Too Good a Rant Not to Share

[brynndragon]

It's not that nice guys finish last. It's that Nice Guys finish last and with good reason. Read further: No More Mr. Nice Guy.

Comments

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Hurm. Not all Nice Guys are obsessive and have never experienced rejection. However, I would agree that they tend to finish last.

(Of course, I claim not to be a Nice Guy. For one thing, I have a Sports Vice.)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

This may be why I am only a Nice Guy some of the time.

[gothfather.livejournal.com]

Kaz said something similar to me once, so I pretty much agree with all of this. I have had friends that tried to play the "Nice Guy" card and failed miserably, and I have even, on occasion, expressed bewilderment as to what I am "lacking". Of course, it's taken a good chunk of my life to understand the difference between nice people and Nice Guys, but it's actually there.

Only one sentence in that entire thing strikes me as inaccurate, however:

Body language and nonverbal cues are not that hard to learn to read.

For a lot of people this is true. However, as someone who cannot read body language and nonverbal cues without intense concentration and study, I'd like to make a point that sometimes, just once in a while, a person simply cannot tell you are looking at them, or flirting with them, or standing in an inviting way.

Sometimes it really does take a whack from the shoju mallet to get a point across to someone like me. :) Almost no one wants to go through that trouble and assumes that my lack of response to the "cues" indicates uninterest. Likewise, my own lack of proper non-verbal cues makes it difficult for me to express myself that way.

Just $.02 from a geek :)

[motomuffin.livejournal.com]

God damn it, I'm glad I'm married (and to a nice guy at that), and don't have to deal with any of this anymore, 'cause I've dated Nice Guys who are guilty of EVERY SINGLE THING she gripes about. Boy that brought back some bad memories. It was like I was reading something I'd written.

Damn.

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

Fantastic essay. I just un-locked this post, which talks about some of it from the Nice Guy's perspective...

And yes, I too am an Aspie and it took me a long time to learn to "read" people and size up social situations. It can be done, but one has to want to do it for the right reasons. "I want to be able to read body language so I can pick up chicks" is not the right reason. "I want to be able to read body language so I can better get along with everyone I meet" is much better...

[shogunhb.livejournal.com]

Long ago, I decided to sematically differentiate between Good and Nice. In my lexicon, Good = (lowercase) nice as defined in the rant.

Nice is the outward appearance. Nice is acting like a good, attentive, wonderful human being. Good is actually BEING a nice, attentive, wonderful human being.

One can be Good AND Nice, I know numerous people like this. The Nice Guys villified in the rant are Nice but not Good. I have been accused of being Good but not Nice.

That may not make a lot of sense, but I just got out of a 3 hour meeting.

[etherial.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It's nice to have someone else's perspective on all this. As a guy who may or may not be Nice, I appreciate the diagnostic tones and advice.

[friode.livejournal.com]

The author of that rant claims that girls who are interested will always express interest strongly. But then she says that she never realized some guy was interested in her because he never expressed it. WTF? Either girls always express it but guys don't, or else she's smoking some good crack.

[redjo.livejournal.com]

Excellent essay. It helped me realize my most recent ex was definitely a Nice Guy. *sigh* Which pisses me off in some ways, really helps in others ...

[fengi.livejournal.com]

Before getting exceedingly defensive about this essay, guys should realize every Nice Guy essay is not a blanket denouncement of all males who act insecure at some point. The assumption is no one, including women, is innocent of being insecure, controlling and passive agressive. The Nice Guy is a separate catagory of excess - constantly acting out while blaming the people he is attracted to for his own problems. To the rest of the population, the Nice Guy is our flaws writ large a reminder to check yourself.

Though not all Nice Guys are male or straight, his behavior is most frequently exhibited by misogynists. The Nice Guy belief that he has earned sexual or romantic gratification just for treating women nicely an underlying assumption that women are not normally deserving of nice treatment. That's not nice, that's hatred of women.

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

I'd managed to miss this post the first time around so I just now read it and I thought it made a lot of sense, although I did take exception to one statement:

If you can't be friends with a woman who's turned you down, especially if you find yourself getting really angry about it, you have no business being in a relationship until you work out your issues.

Keeping in mind that any situation where you get much angrier than is reasonable (e.g. road rage, your kids sporting events, etc...) is bad, the base statement that "If you can't be friends with a woman who's turned you down... you have no business being in a relationship until you work out your issues." seems a bit unfair and if anything it seems like the kind of thing that would engender more Nice Guy behaviour. I think a lot of Nic Guy behaviour is the result of people trying to find romance by following "the rules" without really stopping to think about what they're trying to do or even why they're doing it.

I know that personally when I've been rejected by someone it helps me a lot if I can get away from them for a while (which can vary from days to weeks or even longer) while I re-calibrate how I think/feel about that person. Immediately after rejection I have not-good feelings whenever I see/interact the person in question and I need time to sort things out so that I don't have the not-good feelings (whether I feel sad, or like I'm a loser/unworthy, maybe even annoyed at myself for misreading the other person etc...) and sometimes it's hard to get back into the same groove with someone after that's happened.

I dunno, I guess for me part of the problem is that I tend to be friends with exceedingly diverse groups/types of people and if I stop spending time with one person/group it's not that hard to start spending time with another person/group while I assimilate the new social interaction knowledge (e.g. figuring out what are or are not good signs, what might have been bad signs etc...) and more often than not it does take a while to fully sort things out.

I dunno, maybge I do have issues, but I'm inclined to think that stopping and taking time to figure them out as much as possible is a good thing.

[eyesys.livejournal.com]

Oh my god. :P

It's so true. I tend to like aloof, slightly arrogant men physically the most. They drive me crazy. If they are too available, I tend to respond "shrug whatever" even though I *think* I want a Mr. Nice Guy. I may like them a lot otherwise, might be attracted, but it's always the ones that I'm not sure about entirely or that push me around a little or sometimes a lot that I like the most. If they have the contrast of being sweet to me between the assbeatings, etc. I like them even more. But if they were all sweet, don't think it would really work.

Note, I do NOT like this in a social setting -in fact it completely turns me off. It's only a sexual thing.