No More Mr Nice Guy Hardcover – January 8, 2003

No More Mr. Nice Guy is a GREAT book However, the title is misleading, the purpose of the book is to boost confidence and help men reclaim power in their lives, it does not make men jerks. The author points out that you are the only person on this planet responsible for your needs, wants, and happiness. By boosting a man's confidence and ensuring the man's needs are met, women are naturally more attractive to these men. The greatest aphrodisiac is self-confidence.

The characteristics of "Nice Guys" are men who have difficulty setting boundaries in relationships with women and become doormats. The men often feel as helpless victims and seeing another person as the cause of problems. Many nice guys live life trying to gain approval for others.

Many nice guys did not have their needs met as boys. As a coping mechanism to try to get their needs met, they try to be nice. Later in life, Nice Guys apply the skills learned as a boy in dealing with women - by being nice - it does not work. When being nice does not work, the Nice Guys try to be even nicer.

Men need to set healthy boundaries in relationships with women. Avoiding conflicts in relationships is problematic - Women do not feel safe with a man they know they can push around. A woman wants to know you will stand up to her. That is how she will feel secure in the relationship. There is a catch - she has to test to see if she can trust you. When you set a boundary, she may strongly test and push against the boundary. She will tell you that you are wrong for having the boundary and do her best to find out if the boundary is for real. Generally, when women feel secure, they feel loved. When a man stands up to a woman, she believes he will likely stand up for her. Setting boundaries creates respect and makes women feel secure and feel loved.

Around 50%+ of marriages end in divorce and usually the mother has primary custody. This places the boy in a subservient position to women and minimizes the father's influence. The mother has a profound influence in upbringing of the boy. Mothers teach their daughters to be more independent and teach their sons to be "nice boys" - dependent on women's approval. During the formative years (0-5 years), most of the boy's school teachers are women, so they learn to be subservient to women. The boy must be nice to gain the teacher's approval and earn good grades. In essence, most of the boy's power figures are women and he must be nice to win their approval. Nice guys learn that their needs are not important or having needs contrary to the women's needs is bad, so they try to please others and become miserable in the process. They become wimps, doormats, nice guys - whatever to avoid conflict in relationships and try to make their women happy.

During the formative years, when a boy set boundaries with either his mother or female teachers - he was taught that it was alright to have those boundaries violated. Later in life these boys grow to become men, but use the outdated strategy developed in childhood to deal with women - by being nice and trying to make women happy at any cost. Since Nice Guys learned to sacrifice themselves in order to survive, recovery must center on learning to put themselves first and making their needs a priority. That's what this book is about.

There were 27 reviews on the book; I read all of them before buying the book. I also read the 3 new reviews since receiving and reading the book. A book of this nature cannot please everyone - it will save some relationships and bury some relationships that have been long dead. Depending upon your life upbringing, the book will either apply to you or not. Since I started reading the book, I have been raving about it. Get this book. I bought a second copy to send to a friend. I even recommended friend who is a single mother raising a son to get this book.

So far, reviewers aren't doing this book justice. I picked it up six months ago and was amazed at how well it described my plight as a "nice guy" (a.k.a. codependent). I've read stacks of self-help books, but this one stands above the rest. I mean it, it stands out, by far. And several guys I know who've read the book feel the same way.
This book fully described what I've been going through, told me how things got to be this way, and gave me concrete steps on how to change things. Since I've read it, my life has improved, I feel better, more powerful, and people are responding to me in a new way. If you're a guy walking through life feeling frustrated that you don't get the love, respect, and sex you deserve, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

This book is, in many ways, highly flawed. I cannot, however, rate it any lower than three stars because the core behaviors Dr. Glover advocates are fundamental pillars of psychological well-being. His core premise is that all human beings have needs. Among these are somatic needs (food, shelter, treatment for injury, etc.) and emotional/psychological needs (love, validation, affection, etc.). For one reason or another, however, many men have come to habitually avoid pursuing or expressing these needs and desires in a direct way. Thus, "Nice Guy syndrome" is characterized by attempts to satisfy those needs by indirect means. Glover describes some of the more pervasive behaviors: a superficial niceness (in which one does something nice with the unconscious assumption that he will get something in return - "hidden contracts" as Glover dubs them), passive aggression, and other means of manipulation. Of course, these tactics are most often ineffective and leave the man frustrated and needy. Oftentimes, these desires are rechanneled (into things like porn or drug addiction) or repressed (only to emerge in an irrational or misdirected show of aggression or an emotional breakdown).

Glover encourages the individual to take an assertive role in getting his needs met. He does not mince words, and says outright "you are the only person responsible for meeting your own needs." And the best way to make sure this happens is to take the direct route: express outright and honestly what it is you want, make your own needs a priority, and then pursue them (or ask for help). This is, of course, sound and commonsense psychology. The heart of the book really are Chapter's Three ("Learn To Please the Only Person Who Really Matters"), Four ("Make Your Needs a Priority"), and Five ("Reclaim Your Personal Power"). This is where the book is most thoroughly in touch with the roots of this self-sabotaging behavior and offer the most practical suggestions for improvement.

Where things get somewhat muddy, however, is Glover's analysis of the genesis of this behavior, and the fundamentally flawed model of the "integrated man" that he advocates for the "recovering Nice Guy." While an understanding of where self-sabotaging behavior comes from can certainly offer insight, Glover's theory is disappointingly Freudian (and more specifically, Oedipal; see in particular Chapters 2 and 6 on "The Making of a Nice Guy" and "Reclaiming Your Masculinity" respectively). Likewise, Glover targets the women's liberation movement and the paucity of male teachers in the classroom for having a deleterious effect on the psyche of men. He seems oddly fixated on a gender dynamic that is largely irrelevant to the heart of the problem: an underlying insecurity. While the absence of a father figure and the predominance of women in the public education system no doubt can play a role in a boy's development of sense-of-self (and consequent alienation from other men), these phenomena do not play as large a role as Glover seems to want us to believe. An understanding of WHY certain men are simply more susceptible towards these tendencies goes largely unaddressed, as well as the fact that many men who have gone through the exact same school-system, in the same post-women's liberation environment, whose father figure was absent, etc. have emerged perfectly functional, successful and happy.

In my opinion, these gender politics are merely Glover's shtick and have absolutely jack to do with recovering a sense of assertiveness and competence in one's life. It's interesting to compare this book to another in the male-oriented self-help genre - "The Way of the Superior Man" by David Deida. The modus operandi of much self-help literature is to pander to the reader's deepest insecurities: to convince him that he is fundamentally "broken" and needs fixing, and to fill him with an unscrupulous allegiance to a (mostly random) plan of "recovery." And, indeed, both Deida and Glover pander way below the belt: squarely at the reader's testicles.

Another major flaw with this text (and one that plagues just about all mass-market psychological theories today), is the lack of any control group to establish exactly what a "recovering Nice Guy" should realistically aim for. For example, much of Dr. Glover's sentences are prefaced with "Nice Guys tend to..." But, having spent most of his recent clinical career exploring the inner psyches of men who identify themselves as "Nice Guys" (and of course having been one himself), how exactly does Glover know that HEALTHY men DON'T also "tend to" engage in the same behavior? What this book would benefit from is an explicit idea of where to draw the line between debilitating pathology and functional "imperfections." The fact is, "the integrated man" that Glover speaks of is a theoretical ideal. He doesn't really exist. Even the assertive, talented, successful, and happy men that seem to exemplify this goal experience the selfsame fundamental doubt, frustration, and periods of ineffectuality that Mr. Nice Guy does. Luckily, Glover recommends throughout the book for these guys to get out there and form friendships with other men, which presumably would facilitate a reality check. Glover makes it clear from the onset that it is important that one have a healthy and supportive group of people with whom one can be honest and expose their frailties and mistakes to (he calls these "safe people").

Also, Glover's model of "integrated manhood" is unconscionably narrow. This is most apparent in Glover's use of quotations from Robert Bly out-of-context. One such quote deals with the "lack of vitality" of "soft-men" who are often seen with "strong women who positively radiate energy." Glover compounds the issue by evoking the issue of "softness" again in Chapter 6, where he admonishes the "many men who... even take pride in their [physical and emotional] softness" and then instructs his reader to hit the gym. Glover does not seem to consider that there are as many ways to be a man as there are men in the world. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with being a "soft" man. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with being involved with "strong women." Only one who is fundamentally insecure would argue otherwise.

And this is exactly the point: Glover knows this, and works his reader into a frenzy of attempting to reclaim their "birthright" of masculinity. Passages like this serve only to pander to the reader's insecurity and breed an allegiance to his system, however arbitrary and illogical. One need only hop over to Glover's internet support group to see this in full evidence: some of these men have been at it for years and truly believe they are on their way towards becoming an "integrated man." Yet they are still fundamentally insecure and stuck in Glover's schema of lost manhood.

It must be noted that, while Glover's theory itself is muddled and his tactics more concerned with breeding allegiance to his theory, he advocates fundamentally sound and helpful behavior. For example, he asks the reader to create a list of "safe people." This essentially fosters the formation of friendship: a cornerstone to a fulfilling life. He advocates honesty and assertiveness. This fosters the ability to get/express what you really want, thereby preventing frustration or repression. He advocates getting physical exercise and taking care of yourself. We all know the benefits of exercise and eating right. Essentially, Glover advocates being yourself and not being ashamed of it. This is possibly the most fundamental pillar of psychological health, is it not? All in all, Glover's advice itself is nothing new, nothing revolutionary, and nothing that has not already been accounted for in modern psychology: it's just dressed up with a hook that that bound to bait some of the the millions of insecure men in the world.

EDIT: December 18, 2011 -- Periodically, I like to revise my reviews with alternative suggestions. Recently, I've rediscovered the writing of the late Albert Ellis, founder of an early version of cognitive therapy called Rational Emotive Therapy. Deeply influenced by Greek Stoicism, Ellis was a deliciously no-nonsense voice of reason in the world of psychotherapy and self-help. His A New Guide to Rational Living still stands up quite well three decades after it was written. (However, I must warn you that Ellis' writing is quite rough around the edges; he often comes across as arrogant and dismissive, and his work often attracts, well, arrogant and dismissive people [see some of the comments to reviews of A Guide to Rational living to see what I mean]. Thus, some readers might prefer a work by someone other than Ellis himself. I like Be Your Own CBT Therapist by Ellis' far less caustic British colleague Windy Dryden.)

For people suffering from loneliness or insecurity particularly as it relates to the realm of romance, there is a wonderful little book called Intimate Connections by David Burns (also author of the classic book on alleviating depression, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, also highly recommended) which presents much of the same information Glover does, but does so through cognitive-behavioral techniques in lieu of Glover's somewhat clumsy psychodynamic approach. For those looking for an exploration of sexuality, I recommend psychologist Jack Morin's The Erotic Mind as an excellent (and comprehensive) exploration of formation and expression of the erotic imagination that makes Glover's gloss of the topic seem crude by comparison.