SAMANTHA MCKELVIE — Staff Writer
Time and time again I’ve heard the saying, “Nice guys finish last,” and time and time again I’ve retorted with “That is not true!” (or something to that effect). I always believed that although it seemed the bad boys were winning, in the end good would prevail over evil and the nice guys would come out on top.
I’d tell my nice guy friends who constantly complained about always getting the short end of the stick to hang in there and resist the urge to change their nice guy ways because good karma was around the corner. Well that was then and this is now, and between then and now I’ve come to realize two things: one, I probably shouldn’t give out advice, and two, my beliefs about the victory of the nice guy population were inaccurate, to say the least. Now I’m not saying that nice guys never come out on top, but based on my many experiences and the experiences of others, this doesn’t seem to happen very often. So let’s see where the nice guys often come up short; if you are a nice guy, I’d advise against further reading.
It almost never fails that nice guys get completely overlooked when it comes to females. Why? Well it’s as simple as this: girls love bad boys. That’s why we chase after the guys who ignore us the most;
the ones who call back days later, flirt with other girls, and show not an ounce of affection toward us. That’s why at least one of our girl friends (and probably more) has a boyfriend that no one likes because he treats her like crap. That’s why our guy friends who we trust and love and tell all of our guy problems to are just our friends. We couldn’t possibly date them; they are much too nice for us, and we wouldn’t want to “ruin the friendship” (at least that’s what we tell ourselves).
Even worse than getting overlooked because you’re nice is getting taken advantage of because you’re nice. Over and over again I’ve seen the nicest guys get walked all over in relationships. They get used, abused and ultimately dumped. “He was just too nice,” is what I’ve often heard. Now you would think these girls who are doing this are just plain mean, but some are quite the opposite. Sometimes even the nicest of girls do this. It’s because we like the chase and the thrill of the bad boy; we like the complication of it all, the challenge of taming the wild one. This is where the nice guys fall short and may be why they can never woo the girls quite like the bad boys can.
Of course there comes a point in time when us girls realize that the nice guy is what we needed all along; by then it’s too late, and chances are the nice guy we once knew stepped over to the dark side after realizing the drawbacks of being “just too nice.”
While nice guys get the short end of the stick when it comes to the opposite sex, they seem to get the shaft in the workforce as well. I hate to be pessimistic, but it’s kind of a dog-eat-dog world out there, and you have to step on a couple of people to get to the top. So if you’re too nice to succeed at the expense of others, forget about climbing that ladder and get used to being someone else’s step. And for the sake of my argument, let’s say that being a celebrity is a “job” too. How many nice guy celebrities can you recall hearing about? Now how many bad boy celebrities do you often hear about? From what I’ve seen in entertainment, the more bad you do, the more press you get. And the more press you get, the more “important” you are. I mean, how many times have we heard about Charlie Sheen this year?
So after all is said and done and after all I’ve witnessed, I can no longer object to the statement that nice guys finish last. Even if you wanted to think about this literally and say they don’t necessarily finish last, I can almost guarantee you that many of them certainly don’t finish first, at least not until they join the dark side. And in case you were wondering, I do hold this to be true with nice girls as well, but they don’t have their own saying for that, so I stuck to the guys. I’d end this by leaving the ladies with advice about how they should give the nice guys a shot, but chances are my advice will go unheard. Instead, I’ll tell the nice guys to wise up. Again, I probably shouldn’t be giving out advice.
