Today I will be reviewing a book by, about, and for men. It was written by Robert A. Glover, a real psychotherapist—presumably; his bio attests a PhD in family and marriage therapy and years of clinical practice, although I found no appreciable research publication history (a point that will become relevant). The book, No More Mr. Nice Guy (in reference to the sarcastic “Nice Guy” trope), is not a peer-reviewed academic work but a pop-market advice-manual. It has companion guides and workbooks that go along with it, but I did not consult them. I am here reviewing just the one book, which proposes a particular psychology of men, or at least of a particular kind of man (although it hedges on whether there even are any other kind of men but Nice Guys and ex-Nice-Guys). Glover also published a book of dating advice for men (which I have not read), and pretty much runs his life as a high-priced self-help guru for men. I am always extremely skeptical of sources like this (for reasons I’ll illustrate shortly). But I was hired by a patron to review it, specifically to see (1) if my life experience jibed with what the book says (especially as a feminist and polyamorous man with a substantial relationship history to call upon), but, more importantly, (2) how it fares in light of what I deem essential principles of epistemology and critical thinking. I’ve covered similar subjects before in How to Do Men’s Rights Rightly and Jordan Peterson Is a Crank (and more since). But here we dive straight into a supposed “psychology of men” offered by a man with a plan.

Is There Really Even a Psychology?

First, a digression is necessary. Before we evaluate any purported “psychology of men,” I have to set the foundation of where I am with respect to even just psychology. And l have a lot of problems with psychology as a science. Which you should not take the wrong way.

Psychology has gotten a lot of things right and accumulated a vast and impressive database of good knowledge about the human mind and how it works (and doesn’t). It’s even made a lot of progress on what to do about it. I both critique and rely on it a lot in my philosophy; I use it throughout Sense and Goodness without God. Although psychology as a field has done a bad job of cleaning its own house—it still allows abundant pseudoscience to be respectable (like, but not only, Freudian therapy; or even worse, in Peterson’s case, Jungian), and still does nothing about its over-reliance on harmfully-side-effective crank or pharmaceutical therapies, and its corresponding under-reliance on well-tested behavioral education therapies, focusing more on negative than positive psychology, diagnosing more than solving problems, and trying to “drug” problems away, rather than train them away by teaching skills that also happen to be broadly life-improving because they are adaptable to countless other problems. In essence, psychology as a field spends more time giving men fish (often poisonous fish at that), rather than teaching them to fish. Much of that has to do with money. No one wants to pay for a real health care system, just as no one wants to pay to put our nation’s kids in front of good teachers in capable schools—we think we can get everything “on the cheap,” but what we really thus get is mostly garbage. This is also a problem with psychology as a research field. No one wants to pay for it. So what we get instead is mostly garbage.

But one of the many things psychology has gotten right is documenting the fact that the human brain is mostly garbage. It was not intelligently designed; and in consequence, mostly sucks. At pretty much everything. For example, we well know now that the human brain is prone to the fallacy of black and white thinking (something can only be “all true” or “all false”; there can only be one thing, or another; there are no degrees of anything; nothing is complicated or multicausal; either we are absolutely certain of something, or we know nothing whatever about it; and so on), because our brain evolved to be physically uncomfortable with ambiguity, because of an ad hoc need to resolve problems “quickly” and without indecision, because delay and indecision kill. Of course, so can any of our brain’s quick-and-dirty solutions. For instance, ambiguity intolerance causes cognitive dissonance which causes a slew of bad reasoning like black and white thinking, which often will lead to false conclusions—and false conclusions can kill you. But evolution does not give a shit if you die. As long as enough of us live, it cares not what the casualty rate is to get there (to be clear, it cares about nothing, of course; it’s a mindless process, worse even than a sociopath). So it selected for black-and-white thinking over indecision—itself an irrational false dichotomy—because it kills less. Which is how we know this process isn’t intelligent. No brilliant, considerate, divine engineer was anywhere involved in making us who we are, or is around to do anything about it.

Nor does evolution give a shit if you develop true beliefs. Yes, those are useful; but it takes an impossible amount of work to gerrymander a brain through blind genetic selection to be a reliable truth-engine. Like the dark side of the force, it’s “quicker, easier” to just make “so so” guesses that kill you less often. In other words, fallacious reasoning is easy to get to, yet will kill you less often than delay and indecision. Therefore, that’s what evolution chose. Because that’s all it could have chosen. That is, in a savage world—the world we evolved in. We now live in a civilized world, which allows us the safety to turn delay and indecision into truer collections of beliefs over time. But that environment has barely existed for more than a collective few hundred years over all of human history—far too little time for natural selection to have adapted our brains to it. What we did instead was exploit a new engine of evolution: the evolution of ideas. Culture, in a nutshell. Thus scientific methods, formal logic and mathematics, critical thinking—even just the ability to identify a fallacy of reasoning at all—are in no way biologically evolved features of the brain. They are tools we invented, because they work vastly better than the innate tools of our brain. We fixed our defective hardware with intelligently designed software. But that only works if we install it, and run it. Lots of people don’t have any of this fixware installed; and even those who do, rarely even use it. Like having virus detecting software—that we never or rarely run or even bother to install.

So when I say “you should not take the wrong way” my declaration that “I have a lot of problems with psychology as a science,” I am telling you to make use of one of those things psychology has gotten right: don’t let yourself succumb to the defective natural reasoning of black and white thinking; and therefore, do not stumble into the pit of assuming “psychology has a lot of problems” entails “all psychology is full of shit and therefore I can dismiss and ignore every single thing it has to offer.” That would be to surrender to your savage, irrational brain. 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.” That two out of every three peer reviewed studies in psychology will turn out to have been bullshit (and that is an actual, documented fact of science: see my introduction to Is 90% of All EvoPsych False?) still entails one in three hold up. The problem psychology has is not in producing no usable or true results; the problem it has is in producing too many false or useless conclusions, and still doing nothing to fix this atrocious error-rate (needless to say, the field of philosophy, of course, has this same problem).

I have two major problems with psychology as a research field: (1) it relies too much on embarrassingly under-powered studies (using far too small a sample size; making almost no effort to randomize study participants by almost any demographic, least of all cultural; and promoting results as “true” that have effect sizes far too small to be a general truth about anything) and (2) it almost entirely ignores outliers and the corresponding question of differential causation. To explain what I mean by that latter point, I’ll use a paradigmatic (but by no means unusual) example: so-called Milgram-style experiments (inclusive of the infamous Stanford Prison Study) once proliferated in psychology and promoted a singular monolithic view of human nature (such as that humans will commit any evil if they trust an authority telling them to), yet completely ignored the fact that a huge number of participants do not conform their behavior to that model. Pretty consistently, some 20% or more of subjects actually don’t obey (the Stanford study being a rare exception owing to the fact it was subsequently shown that its recruitment tactics disproportionately selected sociopathic subjects—an example of that failure to randomize I just mentioned). The single most important item of information here—almost literally the only thing that matters about any of these studies—has consistently and always been completely ignored: What is the difference between those 80% of compliers and the 20% who don’t comply. Is it genetic? Is it teachable?

Psychologists have almost never given a fuck. Rarely is any study or effort ever conducted to answer that question. Almost the only question even worth answering. And this bizarre, indeed disastrous failure permeates the entirety of psychology as a science: every study that claims to have proven “something” about human nature always has outliers (usually quite-a-disturbing-lot of them), and almost no effort is made to find out why. Psychologists don’t care if it’s genetic. They don’t care if it’s teachable. The one thing we want to know, and they almost never care. Which is a symptom of a much broader problem with psychology as a science: a poor effort at determining the causation of anything—the one thing a science is supposed to be most concerned with. Which is not to say psychology never does any of this. It’s just that it doesn’t do it enough—and still has not developed very good tools for doing 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). But we still need “psychologists,” so we throw chump change at them that all they can do with is fund garbage low-powered, small-sample studies with disastrous failure rates and useless effect sizes. And everyone then agrees to pretend that counts as doing worthwhile science. Pro tip: it doesn’t.

The net effect is this: we need to be extremely distrusting and critical and skeptical of anything “psychology” as a science tells us; and we need to hold psychologists to task for their failure to answer the most important questions they are supposed to be answering for us. 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. And without that we need to call it what it is: philosophy, not psychology. Often, in fact, really, really bad philosophy. Although sometimes really, really good philosophy. But philosophy all the same. Because science itself is only philosophy with good data. Which means when you don’t have good data—as with most of psychology—you are really just doing a disciplined form of philosophy. You aren’t “doing science.” And the nature of philosophy vs. 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.

Glover’s Psychology of Men

In No More Mr. Nice Guy Glover often writes as if he is talking about all men (there is a liberal use of words like “all” and “always” in his book, as well as declarative unqualified statements that imply as much). I suspect that may be hyperbole, but hyperbole is a problem in a book that is supposed to be discussing science. Even so, I’ll charitably assume he means only “a certain kind of man.” Even though (as we’ll see) he never really explains what childhood environment, for example, makes any other kind of man, or what a different kind of man even would be apart from one who strives to become an “ex” Nice Guy, let’s assume he just forgot to cover those things in this book. That assumption granted, Glover’s overall thesis is that certain parental environments (which he implies are commonplace if not universal) cause men (I assume he means, Western men; he doesn’t mention any other) to adopt a certain way of thinking (a “paradigm”) that is actually dysfunctional, and indeed super-dysfunctional, in the sense that the paradigm itself causes men to respond to its continuous failing by trying harder to realize the paradigm—rather than recognizing the paradigm itself is broken and needs to be abandoned for something else. Glover then proposes what that “something else” is and how to get from one to the other.

Such is the general point. The specific point is to recognize what Glover calls the Nice Guy Paradigm, that it is actually the cause of (these particular) men’s life dissatisfaction, and that it must be replaced with a new paradigm that is in some sense the opposite. Glover early on makes clear he is arguing for something closer to what I would call an Aristotelian mean—not the exact opposite of the Nice Guy Paradigm, which would be equally toxic and dysfunctional (as he puts it, the complete opposite of one kind of crazy is just another kind of crazy), but an ideal “middle point” between those two extremes, a “third” position that rejects both (those are not his words; I’m translating his ideas into other language). 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.

Glover’s proposed replacement he calls the Integrated Male Paradigm, but how he describes it has a number of conceptual and pedagogical problems (which I’ll go into later). As I noted, he is careful to make clear he does not mean Nice Guys should become “jerks.” And he even makes reference to the fallacy of black and white thinking (without naming it), pointing out that a major problem trapping men in the Nice Guy Paradigm is their inability to comprehend any other way of being than either Nice or Not-Nice. Both are incorrect and to be avoided. Glover describes the middle alternative thus: “An integrated man is able to embrace everything that makes him uniquely male: his power, his assertiveness, his courage, and his passion as well as his imperfections, his mistakes, and his dark side.” You might immediately already see some problems here (and not only that there is nothing “uniquely” or even “distinctively” male about this list of qualities). But I’ll get to that later. For the moment let’s just charitably read this as meaning men should stop lying about themselves and have the courage to tell the truth, to themselves and others, about how they think and feel and what sort of person they are and want to be—and want to be not because other people want them to be that way but because they want to be that way; that men should be kind and generous and thoughtful because they like to be, and not because they expect a return on investment or because they use this to manage someone else’s emotional responses to them; and men should stop holding common, normal qualities of their person as “bad” that aren’t really (and thus don’t really have to be “hidden”). There is some trite “love yourself for who you are” psychobabble here, which has the merit of being sort of true, but easily misconstrued as saying something just as toxic as the attitudes Glover is trying to correct. But there is also a lot of common sense here about accepting—and realizing—the importance of genuine honesty and mutual cooperation in building effective relationships, and of becoming the sort of person you actually like.

Problems with the Glover Model

There is, I am certain, a lot of real science backing the general advice: stop pretending to be someone you are not; fix what is genuinely wrong with you (and stop caring about what you merely have been led to believe is wrong with you); work to become the sort of person you like and admire and want to be around; be honest in your relationships; and don’t treat relationships like a vending machine (“do x, and get y.”) but rather as mutual negotiation and cooperation for a common good, with someone entirely your equal, and not as a program to please or rescue someone. Which can be characterized as Glover’s best advice. But it’s incomplete advice. Good relationships are not realized by simply being comfortable with yourself and honest about who you are and what you think and feel. You also need to actually be a good person—considerate and honest and reliable, a reasonable and responsible adult—and you need to actually—genuinely—care about knowing who your partner really is, and what they really think and feel. And that requires showing a real interest in what they have to say about all that; and listening to them; and hearing them. If they still, after all that, are a terrible partner or you don’t really like being with that person, don’t. Not all relationships should continue. And that isn’t necessarily your fault. Or even theirs. Neither of you can control chemistry, or compatibility. You either have it, or you don’t.

So the first problem I have with Glover is what he leaves out. Incomplete advice is almost always bad advice. Because it will lead to exactly the same problem he thought he was solving: someone following his advice will expect it to “work,” and it won’t. Not without the rest. “But I did x, and didn’t get y.” Right. Because x by itself doesn’t get y. Nor is life even a vending machine like that to begin with. You have to meet conditions x (and z and anything else truly complete advice would recommend) in order to ever meet condition y; but that is not the same thing as “x will therefore cause y.” You still have to meet someone who is compatible with you, who you have chemistry with. That you have truly become (and are not just pretending to be) someone they like will do the rest. But that is still contingent on happenstance, which you can only improve by “getting out there” and interacting with a lot of people; that’s the only way to increase the probability of encountering someone right for you, and that you are right for, and who is also available. If you already happen to be in a bad or toxic relationship, you aren’t going to fix it. Likewise, you aren’t likely going to meet a good partner after dating just a few people.

The second problem I have with Glover’s book is…its complete absence of any science. Nowhere anywhere in his book does he cite any study or any empirically proven fact of anything he claims or asserts. This is a huge red flag. It suggests he is just spewing philosophical advice that may or may not be sound. His Ph.D. is essentially useless here. If you don’t rely on any science, you can’t claim a science degree gives what you’re saying any authority. 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. He conducted no studies whatever. All he has are unmethodologically assembled anecdotes, and a hypothesis he unscientifically tested on a few patients, without any scientific controls. And we actually are given no reliable outcome data, so we don’t even know if any of his patients were actually helped, or what they or he found didn’t work, didn’t fit, or had to be tweaked. And their mere belief that they were helped would not empirically suffice for this, either, as the victim of every crank self-help guru “thinks” they were helped…until enough time passes that they realize they weren’t, or they check and find they are an outlier and not a consistent outcome of his treatment. This is what keeps quacks in business. (It is also clear we don’t get to hear about any of Glover’s failures or disappointed clients. He is curating the evidence to vindicate himself.)

So I want a book that proves what it is saying has been properly, soundly, tested and has actually, scientifically, turned out to be well established and effective. Glover does not provide this. As best I can tell, he has conducted and published zero pertinent research. Nor does he rely on any other established research findings in the field. 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 can do that on my own. And I already knew all “the general advice” he gives that’s worth any attention. I would still have benefited from a book that cited all the science that validates that advice. But Glover doesn’t even do that.

The third problem I have with Glover’s book is his sometimes cringingly bad choices of wording or framing throughout. 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. Which is a disturbing irony to say the least. I’ll survey the most important examples of what I mean here later. But as a trivial example, I noticed one disappointed reviewer pointing out how Glover keeps talking about accepting who you are as you are, and then insisting you change who you are. This contradiction is one among many in this book, and is like the contradiction in a plot to a bad movie: we, the audience, might be able to contrive some convoluted retcon that “fixes” the plot, but the writers are already supposed to have done that. Glover produces no disciplined way of demarcating what he is talking about. Apart from the “Paradigm” he wants you to purge from your behavioral repertoire, he never explains that there actually are things that can be true about you that are bad and that you do indeed need to change (a good life is not simply about “accepting who you are as you are,” because sometimes who you are isn’t that great, and is in fact the problem); and though he warns against it, he still does not explain well the difference between genuinely changing yourself and merely pretending (“acting” a certain way as a project of “work,” rather than as a natural expression of your real self); or how to do that (his advice consists mainly of “act this way,” rather than “become this,” and he never provides or describes or even references any of the tools needed to do the latter, which is not so simple as just flipping a script—cognitive behavioral therapy is a complex and lengthy process).

We’ll see all three of these problems crop up as I go through some examples.

Some Examples

The way Glover frames his project, is that “by giving these men the label Nice Guy, I’m not so much referring to their actual behavior, but to their core belief system about themselves and the world around them. These men have been conditioned to believe that if they are ‘nice’, they will be loved, get their needs met, and have a smooth life.” 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. But this is not well communicated; rarely does he demarcate genuine from disingenuous “niceness” so that anyone seeking advice from this book gets a clear picture of what really being a good person means. Indeed, most of his examples of being genuinely good are reductively selfish (put your needs first and, supposedly, everyone will be happy). But be a Good Guy, not a Nice Guy, should have been the mantra here. 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. Otherwise the risk remains that readers of this book will think they have just been told to be aggressively assertive, arrogant, and selfish; that there is nothing they have to improve in themself.

To illustrate what I mean, Glover does clearly demarcate some obviously bad characteristics of Nice Guys as he defines them, e.g. “Nice Guys are dishonest” because they “hide their mistakes, avoid conflict, say what they think people want to hear, and repress their feelings” and “Nice Guys are secretive” because they “are so driven to seek approval” that they “will hide anything that they believe might upset anyone” (which is more or less the same thing), “Nice Guys are manipulative” because they “tend to have a hard time making their needs a priority and have difficulty asking for what they want in clear and direct ways” so they use indirect ways (which, indeed, too many people really do not realize is by definition manipulative), “Nice Guys are controlling,” and “Nice Guys have difficulty setting boundaries,” and they are transactional (they think everything is tit-for-tat) and rationalizing (they will “rationalize” their own bad behavior) and so on. And for all these reasons, because they think they are “nice” but are actually being treated like the person they actually are (the one who is doing all that other stuff) rather than being loved and approved of as they expect, Nice Guys also have pent-up anger and resentment issues. 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. But scientifically it’s unclear whether this profile all that commonly exists or has anything to do with what he claims are its childhood causes or what will fix it. It’s basically just a common sense “don’t be” list.

But it can be even more problematic than that. On this list Glover puts “Nice Guys are passive-aggressive” such that they “tend to express their frustration and resentment in indirect, roundabout, and not so nice ways,” like “being unavailable, forgetting, being late, not following through, not being able to get an erection, climaxing too quickly, and repeating the same annoying behaviors even when they have promised to never do them again.” Here Glover has out-of-the-blue thrown common sexual dysfunctions in as if they were deliberately abusive behaviors. No competent psychologist would have done that. Anyone who has studied sexual psychology knows “not being able to get an erection” and “climaxing too quickly” are not typically passive-aggressive “revenge” behaviors. They are actually common phenomena that can have nothing whatever to do with any personality disorders or behavioral problems. Indeed, it is actually contrary to good therapeutic recommendation to assume (much less imply) these things are something a man is actually responsible for. Men do not choose to “not” get an erection; the cause can be anything from stress or anxiety to low blood pressure, or even, let’s be honest, a plain lack of sexual arousal. Likewise “climaxing too quickly” is simply a product of over-heightened arousal; if a guy climaxes and doesn’t offer to keep going with his partner with any of the entire remaining arsenal of sexual pleasuring available (fingers, tongues, and toys, intentional and improvised, all do exist as things), then you may have a censurable behavioral problem. Glover seems not to know any of this. Which is a red flag coming from someone claiming to be an expert.

More problematic is when Glover gets to his “do be” list, outlining his idea of the Integrated Male Paradigm, where black and white thinking can lead anyone to misread him as saying it is “okay” to have bad qualities rather than making sure only that what you have been thinking of as bad qualities are actually of a kind you and those who love you would be okay with and thus you don’t have to hide or lie about. Because it’s too easy for someone caught in a false paradigm to be unable to tell the difference. To see what I mean, Glover says of the Integrated Male:

• “He has a strong sense of self. He likes himself just as he is.” This can sound like giving men permission to be any kind of bad person, as long as they “like” it that way, and can rationalize anyone’s displeasure at it as now “their” fault. “Why won’t you accept me for who I am?” is the common refrain of an abuser. 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. But this isn’t what Glover clearly says.
• “He takes responsibility for getting his own needs met.” This can sound like permission to be selfish, putting yourself first, being pushy or demanding—and thus feeling justified in one’s “disappointment” when it doesn’t come through. The charitably correct way to read what he means is more nuanced: that you should be respectfully open about what you need and want, and actually negotiate for it, with someone you are treating as your equal. But this isn’t what Glover clearly says.
• “He is comfortable with his masculinity and his sexuality.” This is a blank slate that can justify whatever construction someone has placed on the words “masculinity” and “sexuality.” Glover should here cover the distinctions between healthy and unhealthy ideas and attitudes regarding sexuality and masculinity. There is a toxic masculinity you should not be making yourself comfortable with, just as there are attitudes about sex one should not. But this isn’t what Glover clearly says.
• “He has integrity. He does what is right, not what is expedient.” This is a confusing deepity coming from a book striving to argue that trying “to always do what’s right” is precisely what is not working for the Nice Guy (remember: Nice Guys falsely “believe that if they are ‘good’ and do everything ‘right'” they’ll get everything they want). Glover does get around to explaining what the difference is later in the book—what genuine “integrity” is, when “what is expedient” isn’t what’s “right,” and why one should do what’s “right” if not to seek approval, though his explanations are, again, reductively selfish (as opposed to merely self-interested).
• “He is a leader. He is willing to provide for and protect those he cares about.” This sounds a lot like the “being controlling” and “being the savior” that Glover actually denounces as the dysfunctional behavior of Nice Guys. He should be here clarifying what the difference is between “being a leader” and being controlling, and between “providing for and protecting” and trying to be a toxic Nice Guy all over again. But he doesn’t. Worse, this feature of his replacement paradigm sounds a lot like the toxically sexist patriarchalism that modern society should be moving away from, not encouraging. You are not “the provider” or “protector” or “leader” in your relationship; and if you think you are, your relationship is not likely to go well. You should see yourself as part of a team of equals; you both lead and follow, you both provide for and protect each other.
• “He is clear, direct, and expressive of his feelings.” This can be misread as giving license to be domineering, manipulative, or coercive. Alone, it’s good advice (you don’t want to be the opposite of “clear, direct, and expressive”); but in context it can misdirect. Glover should be giving advice here about appropriate ways to be clear, direct, and expressive, specifically to avoid inadvertently causing the other outcome (like resorting to emotional blackmail, being insensitive to someone else’s feelings, or opposing compromise). Indeed, even when he gets to some examples later in the book, “compromise” is still framed as “surrendering” rather than being generous, respectful, or fair. His relationship negotiation advice tends to be shallow.
• His remaining two items don’t carry any of these risks: “He can be nurturing and giving without caretaking or problem-solving” and “He knows how to set boundaries and is not afraid to work through conflict.” These work well enough as stated, especially given the examples he gives in the book that illustrate what he means.

Similarly, Glover gets to saying that culturally “it does not feel safe or acceptable for a boy or man to be just who he is,” which sounds too much like a defense of Red Pill rhetoric, and thus can play too easily into white male grievance culture, which is just a crystalization of an ideology actually dedicated to defending what Glover is calling Nice Guy Syndrome, rather than curing it. One must parse the difference between what society actually is saying makes men dangerous and unsafe (e.g. our propensity for violence or bulldozing consent, our cultural tendency toward selfishness and arrogance, a too-common indifference or obliviousness to the feelings or plight of others, and a general lack of, even resistance to building, our emotional intelligence—which are all real problems men have not adequately dealt with culturally) and what these guys misperceive as what society is telling them is dangerous and unsafe about men (e.g. a healthy assertiveness, self-care, ambition, confidence, honesty, and sexuality—none of which by itself is dangerous or unsafe, nor is society saying they are).

Armchair Theorizing

Glover goes beyond bad wording and framing, and problematically incomplete advice, to actually espousing scientific theories of doubtful veracity when he starts insisting on a causal theory of how men become Nice Guys as Glover has defined them. 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. But I can at least say he may be on to something as to that—I can confirm from my own experience that men like this exist in some sense and Glover’s construction of their psychological model is plausible (though that is not yet the same thing as making it a scientific fact). But his causal theory is far more questionable. Not only because it sounds too Freudian to even have scientific credibility, but also because…well, he cites no science for any of it. 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. A deep and pervading problem with doing psychology this way is that it is too easy to make any story fit the model. It’s not falsifiable. It’s caused by single mothers, he says; except when it’s caused by bad fathers. Nice Guys are over-attentive; or always absent; are propelled by conscious shame; or else by unconscious shame. And so on. Every possible thing “counts” as confirming his theory. This is another, huge red flag.

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.” He cites no scientific basis for this concept, as a thing or its cause, nor ever explains what age of children he is even talking about—children change substantially in their worldview and egocentricity as they age, but Glover seems unconcerned with such distinctions, and continually uses anecdotal examples that conflate adolescence with childhood, and childhood with infancy, which is all suggestive of a lack of scientific rigor to anything he is doing here. Regardless, Glover insists abandonment causes an ego-centric explanation that causes “toxic shame,” which “is not just a belief that one does bad things” but “a deeply held core belief that one is bad,” and this causes Glover’s Nice Guy Syndrome. The way he has formulated this, causally all human beings (every boy…and, take note, every girl) should be exhibiting Glover’s Nice Guy Syndrome. Which even I can observe is false. So his theory is already falsified by even ordinary observation.

Glover thus actually lacks any differential causal theory of his Nice Guy Syndrome. He never explains why some kids don’t go this route—indeed, I expect, most kids don’t develop “toxic shame,” quite a lot don’t become “Nice Guys,” and I know countless kids of almost all ages who have no difficulty correctly identifying others as to blame for what they do to or fail to do for them, rather than “themselves.” So every single step of causation in Glover’s model is refuted by plain observation. Moreover, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: smothering and helicoptering and spoiling and over-protectiveness are scientifically linked to bad child-development outcomes, so his theory of abandonment does not seem to make much sense. In fact, it’s contrary to actual science (example, example, example, example, example). To answer his unscientific anecdotes with my own, I benefited tremendously from being left alone and allowed to make my own decisions and solve my own problems when I was young, as long as I demonstrated I could and my parents were always there when I needed them—and in fact that is what I think actual current science says parents should do: teach kids to be independent, train them for adulthood; rather than obsessively avoid giving them some dubious Freudian “abandonment issues.” Abandonment issues can be a real psychological problem that can afflict certain people, but they don’t quite work the way Glover claims. So Glover is not even doing good philosophy here, much less science. Couple that with his complete disinterest in even looking at much less citing any established psychological science convinces me that his causal theory is, well, bullshit. And if that’s bullshit, why should I trust his personality model? He presents no science affirming that that exists either. Or his purported cure? He presents no science affirming that that actually works. This is little better than astrology. 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.

So I am not impressed by any of Glover’s scientific claims. It sounds like just any quack guru stuff to me. 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). But this is just common-sense village advice; more or less obvious stuff. Yet not well articulated or framed; and linked to no science whatever. I am not sure it is an asset or a defect that his dubious causal model amounts to saying that Nice Guys are acting like children, that they have not grown up and don’t know what it means to act like an adult. I have the vague sense from experience that men who act this way are often immature, but I have no confident scientific knowledge that that is always the case, or is even sufficiently meaningful to assert as a cause or classification. Indeed, I know a lot of children who don’t act this way, so it doesn’t even seem entirely meaningful to call such behavior childish. Meanwhile, because Glover’s psychological model has never been scientifically validated, men who only tick a few and not all of the boxes, or only weakly do, can’t simply be lumped in with the rest, can they? A man’s propensity to hide things about himself, for example, may have entirely different causes that don’t even connect to their childhood at all; broader issues of adult gender culture can be to blame, or even just universal human consequence-avoidance behavior. Likewise, to try too hard to “be nice” to a partner, without thinking to emotionally connect or communicate with them, need not have any such grand explanation in fossilized immaturity; it can simply be the behavior of an adult who was never taught anything about relationships and hasn’t figured this stuff out yet. Which is every bit as much a defect of adult culture as of how we raise our children.

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.” Sure. But that’s a just-so story. It isn’t science. And it doesn’t therefore automatically describe anyone. Trying to become what you believe others want you to be can be a product of selfishness, laziness, insufficient personal development as an adult, being on the antisocial personality spectrum, or any of a dozen other things. Moreover, one can all too easily confuse “wanting to be what others want you to be” (a form of tit-for-tat thinking; getting what you want, by acting a certain way) with genuinely wanting to be a good person and using others’ whose opinions and judgments you respect as a guide. Finding an ideal you respect and admire and like the company of, and striving to actually embody it (i.e. not pretending to be that, but actually being that) is not likely to conflict substantially with what good people will respect and admire and like in you, and thus it may be the same thing as what “others want you to be.” It thus is not true that you can disregard what other people think of you; but it also is not true that you always should or have to care about what other people think of you. It depends on which people; and which things. And figuring that out—figuring out whose opinions actually matter in formulating what you yourself agree is a good person—is crucial to human moral development. It is trite and contrary to sound scientific advice to simply oversimplify this into “stop trying to please people.” Yes, maybe you are over-doing that detrimentally. But it is not automatically the case that you are. And this distinction is nowhere to be found in Glover’s book.

As another example, Glover insists “these men learned to hide their flaws and tried to become what they believed others wanted them to be,” but what is the difference between “hiding one’s flaws” and actually working to become a better person? 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. 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. What, philosophically (or scientifically!), makes the difference between those two things? Why, in other words, shouldn’t someone strive to be a better person? That is, after all, what Glover wants. So how do we help the Nice Guy productively make that distinction? What really is the difference between genuinely and honestly working to become a better person (which is obviously what everyone should do) and what Glover’s Nice Guy supposedly wants to do? Is it merely that the Nice Guy doesn’t do it sincerely? Is it that he is doing it for the wrong people? Or for the wrong reasons? Or in the wrong ways? Or with the wrong expectations? There is no coherent answer anywhere in Glover’s book. What you get is maybe a kind of a blender mix of all of the above. This is not science; it’s mediocre philosophy at best.

This is even more important than you might think, because Glover gives supposedly real-world examples where this “toxic shame” and thus “Nice Guy Syndrome” was generated by parents merely being critical of their child, thus “communicating” that that child was “not OK just as they were.” But how is that any different from a parent correctly and responsibly calling out bad behavior, habits, attitudes, or values? Glover never makes any such distinction. So all he does here is justify any man assuming any criticism whatever from his parents thus “caused” their every false belief or toxic behavioral pattern. This is bewilderingly incompetent from a therapeutic perspective. 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.” This does not suggest he is operating competently as a therapist here. And this gives me even less confidence in the reliability of anything else he says.

The more so as Glover seems to have a disproportionate number of clients he has diagnosed with this as-yet-not-officially-existent disorder (his Nice Guy Syndrome simply isn’t in the DSM) who were raised in abusively fundamentalist Christian households, which suggests he might be missing the real causal factor here (check out some empirical science on this point, from Marlene Winell’s “Religious Trauma Syndrome,” Valerie Tarico’s The Dark Side, and Janet Heimlich’s Breaking Their Will, to Billy Wheaton’s Hooks and Ladders and Darrel Ray’s Sex and God). Likewise many of the things Glover is classifying as a problem have been traced to a very different theory of a dysfunctional male culture rather than some half-assed Freudian pseudopsych (see the essays of Phil Christman and Matthew Rozsa and Harris O’Malley on the point, backed by real science in psychology, sociology, and anthropology). How do we tease these things apart? Glover offers no clue. He doesn’t even seem aware he’s supposed to. Which renders his book of hardly any real use.

Sexist Mythology

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. For example, to explain why he thinks “the last five decades has produced a plethora of Nice Guys in historically unprecedented numbers” (remember, he has never actually done any study to determine even their present numbers, much less past ones—indicative of his pseudoscientific methodology: things he just “believes” for some reason, become “facts” all of a sudden), he offers the assertion that because of “feminism” and various related things (such as “an educational system dominated by women”), “men became disconnected from other men in general and confused as to what it meant to be male,” because “even the most well-meaning mothers are not equipped to teach their sons how to be men by themselves.” 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). In other words, men are too confident as to what it is supposed to mean to be a man. Not the other way around. They have been raised in a broken paradigm deliberately, not by accident (contrary to Glover’s bogus sexist theorizing, I highly recommend you read what actual scientists are saying the actual science says about this, e.g. this survey article from the APA).

When that toxic male ideal conflicts with reality, rather than abandon the ideal, men resort to tricks and tactics and excuses to try and “make” it work (like, for example, “hiding” their real views, prioritizing “getting a woman” over forming healthy relationships, and so on). Men who escape this vicious cultural cycle are probably more likely the ones who will cope better and develop into more competent adults (and per that last link I just directed you to, there is scientific evidence backing this point). There simply is no evidence women aren’t up to the task of teaching their sons to be good and competent men, nor even that any significant number of men have only women teaching them that. Evidence for this is even found in the fact that most of Glover’s own examples are men who had abusive fathers imposing traditional gender concepts on them; and many of those raised without fathers appear to have had similar views impressed upon them by their mothers or male peers—while guys who didn’t suffer this abuse, Glover won’t have met in therapy, a classic selection bias distorting Glover’s grasp of reality, further exacerbated by his “ink blot” need to “see” (or even create) his “syndrome” in his every client, the very error we invented double blind studies to avoid (e.g. compare this article and this article, which account for the effect of selection bias on such conclusions). When we look at the science, by contrast, the problem seems more likely a defective male culture, not a Freudian crisis of fatherlessness. In support of this, actual scientific studies (e.g. this, this, this) indicate that once you control for universally negative parenting behaviors (e.g. anything we would call abusive, which trends in inverse correlation to socio-economic status, and does not predominate in any gender), there is no appreciable difference in psycho-social outcomes for children raised only by women. Glover is essentially just ignoring science, and replacing it with his own sexist beliefs, sounding disturbingly too much like the infamous misogynist Stefan Molyneux.

Glover continues with his sexist confabulations when he says this “problem” was caused by a society of single moms and female teachers such that “men became comfortable being defined by women and became dependent on the approval of women,” suggesting the solution is to reject women’s expectations of you, which is actually the exact opposite of what needs to be done. 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. And as I just noted, no actual science supports any of the causal effect that he is alleging. He hasn’t even established the cause: just because more women are raising and teaching men, does not mean any significant number of men have actually lacked any male mentors, peers, and role models, or that doing so correlates in any way with the syndrome Glover invented (remember, he conducted no studies whatever). Yet toxic ideas about masculinity driving their dysfunction are more frequently going to come from men than from women, don’t you think? Glover seems to imagine Nice Guy Syndrome is a result of men becoming too weak and compliant, when from his own data it is clear it’s a result of their becoming too mean, selfish, and insensitive. These men don’t know how to assess or interact with women, and don’t see women as people or as equals; and the causal direction is more likely going from the latter to the former. Which makes this a cultural problem, not just a psychological one.

We get this sexism full-on when Glover outright blames “radical feminism” and its message “that men were bad and/or unnecessary,” which “furthered the belief of many men that if they wanted to be loved and get their needs met, they had to become what they believed women wanted them to be” and “for many men, this meant trying to hide any traits that might cause them to be labeled as ‘bad’ men.” Here we see the sexist heart of Glover’s complete failure to construct a scientifically viable explanation of anything. There is no empirical study showing that causal chain exists (feminism —> messaging that men are useless and bad —> men trying to prove themselves useful and to hide being bad). It is entirely a figment of Glover’s imagination. When we look at what is actually going on in his own examples of men he claims have been affected by this, it becomes clear the problem is that these men haven’t been listening to feminism or women at all, and have instead invented fictitious witchery in their place. That error is what needs to be fixed.

Exactly as I wrote earlier in this article: there is a difference between what society (feminist and otherwise) actually says is the problem with men (what makes them useless or bad, which always comes side-by-side with what would make them useful and good), and what these men misperceive as what society is saying. Which is necessarily a consequence of not paying attention to what is actually being said. Which makes that more likely the causal chain here: toxic masculinity —> ignoring what women are actually saying and replacing it with fictional beliefs about what they are saying —> trying to conform to that fictional ideal they thus invented, which in fact women never asked them to do (and would actually prefer they not do), and then blaming women for having misled them (again, there is actual science backing this causal model, per all the links to published research I have placed in this article). Which all would be solved by actually listening to women. So it seems more likely that’s our actual problem: men who don’t listen to women, develop fucked-up ideas about what women want, and when conforming to that fictional ideal doesn’t pay off, their resentment of women grows. Because one of the trap-beliefs of toxic masculinity is that any challenge to it is an effort to emasculate, and is therefore rejected. Ergo men never heed any call to really listen to women, and therefore never listen to women, and thus never become the good men women actually want, at which men get angry and blame women, and round and round it goes. To which fact Glover is oblivious.

Confirming my suspicion, Glover cites or quotes no actual feminist literature on this issue, but instead quotes demeaning, sexist remarks from prominent anti-feminists Robert Bly and Camille Paglia whining about how modern women “castrate” men or make them “soft” and “malleable” and “lack[ing in] energy,” and other eye-rolling bullshit. And at this point we are completely divorced from anything that could be called empirical, factual, or scientific. Glover likewise repeatedly asserts a vague gender essentialism, that boys will be boys and are born a certain way that women are keeping them from, which is as unscientific as it gets. While he stumbles occasionally into a valid, non-sexist point (e.g. a “dependency on external validation,” like having perfect hair or receiving praise as a dad, “actually prevents people from getting to know” a man “just as he is” because “none of these things have anything to do with who he is as a person,” yet “they are the things he believes give him identity and value,” which is indeed a common dysfunctional behavior; conversely, Glover advises men accustomed to hiding their true selves and their mistakes to instead be themselves and own up to their mistakes, which is always good advice), he stumbles too often back into bad sexist advice (e.g. that seeking validation in signals of approval from specifically a female romantic partner is “bad,” or that anything they think is biologically “manly” ought to be regarded as good).

For example, Glover declares that seeking validation from a woman “requires” a man “to constantly monitor the possibility of a woman’s availability” for sex; which is not even plausibly true much less a healthy therapeutic claim to make to any client. A client that is doing that, clearly does have a problem in need of correcting, and the corrective may indeed be to stop associating his self-worth with his wife or girlfriend’s libido, but it does not follow that every Nice Guy is doing that, or for the same correctable reason, or that this is all that emotional validation in a relationship is about. Likewise, Glover describes caring about your (always specifically female) partner’s moods and how to better them as a cause of anxiety and rage, rather than one of the main functions and benefits of even being in a relationship. And on and on. Glover continues dealing, here and there, bad, sexist advice about how to treat or think about women, none of it science, intermixed with common sense village advice one could get from any psychotherapy website, none of it revelatory; plus the occasional troubling deepity, like asking us to tell ourselves “I am perfectly imperfect,” a nonsensical statement that sounds more like a way to rationalize remaining fucked-up and avoid self-improvement than actually accepting only your trivial or tolerable flaws and working on purging rather than accepting the rest. Glover gives no guidance on how you are even supposed to tell the difference; or what to do about it.

Yes, everyone should become comfortable with being alone and having their own self-time, and thus learn enough independence to not let fear keep them trapped in a bad relationship. And everyone needs to learn how to recognize when they are in a bad relationship, with a partner they really should not be with. That’s always good advice. And yes, Glover does a valuable job explaining the difference between genuine caring, and enacting “caring” behaviors for selfish reasons. And so on. But you can get that stuff anywhere. You don’t need them coupled to outdated, sexist ideas of what it means to “be a man” (no, Dr. Glover, learning how to constructively express one’s “aggression and sexuality” is not a uniquely “male” issue that “only” men can ever learn or teach; “working out at the gym” does not “make you a man”; and teenage boys don’t “slouch” and “play loud music” in order to make “themselves so repulsive [to] their mothers” as to “break the symbiotic bonds” their mothers hypothetically saddled them with), or any of his contrived Freudian pseudoscience lumping too many different kinds of men with different problems and psycho-social histories into the same category, painting them all with all the same features, and insisting a mundane package of advice available anywhere is a cure. This isn’t how real, scientific therapy would help you.

Conclusion

Someone else who knew nothing of Glover’s book once wrote asking me my advice about much the same things that Glover wants to address. I answered them before having read Glover, but recommended some books I knew of at the time. Now that I have read Glover, I would not recommend him. What he says that’s right is commonsense stuff you can get from less problematic sources; and everything else he says is bad or misleading advice, or simply junk science—worse even, as he never bases anything he says on any science. If you checked actual science you’d find everything you need.

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. Work out what actually is good and bad about you, and openly embrace the one, and just as openly work to fix the other. Be honest and open and communicative and direct, with yourself as well as anyone you want to bond with. Also be considerate, responsible, helpful, and fair. And do all that because you like being those things, not because you expect a return on investment. When after all that you still don’t like how someone treats you or makes you feel, leave them; no longer include them in your life. And for everyone you keep in your life, endeavor to see and feel things from their point of view and not just your own; and choose as your friends and partners those who do the same in turn. Relationships are a team project of negotiation between equals toward mutual goals, not a hierarchy or a battle or a vending machine.

Once you’ve read that paragraph, you have no need of reading anything in Glover. Yet notice none of it has anything in particular to do with men. This is simply good advice for all human beings.

Perhaps the only thing of use regarding Glover’s book is that it consists of a man telling men (or at least, a certain specific subset of men) what they are doing wrong in relationships, and that it is the fault of their behavior and attitudes, and not women’s. But feminist authors have been telling us this for decades. It is a bit quaint that men won’t listen to women but only a man. That kind of already tells us what’s amiss here. Anyone who actually listens to other perspectives, who actually takes the trouble to genuinely find out why, for example, they are so frustrated in relationships, will find a dozen female voices explaining that “someone who believes himself to possess genuine ‘nice guy’ characteristics…actually may not.” And that is precisely the actual problem. 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. If you are not taking women’s voices seriously, you’ve found your first failure-mode that you need to fix, stat. 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.” Then he throws on top of that a bogus, pseudoscientific causal explanation.

By contrast, if you’d search out and listen more to what a diverse selection of women are already saying, you’ll learn all that’s worth learning here. Yes, you have to do this critically (women are not sages any more than men, so they’ll be wrong about things just as often), but if you do this as critically as you listen to diverse men, you’ll get the signal out of the noise. Vending machine mentalities are not nice. Assuming you know best what someone else needs or feels is not nice. Going at someone sideways is not nice. 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. Being assertive is not the same thing as being a selfish jerk; ergo being unassertive is not what it means to be nice. If you have to pretend to be someone you aren’t in order to be with a person, you actually shouldn’t be with them. If even after dozens of attempts no one likes who you really are, you probably do need to change something about yourself—so you need to get cracking on figuring out what that is. And the options in life are rarely binary. It’s not “be selfish or be self-sacrificing,” but “be judicious in how you care for yourself and your own wants and needs and what sacrifices you make for others,” and “find ways to help and support others that aren’t a sacrifice,” and “try to negotiate win-win solutions in life.”

The question I was asked regarded how men can be self-confident when they aren’t a peak physical or social specimen. But confidence in yourself as a person is not the same thing as self-respect, and neither of those are the same thing as “body image.” 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. Skills and character; not the same things. But after all that, one shouldn’t even care too much about body image. Confidence and self-respect are attitudes towards oneself as a person, not incidental aesthetics of a body you were assigned by happenstance to wear. A body is a tool, like a car, a mere chassis; one can do some things to spruce it up, dress it up, improve it, and keep it in good working order. But it’s more important to focus on what you can do than what you can’t; and leveraging the resources you do have to get the things you need on Maslow’s Hierarchy is crucial to achieving a satisfying life.

That in mind, if you think you need help with this, the books I’d recommend actually start with Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Though that was written by a Mormon, and drops some references to religious things (as does Glover), none of its advice requires religious belief, as there are obvious nonreligious equivalents to everything in it, e.g. praying about something is really just code for taking time to think something through. Covey drew on education and business science, and though it’s really also just a philosophical advice book, not a science-based treatise, I find it lacks the resulting pitfalls of Glover, and offers more complete and healthy advice. Everything in it, I have found, does actually have a foundation in real science. By contrast, IMO, Glover comes across as a lazy and incompetent copycat, borrowing ideas from Covey, and deploying them poorly. By contrast, Covey recognizes everything he says is universal—not just a feature of or only of benefit to “men.” You won’t find any bizarre sexist ideology promulgated there, nor any Freudian psychobabble.

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. Milkman is a real and serious scientist: she has an extensive publication history, and holds a professorship in behavioral economics. Her book is extensively based on actual science, and provides science-based guidelines adaptable to pursuing and achieving any life goal, the pursuit of which will inevitably lead one out of any such conditions as “Nice Guy Syndrome,” should they really even exist. Then there is Barbara Markway and Celia Ampel’s The Self Confidence Workbook: A Guide to Overcoming Self-Doubt and Improving Self-Esteem, which is a good example of how to apply real, established science specifically to the development of self-confidence and self-respect, which covers, far more expertly, nearly half the aims of Glover’s book. Markway is an actual psychologist with an accomplished scientific publication history; Ampel is a journalist with expertise in business, law, and communications. One also should consult the great Albert Ellis himself in The Myth of Self-Esteem: How Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Can Change Your Life Forever (the distinction hinted at in the title being between accepting who you are, and what a healthy way of doing that looks like, and “thinking highly of oneself,” in the sense of arrogance or haughtiness or over-confidence, which is often divorced from any real understanding of oneself). Ellis was one of the leading founders of the entire CBT movement in psychology. He is practically the real-deal version of who Robert Glover is pretending to be: an actual scientist, testing his theories with actual science, and transforming the entire field of psychology with it.

These recommendations conform to a general rule I advise following as much as you can: do not rely on any author who isn’t an actual expert specializing in a pertinent field, discussing actual empirical science or findings in the subject; or an author who is competently conveying what such men and women have written. Even Covey, who started with a degree in business and whose doctorate was in religious education, studied the pertinent science of education, and his dissertation was literally on self-help literature, and his resulting book remains recommended by scientists across the spectrum of the subject. Glover may have an advanced degree in family therapy, but he has no science backing anything he says, and cites none. It is largely a waste of time for anyone to then try to tease out what he says actually holds up as sound, and what doesn’t. Don’t bother. Go straight to real science instead. And listen to many different people who have direct personal experience with every aspect of what concerns you. 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. Yet it should be obvious that you can’t ever solve this problem without that data.