Yeah, that about sums it up.
Most of the genuinely nice guys I know are happily married or in stable, long term relationships. We don’t hear about them much because they’re not complaining.
Most of the genuinely nice *single *guys (and girls) I’ve known have lacked confidence. They’d dress dull because they didn’t want to stand out. They wouldn’t approach te hawt gurls (guyz), because ‘they’d only get turned down’. Or they’d spend all night talking themselves into making the move while their intended was getting to know the men (women) who actually talked to her(him). They didn’t think their carefully rehearsed lines would work so they stumbled and looked silly. Self confidence is an aphrodisiac. It won’t work on all women (or men) since there are other things they’ll find attractive too, but it works better than standing in the corner at a party wondering why Miss (or Mr) Perfect hasn’t come looking for you.
Confident =/= jerk.
Lack of confidence =/= nice.
A Shameful Cracka’s story of his makeover didn’t prove that better looking men get more dates, it proves that women are attracted to men with a bit of pride in themselves - Cracka’s looks were the same, but he cared enough about himself to make the best of them.
I don’t think it’s really any better for a man to say it to people other than women he hopes to date. Well, it’s less likely to blow his chances with those particular women, but the “Nice Guy’s Lament” is still obnoxious even when the guy isn’t hoping to score with me personally.
The first “Nice Guy” to ever come to my attention was dating one of my best friends in high school. He started in on the “Nice Guy’s Lament” in front of me and several other people.
That’s right, while he was dating my friend he publicly complained about how “nice guys” like him always finish last in the dating game*. I don’t think any better of him for saying this when my friend wasn’t around rather than to her face. The problem with this guy was that this was the way he thought – that he had no flaws, that girls didn’t know what they wanted or what was good for them (him, apparently), and that if there was any justice in the world a supremely nice guy like him would be getting tons of chicks (rather than the single one he had, I guess) while other guys he perceived as jerks would be all alone.
A man who is actually nice would do well not to indulge himself in this sort of thinking, no matter how tempting it is. It’s one thing to complain about being unlucky in love, and quite another to blame this lack of success on being too nice while all those crazy women out there only like jerks.
*For the record, this guy was a creep in other ways. I remember he would get all upset if my friend wasn’t at home whenever he called (this was before cellphones were common), and on at least one occasion lied about there being some big emergency so my friend’s mother would tell him where she was.
How about I let a Nice Guy tell it himself, in his own words
Background: I met this guy online. We talked online for two weeks, played WoW together once and met in person once. Nothing happened between us because I didn’t have romantic feelings for him; he clearly showed he had intense feelings for me but it was too much, too soon and it unsettled me. After our one and only meeting he asked me outright, online, if there was a chance for us and I told him “No”. I didn’t want to kick the guy while he was down so I blamed myself saying that it must have been too soon after my previous relationship ended (which was probably true) and told him that I thought everything about him was wonderful and I valued his friendship but I didn’t feel a “spark” between us and didn’t want to pursue a romantic relationship with him (also true). He seemed to take it well, then a couple of hours later sent me this email. I’ll quote it in it’s entirety so you can tell me if I was wrong to be blown away to get this from someone I’d met exactly one time in my life.
He kept chatting online after that though, and took every opportunity that came his way to pitch himself as the perfect boyfriend for me until one day I had enough and I just got snappy and said
and his response:
I couldn’t believe he was accusing me of leading him on! I mean, I’d said things to him like
So I just wrote him off as a passive-aggressive jerk and blocked him on chat, and I’ve never heard from him again. I was going through some old files the other day and I found the log - I’d kept it in case he caused trouble - and I thought of it when I saw this thread. I think of him as a typical Nice Guy - the guy who thinks he was a victim because I didn’t want a romantic relationship with him.
Wow Cazzle, that beats everything.
It beats the guy who kept ringing me for a month, “dumped” me even though we weren’t dating and then got upset that I *still *didn’t know what I was missing.
That even beats the guy who, after failing in his one pick-up line at the bar, said in tones of high dudgeon, “Well, I’ll just go home to my *wife *then!”
It beats the guy who left a valentine’s card under my bedroom door (:eek:) the morning after our one and only five-minute conversation. It wasn’t even February!
That even beats the guy who made friends with my neighbours, then asked them to tell me how wonderful he was so I would dump my boyfriend. They didn’t. I didn’t. Eventually he decided I was a lesbian bitch instead - we worked together, so that went well.
Just think how lucky we are that there’s enough decent guys about that we don’t have to date these idiots!
Cazzle, holy crap. I wouldn’t expect something like that from someone I knew for two months, maybe not even two years (because someone who knew me for two years should know better than that…). I dated someone like that one time, and it was extremely uncomfortable. After repeatedly telling him to please stop bombarding me, he actually accused me of ‘stalking’ him. 
Autolycus, I hope things shape up for you. Apart from the frustration and such in this thread, you seem like a decent guy. Sometimes it’s just REALLY hard finding the right person to click with, and there are days you want to scream, “ARRRRRRRRGH! WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?” or “WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM? I AM NOT SOME FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER, WHY CAN I NOT FIND SOMEBODY?!” I personally don’t think you’re a jackass for venting on a messageboard. I mean, that’s what it’s here for, yes?
You seem like you’re taking some advice to heart after thinking about it, so I’ll cross my fingers for you. I don’t post very much, but I’ve been reading here for ages – and I do recall you being one of the few to say hello to me in my silly ‘introductory’ post.
I used to feel somewhat similarly, except instead of thinking something was wrong with other people for not wanting to date me, I always felt like something must be wrong with me. After all, all those people not dating me couldn’t possibly be wrong, could they? I spent a lot of time (the last five years!) avoiding the silly bad relationships that reinforced my feelings of inadequacy and concentrated on getting myself sorted out, getting my own personal identity settled instead of trying to force myself to suit whatever partner type my current significant other wanted me to be. Once I got a personality and a backbone, and stopped simply saying, “Hey, I’ll do/be anything you want! Just date me!” (I had failed miserably with both men and women, and they weren’t fundamentally all that different, in my dating experience) things really shaped up.
I used to take my friends for granted, also, because I was so focused on trying to get a date. I felt much better when I realized the importance of friendship in my life and the importance of doing things I enjoyed, without constantly worrying about whether it would affect potential relationships.
Putting someone else’s needs and wants ahead of your own is one thing, but letting them tromp all over you is another. One is considerate, one is either passive or passive-aggressive (I hate that term, but it suits sometimes), and the former is really the only one that ‘works’, unless you’re dating someone that enjoys tromping all over the person they love.
Where you look for potential dates is pretty important, too. If you’re looking for the type of person that goes to bars, then looking for dates in bars will work. If you’re looking for something else, though, you’re probably not going to find it there. I think someone else mentioned that. The kind of people I wanted to date were quiet, nerdy, and liked staying home playing videogames or watching TV. It’s hard to find one, because they’re all home playing games and watching TV! The internet helped, but I’m not good with long distances, so those relationships all flopped (and generally I would only find the ones that were depressed or antisocial, so things were really doomed from the start), and I finally ended up recently reuniting with someone I met in college, but it took a long time before we reconnected. Ten years! I just turned 27 and am only just now finding some kind of decent relationship, and a lot of women are waiting until later in their lives to settle down, I think, because of careers and such. So, don’t give up. It’s really frustrating and sometimes it seems like it will never happen, but if you give up, then it surely never will. And don’t let your frustration make you into a spiteful person. I’m sure you are better than that.
Apart from that, I don’t think I can say anything that hasn’t already been said, so good luck. Really.
Apologies for anything silly, convoluted, or offtopic. I tend to get flustered when posting on the SDMB, but I wanted to wish you well.
Truer words have yet to spoken in this thread. Every time I have been out of a relationship this has been the largest hurdle. It’s hard to meet others with your interests when many of your interests are something you do from your living room.
The women in this thread have hijacked the original question in the OP “Why don’t girls like nice guys?” and turned it into a discussion about “Nice Guys”, and how horrible they are and “how could anyone want them?”
These sorts of assholes seem to exist, but this is not the phenomenon that the OP was alluding to.
Also, there were a lot of claims that only a tiny fraction of women are attracted to “bad boys”, and they were the wrong women to be going after anyway.
So, I got curious and did some web searching to see if I could find any studies on women and attraction to “bad boys”
A simple “women bad boys” search on Google turned up a lot of hits. From the top results, two were from women: thisand this.
Some choice excerpts
So, we have two women (one a relationship coach and the other writing in WomensHealth magazine) writing articles and talking about womens’ attraction to bad boys, and disinterest in nice guys, in a very matter-of-fact way, as if it is well understood that this is a well-known phenomenon, and not something confined to a small subset of women, as the responses in this thread would have us believe.
How do we explain these articles? Are these women authors simply mistaken or lying? Is this issue not as widespread?
It seems to me that this is a widespread phenomenon (at least the attraction if not the dating) and the discrepancy between the view (of girls being attracted to bad boys) out in the real world vs here on the SDMB is that the types of women who log on to the SDMB are not your typical women (just as the guys who log on to the SDMB are not your typical men)
So, we have women logging on and reading in this thread about womens’ behavior that seems nothing like their own and assuming that the men posting their experiences are making stuff up.
And then they turn it around and start venting their own complaints about “Nice Guys”. Notice that neither of the above articles mentions “Nice Guys”. In fact, the second article specifically mentions that nice guys (lower case n and g) are not as attractive (are not as fun as the bad boys, they make it too easy, they like you and you know it). Which was the original contention and question in the OP.
Anyway, of course, no man thinks that simply being “nice” should be enough to have women falling at your feet. No one has claimed that, except the women trying to discredit the notion that women are, in general, more attracted to the “bad boy” persona than to the safe, nice guy persona (and this is in a sexual sense, and not in a who’s-better-relationship-material sense. Also, this may be more prevalent among younger women)
And, of course, in real life a lot of nice guys end up getting into relationships and getting married to wonderful women. No one is disputing that.
But “girls are attracted to the bad boy persona” is a widespread meme and, from experience, others’ experiences, and some Googling, it seems to hold. I will agree that it could be a myth that is self-perpetuating and has been around so long that even women (like the two authors linked above) have bought into it, without having any hard evidence that it is true. Is there any data on this? (FWIW, hereis a link to an article that tries to bust the “bad boy” myth)
I have it turned off. I dislike the interface, never notice when I get messages anyway, and keep my email available. I turned it on now.
Exactly. You can only see assholes abuse their way to relationship after relationship so many times before you start wondering what the hell is wrong with the world if guys like that succeed time and time again and sometimes twice before lunch while you remain alone.
Same, same, same and same. No-one is disputing that there are psycho assholes in the world. niblet_head and Cazzle have their stories, which are about psycho assholes, not about actual nice guys who wonder why they can’t get a date.
I’m well aware, and like I’ve said several times I don’t have a problem with the statement “saying that makes you sound like this”.
Polerius. Oh, for Og’s sake - we haven’t hijacked the thread. The OP displayed classic symptoms of Nice Guy Syndrome including labelling himself as a nice guy while lamenting that his adored one did not leave her boyfriend to attend to his ‘needs’.
You keep hijacking the thread into why women really want to be with bad boys. We’ve said (repeatedly) that while some do, it’s not pervasive. You’ve said that women say they want Woody Allen, but really go for Antonio Banderas, then backed away from that when it was pointed out that Woody Allen is a horrid little man and Antonio Banderas seems like a good person. You’ve said that women put out for bikers, without even attempting to qualify the very small percentage of women that fall into that demographic. That’s just insulting. The fact that you think the “Bad Boy” syndrome is more widespread than women are prepared to admit is just as valid as any woman who feels that the “Nice Guy” syndrome is more widespread than men admit.
Nice Girls falling for Bad Boys happens - in a recognised minority. Just like jerks pretending to be “Nice Guys” is a recognised minority. They are not mutually exclusive and the OP’s description of his behaviour was very much in the latter category - as he has admitted and is hopefully addressing.
Someone claiming to be the disputed [del]throphy[/del] girlfriend has joined the thread to admit it was all her fault really and Auto’s a great guy. What more do you want? We are fighting ignorance here. You yourself have gone from rebutting the very existence of the “Nice Guy” syndrome to admitting it actually exists outside of our feminine imaginations. In Auto’s case he’s apparently thanking us for the help.
The OP’s story was about a girl he had two dates with, he admitted much later that they weren’t even real dates in the accepted “we are going out, just the two of us, with the intent of getting to know each other”. They were a whole different category, since she told him up front that she was in a relationship of five years standing.
She told him that her boyfriend wasn’t attentive and Auto went into ‘Knight in Shining Armor’ mode, being the kind of NICE, ATTENTIVE, FRIEND that he thought she would fuck. He posted here because she didn’t fuck him after he put so much effort into being nice. He didn’t think he could pretend to be nice for much longer if she didn’t fuck him like she was supposed to.
She didn’t, saying she liked him more than she thought she should (and going way overboard at that point), but ultimately choosing to stay and work on her *existing *relationship. Possibly (we’ll never know for certain) she was just using him to make her boyfriend jealous, or pay attention. Auto played along, deciding she could waffle between the two of them for as long as he was prepared to believe she’d ultimately choose him. Not ‘Nice’ of either of them.
He doesn’t know anything about the boyfriend, except that the guy has left off building a house for his parents to rush to his girlfriend’s side when she said she wasn’t happy. He’s accepted that Auto was important to his girlfriend and told Auto he doesn’t think he should hang around any more. He didn’t threaten violence or wave his willy about, he just told Auto to stop pestering his girlfriend.
Where in hell do you see this as Auto being the victim of the “girls like bad boys” meme. *Auto *was the ‘bad boy’ trying to make her be unfaithful. By your reasoning she should have laid down and spread her legs in the carpark rather then telling him to cool off while she thought about things.
The only one I feel any sympathy for is the boyfriend - he is the one who seems to be a halfway decent (and restrained) guy. Auto and the girlfriend both acted like asses.
It is not just the women. There have been a few men in here who have “hijacked” this discussion by disagreeing with the sentiment that women don’t like nice guys, and stating that the misconception occurs due to Nice Guys contorting the meaning of nice guy. It is hard to distinguish between a genuinely nice guy and a Nice Guy, but one telling point where they often differ is this - genuinely nice guys don’t usually bitch that girls dislike them because they aren’t jerky enough. Hence the responses in this thread. Surely you can understand people taking offense to the notion that women are so weak-willed they just can’t help but fall for assholes. Yes, there are damaged people out there who like being treated shitty, and have trouble comprehending kindness; but they should not be used as a measuring stick for the general population. I also have to ask how you know what phenomenon the OP was alluding to, and why you feel that matters? Perhaps the OP itself is at the core of what the “hijackers” are discussing?
Really? No man thinks that simply being nice should be enough? Did your read Cazzle’s letter? That shows a man trying way too hard to be nice, and he obviously thinks she should be at his feet. Additionally, if people are complaining that “nice” is a determining factor for not being liked, aren’t they by extension arguing that “nice” should be a determining factor in being liked?
Regarding the rest of your post, if its purely attraction you want to cultivate you can get all the benefits of the bad boy persona while still being a nice guy. Nice does not automatically mean boring, in fact some of the least boring people I know are extremely nice; while some of the jerkiest cats I’ve hung out with have been mind-numbingly boring. You can play up a mysterious aura, keep people on their toes, be daring, take risks, stand on your own, and still be nice all at the same time. The problem is nice guys often adopt personality traits that are self-detrimental such as constantly trying to please people, niceness to the point of being a doormat, or not acting with a sense of purpose. Perhaps one of the more common mistakes a nice guy can make is to shy away from ever making things a little more sexual in nature. Guys in the “friend zone” are often guys that never behaved in a way where women would think of them as anything but a friend. It’s not nice right? Surely a gal will appreciate it when I don’t make any advances, she’ll know I don’t think of her as a piece of meat; and once she realizes how much I respect her, then comes the sex. It may make sense logically, but humans don’t always work by logic. Sometimes people want to get animalistic, and assholes who almost always behave as animals come out ahead of the guy who is paralyzed by niceness in that regard.
Also, you may want to reconsider the way you have phrased your post (especially regarding women). It comes off as sort of Nice Guyish.
Actually, from the examples given in this thread, it’s pretty easy to distinguish them: “Nice Guys” are jerks.
Who said anything about “weak-willed” and “can’t help but fall for”?
When people claim that men are attracted to young women with big breasts, does anyone complain that men are portrayed as “weak-willed” and “can’t help but fall for” these women? It’s a physical attraction. This has nothing to do with how strong or weak the will is.
When people claim that women are attracted to men with a specific set of traits, it has nothing to do with the strength of their will. It’s just physical attraction. Why the need to get all defensive about it?
I didn’t read his entire letter. He was being annoyingly long-winded and I didn’t finish it, so I’m not sure if he claimed that she should be at his feet simply because he is so nice.
Logically speaking, just because some people are saying “don’t hold my niceness against me” does not mean they are implying “you must hold my niceness in my favor”. It could mean they are saying “you must not consider my niceness in your evaluation of your attraction of me”
That’s just logically speaking. In real life, if someone says “don’t hold my niceness against me”, that person is deluded and there is something wrong with them if they think women hold his niceness against him.
Agreed.
A perfect example of a Nice Guy from the movies was Dusty Dinkleman (Chris Klein) from Just Friends. His whole “sensitive nice guy” routine was just a well-crafted act to pick up girls.
Um…the question is why is he still paying attention to a girl who doesn’t have her shit straightened out with her current/ex boyfriend?
She dated this guy 5 years and she’s just going to break things off just like that and pick up with a new guy? I don’t think so. It has nothing to do with “nice” or “jerk”.
Ok, to address the original topic, in my opinion and experience…
There are women who chase the bad boys. Hell, there’s even a Simpsons episode about it, so it must be true! That doesn’t mean that those women are a majority of women. In my experience, they tend to be emotionally immature or damaged. The former may grow out of it, the latter tend to keep living the same self-destructive paths over and over and never change. YMMV.
There are genuine nice guys who can’t seem to “catch” a girl. Odds are it’s not because of their niceness. In fact, there are very few things that are ever motivated by one thing. A girl who likes Bad Boys might still be put off by a Bad Boy with poor personal hygiene habits or nothing interesting to say about anything or yadda yadda yadda. No human is attracted to every human who fits their “type” because there are still so many shades of variation within a “type” that even your perfect match is probably only going to tick most of the boxes - as long as they are the important boxes, it doesn’t matter. That’s why relationships are about compromise. So a nice guy who can’t get a girl is a guy who probably ticks the disposition box but still doesn’t meet enough of the other criteria for most women.
I have some wonderful friends who I love dearly, and we get each other and have such a great time when we hang out together, but I suspect we’d claw each other’s eyes out inside of a month if we tried to live together. We don’t have to be a perfect fit because we’re not in that kind of relationship… it doesn’t matter if we don’t find each other physically attractive or if we’re not prepared to put up with each other’s bad habits or if our sex drives are wildly different. Those things won’t ever be a factor in our friendship. A friendship can still work even though fewer boxes are ticked because it’s less intense than a relationship and so it can tolerate more areas of discord.
This is what I think the nice guys are coming up against. They mistake friendship for the beginnings of a beautiful relationship but the girl doesn’t see it like that. She sees his flaws and doesn’t care because she likes who he is and those other things don’t matter to her in a friend, but they are deal breakers when it comes to boyfriends. He doesn’t get it because she says he’s such a nice guy and she’s happy to hang out with him, talk with him and laugh and cry and whatever but she rejects him when he expresses an interest in her. To further complicate things, she’s probably scared about the idea of losing her wonderful friend and tries not to hurt him so she’s not likely to say “I love you but if I had to live with that thing you do, I’d probably wind up stabbing you with a butter knife”. She’s going to try to soften the blow by mentioning his good points. “You’re a nice guy but…” doesn’t mean “You’re a nice guy and that’s the reason I’m going to go out with someone else”, it means “You’re a nice guy but that’s not enough to compensate for some other flaw(s) that I can’t deal with in a romantic partner”.
Nice guys are, sadly, very often shy guys. This makes them hard to get to know. By the time a woman has learned enough about the shy guy to establish that he’s really very nice (and not airquote “Nice”), she may have stopped thinking about him as a potential partner and relegated him to permanent friend status because, in his shyness, he hasn’t displayed signs of interest in her. Chances are good that once she starts to think of him as just a friend, it’s not likely that she’ll change in a hurry. Shy nice guys probably could change their luck by overcoming their shyness and learning to flirt a little more to show they are interested before they give the impression that they aren’t.
maggenpye, your post is absolutely spot on. Auto, you’ve got people in this thread who are defending you and I’m sure with reason. But honestly, it was you who started this thread, and with all the classic signs of a Nice Guy. It was you who did not clarify until late in the thread. It was you who said you had two dates with this woman, yet we come to find out one was a friends thing and one was a talk thing. You don’t seem to know this woman very well, you have built up a level of expectaction in your mind and then you are angry with all women when it doesn’t go your way.
Now, later you do take responsibility for your impetuousness, and that’s why I think this is a youth thing that you will outgrow. In the meantime, however, those who called you on your shit got fuck you’s and I don’t care’s and tough’s. We get to experience how women like to be dominated and have their hearts stolen, and that’s a fine line for you to walk. Looks like a Nice Guy, sounds like a Nice Guy, quacks like a Nice Guy.
Moreover, you don’t even seem to fit the stereotype of the small-n, small-g nice guy! You’ve had three relationships of a serious nature? How does that make you unlucky in love? (You will suffer the pain for your beloved’s happiness, except, it seems, move, have kids, or get married.)
I think it is completely understandable those of us who went down the Nice Guy path. I don’t think we would have if the evidence presented, circumstantial though it was, didn’t have the odour of … well… shit.
I also find your responses to some of us to be patronizing. I also assume that’s a writing style, but good lord, don’t tell me young man, what you think I should know about women and dating. I outrank you by more than fifteen years of experience. That, and the uterus.
I think you helped ignite a shit-storm and have now walked away from it. That makes me not like you very much right now. I hope I get to know you a bit better in the future and come to see that this is a one-off, and abnormality and not a trend. But if I only had this thread to go on, I’d think you were a pretty ucky person. As it is, I think you’re young.
BTW, I vow to never again use the words “I’m out” on The Dope ever again.
Yeah, why do you do that?
Cite.
Because women don’t want to go out on a limb any more than men do. If he hasn’t shown any interest in me, my assumption is that I’m not his type - he is gay, he likes shorter women, he has a thing for redheads, my voice is annoying, my sense of humor annoys him, he doesn’t want a relationship, he hates my decorating style and is afraid he’ll end up living in a house decorated with Laura Ashley - whatever.
At some point someone needs to show some interest - “I think you are great and I’d date you” is a fairly non-threatening way to show interest." “I have strong feelings for you that are not justifiable given the amount of intimacy we have mutually established” - i.e. Cazzle’s letter - is offputting unless the person on the other hand shares similar strong feelings. And I suspect that is the same for men and women - if men complaining about “it was two dates, then she brought over a week worth of clothes and started talking about how many kids and what their names were going to be” is any indication.