I'm not sure at what point one becomes a "nice" guy. When I was single I had women friends that I had a crush on. Similar to how it is described in articles like this one, I did "favors" for these women partly in hopes that something romantic would materialize. Similar to a lot of these stories, it didn't. While I felt resentful, I never felt like I owned them or that they owed me anything.

I realized that my resentment was rooted in my own expectations and that these women had done nothing to earn it. One woman friend recognized my behavior confronted me and asked me if I was "into her". In order to save my pride, I denied it. She was very direct with me: she valued our friendship, however we would only ever be friends. I respected her for that. She was one of a group of my friends that travelled to Puerto Rico to see me get married.

I never lashed out and in most cases I stayed friends with these women. I worked through my feelings and I moved on. There was one woman friend that felt entitled to my "favors" and I think she was resentful when those "favors" stopped happening. Our friendship was a little awkward after that, but it eventually normalized.

Looking back, I don't regret my choices and I benefited from those relationships, platonic as they were. I learned from those experiences. I stopped only doing things for people when I thought I would get something in return. Either I give freely or I don't give at all. I stopped using "favors" as a strategy for pursuing women.