Nick Offerman - Relationship advice from a married man

I'm 47 years old and I've been blessed with a healthy, happy relationship for sneaking up on 18 years, which is amazing and wonderful. And also, P.S., it's not f***ing Disneyland. We're two people living together. Any two people maintaining a close relationship, you're going to scream at each other at some point about who left the lid off the Tupperware. That's how people work. So, I mean, whether it's your mom and dad or your roommate or your sibling or your spouse, just getting 10 years under your belt is astonishing. Now, a good friend of mine has not been so lucky. He got married around the same time and his relationship ended recently. So, he's doing his best, but he's at this weird middle-aged place where he has to start dating again. And it's tricky because when we were young, finding the loves of our lives, they didn't call it dating, they called it courting. You know, we didn't have the internet, let alone smartphones and all that. So, you had to actually just imagine you had to take your body to another place where other people had brought their bodies so that the bodies could assess one another. Which is inconvenient, certainly, but it has its advantages. One of which is you can use all five senses when you're actually in the physical proximity of the people you're considering. So, maybe they look and sound great, but they don't smell so friendly. Your phone can't tell you that. But, you know, he's being told that he needs to use modern technology. When we were young, you would just basically go to a barn raising or a hog killing. At a barn raising, you know, that's hard work. So, you just wait and see who's the last person standing and you marry that son of a bitch. And at a hog killing, it doesn't take long for the ground to be covered in gore and effluvia and everybody ends up slipping into somebody's arms and that becomes your spouse. It's a much simpler time. Now, they're telling him he's got to use these social dating apps. Now, I'm from Los Angeles, so I'm going to lay a little 411 on you. Apps is short for applications. That's just the beginning. What I'm going to throw down here, you can trust, is totally super one-hundo fire emoji. My ---- is tight AF. But you know the apps I'm talking about. Tinder for straight couples. Grindr for gay men. There's a new one called Attractor, which is for lonely farmers, I can only imagine. And he's trying it. He's trying it. And you know, I have good friends that found romance, so it's not to say it can't be done. But my friend, who's old-fashioned, he's said that it feels cheap. He feels like he's shopping for shoes and he needs to go places to meet people. So he's been looking for things to go to, among which he found, in downtown LA, a workshop called Bake Amazing Cookies. And I say, let me stop you right there, Richard. Of course you should go to Bake Amazing Cookies. That's the trick. It's going to work out way better if they find you. Because if you're out there on the make, you're trying too hard. It's never going to work out. But if they find you, and the way to get them to find you, is to trick yourself into forgetting you want them to find you. And the way to do that is to engage in something that you love so passionately that you forget. You're like, oh, f**k, the whole field of melons. What's that? Oh, yes, hi, I am single. Now, I have to be conclusive proof of this theory. I'm going to use this chair because I'm married so ******* far up. Okay, let's see. Remember where this hand is? That's how far up I'm married. And I still can't wrap my head around it, so let me set the scene for you just a little bit. Let me take you all the way back to the year 2000, when my wife Megan and I met doing a play in Los Angeles. Megan had just finished the first two seasons of the Will & Grace television program. You're goddamn right about that. Now, in the year 2000, television was created by companies called networks, and they would make packages of episodes they called seasons. Trust me, look it up. Each season generally consisted of 24 episodes. So she had finished the first 48 episodes of Will & Grace, or the equivalent of eight seasons of Aziz's show. Right? It's a crazily different quantifiable time. So across these first two seasons, Will & Grace had gone through the quickening of the Highlander, where they had become the stag and run across the beach with Sean Connery. And the world was like, holy ----, you are the greatest. So they had become the celebrated comedy legends we know them to be. Megan, in fact, was about to win her first Emmy a few months after we met. I was living beneath my friend's house in a dirt and stone space in exchange for turning it into a space that could be inhabited by a civilized human who you could then get to pay rent. The entire space was dirt with foundation walls. I could urinate flamboyantly and freely. I'd put on music to pee too. I had all my moves. And the next morning you could not discern that it had taken place. That was the only good thing about living there. So Megan and I were at very different places when it comes to personal hygiene, if nothing else, when we met. But my secret was I was also working for this theater company. They had bought a warehouse and were building a theater into this warehouse. So I was working for them as a carpenter. And the day that Megan and I met, the first day of rehearsal, I had been there working for eight hours, swinging a hammer. So when we first encountered each other, I was covered in a patina of sweat and sawdust and satisfaction. I was wearing a tool belt. And so I can't... This is my best speculative guess. I can only imagine that whatever glow was coming off of my ursine features, because I had just built a stage, had to somehow sway her. And so combining that knowledge and trying to justify it with the experience of seeing myself in a mirror, it's just really hard to reconcile. And so I said to my friend, of course you should go to bake amazing cookies, because guess who's not coming to bake amazing cookies? Married people. It's going to be single people, either out for fun, baking freaks, but probably people looking for romance. You're going to be in some cool room that's going to be warm and thickly redolent of baking cookies. Even if you strike out and don't find romance, the worst case scenario is you'll have tricked yourself into baking delicious cookies. Again, it's all looking away from the f***ing phone and looking into life and where nature is in life. Look inside yourself, see what you can nourish and cause to fully bush. And maybe it's fruit, maybe it's vegetable, maybe it's weaveable, maybe it's smokeable. Whatever it is, someone might want to consume it. Or you just eat cookies. But if you do something that you're passionate about, chances are, even if you're not looking for a spouse, you know how that is. When you see somebody doing something they love and that's their thing, that's when they're the most charismatic. You could just be watching a plumber nimbly replace the wax ring beneath your toilet and there's just something. If he loves it, you'll find yourself thinking, that guy's alright. I don't know what it is, but I like him. That's all I'm saying.