{"id":2516,"date":"2021-09-24T14:30:51","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T14:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/?p=2516"},"modified":"2021-09-24T14:30:53","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T14:30:53","slug":"what-exactly-is-a-nice-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/?p=2516","title":{"rendered":"What Exactly is a Nice Guy?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In my many space travels as a legospaceman, I never ran into a civilization that didn’t speak lego<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019re all just really bad guys. It\u2019s almost its own demographic within the confines of writing that whenever I see a story that mentions \u201cnice guys\u201d, I suspect it\u2019s going to turn negative and start talking about how nice guys are anything but that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, I\u2019m going to let you in on a little secret. Most nice guys aren\u2019t nice guys. They\u2019re opportunists that hide behind the designation and then will eventually pounce when the time finally comes around. But that doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t guys out there who aren\u2019t 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\u2019s focused more on the guy pretending to be one and making lots of noise to convince her of that possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember a story of a friend of mine who stopped by our usual coffee joint one day and started out the conversation with \u201cI don\u2019t understand women. I\u2019m a nice guy, and I get treated like crap.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, you\u2019re probably thinking all sorts of things about my \u201cfriend\u201d, who let\u2019s just call Bob for the sake of names, and let\u2019s 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\u2019ve been treated by the guys in your past, so that if you\u2019ve been treated badly, you\u2019re probably going to think Bob is just pretending to be a nice guy, and if you\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Bob was really none of those. You see, Bob was full of crap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t a gossip column). But seriously, he wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was most definitely not a nice guy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here\u2019s the catch. He THOUGHT he was a nice guy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? Because he was who he was, and in most people\u2019s 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, \u201chey, dufus, you\u2019re a bad guy.\u201d But there are many occasions where it probably should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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: \u201cNails, you\u2019re really a nice guy.\u201d That\u2019s just the natural state of people. We\u2019re stupid when we need to be stupid just so we can get through the day into the next one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what is a nice guy? Or more importantly, do any actually exist?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d like to think they do, and I\u2019d like to say that I\u2019m probably one of them, but I may suffer from disillusion just like Bob did. I\u2019m bred like every other male on the planet in that I\u2019m 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\u2019t surprise me, however, if there\u2019s some woman out there thinking to herself, \u201csorry, kiddo, but you couldn\u2019t even put the toilet seat down no matter how many times I told you,\u201d so even that\u2019s probably just in perspective. Some people are going to like you, and others, no matter what you do or say, aren\u2019t going to like you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s just life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, let\u2019s take it a step further. If you desired to be a nice guy, what would differentiate you from those who aren\u2019t, because in the end, just gaining the designation of \u201cnice\u201d indicates that there must be those who aren\u2019t nice, or are at least not as nice. So, how do we achieve just that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d 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\u2019re never going to achieve a sense of niceness. Instead, you\u2019re going to gain whatever item or items you were striving for that you hoped your good nature would yield for you. There\u2019s no niceness in that whatsoever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I think about feeling \u201cnice,\u201d I often find myself having to think outside of myself. And it\u2019s 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\u2019t actually work to benefit you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t have seen if I hadn\u2019t offered my assistance back then. I saw that as \u201cnice\u201d 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\u2019s future success, or some that actually used it as a vehicle to further their dating prospects, neither of which seemed very \u201cnice\u201d to me. But then, I suspect \u201cnice\u201d wasn\u2019t exactly a part of their process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, after years of interacting with people on various levels, I\u2019ve 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\u2019s an element that sometimes goes over the top with this definition, where people think to be \u201cnice\u201d you have to actually sacrifice and lose something to achieve such a status. Again, that\u2019s back to the transactional approach to giving and receiving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, I\u2019m satisfied just going out of my way to see someone else benefit from something I\u2019ve done or said. And sometimes, just a smile of acknowledgement is enough to make me feel that I\u2019ve done something that is perceived as being \u201cnice\u201d. Those who seek awards or accolades aren\u2019t necessarily nice people, but people seeking some type of validation as payment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t 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 \u201csmarter\u201d 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\u2019t 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 \u201cnice\u201d for going out of his way to fix the computer constantly, and he did nothing to challenge that assumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That sort of showed me that this is how so many people can constantly perceive the wrong people as \u201cnice guys\u201d, and then feel so angry when they discover they\u2019re not, in fact, really nice guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reality of the situation is that most nice guys will go under the radar because that\u2019s part of the process of actually being a nice guy. When you seek validation for it, you\u2019re not really nice any longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nice guys are somewhat the same way, which is why the noisiest \u201cnice guy\u201d who wants everyone to know how nice he is, is often not actually a nice guy. If you want to find the \u201cnice guy\u201d look in the shadows near the guy taking the most credit, and chances are you may actually find him. Just don\u2019t let him know you found him, because most often he remains the nice guy as long as he never has to claim the title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019re all just really bad guys. It\u2019s almost its own demographic within the confines of writing that whenever I see a story that mentions \u201cnice guys\u201d, … Continue reading What Exactly is a Nice Guy?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_regular_price":[],"currency_symbol":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,17,19,23],"tags":[343,2086,2084,2085,907,1069,1428],"class_list":["post-2516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs","category-relationships-2","category-social-networking","category-writing","tag-dating","tag-good-vs-bad","tag-men","tag-men-and-women","tag-nice-guys","tag-relationships","tag-women"],"post_slider_layout_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","post_slider_layout_landscape_large":"","post_slider_layout_portrait_large":"","post_slider_layout_square_large":"","post_slider_layout_landscape":"","post_slider_layout_portrait":"","post_slider_layout_square":"","full":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2517,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516\/revisions\/2517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarbonn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}