oh fucking hellFuck you if you think anyone is ever obligated to ‘give someone a chance’, romantically or sexually. You are not owed anything. You are responsible for your own behaviour. And if you use this to excuse ~turning into~ an asshole, chances are you were pretty much an asshole to begin with.
^^^^ yep
Preach. I’m so fucking sick of “nice guy syndrome”—I’m so sweet, if you don’t want to date me, clearly you’re an evil bitch and hate me because I’m nice.
Mmmmhhhhmmm. Sorry if I want a guy with a little confidence.
Although I do see everyone’s point here, it does suck to be constantly put in the friend zone. Several times the reasons have been because I was too nice of a guy.
I understand that it isn’t necessarily another person’s fault for not being in a relationship with someone, and that no one is obligated to be in one with someone either (unless you live in that kind of a culture). I am just saying that it stinks that a lot of people don’t give us nice folks a chance.
Okay, I am gonna go ahead and drop a truth bomb here. Gentlemen, hold onto your egos. Here it is:
Nobody ever gets rejected for being literally too nice.
Okay, that’s a bit of an overstatement. Out of 100% of rejections, I’m sure there’s a slender 0.00001% who just genuinely don’t like nice people. These rejecters may have a fluffy white cat, an underground fortress filled with doomsday devices, and an obsession with hunting down and eliminating sexy secret agents - but then again, they may not. Whatever you’re into, and all that.
People, in general, don’t want to be asswipes - or at least not to your face. We are conditioned to be polite, because it greases the wheels of social interaction. We are taught that while we can express a ‘yes’ with directness and enthusiasm (“Sure, I’d love to.” / “That’d be great!”), a ‘no’ must be softened, prefaced and padded with apologies and explanations (“I’d love to meet up for lunch, but I have a dentist appointment that day.” / “I wish I could come up for coffee, but I have work in the morning, sorry.”). This is doubly true for women, who are heavily socially conditioned to avoid displays aggressiveness and forthrightness whenever possible - after all, that’s the sort of thing that gets us called ‘dyke bitches’ and ‘ballbusters’ and ‘ungrateful cunts’.*
So when someone rejects you and mentions how ‘nice’ you are in the process, odds are that they mean one of a number of things:
“You’re really nice, but…” - “I’m not into you. This may be because: I am not sexually attracted to you / I do not think we are romantically compatible / I don’t want to be in a relationship right now / [any other reason I am entirely within my rights to have for not wanting to date you]. Because I don’t want to be rude, I will soften and paraphrase my reasoning, and pad it with compliments so as not to hurt your feelings and risk you becoming angry.”
“…but you’re just too nice.” - “I think we get on well enough as friends, but you are too clingy / self-abasing / lacking in self-confidence / needy / your attention is smothering / you put me on a pedestal in a way that makes me uncomfortable / being in a relationship with you would be exhausting / etc. etc. However, because I don’t want to be rude and I don’t want you to become angry, I will avoid mentioning this directly, and instead turn it into a compliment in such a way that implies the fault is mine for not liking nice people.”
If people aren’t giving you a chance and are constantly friend-zoning you (p.s. THAT’S NOT A THING, and you should stop talking about it as though it is), you can be 99.99999% sure that it is never because you are literally too kind and decent to want to be in a relationship with. Trust me, the problem lies elsewhere.
*Slightly more in-depth breakdowns of this can be read here, and in the second half of this post - and these are just from what I happened to have open in my tabs. That’s how pervasive this is. Note that the first article is about how rapists can choose to deliberately misinterpret a lack of explicit consent - so you can also consider this a trigger warning - and the second is mostly about a different brouhaha and the phenomenon of mansplaining, but they’re still good basic examinations of the difficulties people, especially women, face in saying ‘no’ directly.