The Psychology of Thor: Love And Thunder | (#056) The Masculine Psychology Podcast with David Tian

Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in dating, relationships, success, and fulfillment, and explore the psychology of masculinity. Now here’s your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology podcast. I’m David Tian, your host.

In this episode, I’m going to be analyzing some psychological themes in the movie, Thor: Love and Thunder. I’m going to be getting into the battle between good versus evil, and maturity, emotional maturity, psychological maturity, and its relationship to time and love, of course, love and thunder, love and redemption—and so, if you haven’t watched it yet, big spoiler alert because I will be spoiling how the movie goes. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you go watch it. Hopefully, there’s enough time that is lapsed between when the movie came out and when this comes out. Hopefully, you’ve seen it, but if you haven’t, pause the episode here, no hard feelings. Go and watch it and enjoy it, and then come back to this episode. [01:07.8]

It feels a little silly to do a psychological analysis of this movie because the movie itself was quite silly. I loved it. I was highly entertained, but after I came away from it, and it was just under two hours I think—it felt really short—and after looking up some online reviews, and I haven’t read the comics that it’s based on, so I’ve read some reviews that have referenced the comics, and reading the reviews, I discovered there were a lot of scenes that were cut, which explains a lot because there are some plot holes that were huge, but apparently would’ve made sense if they had left those cuts in there.

This is kind of annoying because Doctor Strange 2 also felt very short at just around two hours, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to do a podcast on Thor: Love and Thunder given how short it is and how silly it is. It’s hilarious. If you liked Thor: Ragnarok, it’s the same director. I’m sure you know this director by now, and it was highly entertaining. My wife and I were laughing almost all the way throughout, but as a result, it was actually hard to take the threat, the stakes, seriously. [02:12.0]

The villain was great. Christian Bale was awesome at this, but I feel like because he was surrounded by so many characters that were joking, it was a little hard to take him seriously. There was one dialogue where Thor was wrapped up by vines. The three of them, the three good guys, were being held by vines, which remarkably resembled what happened in Stranger Things 2, spoiler on that, too, not too big of a spoiler, I hope, which I had just finished a few days before I watched this movie. It was starkly similar, of course, by accident or coincidentally.

Gorr says something like “Call the axe” or “Call the Stormbreaker” or whatever, and Thor’s response was, “I’ll call the axe when you call the dentist,” and this is a moment. Thor did this in the Ragnarok as well, of course, right from the beginning, but at that moment it was supposed to be scary. The stakes were there and that moment of levity just kind of deflated the whole thing, because now we’re laughing at the villain that we were supposed to be scared of. [03:09.6]

Anyway, this sort of thing happened throughout and it was a lot of fun, very silly. It felt more like a romcom with some action in it, but this was actually quite deep, and I’ll see if I can tease these out for you and we can draw a lot of lessons from it.

First is this good versus evil, so I’m going to actually focus on Gorr. That’s why I started talking about Gorr and Gorr’s story arc is fascinating here. Unfortunately, a lot of it was cut where apparently he was going to these different gods and massacring them, but also getting the information about eternity, which apparently was why Thanos didn’t know about eternity. It would’ve been a big shortcut instead of having to collect all those infinity stones.

But, apparently this wasn’t just common knowledge and it wasn’t easy to get to an eternity. Gorr discovered this as a result of interrogating gods he was massacring. All of that was cut in the movie, although you see a little bit of it in that scene with The Guardians Of The Galaxy. What I want to focus on is Gorr’s storyline from the very first scene of the movie until the end of the movie. [04:12.3]

At the beginning of the movie, you get buy-in with this villain, right? Because when he was about to kill this annoying god, I think everyone was rooting for him. I was. I was like, Yeah, give it to this god. How awful of a god. At the beginning you’re feeling for Gorr. You get, you understand why he picked up that sword and was taking revenge.

Then, at the end of the movie, you also see his redemption where Hemsworth answers to him that he doesn’t have to do this and he could bring her back, and that’s what he chooses and I wish the movie was longer so that we’d be more in his evil, but the way they made him look, I guess he looked pretty evil, and the way they’d cast his actions of slaughtering these gods made it seem like this was definitely a bad thing for him to be doing versus, say, a neutral character who is policing gods or something. [05:14.8]

We see Gorr at the beginning. We have a lot of sympathy for his situation with his dying daughter and it seems like all of his people died off from the drought, but he stayed faithful to this capricious god and then killing that god. We were all like, Yeah, give it to him.

You know the way in Braveheart, there was that scene where at the beginning of Braveheart, there was the prima nocta and the British lord or whatever came down and took the Scottish maiden on her wedding day and took her for the night. Then when they get to that scene where her husband gets his revenge, I heard somebody behind me in the movie theater, way back when watching it live in the theater, like, Too fast, too fast. I was a teenager then. These other guys wanted to get that revenge, too, on this bad British lord or whatever. [06:08.2]

So, it makes sense. This is something where we don’t see Gorr as evil for doing this. It’s understandable and it might be that the actions of killing this god, the actual killing of the god. maybe went too far and maybe he should have just … but that’s all quibbling because we get his motivation where we don’t label him right away as he’s evil as a result because he did that.

Then, at the end, of course, his redemption of not killing off gods and, mostly, we’re thinking about Thor. We don’t want to see Thor dead, but we don’t really know who these other gods are. Why should we care about them? And if they’re as evil as that first god, maybe the universe would be better off. But because the middle of it, this is the villain, right? There has to be a villain and here’s Gorr, and he kidnapped these children and he’s just scary, though, of course he didn’t harm the children at all, but he is just scary and he’s the bad guy. [07:04.0]

What if all we saw was the middle? And, especially, these days it feels like in the past decade or so, and especially in America, though I could also say the same for Canada and Europe, but especially I maybe just because all the cameras are focused on American politics and the polarization there, there’s a resurgence it seems of good versus evil battles where the nuance, the gray is lost. It’s easy to paint all of our villains on the left and the right as evil and bad, cancel them, just get rid of them completely. The left and the right do this. The right complains about cancel culture, but they’re also painting people as good guys, bad guys. It makes it simple.

I covered this or touched on this in the Top Gun 2 analysis, but here’s a great illustration. Just within two hours, Top Gun 2 skirts the whole thing, because they don’t humanize the bad guys, the other side. They don’t even know what country they are. You never see their eyes. [08:03.7]

Here we have Gorr. We have a story arc and there’s a lot more to the story arc and it could have been more of a buy-in for the sympathy or they could have built it out more seeing how evil he really was. But, to me, especially the fact that Thor seemed calm pretty much the whole time until towards the end in fighting Gorr, it was hard to take Gorr’s evil seriously.

But notice how, if you just truncate, if you cut off the beginning and the end, you would just think Gorr is a one-dimensional bad guy. There’s a great book on this point here by Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS therapy. That book is called No Bad Parts. That’s a great book to get into to understand evil and bad and the gray. There’s also lots of other literature I could point to on this.

Another great one is Roy Baumeister’s book called Evil. That’s a classic on this and that dismantles the myth of pure evil from an empirical perspective. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a great book. I highly recommend these two. I definitely recommend you start with No Bad Parts. [09:11.7]

We also do this to ourselves. Speaking of No Bad Parts, which is an IFS therapy book, we do this to our own parts where we demonize parts of us that we’re scared of that we label as bad or evil or dangerous. A lot of people in life coaching and self-help see this within ourselves as resistance and we demonize parts of ourselves and we play tricks or we develop habits to suppress repress or cut out fights, basically, their resistance within us, because we see it as evil.

But what therapy does, which is different from life coaching or self-help, with good therapy like IFS therapy done properly can help you to do is to go to those parts that you think or that many of your own parts think is evil or evil or shameful or dangerous, and you go to them or parts that you should be afraid of, and you go to them and discover their story, how they got to be the way they are. [10:09.0]

Once you know their story, how they got to be the way they are, the decisions they made along the way, it’s completely understandable once you get to know them. But if you don’t get to know them, if you don’t get to know Gorr, your own versions of Gorr and the Gorr within, if you don’t get to know Gorr and all you see is the current outcome or results—he’s a bad guy. He’s scary-looking, and he’s doing bad things and harming people, right?—and you don’t know how he got to be that way, then you’ll never actually– You’ll always be repressing parts of yourself, because we all have that within us. That’s why we understand. That’s why we instinctively understand Gorr at the beginning of the movie. If you’re honest with yourself, right, and if you’re mature enough, you totally understand that.

Then, at the end, you also see how his mission, driven by this coping strategy for dealing with the grief that he never fully dealt with of losing his daughter, finding out it was, at that time, he thought it was meaningless and reacting to that, and then finally getting to that redemption. [11:12.2]

Again, I would’ve wished for a fuller telling of this story so that the redemption would be more satisfying, but you can see it’s kind of the sped up truncated kind of story arc, where, at the end, it made sense that he would then release his anger, because, finally, he’s face to face with a god, Thor, who doesn’t fight him with animosity, who shows him some understanding, which is, in good therapy, what your higher self, that kind of energy your higher self would bring.

When you bring that energy to the parts that you might think are bad or evil, when you bring that understanding and then you don’t resist the resistance and fight it with fire, fighting fire with fire, and instead you understand it and, in a way, embrace it and let them know you don’t have to be this way, because I can tell you’re not enjoying it because these parts don’t enjoy it. That’s part of Baumeister’s insight, the big thesis in this book, Evil. [12:07.8]

Baumeister, by the way, is “the” most published author or researcher in psychology. He’s a major researcher. It’s a great book, Evil. It breaks down the myth of pure evil and shows that even the people who we think are pure evil didn’t start that way, if you dig deep enough into their stories, and that at the beginning, when they were killing or doing evil, they didn’t enjoy it. It became an acquired taste over time and it seemed that, in Gorr’s case, it was just a reaction to the pain inside.

If he could just take his revenge, then that would assuage his pain, but maybe he’d killed enough gods and then met a god that wasn’t so bad and actually understood him and didn’t try to stop him, that now faced with the act, he realized it wouldn’t bring him the peace. It wouldn’t bring him that love that he was missing so much that he was grieving for, but didn’t allow him the space for it. [13:07.5]

Then that option of bringing her back, I wonder if in the original storyline, if he had considered that before Thor mentioned it, and it seemed like he did because he just caught onto it so quickly, and now he has this redemption. The point here is what if all you saw was the middle? For so many of us, other people that we paint as evil or bad, if you saw enough of what came before and if you’re able to follow them into the after, after they were canceled or after they were painted with that brush of evil, and you were able to follow them to the end, then you’ll discover that they might have done bad things. They probably have done things that have caused great harm, and as a separate issue, maybe for justice’s sake, they would need to do some kind of penance or punishment or whatever. [14:01.6]

But they themselves, the persons, are not intrinsically, all the way through and through, evil or bad, and the same goes for those parts inside us that maybe are being shamed or maybe that you are afraid of. For achievers, that might be lazy parts, the parts that you label as lazy, but you haven’t fully met, understood and explored, or maybe there are parts for some people who are sexual, but you won’t admit it so you’re afraid of them. Maybe you consider them to be sinful and, as a result, you just try to resist them with willpower, but they’re still there under the surface so you have this constant, lifelong battle of repression.

Instead of doing that, demonizing your own parts, applying a therapeutic process to it where you get to know your shadow, you get to know these dark parts of you, what parts of you that you think are dark or scary, and this is a great illustration of this, though it is, again, hard to take seriously, because the movie can be so silly. With Gorr, Chrsitian Bale did such a great job. I wish they gave more seriousness to Gorr and their treatment of this character.

And now we go from Gorr to Thor. [15:11.8]

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Now, one thing that always struck me about the Thor character in the MCU is that he’s supposed to be 1,500 years old. Yet they play him as such a male bimbo, right? [16:05.2]

Now, he’s not a bimbo in terms of the science, which he explained from the first Thor movie as magic or explained magic as science that humans just don’t understand. It’s that he’s not wise. He keeps getting tricked. He’s not savvy to things. You’d think that if you lived to 1,500 years, you’d be street-smart at least, but he keeps getting tricked by his brother, and you’d think with a brother like that, you’d have learned the tricks by now after thousands of years. It has strained credulity.

Even though Thor is one of the oldest—in terms of just the amount of time he’s been living—characters in the MCU, he’s one of the least mature emotionally and least wise, and this is a great illustration of a truth, which is that emotional maturity doesn’t happen naturally through time. Just because you lived a long time, doesn’t mean that you’re going to mature. [17:01.0]

Some guys, they just keep going through the motions for decades. I know guys who started the pickup journey along with me or at the same time I did back in 2005, and they write to me saying, I started when you were starting and I haven’t gotten anywhere with it, and my life hasn’t changed at all and it’s 10 years later or whatever. My life had changed like three different times. I’d basically lived three different lives since then and they hadn’t. Just time, in and of itself, doesn’t do it.

I work with men in their sixties who are still learning the lessons that some people learn in their twenties, and the people who learn it in their twenties often were forced to learn it as a result of severe trauma. But if you led a comfortable life and then you got into a kind of rut but didn’t know it was a rut yet until you were too far into it and there was too much inertia momentum going to keep you down, keep you in the space that you’re at, until you’ve gotten old and gray and only then looked down and discovered life was empty or meaningless for you, but now you had spent so much time just spinning your wheels that this is the hard fact that just time alone won’t do it. [18:18.8]

If you think, I’ll just find a wife in a few years, and just happen to find a woman and then we’ll get married, and then we’ll just go through the motions like everyone else seems to, right? You think it’s like just a God-given right, if you just live long enough, like graduating from the third grade.

I mean, one thing that school really screwed us up on is, if you don’t fail, you just go to the next grade. It’s like you could get a C all the way through, they’re not going to fail you. You actually can get Ds, at least in Ontario, Canada, where I did a lot of public school. You can get Ds and they’ll just pass you and you’ll go along. You’ll be in the remedial levels, but you’ll be in the next grade, because it’s a lot of trouble to keep a kid back.

I hope this isn’t too sensitive for anyone who has been kept back and is still sore about it. I totally get that. But there really isn’t much incentive, at least I didn’t feel any to get As in the third grade when the C students were also going to be there in my class in the fourth grade, at least in the public schools in Ontario, Canada, where I was going through school. [19:16.3]

This is something that we might have taken on in life that, even if you don’t do well or push yourself, you’ll just go to the next grade like everybody else. Eventually, it’ll catch up to you, but you don’t have to deal with that right now. Then maybe at one time, like I did, you’re going to actually try and then you’re going to do the homework and study for once, and then you’ll discover that when you apply yourself, it’s a lot easier. That’s a lesson that you might take through life.

That’s a lesson that I took through life and it didn’t work. In my mid-twenties, I thought, I’ll just get married. This was about the time I’d get married as a good Christian boy and that’s what I did, voila. Of course, I didn’t know anything about, or I thought I did because my wife and I, at the time, took two premarital counseling courses at two different churches and those courses did not help. They did not prepare us at all for the realities of 50 years, let’s say, ideally, of a relationship where you’re sleeping together, everything is integrated. [20:11.1]

That’s tough and most people have no clue and no real preparation for it, and that doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t happen naturally. It might have happened for an older generation, five generations ago or three generations ago where it wasn’t easy to get a divorce or where there was so much societal disapproval in divorce that you just are forced to make do and as a result, your brain looks for ways of making do and you stop asking for more.

But there was a point in which, especially now with the internet, but even earlier, there was a repoint in which people realize that there are lives that they could lead that the white picket fence on the 2.5 whatever kids or cars, I don’t know, doesn’t fulfill and they want more. As a result, you are looking at your marriage and thinking, I could have had more, and that is a possibility now. You could have more. You could have happiness and it doesn’t happen naturally. You’ve got to go and learn how it works, right? [21:10.4]

This isn’t something that we grow up and just learn like we do walking, right? It’s also something that school doesn’t teach us and universities don’t teach how relationships actually work, because most professors have no clue either and they don’t even teach. They definitely don’t teach dating and how to make that happen.

Some of the most important areas, I would say, actually the most important areas in life for your happiness are not covered in any formal sense in school and are not a natural outgrowth of how you are as a human being. If you just listen to your buddies and do what they do, you are screwed, unless your buddy happens to be a therapist, a good therapist or something, but most of us don’t have that. [21:54.3]

That’s a good takeaway from the example of Thor, a 1,500-year-old bimbo, and in this movie, you get to see his zero to hero journey condensed into a short two hours. At the beginning, you get another zero to hero because of his fitness. I actually really appreciated this kind of existential angst that he has in the beginning and through most of the movie, and then meeting Jane again and all of that. That was really nice. I think they could have expanded on that.

Another lesson from Thor, the character and his character arc is the transformation at the end of this movie where he turns to Jane and goes to her. Big spoiler alert. He goes to her and, in the face of death, thinking Gorr will just wish him to death, wish him away, and he’d rather be looking at the love of his life’s eyes, into her eyes, and love makes it worth it. Of course, that’s also true for Gorr and, of course, they really hammer that home by naming his daughter Love. [22:57.8]

This brought to mind the famous quote from Tennyson, “It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” and here we have this 1,500-year-old bimbo or former bimbo who tragically lost a lot of his family and, in fact, almost all of Asgard, the people of Asgard. A lot of them died, and then the land or that planet, I don’t know what you call it, this flat planet, he’s lost that. He’s lost so much and he lost an eye. He lost so much.

When I googled to find and double-check the attribution of that quote, “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” I discovered someone had written, “Is it true? Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?” and this person was looking at a research that showed, if you lived through or had a bad divorce, would that affect an estimation of your happiness later in life? Of course, we know the outcome of that. That’s not new research. Of course, right?

It’s not just that marriage saves you. Only good marriages make a huge difference in making you happier. A bad marriage makes you worse off than if you were just single and this is just super well-known. I think the best evidence of this is the longitudinal study. [24:10.0]

If you don’t know about this, like, What? it’s at Harvard University. I think now it’s been running for over 85 years and it’s Robert Waldinger, famous for sharing this research at that research institute at Harvard that’s been tracking people throughout their lives and checking on their happiness, and connecting those to life conditions and so forth.

The main finding that gets reported and the main finding that they’re showing is that happiness most closely tracks or is correlated to the quality of your relationship, your intimate relationship. Of course, if you have lost love and you haven’t been able to make sense of it or derive meaning from it, or to learn from it that will help you to make sense of how life works and what life’s about, you haven’t learned from it. You haven’t grown from it. Instead, you just lost love and it hurts. [25:04.2]

Then, if that’s all it is, in other words, if you just stopped at Thor at the end of Infinity War, right, since the beginning of Endgame when he lost everything, and then he went and got fat and depressed and whatever, of course, he’s less happy there and, if you asked him, would you want to go back in time or would it be better for you to have never known these people?

Here’s another version of the Thanos thing. You snap everyone out and you wipe their memories out of your mind so you don’t even hurt. This is sort of the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind option, right? Whoever your ex is or whatever, anyone who has hurt you and you miss dearly, what if we could just wipe those memories out of your mind and you wouldn’t miss them anymore? Done, right?

If that’s all it is, if that’s all you’re looking for, just good feelings and happiness—and I know a lot of young guys and that’s what they think is the whole point and they think that sadness is something that shouldn’t be there and that gets in the way of their growth—that’s the number one limiting belief that sadness is a bad thing. [26:03.2]

As a result, they resist sadness and, therefore, they don’t make progress in their therapeutic process. Then, therefore, they don’t grow. They’re stuck like Thor in a 1,500 year bimbo stage, right? They’re not going to be able to make sense of those events that would give them the breakthroughs that would jumpstart their growth. Happiness is it. Happiness is the thing, the gateway to greater wisdom, to greater fulfillment, to actually greater happiness.

There’s a great book on this called bittersweet by Susan Cain. I highly recommend that book as well. I’ve been recommending [books]. This is the third book I recommended here. Go get it, it’s really great, beautifully written, Bittersweet, and it’s on this theme of sadness. I don’t think she uses the word “gateway.” That’s my way of looking at it, but it’s this seminal foundational emotion that you must embrace, but the key is to embrace it with meaning. You have to make sense of it. [26:54.3]

At the beginning of this movie, Thor had a lot of sadness and a lot of good reasons to be sad, and he wasn’t able to make sense of it, all these loves that were lost. But if you were to ask him, at the end of the movie, would it have been better if we could just wipe away the memory of all these people that you had lost, so you never had the love in the first place, right? That’s literally what’s at stake in that Tennyson quote, “Better to have loved and lost and never to have loved at all.”

Let’s do an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind thing and just wipe your memory clear or clean of all those that you lost so we can just return you to this naive state. Would you want it? You’ll be happier in terms of a naive kind of happiness. Would you want it? And for all of those who say yes, then you’ve never really loved. 

That’s a sign that you actually never loved, because part of love is loss and that’s part of what makes it so powerful, and that sadness, if it comes from having lost love, if you can make sense of it, if you have now learned from it, not like the Red Pill kind of lesson of “I’ll never have feelings or be attached to women again, and I’ll just use them and abuse them.” I mean, that is one meaning you can take away from it, but that meaning will not help you to grow. [28:00.0]

But if you can find a meaning that is empowering or allows you to embrace the bittersweet of life to have to stay with the love, because then everyone who has truly loved would never wish away the pain, because in order to wish away the pain, you’d have to delete the memory because this is the reality, right? Whenever you love, it’s the moment you love. Now there’s a possibility of this person dying or of the love being lost, and if that’s not a bargain that you’re willing to embrace, then you actually haven’t loved.

This is what tells me that most guys have no clue what love is. I’m trying to write a piece on this. The point is that most guys don’t know what love is. You don’t know what love is. You think you know, but you just are infatuated and you’re just needy and you’re insecure, and you’re projecting. [28:53.2]

So many guys, and I do all these podcast episodes and other content on unconditional love, 80%, easily, maybe 95% of guys have never actually felt unconditional love. They think they have. “I love this girl unconditionally, but she didn’t love me back, so it doesn’t work, David.” That’s not how unconditional love works. That proves to me you don’t know what unconditional love is, and it’s so hard to describe, because to a lot of guys, it just sounds cheesy.

That’s one thing I appreciated about this movie. It depicts kind of in the midst of all this humor and silliness, especially from Gorr’s side, that that power of love that he would die in reviving his daughter, but knowing that his daughter would live on, his love that would complete the love that he lost, he’d rather have that. He’d rather have the love to exist in his case. In this case, his daughter is named Love. He’d rather have love exist, but also unconditional love exist than to keep living and get his revenge. [29:54.8]

That’s one huge takeaway you can take from it in an otherwise silly and fun movie, just noticing that Tennyson message of “Better to have loved and lost and never to have loved at all,” and the kind of litmus test if you could remove in a kind of your Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—hopefully, you’ve seen that movie, Jim Carey and Kate Winslet, great movie, especially if you’re going through a breakup or something—and you can just erase this person.

It’s most important, I think most guys should learn love not through romantic relationships. If you haven’t experienced love through someone that you’re not sexually attracted to, then I don’t think you can trust your own love yet. I’ve done a video on the true meaning of life being love. I’ve put it back there. If you are not subscribed to my channel on YouTube and you go to the channel, that’s the video at the front because I think that’s the most important lesson for a lot of guys.

I talk about my goddaughter and discovering unconditional love through my love for her and I knew that it wasn’t obfuscated by sexual desire or lust, which is going to be an important and necessary part of an intimate or romantic love or relationship. [31:06.7]

But instead, most guys don’t know what true love on its own is, because what romantic love is, if it’s unconditional, if it’s real love, unconditional love, it’s unconditional love, and then you add on all this other ingredients on top of it, like sexual desire and all of that. Then the whole package is then intimate love.

Most guys don’t know what the love component is and they just have instead this kind of hollow feeling, which is why they’re so needy and insecure with it, and why it turns off women and these guys don’t understand why. They don’t because they don’t know what love is. They don’t know what the core ingredient is. We’re supposed to be the center of the dish. Instead, they just see the garnishes. They have all these garnishes and they don’t know about the core ingredient.

Now we get to the third point, which is going to be really short, which is just that love is the redemption. Love redeems everything. Love covers overall. I’ve actually got that in Chinese tattooed on my body, my arm. Love covers all. In the biblical case, it covers all wrongs, all sins, and it’s not just a theological point. It’s a psychological one. [32:12.5]

It’s illustrated in this movie through Gorr and kind of through Thor, and it’s easy to just paper over and say, Oh, it’s cheesy or whatever, and I totally get it because I used to think it was cheesy, too. I thought it was cheesy because I didn’t know what love was in my twenties and the most of my thirties, until I was actually loving and I didn’t even know it until I was forced to confront it and I talk about that in that video I just referenced, the true meaning of life, on my YouTube channel.

Love actually is the thing that will not redeem a relationship because there might be other practical or logistical reasons that it’s not a good idea for the two of you to be together, but that doesn’t mean that the love is conditional and goes away. [32:56.8]

These are hard truths, but for those who actually have experienced unconditional love flowing from them, which is really the only direction that matters when it’s real love, not when it’s needy, pretend to be love, which is what most guys or 80 to 95% of guys think is love, because they’re just focused on, Does she love me back? If you’re asking that question, what you have between you is not love yet, and almost all romantic love that I’ve seen isn’t actually real love. It’s just souped up infatuation, and that’s why so many so-called love relationships are doomed. They fail.

If you want to sidestep that, if you want to avoid those traps of falling into fake love relationships, I’ve got a course called “Rock Solid Relationships” that not just explains it. I don’t just give lectures and it’s not just teaching, but it goes through a guided meditated process that goes right to your unconscious. That helps you to experience all of these truths, especially of love for yourself, because it is an experiential knowledge, not just an intellectual one. [34:04.8]

Okay, so to recap, I went over the first point being, focusing on Gorr, and the question of what if all you saw was the middle of his story? The point about there are no bad parts, and then the second on Thor, noticing that he’s a 1,500-year-old bimbo and that emotional maturity doesn’t happen automatically.

Then the final point about unconditional love and the redemption that comes from love, and the point that most people, maybe 80%, maybe 95% of people have never actually experienced real love which is unconditional and that is sad. Again, I have courses that lead you through to discover these truths, experientially for yourself, not just intellectually, because they can’t just be intellectual understanding. It has to be experiential knowledge, and that was a big point of why Thor was this 1,500-year-old bimbo in terms of wisdom. You can’t just have the head knowledge. It’s got to be an experiential experience in the heart and that’s a lot tougher to convey. [35:04.2]

You can also get access to “Rock Solid Relationships” in my “Platinum Partnership”, which gives you access to all of the courses that will walk you through the therapeutic process that’s necessary for a successful relationship and to have consistent fulfillment and happiness in life because it doesn’t happen automatically.

Okay, I hope you enjoyed Thor: Love and Thunder, the movie, and I hope you enjoyed this breakdown, this sort of psychological analysis of some of the themes that I discovered in the movie. It was a lot of fun, silly movie. Thank you so much for listening and I appreciate any comments you’ve got, any kind of feedback. I’d love to hear the feedback, so I’m not just speaking into the empty void. Sometimes it feels like that when I’m just with me and the mic. Share any kind of feedback you got. Also, if you enjoyed this episode and this podcast, share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it.

Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, David Tian, signing out. [35:56.2]

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