The nice guy who never got chosen

If you're the bloke everyone says is lovely, the one who remembers birthdays, helps people move house and never makes a fuss, and you still can't work out why life doesn't seem to choose you, this one's for you.

For more than a decade, that was me. I was easy to be with. People liked having me around. And I went home alone, year after year, wondering what I was doing wrong when I was trying so hard to do everything right.

This is the first article in a new series called Books that remade me. Each one covers a book that changed how I see the world and what I actually did differently because of it. I'm starting with the one that's shaped the most: No More Mr Nice Guy by Dr Robert Glover.

Dr Robert Glover is a marriage and family therapist. In his book he describes something he calls Nice Guy Syndrome. The way I understand it, a Nice Guy is a man who believes, deep down, that he isn't okay just as he is. So he tries to become whatever he thinks other people want, and he hides anything about himself that might get a bad reaction.

That sounds harmless. Generous, even. But here's the catch Glover points out: all that niceness isn't really free. It's a strategy. The Nice Guy is trying to earn love, approval and a smooth life by being agreeable, and when it doesn't pay off, he ends up frustrated, confused and quietly resentful. Which, ironically, isn't very nice at all.

When I first read that, I felt a bit caught out. I suppose I'd always thought of my niceness as my best quality. Glover was asking me to look at what it was for.

This is the gold in the book for me. Glover talks about covert contracts. A covert contract is an unspoken deal: I'll do this for you, and in return you'll give me that. The catch is the other person has no idea the deal exists. You never told them. Often you don't fully realise it yourself.

Let me put that in an ordinary situation. You listen to a woman for hours about her week, you're attentive, you never push, and somewhere in the back of your mind there's a contract: if I'm patient and supportive enough, she'll eventually see me as more than a friend. She doesn't know she's signed anything. So when it doesn't happen, you feel let down, maybe even cheated, and she has no idea why the atmosphere's changed.

It doesn't stop at dating. It shows up at work when you stay back without being asked and then fume when nobody notices. It shows up with mates, with family, even in the gym when you're doing it for the compliment and not for yourself.

Once I could see my covert contracts, I saw them everywhere. And that was uncomfortable, because it meant a lot of my "giving" had strings attached. I wasn't a bad bloke. I was a scared one, trying to buy safety with good behaviour.

Underneath the contracts, Glover says, is approval-seeking. The Nice Guy looks outside himself to find out whether he's okay. If people are pleased with him, he's fine. If they're not, he's in trouble, so he works even harder to keep everyone happy.

I think that's why I was so easy to be with and so hard to be attracted to. When you're always adjusting to what you think the other person wants, there isn't much of you left in the room. People can like you without ever really meeting you.

Glover's answer isn't to become a jerk. He's very clear about that, and I want to be too. The point isn't to stop being kind. It's to stop using kindness as a currency. He encourages men to make their own needs a priority, to be honest about what they want, to set boundaries, and to accept themselves, rough edges and all.

What makes this book useful, not just insightful, is that Glover doesn't leave it as theory. All through the book there are short Breaking Free activities: small, practical exercises that ask you to notice a pattern, write about it, or try something different in real life.

Some of them are simple. Some are quietly confronting. I did them, properly, with a pen. I'm not going to share my answers here, because some of that work is private, but I can tell you the act of writing them down changed something. Patterns I'd lived inside for years became things I could actually look at.

Glover also puts a lot of weight on men connecting with other men, finding safe people where you can say the things you've never said. That idea landed hard for me. Because it's one thing to read about your patterns alone in your lounge room. It's another thing to say them out loud to a room of blokes who nod, because they've done the same.

That's why, for about fifteen years now, I've run men's groups based on Glover's philosophy. Monthly support groups, walk-and-talks, dinners, retreats. I've watched good men realise, sometimes in a single evening, that the deals they'd been making in secret were the reason they felt so stuck.

I wrote about some of this with my mate Tom Valcanis in our book, Balding Overweight Sex Machine. And it's a big part of what I mean when I say I got remade. Losing weight changed my body. Breaking free from being the nice guy changed who I was in the room.

So what's the real-world payoff? For me, it was learning to say what I wanted, out loud, without a hidden invoice. It was learning to hear "no" and survive it. And, eventually, it was meeting Sam, the love of my life, as a man who wasn't auditioning anymore.

You don't need to read the whole book this week to start. Try this:

At the end of the week, ask yourself one question: how much of my niceness was generosity, and how much was a deal? You might be surprised. I certainly was.

No More Mr Nice Guy by Dr Robert A. Glover: Amazon

All the ideas above, Nice Guy Syndrome, covert contracts, approval-seeking and the Breaking Free activities, are Dr Glover's. This is just my take on what they did for me. Read it yourself and decide what fits your life.

Next in the series: Jordan Peterson, David Allen's Getting Things Done, The Barefoot Investor and the KonMari method.

If you want more of this in one place, Tom and I wrote it down in Balding Overweight Sex Machine. It's the dating and honesty work that sat underneath the nice-guy stuff, including the Five and Five. Have a look if that sounds like where you're at.

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This is my experience, not psychological advice. If you're struggling, please talk to a qualified professional.