“Nice guy” being a guy that is romantically and sexually interested in a woman, but she isn’t in him and makes that clear. Rather than moving on with his life he clings to her claiming to just be a friend, but he is secretly hoping he can wear her down and get her to eventually love him.
I see jokes all the time about some of these guys being so persistent they will stay around even when the woman they desire is currently in a relationship, just waiting for her to break up so they have an opening! Or giving money or gifts to her or the couple, even being in their lives.
Like if she called her NG and asked him to pick up lube and Magnum XXXXL condoms for her he would jump at the chance, hey once she sees how prompt I am in delivering it she will see she belongs with me!
:eek:Ok besides how incredibly creepy and skeevy the whole thing is, this can’t be real right? No one no matter how desperate for friends/money would tolerate such a stalker, hell who would tolerate this on the other side of the relationship?
I’d be terrified to wake up with the NG pointing a shotgun at us and howling about how he is worthy before pulling the trigger.
Anyone seen a situation like this in real life, or is this just a cultural meme?
Your example is a little extreme, but you can find Nice Guys on the Straight Dope fairly often. I knew a few guys like that in high school and far fewer in college. I haven’t personally met any since.
If you think about it, communicating your romantic interest clearly and moving on when it’s not reciprocated is something people normally develop fairly quickly, but not necessarily immediately. It makes sense that a 15 year old boy might lust after his female friend, but hopefully not be still doing that to women when he’s 25.
I don’t think the meme is that they get the girls. It’s a Charles Bukowski character making up a sledgehammer loop why it doesn’t fall into his lap. She is stupid, she likes jerks. I’m sooooo nice so I’m alone.
There are threads from these guys on straight dope pretty often. The 28 year old virgin who professes his total lack of effort or appeal in the same appeal about the mean girls who don’t drop their panties because he DESERVES it. Rather than acknowledge that women are humans… Much like opining the free will of mail order brides on straight dope. Someone did that on here yesterday. But they were bought! How dare they exist unto themselves. People and the world don’t work as memes. No one has a guaranteed shot and those who work at it don’t always make it in relationships. There is no thing that says “nice guys” have a right. They could try and get something out of life by learning about real people, though, and themselves.
I have run across quite a few characters like this in my life. They give me the creeps with the nice guy routine. Girls will tell me stories about guys they use to buy cars, dope clothes etc so they can go out with other guys and never have sex with the idiot. I see nothing nice about these guys.
As said above I make some exceptions for youth and inexperience and even old age and inexperience but once burned a guy should know.
They’re real, and they’ve attached themselves to me. The very worst one ended up trying to jump me in my own apartment. Happily, I was able to physically throw him out before things went very far.
In the past 30 years, it’s happened to me quite a few times, ranging from really sad endings (nice guy I cut ties with before it got weird!) to just downright weird and yes, a little scary. The most weird ones were while I was bartending, which shouldn’t come as a big surprise.
One of my customers would tell anyone that would listen to him that he was in love with me. He eventually found a woman willing to put up with him when he was drunk, brought her to the bar, and introduced her to me, telling her that she was his #2 girl, he was in love with me. For at least an hour, he told her all the wonderful things about me. I reassured her that I was NOT interested, and she was more than welcome to him. She was willing to accept all this. :eek:
They dated about 3 weeks.
The only resemblance she had to me was that she had long brown hair, which he convinced her to always wear loose. (I would put mine in a ponytail upon occasion, and he hated it. He didn’t tell her why he liked her hair down.) Finally, the day came that she didn’t wear her contacts, and that was the beginning of the end. He went crazy, telling her how much he liked her in glasses, she should always wear glasses, etc., etc. Took her upstairs to have sex, and would not let her take off her glasses!! And then…then, he told her she was beautiful in glasses, it made her look more like Why Child!! That was the last straw for her. She broke up with him, then came into the bar to yell at me!! :mad:
Oh, yeah. Not that I would have ever called one of my friends who was sticking around hoping for a relationship to pick up condoms for me, but I certainly had a few in my life who were eager to be around me.
The strangest thing is that many of these guys never asked me out - they hung around…waiting for, I don’t know - me to wake up and jump them. They weren’t trying to wear me down (then again, I was friends with my husband for eleven years before I made the first move, so maybe it wasn’t quite such a bad idea). (And, I didn’t put up with the guys who asked me out, wanted to stay my friend, then KEPT asking me out - those guys - they aren’t nice, they are jerks). Some of them dated my friends. It was years before I knew they were interested in me but thought I’d say no (and for most of them, I would have said no).
Ugh, yes. About six months after my divorce, I was in the break room at work, eating lunch and talking on the phone with my sister. I always found the most isolated table to eat at, because lunch time was MY time - the rest of the day I was busy managing my team, and I needed that time to read and recharge. But there was this one guy (who was on my team! I was his boss!) who’s lunch was often scheduled near mine. He always, always managed to find a seat close to me.
So, I thought I was being politely quiet while talking to my sister, but apparently I was loud enough for this guy to overhear. I joked with her that I needed a date and I was lonely and blah, blah… normal stuff. As soon as I hang up, he starts telling me about how great he is, and offering to take me out. I turn him down, and he responds with, “But I’ve been so NICE to you!”
I immediately went up to my supervisor’s office and told him that this employee needed to be off my team, but it took me awhile to stop thinking about how WEIRD it was. He was absolutely indignant that I wouldn’t go out with him, solely on the basis of the fact that he’d been nice. I’m not the first to say it, but nice isn’t a selling point, it’s a starting point.
These guys also think by being friends with the woman, they can eventually win them over. This really sucks because the friendship ends up being really insincere. The woman initially thinks they are platonic friends, then discovers the guy only stuck around because he wanted to get between the sheets.
Many nice guys are so shy the woman has no idea he is interested in her. The guys who proactively pursue women, occasionally get rejected then move on are seen as “assholes”. Nice guys have extremely warped ideas about relationships and romance.
You seem to be overlooking a huge chunk of the “Nice Guy” population. Many “extreme nice guys” do “get the (a?) girl” and are involved in doomed romantic relationships. I would think the unattached orbiter would be a minority subset of the nice guy population.
And we girls get accused of being the bad guy because we won’t automatically let them sleep with us! We thought you were our friend and instead you were just trying to get into our pants!
This meme is so insidious girls end up feeling bad. It took me a while to realize just how self centered the very concept of the friend zone is. Yes, I’m sorry if someone is in the friendzone. Sorry I have a friendship with a manipulative, self centered snot who thinks of girls as vagina dispensers instead of actual friends! Take yourself and your damn trilby and get on out of here!
Bolding mine, and this has been my experience. I’m old enough to recognise the signs early on now, but it can quickly become a very dishonest and uncomfortable relationship if not nipped in the bud. Also creepy.
Shy or reticent men who play the “nice guy” card and complain about women blowing them off instead of simply owning up to being shy and reticent and being honest are in my experience resentful towards women and don’t actually LIKE them. They can’t figure out how to be authentic, so they go for pity instead. Which puts the entire responsibility for the relationship on the woman. And also in my experience, guys who do this always end up showing themselves as morphing from fear of women and personal insecurity into disliking women. And you can’t have a healthy relationship with a man who is afraid, threatened and resentful towards women. That’s impossible. (Not to mention really unattractive.)
About the only thing as dumb as self-professed nice guys who believe they’re alone because they’re just too nice, are women who are irresistibly attracted to sleazebags and psychopaths and then complain when they are serially abused by same.
Honestly, one of the things I’ve always found so weird about the “nice guys” who complain about the “heartless bitches” who only go out with “assholes” who don’t “treat them right” is that they don’t seem to realize that plenty of women, particularly young girls in high school and college, make similar complaints.
I remember seeing some girls who’d relentless pursue their crushes and all but parade after them holding aloft signs that said “Be my boyfriend goddamit!” and complain about why they don’t recognize that “you belong with me”. And yeah, I’d hear some of them complain about why their crushes were with some girl who was clearly “a bitch” who “didn’t appreciate them”.
I’m reminded of that Taylor Swift song or the trailer for the first season of Laguna Beach(where some girl is whining about some guy not being with her but with this girl she hates).
Every time I hear someone complain “why do girls always go out with jerks” or “why do guys only go out with bitches” I want to say, “well, first people are stupid, second, you’re a little close to the situation, and third, well, one of the great truths in life is that confidence is sexy and assholes generally don’t lack for confidence.”
Sadly, most women by the time they get to the age of 25 have gotten over this, while, I guess clearly some men don’t.
