The Approval Trap That’s Sabotaging Your Dating Life
If you’ve ever felt like you’re constantly trying to win a woman’s approval—texting at just the right time, saying what you think she wants to hear, or bending over backward to keep her interested—you’re caught in what relationship expert Dr. Robert Glover calls the “nice guy approval trap.” And here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s the exact thing pushing women away.
In a revealing conversation on the Modern Wisdom podcast, Dr. Glover, author and marriage therapist with 40 years of experience, shared a quote from one of his coaches that stopped him in his tracks while driving: “A man doesn’t mature until he quits seeking the approval of a woman.”
“I had to pull off the road and keep replaying that,” Dr. Glover recalls. This single insight transformed how he understood male development and dating dynamics.
This isn’t about becoming cold or indifferent. It’s about understanding a fundamental paradox: the more you chase approval, the less attractive you become. The less you need it, the more naturally it comes your way.
Where Approval-Seeking Begins
The pattern starts early, Dr. Glover explains. As children, we were completely dependent on our caregivers—usually our mothers. We learned to read moods, anticipate needs, and ensure things were “good with Mom” because, at that age, it genuinely felt like survival.
“We come into this world completely needy, dependent, vulnerable,” Dr. Glover says. “We had to make sure stuff was good with Mom, make sure she was in a good mood, she was available.”
This survival strategy served its purpose in childhood. The problem? Many men never outgrow it. They carry this approval-seeking behavior through female teachers in preschool and elementary school, and eventually into their dating lives and marriages—where it becomes their greatest liability.
“It makes sense that since we were born as men that we’ve been—it felt like life and death to get the approval of women,” Dr. Glover explains. “But unfortunately, chasing that approval with women in the dating world actually works completely against the results we want to get.”
The Pick-Me Paradox: Why It Backfires in Dating
Dr. Glover is blunt about what happens when you approach a woman simply because she’s attractive and you want her approval: “When you go approach a woman just because she’s hot, you’ve made her the alpha, she’s the decider now. You’re not. You’ve made her the alpha, you’re the beta.”
He’s particularly critical of the pickup artist community on this point: “All these red pill and pickup guys all think ‘I’m Alpha.’ No, you’re chasing her because you want her approval, you want her to say yes. You’ve just given her all the power.”
Think about it from her perspective. She’s likely being approached by multiple men, all essentially saying “pick me, pick me, choose me.” You’ve handed her all the power, and she can sense the neediness radiating from you.
This creates what the podcast host noted as men “looking for rejection”—so afraid of losing approval at any level that they never risk asking for a number, never touch her arm playfully, never suggest actually meeting up. They get stuck in safe, boring conversation that goes nowhere because they don’t want to “rock the boat.”
The Unattainable Goal: Why Women’s Approval Can’t Be Consistently Won
Here’s another uncomfortable reality Dr. Glover wants men to understand: consistent approval from women simply isn’t attainable.
“Is that even attainable—to get the approval of women?” he asks rhetorically. His experience as a marriage therapist provides the answer. He’s spent more time with married men “suffering through their woman not choosing them than single guys not getting women to choose them.”
“I’ve got guys who say ‘Robert, how can I get my wife to want to have sex?’ How long since you had sex? Fourteen years,” Dr. Glover shares. “And I go, I have no clue. I don’t know how to fix that.”
The point isn’t that all women are impossible to please. It’s that when you’re chasing approval from someone who fundamentally doesn’t approve of you, you’re fighting a battle you’ve already lost.
What to Seek Instead: Building Real Masculine Foundation
So if not women’s approval, what should drive you? Dr. Glover offers a powerful alternative:
Seek approval from yourself and your male peers.
“What if instead we were seeking the approval of ourself? Maybe the approval of our male peers and friends through how we live our life and how we show up and our integrity and our authenticity and our values?” he suggests. “What if that actually was attainable?”
Dr. Glover speaks from experience: “I spent five, six days out at a retreat center with 40 guys, and just watching the love of men—I go away from doing the work I do with men feeling much more loved than I’ve ever felt in any relationship with a woman.”
This isn’t dismissing women’s love—it’s recognizing that male friendships and self-respect provide a stable foundation that no romantic relationship can replace.
The Open Door Philosophy: Stop Pounding, Start Noticing
One of Dr. Glover’s most practical frameworks is what he calls “walking through open doors” instead of “pounding on closed doors.”
“I call that pounding on closed doors—she’s hot, I want her. That’s approval-seeking at its ultimate,” he explains. “What if you’re just living this good life and then all these doors open around you and you notice women smiling at you, walking in front of you a couple extra times unnecessarily, bending over when they put the plate on the table? What if you just start noticing all the doors that are open?”
His advice: “Choose a woman who chooses you.” This simple principle, which he credits to dating coach David Deida, changes everything.
When Dr. Glover describes how he met his current wife, there’s no story of pursuit or persuasion. He was walking down the street in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, heard a massage therapist’s voice, liked it, and turned around. Six months later, she propositioned him. “I didn’t have to go pound on a door,” he says. “She is the most amazing, crazy beautiful, sexy woman I know.”
Breaking the Nice Guy Pattern
Dr. Glover identifies what he calls “nice guy seduction”—listening to women talk about their problems, being kind, doing things for them, fixing things, even paying their bills, all while hiding your sexual agenda, hoping they’ll eventually want to take their clothes off.
“The math on that doesn’t work well,” he states plainly.
Instead, he practiced what he calls “touch, tease, and tell”—being playful, uninhibited, and direct about his intentions. “I wasn’t getting younger, I went through a bankruptcy, I wasn’t rich, but I had success because I didn’t hold back.”
The results? “I just had success with women in my 40s and 50s because I didn’t hold back. If I had an impulse to touch her, I’d touch her. I’d tease her. I would tell her ‘come on, let’s go do this.’ I was just playful, I was uninhibited, and in general women really liked that.”
The Bottom Line
Chasing women’s approval is exhausting, ineffective, and ultimately emasculating. It stems from childhood patterns that no longer serve you. The solution isn’t to become callous or manipulative—it’s to build a life worth living, develop genuine self-respect, and cultivate deep friendships with other men.
When you stop needing approval, you paradoxically become more attractive. When you notice which doors are already open instead of desperately trying to force closed ones, dating becomes easier and more enjoyable.
As Dr. Glover puts it: “I’m a big fan of walking through open doors.”