you have to be joking, right? Each and every woman knows exactly what a physically attractive man looks like-for her. Women aren’t clones and don’t have a hive mind. I know exactly what “look” I like, and yes, it frequently doesn’t “match up” with what the media declares is “attractive” nor does it correlate with what all other women like. I don’t think this is any different than men, who have different preferences as well.
Any man who thinks women don’t care what men look like is kidding himself. Women are just as interested in good looks as men are. However, women are also interested in the actual relationship part after the initial hook-up, while many men never seen to get the idea that a relationship doesn’t consist of repeated hook-ups, it’s an entirely different beast. I’m willing to sacrifice looks for a guy who understands how to be in a relationship. And your whiny “nice guy” rarely qualifies on either factor.
By the time I was in my mid/late twenties it was definitely a relationship I was looking for. I was open to a hook-up as long as it was understood by both parties that was what it was. However, I went without a date between ages 24 and 27, and didn’t get horizontal between 22 and 28. Since I was only in one relationship before 30, I didn’t know much about what a relationship took. Repeated failure can do that to a guy, and I assume it happens to women as well. We end up with shy, more socially awkward men and women hitting thirty without much relationship experience, and they’re probably not likely to find each other. I was lucky to find a woman with lots of relationship experience who saw something in me she liked. However, the whole “Nice Guy” thing reminds me of how painful it was, and how lucky I was to meet Ms. P.
Pantastic is totally right about the screwed-up priorities that a lot of involuntarily celibate dudes have about dating. I had completely messed-up ideas of how it worked when I was a teenager/young adult, thinking that the deep emotional connection/friendship came first, and naturally led to the attraction. That’s how it worked for me, so I assumed it’d work that way for others; and when I confessed my attraction (note that word “confess,” note its connotations–yup), and my female friends didn’t reciprocate, I felt terrible. Huge emotional investment on my part before there was any flirting. Bad idea.
But the other thing, the thing I think people forget, is that dating involves a set of discrete social skills. Flirting, asking someone out appropriately, noticing signs of attraction–it’s great if these come naturally to you, but they don’t come naturally to a lot of people. My favorite example of this for myself is the time I asked a friend out on a date to see a movie.
Two questions:
What’s the worst kind of woman that a guy can ask out on a date?
What’s the worst possible movie to go see on a date?
And that’s how I ended up taking a lesbian to see Schindler’s List.
I can’t add much to the conversation other than to confirm many of the earlier observations and share my own experiences. I grew up with the idea that women should be respected and treated well, and I think this significantly hurt me in the long run because I never learned an appropriate “script” for interacting with the opposite sex. In my mind, flirting with girls and trying to get their attention was boorish, vulgar, and misogynistic. I recall once, when I was about 17, when me and my friend were hanging out with a girl I liked. He kept poking her and tickling her and at some point told me this is what I was supposed to be doing. I was very confused, because to me his behavior was vulgar and offensive and I couldn’t imagine why a girl would appreciate it. Maybe I should have been born in Regency England or something, but it’s clear that I never learned how to navigate a middle ground between being Mr. Darcy at one extreme and a slobbering lech on the other.
It doesn’t help that I was socially incompetent in a general sense. I have been told repeatedly, even by my wife, that I am completely oblivious to when a girl takes an interest in me. I’m just incapable of comprehending whatever “signs” a person is supposed to send.
I’ll also echo the observation that many people believe there is a mathematical formula for success, as in “this behavior plus this behavior equals sex.” My first attempt at establishing a relationship ended disastrously because I believed her rejection should have a “reason” and that if I fixed whatever the problem was, then she would love me and we would live happily ever after. I recall going to the library and coming back with huge stacks of books. I had everything from Dale Carnegie to survivalist manuals trying to figure out what skill I lacked that would make me attractive. The idea that attraction was not a quantifiable phenomenon didn’t make sense to me.
I could go on like this, but instead I’d like to revisit some of the earlier posts that observe the paradox regarding experience. There is definitely a problem of success breeding success on both sides of the issue. From my perspective, failure to secure a date indicated something was inherently wrong with me. I genuinely believed that I was somehow subhuman and unworthy. I don’t think this is an unreasonable observation, because we live in a world where virginity is synonymous with “loser” and having sex with hot people is a direct measure of one’s worth as a human being. This insecurity directly leads to a lack of confidence and further rejections just become more painful, so it has something of a snowball effect.
The other side of the problem is that it impacted how women saw me. I only really had two girlfriends in my life: One that eventually dumped me and the other who eventually married me. Both of them expressed the suspicion that I was only with them not because I really cared about them but rather because I was desperate to be with anybody. This was an intensely painful accusation. I was, in fact, intensely lonely, but they were essentially confirming the idea that because I had never been with a woman before I did not deserve to ever be with a woman. It’s so completely fucked up to hear your girlfriend tell you that your deepest fears and insecurities are not just true, but that she believes the exact same thing and uses it as a reason to reject you.
Have you read/watched it lately? For most of the story, she hates Darcy because he’s a rude, stuck-up, presumptuous ass. Sure, she ends up admiring him in the end, but his personality worked against him the whole time.
At one point—and I can’t recall whether this was in the book or just one of the dramatizations—Darcy tells her she shouldn’t stop to talk to him; she should keep parading around the room so he can ogle her figure.
Yes, that’s my point. I’m not saying he is an example of a “nice guy.” Rather, I was so introverted and socially inept that what I considered “polite” other people interpreted as rude and snobbish. My wife routinely tells me that I am being rude to people when I believe I am being perfectly pleasant.
It’s in the book, if you mean the scene I think you mean, but he actually addresses the comment to Bingley’s sister while the two women are walking together…
Interesting how something so potentially important in the healthy development of people as is relating empathetically to others(*) is so overwhelmingly expected to “come naturally” or be absorbed by osmosis from the environment with no conscious effort – which itself is based on the presumption that everyone is exposed to the same environment and experiences and will respond the same way.
(* As **Chihuahua **points out that includes even ordinary non-romantic interactions.)
(betrayed by Edit window)
…and that also means people become succeptible to the “messages” in the various media tropes about perseverance (or awesomeness) eventually rewarded, or to the preachings by elders about how it is wrong to desire and even worse to do something about it rather than seek some “higher” nature of relationship first. But all the while expecting that “if you’re normal” there WILL be a relationship (where’s the movie/TV character that’s all about “hey, unattached, not getting regular action, and it’s no BFD”?).
Agreed–but I think dating skills are more than relating empathetically to others. Choosing someone to flirt with, recognizing signs of attraction, flirting in a way that is enjoyable for both people, making a move, responding gracefully (positively or negatively) to a move made–that’s not just empathy.
Agreed. A lot of time you will hear about social “scripts” that characterize the roles each party is expected to play in an interaction (romantic or otherwise). I was very introverted and did not take an interest in dating until relatively late (like 18 or so). I think this was so far outside the normal window during which people are expected to learn these scripts that I was twenty and still making mistakes that most people would have learned when they were 14 or 15.
And as JRDelirious pointed out, in the absence of meaningful social interaction, media messaging tends to fill the gap. I could write a lengthy list of TV tropes about romance that are nothing short of disastrous in real life (insert obligatory Twilight joke here).
I think the “middle ground” is learning how to flirt, and getting comfortable with flirting.
I’m an old fogey now who has been married for a couple of decades, but when I was single, I was hardly a numbers-game ask-anyone type; for one, I never had the time or patience for that.
But I did gradually get more comfortable in my own skin, and learn to flirt a bit; the key here is that, by flirting, because it is so light and superficial, rejection isn’t a biggie at all - it is just part of the game. By the time you actually ask someone out, you usually have a pretty good idea of what she’ll say, anyway, if you have hit it off. Women have lots of ways to indicate they aren’t interested, or that they are, without anyone having to say as much expressly.
I think that this is not an innate skill (or at least it wasn’t for me), but something learned.
I think a point that many people who struggle with dating miss (and this was brought up earlier), is that “being a nice person” is the default. Most people are perfectly nice most of the time. Most of us don’t roam around and punch people in the nose, but that isn’t enough.
If we think about people we actually like, not just someone we tolerate or someone we ignore or someone we don’t want to shove into a woodchipper or someone we just want to fuck, most of the time they are not just “nice.” Maybe they click with us for some reason. Or they make us laugh or they laugh with us. Or they make us feel good about ourselves and seem to enjoy our company. Or we like who we are when we are around them. Or all of the above.
So many people, men and women, ignore all of this when they look for a romantic relationship. They don’t look for someone they like, they look for someone they “love”–where the love is really just obsession, infatuation, desperation, lust, or co-dependence.
With all due respect, jsgoddess, I think most Nice Guys™, when they speak of being a “nice guy” they are referring specifically to NOT overtly trying to make sex happen. Think of the connotations that are, or at least used to be, associated with being a “nice GIRL”.
It is unfair, but at the core sexual strategy is selfish. People are looking for the highest quality mate who will provide them with the highest quality offspring. A person who is desperate is giving off signals that they do not have options or any real demand in the mating market, which implies they are not a high value mating partner.
Part of my advice to any ‘nice guy’ is that you should ACTUALLY respect women, and not internalize patronizing misogynistic nonsense like the whole ‘virgin-whore’ idea or put them up on a pedestal as some kind of higher being. Treating women as something other than fellow human beings is NOT actually nice, and is the cause of the big break in ‘nice guy’ interactions with women. Women also like to fuck, sex just isn’t some weird thing that only men want and women endure (regardless of what Victorian era marriage manuals say).
Getting through this whole mess where you think flirting and sex are terrible things to inflict on some innocent icon of femininity, but you also want to have sex, but you don’t want to admit it because you want to be nice is hard to do. And it makes a lot of dating advice bounce off of the ‘nice guy’ because he’ll manage to convince himself that he’s not nice if he actually tries to work towards getting clothes off, and disregard your advice because you’re the kind of absolute jerk of a guy that would try to touch a girl’s butt before you’re in a committed relationship.
(Note that I’m not saying that misogynists can’t get laid or date or marry women, I’m saying that being a misogynist A. isn’t actually nice and B. doesn’t help with women, especially when it’s in a confused form that keeps you from even honestly describing what you want.)
You’ve given a graphic demonstration of WHY people do like Senegoid described earlier in the thread, just offering vague, somewhat encouraging answers instead of real advice. Even without the stuff I pointed out earlier, this right here points to a whole huge toxic mess that some random acquaintance really doesn’t want to dig into, and probably has learned to recognize. You took “Well, she might be worried that you’re just interested in having some woman, nothing specific about her” and respond with “Oh my god you’re confirming that I don’t deserve to ever get laid in my life because I haven’t yet” even though it doesn’t follow from the first part.
Unless the ‘nice guy’ realizes that his thinking on the topic is broken and the other person is a trained therapist, what outcome can they hope for from trying to have a discussion? Knowning what I know now, I’d tell the person that they need to talk to a therapist because their thinking on the topic is simply broken - but they’d most likely take that as ‘oh, you just called me a crazy loser who doesn’t deserve to get laid’ and use it as either confirmation of ‘oh woe is me’ or of ‘look at that jerk that all the chicks cling to instead of me’ or both. Someone nice might try to explain softly and gently, and it won’t get through and the ‘nice guy’ will just keep making them feel worse and worse because he’s clearly hurting so bad, and it will never get resolved. Someone harsher might say ‘dude that’s messed up, listen to what I’ve said instead of making stuff up’ which will go back to the ‘what a jerk’ defense.
Whatever the scenario, the ‘nice guy’ becomes a black hole sucking all the positive energy out of the interaction and never resolving the issue.
All social skills are learned. Some people pick up social skills effortlessly by observing their peers, other some people need to spend a lot of effort observing and paying attention and examining their failures and successes. I can pick up advanced math well enough to explain it to someone on the first pass (I actually tutored a friend through calc in high school who was in the same class), but I have had to work hard to figure out social stuff. I think the cultural idea that social skills are innate, and that ‘if you don’t have it you just don’t have it’ is pretty destructive and causes a lot of people to decide to just give up on other people when they really don’t need to.
My dear Pantastic, I’m well aware of that. Even nice girls are quite fond of the activity. But they were taught certain things about behavior. Those things don’t eliminate the possibility of the activity but they curtail the direct overt expression of interest therein. Likewise nice boys. Problem for the boys is that when they curtail the direct overt expression of interest therein, it often results in elimination of the activity. Or does so until they learn to find girls who like nice boys. (They aren’t necessarily “nice girls”).