I’ve only encountered women wanting jerks on dating sites and in college (undergraduate years). To put it bluntly, my online dating and college experiences were horrible in terms of finding a relationship. However, I’ve had no problem getting dates in the real world (once I graduated and started developing professionally) and I’m an introverted gamer/anime nerd.
Exactly. One simple reason can be that a guy is just not in a position where he meets women very often at all. The same thing obviously happens to many women also.
And while such people can do stuff like online dating, it’s just not the same as meeting people organically through work or mutual friends say.
Your choice of words still suggest to me a degree of scorn. That you still believe that guys who can’t get dates must, just must, be bad people and deserve bad things to happen to them.
Well, again, all I can say is that I know many, dozens, of guys that don’t have any detectable malice or manipulativeness in them, who aren’t bitter and don’t blame others for their problems, who are considerate, and are confident in other situations (e.g. public speaking), but just lack confidence in dating.
I shouldn’t need to say it, but believe me, they exist.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Re: what to call a guy who is actually nice. Well, nice. Or you can call him a good person/dude.
By now, as we all should know by now, the term Nice Guy has been so corrupted that I automatically assume anyone who describes himself that way is a pathetic, whiny little douche. In fact, 100% of the men I’ve known who whine about women not dating them because they apparently don’t like nice guys, and they’re a nice guy, and bla bla bla, have been precisely the kind of douche canoe I’d sooner marry my first cousin than date. I have never, EVER, ever (ever!) met a Nice Guy who gave the Nice Guy rant who was the kind of person who I ever thought was nice or interesting. Ever. And I’ve heard the rant a lot.
I don’t. Ten sexual partners is quite a lot for the age group we’re talking about. I can see women being put off (or intimidated) by that. I can also imagine them thinking, “and I know this how? Did he say, ‘Hi, I’m Mike, I like to have fun and I’ve had ten sexual partners?’”
I get that. The male equivalent of me would never get laid. I don’t initiate things much. That annoys even men, and so I try to do it a little more, but as a woman it mostly works out okay for me. Yeah, in general I think jerks give less of a fuck so they have no problem approaching women. I have sympathy for genuinely nice men who are just shy. That’s the type of man I would be.
What about my words suggests a degree of scorn? Serious question.
But no, I don’t mean that. If anything, I have scorn for the type of men I find attractive. I know I always use my brother-in-law as an example, but that’s because I know him well and he’s my age. He’s so nice, so smart, and so good to talk to. I would give quite a few things to be interested in a man like that. To my knowledge, he and his nice friends have always done okay with women. Do they have women begging them for their attention like my nemesis does? No. But I don’t think a nice man even wants that.
Nice Guy syndrome is a cluster of related attributes, not a single definition. At the core, they all place the blame for romantic failure on women. You might be a nice guy if:
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You just want to date a nice girl, and you don’t see what’s so hard about that. I mean, not a chubby girl, or a divorcee, or a girl with kids, or someone a year or two older than you, or someone with some kind of trauma in their past, or a girl on the low end of the attractiveness scale. Just a regular girl, like you might see in a romantic comedy (in other words, young, attractive, effortlessly successful and no hint of the complications that being a grown up brings…bonus points if you are none of these things yourself)
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You think that women just want to date jerks. A more nuanced version is that women disproportionately value confidence and extraversion, and all those shy self-conscious guys are unfortunately screwed. The issue here is that A. Women are completely and totally entitled to their preferences, and having preferences is not unfair or horrible and B: Being good with people makes you an objectively better person to date. Women are people, so yeah, it helps to be good with them.
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You are sympathetic to the idea that American women have spoiled themselves with choice, and you don’t understand why they have to be so complicated and picky. You think you just want to start a nice family and find a nice girl to be good to, and you “get” the argument that it’s better to look in Russia or Asia where women know how to be women and are grateful to have a simple, quiet life with a provider (note to those actually trying this: YMMV)
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When you are attracted to a woman, you prioritize your friendship and try to always be available. You are there to be a shoulder to cry on, a late night friend to call, and a reliable partner when her real friends are busy. This may go on for years. You do not understand why this does not lead to her realizing why she should be in love with you (Hint: Attraction is not earned. It’s there or it isn’t.)
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If you are really attracted to a woman, you freeze up and don’t know what to do. What do you talk about? What do women do? When you do not hit it off, you attribute the failure to not having followed the arcane rules of female attraction. You use words like “friend zone.” You fail to realize that women, even hot women, are just people and appreciate being treated like people rather than alien species. There is no secret procedure for capturing a woman’s attention, other than becoming more attractive somehow (and even that may not work for any given women).
Nice Guys have no balls.
Honestly, if somebody asked me to “describe myself” or “what kind of person are you?” I’d be kind of stymied. My usual fallback (assuming there’s not some kind of obvious color to the question like in a job interview) is just “I’m… uh… a person?” I don’t think I’m exceptionally boring. I do have funny or interesting stories and I’m interested in a number of things. Unfortunately, I usually need some kind of impetus to be able to produce it, can’t do it on command.
Well, that or I just run with how ridiculous a question I find it and describe myself as a demigod or something and generally go all Hugh Gallagher on them.
A few of my male acquaintances from high school seem to have turned into Nice Guys, and it sucks. I see them on Facebook complaining about this crap all the time and I find it repugnant. When one of them moved to a nearby city and came by to visit me and hang out, I went to a bar with him without my boyfriend present. I thought we had a good time catching up, but he wrote me a long and boring email about how I had always kept him in the “Friend Zone” and I was toying with his emotions. Lame.
I don’t go for “bad boys”. I go for men who I find fun or attractive or have the same interests as me, who are also good people. Some of them might be a little rough around the edges, drink too much or have a criminal record, but if the dude isn’t treating me right, I drop him like a hot potato. I am not a “nice girl” in a superficial sense, so why would I want to date a “nice guy”? It may look like my fiance is an asshole, because he’s weird-looking, excessively confident and a little abrasive, but he treats me like a queen.
End of rant, sorry.
It’s just because you said men that are “annoying (or whatever his flaw)” and are “bitter” and I thought you were about to get vitriolic as several others here have.
I wasn’t trying to put words into your mouth, and it doesn’t look like we have any disagreement here.
OK, and if anyone here is claiming that women want jerks, let me dissociate myself from them.
I think that there are certain confident behaviours that most women find attractive or are even prerequisites to consider a guy a possible boyfriend.
And some confident behaviours have a weak correlation with jerkish qualities. But that’s as far as I go with that.
For genuine nice guys of course many have no dating problems at all. And for those that do struggle, it’s for reasons other than them being nice.
Nice guys finish last. Not necessarily sexually.
Yep.
I would add that I have adopted the use of “kind” to describe nice guys who are actually nice. They perform little kindnesses without expectation of reciprocation. That’s nice. But having men try to do stuff for me that I could otherwise do for myself, with the expectation that sex is a commodity and I will repay this niceness by doling out some sex? That is not nice, nor is it kind.