For clarification before I begin, when I use Nice With a Capital "N", I'm not talking about actual guys who are nice. Nice Guys with capitalization necessary are men who put on a pretense of being nice because they think doing so will get them what they want (usually sexual favors/relationships, but not always). Rather than genuine goodwill, their niceness is pure turd polish. And while this phenomenon does happen with girls, too, it doesn't seem nearly as common in women as it is in men. And I'll get into why I think that is later.
We ladyfolk have heard all the usual reasons Nice Guys make terrible boyfriends. They're entitled jerks, they're manipulative, they don't actually care about you as a person, etc. But I think there's one more reason that isn't talked about nearly as much as it should be. Not because people are afraid to call out the behavior for what it is, but that many out there don't understand what's so fucked up about it.
Nice Guys and Nice Girls are domestic abusers looking for a victim.
Or more to the point, they have the dangerous potential to become domestic abusers, because they have the mentality of one already. Specifically, they have the mentality of an emotional abuser. One who uses guilt and feelings of attachment in their victim in order to get what they want.
When a Nice Guy responds to romantic rejection with the classic line -- "Look at everything I've done for you, how could you do this to me!" -- what he's doing is shifting the responsibility for his emotions onto the person he's pining for. It's not his fault that he's hurt, it's hers for telling him no. She's the bad guy, here, because she'd have to be in order to reject someone as nice as him.
That, dear readers, is the hallmark of emotional abuse.
The vilification of the victim, and the absolution of the abuser is what makes the sick system work. Someone who already has the capability to make another person feel responsible for their moods and emotions has one foot on the abuse train, and the other isn't far behind.
All abusers have a degree of narcissism -- that is, an inflated sense of self-worth and importance and a lack of empathy for other people -- but it's not anywhere near as blatant and apparent as it is with the emotional abuser. He doesn't use the fear of violent reprimand to control his victim, but guilt and feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. And he does this primarily by shifting blame and making his partner feel responsible for all of the problems in the relationship, and therefore unwilling to leave because doing so becomes a perceived admission of failure.
The crux of the Nice Guy mentality is exactly this kind of blame displacement. That he's already learned to do this to someone he's not even in a relationship with speaks volumes to his potential for further abuse should this behavior go unchallenged. And the reason this behavior tends to go unchallenged is because of the three types of abuse, emotional is the most poorly understood and the least visible. The scars it leaves are just as devastating as any physical or sexual trauma, but they're only recognized by therapists who have been trained to look for them, and by people who have been the victim of it themselves. And of the three, it's also the only kind that is perfectly legal.
Nice Guys are more common than Nice Girls for a couple of reasons. One is that women generally don't receive societal conditioning that tells them they are entitled to any man they want by virtue of being a woman. In order to feel entitled to a man, society dictates that certain criteria must be met first. A woman must be stunningly beautiful (read: slender and buxom, with flawless skin and eternal youth), classy and well-mannered (read: keeps her opinions to herself), and able to walk the invisible line dividing the Madonna-Whore Complex with the precision of a highwire performer if she is to be seen as having "the luxury of being picky" (that being picky when it comes to romantic partners is seen as a luxury at all is another rant entirely).
Men, on the contrary, can only lose the luxury of pickiness if they meet certain criteria (and that criteria is being exceptionally unattractive, though Ugly Guy, Hot Wife is a very common wish fulfillment trope for a reason, so sometimes not even then). Otherwise, society conditions men that they deserve the woman they want just by virtue of being male.
Men (especially American men) are also conditioned not to be negatively emotional unless it's anger and aggression. Sadness is unmanly. Hurt is unmanly. Guilt is unmanly. I don't just mean expressing these emotions, but just feeling them. The Nice Guy seeks to shift the blame for his hurt and sadness at being rejected onto the person who rejected him in order to feel "manly" again. His feelings of hurt and sadness don't count against him if they aren't really his fault. If he can make someone else take responsibility for them, he can get his Man Card back.
While women don't display this kind of manipulative behavior as blatantly or as often, Nice Girls are out there, and they are just as abusive. The difference is the pathology of emotionally abusive women is rooted not in a sense of entitlement being challenged, but in...well...feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness.
Women are conditioned to the exact opposite of entitlement, as previously mentioned. We are pressured to be perfect in every way. We are pressured to be beautiful, quiet, chaste, and resilient and if we aren't all of these things to a superhuman degree, we are told we will never attract a mate and if we can't attract a mate, we are worthless. When a woman is trying to weasel into the life of a man she wants, it's because his rejection of her is effectively telling her "you're undateable and therefore useless" whereas a woman's rejection of a man is merely challenging his perceived authority over her. Note that this does not make it okay for women to be abusers; it's not okay for anyone to emotionally abuse another person. This is merely explaining the difference in motives.
When a woman shifts the blame for her moods onto someone else, she's not doing it to reclaim her Woman Card because feelings of sadness and hurt are considered "feminine." Women cry. Women emote. Women react. Women sit around the kitchen table with cheesecake and ice cream and console each other. For women who shift blame to other people for their emotions, the chief difference can be found in the emotion they're shifting blame for. While male abusers shift blame for sadness and hurt, women shift blame for anger. Because while sadness and hurt are considered feminine, women displaying anger (and therefore aggression) is unladylike. When female abusers blame-shift, they are often looking for absolution of wrongdoing. "I didn't get angry, you made me angry by Doing Thing X/Not Doing Thing Y."
So now that I have a Fashionable Headgear Army all bent out of shape because I'm calling the Nice Guys with whom they identify and sympathize potential abusers and steering all the women away from them, what I mean by the title of this post is not that Nice Guys should be avoided forever; they should be avoided only while they are still Nice Guys and still have that blame-shifting mindset. Because while it's entirely possible for Nice Guys to reform and grow up and realize how fucked and awful their behaviors and motives are, while they are still Nice Guys and unwilling to own their emotions and moods and seeking to shift that burden to their partner, they should not be given the chance to reel in a victim.
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