It has been a week and he has not called you once. The longest ten minutes of your life were spent waiting, for what seemed like an eternity, just to get one text back from him. He stood you up last Friday and Saturday night, but you are somehow hoping that maybe the third time is a charm? His name is Tyler* but asks you to call him Ty — of course. His smooth tanned skin and beautiful dark curls give an illusion of Adam Levine meets Nyla DiMarco. It is no surprise that everyone wants him. He is perfect.
He says all the right things — sweet, little nothings. Despite the fact that your eyes should roll so far that they fall right out of your head, you soak up every cheesy line he throws your way. He is so obviously wrong for you that it only makes you want him more.
But wait, did you even notice Connor* called you three times today and you sent all of them straight to voicemail? Did you realize that he sent you texts asking how you are and if he can take you out again, yet you ghosted every one of them? Do you remember the beautiful red roses he gave you on your first date or your favorite chocolates that he bought you that one horrible day just to try to make you feel better? Oh, that guy. Yeah, he never stood a chance.
In the crazy, complicated world of women, nice guys like Connor do not win. To put it lightly, they are simply too easy. Connor is excessively sensitive, overly available, and completely wrapped around your finger. He never had a chance because he was never an option to begin with. Guys like him are completely incapable of providing the hard-to-get appeal that every woman craves. They do not present women with the challenge that leaves them wanting more. Nice guys are soft spoken, easily attainable, and far too predictable. Women never have to break a sweat in order to get a guy like Connor at one’s beck and call — I know I never have.
Surprisingly, not all nice guys are genuinely wired to be that way. Sometimes, guys give off this gentle, endearing front, hoping that it will score them a home run. Ironically, it always backfires. They end up striking out, getting benched, and becoming eternally celibate. Their fake thoughtfulness and attentiveness to a woman’s every whim inherently lands them a front row seat in an inescapable hell, more commonly known as the friend zone. Whether the “nice guy” vibe is genuine or forced, it is a major turnoff and only reinforces the desire for every nice guy’s archenemy: bad boys like Tyler.
With that being said, men, if you want to escape the hellish limbo you are hovering in and dive straight into the sheets with your dream girl, you need to essentially be the antithesis of Connor. Become a dirty douche replica of Christian Grey and your woman will immediately be at your feet, no questions asked. Ignore her calls and leave her texts on read. Deny her of attention and you will drive her to becoming an absolute crazy person, or the monster that dating society calls a “stage-five clinger”. Bury her with your cruel modi operandi, aka ruthless MOs, and watch as she writhes in simultaneous pleasure and agony, hanging onto your every word. If you have any desire to show up on her radar whatsoever, abandon the nice guy facade.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. If things were not already complicated enough, women often say one thing, but often mean something entirely different. An example of this is the infamous, automated, “I’m fine” response that actually means, “absolutely nothing is fine.” Or the passive aggressive “do whatever you want” phrase that secretly means “I swear to god, don’t you dare do it.” It should come as no surprise that we also do this in the dating realm. We directly contradict our undeniable infatuation with lowlife losers when we claim, “I just want a nice guy.” As hypocritical as we are, we do not care if this confuses you — we say it anyway. The minds of women are intricate enigmas, a convoluted mess of many paradoxes tangled together. Stop asking us questions, just keep up.
Thankfully, everyone will continue to grow and learn about what they want and do not want after dating different people. This means that us women will outgrow our obsession for jerks and seek a loving, respectful partner to settle down with. One-night stands, blind date failures, and tinder matches will lead to an endless array of heartbreaks that will eventually exhaust our fleeting interests in flaky fellows.
In the long run, we long for security and consistency. At some point, waiting by the phone for a meaningless one-word text will get old and the constant need to decipher lies and read in between the hazy lines will no longer be worth it. The only problem is, that most people do not realize how bad someone, or something, is for them until they get burned. As sad as this sounds, most of us women need to have our hearts smashed into little pieces and self-esteem obliterated in order to truly realize what we deserve.
At the end of the day, life is merely a learning process where the people we meet, fall in love with, and leave, are our teachers — just as we are theirs. To all of you bad boys, thank you. Your bottomless abyss of lies and painfully degrading behavior have personally helped me mature far quicker than I could have ever imagined. Every one of you serve the essential role of helping women around the world recognize their full potential by assisting them in the transition away from the overly trusting, naive girls they once were. In essence, you have paved a preverbal path for the genuinely nice guys to finally shoot their shot.
It is true: nice guys finish last, but they do, ahem, finish. And if I am being honest, they finish last because they should finish last — they deserve it. After all, every woman needs to practice her messy rough drafts on worthless canvases before creating her ultimate masterpiece.
*Author has changed the name