Why The Stoics Thought That Happy Lives Detach from Needy Relationships
A brief defense of Stoicism’s most controversial advice
Stoic philosophy is known for its toolbox of “spiritual exercises” to help you deal with life. But it seems limited with its advice on relationships. Epictetus (50–135 CE), a prominent Stoic philosopher in Rome, argues that to be happy, you must detach from the things and the people you love:
If you kiss your own child or wife, say to yourself that you are kissing a human being; for when they die you will not be disturbed (Handbook, 3).
How does that advice even make sense? Attachment makes relationships possible at all. Let me explain with a story.
My first serious relationship at university was with a woman named Amy. She was (is) attractive, intelligent, and understood my weird interest in intellectual topics for their own sake. But when summer began, I wanted our relationship to end.
Amy lived in Kansas and we studied in Texas. When the school year ended, then, I dropped her off as part of my own cross-country trip. But my departure was delayed when her town was struck by a tornado.
Fortunately, no real damage transpired. But it is a mark of my youthful immaturity that for the next two weeks I fantasized that another tornado might end our relationship for us.
One lesson from this episode, then, is that if you ever fantasize about a natural disaster taking your “beloved,” it is time to end the relationship. A second turns on reasons related to Epictetus’ apparently terrible advice on detachment.
The reasons I couldn’t bring myself to end the relationship centered on one point: she hadn’t done anything ostensibly “wrong.” In fact, I spent the majority of our time together feeling like an ass for never caring as much about her as she did for me. Admittedly, I often was an ass, but the difficulty ran deeper.
I sensed that she needed me to embody a certain ideal that I just could not be. Because she was an avid romance novel reader and movie goer, I can only imagine I should have been some kind of Freddie Prince Jr. But I am not that guy (thankfully).
As a result, I occupied a relationship space in the gap between her ideal and my real actions that we usually call “disappointment.” And no one wants to be in a relationship where they are a constant disappointment.
At base, I think this is Epictetus’ point. If you treat your loved ones as something that they are not, your neediness will make you unhappy and ruin what you do have. You will be Amy.
My defense of Stoicism — especially Epictetus’ philosophy — holds that the traditional interpretation of detachment in relationships rests on a misunderstanding. This is not a passage about psychological attachment but about neediness in relationships.
That broader defense of Epictetus is my philosophical purpose. I’m even going to defend his view that this kind of “detachment” is crucial for any good relationship.
Practically, I want to show you three practices to avoid neediness in your relationships with things and people — even when your need is covert. Let’s start with things since the point is simpler with them.
Detach From Needing Things
It helps to look at the surrounding context for Epictetus’ claim in his Handbook. The work itself was a compilation of his key ideas by his student Arrian that were included in his Discourses — also recorded by Arrian. Originally, there were eight volumes of the Discourses but only four volumes survive.
Each statement in the Handbook, then, is a sort of “Tweet” of an idea developed in some depth elsewhere. The whole “Tweet” where Epictetus makes his claim about detaching from things and people begins as follows.
With everything which entertains you, is useful, or of which you are fond, remember to say to yourself, beginning with the very least things, “What is its nature?” If you are fond of a jug, say, “I am fond of a jug.” For when it is broken you will not be disturbed (Handbook, 3).
The real concern Epictetus is addressing, then, is a mistake that people make about categories. In the Handbook he takes up this topic repeatedly (see sections 11, 14, and 16). Stoics held that bad logic was the source of many of our life’s problems. Epictetus’ intent can be illustrated by a story.
When I was four years old, I had a favorite stuffed animal: a panda bear, which I named “Pepe” (pronounced with short ‘e’ sounds as in ‘bet’) after the famous real panda bear in Mexico City. I took it everywhere with me and it got beat up. One day, an arm of his began to come apart at the seams. Distressed, I cried. Then my mother came to the “rescue” and sewed the arm back.
Epictetus is reminding us that sometimes we act this way about possessions even when we’re older. You and I need to remember that our possessions can be lost, or stolen, or broken. We shouldn’t become overly attached to them.
We don’t need them to be complete people or to live happy lives.
How to Apply This
Scholars call what Epictetus is discussing a “spiritual exercise” because it is meant to improve your spirit in the way that physical exercises improve your body. It is, in brief, a workout routine for your mind.
More specifically, Epictetus is explaining a spiritual exercise in the larger constellation of anticipatory practices that Tim Ferriss has called “fear setting.”
The idea is to think through what would actually happen for something we fear. Usually, our fears run wild — transforming our thoughts into what the Stoics called a passion — because they don’t have concrete details to put boundaries around them.
Epictetus in this little passage is telling us to recall the type of being something is — its category — so that we can put boundaries around what will and won’t be possible with it.
Just ask: “What kind of being is this? What is its nature?” When you answer that question, then affirm your response by labeling it: “I am fond of an x.”
This will put up realistic boundaries around what you should expect from things.
How to Detach From Needing People
Epictetus continues this line of reasoning so that we arrive at the statement:
If you kiss your own child or wife, say to yourself that you are kissing a human being; for when they die you will not be disturbed (Handbook, 3).
The surrounding context makes clear, however, that the mistake at work is misidentifying the category of being that humans are.
There are really two ideas about neediness in this passage and it might be easiest to phrase them as questions:
- Why are you asking more of this person than they can give? Whence the need?
- Why are you hoping that they will avoid death? Whence the need?
The first of these questions turns on the neediness we might have in a relationship with a person — the sort discussed in the opening case with Amy.
The second of these questions adds something to the analysis. Death raises a more basic question about the value of a human life.
In the Discourses, from which the Handbook draws its material, Epictetus clarifies that a good human life is one that makes use of its human faculties, namely in reasoning well and acting on those reasons.
The example he gives is of Helvidius Priscus, a Roman noble and fierce defender of republican rule (rather than the despotism of emperors). He opposed both the crazed emperor Nero and the later Vespasian, who finally executed him. This is the conversation Epictetus relates when Priscus was ordered not to attend the senate meetings:
Priscus: It is in your power not to allow me to be a member of the Senate, but so long as I am one, I must attend its meetings.
Vespasian: Very well then, but when you attend, hold your peace.
Priscus: Do not ask for my opinion and I will hold my peace.
Vespasian: But I must ask for your opinion.
Priscus: And I must answer what seems to me right.
Vespasian: But if you speak, I shall put you to death.
Priscus: Well, when did I ever tell you that I was immortal? You will do your part and I will do mine (Discourses I.2)
Epictetus’ point, in short, is that the measure of a human life is not its length but its value.
That value, moreover, is determined by whether you have managed to preserve the upstanding, moral individual within. Do you act in such a way that your actions were towards what is good and compatible with other people acting similarly?
If so, your life has all the value it could have. Whether it is long or short will not change that.
How to Apply This
This anticipatory practice involves the contemplation of death — though not of one’s own, but of one’s loved ones. That makes it harder.
Yet it is intended to console us. Ask only:
- Did they act well as a human? Did they preserve what was of value in their character?
If so, then they have lived well and you can be grateful that you have known them. You should grieve — Epictetus insists on this point — but also celebrate the life that they have lived well (Handbook, 16).
These points, of course, raise the broader question: what is the goal for our interactions with other people? What can we do to avoid neediness?
The Opposite of Neediness is Integration
For the Stoics, the opposite of neediness isn’t perfect self-sufficiency. You can’t have that as a human being. That’s why I wrote a whole article on why Stoic courage requires you to practice vulnerability on a daily basis.
The opposite of neediness is integration: when you accept the parts of you as you are.
Stobaeus, the ancient historian, explains the Stoic view on the goal of life this way:
[The Stoics] say that being happy is the goal for the sake of which everything else is done. … This consists in living in accordance with virtue, living in agreement, or, what is the same, living in accordance with nature (LS 63A).
Your purpose is to integrate all your actions, reasons, and feelings. When you do that you achieve “happiness” in the sense of “eudaimonia,” flourishing.
If you achieve this sort of integration, then you won’t need another person to fix what is “broken” about you. You won’t be needy. But that requires acknowledging the sources of your shame and making peace with them.
Nobody makes this point more powerfully than James Stockdale, who was an American fighter pilot in the Vietnam War. He was a practicing Stoic and medal of honor recipient. Before that, his plane was shot down over enemy territory and he was taken as a prisoner to the Hanoi torture camps where he remained for nearly eight years — serving as the leader of 400 men in the prison.
As his plane crashed down he thought: “Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus” (Courage Under Fire, 7). It was Epictetus who helped him through.
In the camp, the primary aim of the tortures was to catch a prisoner in what Stockdale calls the wedge of shame. All men, especially the leadership, were first tortured physically then isolated to make them psychologically pliable.
Commenting on the process, Stockdale concludes: I have
looked over the brink and seen the bottom of the pit and realized the truth of that linchpin of Stoic thought: that the thing that brings down a man is not pain but shame! (Courage Under Fire, 19).
If you address those parts of yourself that bring on the feeling of shame — and it is hard — then you can live a life that is integrated. You can survive hard times and you can live well with others.
How to Apply This
Stockdale is clear about the way to beat shame. It isn’t by “loving” yourself in the banal way that many prescribe. If you address those parts of yourself that bring shame and decide “I’m better for this thing” then you are simply changing its value — transvaluing it.
As a result, it will still have a hold over you and you’ll be living against it — like a teenager who acts out against their parents just to be different.
There are two real ways to make peace with shame. The first concerns how you deal with other people. Since every man in the camp was “introduced” after a round of torture and isolation, the men developed a way to re-integrate them. Having just “spilled their guts” in torture, the soldiers felt unworthy of acceptance. But
because we were equally fragile, it seemed to catch on that we all replied something like this: “Listen, pal, there are no virgins in here. You should have heard the kind of statement I made. Snap out of it. We’re all in this together. What’s your name?” (Courage Under Fire, 13).
In short, you can help other people overcome their shame through qualified forgiveness. You must be qualified — to have gone through the same process, or be the right authority — to have your forgiveness matter.
The other way is to think back on your own experiences and conclude: that happened and it’s ok. Your life will go on and you can live well.
And this brings the discussion to its starting point: happiness.
Happiness, Integration, Authenticity
Stoic “happiness,” eudaimonia, is really closer to what we call tranquility. The goal in your life, they suggest, is to integrate all the aspects of your personality, your beliefs, reasons, emotions, and actions. That, in turn, requires making peace with those aspects of your personality that you think are shameful.
The Stoics have (at least) four key practices — spiritual exercises — to help you do this. They all turn on remembering:
- Remember the category of things in your life.
- Remember the character of people in your life.
- Remember to forgive other people.
- Remember to make peace with your own past.
The value of these practices can be expressed in a joke. Dan Gilbert, a notable psychologist, once puzzled over data about happiness after the end of a marriage. It showed that couples enjoy a “honeymoon” phase of bliss at the beginning of the relationship that is higher than life before marriage. But then, on average, their happiness would decline until they decided to divorce. At that point, he witnessed that it shot back up again to normal levels, only for the cycle to continue.
Those data, he quipped, suggest the key to happiness: fall in love, marry, divorce, then repeat.
Of course, when you dig down into the data, they reveal a different story (Gilbert knew this too). Good marriages do make people genuinely happier, but bad ones make them definitively unhappier. If you are in a good marriage, then, stay in it. If you are in a bad one, leave.
The Stoic point is that even if Gilbert’s “cycle” were genuinely true, you wouldn’t really want to choose it anyway. The main reason is that you would only be using the other person, so you would preclude having a good relationship in the first place.
Humans need each other. We get into relationships, in part, because of those needs. But we drain them of their value if we try to repurpose them to fix the problems in our lives that stem from the sources of our shame.
The value of living well in the Stoic sense, then, is that it opens a path towards a meaningful life with meaningful relationships. I’ll leave you with a final quotation from Epictetus on relationships.
Every event has two handles: one by which it can be carried and one by which it can’t. If your brother does you wrong, don’t grab it by his wrongdoing, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other, that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries (Handbook, 43).
Thank you for reading and I hope you learned something.
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Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.