July 2nd 2009

What's a Nice Guy, Anyway?

What Characterizes a Nice Guy?

Many have tried, at least half-heartedly, to answer this question. Is a nice guy a gentleman who holds the door and piles on the compliments, the best friend who listens to stories of a woman’s “jerk” boyfriend in silence while wondering what color her panties are (click the link and scroll down), or a guy who wants a long-term relationship?

Furthermore, what is a bad boy? Is he a mysterious loner or a loquacious charmer? Handsome, charismatic, or just aggressive?

Even the fundamental characteristics of these prototypes break down under scrutiny. Isn’t it more likely that all of us (men and women), to varying degrees or at different moments in our lives, have been the nice guy and the bad boy?

The Dark Triad

Key question: how many Machiavellian, narcissistic psychopaths have you met? I know, it’s tempting to say “loads,” but allowing for a bit of narcissism and insanity among the majority of the general population, I myself would have to say: “very few.” I’m not disputing that they’re out there, and I’m sure I’ve come across a few pathological “bad boys” in my day and probably just ignored them and let them move on to someone else (okay, I fooled around with one once, but I knew exactly what I was getting into).

But actually, I suspect that the vast majority of us have been on both sides of the paradigm at different times in our lives. Maybe without even knowing it. In a first-season episode of Sex and the City called “The Monogamists,” Skipper, a quintessential “nice guy” who is madly in love with Miranda, displays unmistakably jerk-like behavior when a flirty answering-machine message from Miranda causes him to break up with a date so abruptly that his date responds "You're breaking up with me while you're still inside me?" Nice.

I think in my considerable number of relationships (inclinations toward serial monogamy) I've only dated one guy I would be tempted to classify as a Machiavellian psychopath. (Not bad, right?) And even in that case, I could see where the bad boy behavior came from (which doesn't make it okay, of course). He seduced me for months until I broke up with my boyfriend and fell decidedly head-over-heels for him, then dropped me quite unceremoniously after a 2.5-week affair. Months later he tried very hard to seduce a woman who I considered my best friend at the time. And yet I happen to know that before I ever met him, he played the role of devoted "nice guy" in a passionate if not a little twisted four-year relationship with his high-school sweetheart. She dumped him: voila, bad boy.

Women Can Be Jerks Too (Even Me)

Setting aside the likely theory that women who go for jerks might just be jerks themselves, it’s also likely that women, like men, want different things at different times in their lives, and that can sometimes lead to bad behavior. As we saw in the examples above, one woman's nice guy can be another's bad boy, and the same can be true for women.

I have it on good authority (Stefanie, and my mom, at the very least) that I am a nice person. I've always done my best to be honest and considerate, and to avoid hurting anyone. Did that stop my eighteen-year-old self from chasing an adorable but nerdy guy (older, I might add) until he was writing me cards over Christmas vacation, then telling him I really didn't want a boyfriend and proceeding to invite him to a party in my dorm room where I was flirting with someone else? Unfortunately not.

It took me two years to gain the perspective and maturity to realize what a jerk I'd been in that situation (and several others in the same time period—apparently early college was my time to experiment with bad behavior), but I guarantee I learned from the guilt I felt when I grew up a bit. But I am still aware that to that guy—and probably a few others—I am, if not forgotten, most likely immortalized in less-than-flattering terminology.

Relationships are tricky. We've all done things we weren't proud of, we've all written someone off as a jerk or a bitch (gotta' love gendered insults), we've all written someone off as just not that interesting. But maybe if we stopped looking at the world in terms of "nice guys" and "bad boys" and started thinking in terms of people with a variety of ever-shifting desires, we could all improve our chances of getting what we want.