Is Nice Guy Syndrome Killing Your Marriage?

00:00 We're going to look at something called nice guy syndrome and help you realize, work out, decipher whether nice guy syndrome is killing your relationship. Welcome to the Johnny Jensen show, where modern dads discover how to create the true riches, relationships and results they deserve. Get your high value man blueprint and join our community at highvalumanproject.com. Let's go. Hello, men. Welcome to the Johnny Jensen show.

00:36 It's great to have you here on this latest episode where we're going to look at something called Nice Guy Syndrome and help you realize, work out, decipher whether nice guy syndrome is killing your relationship. My name is Johnny Jensen. If you've not been here before, I'm the founder and creator of the founder and creator. That's the same thing. I'm the founder and head coach at the high value man project, where high value midlife men come to create the true riches, relationships, and results they deserve. It's about living the life that you want, not a life that you feel stuck in. And nice guy syndrome is such a core element to a high value man lifestyle versus the opposite, which is in this conversation, being stuck in a relationship that doesn't work, being

01:27 stuck in a loveless, sexless relationship that is dragging you down, being in a relationship where you fail to even hold hands, let alone have sex on a regular basis. Like, what's it going to take for that relationship to either break completely or you break completely or even your wife break completely, right? It's a shocking state of affairs, the number of people that end up in divorce. And an even worse state of affairs, how many men end up taking their own lives through suicide.

02:03 You know, I'm not suggesting, let's be really clear up front that people should stay in broken relationships, but the work it takes to start over, to go through the divorce, to date someone, to rebuild your life, to date someone, to find someone, will even date you, let alone date someone, then go out on the date, it be rubbish, then got to find another one, it work out okay for a couple of months, then you realize it doesn't, then you've got to start again. Like there's parts of that, which indeed can and should be fun. But blind me, is it hard work, let alone juggling your new life, being a single dad, the finances, all of it.

02:42 If you put the amount of work it's going to take to create this new life, to find someone new into an existing relationship, as long as that relationship wasn't fundamentally broken, and we can talk about that probably on a different episode, but as long as the relationship wasn't fundamentally broken, repairing it should be easier, more rewarding than trying to go out there and find another one to start with. And discovering this thing called nice guy syndrome was an incredible breakthrough for me on my journey to being the man that I am today, on my journey to discovering and putting together the high value man project.

03:24 And quite honestly, in simple terms, creating the relationship I've got, it is wonderful. I feel blessed. I don't take it for granted, but I have fun. I feel supported. We talk. We don't argue. There's no subject that can't be bought up. We have a lot of fun together. We have plans to look forward to. We've got memories to look back on. Our time is split evenly between her friends and my friends. It's not contrived. It's just the kind of relationship that we've created. And that is born out of a high value set of principles of me taking control of myself.

04:07 Of course, she's a great woman and a huge amount of this is testimony to how she is in the relationship coming out the back of a 23-year relationship marriage that was a bit difficult, shall we say the least. You know, we're both in a position to want better things from a relationship. But nonetheless, understanding what nice guy syndrome is and the impact it's having on your relationship is absolutely vital. The book, No One Miss the Nice Guy, is written by Dr. Robert Glover, top bloke, met him a couple of times. You will have seen him on lots of podcasts, videos, bald-headed guy. He's got a little goatee. Probably looks a little bit like me, really, like every

04:51 peanut-shaped head guy does. Dr. Robert Glover, sorry if you don't think your head looks like a peanut. Mind, I'm getting myself in a hole here. Anyway, his video. videos are great and he's a top guy. So, this is my experience and interpretation of the book, right? And yours may be slightly different, but fundamentally, let me say up front, it's not about being a bad boy. You know, the treat and mean, keep them keen. It's not about that. Let's be very, very clear. Nice guy syndrome is very much about being the kind of considerate man. It's about being living in fear of losing love, right? It comes from a background of fear and rejection, right?

05:36 And particularly if I talk about myself, right? When my mum died when I was a kid, my relationships with my dad were great on the one hand, but then all of a sudden we didn't really see him that much where we'd been seeing him all the time. And he was up there in hospital with her. And then when she died, it was a big upset naturally. And then here he was, you know, remarried again within a year. And a little brother, a baby brother comes along. So it was incredibly turbulent times. And I was not to realize what this had done to my outlook on love and relationships until much later in my life. But what it did do was have me be

06:21 in terms of asking someone out. I would either, I would commonly not ask the person I wanted to out so that I could, you know, what would I do in there? I was avoiding the rejection of being told no or avoiding the rejection of being dumped somewhere down the line. So then I'd go out with someone that I liked, respect all the women I've been out with, but perhaps wasn't the one that I wanted to be with. So then the relationship would be a bit bumpy, which would kind of give it a reason to not work, be like justified. But then bizarrely inside of that relationship, I would be like the over pleaser, trying always to do nice things, saying yes to lots of things, doing everything I could to keep her happy, staying inside of relationships that really didn't work, or being heartbroken or clinging on, being needy inside a relationship that didn't really work, and then being heartbroken after the relationship broke down.

07:15 Like they are all classic symptoms or examples of nice guy syndrome. What you realize out of this is that it's a way of being as a result of something that happened, most commonly, right? It could be upbringing, could be circumstances like mine. But inside of that relationship, and you could look at your own relationship, if it's not going that well, if it feels like you're drifting apart, if it feels like the level of attraction from her in particular towards you is drifting, if you feel like you're not getting the attention you want, you know, from holding hands to having sex, like you may want to look at how you're showing up.

08:00 The level of attraction that she feels towards you isn't always going to be driven by how many nice things that you do for her. In fact, if you keep giving, giving, giving, giving, then there's something I read from a different book called Competition Anxiety. Well, if you being there for her 100% and every single second of every moment is a given, then she's got nothing to lose. She can talk to you how she wants. She can treat you how she wants. She can be as demanding as she wants. She can withhold as much as she wants. And you're going to keep like a little dog, keep coming, coming, coming, hoping if you do more, that it will reverse and go back the other way.

08:42 This is nice guy syndrome. You need to put down some markers in the relationship that show that you've got other stuff going on. Show that you're not always going to say yes. And again, to be clear, it's not about that bad boy thing. What are you up to? How fit and healthy do you look? Are you going off to the gym? It's not just about being fit. It's about you going off to the gym. Oh, well, who's going to be there? How are they looking? Who's he going to meet up with? What if there's any other women there? You start to sow the seed of, am I doing what I need to do to keep this man? And that's just a healthy dynamic inside of a relationship, a level of frision, tensions, like sexual energy between the two of you.

09:29 The way that you talk to each other, you know, being able to have the confidence to say what you want to say. And I don't mean just blur it all out onto someone, but being able to talk to them in a way that the conversation can flow both ways. Being able to express your needs in ways that don't come across as you do this or you don't do that or you need to be more this. When you're expressing it as I feel like or my. my goals out of this would be, or what I would like to create for us, it starts to become a much more first-person centered experience where she gets to get you.

10:08 And then, if you can ask that back of her, then you get to get her. This is the core tenets of the relationship reset conversation. If you're going through some relationship struggles and you want a really fantastic tool that I've created as part of High Value Man, then if you comment hashtag reset on this feed or message me, then I'll get you access to the reset conversation. But you have to be able to have that level of communication between the two of you. It can't be all one way. And expectations as well. This is what I would do. I would think that if I do all these things, I will, you know, then my expectation is that surely it will work, it will get better.

10:49 But when the expectation is not met, I mean, expectations in itself are pretty, can be quite toxic. But for you individually, when the expectation is, I'll do all this and I'll get that, when it isn't met, it's a knockback. It's like it knocks you down deeper, lower, less of a man than you want to be. And when you're, when that's happening, and when you're not having any intimacy in your relationship, basically you're feeling completely emasculated, like you've had your bollocks ripped off. And when that sets in, it will impact your work. It will impact your social life. It will impact the way that you,

11:29 the habits and routines that you get into. You may start drinking more. You may start watching more porn. You may start, obviously, like going to bed's not going to be that comfortable. So you're probably going to sleep less. All these things are going to start to eat away at you and make you less of a man, both in the way that you feel and experience yourself, let alone the performance and output of all your efforts. And so you do go further and further down, which makes you less and less attractive, which makes your relationship more and more doomed. It's brutal, but it's not necessarily about her. Now, it might be that you've married a complete nightmare and it is about her.

12:10 But you can't make that decision until you've worked on yourself because you don't know. Well, unless you've chosen to avoid loads of red flags and the run-up to this, but we'll talk about red flags in another episode. But you've got to work on yourself first so that you can go back and get the experience of her. If it's a relationship that you want to save or repair, of course. But even if the relationship is over, isn't savable, then who you need to be to move forward, to build the new life, to find the new relationship is exactly this person. It's a high-value man lifestyle person. No more Miss the Nice Guy is an absolutely incredible book.

12:51 That's really some of just my experience of it. There's a whole bunch more to it. But also, it's only about, I'm going to guess, some sort of three, 300 pages. You know, it's about a four-hour audio listen, I think. I listen to all my books on audio. And it is transformational. Your experience from reading it will be your experience. What I imagine will show up for you because it's what shows up for everyone, though. The thing that is consistent is that how you're being in your relationship is part of the problem. You think it's part of the solution being a nice guy. It's actually part of the problem.

13:28 And that's why the book, No More Miss the Nice Guy, is your opportunity to break out of that habit and those way of beings, that syndrome, and start to create a new life, a new relationship for yourself and your wife. Hopefully, because we don't want to break up families, we want to bring families together. But if that does happen, then giving you the best possible platform to go and create something new. I hope this has been a value. Let me know. You can join the high value man group by going to johnnyjenson.com forward slash group. That'll get you in there. If you comment reset on here, if you're trying to fix a relationship, do that. If you comment hashtag checklist, sorry, hashtag man, then I'll get you the high value man U2.0 program.

14:14 This is about you leveling up. It's about your experience of life being the best it can possibly be so that you thrive in all areas so that you, it's like an upward momentum. It's it's to whatever degree my science is terrible, but it's some kind of physics kind of thing. Like it's a momentum, it's an object in motion, stays in motion. And if you're going on an upwards trajectory, the likelihood is that that will continue. If you're going down, then it's likely that that's going to continue as well. So, like I said, the comments that you leave, I would love to know if you're in the group, it'll be relatively private.

14:49 between us all i'd love to know where you can see the kind of nice guy syndrome the nice guy habits that you're doing in your relationship and what the what what the the impact of that is and if you read the book what are some of the uh tips and tricks the things that you put in place and and how did they work for you i would love to know that um and so we can share that amongst us and all get even more value from from this incredible book that we've got already great to have you here be sure to like share subscribe to this podcast whether you're watching it on video on youtube or or on facebook or whether you're listening to the audio on your preferred and favorite um audio platform it really is great to have you here and i look forward to seeing you on next episode of the johnny jensen show cheers take it

15:42 easy thanks for tuning in to the johnny jensen show be sure to subscribe leave a review and share it with fellow dads creating the life you deserve starts with you get your high value man blueprint and join our community of motivated modern dads at highvalumanproject.com let's go