There's several reasons why I haven't bothered to directly go into this cultural touchstone of a topic. The first reason I can think of has to do with the reality of my relationships with my fellow men. I learned a long time ago that a lot of men who have enjoyed much more success with women than I have, whether they achieved that success by playing the jerk to women or not, really do tend to take quite a liking to me as one of their fellow dudes. I get a lot of bro love. What am I to do? Tell these guys to go jump in the lake? So, I tend not to view these types as my competition. That's kind of hard, because I have been in many situations where the women around us seem to always take a liking to these other guys over me, but on the other hand, I consider myself a friend to these same guys, so I try to have a bit of generous spirit about the whole thing, I guess.
Another big reason why I haven't gone into the Nice Guys vs. Assholes paradox is that I really try to look past the surface of the dilemma and figure out the appeal of a lot of jerky guys to women, and why guys who consider themselves some kind of martyr don't come out well. The guys who do well with women, I've noticed, will pay attention to their personal appearance and hygiene, they might exercise on a regular basis, they might pay attention to their diet, their wardrobe, etc. It's true that a lot of them are just really good looking to start with, so right there, a guy can be nice, or a jerk, or whatever, but if he looks really good, that smooths a lot of things over.
I remember a dearly departed friend of mine, on the other hand, who would say things along the lines of, "They are just going to have to love me the way I am." I mean, it's okay to love oneself "the way one is", whatever that means, but what comes across to women from men who make such statements is a defiant, entitled attitude that basically tells them that the man who says such things is not willing to meet women even halfway. A lot of womanizers can have this scary chameleon-like quality, where they can just instinctively know how to be whatever it is the woman they are trying to conquer needs them to be. This kind of thing is extreme, but men who want to just be their "true selves" all the time might do well to steal a few pages from these more "successful" types and make the more palatable elements of the womanizer's game their own.
As far as personalities go, I think a lot of women will see the Asshole as being exciting to be around vs. the guy who's just trying to find that one special girl to settle down with blah, blah, blah... I think maybe the Nice Guys are looking for that special girl to take them out of their unexciting, humdrum, often depressing life as a man alone. While the asshole type is the SOLUTION for girls looking for a man to take them out of their unexciting, humdrum, often depressing life as a woman alone. See what I mean? It's the PROVIDORS of stimulation that get the action.
Which brings me to another point. I should be the last man on Earth to judge any woman for going for the asshole type, when I have, time and time again, gone for the asshole type of woman myself. Yeah, these types typically look really good, they have an excitement about them, and they get the pick of the fucking litter as a result, ANNND they take advantage of that fact.
Which brings me to another point. I don't really think I can attribute my overall lack of success with women as a factor of my being too nice a guy. I think I have been seen as a guy with a mental illness who tends to obsess romantically on individual women. I think that women would choose just about any other type, whether they are Nice Guys, Assholes, or whatever, over a guy whom they worry might stalk them or otherwise go dark in that way. So I think I've been laboring under the onus of being seen as a bad guy type for good deal of my adult life without realizing that was what I was having to live down.
I don't know how much further I want to go on with this topic. I'm pretty happy these days. I don't have a job that's too stressful or demanding, I respond well to my psych med ( I cannot emphasize how important to my well-being that is), I've made a lot of lifestyle changes I'm happy with (quitting smoking, quitting drinking, quitting drugs, refraining from the pursuit of unavailable women), I'm making art and music that I'm happy with, and, as a result, the rest of me has caught up with the notion that I realized many years ago that making too big a deal out of romantic love has, by itself, been a huge source of unhappiness for me in the past. As far as the tendency to obsess on individual women goes, I've felt more free of that tendency for a longer period of time than I can ever remember in my adult life. I think putting romantic love in its place, plus all the changes, has allowed me to transfer my obsessive nature to my art and music over any individual women in my world.
Another factor for the change in my obsessive nature has to do with, I think, the three big trials I had with women since 2014. First, there was that virgin girl at that business I patronize (I mentioned here in my last post), then there was her equally beguiling, infuriating friend, then there was the Invisible Woman. Three women together are a big theme in world mythology for a reason, I guess. There's the Three Furies, there's Faith, Hope, and Charity, there's the three witches from Macbeth, there's the three fairy god-sluts from those ZZ Top videos in the eighties, I can go on and on about three women.
Maybe the guy who sees himself as a Nice Guy who gets dicked over by women would do well to not take the whole love game so seriously. To the extent that I've tried to steal some pages from the book of men that many might consider to be assholes, I don't think doing so has transformed me into the kind of person I don't like. My tendency to take the love game too seriously manifested itself most prominently in the way I perceived "opportunities" with women as if they were precious individual raindrops during a hundred year drought, and It was as if I ran around willy-nilly with both hands cupped trying to catch each drop as it fell from the sky.