Why do nice guys finish last?

Why don’t nice guys get laid as much as bad boys?

Why don’t nice guys get as much respect as assholes?

In this article I interview Dr. Robert Glover PhD in marriage and family therapy, an internationally recognized authority on the Nice Guy Syndrome, and the author of No More Mr. Nice Guy to answer all of these questions and more.

In this article:

Let’s begin:

Nice guy syndrome

Michael Frank: What is a “nice guy”, and what are some signs you might be suffering from “nice guy syndrome”?

Robert Glover: Well nice guys are often:

Approval seekers

People pleasers

Problem solvers “Mr. Fixit”

Passive-aggressive

Conflict avoidant

Afraid of failure – so they don’t do things they might fail at because they don’t want to look like a failure

Nice guys also:

Try to become what they think other people want them to be, in order to be liked and loved and to get their needs met

Tend to hide things about themselves that they think other people might react negatively to. This might include their needs, wants, behaviors, and sexuality

Basically a nice guy is a person who doesn’t believe they’re okay just as they are, and this is usually the result of inaccurate internalization of life’s events at a very young age, and so they’re basically out there in the world trying to become something other than what they are, and/or they’re hiding certain things about themselves in order to feel good about themselves, to get the love and connection they want, and to get their needs met.

Relationships are one of the big areas of frustration and resentment that I often see in nice guys, and that frustration and resentment often manifests itself through passive-aggressive behavior where we’re indirect about what’s bothering us. We won’t just come out and set a boundary and say, “Hey, I don’t like that”. We won’t invite a person to interact with us differently.

We’ll avoid conflict, we’ll let problems build, we’ll use covert contracts, we’ll try to keep the peace, and then all of a sudden our frustration and resentment comes out in some unconscious, indirect way. Maybe a biting remark, a put down, or we don’t follow through on something we committed to, or we forget something that was important to the other person.

Nice guys also typically have a generalized feeling of frustration and maybe resentment in life. Maybe you know you’re smart enough, that you’ve got certain assets and capabilities, but for whatever reason it doesn’t ever seem to click or come together for you. Maybe you see other people at work getting the advancements that you thought you should have gotten or that you think you’re equally qualified for.

If you feel an unconscious block to living up to your potential, or if you’re feeling frustrated or resentful in your career, personal development, or relationships, being a nice guy may not be the cause, but it is definitely something to look at.

Covert Contracts

Dr. Robert Glover: Nice guys also tend to operate from three covert contracts.

I call these contracts covert because they’re unconscious and hidden, often even to the nice guy himself, and definitely to the world and the people that the nice guy is relating with.

The three covert contracts are pretty simple and they’re all If/Then paradigms:

Covert Contract #1

Covert Contract number one:

“If I’m a good guy then I will be liked and loved, and the people I want to have sex with, will want to have sex with me”

This doesn’t work very well as most nice guys will attest. Being nice to people, buying them drinks, doing things for them, fixing their problems, volunteering to help their sister move etc. these things don’t make people necessarily like you or want to be with you.

In fact, unfortunately this is kind of a hard pill for a lot of us to swallow, but being nice to women actually doesn’t make them attracted to you. I’m not saying to be the asshole or the jerk, but trying to please a woman does nothing to turn her on.

Covert Contract #2

Covert Contract number two:

“If I meet other people’s needs without them having to ask, then they will meet my needs without me having to ask”

Now this doesn’t work for many reasons.

Number one you’re giving to get:

“Hey, I do all these nice things for you, how come you don’t do nice things back for me?”

Well, the other person might not have even wanted you to do the things you did for them. They probably just thought you were doing it because you wanted to. But no. We had a covert contract there, I was giving to get, and I expect you to give back to me and to treat me well in return.

Number two, other people don’t often know what we need. If we don’t express our needs, if we don’t take accountability for our needs, if we don’t consciously set up systems that can help us to get our needs met, then how can we get our needs met?

And add to that, nice guys are generally terrible receivers. It makes us feel bad or guilty to receive. Like we’re doing something wrong, or we’re going to get in trouble, or somebody is going to have a negative reaction.

Covert Contract #3

Covert Contract number three:

“If I do everything right, then I will have a smooth problem free life”

But how are we going to do everything right? We can’t do everything right. That’s not even humanly possible. I mean, probably every great religion that’s ever existed has basically said we’re flawed. But the nice guy, in maybe a very narcissistic, egotistical, grandiose kind of way, thinks he really can do it all right. But we can’t. We’re flawed. We’re broken. We’re imperfect human beings. And that’s okay.

And the other problem with trying to do everything right is that we don’t live in a smooth problem free world. We live in a world that’s chaotic by nature that is constantly changing and evolving, where according to our perspective: Shitty things happen. Innocent people die. Children starve to death. People drop bombs on other people. Bad things happen in this world, so there there’s no kind of OCD magical formula that even if you do everything right you’ll have a smooth problem free world.

So that’s why nice guys tend to be pretty frustrated and resentful in general because they’re following these three covert contracts usually unconsciously and they believe they should work.

If I’m a good guy, people should like me and love me If I give to other people, they should give back to me If I do everything right, nobody should ever get mad at me, and nothing should ever go wrong

And then when those things don’t work out, they don’t have any other roadmap to go on. They don’t want to be the asshole or the jerk, or the person who only thinks about himself, but they don’t see that there’s a different level that they could be operating on. So the typical nice guy just doubles down and does even more of what isn’t working, which just leads to even more frustration and resentment.

It’s not about being an asshole

Michael Frank: That’s an important point: No More Mr. Nice Guy is not about going from one extreme to the other. It’s not about going from nice guy to asshole.

Dr. Robert Glover: That’s right. The title is maybe paradoxical and in today’s climate, you look at the title and think why would we write a book teaching men not to be nice? The whole vibe with “Me too” and things like that is that all masculinity is toxic and evil. And now there’s a book teaching men not to be nice? So it’s paradoxical and you’re 100% right.

They say in 12 step programs: “The opposite of crazy is still crazy”. Sometimes that takes a while to sink in, but you know, nice guys are a reaction to something. They’re often a reaction to the negative messages that we as young boys heard growing up about men, about the “bad men” that our mothers and other women complained about.

So maybe nice guys are trying to be different from our fathers or the asshole jerks who just use women for sex and treat them badly and think the world revolves around them, and whenever you’ve got that, you will also see a reaction to that from many boys that grow up saying “Well I don’t want to be like my dad. He treated my mom badly and was never around. I’m going to be different”.

However just going from one extreme to the other is not the answer.

What is wrong with being a nice guy?

Michael Frank: What else is wrong with being a nice guy?

Dr. Robert Glover: A lot of nice guys are good people. They’re decent human beings. But that’s different from trying to manage your anxiety by managing people and situations around you by caretaking, fixing, co-dependency, problem solving, stuff like that. Are they just naturally being who they are? Are they being their authentic self?

Or are they just being nice to try to get love and appreciation? To get their needs met? To avoid conflict? To manage their anxiety by managing people and situations?

I’d say the number one problem with nice guys is that they’re not particularly honest or authentic. If a person is trying to fit in in every contextual situation, what’s real about that person? They’re not honest. They’re a chameleon. You can’t trust that.

I’ve been doing my nice guy work for about 25 years now. I began in my mid thirties and I’m in my early sixties now. And I thought I was a good guy. I used to say

“I’m a nice guy! I’m one of the nicest guys you’re ever gonna meet!”

But I was not particularly honest, I was not particularly authentic, and I was not particularly integrated. And now when I do workshops or when people connect with me through my classes or my book, one of the first things they often say to me is they how authentic I am. And I always smile and get a big kick out of that because I promise you I would not have been accused of being authentic 25 years ago.

I had everything hidden. I always tried to say the “right” thing. I was a chameleon. I tried to do it right, and I tried to avoid doing it wrong. And I tell you if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that life gets a lot easier when you quit trying to do all that stuff, when you just kinda just lean in and accept who you are and authentically be that person.

I wrote No More Mr. Nice Guy during my second marriage and my second wife would often say to me:

“I’d rather be with an asshole because at least I know an asshole is going to be an asshole. You treat me so well and you’re so nice and everybody thinks you’re such a nice guy, but you can be a real asshole when I least expect it. You make a biting remark, or you embarrass me, or you put me down in public, or you don’t follow through on what you said you were gonna do, or you lie to me, you’re not a nice guy…”

And actually, that’s why I got into therapy and started working on myself because my wife said, “You either go get some help or I’m leaving you”, and I thought, “Wait a minute, you’re the one that’s angry all the time… You’re the one that’s moody and controlling…” So I went to therapy trying to figure out why me being a nice guy didn’t make her treat me better.

And I used to think I’m a nice guy. I’m honest. I don’t tell big lies. But what I found out when I started working on me, was that I was inauthentic. I would accentuate, I would modify, I would leave things out, I would misdirect and draw someone’s attention from what I didn’t want them to see, and if I thought somebody would be upset at me, I wouldn’t share what I thought or felt or had done.

So while I thought I was a nice guy, I was not at all honest and that’s not nice. I mean to be dishonest, to basically be a walking living lie is not nice.

I split with my second wife about six months before No More Mr. Nice Guy came out back in 2003. And as I got out into the dating world, and in the years after that, whenever I would start dating a nice girl, I would have tremendous empathy for what I put my first two wives through, where they won’t say what they really want, where they’ll agree with everything I say even if they don’t agree or really want it, where they’ll say one thing and then do another. Man, I would not want to have lived with me. Even though I thought I was a nice guy, I know I wasn’t easy to live with.

Becoming an integrated male

Dr. Robert Glover: Instead of being a nice guy or an asshole, I recommend consciously becoming an integrated male and that involves a number of pieces.

It involves learning how to ask yourself:

What do I want?

What’s important to me?

What feels right to me?

It also involves learning how to differentiate, and how to soothe anxiety, because nice guy syndrome is primarily an anxiety disorder and a shame based disorder. So nice guys try to please people and make them happy because it makes us anxious for people to be unhappy or displeased around us.

Becoming an integrated male also involves learning how to release shame, and accepting ourselves just as we are, warts and all, because as I said nice guy syndrome is a shame based disorder, it’s us trying to be good or trying to avoid looking bad. It involves making our needs a priority and consciously working to get our needs met in very open, overt kind of ways.

So it’s not just going from being what I’ll call the woodsy doormat to the asshole jerk, because I think both are just an anxiety response to life.

Actually I think that both the nice guy and the asshole jerk are a lot alike in a lot of ways, it’s just that they try to manage their anxiety in different ways. The nice guy tends to either run away or hunker down when they deal with anxiety and fear, and hopefully nothing bad happens, whereas the asshole jerk deals with their anxiety by fighting, being aggressive, being physically or verbally dominant.

So when guys say, okay, I get that being a nice guy doesn’t work, but I don’t want to be an asshole jerk, I need to find a happy middle ground, I say I actually don’t believe in happy middle grounds. I don’t know where the tipping point is between two toxic extremes. The nice guy manages his anxiety by running or hiding. The asshole jerk manages his anxiety by fighting. Where’s the tipping point between those two? There’s not. We have to find a plane that is above that, not just one extreme to the other.

Drawing boundaries

Michael Frank: So to recap what we’ve discussed so far, what’s wrong with being a nice guy is:

You’re not honest or authentic

It’s not an effective way to get your needs met

Instead of expressing your feelings, you suppress them

Instead of telling people what you really think, you tell them what they want to hear

Instead of owning up to your mistakes and flaws, you try to hide them

It’s an anxiety and shame based disorder

Another thing I think is worth mentioning is that nice guys often have a lot of difficulty drawing and setting boundaries.

Dr. Robert Glover: Yeah that is so true and that is something that not only nice guys, but probably most adults need to work on.

The question I always ask in my workshops and seminars when I talk about boundaries is:

“In Western culture why do children get spanked?”

And people will start shouting out their answers…

“Because the child acted badly”

No.

“Because the parents are angry”

No.

“Because the parents are trying to teach the child a lesson”

No.

The reason children get spanked in western culture is because they can’t stop it. They’re small. And we were all that small person at some time of our lives and everyone around us was bigger than us: Parents, older siblings, neighbors, priests, nuns, teachers, principals, cops etc. Everybody was bigger than us and they could do whatever they wanted to us. And we couldn’t prevent it or stop it because we were small.

Can you imagine being seven years old and your dad is pissed off at you, and he’s walking down the hall with his belt in hand, and you just turning to your father confidently and giving him the time out sign and saying:

“I don’t know what’s up with you, or what bugs up your ass, or why you think hitting me with a belt or screaming at me is somehow going to resolve whatever is bothering you, but I’ll tell you what, let’s do this, let’s take a break. You go sit in your recliner and I want you to just to think for a little bit about why you think hitting me with a belt is somehow going to make you feel better, or somehow make me a better person. I’m going to go down the street and play for a little while and when I get back in a little bit, you and I are going to sit down and have a little talk about what’s really going on with you, and why you think it’s a good parenting strategy to come hit me with a belt”.

It would not happen, and it does not happen, because little people can’t do that. So what happens is we little people grow up to be big people and we just naturally assume we have to put up with shit. That’s just kinda how it was when we were kids. We had to put up with shit and it didn’t matter who it came from. So now we go to work and we put up with shit. We get into relationships and we put up with shit. We deal with authority figures and we put up with shit.

But what we often don’t realize is that we can actually invite people to interact with us differently. We can actually train people how to treat us, and we can actually remove ourselves from shitty situations.

So boundaries are crucial, not just for nice guys but for everybody. And here’s the paradox of boundaries: Boundaries are what actually allow other people to get close to us and to have an intense intimate connection with us. And the example I give is if you’re driving in your car in the city, there’s all kinds of boundaries: stop signs, yield signs, green lights, yellow lights, red lights, markers on the lanes, speed limits etc. and if everyone observes those boundaries, a high number of vehicles can coexist in close proximity at high rates of speed without everybody crashing into each other and having constant gridlock.

Without boundaries it’s the wild wild west. Nothing’s gonna work. So boundaries actually allow people to get close to us.

If we can consciously decide:

Who gets to come into our space

What they get to do while they’re there

How long they get to stay

When it’s time for them to leave

And verbally communicate how we expect people to treat us, or remove ourselves from people if necessary, life really begins to get a lot better, and boundaries are one of those key parts of living in integrated, authentic life.

How to communicate boundaries

Michael Frank: What is a healthy way for recovering nice guys to communicate their boundaries to their partner, friends, family, workmates etc.?

Dr. Robert Glover: I think the best boundaries are ones that invite the other person into higher consciousness.

It’s not just saying:

“If you do that again I’m going to leave!”

How does that help?

It might remove you from a bad situation, and maybe that’s what needs to happen. But if you’re working with your manager or a coworker, or if it’s your partner or your parent or a sibling, maybe you’re not going to leave. Maybe you need to invite them into higher consciousness with your boundaries.

But I will say this: When I teach boundaries, the ultimate power you have to set a boundary is your willingness and your ability to remove yourself. Children can’t remove themselves from bad situations in general, so they can’t set boundaries, but as adults we often can but we’re not willing to, so we lose all of our power to set a boundary or to invite somebody else to higher consciousness.

The other thing is that boundaries aren’t about getting somebody else to be different. They’re about getting me to be different.

I have to ask myself:

Does this work for me?

Is this what I want?

How do I need to communicate about it?

Do I need to remove myself?

Maybe I need to remove myself a little bit, maybe a lot, but how can I best invite the other person to higher consciousness so that we both can evolve together in this context?

And a technique I teach people is to say something as simple as:

“Ouch. That hurt. Did you mean it to?”

Or

“Ouch, that felt condescending. Did you mean it to?”

The beauty about the ouch part is that it’s kind of disarming, and it’s actually communicating to the other person that what just happened there hurt. And that’s usually why we get into fights or storm away. It hurt. And by saying, ouch, that hurt, did you mean it too? You’re not blaming them. You’re not telling them what they did. You’re not putting them on the defensive. You’re actually inviting them to ponder. Did they mean to hurt you?

And they might think about it and say “No, no, I’m sorry. I honestly didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry that my words were hurtful to you.”

Alright, you invited them to higher consciousness. You had a little more communication there. You’re both actually more aware and more connected now.

Maybe they’ll think about it a little bit and go:

“You know, maybe you’re right, you know, the truth is I have been harboring resentment and maybe it just came out in the way I spoke to you”

So maybe they get to realize they did act passive-aggressively with you. And that they can actually own it.

If they say:

“No you’re just too fucking sensitive. Get over it”.

That’s probably your clue not to have any more discussions with them and maybe try to find ways not to hang out with people like that. But it invites them into higher consciousness.

This is a skillset that does take practice and work, and it’s not going to solve every problem, and we’ll probably fail at it more than we succeed. But especially in close relationships with partners and family members and coworkers and bosses, as we practice it more and more, and as we stay conscious to what we’re feeling, to what we’re experiencing in our body, we can communicate what we’re experiencing and invite them in some way to to check in with themselves at the same time.

This is part one of a two part interview with Dr. Robert Glover on the Nice Guy Syndrome.

You can read: No More Mr. Nice Guy Part two here focusing on:

Why women aren’t attracted to nice guys

Attracting women

Creating P.E.T (Positive Emotion Tension)

Changing the self-image of the nice guy

Dating

Dealing with rejection

Sex

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dr. Robert Glover is an internationally recognized authority on the Nice Guy Syndrome, and the author of the bestselling book, No More Mr. Nice Guy. He is a frequent guest on radio talk shows and has been featured in numerous local and national publications. His website drglover.com features numerous online self-help courses, workshops, podcasts, groups, and trained coaches and therapists.