If you are adult, you make good, healthy, emotionally satisfying choices. All of my friends who are divorced & now remarried, or widowed and remarried or married later in life, all of them chose the Nice Guy. Consistently, they are all very happy. And at peace.
fyi - people tend to get less picky when the available choices aren't as numerous as they previously were the first time around ;-)
This is a deflective response designed to minimalize the comments that were made.
This is where I fall off the track with those of you espousing the "man doctrine." Women are not looking for hard asses. Being nice does not equal being weak or feminine.
Cesco needs to be more assertive, not necessarily more manly. Allowing another person to walk all over you is NOT a feminine characteristic. It's a sign of a person who lacks confidence and assertiveness. Neither of these attributes are uniquely male or female.
Yes, some men have stopped filling the role of a man. I tend to think this is not because they have stopped being men, but instead that they stopped paying attention to the things they are supposed to be paying attention to. When we ignore our spouse becasuse of complacency or laziness, it's not that our masculinity is failing. It's that we're lazy and complacent.
Chances are good that Cesco was a nice guy when he and his wife met and fell in love. Chances are good that she fell in love with him in part because he was a nice guy. I agree wholeheartedly that true women want and admire (and yes, fall in love with) nice guys.
Why do the movies and commercials so often show men using babies and puppies to win the attention of a woman. Because seeing a man be gentle and caring, and yes, NICE, are attractive to women.
If I was hoping to hook up with the female bouncer at the local Harley bar, then I'd go the hardass, manly man route. That's probably what she's looking for. But, that being said, I wouldn't think that Hilda at the Harley bar is probably a great marriage prospect.
Bill
"Don't tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon."
And the last time I checked, neither gender seemed to say that respect was a male or female characteristic.
OK, I'll bite: I do think there's a big difference between the way women respond to the whole "love and respect" thing than how men do.
Generally, women want to be LOVED unconditionally. Men want to be RESPECTED unconditionally.
For more on this subject, the excellent "Love and Respect," by Eggerichs, is an eye-opening read.
Short version as it pertains to women: a woman very closely ties her feelings of RESPECT towards a man to her feelings of LOVE. She cannot love a man she does not respect.
These underlying principles play a large role in the advice that I give here.
That's right! Knitted Scarf, how dare you presume to know what women want! You, being a woman and all. How could you even possibly know, when we have pros here to tell us this stuff!
My, so much bile and sarcasm here tonite. SO unattractive!
[quote=cesco]I guess this is where the phrase " nice guys finish last" would come from ? maybe yes maybe no, it fits though...
I guess as a kid I was always taught by my mother to respect women. There was no book on how too, but "be nice" was the words she used..
Ahh, but Grasshoppah . . . the secret is learning how to be a nice guy, without being a Nice Guy.
Just in case you are getting swayed with this talk, let's just say this advice is the pits.
Such a respectful response, KS. Did this approach work well with your husband? I'll let my advice nearly 15,000 posts speak for itself -- I really don't feel the need to justify it to you. If you want to disagree with me, that's fine -- free country and free speech and all. But you don't have to be so RUDE about it.
Can I make a suggestion? Someone should create a thread re: feminism, machoism, acting like a man, acting like a woman, acting like a woman acting like a man, acting like a man acting like a woman, whose nuts are whose, etc...
I don't see how anyone is directly trying to help Cesco. It's now boiled down to trying to be right.
The bottom line should really just be...
Wives should act like WOMEN AND LADIES.
Husbands should act like MEN.
Last edited by mindfull; 03/11/1003:00 AM.
Me-46, D-21, S15, S13
After many years w/my head in the sand... I FILED Divorced 6/2011
The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.
If you are adult, you make good, healthy, emotionally satisfying choices. All of my friends who are divorced & now remarried, or widowed and remarried or married later in life, all of them chose the Nice Guy. Consistently, they are all very happy. And at peace.
fyi - people tend to get less picky when the available choices aren't as numerous as they previously were the first time around ;-)
This is a deflective response designed to minimalize the comments that were made.
This is where I fall off the track with those of you espousing the "man doctrine." Women are not looking for hard asses. Being nice does not equal being weak or feminine.
I love this, how many times are people going to write the word "hard ass" as if anywhere in this thread where we discussed the attractive traits of a man we said "BE A HARD ASS!"
I personally have specifically said once if not a few times, "don't be an a$$hole or a prick!"
Read it and stop spouting "HARD ASS" unless it's a sexual fetish of yours and if so, just be clear about it ;-)
A few of the posts on this particular subject in this particular thread refer more to idealistic views more than what reality actually tells us.
In general, people tend to idealize a lot (mindful I separated "alot" for you based on that previous correction, thanks btw)
"I want someone who wants me for me!" "A real true woman loves nice guys!" "Nice guys don't have to change to get a great woman, they should just be themselves and they'll find that special someone perfect for them" "I want a partner who is my equal!" "I want to be honest and share all of my feelings and thoughts with my wife!" "I want my wife to look past the fact that I'm overweight, overly sensitive, lazy - I want her to love me for ME!" "Isn't marriage about better or worse, this isn't fair, she should just love me as I am and not judge me or have high expectations!"
Ok, you hopefully get my point, I could go on and on making a $hitload of idealistic examples but lets all be be honest, review all the threads on these forums, being idealistic like this has no effect on the current situations.
In an ideal world these things would all be great and true.
Let's face it, we don't live in an "ideal" world. In an ideal world, you would be accepted for who you are, spouses wouldn't cheat & have affairs, marriages would last forever, there would be no fighting, a man could be "nice guy" and get the most beautiful girl in the world, "bad asses" and "bad boys" wouldn't attract women at all, a man could cry and express his feelings to his wife without scaring her or making her want to leave him. If people did make the rare mistake in an ideal world, we would forgive them because we love them so much. In an ideal world spousal abuse (in all it's forms) would never exist, love would last forever and divorces wouldn't exist and neither would this website.
In an ideal world these things would be great.
But we don't live in an ideal world.
How do I know we don't live in an ideal world? Easy... you're reading this post right now. This site exists.
So you can learn to accept that we don't live in an ideal world and adapt to it and all of it's quirks and achieve our goals faster or....
You can continue to live on planet Fruitopia.
Real world or Ideal world. Observe reality, follow reality, reality works. If you go against reality, don't complain later that what you did didn't work as you had hoped because you were idealistic instead of being realistic.
Cesco needs to be more assertive, not necessarily more manly. Allowing another person to walk all over you is NOT a feminine characteristic. It's a sign of a person who lacks confidence and assertiveness. Neither of these attributes are uniquely male or female.
Confidence and Assertiveness are traits that women find attractive in men, they literally spark attraction, so much so that when a man stops exhibiting these traits, he kills the attraction between him and his spouse.
