Setting the Tone and Leading in Relationships

Oct 29, 2024 | 6:00 p.m., Mountain Time

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 have a discussion on how to set the tone and take the lead in a relationship so that those who depend on you feel secure.