“Nice Guys” Finish Last but It’s Not for the Reason You Think

A lot of guys fall prey to a counterproductive, even dangerous, mentality.

Basically, they come to believe that women are solipsistic gold-diggers who only respond positively to men who treat them like shit.

You can treat women very well, have an excellent dating life, and maintain healthy relationships without being 6 feet tall with tons of tattoos and a Lamborghini.

So what is it that all of these guys get wrong?

Why are they struggling so much to get a mate when it seems like they’re decent enough-looking lads on the surface?

Why do so many guys fail when it comes to dating?

The answer is simple. Either they fall prey to bad advice that turns women off because they’re toxic or they fall into the camp of ‘nice guys’ who aren’t actually nice.

“Nice Guy Syndrome” Explained

For the fellas out there, let’s do a thought exercise.

Imagine you’re walking down the street and a total stranger walks up to you and starts talking.

They don’t know anything about you, yet they shower you with tons of compliments. They seem to be unusually nice to you for no apparent reason.

In fact, you’ve probably experienced this with people who are trying to sell you something like those people who swindle you into watching timeshare presentations.

You can tell from the jump that something’s off. Your initial thought is “What does this person want from me?”

This is often the way a lot of women feel when they’re dealing with ‘nice guys.’

Niceness is feigned, insincere, and manipulative. A lot of nice guys get it in their head that if they have a certain list of traits on paper, women are supposed to trip over each other to date them, and they’re often upset when they don’t.

Nice guys have the underlying belief that women owe them something just because they’re nice to them. That’s the main issue. It’s not that you’re being nice, it’s that you wouldn’t go out of your way to be nice to a woman who you know won’t have sex with you. Or that you’re not as nice to women you don’t find attractive.

It’s the fact that your entire plan to get a date is totally see-through. Women have seen it more times than they can count and they can sense when you’re doing it, which is why you shouldn’t do it in the first place.

The nice guy isn’t confident enough in himself to just be himself and let women of the world take it or leave it. No, the nice guy uses covert coercion and tries to play tit-for-tat games to get women to like him or stay with him.

Hell, the nice guy isn’t building up this list of attributes because he aspires to have them. He’s doing it just so he can get women to like him. That’s sad.

He doesn’t understand the rules that govern attraction — one of the main ones being that some women just aren’t going to like you no matter what you do. Your just not everyone’s cup of tea, dude.

He thinks that women don’t want him because of some characteristic, e.g., height. No, women don’t want him because he feels insecure about his height and projects it out to the people he interacts with. Again, this attitude extends out to the way he deals with the world.

When he’s in a relationship, he treats it like a scoreboard and expects things to go smoothly just because he does ‘x’ amount of tasks to score a point in the win column for boyfriend or husband.

Robert Glover puts it well in his book, No More Mr. Nice Guy:

“Just about everything a Nice Guy does is consciously or unconsciously calculated to gain someone’s approval or to avoid disapproval.”

He’s trying to game the system. It might work in the short run, but it almost always fails in the long run.

The good news and the bad news are both the same. The nice guy’s problems are all in his head.

What can the nice guy learn to stop trying to manipulate women and the world and instead interact with them in an honest way? If you suffer from nice guy syndrome, here are some observations and tips you can use to change.

Stop Trying to “Negotiate” Attraction

Far too many guys think almost too logically about attraction. They use faulty if-then reasoning:

If I’m a good guy, have a stable career, and treat a woman nicely

Then she will certainly like me

And it’s not that women don’t like them. They do. But they take a few isolated instances where something doesn’t work out with a certain woman and apply that thinking to all women.

Because they ‘did everything right’ and got rejected by one woman, all women hate nice guys. Because their little love math equation didn’t work, they think they’re destined to fail with women.

They think they’re destined to fail because the original plan should have worked. It makes sense to them that said women should have liked them. They fail to understand that you can’t convince someone to like you.

Nice guys have a bunch of these little ‘covert contracts’ — they expect to get a specific result if they perform a specific action. Nice guys try to build themselves up to be this perfect partner on paper hoping that it will cause attraction. But it won’t.

So what does cause attraction?

Boring vanilla stuff — confidence, humor, telling good stories, dressing well, being fit, having a nice career — helps. But it still doesn’t cause anything to happen. There are general things you can do to be more attractive, but it doesn’t guarantee dating success with any one person.

First, just be the best version of yourself for the sake of being the best version of yourself. Then, present yourself in a positive way to anyone you’re trying to get to know, not just women. Learn to like yourself first.

I promise you, liking yourself and having healthy self-esteem is all you need to do to be attractive. Some women will go for it and some won’t. Some parts of attraction are simply a mystery.

Last, remember that you don’t actually want to date someone who isn’t really into you. Even if you somehow twisted their arm and got them to date you, would it end up well? Exactly.

Stop Trying to Weasel Your Way Into Relationships

Let’s talk about the infamous ‘friend zone.’

Women don’t put men in the friend zone. Men put themselves in the friendzone, again, by being manipulative and disingenuous.

Here’s what happens to guys who get in the friend zone. They’re attracted to a woman. But, instead of making it known that they want to pursue a romantic relationship, e.g., just ask her out, they spend time with her under the guise of friendship and try to slowly ease their way into a romantic relationship over a long period of time.

Again, it creates that weird feeling you have to ‘butter them up’ before asking them out. Then, if a woman doesn’t want to have that type of relationship, which is her right, the nice guy will get upset and claim that she somehow wasted his time.

Being ‘nice’ is a passive-aggressive way to try to get what you want without having to deal with real rejection. You could’ve saved yourself a bunch of time by just asking her out right away. The ‘no’ might have stung, even though it shouldn’t, but at least you’ll know the answer and can move on if it’s ‘no.’

Choosing the weasels route both leads to rejection and further confirms you’re a weasel, which causes you to keep trying to weasel into situations instead of just being a man about it. Stop.

This speaks to the way people interact with the world in general. The underlying ‘nice guy’ energy isn’t just exclusive to men. People spend their lives not being intentional about what they want.

So the world puts them in the ‘friend zone.’ Their life purpose puts them in the ‘friend zone.’ You can’t expect to never give a sincere try for a goal and have it just fall into your lap somehow.

The opposite of a nice guy is simply a man who’s honest about his intentions. You don’t have to be aggressive or pushy about it. You just have to be honest. If you want to ask someone out, ask them out. If you want a raise, ask for a raise. Want to start a business? Start the damn business.

You put your intentions out there and you get a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer back. Again, you live with that answer. Just keep going on your mission with playful energy and look to tackle life’s challenges.

Stop Being a People Pleaser

Nice guys are inauthentic and display people-pleasing behaviors.

Let’s say a nice guy likes a woman. He will try to be whatever he thinks the woman wants him to be to try to attract her instead of, you know, just being himself.

He won’t disagree with her opinions, ever. He will let her cross his boundaries in the hopes she’ll like him, but people subconsciously understand when you’re letting them cross your boundaries and they lose respect for you because of it.

You see the theme here. The nice guy isn’t confident in himself the way he already is. Ironically, the number one way to kill a woman’s attraction toward you is to fundamentally change who you are to try to please her or get her to like you.

When in a relationship, a nice guy forgoes his own needs to try to please his partner, which makes sense at times, but he doesn’t do it unconditionally. It’s manipulation at play, again, and it causes him to feel like a victim and martyr for the problems he created.

What’s tough is sometimes he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. No matter how nice the deeds themselves are, the underlying motivation is unattractive.

In general, people-pleasing behavior is a sign of neediness. Neediness repels everyone, not just women. Does this mean that you should never compromise? No. Does this mean you shouldn’t highlight the best parts of yourself to be attractive? Of course not.

It means that you need to find the best intersection between the things you’re interested in, your values, and your personality with the people you want to attract or bring to your cause. This is how dating works. It’s how getting anyone into your life works. It’s how business, sales, and even getting fans for your content works.

Never re-shape who you are, people please or pander to try to manipulate people into engaging with you.

The Fundamental Lesson Nice Guys Need to Learn

The moral of the story for nice guys, or for people who exhibit this nice guy energy into the world is simple.

Stop lying.

Stop operating in a disingenuous way.

Women can tell. The world can tell.

It’s funny. You’re more likely to get what you want in life if you stop fixating on it and trying to finagle your way into getting it. “It” could be a date, a career, an outcome, whatever.

Instead, you’re better off attracting things into your life by the person you are.

There are 7 billion people in this world. Enough of them would love to engage with you just the way you are. So, engage with the world fully but get rid of your agenda.

The agenda is the hallmark of the nice guy.

You can be intentional about what you want without being rude, disrespectful, or crossing over into other people’s boundaries. Don’t be a nice guy, be a human being who’s genuinely interested in getting to know other human beings.

That’s the lesson.

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Previously Published on medium

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