Stop Chasing Her Approval

I used to know a guy, we'll call him Kwadwo, back when I was living in Denver, who could not sit still if a woman in the room wasn't paying attention to him. Didn't matter if he had a girlfriend at home who adored him. Didn't matter if the woman across the room had zero interest. Something in him needed every woman within eyeshot to think he was the guy. He wasn't a bad person. He just never learned how to be okay without that constant hit of approval. And watching him over the years, I started to realize his story is basically every man's story, just at different volumes.

This is about that specific kind of undisciplined man. Not the cheater, not the liar, just the guy who cannot stop needing women to validate him, and how much that quietly wrecks his relationships, his self-respect, and honestly his whole life.

The Approval Trap Nobody Warns You About

Nobody sits a young man down and explains that needing approval from women is a trap. If anything, the culture tells him the opposite. Get attention. Get likes. Get numbers. Get the girl to laugh at your joke, get her to text back fast, get her to notice you across the bar. It's treated like a scoreboard, and men are taught to keep playing the game their whole lives.

Except approval is a bottomless well. You can drink from it forever and still wake up thirsty. A man who built his sense of worth on whether women find him appealing today is going to need that proof again tomorrow, and the day after, forever, because the well never actually fills him up. It just keeps him coming back.

The men who seem most confident on the outside are often the ones drowning in this the worst. Confidence and approval seeking can look identical from a distance. One is a man who's fine either way. The other is a man who is absolutely not fine either way, but has gotten good at hiding it.

What This Looks Like in Real Relationships

Say a man is in a committed relationship. His partner loves him, tells him so, shows up for him. But he still needs the barista at the coffee shop near his apartment in Denver to laugh a little too long at his joke. He still needs to know the woman at the gym noticed his lift. He still keeps a couple of old conversations alive in his messages "just to talk," even though nothing's really happening, because something in him needs to know he could still get attention if he wanted it.

None of this makes him a villain. It makes him a man who never built a floor under his own self-worth, so he keeps needing other people to hold him up, and the people closest to him end up carrying weight they shouldn't have to carry. His partner starts to sense that his affection toward her is somehow tied to whether he got enough attention elsewhere that week. That's an awful thing for a partner to have to sense, even if she can't name it.

And this isn't only about romantic or flirtatious attention either. It shows up in smaller ways too. A man might avoid disagreeing with a woman he's dating because he's scared she'll think less of him. He might say yes to things he doesn't want to do because turning her down feels too risky to his image. He might overexplain himself constantly, needing her to understand and approve of every decision he makes. All of it comes from the same root: he hasn't built the internal stability to be okay if she, or anyone, disapproves of him for a moment.

Why This Happens to Otherwise Good Men

A lot of men who fall into this pattern grew up believing that being liked was the whole game. Maybe they got picked last, or ignored by girls in school, or had a rough patch where nobody wanted them around. So somewhere deep down, a rule got written: being wanted equals being safe. Once that rule is written young enough, it runs quietly in the background for decades, driving behavior a man doesn't even realize is connected to something so old.

My uncle used to tell a story about a boy he grew up with in Tafo, Kumasi, who got teased relentlessly as a teenager for being the last one any of the girls in their group would talk to. That boy grew into a man who, decades later, still couldn't walk past a woman without needing some small sign that she noticed him. Nobody around him ever connected the two, but my uncle always said you could draw a straight line from one to the other if you knew where to look.

The tricky part is that this rule feels like ambition instead of insecurity. A man tells himself he's just being social, just being friendly, just enjoying female attention because he's a normal guy. And sure, sometimes that's true. But there's a difference between a man who enjoys attention and lets it go, and a man who needs it to feel like himself. The first one is healthy. The second one is running on empty and using women as the fuel.

Building the Floor Discipline Requires

Discipline here doesn't look like ignoring women or being cold. It looks like a man doing the unglamorous work of building his own sense of worth somewhere that has nothing to do with female attention at all. Getting good at something hard. Building real friendships with other men. Sitting with boredom or rejection without needing to fix the feeling immediately by seeking out someone new to admire him.

It also looks like learning to tolerate a woman being unimpressed with him sometimes, and surviving it. That's a bigger deal than it sounds. A disciplined man can have a partner who's annoyed with him, or a date that goes badly, or a woman who isn't interested, and not spiral into needing to prove himself somewhere else to balance it out. He can just let the moment be uncomfortable and move on, because his sense of self doesn't rise and fall with every interaction he has with a woman.

This takes actual practice. The first few times a man catches himself craving that hit of approval and chooses not to chase it, it feels bad. It feels like giving something up. Over time, though, something changes. The craving gets quieter. He starts noticing how much energy he used to spend performing for rooms full of people whose opinion of him never actually mattered.

What Changes When a Man Stops Needing It

The strange payoff here is that once a man stops needing approval from every woman around him, he usually becomes more attractive, not less. Not because women are drawn to indifference, but because they can feel the difference between a man who's present with them because he wants to be, and a man who's present because he needs something from them. The second kind of presence always has a slight edge of desperation to it, even when it's dressed up as charm.

A man who has done this work can flirt without needing it to go anywhere. He can compliment a woman without needing her to like him back a certain amount. He can be fully devoted to his partner without a quiet itch to be noticed by someone else too. That kind of settledness is rare, and it reads as strength because it is strength. It's just a quieter, less flashy kind than what usually gets celebrated.

The Point of All This

None of this is about becoming a man who doesn't care what anyone thinks of him. That's not discipline, that's just a different kind of performance, usually one built to protect an ego that's just as fragile as the approval seeker's. Real discipline here means a man cares, genuinely, about the people in his life, including the women in his life, without needing their approval to function.

Kwadwo never really figured this out, at least not while I knew him. He kept chasing that feeling for years, burning through relationships with women who eventually got tired of competing with a room full of strangers for his attention. It wasn't dramatic. It was just slow erosion, one small moment of needing to be noticed at a time, until the people who actually loved him stopped feeling like enough reason for him to stop.

The men who do figure it out usually describe the same thing on the other side of it: relief. Relief that they don't have to perform anymore. Relief that they can walk into a room and just exist instead of scanning for validation. And relief, more than anything, that the women in their lives finally get a version of them that isn't split between being present and secretly auditioning for someone else's attention the whole time.