Most Men Are Listening to the Wrong Dating Advice | (#082) 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 showing you how you can attract a loving partner for an intimate relationship, naturally and authentically, by just being more of you.

This doesn’t mean the stereotypical or clichéd be yourself. What I’m saying is be more of you, more you, and you’ve got to do it this way, if what you want is a loving relationship that lasts in the long term, because if you don’t do it this way, you’ll be getting into a relationship based on your false self, based on putting out a fake persona, which means you didn’t even give the relationship a chance. You didn’t even give your partner a chance to reject you or to cheat on you, because you weren’t even being you. [01:08.5]

If you didn’t attract this relationship into your life and this partner into your life by being more of you, then that meant that you were attracting her by being something other than you. Then the greatest regret is now you’ve created this emotional history, where somewhere down the line in that relationship, it fell apart and you weren’t even being you, and now it’s too late. That’s one of the greatest tragedies.

It’s one thing to be rejected for you, as in, you just turned out to be incompatible, but it’s another to actually lose somebody who could have been an amazing partner because you were wearing a mask that wasn’t even you, and now you don’t get the chance anymore because now there’s all this history and bad blood, and baggage and all this, and you didn’t even get a chance to be you, because if the relationship didn’t work out, but you were truly yourself, you were true to yourself, then you can at least walk away from that and say to yourself, “Well, we weren’t compatible,” because you put yourself out there and it just didn’t work out. [02:09.0]

But imagine it didn’t work out and you weren’t even yourself. You were getting rejected for some B.S. mask you wore, and now you don’t get another chance because of all this baggage and history. That’s why people often construct false selves and project those out there in a dating context, because they’re too afraid of being rejected for their true self, being rejected for how they really are. They’d rather take the coward’s route of projecting a false self or false selves to their partners, so that when the inevitable rejection comes, they won’t feel so bad. The tragedy is that they’ve already sabotaged their success. They’ve already set themselves up for failure, because they’re not actually being true to themselves. They’re not being authentic. [02:56.5]

Enough of the generalities. Let’s get into the actual meat of this episode, and I’m going to be bringing in some concepts from game theory and business marketing and psychology to help you understand how you can attract your ideal mate or the one that would be right for you in a long-term relationship of unconditional love and intimacy, and doing so by being more of you.

But just before I do that, I want to mention a myth or kind of remind you, because I’ve been covering it in the past couple episodes, of a pervasive myth that is all over the internet when I search dating advice for men and keywords along those lines. What I’ve been finding over and over is that there’s lots of relationship for men for how to hook up, but based on the posts and the comments and the messages that I get, a lot of men are a lot more interested in investing in themselves to learn how to create a loving relationship that will be fulfilling and finding a life of partner than they are in just getting lots of hookups and lays, and getting lots of sexual opportunities. [04:03.3]

As a caveat, there’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, with casual sex, as long as it’s between consenting adults. But hooking up and getting good at hooking up, and having lots of hookups, will not lead to the skills or the knowledge or the experience that is necessary to sustain and grow a lasting long-term relationship, and in many cases, it’s the opposite that if you, like I covered in the last episode, optimize for the short-term hookup, you’re actually hurting your chances down the road for a long-term relationship, because you are cultivating a character and some habits of thought and behavior that will sabotage your chances of creating and growing a loving, long-term relationship. [04:53.1]

Now, you might have been like me or you might be like I was, where I thought if I just get really good at hooking up and I just have a period of my life for whatever number of years where it’s party and hook up with lots of girls and all that, and then at some point I’ll just settle down with one of them, because kind of the thinking is, if I increase my dating pool, if I enlarge that, the number of women that will come under my dating net, then that should increase my chances of finding a good relationship, and then relationships are nothing but just hooking up, but just with one woman and just doing it over and over for do the rest of your life.

If you have that notion, and I know it seems like a lot of guys do, the idea seems to be that if I just get good at dating, then that’ll get me more and more opportunities to find the one for me, and then when I do find that one, I’ll just stop dating other people and then I can just settle down, and basically, for men, that means is the hard part was getting her and, now that I’ve got her, sort of the hard part is getting to sex, then after that it’s just coasting. You just put it in cruise control and then you move on to other priorities, like going to make money or something. [06:04.6]

Then they wonder why, three years later, there’s no sex in their marriage and they have a wandering eye, or they go see some prostitutes on the side or they have a wild boys’ weekend in Thailand or something like that. I don’t mean to pick on Thailand, but you know what I mean, right? You go to Vegas if you’re in the States because you’ve got to let it loose, because you’re now not fulfilled in that marriage, in that relationship any longer, because you were approaching it like it was just another hookup times 50 years.

Hopefully, you realize now after listening to the previous episodes that that is totally not how life works. Optimizing for the short term actually makes it harder for you if you want a long-term relationship. So, I wanted to bust that myth yet again that the way to get into a relationship is just date a whole bunch of women and then pick the one you like the most, and then settle down and then there’s nothing else to be learned or done after that. [06:59.5]

Okay, there’s a whole other humongous set that’s far more deep and demanding in terms of skills and maturity in a relationship than in dating. In fact, you don’t even need to optimize short-term dating to create and grow a beautiful, loving relationship.

I was going to share this story after teaching about the long tail and all of that, but I think it might fit in better here, and how I came to discover this for myself was, almost a decade ago, I was in the thick of teaching how to attract women and I was teaching live hundreds of men over the course of a year, let’s say, about over 300 students a year in group settings, live in person, a lot of it in Singapore, but also traveling around the world, holding intensive weekend workshops and trainings and things like this. [07:56.2]

The sales pages for these programs were about how to become more attractive and attract more women, and a lot of it was just taken from my old pickup days, adapted over the years and tested and all that stuff, and it worked, and so a big part of it was taking these guys and making them more attractive conventionally.

So, you get the whole makeover. You teach them how to do conversation, how to flirt, how to make small talk in a fun, funny way, and then how to transition into a kind of sexual attention and how to generate sexual desire, and then just a sexual mood, how to make it sexy. Then setting it up for physical escalation and then what to do so that the date goes smoothly and naturally leads to intimate times together.

This was basically a kind of pickup coaching boot camp, and in some cases, it was extended for over a year because I also covered lifestyle and social circle and all this for those who were doing the resident program that was a yearlong thing. [08:57.7]

Because I did more than a weekend boot camp, like 99 percent of coaches around the world did at that time in pickup and dating—they were doing these weekend intensives. They would fly around different cities and then do a weekend and then fly out—I actually got to know my yearlong resident clients in Singapore for more than a year.

Some of them continued past a year and kept renewing, and I discovered that what most of them actually wanted wasn’t just to become the player, because a lot of these guys were good guys who had this conservative, traditional, ethical upbringing, so they weren’t actually dreaming or fantasizing about being the player in the club. They were just doing that because they were told that that was what would attract their mate. But the majority of them, it turned out, just wanted to have a girlfriend. The sad truth, and maybe this is partly why pickup has fallen out of favor online anyway, the sad truth is that it’s very difficult to learn behavioral conditioning when it comes to picking up chicks. [10:02.0]

A lot of these guys were nice guys, and I mean that in the kind of psychological term, not just ethical, nice guys kind of like white-knight, savior-type provider types, fixer type of guys, who were looking for a good girl to settle down with, and they had a respectable day job in some kind of tech, engineering kind of field. They spent a lot of their time just staring at or just looking at a computer screen and working with a computer.

Then us pickup coaches were telling them and teaching them how to lord it out in the club, taking these mild-mannered, kind of nerdy-ish guys and dressing them up so that they look cool, giving them a great haircut, brand new set of clothes and shoes, and teaching them how to stand straighter, how to get their chin up, how to take up more space, how to express themselves in a kind of louder tone of voice, and basically making, in a way, carbon copies of a player. [10:58.7]

Now, there are variations, of course. There’s the more soulful kind. There’s the more artistic one, a more Johnny Depp versus more, I don’t know, James Bond versus more your all-American kind of surfer dude kind of thing. There are a few different variations on the theme. But we are taking guys who were unique in their own way, but we weren’t appreciating those aspects of them and we were turning them into and it was kind of like a factory where you churn out an “attractive”, quote-unquote, man. A lot of that was based on what evolutionary psychology was teaching, and most guys had so much internal resistance to that kind of change, even on the outside, like even changing their clothes.

One of the most difficult things to do is on that first night of a boot camp, a Friday, Saturday, and then the Sunday. On the Friday night, you’re going out, so you meet up with your clients sometimes at 2:00 PM, sometimes 5:00 PM, and then you do a quick kind of give them the bare bones basics to get them started, and then you break it around 9:00 and then you meet up at the clubs, right? In America, you’d meet at 10:00, but in Asia, it would be 11:30, 12:00 because clubs don’t close until 6:00 AM. [12:07.1]

Sometimes for some very egregious cases, I look at their hair and their clothes, and then I’m like, You can’t even get in the club like that, so when we take them out, I make some phone calls to my local contacts and we get a haircut and we get a new set of clothes, and he looks great, right? Then that takes us another hour after our seminar.

Then, so many times, not just on the weekend boot camps, but even in the residential program, the yearlong one when we do the fashion makeover bit, where during the shopping process, there’s all this resistance. They’re like, Aare you sure? And this looks expensive. I haven’t bought a new pair of clothes in seven years, that kind of thing.

Then the haircut. The haircut is a little easier because they just close their eyes and the stylist does it, but then when they open their eyes, it’s sort of like, Whoa, what is this? They look great and we’re trying to convince them they look great, and they actually objectively do, in my opinion, look great.

But then I’ll get all kinds of phantom medical problems. I’d get a phone call, like, I’ve got heartburn, I’m not going to be able to make it for the Friday night. Don’t worry about me. It’s not like they’re asking for a refund or anything like that. They just have this internal resistance that now they have an identity crisis and they can’t follow through. [13:12.0]

That’s just getting your clothes changed, let alone changing how you stand, how you walk, literally, how you walk, how you talk, how you sit, how you stand, the words that come out of your mouth. We’re now going to, on the next day, needing more time for the conversational bit, but you’re giving them a conversational structure and then you’ll practice it, right?

It’s super simple compared to neuroscience or whatever, computer programming, whatever it is they do for their day job. It’s relatively simple. This is something that a ninth-grader could master if it were just a written test. If you were to just write it out, he could recall it and have an exam within a weekend. He’ll get 80 percent of it right. The problem was not intellectual, and yet I saw this not just in my students, but when I was going through this process. [13:59.6]

I joined a bunch of lairs. Back in the day, there were online communities. This was before even Facebook. There were online communities on some kind of forum type of thing, I don’t know, like a BB. I forget what those things were called. It’s sort of like a pre-Reddit type of Reddit. Then we would just meet up in some place. Somebody would book a kind of conference room and there’d be, I don’t know, 50 guys. Ann Arbor, Michigan, had a lair, and then every city, every major city, even a small city of 100,000 people would have a community of guys who were trying to get better with women. Once a month or so, they’d have some kind of meetup, and I was in touch with these.

This is a great way, by the way, if you’re traveling solo, of making friends in the local area and they tell you where the good spots are and then making friends to go out and hang out with. That community aspect is a kind of innocent good that came out of the pickup phenomena that I think is lost in a way nowadays.

But I’d keep track of a lot of the guys that I’d meet there and I’d notice that one out of 20 would actually make it to the point where he meets his goals in dating. He actually becomes relatively proficient in going clubbing or going to the bar and hooking up with some level of consistency. [15:15.1]

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Easily, 15 out of 20 don’t get anywhere. They just get some intellectual masturbation. They read a bunch of books. They learn some social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and then that’s it. Then they feel bad about themselves because they never acted on it or they did a little bit. They maybe did 10 cold approaches instead of the 100 or the thousands that are required to get past what used to be called beginner’s hell, and they maybe did 10 or so and then they gave up. [16:18.4]

Then there’s another four out of 20. What percentage of that would be, somewhere around the 75^th–95^th-percentile range, and those guys would usually persist further along and get some reasonable results, and often, they’ll learn how to be more social because of this push and accountability from this community. They came out of their shell and they made some more friends, and they became just sort of more socialized.

But they never got consistent results with the hookups, with the sexualization of it, with converting from just making contacts and getting people on your phone to invite-to-the-next-party kind of level, converting from that to actually hooking up and having what we used to call sexual abundance. [17:05.2]

In my coaching—so that was what I saw in the lairs as I was coming up for the two years when I was just a practitioner and wasn’t teaching anyone yet or anything like that—in my several years of just totally full-time focused on getting guys to that point where they can get consistent results going out clubbing, the success rate for what I envisioned for them when they first joined was, I’d say, about 20 percent of them actually made it to that point.

Then there was about 30 percent that just didn’t even stick around past Month 1 consistently. It’s sort of like when you have a big gym and everyone has this New Year’s resolution, they join the gym and then they don’t show up past Valentine’s Day. I had a 30 percent or so chunk of students who paid their monthly fees and then they just didn’t come, so there was that bottom third. [17:51.5]

Then there was the middle 50 percent and it was actually really difficult to get them past just getting good at socializing. This middle 50 percent would be able to go to a club and just strike up a conversation. That might take, depending on how he started out, anywhere from one to three and, in more extreme cases, six months of weekly work until they get to the point where they can just walk up to a group of three women in, let’s say, a smoking area of a nightclub so it’s not as loud as the dancefloor, and strike up a conversation and not creep out the girls and anything like that. That was already a big win for them.

But I envisioned far more because I wanted to make them like me so that they could experience the happiness and pleasure that I had been experiencing. Obviously, there was a commercial element to this, so the more of that I could create, the more buzz and whatever would be generated for my business. So, of course, there was a kind of selfish motive there, but it was also because I wanted them to experience what I’d experienced, this kind of hedonistic pleasure. This was all before I learned about psychotherapy and the big journey that I took that has led to about the past several years of my life, the focus of my work in the past several years. [19:00.6]

A big percentage of that middle 50 percent, after a couple of years after starting working with me, were getting engaged and getting married, and this was often after their yearlong training was over for six months to two years, and then I’d just start to see this showing up on my Facebook feed and where I’d hear it from other alumni who continue to come to the weekly sessions or who would show up to our reunion gatherings, and they looked really happy and then they were having kids.

And this whole time I’m still coaching guys to try to make them into players at the club and getting lots of hookups, because that’s what the sales page said and that’s what got me into it when I was starting out, because when I was starting out learning about pickup, I was coming out of a six-year marriage and the last thing I wanted to do was to jump into another marriage. [19:48.6]

I was a conservative Christian boy for the first 30 years of my life, and if I had any premarital sex, it was a lot with lots of guilt afterwards, and I think I only stepped foot into a club one time before I turned 30 and that was on my bachelor party for my first marriage, my first wedding when I was 24 as a good Christian boy, and I got totally plastered drunk because I didn’t know what the heck I was doing there and neither did any of my good-Christian-boy friends. When I hit 29, 30, I was trying to make up for lost time.

For me, the initial attraction, the initial hook to get me into it was lots of casual sex and being attractive, and being the man and all that. I’ve since discovered the parts that were yearning for more significance and status, and feeling important and feeling masculine and all that, and I’m writing a book about that journey. [20:43.7]

But I’m making the point now that this, my journey, did not parallel, was not the journey and was not the goal or aims of the majority of guys that came to me for coaching to get better with women. They didn’t want to become “the man”—and I suspect that, if you’re still listening to this, maybe you don’t want to either or maybe you’re hoping that someone will tell you that you don’t need to become the guy who is good enough to bed 50 women or attractive enough in a nightclub to bed a different woman every weekend, just so that you can have a loving relationship and build a family for 50-some-odd years or whatever. [21:24.5]

Now, I didn’t know any guy who wanted to turn down that, if it was easy to get. If they could just get that sexual abundance, just walk into a nightclub and have girls throwing themselves at them, I don’t know any of those guys who would say, “Oh, I don’t want that.” But they definitely didn’t want it bad enough to go through all of the work and to completely change, in many cases, their identity-level beliefs, and in many ways, disowning parts of who they were in order to fit this mold of a kind of stereotypically-attractive man in kind of a conventional way—and this is a big mistake that I made and that everyone in the dating world, dating advice world makes—for molding yourself to please the majority of attractive women. [22:10.6]

And the majority of attractive women are immature, so what you’re doing is you’re optimizing your character and how you present yourself for the type of ideal that actually isn’t going to be successful in a long-term relationship. Rarely do I ever get asked, “How would I present myself to be attractive to an equivalent of”—as I brought up in the previous episode, George Clooney’s wife, as an example—“Amal Alamuddin, an International Court of Justice lawyer and human rights advocate and so forth?” I’m not often presented with that. Instead, what I find on the internet is “How can I bed lots of club girls?”

Again, there’s nothing wrong with going to the club. I mean, I love going to the club. The reason to go to the club is to lose yourself in the music, because you like the atmosphere and the light show and the DJ, and then to meet your friends who are there. That’s the normal reason to go to the clubs. Then on top of that, if you’re single, you’re looking to hook up. If you’re in a relationship, you’re looking to cheat, or if you’re married, you’re looking for a sexy time with your spouse in an environment that is conducive to that. [23:12.4]

It’s just a fun night where you can forget your problems and let your hair down, and dance, too, because and I know for a lot of nerdy guys, they don’t understand why dancing feels so good, but if you let your hair down and you close your eyes, and lose yourself to a music that you like and you move your body to it, it actually feels really good and that’s why people go to nightclubs.

I know that there are many morally-judgmental guys who were raised in morally-judgmental environments who look down upon all of that, but then they adopt it as their shadow. A lot of the pickup world, what happens is there are these nice guys who look down on the bad girls, but then they find out that they need to be a bad boy, and the upper 20 percent of the guys that I worked with, a big percentage of them, a big proportion of them, were also like the middle 50 percent when they started out. [23:56.0]

They just wanted to find a wife, a really beautiful and nice, kind and hardworking girlfriend and, eventually, wife, and that would’ve been enough. That would’ve been more than enough. That would’ve been more than enough to cover, to get the value out of their $5,000, $3,000 training program, whatever it was, right?

But instead, I didn’t realize, I didn’t realize that, because that’s not how I started out. I came out of a divorce. Like I said, the last thing I wanted to do was to get into another marriage right away. But that was not the case for these guys, and if you, too, are like them, there is a much better way, an easier way, a faster way, natural and authentic way to attract the right woman for you, if what you want is a loving, intimate relationship than following the dating advice of guys who just hook up a lot.

Now, especially the top 20 percent of guys, in my coaching experience, in my coaching practice, in my dating coaching practice, who got lots of results when it came to short-term hookups, I don’t think any of them regret developing these skills, because what they will explain to me is they kind of got greedy when they realized, Oh, wow, I can do this and this, and this as well, and they were relatively malleable for their character. [25:07.2]

That was my secret, too. I got really good at pickup because of Christianity. This deserves its own episode, and let me know if this is something that interests you, but quickly here, in Christianity, you don’t start off assuming that your natural inclinations, the way you naturally are, you don’t start off assuming that that is good.

Instead, the question is “What would glorify God?” and what glorifies God is probably not what you would want to do naturally, because in reformed theology, there’s this thing called the sinful nature, and we’re born with the sinful nature. So, we have to actually become converted and then infused by the Holy Spirit, and allow God to lead us so that we can glorify God.

I grew up asking the question, “How can I mold my character?” Assuming my character started off naturally sinful, “How can I mold it into something that would glorify God?” So, I was already asking the question of “How can I mold how I am?” and so that was daily prayer, always changing the thoughts. What is this? This is called the inner game, the inner game of Christianity. [26:09.4]

I just later on replaced prayer and Bible reading with visualization and hypnosis tracks—that was closing your eyes, sort of resembling prayer—and, of course, all the reading and learning in the video courses. I’m not listening to sermons anymore. I’m watching guys give lectures on how to pick up chicks and all that.

It was the same when it came to studying for my PhD. Religion, actually, if you’re serious about it, makes you into a really good learner. But most people are not serious Christians or serious adherents of religion. They’re just sort of Sunday Christians.

But, anyway, as a result of reformed Christianity, I didn’t assume that my natural inclinations, my natural thoughts and beliefs and the behaviors were effective in getting the goal that I wanted, so I was already quite skilled at changing my personality, changing my thoughts, constantly shaping my thoughts. [27:01.7]

Most people aren’t like that, and it’s a good thing, in some ways. Now, that top 20 percent of my clientele, my students who got good results in when it came to dating, a big percentage of them just wanted to find a wife as well. They didn’t need to have 50 hookups. Eventually, I clued into this that I was working way too hard. I was overshooting when it came to casual, short-term dating results and that wasn’t even what they were really hiring me for so much.

But they didn’t know any other way. They didn’t really have any other good alternatives, because the way they were going about it wasn’t getting them any dates at all or they were only getting incompatible dates, or they were always in friend zone or something along those lines.

But it is so much easier if what you’re after is one, one woman to be your lifetime partner, lifelong partner that you will build a life with, and all of the markers from science shows that men who are happily married are more successful than single men of the same age. They’re making more money. They’re also healthier overall and live longer. [28:06.6]

So, if that’s what you’re actually after, a successful, intimate, long-term relationship, then the majority of the kind of manipulative dating tactics and even the false representation of yourself—like hiding the fact that you play video games three hours a day and that you love to do that, not ashamed to do it, but that you love to do it, or that you love to wear hoodies. Instead, you do a kind of hitch thing where you hide how you actually are, and you don’t talk about the anime that you love to watch and you pretend to talk about the movies she likes or that you guess you would like. You get a fashion makeover of clothes that weren’t chosen by you or not even appreciated by you, but you were simply told, “Women will love this and will have sex with you if you wear it,” and so, therefore, you wear it. And the things that you say, you just sort of parrot off some video or TikTok thing that you heard some dating guru tell you, “Say this and women will have sex with you,” so you just say it, even though it’s not an accurate representation of your beliefs or your views, or your thoughts or your feelings—if you do that, if you present a false self to appeal to a wider range of women, you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot, if what you want is a long-term relationship that you can be yourself in. [29:18.3]

Now the question is “How? How can I be more of myself? How can I present more of who I am in a dating context, in the way that would be optimized and be most effective for creating and growing a loving, long-term relationship that lasts?”

I’m glad you asked. Tune in to the next episode where I’m going to be introducing how to do this. I’m going to be drawing on the long-tail concept, Nash equilibrium, Mark Manson’s concept of polarization, and a bunch of other kind of game theoretical considerations here.

Don’t do it the way that the internet is showing you how to in terms of getting more hookups and hoping that one of those girls that you hook up with will be the one that you’ll just settle down with, and that’s how you’re going to get into a relationship, and then once you’re in a relationship, you can just go on cruise control because there’s nothing new to learn. That is going to kill you and destroy your relationship. It’s going to undermine any relationship in the modern world. [30:14.6]

Instead, invest in yourself to learn the right way to do it so that it becomes natural and authentic in attracting the right woman, the right partner, and the right relationship for you, and then you’ll have the right conditions for growing that relationship, which require a whole other set of skills called relationship skills, and in the next episode, I’ll show how those connect.

So, come back to the next episode, and I look forward to welcoming you to that. If this helps you in any way, please share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it. Hit a like wherever you’re listening to this, and let me know what you thought. Give me your comments. I’d love to get feedback.

Thanks so much for listening. David Tian, signing out. [30:53.4]
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