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“Nice guys finish last” is a phrase that has always made me feel a lot of negative emotions. Frustration comes to mind. Disgust. Exhaustion. Do women have a phrase like that? Do we say that, “Nice women finish last?” No way. That’s a very complex topic in and of itself since women have been told for centuries to just “be nice,” which really did hold us back, but we were told was a good thing. And now you have empowered, fabulous “nasty women” who make some gains due to it, but are also chastised for it. We don’t get this clean and convenient relationship with the word “nice” that men have. But I digress. I’m tired of men saying “nice guys finish last” and, quite frankly, I’ve never met one who said it that was really all that nice. Here’s the truth about that twisted idea.
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Being nice for a reward isn’t nice
Often, when men say this, it’s because they were very nice to a woman for a long time, in the hopes that, in return, she’d sleep with them. Then she didn’t. She slept with someone else. And they complain it’s because they were “nice.” So, to be clear: doing something nice purely because you want something in return is not nice. That’s called being selfish.
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Neither is being dishonest
Also, while we’re on the topic of being nice to a woman in the hopes that she’ll sleep with you, it’s dishonest. She believes you just want to be her friend because you’ve never stated otherwise, and all the while you have an agenda. You’re a guy who wants to sleep with her, in disguise of a man who doesn’t. You’re pretending to be happy in the friend zone. That’s dishonest, and that’s not nice.
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Being a doormat doesn’t = being nice
I typically see men who will let women walk all over them—they’ll take the woman’s car to be washed while she has lunch with another man and dog sit for her while she goes on a trip with another man—and then they’ll say they didn’t get her because they were nice. What they were was a doormat and that’s a different category.
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Nobody made you be nice
When men complain that they were so nice to a woman and got nothing return, it really angers me because nobody made them do that. They are grown*ss men with free will who don’t have to do anything for anybody that they don’t want to do. They have nobody but themselves to blame if they did a bunch of things they didn’t enjoy.
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Your values should be for you
You know what’s really attractive? Sticking to your values because they matter to you and not because they may attract or impress someone else. When men are just nice in the hopes that women will take notice, that’s just sad. Does that mean they aren’t nice when women aren’t watching?
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If she truly prefers jerks…
Sometimes, a man is correct in that the woman he is after just likes jerks. Okay. Fine. I can concede that sometimes women do like jerks. But to that “nice” guy I ask: so, um, why do you like women who like jerks? That really says something more about that guy than that woman.
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But sometimes, that’s just your perception
The reality is that a lot of times when a guy loses out on a woman who chooses another guy, the “loser” makes himself feel better by just telling himself that the other guy is a jerk and the woman likes jerks. But, sometimes, that’s just his perception. The winner is often a nice guy, too.
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What we really like is confidence
What “nice guys” mistake as cockiness is really just confidence. That’s what women tend to respond to in men. Some men who struggle to exhibit confidence have to tell themselves that confidence always equals cockiness in order to console themselves.
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Confidence, combined with kindness
And, for the record, confident men can be kind. In fact, that’s the combination of traits we like the most. It’s not as simple as men breaking down into two categories of meek but nice men and confident jerks. Hybrids exist. Oh, and there are meek jerks, too.
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Being assertive doesn’t= being a jerk
The story many “nice guys” lean on is that the guy who got the girl was pushy, while the nice guy was “polite and patient.” What really happened, often, is the guy who got the girl was just assertive. He let his intentions be known.
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Sitting and waiting doesn’t make you nice
Sitting around, quietly waiting for someone to notice you and give you what you want without you ever having to ask for it doesn’t make you nice. It’s actually the opposite of that because, you’re setting others up to fail. A woman who might have said yes if you’d asked her out is now the devil in your eyes because she dated someone else. But you never asked her out.
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In fact, it makes you a little pathetic
Truly, just sitting around hoping somebody hands you what you want without having to fight for it or ask for it makes a man rather pathetic. There seem to be a lot of self-proclaimed “nice guys” out there who, quite frankly, are just being pathetic. They’re sitting around feeling sorry for themselves.
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Becoming resentful is so petty
Let’s not forget about the men who get fed up with being “nice” for so long that then they intentionally become jerks. Ugh. What a delusional, stupid, and misguided path.
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Plenty of jerks finish last
There are jerks who finish last, by the way. Jerks finish last all of the time, because they’re jerks!
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They just don’t sit around pitying themselves
You know what the jerks have over the “nice guys”? Well, at least they don’t sit around pitying themselves for not getting what they wanted. They just go out and try again.
