Philosophy of Romance at Decentered open mic 7/8/25

My name is Farley. I am writing a I'm philosopher. I'm writing a book about philosophy of social interaction.

I wanted to share an excerpt from my opening book about philosophy. So there's a famous study um by John Gman called the magic ratio study. It's they tried to identify the the optimal ratio of positive negative interactions in what you choose and they put numbers on it.

You want to have minimum 5:1 positive to negative interaction and maximum 20 to one positive negative interaction. So I was thinking about that um the relevant there for me is that you can be too nice and I was wondering why you can be too nice. So I think this is why it's because if I can't have a negative interaction with you then I can't protect myself from you.

Likewise I can't protect you from you. Um there's chaos in the world and everyone is constantly provisioning effort to watch out for the chaos in the world. There's enemies and there's absence.

Um there's also chaos inside of you. you are also a provision effort to watch yourself to make sure that you don't make a fool of yourself deter yourself. So if I can't have a negative interaction with you then I can't um protect you from yourself.

Also if I'm not willing to have a negative interaction with you to protect you from you then why would I go out on a limb to protect you from an enemy should they approach. So that's that basis. Um I believe that there is a spectrum of purpose in relationships from nurturing to challenging.

The purpose of a nurturing relationship is to help you achieve your potential and the purpose of a challenging relationship is to help you expand your maximum potential. So the same negative interaction that signals enough strength to protect you um also signals enough strength to challenge you, help you to grow, sharpen you. So I think this is the awful relationship with the line of being too nice but also being too negative on or challenging or whatever.

Um at the same time maintain tension between those two extremes because it represents maximum nurturing. I'm here to protect you and also maximum challenging. I'm here to make you better but both at the same time.

I think that's an impossible human relationship. And then uh you had a sexual relationship on top of that. That's usually what we think of as romance.