The People-Pleasing Pattern Destroying Your Relationships
The difference between kindness and erasure, and why one keeps you lonely.
I once watched a client check his phone three times before our session even started. A text popped in from his boyfriend about dinner plans, and it hijacked his attention.
He had to respond. He pulled up the eight restaurants saved in his Apple Notes, the ones his partner liked.
The catch? My client didn’t like any of them.
Sound familiar? Many of us perfect the art of predicting what someone wants before they even say a word.
Even as a therapist, I’m not immune to this. I remember spending about half an hour crafting a WhatsApp message to a friend, worried I might say something wrong. Like I was texting my old English professor, who treated my essays like crime scenes in need of red ink.
As someone who works exclusively with gay men, I see this scene unfold often.
Take a client in his mid-thirties, a banker. On Zoom, he looked puzzled when I asked about his likes and dislikes. He couldn’t answer because he hardly knew what he liked anymore.
The tragedy wasn't that he didn’t know what he liked. It was that he had learnt to rely on his ‘yes’ as a reflex, an echo of years spent agreeing.
When Agreeing Too Much Becomes Absence
Many gay men package people-pleasing as a virtue. Some call it “Emotional intelligence” or being “low-maintenance.”
The truth is that people-pleasing is preemptive self-abandonment. It’s a survival strategy learned to keep the peace and stay agreeable in hostile environments. A trauma-conditioned way to feel safe when being yourself felt risky.
In everyday life, it’s deciding that someone else’s comfort matters more than your existence. It’s the muscle memory developed after years, sometimes decades, spent editing what you say into something more acceptable, less threatening, and smaller.
Why do gay and bi men struggle with putting others ahead of themselves? It’s deeper than personality. From childhood, our minds find ways to help us survive, especially when being ourselves might cost us love.
This is normal; our brain’s primary task is survival. The threat? Rejection, disapproval, shame, and loss of connection.
People-Pleasing Affects Many of Us
The research is bleak. In Western countries, 70-80% of gay and bi men show self-sacrificing behaviors. That’s most of us. If you grew up in a conservative or religious household, the numbers are higher. U.S. and Canadian studies report that 60-75% of gay and bi men show people-pleasing behaviors.
The common theme: these men develop protective patterns due to the stigma and trauma they experience during their upbringing.
To protect ourselves and avoid rejection, disapproval, shame, and loss of connection from being othered, we practiced shape-shifting. We became skilled at adapting to whatever form a situation demands.
Years later, we feel lost because we’ve forgotten who we are.
Maybe you recognize someone like this:
The friend who never declines a group plan, even when you know he secretly dreads it.
The colleague who laughs at offensive jokes.
The man who minimizes his opinions to keep the peace at the dinner table.
A friend who makes concessions in relationships to avoid tension but feels quietly resentful afterward.
They are the partner who edits his stories mid-sentence when he notices someone’s disinterest.
The sibling who agrees to exhausting requests despite knowing it affects their mental health.
The one who stays quiet when something bothers him, fearing backlash or rejection.
Or the partner who suppresses his emotions to avoid conflict.
Maybe it’s you.
These individuals are not being kind. They’re performing erasure, wearing a mask of politeness.
The Intimacy You Believe You’re Creating
The irony of people-pleasing in relationships is that it doesn’t actually foster closeness; it merely creates a facade of harmony while obscuring genuine intimacy.
When every interaction becomes an exercise in anticipating needs, deflecting conflict, and smoothing over differences, the connection that forms is not one of genuine understanding and acceptance, but rather a performance of what the other person wants to see.
Instead of falling for the real you, your partner is enamored with a curated version. One with all the difficult, messy parts edited out. This prevents them from truly understanding and accepting you as you are.
I’ve worked with many men in long-term relationships who have become so adept at people-pleasing that they can’t voice basic preferences or desires. They’ve built their partnerships on a foundation of “I don’t mind” and “whatever works for you,” thinking their flexibility makes them a good partner. But the reality is their partners don’t know them in any deep, meaningful way.
These clients will sit across from me, hollow-eyed, describing a deep loneliness that seems incompatible with their being rarely physically alone. They’re in relationships, yet it feels like they’re shouting into a void. This is because the authentic, vulnerable person with their own needs and boundaries never showed up. Instead, they presented themselves as a diplomatic intermediary, mediating between their true self and the world.
Ultimately, people-pleasing robs relationships of the intimacy they crave. It’s not until we learn to show up as our full, unedited selves that we can truly be seen, known, and loved.
The Hidden Cost
People-pleasing compounds like interest on an unknown debt. It’s not just one accommodation, one white lie, or one preference. It’s thousands of micro-erasures that accumulate until you’re overwhelmed by who you pretended to be.
Like all things emotional, the body keeps tabs on everything. Those mysterious headaches, the jaw that stays clenched even in sleep, or the stomach that knots before social events with supposedly close people. That’s your body remembering what your mind tried to forget.
That exhaustion you feel that no amount of sleep touches? That’s not burnout from being busy. That’s the cost of maintaining a performance with no break.
The insidious part? This pattern works... initially.
People like the agreeable version. You’ll hear people call you “so chilled” and “such a team player.”
Of course. You avoid conflict, maintain peace, and keep everyone comfortable.
Then you realize you’re keeping everyone else comfortable, except yourself. Or, when a friend or therapist tells you that you care more about others’ needs than your own. You realize you’re unsure of your own preferences, desires, or identity without considering others’ expectations.
A client once told me, “I feel like a mirror. I’ll show you whatever you need to see. But if you asked me to describe myself? Nothing.”
I’ve never forgotten his words.
Why Doing Nothing Isn’t An Option
You can’t think your way out of people-pleasing.
I’ve seen too many try: devouring self-help books, drafting boundary lists, promising change.
Then the moment comes, and that old programming tightens around the throat: “Better to disappear than risk rejection.”
People-pleasing is more than a bad habit. It’s a survival strategy your mind adopted to keep you safe.
Your mind remembers when you felt unsafe during a disagreement. When taking up space threatened your self-esteem. When being joyful and colorful made you a target of the school’s bullies.
When you learned that agreeableness reduces conflict and social exclusion, or when your parents rejected non-heterosexuality, and you experienced early attachment disruption and chronic fear of rejection.
Unlearning this requires more than willpower. It demands new relational experiences, where “no” doesn’t end connection, where your desires matter, and where being visible isn’t dangerous.
The Unexpected Shift
Recovering people-pleasers often find the hardest part isn’t learning to say “no,” but discovering what “yes” even feels like. After years of prioritizing others’ needs, your own desires have become background noise.
The work of recovery isn’t just learning to set boundaries. It’s about excavating the buried layers of your authentic self. Finding the preferences you’ve suppressed. Learning that wanting something isn’t wrong, and that disappointing someone doesn’t make you a bad person. Trusting that relationships can withstand friction and even become stronger through it.
It’s small, everyday moments that can feel revolutionary, like ordering first at a restaurant without scanning everyone’s face for approval. Or naming what you want to do on a Saturday without hedging. Disagreeing with your partner about a movie, and realizing the relationship won’t end. Allowing yourself to take up space and exist fully, without fading into the background.
The Permission You’re Waiting For
If you feel uneasy, anxious, or tightness in your chest while reading this, it’s not weakness. It’s your body’s way of communicating something you’ve been too busy to notice.
Remember, people-pleasing isn’t your personality. It’s armor your mind constructed when being yourself felt too risky. When love came with conditions you couldn’t meet unless you disappeared a little.
But here’s what changes everything: You can decide that pleasing others isn’t worth the cost of your needs. That being loved by people who don’t know you is lonelier than being alone. That the relationships worth keeping can handle the complete version, rough edges and all.
Maybe the most radical thing isn’t learning to be nice, but asserting your presence.
Where are you still performing instead of being present? What would it cost you to stop?
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This Substack is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any mental health condition.
Client and personal examples may have been altered to safeguard privacy and maintain confidentiality.
This: Remember, people-pleasing isn’t your personality. It’s armor your mind constructed when being yourself felt too risky. When love came with conditions you couldn’t meet unless you disappeared a little.
And this:Ultimately, people-pleasing robs relationships of the intimacy they crave. It’s not until we learn to show up as our full, unedited selves that we can truly be seen, known, and loved.
This is a great article Gino. Thank you
Gino, you are so on point. 🤦♂️