Is It OK To Cry In Front Of Your Girlfriend Or Wife?

David Tian: Hey, I’m David Tian. And in this episode of Man Up, I’m going to answer the question “Is it okay to cry in front of your girlfriend or your intimate partner?” Welcome to the Man Up show.

Masculinity for the intelligent man. I’m David Tian, PhD, and this is Man Up!

Welcome to the Man Up show. I’m David Tian. For the past 14 years now, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people in over 87 countries to attain success, happiness and fulfillment in life and love.

And here I am in beautiful Taipei, Taiwan. This is a spot that’s just a couple blocks from where I live. And I’ve got a question here from the Man Up group from [sp] Colin.

So, it’s a quick question, I’m just going to read it out. Is it okay to cry in front of your girlfriend? Seems very bad for mental health if you feel very down about stuff to hide it from your partner and person you live with due to fear of them losing attraction. Thoughts?

Okay Colin, great question. This got quite a lot of response in the group, so I chose this one to answer. Okay, so, there’s three parts to my answer here, and the first is if you’re afraid or worried about crying in front of your girlfriend, you need a new girlfriend. Okay, that’s the easiest one.

Mate selection is everything. Pick the right partner. We don’t know anything else about this girl except that he’s afraid to cry in front of her or is worried about it. So, we’ll bracket that, but that’s a big component.

That’s like, 50% of the equation, what’s she like? What are her values and all of that? So, that’s important to just point out to choose the right partner. It can’t just be because she’s hot, and that segues into the next the point out of three. And the second point is, the difference between short-term and long-term attraction or the difference between attraction and love.

So, notice that Colin’s fear here is that she will lose attraction for him. This is the biggest fear of insecure guys when it comes to dating and relationships. And a big part of it is that they confuse what dating and relationships are about.

So, if you are just a hook-up guy or a player, you’re a pick-up artist, you’re a redpiller, you’re – whatever it is, you know, one of the manosphere guys. And you’re just worried about hooking up or getting a girl to be attracted to you, then that’s one thing. If you’re just looking to hook-up, then just present your most sexually attractive side on that date and just hook-up.

Okay, that’s not my thing. That’s not what I’m focusing on these days, and that’s not his worry. His worry right now is in the context of relationships. So, in the context of a relationship, it can’t just be attraction.

And even more, you can’t start the relationship from just trying to get her to be attracted, and then switch gears and then expect a switch in gear into a love relationship to go smoothly because you approach the whole thing, the whole relationship on the wrong footing, from the wrong approach, from the wrong angle. You’re looking at it from the angle of attraction instead of love.

I’ve done an entire seminar on this. You can Google or YouTube search “David Tian Love vs Attraction.” It’s a really, really important distinction to keep in mind. Notice that Colin has not kept that in mind, and now, he’s fumbling through it.

So, if you’re in a relationship where you’re worried about your girlfriend not being attracted to you anymore if you show your vulnerable side, you are already not going to succeed in that relationship.

The fact that that worry is there at all means it’s just a matter of time. Because you’re on that treadmill, like a lab rat, and it’s just a matter of time before you get exhausted, you can’t keep up appearances, you can’t keep pretending because at some point, you just want to relax and be yourself, and that includes the more vulnerable parts of you.

Okay, so, that’s the second point. Love versus attraction, the difference between short-term and long-term. When you start a relationship with a view to being in a long-term committed relationship, right from the get-go, you are already – if you do it well, if you do it properly, you are already in the evaluator’s position.

You are not in the position where you’re worried about her being attracted to you or not. That’s for just hooking up, alright? Now you’re in the position of, “Do I want to spend the rest of my life with this person or a really long period of time?”

Because if you’re not taking the long-term view and you enter it with a short-term, you’re already screwing it up. So, if you’re in a relationship where you’re worried whether she’s attracted to you or not, that’s already a sign that you’re not going to succeed in that relationship, which leads to the third point.

The third point is, well then, what does it take? Okay, so obviously, watch my seminar on Love vs Attraction. Get my free masterclass on how to make a relationship passionate. And there’s another free masterclass on the secret to a successful relationship. There’s another masterclass for free with the relationship red flags. And there’s another masterclass on how to tell if she’s relationship material. All of that is for free.

You can go to our website, my website www.davidtianphd.com and just go through the quiz assessment and you will get access to the masterclass. You can also get access to the masterclass by joining the Man Up private Facebook group.

And in there, you can just follow the instructions in the cover image and you’ll get access to the free masterclass. Go through the free masterclasses, those are awesome. So, I’m going to – those are much more in-depth on what to do to succeed in a relationship. But for this video, the third point being – I’m just going to give you this one.

So, just to recap, the first one is choose the right partner. Mate selection, partner selection. super important. That’s like 90% of the game right there. If you choose the wrong partner who’s not emotionally mature enough yet to succeed in a long-term relationship, and if you’re worried about whether she’s attracted to you.

And just in the attraction phase, and that’s the insecurity that’s driving your relationship, “How do I keep her? I got to keep being the man.” All that stuff, it’s already over. You’re already going to fuck up that relationship. It’s just a matter of time, ticking time bomb. Okay, so that’s a really important thing to point out. Pick the right partner.

The second is the difference between love and attraction, the difference between short-term and long-term relationships or interaction differences. The difference between a player and a guy who actually wants a committed relationship that succeeds. And then the third point is what do you do about it? So, this third point is take a look at your values.

So, if you’re in a relationship that’s based on superficial short-term values like attraction, then very likely, that relationship won’t last very long because you’re always going to be vulnerable to the bigger, better deal.

There’s always going to be some other guy that shows up in her radar that is going to have more money, going to be more physically attractive, more funny than you. Just more of whatever it is that you’re banking on because it’s not actually about you, it’s about what you’re projecting, the persona that you’re using.

The sort of false – or that sort of fake self that you’re putting out there to hide that vulnerability where you’re afraid to cry in front of her.

And if you’re naturally crying, not as an affectation, but like, it’s really coming from you because it’s a real authentic feeling you’re having, and you’re afraid to have that in front of her, then you’re already in trouble, right?

So, make sure that your values are clear. What do you stand for, are you more about inner beauty or outer beauty? If you’re just focusing on outer beauty, don’t be surprised when you keep dating emotional vampires.

Focus on – here’s my tip, if the type of values that it will take to succeed in a long-term relationship are ones where you prioritize moral goodness, that is “Is this a good human being?” Or at least “Are the parts that are dominant in this person good? Are they compassionate? Are they kind?

Are these people in your life people of compassion and kindness and can really feel bad when they see somebody who’s innocent and suffering? Or feel some degree of empathy, are they able to do that?

Are there values about what it takes to, or what is valuable about a human being? Are those in line with yours, or specifically about moral goodness? Are they in line with moral goodness?”

Okay so, there is an entire module in my Invincible course where we focus on that, helping you discover your own values and thinking about them in terms of a more long-term successful relationship.

And even just thinking about it in terms of short-term attraction, because you don’t want to be dating emotional vampires or getting entangled with them either, right? So even in the short-term relationships, that’s something to keep in mind.

And just being able to suss out or spot emotional vampires and red flags and being turned off by them instead of being turned on by them like the emotionally neurotic do, you want to be able to avoid that so you’re not getting stuck in these toxic relationships all the time. So, that’s the third point about your own values.

So, if your values are right, then everything will go smoothly. I’ll give you an example. When I first started dating my wife I think our second date – our third date was a trip to Bali, where I was going to Bali, invited her along and we went to Bali.

And there, I think on the third night, there was something that I had a little bit too much wine, something triggered me to think about my goddaughter and how I missed her or something like that and it led to me just crying uncontrollably. And I went into the – we were at a villa in Bali.

I went into the guest bathroom and tried to hide it, and eventually realize I’ve been in this guest bathroom so long she either thinks I have horrible diarrhea or – I can’t hide the crying anymore, so I just opened the door because it’s been too long. And I – my eyes are completely bloodshot red and I’m just crying. And she held me that whole night as I continued to sob.

I think I just sobbed myself to sleep. It’s like a half hour or more of straight, full-on – like, my whole body was like, shaking kind of level of crying.

And it wasn’t anything I planned obviously, but part of it was that I had reached a point in my life like, I, was almost 40 at that point, where I was done playing the dating game.

I didn’t want to do the whole super long courtship where we tiptoe around each other for like, 10 dates before we decide whether we’re going to be committed to each other. This woman seemed awesome, I didn’t see anything bad about her, so I needed to just figure that out faster.

One of my friends Mark Manson puts it this way, “Fuck yes or no.” That is it’s either fuck yes, completely all in, or no, I’m sorry I’m not going to waste my time here. And the faster you figure out whether it’s fuck yes or it’s no, the faster you’ll be able to to find happiness, to go all in. And you want to suss that out as fast as possible, not tiptoeing around the fear of “Is she going to lose attraction if she sees this part of me?”

If you are doing your values right, the right type of values that will succeed in a long-term relationship are ones where you realize that in order to succeed in a long-term relationship, each partner has to love all of the parts of the other person. And that’s the challenge, that’s what it will take to succeed over the long-term.

And the reason why a lot of guys don’t even think about that is because they actually don’t love all of their parts. They don’t actually love their own vulnerability. They are actually ashamed of their crying parts, their weak parts because they think of them as weak and they want to hide them. And they don’t love their own crying parts.

When you love all of your parts, then you can just have them all out depending on the situation, right? So, at the beginning, if it’s just about attraction on your first date, obviously, you want to ramp up the attraction there just to see whether you guys have any chemistry and it’s going well.

Somewhere around the second or third date, you can start to feel more comfortable in leading with those parts of yourself that maybe you think it’s not so much that they’re not attractive, it’s not that crying or vulnerability is not attractive, but it’s not unattractive either. It’s neutral but it’s a part of you.

So, it’s important to put that out there to see whether – to see how she responds and whether she is mature enough to be able to embrace those parts as well. But it all starts with you and your ability and whether you’re mature enough to love your own vulnerable parts.

And that requires a therapeutic process. Most people – so, if you have not gone through a therapeutic process, there’s no way that you will be – I can’t conceive of a way or of a person who is able to love their own vulnerable parts. So, a big step is embracing the therapeutic process.

You can do that with 20, 40 sessions or years of therapy with a good therapist. Or you can also, alongside that, I recommend to speed everything up and just to accelerate it, is to take our recorded courses. So, the best way to do it is platinum partnership because then you get access to everything. So obviously, I’m biased there but I’m plugging that one.

But you can – like I mentioned, Invincible. Another big one is Rock Solid Relationships to help you meet your toxic shame, to help you meet your own needs for certainty. So, for Colin here, one of his big needs that are not being met is his need for certainty and security. And he’s trying to meet that by trying to stay attractive all the time and not allowing himself to let his guard down.

And if you can’t be vulnerable in a relationship, that relationship will not last. Okay, so just to recap, the first point is mate selection, partner selection that’s everything. The second point is values – oh wait, no, sorry. Second point is love versus attraction, short-term versus long-term relationships. And the third point is values. What are your values and what values will actually lead to a successful long-term relationship?

All right, there you go. Obviously, join the private Man Up Facebook group for more. And I will see you inside the group. Until then, David Tian signing out from Taiwan. Take a look at this view, it’s pretty awesome. The sun is setting just over there. Got this cool Ferris wheel as well.

And you can see the domestic airport, there’s actually a lot of international flights taken off from that airport there, the Songshan Airport. And there’s Taipei 101, clear as day. Beautiful mountains that we’re surrounded by. And I’m checking out now, I’m going to get a drink. David Tian signing out, Man Up.