For the past couple of days I could just hear Mark lurking in the background, tapping his feet, shuffling like he needs to piss, and finally he has let it all out. Bottle it up much Serlin ?
Mark, I strongly disagree. “Nice guy” != “masochistic self-pitying jerk”.
WOW!
You don’t have any bad feelings or anything about your past do you? I take it that you’re not married.
Seriously, I KNOW guys who fit his description. They had more problems with the opposite sex and were real nice guys, the type you could let watch your house when out of town and they’d not even drink your booze, steal any money left lying around and would clean the place up before you got back. I liked to go drinking with such guys because they’d not horn in on any chick you picked up, would watch your back and drive you home if you got too drunk. (I had to PAY some dancers to flirt with a couple of them, which inflated their egos tremendously and never told them what I had done. I mean, hell, they LOOKED so happy over it and bragged about it forever after.)
I know one nice guy who changed dramatically after reaching 25 and could not get a steady love interest. He became a real shit, to put it bluntly, actually did get a whole bunch of casual sex, and wandered off on his own. I ran into him in a local topless bar, where it seems he spends most of his time after work. What was real strange was that he carried a small gun in his boot, something he never would have done before and he wasn’t real friendly.
He did get a lot of the dancers at his table, though. I was impressed.
Mark, I think you might want to see a professional, though much of what you said rings familiar when I consider some old friends of mine. I never could understand why those guys had so much trouble getting girls. I mean, they idolized the typical female!
Natural attraction where girls tend to gravitate towards the more ‘rough and tough’ individual for better genes in breeding? (The survival of the species thing.) Isn’t being artistic, creative, intelligent and kind a survival trait?
I don’t know. Probably in primitive times, such creative guys got splattered by the brutal ones. Plus, by the time such guys reach their 30s, most available women have already been through a series of not so nice relationships and are often suspicious and hard. They might not believe what they find in such guys.
What? Me worry?’
Mark,
Wow, and I thought I was bitter!
Rory,
I wish I could tell you that you will be repaid for your niceness eventually, but it’s not true. You should do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because someday it’s going to get you laid. If you think that someday the world’s going to change and everybody going to get what they deserve out of fairness, you’re going to be sadly disappointed.
The world is not fair. I don’t like that either, but that’s the way it is. There’s no point in being bitter about it, because showing your bitterness won’t make it any fairer. Perhaps (indeed, probably) things will change for you, because things do work out for most people, but don’t think that because you’re a nice guy things have to work out right.
Let’s not even talk about niceness, because I’m not sure if I can believe someone’s own account of whether they’re a nice person. It’s always been clear to me that, as much as people deny it, looks do matter. I’m 47 years old, it looks like I’m not going to get laid this millennium, and it’s clear to me that being 4’11" is part of the reason.
I think I’m as much a nice guy as the next person, but who am I to judge my own personality? On the other hand, I can use a yardstick and tell my own height. Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter, because it does. I could see that every time I made a serious attempt to interest a woman, they looked at me and decided that they could do better than me.
Women do care about height, about weight, and about all the other things that are conventionally counted as good looks. And, yes, men do the same for women. They may claim that they are really looking for a good personality, but personality is a secondary consideration. It doesn’t get much better with age either.
Again, do the right thing because it’s the right thing. Don’t think you’re going to get rewarded because you’re a nice guy, because you won’t.
And, Mark, may I make a suggestion? Stay out of bars. Quit drinking. You’re obviously on the edge of becoming an alcoholic. You’re in considerably worse shape than the guys you used to despise when you were a nice guy. Some of them, after all, didn’t even know how big of a jerk they were. You do, and yet you keep acting like a jerk. What’s more, you hate yourself for doing it. This can come to no good.
MarkSerlin, you sadden me beyond words, please get some professional help. Your turning into an a**hole will not make the world a better place, and it will not make you happier. You are beginning to sound like those bitter old maids of 40 who spend the rest of their youth in the lounge at the Holiday inn. It’s not true nice guys finish last, I married one after 25 years of dating every type under the sun, including some truly BAD boys. If you are seriously so embittered by life, it is time for therapy - not the opinions of platonic girlfriends and your guy friends.
See, that’s the thing about ‘Nice Guys’, they initially DON’T act nice just to get laid or a relationship because they genuinely are nice. Some end up like me, broken sinus cavity so’s I can’t dive below 10 feet anymore, daily headaches – that wild right to my temple kind of shook things up in there --, crooked nose, and a jaw that no longer closes properly. Nerves rerouted through my once broken jaw so that sometimes, a dentist cannot numb a tooth or two he needs to pull. Luckily, there is a thing called a ligamental block that gives him three minutes to get the work done.
Nice guys walk headlong into danger without thinking of themselves and only much later do they suddenly realize that every dork in the world who saves a mouse from being run over gets their picture in the paper, but not him.
Nice guys freely loan girls their money and pay their bills and pay for their doctors and medicines and car repairs and then the girls run off, owing them $8,000 and refuse to pay it back. A nice guy might walk into a job in a mental institution and discover that the staff is crazier than the patients and spend half of his time protecting the patients from racism because most of his staff is Black and PROUD and willing to lie about Whites on the medical notes, which delays their therapy. He’ll fight a loosing battle for about 5 years. In that time he’ll discover that well adjusted, favorite Black Aides go out and get shot by bouncers because they got drunk and pulled a gun. Then that same Black Aide attacks a violent patient in a fit of anger and the Nice Guy has to not only contain the patient but keep the other ‘Caregiver’ from beating the shit out of him and afterwards, the Black Aide is never even disciplined for loosing his cool. The Nice Guy watches aids of color steal from the clinic in front of other aides and nothing is done, observes aides of color goofing off and lying on patient charts, finds out that a male aide of color is busily seducing the confused white female patients when he is on duty at night and setting up a pussy brigade of discharged but not cured patients for his own use. No one even comments when female patient after female patient returns for additional therapy, accusing the aide of color of using them and taking advantage of their sickness. The Nice Guy gets in MUCH trouble trying to stop all of this and nearly fired several times. The Nice guy will keep his opinions racially neutral but observe the aides of color making it very clear to all patients that they resent the past history of slavery and any perceived superiority by whites. The nice guy might observe a highly trained and educated nurse of color tell a depressed, female patient, who just got her divorce papers, that if a man had treated HER like THAT she’d GET A GUN and SHOOT HIM. (Not the wisest thing to tell such a patient.) The nice guy might leave after 5 years of fighting the corrupt system and leave the field that he loved forever.
Nice Guys probably have had scores of women cry all over his shoulders, had them sleep unmolested on his bed, couch, floor or chairs and each one took off with some crappy guy and several came back, crying and wailing over how there were just ‘NO NICE GUYS LEFT.’ The nice guy might sit and watch over them when they fell into drunken sleeps, clean them up when they vomited all over the place, provide medications to ease their hangovers, and listen to them talk and talk and talk for hours at any time of the day or night, to vent.
And when he gets sick, they all run like hell. It is the nice guy who is called when a girl wants to kill herself and the nice guy who talks them out of it and goes to work on no sleep the next day and checks on them to make sure that they are OK and watches them run off to meet some guy they came across in a bar. The Nice guy probably will work 3 jobs to pay the therapy and medication bills for a girl, only to have her cheat on him with his best friend.
The Nice Guy may even become friends with topless dancers at his favorite bar, fish them out of cars between sets, take them out to eat, drop them off at their homes, sober them up when they are too drunk and let them use that old shoulder and sit back and watch while they screw everyone else.
The Nice Guy reads Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and understands it. He’ll drop off heaters at girls homes in the winter when they have none and almost freeze by himself in his own home. He might install a phone for a girl in her home, as an extension of his, under her name because she ran her bill too high and hers was disconnected. Then he will get hit with a $3,000 long distance bill that some smooth talking Black male friend of hers ran up when she was asleep and will have to spend several tense days, almost loosing his own phone, getting the bill dropped. The Nice Guy is not usually dumb. The Nice Guy then disconnects the loaned phone and absorbs the last $300 the girl owes. In the mean time, the smooth talking friend of the girl, who was not only running up bills on the phone, but screwing her on the side, drops out of sight and can’t be found to repay the bill.
The Nice Guy understands. X number of years later, after a breakdown, the Nice Guy claws his way back on his own because his ‘friends’ ran like hell when they saw he was getting sick and decides to change things around a bit. Nice Guys, he realizes, do finish last, and that there is a price to pay for every good deed.
After X number of years, he is left with a crooked nose, frequent headaches, a jaw that doesn’t work all that well, empty bank accounts, no real girl friend, no close friends (he chooses to do that deliberately because close friends of years will eventually stab one in the back), a whole new work ethic and on some pills and disabled.
Being loyal to any person or business, he has discovered gets one screwed. Listening to problems of others gets one used. Loaning out money is not wise. He also discovered that when one is sick, no one gives a shit and he’d better recover in silence because girl friends don’t want to hear about it, don’t want to drop in and see how he is doing and don’t want to catch what he has.
Good guys are a dying breed and no wonder.
I was the Scoutmaster of the very first integrated troop in my town. We never even got mentioned in the local paper but now, the papers have all forms of big spreads on anything integrated. I found some kitchen cabinets while working as a courier, picked them up and found the local Scout Camp was in need of such things and gave them to the camp. I got in trouble by my job because someone saw me picking up the things and thought it strange that I knew where they were and wondered if I was part of some group dumping construction trash on their property. I was forbidden to pick up anything else I found.
I worked a week with pneumonia and finally had to stop and while sick, my boss sent a driver around to check on me to make sure I was sick and not just drunk. Then I was told to get back to work too early or loose my job and as a result, remained sick for another month. The sickness slowed me down and I got in trouble for being slow, even though it was obvious to all that I was still quite ill.
I was knocked off of the road by a car while delivering and the vehicle I drove was totaled, but no one suggested that I take the rest of the day off and I got another vehicle, transferred my freight and went back to work. I got in trouble for being late on deliveries because my boss never informed the home office that I had been in a major accident.
My girl friend of that time spent 2 minutes cooing over me and the accident and then proceeded to spend the next two hours telling me her problems.
People used to pound on my door at all hours of the day and night and drop by to talk about their problems, drink my coffee or booze and go home better off than when they came. Once, while working in A/C installation, I got into a discussion with the owners 14 year old, red neck, snuff dipping son and informed him that beating up women, dipping snuff,
Actually, I kinda found MarkSerlin’s posts rather humorous, in a “I can relate” sorta way.
There’s always another beer.
Mark,
I think you’ll feel MUCH better with therapy.
Regarding being “nice” and ehotism and altuism in general, I don’t think that putting oneself (and one’s SO or family) in harm’s way in order to be be “nice” to strangers is “nice” (to oneself or oen’s family). American women used to be taught that one of the bes6t things a woman can do with ther life is to marry a guy with a problem (an alcoholic, a compulsive adulterer, etc), sacrifice her career and take care of him as he abuses her and the kids. Most (not all) women know better now… No sane woman wants to be be the girlfriend of a masichist who’s make himself and her miserable for the benefit of some strangers.
Mark,
I re-read your long post in detail and have the following comments:
-
You really, really would benefit from therapy.
-
Please consider writing a book about your nursing experiences. You sound like you’ll feel better telling your story; and it’ll definitely make you some money; and it’ll make a difference.
My observations tell me that nice guys don’t get laid because:
- They are only interested in hot looking babes-not “nice” ordinary-looking girls
- They wait for the woman to approach them and that is why there are so many 40 year old bachelors who are straight.
My advice–find a nice girl and be aggressive dating her and when the time is right–you’ll get some 
P.S. Mark–write your memoirs!
Mark: I second the “Write your memoirs.” movement.
If they are as interesting as your posts above, they will be a best-seller. Besides, it will probably be theraputic on several levels to write it all down and get paid for it.
–Baloo
Jesus himself noted that “No man knoweth the day nor the hour of my coming.” But you know how people are. They get all excited and stuff.
–John Michael Scalzi
http://members.tripod.com/~Bob_Baloo/index.htm
HOLY COW! Talk about a diatribe! I knew a girl friend once who dated a ‘nice guy’ and she said he was ‘too nice,’ that he always did everything for her and treated her too good, which I thought was remarkable. She dumped him. I could have kicked her butt.
Right now, MarkSerlin, I think you better get some anger management therapy because you probably aren’t much good to anyone right now with all of that resentment built up, though, if half of what you claim is true, I think you have a reason to be ticked off. The News is fickle also and sometimes I think it is who you know, not what you do because a male friend of mine once stopped at an accident and pulled two people out of a car, administered first aide and more than likely saved their lives before the paramedics got there and nothing was ever printed about it. Even the rescue team didn’t acknowledge his efforts.
When beach combing, I once found what appeared to be an unexploded military bomb in the reeds and decided to be a hero and called the police. They had me call the nearest military base, who shuttled me to fire rescue who dumped me back with the cops, who sent out the bomb squad. (DAMN! They don’t mention all that on TV.) When they arrived, like an HOUR later, I showed them the bomb and was ushered back out of the way. It turned out to be a spent military flare casing, but the big CCCP on the side made me think it was Russian. I wound up sitting for another hour watching distinctly untalkative cops guarding the area and watched while they took the thing away and no one even asked me my name and no reporters showed up and I was left alone to do as I pleased.
I guess my ‘15 minutes of fame’ was not to be on that day. (I would have liked to have the empty casing as a souvenir, but they kept it.)
Actually, Mark’s minor-chord post blends in pretty well with what Rory asked. Okay, no flaming here (unless this gets sent to the Pit) but Mark’s post struck me a an extrapolated, lotsa-miles, pain ridden version of the OP.
There’s “nice guy” and “getting laid”. The getting laid part shouldn’t be dismissed, as we are all social mammals here. IMO, as long as both parties are aware, responsible and kind, sexual experimentation is nothing to get het up about. Ideally, glandular contact would be in sync with spiritual and social notions.
Since that rarely happens, the best one can hope for is kindness and a kind of honor: male and female. Urges grow a heck of lot faster than the baggage that surrounds them, but the concept of “nice” (male and female) assumes a certain capacity for goodwill and error. As maligned as the 60’s were, the time did carry a message of “if you can’t love with permanance, then at least love with kindness”.
In other words, walk the path you need to, but don’t stomp the flowers while you’re at it.
The inevitable baggage of intimacy, i.e. friend, fun, loyalty, love, etc. gets much harder–and rewarding, when it works. Which it often doesn’t. True fact. Hey, who said good things were easy? That’s why the inner compass becomes essential. It’s so damned easy to take that seductively easy step 1 and think there’s clear road on.
Mark described the pain clearly. Maybe it wasn’t PC or to individual taste, but it was a great description. I daresay women on the board could counter with hurting, mystified yowls. (It’s those quiet, tantilizing ones who tie you up in knots.)
The syndrome is endless and anything but new. Guys would love instant sex, cosseting,
feminine stuff around. Women would love uncomplicated laughter, huge shoes strewn around, hogging the remote and enthusiastic sex. So it’s complicated. If you’d wanted easy, shoulda been a single cell organism.
But somehow this whole interesting mess has to come back somehow to “nice” and “honor”. Sex happens, but intimacy is earned. Men aren’t troglodytes and enemies, and women aren’t teases and ballbusters.
So, Rory (feeling forgotten in this shitstorm?) gather your rose petals while you may. Keep in mind those rose petals are just as human as you are. Do it kindly and responsibly. Don’t names or faces. You won’t judge yourself later on permancance, but you will on kindness. Share sex where you find it, but know there’s a difference between sex and love, and human decency overall.
But mostly be careful. Bodies are vulnerable, but hearts and memories are more so. Honesty. Honor. Kindness.
Male or female, anyone who gives less isn’t worth one second of your time or energy. And that will not change with time.
Veb
It’s true…the “nice” guys want the more attractive, cheerleader girls…what about the nice looking fun “nice” girls? It shouldn’t be about getting laid… and yes…I’d take a “nice” guy in a heartbeat. Age plays a big part…when it’s time to settle down…the height and weight don’t really matter that much…I much prefer the time and attention.
Hey, just thought I’d check in, let you all know that I am reading your posts and loving them, and also thought I’d move this back up to the top.
To further: Does anyone have a success story that didn’t take place 20 years after high school? Are there any nice guys out there who had tantric sex in hgih school with a great girl becuase the girl realised the truth before she turned thirty?
“C’mon, it’s not even tomorrow yet…” - Rupert
If you need a graphic solution, http:\ alk.to\Piglet
Hmm… Have you considered going for an older woman?
The link to the previous discussion for the newcomers and those of you who missed it the first time, a cool web site and guys that can’t get laid…
http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/002488.html
Why do I have this feeling that MarkSerlin’s posts here just MIGHT have a real big part in his last posts across the board?
Agreed, guys and gals would love to have things of the opposite sex strewn around and agreed, love is a bit of work, BUT it can be simple, sweet and wonderful. IF it works. If not, it can be a real bitch! People get kinda nuts in love. Even shrinks have been mulling over the changes in a persons brain when they fall in love and what happens when it is bad.
I never have understood some relationships like when I see a drop dead pretty girl sauntering around with a bearded, old hippy, looking drugged out, stinky guy who acts like she hardly is there. Then I’ve seen these ‘hunks’ – good looking, handsome guys walking around with a plain-Jane, tubby wife. I once happened by this little stunning Oriental girl who was well dressed, all of about 19, who steamed me up and she was with a skinny white guy about her age with a feeble set of chin whiskers and who was acting Blacker than the Black people do. (I had to resist the urge to twist his mouthy head off to free the girl from his obviously corrupt and selfish influence.)
Now, shy guys have a BIG problem, because they will not pick up the cues and signals from women, of if they do, they will not believe them. Plus, low egos often make them figure that any really pretty girl would not be interested in them at all. I personally like it when the girls are more aggressive in meeting guys. I mean, it makes things so much easier. I met a couple of fine, ex-girlfriends that way and still appreciate their forwardness (I must admit that the FIRST time I was at a girls house, sprawled out in a bean bag chair, listening to tunes and talking, when she rolled over and asked me if I’d like to fuck, I was stunned. I recovered quickly, though.) 
What? Me worry?’
I have good self confidence. I feel intelligent, yadda yadda yadda… it hink the only problem I have with self confidence is a small part with my appearance, which somehow translates into really low sefl-confidence with women. I have only ever asked one girl out, who promptly denied me. I am still quite enamoured of her, and we are best friends, but it was quite a while before she felt comfortable talking to me again after that.
I think that is what worries me. I have a few friends who I would almost ask out, if I didn;t think it would totally screw up our friendship. I guessI am sorta expecting someone to tell their friends to tell my friends, or show signs that i Can’t misinterpret or something… i dunno. Does that ring anyone’s bells?
“C’mon, it’s not even tomorrow yet…” - Rupert
If you need a graphic solution, http:\ alk.to\Piglet
BigRoryG - you’ve only asked one girl out and you don’t understand why you haven’t got a girlfriend? Sheesh.
Start asking girls out. Accept it with good grace when you get turned down, but don’t ask a girl out with the expectation that she will turn you down.
Dating, like everything, takes practice.