Taking the Lead: How Integrated Men Set the Tone for Stronger Relationships

Aug 06, 2024 | 6:00 p.m., Mountain Time

Since Nice Guys tend to be passive, especially around women, and especially around women they’re attracted to, they often attract strong or controlling women. Because Nice Guys often won’t take the lead when it comes to the relationship with women, it forces the woman to take that lead, so it makes her appear fairly strong or controlling. Often, if a woman gets used to playing that role, it makes her seem like a strong controlling woman. The nice guy often thinks the woman wants to be in control even if she doesn’t. But she will take the lead because somebody has to.

Setting the tone and taking the lead is one of our most talked-about topics at our meetings, as the concept of “leading” is frightening for most Nice Guys who spend their lives trying to be different from the controlling men they have heard women complain about.

For most Nice Guys, it is difficult to understand how setting the tone and taking the lead is not controlling or self-centered.

Perhaps even more significantly, it’s difficult to understand why women like it.

Maureen Dowd, a feminist and columnist for the New York Times, put it this way:

“Women are physically vulnerable and hormonally complex.”

Women feel best when they feel secure.

Historically, women turned to the tribe for physical and emotional security.

Most women can adequately take care of their basic needs in modern society, but because their primary evolutionary drive is to feel safe, they naturally turn to a man to be their primary emotional security system.

Mother Nature programmed them this way.

A woman feels unsafe when a man is anxious, avoidant, passive, unpredictable, dishonest, or pleasing.

A woman can’t follow where a man doesn’t lead.

Let’s talk about how to set the tone and take the lead in a relationship so that those who depend on you feel secure.