One of the more common tropes of banter on social media is the concept of nice guys and how someone feels she was treated badly by one, and thus, they’re all just really bad guys. It’s almost its own demographic within the confines of writing that whenever I see a story that mentions “nice guys”, I suspect it’s going to turn negative and start talking about how nice guys are anything but that.

Well, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Most nice guys aren’t nice guys. They’re opportunists that hide behind the designation and then will eventually pounce when the time finally comes around. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t guys out there who aren’t nice guys; it just means that there are very few, and most women will come across one or two in her lifetime, and probably never even realize he was standing in front of her at the time because she’s focused more on the guy pretending to be one and making lots of noise to convince her of that possibility.

I remember a story of a friend of mine who stopped by our usual coffee joint one day and started out the conversation with “I don’t understand women. I’m a nice guy, and I get treated like crap.”

Now, you’re probably thinking all sorts of things about my “friend”, who let’s just call Bob for the sake of names, and let’s just get the baggage out of the way with what we suspect about Bob. If Bob called himself a nice guy, your impression of him probably has a lot to do with how you’ve been treated by the guys in your past, so that if you’ve been treated badly, you’re probably going to think Bob is just pretending to be a nice guy, and if you’ve had a decent relationship with guys in your past, you might suspect that he could be a nice guy, but he probably has a flaw or two that might need to be fixed.

But Bob was really none of those. You see, Bob was full of crap.

When Bob told me this nice guy stuff, I remembered that he had been in a dicey relationship with Shirley because she had found out about Becky, and he was trying to make time with Veronica (yeah, all made up names cause this isn’t a gossip column). But seriously, he wasn’t loyal, cared only about the woman he was with at the very moment he happened to be standing in front of her, and he either dumped or got dumped by them on almost a whim.

He was most definitely not a nice guy.

But here’s the catch. He THOUGHT he was a nice guy.

Why? Because he was who he was, and in most people’s stories they are never the villain; they are always the hero. Our psyche is designed to make us feel that way. Our inner voice rarely says, “hey, dufus, you’re a bad guy.” But there are many occasions where it probably should.

As a guy who tends to be that person that people confide in, let me just tell you that practically every guy sees himself as a nice guy. Because he’s who he is, and I would argue that even a guy sitting on death row for murdering half the population of Arkansas with a chainsaw is probably looking into the mirror and saying: “Nails, you’re really a nice guy.” That’s just the natural state of people. We’re stupid when we need to be stupid just so we can get through the day into the next one.

So, what is a nice guy? Or more importantly, do any actually exist?

I’d like to think they do, and I’d like to say that I’m probably one of them, but I may suffer from disillusion just like Bob did. I’m bred like every other male on the planet in that I’m always going to believe my inner voice is helping me to do the best job I can, so therefore, I must be a nice guy. Wouldn’t surprise me, however, if there’s some woman out there thinking to herself, “sorry, kiddo, but you couldn’t even put the toilet seat down no matter how many times I told you,” so even that’s probably just in perspective. Some people are going to like you, and others, no matter what you do or say, aren’t going to like you.

That’s just life.

So, let’s take it a step further. If you desired to be a nice guy, what would differentiate you from those who aren’t, because in the end, just gaining the designation of “nice” indicates that there must be those who aren’t nice, or are at least not as nice. So, how do we achieve just that?

I’d argue that to begin with, your goals need to be further than a cost-benefit analysis of outcomes. If you do everything in the guise of transactional behavior (if I do this, I get that), you’re never going to achieve a sense of niceness. Instead, you’re going to gain whatever item or items you were striving for that you hoped your good nature would yield for you. There’s no niceness in that whatsoever.

When I think about feeling “nice,” I often find myself having to think outside of myself. And it’s a two-step process. First, you have to want to do something for others to benefit them. And then, which is the hardest part, you have to do it in a way that doesn’t actually work to benefit you.

Years back, I used to mentor young people in writing. People used to ask me what I got out of it. My response was that one day I would get to see really good writing out there in the world that I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t offered my assistance back then. I saw that as “nice” behavior, even though in the end, I was still probably getting something out of the mix. But then I ran across predatory writing mentors that were interested in achieving a piece of someone’s future success, or some that actually used it as a vehicle to further their dating prospects, neither of which seemed very “nice” to me. But then, I suspect “nice” wasn’t exactly a part of their process.

So, after years of interacting with people on various levels, I’ve come to the conclusion that being a nice guy means going out of your way to help others without any desire for compensation or benefit in return. Having said that, there’s an element that sometimes goes over the top with this definition, where people think to be “nice” you have to actually sacrifice and lose something to achieve such a status. Again, that’s back to the transactional approach to giving and receiving.

For me, I’m satisfied just going out of my way to see someone else benefit from something I’ve done or said. And sometimes, just a smile of acknowledgement is enough to make me feel that I’ve done something that is perceived as being “nice”. Those who seek awards or accolades aren’t necessarily nice people, but people seeking some type of validation as payment.

Back when I was in grad school, I remember the grad lounge had a printer that always broke down. Before going back to grad school, I was a computer repair technician, and I specialized in harder to maintain aspects of that field like monitors, hard drives and, yes, printers. So, often, when I heard another grad student complaining about how he or she couldn’t get his or her papers completed in time because of the printer, I would sneak into the lab at night and actually fix the printer so it would be working the next morning. No one ever figured out who was constantly fixing the printer (it was old and it happened a lot due to the amount of usage), but eventually people started giving credit to one of the “smarter” grad students who was always bragging about his accomplishments; he even took credit for it. I could have jumped in and revealed his lack of accomplishments, but honestly, I didn’t care, and I found it kind of funny while a bit interesting as it told me more and more about this individual than I would have ever discovered any other way. For the longest time, he was perceived as “nice” for going out of his way to fix the computer constantly, and he did nothing to challenge that assumption.

That sort of showed me that this is how so many people can constantly perceive the wrong people as “nice guys”, and then feel so angry when they discover they’re not, in fact, really nice guys.

The reality of the situation is that most nice guys will go under the radar because that’s part of the process of actually being a nice guy. When you seek validation for it, you’re not really nice any longer.

It’s kind of like the old Socratic argument that plagued the philosopher in his final days. People claimed he was the smartest man alive, yet he suspected that once he acknowledged himself as the smartest man, he would no longer be worthy of that title.

Nice guys are somewhat the same way, which is why the noisiest “nice guy” who wants everyone to know how nice he is, is often not actually a nice guy. If you want to find the “nice guy” look in the shadows near the guy taking the most credit, and chances are you may actually find him. Just don’t let him know you found him, because most often he remains the nice guy as long as he never has to claim the title.