11 Stoic Rules For Love

Love isn’t just an emotion. It’s not just a feeling that hits you out of nowhere. It’s an action, something you can practice and something you can get better at. And while philosophy might not seem like a guide to a great love life, especially Stoicism, it actually has a lot to teach us.🎥 Watch this episode on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvPHVQ2yu90🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Love isn't just an emotion. It's not just this feeling that strikes you. It's an action. It's something you can learn and get better at. And although philosophy might not seem like a guide to a good love life, especially Stoic philosophy, it actually is. Stoicism isn't this lone wolf philosophy. I think it holds exactly what you're looking for. And in fact, two people together could make you both more Stoic. So I've written a number of bestselling books about Stoicism and self-improvement. But like, as just a regular human being, I've been happily married to my wife now for over a decade. We've been together for almost 20 years. And I am also the proud father of two young boys.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  And in this video, I want to give you some Stoic lessons that will help you choose the right partner, become a better partner, how to love more intentionally, and live a better life.

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  It's got to start where I think all philosophy has to start. This is actually inscribed the Temple of Apollo, which housed the Oracle of Delphi. And it's this idea that we must know ourselves, right? How can you be with another person? How can you have a happy life if you don't know what makes you happy? If you don't know what you want out of life? If you don't understand yourself? One of my favorite characters in Wisdom Takes Work is the French writer and thinker Montaigne. And Montaigne had a, you know, he has this unusual education. He's fluent in all these different languages. He's read all the great texts. But he was taught from an early age that he had to understand himself, that even when we are studying other people,

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  when we're studying history, this is, the purpose of this is to better understand ourselves, what makes us tick, why we do what we do? What are our pitfalls? What are our blind spots? What are our predilections? He famously said, I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero. And I think by the end of his life, he knows something about his virtues and his vices. That's what his famous essays are, right? He knows about the monstrosities and the miracles and the mundanities that are all inside him, as they are inside all of us. "It's a sad fate," Seneca said, "for a man to die too well-known to everyone else, but unknown to himself."

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  Most of us have met many smart people, but how many self-aware people have we met? Actually, Blaise Pascal would say that "one must know oneself." He says, "Even if it does not help in finding the truth, it helps in running one's life, and nothing is more proper." How do you know what you want in a person? How do you know what you're good at? How do you know what you bring to the table? Obviously, this is the journey of a lifetime, but it is also the secret to good relationships. So much of the practical problems that can come up in relationships are rooted in who we were as a child, assumptions we have, aversions we have, attractions we have, things we like, things we don't like, scripts that are running in our head that if you're not aware of,

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  if you're not clear on whether they're positive or negative, whether you want to be acting this way or not, you're just going to get yourself into trouble. Just knowing yourself is going to help you choose the right person, and it's going to also help you get away from the wrong people. It's going to help you stay with the right partner. And I think this is something that Shakespeare actually cribbs from Montaigne, this idea of "to thine own self be true." I think so often in relationships, people are pretending to be someone they are not for someone else's sake, and that's not going to work either, right? Both you and your partner, or your partners, are going to be evolving as you grow, and you have to be aware of this and able to articulate it and understand it, and ideally, help each other on that journey.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus, he's riffing on Socrates. He says, "Look, some people are trying to cultivate land. Some people are trying to breed horses." He says, "Me, I cultivate my own improvement day to day." People want to find the right person, but how many of us stop and ask like, "Are you the right person for anyone else? Are you really the catch that you think you are?" And so if we can think of philosophy and Stoicism as a guide to self-improvement, how to be better than you are, how to delight in your own improvement, and here we don't mean like, "Do you have a perfect six-pack? Do you have broad shoulders? Do you make a lot of money?" But like, are you a good person? Are you working on yourself? Are you getting better? That's how you make yourself attractive to others. That's how you make a good match.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  That's how you are a catch. Now, once you're in a relationship, this doesn't stop. You can't just let yourself go. You can't just be like, "Well, I did it," and you're stuck with me. No, you should be wanting to get better. This is why I go to therapy. This is why my wife and I have lots of conversations about, "Hey, I could use more of this," or, "Have you thought about this?" We spur each other to be better, to work on ourselves. And I think the work my wife has done on herself has really inspired me to get better. I would hope, you know, the converse is true. The Stoic is working on themselves. That's what Marcus Verliss is doing in meditations. He's trying to be more patient. He's trying to be more understanding. He's trying to be kinder. He's trying to remind himself what's

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  important. He's trying to be less judgmental. Stoics would say, "No one is wise, or good, or virtuous on accident. It's work. It is constant dedication and commitment." And if you want to have a good relationship, if you want to be the kind of person that people want to be in a relationship with, you have to do this work.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  All right. So this seems obvious, but a lot of people mess this up. Like, 50% of people mess this up, right? You have to pick the right person. And this arguably might be the most important choice that you ever make. Winston Churchill, who makes a lot of critical decisions, he says that the most important decision, the decision that most leads to his success, was his decision. To marry his wife, that his greatest good fortune was finding Clementine, his wife. There was a person behind the scenes, often in front of the scenes, all along the way. Clementine Churchill is strong and charismatic. She's incredibly intelligent. She makes Churchill better personally, professionally. She balances him out. She builds political allies.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  She mends relationships. He's an emotional erratic person. He's fits of depression, he's fits of ego, fits of anger. And she's the one, especially during the war, who's like his sort of emotional ballast. She stabilizes him. She prevents him from doing reckless and irresponsible things a lot. Now, she doesn't always get credit for this, but people who know them knew the role that she played. And she also didn't just agree with her husband, support him like unconditionally. You know, she calls him out, she challenges him. Some of her most famous letters are prompting him to stop doing this, start doing this. She is a critical sounding board and advisor to him, much in the same way that Pericles's wife

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  is one of the primary advisors and stabilizers to Pericles in the midst of that clash of civilizations, the Peloponnesian War. I think a lot of people think that being married will tie them down. It will negatively impact their career. And I would argue, yes, it will tie you down. It will hold you back. It will tie you down to reality. It will hold you back from making sometimes fatal errors. There's a Stoic that most people don't know, but was actually critical in the development of Stoics. I talk about him in Lives of the Stoics. His name is Antipater, who was a couple hundred years before Marcus Aurelius. And he's one of the first Stoics to talk about the importance of relationships and marriage.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  To Antipater, like a successful city, a successful world could only be built around the keystone of family. He says that among the primary and most necessary of appropriate actions was finding your life partner and marrying them. Actually, Foucault, the 20th century French philosopher, would credit Antipater with pioneering like a new, more modern concept of marriage, not just A legal arrangement, not just a financial arrangement. He's talking about a relationship, a marriage where souls are blended, where they both become better for being together. The Stoic word, which means home, it was perfected in marriage. It was about creating a sanctuary, a citadel

• 8:44Ryan Holiday?

  that could withstand the blows of fate and facilitate the good life. And as I've said before, I think my wife is much more naturally Stoic than I am. And she's been with me through my businesses, the businesses we've created together, the books that I've written, raising our sons together. None of the things I have achieved or managed to do do, I think, would have been possible on my own. I was just in positions that I, as a 20-year-old, was not emotionally equipped to handle. Like, the bookstore, the studio where this is happening, like, not only was it her idea, but it looks the way that it looks because she designed it. And I guess what I'm saying is that one of the first and most essential things you can do in your life is find someone who makes you better,

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  who you, in turn, can do the same for.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  Remember for the Stoics, that virtue is a thing that you give, not a thing that you get, right? It's in verb and not a noun. And I think that's an important thing to think about as far as relationships go. The ancients talked a lot about giving rather than receiving. Because, by the way, the one thing that you control in your relationship is you. How can you be the person that you need to be in the relationship? How can you give rather than receive? And as they say, love is about serving. It's about taking pleasure in making somebody else happier and making their life better. We Stoics, Seneca said, "Take pleasure in bestowing benefits, even though they cost us labor, provided that they lighten the labors of others."

• 10:20Ryan Holiday?

  The labor, I guess what today we would call emotional labor, that Seneca is talking about, it isn't physical work. It doesn't have to be expensive. It's about being generous with your time. It's about being generous with your attention, with your... Your energy. Musonius Rufus, another Stoic who actually pioneered some of the Stoic ideas in gender equality, said that a good marriage was one where each person tried to outdo the other in their devotion, which is a pretty beautiful thought if you think about it. It's not what your partner can do for you, it's what you can do for them. It's about what you can give, not what you're trying to get. And you want to be the kind of person that your partner wants to come to,

• 11:01Ryan Holiday?

  whose ears are always open to listening, the person who checks in on their friends, the kind of person who's ready with a kind word, because this kindness is a form of generosity and something you can always afford.

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  Look, the fundamental teaching of Stoicism is that some things are in our control and some things aren't. Well, one of the things you have to remember about relationships is that you control yourself, you don't control the other person. You control who you are, you control how you show up, you control the changes that you make, you control your mood, you control the standards you hold yourself to. You don't get to force anyone to do anything else. And if you want to see change, if you want things to be different, the best place you can start, the Stoics would tell us, is to focus on yourself. Look, life is hard, people aren't perfect. There's going to be things that your partner does that drive you nuts and you can focus on getting them to stop doing those things

• 12:00Ryan Holiday?

  or you could focus on why this drives you nuts and does it really need to drive you nuts? They're going to say things that upset you. You can speak up about that, but you also decide how long you're going to hold on to something, how big a deal you're going to make about something. As Mark Schrute says, you don't have to turn this into something. He says, events, people, your partner, they're not asking to be judged by you. And I think this is really great advice for our siblings, for our parents, and then of course, for our spouses. You don't have to make everything into something.

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  If you can only love someone if they're perfect, if you expect everything to go seamlessly every time, you're going to be horribly disappointed. Part of being in relationships is going to be hurt. It's going to be frustration. It's going to be mistakes. Marcus Aurelius and his wife were married for 30 years. They had 13 children and when she died, he was profoundly devastated. He had her deified. There are rumors and they date all the way back to antiquity that Marcus Aurelius's wife, Faustina, was repeatedly unfaithful to him. There's even more modern rumors, this viral video about how he supposedly murdered her paramours and all this stuff.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  The meditations by Marcus Aurelius, things he didn't talk about when he found out that his wife was having an affair with a gladiator. And so he invited them both to his bed chambers, then forced them to have sex in front of him, then slaughtered the gladiator and let all the blood run down on his wife. That to him was like, guys, I solved this, you know? And I did not let myself become affected by my emotions today.

• 13:36Ryan Holiday?

  There is no sign in anything that Marcus wrote or anything that Marcus did that lends much in the way of credence to these rumors. Musonius Rufus, again, when he was talking about companionship, he said, "You need to love in sickness and under all conditions." As we say now in marriage vows about in sickness and in health. And Musonius calls out the relationship between Brutus and Portia, Stoics, Portia being the daughter famously of Cato. And what he loved about this was that it was an example of two people sticking with each other through adversity, who inspired and called each other to greater virtue. I guess what I'm saying is that you can't give up on your partner when things get tough.

• 14:19Ryan Holiday?

  You can't give up on your relationship when things are tough. You can't expect them to be perfect. You have to love them unconditionally. There's basically nobody different than Cato and his brother. Right? Cato's the strict stoic. He's disciplined. He's committed. He's austere. And then his brother is, you know, much more of your typical Roman. But Cato loves his brother and most importantly, He loves him unconditionally. I think about that Bruce Springsteen song, "Highway Patrolman." He says, "Sometimes when it's your brother, you look the other way." He's talking about unconditional love. Obviously, it's important with siblings. It's important with kids. But like with your spouse, this is your person and you have to accept them for who they are. You have to love and support them unconditionally.

• 15:06Ryan Holiday?

  Some people ask me what the secret to a long, successful marriage is. And I do have a secret. I say, "The secret to staying together is not breaking up." It was on her wedding day that Ruth Bader Ginsburg's mother-in-law gave her a piece of advice that not just shaped her 56-year marriage, but also her three decades on the Supreme Court. She said, "In a marriage, it helps to be a little deaf." And by that, she meant, "Sometimes you've just got to let things go. Sometimes you've just got to pretend not to hear certain things." Because if you lock on to everything, if you hold on to everything, if you give everything a great weight and seriousness, you'll never be able to get along with someone. Because if you can't do this,

• 15:51Ryan Holiday?

  not only will you be constantly bogged down in fights and arguments over things that don't really matter, but you're going to miss all the things that you do agree on, that you should hear, that you should hold on to. So part of maintaining a good relationship is going to be letting things go, pretending not to see or hear certain things. There's also a famous story about Cato in the Roman baths. He's walking in and he gets bumped and shoved and it ends up devolving into a fight. Then afterwards, he realizes how silly and foolish it was. And when the man comes to apologize, he says, "I don't even remember being hit." And this is the secret to a good marriage, to a good life, to a life with less conflict and grudges and grievances.

• 16:34Ryan Holiday?

  You have to be able to let things go. It helps to be a little deaf.

• 16:42Ryan Holiday?

  One of the best pieces of advice I ever got is that love is spelled T-I-M-E. If you love someone, if you're in a relationship with someone, you owe them your time. And your calendar doesn't lie. There's a letter that Marx realist is writing to his teacher, Fronto. And he says, "Call the gods to witness that I would now live in exile with Faustina," that's his wife, "rather than without her on the palanquin." He's saying that he'd rather be with his wife anywhere than in a palace by himself. And it's a beautiful idea that the tragedy of Marx's realist's life is that he didn't do that. He spends enormous amounts of his reign away.

• 17:25Ryan Holiday?

  He says, you know, somewhere else in Meditations, that life is warfare and a journey far from home. And that was the reality of the job. And he seems to have thought that he had no choice in the matter. I guess what I'm saying is that your calendar doesn't lie. Your choices don't lie. Again, we want to see these virtues as verbs and not nouns. If you say you love someone, if you say you care about someone, if you say, oh, I do everything for my family, I do everything for my kids, for my wife, to me, I'm happiest at home. The proof is in the pudding, right? If you're gone all the time, if you're interrupting your time with them always for the phone, for the computer, for opportunities, that says something. Like, your priorities are clear.

• 18:07Ryan Holiday?

  It takes a lot of work, though, especially, again, in today's noisy, busy world, to be present, to be available, to prioritize the things you say that are your priorities and not the other things. It's why on my wall in my office, I have a picture of my youngest, a picture of my oldest, and in between them, I have a little sign, and it just says, "No." It's a reminder that when I am saying yes to things, I'm saying no to them. And conversely, when I am saying no to other things, I'm saying yes to them.

• 18:38Ryan Holiday?

  So, look, one of the realities of the human experience is change. Change is everywhere, all the time. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius returns to the idea of change like over and over and over again. He says, "Constant awareness that everything is born from change." He says, "Nature loves nothing more than to alter what exists and make new things like it." He says, "All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it." Then, one of my favorite passages, he says, "Oh, you're frightened of change, oh, you're fighting against change." He says, "But what would exist without it?" Right? Who I am, who my wife was when we met 20 years ago, I can barely even wrap my head around who those people were. If you want a relationship that lasts,

• 19:22Ryan Holiday?

  you're gonna have to come to terms, you're gonna have to assent, to use the Stoic word, to change. You're changing, they're changing, you're constantly being remade all the time. Right? The Stoics are talking about how we never step in the same river twice. You're not in the same relationship with the same person. What I'm talking about is not just accepting change, not just embracing change, but loving change, loving that you're both on this constant journey, that you're becoming new people and you have to fall in love with that new person. It's not about fighting to keep things the same, but fighting to continue to be with that person as you both evolve and change.

• 20:01Ryan Holiday?

  Today, we talk a lot about passion, right? Your relationship has to have passion, you have to follow your passion. The Stoics were actually a little bit suspicious of passion, maybe more than a little bit. They were actually opposed to what they would call "the passions." Being passion's slave was something they were quite worried about, something they thought led to a lot of mistakes. What Stoicism is, is this philosophy, you have this emotion, you have this opinion, you have this urge, you have this desire, and it's the ability to stop and question it, to think about it, to go, "Hey, is this something that I want to do? Is this something I'm gonna regret doing? Is this something I want to say? Is this something I'm gonna regret saying?" What happens in the heat of the moment, I guess, is something the Stoics were concerned about, and it's something we have to be concerned about. The Stoics wanted to be aware and rational.

• 20:47Ryan Holiday?

  Not in the throes of passion or emotion. We could say this is in contrast to like the hopeless romantic who's, you know, after unrequited love. I think the Stoic is approaching emotions, love included, from a more philosophical sort of reflective place. They're concerned about not being overwhelmed, about not being caught up in the moment. Arius Didymus, another Stoic, was talking about being wary of those excessive impulses, he said, which are disobedient to reason. When people blow up their lives, they blow up their relationships. It's usually over a few seconds of pleasure or a thing that in retrospect they wish they

• 21:26Ryan Holiday?

  hadn't said, a decision they made at their lowest ebb or their most overwhelmed. And again, what Stoicism is, is not not feeling those things, but not letting them make you do something that you're going to regret or that can't be undone. So, look, it's, it's good to be in love. It's good to feel love. It's good to love deeply, but you don't want to be a slave to it. You don't want to be overwhelmed to it. You don't want it to overwhelm you.

• 21:54Ryan Holiday?

  Look, all good things come to an end. Relationships end, life included. I know this might sound a little weird to end this video on. It might even be a little depressing, but, but the Stoics did meditate on love ending. They meditated on life ending. This is not just premeditatio malorum, the idea that, that things could happen and, and that it's the refusal to consider what percentage of marriages end in divorce, that people grow apart, that people have affairs, that people make mistakes, that life can take us in very different directions, right? To be utterly stunned and surprised by this, the Stoics would say, is to make it hurt all the more. Seneca says, "The unexpected blow lands heaviest."

• 22:38Ryan Holiday?

  Like, look, the, the one thing we know for certain is that every relationship will end, right? Either in a breakup or one person, and then eventually the other will both die. That is the human condition. And the Stoics want us to meditate on this, to be aware of it, to not be surprised by it. Epictetus said that whenever there's things that you love... Or that bring you pleasure and joy. He says, remember to tell yourself of their general nature, which is to say they decay, they fall apart. Eventually, they leave you. He even says, and Mark Schurles quotes this in meditation, that when you kiss your child at night, when you say goodnight to your wife at night, he says, say to yourself that you are kissing something human and that they may not make it to the morning. Now, the purpose of this was not to detach, to disconnect.

• 23:23Ryan Holiday?

  I think it was to be present, to say, hey, this bedtime matters. Hey, this conversation in the car matters. Hey, this walk matters. Hey, this phone call, this text message matters. It's not supposed to be grim. It's supposed to make you present. It's supposed to make you connect it. And yeah, it's hard, Mark Schurles says. It feels like tempting fate to contemplate such a loss. It feels almost sacrilegious as a parent to consider that something could happen to your kid. But fate can't be tempted. Fate isn't in our control. What happens is outside our control. How prepared we are for it to happen is in our control. And it isn't just about being able to shrug off something bad if it happens. No, it's designed to make you live and be present

• 24:07Ryan Holiday?

  and love in such a way that you have less to regret on the other side of that.