Confessions of a Former Nice Girl™, Part 1

I have yet to write at length about Elliot Rodger’s killing spree or the #YesAllWomen hashtag that surfaced in response to his misogynistic manifesto, partly because I haven’t had much free time lately (hello, first blog post in over a month), but also because I needed to sit with my thoughts on it for a little while. Some news stories are too upsetting to talk about immediately and I needed a little time and distance before I could comment.

I considered writing a blog post about the most egregious forms of sexism I’ve experienced in my lifetime, or of being harassed on the street, or of being on the receiving end of a piece of intimidation disguised as a compliment.

Instead, I want to talk briefly about the Nice Guy™ phenomenon. Elliot Rodger was the most dangerous form of the Nice Guy™, whose anger towards and hatred of women led him to commit a series of murders. He desired women, and when they didn’t desire him back, he resented them, and he killed several women (the prizes he could never win) and several men (the undeserving jerks who stole the prizes he could never win).

Most Nice Guys™ don’t go as far as committing murder, but the Nice Guy™ mindset runs rampant in our culture, with scores of men thinking that the best way to get a woman to be interested in him is to be Nice, and then eventually, she will reward him with sex and/or romance.

Already, I can hear the choruses of men – some of whom are jerks, some of whom might be genuinely good guys who are feeling momentarily defensive – crying out that sometimes women do that too, and are we saying that there’s no such thing as a Nice Girl™?

No, I’m not saying that. There are definitely Nice Girls™ in this world. I know because I used to be one of them.

In middle school and high school, I was not a pretty girl. I had few friends, I was isolated and teased, and I was repeatedly told that I was undesirable, unattractive, and ugly. As a coping mechanism, I invented elaborate fantasies about the guys I had crushes on. Most of these fantasies involved a popular boy declaring his feelings for me in front of his popular friends, thus getting the affection and validation I wanted and saying “screw you” to anyone who was ever mean to me.

These boys all had the same two important qualities in common. They were all funny and all had shown me more basic human decency than the other kids in school.

In every case, I decided that we were meant to be, and focused obsessively on the qualities that I liked about him (he’s funny, we get along, he’s friendly) and conveniently edited out the qualities that made him incompatible with me (he’s not interested in me in that way). I didn’t want the real guy. I wanted the idealized version of him in my head.

As a result, I never asked the guy out or let him know that I was interested (with one exception, which I’ll get to shortly). Heavens, no. That would have required guts that I didn’t have. Instead, I would hang around the guy more frequently, time my exits from the lunchroom to coincide with his so we could walk up the stairs together, and try to be his friend…because even if he didn’t like me now, surely he would once we spent enough time together and he saw how cool I was.

I broke this pattern only once in my sophomore year, when I told a male classmate and friend over email that I liked him, that I knew he probably didn’t feel the same way, but I wanted to let him know just in case, and I still wanted to be friends regardless. He let me down very nicely, and after a few days of awkwardness, we were back to normal, and we stayed friendly until the end of high school.

Looking back, it’s funny to see how, at the time, the “pining in the distance and waiting for him to like me” strategy seemed like the safer choice, when being honest about my feelings was too mortifying a concept to entertain.

Looking back, my moments of pining and longing still make me cringe, while the one time I was forthright and honest makes me want to go back in time and high-five my fifteen-year-old self for having the guts to lay my feelings on the line.

Looking back, I understand what set apart that incident in sophomore year from the other times I pined from a distance. In that case, the boy in question was more than an idealized object I worshiped from afar and sometimes conversed with awkwardly. In that case, he was actually my friend, not someone I faked friendship with in the hopes of getting something more later on. And I realized that I had to tell him how I felt because hiding my feelings was driving me to distraction, but I also knew that I would want to continue be friends regardless of whether or not he returned my feelings, because I liked him enough as a person that the friendship was worth maintaining.

To put it more simply, I had crushes on several different guys during high school. With most of them, I was a Nice Girl™. With the guy in sophomore year, I was just a girl who had unrequited feelings for a friend.

Because most of those guys were fantasy objects I put on pedestals, but the guy in sophomore year was an actual person in my eyes, not a vessel in which I could pour all my romantic hopes and fantasies.

And it’s really not hard to tell the difference between the two.

[To Be Continued…]