{"id":256,"date":"2008-05-20T16:22:25","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T16:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntucat.wordpress.com\/?p=256"},"modified":"2008-05-20T16:22:25","modified_gmt":"2008-05-20T16:22:25","slug":"why-i-was-never-a-bitter-nice-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/why-i-was-never-a-bitter-nice-guy\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I was never a bitter nice guy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve met my fair share of bitter &#8220;nice guys,&#8221; but I&#8217;ve never been one of them. I&#8217;m a nice guy; I&#8217;m just not a <i>bitter<\/i> nice guy or ex-nice guy. You know whom I&#8217;m talking about: the guy who seems nice, fawns all over some girl he likes who happens to like jerks herself, and then when she doesn&#8217;t return his affections and says she thinks of him only as a friend, he gets all bitter about it and whines about how girls like only jerks. Eventually, he decides to be a jerk himself so he can get more girls. <\/p>\n<p> And if you don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m talking about, you can read some of these rants from bitter ex-nice guys: <br \/> <a href=\"http:\/\/justinvsblog.wordpress.com\/2008\/01\/26\/why-nice-guys-finish-last\/\">Why Nice Guys Finish Last<\/a><br \/> <a href=\"http:\/\/kingofbrooklyn.wordpress.com\/2008\/01\/16\/nice-guys-finish-last-assholes-finish-with-time-to-spare\/\">Nice Guys Finish Last, Assholes finish with time to spare !<\/a><br \/> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.craigslist.org\/about\/best\/lax\/483318927.html\">&#8220;What Happened to All the Nice Guys?&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<p> Now you know what I&#8217;m talking about. Well, I&#8217;ve never been like that. See, in my book, if you&#8217;re a nice guy only because you think it&#8217;ll get you girls and then turn into an asshole because you think that&#8217;ll get you girls instead when your nice guy act doesn&#8217;t work, then you&#8217;re not really  a nice guy. You&#8217;re an asshole who pretended to be a nice guy to get what he wanted. You were always an asshole&mdash;you&#8217;re just now finally owning up to it. <\/p>\n<p> If you&#8217;re nice, you shouldn&#8217;t be nice to reach some end goal. You should just be nice. It should be a part of who you are. <!-- I was in a situation like that with my best friend in college. I was her \"nice guy,\" and I let her know I was interested in her, and she let me know she would never think of me that way. She dated a not-so-nice-guy instead, and I wasn't bitter about it, and I didn't decide I should be an asshole. I was her friend, and we hung out, and eventually she dumped him, we started a relationship, and we got married. --> <\/p>\n<p> The phenomenon, which is widespread but not absolute, of heterosexual women going for &#8220;jerks&#8221; instead of &#8220;nice guys&#8221; is complex, and I&#8217;ll try my best (as a het man) to explain it to all the pretend-nice-guys out there. <\/p>\n<p> Here are some reasons she may not be digging your nice guy act: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Many women find assertiveness attractive<\/b>, and a lot of jerks tend to be more assertive than their nice guy counterparts. Granted, the jerks can be overassertive (re: obnoxious), but these women find it better than nothing.\n<li><b>A lot of nice guys are attentive to the point of being suffocating.<\/b> I know the stereotype is that men are the ones always complaining that they need space in the relationship, but women need space, too (it&#8217;s a human, not a male or female, need).\n<li><b>A lot of nice guys like to whine<\/b> (as you can see from the above links) <b>about being nice and getting the shaft.<\/b> This kind of bitter self-pity isn&#8217;t attractive.\n<li><b>Jerks create drama, and<\/b> (for a time at least) <b>drama can be fun<\/b>, particularly if you can share it with your girlfriends and have them commiserate in turn. A rite of passage for het women is the ability to complain about what bonehead thing your boyfriend has done lately.\n<li><b>Many women subscribe to the notion of females being the more virtuous of the two main sexes.<\/b> A jerk makes a normal woman look great by comparison, and she doesn&#8217;t even have to do much. The more of a jerk he is, the more a martyr she looks like.\n<li><b>Men aren&#8217;t the only ones who like the thrill of the chase<\/b>, or as <i>The Tao of Steve<\/i> says, <i>we pursue that which retreats from us<\/i> (or something like that). Traditionally, people tend to think of men as being the pursuers and women as the passive pursuees, but women can also enjoy a good chase, and some women may find supposed nice guys too readily available.\n<li>On a similar note, <b>a lot of women enjoy a challenge<\/b>. They can sometimes view boyfriends as a makeover project, and if the guy is a jerk, all the more to make over. If the guy appears too much of a nice guy, she might worry that she&#8217;s the one who&#8217;s the makeover project for the guy.\n<li>On a very basic level, <b>the media portrays the &#8220;bad boy&#8221; as exciting<\/b>. You want to be with the hunky guy, not stuck with Ducky. <\/ul>\n<p> I should also add that it&#8217;s entirely possible that a lot of these snubbed &#8220;nice guys&#8221; might in turn be snubbing nice girls and going after jerk girls themselves for many of the same reasons these girls are going after jerk guys. <\/p>\n<p> Cheesy as it sounds, be yourself, and you&#8217;ll attract whom you&#8217;re supposed to. Relationships and dating may have game-like elements to them, but they are not games. The more you play games, the more you will also be played. <\/p>\n<p> This is the same reason het women shouldn&#8217;t debate about whether they should ever ask a guy out or not. If you&#8217;re afraid asking him out will turn him off, and you want a guy into traditional gender roles, don&#8217;t ask him out. If you don&#8217;t want a guy into traditional gender roles, don&#8217;t be afraid to ask him out. It&#8217;s not that difficult. <\/p>\n<p> <!-- And I'm not just saying that as a smug married person. --> If you&#8217;re nice, be nice. If you&#8217;re an asshole, don&#8217;t be pretend to be nice. Be who you are and confident in who you are. Confidence and a strong sense of identity are attractive to everyone. <\/p>\n<p> <b>Recommended Reading<\/b><br \/> <a href=\"http:\/\/divalion.livejournal.com\/163615.html\">No More Mr. Nice Guy<\/a> <\/p>\n<p> <b>Further Reading<\/b><br \/> <a href=\"http:\/\/mslaine.wordpress.com\/2008\/06\/09\/good-girls-and-their-bad-boys\/\">Good girls and their bad boys<\/a> <br \/> <a href=\"http:\/\/xenlogic.wordpress.com\/2008\/06\/08\/why-nice-guys-finish-last\/\">Why Nice Guys Finish Last<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve met my fair share of bitter &#8220;nice guys,&#8221; but I&#8217;ve never been one of them. I&#8217;m a nice guy; I&#8217;m just not a bitter nice guy or ex-nice guy. You know whom I&#8217;m talking about: the guy who seems nice, fawns all over some girl he likes who happens to like jerks herself, and&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/why-i-was-never-a-bitter-nice-guy\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why I was never a bitter nice guy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[109,226,918],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-dating","tag-nice-guys","tag-relationships","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}