What are your experiences with "White Knights" and/or "Nice Guys" like?

Most of the people I've seen called "White Knights" were online only and were generally being called such for actually pointing out that someone was doing something really fucked up. Shit on the level of Guy A tells the story of stopping a bus pervert from harassing a pretween, Guy B calls him a White Knight. I have met a few IRL who I think really did deserve the scornful title. Guys who would try to "rescue" women at parties from dudes they were trying to hit on, or jump into disagreements between couples and act like the woman was a poor defenseless little mouse regardless of what was actually going on.

There's nice guys and then there's Nice Guys.

The first bunch are non-aggressive people who have empathy and compassion. In general, they treat other people with respect and do their best not to cause harm. They actually like helping others, even people they are not sexually interested in. They tend to have reasonable responses to setbacks, and when they don't get what they want they may be sad but they don't feel they've been robbed of their entitlement. Some of them are confident and do well getting into relationships, some of them are not confident in themselves and don't make moves when they probably should. Also because they tend to think well of people, they may be attracted to people who, well, aren't that nice. People tend to assume other people are like they are, it can be hard to get past. But most of them are smart and self aware enough not to do that, and instead they end up off the dating market in healthy long term relationships.

Then there's Nice Guys. They make a lot of noise about how well they'd treat someone if only they were given the chance, but when you look at their actions they're usually not even treating their current friends well. They blame other people for their failures ("Jerks" "Women" etc) and are outright mean especially to anyone they think has rejected them. Their focus is firmly on their own feelings. Even their romantic interest is viewed with a kind of hostility, because (s)he's not giving them what they think they deserve as a self proclaimed "nice" person. On a very fundamental level, they think that the world owes them good things because they are a "good" person. Often their romantic intentions go amiss because they don't actually know much about the person they are 'interested' in. Instead they know all about their own feelings and attitudes to that person. A classic example is the Nice Guy who complains about how he sat and listened to her troubles with her ex, but now she won't date him. If asked what those troubles were, he'd draw a complete blank because what he was doing was not in fact "listening".

/r/AskWomen Thread