(blinking in confusion) Uh, did we go to different schools or something? Because I never had that class. All I saw was guys I knew were jerks nailing the hottest girls with no hand waving at all. It wasn’t until I was married and no longer had anything at stake that I started to have more success talking to women, including women who didn’t know I was married. Maybe because I wasn’t “in the market” I seemed less needy or more confident. Maybe it was because I started to play it as a game.
If they’d just stop rejecting us because we’re not self confident, we’d be more self confident! 
I know you were joking, but take that statement, apply it on the abstract rather than the individual level (say, by replacing “they” and “us” with “everybody” and “each other”), and you’ve nicely summed up a good portion of my point.
In my experience, guys that don’t get dates don’t get dates because they havn’t got the slightest clue what a woman is or what to do with one.
All the guys who are talking about how women were such a horrible mystery until you met your wife and now everything is great discovered something they were missing out on before. Women are just like normal people. Even the women you want to date are normal people, and the best plan is to interact with them kind of normally. These guys get along with their wives so well because they treat them like their wives, not some unobtainable object.
But so many “nice guys” never realize that that hot girl in their theater class is just the same as the girl that lives down the hall from them. They understand women as friends and collegues, but a woman who they like suddenly becomes an alien creature to them. They feel they have to act differently around them, and that just ends up all muddled. The girl is left wondering who the hell this guy is and why he’s acting so strange.
Take, for example, gifts. Now, we’ve all found something at an antique store or something and said “That’d be just right for so-and-so” and bought it as a gift. Thats one of the things that friends do for each other. But a lot of romantically unsuccessful guys “know” that you are supposed to give romantic gifts. So instead of giving a simple heartfelt gift when it comes naturally, they rush around looking for something that fits their scheme of “romantic”. This is probably going to end up creeping out the girl, who will realize that this guy probably doesn’t know a thing about who they are but is spending money on them and is therfor probably kind of creepy. The guy ends up feeling like he was rejected for being sweet. What he really should have done was do what he would have done for any other friend.
Let me know how that Not a Nice Guy works out for you in the future. You’re probably the same kind of person that complains about how the men you date “end up” being assholes. Trevor was obviously too good for you.
Damn, are you correct.
And folks, it’s not a man-vs.-woman thing… it happens on this side of the discotheque, too.
First of all, DISCLAIMER This is NOT directed at the men who are in fact, just plain ole “nice guys”. But at those self-proclaimes nice guys whose constant whining about how they can’t “get” any girls and all their psychotic reasons why, drive a girl NUTSO.
Anyway…Oh HECK yeah. Good OP. The sort that drive me the absolute CRAZIEST are the self proclaimed nice guys who have some weird sense of “ownership” of womenkind or something.
You all know what i’m talking about, the whole " what’s she doing with HIM? All girls only want assholes, I deserve to have her, but she only wants guys like that".
Ummm what?? Are we cookies or something to be parcelled out to whoever “deserves” us? Or that so-called “nice guys” define “nice” as that they don’t:
Beat women
“Treat them bad” (although what THEY define as treating well and MY definition of treat well are world’s apart). Like expecting you to hold up the entire conversation, to not have a single opinion of you own, to fall in love on the second date hence putting the guilt trip on us, or to CLING like static charged polyester to ME is definitely treatment of the “bad” variety
And that they do (or would, if they could just “get” one, yeah, there’s that whole implied ownership thing again), be so “nice” to her, by which nice again has a whole different definition to them as it does to us.
The next in line thing that pisses me off the most about the self-proclaimed nice guy is how they’re always whining and griping about how they can’t “get” a girl. When what they REAAAAAALLLY mean, is that they can’t “get” (I hate that phrasing) a HOT girl.
They don’t get, or else they won’t accept the concept of market value. For instance. I’m 45, I’m okay, but no longer droolingly hot, and since I’m trying to get back on my feet after a rather long sabbatical, I’m not so great financially either.
My market value isn’t going to net me a 21 year old Brad Pitt look alike with abs of steel, with his own multi million dollar trust fund.
Similarly, if you’re a young, broke, socially inept, college student. Ditto, the Angelina Jolie lookalike head cheerleader isn’t really “in your league” so to speak. Now, if you’ve got a SCREAMING great personality, your odds just shot you right into her league, but if you’re always all hangdog “women hate me, those bitches always date assholes, they never know what they want…:”
Oh, yeah, I can’t understand why YOU haven’t been snapped up by a young hottie. Grrrrr, I’d better stop, having had a few of these self proclaimed nice guy incidents myself, I’ve discovered that few other things are as adept at making me see red and/or being completely perplexed after such an experience…grrrr
Unfortunately this is very true. I’ve been Spineless Nice Guy for most of my life, and I’ve dated several women who’ve immediately taken advantage of my personality and attempted to turn me into their subserviant trophy man-slave. Luckily I’ve always had enough self-respect to walk away from such relationships.
No, but that doesn’t mean she has to date an asshole, does it? And yet she does.
DING DING DING~~~~
Exactly. Not to mention that what the self proclaimed nice guy (and anyone else dismissing a girl’s choice of boyfriend based only on the few moment’s they see her and her guy together out in public) seem to not get is that the girl didn’t KNOW he was really an asshole on the first, or even the 20th date.
Assholishness and mistreatment by men is an insidious sneaking thing. Those men are charming WONDERBOYFRIENDS until they’ve got the woman nice and in love, completely ensconsed in his life, and totally off guard. Getting out from under THAT sort of misery is about 10 Pit threads all by itself. I don’t want to totally hijack this, so for more information on this, any website or book dealing with battered and/or abused women can outline exactly what I’m talking about here.
I mean come ON!!! Do you really thing you’re going to “get” a woman after you just insulted womankind by suggesting that so many of us are so stupid that we’d willingly get into a relationship with someone we knew at first meeting was going to treat us badly? No one is so stupid that they’d willingly date a person (never mind men or women) they knew at first date was going to beat them, insult them in public, verbally abuse them and ignore them (to name a few bad guy tricks). No one.
You’re mistakenly equating one to be a result of the other. You’re thinking she purposely dates the bad guy in order to escape, or “diss” or not date the self proclaimed nice guy.
As I explain in my post above, women that you see out in public for a few moments with a bad guy DIDN’T as their reason for getting into that relationship in the first place think “You know?? I’ve had way too many out of my league men following me around, now THAT man, he looks like he’d be guaranteed to treat me badly and act like an asshole out in public to boot, Yup HE’S the one”. Really women aren’t that masochistic or stupid. We are NOT going to set out to choose a bad guy.
Most assholes can be THE most charming and loving individuals, for months at a time, long enough to lure women into thinking she IS with a real honest to goodness nice guy.
And you have no idea how a particular girl you see for a second or two being mistreated by a man in public ended up in that situation. You don’t even know if it’s just that he’s normally a pretty decent guy, but that this is just a really bad day for him, or for them both, and he just is being an asshole at that particular moment.
Everyone has the capacity to be assholISH. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are an assHOLE. Giraffe really lines it out quite logically above. But really, it’s not always about you. Sometimes, no matter how “nice” a man is, there is just no chemistry. That’s true for both sides, and it really isn’t about “you”. It’s just nature.
I would say that just as “why ‘nice guys’ don’t attract women” is blindingly obvious to you yet apparently invisible to said “nice guys,” that “gee, she’s really dating an asshole” is blindingly obvious to some outsiders, while the woman herself is apparently oblivious.
And yeah, the outsider doesn’t “know” you’re dating an asshole from a few public observances…he might be having a bad day. You don’t “know” that nice guy is really a “nice guy” … he might have just gotten out of an emotionally taxing relationship, or be working overtime for a few weeks and isn’t his usual boisterous self. Or whatever.
Works both ways. If you don’t want people making uninformed judgements about you and your ability to work in relationships, please try to afford others the same courtesy.
Quite the opposite with me: I thought women were too much like me. And I simply couldn’t conceive of finding a man attractive, and so I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea thata woman might find a man (specifically, me) attractive. It took distancing myself before I could accept that concept. I grew up with plenty of extremely close girl friends, but no girlfriend.
Daniel
I think we’re missing some obvious stuff here: basic anthropology and psychology.
Men who project dominance score with chicks. I’m talking about basic, primate dominance, something that’s hardwired into both the projecting and receiving sides. We’re talking about “self-confidence” and other psychospiritual values, when really that’s all irrelevent.
How do men project dominance? Some of it is purely physical: height. The vast majority of women want a man that’s taller they they. A short guy literally does not dominate most women and is at a severe disadvantage.
The rest is body language, words, application of styles and other social cues. A guy must seem dominant, and part of that is fitting into the image of a dominant male within society.
Do you see where this is going? Dominance is a quality with many subfactors. You can have all the “self-confidence” in the world, but if you’re 4’5", you are not dominant. You can take a butch guy with balls of brass, but if you put him in the wrong type of clothing he’s not going to score at the bar.
I started doing better within women when I entered graduate school, and I had one particular set of information to help me: the movie The Nutty Professor starring (and written by, directed by, etc.) Jerry Lewis. I said to myself, “I’m just going to start acting like Buddy Love.” No joking. A man who is dominant looks down on women a bit; they are inferior and to be commanded, socially speaking. Subordinate. He asks for the date, assuming she’s going to say yes.
And this worked for me, getting me two girlfriends that I wanted. I am at heart a decent guy who treats women very well, but it was necessary for me to change my approach to get things started.
The criticism that women go for assholes is perfectly correct. Many dominant men are assholes. Women “buy” the dominance and end up paying with despair over the man’s actual character. But they get fooled over and over again.
The parallel criticism for men is that a guy will choose a great rack over a warm heart. And, yep, this is completely accurate as well. For the same primate reasons.
Maybe to you, but not to everyone. Some people never saw the signs being taught, but rather a haphazard, unstructured, series of being flashed one or another random sign – some part of the language, some just noise – w/o warning at often totally unexpected times and places; and the test includes signs that you’re expected to read up on independently.
Sucks to be them, but it’s not a moral shortcoming on their part… unless they then get it into their heads that they’re gonna do everyone else a service by making everyone else speak THEIR language.
Of course, then there’s the trouble you get into if you catch some of the lessons but not all and try to figure which ones you’ll be tested on but ignore the others… you end up coming across like the sign language equivalent of badly-translated-from-Korean assembly-instructions…
…because somewhere along the way they caught on that there WAS some sort of difference, but they did not figure out WHAT was the difference.
(Though in defense of the guy who’s merely a socialization laggard, the “Hm, he obviously does not know his way around, something must be wrong with him for this to be so, let’s stay away from him” reaction does place him in a no-win situation.)
I just thought this was worth repeating:
Yep. That’s true. Life’s unfair because they can’t bag the supermodel.
CanvasShoes made some very good points.
There are plenty of nice guys that do just fine with women. The “nice guy” tag has come to mean “the guy who bitches and moans that women don’t like him because they prefer jerks”. If this is your attitude, the problem lies with you, not with women. Your attitude is incredibly offensive. You may have had a rough life and you may lack self-confidence, but that doesn’t obligate women to get involved with you. Women are individuals, and we have our own issues with self esteem.
I’ve found that “nice guys” are lazy about relationships. They put no energy into the relationship. They glom onto me and want to be included in everything I do, and they start getting upset if I participate in activities without them. It’s like I’m dragging around a defective copy of myself. For me, a big part of relationships is learning about the other’s persons interests and participating in activities I might not otherwise know about. This doesn’t happen with “nice guys”; they never initiate adventures, they rarely have ideas about fun things to do.
The interests they do have, they don’t share with me. Many of these guy pride themselves on being intelligent; in fact, intelligence is a big part of how they define themselves. However, it never occurs to them that I might be as smart or smarter than them. In fact, I am smart enough to know when they are bullshitting about the things they’re supposedly smart about, and it really turns me off. These guys bullshit a lot to impress people with their intelligence – this is not “being yourself”.
I’ve also found that “nice guys” tend to be cheap. They like to talk about how much money they have, but they don’t contribute their share. They tend to hang around my place, eating my food and running up my bills. But when we go out, we go dutch.
The worst case of this I experienced was a guy I was seeing in college. He wanted me to travel with him to meet his parents. I told him outright that I had zero money, and he assured me he would take care of everything. On the two-day car trip, he did not get me any food ever (I think he had some snacks hidden away that he was eating on the sly). By the time we arrived at his parents’, I was on the verge of passing out. He promptly went to the refrigerator and made himself a big plate of fried chicken. He did not offer me any. Thank goodness his mother offered me some food.
A final point: these guy do not care about a woman as an individual. They care about having a girlfriend. They are not capable or willing to actually get to know the woman. She’s just an object that’s supposed to make them feel better about themselves. Ultimately, the “nice guy” is totally self-absorbed – it is this, not the “fact” that women prefer jerks, that prevents him from having a successful relationship.
No, not at all. I think that she’s an idiot, or she’s addicted to abuse, or she thinks she can change him (which probably is a subcase of “idiot”), or she doesn’t realise all men aren’t assholes, or some combination of these. It has nothing to do with her not wanting to sleep with me. Heck, I probably wouldn’t sleep with me and I am me. Doesn’t change the fact that women keep dating assholes and then whining about it.
Is there some way we can clarify exactly who we’re talking about here? Several people have mentioned there being a difference between the nice guys who ARE nice but a little inept socially and the passive-aggressive “Nice Guys” who are just another variation on the Classic Male Asshole. (Personally, I think the guy in the OP was more the former and Susan, being probably a bit socially inept herself, over-reacted, but I am judging based on too little information.) Could we separate the discussion into two topics, the guys who are redeemable and those who are not?
Also, I’d like to point out that Misnomer is FLAT WRONG! This is not the world of Jane Austen and there is no mechanism in modern society to teach people how to interact. To assume that there is allows her, and the others who buy into that falsehood, to dismiss anybody who does not behave in the manner she expects, though that manner is her own construct based on what she imagines everybody has been taught. That conveniently places the onus on others to meet HER unwritten standards and leaves her with no need to make effort on her own part since she already “knows” how to behave.
Most young men and women have little idea how to behave with potential mates. They may think they do and may have constructed whole encyclopedias of rules* and what works and what doesn’t but these, typically, are based on bad novels, TV, movies, trial, error, and listening to the trials and errors of friends who usually know as little as they do. They find or imagine patterns* of behavior to fill the gaps of their knowledge but as their knowledge is so tiny and the gaps so vast this is rarely effective.
-
- More Anthropology: Humans, the rule makers and pattern finders!
I would tend to agree with you, as I’m certainly not Ms Smooth in most social situations, if Trevor hadn’t spent half of our conversations bitching about women who did him wrong and women in general. The other behaviors were immature or socially inept, but not in and of themselves Assholish.
The article I linked to in the OP is just one of many (including letters from Nice Guys that prove the point)
Most of my problems with Nice Guys all stem from one root: their absolute selfishness. No complement, gift, or act of friendship is really given to you. Instead, it is given to their idealized picture of A Girlfriend, and it is given only so that the NG has another lever for his emotional blackmail when you don’t live up that that ideal (and when that doesn’t work, he another Martyrdom badge to pin on his hair shirt).
They also refuse to believe that they aren’t the only ones who feel left out, inexperienced, or royally screwed by the whole dating process.
Actually, I’m very happy with my dating life overall. I’m pretty enough that I’ve never worried about getting my man, and if he doesn’t work out there are plenty more. I know that FuckingCockery (TM Roland) and/or NiceGuyitis only strike a relatively small percentage of men. That doesn’t mean I can’t pit them. 
And right now I’m seeing an honest-to-God Good Man, who can let me see his flaws without flaunting them, and can see mine without freaking out. What’s that I hear? Carnick, hon, if you’re going to eat your heart out, at least wear a bib- they can get messy. :wally