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A Subspecies of Nice Guy™

zuzu

Lauren’s got a post about a variety of Nice Guy™: Save the Day Guy™.

I dated one of these once, a knight-in-shining-armor rescuer type. He sought out women who were vulnerable, who were going through rough times, so he could feel like he was rescuing them. And he wanted to keep them there.

I had a moment of clarity with him when I realized that he was invested in seeing me as some basket case, even though the circumstances that had made me a little more basket-casey than usual had ended. It was during a fight we were having that requires some background to understand.

He was pretty low income, being a Head Start teacher, and had lost a tooth at some point before I knew him. I’d noted it, but it was a fairly-far-back tooth that I never noticed unless he threw back his head and laughed.

I never mentioned it during the year or so we dated. I knew better.

During a rather unremarkable conversation we were having about dental insurance — his job had just given him comprehensive dental for the first time, which included near-full coverage for prosthetics — he brought it up. Said he had coverage, so he was considering getting a denture or implant. I responded with something mild, along the lines of “If that’s what you want to do, why not?”

And he responded with something as non-committal, and I didn’t think anything of it for months.

Until that moment of clarity. We were arguing on the phone about something — nothing important — and he brought that conversation up. Only in this new version, I had been drunk and had taunted him about his missing tooth.

Except that I had been stone-cold sober — at work, in fact — and said not a damn thing about his tooth that he hadn’t said himself.

It was a very Rashomon moment. I suddenly realized that he was invested in seeing me as some kind of unbalanced type who needed to be taken care of in a way that was most suffocating. That he needed to see me as broken so he could fix me.

I ran like hell.

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78 thoughts on A Subspecies of Nice Guy™

  1. I know someone like that, and in his case, his desire to see me as the helpless little damsel in distress is matched by his desire to see himself as the strong, manly man—which he’s not. He’s one of the weakest people I know. Coincidentally, I’m sure, he also is enraged at people who act just like he does but without his money.

  2. 1. Oh, gods, yeah. I know *exactly* what you mean. I’ve definitely known people who thrive on “helping” or “fixing” people. I’ve found that I can kind of tell who they are sometimes, because they’ve always got a story about someone that they’re “helping.” They always seem to thrive on the [i]dramatic.[/i]

    2. God. I love Rashomon.
    [i]Love it[/i].

  3. See… I’ve been unable to put my finger on why I really, really dislike the friend of a friend. But this is it. I have an idea for a strategy we can all implement if we need to escape from a Save The Day Guy. Set his pants on fire. He’ll be too busy trying to save his own ass to notice as his project RUNS AWAY.

  4. Ouch! I have definitely been Save The Day Guy before. Hopefully I’m growing out of it but it’s a tough habit to break.

    I just wish people called me on it more often offline. Ah well, that’s what the Internet is for, right?

  5. Save the Day Guy is great when he notices a clicking sound in your engine and takes your car to the shop for you. Save the Day Guy is not so great when he will not let you drive to your parents’ house without him expressly approving the car as “safe.”

  6. Hey I know that guy – he just dumped me after 7 years because now that I’m not too afraid to stand up for myself anymore, he decided I’m a total bitch.

  7. *hand to forehead* My older brother is one of those people. He thinks he needs to “help” people to “repent” for things he did in the past… it’s really messed up.

  8. i’m dating a guy now who I don’t think exhibits very many signs of The Nice Guy, but sometimes he mentions that I’m “not going to find anybody who treats me better” than he does. And he doesn’t say this in a … verbally-abusive-you-should-stay-with-me-because-you-won’t-find-anybody-better way. rather, I think its out of a sort of desperate attempt to push his merits, because we are dating other people right now. nonetheless, it makes me very uncomfortable. i responded as much yesterday; I said “that makes me very uncomfortable when you say that, and, um, actually, yes, I could.”

    anyway, it’s frustrating. is there a middling Nice Guy territory where an otherwise non-sucking-guy who exhibits a few Nice Guy tendencies can be reformed? can a semi-Nice-Guy be made to show the error of his patronizing ways???

  9. Oh God yes. I have a friend–who I dated, briefly, a couple years ago–who’s like that. He’s a good friend but I am so glad to not be involved with him anymore.

  10. Ohhhh, so that‘s what it’s called. That helps. My ex seemed to like me well enough before I spent six months sick in bed, but once he got used to me relying on him – for groceries, for hot packs, for keeping me sane in a house full of insane people – he just wasn’t able to let go of it. I was only up and about for a week or so before he flipped out over nothing and dumped me on a transcontinental phone call a few days before xmas, saying that all the taking care of me outweighed all the assholery (i.e., I wasn’t always a total asshole, so you don’t get to criticise), and unceremoniously informing me that I was “crazy,” both in general and to think that anyone would ever treat me better.

    Part of it was probably that my being sick let him get away with murder, like when he chose to go out drinking with a work buddy while I was in surgery and so “didn’t have time” to even talk to me when I called from the hospital, much less come and help me get home. I would have been waaaaaay past done under any other circumstances, but I still needed someone able-bodied to install my showerhead and whatnot, so the ass got a second chance. Plus, when your partner is always on painkillers, it’s easier to write off anything they say that you don’t like; when you’re constantly on painkillers, it’s easier to believe them.

    I’m still getting over hating myself for becoming so dependent – mitigating circumstances be damned! – and it really really really makes me wonder how the hell our foremothers got through whole lifetimes in social and financial dependence. I thank Whomever for having been born in this day and age, when things aren’t perfect but at least we generally have the ability to get out of shitty situations.

    I know I’ve been thanking y’all a lot lately for all the awesome posting, but this is especially good to read today…it’s like you’re reading my mind. Wait, are you? {blush}

  11. Elyzabeth, other people cannot be reformed or made to see the error of their ways. They are fish who have no idea what “water” or the “ocean” is. The only person you can change at all is yourself. You can try not to exploit other people or be a “bad” influence on them – as in not taking alcoholics to bars all the time. That’s all. My first husband gave me a big raft of that stuff while we were dating. I finally had enough of it, went to France without him, and essentially indicated that he could jump in a lake while I moved on. When I came back from France, he was waiting with a ring and immediately put his ‘I’m the best you will ever find’ rhetoric on the shelf – UNTIL AFTER WE WERE MARRIED. And then it just escalated. I don’t know whether it’s worse when these guys actually BELIEVE it or are just whistling in the dark with their own insecurity, but either way you are in for it, because this person can only feel good by making you feel bad (you are not good enough to be treated superrbly by others), and you will not believe the bat shit picking apart of your impefect self someone can do when they like, live with you all the time. You will end up locking yourself in the potty from time to time to get away from them. Anyway, this guy showed his true spots. Don’t be fooled if he learns his lesson and changes tactics. He either thinks he is better than you or thinks he can only keep you around by trying to make you think that – either way a lose lose for you. Dump him for good like a big load of rancid garbage. Divorce lawyers are expensive.

  12. anyway, it’s frustrating. is there a middling Nice Guy territory where an otherwise non-sucking-guy who exhibits a few Nice Guy tendencies can be reformed? can a semi-Nice-Guy be made to show the error of his patronizing ways???

    I think, yes… maybe?
    Here’s the thing, just like there’s a difference between nice guys and Nice Guys, I think that there’s a difference between guys who save the day and Save the Day Guys. Just because someone tries to help people doesn’t mean that he’s a Save the Day Guy.
    All of my friends know that, if they ever need just about anything, I’m more than willing to do what I can to help out. I think that the difference is that I’m not looking to use that relationship as power, and I’m sure as hell not looking to get into relationships with people specifically because they have issues that Only I Can Fix.
    Now, if you’ve got a guy who’s reasonably cool, but does the occasional Nice Guy or Save the Day Guy things, I’d say… probably. I mean, nobody is perfect, and if he’s really a nice guy, and not a Nice Guy, there’s no reason why someone can’t call him on the patronizing things and say “Hey, listen, that… right there? That wasn’t really cool.”
    I know I’ve done shitty things before. Getting called on it kind of sucked, but, afterwards, I had to admit, “Okay, they were right. That was shitty.”
    If he’s a nice guy doing something dumb, he’ll probably learn from it.
    If he’s a Nice Guy? Probably not so much.

  13. I know a guy who likes to befriend (and often eventually fuck) young, confused, often mildly mentally ill women. (Of the early-20s-onset Schizophrenia, bipolar, or borderline personality variety. Nothing incapacitating, but enough to fuck up a life for a few years, more if not treated.)

    He’s very smart and eloquent, and very good at helping people. Especially if they’re young and attractive, and he becomes the center of their universe.

    I keep the hell away from him.

  14. He’s very smart and eloquent, and very good at helping people. Especially if they’re young and attractive, and he becomes the center of their universe.

    You say “helping people” and all I see is “manipulating people.” A friend of mine fell victim to a guy like this recently, and it’s really, really screwed her up.
    That’s predatory behavior of a particularly insidious and disturbing type, imo.

  15. One of the signs to watch for is whether the guy starts trashing your friends or parents, or making it very difficult/inconvenient for you to continue your relationship with them and him at the same time. They don’t have to be HIS best friends or cup of tea, but in the end, my X would not ever set foot in my parents’ house, spend a holiday with them, or anything. We lived 1000 miles away, so it’s not like this was all the time. Finally I realized he did not want them around because they were the only ones left who would openly question the way he treated me, and that’s the same reason guys like that need to get rid of your friends. Funny how since I got rid of him I have many many more friends and see my parents more, plus have much more fun when I do see them.

  16. A coupla questions:

    I never mentioned it during the year or so we dated. I knew better.

    Why did you know better? Could you already sense that there was something wrong with him? Or is a missing tooth something that men are unusually touchy about (I’m missing a molar like this guy was, and it doesn’t bother me at all)?

    That he needed to see me as broken so he could fix me.

    He sounds like a jerk, but how did his freaking out about his tooth indicate that he needed to see you as someone flawed for him to fix?

  17. One of the signs to watch for is whether the guy starts trashing your friends or parents, or making it very difficult/inconvenient for you to continue your relationship with them and him at the same time. They don’t have to be HIS best friends or cup of tea, but in the end, my X would not ever set foot in my parents’ house, spend a holiday with them, or anything. We lived 1000 miles away, so it’s not like this was all the time. Finally I realized he did not want them around because they were the only ones left who would openly question the way he treated me, and that’s the same reason guys like that need to get rid of your friends. Funny how since I got rid of him I have many many more friends and see my parents more, plus have much more fun when I do see them.

    Ugh. I lost my girlfriend to one of these people. He immediately set off my hackles. He seems to do the charming, “you become the center of my universe” to vulnerable people. (And I do blame myself for not being there enough for her that she was vulnerable.) He is *never* dramatic, he avoids it. The way he does is by telling his lovers not to talk to other people outside his relationship about the relationship, because they cause drama. Nothing is his fault, he never said that – other people have misquoted or are misrepresenting him or you misunderstood – and he always has the right answer.

    It hurts to be dumped, yes. But to be dumped for something that to me is so transparent hurts more. I think he’s going to leave her even more of a victim than when she went in (she was recovering, I thought, re-embracing her strength). It breaks my heart, but I’m just a jealous ex-boyfriend who can’t see how great he is and how important he is to her life.

  20. He sounds like a jerk, but how did his freaking out about his tooth indicate that he needed to see you as someone flawed for him to fix?

    Why do you never read the posts, RM?

    He changed the narrative on me. What was a fairly mundane little conversation about insurance got twisted in his mind into an unprovoked, alcohol-fueled attack on him. Why did he need to cast the event in that light? Because he couldn’t see me as I actually was.

  21. Because it’s fucking rude to ask people about their missing teeth?

    Ah. I thought that “knew better” meant that you knew he wouldn’t take it well, so you better not bring it up.

    I still don’t see the connection between the tooth outburst and your view that he needed you to be a basket case to take care of. Perhaps you mentioned this in earlier posts.

  22. Oops. Cross posted.

    Why did he need to cast the event in that light?

    He obviously had issues.

    Because he couldn’t see me as I actually was.

    I’ll assume that there are other facts that led you to this conclusion that weren’t mentioned in the post.

    But thanx for trying.

  23. My ex was a variant of Save The Day Guy that I’ll call “‘I Could’ve Saved The Day’ Guy.”

    Like your average STDG, he desperately needed to believe that I was “broken” and in need of fixing (by him, of course) and that it was only his great and unselfish love for me that made him willing to shoulder that burden. And that because of my brokenness, immaturity, and general ineptitude I should never make any decision or attempt any task of consequence without first consulting him for advice and/or assistance.

    But this only ever seemed to get pointed out to me after the fact. If you’d checked with me first, I could’ve saved you a lot of time/trouble/money, I know people in the business, why didn’t you ask me about it before you decided, You should’ve waited until I got here, I’ve got the tools for that in my van, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

    However, on the few occasions when I’d either get fed up with his constant harping on how I should’ve consulted him before doing whatever, or actually started believing that I ought to be asking for his opinion and/or help with whatever (I mean, we’re a couple, we’re supposed to be on the same team, right?), and went to him for advice/assistance before whatever what it was, what response do you think I got?

    I don’t know why you’re asking me about that, how would I know anything about it?

    Or some variation on same.

    Nothing like a guy who wants you to believe you’re too broken, too inept, and too immature to take care of yourself and your own business so he can feel all “Me Big He Man Take Care Of Little Woman” at your expense, but who doesn’t actually want any of the responsibility involved in making the decisions and doing the work that he claims he could have done better than you if you’d had the sense to ask him for help ahead of time. Because if he actually did take that responsibility ahead of time, and HE screwed it up, then there go all his warm fuzzies and claims of superior know-how and ability and functionality.

    Near the end of our time together this guy said that he needed and expected to be treated like “The Man” in our relationship. And I remember thinking, well then by god you’d better start acting like “The Man” in this relationship, whatever the hell that means, and at the very least he didn’t live up to his own expressed standards in that respect. You don’t get to complain about someone not depending on you for advice and assistance if you’re consistently unwilling and unable to provide it when they need it and ask for it. And if your idea of being a man requires you to have an utterly dependent woman hanging around waiting for you to dole out your “manly” wisdom and services, then IMO you’re too screwed up and dysfunctional yourself to be calling foul on your partner.

  24. I still don’t see the connection between the tooth outburst and your view that he needed you to be a basket case to take care of. Perhaps you mentioned this in earlier posts.

    Dear god.

    Sorry RM, but that’s my first reaction to your comments. Look, if someone you are intimately involved with misrepresents your conversations so radically toward you being a drunken, irresponsible, mean-spirited person… something is wrong. What if you were seeing someone who, from time to time, lied about your behavior in various situations and cast you in the worst possible light? Would you think that person genuinely cared about you? I don’t know the true extent of how much this happend to zuzu and it’s certainly not my place to ask, but the sort of person who does these things is usually trying to keep you down and in “your place,” whether they admit to it or not.

    That’s not cool.

  26. I still don’t see the connection between the tooth outburst and your view that he needed you to be a basket case to take care of. Perhaps you mentioned this in earlier posts.

    Basically, he was gaslighting her in order to make her think she was a blackout drunk who said nasty things to him that she couldn’t remember. Had she fallen for it, she would have been lead to think she had real problems, and he was trying to stick it out despite her many flaws making it so very hard for him, but he had to engage in some wholly justified criticizing her for things she didn’t remember in order to help her.

    Also, if he said she did anything wrong, she had to believe him and apologize, since she was far too sick to trust her own thoughts, memories, and experiences.

    Since what he described clearly did not happen, he was either so emotionally invested in having her keep the role of “the one with a problem” that he was willing to stoop to extremely low manipulation, or so deluded that he was rewriting his own memories in order to trick himself into thinking she really was that messed up. And if the guy who’d always put himself in the rescuer/protector role in their relationship started inventing problems for her to have as soon as she started to pull out of the actual crisis, then it’s because he can’t or won’t deal with the fact that Victim and Rescuer are not permanent and defining roles.

  27. What if you were seeing someone who, from time to time, lied about your behavior in various situations and cast you in the worst possible light?

    Thing is, that’s exactly how my STDG™ ex used to describe me when I’d try to call him on his shit – even put in the most nonconfrontational, gentle way possible, like “hey, this has got me thinking and it’s something I’d like for us to talk about,” it was still me being a screeching harpy about things I’d made up.

    This was also the guy who, more in line with what Zuzu posted, liked to use my past relationships against me, or more specifically and even better, my insecurities from them. Example: I made the mistake of telling him that I’ve been burned by some cheaters and have a bit of a sore spot about it – which he took to mean that since most of his friends were girls and a good number of them were exgirlfriends, he could bail on me or sell me out or just treat me like crap in (or lie about) any situation involving them, and any protest on my part was just me getting jealous. Even if it was my birthday, and he was informing me who he was going to be spending it with (um, not me).

    Remember, there were lots of painkillers influencing my judgement at the time, so cut me some slack. Man, I’m getting all cathartic today…sorry to be doing it all over your shoes. It’s a good counterbalance to talking to my dad last night – he’s worried about me not being married and pregnant at 25, so he thinks I might’ve been too hard on the guy.

  28. I had a brief relationship with save the day guy. He would always tell me all the ways he would fix me if given the chance. Oh how beautiful I’d be if I would just shop at the right stores (approved by him). My plain face would be so much better if only I would spend more time applying makeup. I worked the wrong job and didn’t know anything about the world (that made all debate just about impossible, because contrary opinions were met with an “I have so much to teach you” attitude).

    All of this was always under the guise of helpful and friendly advice. He didn’t think anything was wrong with me, of course, he just wanted to make me a better person.

    Once I decided that I didn’t need his “advice” and that I was fine just the way I was, I became a real live person and not a project and he didn’t need me anymore.

  29. *hand to forehead* My older brother is one of those people. He thinks he needs to “help” people to “repent” for things he did in the past… it’s really messed up.

    Yep, yep and yep. My brother left his wife and their two small children to take up with a married woman who needed to be “rescued” from her horrible, controlling husband who was convinced she was cheating.

    Of course, she was. With my brother. And I don’t think it was only with my brother, since she cheated on him, too, less than a year into their relationship.

    But they’re still together. Engaged now. Because, you know, he can rescue and fix her, even if he can’t trust her to have a job outside the home for fear that she’ll cheat on him again.

    At this point, my palm is permanently attached to my forehead, I’ve slapped it so often. (Makes it hard to type, I tell you what.)

  30. Isn’t it interesting that there seems to be a correlation between the self-sufficiency of a woman and a man’s impression of the girth and width of his penis, or in flowery romance novel rhethoric, his manhood?

    This subject reminds me of a post I read last year at Salon’s broadsheet regarding governmental funding of literature passed out in school, ostensibly about sex education, but which only espoused abstinence? The promoters of the program still found room to include some half-assed fairy tale for girls depicting two princesses, one who had effective suggestions of how the rescuing prince could slay the fire-breathing dragon and another princess who left it up to his manly machinations to slay the dragon. The story ended with the prince riding into the sunset with the wimpy princess. Moral: men don’t like smart women. Similar moral held by the STD guy who detests the self-sufficient woman.

  32. Found it!

    Deep inside every man is a knight in shining armor, ready to rescue a maiden and slay a dragon. When a man feels trusted, he is free to be the strong, protecting man he longs to be.

    Imagine a knight traveling through the countryside. He hears a princess in distress and rushes gallantly to slay the dragon. The princess calls out, “I think this noose will work better!” and throws him a rope. As she tells him how to use the noose, the knight obliges her and kills the dragon. Everyone is happy, except the knight, who doesn’t feel like a hero. He is depressed and feels unsure of himself. He would have preferred to use his own sword.

    The knight goes on another trip. The princess reminds him to take the noose. The knight hears another maiden in distress. He remembers how he used to feel before he met the princess; with a surge of confidence, he slays the dragon with his sword. All the townspeople rejoice, and the knight is a hero. He never returned to the princess. Instead, he lived happily ever after in the village, and eventually married the maiden—but only after making sure she knew nothing about nooses.

    Moral of the story: Occasional assistance may be all right, but too much will lessen a man’s confidence or even turn him away from his princess.

    I think it should have ended like this;

    Moral of the story: Don’t go talking to me about how to do my job, woman! Who do you think you are?

    And I quite like the sybolism of his sword v. her noose. Wonder if he’s afraid it might strangle him?

  33. Isn’t it interesting that there seems to be a correlation between the self-sufficiency of a woman and a man’s impression of the length and girth of his penis, or in flowery romance novel rhetoric, his manhood?

    Sometimes not just the “impression.” I briefly dated a guy who I now realize would have turned out to be a Nice Guy and, let me tell you, he had good reason to be insecure in his manhood. My now-husband is a genuinely good person (not a Nice Guy) and, um, has no reason to be insecure, so he isn’t.

    He drives a Toyota Corolla, because he has nothing to prove. 😉

  34. Thing is, that’s exactly how my STDG™ ex used to describe me when I’d try to call him on his shit – even put in the most nonconfrontational, gentle way possible, like “hey, this has got me thinking and it’s something I’d like for us to talk about,” it was still me being a screeching harpy about things I’d made up.

    I can believe that. All of those tricks depend on there being people who really act that way (people who act nasty while drunk and deny it/people who distort or make things up to make their signifigant others look crazy) so the accusations have some credibility. You get paranoid jealous types, and chronically unfaithful types. It makes perfect sense to have both people who spread crazy lies to make their partner look bad, and people who hide their own bad behavior under the “You’re spreading crazy lies,” excuse.

  35. Basically, he was gaslighting her in order to make her think she was a blackout drunk who said nasty things to him that she couldn’t remember. Had she fallen for it, she would have been lead to think she had real problems, and he was trying to stick it out despite her many flaws making it so very hard for him, but he had to engage in some wholly justified criticizing her for things she didn’t remember in order to help her.

    Ah, now I get it. Thanx.

  36. I think I used to be a variant of this, the “Don’t You Want Me Baby” (after the Human League song) guy – I’d get involved with people who didn’t think they could do any better (because I didn’t think anyone else would be involved with me), be nice and supportive (as much to fulfill my own fantasy of being the Good Boyfriend as to help them), and then eventually we’d have a long period of stagnation before they’d decide I wasn’t what they wanted, and they’d dump me.

    I don’t think I was controlling, or that I wanted them to be dependent on me, but I’d get resentful when they decided that they wanted something else out of a relationship – that they were fair-weather friends, that I was being used and cast aside, that I was entitled to their continued affection, etc. Sometimes this would guilt them back for a while, sometimes it’d just get them mad and we’d part less amicably than we should have.

  37. He drives a Toyota Corolla, because he has nothing to prove. 😉

    hee hee hee… this is totally tickling me. : )

  38. What about the species of women the “Wants to be Saved Girl.”? I have a friend like that, she immediately falls in love with a guy who she feels can get her out of her crappy situation and rescue her. My best friend dated her for a year: he was coming off a divorce and they met at my birthday party. He was upfront and honest about how he wasn’t ready for a relationship and had no money, but she thought she could talk him into it, as far as trying to ‘sleep convince’ him. I don’t want to rescue anybody, I’m glad I have someone in my life who is selfsufficient. I once thought I could ‘save’ an ex-girlfriend, after she told me about being hospitalized for depression, but it was treating her well and like a person, but that turned out not to be enough.

  39. The knight hears another maiden in distress. He remembers how he used to feel before he met the princess; with a surge of confidence, he slays the dragon with his sword. All the townspeople rejoice, and the knight is a hero. He never returned to the princess. Instead, he lived happily ever after in the village, and eventually married the maiden—but only after making sure she knew nothing about nooses.

    Moral of the story: Occasional assistance may be all right, but too much will lessen a man’s confidence or even turn him away from his princess.

    Ummmmm….yeah. Whoever wrote that is totally not driving a Toyota Corolla. Nor is the guy I’ve been bitching about, for that matter. Damn, that might have to become my new euphemism for, um, “big.” Thank you, Mnemosyne! And thanks for finding that story, ako, it cracked me up almost as much as the yoga post.

  40. He drives a Toyota Corolla, because he has nothing to prove. 😉

    hee hee hee… this is totally tickling me. : ) >>

    But my Honda Civic, that’s a chick magnet 😛

  41. What about the species of women the “Wants to be Saved Girl.”?

    She and STDG should get together and live the rest of their lives in uber-dramatic bliss.

  43. Someone who shows signs of those tendencies CAN change, but they have to want to. And they have to change themselves, it’s not something a significant other can do for them. If they change, it’s not because you love them so much and changed them with your love and support, but because they love you and recognise their behaviour is destructive to you. And also love themselves enough to recognise when they fuck up and try to make themselves a better person.

    I know a couple who met at a t ime when she was going through an incredibly traumatic time and this guy became her rock. And then, over time, she started to get back to normal, and wanted the relationship to change to reflect the fact that she wasn’t a basket case anymore. Also, that him wrapping her in cotton wool wasn’t ONLY about wanting to protect her for her own sake, but also about getting off on being Mr. Supportive.

    When she first said it, he didn’t want to hear it,a nd they broke up. For a little less than a year they both saw other people, and after an initial rocky few months, managed to remain friends (in part because he eventually realised she was right about him crossing her boundaries, and he wanted not to be like that). And eventually they got back together, and got married about ten years ago, and now have two kids.

    So, it CAN happen. But it’s pretty damn rare. And the power balance in the relationship changed not because she loved him enough to make him change, but because he decided independently to make those changes. And made them for himself as least as much as for her.

    Confirmed Save the Day types who don’t want to change should consider redirecting their energy towards stray or rescued animals. You have to work your ass off to get their trust and be able to help them, but once they love you, they never ever stop, and they can’t talk, so they never complain about their individuality being smothered.

    A dog will always worship you and be grateful to you, given a minimum of encouragement. And a cat will be a little more independent-minded, but still, there will be large chunks of adoring time. AND you have the knowledge of being such a good person.

    Get it out of your system with strays, and when you date, remember your significant other is NOT in fact an abused pet.

  44. Ugh, why do I get the feeling that this is all wrapped up in the crappy examples our society sets forth for men to emulate? — oh yeah, I get that feeling because it’s fairly obvious. Doh.

    The only time I’ve ever felt the single-minded urge to shack up with and “rescue” a troubled woman was when I was in a bad place myself, and deep down didn’t feel like I’d be “worthy” of a woman who isn’t troubled in some way. So maybe I’m haloing, but I think this kind of behavior is ultimately born from self-loathing of some kind. Make up a shiny, false self-image to take the pain away. I bet alot of these guys are borderline pathological underneath their Lancelot persona, and would lash out if forced to confront their own bull.

    This blog makes me introspect too much. 😛

  45. Someone who shows signs of those tendencies CAN change, but they have to want to. And they have to change themselves, it’s not something a significant other can do for them. If they change, it’s not because you love them so much and changed them with your love and support, but because they love you and recognise their behaviour is destructive to you. And also love themselves enough to recognise when they fuck up and try to make themselves a better person.

    Well said — I was chasing this exact distinction myself, but couldn’t put it into words.

    I don’t think a person with these flaws can *be* changed, but the circuimstances of their life and their experiences can motivate them to change themselves. A vote with your feet situation, if you happen to be the smother-ee.

  46. Ugh. I was briefly involved with one of those back when I was, shall we say, more enthusiastic about being female than I am now. Everything about me, according to him, was proof of how low my self-esteem was. Wearing army pants? Not confident in my womanhood. Liking sex every night? Not seeing myself as anything other than a sex object. Enjoying football? Wanting myself to be swallowed up by the crowd. And of course, I *was* on the verge of depression and I *did* have self-esteem issues, which meant I couldn’t just tell him “My self-esteem is fine, thanks.”

  47. Enjoying football? >>

    That’s why I asked my wife out, I heard her talking about going to a game and our first date was a Jets game. As opposed to what happened with the previous gf. I was at her home with her father and brother watching a game, and she brought down brownies. So I joked, “This is the way it should be, men watching football, women bringing them food.” (I’m sure you ladies would’ve stoned me). Her brother shot me the “you’re in deep crap now” look.

  49. I’ve dated a variation on STDG — and when he got married this weekend, all of my friends and family told me “I’m so glad he’s not marrying you. He was passive-aggressive and ever so helpful, and let me know how happy he was that I needed him. I was seriously ill, and seriously depressed, and he enabled me to ignore my health.

    I was at fault as well, letting myself grow more needy and dependent as the years went by, and finally it got to a point where he couldn’t stand me. He waited 6 months to break up with me after that because he was afraid of what our mutual friends would say, but he also lied and reassured me when I asked him if anything was wrong, with me or with us.

    Now I’m in an interesting relationship with an alpha-male type guy — I have to be very careful to assert myself and keep the power balance between us equal, because he’s never dated a feminist, but he respects me, we can talk about anything, and when I became ill, instead of telling me that he loved me no matter what, and then letting me keep being sick, he insisted I see a doctor, and probably would have broken up with me if I hadn’t.

    Now days I run like hell from STDGs or Nice Guys.

  50. Hey Jicklet, I think we dated the same guy. He even let things drag out for an extra six to eight months, but I was in a different country (my parents insisted I come home where they could take care of my depressed ass) and he told everyone we’d broken up and started cheating on me. I feel sorry for his new girlfriend. She doesn’t sound as needy and depressed as I was, but she acts like she’s so fucking grateful that he would deign to date someone like her. It’s like she thinks she’s unworthy of his, or anyone else’s, attention. I know he was cheating on me with her, but… poor thing.

    New boyfriend is much more accepting and never guilts me about being sad. Apparently, I’m awesome.

  51. Women do this too. In fact, there’s a lot of pressure on some women to fix the “flawed” people in their lives. A female friend of mine seeks out basket cases and takes care of them. I loved it when it was me she was taking care of. (e.g. my social anxiety makes it difficult to make telephone calls, she learned all my personal data so she could impersonate me on the phone) Then she started dating a bipolar man who refuses to treat his condition, and the effort she puts in to keep him together is destroying her life. She enabled my immaturity and dependency, and she’s doing the same with him.

  52. This is sort of how my mom is, weirdly enough. Not only does she … “misremember” conversations (or not remember them at all) and project her hysterics on everyone else (asking me and the rest of my family, “WHY ARE YOU MAKING A BIG DEAL ABOUT THIS???” when she’s the one throwing the fit), but she also wants to be needed. She seems to try very hard to keep my older brother in some sort of perpetual … highschool-agedness. He’s nearly 26, and he still depends on her for just about everything. She also has tried really hard to make ME depend on her for everything, but I’m managing to break free.

    What’s weird about that is she’s totally dependent on my dad for everything, since she refuses to put herself in a position to make more money (but yet complains about how little she gets paid as someone with a BA–$10k for a quasi-full-time job) … so I can only figure that since she has such little power in that relationship (except for the spending power) she feels she has to have power over me and my brother. I dunno. But it sounds like those Nice Guys.

  53. I had a relationship with a Save The Day Guy while I was down and out and in extreme poverty for about a year and a half. He did help sometimes, but also a very co-dependent relationship developed. Anyway, things changed as the I worked to resolve the obstacles in my life and the relationship became boring and oppressive. I know him on a friendly basis and frankly, sometimes use him as needed, but keep him at arm’s length.

    Might I mention that his controlling behavior has wreaked havoc on his family. At least two of his three grown children exhibit signs of serious co-dependency that has them crippled as adults.

    Recently in fact I recounted to him a problem my daughter was having with a former employer. I was telling him how I was encouraging her to contact appropriate authorities and seek possible legal advice. He chimed in, “Why don’t you have her call me, I know so and so up at the state house who can and I can—”

    At that point I cut him off and replied, “No, she’s quite capable of doing it herself, she’s intelligent and needs to learn how to handle problems on her own.”

    He kept on and I insisted until he realized he was getting nowhere and then dropped it with a , “Well, she could really mess things up for herself.” I replied, “Oh well and she’ll learn either way won’t she?”

    His need to help people is so overwhelming that he will often sacrifice his own personal time with family or work in order to ‘help’ people (and don’t you think he loves to parade that fact around). Usually also, he doesn’t do too well.

    On humorous note and to illustrate how bad this sickness can be, I was stopped once by a cop in town, he was riding with me. When the cop came back with my ticket and was beginning a nice lecture to me, he leaned over to the cop at the driver’s window and began to politely protest the cause of my ticket (for a cracked windshield and an expired inspection sticker).

    The cop quickly snapped back at him, “You her lawyer?!” Undeterred, he pressed on, “Well, no but I’m—” she interrupted him abruptly snapping, “Well then, shut up because this isn’t about you.”

    He recoiled back in the seat and said nothing more. I felt it just deserts as I was quite embarrassed to have him in my seat at the moment he began to ‘speak for’ me without my consent. I told and retold that story to the great amusement of everyone who knew him and his meddling ways.

  54. Confirmed Save the Day types who don’t want to change should consider redirecting their energy towards stray or rescued animals. You have to work your ass off to get their trust and be able to help them, but once they love you, they never ever stop, and they can’t talk, so they never complain about their individuality being smothered.

    See, I’ve been thinking that a big part of the problem for Save the Day types is the tendency to try and fulfill this in a relationship. I have definite tendencies of wanting to be the hero or rescuer, but I find much healthier ways to channel them. I look for careers and volunteer work that help me meet these tendencies.

    Channelling all of that into one person requires that this person be perpetually in need of care and rescuing. The only ways of achieving this are; find someone who’s continously having some sort of crisis or emergency (which is stunningly difficult to do; most people have at least long stretches of improvement) and see that they never pull out of it, fabricate problems so that you can claim they need fixing even when they don’t, or redefine saving them so broadly that you can include saving them from the “wrong” car insurance or needlessly expensive shoes.

    If you work as a firefighte, or a social worker, or volunteer with the Red Cross to do disaster relief, or at an animal shelter, there’s always someone new in need of rescuing, and if you help them in a way that they don’t need future help, you’re not going to run out of people in need. So you don’t have to build or maintain dependency to keep your status.

    Unfortunately, misdirecting the energy isn’t the only place the Save the Day types being discussed here go wrong. So unless there’s a serious effort to rein in the out-of-control egos (there’s an important difference between “Look at all the good I did,” and “Look at all the good I did”) they’re likely to do a lot of damage on the job as well.

  55. From my experience, many people who like to make other people’s problems their own (“saving” others) are little different from the procrastinating student who cleans the kitchen instead of learning for his/her exam. They have something really urgent to do (namely, work on their own darned issues and solve their own problems) and they know it, but as they do not know how, they do something else instead. (sigh).

  56. wow, my ex did some of these things. i don’t want to get onto the details as it’d take forever, but wow.

    he wasn’t a jerk, he was just broken himself, but him trying to help me wasn’t very effective, and that pushed him into a bit of STDG when we fought, with the misremembering conversations and all.

    we’re both glad we got out, because it meant that we both went and got help (me for anxiety and depression I later found stemmed from untreated ADD; him for hallucination-inducing panic attacks), but it wasn’t fun.

  57. My ex husband and many of his friends prided themselves on their abilities to “Save the Day.” My ex surrounded himself with people who had a fierce sense of community, who really needed their friends, who lurched from one crisis to another, pulling each other out of crises and messes.

    When they all pulled together, they could do some amazing things: find someone a job or a home, get people moved, intervene in sticky situations. Thing is, they never did the stuff people need to do to avert crises in the first place.

    Trivial case in point: I heard through the grapevine that my ex’s friend, E., had been organizing an event. A week before the event, she had no volunteers, no head cook, the negotiations with the venue were shaky, few registrations. People were thinking of cancelling the event, which would have had serious repercussions, and lost a lot of money for the group. The friend got into full Save the Day mode, roped in all her friends, didn’t sleep for the week before the event, put all her energy into publicity, negotiations, volunteer wrangling, and pulled off a successful event.

    I heard this story and the praise she was receiving for Saving the Day, and all I could ask was “Well, she’s been in charge of this thing for the past eight months, right? What’s she been doing all that time?” She wouldn’t have needed to Save the Day if she’d put any of her considerable skills and energy into crisis avoidance, rather than waiting until things were in dire straits. But of course, that wouldn’t have been nearly as dramatic, and that wasn’t how that crowd Did Things.

    Everything was like that. Someone was always having a crisis. Everyone knew how to deal with crises. They didn’t know how to manage their lives so that crises were rare, rather than the norm. It was quite tiring.

    And, at the age of 21, I started to realize that among the friends of my considerably older husband, I was fast becoming the grownup.

  59. Whoever used the term “gaslighting” hit the nail directly on the head.

    What I realized about my variant of STDG (and to Jenny D and all other survivors of the Mr. – and Ms. – Fixits in our midst, my condolences and good on ya for getting out of their clutches) was that the whole “I could’ve saved the day” thing was part of a larger program of manipulation designed to 1) keep me feeling unworthy and insufficient unto myself and therefore more and more dependent on him and 2) punish me for those times when #1 wasn’t going according to plan. And once I started to catch on and call him on this shit, then I was just plain crazy and too screwed up in the head (according to him) to understand what was “really” going on.

    The easiest way to do both was to continue insisting that, no matter what, I must be in the wrong. If I didn’t ask for help, I was wrong not to have asked. If I did ask for help, I was weak and/or stupid for needing and wanting it and assuming that he ought to be able to provide it.

    This same sort of schtick applied to just about everything. Choosing a restaurant or movie? He’d have no preference beforehand, shrug his shoulders with indifference at every option I suggested, and then at the end of the outing make a point of expressing his dissatisfaction with and disdain for whatever option I had settled on myself once I finally gave up trying to hit on something he actually wanted to do.

    If I did something he specifically claimed would make him happy or help him out, once it was done not only had he never made any such claim but now whatever I had just done was the exact opposite of what he really wanted.

    The real kicker was at the end, when I finally got to the point where I’d had enough, and we had a conversation where he insisted that if he wasn’t happy with me it was my fault for not doing all the things necessary to make him happy, whereas if I wasn’t happy with him… yeah, you guessed it: still my fault, for not making him happy enough to be willing to do the things necessary for my happiness. The gist of it was, I had to earn his love and affection and respect by sufficiently showing my love and affection and respect for him… where that was supposed to come from, since obviously he didn’t feel he had to earn it from me in the same fashion, is anybody’s guess. (Probably he just thought he was entitled to it for showing up and having a penis. And that’s not me distilling some Orwellian doublespeak bullshit into its fundamental craptasticness, that’s pretty much exactly how he put it.)

    I pointed out how it didn’t make any sense to keep claiming that we were a “team” if all the responsibility for his happiness AND mine was on me, that if his happiness was supposed to be my responsibility then mine should be his in equal measure (not that I believe that’s true in a healthy relationship, one’s happiness is one’s own responsibility, but for the sake of argument, whatever).

    And then he told me that the reason I couldn’t see the “rightness” of what he said was that I was too dysfunctional and immature to understand what a “real, mature” relationship was all about.

    Because apparently in a real, mature het relationship the man gets all the perks of a voting adult, and then some, but has all the responsibility of an infant still basking in the glow of mommy’s unconditional love and acceptance, with his female partner playing the part of mommy and being so glad to have him around that she’ll gladly meet all his unspoken needs without complaint and expect nothing but his exalted presence in return.

    Uh… so, yeah. Sorry. I still get carried away remembering that guy. But, anyway, that conversation was the last one I ever had with him, thank heavens.

  60. There is a female version of this creature. I call her the over helper. At work, she tends to interject herself as the ‘mediatior’ between co-workers who are having ‘issues’ with each other. Problem is, if there are no issues, she will create them though gossip. One kept coming to me claiming that my staff did not like the way I treated them; after a lot of personal upset and sincere discussions with those involved, I realized she was in some cases totally gaslighting me, and in other cases perceived situations in a manner NO ONE else did. I FINALLY had to write a 6 page memo to her boss, have my boss meet with her boss, and essentially order her to stop the meddling. I realized she loves being the middle of everything so she can say she is solving problems. Truth is she is in therapy herself and just had a another smoking relapse.

  61. I’m glad I looked up the definition of “gaslighting,” because while I got the general gist from context the first time, the word itself is kind of illuminating (seriously, no pun intended – but now I’m leaving it that way, which I guess is intentional).

    Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse. It uses persistent denials of fact which, as they build up over time, make the victim progressively anxious, confused, and less able to trust his or her own memory and perception. – Wikipedia

    Whenever I’d get (or be perceived as getting, it really made no difference) upset with my ex, he’d go from Nice to Loud-and-Cruel in the time it would take me to bring up a subject. He’d blow up at me and never even hear what I was trying to say through all of his yelling. Later, he’d tell me that he didn’t understand it, he’d never blown up that way with anyone else ever before me, but something in the way I spoke made him feel like he was being attacked and made him fly off the handle. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what, though, so while it was definitely my fault, there was nothing I could do to fix it.

    The thing is that I can be nitpicky and I do get sarcastic when I’m mad, plus I’m mortally afraid of growing the temper my mom and sister have…so it wasn’t too long a leap for me to start doubting everything I said while trying to make things better. Even when I invoked my best high school mediator training and covered every base of non-confrontational discussion, he would freak out and then blame both his emotions and his actions on me. And because he was sooo patient with my inability to communicate (or to trust, because I also had to doubt my doubts about him), I was lucky that he loved me enough to stick with me and try to sort out what I was trying to say (instead of just, y’know, listening the first time). And of course, whatever he’d eventually hear me as saying would inevitably be taken as a manifestation of my crazy neuroses rather than a legitimate issue, so I was doubly lucky that he was willing to take my crap at all.

    One of his favorite tactics was to go ahead and say his whole mean piece about how wrong and out of line I was for thinking he was anything but saintly, and then before I could respond, tell me he was “too worked up” to continue the conversation and had to go. The last time he did that, he let it hang for three days, except to call twice and that he wanted to talk, but had made plans with a friend. He used the same girl as an excuse both times, and he seriously told me that he didn’t plan on having any time alone between meeting up with her and his head hitting the pillow the first night. The second time, I called him on playing on my insecurities and trying to bait me (instead of accusing him of cheating, like he was going for). He flipped out to a level I had never seen before, called me crazy and told me to get help – a pretty low blow since I am being treated for depression that, um, might have something to do with spending six months sick in bed with only an emotionally abusive boyfriend for support – and hung up on me. It was very much like the end of Rumpelstiltzken: him realizing his secret is revealed and exploding in a little puff of rage. We haven’t spoken since.

    I’ve been able to put a lot of stuff into perspective with the help of you guys’ insights [is there a less awkward way to say “you guys’ “?] and experiences with this particular breed of asshole, and my heart goes out to anyone who looks back on any relationship with similar nauseous recognition. I feel pretty presumptuous hoping that my ramblings are somehow useful to somebody here, but there it is, I do.

  62. I’m glad I looked up the definition of “gaslighting,” because while I got the general gist from context the first time, the word itself is kind of illuminating (seriously, no pun intended – but now I’m leaving it that way, which I guess is intentional).

    Incidentally, the word comes from this movie starring Ingrid Bergman, which everyone should see.

  63. jennie, speaking as someone who gets 2am crisis phone calls and has a bunch of friends who are good at making things happen if they put their minds to it,

    Thing is, they never did the stuff people need to do to avert crises in the first place.

    is mostly caused by the assumption that unless someone declares a crisis, things are under control and it would be impolite (or worse) to interfere. So one might not do anything but roll one’s eyes if a friend is involved with a guy one doesn’t approve of, but mobilize everything needed if she calls and says she has to get herself, her pets and her stuff out of the flat she shares with him during the lunch break.

    If there are a lot of people in the group who do not get into gear until the eleventh hour, there’ll be no shortage of emergencies, of course. One hopes that people learn better planning skills sometime during their lives, but some just seem to thrive on adrenaline.

  64. I second the thanks for the term “gaslighting.” I’ve never seen it before, but damn does it make sense.

    There have actually been a series of robberies here in town among a certain group of people I can’t illuminate on, but the “robberies” consist of moving people’s stuff around and placing highly personal objects in the open. As opposed to stealing money or electronics, they usually steal stupid shit instead. The suspect in all these cases is believed to be a guy who wants to intimidate his “friends” for whatever reason. I’m pretty well convinced knowing the suspect that there is real mental instability involved beyond the criminal type.

    And that’s about all I can say about that.

  65. You’ve been involved in the rearranging, haven’t you?

    “Gaslight” also features Creepy Angela Lansbury. Who, as far as I’m concerned, is the best Angela Lansbury there is. But I’m a big fan of the original “Manchurian Candidate.”

  66. Why call him “nice guy” or “save the day guy”? Why not call him “emotionally abusive guy”, or, at the very least, “manipulative asshole”? Euphemisms, by def, obscure the point.

    It wasn’t until my ex became physically abusive after 5 years together that I recognized our entire relationship had been abusive in some form. It would have been nice to feel comfortable accurately naming that abuse a few years earlier.

  67. “Gaslight” also features Creepy Angela Lansbury. Who, as far as I’m concerned, is the best Angela Lansbury there is. But I’m a big fan of the original “Manchurian Candidate.”

    I am sooooooo sorry to be this amazingly off-topic, but for my money, the best Creepy Angela Lansbury is Sweeney Todd Angela Lansbury. She’s harboring a serial killer, putting his victims in pies, and singing the whole way through. Go Angie.

    And Lisa: yes. yes. yes.

  68. There is a female version of this creature. I call her the over helper. At work, she tends to interject herself as the ‘mediatior’ between co-workers who are having ‘issues’ with each other. Problem is, if there are no issues, she will create them though gossip.
    I KNOW THIS GIRL. She is one of my close friends and I love her to death but she doesn’t seem to think other people are capable of running their own lives. In tenth grade I was having issues with my boyfriend (nothing like what’s being described here, mostly issues of chronic awkwardness that are sort of cute in retrospect) and she CALLED HIM AND LEFT A THREATENING MESSAGE ON HIS VOICE MAIL. WHO DOES THAT.

    Interestingly in relationships she is both Save The Day Girl and Needs To Be Saved Girl. It makes for a lot of drama. I used to watch her relationships with envy, wondering why mine wasn’t filled with all that passion! and worship! and saving! And then I realized that wasn’t actually what I wanted, it was what I thought I wanted and what Hollywood romances tell you you want but really, for me love was about caring about each other and helping each other and makign each other happy and being nice to each other because you want to, not because you need each other, and just generally digging each other and enjoying each other.

    I think there’s a lot of romanticization of need going on in this culture, and I think it’s very damaging to relationships. Lord knows it was to mine (somehow I so far have avoided dating boys who have internalized it, which made it much harder for me at the time but in retrospect I’m grateful for as otherwise I would have kept on thinking it was normal and not grown). STDGs don’t think they can be loved without being needed (a lot of the time), hence the need to Save The Day.

  69. One of his favorite tactics was to go ahead and say his whole mean piece about how wrong and out of line I was for thinking he was anything but saintly, and then before I could respond, tell me he was “too worked up” to continue the conversation and had to go.

    Bingo. My ex and I used to get into it on the phone, when I’d stand up for myself or disagree with him or point out the complete irrationality and inequity of how he insisted our relationship should work. If I didn’t back down he’d finally just say something to the effect of “I can’t deal with this right now” and hang up in a snit. And then *I* would feel bad and call him back and apologize for upsetting him. Except for the last time, the conversation I alluded to above. At some point I just said, you know, I don’t think I want to do this any more. And he said something like “well you do what you have to do” and slammed the phone down on his end. And I sat there and realized that I no longer had any impulse to call him back, and nothing on earth to apologize for. I’d already broken up with him once, which had prompted a long phone call from him where he’d claimed he wasn’t ready to “give up” (because he hadn’t yet “fixed” me to his satisfaction, I suppose, although with a “fixer” what they really want is to keep doing more damage so they seem ever more indispensable). He swore things would be different, he wanted to try and work things out. And yet after three months, with him all the time knowing that I had gotten to the point where I was ready and willing to just walk away, not a damn thing changed – it was right back to the same old nonsense.

    It took six days for him to call me back, and thankfully I wasn’t at home – but judging by the message on my machine he was very upset that I hadn’t tried to contact him (despite the fact that it had been his little temper tantrum that had cut our last conversation short) and then he tried to blame that on whatever “lies” other specific people had been telling me about him… which was VERY interesting since he had no reason at that point to think that I’d heard anything alarming about him from those people, unless he already knew that there were things they could tell me about him that would prove what a manipulative liar he was. (Which there were, and they did, but not until after they found out I’d dumped him for good and started sharing with them about all the shit he’d put me through. It wasn’t until we started comparing notes that the depth of his dishonesty became apparent.)

    His last message to me was an email bewailing the fact that I was too selfish and immature to appreciate everything he’d done for me. It sounded so much like one of my mother’s self-pitying “martyr” speeches that reading it actually made me laugh out loud… when I shared that with a friend, she said, “so, basically, you’ve been dating your mother all this time?” And ye gods, when I thought about it some more, the similarities were all too obvious.

    My mother, by the way, suffers from all the signs of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which I discovered after a therapist I was in a discussion group with recommended that I read a book about growing up with an NPD parent. My ex also had a lot of the symptoms, so if a whole lot of this stuff rings a bell – people who try to keep you dependent on them so they feel important, who constantly negate your feelings about and memories of your interactions with them by denying that they ever said or did the things that hurt you, who act as though they’re entitled to your respect and devotion and trust without ever doing anything to encourage or earn them (quite the opposite, usually), etc. – it might not be a bad idea to google “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” and read up on it.

    Here is a good place to start:

    How To Recognize A Narcissist

    I believe it’s written by a layperson, but it’s very informative and if you ARE dealing with an NPD individual it can be very helpful, because realizing that you aren’t imagining things and aren’t “crazy” for thinking that you’re being jerked around when you actually are gives you the validation that a narcissist never will, not in a million years.

  70. I think there’s a lot of romanticization of need going on in this culture, and I think it’s very damaging to relationships.

    For some reason this reminded me of something else I read.

    It’s on Bad Fanfic! No Biscuit!, a site where they satirize bad cliches of internet fanfiction. Sort of a humor/education in fanfic writing page. The line that sprang to mind came from a critique of a sex scene that was all “Yes! Do it! I need this!”

    The author thinks ‘need’, is more sexy than ‘want’, but there is an underlying feeling that it’s not as ‘dirty’ because it’s therapeutic.

    So ‘needing’ relationships or sex or dating can be a way to not take the blame for what you want, or to make it seem less ‘dirty’ to some. Because if you’re with someone because you like them and it feels good to be around them, do things with them, have sex with them, talk to them, etc. that’s just fun, and everyone knows fun is shallow. Whereas if you “need them to fix you” that’s therapeutic, and if you’re “rescuing” them, it’s noble.

  71. If I didn’t back down he’d finally just say something to the effect of “I can’t deal with this right now” and hang up in a snit. And then *I* would feel bad and call him back and apologize for upsetting him.
    It’s as if there’s a template somewhere that they’re all following…

    After my ex dumped me, we had this messy dynamic going on where he would call to check I was coping with my grief OK (and I poured it all out to him because I figured the least he could do was listen) and eventually get into an argument about how I wasn’t grieving in an appropriate way (no prizes for guessing who defined appropriate).

    In one of the calls, I was explaining how my mum thought I was being unreasonable for refusing to consider getting involved with another relationship. He took her side and informed me that I needed a significant other, which I disputed quite hotly. For some reason, he thought being in a relationship was all sweetness and light and getting your needs met at every point, and I said something about how he only subscribed to this idea because he’d been able to take advantage of it for so long.

    Well, that lit the blue touchpaper. He was too terribly, terribly hurt to continue the conversation, even when I called back to beg his pardon for using such a horribly triggering expression as “take advantage”. That was probably what finally convinced me he was never going to magically see the error of his ways.

  73. i was a victim of gaslighting as well…. i’m so glad that relationship ended.

    the STDG can very quickly turn into something far more psychologically damaging, and insidious for the fact that it evolves from something seemingly harmless: the desire to help a vulnerable girl onto her feet.

    Lauren’s post ought to be blown up and posted on a series of billboards in every city and town in the United States….

  74. Interesting how naturally this thread turned from a discussion about a species of “Nice Guy” to a discussion about manipulative-abusive people.

  75. MM, I thought that was kind of the point – Nice Guy ™ doesn’t mean, literally, just “nice guy”.

    This thread is of great interest to me as someone who has been in couples counselling and has been a member of an internet forum for survivors of infidelity– not exactly a club I’d have wanted to join. (I’m sure you can fill in the blanks on that one.) A useful concept I learned was the People Pleaser – which could be a subgroup of NG ™ , People Pleasers also are greatly concerned with how they come across – they always want to be nice, nice, nice – but this can lead to situations where, for instance, an extramarital affair blows up to bigger proportions because they can’t be seen to be offending, or hurting, the affair partner.

    Another is the Knight in Shining Armour, which is obviously relevant to this topic – the KISA gets a lot of emotional warmth from (he thinks) rescuing the affair partner, who is a poor damsel (rotten family background, or whatever is the excuse she uses for the poor-me-ness). Unlike the guy’s wife, who knows him intimately, the Poor Damsel looks at him through rose coloured specs. What a great guy!

    So, interestingly enough – as our counsellor pointed out – it isn’t only the mustache-twirling bounder types who commonly engage in extramarital afffairs, but often the Nice Guy ™, who gets off on the dewy-eyed admiration he gets from being the Rescuer, and can’t extricate himself because his people-pleasing tendencies don’t allow him to make the necessary break and potentially “hurt” the affair partner.

  76. Yeah, I was being a bit ironic. One thing I learned from sites like Feministe is that a “Nice Guy” (with scare quotes) is the tiny gecko counterpart to the abusive-manipulative jumbo gila monster that’s described in psychology texts.

  77. After my ex dumped me, we had this messy dynamic going on where he would call to check I was coping with my grief OK (and I poured it all out to him because I figured the least he could do was listen) and eventually get into an argument about how I wasn’t grieving in an appropriate way (no prizes for guessing who defined appropriate).

    Okay, THIS officially takes the cake. “I don’t want to be with you any more, but I want to control how you deal with my not being with you any more.”

    Man, you don’t get to control how people feel and handle how they feel when you are IN a relationship. You sure as shit don’t get to do it once the relationship is over (which obviously it wasn’t, not in real terms, not for him, if he was still pulling this crap).

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