Last night, I ended up drinking in the hot tub with my two younger brothers and a few of their friends. It was totally unexpected. I came home around 9pm from collecting plant samples for a university biology course this fall, expecting to kill the rest of my Saturday night watching a movie in bed or something. Instead, I walked into my room to find my brother and 2 friends drinking Burt Reynolds's, and things just sort of escalated from there.
Alcohol is a hell of a drug. For all its vices and virtues, at the very least you can usually count on it to grease the wheels and make something interesting happen. One way it does this is making people open up and talk about topics they'd normally steer clear of.
My brother's friend started talking about how she'd been asked out to the movies that night by a certain guy, but turned the guy down. She told him she had to work til 9 and had to get up in the morning, but she ended up drinking in our hot tub til all hours and felt kind of guilty about her hypocrisy. I hazarded a guess that the guy wasn't that cool, fun, or attractive, and she didn't really want to go out with him very badly in the first place.
The girls in the tub rushed to this guy's defense, all quick to say what a nice guy he is. He's such a nice guy, you guys are being mean. My brother chimed in to tell me how right I was. He described the guy as "if someone wanted to be a Hutterite, but wasn't a Hutterite. Skinny, old farmer clothes, good manners, and totally socially inept."
I was right. This guy, by all accounts, was a real sweetheart and probably deserved a date with this girl. But the proof was in the pudding. She blew him off, was prepared to go home to bed, but came right over without hesitation when a hot tub get-together with a bunch of fun, cool, good-looking people was presented. I brought this up, and all the guys heartily agreed with me. A huge percentage of nice guys are nice because that's the only way they can get any attention at all; they have little else going for them. But the attention that they get is rarely the kind they want. "As a guy, you're never really going to nice your way into anything", I said.
That was the line that really set one girl off. "You know Michael," she snapped indignantly, "one day, a nice guy is going to trump you in a big way, and you'll be left in the dust." At the time, I thought she was wrong but didn't want to fight about it, so I went to my classic argument-defusing line: "You know what? Maybe you're right" and moved on to something else.
I thought about it more later, and found that maybe there was an element of truth in what she said. I stand by my statement that you can't nice your way into anything with a girl, but what if there was a guy with the complete package? What if a guy came along who was confident, funny, good-looking, didn't give a fuck, and didn't take shit from anyone, but who could also pull off the flowers and cute movie dates and telling her she's pretty, without one side compromising the other? That would be one guy who could get any girl he wanted.
I used to be a nice guy in the worst way. It didn't work very well, but it's not like it didn't work at all. When it did work, it was great because it was based on genuine care and feelings. But over the past few years, I've changed and I'm not that nice guy anymore. I've become more focussed on being confident and true to myself and what I want. People say girls love jerks, and they're right, but they don't love them because they're jerks. Jerks have attractive qualities, like confidence and not taking shit from people, that nice guys often lack. Imagine if you took a jerk, and then made him not a jerk. You'd have the perfect guy.
I don't know where to go with this. Examining myself, I see that I've become a jerk in a lot of ways. Its opened up so many new opportunities with new girls, but its also burned bridges with girls I care about. Will I ever get the balance right? Is it right to be deliberately screwing around with who I am? Am I doing this for the right reasons? What's going to happen if I continue down this path?
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