Many thanks for sending me the link to this post (you know who you are). I had a great time making this video

You're welcome ;) Now that you've done the video, I'll offer my perspective: I think a key part is that this is her retrospective story of what happened, and she's emphasising a narrative that lets her off the hook. For example, she plays dumb about the clear signals he was sending (he took me out for dinner and keeps complimenting my looks, but could it be a date? Who knows!). But I really can't believe that she was actually so naive at the time. I think that she understood what was going on at the time just fine, but is choosing to give this cognitive-dissonance-reducing, self-esteem-preserving version in retrospect. It reminds me of something a female friend of mine observed a while ago: women sometimes go for 'I'm afraid of him', or 'he made me feel unsafe', because it's easier than 'I don't like him' or 'he's unattractive'. Because there's so little pushback, so little cost to claiming that. Like, you're within your rights to dump someone for being fat and into Disney movies, but people might potentially judge you for it, you risk seeming a little vapid, and it means you have to take responsibility for that decision. Instead she found a script that lets her dump him without being on the hook for any of that: he's a 'nice guy', and she was just defending herself from his entitled advances. And then she twists the story to emphasise that interpretation. As for nice guys: I agree that you shouldn't totally kill the nice part of yourself and go full dark triad. But I disagree that 'niceness' is always a purely good trait, either. I think it depends where it's coming from: a genuine desire to make people happy, or out of fear of not being liked, terror of rejection. I think for lots of men, especially the kind who get called 'nice guys', it's the latter. (Definitely it was for me a few years ago.) But sometimes you have to choose between being liked and being respected, and sometimes you have to risk being rejected in order to be loved.

Jeans