Nice Guys

 If you're looking for a "nice guy", check under one of these.

There’s a term that gets tossed around all the time in Reddit comment sections, Facebook status updates, and idle male chatter that makes me roll my eyes hard enough to cause serious ocular damage. The term is “nice guy”, and it’s done more to tarnish the reputation of sexually frustrated young men than any Judd Apatow movie – and as a sexually frustrated young man, that really offends me. I’m mad as hell, and I’m going to spend the next 950 words explaining why I’m mad!

For the uninitiated among you, men use terms like “nice guy” when discussing their (usually unsuccessful) relations with women. Here’s an example:

“Sloan and I hang out at the mall and talk on the phone all the time, but she just started going steady with that jerk Chad who works at the travel agency! I don’t get why girls always date bogus losers but never nice guys like me – they avoid me like the Noid! I also don’t get why it’s apparently the 1980s in this example.”

The gist of it is that “nice guys” believe themselves to be love’s long suffering martyrs: Despite the fact that they’re nothing but respectful and courteous to the women in their life, those cold-hearted bitches never think of them as anything more than friends. Hang around a group of younger men long enough and you’re bound to hear a “nice guy” griping about being trapped in some girl’s “friendzone” – a sexless place where cruel women imprison “nice guys” and force them to watch and listen as they get their hearts broken by one douche boyfriend after another.

What disgusts me about “nice guys” is that they seem to believe that men who are polite should be allowed to have sex with whoever they want to, and that any woman who doesn’t play ball with that notion is a manipulative bitch who has emasculated them. In that regard, self-proclaimed “nice guys” are really Al Bundy-style chauvinist assholes.

I hold doors open for people, recycle, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ use my turn signals, make eye contact with waiters and laugh at their jokes – even the ones that aren’t funny.* I’m a nice guy. And when I’m trying to describe things about myself that I believe make me attractive to the opposite sex, the fact that I’m nice doesn’t even make the list because there isn’t anything hot about common courtesy!    

*”Ha ha ha! Did you hear that, guys? The dessert special is Very Berry Cobbler! It rhymes and it’s descriptive of the dessert’s fruit content!”

“Hi, I test my smoke detectors every six months – can I buy you a drink?”

“You may not know it to look at me, but I’ve never once eaten somebody else’s lunch out of the fridge at work. Mind if I have a seat?”

“Hey baby. I always make sure to park less than six inches away from the curb to ensure that my car doesn’t impede the flow of traffic. Want to get out of here?”

I’m going to say in all seriousness something that will make a lot of my readers laugh harder than any other line I’ve put on this blog in five years: I, Truman Capps, have some idea of what women want.

Women want to be with someone interesting. I know this because I want to be with someone interesting, and I’m of the controversial opinion that men and women are not only members of the same species but also are looking for similar things in a romantic partner.

“Nice guys” who are reading this: Suppose you know a girl who really, really likes you. Her greatest point of pride is the fact that she has good manners. She doesn’t have any particular interests, doesn’t read or watch much TV, no real goals or aspirations, and her only hobby is being nice.

“What did you do this weekend?”

“I was nice! I went to the park and was nice to people, and then I got lunch and was really nice to my waiter, and then I just went home and was nice alone for a couple of hours before going to bed early. Thank you for asking! How about you?”

Would you really want to invest a huge amount of your time and energy in that person? If the answer is no, then why the hell would you expect a woman to be bowled over by you when “niceness” is the one thing that supposedly sets you apart from other guys?

Being nice is pleasant, but not interesting. It’s possible to be nice and interesting – holla back, Ryan Gosling! – but between the two, interesting is the real panty dropper. Women date assholes because assholes tend to be interesting enough to make up for their lack of niceness.* Full stop. That’s the secret. Where’s my Nobel Prize?

*The vast majority of the women I know are dating guys who are so interesting, wonderful, and nice that I wish I was dating them.

The good news for “nice guys” is that everyone is interesting. My advice to any “nice guy” desperate enough to listen to pickup tips from the single guy with a blog would be to take the time you spend on the Internet talking about how unappreciated your “niceness” is and invest it in the qualities and activities that you think make you interesting.

Sooner or later you’re bound to meet a woman through this activity (provided your interesting activity isn’t competitive helicopter dicking) who shares your interests, and then you’ll discover that being in a relationship with someone you care about is its own can of worms.

I hope that at no point in this update I’ve given the impression that I consider myself an expert on women, because I’m far from it. I think a lot of this ought to be common sense, but it seems like every day I see some “nice guy” claiming that all women are stupid or evil because he’s been rejected by a few of them, opting to write off 51% of humanity when the common denominator in all of his failures is him.

If you’re “nice” because you expect something in return, you’re actually kind of an asshole – and not even the cool, dangerous type of asshole who gets laid.

Truman Capps apologizes profusely to his mother for using the term 'panty dropper' in his blog.