This sounds a lot like the “being controlling” and “being the savior” that Glover actually denounces as the dysfunctional behavior of Nice Guys. There is a toxic masculinity you should not be making yourself comfortable with, just as there are attitudes about sex one should not. 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).

Glover describes this toxic Nice Guy Paradigm in a broad sense as someone who “believe[s] that if they are ‘good’ and do everything ‘right’, they will be loved, get their needs met, and have a problem-free life,” but really what they are doing to manifest that program is lying to themselves and others (about their true character, thoughts, and feelings), hiding their flaws and mistakes (rather than confronting, admitting, or accepting them), avoiding conflict (rather than resolving it), trying to “always help” (but really becoming controlling, meddlesome, ineffectual, resentful, or emotionally deaf to people’s real needs or expectations), suppressing their emotions (and foolishly trying instead to be emotionlessly “rational”), and pursuing the approval of others (particularly, for various reasons, women) instead of themselves. The one thing Glover seems never to have done is talk to a large and diverse array of women about what their experience with bad partners was like and what they really do and don’t want from the men in their lives, and why.To illustrate what I mean, Glover does clearly demarcate some obviously bad characteristics of Nice Guys as he defines them, e.

At least, he never cites any (and, as we’ll see, sometimes his ideas even contradict what there is). I am left to evaluate him just on a basis of philosophy and personal experience and the pertinent science I can reference, which is hardly scientific; I don’t need his book to do that. I have also found that when they share the experience with other nonjudgmental men, their shame diminishes rapidly. The actual science I just cited proves the opposite is the problem: boys are being raised with a particularly toxic idea of what it means to be a man, which is presently dysfunctional (and was never great).But seriously, if what you mean is, do I recommend anyone ever read this book, my answer plainly is no. And everyone needs to learn how to recognize when they are in a bad relationship, with a partner they really should not be with. g. this, this, this) indicate that once you control for universally negative parenting behaviors (e. Some of Glover’s wild speculations declared as if facts suggest a sexist dark side even lurks behind his confidence; which in turn suggests maybe we shouldn’t even be reading his advice as charitably as I have been.

As another example of what I mean, Glover says, “Trying to be ‘good’—trying to become what he believes others want him to be—is just one of many possible scripts that a little boy might form as the result of childhood abandonment experiences and the internalization of toxic shame. I fully agree this profile contains nothing good in it, and is a great list for a person to check off as not being that. Because of this reality, Nice Guys create adult relationships that mirror the dynamics of their dysfunctional childhood relationships. Glover never explains what the difference would be between a legitimate, healthy, productive, and appropriate parental chastisement, punishment, or criticism, and whatever he imagines is causing “toxic shame” and thus “Nice Guy Syndrome.Confidence is a question of either doubting or trusting your skills, knowledge, or odds of success in a given situation; self-respect is a question of believing on real rather than delusional evidence that you are a good person—more particularly, that you are the sort of person you like and admire, the sort of person you’d prefer to have around you in life, and not, instead, the sort of person you actually dislike or despise and would usually avoid or get away from. He claims a paradigm exists, but produced no instrument to measure if it does exist, or what its prevalence or correlations are, or whether his recommended treatment even worked, or how often; again, no study of outliers and the differential causes of them. To help Nice Guys decide if they need to set a boundary with a particular behavior, I have them apply the second date rule: “If this behavior had occurred on the second date, would there have been a third? landed its author, a certified marriage and family therapist, on The O'Reilly Factor and the Rush Limbaugh radio show. It is almost as if Glover does not know how human psychology works, as his advice can easily be misread as saying something much worse than he thinks he is advising.