The silent destruction of the ‘Good Guy’
I’m still in the thick of it. The turmoil of being caught up in the net of the ‘Good Guy’. My version of the Good Guy was as good as they come: great relationship with mother, family man, serviceman, protective, reliable, loving… We had a home, have two children, he loved dogs, we had sex (good sex, often enough — though, more on this later), affection, shared values and goals.
The Good Guy, in my experience, is the guy who is charming, nice, amiable, does just enough for a Good life. They’re what our juvenile rom com dreams of adult life are made of. Only, the fragile veneer of the Good life that skims above the chaotic, messy, whirling undercurrent of real life is not his problem. Don’t dive deeper. Just be positive, don’t be dramatic, don’t have the hard conversations. Keep him stable on the veneer, mend the hard stuff quietly as you go, never bother him with the details, smile, make him smile, and definitely don’t ask him to help you. Unless it’s to do the dishes. He’ll definitely do that. Just be ready for it to come up as a reason he shouldn’t have to when you’re reaching up from the chaotic current, begging them to give you their hand. They’ve done their bit. Just look at those plates.
We met at 26 and fell in love. We had a marriage. A really happy one. Until life became harder than it had been previously; we faced an inevitable season of young kids, hectic schedules of work and study and financial responsibilities. I saw it as a time we’d weather. He, quietly and surprisingly, was having his first experience of needing to put effort into sustaining connection, spark and love, and believing that if it wasn’t a magically existing entity sustained at its highest point, it must be the end of loving his wife. The decline was marginal; he still had intense sexual connection, attraction, affection and general enjoyment of my company (by his own admission). He just wasn’t feeling ‘the spark’.
When it came to the suggestion that we work on igniting that spark, that we both face our lazy habits and connection shortcomings (I had my fair share. It was time to not just endure the season, but make active choices to walk through it successfully, together) it became clear his confusion: Oh, no no… This is going to take work and effort? That can’t be right. I mustn’t love you…
When recalling what he did to first try and save the marriage and family unit, his words were ‘Jack shit’.
The Good Guy has had a lifetime of the world accomodating around him, taking the wheel when required and forgiving him quickly and easily when his hands slipped. When it was his turn to take control and accountability, unavoidably, he put his hands in the air as our marriage veered toward danger, looking at me… don’t get hysterical, it’s just not my job to drive… And without recourse, our marriage was over.
It wasn’t a perfect marriage. What marriage is? There were red flags. Tiny ones though, the kind we all wave behind our backs, obscuring anyone’s ability to be wholly perfect. The biggest tiny flag flickered its corner right after we were engaged.
I had returned from a work trip, while he was on one, to find our iPad delivering his text messages. I had zero inkling to look… until they were flashing in the night, while I had jetlag. Curious (and flashing my own tiny flag), I looked. Inappropriate (though not entirely cheat worthy… I’m pretty sure… right? He’s a Good Guy) texts to a bartender flashed up. The worst of it: “I think I deserve more than that” to her sending a non-sexy image in response to being asked for a sexy one. This was the very last behaviour I expected from my Good Guy. My ears felt like they were filling with rushing blood… the proceeding scene a frantic rush of calls and cries, begging, and explanations. In the hush of the finale, I believed his story.
I remember saying to myself, “You either don’t believe him and blow up your life over a temporary feeling. Or you believe him, trust the Good Guy you know him to be, forgive quickly and easily his hand slip, and live happily ever after”.
I want to go back to that girl, crying in the bath, trying to decide… shake her and say, “Girlfriend, leave or brace yourself… he’s not who you think he is.” But, alas, off we went to get married, have kids and live happily ever 13 years.
I think all couples should do therapy.
We didn’t, until it was too late. It just felt so easy to love each other. At least, kind of easy… There was a moment of needing to try harder, by me. After our first baby I had undiagnosed postpartum, and could have left him a million times. I lost all feeling of connection for a while. But, the context was palpable and, again, I decided not to blow up my life for a temporary feeling. The connection returned. I always felt like we were on a team, a really loving one; sure we might get irritated and want to be drafted every so often, but we were lifers.
What I didn’t know, also until it was too late, was that the Good Guy has a place in this world the rest of us don’t: they can sit on the bench all game, and still get man of the match. They do just enough to get by, to keep things ticking along happily if their fragile ecosystem of non-effort is kept in tact, not revealing that one scratch on the surface will shatter it all.
When I say it was easy to love, it was a clear run for him, until it wasn’t. Every one of his genuine dislikes toward me (by his own admission) exist in the space of who he faced in the aftermath; an unattractive shadow of a woman crawling through confusion and devastation, without answers (ever, even today), with too many words.
‘Good Guys’ finish first, and last.
Good Guys (especially privileged white ones) get equally the best lane (like, the bus lane) and the worst lane (the bus lane, with pot holes they have no idea how to navigate through without an internal conniption that there dare be pot holes on their beautiful road, though having not contributed tax to maintaining it).
The old adage ‘Good guys finish last’ isn’t, I believe, what people think it is. It’s not because (apparently, though ostensibly untrue) women don’t want to date them. It’s because society has laid such a special, low hurdled, path for them from birth, that the rest of us aren’t afforded. As a middle class white woman, I am well aware of what it’s like to also be the recipient. With that, I can state with a good amount of certainty that it sets you up for dangerous and damaging entitlement. We all learn the hard way, if we learn at all, that we are not entitled to anything, especially at the sacrifice of others. There are so few opportunities, relative to anyone else, for the Good Guy to learn this. This is the one area they come in last.
At some point it is decided that they don’t need to look down at the work others do to sustain his Good life. They are afforded discretionary power over their contribution to sustaining the life they chose. If they don’t want to, they don’t really have to, and it’s ok. Don’t want to put in the work of marriage, ever? Don’t have to, despite having another human in the fold of that decision. Don’t want to live in the family home anymore? Great, don’t have to keep paying the mortgage. Don’t want the reality of the messiness and difficulty of two kids 24/7? Great, choose another life with a cleaner path, while the old messier life takes care of itself. It doesn’t get more Good Guy than being fun dad every second weekend. (Context: he is moving to study interstate shortly, for a year, with likelihood of work keeping him there).
For the evolved good guys (not Good Guy), they would say, ‘Well, I realised I am not entitled to this lane, but I want it and so will contribute and work for it too”. Others, like my Good Guy, keep their head forward, never looking at the work below.
In the end, the first suggestion (while heading straight for a pothole) that maybe, just maybe he too should start paying some tax, he tells his wife to get out of the car, throws a bunch of explosives out the back window (not wanting to face any past behaviours he might be held accountable for. He must be the Good Guy, feeling good, at all times), blows up the entire highway behind him. He looks forward at the lovely clear bus lane ahead, smiling, losing his way home.
That road behind, obliterated, once the base holding all the Sunday mornings, the nights together, feet touching before sleep. The baths. The laughs. The sacrifices. The nicknames. The coffees. The taco bowls. The plans. The attraction. The affection. The Easter camping. The deep embedding that occurs when two people, until so suddenly it disappears, make an adult decision and promise to build a life together. None of it enough for a millisecond of consideration when the threat of effort is nigh.
‘What a marvellous day for a drive!’
The beginning of the end of the Good Guy being good
For a while it began in May 2022. Then it began in June 2020. Then it really began some time between 2 Jan and May this year. I still don’t know for sure… His ability to pinpoint his ‘I’m definitely out’ is not present. But, the Good Guy left me (mentally, the jury is still out. Physically, a few months ago). He left me responsible for majority joint debt, the dog, the home, the loss of my ability to study, a cap on my professional progress (restrictions on my life due to his job), trauma, emotional whiplash, surface gaslit scars, and an epic clean up job in the wake of the Good Guy’s destruction path.
My now lack of softness toward him made him uncomfortable. Not feeling uncomfortable won over adequately or meaningfully helping around the house and with the kids, despite that being the quickest route to a more amiable me. Expressly listing what I needed help with, after he failed to turn up for a morning pick up so I could go to a client meeting and forgetting Father’s Day breakfast at school, I felt the weight of everything push me to a physical, emotional and mental decline, but it didn’t move the needle. In fact, it was the point he began dating. Dopamine wins.
All decisions seem prefaced with Does this make me feel good right now? No? Ok, check ya. Yes? Let’s go, baby!
As the Good Guy, it’s easy to be good. They never need to show their cracks, so everyone loves them. Someone else mends the cracks before they’re exposed (society, parents and partners). But… if one of those cracks gets missed, and the GG is forced to tend to it, it goes one of two ways: they do it. Or, the quiet tirade of a Good Guy begins. The Good Guy trait of protection [once applied to, say, family] shifts to a metastasising black orb of fierce protection of just one thing: effort exemption. Nothing is more important than having the Good Guy life, without contributing to it.
Life was as it always had been, though some of these cracks were appearing as children, work and uni meant I wasn’t as stealth at mending them as I once was. He complained about how little he felt we were having sex, though wouldn’t ever engage in the things I had cited as making me more interested in sex (the boring old stuff, romance, more than five seconds lead time etc.). We’d had some arguments about him not thinking of me. About how I dominated arguments (an unhelpful trait I continue to work on). And then, the last nail in the coffin before I even knew we needed a GP… I did something shit, totally worth a fight, and we had a fight.
The fight about what I’d done was short lived, worked through. A few short days later we were laughing about life, sexting from the kitchen, being affectionate, saying I love yous. But, it was enough to decide to attend therapy. We were gonna do marriage so Good.
However, in a series of confusing and devastating blindsides (concurrent contradictory statements — I don’t love you, I love you, I don’t want to be with you, sure separate our bank accounts, it’s reversible when we get back together), and the realisation for the Good Guy that he wasn’t going to keep his bus lane without paying a tax afterall, he unceremoniously reached for the explosives.
He blew up our life on a temporary feeling.
Why? It’s not actually so hard to be a Good Guy. It is, however, actually quite difficult (though rewarding and the responsibility of those who choose to have a family) to be a genuinely good guy. Grown men are walking around, with other people doing the leg work to clear their path, never learning what it’s like to have to pick yourself up when you fall, instead so used to being caught.
His fall: a deployment in 2020. Defence have a lot to answer for in the poor mental health support of deployed servicemen and women, particularly at the onset of a pandemic that had him holed away for seven months, then thrown back into the responsibilities of being a husband and father. This is not his fault.
However, he left at the precise, and first, point in our marriage where effort to sustain connection, as all married people face even with less clear and significant factors, and keeping the family together was required.
This isn’t to say bad marriages should stick together just for the sake of a singular version of ‘family’. However, even now, he cites the memory of the marriage as happy. Cannot identify a reason he wanted to leave, except for not tending to a feeling of disconnection, and a general feeling he shouldn’t have had to.
As the months have gone on, his disconnection has solidified. Largely, this ‘disconnect’ has scaled with the increasing likely levels of effort required to come back from the intensifying damage, disappointment and, sometimes, emotionally abusive behaviours made by the black orb of self-protection.
You can’t see my scars under the light of the Good Guy’s halo
The destruction of the Good Guy is two fold: the mess they leave behind at the tantrum from needing to contribute to a life that has been awarded to them thus far (by their mothers, their workplaces, their friends, their children, their partners). Then, the lack of belief by others (belief themselves) that they are capable of behaving in ways that are actually abusive and manipulative. It can’t be, they’re the Good Guy! This is destructive to those closest to them, and to themselves.
If the emotional gut punches and mental hits were physical, he’s no longer the Good Guy and a lot more people (though, sadly, still not at all enough) hear you, believe you, recognise that something is really, really wrong here.
But, as there are no physical signs, there’s no yelling, no screaming, no name calling and the Good Guy is charming, nice, sorry (though not sorry enough to stop), high functioning, calm, nuanced in his jabs, pokes, attacks and ability to pretend things didn’t happen, to have you questioning reality (suspiciously close to gaslighting), the person at the receiving end is in a precarious position. Their trauma is real, but cannot be seen and is extremely difficult to explain.
Isolated, every instance seems petty, a bit stupid and insignificant. Accumulated, and you are being faced every day with mounting emotional whiplash, rewritten history, a new way of being told you’ve overreacted, remembered wrong or, worse, treated with pity. The last one is probably the worst. See, having the Good Guy do his Good Guy thing and tell you how sorry they are, that they know the impact, only to continue creating the precise conditions they know creates the impact, is unbearably frustrating at best, confusingly abusive-y feeling at worst.
Few around me, us, see the behaviour. It has been put down to a ‘oh well, marriages end, tough break’, as though we are just two people who tried to make it work and it just didn’t work out. But, alas, I know that actually, I inadvertently walked into the web of a Good Guy. And walked out with bruises that no one can see. The most difficult part of the Good Guy is that you cannot see them coming. They have no rap sheet. I believe they don’t even know they are one until their privilege, entitlement, is tested.
Or, I could be a bitter ex-wife with an axe to grind. If not for my intimate knowledge and experience of the Good Guy, I’d think the same. But as always goes the case of the silent destruction of the Good Guy, their path is clear either by well masked brute force, or by others sweeping away the hurdles, and it’s only us left in their wake, looking knowingly at each other, nursing invisible scars.
Too, Good Guys have been let down. They are the result of societal support of a privileged patriarchal hierarchy, right down to ‘mummy’s boys’ (and look, I’m one of them. I will have to dig deep to not accidentally love my son to his emotional intelligence death). The mental health support of men is lacklustre. They make 75% of all suicides in Australia. We are letting men down by making them susceptible to being the Good Guy. We are letting them perform as men (as opposed to boys), while having paved their path there with no coping skills for emotional precarity. I have been waiting these months to see a glimmer of the good guy, not the Good Guy, tell him I can still remember him even through the thick debris of explosives. But, it appears the truth is that this a search only in vain. Once they decide to not question the Good Guy path, the devotion to its pristine promise is too entrenched.
Now, he died on the hill that he not contribute to the mortgage for the house I live in and raise the kids through a 90/10 custody split, because his move to a new life must offer him as little burden as possible. Never look down.
(Yes, he will pay his legally required child support. It’s a flawed system. Even accounting for his subsidised rent, a salary sacrifice payment of the car I use, and utility bills of a singularly occupied apartment, the sums don’t add up equally, significantly. It’s a system issue, and a choice of his to subscribe to it. He’s not doing anything technically or legally wrong.).
It took four months from the lip service of ‘I don’t want a divorce/I don’t know myself’ to falling in love with someone new (I assume, as he has introduced the kids), hitting the Good Guy reset button, taking on new clothing choices, a new coffee order, new penchant for wearing bracelets, and other choices that seem to indicate a performance of freedom from a whole life of left responsibilities, in what appears to be the early, fast, absorbing all-in Good Guy display of interest for someone. What a Good Guy I am.
I came close to a job that was $60k over my current wage; life changing in the face of single parenthood. However, in a fun Catch 22, the need for the job to have two flexibly allocated days a week in the city made it impossible to continue (two hours away. Achievable if not for the custody arrangement in support of, willingly or not, his unquestioned career choices). In response to him knowing: ‘The important thing is you got a call back’.
When confronted he demands he has, though has never truly apologised, acknowledged nor demonstrated appreciation for the inequity of the split, even as it continues. He literally runs out the door when pressed on how and why. Never seeing that how ever uncomfortable I make him with my subject and tone, what he has handed me is ten fold on that feeling, and the very reason for my manner.
With all of that, my guess is that the internal work wasn’t done during the six month sabbatical from his old life’s responsibilities, and I will never get the answers/outcomes my little manic mind can crave. The Good Guy won.
I will never not be left holding the debris. In the last week before moving interstate, a big upshot in being helpful beyond his ‘if I feel like it’ boundary occurred. A curious belief that who you are, what you’re capable of, your legacy and your reputation perches conveniently only on the very last leg of your behaviours; a burst of intense, pointed out, effort before the facade strikes midnight. (As the less performative and quieter detrimental decisions remain) See! I AM the good guy.
Unlike the narcissist, the Good Guy isn’t consciously constructing any of it. Each behaviour is done with what they believe to be the greatest of intentions. The mask blacking out the peripheral, welded for good measure, protecting him from the pain he’d face if he were to pry it off.
Whatever amount of hurt I feel from the burns on my hands, it is nothing compared to what it must be like trapped behind the suffocating Good Guy mask. Living on the veneer of life misses all its messy richness below, that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
The destruction of the Good Guy is as much unto themselves as it is unto others.
EDITS on reflection, and in response to some comments…
- He now, after a fight for it, contributes to the larger joint debts.
- I brushed over how I argue. It’s not good. I use words, verbally and written, incessantly in ways that overwhelm the other person. It’s manic when I feel out of control and not understood. If I just say this one other thing, they’ll definitely get it. If I just lay out this fact, they can’t deny it. He’d see the read length on this story, and say ‘See! She doesn’t shut up when she’s mad!’
- He was (I now know) deathly repellent to confrontation. We didn’t argue often, but when we did he was agreeable (his quickest exit strategy). He rarely brought up his gripes with me, again to the confrontation panic room; I now see this as unhealthy.
- The shit thing I did was read a message on his Instagram account. Juvenile, huge red flag behaviour, intrusive, boundary-crossing and not ok. I had received my Mother’s Day present with an old blanket from the couch thrown over it, instead of wrapping, and the whole morning felt off… It was enough to have my sometimes manic mind need an answer, I quickly thought I’d find it there. In a way, I did. But nothing about it was ok.
- He’s not an innately bad guy. He has in the past been kind and honest and tender and genuinely loving. If he loves you, you’re golden. 2020 did a real number on him. He simply chose destruction over reconstruction in this instance, this story is my opinion on why.
- Effort avoidance was as much about his own issues as it was in (not) doing something for his marriage. I can now see I chose holding up the practical parts of life (the kids, the schedules, the house, the dog) and what I could of myself, over him. On paper, I’m sure I have a good case for this. But in real life, someone needed me more than I could give them… And that is a really familiar sentiment I spent some time writing a whole story about.
