I spent most of my twenties in New York chasing women. With my shy, sensitive demeanor, they thought I was safe: a “nice guy.” “Boyfriend material.” But I see now that I was less interested in a relationship than the validation of a woman’s desire. Once I had it, I lost interest. I’d run off looking for the next person to give me that rush of being wanted and needed, then the next. Each time, I became deeply depressed.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had become a straight white male cliché. On Reddit, for example, there’s a thriving page devoted to screenshots of self-proclaimed “nice guys” who think their docility should entitle them to getting their emotional and sexual needs met by women — or, alternately, who meet women’s rebukes with righteous indignity or threats. The posts range from comically un-self-aware to alarmingly hateful, bursting with misogynistic rage. I’m not proud to admit that, sometimes, they hit a little close to home.

The idea of the nice guy isn’t new. In his 2003 book No More Mr. Nice Guy, the psychotherapist Robert A. Glover identifies the “nice guy” as a real-life archetype he’s noticed among some of his male patients. The “nice guy,” according to Glover, appears pleasant, agreeable, seemingly generous, and peaceful, but is full of repressed anger. He’s also desperate for approval — particularly from women — which he feels both undeserving of and, contradictorily, entitled to. “Nice guys believe that if they are ‘good’ they will be loved, get their needs met and live a problem-free life,” wrote Glover.

But being “good” isn’t a free pass; in fact, it can be a passive and even manipulative way of avoiding real communication and honesty with the people in our lives (including ourselves). And expecting women to swoop in and solve our emotional problems for us is just another form of misogyny. It’s dickish, and it’s dangerous. (At the extreme end of this spectrum is the incel community — men who blame women for their inability to find a sexual partner — but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

Some guys saw the error of their ways in #MeToo and #TimesUp. For them, there was no more hiding their true feelings or behavior. But for many, it just drove our pain deeper. We scrolled through news headlines watching our fellow men take the fall, thinking: “Well, I won’t be that guy.” We silenced ourselves, afraid of saying anything wrong or “toxic,” anything that could brand us as insensitive, misogynistic, or ignorant to the women we loved. We became even more afraid of our own feelings.

The journalist Peggy Orenstein, whose recent book Boys & Sex outlines the shifting cultural consensus about gender roles in society, recently pointed out in The Atlantic that the poor coping skills so many men are raised with often become literally hazardous to our health. She cites research that has become, by now, almost common knowledge: that men who stuff away their pain are more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher suicide rates, and fewer friends in whom they can confide.

Dig into any Nice Guy’s history and you’ll find his story framed by growing up in a society where boys and men are encouraged to bottle up their feelings. This was certainly true for me, as a sensitive kid who was never given a safe space to talk about my parents’ divorce, my father’s addictions or, later, my difficult relationship with my stepmom.

“Boys are born knowing how to express a full range of emotions, but they’re socialized away from that by male culture,” says Judy Y. Chu, an Affiliated Faculty member of the Program in Human Biology at Stanford, and author of When Boys Become Boys. “They learn that anger and violence and stoicism are what ‘boys do,’ and vulnerability is what ‘girls do. They’re taught to renounce parts of their humanity.”

As boys grow up, this pressure to conform to the norms of male culture means that many men learn to reserve their most vulnerable moments and sides of themselves for women. “Women allow them that space,” says Chu. “The space to be more than just ‘tough’.”

And this is where the work comes in. As men, we have to do the uncomfortable work of getting in touch with the parts of ourselves that we’ve discarded. We’ll never be able to behave with real decency and self-respect until we see women as more than our emotional caregivers. Women are people too, and they have their own baggage to deal with; it’s not fair to expect them to also carry ours.