Confessions of a Former Nice Girl™, Part 2

Once upon a time, I exhibited some Nice Guy™ tendencies in girl form. As a lonely teenager, I idealized boys from afar, built them up in my head to meet unrealistic romantic standards that no human being could possibly meet, and never made my feelings known, preferring to hang around them until they realized how cool I was and fell for me. (This part never happened.)

Back then, I could check off some of the main qualities on the Nice Guy™ checklist. I had the unrealistic expectations, the romantic objectification, and the romantic interest disguised (sometimes poorly) as friendly interest.

Still, there was one big quality on the Nice Guy™ checklist that I lacked: the sense of entitlement.

I wanted these boys to like me, maybe even love me. I wanted it badly. But I never once thought that any of them owed me their affection or interest.

I never thought that, after all the effort I’d spent yearning for a person, that he somehow needed to pay me back for the time I spent thinking about him.

This lack of entitlement could just mean that I’m a better person than those unfortunate people whose Nice Guy™-ness extends past adolescence and far into adulthood, and I think there’s something to that theory. I also think my lack of resentment has something to do with the difference between how boys and girls are raised in our society.

Boys are taught, “If the girl you like doesn’t like you back, you should never take no for an answer, because if you keep pursuing her and never give up, you can turn that no into a yes. And if she still doesn’t like you after all that, she’s a bitch who doesn’t deserve you and you’ll find someone hotter later on.”

Girls are taught, “If the boy you like doesn’t like you back, it’s because there’s something wrong with you, because you’re not pretty enough, or you’re too pretty and too shallow and focused on your looks, or you’re too girly, or not girly enough, or any other item on a list of flaws that makes you imperfect, and the only way to get that guy is if you change x, y, and z.”

Imagine how society would function of boys and girls are both taught, “If the person you like doesn’t like you back, it probably doesn’t have any reflection on either one of you as a human being. You’re probably just not right for each other even if you’re both decent people. C’est la vie.”

But that’s not how it works. Boys are taught that girls are to blame for crushed sexual and romantic hopes, and girls are also taught that girls to blame for crushed sexual and romantic hopes.

Perhaps that’s why, while I didn’t have the Nice Guy™ sense of entitlement, I did have a very Nice Guy™ view of the girls my age: they were the source of my unhappiness.

If the boys I liked didn’t like me back, it wasn’t their fault. They were distracted by the prettier and shallower girls. Guys were stupid and entranced by shiny objects, but other girls were the real problem. They were the mean girls, the Heathers, the ones who wore short skirts while I wore T-shirts, the cheer captains while I sat on the bleachers.

It didn’t matter that, on the whole, the popular girls left me alone and the boys were the ones who bullied and teased me (and I didn’t know many cheerleaders in the first place). Somehow, I still had the perception that the other girls were the enemy, that they were far more to blame for my lack of romantic success than any boy’s lack of interest.

Fortunately, I got over this phase midway through high school and stopped resenting other girls, but it took me much longer to stop feeling this bizarre superiority/inferiority complex with them, where I thought I was smarter and funnier and more interesting than other girls, but they were all prettier and more socially savvy than I was.

I resented boys as well, of course, but mostly because I couldn’t get through a single day without several of them making fun of me. I resented girls because they attracted the attention of the decent guys I idealized as being “not like the other guys.”

I resented boys because of the way they treated me. I resented girls for existing.

Boys are taught to hate girls. Girls are taught to hate girls.

In my days of being a Nice Girl™, I had negative feelings towards other girls, but the lack of entitlement meant I also didn’t actually believe I deserved what they had…because girls are taught to hate themselves more than anyone else.