I think the female equivalent of the “nice guy” is the “don’t stick your dick in the crazy” - Its the woman you go out with a date on and she starts naming your children and shopping for wedding cake. She texts you fourteen times a day and gets upset when you haven’t called her the very next day after a simple “lets meet for coffee” sort of date. Let the relationship continue (because she’s available and willing to put out) and you can discover that she’s pregnant “accidentally on purpose.” She is jealous of your friends and god-forbid any of your friends are female.
A lot of my guy friends have spent months dating this type of women because its the path of least resistance. And one was married to her for almost ten years after “birth control failed.” And I think its this type of woman who has the same sort of opposite gender reaction that women have with “nice guys.”
The other thing “crazy attached girl” and “nice guy” have in common is that while their behavior is wrong, entitled and selfish, its really just a ramp up of the behavior that you’d want to see in someone you are really interested in - so its difficult for them to see how their behavior is wrong.
When I was young I had a really good looking male friend who attracted this type of woman like flies to honey. He learned quickly that this type of woman you don’t throw any crumbs to - not even kindness. Which made him look like a jerk who always had women, but jerk was a self defense mechanism.
Yes, but when it’s a pattern it can be useful for the woman to realize the pattern exists and that she can change it.
I think this approaches the “nice guy” issue when the woman takes a sort of pride in how awful these relationships are–when she feels like she’s doing something virtuous when she forgives an abuser, when she thinks her pattern of going back to him shows how sympathetic and feminine she is. When she takes the stalking as a weird sort of flattery, and her own fear and pain as something she is doomed to because she’s a better person than those who would have just left him.
Probably more like equal or greater ambition. I know plenty of people who are damned smart and who have no desire to get into the rat race. Intelligence is involved in far more than job prospects. It involves interests and the level of discussion between partners too.
Measuring the success of marriages based on ambition would be really interesting.
Yes, and it could very well be. I still refuse to abandon my original point. Within a two-profession relationship, whether the driver is intelligence, ambition, or something else, it is more common for a woman to be punished for desiring fairness than for a man to be punished for expecting his career to be number one.
Karpman Drama Triangle. I was friends for a while with a woman who would complain that every other man involved in her life, from her boyfriend to her boss, was a brute and a bully. She’d change jobs, or boyfriends, and the next thing you’d hear was how he was being mean to her. Eventually I figured was that she’d date or work with bullies because she needed to be a victim, and she was looking for a saviour. I say was friends with; she was just too much hard work.
It also plays on our social reciprocity clause. We exchange Christmas cards and gifts. If you give me your phone number so I can contact you, I’m sort of expected to give you mine. If I invite you to a party (not a small intimate one, but a big gathering) the next big party you throw, you should invite me to. If I help you move, its polite when I need help moving that if you can help, you do. I snowblow out my elderly neighbor, eventually I will be the elderly neighbor and I hope someone rakes up my leaves. You remember my birthday by posting to my Facebook wall, I respond in kind. It isn’t a hard and fast rule, and there is some amount of pay it forward, but this social reciprocity thing is sort of how it works.
When nice guy or attachment girl give you something (something as easy as nice guy giving you a complement, something as complex as attachment girl having sex with you, something as long term as nice guy in friend zone giving you his friendship for years) its will the expectation that you will reciprocate with a romantic attachment - it moves that burden onto you and the blame onto you if you are so rag mannered as not to hold up your end of the social contract. If you don’t, they get to be the victim - they gave and gave and gave and you were an asshole.
Within a two-profession relationship, whether the driver is intelligence, ambition, or something else, it is more common for a woman to be punished for desiring fairness than for a man to be punished for expecting his career to be number one.