While scrolling through Facebook I came across what appears to be a Reddit post retweeted by AskAubry about a male university student who felt spurned by the female lab partner he’d wanted to befriend and love. The post has since been deleted, and its author has likely received enough Internet fame, so I won’t share the text here. But reading it did make me think about Nice Guys and incels.
My understanding is that an “incel” is a person who identifies as “involuntarily celibate,” who wants love and sex but is unable to find a willing partner. Straight men who come to identify as incels and participate in incel-spaces seem to support each other in their bitterness and resentment of women as a while, expressing a sense of being unfairly denied the love and intimacy they deserve.
Nice Guys are not necessarily incels, though many of them seem to end up there. They’ve been around for decades. Nice Guys think of themselves as, well, nice. Good men who love and care about women, who want to nurture and protect them, and want to love and be loved. But Nice Guys tend to approach their desire for partnership indirectly, through first befriending women and becoming emotionally close with them, all the while hoping these women will come to see them as valuable romantic partners.
(There are Nice Guys who are queer, and likely many who aren’t guys at all, but the dynamic tends to be parallel. If you feel like a Nice Guy who isn’t a straight man, you could see what in this post still works for you, or check out my other writings on queer relationships and loneliness.)
If you’re a Nice Guy, you may think of yourself as different and better than “horny” guys who openly pursue sex and romance, but you they feel aggrieved is that the woman you desire ends up with the horny guy and has no interest in you as anything but a friend. Nice Guys and incels used to call this getting “friendzoned”—maybe they still do, I assume that must be a dated reference by now—officially taken out of the “zone” of potential romance and never considered again.
As a Nice Guy, you might be idealistic, hoping for that romantic movement of gradually being rewarded for your loyalty and devotion and being the one to rescue or heal your beloved from her disappointments and tormentors. Though this path can lead to dark places, there is a genuine sweetness here. The problem is, this approach tends to fail, and your idealism curdles into bitterness and cynicism.
My genuine hope is that all of us who want it gets to experience authentic love and joyful, consensual sex. It’s a real sorrow that what Nice Guys do to pursue those desires ends up getting in their way. You might have come to your idealism honestly, listening to the women in your life complain about being hurt and used by men, and thought you were doing something different. You might feel ashamed of your own desires for sex and love because you worry they’re the same as those horny men you learned to dislike. That makes it even more confusing and frustrating when the women you like keep going back to the men who hurt them and not seeing you.
The reason the Nice Guy strategy fails tends to come down to underlying shame about yourself, your passivity, and your inability to tolerate another person’s boundaries. The loneliness you’re trying to cure through romantic connection becomes your greatest hindrance. Loneliness is true suffering, it is incredibly painful, and makes us more sensitive to rejection from the people with whom we want to connect.
The Nice Guy strategy tries to avoid experiencing rejection by not being up front about what you want—love, or sex—and instead settle for friendship with the thought that you’re playing the long game and will eventually be seen by your beloved without having to take any risk. But when the game becomes too painful, or you finally make it clear what you want, you’ve created the conditions for a really painful rejection that would have been much gentler if it had happened before you got so invested.
Men who have not experienced the kind of emotionally intimate friendships that women enjoy tend to get confused when they first encounter it. It feels so special and rare in comparison to the kinds of connecting that younger men do, that it’s easy to sexualize it or confuse it for romantic intimacy. So Nice Guys may feel betrayed when you finally accept that this person only wants friendship from you. The woman you befriended, who didn’t realize there was this other agenda all along, also feels betrayed. It’s not good!
Men need emotional intimacy, companionship, friendships, and nonsexual touch as much as we need sex and romantic love. When you feel ashamed about any of these desires, you may pursue them with desperation, with resentment, or in these indirect ways that are tantamount to digging a love pit and hoping someone falls in.
None of which is sexy. What is sexy is confidence. Confidence suggests a person who has strength and resilience, who can respect another person’s needs and boundaries, a person who won’t be easily broken or overwhelmed, a person who has direction. Confidence is willing to put his agenda forward and experience rejections and setbacks because those clear the board for a good partnership. When you’re lonely, confidence may feel impossible to achieve.
For all my lonely clients, I strongly encourage taking a break from searching for love and romantic partnership for a while and instead investing in cultivating friendship and community. We tend to burden romantic love with too many of our needs for acceptance, validation, belonging, connection, and meaning, which is especially heavy for the early stages of meeting and dating.
Having a community of friends, having a strong and supportive family relationship, all of these can meet many of your needs and teach you important lessons about the give and take of relationships without being so explosive. It can blunt the sharp edges of loneliness and help you find confidence and cultivate your interests. Some of those men that you think yourself better than may end up being great teachers and mentors.
End those relationships with women where you’re secretly pining for them—either take a break or come clean. It’s not good for you. Eventually you’ll find love, but you won’t see good partnership if you’re staring at these unfulfilling friends.
Take six months and focus on friendship and working on your anxieties and shame. Get a journal or a therapist. If you can exercise, do that. Get into your body. Practice flirting in a mirror. It’s probably weirder when you’re flirting with yourself, but watching yourself is a great way to reduce shame and get more comfortable expressing your sexual and romantic desires.
After several months, try taking risks with women you find attractive. Don’t immediately rush to asking them out or propositioning them, and don’t send them dick pics when they haven’t asked for them. Try a month of just smiling and saying hello, and if that goes well, asking a few questions about their lives. Make that the goal—once this week, I’ll smile and talk to a woman I find attractive. The goal isn’t to get their phone number or find your soulmate, just to start building your tolerance for taking risks.
Whether they flirt with you or reject you, it’s all part of your strength-building practice. You can practice being with the excitement of success, and you can practice tolerating the pain of rejection without lashing out and blaming her or yourself.
As you get successes, you can try taking bigger risks. What’s most important is that you are able to hear and work to take care of your own needs. Confidence comes when we can see ourselves being resilient, able to keep going and looking for a person who can really connect with us rather than settling for unfulfilling relationships or loneliness. When your needs know that you care about them and take them seriously, they become easier to bear and to care for. It starts to become clearer when you can take a risk and when you need to protect yourself. And then you really get better at being able to do that for friends and romantic or sexual partners in your life, and accepting only those who will offer that in return.
If you’re a straight man who has read this far, here are a few additional thoughts:
- Be wary when you’ve created a fantasy relationship about a woman you barely know. Keep in mind you’ve invented an idealized partner and do not know the actual person. It’s not horrible to do this, but it’s a big problem to forget to get to know the real person.
- Avoid approaching potential friends and partners with a showing-off, dominant attitude. That is what men do with each other when we feel insecure, anxious about being attacked, and want to establish a place in the social hierarchy. It’s a defense against rejection that it gets in the way of real belonging and intimacy. Pay attention to when you do this, and try being curious about the other person instead.
- Observe how you behave toward women and ask yourself, “If I were talking to a man I respected, would I behave the same way?” Really sit with that question. It can lead you to unexpected places.
The paradox of being a grown up is that I need other people to help me meet my needs, but no one else is obligated to do so. I must be responsible for my needs, which means I keep going until I find a relationship where we can meet each other’s needs with pleasure and enthusiasm.
