What Nice Men Don’t Say To Nice Women

Dr. Robert Glover, author of No More Mr. Nice Guy, has dubbed the “Nice Guy Syndrome” trying too hard to please others while neglecting one’s own needs, thus causing unhappiness and resentfulness. It’s no wonder that unfulfilled Nice Guys lash out in frustration at their loved ones.

The nice man has learned not to say everything. That’s why he seemed so nice. There’s a lot going on in his mind that he’s not quite allowing himself to express. He’d rather be kind than entirely honest and feels probably quite rightly that he can’t really be both. The nice man is intent on not being the land of the bad boy he had enough of nacho rowdy behavior in school and never wants to be exposed to it again. He’s tended towards his mother and his little sister. He likes women a lot as friends and not just as lovers. This makes it hard for him to live with a side of himself the scene focused on some pretty awkward priorities. He’s very easy to shame.

 

For example, when you’re in a restaurant and you’re explaining about your ants recent operation the doctors had to say the whole tendon back together, half of his attention at least will be on the waitress or perhaps one of the other diners. He’s haunted by the idea of a rapid meaningless encounter possibly with one of your very best friends. When you say that all those porn sites are revolting and humiliating for women and what-not hope as those who go there might be he agrees wholeheartedly. Then with some guilt spent many absurdly exciting hours on them when you’re out.

 

The nice man is democratic, egalitarian and deeply sympathetic to the feminist agenda. And yet in sexual fantasy he loves the idea of being brilliant and really pretty rough. He himself can’t understand the disjuncture between competing parts of his nature,  be spooked by the drastic switching his value system that occurs the very second after orgasm.

 

A nice man is your brother, your father, your friend. The nice man doesn’t feel that he can be loved and reveal the true sources of his sexual excitement. Without noticing all meaning to in any way you are silencing him. It takes very little to keep the nice man quiet. He picks up on the slightest hint of your displeasure and sensors himself accordingly.

 

Maybe you by now thinking that the nice man isn’t really nice at all. He’s just a fake and a phony but no, far, from it he truly is nice. It’s just that niceness isn’t what we might think it is. Niceness isn’t about having no harmful desires inside oneself. It’s about knowing how to keep these very quiet. Niceness is to a crucial extend about secrecy. It’s an achievement of repression. Nice guys don’t not have bad thoughts that just unusually committed to keeping them at the level of muscle feelings rather than statements or actions.

 

The nice man wants to do everything to avoid paining those he loves with the more troubled side of his imagination. Of course there is a price to be paid for all this niceness. That’s invariably a degree of buried resentments and distance whenever we aren’t able to be fully ourselves as could get rather dangerous cross decades. It’s clearly very hard for the partners of the nice to take on board the darker sides of their lovers but if their robust enough to death to give them some attention the result can be an extraordinary flowering of the relationship, beyond anything yet experienced. However closed we may be to someone because they’ve been nice to us it says nothing next to the closeness will achieve if we allow them to show us without shaming or humiliating them what really isn’t quite so nice about them.