What Actually Makes a Good Man, Part I: Integrity
A good man is not a ‘high-value’ man. For everyone has value. Not everyone has integrity. It is not what you say, it is whether what you say and what you do are the same thing.
There I was, sitting across from a beautiful woman, watching her desperately fight for and cling to a man who had told me, ten days earlier, that she was not his girlfriend, moreover because of sexual promiscuity, definitely not his future wife.
The begging, the hugging, the crying, the mixed scent of cortisol and pure desperation hung in the air like a humid cloud. It was like witnessing a man thrown overboard attempting to hoist himself onto a tiny inflatable liferaft… that was never going to save him. I found it hard to not feel sympathy when witnessing such a scene, a woman drowning.
Oh, Bali. How you love to deliver the drama directly to a writer's doorstep, fresh, still steaming, precisely when she needs something to write about. I did not go looking for this one. In fact, just fifteen minutes prior to the current unfolding scene, I was putting off starting to write my Good Man essay. This walked across a restaurant in a pair of sandals and sat down at my table before I had ordered.
A man will tell you exactly who he is. The trick is that he tells you twice, once with his mouth and once with his actions, and only one of them is telling the truth.
Let me back up, because you need the shape of it, and because there is a reason I am going to call this man Peter for the purposes of this story (and being a writer on a tiny Indian Ocean island).
I. THE MAN I WILL CALL PETER
In the Gospels, Peter loved Jesus, swore he would never abandon him, and then, in a courtyard full of strangers on the worst night of his life, was approached by a woman who looked at him and named the truth. You were with him. And Peter, frightened, said the words that have echoed for two thousand years. Woman, I do not know him.¹ He said it three times before the rooster crowed.
Peter was not evil. Peter was afraid. And in the fear, his mouth betrayed what his heart already knew.
The man I am about to describe denied knowing what we were, after flirting with me on and off for two years, in a restaurant full of strangers, when a woman stood up and named the truth. So I am going to call him Peter, and I am telling you that I am doing it on purpose, and I am telling you why. Because a human should say what she or he means, and I intend to model that on the page even while I describe a man who could not.
Here is what you need to know about Peter. He has been orbiting me for two years. We went on one date or two long ago, he did not follow through, and I filed it under bygones. Recently he helped me through a genuine emergency, a business mess that could have cost me dearly, and competence is its own kind of attractive, so I will admit the needle moved. At a friend's party we took a Polaroid, and Peter exclaimed: "What a cute couple, don't you think they'd make a cute couple?"Here we go again, I thought.
And the flirtation was not subtle. Over lunch last week, when he mentioned he wanted children, I opened the negotiation the way I open everything, directly. Are our lawyers going to talk, or are you going to do this the old-fashioned way and seduce me? His reply: If I haven't seduced you by now, I probably can't. But I'm going to try. I sent him the Yoda line, because it is the truest thing anyone ever said about effort. There is no try. There is only do.
Hold that in your mind. His words pointed in one direction. His behavior pointed in the same direction. Couple, courtship, children, I'm going to try. Remember it, because in about an hour it is going to collide with something like the Titanic collided with that iceberg. Catastrophically.
II. THE ROOSTER CROWED AT LUNCH
Peter offered to pick me up for lunch. Lovely. He collected me and we drove to a restaurant, and before we had even sat down, a woman crossed the room toward him, her face already coming apart.
What are you doing here. You lied to me.
She had caught him. He had told her he was going to meet guy friends at a restaurant in Perenenan at eleven thirty. Instead he was walking into a restaurant in Canggu with me at precisely eleven thirty five. And she knew, the way women always know, that eleven thirty with the guys had a name and the name was sitting right there ordering a drink.
I am going to call her Nadia, and I am going to tell you almost nothing else about her, not her real name and not her country, only that she is a Slavic woman far from home. She is not the villain (nor even the victim) of this story. She does not deserve to be identifiable in it. She deserves, if anything, a better seat than the one she took, which was the empty chair at our table, into which she lowered herself, in tears, in public, while the surrounding tables discovered that bad reality tv drama had a free viewing today.
I ordered a kaffir lime tea. I had been promised lunch. I could see, with the clarity of a woman watching a situation reveal its true dimensions, that lunch was now a distant and theoretical thing.
And then it all came out.
Nadia was fighting, out loud, for a relationship Peter kept saying was not a relationship. She believed that next week she’d be flying to London to help care for his sick mother. They had been chatting just last night. And then, because a scene like this always has a second act, another name surfaced, a woman in a Nordic country, and Peter said the same thing about her that he had said about Nadia. Not my girlfriend. A situationship. According to Nadia, he had a portfolio of women, and to each of them, apparently, he was technically unclaimed.
But watch what Nadia did, because this is the hinge of everything I want to tell you. She did not ask him what was true. She told him what he felt. You're being defensive. You're retracting. Stop trying to pull away. He said, I feel attacked. She said, I'm not attacking you, while she was attacking him. She had decided she knew the contents of his mind better than he did, and she was going to argue with the version of him in her head while the real one sat there insisting he was someone else.
And then, the two of them, deadlocked, turned and looked at me. Well. What do you think?
Reader, I had come for lunch. But apparently, circumstances dictated that I had become the de facto oracle.
III. WHAT THE ORACLE SAID
So I told them. I will give it to you the way I gave it to them, because it turns out this was the whole essay arriving through my own mouth before I had finished writing it.
To Nadia I said: you have to love yourself first. It is a beautiful thing to fight for a relationship. But someone has to be fighting on the other side of it with you, taking turns holding the rope. A woman hauling on a rope that is tied to nothing is not in a relationship. She is doing cardio. And, I said, you are pathologizing this man. You are telling him how he feels instead of asking him and then listening to the answer. That is not love. That is a monologue with a hostage.
To Peter I said the sentence that is the spine of this entire piece. What you say and what you do have to be in alignment. That is integrity.
And to both of them I said the thing that keeps this from being cruel, because I meant it then and I mean it now: this does not make either of you a bad person. We are all good and bad. We are all, sometimes, out of alignment. I was not there to condemn. I was there, allegedly, for a sandwich.
Peter, for his part, kept reaching for me as the contrast. Amanda is a safe space. “Do not,” peeped a little voice inside my head, “drag me into the middle of this.” I am not the exhibit for your defense. I am hungry.
After an hour of serving as the unpaid, un-fed therapist to a man and the woman he would not claim, I told Peter I would be sending a bill for the session, and I left. I want to be honest about what I felt walking out, because it took me until I was journaling 20 minutes post exit to find it underneath the spectacle.
I did not feel considered.
Peter and I had an arrangement, a commitment, a timeslot on the calendar. At the very beginning, he could have said, gently, Nadia, I promise to talk with you, truly, but not now, I made a commitment to Amanda. He did not. He let her sit down and turn our lunch into a tribunal (where she was judge, jury, and executioner) because he could not bear to make her, a woman he had already told he didn’t want to be with, uncomfortable, and he was willing to pay for that comfort with mine.
File that too. We are coming back to it.
IV. THE WORD EVERYONE IS GROPING FOR
I shall now state the thing this whole scene points toward.
There is a language that has taken over the way we talk about people, and I have come to hate it. High-value man. High-value woman. Low-value man. Low-value woman. It is everywhere, and it is rot.
I do not believe in it, and I shall be precise about why. Not because value does not exist, but because every human being has it, intrinsically, without exception and without audition. You do not earn your way into being worth something. You were born worth something. The phrase low-value human is a status game wearing the robes of a moral judgment, and it should be treated with the suspicion any wolf in vestments deserves.
Pause, because I am going to address the people who traffic in it. To the relationship coaches and the dating-content creators and the men with mics and ring lights explaining the hierarchy of human worth to a camera: stop. You are teaching a generation to price one another like livestock and calling it empowerment. You are handing frightened young people a scale and telling them their job is to weigh souls. Every human has dignity, and it is not yours to grade. And here is the part that should sting, because you are close to something real and you keep missing it by an inch: there is a better word for the thing you are circling, and it costs you nothing to use the accurate one.
The word is integrity.
And integrity does not mean what most people think it means. It is not merely honesty, in the narrow sense of not telling lies. It is alignment. It is the state in which the (wo)man you are in your words is the same (wo)man you are in your actions. The root of the word is the Latin integer: whole, entire, undivided, one thing all the way through. A person of integrity is not two men. He does not have a mouth that says one thing and a life that does another.
Peter was two men. The man in his text messages was courting me. The man in that restaurant had a potential portfolio of women he had each individually strung along, all them hoping that one day it would work out with him and him perhaps believing that he’d never have to face rejection if there was always a “backup.” Same man. Two truths. And only one of them, as I told you at the very beginning, was telling the truth.
Now, the distinction that matters more than anything else in this essay, the one that keeps me from simply throwing stones. Low-integrity is not the same thing as being a bad person. Everyone falls out of alignment. You will say you will call and then not call. You will mean to be brave and be a coward for an afternoon. Being out of integrity in a moment is simply being human. The problem is not the slip. The problem is living in the gap, and then hiding behind your words to escape the consequences of your actions. Fault for the stumble. Responsibility for the pattern. Hold both, the way I keep asking you to hold both, because adulthood is mostly the ability to hold two true things without dropping either.
Here is where it stops being my opinion and starts being documented. A Cornell researcher named Tony Simons gave this exact thing an academic name: behavioral integrity, the perceived alignment between a person's words and their deeds. His work shows it is one of the deepest predictors of whether anyone will ever trust you.² But the finding that stopped me cold is this one. Simons found that the more a person's actions drift out of line with their words, the less aware of the gap that person becomes, because the mind quietly activates its own internal public-relations department to keep the inconsistency out of view.² This is not new. Festinger called the underlying engine cognitive dissonance more than sixty years ago: the mind cannot bear holding a belief and a contradicting action at the same time, so it edits one of them, and it is almost always the one that lets you keep feeling good about yourself.³
Go back and read that last paragraph twice, because it is the whole tragedy of the mediocre man. Peter is not lying to you when he says he is a good guy. He is lying to himself, and he has lost the ability to hear the lie in the statement. His behavior is telling the truth he can no longer afford to know.
There is even a name for the specific trick where believing you are one of the good ones licenses you to behave badly. Psychologists call it moral licensing, and the original studies found that people who first got to prove they were not prejudiced then felt freer to act in ways that were.⁴ I will be honest with you, because I refuse to sell you a fact I have not checked: this particular finding has had a rocky time in replication, and a large recent study failed to reproduce the classic result, so treat it as a compelling idea under active debate rather than settled law.⁴ But you have felt it, haven't you? The man most loudly certain of his own goodness and righteousness is so often the one quietly hemorrhaging it. The certificate becomes the permission.
V. THE MAN WHO THINKS HONESTY IS A HALL PASS
Now let me describe a man who is not a social bomb-diffuser attempting to avoid a scene and set boundaries in a restaurant in the middle of the day while his ex-girlfriend keeps crying and hugging him, because I do not want you thinking this is only about a six-foot-something charmer with a portfolio. This one is quieter, morecommon, and he believes, sincerely, that he is behaving well.
He says it up front, on the second date, with the grave honesty of a man doing something noble. I don't want anything serious. I'm not looking for a relationship. And having said it, he exhales, because he believes he has just discharged every obligation he will ever owe her. He said the honest thing. He is one of the good ones. A good guy, who doesn’t lie.
Then he behaves like a boyfriend.
He takes her to breakfast the morning after. He texts good morning and good night. He listens to her problems. He introduces her to his friends, keeps a toothbrush at hers, folds her into his weekends, receives her care, occupies the warm center of a relationship in every way but the one he disclaimed. His actions build a house. His words rented her a tent.
And here is the sleight of hand, named plainly, because someone has to. He believes one sentence in week one is a lifetime indemnity against everything his behavior does in week ten.I told her at the start. As though a disclaimer, spoken once, absolves a man of the confusion he generates every day thereafter with his conduct. He gets the entire warmth of partnership and the entire freedom of no commitment, and she gets whiplash, and self-doubt, a glimmer of impossible hope, and the special madness of being told that what she sees with her eyes is not happening.
He calls this honesty. It is the precise opposite. He took the words I don't want anything serious and used them not as a truth to live by but as a shield to hide behind, so that his actions never have to answer for themselves. His words are not describing his life. They are excusing it.
The integrity move is not complicated, and every man reading this already knows what it is. If your words say one thing and your behavior says another, you do not get to point at the words. You bring one into alignment with the other. Either stop behaving like her partner, or admit that you have become one. What you may not do, what is beneath the man you are capable of being, is keep both and call it integrity, or worse, “being a nice guy.”
Random aside: To be honest with you, I feel literally shocked as I write this because I can’t believe that no one taught these men or women to do what they say they are going to do and to only be friends with or date people who follow through with action. Perhaps it is my Texas upbringing, but this is parenting children to be good humans 101.
VI. A GOOD MAN GUARDS WHAT IS HIS
There is another half of this, and it is the half that turns integrity from a private virtue into a visible one. It is the keeping of the commitments you have already made, out loud, with your body and your loyalty, especially when it costs you something in the moment to do it.
Picture the most ordinary scene. A man is out with his woman, and a stranger puts her hand on his arm and asks him to dance. The low-integrity move, and it is so common we have stopped noticing it, is to be nice. To soften it. To worry, in that half-second, about the stranger's feelings first. To offer a gentle, apologetic sorry, I have a girlfriend, as though his own commitment were a misfortune he was regretfully reporting.
The internet has been chewing on this exact moment for a while now, on the difference between two tiny sentences, and I think it landed on something true. Sorry, I have a girlfriend versus No, I have a girlfriend. The word sorry frames his own devotion as a regret, an inconvenience, a thing he wishes were otherwise. But there is nothing to be sorry for. He is not declining her out of tragedy. He is choosing his woman, gladly, and the honest word for that is not an apology. "No" is a man standing on his commitment. "Sorry" is a man apologizing for having one (and who perhaps needs the ego boost of being desired by multiple women). He removes the hand, he says no, and he turns back to the woman he came with, and he does not spend a single further calorie on the comfort of the stranger. His commitment to doing what he said he was going to do comes first. His partner comes first. That is the entire sentence.
Now, what the science says, because it makes this less obvious than it looks and therefore more to a man's credit when he gets it right. Researchers ran four studies on what men do when their masculinity is threatened, and found that men responded by pulling away from their partners, reporting less closeness, less commitment, less interdependence, in an attempt to shore up the threatened identity.⁵ Worse, they found that men who described their relationships in interdependent language, the language of we and my partner and us, were rated by strangers as less masculine.⁵ So there is a real, measured gravitational pull on a certain kind of man to distance himself from the woman he loves the instant claiming her feels like it might cost him status in the room.
Which means the man who plants his feet and claims her anyway, warmly, publicly, without hesitation, is not merely being decent. He is overriding a documented instinct, on purpose, because she matters more to him than the opinion of a stranger. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.
And it is not only physical. Protection is emotional, and it is domestic, and it is often aimed at the people a man is most afraid to disappoint. If his family is bashing his wife, it is his job to walk into that room and set them straight, not hers to quietly absorb it and smile through dinner. A man who marries a woman and then leaves her to fight his mother alone has a word-and-deed gap the size of an arctic iceberg. He said she was his family now. His actions fed her to the wolves he was raised by. Standing between your woman and the people you are frightened to cross is not a bonus feature of love. It is the load-bearing wall.
And none of this, to be very clear, is possessiveness or control. It is the difference between a man whose 'you are mine’ is a line he uses, and a man whose ‘you are mine’ means that when the water rises, he puts her in the boat first. The research on this is quietly beautiful: when a partner reliably shows up and protects, the other person's nervous system settles, feels measurably more secure, and the effect is largest for the people who came in most anxious.⁶ She relaxes because you are solid. That is not oppression. That is the job, and almost nobody tells men how deeply they are built to want it.
VII. WHY ALL OF THIS IS A GIFT TO MEN
I know that I opened this article with a dramatic recent story, but you still may not understand what this first article (in a series) is really about.Underneath all the stories and the studies, this is a woman writing to men about how to be better men. And that will be misread by the lazy as a woman asking men to shrink. It is the reverse.
A man divided against himself is exhausted. Maintaining two versions of reality, the one you say and the one you live, takes enormous energy, because the seam between them has to be watched and hidden every waking hour. Wholeness is lighter than division. The man of integrity gets to stop performing. He gets to stop existing in the chaos of his own making and start actually living, taking accountability, facing the exciting challenges of life head on with aligned strength. He gets to be the same man in every room, which is the only way a human being ever actually rests.
And he gets the thing every man says he wants and few understand the price of: trust. To be believed. To be followed. To be admired. To be adored. To be respected. To have a woman who can finally exhale in his presence because she is not running a background process to check whether his words and his actions match. That ease, that dropped guard, that loyalty, is not extracted from a man by a demanding woman. It is the natural yield of a man whose life tells the same story as his mouth. You cannot respect a man you have to keep editing, and that includes when the editor is you, the man.
The ego can stop seeking outside validation from surface level appearances and instead start building an indestructible airtight ship of self-validation. For as the old maritime saying goes, “all the water in the world cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside the ship” and “all the negativity in the world cannot sink a person unless it gets inside the mind.”
VIII. HOW TO CLOSE THE GAP
Diagnosis without a remedy is just anxiety, so voila, here is the practical part. I have written it for the men, though the women reading will recognize every line.
Audit the gap honestly. Not where you mean well. Where your words and your actions actually diverge. Name one out loud. Naming it is the entire first step, and it is the hardest, because your own mind is literally wired to hide it from you.
Retire "I'm one of the good ones" as a defense. The instant you reach for that sentence, you have stopped examining yourself. Good men do not announce it. Their behavior is the announcement.
Say the true thing, then let your actions carry it. If you do not want a relationship, let your conduct match your words and stop collecting the comforts of one. If you do want her, say so, and act like it. Pick a lane and live in it. The cruelty is in the straddle.
Ask the second question. Before you tell yourself you are "not with anyone," ask whether anyone else believes they are with you. If the answer is yes, you are not single. You are unclear. And unclear is a choice you are making at someone else's expense.
Say "no," not "sorry." When a stranger crosses a line your commitment already answered, you owe no apology. Decline like a man who is glad to be taken, not one who regrets it (and secretly needed more outside validation).
Stand between her and the wolves. Your family, your friends, the stranger at the bar. Where your protection goes when it costs you something is the truest map of who you actually value. (Including when you do nothing to protect yourself from discomfort.) Draw the map on purpose.
Forgive the slip. Fix the pattern. Falling out of alignment occasionally is human, and you are allowed to be human. The work is not sainthood. The work is noticing the gap and closing it, and then noticing it again, for the rest of your life. Taking accountability, changing things so it doesn't happen again, and then making amends. That practice, repeated, is what a good man actually is.
IX. WHY I CALLED HIM PETER
Let me bring it back to the courtyard.
Peter denied Jesus three times, out of fear, in front of strangers, when a woman looked at him and spoke the truth. And then the rooster crowed, and he remembered, and here is the part that matters more than the denial: he wept.
Scripture says he went out and wept bitterly.¹ He saw the gap between the man he swore he was and the man he had just been, and it broke him open. And that breaking is the beginning of every good man who has ever become a great one. Peter, the denier, the coward in the courtyard, became the rock. Not despite the night he failed, but because he let it change him.
So understand what I am doing when I give my Peter that name. I am not condemning him. My Peter is not a villain. He is a man whose words and his actions came apart in public, who has perhaps not yet wept, who still believes, sincerely, that he’s just ‘trying to not hurt anyone.’ I am not writing to shame him into the ground. I am writing because the only thing standing between the man he is and the great man he could be is the willingness to look at the gap and take action to fix it.
And I suspect, if you have read this far, that some part of you assumed this essay was about someone else. Most men reading it will. That certainty, that easy confidence that the crowing is for another man, is itself the rooster. Sit with the possibility that it crowed for you. Not because you are a bad man. Because you are, I would bet, a good one who has stopped paying attention, and those are the only men worth writing three thousand words for.
You are not a good man because you say you are.
You are a good man on the day the man in your words and the man in your life finally become the same man.
A dispatch from a restaurant in Bali, written for the men I believe in.
With love, always,
— Amanda
P.S. This is the first in a series on what makes a good man, a bad man, and a great man. Next, I want to talk about the spectrum, because most men picture the world as a vast field of good men and a few distant monsters, and the truth is a gradient, and the sentence "I'm one of the good ones" is the exact sentence that keeps a man from ever finding out where on it he actually stands. If a man you love came to mind while you read this, send it to him. Not as an accusation. As a vote of confidence, because you already know he is the kind who would want to close the gap.
CITATIONS & NOTES
1. The denial of Peter is recorded in all four Gospels: Matthew 26:69-75; Mark 14:66-72; Luke 22:54-62; John 18:15-27. The quoted exchange follows Luke 22:56-57 (NIV): a servant girl says, "This man was with him," and Peter, described as "panic stricken," replies, "Woman, I don't know him." Peter's weeping after the third denial: Luke 22:62; Matthew 26:75.
2. Simons, T. (2002). Behavioral Integrity: The Perceived Alignment Between Managers' Words and Deeds as a Research Focus. Organization Science, 13(1), 18-35. doi:10.1287/orsc.13.1.18.543. Simons defines "behavioral integrity" as the perceived pattern of alignment between a person's words and deeds and identifies it as a critical antecedent to trust and credibility. He further theorizes that sustained word-deed misalignment activates internal impression-management processes that reduce the actor's own awareness of the inconsistency.
3. Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. The foundational account of the mind's intolerance for holding contradictory cognitions and its tendency to resolve the tension by altering one of them.
4. Monin, B. & Miller, D.T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33-43. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.1.33. The original moral-licensing studies. In the interest of intellectual honesty: a 2022 large-scale registered replication (N=932) failed to reproduce the classic moral-credential effect, and meta-analyses (2015-2018) estimate the true effect as substantially smaller than the original papers reported. The concept is presented here as compelling and widely observed, but with genuinely contested empirical support.
5. Lamarche, V.M., Atkinson, C., & Croft, A. (2021). A Cognitive Uncoupling: Masculinity Threats and the Rejection of Relationship Interdependence. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(4), 608-617. doi:10.1177/1948550620961263. Four studies (N total = 806) found that men cognitively distance themselves from their romantic relationships following masculinity threats, reporting less closeness, commitment, and interdependence; and that men who used more interdependent language to describe their relationships were evaluated by others as less masculine and more feminine. Notably, distancing did not actually restore observers' perceptions of the men's masculinity.
6. On perceived partner responsiveness and felt security: research on adult attachment finds that individuals who perceive their partners as reliably responsive display lower partner-specific attachment anxiety and avoidance, with the strongest benefits for those who are otherwise insecure. See, e.g., the perceived-partner-responsiveness and attachment-security literature (Reis, Clark, and colleagues; and studies of responsiveness as a buffer for insecure individuals, N=472 / 236 couples).
