Just a shot in the dark about jerks v. "nice"

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It depends on how silent.

I knew a man who was very handsome and horribly horribly introverted to the point that he could barely speak a word to someone even when expected of him.

A woman cannot connect to a man who does not speak to her.

He can be quite but must be able to speak to her and be confident and speak to others when needed.

I wouldn't be silent with a girl I was comfortable with - having a partner I can open up to and connect with is very important to me too. My concern came more from the fact that a lot of the advice about what attracts women seems to emphasize skill/confidence in socialising with others as well, and being an actively social person in general. The impression was that even mild shyness was a very ugly trait to most women.

Most women can deal with mild shyness as long as you make it clear to them that you're a bit shy and not dis-interested.

However as a male in society, it is your job to "break the ice" so to speak and generally approach the woman.

If it helps, usually when a man comes up to me and says "Hi" and seems like he wants to say something else but isn't sure what, I usually understand he's interested in me.

Just make sure you don't take her completely by surprise because then she'll be momentarily confused as you have abruptly pulled her out of some thought process, and she will not have time to analyze the situation.

You know men with AS can actually do quite well at approaching women. AS is not synonymous with shyness. A person with AS can be either shy or outgoing, as outgoing people with AS usually only appear outgoing because we really don't know enough to know when we should be nervous or self conscious sometimes, so we can actually be less inhibited.

I shifted to being more outgoing when a group of girls who had roomed with me for a semester abroad and actually got to know me said "At first we thought you were really stuck up but then we realized you're actually shy and a nice person"

I didn't intend to come across as stuck up, so I figured, being I really didn't have much of an idea about the dynamics of socialization either way, it was better to be more outgoing as at least that way people wouldn't think I thought less of them and was stuck up.

Maybe I make a fool of myself sometimes but if I'm not aware of it *shrug*, what can I do right?

The things that are good are to have an opinion, self respect and respect for others.

A tip: Try to think about how you treat yourself, then imagine a good friend of yours telling you that another person was acting that way to them, think of how you feel about how this friend is being treated.

If you don't like how this imaginary unknown person is treating your friend (in the imagined situation), ask yourself why you don't treat yourself as you would a good friend. If you're happy with how the imagined person is treating your good friend in the imagined situation, it's probable that you have good self esteem and self respect.

Sure, it can be. But the problem with focusing on that is exclusion of other traits. It's the mix ratio that's important. Any major deficit is a problem. So you can go ahead and be silent, shy, reserved, and it won't make you girl-proof. But that's generally only true if you don't have other deficits or issues that are interacting, such as a negativity orientation, or extreme awkwardness when you do speak, or being physical diminutive or unattractive or obesity, or being a 'homebody,' or being generally dry and uninteresting.

Introversion on it's own isn't a killer, it's just that if the combination of it, and other potential detractors, combine to make an unappealing picture. So it's exactly as you implied, 'Silent, but not at the expense of Strong'
In fact, there's lots of women who really, really like that if you personify it well enough.

Another similar interaction that a TON of guys misunderstand is the idea of sensitivity. When women say they want a sensitive guy, or more specific stuff like 'a guy who's not afraid to cry,' etc, they are usually omitting the more-important prerequisite: they want a basically strong man, but with a touch of sensitivity.
So the mixture is all out of whack with this common breed of 'Nice Guy'(and this represents me a few years ago, btw). They figure, 'I'm sensitive, my actions are always consistent with that, so what am I doing wrong?' The answer to that is usually their deficit in the 'strong' department.

This also explains the phenomenon of women attracted to jerks. Jerks are not that sensitive... but the seem strong, and it contrasts perfectly to the rare moment of sensitivity(...serving to inflate the perceived value of that moment....). They actually aren't that strong, as a whole, as they are generally still bitter despite their emotional extroversion(turning bitterness outward instead of inward, compared with the bitter introversion of the 'nice guy'), but at least their behavior is less easily identifiable as weak.

The sad thing is that a ton of 'nice guys' skip over the real solution when they see the seeming success of a jerk, and focus on him as the seemingly coveted guy. But he's not coveted one. He's the compromise, the step down from what women really want. Women don't want 'nice guys', but really they don't even want jerks either. They just want a guy who's not bitter, who has real self-esteem(which the jerk also lacks), and hopefully not too introverted.

Working on the introversion is easier - You just try to be more outgoing as best you can, get lots of social practice, and that will yield great progress. No need to be a social butterfly, not by a long-shot. Although getting more socially skilled will help you broadly, in general, the bigger part (which is more tricky) is to lose the bitterness, to raise self-esteem, and to realize the objectification of women which is innate to the nice-guy personality.
That part is tough, those are doozies.

how odd, that article only tells why men are this way, not why women are attracted to them. And I really wanted to know, since I am attracted to lesbians like this, that have the dark triad.

There are lots and lots of species in nature that survive by looking like some other species, partially or completely. If the aim and genetic programming of the bad boy is to spread their seed without any kind of obligation then perhaps they have gotten really good at aping the qualities of the nice guy, until the conquest is made, hence the term snake charmer, etc. Add that with looks and it's a deadly combination. I also think a tremendous amount of this is just bad parenting. My dad is a narcissist (I think strongly enough to be called narcissistic personality disorder) and I am strongly attracted to narcissists. My love map in that area is one of strongly craving paternal love and being rebuffed and ignored about 99% of the time. I am going to go out on a limb and risk posting a sexist comment by suggesting that whether due to proximity, sexism, gender differences, cultural taboos, etc, a father's love is many times something that has to be worked for, earned, or whatever by a daughter and some women grow up with the sense that love like this, dangled like a carrot, is what they should be aiming to attain, and they may not even register unconditional love or love freely given, until they have worked through some of this stuff or matured a bit (or never, in my case, lol).

My advice is not to worry about nice vs. jerks, and take the advice of the old Army commercial: Be All You Can Be.

God, I miss those commercials.

You could also not care about the whole nice-jerk issue, be yourself whether that implies being nice, a jerk or in-between. I thought aspies didn't like faking? ^.- Honestly though, you'll sleep better at night not worrying about such trifling matters.

No one worries about it until they feel they've been bitten in the butt by the issue. At that point it's not trifling, no matter how one downplays it, since it means the difference between finding a relationship and not finding a relationship.
The issue should be addressed at that point, before bitterness sets in.

Making less of the situation is silly, just as it would be silly to make little of a depression, or an eating disorder, or substance abuse, or constant negativity. None of those are trifling - they have repercussions. So, too, does this behavior pattern.

....And who said anything about faking?

This thread has veered way off what I was intending it to be about. I didn't want a thread about the phenomenon of nice guys and jerks, I just wanted to give a tongue in cheek hypothetical exploration of why the phenomenon might be true. If I had more time for internet boards I probably would have been able to phrase my intentions better. It's too late to change this thread now, I think.

Basically I was trying to define a "nice guy or girl" as the kind of person that your parents would choose for you, depending on your parents. This suggestion hinges on the kind of parents doing the choosing, generally from a society that makes a big deal about freedom. In this case you will want to reject your parent's choice because you want to choose for yourself. In short, I'm basically saying that some people choose a bastard as their partner just to piss their parents off because you're all a bunch of bastards yourself.

Lots of stories about sons in law not getting along well with the old mother in law.

In that case, I think your theory is a good guess but I disagree with it for a few reasons.

Ehh... yeah, this sounds to me like a completely separate phenomenon than the 'nice guy' paradigm. Completely unrelated, IMO.

That's what I just said.

oops, sorry Tim, i tend to skip the walls of posts sometimes. <.<

Don't worry about it. It happens to most people at some point.

Ok, back to your premise. I think that sometimes that could come into play, but when I hear parents talk about what they want for their daughters, personality rarely comes into it. When parents actually discuss this, more often than not the parents (if they had a say in it) would want somebody from the same ethnicity or religion or social class or political afficliation. Tea party republicans don't want their daughter to bring home a liberal and vice versa. Baptists don't want their daughter to bring home a muslim and vice versa. Personality doesn't really come into it. The most frequently expressed parental desire for daughters is a son-in-law who fits neatly into the family by being not too different from it. They don't want somebody abusive or otherwise mean, but beyond that, there is no reason to think that they would see the "jerks" as being undesirable. Especially if the men called "jerks" have good jobs that the parents admire and are confident and give off the aura of good provider.

From what I have seen, when a daughter chooses a man who will piss off her family, it is never because of his personality. (Obviously I haven't seen all cases, but by my age I have seen this phenomenon very many times.) Every single time I have seen this actually happen, the daughter picks a man who will piss off her parents because he is of a different race ("my parents are such racists") or a different religion ("I am so sick of my parents' church and I don't want somebody who wants that") or social class ("my parents want me to marry a lawyer but that's boring, I'm in love with a musician and I don't care what they think") or other non-personality quality. The girls don't go for somebody who has a personality the parents don't like, they go for somebody who has a far more concrete quality their parents have expressed disaproval of.