How Nice Guy Culture and Worthiness Culture Became the Same Problem
Worthiness Culture Series: Unchaperoned Life | Post 2 of 5
He was a good man. Everyone said so.
Home teacher. Faithful in his calling. Tithe-payer. The kind of husband who showed up, who helped, who never raised his voice and never complained. He endured long silences without protest and long stretches without physical affection without saying a word, because he had been taught — by leaders he respected, by a framework he trusted — that endurance was love. That selflessness was the mechanism. That if he just kept being kind, kept serving, kept performing the role he had been assigned, something would eventually give way in her heart.
It didn't.
What he got instead was resentment he couldn't name, a marriage that felt hollow in ways he couldn't explain, and a quiet, corrosive suspicion that had been building for years: I did everything right. Why does none of it feel like enough?
He is not a villain in this story. He is not a weak man or a foolish one. He followed the instructions he was given, completely and sincerely, for a very long time.
Robert Glover has a name for this. And it is not a spiritual problem.
What a Nice Guy Actually Is
In No More Mr. Nice Guy, Dr. Robert Glover describes a pattern he calls Nice Guy Syndrome: a man who has learned, somewhere in his formation, to hide his authentic self and meet his needs covertly. He presents a polished, agreeable, accommodating surface to the world. Underneath it, he is running a transaction.
The mechanism is what Glover calls the covert contract. It works like this: I will do X — be helpful, selfless, compliant, self-sacrificing — and in return you will give me Y — love, sex, approval, security, peace. The contract is never stated out loud. The other party never agreed to it. And when the expected return doesn't arrive, resentment floods in — quiet, confusing, and corrosive, because the man running the contract can't quite name why he feels so cheated by someone he's been so good to.
The hardest part of Glover's insight is this: Nice Guys are not actually nice. Not in any freely given sense. The helpfulness is an investment with an expected return. The sacrifice is a down payment on something the other person never agreed to pay. This makes genuine intimacy almost impossible, because you cannot truly connect with a transaction. You can only connect with a person — and the Nice Guy has hidden the actual person under layers of strategic performance.
The plain-language version, for anyone who grew up in a high-demand religious culture, sounds like this:
If I do everything I'm supposed to do, I will finally be enough.
Where the Church Comes In
What Glover describes as a psychological pattern, worthiness culture systematically installs as doctrine.
Not maliciously. Not in some calculated effort to produce emotionally stunted men. But through explicit, well-intentioned, consistently reinforced instruction that maps almost perfectly onto the covert contract framework:
▪️Perform your calling faithfully → God will bless your marriage.
▪️Serve your wife selflessly → she will desire you.
▪️Keep the commandments → your family will be protected.
▪️Suppress your needs, especially physical ones → you demonstrate your spiritual worthiness.
Each of these is a covert contract dressed in the language of covenant. The return is promised — sometimes implicitly, sometimes with remarkable directness — but the other party never signed the agreement. God doesn't negotiate. Your wife didn't agree to the terms you were running in your head. And the community that handed you this framework will not be in the room when the bill comes due and nothing arrives.
Jeff Strong's research names the structural version of this problem. When standards function as sorting mechanisms rather than growth tools, they produce performance rather than transformation. The Nice Guy and the Pharisee are cousins. Both are performing virtue in expectation of a return. Neither is actually free. Both are, in a profound and painful sense, unable to be genuinely known — because what they're offering isn't themselves. It's a carefully maintained presentation of who they believe they need to be in order to deserve what they want.
The Instructions I Was Given
I want to tell you three things that were said to me — by men I respected, in moments that were meant to help.
The first came from a former bishop who served with me in the Stake Sunday School Presidency. He was a genuinely kind man, the kind of man you trusted immediately. He could see the strain in my marriage, and he counseled me regularly during our time together in the stake library. He talked often about his love for his wife — openly, warmly, without reservation. Others around him sometimes commented quietly on her coldness toward him, her indifference. He seemed not to notice, or at least not to mind.
His counsel to me was simple: unconditional love, consistently given, eventually turns a heart. It was the only way Christ could live, and it was the model for a worthy husband. Keep going. Keep loving. The return would come.
I believed him, despite it feeling frequently like self abandonment.
The second came from a High Council program facilitator that I knew through a weekly meeting that I participated in for several years. He was another beloved former bishop — careful, spiritual, well-regarded. He revealed in confidence, that his wife had refused to be intimate with him for more than a decade. I don't know how long this 60-70 year old man had been in a covenant marriage, but he had absorbed it without complaint.
His counsel to me, knowing what he was living: selfless service was the Savior's solution to unkindness. Keep giving. Keep serving. The answer was more love, not a different approach.
He was still in that marriage. Still giving. Still waiting.
The third came from my own parents, when I described the silence treatments I was receiving from my wife — days at a time of no eye contact, no acknowledgment, no response. My parents were not unkind people. They were trying to help. Their explanation: women's hormones, pregnancy, the distance created by my frequent work travel. The response they recommended was patience, understanding, an abundance of kindness. There were stories — there were always stories — of marriages where relentless gentleness had finally moved the stone. Where the wife had seen the faithfulness of her husband and her heart had turned.
I received three different versions of the same instruction from three different sources over the course of years: your needs are not the point. Give more. The contract will eventually pay out.
It did not pay out.
What I didn't understand and couldn't understand then, was that my selflessness wasn't failing because I wasn't doing it correctly. It was failing because selflessness, performed as a strategy rather than given as a gift, produces exactly the dynamic it is trying to resolve. When you absorb everything and ask for nothing, you don't create gratitude. You create contempt. Not always conscious contempt — but the body-level sense that the person across from you has no spine, no weight, nothing to push against. Nothing to respect.
A woman I dated after my divorce put it plainly. My self-sacrificing behavior, she said, was completely unattractive. It prevented her from respecting me.
My first reaction — and I want to be honest about this — was that her reaction revealed a problem with her character. It seemed sad to me that she would prefer a selfish man over a selfless one. That reaction is the Nice Guy response in its purest form: someone hands you accurate information about how you're landing, and you file it under their failure rather than yours.
It took reading Glover himself — after years of hearing about the concept, after more than one podcast, after more than one woman's honest feedback — to finally let the information through. My constant effort to be Christ-like, forgiving, and accommodating was the very thing that made my wife feel unsafe. Not because she was broken. Because a man with no discernible needs and no expressed desires is not actually a partner. He is a performance. And you cannot be intimate with a performance.
I have to own that. My behavior contributed to the failure of my marriage. That is true even if we probably lacked the compatibility to survive in the long run regardless. Both things can be true at once.
What This Produces in a Marriage
A man running a covert contract inside a marriage cannot ask for what he wants directly. Directly wanting things — naming them, asserting them, holding a line around them is "selfish." The framework has told him so, and his own nervous system has reinforced it for decades.
So he hints. He absorbs. He performs generosity in the hope that generosity will be returned. And when it isn't, the resentment builds in a place he can't quite reach — because the contract was never acknowledged, the other party never agreed to it, and there is no language inside the framework for naming what has gone wrong without sounding like you are failing to "endure to the end."
There is a rule among men in this community that I understood completely before I ever heard it stated explicitly. I learned it explicitly over a steak dinner with a member of the Stake Presidency — a close friend, someone I'd sat around Scout campfires with for years, just the two of us while our wives were out of town.
I asked him directly: what would happen at one of those campfires if a man asked for honest advice about his marriage? What if someone complained about how his wife was treating him?
He gave me the answer I already knew.
"We'd tell him not to criticize his wife. What man does that?! We'd probably tell him that he didn't deserve her."
We both sat with that for a moment.
Women in this community gather and commiserate about their husbands regularly — the disappointments, the frustrations, the things he doesn't understand or doesn't do. That is normal and viewed as largely harmless. But a man who complains about his wife is signaling something different. He is signaling weakness. He is signaling that he has failed in his role as the leader of his home. The failure is always, always his.
So men don't say it. Not at the campfire, not in priesthood quorum, not to their bishops. They absorb. They perform. They wait for the contract to pay out.
And they sit in stake library offices getting counsel from a man who has been living in a sexless marriage for ten years and still believes that selfless service is the answer.
The Women's Version
This pattern does not belong exclusively to men. Women in LDS culture are handed a parallel contract with equal precision:
▪️Be spiritual, pleasant, and self-sacrificing → your husband will lead righteously and desire only you.
▪️Suppress sexual desire before marriage → it will unlock beautifully within the covenant.
▪️Support his calling, his priesthood, his needs → he will honor and cherish you.
The female version produces women who feel invisible, uncherished, and quietly bewildered — because the man across the altar has also been following instructions and also cannot quite figure out why none of it is working.
I asked a woman who had lived inside this for years to describe how it actually operated from the inside. Not the theory. The daily mechanics.
"You go into marriage thinking you're supposed to put him first — but he's also supposed to do that for you. So when he doesn't, you think he just didn't do it this time. You keep giving him chances. And then it just never happens. You end up doing it all the time, and he doesn't do it at all, but you hope that he will."
When I asked why she didn't call him on it, the answer was simple and devastating.
"You already have them on this pedestal because you married them. You think they're awesome. So you just keep giving them excuses — he's busy, he's stressed, he doesn't realize."
That is the female covert contract running in real time. Not naivety. Not weakness. A woman doing exactly what she was taught to do — giving generously, forgiving readily, assuming the best — inside a system that never told her she was allowed to have a bottom line. When she finally raised her concerns directly, the concern got turned around. She was blamed. The voice that might have saved the relationship was silenced — not by cruelty exactly, but by a dynamic both of them had been shaped to maintain.
"I wanted it to work. I thought I could. But if I had a concern about anything, I brought it up — and it just got turned around. So I never really got to address it."
She wasn't giving up. She was still trying. She just had no place to stand.
Some women never find that place. Others find it sideways — not through a confrontation or a revelation, but through the slow accumulation of their own competence in the world outside the marriage. A second woman I spoke with described it this way:
"I just learned to accommodate. But I was healing the codependency without even knowing it — through running my business. You can't run a business and always be a people-pleaser. I was being pushed out of my comfort zone constantly. I didn't realize at the time that I was actually healing."
What she was describing is something the framework never anticipated: a woman growing into herself not through better compliance, but through the ordinary demands of competence. Her business required her to trust her own judgment. She started listening to her gut. She stopped deferring automatically. After a series of bad decisions she had allowed herself to be talked into, she decided to stop outsourcing her instincts to someone she had placed on a pedestal.
The theology underneath her original accommodation was sincere. She hadn't been a doormat out of weakness.
"I was trying to be Christ-like — my version of it. You accept people where they are and you love them through it. And I saw evidence of it working. He would cycle in and out of depression and difficulty and I just loved him through it. I didn't imagine that would stop working one day."
But the framework that told her love could carry everything also told her that her growing strength — her refusal to absorb bad advice, her trust in her own judgment, her decreasing need for his approval — was a disruption to be explained rather than growth to be celebrated. When she stopped accommodating everything, he detached. When she stopped reflexively affirming him, other women filled that role. The contract she had quietly exited was still running in his head. And her wholeness, rather than deepening the relationship, exposed how much the relationship had depended on her staying small.
"The stronger I got, the less I was reliant on him. That makes you a healthier, more whole individual. And that was threatening to him."
This is the detail the culture almost never discusses: a woman becoming more whole does not automatically produce a better marriage. It can just as easily expose the hollowness of what was already there. Both outcomes are worth naming honestly — because the women sitting in bishop's offices being counseled toward more patience and more service deserve to know that the problem is not always that they haven't given enough. Sometimes the problem is that they have given so much, for so long, that the relationship never had to become anything more than their generosity could sustain.
More than one of these women heard the same counsel: be more loving, more patient, more service-oriented, and his behavior would change. As if her forgiveness held the key to his repentance. As if her capacity to endure was more spiritually urgent than his obligation to grow.
That inversion — her forgiveness more important than his repentance — is the female covert contract at its most precise. The more faithfully she runs it, the less visible her actual needs become. Her sacrifice is expected, so it becomes invisible. Her endurance is praised, so it becomes the norm. And somewhere along the way, she loses the ability to name what she actually wants — because wanting things for yourself was never written into the agreement.
Two people running covert contracts at each other is not a marriage. It is a negotiation with no disclosed terms, conducted by two people who were never taught they were allowed to have terms in the first place.
Why Breaking the Contract Feels Like Betrayal
When someone finally starts asking for what they actually need — clearly, without hint or performance, without the strategic softening that makes the ask feel less threatening — the system responds with alarm.
For the person breaking the contract, the guilt is immediate. They have been told, implicitly and explicitly, that their needs are the problem. That a good man (or a good woman) doesn't ask. That asking is selfishness wearing a costume. The discomfort of simply naming what you want can feel, after decades of training, almost physically wrong.
For the person watching it happen, it can feel like abandonment. I held up my end of this. I did everything I was supposed to do. Why are you suddenly changing the rules?
This is why so many LDS divorces and faith transitions produce genuine bewilderment alongside the grief. The contract felt so real. Both people had been living inside it for so long that it had become invisible — the water they swam in rather than a choice they were making. Nobody told them the contract was only ever one-sided. Nobody told them the other party had never agreed.
What I discovered — not from a book first, but from a series of honest conversations with women after my divorce — was that the contract could be broken in a completely different direction. Not by demanding or coercing or giving up on what I wanted, but by simply saying what was true.
I started being honest with the women I was dating about my desire — clearly, without performance or equivocation, without the apologetic hedging the Nice Guy uses to make his needs feel less threatening. Not a demand. Not a negotiation tactic. Just an honest expression: this is what I want, this is what matters to me, this is what I'm looking for.
The response surprised me every time. Smiles. Gratitude. Relief. Even when my desires weren't in alignment with theirs, the honesty was welcomed. I could say clearly: these are my needs, and I'm willing to walk away if we're not aligned — and mean it without anger or resentment, because I was no longer waiting for a contract to pay out. I was just telling the truth.
The covert contract dissolves the moment you stop running it. What replaces it is not vulnerability in the frightening sense — it is clarity. And clarity, it turns out, is one of the most attractive things a person can offer.
What Actually Needed to Change
The path out is not to stop being kind. It is not to stop being generous or faithful or genuinely caring about the people in your life. Those things are real virtues. The problem was never the virtues.
The problem was running them as a strategy.
Real generosity is given freely — not as an investment, not as a down payment, not with a return in mind. Real service is offered because you want to give it, not because you believe it obligates someone else to give back. The moment any of it becomes strategic, it stops being love and starts being a transaction. And no one can truly connect with a transaction.
The church's theology of covenant love, at its best, describes something genuinely true: a relationship that doesn't keep score, that gives without calculation, that persists through difficulty because the commitment runs deeper than the feeling of the moment. That is not the problem. The problem is that this theology was handed to people who had never been taught to name their own needs — who had been told, from childhood, that needing things was the spiritual problem rather than the natural human condition — and told to love unconditionally inside marriages where their actual desires were invisible even to themselves.
You cannot love freely from a place of suppression. You cannot give without calculation when you have never been allowed to name what you want. The work is not to become selfless. It is to become honest — about what you want, what you need, what you are not willing to absorb anymore — and then to give from that honest place rather than from a performance of sufficiency you have been maintaining since you were old enough to understand what worthiness meant.
That honesty is not a betrayal of your values. It is the only version of love that can actually last.
Worthiness Culture is a five-part series at Unchaperoned Life, written for midlife singles who are done performing and ready to find out what love looks like when it's built on something real.
Next: "The Six Things You Need to Feel Human — and Why You Lost All of Them at Once"