I’m asking questions because I don’t feel like playing the generalisation game. That game is old. Yes, the word ‘nice’ can often mean ‘nothing offensive’ and that usually means that you err on the boring side from the perspective of the ‘nice sayer’, but it’s the interaction between two people that’s important here.
I want to come up with an answer that is tailor-made for Whack. What girls he should probably avoid, and what girls would suit him, what he needs to change or not change about himself to be the person that can find the girls that he can do what he likes best with (or the closest compromise).
Do you think men are going out of their way to meet “nice girls?”
“Hey joe check out that girl. Damn she is so nice!”
“I know! Look how she holds the door open for little old ladies. I am so very attracted to her!”
Hehe, it is an important factor but not one you notice right off the bat. Case in point: There is a delivery guy at work who started our route in december and the other girls in the office would not shut up about how great he was and when I finally met him I was underwhelmed, as in, oh he is ok. But then I got to know him through his visits and I’ll be damned if his warm friendliness didn’t make let his attractiveness shine through. I’m moving soon but we are staying in touch.
It’s silly to me to divide it up by sexes. Yes maybe the motives behind it are different but it goes both ways.
Actually, it was 8 pages, but only because ctsx got involved (you’ll see).
My original pitting of a Nice Guy I had been on a date with:
I’m not saying you do any of these things, but that is why I don’t like Nice Guys. I don’t date Alpha-Male Assholes, either, but at least they are interesting.
Why is there this assumption that there are only two kinds of guys? Nice guys/wussies and bad boy/arrogant asshole. A wise friend explained it to me years ago, she said I shouldn’t be either of those types I should strive to be a good man. That’s not a simple definition and it has elements of both ends of the spectrum and I’m always redefining what it is. I would open the car door for my date and still do for my wife but I realize there are times but I realize there are times a woman doesn’t want me to be acting all all sweet and nice so I’ll impress her mother.
belladonna, do you truly want a man to degrade you and never treat you decent or would you rather have a good man that knows when you want him to “screw the roses, give me the thorns.” If you opt out of LTRs because of this without ever examining your own motives and perhaps making some changes you will be doomed to a fate of your own choosing. Not every relationship is supposed to be Ozzie and Hariett.
This is probably a restatement of what many have said, but here are my thoughts:
First of all, confidence is attractive. But confidence is being comfortable with who you are, and not needing the approval of others to have faith in yourself and believe in what you’re doing. Trying to grope a woman in your car is NOT confidence, that’s just a lack of manners and the inability to function properly in a civilized society.
I think a lot of guys will go out with a girl and talk to her and give her compliments, and not say even one thing remotely controversial or opinionated, and consider themselves nice. I also think that the women they’re talking to see this and don’t consider it nice, they consider it boring. I’ll bet most women do want nice guys, but more importantly, they don’t want ‘boring’ guys. Unfortunately for them, the middle ground (confident, interesting, non-abusive, non-lying guys) is probably not too well populated. So when we look at this, we see it as ‘women only like jerks’. I’d say women like confident men who aren’t boring. I don’t think women ever think to themselves ‘this guy treats me like dirt, so I’ll go out with him’, I’d bet they’re thinking ‘this guy is fun to be around…I never know what he’s going to say or do next, and that’s exciting’.
Also I think the fact that these ‘jerks’, for lack of a better term, don’t call, don’t bend over backwards with compliments, etc… helps their cause. While this may not be ‘nice’ behavior, it’s also not predictable and boring. If a guy calls a girl every day and tells her he loves her it is nice, but it also gets predictable. If a guy rarely calls and she’s not 100% sure he likes her, it’ll make her want him more. People tend to want what they can’t have.
And by the way ladies, this works both ways in my opinion.
Oh, I know that. In my head. But the wiring between my head–where intellect rules–and my heart/hormones/libido/whatever–where I crave the pain–are obviously a bit miswired. I’ve done plenty of motive examining, but *knowing * why you want something that’s bad for you doesn’t make those feelings magically dissapear. For now I’m content with my short term encounters, but I’ve definitely not given up hope of “fixing” this about myself in the future. I’m a work in progress. Maybe some “screw the roses, give me the thorns” type will come along some day and we’ll drive each other extremely insane and love every minute of it. But until then, I don’t think it would be at all right or fair to involve innocent bystanders in my insanity.
I haven’t read all of the previous posts yet so I apologize if this is redundant.
I have a “nice guy” friend. Sometimes he’s great to be around, but then he gets REALLY clingy. I finally got to the point where, when inviting him over for dinner, I include an ending-time for the evening. Something to the effect of “Dinner’s at 6. Since it’s a work night and I’ve got to get ready for work, I need you to leave at 9.” He totally doesn’t pick up on the social cues about “time to go.” This is annoying to me and we’ve been good friends for a long time. If it were a first date, I’d never call again.
He also has a tendency to stare at me with puppy dog eyes. He’ll be sitting on my sofa, I’ll get up to do something in the kitchen so he’ll turn around so his chin can rest on the back of the sofa and he just stares at me. I just want to smack him up side the head. (I’m not a violent person, but REALLY.)
Both of these really do seem like confidence issues to me. If he had confidence in himself, he’d understand that I WILL invite him over again and that he doesn’t have to sop up *every single minute possible *each time he comes over. And then (in theory) he’d be willing to leave after a reasonable visit time like a normal person. And I hope that if he had more confidence, he wouldn’t stare. I’m not going to disappear when he turns around. ARGH.
So to sum up, it usually is a confidence thing. I don’t think I’ve ever dated a jerk, but I’ve only dated one “nice guy” and it’s the only relationship I truly regret having. It was awful, and he got hurt in the end, and I felt terrible. The rest of the guys I’ve dated have been confident and fun to be around and didn’t give off an air of desperation. Desperate isn’t attractive.
The girls who want a nice guy will find one eventually, and when they do, they stay with him, because he is a nice guy and there is no reason not to stay together.
Therefore
Most of the girls who want a nice guy have found a nice guy, and once you find one nice guy, there really isn’t any reason to break up.
Conversely, the girl who doesn’t want a nice guy and likes jerks (consciously or not) will choose jerks, and then when the act like jerks, they break up. Therefore, she heads back to the dating pool.
So you have the girls who really like nice guys and they come up on the market as single about once every two years, and you have the girls who like the jerks, and they come up on the market about once every two months.
That is why in general, it appears that more women like jerks, but really, it’s just that more SINGLE women like jerks.
Post back, let me know if that sounds good to you or if that sounds like a load of Hooy.
Just to give a sense of perspective on the word “nice,” here’s the etymology of it:
Middle English, foolish, from Old French, from Latin nescius, ignorant, from nescire, to be ignorant.
So why don’t we define what “nice” means to guys and gals, respectively?
I have a friend, early 40’s, who keeps going for the “bad” guys. She was in a LTR with a guy who cheated on her, and she’s trying the dating scene again. Bad choice after bad choice, and she keeps asking me why, and I don’t have any answers for her. Loving stable family background, no traumatic events in her youth, but she seems unable to pick someone who doesn’t simply use her and throw her away. I feel bad for her, but something keeps telling me that she’s genuinely attracted to these guys, she’s picking up on something that would be a warning sign to someone else, but she falls head-over-heels by the third date…
And is crying by the fifth.
And I like Padeye’s point, which is why I avoid using the term “nice guy” like the plague. I don’t want some one-dimensional cardboard cutout of a guy; I want a real person, with thoughts and feelings and all of the usual baggage. I don’t want someone who supresses that. (I’m sure there are women who do the very same thing, but I don’t date women, so I have no opinion about that.) I just want to date a human neing, who may sometimes act like an angel from on high and other times like a pig in swill. Not a stereotype.
I have been called a nice guy. I have been called a “grownup Boy Scout” on more occassions than I can count, and I try to be kind, courteous, and respectful. I’m definitely not a “Ken doll”, either, unless Ken dolls have gotten a lot chubbier…but I wouldn’t say I am entirely unattractive.
That said, before meeting and marrying my wonderful wife, I never had much trouble finding dates. I think it was because I am nice and quite extroverted. I talk alot. I sing in parks. I laugh in public. I smile constantly (and have been told I smile too much!). I am extraordinarily comfortable with who I am, and I don’t hide it. I never really sought the relationships I was in before marriage…I kind of fell in to them.
I guess what I am trying to say is that confidence and being secure with who you are do make a huge difference to a lot of women.
Here’s my 2 cents: I am a woman, and I like nice guys. When I found the nicest one, I dated and married him. I am still married to him. There is the problem- if you go on a date with a guy who’s not “nice”, you are still going to be in circulation. You get dumped, you have a fight, there is a relationship, but it doesn’t last. So you gotta go out and try again. So people see women dating these “not-so-nice” guys one after the other. You don’t see so much of the dating lots of nice guys, because … well, nice guys are keepers. The woman dating them functionally drops out of the dating pool. This leads to the commonly heard complaints from my single friends, “All the good ones are taken” and “Does he have a brother?” A really nice guy is a hot commodity. This hypothesis is not totally perfect because of course there are women who have personal agendas that make “niceness” an irrelevant variable.
I agree with a lot of the posters in this thread. My definition of nice doeos not NOT include whiney, clingy types. I could not bear a long term relationship with someone who was totally lacking in self confidence, failed to establish limits, or acted passive aggressive. “Nice” may be highly variable to the individual. My husband is kind to my psychotic pets, but will not pretend to get along with jerks just so people would like him more. Both qualities are key points of niceness.
Hanging out, having drinks somewhere talking about anything and everything.
A night home watching movies.
A night out with friends doing whatever.
Exploring somewhere new.
Lying in bed reading next to one another (sounds lame I know but if that feels comfortable then usually all else is good).
There are of course many other things but that is a nice view of it from 10,000 feet.
I think my issue with the “bad boy” phenomenon also partly stems from not having that…whatever…to sweep women off their feet. As someone alluded to a woman will go all weak in the knees for Colin Ferrell and not Tobey McGuire and guess which one I am.
I am not a waffly, spinless wimp with zero social skills. I do not profess undying love on a second date. I do however take a little more time to warm up to than most women would take to do the same to Colin Ferrell. While not hard on the eyes no one swoons over me either (which is fine…nice as it might be). I have never mastered the witty banter to sweep a woman along right off the cuff. That does not mean the first few minutes or date is painful as I find my pace. I can keep things going well enough but it won’t set off the “chemistry” alarm in the woman either.
One woman I went on a blind date with decided in 10 minutes (literally) that it wouldn’t work. She was not horrified by me. I hadn’t said anything overtly stupid. She thought I was attractive (or so she said). She just did not get the chemistry thing in those 10 minutes. While I admire her forthrightness I still found it shocking. Despite all the things that say first impressions are everything I almost always give someone three dates minimum just to be sure. Most times my first impression was correct and it went nowhere but a few times I was very pleasantly surprised and things went great. Well worth keeping that habit up in my book unless the first date is truly painful (that only happened to me once).
There is also the possiblity that even if you are a woman who likes nice guys, you may not like that particular nice guy. There are hundreds of reasons for incompatibility, not just nice/not-nice, and very few of which you are aware of on a conscious level.
If you are a non-asshole, but the spark just isn’t there, it is hard for me to come up with a good way to tell you that it isn’t going to happen.
a) If I just say “no” then the guy will press me for an explanation.
b) If I give him the reasons, he will think he can “change” and try again. He can’t change that fast and even if he could, I don’t want to try again. I want him to accept that it isn’t working and move on. Whatever reason I gave is only a part of the whole problem.
c) If I say “you’re a nice guy, but…” he will leave me alone.
If you were a woman, which option would you choose?
True and I have no issue with that. Had it happen to me lots of times and I never questioned it. No biggie and move on. This thread was directed at the ones who actually seem to like me (dated for months, great sex, had loads of fun) but who is still enamored of the jerks in her past. So here I sit thinking, I treated you well, you call me up late at night just to come over for sex several times a week even though we have to be up in the morning, we go out and have a lot of fun yet you want the confirmed dickhead who dumped you. I just do not get that except to know I am better off running and not walking away.
I will admit if I am the one getting dumped I do ask why. She will answer or not but I don’t ask that to convince her otherwise…just to see if there was an obviously bad move I made that I might avoid in the future. When I am the one doing the breaking up the women have always asked “why”. Just human nature I think.
I usually know within 10 minutes whether I could be sexually attracted to someone. It it is there, it is just a matter of making sure that he has a compatible personality and doesn’t set off my Asshole Alarms. If the chemistry isn’t there, he may or may not be friends material, but he will never be my boyfriend. I’ve heard a lot of other women say the same thing.
It could just be an intuitive thing, but I’ve never felt the need to lead some poor man for three dates on when I know by the first that it isn’t going to happen. FTR, I have done that several times and never changed my mind (about the sexual chemistry that is: I’ve been suprised by personalities, but my physical reaction to someone has never changed).
As I get to like someone more and more I become more physically attracted to them as well. There are many women who at first sight I didn’t think were all that great and then somewhere down the road after getting to know them I found very sexually attractive. They actually look better to me. I remember one girl I dated who was like that. I kept mentioning to my friends how hot she is and they all kinda looked at me like I had gone mad (she was ok looking but not hot). Couldn’t keep my hands off of her.
I wonder if this is a guy/girl difference or just a difference among people in general.
