Saw this post on LJ about "Nice Guys"...

Post Reply New Topic

divalion.livejournal.com/163615.html

The person is talking about "nice guys" with a capital N. This would be the 'bitter' types. I read it and had to wonder, was this a NT woman encountering particularly inept AS men? What do you guys think?

There is one criteria that makes a nice guy.

That criteria is that the said guy in question is not a human.

Here is an example of a nice guy.

One problem I have with the article is it bashes guys for not being intuitive about body language etc. and not picking up on subtle cues. I have AS. I try very hard to improve my social skills, but some times I just fall a bit short in the moment. No, I don't understand how to be exactly what these writers out there say I need to be, I don't know if I ever will. Bitter guys aren't good, but it seems like there's so much written out there bashing the "bitter nice guys." I feel like some of these articles are just kicking you when you're down and shaming guys who aren't successful with women. I don't feel like I have a better understanding of how to have a relationship after reading this, which is what I was hoping for.

It doesn't bash guys for being unable to read body language. It bashes some of them for being jerks about being bad at reading body language:

Do you make it your business to make sure you don't put yourself in situations where your body language problems will creep people out until such time as you learn better reading skills? If so, then the article isn't talking about you.

An interesting study showed that (American) women can tell when a man or a woman is being friendly or flirting. The men can tell when other men are flirting with women. But, the men were uniformly not able to tell when women were flirting or being friendly. In fact, they almost always got is backwards.

Conclusion A: American men are clueless.
Conclusion B: American women are sending the wrong signals.

Argument supporting B. If you are trying to get across a message and your target audience does not get it, clearly you do not understand your audience. I've taught at the University level and on any test I that I wrote tossed out questions that 75% or more of the students missed. That big an error means either I didn't phrase the question properly, or I didn't cover the material correctly.

So what would the right signals be for "not interested" then?

damned if I know. I don't even know what they are, and I'm female.

As far as I can tell, breathing constitutes a signal of interest to most men.

"I just want to be friends" is women speak for "I want nothing to do with you"

Is that what guys mean if they say it to a woman?

I'm sure some AS guys end up as "Nice guys", although I don't believe all do, as it isn't really about being bitter just because you have had difficulty connecting with women. It also involves some degree of acting like you genuinely want to be someone's friend when in fact you have an ulterior motive of wanting to date/have a physical relationship that you just aren't admitting to up front. When this doesn't work, the "Nice guy" blames it on the woman. Usually this is due to low confidence, a fear of rejection, and an inability to accept signs that the woman is simply not attracted to the guy. These are definitely issues that AS guys struggle with (although with the last one it's as likely to be a failure to detect as a failure to accept), but not for the same reasons as NT guys, so I suspect that the AS guys are less likely to decide that the problem is that the woman is a heartless b***h, and by extension all women are heartless b***hes. That last bit is pretty essential to the formation of a genuine "Nice guy", as real "Nice guys" above all else see themselves as victims.

The XKCD comic about it sums it up best in my opinion - http://xkcd.com/513/ (Although I should note that some people find the guy sympathetic, and that makes me think they've missed one important fact - he doesn't really care if the girl is actually somewhat unhappy, as he's decided what he wants is what's best for her. That is not the act of a genuine friend, so it's clear that the "friendship" is a pretense for him to get what he wants)

One of the biggest differences here, I think, is that a man's intentions are typically easier to decipher. When men flirt, it's usually as a means to an end. When women flirt, it could just be because she likes to flirt.

I'm not sure how helpful the article was; it was perhaps more long-winded and presumptuous than it really should have been. Most Nice Guys that she talks about could just look at one thing they don't do and wouldn't do and say "ha! I'm OK". She counters this point with the claim that there is a sort of spectrum between nice guys and Nice Guys. But then where does one draw the line between attractive, bearable and unbearable? The list of points that she has at the end would have stood well enough on its own.