Why do some nice intelligent women end up with crappy men?

[Thecowandcat]

I've been reading a few threads on here today that got me thinking, why do some women end up with such awful men?

I'm not talking about the horribly physically and emotionally abusive ones, where women get trapped and are intimidated and afraid so they end up staying.

I'm talking about the more everyday kind of awful man.

For example, a friend of mine is an amazing women. She has a great career, a great personality, is good looking, is funny, is wise and kind. She is one of the best people I know.

And yet . . .

She is married to this utter doilum. He makes creepy flirtatious comments to other women and clearly thinks the sun shines out of his arse. I avoid him when possible.

In fairness she seems fairly happy and it's possible that she doesn't know about the comments. He's pretty clever and the comments are sometimes open to interpretation, a lot of the creepiness is in the tone and they are never made in front of her, so maybe she is clueless about that side of him.

I just cannot understand how such an amazing women ended up with a man who is so far beneath her.

Anyone else observed this?

Well yes, it takes a special sort of twat to hide it all so well. But what can you do? Pick the obviously wrong'uns?

Great posts, Dee.

"Too nice" can mean drippy, boring, unambitious, treats me like a delicate flower, rubbish at sex (often!) or weird fetish, mummy's boy, risk-averse, insincere, manipulative ... Niceness is perfectly compatible with an independent & vibrant personality. Suspect there's something about your cousins that isn't quite so nice, whats, though it's probably immaterial to family relationships.

I think it's the idea that "good men are rare/hard to find/boring/married already/gay." I used to think this and it meant i put up with a bunch of shit because the blokes had one or two things going for them. but really it doesn't follow that there aren't enough nice men to go around unless you think that women on average tend to be nicer than men. As has been pointed out many times in this thread, good men can get stuck with bad women too.

I think it's about changing the way you think. If you think they are rare/hard to find or even nonexistent because your experience backs this up, then you're probably looking in the wrong places and may be moving in emotionally unhealthy circles. Check your self esteem and raise your standards.

If you think that nice men are boring you might have an unhealthy relationship script playing out, or youhventhaven't given one a chance .Cerrainly, it's not true that nice is boring and boring is nice. Boring blokes can be just as twatty and nice blokes can definitely be interesting or exciting. What IS boring is sticking too strictly to a "type".

If you think most nice men are gay, woah, I just don't know where to start except to say perhaps it's worth examining your prejudice and ideas about masculinity a bit?

Lastly if you think they are all married or taken, you are totally misunderstanding relationships. Relationships aren't really something you can be good or bad at, successful or failure. It's more about how well two people work together. If someone else is happily married it doesn't nenecessaripy mean that either of them would be a brilliant spouse to anybody else. They might drive another person utterly insane.

I don't think it's that hard to spot a wrong 'un. Some people are very poor at it though. And I'm not trying to imply they are thick or victim blaming, they just aren't very good at reading people.

Ummm OK Galrick. For the sake of argument let's assume that they aren't weirdos. My point was that there are perfectly decent men out there who for whatever reason don't attract women. Could part of the reason be that some women (as seen on this thread) are conditioned to believe and expect arseholery?

(I also know plenty of nice women who want but aren't in relationships. Should I assume they're rubbish at sex too?)

Galrick

"something that isn't quite so nice" is it, exactly. All looks perfect and normal to outsiders but its just a very carefully constructed facade. The reality is entirely different

OH is lovely. A (real) nice guy. But put him up against my ex I just know people would think "whats she doing with this one? Her ex was a far better prospect, better looking better job nicer person...". In fact, people have intimated that. He leaves ex standing though.

(Not suggesting your cousins are like that at all whats just saying there's often a reason why women swerve guys who are deemed "nice".

Out of interest Dee, when did you begin to cotton on, and were there signs (with the benefit of hindsight) of what was to come?

Could part of the reason be that some women are conditioned to believe and expect arseholery?

Oh, totally I've said that I was such a woman! Thing is, though, I knew quite a few absolutely lovely, really nice men, and it never even crossed my mind to take it beyond friendship because of my conditioning. They're all very happily married now. Sane, emotionally balanced, women do not avoid good men - far from it!

But what can you do? Pick the obviously wrong'uns?

Nah, tried that

And don't forget the "nice guy" makes it harder for women to spot an actual nice man! I find it difficult to tell how when a man is nice or "nice" because I've been tricked by the second one many times now.

To tell now*

Reading this thread with interest and am still none the wiser about my SIL. No answers seem to fit!

Super intelligent, well traveled, financially independent (medical career), socially confident, unashamedly outspoken, outgoing, physically attractive, physically fit SIL has twice now picked a 'wrong-un'. She's divorced from no.1 but is 'sticking it out' with no.2 for ever i recon sadly the foreseeable future.

Both these men are/were the total opposite of her. Both quiet, very socially awkward, and unsuccessful career wise. Crap with child care (she has a DC with each), crap at being a husband (emotionally unavailable plus addiction problems and verbally abusive behind close doors) and just ... crap basically.

When on the lookout for no.2 - yes, she actually chose him via a dating agency, she told her DM (my MIL) that she'd not repeat the same mistake of marrying and having a child with a 'loser' again. She'd learned her lesson she said. And yet she's done it again. 40 next year and so unhappy. WHYYYY!?? :(

We often don't know what's really going on with people. A couple of men in my extended circle are good-looking, witty, charming, well-connected, rich, kind, thoughtful and heterosexual men who are single for life apart from the very short marriage one attempted. The thing hardly anyone knows is that they were comprehensively sexually abused as children. Thanks to their parents' awful choices, they go all weird in intimate relationships. So, because they're intelligently kind, they don't have them.

Other formative experiences can have equally long-term results. You just never know, either because they themselves are in denial or simply because it's not really dinner-table talk.

I don't know, Eponas, perhaps the second husband conned her?

Or perhaps she has 'impostor syndrome' and doesn't value herself as much as she's worth.

Do tell her two divorces are practically de rigueur these days

I think that Reality put it very well in that Listen Up post in Relationships. "Just because you've escaped a level 10 bastard, don't put up with the level 8 one and feel like you're lucky. The only acceptable level of abuse is NONE."

When you are used to level 10 a level 8 bloke looks like an absolute prince in comparison. And also often we tend to fixate - I had three or four or five crappy relationships in quick succession and kept believing the next one was "different". The most obvious change was that I kept seeing unavailable men, and wondering why I was so much more into them and why men never seemed to want to commit. When I met somebody who was (in hindsight) controlling and smothering, I saw the commitment and the adoration that I'd been missing in other relationships and clung onto that because I thought it was rare. I didn't push him to slow down or give me some space because I didn't want to frighten him off.

It can be really easy to think that you're really savvy about crap relationships now and avoid the hallmarks of one you've been in just to fall straight into the clutches of somebody who's still crap but in a totally different way, or still crap but just not quite as crap as the last one. And if your experience is that men are usually shit then you tend to hold on really tightly if you see any good in the one you have because you fear he is your only chance.

It's not the fact there are no good blokes, it's the fact people believe there are no good blokes.

Some women are "fixers" aren't they? Some men are too broken to be fixed.

Galrick she and i celebrated our first divorces becoming final in the same week

I don't think she feels any stigma about divorce itself. Many of her friends have a couple under their belt. She has good friends.

Will look up 'imposter syndrome'.

I just remember the first time we (family) met no.2 - he just sat rather sullenly in the corner insisting on watching the sport on the telly and i thought - hmm, but I hoped it was just first time family gathering shyness.

It's just so odd. She's so bubbly ...

Some women are "fixers" aren't they? Some men are too broken to be fixed.

I don't think the fixer mentality is that gendered. The 2 fixers I know are men- which means they work, do a lot with the dcs and household and put up with a bonkers wife act us a buffer between the world and their wife.
Broken men are more dangerous than broken women, that's the only difference.

whatsthatcomingoverthehill about 2 years into marriage. Started in really odd little ways - watching tv programmes & he'd make really derogatory comments about women's looks, or actions. & he would go on & on aiming to prove he was right, when I protested. In fact he was never wrong about anything. From there to finding a way to "tell me off" in public, always in front of women ie checkout operators...the feeling of humiliation was horrible coupled with either sympathy or fury on the other women's faces.

Thinking back, he hated his stepmum with a vengeance but I think he was a womanhater in general and he couldn't hide his true face forever. He progressed to criticising my friends, female family members, my clothing "men look at you when we're out, its your fault". & inspecting my housework.

He went through 3 jobs..reasons he couldn't get on at work was due to female colleagues "bitches who made his life difficult"

I can honestly say, whilst we were dating he displayed NO sign of this attitude, at all. Id never ever have guessed. & I used to be one of those women who wondered how men like this can even get a woman. There is absolutely no way Id have believed, a man could have such a horrible facet to his character and hide/repress it so completely for a pretty long time. I actually think there must have been signs of who/how he was but he didn't show them to me, just other women - hence, his issues at work which I never ever got to the bottom of.

When I dumped him I STILL had some of my friends saying awww but he seemed so nice. What they really meant was he is goodlooking, charming etc, solvent etc.

He was a pest.

Bloody good actor tho...!

Oh I quite agree Seriously, I suspect my DH is something of a fixer, he could have certainly done a lot better. More women tend to have that nurturing trait though, I think. And we are very evolved to love unconditionally, (otherwise most newborn babies would be abandoned and most teenagers would be homeless).

Thanks Dee. It is scary how you can do all the 'right' things yet still end up with someone like that. It certainly does sound like he hates women.

( I've always thought they should have kept the Swedish name for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was Men who Hate Women. Lisbeth is the catalyst that exposes the men, but really the social commentary that drives Larsson's writing is about male attitudes to women.)

In my case it's because of an abusive father and unhappy parents as a result.

'A woman's first relationship is with her father' - this is definitely true for me and given that my mother is pretty downtrodden and passive in nature (she didn't want to marry him in the first place but went along with it for a 'quiet' life which she even got), it has influenced my relationships for the worse.

My self-esteem isn't good - I'm clever, funny (when you get to know me) but very ugly and have been pathetically grateful in the past for any male attention. I'm not bothered about being left on the shelf but do crave male attention and dream of looking lovely.

Eponas my sister is the same - not necessarily academically brilliant, but very hard-working and good job. She's very bubbly and her DP is so quiet! When we first met him it was fair enough, but now a year on when I go and stay with them he hardly talks to me and will just and go and put the TV on when he wants. And my sister will barely leave his side...

(I'm new to mumsnet - how do you tag someone, is it just enough to write their name? Thanks!)

money!