Dating as a NiceGuy™️ 

Over the last few weeks, I’ve begun to understand the connection between a few, disparate, odd things I would always say, but never understood:

𝓣𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼 𝓘 𝓱𝓪𝓿𝓮 𝓬𝓪𝓾𝓼𝓪𝓵𝓵𝔂 𝓼𝓪𝓲𝓭

• “I don’t feel real.”
• “People talk about being authentic or enjoying themselves, but I don’t know what that means.”
   
• “Other people don’t feel entirely real.”
• “Other people are more real to me.”
   
• “I feel scared of my mom.”
• “The less scared of my mother, the more I can engage with romantic relationships directly and ask what I think.”
   
• “Relationships are work.”
• “I mean, in some ways, it feels like if only you changed yourself entirely as a human being enough, you could have someone like you.”
   

There’s a version of nice guys, who are actually just nice and chill and normal. I think nice guys with self also do quite well in dating, actually. This isn’t about them. This is about NiceGuys™, who are terrified out of their bloodied minds. Even if they don’t feel it. Constantly.

It’s like I lacked a self for the longest time.  A person I could count on. Who would always be there. Whose highest priority was to myself. Not serving someone else.

A self is the thing that can be there for you if literally nothing or no one else in the world is.

Don’t get me wrong. I had something that felt like a self. 

It was hyper-competent, and always told me when something smelled of bullshit.¹ I could count on it being loyal to my goals. 

But to be honest, it didn’t really feel like my self. My self felt more like:

^{[1 Unless it directly contradicted basic emotional truths about my family like “my parents were good parents.”]}

Perhaps it’s easier to describe what the absence of a self feels like. It feels like constantly looking around you for any semblance of a person you can focus on to. If I could find a real person to focus on to…

Someone who had real desires, you know?

Not like this guy. This guy was focused on survival. 

This is the version of the NiceGuy™️ that thinks you can make people like you. They have a sort of “just fucking tell me what to do to do so I can have you goddamn it.”

The problem with that is it’s boring. 

This person is basically an unmoulded lump of clay asking to be shaped into the thing that you want it to be. So first— a project. Second — fundamentally incapable of surprising you

Some women do actually want that, just like some men definitely want that in a woman too. But loving what you can mold someone into is more like loving yourself than loving them.

Some people want this, but a lot more people, it turns out, just want someone else who exists.

One of the foundations of  a secure relationship is that the two people are secure enough to venture apart from one another and come back together and share what they found about the world or people or meaning or whatever in their explorations. The relationship and drama of intimacy doesn’t need to be the thing. It can be the easy part. The point is everything else it enables. 

The problem with NiceGuys™️ isn’t a lack of niceness, or a lack of generosity. It’s a lack of courage.

Sometimes a sense of self is a birthright. Sometimes it needs to be  conscious act.

In what esteem do I hold myself? It doesn’t need to be particularly great. But it needs to be. 

Otherwise, you’re dating a vacuum.

You’re dating a hole where a person might exist.

The truth is the person always exists, and for the kind, and compassionate enough, you can still see it in people’s eyes.

The life force (eros) runs through people, up and down, animating them, still like it did when they were a child. But for some people, it is buried under such a wall of survival compensation, it shows up only in glints and glimmers. (But it is still there.)

𝓦𝓱𝓮𝓷  𝔀𝓮  𝓯𝓪𝓵𝓵  𝓪𝓼𝓵𝓮𝓮𝓹, 
𝔀𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓮  𝓭𝓸𝓮𝓼  𝓽𝓱𝓮  𝓼𝓮𝓵𝓯  𝓰𝓸?

The prime directive of an infant is to make it out alive. Every single person you see comes from a lineage of infants that made it. The way children do that is by not breaking connection with their parents.

Babies are born into the world from the womb, completely undifferentiated. The world is the baby, the baby is the world. He isn’t mobile on his own. When the baby cries, the mother does things; it’s all part of the same undifferentiated mass of stimuli and responses of the world.

When babies begin to crawl, they discover there is an independence to the world. Ideally, this independence is encouraged. The mother becomes a home base to anchor safety in the world—that you are not alone, and other humans will take care of you when you need it—and you continue exploring. This process happens naturally and organically, without anyone reading any parenting books.

If the mother’s system can tolerate the child feeling upset, without feeling overly upset herself, the child can feel mirrored, and yet also feel the felt trust in the world to process it.

But if the parent’s reaction overshadows the child’s, or if s/he is neglectful, or distant, this process is broken.

If sharing an emotional reaction in any sort of way with your parents felt worse than not sharing it—you are in this picture.

Whether the child knows it or not, the prime directive then becomes: “don’t break the connection with the parents. And as quickly as possible, stop needing it.”

Now there is no safe container for intimacy. Because the mother/parents/other must inherently be blocked out. Kept safe from one’s true reactions. Instead—the child becomes whatever he needs to be.

𝓣𝓱𝓮  𝓽𝔀𝓮𝓮𝓽

This tweet that made me write this post.

Without taking the causality of this tweet seriously, it’s possible to take the gist of it. Did my mother “really” do this? It doesn’t matter.

It matters that it offers a point of resonance. Of what it’s like to relate to someone who is bigger than you, whom your survival depends on, and try to please them; mistrusting them.

and try to please them; mistrusting them

This phrase captures the way it felt to me on dates I was scared of.

I didn’t trust the people I was on dates with. I didn’t trust them to be kind. 

I know women who feel this way about men. It seems to cut both ways.

This isn’t about being creepy, or harmful. It’s about people who grew up without strong senses of security of selves discovering it for themselves. 

𝓣𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼 𝓘 𝓽𝓱𝓸𝓾𝓰𝓱𝓽 𝔀𝓮𝓻𝓮 𝓷𝓸𝓻𝓶𝓪𝓵 𝓪𝓼 𝓪 𝓬𝓱𝓲𝓵𝓭

• Growing up, friend meant: “this popular clique I hung out with.” “This person who called me their best friend.” But never “someone who could provide me emotional comfort.”
   
• It was surprising to me to consider the idea that other people would actually care about me. Why would they? 
      Loyalty was important to me. I understood loyalty. I was fiercely loyal to my friends, and it was the one reason I understood why they would keep caring about me.²
   
• I emotionally trusted approximately 0 – ½ people.
• My only mission was to make it out of my home country, into a different one, where I could be with different people.
• My one true friend who understood me suddenly abandoned me one day. I took this completely fine, with no seeming emotional disturbance.
• I changed schools, countries, and social circles every few years. 
• I didn’t feel secure that the people who liked me would keep liking me,  that they’d be in my life 4 years from now, or that they were enough to get me to where I needed to be.
   

From the inside, all this felt like a very coherent worldview— I was here to survive. Sometimes you banded together with other people to survive. There wasn’t anything missing from this picture.

The thing about missing secure attachment is that the security doesn’t always feel missing.

^{2 [Because what did it look like to truly care about someone through just mutuality? I didn’t know yet.]}

𝓜𝓸𝓻𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓷 𝓪𝓷𝔂𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓮𝓵𝓼𝓮, 
𝓝𝓲𝓬𝓮𝓖𝓾𝔂𝓼™️ 𝓪𝓻𝓮 𝓼𝓬𝓪𝓻𝓮𝓭.

I felt scared of dates.

Why am I scared?
Why am I possibly so scared?
What is this person going to do to me?

The point was I didn’t know. I didn’t have a home base of security, a feeling of something that was not fuckable with. I didn’t know I could expect of my friends to stand by me, even if a date thought I was lame or a bad person or something else.

I didn’t know—in my bones—people could disagree on whether I was a likeable person. 

I felt like the quintessential NiceGuy, who doesn’t understand you can’t get everyone to like you, who reacts to everyone like a fundamental other, instead of just a normal person like him, because he doesn’t feel like a normal person. 

I truly thought it was my job to get everyone to like me. Someone saying it wasn’t doesn’t make it feel that way.

More than anything else, NiceGuys™️ are scared. And the thing about scared animals is you can’t really trust them.

[I’ve also always been fearless in a way. I’m fearless about writing this. I’m fearless that the truth will liberate.

Maybe it’s one of the best things about me. Maybe I inherited this.

One thing my family didn’t do: it was make me scared of the objective truth. Science, religion, dogma—it was all there to be questioning of.]

FIN PART ONE