Troy age: 18

WHY NICE GUYS SLEEP ALONE

by Roger Simmons

Let her curse and berate you. Call you a dog, a scoundrel, a telemarketer. Just don't let her call you "nice," because the next thing she'll say is "goodbye"

Remember, before E-Mail? How few personal letters you'd get in your mailbox? Not junk mail and catalogs, but notes from friends, enemies, colleagues? We're talking, what, 10 months, tops? Now you get 20 a day. Every passing thought is jotted down and sent across town or to China. In my case, this is not always good news. For example, I note, with some sadness, that every week I get the same letter on the same subject, although always from different guys. This week's is from a helluva guy named Jim in Louisiana, but it's the same old story: "I've been dating a woman for a while and then Tuesday she breaks up with me. She says I am 'too nice.' What's that supposed to mean?"

Here's the translation: She despises you, she can't stand to breathe your air, she never wants you to touch her again, she's just fed up. It's one of the oldest female gambits known. A woman will use it to shake any guy who's been trying to climb her leg. You haven't comitted sufficient evil to merit those feelings, so she feels guilty about reviling you and finding you undesirably reptilian, so she says you're "nice" instead of saying "you make my skin leap off my body and run screaming out of the room." The best way to make the situation worse? Be even nicer.

I don't want to dig up Durocher here or anything, but "nice" is such a hideous concept that most guys instinctively run from niceness. Every now and then, I take my kids to the park and pretend I'm a single parent. Kids are better babe magnets than dogs, don't ask me why. But whenever I hear a mother suddenly yell across the playground, "Hey! Junior! Be nice!" I want to run over and buy the kid a drink and a motorcycle, convince him to get his girlfriend pregnant and drop out of school. What kind of parent would wish nice on her kid, for crying out loud? She might as well have yelled, "Hey, kid! Be mediocre and uobtrusive!" for "nice" is the dead catfish of the English language, a bottom-fed piece of bloated, floating adjectival trash.

As a way of life, it comes in several different flavors, all of which combine to make vanilla. Here are the four ways of becoming overwhelmingly, idiotically, unbearably nice:

BE PASSIVE

Think back, Jimbo, to the last time this woman spent an evening with you: Did you ask her out? Or did you simply make some time and let her arrange the details? "Where would you like to go for dinner?" is right up there with "Did you gain some weight?" as one of women's least favorite questions. Letting her choose where to go and what to do seems nice, huh? Well, I can make a long list of unsuspecting gents who will at any moment receive walking papers from their wives or girlfriends simply because the level of nice in the house is neck-high and rising with every deferred decision, every delegated choice.

A woman told me recently that she was leaving her husband the next time she had to decide where they were going to go when they went out together. "I can't stand making every single decision," she said. She admitted it seemed petty--but that only made her madder. "I despise him every time he looks up at me and says, "'Oh, I don't care, honey. Wherever you want to go is fine with me."

BE AMBIVALENT

Ambivalence is "passivity" with an agenda. A passive chap makes no decisions at all. An ambivalent guy on the other hand makes a decision then remakes it several more times. A year or so ago, I'm out to dinner with a friend of mine, single guy, younger than me. The waitress starts flirting with him. The girl wasn't bad--definitely within the realm of plausibility. She's chatty and smiling and asking about his job and all that. Everything's great until he starts trying to order food. For waitresses, ordering food is a litmus test. After a lot of questions, he narrows it down to a choice between swordfish and salmon. The waitress indulges his entree-level indecision for a while, then she starts looking around nervously at tables full of waving irritated patrons. "I'll be right back," she says, and steps away to serve several dozen dinners while the guy goes fish-to-fish. He looks up at me with a grin on his moronic face: "I think she kind of likes me," he says. I go, "Yes, she thinks you're nice." He nods like a plastic dog in the back of a Buick. We never see the waitress again.

AVOID CONFLICT

Lots of people fear confrontation because they want everybody, even those who already know much better, to think they're nice. I'm in this category. I avoid confrontation like a congressional Republican. Why? Because I'm like Newt: I want everybody to like me. I've been this way forever. Consequently, I now have more enemies than any other person I know, including my friend Gutfeld, who is unpleasant on purpose. Nobody likes me.

I work with a guy who used to be just like me: A complete confrontation-avoider. When he had to negotiate something, it was like that Marx Brothers skit in which everybody stands in front of an open door saying, "After you." "No, after you." "No, no--after you." It was disgusting, but then one day the guy got it all figured out. Now he loves confrontation. that's bad for me. I watch him now and think, "Damn. How does he do that speak-your-mind thing?" Me, I try to speak everybody else'd mind.

Women don't like this. My wife has such an aversion to my conflict-avoidance that she avoids conflict just so she doesn't have to watch me avoid it...or watch me clean up the mess afterward.

BE ANDROGYNOUS

Take passivity, ambivalence and avoidance, put 'em in the big sex stew, stir it all up, and what do you get? Androgyny, at once the most muscular expression of modern sexuality and also the most despicable. The idea that a man should be unapologically masculine and that a woman should be unapologetically feminine is pretty radical these days, when many people are unapologetically androgynous.

Being androgynous is being nice from the waist down: it's the prevailing sexual policy of large corporations, the media and that hotbed of sexless banality, the university. Unsure of what to do with the boy-girl thing, most modern leaders opt for androgyny as the desired model of sexual behavior. Because it's the safest sex there is, many women give androgyny lip service--if you'll excuse me--and they're joined by a lot of serious young men (many of whom, I've noticed, have affected the androgynous, Cavettesque vocal stylings of NPR news-spinners).

But in real life, where the rubber meets the rut, most women detest androgyny in their man. "Why can't he just be more of a man?" is actually a question posed to me by a woman complaining about her husband. Her beef wasn't directed at a lack of virility or a performance shortfall between the sheets. It was about the overarching sense of apology the guy toted around the house.

Chances are, he followed the standard model for marriage: A woman chooses a man based on old-fashioned ideals; she thinks that given enough hard work, she might be able to fashion a real man out of the lumpen pile of Gap-clothed flesh she weds. But then, obedient to society's demands, she spends the first few years of her marriage making it clear that she's independent, a separate person, her own gal. And the poor chump she's married to tries to oblige, as men often do, by trying to adapt to whatever it is she seems to want. There's very little a man won't do for three-squares, regular sex and the comforts of a family. but for many a guy, by the time the 60-month trial is over, he's a pillar of ambivalence, a wall of passivity, an in-your-face avoider. So his wife dumps him because he's nobody's idea of a man. He's just too damned nice. That's where you were headed, Jim.

Many men have cottoned on to the no-win disaster that comes with cosmic niceness. Promise Keepers, for example, has earned the undying enmity of feminists and the mainstream media by rounding up several hundred thousand guys into ballparks and decided to do what a man's gotta do if his family, his children and his community mean anything to him. Some women really hate it when men act like this, because they would prefer their alternative versions of family, children and community.

The trick, of course, is to ignore what women say they want and simply do what you think is right. These days, that small act of bravery requires a support group of thousands of guys in the bleachers, cheering you on.

Nice, huh?