We Have to Try to Be Nice to Each Other

Revisiting the idea of whether men and women even like each other anymore, and what it's going to take to make romance work again amid the gender war.

a couple that actually likes each other!

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

A year ago, I asked a question that felt both obvious and unspoken at the time: do men and women even like each other anymore? It wasn’t the answer itself that was surprising — no, of course they don’t — but rather that this answer had already become an unquestioned part of culture. This animosity between men and women had reached a level to where the fundamental reality that we’re supposed to like each other was no longer a given.

But it still feels like we’re all due for a reminder, here: in order to make any of this work, we have to try to like each other.

There a lot of realms of life where this dynamic is not required. You don’t have to like your coworkers. Politicians do not have to like the representatives of foreign countries with whom they hope to make international agreements. The woman who slices pepper jack cheese at the Stop and Shop doesn’t have to like her customers in order to get the task done. In all these scenarios, though, everyone involved does at least have to be cordial (well, usually). And even then, it would be a whole lot easier if some liking were involved.

This is something we seem to have done away with, romantically. Men and women are not even cordial! The distaste has run so deep that many of us are hardly capable of simply being nice. So maybe, let’s try to start there.

I hate so always circle back to these elementary school platitudes, but it is this type of basic decorum that is missing from the gender war conversation. Treat others how you wish to be treated. Consider how another person might be feeling. Do we all need a reminder of the “T.H.I.N.K” acronym? That before we speak we should consider whether what we have to say is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary or kind?

Of course, one problem with this is that the gender war itself has distorted what we might consider true and necessary, and moreover that these falsehoods take precedent over the requirement to be kind. Every interaction is an opportunity for righteous indignation; rather than pursue dating for our own sake, the opposite sex is a target for broader political hostility. And thus rather than treating other people as, well, other people, we treat them instead as an ideological enemy.

Both sides here bristle at the idea of being nice, but the motivations differ. For men, there is a specific belief that being nice to women “gets them nowhere.” I recall in the panel I participated in at the University of Chicago over the winter, fellow panelist Clay Travis tried to argue that none of the young women in the audience would be willing to date a guy making six figures as a plumber. I replied that many of these women likely would, at least at some point in their lives, if this hypothetical plumber were nice to them. This idea that women today think they’re “too good” to date someone in the trades is a ego-protecting fantasy. While there are undoubtedly some women with this mentality, the vast majority would be happy to partner up with someone without a college education who makes a solid income. Men in trades like this who are getting rejected aren’t doing so because of their jobs. There is something else going on — perhaps a deficit in kindness. This hypothetical plumber navigates the dating world with the belief that women don’t like him because women are superficial bitches, and he treats them as such. He gets rejected by them accordingly. Then he continues on in this mental cycle that he is being rejected because of his job, rather than the truth that he simply does not treat women well. And on it goes.

The specific detail of career here could be replaced with most any other trait. The plumber element is somewhat irrelevant — there is nothing inherent to being a plumber that makes this a particular problem for them. All my respect to the plumbers out there. But there is a significant set of men, plumbers or otherwise, who have internalized the narrative of “nice guys finish last” to the point of cruelty.

I’ve been spending far less time on Twitter/X lately, by some grace of God. I popped on over there today to see a photo of a young couple going viral. The girl is a conventional tan and blonde beauty, while the guy was heavier set. She has her arm around him, he has his hand on her inner thigh. “What the fuck am I doing wrong?” the original poster asked, as though he’s so much more worthy of an attractive woman than the man in the photo. There could be any number of reasons why this couple is together, ranging from “he has a lot of money” to “love at first sight.” I have absolutely no fucking clue who these people are or the nature of their relationship. But to answer the original poster’s question, in all likelihood, the answer is: you’re not being nice to women. And I don’t mean being a pushover, or spoiling her with nice dates and presents, or letting her walk all over you. I mean treating her with basic respect. You know, like a human being. When I commented as much, I was practically met with ridicule. Several men commented with cry-laughing emojis.

No, women do not like what other men might perceive to be as a “nice guy” who doesn’t stand up for himself. Women do not like guys who think of themselves as “nice guys” but are actually exclusively wielding their so-called kindness for sex and then become hostile to women when they don’t receive it. But women do like men who are genuinely, authentically, without ulterior motive, nice to women in general. Men who balk at the idea that women might like men who are kind to them are not actually nice to women. This is why they don’t believe it to be true — because they have never been nice enough for it to work. Because they do not actually like women.

This is again what separates the problem of gender relations today from that of the past. Pick up artists, as I mentioned in my original essay on these themes, did and sometimes still do like women. They are also a set of people who did not often advocate for being nice to women. Many argued something of the opposite, encouraging men to “neg” or lightly insult women as a flirting tactic. Looking at this, one might again be tempted to believe that women do not like men who are nice to them. But when you are a man who actually likes women and wants to enjoy their company, these jabs come off as flirtation rather than strictly an insult.

To many online men today, being nice to women is preposterous. It’s laughable. They don’t want to believe it to be true because it would require a fundamental shift in not only how they view women but how they view themselves. Never would I say that being nice is the only thing required to make a man attractive to a woman. Ambition, good looks, money, charisma — these all help, too. It would be preposterous to think that niceness alone is all that it takes in the ineffable swirl of emotion that makes up attraction. But niceness is, in the romantic arena and most others in our lives, the foundation. And it is that specifically that we’ve forgotten.

Now where does women’s kindness come into this? My grasp on this is less firm. On an immediate level, there are many men for whom a woman’s niceness is entirely secondary: even if she is unkind to him, his attraction to her will not wane. For others, however, the attraction is directly linked to niceness, even confused by it: people often mistake flirtation for what is ultimately just a polite or thoughtful interaction. Many women moreover feel as though they’ve been trained to be nice to their own detriment, favoring the feelings of men and everyone else over their own wellbeing. But as with men, I think women are experiencing a macro dislike of the opposite sex that has become normalized to the point of being unquestioned. The viral essay “The Trouble With Wanting Men,” published in the New York Times over the summer about the widespread heterofatalism women are experiencing, reveals this right in its name. The trouble with liking men is that it is framed as trouble, at all. While the unkindness here might be framed more philosophically, it is nevertheless not nice to position men as wholly unpleasant to have an attraction toward.

This frustration and sense of “trouble” is often justified (and believe it or not, so is men’s frustration toward women sometimes, too). Online, though, this shared apathy routinely bubbles into a more full-throated aggression. But the big problem with it is that it doesn’t get us anywhere. Most of us aren’t actually meant to divest from men entirely. Most of us should still want and desire them, and vice-versa. Both sides have instead absorbed this idea that their antagonism is a political act, a challenge to the tyranny across the battle lines.

There was a time that this whole heterosexuality thing was working. There were decades in which women had financial, legal, bodily, sexual autonomy from men and still people managed to date and have sex and get married. What’s stopping us from doing that again? I don’t know that it will be so simple as trying to be nice to each other again. At least it’s somewhere to start.