When the nice guy discovers that spending time alone doesn't kill him, he may also realize that he doesn't have to stay in bad relationships, tolerate intolerable behavior, or manipulate people to try to get his needs met. Next on my list is Katy Milkman’s How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. A fixer-upper may be a fun challenge when it comes to restoring a car, but it’s a terrible way to choose a partner.

Toxic shame is not just a belief that one does bad things, it is a deeply held core belief that one is bad. A civilized, rational mind will quite perfectly grasp that it can both be true that “psychology has a lot of problems” and “psychology has accumulated a vast body of useful knowledge we should pay heed to. Even by his own proposed model and evidence, it is the ignoring of women’s actual concerns and complaints that causes the problem psychology that Glover is trying to fix.A genuinely good person is actually considerate, because it makes them feel good about who they are; actually honest, because they don’t want to be any other kind of person; actually helpful, because they want to know what someone they love really wants or needs, and they understand they have to ask them to know what that is. He makes a bunch of assertions about child psychology—and despite there being a vast literature on that subject, he never links anything he is saying to any of it. science is that its results are less certain, and therefore more questionable—and are really, honestly, just the stop-gap we have to resort to while we wait for real science to weigh in. Good relationships are not realized by simply being comfortable with yourself and honest about who you are and what you think and feel. He does throw in some clarifications in the hopes that you understand that he means something more particularly toxic about being ‘nice’ and not actually being nice.

He needs to make clear what the difference is between a genuinely bad quality that one ought to habituate out of oneself (like, say, the Nice Guy Paradigm)—and that means openly and for real (not pretend to do it, nor hide that you’re doing it)—and something you merely misperceive as bad but that you could really just embrace and find a partner and circle of friends who are okay with it. Gurian addresses the unique qualities and characteristics of boys and adolescent males in his books.If we rely on psychology at all, it has to be multiply replicated results, high powered results, very strong effect sizes, well-constructed causation studies, indisputably documented phenomena, or the like. Unfortunately, the negative traits listed above find a way to ooze out into Nice Guys’ lives and personal relationships.

An historian and observer of modern culture, Paglia frequently touches on issues of personal and sexual relationship dynamics.

By learning to approve of themselves, they begin to radiate a life energy and charisma that draws people to them.