TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Hey Guys! Marry A Waitress Not A Lawyer
Date: 02/09/26 Length: 00:41:11
Daniel Lapin 0:04
Greetings, Happy Warriors and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, where I your rabbi, I reveal how the world really works. And one of the most valuable aspects of how the world really works is that it rewards the Happy Warrior. And so when I greet you all as Happy Warriors, it's a very real appellation. It does mean something. What is a Happy Warrior? A Happy Warrior recognizes that life is a challenge for everybody, and at its most basic, it's a challenge because the good Lord created a world with entropy built into it, and entropy is what explains why it is that a beautifully kept God, once neglected, will turn into a wild jungle, but no matter how long you wait, a wild jungle never turns into a beautiful garden. A car that's neglected and whose upkeep is overlooked will turn into a ruin. But no matter how long you wait, a ruin will not turn into a car, a home that isn't maintained starts going downhill. Now, these things are so obvious because we live with them every day. We're so accustomed to them, we don't realize that it actually is a feature built into our world. Things deteriorate. They move away from the state of order. And so it's natural for us, human beings, to try and bring about a condition of order, a garden instead of a jungle, a farm instead of a swamp, a home instead of a cave. And what's more is that women are more driven than men to create a state of order. Again, almost everybody knows this, that a man is much more comfortable living in a state of chaos, a state of disorder, messy things all over the place. Women much less comfortable that wanting to tidy, wanting to create. And so one of the first things that people notice when their male friends get married is that their living conditions totally change because their wives don't like living in clutter and in mess. And so that is an aspect of the civilizing impact that women have on men. Women are created in such a way that they are bothered by mess. But most men not like that. Most men dishes piled up in the sink, no problem. Most women, that is a problem and so that is an interesting aspect, worthwhile realizing a fundamental difference between men and women in terms of combating entropy. Women are attuned to combating entropy. Men have to almost be encouraged to combat entropy, and how we encourage our living conditions change dramatically when we set ourselves to defeat entropy. And so the Happy Warrior is number one, a warrior because he recognizes that dealing with life on a day to day basis is a fight. You are a warrior, whether it is building and maintaining your family, building and maintaining and growing your finances, your social relationships, which is to say, your friendships, your fitness, taking care of your own body is a struggle against entropy. Everybody knows that the natural state of a body, the default, is to put on weight and lose muscle mass, and we work at trying to avoid that happening. And then finally, the area of faith. Faith doesn't just happen. You don't wake up one day feeling faith. You have to work at it, and like everything else, in the same way, you don't, all of a sudden find that your finances are prospering, you know, unless you won an inheritance or a lottery, but ordinarily, you make your finances grow well, in the same way, you have to make your faith grow. It is a feature of life. Having faith is an advantage in your financial life. Having faith is an advantage in your family life, having faith is an advantage in community. Maintaining your fitness. Having faith is an advantage in building your social life, your friendship. So all of these things interact and the happy part of it is that we're not sullen and resentful about the fact that life is a battle. We walk with a perceptible bounce in our step. We walk with a debonair smile on our faces because we are grateful and excited and passionate and positive about defeating entropy, about building the five aspects of our lives we are fighting joyfully. We are indeed Happy Warriors, and the way we do that is indeed focusing on the five F's, no matter what's going on in politics, no matter what's going on in international economics, it doesn't matter, no matter what's going on anywhere and everywhere, your 5f remain your paramount concern for a happy, successful and fulfilling life, family life, that is all relationships that stem from male female connection, cousins, aunts, uncles and indeed, your own spouse. The can all the relationships that have to do with finance, not only your customers and your clients, not only your boss and your co workers, but also your assets, your relationship with your money, your relationship with your possessions and your various investments. Yeah, that's all part of it. And so that's family and finance. Friendships are all those relationships that are neither financial nor family in nature. So political relationships and all kinds of relationships, neither financial nor sexual, are or sexual in nature. Not that every sexual, not every family relationship is sexual, obviously, but family relationships flow from the fact that male and female have connected and then there's your relationship with all things intangible, all things spiritual, part of which is your relationship to God, and that's under faith. And then, of course, your relationship with your own body fitness. And so we work on all of those things and part of my work, when I work with people, it's usually in the areas of how these things interact with one another. A 38 year old young man with a fantastic business concept, with every reason why it should move forward, and it's not getting anywhere. Well, it turns out he has no family relationship. It turns out that he works out of his home. It turns out he does most of his shopping online. His groceries get delivered to his door, and so does everything else. And it didn't take long before we discovered in conversation that he was meeting very, very few people face to face in real human encounters during the course of a week. And he was tending to put it off, you know, as soon as my app gets onto the App Store, I'll have time to socialize. And he couldn't figure out, you know, what was going wrong, why it wasn't progressing anyway, all of these 5f do interact and interplay with one another. A guy doesn't always realize that what's holding him up in business and finance is a
Daniel Lapin 8:57
poor relationship with his wife, and he doesn't know how to handle her bouts of anger about her bouts of emotional upheaval. He just he isn't he isn't equipped to deal with it, because he doesn't realize that male and female are completely different, and absolutely nothing in his education or in his background prepared him to understand that if a male has, you know, let's say, a business partner or a friend has a an emotional meltdown, that's dealt with one way, but if your wife has an emotional meltdown, well, that's dealt with in an entirely different way. And all of these things do have to be understood and do have to be worked with. So marriage obviously very important, because marriage and its results provide the longest, lasting and most powerful areas of joy and fulfill. And in life, but in recent years, it's become much more difficult, particularly men. For a large part of women still realize that they would like marriage, but part of their problem is and I can't tell you how many times I've had to work with women on this particular problem. They've been living with a man for three years, waiting for him to propose and waiting for them to get married and waiting to start a family, and he just doesn't get around to doing it and that's not clearly understood. Women do tend to want to get married, although they are also finding themselves frustrated with the process and with the kind of marriage they are likely to end up with men, the fear is different. The fear is they depend on false statistics on the failure of marriage. And so they assume that there is an even likelihood of a marriage failing, and they then assume that courts will be unfair towards them when it comes to children and when it comes to money. And so they also tend to say to themselves, look, you know who needs us? And so large numbers of people are immersed in circumstances of loneliness that they don't see a way out of. But there is, and that's really very much a focus of the sort of coaching I do with people. Again, it's only a very few people I can work with, but that is the the main concern. There is a way out of this for both men and for women. And I realized that I wanted to tell you that. Well, let me put it this way, perhaps what will be most useful is if I say here is good marriage advice for young men looking to get married, the advice is, marry a nurse or a kindergarten teacher or a waitress. Do not marry a lawyer or an investment banker or a doctor. Yeah, that's right. Why am I saying that? Well, the first thing I want to do before I tell you why I'm saying that is I want to also invert that and tell women, listen. You got to decide what you want to do with yourself, and if your goal, if somebody says to you, so, what is your goal? And your answer is only a career type answer. I want to become a lawyer. I want to become an investment banker. I want to become a doctor, then you have to know that you are taking a serious slice out of your likelihood for happiness in life, because somehow or another, you have been persuaded by the culture. And heaven knows, there are enough culprits in the culture you've been persuaded that the results of your quest will be happiness, that you will feel fulfilled when you achieve some degree and some measure of career success, happy. Happens all the time. Say to young women, women in high school, so what are your goals? Well, I want to school. I want to finish school and get into a good college, and then I want to, you know, whatever it is, it's very rare, and it's generally only when I speak to religious young women, either Jewish or Christian, where the response is that, well, my, you know, my main goal is family. I want to be married and I want to have children, and I want to build a family, and, you know, until that happens, I'd like to do this or that, and generally this or that is not to become an investment banker or become an international lawyer, but it's generally seeking a field in which I can make a living, but it can function in a subservient role to my primary interest, which is being a wife and being a mother. And of course, they are all concerned. I do want to be a wife and a mother, they tell me, but they are worried. Where are the men? Boys? Are plenty. No shortage of boys, but where, in fact, are the men? And so why do I give this advice? Why do I say. Do men seek out a lovely girl who is, as I say, not career driven, who has a perfectly adequate, average, ordinary type of job, not somebody who, and you don't understand the difference between a career and a job, a job is in order that I can live a career is my life. Everything is subservient to my career. My job is subservient to my life, and that's the decision. But why am I suggesting this? And in order to explain that, I have to start off with another question, and that is because, well, the question I've got to ask you, really is, Why are men bigger than women? There are two reasons from an evolutionary biology perspective. One is that men evolved to be bigger because in the eternal fight for the best women, the biggest men won, and so there was a natural selection preference that tended to breed for physical size in men. That's one explanation from an evolutionary biology perspective. Another one is that, because of the female hormone estrogen, this is not something I know the words, but I don't really understand it, but the words are that women's bones and parts of their body fuse earlier than men do, so men continue growing for longer, whereas women's height becomes fixed earlier. Those are the words don't really understand it, but I don't worry about not understanding it because I don't think that those are the real reasons. And I'm saying that because if the reason for larger men being noticeably larger than women was truly a biologically rooted phenomenon, then I would expect to find it in if not all mammals, the overwhelming majority of mammals. But that isn't true. Male mammals are bigger than female mammals in less than 50% of the mammalian species, and in the other half, little more than half, they're either the same size, like horses, for instance, you can't tell from the size of a horse if it's male or female, and in many species, the female is larger than the male. And so if there really was a evolutionary advantage, I would have assumed it would apply to all extant mammalian species. No, I have another reason for that. I have a reason based on the Torah and what, in other words, the Hebrew Scripture and ancient Jewish wisdom understanding, or the lens through which the Torah is viewed, and that explanation is a little bit different, and that is that both women and men are happier when the woman looks up to the man.
Daniel Lapin 18:31
Yeah, it seems pretty basic, doesn't it? I mean, really, is it that fundamental? I mean, are you telling me that human beings are of different sizes, men and women. Yeah, I'm not saying it's an evolutionary thing. I'm saying that's how God created us. It fits in that both men and women like it. When the woman is looking a woman likes to look up at her man, both literally and figuratively, and a man likes to see his woman look up at him, that that is a reality. Now you think, is that really how all this works and the answer is, yeah, there's a lot of areas in which Biological Indicators hint at a spiritual veracity. I'll give you an example. Most obviously is the fact that women tend to be more circumspect about their bodies, right? Women tend to want to be covered, and even women who are wearing provocative and skimpy outfits will still pull down the hem of their dress. If they're wearing a dress that on a windy day, and it tends to blow women will hold on, or women sit on a chair and a short dress rides up far up their thighs, and women will tend to. Pull it at again. That sort of thing is not male behavior. That is female behavior. You find that in clothing catalogs, women's clothing will sometimes say, modesty panel available, or on the side, it'll, you know, an extra item. What's a modesty panel? Well, if, if something reveals more neckline than they feel, all women will be comfortable with you can fill it in the this dress is sheer wear with her shell. These sort of things don't happen with men's clothing. The word modesty never shows up in a man's clothing catalog. It's just not there. Well, this reality is hinted at very strongly by the presence of the masculine part of a man's body is very visible, extremely visible, and the more intensely involved he is in masculinity, if I can put it that way, the more juttingly Obvious his masculinity becomes. Whereas with a woman, it's all hidden. Nothing is shown, nothing is seen. And that is a physical, biological reflection of a spiritual reality. I'll give you another example, if I might. It so happens that within, you know, 30 minutes to maybe a few hours after a union has occurred, a sperm travels up to meet an egg, and when a sperm Finally encounters an egg, how does conception occur? It occurs because the sperm penetrates the egg, and that act of penetration is an echo, if you like, of what happened half an hour earlier, in the sense that in the ultimate moment of male female connection, the union is also a male to female penetrative action. I'm trying to be as discreet as I can, but also I want you to understand that what is happening on an invisible level within the body is a reflection of something that is very real, and so that penetration is something that we also find militarily. In other words, if one country invades another country. It penetrates the borders of that country. It penetrates into that country. And so we use the word conquer, both with a military conquering and also with a man woman conquering. We very seldom in English literature or in conversation or in poetry, speak about a woman conquering a man. That's usually not the way. It's usually the other way around. Because there is a certain reality that is a spiritual reality that is a tangent to the fundamental relationship. And this is hinted at or echoed by an underlying spiritual reality, and I hope that that becomes very, very clear. Another one is that even on a boy, male fetus that is an x y. In other words, when it was conceived, it was a an X Y conception. So it's going to be a boy, as opposed to an X esque conception. So even so, up till about seven weeks, it's anatomically indistinguishable from a female, and so it's like the default start of condition is female, and then at about seven weeks, we get a jolt of testosterone that enters the fetus, and that kicks off the beginning of the anatomical distinctions that make a boy, a boy and the Yeah, i. I had a slightly more poetic way of putting it, but it doesn't matter. You get you get the idea. And so that's that is a biological reality. What is the spiritual reality reflected by and that is that if a boy isn't carefully raised by his mother and his father to be a boy. He The default is that he doesn't become a man. He will become a diminished man. And the it's hard to raise a boy. It takes that extra jolt of testosterone. Does it take a father to raise a boy? Pretty much it does. Can single moms raise boys? They can, and sometimes they do, but it's much harder, very much harder. And so this essential idea that the natural state is a girl, and that it takes this jolt of energy in the form of a burst of testosterone, usually at about seven weeks, to turn that potentially boy male creature into a Boy. Yeah, but it takes energy. And so these are our realities, in the sense that there are biological realities that have really important spiritual consequences, really important spiritual implications, as a result of them, and one of them is the height thing, the size that women like looking up to their man, and men like their women looking up to them. And again, it's let me be discreet. It's not an accident that the most common and the easiest and the most natural position of male female connection is, once again, the woman looking up at the man, there is something that is enhancing to the essential polarity of male female that is reflected in that moment of union and connection. So how does this? How does the woman look up to the man? Well, the Institute for Family Studies came up with something interestingly recently, and that is that the number of girls that are looking forward to marriage has been going down and continues to go down. Well, I already said that a little earlier in this discussion. I'm not shocked or horrified by that. The number of boys who feel confident, you know, I'm going to be getting married. That is down. And I was speaking to a 15 year old boy in Israel recently, and
Daniel Lapin 28:15
I asked him, Do you know, what will
Daniel Lapin 28:22
you be doing in four years time? And he answered straight away. Said, I'll be in the army. And I know that had I said to him, and what do you think you'll be doing in 10 years time? He said, Well, I'll be married now. I'll have a couple of kids. But if you ask an American 15 year old boy, what will you be doing in five years? Four years time, I think you'll probably say, I haven't the faintest idea. And if you say, what will you be doing five years after having the faintest idea, in America, there has been a clear diminishing of the sense of a progression, a sense of a roadmap to life, however, says the Institute for Family Studies. However, the one area where boys and girls still see an important role for the guy. 78% of men saw this, and 74% of women saw this, and that is that it's the man's role to protect me, said the women, and it's the it's my role to protect her, said the guy. So that remains very strong, and again, linked to the size why a woman prefers to look up to her man? Part of that is she has an innate sense that if he's bigger, he's able to protect her better. But if you're not looking at a jungle environment where mass and muscle are the prime prerequisites for protection. Then, in a more civilized environment, what are you looking at? What is the best means of protection? And the answer is money. It's as simple as that. That's what money is. So yes, a woman looks to the monetary situation, both current and potential of a man in a way that she doesn't look to see. Is he a good dancer, or can he play tennis? Or can he, can he do quadratic equations in algebra? Those are not nearly as important as the far more basic ones, which is, is he larger than her, and is he able, or is he monetary, monetarily more blessed than she? Is that that becomes really, really important. And so when I said, Gentlemen, marry a nurse, a nurse, or marry a waitress, or marry a kindergarten or a preschool teacher. Part of what I'm saying is that you will be in a better marriage if your wife needs you financially. Now, I know very well that women have been indoctrinated and propagandized for nearly 60 years already to say, we don't need men, right? The old line, women need men like fish need bicycles. Yeah, very funny. We know all of that, but you see, here's the interesting thing about money. People mistakenly think that money gets you independence. Oh, with money, I don't need anybody. But paradoxically, money is exactly what binds you to other people? Because you only make money through serving other people. There is no other way to make money. You have to be of service to another human being. That's what produces money. And a lot of people don't discover that till late in life, but it's a reality. Number two, what's important is that your money is only useful in the context of a community of people who have a common set of values. In other words, think about the value and usefulness of money. Money is only useful as long as it can buy you the things you need in order to live at its most basic, food and shelter. And as we move up the scale or the hierarchy of human achievement, you know it's all kinds of other things, but it all boils down to money to begin with, and what happens? What happens if a large number of people in your society decide that money doesn't really have any value? Well, the answer is, it actually will lose value if a large number of people believe that real estate is overpriced and doesn't have any real value, and if a large number of people believe that, it'll suddenly not have value. There are no other areas like this. If a large number of people don't believe in gravity, it would still be a mistake to step out of the window on the 20th floor of a building, because although you might enjoy a short, exciting ride, the end will be very depressing. And so gravity doesn't go away if people don't believe in it, but the value of money does go away if people don't believe in it. And so your money only has value provided you are part of a healthy society. I hope that that if you think about that. Money binds you to other people. It doesn't make you independent. If you have a lot of money and you take it off with you, and you decide to move to an isolated desert island, what good is it to you? You may have your money. You may have it in the form of diamonds or gold or Bitcoin or anything else, it doesn't make the slightest differences. Of No, it's only useful to you in a marketplace, and marketplace is other people. And so people walk around, oh, money is going to give me my independent No, it doesn't. Money is what binds us to other people, and that's one of the reasons that it tells us so much about somebody. And so if a young woman is contemplating marriage and she knows something about a young man's financial status and his financial history, she knows a whole lot about him. It. If he's got a lot of debt, that suggests a character problem, doesn't it? It tells her something about him. If he's making a good living, she knows something. She knows he's interacting with a lot of other people. He must have a job. And if he has a job, he's serving other people, and to do that, he must have relationships with other people, that's all very good. And so if there's one thing you want to know if you're a young woman and one thing you want to know about a guy, what you want to know is you don't want to know if he plays tennis Well, you don't want to know what sort of shampoo he uses on his hair. You don't want you don't need to know those things, but if you're only allowed to find out one thing about him, his financial status, is what you want to find out. And then after that, you want to find out his family status. What's his relationship with his mother? What's his relationship with his father, what's his relationship with his sisters? These are hugely important things in moving forward into a permanent relationship of marriage, and doing so in a way that Jen that that absolutely will bring joy. But all of that requires that she looks up to him, and in this day and age in a relatively civilized environment, what that means is she looks up to him financially. And if a guy marries, just for argument's sake, I said, doctor, lawyer, investment banker, but there's all kinds of others as well. If he marries a woman who is focused on her career, and her career is measured by her revenue and her income, he's got a problem, because she's not going to look up to him. And even if she does when they initially get married in the first flush of romance, she'll stop looking up to him. And this, this, I mean, I can't tell you how often this problem crops up in a Rabbi's world happens all the time, and it happens very often with women who marry very idealistically. And I don't think marrying with an eye to the man's money robs you of idealism. I think it is idealistic because it shows that you understand the role this is going to play in the durability and the happiness of your marriage, and so it's a good thing. Please don't let anyone tell a woman that she's being a gold digger by being interested in a man's financial situation. Every smart woman, every woman who knows where she is in the world, who knows herself, is interested in a man's financial status, and she's exactly right to be there. And the problem that crops up is so often a woman marries in an idealistic frame of mind, meaning she's not worried. He's a wonderful you know, she's just in love with him, and he's such a good guy, and he's going to be an artist, or he's going to be a poet, or he's going to be a rabbi or whatever, and that's all fine, provided he has a way of earning a living. But she, let's say she's just taken and she doesn't matter. I have a very good job. I'm on track to become a, you know, whatever it is, a high earning thing.
Daniel Lapin 38:25
It works for a little while, a very little while, and after that, every molecule in her being starts drawing her towards men who are making more money than she is seen this many, many times, and it's always painful and very, very difficult to solve and to resolve. So these are some of the matters that have to do with how money and marriage connect, or in the 5f world, finance and family connect with one another, and they do and in exactly the same way. So do friendship, and so does faith, and so does fitness. Each of them tie in with family and with finance and all with one another. And it's very complicated. But all systems are complex, and a human life is one of the most complex systems there is. And the key of a complex system is the interplay between the various parts of the system. And this is, really what's at the heart of 5f thinking. And you can find out more about that on my website, of course, RabbiDaniellapin.com and also, by the way, for free right now, is the first lesson of the Scrolling through Scripture. If you wonder how ancient Jewish wisdom extracts powerful life lessons from seemingly narrative and prosaic verses of the Bible, take a look, and I think you'll enjoy me teaching a lesson in Scrolling through Scripture. Head over to www.rabbidaniellapin.com, and right there, you will find an opportunity to simply go ahead and get yourself a free download of the first lesson of Scrolling through Scripture. Okay, my dear Happy Warriors, that's as far as we're going to go today. And so I wish you a week of climbing onwards and upwards, fighting ferociously and with great delight and joy as you progress on your five F's, your family, your finances, your faith, your fitness and your friendships. I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, God bless.
