How To Know If A Guy Is Using You

Women from Around the World Share Their Worst "Nice Guy" Experiences

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It's a safe bet that every woman has encountered "Mr. Nice Guy." He's a guy whobelieves he's nice. In fact, heinsists on it. He may even act nice, but it's never more than an act, and the fake niceness goes away as soon as a woman tells him she's not interested.

Guys like this seem to think that women are vending machines. If they spend enough kindness coins, then they deserve a date, a relationship or intimacy in return. They tend to go a bit crazy when they find out they're not entitled to a woman's body and time just because they exist.

If Nice Guy buys a woman a drink, she should go home with him, and a girl who is polite is obviously interested. Nice Guys constantly complain about getting friend-zoned — as though friendship is some kind of punishment. At best, these guys are annoyances. At worst, they're dangerous. Nice Girls exist too, of course, so both women and men have had to suffer these fools.

Do any of the following stories resonate with you? We sure hope not!

(No) Thank U, Next

My worst Nice Guy experience was probably the creepy mid-50s man who harassed me for months and finally made his big move by telling me he liked my pheromones. Then he mansplained what pheromones are and got very angry when 19-year-old me turned him down. He told me that what I needed was a good experience. Yeah, no thanks, you gross pervert.

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Just About Doesn't Count

As soon as I started dating my fiancé, a close guy friend/roommate turned out to be a very toxic Nice Guy. He had never indicated that he wanted to date me. Then one night he freaked out on me because he was, "JUST ABOUT TO ASK ME OUT!" Then he told me that my fiancé was going to dump me anyway, so I might as well cut my losses early and go out with him instead. So, instead, I cut my losses with the Nice Guy, moved in with my fiancé and have been blissfully happy ever since.

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Paying the Troll Toll

I had recently moved back into my parents' house after a long, toxic relationship. I started dating again and met a guy on OkCupid. He was mostly a gentleman and polite, although he seemed a little lonely because he was from out of state and hadn't made a lot of friends yet. We had been hanging out regularly for several weeks and hadn't really discussed where we were headed, what our expectations were, etc. I was still seeing other people and assumed we were casual.

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Apparently, he saw things a lot more seriously. I posted a photo of myself at a museum that was obviously taken by someone else, and he contacted me as soon as he saw it to ask who I was with. When he found out it was a guy, he was very upset and literally started screaming at me. Apparently, he considered me his girlfriend.

He was livid, and it was scary. He said he wanted me to pay him back for the money he spent hanging out with me (getting food and driving me 30 minutes each way to hang out at his house). He said he was coming to my house that night to collect it.

I agreed to leave $100 under the doormat if he never talked to me or came to my house ever again, and he agreed. He got off work late at night, like around midnight, and when he collected his money he pounded on my door and screamed profanities at the top of his lungs. Then, when I came to the door, I told him I would call the cops as he ran away screaming.

I'm pretty sure I got a prank call from his roommate a few days later, so I blocked all possible forms of contact.

Sacre Bleu, a Nice Guy in Paris

I was in Paris for the weekend, and the friend I was meeting in the city wouldn't be there for a few hours, so I just went to sit in front of the Eiffel Tower and sketch for a while. Soon after I sat down, a guy came and sat down near me. I had headphones in and just ignored him, but he slowly scooted closer until he was a few feet from me.

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He started talking to me, ignoring my headphones and my work. He clearly wasn't going to give up. I eventually stopped blatantly ignoring him and took out my headphones, hoping for a few minutes of stilted and awkward conversation at most.

He would not leave me alone. He talked about his graduate program, how he was looking for a woman, how smart he was, how he traveled so much, and a load of other personal glorification of how great he was. I told him repeatedly that I was enjoying my alone time, that I had a boyfriend, that I'm not in the mood for chatting with anyone, etc. He brushed it off like I hadn't said a thing.

So, I went back to working, ignoring him as he talked at me. I didn't know the city well, and I don't speak French, so I wasn't keen on wandering around by myself. Maybe 15 minutes later, I couldn't take it anymore and got up to move, and he followed me across the park. I told him I wanted to be alone, which didn't help at all. When I got up to leave again, he tried to rip my drawing out of my sketchbook because I had "drawn it for him."

Somehow, I managed to walk off quickly with my drawing and wandered around by myself until my friend arrived.

Lunch with a Side of Manipulation

When I was in high school, I had this best friend who had come to me and told me he liked me as more than a friend. I politely told him I didn't feel the same way and would be much more comfortable just remaining friends. He said he was okay with this, and things almost went back to normal, but he started being more withdrawn. Then one day at lunch he was sitting against a wall all alone pouting, and I came over to see if he was okay, and he told me that his depression was so much worse lately, and he was just feeling so suicidal and that "I wouldn't want to end myself if a girl would ever actually like me back…" It took all of my self-control not to end him myself.

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NG Expects Praise for the Bare Minimum: Shocker

I went to a rave with a friend and his group of friends and had a great time (and I was really inebriated). The next day when my friend and I were talking about the rave and how messed up I was, he told me that I'm really lucky that he and his friends were good guys and that nothing happened to me. What?!

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He Finishes Last 'Cause He's Trash

I spent three-and-a-half years, the last of which we lived together, with a self-proclaimed Nice Guy. In those years, we had fights consisting of him calling me every name you can think of. I was accused of wanting to cheat on him constantly. I was constantly told I was stupid. I was told that my family was trash, and there were a couple physical altercations as well.

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Finally, after numerous attempts to fix the problems and being given every excuse in the book, I decided "running back to the trailer home" wasn't that bad of a deal. He goes off about how he's given me so much and put up with so many things other guys wouldn't, including me having seizures in my sleep. He finishes it off with: "But ya know, nice guys always finish last."

Fragile Egos at Play

In college, I worked at the campus bookstore, and a guy would come through my line and make small talk. He wasn't bad looking, just a little socially awkward. One day he asked me out while I was ringing him up. He looked so vulnerable standing there, and there were other people in line waiting with glee for me to shoot him down, so I agreed because I didn't want to embarrass him. And, hey, who knows?

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So, we went out on a date to see a Hitchcock film at a campus auditorium. I have no idea why, but he suddenly tried to jump over the row of seats and caught his foot and went down hard. His nose was gushing blood, and he could barely walk on his ankle. I was trying to help him, and he screamed, "Leave me alone!" I asked him if he was sure because I wanted to stay and help, but he screamed abusive profanity at me until I left.

I never saw him at the bookstore again. I still have no idea what his deal was.

Using Kindness as Control

My ex-boyfriend would keep tallies on how many "nice things" he did for me, and he used it against me when I didn't meet his standards. He used it as a way to control, manipulate and guilt me. I told him he was too controlling, and his response was "I've just never loved someone so much, and I just care about you a lot."

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Nice Guy with a Twist

In high school, my best friend and I were friends with this Nice Guy. She worked with him, and we were into some of the same geeky stuff, but we didn't have much else in common. He asked my friend out, and she politely told him no, saying she'd rather just be friends. He seemed to take it well, and we all continued hanging out. Over the course of the next two years, he followed her around everywhere, managed to go to several school dances with her (as "friends"), and asked her another handful of times. He always threw himself out there, always created embarrassing situations.

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She constantly rejected him, but he kept at it. To spite her, he asked me out, expecting me to freak out on him so he could win her pity. Unfortunately for him, I said yes. We spent our "date" driving around looking for my friend. I pretended not to know where she was so he would back off. It ended pretty anticlimactically.

We were both bored, so we kept hanging out away from my friend. It turned out, when he stopped stalking her, we noticed that we had a lot in common.

We're married now and have three children.

Friends with Conditions

I've had a couple "nice guys" that took FOREVER to just leave me alone, but the worst out of all of them was my best friend of four years dropping me like a hot potato because I wouldn't date him. It took about two-and-a-half years after that to reconnect. Now he will answer when I call, but it won't ever be like it was before.

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He'll Be Right Here Waiting for You

I was considering dating one of my friends in college, but I was getting cold feet and second thoughts. So, I went to spend some time alone and figure things out. I process better that way — you know, the nerdy, introverted type.

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The lack of an immediate answer made him decide to plant himself outside my dorm room, and he didn't move for what must have been eight or nine hours, waiting for me.

This Guy's No Guitar Hero

I met a guy at Guitar Center who was looking for stands of some sort. I foolishly and obliviously gave him my number so I could text him the address of another music store. We began talking about video games via text, and things were going pretty well until he asked me to be friends with benefits.

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Keep in mind that he already had a girlfriend and had told me that. I repeatedly said no, and he kept saying things like, "I'll treat you with respect," and "I'm not a jerk." Toward the end of our texting conversation, he said that I was lucky that he was even bothering me with his request to be friends with benefits. I had to block him so he would leave me alone.

What a sweetheart.

A Thin Line Between Love and Obsession

The worst Nice Guys are the ones who don't give up. It's one thing to turn someone down and have them back off, but I've had some people who refuse to give up. I think a lot of them assume they will eventually win you over like some kind of rom-com, but it's usually just creepy.

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A guy who lived in my dorm during freshman year of college professed that he loved me one day, because it was killing him seeing me get close to another one of our friends. I let him down, but he continued to pursue me for the next six months. He wrote me poems, played me songs that reminded him of me, and told me I'm beautiful and perfect in Italian (a language we share) when other people were present.

He even told me that he didn't know if he could live without me and might be at risk of harming himself if we didn't date. Even when I started dating someone else, this behavior continued until he decided there was another girl he was in love with. It gets kind of scary when people confuse obsession for love.

The Nice Guy Blew It

I once really hit it off with this guy at a pub. He was attractive, an amazing kisser, made good conversation, etc. We exchanged numbers and planned to hang out that night, but somehow our respective friend groups got separated, and it didn't happen. Oh, well, we'll get together another time, I thought.

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But then I wake up to his text at 3 a.m.: "I should have gone to bed hours ago. YOU RUINED MY NIGHT!" (Because I didn't go home with him?) This was followed by WEEKS of him blowing up my phone, asking me why I wasn't texting him back and why I lost interest. Hmm, I wonder why?

No, Pal, That Friendship Has Sailed

A "nice guy" told me he would bash my head in with a brick and harm my entire family after he asked me out, and I turned him down. He texted me a month later to apologize and ask if we could still be friends.

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A Pack of Nice Guys

I lived one building over from a guy friend in college, so it was like a two-minute walk to my apartment from his. There had been increased crime in the apartment complex, so when I was leaving a party at his apartment, he offered to walk me home, just in case, because it was 2 a.m.

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He went in for a kiss at my door, and I politely declined but thanked him for walking me. He was really nice about it, but when I saw all of his friends on campus the next day, they were yelling that I "owed it to him to at least make out with him for being so nice to me."

Ah yes, very classy guys. That's probably why almost all of them were single.

An Element of Control

He was my ex. I stupidly agreed to go for a picnic with him a few weeks after we broke up. He absolutely insisted on being a gentleman, and by "being a gentleman," I mean treating me like a child by taking the bottle out of my hand when I went to pour myself a drink so he could do it. Every time. It was the same when it came to making the sandwiches, he insisted and pushed me out of the way, even though I wanted to make my own. He wouldn't let me.

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It infuriated me and reminded me why he wasn't good for me, and I never went out with him again.

Grief Counseling Gone Horribly Wrong

The morning that my best friend took his own life (I was 15, he was 17), a boy in his grade came up to me in the cafeteria. He had previously been creepy with just about everyone I knew, but it was a solemn day, so I figured even he would be normal. Nope.

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He sat down and proceeded to tell me that he'd seen my friend's body in the courtyard. If I wanted to make out to take my mind off of this stuff, he'd be happy to help me out.

Shamed for Saying No

I was joking with a "nice guy" friend about dating him and thought he was joking too. He kissed me, and I didn't stop him at the moment. After that, I politely let him know that I wasn't interested in him. I later found out he told everyone we actually dated, I broke his heart, and I'm addicted to intimacy.

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Entitled, Buddy, Not Courageous

I'm a dude, but I'm going to go ahead and post my experience. There's a local bar that's always packed on the weekends here where I live (college town). One Saturday night, my buddies and I are grabbing some drinks after watching a concert, and the place is packed. I'm noticing a total neck beard "nice guy" following around a group of girls that are clearly way out of his league. I mean this dude has the neck beard, the exposed belly and the anime shirt, and these chicks are perfect tens.

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Normally, I root for the underdog, but in this situation, I could tell these girls were bothered by this guy, and he clearly wasn't getting the hint. The girls ended up behind us, and I could hear the guy begging for one girl, in particular, to go home with him. "Come on. Are you serious? I'm way better than these guys here. Just give me a chance."

I had to hand it to the guy, he had guts.

Real Nice Guys Don't Commit Assault

I was 18 years old and had just started dating. This guy met me at my part-time job and said that I was really nice and that he wanted to take me out on a date. I said sure.

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So he picks me up in a Shelby Mustang. And he is really handsome. I feel like I've won the lottery. However, right there… not even two seconds into our car ride he tries to pull over and assault me. I'm like… no. I push his hand away and tell him that he needs to stop trying to assault me or I will throw his keys. He laughs and tries again. I pull the keys out of the ignition, undo my seatbelt, open the door, and hurl his keys as far as I possibly can into a field.

He starts cursing at me and how this wasn't even his car and blah blah blah. I just laughed and then I left. He tried texting me again afterward, but I ignored him.

Women Aren't Vending Machines

On my 21st birthday, we were in the club, and I'd had a little too much to drink. I went up to the bar for some water, but it was packed, so I just asked a dude who was about to be served if he could grab me some water with his drink. He did, and I said thanks and went back to dancing with my friends.

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About 15 minutes later, he just walks over and hands me a drink that isn't water and walks off again before I can explain that I'm done drinking or can even say thanks. I ended up just giving it to a male friend and forgetting about it for the rest of the night.

It hits 3 a.m., and the club kicks everybody out, and as I'm standing outside waiting for my boyfriend to appear with our bags, I'm approached by mystery drink dude. He just walks right up to me and says, "So are you coming back to my place tonight then?"

I laughed and was like "ARE YOU FOR REAL?" and he got mad. He genuinely thought I owed it to him to go home with him because he bought me a drink I didn't want. I tried to chill him out and explain that I was actually out with my boyfriend, and he got even madder that I hadn't mentioned that until now. Bear in mind our only interaction was when I asked him for water. And now suddenly I'm a lying, manipulative person who leads men on for my own gain and then denies them the intimacy they are owed.

Apparently, women are like vending machines. All you have to do it put drinks in, and you get intimacy out.

Captain Rebound Has No Clue

My boyfriend of four years had just broken up with me, and I was devastated. I had a guy friend in college that I was close to, so two days after the breakup, he asked me to hang out and get my mind off it. We went to a chain restaurant for dinner, and I found it odd that he kept insisting on paying — same thing for the movie we went to. I insisted he shouldn't, but he just whipped out his card and paid.

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Lo and behold, later that night he tried to make a move, eventually pretty much asking for intimacy. His reasoning? "You could at least give me something. I mean I took you out to dinner and a movie."

Gee, thanks. That's exactly what I want after I was betrayed by the love of my life two days ago: You betraying our friendship to try to get with me.

NGs Always Reveal Themselves

Someone I knew and trusted grabbed me when I was 17. I thought I was confiding this to a long-term friend, but then he told me: "I don't understand how you got to that point with him, but you and I hang out all the time and haven't gotten close."

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When Entitlement Becomes Violent

He asked for my number after buying me a drink. I didn't know him or even notice him until he walked up with a drink in hand. I said I was in a relationship (I was), and he started ranting and raving about how when "a nice guy buys you a drink, you give him the time of day." I got up and started walking away, he threw the bottle at me.

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High School Never Ends

First guy I ever dated was around 15. I told him I was still figuring things out and wanted to take things slow. He showed up with a dozen roses on our second date. I told him it was too much, and I was uncomfortable, but he refused to take them back. We hung out a few times, but I just wasn't that into him. I said I didn't want to keep dating, and we should just be friends.

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He said okay, but then he gave me a "goodbye" book that had jewelry hidden inside, and he refused to take that back too. If he texted, I kept things friendly and jokey, never saying anything romantic. I tried to avoid him and even sent him a garbage poem as only teen me could write to tell him to forget about me because I liked someone else (which was true).

Sometime later, it's prom season. He asks another girl, but then he finds out I haven't been asked yet, so he offers to dump her for me. I say it won't be fair to her and refuse. (I also really don't want to go with him, but I'm too scared to say this to his face.) He's super angry at prom because I went with a guy he hated. That guy also turned out later to be a jerk. (Oh, well. It still wouldn't have driven me into my first date's arms.

Years later, when we are both in college, I go home for a reunion. A girl asked me, "Hey, first date used to talk to me about you. I always wondered, why were you leading him on?"

A Venti Nice Guy with Extra Salt

I'm a barista. I had a regular ask me out a while back. He's kind of a creepy guy who has a reputation for being a "starer," and he likes to try to make small talk with the women there, even when they're obviously busy doing their jobs. I try to avoid talking to him as much as I can, but he seems mostly harmless.

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When I rejected him, he went on this tirade about how all women are shallow, and I only turned him down because he's a bigger fellow. Note that I'm engaged and wear a ring, so he was barking up the wrong tree in the first place. I basically told him that he was the shallow one because he only asked me out because he thinks I'm pretty, given that I'm not even nice to him. That shut him up.

Stalker on Aisle Five

I had a guy stalk me at the store I work in. I work alone too, which made the whole thing creepier. He would come in occasionally and stay there for an HOUR. Even if someone else would come in, he'd just drift around the store until they left and then keep talking to me. I was like 22 at the time, and he was easily in his late 30s.

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One time, I came into the shop, and my coworker asked if I knew this dude. I was like, no, why? "Because he comes in every day and is asking when you work." Dear. God.

So, the next time he comes in, he asks me out on a date. I say sorry, no, I have a boyfriend. Then he goes on a 30-minute rant about how women hate him, e's recently divorced, lonely, etc. He was full on guilt tripping me as if it was my fault I was in a happy, committed relationship. Yikes.

A Slow Grinding Halt

He picked me up and took me to the beach to get me out of my head and not be alone with myself after my friend committed suicide. When I turned away to stare out at the ocean, he came up behind me and started grabbing me. I told him to stop and that I wanted to go home, as this was just making my mood worse. When we got to my house, he moved in for a hug goodbye and immediately pulled my face up to his and tried to full-on make out with me. Thanks for ruining a kind gesture with the assumption of getting intimate when I am grieving my friend's death.

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