Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in relationships, attraction, success, and fulfillment. 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, we'll be exploring one of the most common manifestations of neediness and why you're probably a lot needier than you think. And, of course, if you've been following this podcast for any length of time, you know why neediness is so important. It's the most important factor to be tracking if what you're after is to increase your attractiveness as a male, to increase your attractiveness to women.
Your sexual attractiveness as a man is inversely proportional to your neediness. The needier you are, the less attractive you are, and if that's new to you, I suggest you start with Episode 101 and then dig into the rest of the podcast series, because I go into depth on why exactly that is the case and discuss the various ways in which that plays out in day-to-day life, especially in early interactions with women, but also throughout the course of your relationship with a woman. [01:12.8]
Now, I want to repeat here that attraction is but one of many factors that go into a successful long-term relationship and it's not even the most important factor. Your attractiveness as a man is far less important to the success of your long-term relationship than the woman that you choose. That's far more important, mate selection.
It's also far less important than the degree of your emotional connection and your emotional intimacy, and, of course, whether you actually have love in the relationship, as well the moral integrity and loyalty that each of you have as part of your character. [01:51.4]
Obviously, two people who are just really hot and hot for each other aren’t going to sustain a long-term relationship over time, but I think a lot of young people, especially men who write into me, are so insecure about their attractiveness that that is the overwhelming worry, and, of course, the very fact that they're even asking that or worrying about it is a big sign that they are needy and that's one of the main reasons they're not attractive.
Just worrying about whether you're attractive makes you less attractive. And how does it come across? Are they reading your minds? Not directly, not like Professor X reading your mind. But what attractive women and mature people are reading are your sub communications. That is, your body language, your eye contact, the tone of your voice, as well, of course, as the things you say and, more likely, your behavior, the things you do.
All of these tells are subconsciously, unconsciously leaking to the outside world, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, leaking your neediness, and even through processes like emotional contagion through the mirror neurons in the brain, women and other people are able to pick up your emotions unconscious, on an unconscious level, without you or they even being consciously aware of it. But they're feeling this kind of ickiness from that neediness that you're displaying in a social situation in which you're trying to generate attraction. [03:15.4]
For the men who are concerned about their attractiveness as a potential mate, neediness is the one most important factor or metric to be tracking. But if you're looking for a long-term relationship or once you get into a long-term relationship, or the beginnings of what could become a long-term relationship, you really ought to be paying attention to a lot more other important metrics, like integrity, like your mate selection, and so forth.
But I know maybe even the majority of my listeners at the moment are still not in a relationship, and this is pretty common nowadays for people in their 20s to not be in a relationship, especially even men in their 20s to not have had sex. The majority of men in their 20s have not had sex in the past 12 months according to surveys, so not only are they not in relationships, they're not even sexually active. [04:04.0]
This super-quick review of neediness is to set up the background to understand the question and topic that is the focus of this episode, and over the years, I’ve been getting lots of questions about crying in front of women and I’ve done multiple podcast episodes on the topic of crying and when it's appropriate and what will happen in terms of your attractiveness and so forth.
I had a video podcast years ago called “Man Up: Masculinity for the Intelligent Man” and it’s still up on my YouTube channel, and I had an episode there called “Is it okay to cry in front of your girlfriend or wife?” I addressed that there. Then I had another one called “Is it masculine to cry?” Those were, let's see, Episodes 247 and 172. I also addressed the crying topic in other episodes. I just did a quick YouTube search on David Tian crying. That's what came up. [04:57.2]
In this podcast series, Masculine Psychology, I covered multiple times the topic of crying and when it's appropriate, and so forth. I even told the story of when I bawled uncontrollably on what amounted to basically the third date with the woman I was seeing, who eventually became my wife, and why that was so important. But as I dug further and, over the years, kept getting more and more questions and comments about when is it appropriate to cry in front of a woman that you're attracted to? It's also tied up with the question of how to be vulnerable and when to be vulnerable with a woman.
After reading so many messages and comments, it finally dawned on me that most of the content I had been making about crying in front of a woman and so forth was not actually developmentally appropriate for a lot of the questioners, a lot of the people writing in, because I was answering the question from my perspective now or in the recent years, and how empowering and awesome it is to do that, and how it can be a litmus test for the right woman and so forth. [06:05.3]
But that doesn't actually apply to these questioners, because where they're at developmentally is still at a very super-needy stage, and what they're actually hoping to get as a result of crying is comfort and security and certainty, and for their own emotional needs to be met by her. But he's concerned that it will make him look less attractive, and so he's asking for some kind of reassurance for “When I bare my soul and ask her to comfort me, to put her arms around me and cradle me and rock me, like my mother did when I was a little baby and crying, when I do that to her, please tell me that that will at least not hurt my attractiveness. Even better, please tell me that it will increase my attractiveness.”
That's the same motivation I'm reading from the questions over many of the questions on vulnerability. Guys are trying to use their vulnerability as a kind of technique to increase their attraction or to get her to comfort him, and not only is this manipulative and Machiavellian, but it doesn't work. [07:07.1]
So, let me bust this myth here that maybe you picked up somewhere and, hopefully, you didn't pick it up from me. But maybe you did because my earlier content, a lot of mine, not all of it, but a lot of the earlier content addressing the crying question was aimed at an audience that was developmentally more mature than what I'm realizing a lot of the guys who are asking about crying and vulnerability are. It's too advanced for them, that, my old answer, the other answers I’ve given.
My answer to the guys who are trying to get women to comfort them or meet their emotional needs, and they're trying to do that by crying or displaying their, quote-unquote, “vulnerability” in front of the woman? No, that will not work to make you more attractive. In fact, they will probably make you less attractive, because what you are is you're needy, and you're thrusting now your neediness on full display to this woman. Then there's no mistaking your neediness and it's going to be a massive turnoff. [08:00.6]
Now, crying in front of a woman that you're intimate with emotionally and maybe even physically, if you're able to meet your own needs that you are feeling, all those emotions, you can be with them a hundred percent yourself. You don't need her to comfort you or to make you feel better. If that's your actual true, authentic state, and you're simply letting her in on the crying that's going on. That's a natural process and it's a healthy one of releasing this emotion and displaying it through your body and letting it out. It also releases lots of endorphins and oxytocin.
But that's not where most guys are. Most guys are needy and they're hoping to use the vulnerability and this crying as a kind of vulnerability to technique to get her to meet his emotions. Yes, that's manipulative, but it's also understandable because these guys don't know how to meet their own emotional needs. They don't know how to cure their neediness. They don't have access to their higher self that can be there for those parts of them that are holding the sadness, so they're hoping that she will step in and kind of mother them. [09:07.5]
A lot of this obviously is happening unconsciously, because, for them, it's like, She's hot. I want her to like me, but I'm feeling this way because she's pulling away and I just want her to see the damage she's causing to me and I'm sad. That's one scenario out of many.
But what I'm noticing is the motivation behind why these guys are asking about crying. Why do they want to cry? Why are they even considering it in front of a woman that they're attracted to? Why do they need to display the vulnerability? On the surface, they say, “Oh, I want to display my true self,” but why do you need to do that? Why do you need to do that in front of her? Of course, the big overarching question is “Will this make me less attractive?” The fact that you're even asking whether it'll make you less attractive, the fact that you even care about that, proves that you're needy, and your neediness will guarantee that you are not attractive. [09:57.3]
If what you care most about at this stage is your attractiveness, then the most important question isn't “Should I cry in front of her?” or “Should I be vulnerable in front of her?” No, the most important question is “How needy am I? Is my desire or temptation to cry in front of her or to be vulnerable with her, is my hesitation to do so coming from a place of insecurity that, as a result, I won't be attractive?” If so, you've got your answer. You are needy, so, actually, no matter what you do, eventually, you're going to turn her off, because your neediness will leak through. The most important thing for you to do was to address your neediness, and not to get her to address your neediness, because that's exactly what you're doing when you try to cry in front of her or be vulnerable in front of her.
I have done another episode in this podcast series, the Masculine Psychology Podcast series, entitled, “Why voicing your insecurities in front of a woman is a form of emotional manipulation.” This is Episode 71. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, do so after you're done with this one. Go hit Number 71, why voicing your insecurities is a form of emotional manipulation. [11:09.2]
The far more important question then is whether you should cry in front of her or be vulnerable in front of her, for you guys who care most about whether you're attractive, the most important question is “Am I needy?” because, actually, if you're able to meet your own needs yourself, including security, certainty, comfort, and connection, and so on, and you don't need her to meet those needs for you, because you've got those in control for yourself, then you can do whatever you want from that place, from that emotional state.
Okay, let me give some more specific examples so that it's clear. I’ll just use some examples from my own life and it was really nice to revisit these memories as a result of digging into the underlying motivations and assumptions of the many questions on crying and vulnerability that I get. [11:58.0]
The first time I learned this lesson that crying in front of a woman is going to make you less attractive if you're needy, if the crying is a form or a sign, or a manifestation or an expression of neediness, I learned this in high school with my first ever girlfriend, and this would have been in senior year of high school for me, so I would have been 16 turning 17.
This girl that I was dating through most of the school year, or, actually, the whole school year, and then as we got to the end of it, I think the last month, I was going to go to university a six hours’ drive away, she was going to stay in the same town and finish the fifth year of high school in Ontario—at that time, it was normal to do a fifth year of high school. It was called OAC year, Ontario Academic Credit year. I don't know if they abolished that.
But, anyway, I finished high school. The five years, I finished it in four, so I was fast tracked and I went to university at McGill in Montreal, a six-hour drive away from the suburb in Toronto that we lived in. Anyway, we are starting to break apart as a result, partly as a result of that, but mostly actually as a result of my own neediness coming up to that. [13:06.5]
We were basically breaking up, though, for both of us, it was our first boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, so we had no idea how to actually break up. But we were kind of drifting apart, even though we were hanging out almost, I think, the same amount of time. But, anyway, there must have been some kind of fight or something like that and I went over to her house one school day afternoon, and by that point, we had rigged our schedules so that we had lots of recess periods. We had lots of time off in between class times.
Anyway, she was at her father's home and I went to her home, and just overwhelmed by this kind of sadness, a kind of feeling of abandonment that she was pulling away, I just started bawling. I don't remember many of the details because it was so long ago, 30 years ago. But I do remember coming into the home through the front door, standing just inside the front door. I'm pretty sure that the front door was closed, and then there were two staircases, a half staircase up and a half staircase down. It was one of those homes where that's what you saw when you entered, two staircases, and she stood at the top of the staircase and her little brother was there and her little brother was I think three or two years younger. [14:14.1]
I said, “Hey, man, can you go get your sister?” She comes out, and then I started to tell her stuff and then I started crying. I remember I was crying so hard, I couldn't see through my eyes, so the memory is all sort of like looking through a glass in a hard heavy rain, okay. It was all blurry and I remember crying so much, the boogers were coming out my nose and I was sobbing while still trying to get words out. Looking back, this was a little bit embarrassing and I was a little embarrassed about that.
I go on for, I don't know, it must have been 10 minutes, maybe it was 20 minutes, and it was pretty much a one-sided conversation. I am offloading all of these emotions very probably inarticulately. I think she somehow calmed me down and gave me some kind of reassurances, but there was almost-- I don't think there was any physical contact. [15:03.5]
Somehow, I just calmed down, and then she asked me, “Can you send my brother to his school? Because he's got something at his school.” I was like, okay, because I do remember then getting into my car, driving her little brother to his school, and the whole time, he's giving me this look of disgust and I'm feeling quite embarrassed, because I forgot, oh, yeah, this dude is there, and he looked at me with this sort of-- I don't know, it's hard to know what that actually looks like, I can't describe it, but I remember feeling a kind of disgust from him and a loss of respect from him, though that I can't now point out any specific things that I picked up, but that was the general feeling I got from that and it all makes sense.
From that point, on that day, I learned the lesson and I didn't do that again, except maybe one or two other times with the same girlfriend, kind of Hail Mary attempts to invoke some kind of sympathy or empathy or whatever, and that just turned her off even more, and we were, what, 16, 17 years old at the time. [16:04.7]
If you think you're going to do anything like that, where you're just going to express all of these needy feelings you've got about how you feel abandoned and super sad and she's the source of it, but also the source of potentially not feeling this sadness anymore and you're just going to show her how much you're hurting because of what she has said or done or whatever, something like that, and then just letting it all out and then hoping that will invoke some kind of empathy or sympathy from her or compassion, if that's what you plan to do, if it's anything like that, stop, don't do that. It won't work.
It's not going to make you more attractive to her. It's not going to make her more attracted to you, and you're not going to feel any better as a result. It's not going to be therapeutic for you. You might get some oxytocin or endorphins as a result, but it's not going to be long lasting. You are far better off just crying your eyes out in your own bedroom than doing it in front of her as a kind of manipulative technique to get her to feel sorry for you. [17:03.5]
I think that's what most guys are referring to, “Can I do that because I'm holding all of this hurt in myself? And if she could just feel how bad I feel, then I believe (they think) that she, because she's so compassionate and loving and has displayed this kind of kindness to me before that, that it will turn the tide and she will repent of all of her wayward ways and come back and want to be in a relationship with me again.”
I’ll tell you straight up, no, that will not happen. You’re going to turn her off even worse, and she's going to be even more disgusted by you, if she's a normal human being. It might actually, if she's very mature, evoke some compassion in her, but it will be a kind of motherly nurse type of compassion and it won't have any kind of sexual attraction in there, unless she's got some really weird fetish. So, it could kick in for her, that motherly instinct, but that will actually turn her off in terms of sexual attractiveness, because no mother wants to fuck a baby. Actually, I should say, no healthy individual wants to do that, just on the record there. [18:02.6]
So, don't bawl your eyes out like a baby in an attempt to get some kind of reaction from others. That's developmentally appropriate for a baby because it's pre-verbal, and literally like a newborn or a baby is still forming the self-versus-other distinction. That kind of manipulative needy crying is a lot more developmentally appropriate for the baby than for a fully-grown man in an intimate relationship, trying to manipulate her into feeling sorry for him so that she will come back to him or for her to be how he wants her to be. [18:32.5]
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.
Learn more about this transformational program by going to DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery.
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I never cried again in front of a woman in order to manipulate her to respond to me in a certain way. Here’s another type of crying that is not therapeutically effective. In that case, the first example I gave, I'm trying to be effective in an interpersonal situation with other people, with her, but even if you're just crying alone-- Like I suggested, it's actually better because you're not screwing it up, if you care about things like attractiveness and attraction, though, like I said, if you what you want is a long-term relationship, that's one of the lower priority though it still is an important thing to take into account. [20:03.8]
But if you've got all of these emotions pent up, you should release them. Holding them in and suppressing them, especially when you're by yourself and there's nothing to lose there, it’s very toxic and this is repression, right? Eventually, if you suppress long enough, it becomes unconscious repression. This is the cause of the neurotic behaviors and disorders and so forth later on down the line.
You should process these emotions that you've got. Speaking man to man, so to speak, have the courage to just be sad alone in your room. A lot of guys are so afraid that if they release the sadness they've been holding for most of their lives, all their lives, if they release the sadness, then it will be unending and it will go on forever, and all they'll do for the rest of their lives is cry and they'll have to buy a lifetime supply of tissues just to stay alive. [20:53.3]
Okay, so this is an unfounded fear. I dare you to have the courage to cry and to time it to see how long you can sustain this degree of crying. I know guys are going to write back to me saying, “I did all day.” I dare you to just chart the hours, if it's that long. But what it will be is that it will come in waves and what you're going to need to sustain is to ride each of these waves. The question is, how long will this wave be? And just, physiologically, it is generally hard to keep crying intensely for more than five minutes or 10 minutes. Just time it. Just see how long it takes.
The more you release it, the first time to release it, the first day or week, or even maybe a month if you've got some intense sadness that you've been holding in for a long time, the first few times or the first several times that you're letting it out, it will probably be long and intense. So, hang in there and ride those waves, okay?
Then you'll notice that they become more and more manageable, partly because you become stronger and more resilient, and this is really important for your therapy to go well, because if you wait until your therapy sessions to cry, then you're going to end up taking a lot of the therapy session just doing the physical act of crying and you're not able to really do the other experiential work, because the actual physical act of crying is a necessary part of accessing the rest of the experiential work, so it's a necessary thing. You have to kind of get it out of the way. [22:17.6]
So, get it out of the way alone in the comfort of your room, and just crying on its own is like level one out of 10 levels of therapeutic effectiveness. Here's an example of when I did it alone, when I cried and sobbed uncontrollably alone and it didn't feel better and it didn't help because it went unprocessed. I had no therapist at the time. I did not respect psychotherapy at the time, so what do you know? I do realize that, for most guys, this is their experience with crying and sadness, especially alone.
The context for this, real quick, was the girlfriend that I had been dating at the time, who, eventually, I think about a year or so later, I found out cheated on me, actually, a year or so later. But this time, it was just a breakup and she was living it up and she was displaying this all over, clubbing and stuff like that with her other friends and displaying this all over social media. [23:11.3]
Back then, I was still half pickup artist, half life coach, and the pickup artist sides of me were very much still invested in status and things like that, because that actually matters when it comes to pick up, status and your attractiveness and how many women will want to hook up with you just for casual, short-term one-night stands. That was a metric that the pickup kind of parts of me were tracking, and I was losing big time on that versus her and she was living up.
I went on a solo trip, in other words, by myself, to a foreign country that I liked, and when I landed, it was pretty late at night. My first hotel, I booked an airport hotel, and I was alone in this airport hotel and I found myself looking through old photos of the two of us and just crying. I remember thinking in my mind, I think I might have even said it out loud, our term of endearment, like our version of “my dear” and “How could you?” kind of thing, like, How could you do this to me? [24:09.2]
I remember stomping the ground, the floor of the hotel room. I was sitting at the desk of the hotel room, stomping the floor, and just in pain in that sense, emotional pain. “How could you do this? I feel so lonely. I feel betrayed, abandoned, all this stuff,” because she dumped me at the time. We had a big fight and I think we just dumped each other, but my feeling was that she dumped me and I cried it out.
In the weakness of 1:00 a.m., sitting in a hotel room by yourself, I was looking at porn. I was looking at old photos of us reminiscing and I think I was probably watching some sappy movie because maybe somewhere on the internet I read that it would help, like (500) Days of Summer or something like that. Maybe I watched that on my laptop and then went into the photos or something stupid like that, and I was just sobbing and crying it out on my own, pounding on the floor of the hotel room and then somehow went to sleep. [25:01.4]
To look back on that, it was important for me to process that, so I think it was good to let it out. It was much better than holding it in, and not pretending like I didn't care, so it was good to let it out. That was Level 1 out of, I don't know, 10, 12 levels, but it was not therapeutically effective because I had no new perspective on the sadness of the pain. I had no bigger perspective and there was no higher self to be there for me with compassion and for me to feel connected with and all that. I was just letting out my pain and hurt, and that did not feel much better afterwards.
I think that, too, is what a lot of guys associate with crying. They just cry alone in the closet, and we did that as kids and it didn't help, so we learned that crying doesn't help, so we’d just suck it up. A “What good is it anyway?” kind of approach, right? I think I even remember saying that phrase to my first good therapist and saying, like, What good is it? It was kind of like indulging myself, because, in a sense, I do get some dopamine, or endorphins anyway, out of it, and it feels a little tiny bit better and I’d blow my nose and everything, then pick myself up and, okay, that's done and go take a shower and get on with life. [26:11.5]
If that's your only experience, if these are the types of experiences that you've had with crying, crying in front of others in order to get them, unconsciously, to meet some kind of emotional need—security, reassurance or even attention, certainty from them, some comfort, connection—and then maybe not getting it, or maybe if it's a friend of yours, getting some kind of lip service, reassurance, “Hey, man, it's going to be alright,” or “Hey, give me a hug, man” and that sort of thing, it's probably not very healing that way because you're not really there for yourself. If that's your experience of crying, crying in front of others in order to get them to comfort you, it was probably not very rewarding or empowering, or therapeutically effective. [26:53.1]
Then if your other experiences of crying or just crying alone in a dark room or in a closet, or, heck, even in a bright room, it doesn't matter, crying alone and not having a new perspective, a bigger perspective, a higher perspective, and not being able to be there for yourself and give yourself compassion and connection, and so forth—in other words, you're not crying therapeutically—then I can totally a hundred percent understand why you think crying is useless.
Now, I'm aware that I started by saying a lot of guys are writing in because they want to cry in front of a woman and show their vulnerability in front of a woman, but the reason is you're needy. The reason you're asking, “Am I still going to be attractive?” is because you're worried about your attractiveness.
In other words, you're needy. You're insecure about your attractiveness. All of that is going to undermine anything that you do, but it will especially undermine this attempt to manipulate her through your displays of vulnerability. Here, you're trying to weaponize vulnerability and it won't work to make you more attractive. [27:56.2]
Now, here's the exception. If you're in fact not needy, then crying and displaying your vulnerability will make you more attractive. Okay, so the most important thing is the neediness, not what you do. The crying and displays or saying vulnerable things, revealing vulnerable things, those are not the important things to be looking at. Whether you're crying or not is not important. What's important is whether you're needy.
Here's a typical example that I heard as I was learning about attraction and pickup, and stuff like that. Imagine a very powerful godfather type figure who's really tough, your stereotypical alpha male and maybe like a godfather. Maybe he's like a patriarch of a tough family or whatever, right?
Then at the funeral of someone he loved or someone that you would expect that he would love, you see one single tear come down his eyes and roll down his cheek, and then you go, “Wow, that's powerful,” because most of the time, 99.9 percent of the time, he's like the tough ’80s action-hero type guy, right? Then you see this little bit of vulnerability. That's acceptable. That's even for action-hero type guys. That's acceptable, and you can see how that would be attractive and that would be cool, and that humanizes him, so it makes him more multi-dimensional and that's intriguing. [29:13.2]
Okay, so that one's easy to swallow. But here's why actually, really, crying and showing real displays of humanity actually make you more attractive, if you're not needy, assuming you're not needy. Why? Because there's this thing called the compassionate instinct and it's hardwired into women to be on the lookout for that in a man, because if a man is just action-hero tough and he's just assertive and a leader and all that, there's actually this implicit threat there to her.
This is something that's important for dudes to understand because dudes find admirable or respectable, for most of us anyway, as you see it in dude movies, like movies aimed at an audience of men. You see these action and adventure movies, and especially in the ’80s before they really humanized them—I'm talking about the period of classic Stallone and Schwarzenegger before Bruce Willis’ Die Hard, so the classic invulnerable action hero—that was more of a male fantasy than a female fantasy. [30:09.5]
The woman's fantasy during those periods was like the long-haired Fabio guy that you’d see on the cover of those old Harlequin romance novels. You don't see those anymore, so now I know guys in their 20s probably don't know what I'm talking about. But it's like the difference between Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and The Loki in that first movie. Women, by far, found the Loki figure played by Tom Hiddleston far more sexually attractive, just based on the character depiction in the movie, because Chris Hemsworth’s Thor for almost the whole movie was pretty one dimensional and kind of a bimbo. But he's physically attractive, just as physically attractive, I think, from a heterosexual male as Tom Hiddleston. But Hiddleston’s character was a lot more intriguing, interesting, multi-dimensional, and he gets a far more compassionate backstory where he's this sort of orphaned child and so on, right? [31:01.0]
This is why, if you're just a big tough jock who is really tough, and will beat up anybody else, sort of like the Gaston in the Beauty and the Beast, if you're just this one-dimensional action hero, it's actually kind of scary for a woman, because she doesn't know, if you beat up all the other competitors, that she might have that turned against her down the line when you're married and she triggers you and you get really angry. She might get that turned on to her or on to her child or children, so she has to see that you have compassion, and so she needs to see that you're somebody who has empathy, that you're not just a hardened warrior.
So, you want to start with a kind of masculine exterior. That's helpful, and in previous episodes, I went into the science of that. It's proven scientifically that women prefer men who are more masculine, in many ways, masculine in the sense of physical appearance but also the sound of the voice and so forth. But then if that's all you are, then beyond a one-night stand, if what you're looking for is to get into a relationship, she's going to be evolved to prefer a man who also displays empathy and compassion, and has a capacity for doing so, so she's going to be on the lookout for that, if what she wants is a relationship down the line with you. [32:17.6]
Let me give you a specific example of how this can come about from my own life on our second date with my now wife, but the girl, the woman that I was seeing then. Our first date was after meeting her in the club. She invited me to her, at the time, best friend's birthday party, and then the third date was us going to Bali together, so we flew.
We kind of met there at the airport and then flew together to go to Bali, and on the second night, we were out in the jungles of Ubud in the mountains, and I think I had a little bit too much wine and I was thinking about my god-daughter, who, at the time, was about three years old or four years old. I was so sad because I’d missed out on her birthday celebrations because I was leading a weekend seminar on her birthday celebration day, but I could make it at the beginning for about 15 minutes. [33:07.6]
So, I drove way out because they had rented this chalet and I'd gone way out of town to go and see her, and I spent this wonderful-- I think I might have dragged it out to 30 minutes, 15 to 30 minutes together, she and I, and all the rest of the family was preparing the cake and all that stuff, right? It was at a big pool area, so we got to spend this half-hour.
Then I got into a taxi and they were going to spend a whole day there and have lots of fun, and there were more people coming and stuff. I got in a taxi and I looked at her and she was sad, and I saw her frown and that killed me. Even now, as I tell it and think back to it, it brings tears to my eyes, and at the time, it was fresh, because I was still kicking myself and I kind of hated the fact that I had to leave this damn seminar for these guys who were trying to pick up chicks at the time—that's what that that particular seminar was on—and that tore me away from being with this little girl that I loved, and I could only see her once every two months because of my travel schedule and I couldn't be with her on her special day, and I was thinking about that and I couldn't stop crying. [34:08.8]
We got back to the villa. Luckily, it was a two-bathroom villa. I went into the guest bathroom and just bawled my eyes out and it wouldn't stop. I couldn't get it to stop. I just kept crying, and I didn't want her to think I was having diarrhea or something, because, in my mind, I thought that would be more embarrassing than just me crying over my god-daughter.
But when I came out, I couldn't get any words out. She kept pounding on the door, like, Are you okay? Are you okay? I came out of the bathroom and I couldn't explain to her why I was crying. I was just crying. I probably tried to explain to her, but it was just like, Wah-wah-wah, and I was this mess and boogers and the whole thing, and blew my nose and whatever. I just couldn't stop the waterworks.
Then I remember waking up in bed and she was holding me, and I hadn’t changed my clothes from the dinner, so it must have been that she just held me to sleep as I cried and then I fell asleep, we fell asleep. Then I got up and took a shower, whatever, and came back into bed, and I remember thinking, Wow, she responded really well to that. [35:04.2]
I did not need her to respond to that at all, and, ideally, this would have happened when I was by myself so that I could just cry it out and I could be by myself, because it was a sad thing and I was honoring the sadness and that's actually part of the feeling of love. I loved my god-daughter so much that it was overwhelming for me that I couldn't be there for a birthday party and that was just sad, but that's part of what it means to love and I had no problems with that.
That's actually a really good feeling for me, and I didn't need her to be there for me, but I allowed her to see it and she didn't say anything about it for the rest of the trip. She didn't reference it ever and I would have been happy to talk to her about it, and I think I brought it up later to explain to her, but she never did. She didn't make it a thing at all and, I don't know, I probably should ask her if she can recall whether that increased my attractiveness amount, but I did not care.
That was not something that, at that point in my life, I even cared about, whether I was attractive. If I was going to pick out some clothes for an event that I was going to, the question wasn’t whether girls would like me in it. The question is whether I like myself in it. Do I think these clothes are awesome and make me feel cool? And that's a really good place to be in, right? That's what it's like to not be needy. [36:14.0]
I know, for most guys, they're surrounded by their peer group, their other guy friends, their whole community. They don't know a single guy like me who talks like this and every other guy always asks the question, all their friends are doing stuff because it'll make them look hotter or whatever to girls and that's the reason why their reality is warped.
I'm telling you here on this podcast episode that if you are thinking of crying or being vulnerable in front of a woman, in order to get some kind of reaction or response from her, that's needy because of your insecurities. If you're even asking the question or if you're concerned about the question, “Will it make me look less attractive?” The answer is you're needy, so you're already unattractive because you're needy, and I know you're needy because you care a lot about whether you're attractive. [37:00.5]
Okay, so a quick recap. I covered the reason why the question that's important is not “Should I cry in front of a woman” or “Should I be vulnerable in front of a woman?” The important question from an attraction standpoint is “Am I needy?”
I covered two scenarios, one where you're crying in front of her to get a reaction from her and how that's awful and doesn't work, and also doesn't help you, and then the other example of crying alone and how, while it's good to process it and get it out, it's probably not going to be therapeutically effective, unless you can access your higher self or if you're with a loving stand-in for your higher self, like a good therapist.
The thing to do now if you find yourself needy is to go through the therapeutic process and I covered that in other podcasts episodes. I also cover some of the therapeutic process in my recorded courses. You can also contact me. I have a private practice for therapy where I help people go through the therapeutic process. I also have therapy groups. All that you can get access to or get more information about at my website, DavidTianPhD.com, or you can write to support@auratransformation.org. [38:09.8]
Thanks so much for listening. If this helped you in any way, hit a like. Let me know what you thought of this episode. Any feedback, I welcome, and I'd love to hear what you think of it. Again, if this helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it.
Thanks so much for listening. I'm glad to be back. If you've been following the podcast, I took a hiatus for four weeks as I traveled with my son and my wife to Singapore and Bali. We did a couple of work retreats and work events in Bali, so that was fun, and then saw family in Singapore, and it is great to be back home in Taiwan, back into the routine and back to the podcast.
Thanks so much for listening, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [38:55.0]
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