The through-the-looking-glass version of Nice Guy is the woman who complains about how she repeatedly gets into abusive relationships with men who are violent/substance abusers/mentally unstable.
Victimized Woman never seems to realize that her attraction to these sorts is the root of her problem.
Exactly. That’s the core of the problem.
If a “strong confident” man gets societal feedback that people are starting to think of him as a jerk, he’s more apt to interpret that as simply people thinking he’s being a jerk, and possibly make efforts to modify his behavior accordingly. But if a “strong confident” woman gets similar feedback, how is she supposed to interpret it? Is she really being a jerk or are these people just labeling her a jerk because she’s a boundary-buster? Hard enough for people to figure themselves out as it is, and this doesn’t make it easier.
Well, when you create a profile, you’re not actually interacting with anyone, you’re posting something for other people to look at. So I would say they’re different situations. When an online form says to describe yourself, you describe yourself. When you receive a message from someone starting a conversation, you converse.
But it seems as if ‘nice guy’, which I note this supposedly different thread has gravitated back to, is defined at least by many here as ‘guy who doesn’t have success with women, says he’s nice but actually he’s full of character flaws’. If you define it as phony self proclaimed ‘niceness’ by toxic personalities, then it is a character flaw.
But AFAIK in the real world some ‘nice guys’ are just people without enough natural attraction (money, social prestige, height, looks etc) to overcome shyness. It could be wholly or partly ‘too high standards’ or ‘not really nice’, but not necessarily. If you start making a lot more money it definitely gets easier*, which probably isn’t because that makes you nicer, or less nice necessarily either. And I’d imagine the same is true if quite tall and good looking.
Very much an ink blot test I think, with also perhaps a reluctance to say stuff about women in general which might not be viewed as flattering. ‘The guy claiming niceness must actually be toxic’ is safe in that regard.
The foregoing since the topic seems to be coming back around to guys. On the supposed topic here, one possible case would be that ‘strong assertiveness’ in a woman leads to career success, which itself tends to be a (though often partly self imposed) romantic hindrance for women. Why do very successful women often feel less than very successful men are unsuitable as partners? Maybe for good reasons or not, but it’s a thing to some degree AFAIK. OTOH if the ‘strong assertiveness’ is just being obnoxious in a way that doesn’t even generate career success, that’s pretty simple: it’s unattractive. The double secret twist in ‘nice guy’, is that ‘nice’ should theoretically be attractive (in a sunny view of the world) so why isn’t it? Maybe because the person claiming to be nice really isn’t, though other possibilities IMO. That potential paradox is absent with ‘proudly obnoxious person’, of either sex.
*easier to attract women to the point of illustrating ‘who you really are’ in a relationship rather than being shot down in flames at time zero. Defining ‘true fulfillment’ in a relationship is a whole other thing with a whole other set of unstated assumptions which will have people talking past each other even more furiously.
I haven’t read further than your post yet but I imagine you will be roasted.
However, I have a friend…she is tall, very pretty, has an MBA from a prestigious school and is a director of a large public company at 32. She is impressive I think 
She constantly complains that she cannot find men to be serious with. She would like a family but out of all my friends she has the most trouble even though she is the most gorgeous of us.
We were at a bar and this conversation came up. I was drinking and so I challenged her on this. I basically pointed out that:
She was tall, I think 5’ 11". She wanted someone much taller than that so she could ‘wear very high heels and not be taller than him’. I pointed out that meant about 6’3" or taller. I did a phone web search and found out something like 10% or less of men fell into that category.
She was in shape. Thin and exercised. She wanted the same from a guy.
She made something like $200K+ a year. She wanted someone at least as ‘successful’ as her.
She was very pretty. I’m not just saying it as a friend…she’s VERY pretty. She wanted a pretty guy as well. I pointed to the bar and asked her how many guys met this standard of handsomeness that she would find successful. There was “maybe” one. There was at least 50 guys around.
I then pointed out that if you were to multiply out these probabilities it would mean only one guy in 10,000 (being generous) or likely 1 in 100,000 would meet these requirements and ALL of these things she is looking for is valued for most women. The competition would be FIERCE for getting a guy meeting these requirements.
She and I talked for quite some time and she realized, I think, for the first time in an unflinching way why she was having such problems. At the end of the night, though, she confided that she just couldn’t loosen her standards.
She is now 40 and unmarried and without a family. She is thinking of adoption which I love her for
I read an article a while back ago that stated lots of successful women are pairing off with men who make substantially less money than them. A lot of them blue collar workers. And according to the article, their relationships are getting along quite nicely.
One lady interviewed in the article related that her husband quit his job as a handyman. He now keeps their home in tip top shape. He does all the remodeling in the home. Plus he knows hows to tow their large boat and put it in the lake.
Qualities she was unlikely to find in a man earning in the high six figures bracket.
Grrr! I remember us having the game of ‘which one of your standards would you loosen up on’…and the as successful as her was one she emphatically would not loosen up on. The one she choose was height. I actually set her up with someone pretty much meeting her standards except he as like 5’8". She did go on a date but just couldn’t accept him even though she said she liked him very much.
Blue collar guy? Linda would never LOL. Makes me laugh even thinking of her going out with one.
I think one other factor is that many women have a lower “relationship drive” than men, so to speak. Many men are desperate enough for a woman - or, just for sex - that they will “settle” quickly (to a certain extent.) Some women, on the other hand, have an attitude of, “I would rather be single for life than settle.”
A few years ago, I bought a copy of Lori Gottlieb’s bestseller book, *Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good-Enough. * It was written for women, and I am a man, but I was curious to see what the book had to say, and it was very applicable for men, too - some men won’t settle when they should.
IME one reason a lot of people - both men and women - have trouble loosening their standards is because they’ve already rejected many people who were below these standards. So if they lower their standards now, then all those rejections will have been for nothing. Looked at another way, anyone they consider now will be measured up against the people they’ve rejected in the past, and if they rejected people who came closer to the standards than the current candidates, it’s a tough pill to swallow.
And many people eventually do lower their standards but not fast enough or low enough. As the pool shrinks, they may lower their standards, but with the pool shrinking they need to lower it even lower than they did. If their lower standard is still too high, then it’s only a matter of time until the pool shrinks even further, and they need to lower it again. But if that second lowering is not enough then the dynamic repeats itself.
There are pools and there are POOLS. With Linda and splitting the difference and saying 1 in 50,000 meet all her standards you then need to include gender (x2), age appropriate (x6?) and single (x4) and that means that in a general population of 2.4 MILLION there is one that meets your 1 in 50,000. In the Minneapolis/Saint Paul there are about 3 million within 30 mile radius…so one guy…ONE GUY out there for you. If you go by 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 5000 you are still talking 10-15 guys in the whole metropolitan area. Even meeting one of these would be an Herculean task let alone passing the huge competition for them.
This is why it broke my heart when she said she just couldn’t do it. I KNEW she would never have a traditional family after she said that. I kept hoping she would have a child out of wedlock so I could be Auntie Voyage but that never happened either. Adoption is cool though and I think she will go through with it soon.
Overall I agree with all your contributions to the thread.
I’m happily married but have run through the numbers for what it would be like “shopping on CarMax” for a new woman. You know, they show you 1 million cars for sale. Then you select the brand and it drops to 50,000. Keep selecting through color, mileage, 2 doors or 4, convertible or not. Suddenly there’s 3 cars to look at.
I’m exceptional IMO in just a couple of parameters the mythical “typical woman” might consider desirable. I would not be anywhere near competitive for your pal Linda’s complete shopping list.
My thought experiment was to find a woman who brought to the table roughly what I did mutadis mutandis for the differences inherent in my/her hetero gendered POV. IOW, I’m not trying to date way up the food chain; just trying to meet my statistical equal. It still winnowed the Miami metro area, all 6 million of us, down to a few hundred women. Good luck finding those needles in that haystack.
Scary thought in a way. Or, more realistically, it says the CarMax filtering approach is not the way to find a mate.
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One other question for the rest of us. …
How the heck did the SDMB get to having over 189,000 members each with a cleverly chosen member name before somebody was smart enough to choose this cool moniker: BombVoyage is inspired; truly inspired.
Bravo Good Sir. You deserve a round of applause.
Late add:
And then I go and screw it up by not noticing you disclosed your gender. :smack: Oh well. I rarely miss the chance to make a bad first impression.
Bravo Madame Voyage. Here’s a large flourish of the **LSLGuy **plumed hat in your general direction.
Maybe it’s better to have no standards and see what happens.
I’ll mention this to my colleague from China with the PhD in immunology, who’s been married for thirty years. To a guy with a PhD. 
BTW, what’s up with including TALL in your list?
I will agree that a lot of “strong, confident women” are massive pains in the ass, not least because they go around reminding people that they are strong and confident. It’s a bit tedious.
I’m curious if these studies account for education. While I refuse to conflate intelligence with education, it can be a rough indicator, and education is correlated with income, so maaaaaybe women value intelligence more highly than income per se?
Speaking for myself, that’d fit the bill. My husband’s higher income is certainly convenient but it’s not like I did a cost/benefit analysis of his career goals when we were 19. I was impressed that he was as smart as I was, in ways that I am not smart.
I’d go with the old canard of ‘‘be yourself.’’ If someone is into politics, philosophy and science fiction, I can connect the dots without them saying, ‘‘I’m super cerebral, you guys.’’
I’ve never heard this either, except maybe Facebook memes. I find ‘‘strong, confident woman’’ vaguely insulting because it implies the rest of us are rubber-spined doormats.
Well, some of us are just nice. Yeah, I said it. Nice.
That’d be my Mama, currently on husband number five. My childhood was basically a revolving door of shitty father figures. I spent a few years observing her failed relationships and said, ‘‘Hell no.’’ There’s a reason my standards were ridiculous. And by ridiculous, I don’t mean, ‘‘six foot five with the body of Adonis,’’ I mean, ‘‘extremely responsible, career-driven, intelligent, kind (to everyone, not just me), understanding, and fully committed to egalitarian ideals.’’ There’s no magic formula; I just got lucky. I strive to be worthy of him, I mostly do a good job.
That’s how I felt, and probably how I’d feel were Og forbid something to happen to my husband. As I mentioned above, it’s just too damned risky to lower my standards, knowing I had a role model with zero standards, knowing how bad a bad relationship can actually be.
I don’t think it’s just about sex for men. Since we’re having great fun with broad generalizations, general trends in research indicate two things: men are happier in marriage than women are, and women do more housework and child-rearing. When a single man gets married, the housework decreases, for a woman it increases. One article I’m reading (based on the Labor Department’s 2011 American Time Use Survey) claims that married men get an average of four hours a day of leisure time; women get about a half an hour. The disparity holds even when women are working full-time.
I’m making an assumption that men are happier in marriage than women at least in part because they don’t have to do as much of the grunt labor. (I say it this way because I find my career infinitely more fulfilling than doing the dishes.) So whether men are looking for sex or a relationship, they have an incentive that women do not.
Isn’t this game fun? Anyone feeling dehumanized yet?
Ding ding ding. It’s almost as if people are unique individuals and context matters and… shit, sorry, I forgot where I was.
So, Spice Weasel, are you implying that men get and stay married for the live-in housekeeping service too? I’ve had other (usually) women say they felt that way, but if you think about it, once you toss children into the mix, that gets to be an awfully expensive maid.
I hope you understood I was not advocating for CarMax filtering as a dating strategy. Rather the opposite.
Well, the saying only came in vogue recently, though. Here’s the 2014 article. 
Because women often don’t want to marry men who are shorter, and men often don’t want to marry women who are taller. So a tall woman has a pretty small dating pool.
I screwed the pooch on this one. On re-read, the article says women get a half hour less. Still a disparity, but not by a magnitude of eight.
I don’t think it’s only the housework, so much as a sense of stability and everything being in order, which may include having a clean home, but could also include having space to relax, receive emotional support, etc. Or the joy of spending time with your kids without having to do the shit work. If you stick with traditional gender roles, as some do, the woman’s role is to nurture, the man’s role is to provide. Perhaps being emotionally nurtured contributes more to happiness than being provided for. These disparities have improved over time and may continue to improve, though it’s noteworthy that there is a pretty striking difference between Millennial men and women in terms of their expectations for labor division in the household, or whose career comes first, etc.
I always get perplexed by these conversations because I see way more nuance in people. I despise the idea of reducing people’s romantic value to their location on a bell curve. The idea of excluding someone from the dating pool because he’s not six feet tall is asinine to me. I don’t understand why people think this way, especially because being six feet tall has zero percent to do with sustaining a relationship for fifty years. It’s like I instinctively (perhaps because of being modeled so many poor relationships) knew what really counted in a relationship and by all accounts here there are a significant percentage of people who don’t get it.
People seem to have unrealistically high standards about all the wrong things.
I know someone married to a man who is six foot five, handsome, and financially successful - the supposed trifecta of a desirable mate. Overall he is a good person. But sometimes she tells me things I cannot fathom experiencing: he will buy the latest entertainment system or the best coffee maker in the biz, but he gives her a hard time about spending money to get medical treatment. He whines when she asks him to help her clean. He whines when she asks him to put his dishes away. I once saw him whine about having to help her the day after she had back surgery. He causes her a lot of frustration.
I could not be married to this person. We were discussing respective spouses, and she said of my husband, who is five feet, seven inches tall, ‘‘He’s a good looking guy, but he’s too short for me.’’ Well, sucks to be you, then, because he does the dishes without having to be asked and once agreed to drop $10,000 on an experimental medical treatment for me, without hesitation. He’s generally very frugal, but his mantra has always been, ‘‘Your health comes first.’’ He’s calm and nurturing and responsible and does the work. After fifteen years with him, my biggest complaint is that it takes him three times longer to do anything than it takes me.
He’s short. So what?
Absolutely. I was agreeing with you. People aren’t cars. We do not ‘‘shop’’ for a mate. The whole idea gives me the willies.