Transitioning from Nice Guy to nice guy

[brynndragon]

I get the feeling that the defensive reactions demonstrated by some of the comments in my post on the topic of Nice Guys is because people recognized more of themselves than they are comfortable with in the rant I linked to. If you're one of those people, or you got that mildly ill feeling in the pit of your stomach when you read that rant, you might be interested in an essay on becoming a nice guy. I know I found it to be useful. . .

Comments

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

In general I think that the original writer hit it on the head in her note that those who doth protest too much are usually the culprits.

Yeah, for those of us who don't read innuendo and body language as... eloquently as others, it's a bitch. Which is why I try to be upfront with people about those issues and explain why I'm blunt and dense. Thank goodness too or my boyfriend would have broken up with me 9 times over. Instead we're quite happy and succesful.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I agree whole-heartedly. The vast majority of social behavior is learned, not inherent, and some people are just better at picking it up than others. I suspect that geeks, who usually have the experience of learning scholastic subjects with ease, get very distressed should they realize they're having problems learning the social stuff because it implies a lack of learning ability, which is what they pride themselves on. In other words, not getting social stuff is a blow to the ego, which makes it difficult to get over themselves enough to actually learn it. There are geeks who get social stuff as readily as scholastic subjects, and geeks who don't have "picks up new subjects with ease" as a point of identity/pride, and I would bet they tend to have fewer Nice Guy problems.

I've never found you socially difficult, btw. To the point where I'm occationally confused when you bring it up. I suspect my metric for such things is calibrated oddly, however.

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

Well thank you. There are a couple reasons for that. First, I've learned to compensate in a couple ways (including essentially keeping lists of innuendo in my head). Second, you're easy to be comfortable and blunt around and in such situations I get much better at it. The acceptance of the problem (without trying to use it as an excuse) has helped a lot with finding ways around it. Being around anyone I'm not familiar with takes actual physical effort to be socially effective.

[randysmith]

I suspect my metric for such things is calibrated oddly, however.

Maybe by the fact that you hang out with a lot of geeks? :-} :-}