Terrific at Tinder but Terrible at Relationships? | (#083) 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. 

This episode and the one before it are about how to attract women naturally by being more of you, because if you do it any other way, you’re actually attracting women into your life by being a false self. And that might be okay with you if you’re just after short-term hookups or one-night stands, but if your ultimate dating goal is to eventually find “the one”—the one that you will invest in as a lifetime partner and be your wife, who you will build a family with and live together, and be the most intimate and see each other the most out of any other human beings on this planet for the next 50-some odd years—then it better have been the case that you attracted her in the first place by being you, not some fake you or being a false self, or even putting your best foot forward in a way that is unsustainable for you. [01:16.6]

That wouldn’t even be interesting for you to keep being that way so that when you finally relax and, unquote-unquote, “be yourself”, and if you had attracted her with this false self or some kind of mask, or some other kind of fake persona, and then you finally relax because you can’t keep this up forever.

This applies to those guys who have bought into the lie of self-help and life coaching that the point of attraction coaching and dating coaching is to learn how to be your best self: always achieving, always growing, always progressing, always striving, and buying into that lie that you have to be something other than you are already, in order to be worthy of love. [01:59.2]

And, as a result, never being allowed to or able to rest, and actually be comfortable and content with how you are now, because even needing to be your best self is a kind of neurotic need borne out of toxic shame that you aren’t worthy intrinsically of love just in who you are, but that you have to earn it by all of the striving, which you then, hopefully, arrive in from based on the lies of life coaching and self-help and personal development, that only when you step into being this best self can you then enter into dating, and dating as your best self.

But then we’re not always our best selves. Sometimes shit happens. Sometimes life hits us hard. Sometimes we just want to rest and we’re tired, or maybe we have come to the point where we have matured enough to realize and recognize that this external goal that we thought would complete us, that would finally make us enough, if we were just able to attain it, actually is a lie and that it won’t. [03:02.8]

Then we stop striving to be this fake best self and then she sees through that, and if you attracted her as your best self and now she sees the real you, the you when you relax, the you that you really want to be, just playful and fun and not striving, achieving, and maybe not progressing all the time, then the foundation, the basis for why she is with you will then have dissolved.

So, it’s one thing to keep up this fake exterior, pretending to be your best self or this narcissistic ideal version of you, the version of you you wish you were so that you could then be enough, this kind of fantasy version of you that you’re working so hard to enter into with the belief that, finally, then you’ll be enough to attract the love that you want to tell you that you’re significant enough, that you’re man enough. 

So, it’s one thing to be able to attract a woman by striving and achieving, and thinking that you are now your best self and, as a result, you finally ought to, anyway, deserve an attractive woman who could then make you feel and kind of validate that you are good enough. [04:08.8]

I’m not even talking about the manipulative tactics that you might find for dating advice for men on the internet. I’m assuming if you’re listening to this, that you’re [aware] that this is obviously not the right thing to do and the right way to go, especially if what you want eventually is a long-term relationship that lasts for 50-some odd years. I’m not even criticizing that. That’s just obviously not the right way to go. What I’m attacking here is this striving to earn this, quote-unquote, “best self” as it turns out is a false self.

Now, obviously, I’m not saying that hard work and achievement and striving are bad things in and of themselves. If you enjoy these activities that you are devoting so much time and effort into as, after all, I’m doing this podcast. I’ve done a PhD and three master’s degrees and have many parts of myself that are achievers, and love to study and read and talk, and learning to love writing even more than ever before. [05:08.7]

I’m not looking down on or criticizing the actual hard work. What I’m bringing out is, if you are doing all of this hard work because, if the motivation for it is because you think, at the end of all of this hard work, you will then finally be enough significant, worthy enough for love from the type of woman that you need it from, which is usually the code word for that is “attractive woman,” and that’s why you’re striving to create or become this ideal self that you will then be able to leave behind, exile, disown, cut away, kill off that old, weak, sad, pathetic you in the past, then what I’m saying is you’re setting yourself up for failure when it comes to a long-term relationship. [06:00.0]

The good news is there is a much more natural way to attract women authentically by being and presenting more of you, who you already are. In the last episode I covered why hooking up and getting good at hooking up, optimizing for the short-term hookup, is not only not the same and will not serve you when you want to get and create a loving long-term relationship, but it will, in fact, hurt you if you have to spend a lot of time and effort to optimize for hooking up, if the hooking up doesn’t come naturally to you.

Unless you’re a male model or in the top 0.1 percent of wealth or status, you probably will have to put some degree of effort into optimizing for hooking up, if what you are tracking as a metric to determine whether you’re successful and getting better at hooking up, and getting better at dating or attracting women, if the metric is the quantity, and then, of course, the looks of the women, then you’re going to have to rack up the numbers. [07:07.0]

If it takes you effort and time to rack up those numbers, you’ll be creating habits of thought and action that will lead to a character, a personality, automatic– This is why it’s called habits, right? It’s automatic patterns of thought and behavior that will sabotage you or get in the way, become big stumbling blocks and obstacles to succeeding in a long-term relationship for decades.

In the last episode, I actually wanted to get to this point here about the long tail and some game theoretic, basic game theoretic concepts, but I took almost 30 minutes to frame why this is important and why it’s important to ask this question. Is optimizing for a lot of short-term hookups going to actually help me or set me up for success when it comes to a long-term relationship? The answer is no, and not only that, it’s going to sabotage you for long-term success when it comes to a relationship. [08:08.2]

How most guys do it is, as I did it back then, as I was thinking about it back in my early-thirties was “I’m just going to date a lot of women, hundreds of women. I’m going to expand my pool, my dating pool from which I will select the one that I will settle down with.” The problem was, as I’ve been pointing out, that I wasn’t good at dating or attraction. It did not come naturally to me in my twenties. I had to learn it. It’s like a second-nature thing. I had to go through a lot of time and effort, years of time and effort, invested almost full-time and then later actually full-time in the pursuit of getting really good at flirting and banter, and seduction and attraction overall, and charisma and the whole package that that includes, which, of course, includes body language and local tonality and eye contact and all of that. [08:59.5]

Most importantly, it includes mindsets, what to think when you are speaking, what to think when you’re on a date or attracting or flirting with a woman, and what to think while you’re texting, and that’s what I’ve been referring to in terms of the patterns of thought that those are what drive the attractive behaviors and decisions that then, hopefully, will become second nature to you because you’ve done them so much, they become automatic.

Then you don’t have to exert so much energy or any energy into figuring out what the right thing to do or say is. It just comes naturally to you because you’ve internalized them, and they start with thoughts, patterns of thought, habits of thought. Then, of course, you start to internalize habits of action and behavior, and things that you would say naturally and sort of gut or kneejerk reactions that work in your favor. Then you don’t really need to apply much effort. [09:52.4]

Unfortunately, once you’ve internalized these behaviors that are really good at optimizing, right, that are really good at getting you short-term hookups, they will actually get in the way and make it harder for you when it comes to creating and sustaining, and then growing a long-term relationship for years and decades, and then to sustain and grow that passion and connection with your wife, your spouse, while you’re growing a family.

Before I get into the concepts of the long tail and how this relates to Nash equilibrium and all that, I’m going to illustrate this with a quick story and this is a client of mine named Tim, and when Tim came to me, he was in his mid-thirties, a management consultant, very successful professionally and in terms of business.

But he was incredibly overweight and very socially awkward. He was very much the geek or nerd, so he could talk endlessly about management theories and optimizing life and life-hacking and all of that, but when it came time to just having a fun time, especially just flirting and just bantering with women, he was incredibly awkward. [10:59.3]

While he was going through the longer-term makeover process and a lifestyle makeover, and alongside that, the therapeutic process, we also helped him optimize his Tinder profile, and the first woman that he went on a date with from Tinder after working with us, he ended up marrying and creating a beautiful family with kids and a beautiful life.

That was the first woman that he dated off Tinder and he didn’t know that this was going to be his wife, and like most guys, he got caught up in the kind of greed that comes from recognizing that “Wow, with all of these lifestyle changes and knowledge that I’m getting from David,” and then, of course, the therapeutic process takes longer. That’s happening in your unconscious mind over the course of several months, in some cases, a few years. [11:51.4]

So, while that’s happening, you get the quicker short-term wins of a wardrobe change, fitness regimen, in his case, a new nutritional diet, and just sort of this newfound confidence, especially confidence from a guy that you look up to, that’s me, saying, “You’re awesome. You’re doing great. Keep it up. You’ve got so much value in your life,” and helping him to see that and recognize that, as well as our team of fashion consultants who are all women, cute women who are saying, “This looks great on you, you look awesome.”

He got the short-term boost of confidence that lasted as long as he was working with us and he was able to get a lot more dates on Tinder, and the problem with Tinder is it actually exacerbated these tendencies in him because it fed the beast, so to speak, because he was getting more and more confident off these matches, which led him to disregard that first match.

So, actually getting good at Tinder and other dating apps—it wasn’t just Tinder that he was on—encourages you, motivates you, incentivizes you to optimize the wrong things if what you want is a long-term relationship, and that’s what Tim wanted when he started. He’d never had a girlfriend before, at least not longer than three months, nothing serious, and he wanted to settle down and start a family and all that, and he was killing it in his professional career and he just wanted to get his personal life together because he felt lonely. [13:12.4]

But he bought the VIP coaching package, which includes the “Platinum Partnership”, which includes access to all of my 21 courses at the time, and some of those help you to get really good at flirting and banter, and even sexual escalation and sex itself, and sex psychology. And he got into that and was like, Wow, I can actually do this for myself, and of course, this sort of greed because he had never lived this life before and so it tempted him and he gave into that temptation, which is totally understandable.

Now, one thing I want to point out about Tinder is there’s actually a great podcast discussion on Jordan Peterson’s podcast and he had a guest, a young researcher named Rob Henderson on there, and they talked a lot about Tinder and there was a statistic that they quoted, and I’ll cite it here, but there are a bunch of others that they cited, that on Tinder, a study on Tinder finds that women like the profiles of only 4% of the men they see on the app, whereas men swipe right or like 60% of the profiles. [14:10.5]

So, if anything is a numbers game, if dating was a numbers game before dating apps, now it’s really a numbers game, and when you are optimizing yourself and the way you present yourself, and the way you think of yourself in terms of women and dating, and you optimize for more Tinder matches and then Tinder hookups, that is sex off a Tinder date, you’re actually optimizing for the wrong thing, if what you want to find and create for yourself is a lasting long-term loving relationship.

No, there’s no question that you can actually get better at your Tinder game, your dating app game. In fact, that’s what Tim did just using basic dating-skills courses, and what happened with Tim was he went on a lot more Tinder dates and I think he hooked up with over 10 women off Tinder, and one of the things that happened was he tried to string along that first woman, his first Tinder match. They were actually still going on dates. He would still date her about once a week or once every other week, but they never had sex. [15:14.1]

He said she suspected that he was continuing to date around and she didn’t want to fully invest herself in him until he was ready to appreciate her to settle down. He kept saying to her, “Yes, I am, I’m ready,” but this was a lie maybe to himself as well and he continued to hook up with these women off Tinder.

As a result, she lost patience and just gave up, and after a few months of dating, she stopped returning his texts and then they stopped seeing each other, and when they stopped seeing each other, he came to me saying, “She’s the one that I enjoy spending time with the most. She’s the one that I think about the most. She’s the one I can feel most natural with and more of me. With these other women, I have to wear these clothes that I find incredibly uncomfortable,” because he is not used to them and maybe his fashion sense hadn’t developed, kept up with what his stylists were giving him, but he looked awesome. [16:03.8]

But he didn’t feel comfortable in his own shoes and that was just the clothing he wore. Think about this sort of witty, humorous, bantering part of himself that was now really overworked because he leaned on him so much, and this guy was just new at learning this in the first place, so he actually finds himself kind of exhausted at the end of these dates that end up with sex. He just wants to get out of there and move on to the next one and move on to the next one.

He found that he wasn’t actually enjoying these hookups intrinsically for their own sake. Instead, he found himself sort of racking up a record so that he could tell his friends and himself that he was finally becoming the man that he had always dreamed of becoming where had always looked up to these other guys who were hooking up with the hot girls. [16:47.5]

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.

Find out how to master your emotions through David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program. The Emotional Mastery program is a step-by-step system that integrates the best of empirically-verified psychotherapy methods and reveals how to master your internal state and develop the inner strength that makes you naturally attractive, happy, and fulfilled.

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But when she stopped responding to him and told him she wanted to stop seeing him, that was his wake up call that this woman that he had the most chemistry with, that he enjoyed the company the most and that saw him and was attracted to him before he got any good at this game that he was now really into, that this woman was the one that he would be willing to have given up all of those other hookups for. [18:12.5]

So, he did a kind of Hail Mary. It’s a strategy that I cover in my free masterclass on getting your ex back and this is what I call the “intense-connect strategy” and it’s done. Actually, he had already exceeded the ideal period of time that this is best used for it, which is about six weeks. In his case, it was about three months. But he went for it, an intense connect.

I’d explained it in more detail in the masterclass, but an intense connect is basically where you just put it all on the line. You meet her up in person and you just tell her, “What’s up? What have you been going through? What have you been thinking?” And you don’t play any games. You don’t hold anything back. You tell her, as much as you know in terms of your self-awareness of why you’ve messed up and why you’re sorry about it, and then you just let her know that. You just come clean. [18:59.2]

A great example of this strategy is at the end of the Jerry Maguire movie when Tom Cruise realized that the one person that he wanted to share this big win with was his girlfriend, or actually I think they were married by that time, his wife. They were married by that point. So, he rushed over there and he laid it on the line, and that’s sort of like what Tim did, not quite as dramatic. She said, “Thank you, I’ll think about it,” and then he had to go radio silent for a couple weeks, and then she reached out tentatively and they met up on her terms, a safe afternoon coffee meetup.

Then from that point on, it’s history and now they are, from all perspectives, happily married. They are seeing their couple’s counselor, at least I think it’s once a month, and they’re raising their two beautiful children and they’re living a great lifestyle. He’s been incredibly successful in his business career over the several years since then. [19:53.8]

This is a great example. Tim’s case is a great example of how optimizing for hooking up can actually hurt you when it comes to optimizing for a relationship, not just in the sense that you might miss your opportunity because you’re hooking up with all these other women, but optimizing for it makes you think that your earning attraction by being this way, and that’s right. That’s actually not a good way to go. 

That attraction is ephemeral. It’s transient. It’s temporary. That’s just a temporary feeling. It’s like a high, but you can’t create a long-term relationship off that. The long-term relationship that lasts for decades that you build a family off has to come from love, and love can’t be based on this surface-level attraction or the surface-level significance or worth.

It has to come from a deep connection, and you can’t have a deep connection with somebody unless you know who they are, unless you present how you really are, not how you are just on your best behavior, but how you really are, including all of the geeky or nerdy parts of you, or those parts of you that you might be ashamed of. [20:59.5]

That’s why the therapeutic process is necessary for this, because most people aren’t even aware of, have disowned and exiled the most intense, most vulnerable parts of themselves and those vulnerable parts of you are essential to who you are. You might think that you are successful in cutting them out or locking them up in the basement of your unconscious, but you’re not. They’re coming through. They’re leaking through in the most intimate relationships you will create.

Unless you have gone through a process like the therapeutic process to integrate and to heal and to love, let alone accept these parts of you that you have disowned—those could be your shadow parts that you might be afraid of or they might also be the some inner-child parts that are holding a lot of shame and pain—unless you have built a loving relationship with these different parts and have integrated them into a greater hole, which is your system, and in order to do that, you have to discover your higher self that is fully confident and courageous, and compassionate and caring, until you’re able to access this higher self in you consistently, you won’t actually be able to integrate those shadow parts or the disowned or exiled vulnerable parts. [22:14.1]

That’s one of the many reasons why the therapeutic process is necessary for almost anyone who wants to create and grow a loving relationship over the long term—and this is why it’s so important to understand how long tail works in dating. I first came up with a long tail concept for this episode and then I thought of Tinder, because these are both sort of numbers games.

The long tail concept or strategy comes from business and it comes from looking at some businesses like Amazon that make more money off the long tail, that is, niche products for a much smaller market than they do off the big sellers that appeal to the biggest market. This wasn’t possible or was very difficult to do before the internet, because for every product that you have, you need shelf space, and if you take up shelf space for these products that only appeal to a small number of people, then you’re not using your shelf space wisely. [23:14.4]

But when it comes to the internet type of businesses, like Amazon that has giant warehouses, and it costs relatively little for them to stock a toy, let’s say, that only appeals to a small number of the market or small percentage of the market, then they can have infinitely large shelf space because it’s just on the internet, and then they can ship direct from the warehouse.

What’s happened as a result of the long tail is that these companies make more money off selling these niche products on the long tail than they do on the big, winner products at the front that appeal to everyone. What happens is they often sell those big winner products really cheap to bring in a lot of people into the store, so to speak, and then they charge them more for these niche products that would only appeal to them specifically as a sort of small market, and this is actually how a lot of internet businesses are now run. [24:06.3]

I am building my business off the long tail. It’s a relatively small market, a niche market that I speak to. Luckily, I don’t have to make billions of dollars. I don’t even need to make tens of millions of dollars in order to reach my goal, because I’m on the long tail.

When it comes to optimizing for a long-term lifelong partnership with one person, one human being out of 8 billion, this is the longest tail possible. You are actually optimizing for a market of one. When you think you’re optimizing to be attractive to all women or the majority of women, you’re actually going the opposite direction.

You’re just watering yourself down to be as generic as possible or, even worse, you are dressing up a niche product which should properly be a niche product, which would be an amazingly expensive, valuable niche product, the sort of thing that you might notice that collectors will pay millions of dollars for and you wouldn’t even understand why because it looks like any other replica, just almost even fine art. [25:04.6]

Instead, you dress it up for consumption by the masses. You’re actually doing that product a great disservice. Now, can you take a niche product and dress it up and market it so that it becomes a mass market product? Absolutely. But then you end up fundamentally changing that product or the presentation of the product, or the branding of the product, which are all worked into, baked into the identity of that product in the mind of the market.

Now, bringing it back to dating, that’s like optimizing for hundreds of women and hooking up, trying to hook up with as many of them as possible, and then hoping to then find your one out of 8 billion women, the one that you will settle down with and build a life with, instead of recognizing and taking the much easier route of just recognizing that you are a niche product and you should properly be, rightfully be a niche product, and to figure out what niche you want to be in and then optimize the heck out of that niche, because you only have a target market of one. [26:06.8]

Instead, you go mass market and you kill your uniqueness and your identity, and you become just another player, and what happens is that niche buyer comes along and doesn’t even notice this potentially-great niche product that got branded as and dressed up as an altered into a mass market consumer product, and instead, they just overlook it because that’s actually not what they’re looking for.

Now, if you have been a player like I was, this is not the end of the story for you. You can absolutely bring it back into its uniqueness, but you’ve got to go through the therapeutic process. You’re going to do therapy on this product, and now, of course, the analogy breaks down.

But the long tail as a concept is a great one to apply to dating. If what you are after is a relationship, a lifelong partnership that you can build a family on, then you really need to pay attention to the fact that your target market is one, not thousands or even not hundreds, and definitely not millions. [27:10.3]

I mentioned Nash equilibrium as a great example in the movie, A Beautiful Mind. Russell Crowe is playing a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who came up with these game theoretical concept, and in the movie it’s depicted in terms of this dating concept and I think it’s just sort of apt here, because if you all go for the same women, then you all lose or one of you will win, but it’s a high-risk game, and the worst thing is you’re not in that game.

If what you want is a relationship, if what you want more than just mere hookups is a relationship, then you’re in a completely different game from the hookup, guys, and if you don’t realize that you are going to lose the relationship game to try to take the much more competitive and high-risk hookup game that 95 percent of guys who start out trying to get good at fail at. [28:00.4]

That hookup game is largely zero-sum, whereas like the Nash equilibrium points out, everyone can get their ideal relationship or a good relationship for them, if they recognize what they’re really going after isn’t to become attractive to the vast majority of women, but instead to be able to polarize enough.

Now I use now a reference, a great concept that my friend Mark Manson has done a great job in explaining, polarization. When you polarize for the one market, your target market, which you should define as narrowly as possible, then what will happen is there are going to be people who are going to be turned off by you, the presentation of the product, your branding and so on, and that’s great because you want to turn off the right people and turn on the right women. Right? That’s an important thing to think about in terms of who you are. [28:55.5]

Who do you want to live with for the rest of your life? Who do you want to be for the rest of your life? This is a much deeper question than most guys realize, because if they don’t answer this properly, they’re just going to say the obvious things. “I’d like to be the guy with the six-pack with millions of dollars,” and whatever, and in fact, those are never actually about who you really are at your core. Those are all surface-level features or factors. What you’ve got to get to know are those parts of you that are essential and that’s why the therapeutic process is so important.

Now I’m going to quote a comment that was on the last YouTube episode, and that is from Philip. Phillip said, “Great episode. Interestingly, I’ve started to embrace my identity of being a nerd that happens to be fit and fashion conscious. In fact, Philip, that’s awesome. But, Philip, you’re using the word nerd incorrectly here. Let me just point this out because I think it’s a little bit important here.

Nerds are studious and intellectual. Geeks are collectors. They’re collection- oriented, gathering facts and mementos related to their subject of interests. They’re obsessed with the newest, coolest, trendiest things that their subject has to offer. [30:03.1]

The example that Philip gives here is, and he says, “I have no problems admitting my nerdiness, geekiness, really, while at the same time still keeping my health and grooming in check. Like tonight at work, I had an attractive woman come in asking questions about whiskey.” He works in a large liquor store. “I helped her out, throwing some flirtatious vibes out in the process, and in the end, I admitted I’m kind of a whiskey nerd, which she seemed cool with.”

So, actually, you’re a whiskey geek, because this is a collecting thing you’re saying, right? Because maybe you are also a whiskey nerd, for which you should never apologize, because that is awesome. I’d love to meet whiskey nerds, because that means that you know a whole lot about whiskeys, and a better term than either geek or nerd for you, Philip, is a connoisseur. You are a whiskey connoisseur, or just go ahead and say you’re a whiskey expert. That’s awesome. Why wouldn’t you have a really cool sort of James Bond type of feature that you might find on his profile that doesn’t get talked about, but it would make a lot of sense if he had that? [31:02.7]

Now, you can see that this is an insecurity or was an insecurity for Philip, as is also his fitness and grooming, because he has mentioned those a bunch of times as if they’re that important. They’re sort of important, but like I said, putting your best foot forward all the time is actually a trap. Wear the clothes that you like and that you can appreciate, and that are expressing parts of you or just your taste. But once you think being fashionable and being fit are what will earn you attraction, then you’re screwed. It’s a trap, as I’ve been explaining for the past two episodes, as well as in other episodes.

It would be important for Philip to be able to find a woman who could appreciate his whiskey connoisseurship, his whiskey, let’s say, geekiness, because it’s an important part of who he is. It’s something he enjoys. Same for me. It’s like jazz and philosophy, and history and literature, and going to museums together and enjoying fine dining. I personally don’t think that those are hard to find in women, but if I found a woman, so I’m putting those out. I’m always putting those out there. These are part of my identity. That’s who I am and I’m proud of it. [32:07.3]

You want to get to the point where you are aware of and accept every aspect of yourself, without any toxic shame, because then you’ll be able to naturally express that more easily, and in so doing, you’ll be able to polarize more easily. That is, you’ll be able to attract the right people into your life naturally just by being more of who you are, and in Philip’s case here, I’m just pulling out an easy example of whiskey that he’s passionate about, and instead of hiding it, thinking, Oh, that’s a geeky thing about me, putting that out there and then turning off the many people that would not be able to connect with that or might look down on it or judge it.

So, in order to take advantage of the long tail concept, you’ve got to know your product inside out. Then you’ve got to know what niche market you want to spend the rest of your life with. You’ve got to think through that, and a big part of it, yes, is life experience. You’ve got to try out different women, different relationships and find out what you really enjoy and what clicks with you. [33:04.6]

Bringing it back to Tim’s example, that’s what he did, which helped him appreciate that first Tinder match a lot more. As a result, luckily, he figured that out early on enough that he was able to go back and revive that relationship.

It’s also a good thing that he had that first Tinder match, because a lot of guys are already optimizing for the wrong things, wondering why they have never found the right woman. You do not want to be in the position where you are actually, and we all are, really, niche products for a niche market, if what we want is a relationship, right? That’s a relationship of one. That’s a market of one.

Instead, we’re trying to take this niche product and trying to turn it into the iPhone, for instance, and that is an incredibly difficult thing to do and it is far more competitive as the Tinder statistics show you, and it is actually going to undermine and destroy a lot of the uniqueness of who you are. Then even if you were to succeed, you create a relationship that is based on false pretenses that is actually not about who you are, and all of the diversity and complexity and fullness of who you are, and that’s why the therapeutic process is so important. [34:17.8]

You do not want to get stuck building a lifelong relationship based on a false self. Instead, what you want to be able to do is to go through the therapeutic process so much that you accept and love all parts of you, and as a result, you’ll attract the right people into your life naturally by being more of you authentically.

Okay, if this interests you at all, have a listen to the other episodes in this podcast. Go check me out on my website. This is a major, major theme of what I do, and if this podcast helped you at all, please share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it. Let me know what you thought of this episode. Leave a comment wherever you’re listening to this, and thank you so much again for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. David Tian, signing out.

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