How to Handle Temptation in a Long-Term Relationship | (#100) 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’ll be exploring one surefire way to know whether you’re really ready for a long-term relationship, because if you get into a relationship when you’re not actually ready yet for the relationship—you haven’t matured enough. You haven’t grown. You haven’t developed to the point where you’ll be able to savor and fully cherish and appreciate a committed, monogamous relationship. I’m not talking about an open relationship here. I’m talking about the traditional, monogamous, committed relationship—if you haven’t entered that developmental stage in your life, but you prematurely enter a relationship, then you’re in for a world of heartache. [01:00.8]

The studies have shown that those who are in bad relationships have to endure a much greater degree of emotional pain than they would have as a single person. It’s actually easier to experience a base level of contentment or happiness as a single person than you would in a bad relationship.

In a good relationship, as the research has shown, there are a lot of benefits to your emotional health, as well as your physical health. The research has shown that being in a happy relationship even increases the length of your life as a man, but if you’re in a bad relationship, it makes everything so much worse, and if you’ve been in a bad relationship, you know exactly what that’s like.

From a happiness and fulfillment perspective, it’d be preferable to be single than to be stuck in a bad relationship. And if you’re not developmentally ready yet to be in a long-term, committed relationship, but you end up somehow in one, then that relationship will fail dramatically and you’re going to be miserable once the honeymoon period is over, and the honeymoon period generally lasts anywhere between six to 18 months. [02:08.3]

So, if you’re in a new relationship and you think, Everything’s going great and this will go on for the rest of my life, big spoiler alert, you’re very likely still in the high of the honeymoon period and you would be wise to prepare for the inevitable coming out of that natural high from the chemistry or the hormones of the honeymoon phase.

So, what is this easy, surefire way of telling whether you’re ready developmentally for a relationship? It’s not the only way to tell whether you’re ready for a relationship, but it’s one easy litmus test, and that is to gauge to what degree you’re afraid of sexual temptation in your relationship, either temptation for yourself or for your partner.

According to our analytics, about 95 percent of our listeners are male, so it’s probably a man, so I’m going to be in this episode, assuming your partner is a woman. Again, these are heterosexual males, as far as I can tell. But almost everything applies both ways. But my examples will be for men who are in relationships with women. [03:13.6]

So, you can ask yourself, “How concerned am I about sexual temptation in this relationship for myself or for my woman?” First, I’m going to directly attack this myth that the best way to deal with temptation is avoidance or sheltering yourself from the sources of temptation, the kind of isolating or cloistering, or sequestering her or you away from potential sources of temptation. That will not work in the long term, and when you’re looking at a marriage or a long-term relationship, you’re looking at something that will last 50 or more years, so that’s really long-term. [03:54.0]

A great analogy, again, just an analogy. A great analogy is with food. In the reality show, The Biggest Loser, you have obese people who are competing to see who can lose the most weight, and they end up in these very artificial environments during the show where the food that they’re around and the trainers that they’re constantly surrounded by are all moving them towards this goal of losing this weight, and most of them lose an astounding amount of weight.

But then, when they go into their day-to-day lives after the show, almost all of them gain all that back and more, because that avoidance, the sheltering, what I would call the Rapunzel strategy—keeping the person hidden away very high up in this tower that you can’t even get into, unless she lets her hair down, right? It’s the ultimate cloistering or sheltering—and just like in the fairy tale that does not work in the long term.

Again, looking at the analogy of food, think about a professional fighter or some kind of athlete, or a bodybuilder who is preparing for some kind of competition and they’re ramping up their diet and everything for the fight week or whatever the preparation period is. What are they eating right after the competition is over? [05:09.7]

They’re eating that food that they’ve been craving this whole time, but have been denying themselves, and the happiness on their faces when they bite into that pizza that they haven’t allowed themselves the pleasure of eating for however many months is very evident.

So, you can keep up that discipline willpower approach for two months, four months, whatever the short-term period is, knowing that there’s a goal at the end that’s like a finish line, and it’s possible. But ask anybody who has sustained a diet for more than 10 years, the secret to that cannot be disciplined in willpower. Denying yourself the very things that you enjoy in life for 10 or more years, that is only a recipe for burnout, acting out, and extreme self-sabotaging behaviors. [05:57.7]

The average person who goes on a very restrictive diet ends up binge-eating when they can’t take it anymore, and then they end up often gaining all their weight back or more. The only sustainable way to keep up a diet is to actually change your preferences so you’re not craving those old bad foods anymore, and that’s the only sustainable way of altering your diet for good for the long term, and that’s the same here with your appetites sexually.

The question that was posed to me that I’m making this episode in response to is “How do I deal with sexual temptation in my long-term relationship?” This is actually a really deep question and is much bigger than, I think, the questioner initially realized. Your attitude towards sexual temptation says a lot about how you understand long-term relationships and what it takes to succeed for 50 years. [06:48.4]

The immature person is afraid of what their partner might do, given sexual temptation, so they try to control their partner and forbid them from talking to certain people or going to certain places, not realizing that if you’re relying on this restricting or avoidance, or sheltering or coddling of your partner, you will never know what she’s really like or her real moral character when there’s temptation.

Unless you end up on a deserted island, just the two of you, and if you end up there, then there’s no question of sexual temptation. You have to worry about it, right? Or you’re the king or emperor and the only men that you allow around your harem are eunuchs. Save for those scenarios of a kingdom with a harem, surrounded by eunuch guards, or being stranded on a deserted island, the very thing you want to see before you commit is how she will respond to temptation.

By all means, bring her into the nightclub and introduce her to hot guys, and see how she responds. Save yourself the time and heartache, and this is precisely some of the information you will need in order to determine whether she is mature enough for a long-term relationship, and, thereby, whether it would be wise for you to select her to be your wife or to be your girlfriend, whether this is somebody who is mature enough that you can trust them to make the morally-right decision under temptation. [08:16.7]

Now, I know a lot of guys who can’t even imagine growing beyond where they are in their current phase of sexual maturity. Now, I am saying that this is a matter of maturity. It’s not a matter of right or wrong, in this case. If you are not ready for a relationship, then you need to experience single life to the fullest so that you’ll be able to move on to the next stage in your life, being in a relationship or being married, and then move on to the next stage, being ready to be a father, a responsible and loving and present father to children. [08:53.2]

These are all stages, and if you rush through them prematurely, and you’re in a society that exposes you to sources of temptation, even just through thoughts of being able to see how others live on Instagram or other sources on the Internet—which, if you lived in a deserted island, you wouldn’t be exposed to, or if you lived a thousand years ago, you wouldn’t have been exposed to, so it’d be actually easier to be content with your lot, but now it is much harder in the modern world and will very likely become increasingly harder—you will sabotage any relationship you enter, unless you are developmentally ready to be in a relationship.

Yes, this is a developmental issue. This is about maturity, and it’s completely okay to not yet be ready for that, because the thing to do is to not just skip the next stage prematurely and then screw that up because you’re not ready for it. Just like skipping first- or second-year calculus and just skipping to the third level or third year, and then being completely confused, right? Because you’re not ready yet, and that’s okay.

See, what you need to do right now is to get through the earlier stages, so once you get into a relationship, the next stage, you won’t be pining after all of the fun you could have had when you were single and that you didn’t get a chance to have and you see now your buddy is doing that. [10:07.0]

I speak from personal experience. I got married at a young age at 24, and as a conservative evangelical Christian, I skipped, developmentally, all of the bachelor years, really, and the bachelor fun, and went right into marriage and I wasn’t ready for it. Then when I came out of the faith, it became now opened to me, this option of living it up, and I did exactly that. I really lived it up, a lot of hedonism, a lot of pleasure, the player lifestyle.

At that time—this was before TikTok, before Instagram—I was posting photos and albums on Facebook as we used to, and my old friends who came up with me in high school, we were the same age, had stayed with their early marriages and had kids by then, and we were in our mid-30s, and they were privately messaging me saying, “Wow, this life that you’re leading with you and five girls in their bikini,” those photos that display kind of player lifestyle, “man, I wish I could do that now.” [11:05.0]

Then when I moved to Thailand and Indonesia, living as a digital nomad at various places in Southeast Asia, friends who were married with kids, coming to meet me, and then when we went out to party, their number-one objective was to get some casual hookups and that sort of thing.

These are all great examples of guys who weren’t developmentally ready, but now we’re stuck, and a great depiction of the pain of that—the sort of life of quiet desperation where you’re continually pining for the life that you never lived, the grass is greener on the other side, that keeps coming up in the background for you—this ongoing pain of having to deal with, coming to terms with a life that is appealing to you, but that you never got to live, will either undermine and make it very difficult for you to fully enjoy the life and the good things that you do have now, or will cause you to cheat or act out, or get a divorce. [12:01.8]

Okay, so how do you know whether you’re developmentally ready for a long-term relationship as a man? Here’s a great illustration. The late Professor O. Gómez, one of my mentors at the University of Michigan, he was an eminent professor, tenured in the Department of Psychology, former chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and I think one of the cofounders of one of the few Buddhist studies programs in the world. Anyway, very mature and profound man.

He said to me once, “You know, I knew I was at that next stage in my life, when my first lecture for the intro to Buddhism class for that year, which has over 300 students in a kind of auditorium seating. At my first lecture, I looked down and I saw on the front row, all seated in a row, about half a dozen beautiful women, all wearing identical sorority T-shirts, and I thought to myself, They’re so beautiful. Their dads must be so proud of them.” [13:00.3]

And we grad students, all of whom were married, and some had kids already at that point, all laughed appropriately, because it’s funny. I’ve told this anecdote many times to guys at my in-person seminars, and most of the time, there’s no laughter or even smiling. They’re still trying to figure out what I’m trying to say. They haven’t quite gotten the point emotionally, even though they might get it intellectually—and if you just heard that and you didn’t chuckle, then that’s an easy sign that you’re not yet ready for it.

But even if you did laugh, as I did, many, many years ago, when I was in my late-20s, hearing this, I wasn’t yet mature enough for a 50-plus year relationship in the modern world where I’m not living in a deserted island, but instead, I’m often in huge cities. And, yes, like any kind of maturity, sexual maturity can also grow and develop, but for many men, it doesn’t develop very far past high school age. It gets stuck at a certain level, usually around college. [14:01.3]

My hypothesis for this is that it’s largely because there’s this limiting factor, this limiting force, which is sexual shame that’s baked into many traditional societies and sort of a vestige of crap that we’ve inherited uncritically. We have not examined these beliefs or assumptions, or even arguments or reasons. We haven’t examined them critically. But instead, at a young age, we were shamed into uncritical adoption and acceptance of beliefs that were foisted onto us, and that have a lot of emotional valence.

That is, they’re charged emotionally, so even if we can assent intellectually to scientific beliefs about sex and sexual behavior, which has already come in since the advent of the Kinsey Reports and Masters and Johnson, and sexology research that is being conducted at top universities in the West, especially in places like Canada, we end up uncritically adopting the sort of fundamentalist knee-jerk responses to sex, and these are shame-based ones. [15:03.8]

As a result, many men around the world are stuck developmentally at a relatively immature stage when it comes to sex and sex psychology, but even sexual attraction, because it has to do with sex.

No matter their physical strength, for many men, emotions are too much for them to handle. It’s why they can’t give women the deeper levels of emotional intimacy and connection that they crave. It’s why they fail to be the man that modern women desire most: a man with inner strength, a man who has mastered his emotions.

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Going into the next stage beyond living it up in your singlehood and being ready for a long-term committed, monogamous relationship, requires living out to your satisfaction the temptations of your single life, and for those for whom he was denied, it’s going to be very difficult in the modern world to avoid or to be sheltered away from all sexual temptation for 50-some-odd years.

This might have been possible in the 1800s, definitely earlier, definitely before the internet, but now even if you live in a small town out in some rural area, if you have a phone and the internet, you’ve downloaded certain apps, you’re going to be seeing what other women or men your age have available to them and it will be very easy for you to see members of the opposite sex who are far more physically attractive than any members of the opposite sex in your immediate physical proximity. [17:09.8]

So, yes, I recommend for almost everyone that you take advantage of your bachelorhood and sow your wild oats, live it up, get it out of your system, so to speak, live that to the fullness of your satisfaction. One red flag that I found to be pretty reliable over the years is looking at how excited the couple is about their bachelor and bachelorette party and the nature of that party. If this is sort of like your last chance to be a single girl or a single boy and you go to a strip club and you go full-on debauchery, you might be able to predict what I’m going to say here, but that couple is not ready to be in that relationship yet.

When my guy friends got around and asked me and each other, we were in a group, “What are we going to do for Dave’s bachelor party?” and I got married in 2017 for the second time and this has been an amazing relationship so far, and we’ll see how it goes—it’s been great so far, a lot of pleasure, a lot of fun, and lots of growth opportunities—and my guy friends got around and I couldn’t think of anything that they could do for me on my bachelor party that would also be something that they would want to do that I haven’t already done before. [18:16.4]

So, we didn’t end up having a bachelor party because I’ve had the equivalent of bachelor parties for seven years. I got it all out of my system. I had no curiosity about anything else when it came to my bachelorhood or single life. And the same with my, at that time, young fiancée. They couldn’t think of anything that she wanted to do that they also wanted to do that was sort of bachelorettehood in nature, and we just ended up having lots of fun parties and you could have called any one of them a bachelor or bachelorette party.

I question, actually, the need for a bachelor or bachelorette party entirely. Whatever it is that you have set aside for your bachelor party, why are you waiting until then to do it, and why don’t you do it every year or as often as you can financially swing it? [19:01.5]

I know a lot of guys are skipping this casual-dating phase of their lives and taking advantage of modern life, and I know that they’re wondering about it, and if they could see an easy way to experience casual dating and that abundance of dating opportunities, they will take it because they see that that’s not open to them.

They assume that they’re just going to be happy, skipping all of that, having never dated a woman in their entire lives, for instance—I get this question surprisingly a lot—and instead just are looking for a wife. Unfortunately, this isn’t the 1800s anymore or early 1900s, and the fact that you’re emailing this question to me means that you do have access to the internet and modern technology. You will be surrounded by temptation all the time, unless you plan to take her into your Amish community or something along those lines. Both of you are going to have to deal with temptation sooner or later, and even if it’s temptation just in the fantasy realm for you, where your man mentally checked out on porn or something in your marriage. [20:03.8]

I know this is true for a lot of guys, if you’re spending a lot of time on porn, that’ll be a good clue for what you need to get out of your system before you’re going to be ready to be happy in a long-term committed relationship—and now you can see why I can very easily conclude that most guys who are in relationships are doing it prematurely and are probably not very happy in that relationship past five years in, once, definitely, the honeymoon period has worn off.

For single guys, and I know, nowadays, there are a lot of single guys in their 20s who have never had a relationship, it will be hard for you to believe that these happy couples that you see walking down the street hand in hand will eventually, if not already, be unhappy or living lives of quiet desperation. But, yeah, that’s what’s in store for them if they’ve skipped the developmental stage and just assumed they’re ready for a relationship. [20:56.0]

The guy will get into porn. He’ll be escaping into fantasy land for his sexual needs, and so will she, and it’s just a matter of time there for either the two of them to simply move into a kind of co-parenting-friendship relationship where the passion is gone, or they’ll just separate or divorced, and maybe one of them will have to cheat in order to force that to happen. And, yes, one of the factors was that they hadn’t played out the earlier phase enough and that’s why it’s hard for them to resist that sexual temptation.

Now, of course, when it comes to cheating or acting out in a relationship, it might not just be sexual temptation. I’m just looking at the case of the sexual instinct having been repressed when you had that opportunity in the short period of your bachelorhood and now it’s like the grass is greener every day on the other side. But perhaps even more commonly is for a woman to not have her emotional needs met, not just sexual, but her emotional needs in that relationship met, and this also applies for men. [21:59.1]

Now, what are some needs emotionally that you get in a relationship? Not just sex and your sexual needs, but also your needs for romance, which are legitimate. If you don’t have romance in your relationship, that relationship is going to be screwed. That’s the co-parenting friendship. That’s what it’s devolved into.

Of course, we will want to find romance. It will be easy for somebody who is physically attractive, let’s say, at a workplace or a friend of a friend, to incite the romance, because a lot of romance is just novelty and sexual attraction mixed together, and of course, excitement and the uncertainty and unpredictability of a new romance, right? Those are needs that are supposed to be met in a relationship as well, especially a committed one.

If you don’t know how to spark that passion and spark the romance and the excitement in a long-term relationship, you’re going to have to learn how to do it. I have courses that will help you to do this, and this is a skill and this is knowledge, and, yes, school does not teach you. Your parents probably don’t teach you. Probably nobody else in your life teaches you how to do this.

I have this covered in my courses, which you can access in the Platinum Partnership or in my course Rock Solid Relationships. I get into some of that in my free master class that you can get on my website at DavidTianPhD.com in the master class, the free master class called “How to Make a Relationship Passionate.” [23:12.6]

In addition to sex, romance and excitement, there’s the need for significance, and we derive our significance from all kinds of different things depending on who you are. But one very important function of a healthy intimate relationship is feeling like we are worthy of the connection with the other person.

If she’s ignoring you or you’re ignoring her, or you feel disrespected by her or neglected by her, or you’re getting a lot of criticism, you’re not going to be getting your needs for significance met in that relationship. So, it’s natural that if a woman, let’s say at work, makes you feel significant, that as a result of getting that emotional need met outside the relationship or met more outside the relationship, that temptation to enter into a fling will be pretty strong and hard to resist, right? [23:59.8]

Some other needs that are supposed to be met in a long-term relationship are not just significance, but also emotional connection and encouragement, and acceptance and security, and certainty and comfort, let alone love. If you’re getting or if you or she are getting these needs met more outside the relationship than inside the relationship, that’s a reason why that extramarital relationship is so tempting to take to the next level to become sexual.

So, I would be remiss here if I didn’t mention these emotional needs in the relationship that would make extramarital affairs much more tempting. But I really wanted to focus here on this episode, as the question was directed to me, mostly about sexual temptation.

Regardless of all of these different needs not currently being met in the relationship at that point in time, there is the all-important issue of moral goodness, of integrity, and that is an indispensable requirement for more success in a long-term relationship in the modern world—does she have a conscience? Do you have a conscience? Are you just out to get yours? [25:07.8]

If you get your needs met more by somebody else in the relationship, do you have any sense of loyalty or guilt or conscience about that? Do you have the guts and the courage, and are you man enough to end their current relationship before you go any further in this new relationship that you’re tempted to enter into?

Now, if you think all morality is relative and there’s no such thing as moral goodness or badness, or right or wrong, then I can’t trust you and you’re not ready to succeed in a long-term relationship, because what will happen in a long-term relationship is, inevitably—unless you’re on a deserted island or you’re in some kind of tiny community that’s completely isolated—especially in the internet, from the rest of the world, if you’re integrated into modern society, you will meet people who are more attractive physically than your wife or your husband, inevitably. Because you will age and so forth, right? [25:59.2]

Of course, as I’ve been articulating this whole time, hopefully, you have left no stone unturned in terms of your single life, so you don’t have any regrets and you’re not always pining about it, like, Oh, that guy who’s my age, he’s living it up with all these hot girls. I wish I could do that now.

If you’ve sown your wild oats and you’re ready, really ready to settle down, because you’re bored and you’re tired of the same old, same old of casual short-term flings and you’re ready for that next level. You’re craving it and you can’t wait to get there—yes, even assuming all of that’s in place, you’ll still need this person to be able to have the wherewithal, morally, to not follow the temptation when the going gets hard in the relationship, which it inevitably will and needs to, in order for the intimate relationship to grow.

Intimate relationships don’t grow by being good all the time, like never having any fights. Intimate relationships grow through disconnection and then repair, just like muscles grow only when you get nearer to failure, and then you rest and recover and allow your body to grow that muscle during recovery, and then you hit it again with progressive overload, and so forth. It’s the same in an intimate relationship. If you’re never tested, you will never grow. [27:14.0]

When the going gets hard, if you don’t care about integrity or moral goodness, and you simply prioritize your own selfish needs and pleasures above anything else, then it will be hard, if not impossible, for you to hold the line for 50-some-odd years—and that’s as true for you as it is for her.

So, when it comes to selecting who to invest your time and effort into for these 50-some-odd years for an intimate relationship, where you’re not only going to be lovers together, but you’re also going to be practical partners, creating a life together, and if you’re going to have kids, co-parenting, this is not just about romance and fun, though those aren’t necessary ingredients in an intimate, passionate relationship. This is also about love and connection. [27:59.4]

So, it’s imperative to test all candidates for a relationship to see where they are at in terms of their moral development, and part of that testing, a very easy way to test them, is to not sequester them from potential temptation, but to allow temptation to happen, in fact, maybe even encourage it.

You go to the club and introduce her to your hottest guy friend and let him hit on her, and see how she reacts, because if she gives in easily to that, then you’ve saved yourself a whole lot of time and you thank your buddy for it, and now you can check out, and, hopefully, you do that as early as you can. This is why one of the best ways to meet women is actually right there in that, the center of that temptation, to see how they handled themselves there.

It’s very easy to not give into temptation when you hardly get any, right? If you’re physically unattractive and you just hang out in a library all the time all by yourself, you don’t know the moral quality of this person yet. Give them the temptation and see how they respond. [28:56.1]

Okay, so in this episode, we covered sexual temptation. I connected it to and highlighted how it is actually a symptom of larger issues in a relationship, how the isolation-avoidance sheltering strategy does not work in the long term and how what’s really at issue is whether you’re mature enough to be in a long-term committed, monogamous relationship, and a big part of getting to that maturity level is the current stage of bachelorhood or singlehood. You’ve got to live it to the fullest. You’ve got to go through it with no regrets, and this is like sowing the wild oats, getting it out of your system, satisfying your curiosity, so that you’re developmentally ready for that.

It’s the same for a lot of guys who got married and then became parents, and I know a lot of guys who are fathers who can’t connect with their young children and are waiting until the children can talk and interact with them, because the father is not developmentally ready to bring up a young child yet. I pointed out how this is related to sexual shame and greater emotional needs in the relationship, and then that big point about moral goodness and integrity. [30:01.8]

Okay, so I made all these points today. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please share it with anyone that you think could benefit from it. Thanks so much for listening. Let me know what you thought. Leave a comment. And I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then David Tian, signing out.

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