The former part is the cause of the latter. The guys I've known like this were trying to treat it like a game and/or had unrealistic expectations, and that ended about as well as it always does. Once they started being genuine and realistic, things changed dramatically.

You have no idea. I am sure there are some men who change for the better, but there's plenty of men who try being genuine and realistic and get no positive response.

Well, I certainly don’t know your friends but I can say that in my experience the guys who _said_ that tended to have, shall we say, gaps in their self-assessment or were unable to accept that there was nothing you could do to make one specific person feel differently.