A short and sweet email for you today:

One common trait of “nice guys” is that they will go out of their way to try and accommodate women.

There are a million reasons why this pisses women off. It makes them guilty, it results in the guy being resentful and passive aggressive. For the sake of focus I won’t go into them all.

The trend with “nice guys” is that they suppress their own needs in order to make the woman feel good. And then hope these women will meet their needs later in return.

This of course is all unspoken, so the woman doesn’t know what the guy wants her to do. She’s supposed to “just know.” And, even if she were to do it, very often the guy would deny her kindness… because he doesn’t want to “burden her” by receiving. It triggers his shame, and makes him feel guilty.

Not surprisingly, this is a recipe for misery which is why all relationships with “nice guys” are at best tolerable for both parties.

But one of the big ironies of this nice guy behavior — that may yet be surprising — is that while the nice guy might THINK he is doing the woman a favor by resisting meeting his needs, very often the girl actually wants the same thing as him.

I’ll give a simple, vanilla example of this to illustrate.

Let’s say you have a married couple. It’s been a long day, and neither has had much of any time to each other. It’s evening and the husband wants to catch up with the wife. But, he sees that she’s about to take her book out to read.

If this guy is a “nice guy” he will do some weird passive-aggressive thing where he makes a gesture to sit with her, but then says “oh never mind I know you want to read” and will go to leave.

This is of course lose-lose, because if she says “ok” or just goes to read his feelings will be hurt. His mindset will be: “She doesn’t care about spending quality time with me” — even though he is the one that evacuated himself from the vicinity, before she even said anything.

But the funny thing about this is that the wife might actually WANT to have quality time with him. Maybe she is only picking up the book because she doesn’t know how to get HER needs for intimacy met. The book is a protective barrier for her — she doesn’t have to get vulnerable and ask for anything.

So in the end, the “nice guy” being nice only ends up giving NEITHER party what they wanted.

The point of all this is simple…

If your woman isn’t initiating intimacy with you, it’s not necessarily because she doesn’t want it.

She may just be waiting for you to get over YOUR emotional barrier and help break through hers.

Anyway, I know it’s tough to see when you’re in a relationship.

But the good news?

You can work with me and get some expert perspective.

Because I can see what’s going on between the two of you objectively… and show you how to navigate all that shame.

So BOTH of you can get your needs met, and have the relationship you deserve.

Apply to work with me here: www.patstedman.com/application

– Pat