Do women ever complain about being "Nice Girls"?

In My Humble Opinion
161

I think we do, but not in the way you think. The Nice Guy typically isn’t anything like Eddie Haskell, because he’s just not that self-aware. He earnestly does think women should be falling all over him, not because he’s such a smooth operator, but because someone who was biased or trying to tell a polite lie told him so, and he was dumb enough to believe her.

It’s like these guys sat through those conversations we all have with our moms where they wax poetic about how brilliant and gorgeous and generally fantabulous we are and how we could have any man/woman/sheep we wanted…but instead thinking, “she’s my mom; she has to think that,” these guys thought, “she’s my mom; she wouldn’t lie to me about this.” Or they sat through the “it’s not you, it’s me, you’re a great guy and any woman would be luck to have you” speech without it ever occurring to them that maybe to some it degree it might have been them, just a little bit around the edges.

A self-aware person, even one who believed Mom and the ex who was letting him down easy at first, would re-evaluate that belief after the first few waves of women who don’t want him. Maybe Mom was a little biased, or just outright wrong, or not seeing something these women are. In short, maybe it’s something about him. The Nice Guy, though–these kinds of thoughts either never enter his head, or they’re quickly banished. If his path is paved with willing pussy, it must be something about all the women out there who don’t see how glorious he truly is.

162

That still doesn’t quite jive with my own experience, nor any Nice Guys I knew. (And for a long while, that pretty much described all of my friends.) I never thought that women should be falling down all around me, at least not past the age of 12 or so. I’m not sure where you’ve found the guys you’re talking about, but I strongly suspect that your experience of them is not accurate. Could it be that that’s the way they just seem to you?

Here’s my take on the thought processes of a Nice Guy (dramatized a bit for effect and entertainment):

I like Becky. She’s real pretty. Mom told me that if I’m really nice to girls, they’ll go out with me.

I asked Becky out and she said no. I probably wasn’t nice enough. I’ll ask again even nicer.

Becky turned me down again. I’ll try pouring on the niceness even harder.

Becky told me to drop dead. I probably wasn’t nice enough.

Alice seems really awesome. I’ll ask her out, but I’ll be ten times as nice as I was with Becky.

(Predictable results ensue. Begin death spiral.)

Janet MIGHT go out with me if I’m super duper nice. I’ll bring a dozen roses to her to try to get her to like me.

(More predictable results ensue.)

Geez, I can’t get anyone to go out with me. I’ll ask Suzie out, even though I don’t like her that much. I’ll bring her a diamond ring so that she knows how serious I am.

(Predictable restraining order ensues.)

OK, that didn’t work. I’ll try announcing to every woman within earshot how incredibly nice, wonderful, and incredibly irresistably NICE I am, and how I’ll kiss as much ass as I need to just to get a date.

(Death spiral reaches warp speed.)

Say, Lola McHottie was out with some real jerk. When she sees how incredibly, disgustingly, doormattingly NICE I am, she’ll leave that jerk.

(Death spiral goes through wormhole.)

Geez, no matter how nice I am, I can’t get a date. There must be some fundamental flaw with me. Maybe I’m basically unlovable. Or maybe women just like jerks.

163

This is what I was trying to say earlier. When you have a good male friend that can’t get a date, people (especially when everyone involved is under 21) don’t say “it’s because you’re boring” or “it’s because you have a funny smell–not a bad smell, but a funny one” or “you make $7 an hour and likely always will”, they say “I think you’re just too nice and women like assholes”. To women in the same place, they say “You’re just so intelligent that you intimidate men”. It’s BS, and most people eventually recognize it as such, but the people that believe it then become bitter and blame the world for rejecting them because of their awesomeness.

164

I think people are really complex, and while what you describe is accurate, the reason that nice guy never breaks out of the pattern is that he never reevaluates that advice his mom gave him.

165

It sounds like you’re describing someone with an excess of self esteem, which isn’t one of the classic symptoms of Nice Guy Syndrome. The Nice Guy conundrum is “I treat women well, why aren’t they strewing rose petals in my path?”[sup]*[/sup] Someone who is too full of himself thinks the women are lucky to bask in his presence regardless of how he treats them. You can’t be a Nice Guy if you’ve been told all your life that niceness is irrelevant.

You can use your metaphors, I’ll use mine.

Sometimes on preview I catch entertaining typos that I almost wish I could leave in. Accidentally typed it as “metahors” at first.

166

This thread, by the way, is kicking my self-esteem down the street like a rusty tin can.

167

I hear you. I tend to overthink things too. So often, we become our own worst enemies.

168

Well, it’s sort an excess of the wrong sort of self-esteem. I mean, “I’m such a nice guy, why don’t women like me, must be something wrong with them” certainly indicates that a guy thinks women should like him, nay, that they are defective for not liking him. And that is absolutely the crux of Nice Guy syndrome, and isn’t exactly an indicator of thinking poorly of yourself, iyswim.

And of course Nice Guys think women should only bask in their presence if treated well. If he wasn’t Nice, he wouldn’t be a Nice Guy; he’d be a Jerk. Besides, you’re forgetting the end of the Mom You’re-so-wonderful speech–keep being nice and smart and gorgeous, and they’ll go nuts over you. Not even a mom would tell you that you’d be drowning in dates even if you were an asshole.

Most Nice Guys do indeed have a lack of the healthy sorts of self-esteem, though, the kind that allows you to say, “Here I am, this is what I think and like and do; if you like that great, and if you don’t that’s okay too.” They think Nice is the only thing they have going for them, but they also think Nice, in great enough quantities, ought to be enough. They’re hurt and confused and often really, really bitter when it turns out not to be enough.

169

What’s more, I think a lot of “Nice Guys” misunderstand what kind of behavior is jerkish. I mean, my old classmate George apparently feared that saying he didn’t like ketchup was offensive. If one day he decided “No more Mr. Nice Guy! The next time someone offers me ketchup, I’m going to refuse WITHOUT APOLOGIZING!” then he might consider that to be acting more jerkish. To pretty much anyone else in the world it would be acting more like a normal adult, though.

It’s funny to think that someone like George might observe a perfectly ordinary interaction between a couple (“I’m going to get some ketchup, do you want some?” “No thanks, I don’t like ketchup with my fries”) and conclude that the woman was dating a jerk who didn’t even have the decency to apologize for not liking ketchup. Maybe that’s where some of the “women only date jerks” stuff comes from.

Not Ellen DeGeneres!

170

I’ve been following this with great interest and am somewhat pleased to note that in four days, it’s become the second-most replied to thread I’ve posted in my just-short-of-ten-years here.

The various thoughtful responses suggest there are four types of women roughly analagous to the “Nice Guy.”

  1. The “men are intimidated by my (character trait)”
  2. The ones who go straight to bed with a man because they think that’s the only way to keep his interest.
  3. The tomboy who guys don’t really think of as a romantic partner.
  4. The “nice girl” (lower case) who has no particular personality at all.

In going back through the thread however, I notice that less than 30% of the responses have actually been about the female side of the “Nice Guy” phenomenon. The vast majority of the rest have gone back to various discussions/bashings of the “Nice Guy”/jerk.

Okay, I yield to the will of the majority. Let me rephrase my original question.

Are men or women more likely to blame their lack of romantic success on the other sex vs. their own faults?

Let the discussion continue.

171

I’m not sure it’s possible to answer that question. If a woman says that the only reason she can’t get a boyfriend is because men are shallow and only want to date women who are thinner or prettier than she is, then is that blaming the opposite sex (men are shallow) or her own faults (not being thin/pretty enough)?

172

Well put. The general consensus on this thread has been that Nice Guys must be the manipulative or egotistical type, but often they’re the ones lacking self-esteem in my experience.
They see pretty, smart women in relationships with sucky guys and think “I behave better than that guy, I should be able to get a date with a girl like that” but that’s a wrong (or simplified) way of looking at it.

The vibe on this thread, like others on dating, seems to be that the only reason that someone might not get a date is if they have some terrible personality issues and/or are extremely unattractive.

I gotta call BS on that. I think it’s possible for someone to be a good person but hopeless at starting relationships.

173

A friend’s ex had the unusual theory that she couldn’t get dates because men preferred fatter women, and it wasn’t fair to women of average body types :confused:

She was extremely obnoxious in many other ways and it was great vindication when my friend dumped her to get with a girl who was literally TWICE as big :smiley:

174

I was scanning the threat one more time and saw this. Not to hijack the thread but I wanted to give you some feedback (if you’re still reading this) because I had a similar problem to you, albeit at ten years younger…though you’re never too old to learn!

What got me to break out of it was a rhetoric I use for myself called ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’. You, like a lot of people are scared of that rejection, of the humiliation you’d face if the other person said ‘no’ or ‘stop it’ etc. You’ll think the other person will see you as a lout or pervert if you mis-time asking someone out or kissing them on a date.

What I’ve learned is that most of this is all in our heads. Have I asked women out who refused? Sure. Have I leaned in to kiss a woman and had them dodge away? :smack: admittedly yes, once. But the majority of the time things went well for me. Try to challenge yourself next time you are wanting to ask a girl out- do the thing you are most afraid of. Once you can take that first step, it will seem so EASY and effortless you’ll gain a lot of confidence, and that will give you even more momentum.

If you are a 29 yo virgin, obviously the things you have tried up until now arent working, and you have more and more incentive to go outside your comfort zone and be creative about asking women out. Its also really crucial to be able to differentiate the ‘jerk’ that women seem attracted to, and acting flat-out rude (which NOBODY is attracted to)

175

That’s good advice Incubus. As you might imagine, this is something I think about constantly and I more or less came to the same conclusion. But there’s a difference between feeling confident here at my computer and being able to get my mojo working with an actual girl.

One of the things that I find the most frustrating is that with exception of dating and sex I’m pretty good with women. I can hold a conversation. I can make them laugh. I can flirt a little bit. I seem to be well liked. It’s just that I think I’m liked because I don’t ever make a move and if I ever did ask out someone that I developed a rapport with I would be violating whatever friendship we had.

There have been so many openings for to ask someone out on a date that I let pass me by because of this bullshit. I’m really getting tired of being like this and I know I’m the only one who can fix it. One thing that psychs me out is the number of times I’ve been interested in someone who I thought was interested me only to found out that they had a boyfriend. There was this one girl that I was close to being in love with that I thought liked me. After three years of pining away for her I found out that she had a boyfriend the entire time I thought she wanted me. Then she broke up with her boyfriend of ten years and started sleeping a twenty year old pothead (she’s thirty). I spent all that time thinking that she wanted me only to find out that I was in the friend zone all along. If I can’t trust my own senses and instincts what can I trust?

176

Why is that “being an asshole”? So what if you are talking to her just to sleep with her?
I think Nice Guys think if they are polite and well mannered good things will come to them. In truth only your mom cares about that shit. For most people in life, if you want something worth having (be it a job, a woman or whatever) you have to bust your ass and compete for it. And quite often that means stepping on some toes.

In any relationship, men hold 50% of the vote…but women hold 100% of the vagina.

177

At some point in the first three years, you have to make your intentions known. You can’t even say you were waiting until she was available. If you thought she didn’t have a boyfriend, why didn’t you ask her out?

(Easier said than done, and not just for having the guts to do it. It’s possible to be so deep in the friend zone that a woman won’t even realize you’re asking her on a date. And being dismissed may be even worse than being rejected. Still, it’s better to take your shot and find out for sure, and sooner rather than later.)

178

Yeah, this.

Funny, too, because they’re always asking us hold their purses.

This, underlining mine.

I could be wrong, but while you’re pining away for one woman, no other woman can compete, right? Other opportunities might come along but you don’t pursue them because you haven’t resolved the situation.

Sooner, not later.

179

Good point. Just glance at the cover of a lad mag and a Cosmo and the underlying (or overt) messages tend to be, ‘How to get her into bed’ and ‘How to be attractive enough to have men want to get you into bed (and how to know when you should actually sleep with them and then, after that, how to make the sex pleasurable while still attending to his needs).’

The problem with this one is that there are quite a few women who genuinely want to go straight to bed, not because they think that’s what guys want, but because they’re horny and want to test out a new partner. They’re usually in college or older and assume times have changed, that in a post-Sex and the City world no guy is going to disqualify a girl for being ‘too easy’ when he was just as willing to have sex on the first date. So when any woman find out that this can, indeed, be the case (along with earning a ‘bad reputation’), it can be a bit disappointing.

180

That’s another problem Nice Guys have. “Oneitis”. They see some girl they think is perfect and totally obsess about her, ignoring all others. They aren’t in love with her. They don’t even really know her. They are in love with their fantasy of her.

What they should be doing is going out and meeting as many women as possible instead of just targeting one unavailable girl.