People sometimes tell me that I’m “too nice”.
I don’t agree.
I’ve got a list of ex-girlfriends who wouldn’t agree, either. I am not too nice. In fact, exes would probably say that I’m not nice enough, not a good enough listener, a bit self-absorbed, and many other equally valid complaints. I try to be kind, but unfortunately, I’ve also got a bit of a mean streak.
I’m working on it in therapy.
My problem has never been that I’m “too nice”. However, that is the problem for a lot of my friends. A lot of my friends are “nice guys”.
Or, at least, they’re guys who think they’re nice guys.
Self-proclaimed nice guys are a complicated bunch because some of them actually are nice guys.
But some nice guys have flourishing dating lives and healthy relationships, and other nice guys “finish last”. Why?
The solution to the “nice guys finish last” problem is far more complicated than just getting them to clean up their rooms and log out of 4chan. If you want to be nice without “finishing last”, you don’t have to turn yourself into some obnoxious alpha-male with a Joe Rogan tattoo, you just have to stop lying to yourself and the world. You have to become actually nice.
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What’s is a nice guy, really?
I have a friend who’s insanely nice, and honestly, I can’t stand being around him most of the time.
He claims that he’s nice, he claims that he “respects women”, but I honestly I wouldn’t call it respect. He doesn’t view the opposite sex as human beings, he views women as prizes that he can only win by contorting and bending his behavior to meet their every wish and demand. He’s “fake nice”.
How do I know? He constantly complains to me about having to act a certain way in order to keep his girlfriend happy. He hates being nice, but he does it anyway.
His persona is that of a proud feminist, but really, he’s just another victim of toxic masculinity who’s becoming a manipulator.
See, toxic masculinity does one of two things to young men:
- It makes them into hyper-aggressive jerks.
- It makes them into doormats.
For most of my life, I was “type of man #1” and my friend was “type of man #2”. I was an angry, loud, aggressive asshole who wanted what he wanted and would be upset till he got it, and my friend was a doormat who would let women walk all over him in relationships. Every time he started dating, I stopped seeing him for months because he’d become a devout worshipper of the woman he was seeing.
The truth is, we were both insecure men who just wanted love and had been convinced to act a certain way in order to get it.
We had the same problem, and we approached it in two very different ways. Both were wrong.
Bro, you’re not “an alpha”
I grew up in the aggressive, hyper-masculine world of combat sports.
I played football and wrestled in middle school, wrestled in high school, and I’ve fought in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competitions since I turned 18. I also grew up around a lot of behaviors synonymous with toxic masculinity, like excessive drinking, verbal abuse, and emotional repression. As a highly sensitive, anxious kid, I felt constantly bombarded by the message that I was not enough of a man to hang in the real world.
My conditioning made me believe that I was not a “real man”.
I responded to this insecurity by becoming a really tough, strong, respectable athlete, which I still am to this day. In a lot of ways, I look like what people would call an “alpha male”. I have a strong physique, I can be loud when necessary, and well, I fight every day. Risky behavior is my livelihood.
But honestly, I don’t really feel like “an alpha” sometimes. Sometimes, I get insecure, depressed, and anxious. I have a mental illness. Sometimes, I get tired of carrying around this persona of a man who can handle anything, because honestly, I can’t.
Does that mean I’m a “beta male”?
I don’t know, but honestly, I don’t really care.
I don’t care because there is no evidence that alpha males actually exist in human sociology.
Whether alpha males actually exist or not is irrelevant, but arguing over their existence is certainly not what true alpha males would do. Real men don’t sit around talking about how much of a man they are. Humans are more complicated than chimpanzees, which is why it’s silly to believe that we would use the same social hierarchy as them. Humans are monkeys, but we’re highly advanced monkeys. Our social games are much more complex.
Real men are kind, not nice
There’s nothing wrong with being a “nice guy”. I’m trying to be nicer myself.
The problem with “niceness” is not the niceness itself, but the authenticity of that niceness. If you’re a man who’s being nice solely to get laid, you’re not really nice, you’re a liar. That isn’t kindness, it’s manipulation. That isn’t kindness, it’s trickery and exploitation.
That isn’t kindness, it’s messed up.
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Kindness isn’t something that should be only given out when sex is potentially on the table. If someone is attracted to people who are mean to them, that isn’t verification that girls like “bad boys”, that’s verification that some people have trauma responses that make them attracted to pain, because the pain feels like home to them.
I once was in love with someone who essentially left me to travel with someone who was a manipulative narcissist. She had a choice, and she chose that. For a while, it broke me. I couldn’t understand how the world could have done something so evil to me. I was self-centered and young, and I thought she left me because I was weak. It made me angry with myself. It made me feel like a doormat.
In time, however, I’ve realized that not everything that happens to you is about you. Sometimes, you’re just an extra in someone else’s story.
Realizing that gave me so much peace and made me far kinder than I’ve ever imagined.
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Closing thoughts
Every article I’ve ever read about “nice guys” has seemed incomplete to me.
Guys who are “too nice” aren’t actually nice at all. They’re creepy. However, this doesn’t mean you should be mean to people. There’s a 3rd option: develop genuine kindness.
In my life, I’ve been in relationships where I’ve been an emotionally distant jerk and other relationships where I’ve been a doormat. Honestly, I haven’t mastered the craft of having perfect relationships, but I do know that in both of these cases I was being inauthentic. That was my problem.
I’m not going to become a jerk nor a doormat in order to get laid or get someone to like me. I don’t really know what “real men” do, but I’d guess that they don’t contort their behavior in order to exploit others in social situations. You can be a kind person, be strong, and still have healthy relationships.
That’s not manipulation, that’s called growing up.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Evan Wise on Unsplash