[KEEPER] What? I don’t know that! Auuuuuuuugh! [/KEEPER]
(With thanks to this place)
You’re just being a dick who, now that he gets to sit at the popular table with all the cool kids, tries to mock his former crowd in an effort to distance himself from them. Your problem is that you still see too much of yourself in these threads.
Well darlin’, you’re perfectly free to stop reading those threads and to stop letting them bother you. Obviously, many of us here find them interesting and are having an ongoing conversation about the subject. Doesn’t matter what the subject is; you can’t just walk up to a group of people and tell them to shut up because you’re tired of hearing what they’re talking about.
When I’m tired of the subject, I’ll stop reading or posting about it. I don’t expect everyone else to spontaneously give it up because I’ve had enough.
My wife is one of those rare women who actually has a genuine affinity for nice guys.
What she’s doing with me I haven’t a clue sometimes. 
Incubus, I tried reading your OP, but well… you’re just too nice.
It isn’t working out and I couldn’t finish reading it. Sorry.
No, but here’s the deal, the guys who are truly just nice and not jerks while not being pathetic doormats are never the guys who will describe themselves as “Nice Guys” and they most certainly will never complain that girls don’t pay attention to nice guys and only go out with jerks. That’s just the situation.
If you’re complaining that girls don’t really dig nice guys, with your evidence being that you’re single and lonely, then chances are, it’s because you’re either a) not really a nice guy, or b) an unassertive wallflower. The true nice guys with a handle on themselves a) aren’t single, or b) don’t blame the women for their singleness.
phouka is my new hero.
First of all – do NOT be dissin’ the eating of raw nuns. If you’re Catholic, that might be the only meat you can eat on Fridays. Besides, I don’t mind that fishy taste…
Second, the blaming women part might be just the tip of the iceberg. From my own experience, the “all women suck” bit constitutes maybe 10% of the Nice Guy’s whining. An enormous amount is given over to self-loathing, self-doubt, and plain old depression. But this is a private self that the public rarely sees. Blaming women is just an outward manifestation of this. So I don’t see it as grounded in misogyny. It’s just a fringe benefit. 
Let me try to explain a prototypical Nice Guy, from the perspective of a former Nice Guy:
Mr. NG loves women. He wants to date them. He wants to fuck them. He wants to bring them flowers. He wants romance. He is constantly bombarded with tales from women who complain about their insensitive jerk boyfriends. “Aha!”, says NG. “Women hate insensitive jerks. And yet they’ll date them. If I could be sensitive and thoughtful, I’ll have a distinct advantage in the dating world.” So he treats women the way he thinks they want to be treated. Inexplicably, they reject him. So he thinks “Maybe I’m not trying hard enough. I’ll try harder.” So he gets overly nice. Women treat him like sewage.
And on and on it goes.
NG hears women complaining that women don’t like guys who just want sex. Women want romance and relationships. So NG tries this tack. He drives even more women away. NG figures that there must be something terribly wrong with himself. Maybe he’s ugly. Maybe he’s too poor. Maybe he has smelly feet. And all the while he’s thinking these terrible things about himself, he sees his asshole brothers scoring like crazy. During a fit of bitter self-loathing, he happens to say “Women only want assholes. They don’t respond to niceness.” Not an unreasonable conclusion, given the perspective of NG. But he says this out loud. BOOM! He’s labeled as a misogynist. Now he’s not only ugly, poor, and smelly, but misunderstood.
News flash to him, he has a deep-seated hatred of women. Funny, he’s been going through hell to find a woman to love. Good thing someone informed him of his true motivation, loathing women. After a while the bitterness takes over. From his perspective, he might as well start hating women. It’s far less painful than loving them. (Although this is a faux hate. Deep down he still really loves women.)
Every now and then he has a glimmer of hope, and puts his bitterness on hold long enough to ask a woman out. He gets his hopes up. He asks her out. She rejects him. (Or alternatively, she goes out with him. He acts extra nice, because he doesn’t want to lose her. He drives her away by doing this.) His self-loathing and bitterness are confirmed in spades. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sometimes for decades.
What NG needs is to learn that dating is a game, and he might be misunderstanding the rules. But nobody will tell him the rules. They just accuse him of hating women or being selfish, when in fact the opposite is true. He remains unhelped.
Wow. Typing that brought up a lot of bad feelings. This was me for well over a decade. It was a New Year’s resolution that got me to further examine the rules and myself, and to question whether things had to be the way they always had been. I did a buttload of self work. I challenged not only my own attitudes, but those of others. I became a dating skeptic. By August, I was “getting some” on a regular basis. One week I had 6 dates, 5 of which ended up in sex, with 4 different women. Like the god I had become, I needed the 7th day for rest.
Fair enough. But in current society, can you blame someone for this?
How about this, then:
Wrong. They are misguided people who could be part of a very healthy relationship if they just had a little knowledge. You seem to mark them as some sort of psychopaths.
While I’m at it, let me address the subject of “learning the rules.” While most Nice Guys may seem to not want to learn or change, most are desperate to learn anything they can. “What do women want?” is still the number one question of our time, more important than “Is there a God?” and “How did it all begin?” Nice Guys thirst for this knowledge, but they soon come to realize that while there are answers out there, there is a metric buttload of misinformation. Not much of it can be trusted.
Wrong. The difference can often be quite fuzzy. If the difference is so obvious to you, perhaps you can make a million bucks by teaching a class or writing a book on the subject.
That’s always death. You’ll never get hyperbole into the sack now. 
Well, I did have a question as to what the Pope could do to make his penis appeal to a more sexually diverse crowd, but those threads helped clear that issue right up. No need to post now. Thanks!
See this is my problem with Nice Guys. They want to date women. Not one particular woman they happen to really like. The Nice Guys I know put women onto a pedestal and seem to see women as this strange other species. Not as real people who may have the different likes and dislikes than other women. So the NGs try the “standard” dating techniques and then can’t figure out why they don’t work…
I can assure you that most NGs have very often been attracted to one particular person. Repeatedly. They soon figure that that strategy isn’t working, and so adopt a more spam-like approach. Most often it doesn’t work, but there is a certain logic to it.
Yeah and you know what - I really don’t wanna hear about it when a loved one dies. So the fuck what? People DIE! Get used to it. There’s nothing special about your grief do us all a favor and don’t consume valuable message board space talking about it. yawwwwwn.
Lost your job? SCREW YOU. I’m falling asleep already.
Just been diagnosed with a serious illness? Go fuck yourself. We’re all going to get sick and die one day so move on already. We’ve got better things to think about like whether it’s ok to order milk in a bar.
:rolleyes:
Exactly. You and tdn both have made some brilliant posts. If people like phouka have decided they already know everything there is to know about Nice Guys, then they are free to not read or post threads on the subject.
For everyone else that wants to participate, well, that’s what the boards are for, aren’t they? If someone new to the board comes in and asks if a duck’s quack echos, do we have to try to chop off his balls and call him duckgynist at that?
And for all you other smartasses: I said sub-Saharran, so I’m obviously talking African, and I had no idea what was in those threads, I was just making up numbers.
**phouka **, I agree completely.
wolf in second hand clothing, you are also correct, however, I do not have a problem with it. The way I see things, is that I don’t believe anybody deserves to suffer being as stubborn, immature and ignorant as much as I have. So why wallow in it? Why complain when you really need to look for solutions instead?
As much as I appreciate the help people on the SDMB gave me, ultimately I had to fix my own problems, fight my own battles. Guys that post those rants want a pity party, they want to put themselves up on a cross and have people reassure them that they are doing nothing wrong. They are not going to listen to the most sound advice because it puts cracks in their own personality and reveals their own flaws. And to see it play out over and over and OVER again gets tiresome and makes me rather jaded.
Frankly I have so much self-loathing about my former self I regret even playing into the misguided notions ‘nice guys’ had. Seeing it happen so frequently makes me a little concerned as well. Is this a problem of my generation? A whole demographic of guys having difficulty interacting with women? Were things this difficult a generation ago? Is it a generational thing? Maybe an American thing (the cultural obsession with ‘self confidence’ and not wanting to be seen as a ‘loser’ or ‘sissy’).
You and the other men in our age group are a generation of men raised primarily by women. Not that this makes you all automatically “sissified,” but it does mean that many of my male peers have never known a good male role model, or seen a good adult relationship.
So what do these men have to go on? Nothing but what they see in movies and TV where the Nice Guy, capitilized, always gets the girl. Nothing but what they hear women saying, “I want a sensitive guy, who brings me flowers and will hold me when I cry.” Seriously, women, stop saying that if you won’t date them when you have them.
Not that women fare any better from this upbringing, but we’ll save that for another thread, k?
I think you’re partially right. NGs want pity, but also in the back of their minds are hoping for some advice that will save them. But the advice they usually get, even when sage, is not what they want to hear. Real change, as I’m sure you know, takes work. Most people are lazy.
This puts NGs in good company with most of the rest of humanity.
Not sure I agree with this. Since I was a typical NG, I think my background is relevant to the topic – and my father was there just as often as my mother was. And I have an older brother, who was quite adept at relationships. The male influence in my house was quite strong.
TV. Yep. Everything I know about life I learned from channel 10. I think you’ve hit on something here.
I’ll leave the whole Nice Guy vs. nice guy debate for those who care. I haven’t noticed a plethora of nice guy threads; I’ve actually seen more posting activity from people bashing nice guys (or Nice Guys). Whatever.
Anyway, I’ve noticed a recurring theme that I think is kind of the crux of the matter:
I think what causes a lot of consternation is the fact that shyness is generally considered an attractive trait in a woman, but often seems to invoke unexplained hostility and disgust in people when a man has that trait. I rarely encounter men who downright loathe shy women to the extent that some women seem to feel about shy men. And I think that’s part of the frustration that some men feel. In this age of sexual enlightenment, they expect there to be less of a double standard. And if a man is shy (oh, the horror), it becomes very difficult for him to become less so, when he has abuse constantly heaped on him.
You don’t need to feel bad about being a certain way, then changing and growing, Incubus. If I recall correctly, you’re in your early twenties, and that’s what our twenties are all about.