People Pleasing & The "Good" Man Paradox

Written By: Dr. Yedidya Levy

In Steinbeck's East of Eden, the following dialogue is had between Adam and Hamilton. In their exchange, Steinbeck lays bare the illusion and pathology of the people-pleasing man.

Hamilton: “You have no love.”

Adam: “I had—enough to kill me.”

Hamilton: “No one ever had enough. The stone orchard celebrates too little, not too much.”

Adam Trask is a paradigmatic "good" man. He believes that he is doing everything in his power to be "good," and that this goodness will make him worthy of love. He nurses Cathy back to health, neglects the cold and callous oddities of her behavior, ignores her wishes to disappear, and instead continually promises to make her happy. He never raises his voice in anger or expresses disapproval. She shows Adam no affection, tries to abort her pregnancy, and tells Adam she wants nothing to do with the children, but Adam's response is to be "good," and being good means not getting angry, ignoring the concerning patterns, and pretending that everything is fine. For Adam, this is his definition of love. Love equates to martyrdom. "I had—enough to kill me," he said, meaning love for Adam is not fundamentally an interpersonal experience, but an intrapersonal project. The love of the people pleaser is a love in which a relational disposition of "goodness" is chosen and held onto at all costs, even the cost of one's life.

When people pleasing becomes a default disposition, by definition it lacks the reactive quality of a reciprocal relationship. He is not responding to the other person as they actually are; he is responding to an internal image of who he needs to be in order to be loved. Even when they are put down, neglected, or abused, the people pleaser responds with more submission. Chronic submission communicates that a partners behavior has no meaningful effect on him, but rather elicits a default response. The problem is not goodness itself, but the inability to depart from goodness when the relationship demands anger, disappointment, confrontation, or withdrawal. The people pleaser, desperate to be loved, remains unloved and rejected because their chronic disposition to please comes across to others as fake, disconnected, and absent. This is the "good" man paradox: when being a "good man" means eliminating anger, aggression, impatience, and assertiveness, the result is inevitably being treated as dispensable.

In the words of Hamilton, the people pleaser has "no love." Instead, what he calls love is a gaping hole desperate to be filled by the love of others, and in his desperation, he welcomes pain, rejection, and estrangement.

Reciprocal relationships are deep and meaningful because they involve two people having honest and complex reactions to one another. When partners react to one another and communicate these reactions effectively, they reveal to one another the contours of the self. This means that getting to know someone else requires an exquisite openness to their expressions and to one's own reactions. When we can do this, we get to know people, and we can make informed decisions about whether we want to pursue a relationship. Reciprocal relationships are relationships whose interactions produce meaningful reactions in one another over time. A person who cannot allow himself to be affected by another may appear endlessly loving, but is actually absent from the relationship.