A Nice Guy Vs. “Nice Guys”:My Incel Days.

“Oh, right YOU’RE a nice guy…”

Well, at least I’m trying to be. Even though I’m ostensibly the nice guy not in the ironic shield of quotation marks in the title, I tend not to outright call myself that. It’s the same relationship I have with being funny; I’d rather be it and have people call me it. I’m also trying to be honest, too, so I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize the fact that there are people I’ve encountered in my adult life in retail work and who have seen me perform stand-up who would disagree with all of those things.

But the question I’ve had to ask: “When did being a nice guy become a good thing?”

Certainly didn’t seem that way in High School, back in the late 80s. A common mantra I’d hear was “nice guys sleep alone”.
I was taking a study break in the library at the local community college and talking to some of the most popular girls in my school and they could not have made it clearer:
“I like it when I guy treats me like shit.”
“Nice guys are boring.” On and on.

Quick sidebar: When this was happening, I was doing one of the cruelest things I’ve ever done: the girl I was dating at the time made an unannounced appearance, and I acted like I didn’t see her, because I was a bad breaker-upper. Almost 35 years later, I still regret it. For the record, she didn’t like me treating her like shit. It got me my only death threat, to date.

I led a relatively unsocial life growing up, exacerbated by frequent groundings for my grades. Sincerity was the only language I could speak in and one of the only ones I understood. When friends would suggest “acting” a certain way to get attention from the opposite sex, it didn’t make any sense, why lie? After high school, I would periodically be told that someone then had the hots for me and it would be someone that constantly picked on me, which was literally the last thing I’d ever want in someone I’d want to make out with.

Certainly didn’t seem like a good thing in my 20s in the 1990s. Guys could not have have telegraphed how clearer a piece of shit they were and were rarely alone. They’d lie, cheat, steal, get caught, rinse and repeat, and it not be a deal-breaker. One of the biggest indie heartthrobs of the 90s was Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, who wrote entire albums about about love was wasted on him, he was perfect totem of it.

For me, the decade played out differently. Dudes would do these things in front of me, because I was just Pete. Any guilt I may have felt for keeping these secrets to myself was severely mitigated by their girlfriends seeing it for themselves.

I’ve spent much of my life single, but the 90s were especially lonely. People would want to fix me up with people, but wouldn’t date me themselves. Women would flirt with me madly, especially when things weren’t going with great their boyfriends, and become decidedly more demure when things got better or ended.

I lived in a college town, full of casual hook-ups among people who all knew each other, but when I’d have the rare one, things seemed different, especially with my woman friends.

“I didn’t know you were that kind of guy…” You mean a guy?
(to her)“You better not hurt him” She didn’t, not to worry.
“He falls in love too easily!” How did they know? They didn’t know anyone I’ve dated, much less fallen in love with.

Certainly didn’t seem that way in my 30s in the 2000s. I dated quite a bit more, but a certain theme emerged. Some women either chose to not date me or not continue dating me because they weren’t ready to get married, despite the fact that I haven’t gotten close to asking anyone to marry me since I got capriciously engaged to my first love when I was 18. Some women have responded more positively to this vibe I was presumingly laying down, which hastened me breaking things off. I had a woman ask, literally 30 minutes after we’d met, “I can’t have kids, is that going to be an issue with us?”

There’s a reason I’m talking about this. I wanted to give you some context for some of the bewilderment I felt in my 40s (I’m 52 now), when things seemed to change.

Mind you, mostly for the better. I actually had a (relatively) normal dating life, despite being officially single through most of it. Honestly, maybe it was a change I subconsciously made to my overall vibe, I can’t objectively say for sure. All I can say is that things seemed to be working (relatively).

The bewilderment started around 2014, when an “incel” (a term I’d never heard before) dipshit shot a bunch of people in California. So many fellow hopefully less-murderous dipshits basically said that that’s what happens when you push a nice guy too far.

“What the fuck is this?” I said to myself.

Then there was the other end of this, from which I inferred that “nice guys aren’t really nice”.

“What the fuck is that?” I said to myself.

I’ve had to eat a lot of shit because of the way I can’t help but be, and I’m doing it because I’m playing some sort of long con? But I tried to set aside my emotional response and actually listen to what people are saying, unfortunately not before non-ironically using the hashtag #notallmen.

The incels: stands for “involuntarily celibate”. I’ve been that, I’ve been that A LOT. But it was obvious immediately that that’s where the similarities ended. They seemed to think that if they did good deeds for women it’s added to a social ledger that will entitle them to said woman’s attention and/or affection and the fact that this ridiculous notion isn’t actually reality has radicalized them into misogyny disguised as “Men’s Rights” activism. They expect intimacy from someone when they can’t recognize their basic humanity.

This is not to say I haven’t had my own regrettable opinions about women, but they were in no way based in hatred. In fact, if anything, I’ve idealized women; which is unfair, too and not recognizing their full humanity. But I’ve tried to keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut, with the last one sometimes proving difficult.

The “Nice Guy”deniers: Considering how we regularly ignore what’s in front of our faces, it’s easy to deny something that you rarely ever see. Talking to younger dudes about women shocks me with how backwards things seem to have gotten. Talking to women (and seeing social media posts) about the guys that accuse women of “not liking nice guys” one blindingly obvious theme emerged: they weren’t remotely nice.

If you don’t honor plainly established boundaries, you aren’t nice.
If there are conditions to your niceness, you aren’t nice.
If you easily slip into slurs and personal insults into disagreements, you aren’t nice.

And for fuck sake if you kill people for any reason other than they’re trying to kill you or someone else, you aren’t a nice guy. Even if the incel mentioned earlier hadn’t gone on his rampage, he wouldn’t objectively be a nice guy based on his earlier assaults on people.

Basically, “Nice Guys” are indulging in that most 21st century of activities, saying you are something and hoping that’s enough, because you’re actual actions wouldn’t support it, like many people who call themselves “patriot”, “godly”, or “funny”.

When I first formulated this, at one point I realized that I was asking the reader to do the same thing, just take my word for it. So I contacted almost everyone I’ve dated for the past 30 years, minus some I’ve lost contact with, and asked them: “If I called myself a nice guy, would you agree?” All of them said yes, some very enthusiastically, which did my heart good. But quite a few of them said, “But you know the problem with guys that call themselves ‘nice’”…

Yes, in fact I do.