with you again. As I said before, you just ask wonderful questions and you listen so caringly.