Another take on the "nice guy" conundrum

[vvvexation]

A comment (and addendum) I posted elsewhere--fortunately not a propos of anything in my life at the moment, but I've been chewing on it for a while:

Dan Savage had some scathing things to say once to a disabled guy who wrote in complaining that he couldn't get chicks--mainly because, as Dan pointed out, he was only looking for "hot" chicks and didn't seem to have considered dating disabled women for a moment. I've since been convinced that what all those guys who complain that women won't date them because they're "too nice" really mean is that beautiful, bitchy women won't date them. Maybe if they actually went looking for nice girls--and bothered to include shy girls, plain girls, and nerdy girls in that pool--they'd have better luck finding a few who genuinely like nice guys.

(Okay, so I have known some genuinely nice guys who can't seem to get dates. In fact, that description fits a fair number of my closest friends. But you know what? Absolutely none of them, to my knowledge, have trouble getting dates because they're too nice. Some of them have self-confidence issues, and some of them are just nerds surrounded by too few nerd-loving women, but niceness is definitely not what holds them back.)

Comments

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Y'know, revisiting this topic has just made something crystallize in my mind that I think you came among the closest to expressing: Those of us who do like nice guys still don't want guys who aren't anything besides nice. Niceness might be a necessary condition, but isn't a sufficient one--and if a guy's defining characteristic is that he's "nice," that's likely to mean that he isn't anything much besides.