Lie I was told as a child

The truth is we’re lied to every day, but I just wish to focus on some lies I was told as I was growing up. You know the ones. The ones your parents tell to make you feel better about being awkward.

The simple ones that say the nice guy wins in the end, that the nerds will end up better off than the jocks and that you can achieve everything you want as long as you put your mind to it.

Allow me to dispel any notion that these contain any amount of truth. Maybe a little bit of truth for some fortunate souls, but these are most definitely not universal truths.

Let’s start with the one I harbor the most bitterness toward. Nice guys don’t get the girl in the end. That’s not to say a nice guy can’t win, but I will say in the 24 years I’ve been on this confusing planet, a woman saying to me, “You’re so nice,” hasn’t ended with good news. It normally concludes with some statement about me being too nice or how brotherly I have become.

“I don’t want to ruin our friendship.”

These are loaded words, foreshadowing a future of shopping together and holding countless doors.

What hurts the most is the lack of return on my investment. That may sound quite insensitive, but let’s go ahead and throw that into perspective, shall we?

When you hear the word investment, what does that mean to you? Money put somewhere, any quantifiable variable put toward an object? That’s not what I’m talking about here. Women aren’t objects to be won and lost, but emotions are what are wasted when you are sequestered to the friend zone.

I once spent quite a while investing myself in a girl I had a class with. We went on a few dates, and we seemed to get along quite well. I, of course, paid for everything, like a real gentlemen should. I was jobless then, and every penny was important, but I still managed to budget around a nice dinner and a movie. I sacrificed what I had to because I knew this was the girl for me.

I’m sure it isn’t terribly difficult to imagine what happened next. Friend zone. Not a second thought.

“You’re just too nice.”

“But, I don’t understand why?”

I never got a straight answer from her. For some reason I couldn’t just let that investment go. I stayed friends as she was cheated on, emotionally abused and dated jerks in general. Or at least I saw them that way.

I’ve been in that situation more times than I can count. So I changed.

I became the guy who takes advantage of women. A jerk that just really didn’t care about anything but myself, and guess what? It worked.

When asked why women don’t date nice guys, I’ve seen a few say that confidence is key. I consider that quite a lie. My confidence level never changed, just my attitude toward women. As I became bitter and jaded, women seemed to become attached to me, and I was carelessly tossing them into the friend zone.

I had changed in a way I can’t describe. I wasn’t the nice guy I had previously been, and it paid off. In a physical way. And that wasn’t the return on investment I had wanted.

So, in a roundabout way, the truth is, it’s better to be a nice guy. You just have to realize that when you finally get that return on your emotional investment, it’ll be extra worth it.

Sometimes.