How to Naturally Create a Healthy, Intimate Relationship | (#060) 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 the last episode, I covered how most online dating gurus are actually overcompensating for their fear and their neediness and their insecurities, and most of the advice they give are actually behaviors that are in line with what a narcissistic-personality-disordered person would do. They take on these behaviors, these narcissistic behaviors, to compensate for their insecurity about their attractiveness or their status and their fear about not being good enough just in who they are. [00:55.3]

In this episode, in contrast, I’ll be presenting how to create a loving, passionate relationship in a healthy, natural way. This is in the hopes that you won’t then waste your life, living out of fear and insecurity, overcompensating for your neediness with narcissistic behaviors, and instead you can live a life founded on love and courage, so it’s fear and insecurity versus a life of love and courage.

In previous episodes, I’ve covered how it doesn’t help to focus on whether you’re masculine or even whether you’re successful. Many men want to become masculine or successful in order to compensate for their feeling that they’re not enough, and they believe that if they’re just masculine enough, then, finally, they’ll be enough for love, and if they’re enough for love, then they ought to be enough for attracting the woman into his life. He’s mistakenly thinking that the key to his happiness is by becoming more masculine. [02:00.0]

Similarly, there are some people who believe that if they’re successful enough, success as defined by worldly success, as in financial success and outward status, and they believe, they mistakenly believe, that if they can be finally successful enough, then they will be enough for love and then they can be happy. Their big mistake is in thinking that masculinity or success will necessarily bring them happiness, but they don’t. They’re actually totally different wavelengths. They’re flowing along different channels. Happiness, love, and fulfillment aren’t linked to being masculine or even being successful.

Any man who is obsessing over whether he’s masculine enough is actually feeding his own insecurities and making himself needier. If you’re asking yourself whether you’re masculine, you’re actually just reinforcing and amplifying your neediness, thereby ensuring that you are becoming less attractive and less masculine. [03:02.8]

Similarly, the level of an intensity of the love, happiness and fulfillment in your life are not pegged to, are not connected to your success. Up and down all levels of worldly success, you can find people who are happy and fulfilled, and who have lives full of love. Similarly, up and down the entire spectrum of success, worldly success, you can find people who are unhappy, miserable, depressed, full of anxiety, never satisfied, never feel like they’re enough, regardless of how much worldly success they have.

So, it’s really important for you in your mind to uncouple, to decouple masculinity and success from love, happiness and fulfillment, and one of the many traps that these online dating gurus fall into is linking the necessity of being masculine or successful, or whatever other quality, whatever other outward quality, and linking that to your happiness and fulfillment and being enough, and that is a lie. [04:08.0]

Being masculine enough or successful enough won’t bring you love, and no amount of worldly success or masculinity will make you happy unless you are already happy to begin with. Those things can bring you pleasure and a kind of superficial happiness, but they won’t lead to any lasting happiness and they definitely won’t lead to fulfillment, and of course, they just having this requirement at all would undermine them leading to love.

What should you do instead? I’ll present to you four points for how to find and create a loving relationship in a natural way that’s organic with the way you live your life. Okay, so there are these four points roughly in this order.

The first point and the first in this order is to meet your own needs. Learn how to meet your own needs. I’ve covered this in many episodes, especially the one on the seven steps for how to overcome your own neediness and I’ll review those real quick here, but I also go through them in a lot more detail in my courses. [05:10.7]

Each of the courses is focused on a different aspect of your life, like relationships or lifestyle, or casual dating, and all together, they are meant to be a comprehensive approach to the seven steps and an easy way to get access to them is just joining the “Platinum Partnership”, which gets you access to all of them. Just in case, to head off any questions, because I know I’m going to get the question of “Which courses? Because you have so many courses, David,” the courses that are focused on meeting your own needs and the seven steps, and that include major components of the seven steps integrated into the course material, include “Freedom U”, “Rock Solid Relationships”, “Lifestyle Mastery”, and even “Invincible”, which has about half of the material that’s therapeutic material. 

That’s a challenging course because a lot of guys who were buying it when we first launched it seven years ago, and now it’s, at least at the time of this recording, in its fifth iteration, the 5.0 version, about half of it, again, is the therapeutic process, the therapeutic material. [06:14.2]

Unfortunately, at the beginning, because there were so many guys coming to me, looking for dating advice as for casual dating and even from the pick-up world, they didn’t know how to appreciate the therapeutic material, and that’s a big part of why I have this podcast to draw your attention to how this is far more important than the tactic, strategies and techniques that a lot of the pick-up type of guys were originally focused on and completely ignored any of the therapeutic material. The therapeutic material is the most important thing and it makes all of the technique type of stuff so much easier and so much more natural.

I also go through the seven steps in some of the smaller courses, if you take them all together, courses like “Drive”, “Heart”, “True Self”, “Purpose”, and “Core”. Together, these courses will help you walk you through the seven steps as well. [07:03.2]

What does it mean to meet your own needs? First of all, just real quick, this is by way of review—I cover this in a lot more detail in other episodes as well as. There’s a lot more detail and I guide you through the process in the courses themselves—but what are the needs that you need to meet? What are the needs that we all have necessarily? These aren’t needs that are unhealthy or healthy. That’s not the question. The question about healthy or unhealthy is about how you meet these needs. The needs themselves are natural. The question isn’t whether you have these needs. We all do. The question is how are you meeting these needs?

What are other needs? I’m going to list off 10 universal human needs for you to fulfill this first step. You’re going to need to figure out how to meet them yourself on a frequent basis, every day or maybe multiple times a day, and within your control and not requiring other people to meet those needs for you or to behave towards you or treat you a certain way for you to get your needs met. [08:08.7]

These 10 needs include security or certainty, healthy limits, variety, play and spontaneity, significance, autonomy, a need for connection, a need for growth, for contribution, and the most important need that undergirds them all is a need for love. I go through each one of these needs in a lot more detail in my courses, as well as leading you through discovering how you can meet those needs yourself in healthy, sustainable, frequent ways.

I’m going to assume that you’ve listened to some of the previous episodes before on your needs or maybe you’ve gone through some of my courses before, so you have a basic idea of healthy, sustainable, in-control ways to meet your own needs on a frequent basis. [08:58.5]

You’d understand that as you’re doing this, you must be creating a life or lifestyle that you enjoy, because that’s a big part of meeting your own needs, being able to have within your control a life that you actually take pleasure in, where you’re not doing everything just for a paycheck, but you’re actually able to meet your needs for play and spontaneity, and significance and variety through your life. If you’re doing that, then you’d naturally be going places and engaging in activities that you enjoy, and then it just takes a little bit of tweaking, though, for most people, it would just happen naturally because many of these activities or places involve other people, but even if they’re just you going to, I don’t know, your guitar teacher and it’s just that, there’s no band yet, then it just takes a little bit of tweaking for you to be able to go to venues that you enjoy that are in line with your hobby or your interests, or your passions or the things that you enjoy, these activities, and meet other people who also enjoy those activities. [10:05.0]

For instance, and this is just an example I pulled off the top of my head there, if you enjoy guitar, playing guitar, you must enjoy listening to guitar. You’re going to need to enjoy listening to the guitar in order for you to become good at guitar. If you enjoy listening to the guitar, you probably enjoy going to venues where live guitar is being played and, at these venues, these are concerts or maybe smaller concerts in pubs or something. You’ll naturally be in settings where there are other people who also enjoy their guitar and watching it and listening to it played live. Trust me, for this example, there are going to be a lot of women there, so I’m assuming you’re a man listening to this.

You can just pick any example in your life, and just with a little tweaking and ingenuity and creativity, you can find some way in which there is a group setting for this, and then you’ll have a natural, organic interest already. You’ll already be enjoying yourself there, because you’re going there not just to meet women, but you’re going there because you have an interest in the activity and you’ll also have a natural conversation starter, and you already can assume that you have something in common, some common interests. It’ll be a lot easier and a lot more natural for you to strike up a conversation or to meet people. [11:16.8]

Now, a lot of pick-up artist boys who are shy and socially introverted, and need the comfort of an entire scripted-out conversation before they even leave their home, they don’t know what to make of this, because, first of all, they don’t even have natural interests yet because they haven’t learned how to meet their own needs, so they’re actually needy so that you can’t do Step 2 until you’ve done Step 1 or made a lot of headway or progress on Step 1.

That’s the main focus. Step 1, which is the seven steps, should be the main focus for all of you guys listening, for all of us, if this is something you want, love and happiness, because Step 1 is about meeting your own needs for something, such needs that are so big as growth, contribution, and love and connection. [11:59.3]

In fact, once you’ve taken care of Step 1 or Point1, which is to meet your own needs, and you’re well on your way on the seven steps, then all the other points get taken care of for themselves. You don’t even need to really worry about them. The second point here is to live a life you enjoy, to get out there, because you’d already be doing it naturally, so I wouldn’t even need to point this out to you. It would just happen naturally. It’d just be an extension of you meeting your own needs.

I’m only pointing out Points 2, 3, and 4 on this episode so that, for those who haven’t learned how to meet their own needs or haven’t even started really, they have an idea of what is coming, what’s coming up. These Points 2, 3, and 4 would’ve happened along the way as you learn how to meet your own needs, as you’re going to have to get out there.

You will get out there because you will be meeting your own needs, for your own needs for connection. That will at least lead you out of your house and at least into nature, and if you love nature, there are plenty of opportunities to meet new people, especially other nature lovers, especially if you go to nature retreats and things like this. There are entire communities formed on just the common interests of their love of nature, and this is true for everything, especially now with the internet, which hyper-connects us. [13:13.5]

If you are well along the way to meeting your own needs, then you will naturally be living a life that you enjoy, and your neediness, because it will be going down, your attractiveness will naturally be going up and then you’ll be going out into the world. That’s Step 2. You are going to be going out in the world, living a life that you enjoy.

Obviously, part of that life that you enjoy will also be in the comfort of your own home or whatever, and for those pick-up artists who are worried about “If I go to these venues, let’s say I have an common interest in wine and I go to a wine tasting event, but then I don’t know what to say to her. What’s my opener? What’s my transition?” and blah, blah, blah, I covered this in the last episode, but I want to reiterate here, one of the big differences between what I’m doing here in this podcast, as well as in my work for the past several years, versus what pick-up artists are doing. [14:02.3]

In other words, we have different goals, but the pick-up artist’s goal is to become a ladies’ man and he tracks that goal by his conversion rates and depending on whatever conversion he’s focused on, whether it’s getting the number or getting late or whatever it is. He’s trying to get his numbers up, so he sees women not really as specific human beings and wanting to get to know them as humans, but he sees them as a means to his end. The means are a way of keeping score, and the ultimate goal is “to become really good with women”, quote-unquote.

That’s not what I’m focused on. That’s not what I’m interested in helping you with. What I’m interested in helping you with and what I’ve been doing all along in this podcast isn’t helping you to become a ladies’ man and to jack up your opening rates or whatever. What I’m focused on is helping you find love, fulfillment, and happiness, lasting happiness, because being a ladies’ man won’t lead to lasting happiness or fulfillment. It won’t lead to love and this is a big reason why I did that last episode. [15:04.7]

Now that that is clear, even if you’re super shy, socially awkward, but because this is truly an interest of yours, whether it’s wine or cosplay or comic-con, I don’t know, whatever your interest is, the fact that you are there and there’s somebody else there that you’d like to strike up a conversation with, you already have a natural, organic conversation with this person. Then, because you’re meeting your own needs, you’re also becoming more healthy emotionally, as a result, and then you’ll be naturally taking an interest in the other person.

Then it will be easy, because you will have a natural interest in the other person as an end in herself, not as a means to make you feel better about yourself or for you to pump up your ego, or for you to add another notch to the bedpost, so to speak, or another close on your metrics that you’re tracking to see whether you’re manly enough or whatever. You’re actually interested in this human being and what she thinks and feels, and you’re interested in getting to know her. [16:07.0]

Most pick-up artists and most dudes aren’t actually interested in the women themselves. They’re just interested in the women’s reaction to them so that the man can feel good about himself. That’s the reason why he goes blank. That’s one of the main reasons why he goes blank in conversation, because he’s racking his mind to try to come up with something that will impress her or that will come off well, so he is in his own head about himself. “What does she think of me?” It’s all “me, me, me, me, me,” instead of actually being fully present with her and not thinking about himself at all.

This leads naturally into the third point, which is that as you’re living a life that you enjoy, naturally, along the way, you’ll be attracted to, you’ll start to spot women who also meet their own needs, who are also able to or are learning how to meet their own needs. [16:53.5]

As you’re learning how to meet your own needs for security, for significance, and so on, you’ll know from the inside through experience intimately, what it’s like when you’re not able to meet those needs on your own, and you’re feeling needy and the things that you do and say when you’re feeling needy, versus as you’re learning how to meet your own needs yourself on a frequent basis, on a daily basis, within your own control, not needing other people to meet your needs for you, you’ll also be able to spot what it’s like when other people are doing the same thing. When you don’t need others to treat you a certain way for you to feel good about yourself and you take full responsibility for your own thoughts, feelings and beliefs, you’ll naturally be easily able to spot other people who are doing the same.

This point is hard to describe without just giving tons and tons of examples, but the easiest thing to do instead of focusing on Point 3 here is to focus on Point 1. As you do Point 1, naturally, as you learn how to meet your own needs, you will naturally easily be able to spot other people who are experiencing and going through the same thing, and you’ll also be able to spot easily and naturally people who have not yet gone through it, because you were once there and so it becomes easy for you to say, Oh, right, I can see that this person is experiencing this, which is also why it’s so easy to enter into compassion for those who are not yet at the maturity that you are in. [18:20.4]

There’s a compassion for them because it sucks to be in that position, so naturally there’s a compassion when you watch some of these online dating gurus and their immaturity, and of course, it’s also entertaining, but there’s also this compassion. That compassion does not mean that you then bend over backwards to accommodate them on their every request. 

One common objection that you hear from immature people about unconditional love or even compassion is that then they think that it means that they have to just do everything and anything that the person, their love object says, but that’s obviously not true. You can clearly have compassion from somebody, but not get entangled with them, because it’s not good for you and it’s not good for them. [19:02.4]

Another easy example for love, for instance, is if you love your child and the child keeps asking you for more ice cream, because you love them, you don’t give them unlimited ice cream, despite the fact that they’re whining for it. Clearly, right? That’s an example that as you know intimately from the inside through your own experience what it’s like to actually meet your own needs, it will naturally and easily be obvious to you when it’s not yet [there], when you’re not yet there, when you’re not yet able to meet your own needs for love, connection, growth, significance, security, and certainty. Then it becomes very difficult for you to understand what it’s like to be able to spot that in someone else. Okay, so the easiest thing to do to master Point 3 is to actually master Point 1. Then Point 3 will come along naturally. [19:52.5]

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The final point is similar to the third, that along the way, as you’re living a life that you enjoy as a result of meeting your own needs, along the way, find a partner who has moral principles, and this will be easy to spot if you have moral principles. Why do so many Red Pill guys get cheated on and lied to by women? It’s because they also cheat and lie when it serves them. They also can be mean to others when it serves them. They’re just bitter that they lost that fight against that girl, so they’re trying to get it back. [21:04.0]

Again, if you have moral principles, if you are already somebody who values and prioritizes integrity, and that means you live up to your word, you keep your word, it also means that you follow your moral principles, even when there is no punishment or negative consequences, just because it is the right thing to do or just because it is the good. You also follow through even when no one else sees and you’re not out just for your own selfish or personal gain, but that you value the good for the sake of good, because it is good, not because the good will get you something as a result.

Similarly, you don’t treat people as means to something else. You treat them as ends in themselves. They are their ends for their own sake, not as means for you to feel good about yourself or for you to rack up a higher score on your dating scorecard or whatever. [21:58.0]

This is a good example actually. This is a good place to pause for an example. Let’s take an example of going to a speed dating event and approaching it with moral principles, versus approaching it without moral principles. If you were to approach it without moral principles, as an example, here’s one way that you could do it.

As a man, you go there not interested in really meeting any of the women, but just interested in seeing what your score would be, how many of them you could convince to give you their number. You don’t value them, meeting them in themselves, but you’re just using them as a way of gauging your score, racking up points on your scorecard.

In that sense, you’re treating them as means instead of ends, and that’s creepy, versus going to a speed date to see who might be there that you could strike a conversation with and find common interest in, and maybe something bigger can come out of it, maybe a marriage out of it. You never know who you’re going to meet, and so you’re interested in each of the people that you meet as human beings, not as a way to keep track of how successful you are in speed dating as a separate activity. [23:05.3]

The same thing could go with cold approaching, cold approaching with moral principles versus cold approaching without moral principles. Now, let’s go with the first one, cold approaching with moral principles, because this might seem surprising to some of you who are more morally judgmental.

Cold approaching is simply the act of going out, out into the world, with the intention of meeting some new people. It’s similar to speed dating with moral principles, except speed dating is highly confined and ritualistic. There’s a lot of rules. There’s a timer and all that kind of setting, whereas cold approaching is just, I don’t know, the world, right? You could cold approach technically anywhere, because the cold and the cold approach simply indicates that you don’t know each other yet or you have no mutual friends in common or something. [23:48.2]

You could, say, set aside one hour or two hours in the day to go and meet new people, and if you have moral principles while doing it, that simply means that you’re going to treat each of these people that you meet as an end in themselves that the very activity that’s interesting to you, the reason you’re doing it, is so that you can get to know these people and the people themselves are intrinsically interesting to you. You might meet some new friends out of it. You might meet a potential mate out of it, but, regardless, you are treating them as ends.

Now, here’s the creepy way to cold approaches, which is actually how pick-up artists encourage you to approach cold approaching, which is a depersonalized impersonal way, which is that you just view it as like a video game, like the game, right, so that if you get “rejected”, quote-unquote, you can just brush it off like you’re just putting another quarter in the arcade and press continue and your character starts up again.

Cold approaching without moral principles is seeing the women that you meet not as ends in themselves, but as a means for you to gauge your success in dating so that you can feel better about yourself or masculinity or whatever, hoping, ultimately, at the end of that, that you’ll finally be enough. [25:03.0]

If you can rack up enough points to finally be enough as a human being or be enough for love or whatever it is, or finally be significant. You’re using them as a means to make you feel better. Now, you might have heard of that saying of a notch on the bedpost and that’s exactly getting at the same point.

Now, if you’re somebody who naturally has prioritized following your conscience and has thought through your moral values, and is trying to live according to those moral principles and you actually care about the good for the sake of it, of the good, not because you think that the good will get you more money or more babes or whatever, and that you’re not out just for selfish gain.

A lot of guys are only friends with each other for as long as they can use each other, and that’s really sad that that’s not really friendship. That’s just mutual using of each other, and then they wonder why they get so bitter and resentful when they get burned. You set the whole thing up, you hypocrite, and this is the case for most, I mean, all the Red Pill guys that I’ve met and most people out there. [26:09.0]

It’s like we’ve forgotten, as a society or as a world, what moral values are and most people have not even been equipped, they’ve not even given the opportunity to debate them or to think through moral values and ethics. It’s like it’s not even a topic anymore. That’s really sad, especially coming from a former professor of philosophy who taught courses in the university on ethics and moral philosophy. Even if you reject it and you become a nihilist, a moral nihilist, or a moral relativist, at least have arguments for it. At least have thought through your position and have considered the major alternative positions.

Anyway, this is just something I recommend that everyone do. I think it’s very difficult to have moral convictions, if you can’t defend them in the face of counterarguments, and if you’ve never had the opportunity for that, because everyone nowadays, through the algorithms of social media, lives basically in these mental silos where their ideas aren’t challenged. [27:07.2]

It’s very sad that the universities have gone towards a cancel-cultural route and that politically-correct route, which has not allowed young people or university students to learn how to debate moral principles and ethics and that sort of thing, because then along the way, naturally, as you think more about the virtues like courage and fortitude, and love and so forth, you will have developed your own theories and ideas.

Now, you don’t have to have the theories behind why you should be good. You could just be a good person because you value the good, because you’re naturally compassionate and considerate, and kind and so forth. But it’s even better if you are also kind and considerate, and compassionate, and have the arguments, the philosophical reasons for why you are holding to these moral principles.

When you have a higher degree of sophistication around these, around moral principles, it’d be a lot easier. It’s natural to spot other people who have similar values and you’ll naturally be drawn to them and day to you. It’s natural, so there’s nothing else you need to do. [28:11.0]

If you’re doing Step 1, Point 1, meet your own needs, okay, and then you just live your life. You’ll naturally come into contact with other human beings, including females who are also learning to meet their own needs. You’re naturally going to be attuned to them. It’s like a radar that you’ve got going naturally, going all the time. Similarly, for those who share your moral values and your moral principles, you’ll already be [attuned]. You’ve got this radar going.

Okay, those are the four points that I wanted to cover on how to create, in a natural way, a loving, passionate relationship.

The first point is to meet your own needs and I covered the seven steps for doing that in a previous episode.

The second point is to live a life that you enjoy, which will flow naturally from the first point. [29:00.8]

Then the third point, which flows naturally from the first and the second point is that, along the way, as you live a life you enjoy, find a partner who also is meeting her own needs or is learning to, or is growing in it or is meeting her own needs, and that will also be natural for you because you’ll naturally have your radar attuned to that.

The fourth point is to find a partner with the same or similar moral principles or moral values, or for somebody who prioritizes or appreciates moral values, like integrity, compassion, courage, reliability, following through on your word, loyalty, things like this.

You’ll have a much easier time with Points 3 and 4, and, of course, with 2, if you’re already doing Point 1, meeting your own needs. Then, a special case for Point 4 on moral principles is it really helps to be thinking through moral values for yourself, because society is not doing it for you and most people did not get this education or opportunity in school as they ought to have. [30:03.7]

My son is just over a year old right now. I mean, he’s in this beautiful time in his life right now, but I’m also looking forward to the time when he’s old enough to debate me at the dinner table on moral values, moral positions, and even if we totally agree on all our values, I’m going to assign him an opposite position to get him to have practice in defending a position that he doesn’t himself believe, because that in itself is a skill, to be able to enter into alternative positions and to shore them up, to even come up with stronger arguments and a stronger position than the original one that he was given, even though he doesn’t actually believe in it. That’s actually a skill. It’s a skill that I think everyone should learn and it will make it a lot easier to be able to find partners with the right type of moral principles and to be able to spot people who value morality. [30:52.6]

I should have mentioned this when I was talking about Point 4. If they don’t value morality, then it will be just a matter of time before they cheat or lie, and destroy or sabotage the relationship, because the more intimate the relationship, which is required for a fulfilling relationship as, over time, you get deeper and deeper and intimacy, the more intimate it becomes, the more triggering it becomes for your burdened exiled parts. 

If the relationship is healthy over time, especially the first five years or first 10 years, it’s going to trigger the fuck out of you, and every time, it’s an opportunity for you to meet your own inner child parts that are reacting out of their burdens and to help them. That’s your responsibility, not your partner’s responsibility. It’s not your partner’s responsibility to heal you. That’s yours. Similarly, for you, it’s not your responsibility to heal your partner. That’s part of Point 3, find a partner who also is meeting her own needs. When that’s the case, the relationship is a wonderful place for your own personal growth. [31:58.4]

It’s easy for single guys to be level-headed and even-keeled because they don’t have any intimacy. Without intimacy, no one is triggering you, and without that triggering, you’re not actually going to grow. But because a loving intimate relationship will necessarily involve the level of intimacy and vulnerability that will necessarily trigger all your inner demons, if you haven’t learned to meet your own needs, you’re going to destroy. The relationship is done. It’s going to be destroyed. You’re going to destroy it. She’s going to destroy it. You’re both going to destroy it, because you can’t handle being triggered, because you haven’t actually learned how to meet your own needs.

That is at a deep level, right? I break it down to the seven steps about the protector parts and the exiled parts, and so forth. There are levels to this, right? I cover that in seven steps of meeting your own needs. If you aren’t a person who prioritizes or values morality or moral principles, then when the going gets hard, you’re going to bail, because when the going gets hard, you get triggered because the intimacy is increasing now. It’s going to be uncomfortable, because you haven’t learned how to meet your own needs, and as a result, you’re just going to back out. [33:04.8]

You’re just going to break up or, on the spot, going to get really angry and probably say a lot of things you regret and throw things or whatever, and then you’ll break up. Then maybe you’ll get back together, if you’re needy, if you are using this other person to meet your needs for security, and then it’ll be back and forth, back and forth, break up, get back together, break up, get back together. I’ve been there. I’ve seen so many people there as well.

So, that fourth point of finding a partner with moral principles is important because that’s required for that person to stay with it. That’s the part where therapists talk about marriages or relationships requiring work. That’s when it kicks in, so it’s really important that you have that moral value of integrity and compassion and that kind of stick-with-it-ness and not just lie and cheat whenever it benefits you or whenever it’s easy, because, definitely, in a long-term loving, intimate relationship, if you don’t have the moral principles to keep you in it, it’ll be far too easy for you to just step out and leave the discomfort and go back to your comfort zone, which is to find a new relationship with a new person that you buy the lie that this will bring you happiness. [34:11.8]

If the reason you broke up is because the other person kept triggering you, that’s actually on you and this is an opportunity for you to grow. There are also plenty of other legitimate reasons to break up or divorce, right? But the triggering, it could also be legitimate in the sense of, hey, this is at that period of time in your life you didn’t know any better, right?

But now that you know this, if you value that relationship, you can stick with it and do the work, get a good therapist and do the work. You can also go very far with my online recorded courses, especially in this area, in this area, especially, in “Rock Solid Relationships”. You can also go through this with your partner. Plenty of guys who go through this with their partners. I mean, so many guys who have said that they’ve saved their relationship. [34:58.1]

Just before I go, I want to share the story of Mark. When Mark came to us, he joined our “Platinum Partnership”. He started the courses. He was sharing with us in the forums and in the private coaching session that he comes with that he had a really strict father who had very high demands for Mark to be as successful and, in fact, more successful than he was, than his father was. 

He felt a lot of pressure about this and Mark’s father was verbally abusive telling Mark that he’s not good enough to be in this position that his dad was in, and he kept, in this way, being very hard on Mark. As a result, Mark made the choice that for him to be significant, he’s got to beat his dad, which means he’s got to make hundreds of millions. He’s got to have a McLaren, right?

He went about constructing his life in such a way that, in this kind of tortured haunted way, he went out and achieved, and kudos to Mark, he did. He managed to put together these deals that netted more than his father was making, or at least more than his father was making at his age, and he was getting the money together to get his Lamborghini and all that. He was incredibly miserable. [36:12.8]

Along the way, he got a girlfriend who was more of a trophy girlfriend for him. It was the type of girlfriend that made him feel like he had made it and he was showing her off, but then it turned out she was cheating on him multiple times and he broke up with her. She begged to get back together, let her come back together with him, and she cheated on him again, and this happened again and again. 

He was sharing all of this. This was the situation he was in as a result of the inability to meet his own needs for significance and love, and security and certainty, and so many other levels of needs. As he went through the seven-step process of meeting his own needs, the therapeutic process, his life transformed. He no longer was attracted to this woman who was toxic and suggested to her that she find a good therapist. The last I heard, she was working on herself, which is a great thing, but he didn’t take responsibility for healing her or for making her better as he was tempted to do because of his dynamic with his mother. [37:09.8]

He also was able to let go of needing to prove himself as a man to his father, and as a result, he no longer needed all of these external trappings of happiness and, instead of collecting a Lamborghini and a McLaren and all that, he actually was able to come out of the closet with one of his real passions, which was antique furniture collecting.

It turns out, there are some really expensive antique furniture out there in the world that you can auction on and he started to do this, and it wasn’t for anyone else except himself. He just took so much pleasure in getting these items and placing them in his home, and seeing them in every day and using them, and he didn’t even really make it a point to mention it to people when they came over, and it was just this quiet pride and enjoyment for himself meeting his own needs that he was doing this for himself, not for others or not to get significance or validation from others. [38:07.0]

His life became so much lighter, became deeper in meaning and he switched his vocation, his industry, into helping others and, as a result, was just experiencing so much more happiness. He was also not haunted by the need to make more money and that actually opened up the floodgates for him actually making a lot more money, but all in ways that are far more enjoyable for him.

This is what can happen. By the way, I know a lot of guys who have books on women. Mark is also dating a woman who is really great for him and they’re going on all these different retreats together. I’m going through their own transformational journeys separately, but also together. This is what can happen when you meet your own needs and make that the priority, rather than trying to find some other intermediary thing, like fancy cars or worldly success or being masculine, and instead going directly to lasting happiness, fulfillment, love, and joy in life. [39:08.5]

When you do that, you go right to the end. Instead of having to go through all these things that you mistakenly believed or brainwashed into thinking would get you lasting happiness and you just find lasting happiness just within yourself, within your own control. Then, as a result, your lifestyle completely changes. Your life completely changes. The people in your life completely change and this is something that happens naturally when you’re able to meet your own needs.

Thanks so much for all your comments on all the other previous episodes. I want to hear what you think about this one, so please leave a comment and please share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it. Thank you so much.

I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [39:50.5]

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