Woah, this is common behaviour?
I’ve certainly heard of vengeful ex-boyfriends (& girlfriends) doing crazy stuff like this, generally in the context of a harsh break-up; but I’ve not heard much of people going that apeshit over merely being turned down.
This sounds to me more a case of serious psychiatric problems/personality disorders than what I assume others are talking about - jerkish, entitled behaviour.
This guy is a major asshole. I don’t know why the label “Nice Guy” applies in this case, when “Major Asshole” is more accurate.
Whoa, you just described my ex-friend from the Ladies: List the reasons some guys are on the “just friends” thread, except he felt more sad and ripped off than angry when his presents and favours went unrewarded. He’d bend over backwards while falsely claiming to want nothing more than friendship and when that’s all he’d get, he’d whine about how unfair it was that his subservience didn’t lead to the romance he felt his unsolicited deeds deserved.
Edit: And yes, that made him a major asshole, too.
Bolding mine. See, this is the crux of the argument for me. A genuinely nice guy isn’t making an effort to be nice, so it’s not something he needs to “keep” doing. He’s just a good guy, who considers the feelings and desires of other, because it wouldn’t occur to him to do otherwise. He’s not “being nice” in the hope that will lead to something else, he just is nice.
If that’s your point you really would have been better off with a different example. I’d agree that Woody Allen is pretty funny, but “nice, mature, considerate” are not adjectives that I associate with him. And while I don’t know much about Antonio Banderas I’ve never heard anything bad about his personality, he hasn’t been associated with any scandalous behavior, and his work in Shrek 2 suggests he has a sense of humor. Whatever he may be like in real life, the average woman has no reason to believe that Mr. Banderas does not possess all these positive qualities on top of being a handsome, successful movie star. What’s not to like?
If a woman had to choose between two men who were equally nice, funny, smart, etc., then I’d agree it’s very likely she’d go with the more handsome fellow. But this thread and others like it aren’t asking “Why don’t women like men who aren’t especially good-looking?” They aren’t asking “Why don’t women like men with poor social skills?” No, it’s “Why don’t women like nice guys?”, as if being nice is the man’s only “flaw” and it’s impossible that there might be something else about him that’s unappealing to women. No, the answer must be that all women are crazy, hypocritical masochists for whom niceness is like garlic to a vampire.
If a man is unsuccessful with women, his problem is not that he’s nice. His problem might be that he has nothing going for him other than being nice, though. Niceness is not an especially impressive trait. The word “nice” doesn’t suggest that the person is Humanitarian of the Year or anything, merely that they are pleasant and inoffensive. Being nice is like bathing regularly. It’s a minimum standard that needs to be met in order to be considered acceptable socially, but is not in and of itself going to win someone positive attention. I don’t know why there seem to be so many men who think that it should.
I can’t think that I’ve ever known any woman who was in a situation like this. In the only case I can think of that even came close, the woman broke up with her boyfriend and soon started dating her guy friend. (Said guy turned out to be a lot less nice than he seemed when they were just friends, but that’s another story.)
There are women who have guy friends who they tell all their problems to, just as women do with their female friends, but ask any man you know who’s in a relationship if his girlfriend or wife “never talks about their problems”. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard men complain about HOW MUCH their special lady wants to talk about their problems!
Maybe some guy friends are confused as to the significance of a woman being willing to talk about her problems with them. For most women it doesn’t signify a whole lot. To generalize, women tend to be a lot more open to discussing their problems than men are. If a woman is willing to complain about her boyfriend to a male friend, that doesn’t mean her problem with her boyfriend is a particularly big deal or that she has a particularly great level of trust or affection for the friend.
niblet_head, thanks for sharing your story. I’m sorry you were in such a bad situation, that must have been really stressful and frightening at the time.
Sadly, this sort of thing is not terribly unusual. I know other women who’ve had to deal with similar creeps, although few who had to endure such an extreme level of harassment. Why call these men “Nice Guys” when they are anything but? Well, it’s been my experience that these types call themselves nice guys and complain a lot about how “nice guys finish last” when it comes to dating.
That is an extreme example. Thankfully, the last kind of bullshit like that I ever put up with. I became wiser after that and now I see the red flags. That’s why this seems to be a young person’s problem. But there have been more examples of that between the eight-grade ruining of my reputation and a young dick trying to destroy whatever he could of my life.
It is the Jekyll and Hyde aspect. To diagnose a Nice Guy at least three criteria must be met: his kindness is insincere, it has an objective (to reel you in), and when he is rejected his reaction is not sadness but anger.
It’s not common, but it’s not rare, either. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you. It ranges from a guy calling you a bitch if you decline his number to what I’ve been through.
Dude, you are thick. “Nice Guy” is ironic. God gawd in h’vn, that explains a lot about your responses in this thread. Do you get it? THEY think they are Nice Guys. THEY don’t understand how they could possibly be rejected. It’s clearly becauce women are fucked in the head! :rolleyes:
Or he reacts with sadness but the sadness is SO EXTREME as to be inappropriate. I broke things off with a guy I dated for less than 3 weeks and he sobbed for more than an hour and sent me emails about how depressed he was for about a month afterwards. I went out with another guy 3 or 4 times who got so upset that I wouldn’t sleep with him right away that he told me it was like I was “rejecting his soul” despite the fact that he had told me he had HPV. So because I wanted to know he could be ‘the one’ and go through the 6 months of vaccinations before I would have sex with him I was causing him intense emotional pain by rejecting him despite the fact that I hadn’t rejected him at all, I simply asked that he give me time to protect myself against HPV before I’d fuck him. Then he cried about how I made him feel like a leper and pouted for days until I finally just stopped taking his calls.
I think another way of stating it is that Regular Guys try to win affection while Nice Guys try to trade for it. A guy who makes a straightforward proposition is showing some balls and taking a risk, but he’s not sacrificing more than that. Without any obligation, a woman feels comfortable either taking him, leaving him, or putting him in the “try again later” pile. On the other hand, Nice Guy thinks he’s demonstrating how agreeable is, but he just comes off looking like he’s trying to create an obligation. The obligation makes it uncomfortable to turn him down but even worse to accept… he’s created an implicit agreement in his mind and is likely to become ill when it’s broken. Best to either steer clear from him entirely, or draw very clear boundaries.
I think many of us start off as Nice Guy because it seems like the easy way, right? Just make friends with some girls, ask them what women want, and then try to deliver that. The kicker is that women never tell you the real deal about how to attract them. They tell you how they’d like men to act after the courting is done, because that’s where their real life struggle is. They rarely ever tell you any surefire way to attract them, because (a) they don’t consciously know, or (b) some parts of attraction seem too embarrassing or shallow to say, or © it would give an inconvenient advantage to all the losers who they already spend too much time fending off.
Okay, let me try to explain it a different way and maybe it will make sense.
Why can’t the first type of nice guy get a date? The reason probably varies by guy. Some may be shy, some may be physically unattractive, some may be whiny, some may have body odor, some may chase after women way out of their league, some may just not meet the right women. There are thousands of possible reasons. For the vast majority of them, it’s probably not because they’re too nice.
So you have many truly nice guys unable to get dates, but it’s not because they’re too nice.
What bothers most women isn’t that these guys feel bad about not getting dates. A lot of us have been there! If they were to ask advice about how to get do better about being shy around women, etc., we’d be happy to help or at least commiserate. What bothers us is that many of these guys turn around and blame it on being too nice, and that’s not the problem!
It’s bothering because it’s insulting. It implies women don’t know what we want and what’s good for us.
Then there are the guys who take it one step further and think, because they’re “nice,” we should be sleeping with them rather than our current boyfriend. Often these guys aren’t all that nice. These are the “Nice Guys” that most women have encountered and they make us run in the other direction. For example, they’re the ones who ask us where we want to go to dinner and, when we tell them, think they’ve done us some huge favor by being “nice” and letting us pick. And they drop hints about it all evening! Then they get upset when we don’t want to see them again after they were “so nice.”
And, by the way, there are women who are just as bad. I have a friend who insists the reason she doesn’t do well with men is that she’s smart and that intimidates guys. I can assure you it’s not her smarts that are holding her back. When she’s around guys, she’s defensive, negative, and bitter. If she treated me the way she treats guys she dates, I’d have given up on her friendship years ago. Yet no matter how many times I and her other friends try to convince her to act differently, she still insists guys don’t like her because they’re intimidated by her smarts.
If she were to post “why are men intimidated by smart women?” wouldn’t you find that a bit insulting? Especially if she kept insisting you are even when you say you’re not.
As a confirmed former “nice guy” myself, I’m really surprised to read this thread. I just figured the OP was a guy like me. I’m the one who every one’s mother wishes they would date, who has a bunch of female friends, but never got any sexual interest from women. For a “nice guy” like me, part of the anger that finally builds up is as much from watching women friends destroy themselves in bad relationships, as from the constant sexual disinterest.
I’ve never done any of the things the women in this thread accuse “Nice Guys” of. And my nice actions were genuine. I never expected anything for them except to be acknowledged. And when they weren’t, I just went away without any awful confrontation.
The sad part is that now I have a very sexy woman’s attention, but because of a feeling of missing out on so much of life, I’m unable to feel committed to her.
So any chance this thread could get back on track on why genuinely nice guys get rejected so much? No, I expect not, but it felt good to put this into words.
Saying that you’re a nice guy is equivalent to saying ‘I am so modest’.
Just live it, don’t preach it… and shit’ll figure itself out.
I can’t give you a reason for why something happens when it doesn’t actually happen. I reject your basic premise that men who are nice are more likely to be rejected by women. Maybe you personally have been rejected “so much” by women, but you’re a nice man, not all nice men.
If a nice man is rejected by women it’s not because of his niceness. Either he has nothing going for him other than niceness, he has some flaw that outweighs his niceness, or he’s pursuing the wrong women.
If you knew many women who “destroyed themselves in bad relationships” then I’d guess you weren’t hanging around with a very good group of women. Lots of women have been in bad relationships, it’s a hazard of dating, but healthy, stable women get OUT of these relationships and are NOT destroyed by them.
From your post it doesn’t sound like even these screwed up women actually rejected you, though. It sounds like you never let them know that you were interested in anything other than friendship.
I think it’s fear. Some might not want to get involved in something that they won’t be able to dissolve easily.
It’s really none of my business and it probably will not put an end to this nice guy/Nice guy nonsense but I will personally verify that Auto is a nice guy. However, it really isn’t all that nice to read all this crap about him or me by people who don’t know us personally or have all the facts… so I’m going to refrain from venting and consulting any forums about my relationship problems…
I will say this though, I was happy to know Auto and cherish the time I spent getting to know him even if we will no longer keep in touch. I also regret the pain I’ve caused him and my boyfriend, who is also a nice guy that deserves better treatment.
To those of you who suggested that the best thing for Auto to do was to turn his focus inward, I wholeheartedly agree. I will be concentrating on self-improvement for a while so I can conduct myself in a more appropriate manner.
Actually, that’s the funny part. One woman who I was very good friends with for a while told me she was only sexually attracted to me while I was going through personal troubles and in counseling. Once I was through that, any attraction other than friends ended.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t just have messed up single friends. Married women think I’m great. At this point I’m very non-threatening, nice person to talk to. When I’m with a new group for any reason, the married woman seem to seek me out, and the single woman go hide.
I suspect that’s actually the problem. Guys like me have been told just “be yourself” is good enough, and we end up not sending the sexual signals that we never learned. So we are attractive to woman, just not in that way.
Oh well. I only spoke up because the woman talking about “Nice Guys” who aren’t really nice where dominating the thread. From my viewpoint that seems to be more of an outlier.
Came into the thread very late, heard the argument before just wanted to chime in that I am a ‘reformed’ nice guy- came to my senses both from feedback of people and by kind of observing my own behavior/looking back at stupid things/attitudes/misconceptions I had in the past. Getting rejected is much easier now, because its not as personal, and some women that want to be ‘just friends’ sound great because you never know if you might meet someone through them or at the very least get a good friend- hey win win in my opinion.
One thought that DID spring to mind. These ‘nice guys’ are convinced women only want to sex up assholes. If their theory is SO TRUE, I would think at least SOME of them would have the ‘if you can’t beat em, join em’ attitude; getting a few tattoos, acting like a ‘tough guy’, etc. I think if they tried this one of two things would happen:
1.) They meet someone who likes them for their fascade and they feel validated (I doubt this would happen, but you never know)
2.) They realize that by acting out the tough guy persona the only thing they are really changing about themselves is that they are no longer being passive-agressive about their jerkishness and instead are explicit about it. Women still reject them, but maybe aren’t as friendly/polite/subtle.
My perspective (admittedly, as a guy, and not being on the receiving end of this type of person) is that ‘nice guys’ confine themselves to a very narrow set of rules as to what women are ‘supposed’ to like, and get pissed when other guys don’t obey these rules and are sucessful (or the more misogynistic version: women responding to the ‘wrong’ guys).
I’m sure that “Nice Guys” are outnumbered by guys who actually are nice. But a lot of women will tell you, based on hard-earned experience, that the sort of man who goes around complaining about how women never go for nice guys is a lot more likely to be a “Nice Guy”.
To all the truly nice men out there, I’m sorry your love lives can’t be perfect. Since they are not, I hope that if you take nothing else away from this thread then at least you’ll now know better than to start up the “Why don’t women like nice guys?” lament. Seriously, don’t do it. I say this not just because it’s obnoxious, although it is, but because it is counterproductive. Saying things like that is not going to make women think “Oh, that poor nice man! I should totally date him!” It’s only going to make women think you’re a creep like those described by niblet_head and pbbth.
If you (general you) don’t like being lumped together with such men, stop acting like one of them.
Here is the thing though - which way back somewhere on a previous page I already said…
This is an EXTRAORDINARILY COMMON perception among women. True or not, this is what women hear when a guy says “I’m a nice guy. Why can’t I get a date? Why do women only like bad boys?” It may be a completely unfair perception, but - for anyone trying to get a date - its a common enough perception that it really doesn’t matter if its unfair or not. That’s what you are dealing with. It isn’t fair that a young black man walking in a dark alley is feared by a white suburban woman either. It isn’t fair that a good looking young blond woman is assumed to be dumb. It isn’t fair that if a woman wears a short skirt she is seen as a slut. It isn’t fair that if you are overweight, people think you must be lazy. Guess what, stereotypes and perceptions often aren’t fair.
I suspect this gets at the difference. I might complain to my friends, or in a anonymous setting, but I would never say it to a woman I hoped to date. And I gather there are a number of guys who use that as a pickup tool. That does sound sleazy, and has little to do with any nice guys I would know.
I can summarize the difference I think. A nice guy like me looks around and wonders why so many women date jerks when there’s so many nice guys around. A “Nice Guy” whines why don’t they aren’t getting dates themselves.