No More Mr. Nice Guy

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The charitably correct way to read what he means is more nuanced: that you should not try to be perfect, that you need to have a realistic idea of—and be honest about—your flaws and limitations, but still endeavor to recognize and change those that really are bad for you and others around you. Due to the sense of helplessness and resentment this pattern inevitably produces, Nice Guys are anything but nice. Further, his dependency on external validation actually prevents people from getting to know him just as he is.

I can come up with an answer (see The Real Basis of a Moral World and Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider); but Glover never goes into it. Which probably comes down again to money: good studies, good methods, large and genuinely randomized samples, all cost money, and no one really funds psychology (as opposed to, say, medicine, chemistry, physics, climatology—pretty much every other science). His profile can be imagined to fit anyone who fits any part of it, and his causal model can sound like something true for anyone, if you simply imagine that a single instance of mistaken self-blame at any age satisfies it. There is a toxic masculinity you should not be making yourself comfortable with, just as there are attitudes about sex one should not.Nice Guys just keep trying harder to get a non-workable situation to work or get someone to be something they are not. Getting good sex is dependent on recovering Nice Guys bringing their shame and fear out of the closet and into the open where they can be looked at and released. All Glover does is take what women have already been saying for ages (on the internet alone I could find examples from 1988 to 2002), and presents it as his own new breakthrough theory: that being a controlling, dishonest, secretive, passive-aggressive over-expecting non-listener is not “being nice.

The only fix really is to start changing the cultural mindset about this, so we will collectively see this as a national infrastructure problem and not just another thing we throw mere chump change at because we don’t take it seriously. He should have made clear that “being nice” is not the same thing as “being good” or even “being worthy” of anything; and most importantly, why.Abandonment issues can be a real psychological problem that can afflict certain people, but they don’t quite work the way Glover claims. The dynamics that keep Nice Guys stuck in dysfunctional, unsatisfying relationships are often the same dynamics that keep them stuck in dysfunctional and unsatisfying vocations. Vagiphobia is a syndrome where the penis tries to stay out of vaginas or gets out quickly once it gets in. This is how the YouTuber Shaun, for example, escaped his own sexist attitudes toward and resentment of women: by actually talking to women, and actually listening to what they have to say.

Markway is an actual psychologist with an accomplished scientific publication history; Ampel is a journalist with expertise in business, law, and communications. The only positive thing I can say about it is that what he draws up as bad mostly is indeed bad (no one should be ticking any of the boxes in his Nice Guy profile) and most of what he draws up as better is indeed better (with some misses and ambiguities I’ve already made note of). Live the self-examined life and strive to become the sort of person you yourself want to be, the sort of person you like and admire and are comfortable being around. Yet toxic ideas about masculinity driving their dysfunction are more frequently going to come from men than from women, don’t you think?The first is becoming overly involved in an intimate relationship at the expense of one's self and other outside interests. He explains how they can stop seeking approval and start getting what they want in life, by presenting the information and tools to help them ensure their needs are met, to express their emotions, to have a satisfying sex life, to embrace their masculinity and form meaningful relationships with other men, and to live up to their creative potential. Good sex occurs when two people focus on their own pleasure, passion, and arousal, and stay connected to those same things in their partner.

When this life strategy fails to produce the desired results - as it often does - Nice Guys usually just try harder, doing more of the same. Remember, no such personality type has even been shown to exist; Glover has done no science here, just some field philosophy, proposing untested hypotheses based on some personal experiences and anecdotes.Glover’s causal model is, in a nutshell, that all children experience abandonment (at some point or other, and likely frequently, some need they have is not met “in a timely way” or at all; which is a truism for all human children), abandonment always causes children to develop an ego-centric causal explanation for it (because “all” children, he says, are “ego-centric”), and therefore children “always” (sic) blame themselves for it (“they” did something wrong; or there must be something wrong “with them”), and this leads to “toxic shame,” which Glover says “is the belief that one is inherently bad, defective, different, or unlovable. By contrast, Covey recognizes everything he says is universal—not just a feature of or only of benefit to “men. Sex creates such a powerful bond that it is difficult to accurately evaluate the appropriateness of a new relationship. As they reclaim personal power, recovering Nice Guys can experience the world in all of its serendipitous beauty. For Nice Guys, re–examining the relationship with their fathers means seeing their dads through their own eyes as they really are.