100 Tweets on Marriage

By Glenn Campbell

Below is a collection of 100 of my past tweets on marriage (tweeting as @BadDalaiLama). This list was assembled for the English language edition of my forthcoming book, The Case Against Marriage. If you would like to locate and retweet one of these tweets, you can find it by searching one of my two archives: the official downloaded Twitter archive or my own homemade tweet archive.

1. Trying to capture love with marriage is like displaying a wild animal on your wall. As soon as you've nailed it down, you've killed it.
2. Beauty cannot be purchased or possessed. If you try, all you'll get is bragging rights to the beauty that was once there.
3. As a rule, Paradise turns into Hell as soon as you move there.
4. If you're not willing to fight, stand up for your interests and defend your borders, then love is not the place for you.
5. Love alone cannot bear the weight of all we ask it to do.
6. Given the credit card of life, most spend it to the max as soon as they can, laboring the rest of their lives to pay the interest.
7. A relationship cannot truly grow unless there is the realistic option to withdraw and renegotiate.
8. A romantic relationship should not be confused with a parental one.
9. A successful relationship isn't merging. It is sharing of independent viewpoints.
10. Don't be a victim of your own cleverness—finding ingenious ways to sustain a relationship that really should end.
11. Even after years of research and testing, there is still no clean-burning form of love.
12. Every relationship is a balance between sharing and the need to preserve ones own identity.
13. You can't prove love by killing freedom.
14. If a little of something makes you happy, that doesn't necessarily mean a lot of the same thing will make you more happy.
15. A bad marriage is the ultimate police state, with Big Brother watching your every move for signs of disloyalty.
16. Love is not a steady state but an ongoing negotiation to get what we want.
17. Adult personality cannot be changed from the outside, especially within the scope of romance. Change may happen, but only after you're gone.
18. Love is a means of travel, not a destination.
19. People in love are not sane. They are the worst people to be making fateful choices about lifetime commitments.
20. It is remarkable how humans can willingly accept imprisonment in exchange for the approval of their family and society.
21. Failed romances are one of life's great classrooms. You learn how people really work and how fantasy differs from fact.
22. Gay couples who cannot marry must take their relationship in small discretionary steps in a process resembling reason.
23. Falling in love with someone is the best guarantee that you won't be able to change them.
24. Love is a condiment of life, not a main course. It can't give you a meaningful mission any more than ketchup is a food group.
25. Given the choice between being lonely and losing yourself in a relationship, lonely gives you far more options.
26. Love is a dance of "Closer, please, but not too close!"
27. It is remarkable how love can turn lead into gold—and back to lead again shortly after marriage.
28. Romantic love is a partnership, not a charity. You're not there to repair the other person or protect them from themselves.
29. Happiness is not a permanent condition. It must be constantly renegotiated and cannot be nailed down in the future by any form of contract.
30. Hubris is thinking your romance will last forever.
31. It is plain enough to us when a friend gets drawn into an unproductive relationship. If only we had that same insight for ourselves
32. Marriage is like giving guns to teenagers. Who among us, in the heat of passion, can comprehend the implications of "Til Death Do You Part"?
33. Romance does not just combine the strengths of two people, also their weaknesses.
34. If a relationship is faltering, don't fool yourself into thinking you need "more commitment" and fewer options for escape.
35. The main effect of marriage is to tie people together by shared financial obligations. This is different than being tied together by love.
36. The neutralizing of future discretion should not be mistaken for a declaration of love.
37. In Medieval times, marriage was a necessity. You couldn't have sex, live together or have children without it. Today it is a vanity.
38. The unmarried look longingly over the fence at those who are married. The married look longingly back.
39. Marriage can give you a front-row seat to insanity no one else can see.
40. In the beginning, love is defined for us by others. We have to fail many times before we learn to define it for ourselves.
41. Romance is a futile attempt to reproduce the apparent security and unconditional love of childhood.
42. It's a bad sign for your relationship if you're watching your words and editing your thoughts to not trigger an explosion.
43. Ice is water that got married. Those free-flowing days are over!
44. Instead of making one grand decision based on faith, you should make many small decisions based on knowledge.
45. In every relationship, you have to fight for what you want, especially from those you love.
46. The greatest wealth is the freedom to change.
47. Just because you love someone doesn't mean you can live with them.
48. It doesn't say much for your relationship if you think you need marriage to lock you in and make it harder to escape.
49. If one fat person marries another, they'll both get REALLY fat. Same with any other mutual defect.
50. Looking back on our own romantic obsessions, we are bound to exclaim, "I can't believe I fell for that!"
51. Loss of libido is a crisis only if you are already committed to a relationship that depends on it.
52. Gays battling for the right to marry is like men fighting for the right to wear corsets.
53. Love is harmless. The obligations that follow on its heels are not.
54. Loyalty isn't all that admirable if it makes you hold on to a dysfunctional relationship.
55. Making babies is the standard turnkey solution for couples who can't think of anything else to use their relationship for.
56. Many a marriage is kept marginally afloat by the herculean efforts of one party who mistakenly takes the wedding vows literally.
57. Romance is powered by the need to believe, which can sweep all sorts of disturbing evidence under the carpet.
58. In any relationship, how you argue is more important than what you argue about.
59. You can't reason with the gambler, the addict or someone in love. They may agree with your logic, but it won't change their behavior.
60. In romance, you build the theatre, write the script, choose your own role and cast a lead actor. Don't rant at all actors if the play sucks.
61. Marriage is the most effective Redpill you can take. In a few weeks you'll start seeing your partner for who they really are.
62. In any relationship, there are times you draw close and times you pull away. You damage the former if you try to prevent the latter.
63. Marriage, under the law, has nothing to do with love. It is an economic incorporation that most relationships are much healthier without.
64. Much of what we call romance is the attempt to outsource responsibility for our own life. 
65. If you grew up in a paper mill town, the smell of wet paper would remind you of home and you'd probably marry someone who smelled like that.
66. Love without flowers, chocolate, jewelry, children, alcohol, codependency or interior decorating. Can you imagine such a thing?
67. Marriage and home improvement recursively justify each other.
68. In romance, you are not a therapist, protector or parent. You are a consumer, willing to pay a reasonable price for a quality product.
69. Even a "successful" marriage runs the risk of freezing your life in place and bringing an end to creative growth.
70. Only in romance are people expecting someone else to save them from themselves.
71. Passion alone cannot fuel a long-term relationship.
72. People in love build a mythology about their early days that involves some selective memory loss. When love ends, full memory comes back.
73. Marriage is most destructive when you have to mute your own growth to match that of your jealous and less competent partner.
74. The recurring error of investors everywhere is to take the "trend" of today and extrapolate it in a straight line into the future.
75. People tend to confuse having a lot of obligations with having a meaningful life, so they pile on the obligations.
76. Relationships are damaging when they disrupt the individual's direct negotiation with outside reality.
77. Romantic love is a value-added service. If you are not receiving value in excess of the price paid, you shouldn't be using the service.
78. Most forms of mutual protection become unequal over time, with one party giving far more than he is getting.
79. Romantic relationships are successful only when power is relatively equal and each person remains responsible for their own problems.
80. single — adj. the state of being able to do whatever you want with your life without having to negotiate with anyone.
81. Someone in love is the perfect propagandist, trumpeting the positive aspects of their choice while obscuring the negative.
82. Survival in marriage means carefully watching your words and not rocking the boat.
83. Romance involves the acceptance of creeping change, often leading to conditions you never would have agreed to in the beginning.
84. The dueling agendas of gay rights are "Government must stay out of our bedroom," and "Government must sanction our relationship."
85. The greatest danger of marriage is the loss of negotiating power.
86. The main fallacy of romance is thinking someone else can give your life meaning when you can't find it yourself.
87. When your love is completely selfless, prepare to be abused.
88. The only thing sadder than divorce is a failed marriage that does not end.
89. The premise of many a Hitchcockian thriller—and countless real-life ones—is how your partner changes after you are married.
90. You don't fall in love with a person but with an image of them which is partly a fiction in your own mind.
91. The scary thing about intimate relationships is how one party accepts and adopts the dysfunctions of the other.
92. There are no unconditional relationships. You have to fight for what you want, even from those you love.
93. To be against marriage doesn't mean you are against love. It only means you don't want money to come between you.
94. Walking down the aisle, taking the marriage vows, the bride is thinking: "What does everyone think of me? Am I doing this right?"
95. We design our own romantic disasters. The opposite gender just fulfills them for us.
96. When you find something thrilling, the worst thing you can do is commit yourself to repeating it. The thrill goes, but the commitment stays.
97. You never know what a person is really like until after the honeymoon.
98. Young people in love think they have things all worked out, but time will teach them otherwise.
99. Your best asset in romance is to not really need it.
100. Free will dies the moment you say "forever".

You can find many more related tweets be searching the archives (above) for "love", "marriage", "relationship" and similar terms.

Identifying Your Own Narcissism on Twitter

On Twitter, we are broadcasting short messages to the world about ourselves. Every tweet has some of its author contained in it, but not all tweets are narcissistic. What distinguishes a narcissistic tweet from a non-narcissistic one?

A narcissistic tweet is something that aggrandizes the author without giving anything of value to the reader. "Here's what I'm doing" or "Here's what I'm feeling" or "This is my opinion." It's all "I" centered, concerned only with the needs of the author. If you don't think that's bad, imagine removing you own name and reading the same tweet from someone else. Would you even care?

The simplest test of narcissism is whether the tweet would be compelling to the world regardless of who wrote it. If it's not meaningful with the author's name removed, then it's probably just self-centered crap, destined to be forgotten instantly.

The difference between narcissistic and useful can be hard to distinguish in your own tweets. Just because you are talking about yourself and your own activities doesn't make a tweet worthless. The question is whether the tweet gives stand-alone value to others.

We are all, at our core, narcissistic. We want others to love us! But some of us learn to step beyond this primitive urge and actually serve the needs of others. In the end, people should value you for how you contribute to their own lives, not just for being you.

It is not necessarily narcissistic to travel to some interesting destination and tweet photos and descriptions of things you discover along the way. If those observations are unique and interesting in themselves, they are useful to your readers. Even though the journey is centered on you (where you are going and what you are doing), you are still performing a public service. You are taking your own experience, filtering it and giving only the most interesting and useful parts to others. Traveling has inherent value to others, just like being in the middle of a major news event, but you have to find the parts that are universally meaningful.

Should you also tweet photos of yourself while traveling? Sure! If I was visiting the Taj Mahal, I would almost certainly turn the camera on myself in front of the monument and tweet that photo to my followers (hopefully geotagged with the Taj Mahal's address). Is this narcissistic? Certainly! Deep down, I am saying, "Look at me! I'm special because I'm in a special place!" but you get a pass on something like this if the photo is interesting in itself and contributes to the credibility of your tweet stream. There are thousands of photos of the Taj Mahal already on the web. The world doesn't need another unless there's something unique about it. Placing yourself in the scene gives your tweet stream some immediacy and makes people pay attention. It shows people that you are actually tweeting from experience, and this increases the value of whatever you subsequently tweet—which is the interesting and ironic things you find in Agra.

It's not so interesting to tweet your location in your own hometown when you happen to be meeting friends. "I'm at the Berry Barn, 123 Main St., with Joe and Sue." That's fine if your only friends are Joe and Sue and people who know Joe and Sue. For the rest of your followers, it's just noise, and if you tweet too much of this stuff they'll unfollow you.

If you aspire to having followers around the world, not just on Main Street, then you have to broadcast things with worldwide appeal, which doesn't include the Berry Barn. You tweet above has value to Joe and Sue's friends, but it has only a COST to everyone else. Someone in another country is forced to read your tweet while getting nothing out of it, and this pulls down the value of your whole tweet stream.

A narcissist thinks his activities are important just because they're his. Therefore, he spews lots of tweets about what he is doing and how he is feeling. He also thinks his own opinion is important to tweet just because it's his. He'll tweet, "I love Sarah Palin" or "I hate Sarah Palin," but in both cases, he isn't giving the world anything it hasn't heard already. You get a pass if you can say something clever and funny about Sarah Palin, but even then the bar is very high. It has to be funnier than the million Sarah Palin jokes already out there.

Unless you happen to be a celebrity, no one cares about your opinion! Instead, people care about insight. If you have new information to offer, something that's never been said before, then it's worth tweeting. If you're just adding your voice to a million others, then it's noise.

If you ARE a celebrity, then you can get away with just about anything. For a stream of pure narcissism, check out @KimKardashian. For some unfathomable reason she has almost 7 million followers, even though she says nothing of value to anyone outside her personal clique. If she didn't happen to be a celebrity (and constantly referencing other celebrities) she wouldn't have more followers than the average teenager.

The rest of us can't get away with that. We have to actually give value to people if we expect strangers to follow us, and it takes time for strangers to recognize this value. It can be a long, hard slog!

@CharlieSheen may be able to attract a million users overnight, but the rest of us have to fight for every 100. This doesn't matter! In the end, we will win and Charlie will lose, because Charlie will never learn how to gain self-worth by giving to others. He will be forever trapped in the most primitive form of narcissism: "I'm special just because I'm me." (Or in his words: "I'm tired of pretending I'm not special.") He'll never learn to modify his behavior to serve the needs of others, so eventually he'll self-destruct. Like other narcissists, he'll perpetually seek perfect love and adoration that can never be achieved.

We may all be narcissists at our core, but some of us get a clue: To be loved by others, we have to serve their needs. We have to step out of ourselves enough to see what those needs are and filter our own output to address them.

Reducing narcissism in your own tweet stream doesn't mean eliminating yourself from it entirely. Frankly, you SHOULD tweet about yourself from time to time. Use of "I" and "me" is not necessarily selfish. In fact, it may be essential! Why? Because if you don't insert yourself and your needs into you tweet stream occasionally, people will start taking it for granted as a free public service. It is important to let people know there's a real person behind this output and not a robot or organization. Otherwise, your efforts will never be appreciated.

Yes, you WANT people to love you, but it has to be for the right reasons. You want to be judged for what you DO, not who you ARE! Children are valued for who they are. Adults should be valued for what they do for others.

If your tweet stream does something for people, then you ought to be recognized for it. If that's narcissistic, so be it. It's good kind of narcissism: seeking love and appreciation by doing good things for others. That's a noble undertaking! It's not noble to just say: "Here I am. Love me!" Sadly, that's how most people think, because they haven't broken out of childhood. They expect to be treated as special without doing anything for anyone.

You can break out of that, can't you? Just work on giving value to others, without losing yourself in the process, and the respect of others will (probably) follow.

---

Also see my YouTube video: "How to Twitter (and How Not To)"

Complexity and How to Find It

Complexity is the quality of being intricate and compounded. For example, the human body is a very complex life form compared to an amoeba. It's not just a matter of there being trillions of cells in the body but that they are connected in many different ways we're only beginning to understand. Complexity is hard to define precisely, but whenever you compare two objects or systems you can usually say without a doubt that one is more complex. One has more layers, more systems, more internal connections. An aircraft carrier is more complex than a sailboat. A chess game is more complex than tic-tac-toe.

Complexity also applies to people. Although we all have approximately the same number of brain cells, some brains are much more intricate than others. You can probably quantify this by slicing open someone's brain and examining the number of connections between cells, but that option isn't usually available to us.

An easier way to judge someone's complexity is to talk to them! Are they a one-song band or a multifaceted orchestra? Although complexity can't be precisely defined, you know when someone is complex and "deep" or simple and shallow.

Complexity is like layers of onion. Some people have many layers, others only a few. You find out which is which by spending some time with them. Assuming that you yourself have many layers, those with fewer get boring very quickly.

When you are trapped on an airplane, sitting beside a stranger, you may strike up a conversation with them just to be friendly. How long this conversation continues is a hint of their complexity. You might learn they are married, have a new baby and are a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, but the conversation peters out after that. There's just nothing more to talk about.

Then there are the rare people you find yourself beside where each question you ask leads to another and another, and soon you're engaged in an hours-long conversation that occupies the whole flight. Those are the complex ones. Each layer of them you peel away reveals a new, more subtle layer. They show signs of having thought things through, having built system upon system to deal with the challenges of their life.

In fact, these conversations usually end only when YOU reach the limits of YOUR complexity, to the point where you don't know what they're talking about—or don't want to. Their solutions may become upsetting to you when it is clear they have outpaced your own development. You curtail these conversations yourself because it is painful to see all that they have done that you haven't.

Complexity is different from success. Many simple-minded people achieve great outward fame or wealth yet remain very one-dimensional to talk to. Complexity is also not the same as intelligence, at least by standard measures. A mathematician can be brilliant in his field but still not know a thing about life outside it. Complexity is a holistic measure of emotional depth, not just abstract intellect.

Someone who is simple has one or two core areas of interest and sticks to them. He has only a couple of dimensions, which you come to understand quickly. He doesn't inquire beyond his current sphere and doesn't display much real humor about himself. Someone complex has multiple interests and appreciates the ironies of life. She can laugh at what she is doing and appreciate the absurdities of it without getting offended. The simple people are ants who see only their little ant world. The complex people see the world from above, from outer space, and even if they have to live in the ant world they are always striving to understand their place in the cosmos. They want to grasp the big picture and the underlying mechanisms, while most ants are content with the surface world in front of them.

Complexity is a treasure! It is something we want to nurture in ourselves and seek out in others. In ourselves, complexity means that we aren't just seeing in black and white but in a subtle range of colors. We see systems within systems in everything we look at, so we end up making better, more nuanced decisions.

Complexity in others helps enhance our own complexity. If you hang out with smart friends (on the internet or in real life), you're going to get smarter yourself, because these people will help you see all the subtleties of life you've been missing.

So how do you identify complex people, short of dissecting their brains? Listen to them. Watch them. Most of the data you need is being spewed out of them spontaneously. When you want more data, poke them. Ask them questions and see how they respond. Push them out of their comfort zone and see what happens.

Any data stream from the person is useful. For example: Look at their Twitter feed! People can pretend to be anything they want, especially on the internet, but they can't fake complexity. Even if a tweet stream consists entirely of articles and retweets from others, it is either a complex stream or a simplistic one. Is there intelligence in the selection of material, or is it based on a simple algorithm a computer could replicate? Are we seeing a growth curve, or are the tweets of today the same as those a year ago?

On Twitter, a good gauge of complexity is how long you want to keep reading someone's tweets. A tweeter may seem fascinating when you first subscribe, but over time you see them repeating the same ideas over and over. Once you understand their schtick, you can write it yourself and you end up unsubscribing. When your own complexity exceeds someone else's, you eventually want to move on.

Complexity has nothing to do with how many followers you have. Some celebrities with millions of followers are extremely boring and give you nothing back for your time. They are popular because most followers are simpletons themselves. They want the same things repeated over and over again because it's predictable and reassuring. If you happen to want complexity, then you have to look at a person's output objectively. Would you be following this stream if the person wasn't a celebrity or didn't happen to be a friend? Are you really getting any benefit from this output stream? Is it increasing your own complexity, or just taking up your time?

The same is true in real life. We are connected with all kinds of people—friends, family, co-workers. We receive, in some form, an "input stream" from each them. We are emotionally attached to some people, but that's a separate question from whether their input is useful in itself. Although we are very fond of a person, we may not be gaining much by interacting with them. When our own complexity exceeds theirs, they start dragging us down.

Almost everyone has something to teach us. The have techniques and perspectives that are useful to us. However, with most people, the lesson doesn't last long. We learn all their tricks, and then it's like we're trapped in First Grade with them when we really should be in Second.

Romantic relationships ultimately fail when complexity diverges. When you're in love, you see far more of that person than you normally would. After the honeymoon period, you quickly learn their limitations. You know the song they are going to be singing over and over for the rest of their lives. If you stay with them, they're going to hold you at this level, for better or worse. If you aspire to something more, then you've got a tough decision to make: Do you detach yourself, or do you accept a permanent burden on your own complexity.

In circumstances like this, where the decisions are painful, most people prefer to sacrifice their own development. That helps explain why there are so many simpletons in the world. Complexity is hard! It involves hard decisions about which input streams you are going to reject. If you have a dear friend you've known from childhood who isn't doing anything for you in the present, do you pull away, or do you continue giving them your precious time?

There is a limit to the input streams you can follow. If you are following dull and repetitive streams then you can't be following the complex ones that are going to benefit you most. Over time, you become whoever you associate with. If you follow a lot of fascinating Twitter streams, yours will become fascinating too. If you hang out with a lot of smart people, you'll become smart yourself. But of course it works in the other direction, too.

Time is your most precious resource. How you spend it—and who you spend it with—is the best predictor of who you will become.

Kilroy's Rules of Twitter Style

I have a theory that you can tell whether a Twitter feed is worth following by reading only the five latest tweets. Below are the features I am looking for. These are the style rules I am trying to follow on my own Twitter feed (@KilroyCafe) and that maybe you should follow in yours.

1. A stylistic avatar. The best feeds have an avatar (little profile picture) that someone has put some thought into and that reflect, in some simple way, the content of the feed. Less interesting feeds just have a bland picture of the author. To a certain extent you can judge a book by it's cover! Just by scanning through avatars, you can get an idea of what feeds might be worth following from how interesting the avatar is.


2. Talk about universal truths rather than what you are doing. Do I care that you are currently at Starbucks on Main Street? Give me something I can use! Unless you intend your feed for only your five closest joined-at-the-hip buddies, no one really cares what you are doing.
   


• Personally, I believe your "what I'm doing" stuff should go on Facebook. Even then, you should limit your updates to things that are somehow useful to others.


3. Limit the use of "I" and "me". Again, what you are doing may be interesting to you, but the rest of us want information we can use in our own life. "I" and "me" should be used only sparingly in certain rhetorical situations or to distinguish your work from someone else's.
   


4. All links should be explained. Don't just tell me to "Look at this!" You have to give me a reason to look (because clicking on each link takes time, especially on a mobile device).


5. No wasted words. There should be not a single unnecessary word in any tweet. Even if you have extra space available in your 140-character allotment, the tweet should be as compact and efficient as possible. Before sending the tweet, read and re-read it to make sure you have cut it to the bone. Extra words just dilute your message.
   


6. Interesting language. Don't say something in a bland way if you can say it in an interesting and stylized way, with clever and precisely targeted language.
   


7. Only one idea per tweet. Don't try to insert multiple ideas into the same tweet. Know when to stop!


8. Every tweet should stand alone. Although two adjacent tweets can be on a related topic, they shouldn't depend on each other for their meaning.


9. Every tweet should be timeless. The best tweets should be just as meaningful when read ten years from now as they are today. If the tweet must comment on a current event, it should contain enough information about that event to allow the future reader to decode it (with some help from Google).


10. Avoid hash tags. I think they just clutter up the tweet and make it less timeless. I admit I don't have much experience with them, but I doubt they help anyone find your tweet. (What sense is there in commenting on #obama if a million people are using that hashtag too?) I suspect that most readers rarely do searches by hashtag but merely read the feeds they are subscribed to; in that case the hashtag is just noise.
    


11. Avoid abbreviations. I you have to use abbreviations to fit your tweet into 140 characters, your tweet is probably too long anyway. God gave us only 140 characters for a reason, and you shouldn't try to fudge His limit.
    


12. Use proper punctuation and capitalization. It makes you look like you care.


13. Low sexual content. Sex is the world's most overused topic. Tweets that consistently dwell on sex are a sign of weak imagination and are ultimately boring. Let it go!


14. No moping! Even if you're funny, your readers don't need to know how badly your life is going. If you have a problem, solve it. Otherwise, don't expect affirmation from us for your drinking, career problems or lack of sex lately. Honestly, tweeting something funny about is just an evasion mechanism. Do something!
    


15. Don't feel the need to be funny. Comedy can be a crutch and a prison, especially if your followers expect you to be funny in every tweet. It is more important to be observant and useful. Don't set up expectations for entertainment that you can't reasonably fulfill.
    


16. Know your focus! Every feed should have a central topic. This is your central core - your Twitter personality - that you are always returning to. Over time, people should be able to distinguish your tweets from everyone else's from both their content and their style. There are plenty of "general" Twitterers out there, commenting on the news and celebrity scandals of the day. Your feed should have a unique identity that doesn't depend on these topics.
    

This last item is the toughest. How do you define your Twitter identity? It's like finding your unique identity in the real world: There is no easy formula. If nothing else, your identity will be defined by the topics you often return to. If your topics are consistently interesting, your feed will be too.

Here is some information on my own Twitter feed including my tweet archives. My best tweets respect the rules above.