Now, that WAS funny, but I can’t pretend any of the women I pursued ever did this to me. As I said, the women who “friend zoned” me were genuinely wonderful people. If I eventually broke off all contact with them, it wasn’t because THEY did anything wrong.
To their credit, they never led me on, and never did anything to get my hopes up. I got my hopes up on my own. I probably COULD be “just friends” with them now, because I’m long married and long past any ulterior motives. But at the time, I had to make a decision: is the genuine enjoyment I get from this woman’s company worth the pain of being reminded constantly that my dream will NEVER come true?
If the answer is “no,” it’s time to move on. Stop torturing yourself and stop annoying her.
As someone whose best friend is a woman, and has been since high school - some folks look at us, and must be thinking that we are like unto that Onion article.
We aren’t, at least, I don’t think so. To my mind the key difference is this - I really do enjoy her company more than anyone’s except my wife, and she has helped me out as much as I’ve helped her, through some tough times.
You know the old saying “friends help you move - real friends help you move bodies”. I’ve never actually put this to the test, but of all the people I’ve known, I think only two who I’d be willing to try it on - three, including my wife - and she is one.
One thing these “Nice Guys” though seem to forget is that women face rejection too. It’s almost as if they think women can get whoever they want, whenever they want. And that’s a load of bullshit.
Even cute women, and for many of the same reasons.
I think I’ve told this story once before, but once I was at a summercamp, and every year there was a dance. One of the years I was there there was this girl who would not leave me alone the entire dance. During one of our dances one of the kids snarked at us and she said something along the lines of “it’s okay, they don’t have a girlfriend”.
Uh… okay crazy lady. I, like, didn’t even know her name (I think it was Melissa, but that’s only because she had a necklace that said “Melissa”, she certainly never introduced herself). She was already being kind of annoying, I couldn’t even go outside for fresh air without her dragging me back inside to dance. Like she was afraid I’d get spirited away by dragons if I left her cone of vision.
The thing is, she was really cute, and other than the weirdness she was pretty nice. If she’d asked me to the dance I probably would have said yes! Hell, we may have even ended up dating! But holy crap if you want to instantly shoot your chances in the foot hover around someone incessantly and then say you’re in a relationship after knowing them for an hour and a half.
Needless to say, I found a great excuse to not sit next to her on the bus ride home. And then she kept calling me after looking me up in the camp phone directory, even after I rather explicitly said “no”.
Yes, indeed. I was pretty far into Nice Guy Land as a teenager, and a I have crazy, manipulative ex who was actually responsible for breaking me out of it. I was so emotionally vulnerable that I ended up in a relationship with her because I didn’t really see anyone else who’d date me. She jerked me around so badly and for so long that when I finally did break it off, all of our friends took my side rather enthusiastically and she got cut off so badly from all of our friends that she had a rough few months afterwards.
Thing is, even having a crazy person as a girlfriend raised my self-esteem enough that I was able to date like a normal person afterwards, and I got past the whiny desperate Nice Guy thing without much fall-out into my later life. It worked out OK. Of course, all of those events took place when I was about 16. There’s a big difference between a whiny teenager who grows out of it and the sad man-child in his twenties or thirties who can’t get past it.
True enough, but also Nice Guy =/= Friend Zone guy.
You don’t have to be whiny or feel entitled to end up in a situation where you’re perpetually this close to being her boyfriend.
But I’m glad that you were able to emerge from your experience positively.
Since for guys attributes like confidence are so important, it’s easy for one bad relationship to cause a change in behaviour and expectation that makes further bad relationships more likely. This is how you can get to a situation where otherwise quite normal guys can be in their 20s and 30s and still spectacularly bad at starting and maintaining relationships.
You’re right that early bad experiences can make it harder to break out of it. Spectacularly bad is exactly how I would describe myself up until about thirty. It can become a vicious cycle.
I mean I never bought the idea that women always want to date bad boys or that you have to be a jerk to attract women. I still very rarely see any women who put up with a guy who is actually jerk to them.
And it kinda perplexes me. I read the same literature and forums that these guys did. I even tried some techniques out and got success. Yet not once did I get this idea that women were inferior or existed for my pleasure. Heck, what I took away was that a “ladies man” is both interested in people as people.
How did they get such a completely different message? I can only think it’s because they weren’t looking beyond their own experience. They didn’t check in with the real world. I actually knew people who were good at this sort of thing–and they were all cool and fun people.
There was just no way Curtis, Ryan, Jordan, Aaron, Eric, Caleb, Dustin, etc were jerks. Heck, Dustin was pretty much the nicest and shiest guy I know. Actually being a jerk clearly was not it.
Oh, absolutely. I have a good male friend who is perpetually sabotaging himself in terms of dating. He falls so hard and so fast and so frequently for different girls that he comes across as desperate, which, of course, he is. It’s a damn shame, because he’s smart, charming, and kind. But he can’t break the cycle, and it’s self-reinforcing, especially in the small academic circles he’s been in for the last seven years or so. Once you get a reputation as Desperate Guy, it’s hard to break.
To my mind the key difference is this - I really do enjoy her company more than anyone’s except my wife, and she has helped me out as much as I’ve helped her, through some tough times.