Are You an Embittered Nice Guy? You Might Be Angry at the Wrong People.
It’s not women who did you dirty…
“It’s not surprising that you ended up alone. Women like you always do. You love the bad boys and then are surprised when they dump your ass. If you’d just dated nice men in the first place, you’d be happily married by now. You made your bed, now sleep in it.”
If you’re a woman on the internet, then you know there’s a script being passed around. There must be. So many of the men online cover the exact same talking points using the exact same language.
There’s also an implied familiarity that I find staggering. They always talk about us as if they know us intimately. They know our history. They know who we dated and why. They know the circumstances of our breakups. They know our romantic and sexual preferences.
In fact, I’ve even had men call out specific incidents in my history — like that time I dated that abusive but totally hot bad boy when I was 21 while heartlessly rejecting the five nerdy but lovable guys who kept asking me out. Or that time when I was 26 and laughed at the nice guys who brought me roses and treated me right only to choose some asshole with a motorcycle.
Only…these incidents never occurred. Not a single one of them.
And in particular, I’d like to say that I never dated a bad boy. Well, actually, there was that one time, but I’d hardly call that dating, and I didn’t reject anyone in order to be with him. Believe me, there were no “nice guy” casualties in that scenario. The only casualty was me.
Isn’t it interesting how well these guys on the internet have pegged us? They literally know these hyper-specific details about our romantic histories, including the actual counts of those “nice guys” that we rejected. Or rather, they know, in detail, the fictional accounts of our romantic relationships and the alleged number of nice guys we rejected.
And the point, I suspect, is that gotcha moment. That “all women love bad boys” trope that seems to be so popular with those types of men.
So let’s take a look at that “gotcha.” And while we’re at it, the bad boys, too.
My very first serious boyfriend was a prince. He talked about marriage and parenthood constantly. He took me out on dates and never tried to make a move on me that I didn’t want. He didn’t pressure me to move forward. Didn’t pressure me for sex. He even planned a romantic evening for me, one night, playing some of my favorite songs and dancing with me in his apartment for about seven minutes before he confessed he’d gotten drunk just before I arrived and had to cancel the rest of the evening because he was afraid he was going to vomit in front of me.
After we had sex for the first time, he continued to be loving and affectionate for the next few days. Then one day, when he finished very quickly and I hadn’t climaxed, I gently asked him if we could have sex later that night so I could have an orgasm, too, and he suddenly turned into a different person. He screamed at me, called me names, and left my apartment, slamming the door behind him.
I didn’t think anything of it until a month later when we moved in together and within an hour of unpacking, he physically abused me for the first time.
I remember lying there in our bed, later that night, overwhelmed with confusion. The man I had known was suddenly gone. I didn’t recognize my boyfriend anymore. And I didn’t know what to do.
Over the course of the next few months, he regularly assaulted me, called me names, screamed at me, and pressured me to end my relationships with friends and family. I became increasingly isolated, stuck at home, and with no freedom, thanks to the financial agreements he had pressured me into.
I was trapped with someone who suddenly wasn’t so nice anymore.
I met the boyfriend I thought I would marry when I was 31. He was the definition of a nice guy. He called himself “mildly conservative” with “solid family values” and, like my first boyfriend, talked openly and regularly about how much he wanted to get married and have kids.
During the first two years of our relationship, he was gentle, loving, and always supportive as I started my teaching career. He said he loved my independence, loved that I was such a strong, modern woman. We were equals in every way.
Once we moved in together, everything took a radical turn. My boyfriend became aggressive and domineering, insisting he was now the “man of the house.” He demanded I take on all the domestic chores, including making his brown bag lunches to take to work, as well as dinner for the two of us each night.
And then came the affairs. He claimed the first one was just a “friendship that took an unexpected turn…by accident.” I forgave him. I thought my show of loyalty would remind him of how much I loved him and wanted to start our family.
But his behavior became increasingly secretive and as time went on, I discovered I could not trust anything he said…because most of the statements that came out of his mouth were lies.
I didn’t know what to do. We had already started building a life together. But he wasn’t the nice man I’d fallen in love with.
I suppose there was another man I thought I’d marry. We dated not that long ago. Nice guy? No, he was the Nice Guy.
Admittedly, I didn’t actually want to date him. I wasn’t ready for a new relationship. Further, we lived far away from one another. He came with kids and an ex-wife. The whole thing was complicated.
But he wanted it. Desperately.
He spent months wooing me, eventually telling me he loved me, that he knew in his heart that we would get married someday, and he openly fantasized about what it would be like to fold me into his family.
I became besotted somewhere along the way, drunk on all those promises of marriage and motherhood, the two things I’d most wanted to experience my whole life.
After we slept together, he started withdrawing from my life. He didn’t have time to talk on the phone anymore. Didn’t seem interested in our usual good night texts. Didn’t exhibit any enthusiasm whatsoever for the woman he’d said he was certain he would marry.
My nice guy — a man I fell in love with specifically because he was so “nice” — suddenly was as hard and cold as ice.
I wonder how it’s possible that the men who accuse women of only being interested in bad boys, abusive men, and absent partners, actually think we’re so depraved that we would actively, purposefully seek out dangerous, unhealthy, abusive partnerships. Clearly, they believe that not only do we dislike and disrespect “nice” men, but we are only capable of being attracted to the most reprobate of their gender.
They seem unable to believe that there are a whole lot of men out there who will do whatever it takes to procure a relationship — and particularly to gain access to sex. These men will tell women whatever they think we want to hear. They will create fake social media accounts to illustrate the pretend lives that they think their targeted woman would be attracted to. They’ll even create a fake personality in order to win a woman’s heart (or access to her vagina).
And once the object of their desire has been obtained, they no longer have to keep up the ruse. If it’s sex they wanted, they can simply tell their former partner the same things I’ve heard so many times: they don’t remember ever talking about wanting to have a relationship, they didn’t realize until it was too late that they don’t actually have time for a relationship, or the classic: “You’re a broken person and I just can’t handle that in my life right now.”
If it’s a relationship they wanted, they wait to reveal their true selves until the woman is trapped: after they’ve moved in together, after they get married, after she gets pregnant, after they have their first baby… At some point, it’s going to be really hard for her to leave — inconvenient, expensive, embarrassing, legally challenging… So odds are in his favor that she’ll stick it out.
And you want to know a secret? These are the “nice guys” those “nice guys” are talking about. The ones they accuse women of overlooking and cruelly rejecting. The ones who are, allegedly, so disenfranchised and beleaguered.
Every guy I dated whose personality radically changed after a milestone in our relationship was a “nice guy.” Because you know what? I wanted a nice guy. I always have. These guys even told me over and over again that they were the nice guys of myth and legend. They were the ones who loved and respected women, who wanted to get married and have kids.
But they were not nice, at all.
I know these types of men, these “nice guys,” won’t believe me when I say this, but it’s obvious that their anger is entirely misdirected. They aren’t angry at women for rejecting them in our alleged determination to win ourselves a “bad boy.” Because the women of the world are consistently telling the same stories: we want “nice guys,” we date “nice guys,” and the only reason we end up with “bad boys” is because we’ve been victimized by the old bait and switch.
The detailed stories these guys are telling about how all women have cruelly rejected them en masse are nothing but mythology. There’s multiple lies at play here, including: 1) that all women are purposefully rejecting “nice guys” as an exercise of abusive dominance, 2) that they know the intimate details of our romantic and sexual histories, and 3) that they are the “nice guys.”
As we have established, no, they are most definitely not.
So if they stopped projecting their anger and disillusionment onto women, what might they find? Who are they actually angry at?
Can you guess?
They’re angry at the bad boys. The bad boys are the alpha males. But the “nice guys” know in a dominance hierarchy, they will never win by confronting the demographic that has most disempowered them. That demographic (bad boys/alpha males) is one step above them on the food chain.
But you know who they can confront and abuse and terrorize with their unrelenting anger and bitterness? The demographic that is lower on the food chain than they are. A demographic that can’t fight back, that can’t hurt them no matter what they do: women.
And so they make it our fault, instead of facing the truth. We didn’t do this to them — our patriarchal system did. Our culture’s obsession with rough-and-tumble no-consequences masculinity is what’s making them feel so disempowered. Not me, the person they allege rejected them dozens of times. Not all the women of the world (because for them, it’s always #notallmen, but it’s definitely #allwomen) who supposedly passed them over in their self-destructive rush to the Bad Boy Boutique.
Women are doing exactly what they want us to do: we are dating the nice guys. Most of us want the nice guys.
But it turns out the nice guys are just playing a part, doing whatever they have to do to beat out the alpha males, the bad boys, in this culture that sets up men to treat everything like a competition.
And if these guys were really so nice, they wouldn’t blame women for the never-ending strings of boyfriends who magically grow a brand new personality after a step into deeper intimacy. Because nice men wouldn’t expect women to see through multilayered webs of lies and deceit that our exes constructed. Nice men wouldn’t blame women for men’s inexcusable behavior.
And nice men wouldn’t delight in women’s suffering in romantic and sexual relationships.
Thankfully, women are getting better and better at learning the difference between the “nice guys” and the good men. Which I suppose means the nice guys are only going to get angrier at the wrong people.
© Yael Wolfe 2023
Yael Wolfe is a writer, artist, and photographer. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com.
More on dating, abuse, and nice guys:
