I said my piece in a thread about this from a long time back and my position hasn't changed, so...
You more or less said what I had to say.
To answer Soul's question as best I can (in a comprehesive way):
Nice Guys™ are manipulative narcissists who blame others when their 'insert kindess for sex' strategies fail. Compare them with pickup artists. They are playing their targets with a relationship in mind. Contrast them with pickup artists. They both very bad at what they are doing and immediately go for the long con. They invented the friendzone to make themselves feel better about their actions and eventual failures.
I think there is truth to the claim that actually nice guys end up alone, even if it only gets talked about by misogynists. Females are chemically predisposed to and taught to expect their partner to make the first move. Females who make the first move are few and far between and the ones who do often get shamed for this behavior. Doing so is a risk. When someone does not make a move, they accept that this person has no interest and move to the next natural conclusion for the relationship: they designate them as a friend. Truly nice guys are the same way. Their sumissive personalities cause them to expect their partners to move first, so when that does not happen, they automatically designate them to another part of their life and move on. Submissive males have trouble finding mates because they predominately like women and not many women are domineering enough to make up for the role reversal.
The Nice Guy strategy fails because of differences in expectations. We expect different things from different people. Once an impression is formed, it can be hard to break out of. This is one of the reasons first impressions are important. Bosses offer different things from coworkers. Coworkers offer different things from friends. Friends offer different things from love interests. Love interests offer different things from family. We have different expectations and thresholds for each kind of relationship and as such we naturally compartmentalise them into different parts of our lives.
Once someone has designated you a friend, that designation solidifies your role in their mind. From then on they will view you in the model of their life as that kind of asset and create a kind of budget for you in their life. Friends are a medium case with about equal benefits and risks. They are useful assets because they have a sense of security and stability that romances do not and come at a much lower cost. Some examples: Arguments are easier to smooth over when less is on the line. Requests can be turned down without much fuss. Distance and time apart does not create worry. Jealousy is less likely to happen. The benefits are many and the costs are a few, making friends easy to change to, but hard to change from. Coworkers can easily become friends, but a friend is not likely to become a coworker again.
It is no easier to go from friends to love interests. The stronger the friendship, the harder it will be to change it to anything other than what it is. You could call this a friend zone, because it is one, but it does not have the negative connotation that Nice Guys people put on it when they use their term. It is a natural phenomenon that happens for a good reason: self-preservation.
Nice Guys have no understanding of these compartmentalisations and completely misread the expectations others have. In romance, they think that because they expect to be a friend and then change it into a relationship, their target must expect that, too. When their targets inevitably do not, their concept of them as a friend grows stronger the longer the Nice Guy waits to reveal their intent. By the time the Nice Guy expresses their feelings, they have made their bed as a friend and strengthened it every time they did something friendly. They have ruined their own chances.
Think of getting kicked out of your house and having someone ask you to have a sleepover, but not invite you to sleep in the same bed when they make the invitation. You make plans and talk about it, they volunteer to buy the necessary materials, and you thank them profusely and make a note to pay them back (as a friend). Then you get there and they only have one bed planned. You ask where yours is and they say they figured you would sleep together. You say no, maybe even thinking they are joking. They get upset and call you out for not being interested despite their good nature. They may even have the gall to say that they are entitled for asking you over and taking care of everything.
A genuinely nice guy would let you sleep over and not expect anything or even hope for it. Both they and you would have already ruled each other out as romantic interests when you did not make advances from the start.
My two pence.
Be careful when claiming "everyone my age or older agrees with me" and "those aren't the words I used".
Did you mean: PS3
