When did being nice become the same thing as being creepy? That’s the question I keep circling back to. Last semester, I had to take a walking lab for gym credit, which is exactly what it sounds like. We walked.
That’s it. During one class, a boy I barely knew struck up a conversation with me. I mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that my earbuds were broken while I fiddled with my iPod. The next class period, he walked up to me, kind of sly, and handed me a brand new pair of cheap earbuds.
I was so stunned I didn’t know how to react, so I just accepted them and kept talking. Later, when I told people about it, they all led me to believe it was a creepy gesture. At first, I was wary. Then I thought about it more.
Why should I think this extremely nice thing a boy did for me was creepy? It was bold, sure. Maybe even a little forward. But creepy?
No. We’re still good friends to this day. I still use those earbuds. Here’s what I don’t understand.
Giving a gift to a total stranger online is fine. Giving a gift to someone you sort of know in real life is creepy. That logic makes no sense to me. And it always comes back to the same tired argument.
The real question everyone wants to ask is, why do girls like jerks and have no interest in overly polite guys? But in my experience, almost every girl I know only dates nice guys. If you keep going after women who only date douchebags, maybe the problem isn’t women. Maybe the problem is your taste in women.
Being nice isn’t creepy. The way you’re nice is creepy. That’s the real distinction. A lot of people talk about complimenting a girl on her hair.
If you say it in a friendly way, the same way you’d tell a guy friend he has a cool T-shirt, that’s not creepy at all. But that’s not how most guys do it. They do it in an overly sincere way, a way that implies the compliment is supposed to mean something more than just a compliment. A way that implies the compliment doesn’t actually have anything to do with her hair at all.
That’s creepy. Creepiness has a lot to do with tone and body language. You can say the exact same words, but your tone and your posture can convey a completely different meaning. And honestly, the media hasn’t helped.
The oversaturation of psychopaths, rapists, and murderers in the news has created an atmosphere of constant fear and suspicion of strangers. The thing most people don’t realize is that you’re far more likely to be attacked by someone you know than by a stranger. The only foolproof way to stay completely safe would be to isolate yourself from all human contact, move to a deserted island, and slowly lose your grip on your sanity. Frankly, it’s all in the presentation.
Excessive persistence. Overly lengthy eye contact. Those things matter. I’m a pretty nice guy myself.
I go out of my way for most people. But you have to know when to back off and be able to read someone’s personal space. In public, most people are private and they like it that way, but they still appreciate a kind, sincere gesture as long as you aren’t pushy about it. I’m not a particularly friendly looking guy either.
I’m 250 pounds, bald, with a giant goatee. If I’m not smiling, I’ve been told I look like I’m ready to raise hell. But following these little rules of thumb has really changed how people perceive my actions, at least I like to think so. Talking to people doesn’t equal creepy.
It’s about context and the manner of conversation. Waiting at a bus stop in broad daylight during rush hour, or standing in line at the store, talking to a stranger can be perfectly fine. If you’re not standing too close, if you’re not giving too many compliments, if you don’t look creepy, and if you’re approaching in a neutral manner, it’s fine. But if you stand too close, give inappropriate compliments, compliment how nice her hair looks instead of her band shirt, look like you haven’t shaved, smell bad, wear old dirty clothes, and ask direct personal questions as your opening line, yeah, people are going to be hostile.
Even worse if it’s at night. I’m assuming you’re a guy who’s been blown off by a lot of women recently. But I think it’s a reaction to the way people act randomly nice. The last few times I was approached by a stranger and treated nicely, they all had an agenda.
There were the guys on campus who approached me at lunch and chatted with me for a few minutes until they got to the point. They wanted to know if Christ’s love was in my heart. Then there was the girl who came up to my table in the dining hall and made small talk until she got to the point. She was running for student government and wanted my vote.
And there was the guy who chatted me up pleasantly at a bus stop until he got to the point. He was a political activist who tried to make me miss my bus because he wasn’t done with his pitch. And then there are the rebukes these people give when you respond politely but negatively. One time, I was short on time and literally didn’t have a moment to sign a gay marriage petition.
I was asked, with a straight face, if I hated gay people. Another time, I didn’t want to run a 5K for some random guy with muscular dystrophy. I said, without sarcasm and with a pleasant smile, no thank you. And I was asked with a straight face if I simply didn’t care about him.
I never even met the guy. He might be a killer of puppies. I’m not going to assume he’s nice just because he has a medical condition. In my experience, when people approach you randomly and start trying to engage you, they are much more often than not trying to get something from you.
So now I’m always suspicious when that happens. When someone is nice during a normal, naturally happening interaction, I’m usually genuinely happy about it. And I always try to be nice to everybody. But the bad apples really do spoil the bunch.
I consider myself a nice guy. A lot of people do. People also think I’m creepy as hell. Not sure if it’s because I’m nice or because I’m actually creepy.
One girl I work with told me I remind her of a serial killer. Wow, that’s a crappy thing to say. But then she said, no, not in a bad way. You’re just really quiet.
Like, I wonder what you’re thinking sometimes. I told her, where to hide a body. That was a joke. Well, I thought it was funny.
True niceness is doing something with no expectation in return. Often men do nice things for women because they want to initiate a potential relationship. They’re looking for a girlfriend or a hookup, and they use niceness to begin or increase contact. But genuine niceness is what strangers do when they know they’ll never be repaid.
Giving a compliment and then immediately walking away to make it clear there are no expectations. Holding a door for everyone, not just the cute girl. A nice person is a smile that isn’t followed by lingering glances or an approach. Creepy is a compliment followed by a request.
It’s initiating uncomfortable physical closeness. It’s asking a girl out before you even know her first and last name. It’s inviting someone to hang out with a group and then treating it like a date. It’s trying to pay for things just because she’s female.
A nice person is equally kind to the old, the young, the lovely, the ugly, the grumpy, the cheerful, the rich, and the poor. If you’re only nice to women you might approach romantically, you’re not nice. You’re creepy. Creepy can also be essentially trying to force someone into a position where they feel like they owe you a debt.
I hardly ever encounter rude people. Where I live, people are nice, generous, and respectful. But I think it depends on the area you’re in. And I assume you’re partly talking about women assuming random guys who make conversation are creepy.
From what I’ve gathered from my female friends, random males giving them compliments often leads to some kind of unwanted and situationally inappropriate sexual advance. Since women are generally smaller than the men creeping on them, they have legitimate reason to be afraid in that situation. That fear carries forward to other potentially threatening males. It’s unfortunate, but I consider it an appropriate caution given how common extreme creepiness, groping, and sometimes threats actually are.
As a female, I’ve noticed that if a guy comes up to me and is acting very nice, and I make an effort to be nice in return, he will immediately think I’m flirting with him and try to take advantage of that. So in general, I’m a little curt. Maybe even rude. But what can I do when the alternative is the person immediately thinking I’m flirting with him?
I personally am always suspicious of nice guys who seem very sweet and unassuming and don’t appear to have any motive beyond being a really nice guy and a good friend. That’s because I got into a very unpleasant, very scary situation last year. A nice guy decided he had been nice for the appropriate length of time and was due his reward for being so super lovely to me. And by reward, I mean sex, whether I wanted it or not.
He tried to claim his reward very, very forcefully. I’ve never believed anything a nice guy has said since. I’m so sorry for what you went through. It isn’t fair, and your viewpoint is completely understandable.
Sad, but understandable. I wish friendship was still as simple as it was in kindergarten. Walking up to someone and saying, hey, do you want to be my friend? I love how this conversation went from when did society start thinking nice people are creepy to why do girls like jerks.
Let me correct you there. Some girls like jerks. Some men also like jerks. Disliking people who treat you like crap is in no way limited to a heteronormative perspective.
Many women do not like jerks and actually think they’re quite unsavory. I think the widespread belief that women only like jerks is mainly perpetuated by whiny entitled man children who are hurt that they didn’t get the girl they wanted. This might also be because I live in the southern United States and the culture is different here, but my experience is that most people appreciate kindness and good manners. I have never had a negative experience because I was nice to somebody, and it’s something I go out of my way to do often.
But I’ve got a story I’d like to share that’s related to the topic. It’s not a solution to the question, but it’s something I witnessed that absolutely boggled my mind. One day at school, my friends and I finished our lab early, so we had about an hour break before the next class. We decided to go get dinner in the cafeteria.
I bought myself a sandwich and proceeded to the cash to pay. While I was waiting in line, this girl came up behind me with some pizza slices and a ten dollar bill in her hand. When it was my turn to pay, I had to use my debit card since I didn’t have any cash. The cashier set me up to pay, then noticed the girl behind me was going to pay cash.
Since I was using debit and she was paying cash, it wasn’t a problem to do two transactions at the same time and speed things along. The cashier looked at the girl and said, that will be three twenty-five. The girl looked back at the cashier with disgust. That was creepy, she said.
The cashier looked confused and replied, how was that creepy? You knew the price of the pizza without even punching it in. How is that remotely creepy? Pizza is probably the most popular food item in that cafeteria.
You’d have the price memorized after working there for a minute. And even if you didn’t, knowing a price isn’t creepy at all. Maybe it’s like a front. If she says it was creepy, there’s very little to say back.
It puts the speaker in a higher position right away, and she gets her shield up immediately. I see this all the time. There was an older man who lived on my block who had never been anything but generous. Always giving food and help to people who needed it.
I remember when a neighbor family wasn’t doing too well. Couldn’t even afford food. So he brought them a box full of all sorts of food and supplies without even being asked. I happened to be there at the time, playing with the other children, and they all talked about how the man was so creepy and way too nice.
Someone gave them food to survive, and he’s creepy. I’m shaking my head in disbelief. For me, nice became creepy when I could talk to an older guy at work for eight months, every single day, one of the eighty-plus mostly older men I work with, and have him try to manipulate me into going home with him when I was drunk at the staff party. Nice became creepy when the cute guy who had earlier approached me at a restaurant with my friends grabbed my butt when we passed outside a bathroom.
Nice became creepy when a guy I used to work with claimed that he had encountered all the wrong women in life and hadn’t wanted to date in years, but then he met me. Well, gosh, I was special. He could see dating me. Then he tried to plant a big romantic kiss on me.
Nice became creepy when I posted an ad for hopeful roommates in my area and got around seven desperate people who waited until we’d gotten to know each other over email before telling me I could live free or cheap in exchange for sexual favors. There are plenty of nice guys out there, and I love them to pieces. My heart swells hearing my coworker talk about his wife like she is literally the other half of his thought process. Guys that treat girls right.
But sadly, the bad encounters are what we remember. Attacks on your security, your esteem, and your safety. I think this whole women like jerks thing is generally bull. There is nothing wrong with being nice to people.
If someone takes your niceness out of context and makes it creepy, they are the jerk here. Some people you just cannot be nice to. You have to treat everyone differently. Be nice.
Take note of the reaction. Continue accordingly. I’m not saying buy someone earbuds, but hold a door open for someone. If they thank you, keep being nice next time you see them.
If they don’t acknowledge you, forget them. I’m a nice guy a lot of the time, but I will not hesitate to be a jerk in a second if I feel it’s warranted. Basically, I’m nice and polite until you jerk me over. It’s terrible, but if an unattractive person is rude to me after I’ve done something nice, it doesn’t bother me.
I expect it, because society isn’t the nicest to unattractive people, and they don’t expect people to be nice, and they don’t always know the proper way to respond. That’s a fault of theirs or of society, not yours. My answer to this whole question is, does it even matter? Keep being nice.
You’ll find another nice girl, and you can make nice babies. Am I the only one who hasn’t experienced any of these problems? I’ve encountered more kind people than rude, and few people have ever given me any indication that I was coming off as creepy. Actually, just today I was in line with a few friends and saw a bag of candy.
I said out loud that I wondered what it tasted like, and some woman bought the bag for me, and then we had a conversation until we left the store. A few weeks ago, I also helped an old man to his car on a windy day at the DMV after he fell, and many people standing in line rushed over to help. To be honest, I can’t remember the last time someone acted rude or cynical towards me. And if they did, I’d regard them as jerks.
It’s not a new norm. Stop dwelling on the negative jerks of the world, and spend some time thinking about the good. I’m a nice girl. I pick up things that people drop.
I hold doors. I let the elderly go ahead of me. But people are rude back to me all the time when I’m just trying to be nice. I try to connect on a human level with my customers, and I get treated like crap for it.
I don’t know. People are rude, but I hang out with nice people. We treat others well. Kind of hoping the minority, the non-jerks, will become a majority someday.
Odd is not understanding something. Weird is not understanding something and not really wanting to. Creepy is not understanding something and definitely not wanting to. Why do you insist on giving people compliments?
It’s possible you’re actually coming off as creepy. Creepy people don’t know they’re creepy, or else they would stop. Try giving compliments while not smiling like a predator. Or just don’t give compliments.
Make people’s day brighter in a way that doesn’t force them to interact with you or else they look like a Grinch. Speak through actions instead of words. Don’t give people the opportunity to accuse you of having hidden motives. Be excellent to everyone, not just pretty girls.
And to answer the question, why do girls like jerks and have no interest in overly polite people? Why do men treat girls like a homogeneous blob and not like people? For crying out loud, we’re all just people with different tastes, different formative years, and different personalities. I don’t like jerks because they’re jerks.
I like people. I might not romantically like every person, but that doesn’t mean I’m an ice queen who only dates douchebags. Your original point about creepiness isn’t wrong, but you do make some gross generalizations. Being nice isn’t creepy.
It just depends on where you do it and how you present yourself. Something is only as awkward as you make it, as long as you’re nice and confident about it. Also, people in cities are generally more resistant to interaction with strangers due to all the crazies. People in suburbs and rural areas respond to niceness much better than urban dwellers.
I think it became creepy when people started using niceness as an advantage. The first obvious example is predators. A stranger being overly nice to you means they want you to put your guard down. But I think a better example of when this really started affecting everyone was the creation of the door-to-door salesman.
People used to be nice for no reason. Then a stranger knocks on your door and is nice to you because he wants to sell you something. Maybe niceness became synonymous with someone wanting something from you. Either way, the best way to get rid of these people was to be a jerk to them.
People got in the habit of being jerks for that reason. Kids see it, learn it, replicate the behavior, and here we are. I think it also happened around the time popular television started making comments to the effect of, to get her, just be nice. It popularized the idea that to get a girl, being nice was the required key.
I’m thinking of basically every sitcom from the mid-nineties on. Going back a little further, we can see the start of it with movies like Revenge of the Nerds. The hopeless nerdy idiot gets to have sex with the cheerleader by being nice, and without her knowing, which was basically rape. When the ex-boyfriend jock finds out, she basically says he treats me right, which starts to cement the idea that if you want to get away with predatory behavior, just don’t beat her or call her names.
Over time, the real jerks of the world saw this in pop culture and thought it might work. Probably did work at first. In the end, though, it poisoned the well. People became fearful of anyone being nice, figuring they had some ulterior motive.
That slide into paranoia happened around the same time the popular message in the media became, watch out, something bad is probably going to happen soon. So it was an easy slide into distrust. Combine all that with the fact that our culture has always valued the pursuit of profit, whether it’s business, grades in school, or the number of friends on Facebook. The Puritan work ethic makes it natural to assume that any interaction with a stranger is because they want something or are after some goal you just can’t see.
This is personified in the sleazy car salesman. He’s super nice, ultra friendly, just wants to help you out on the outside. But we all know it’s about the sale. I think it’s natural for people to be apprehensive towards the nice guy.
Every message they’ve received their entire life has been about how people want what’s best for them, not what’s best for you. Nice guys are acting. They’re secretly jerks in disguise. And watch out.
Stranger danger. How could they not think it was creepy, really? I’m late to this conversation, and most people browsing won’t read this, but let me make an observation or two. This thread is full of pent up frustration from both genders.
As a man, may I suggest another facet of the guys only being nice to girls to have sex with them line of thought? I’m a nice guy, honest, sincerely I am. I’m an excellent conversationalist, and I possess a depth and breadth of knowledge about most subjects that I can chat it up with just about anyone. I’m confident, smart, and successful for my age.
Definitely not a socially awkward penguin. All that being said, I quite often find that some of the women I interact with misconstrue my being kind and responsive to them as romantic interest. My internal line of thinking is usually something like, just because I’m nice to you doesn’t mean I like you. So stop warming up to me so much.
The blade cuts both ways, I guess. The whole social dynamic of interacting with the opposite gender sucks to a certain extent, because society really does ignore women it doesn’t find attractive. This means some women I’m not attracted to tend to read ideas into otherwise innocent interactions that aren’t there at all. I hate having to be short, curt, and indifferent to people I want to be nice, open, honest, and genuine with, just to avoid misunderstanding and hurt feelings later on.
Our first world man problems. Being nice has become somewhat of a slur. It became creepy around the same time it became being a suck-up. People equate being rude with being real, and having some sort of polite decorum with brown nosing.
I’ll be blunt about this. I’m a nice, awkward guy with a highly cynical and dry sense of humor. Most girls thought I was arrogant, socially oblivious, and creepy overall. I hit the gym for a few months.
Now girls don’t see it as creepy anymore. They see me as brilliant, unique, and hilarious. Quite frankly, people, men and women alike, are superficial when it comes to what they find attractive. I’m so sick of the creeped out looks that women give my husband, a new father, in stores when he asks how old their baby is or says how cute they are.
If people are nice to me, it often confuses me. I was often the kid who was hated for no apparent reason in school, so I just assume these days that everyone will hate me or eventually will. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve realized there are people who are actually genuinely nice, but it took me a long time to let them in through my walls and accept their kindness. It didn’t happen overnight, but it seems like the media and the internet had a lot to do with it.
When the media moved more towards hyperbole and dramatization, people started getting more paranoid and distrustful. When people discovered they could be completely anonymous on the internet, combined with social media, they recognized they could say anything with no consequences. People are quicker to write the things they’re thinking on the internet than they would say in person. That attitude is leaking from the internet into real life now.
Of course, no one thinks they’re guilty of that themselves. It happened when people stopped trusting each other and lost faith in the goodness humanity can bring. I guess people are just more cynical now. When you see a stranger approaching you being all nice and friendly, you think, what does he or she want?
Somehow it became hard to take people at face value. There has to be an ulterior motive. And that’s why nice has become creepy. For women, we are basically bred into being suspicious of men.
Honestly, it’s not even that irrational. Men want sex. Lots of men get it. Some take it with force.
A compliment is usually the first initiation that says, hi, I think you’re attractive enough to approach, and I’d like to initiate that potential. For others, it’s because people usually want something. Over time, that’s how you distinguish friends from acquaintances.
And once you learn that lesson, it’s hard to unlearn it.