Had this song on my mind lately.

That’s totally not the video I downloaded the song from, but I can’t find that one, so here ya go.

Love the guy’s douchey expression.

Anyhow, I love that song because it does such a great job of expressing how a lot of lonely straight dudes feel. To me, it is crystal clear that the attitudes being expressed in the verses are not being endorsed. They are, in fact, being shown in all their horror and brutality. I get the feeling that everything in there is something that the songwriter(s) has experienced and was so horrified by it they could not process it.

If so, then this song would act as their way of dealing with these unacceptable, indigestible memories. That’s how art works sometimes : a way for the artist to regurgitate their bad memories and send them back into the world, and thus, be rid of them at last.

It’s quite the neat trick, when you think about it.

Anyhow, this “nice guys finish last” sentiment comes from a very real place in the straight male psyche. Society teaches us that woman want men to behave a certain way, and that if they behave that way, women will like them.

Then they see someone who breaks all those rules and treats women like shit and the women lap it up and beg for more, and they feel betrayed.

Part of the problem is that the “nice guy” mentality makes it hard to recognize the other parts of the equation of attraction. Niceness alone will never be enough to win the heart of the fair maiden… or the fair lass.

There’s so many other factors. Physical attraction. Respect. Compatibility. Similar interests. Chemistry. Your respective moods. And so forth and so on.

Of all those factors, respect is probably the largest contributor, and it’s the one where the “angry nice guy” is most likely to fail. Sure, the ladies (or laddies) want someone with whom they get along, but they also want someone they can respect.

And being servile and eager to please and willing to change to be whatever the other person wants to you makes you nearly impossible to respect.

In fact, it engenders contempt, and if you try to put yourself in the other person’s position, you will understand why.

People want to deal with people who are their own person. Someone real, with a personality and limits and their own likes and dislikes. They are not looking for the most “user friendly” person around.

Also, the “angry nice guy” tends to be the sort of guy who internalizes a set of rules as to how to get the girl and then gets very frustrated when they follow all those rules and still don’t get the girl.

Life doesn’t work like that, fellas. Thi sisn’t school.  You don’t get the girl by having the highest marks in the dating class.

In fact, the whole “get the girl” mentality is fundamentally flawed, because it suggests that there is a way to “earn” the girl, and the truth is that there just plain isn’t.

People either click or they don’t. Individual merit often plays very little part in it. The right person for you will come along and you will click with them. All the others were just bit players in your love story.

Like I have said many times before, the only dating advice worth a damn is “meet lots of people”. That increases your odds of meeting the right person for you. Everything else is secondary, and futile if you are not meeting new people.

I’m not saying meeting new people is easy – I sure as hell can’t manage it. But it is good advice nevertheless, despite that.

This advice might seem harsh and it is definitely unromantic to look at love as a lottery where the idea is to buy as many tickets as you can and hope to get lucky. A lot of people will reject the entire notion due to how unpalatable it is.

But when you think about it, it’s also very freeing, because it means that merit is no longer the primary factor and that therefore rejection is not a reflection of your lack of merit. It has nothing to do with whether you are “good enough” for the person.

All it means is that this was not the right person. That was not a winning ticket. You failed at nothing.

That doesn’t mean you should give up if it doesn’t work out right away; Persistence is also a good thing to have when you really feel strongly attracted to someone in a way that is beyond desperately wanting to bone them.

A lot of the time, there’s a lot of psychological garbage that you have to wade through in order to really connect with someone. You could find the objectively perfect person for you and you still have to jump through hoops because of trust issues, the ghosts of previous relationships, weird parental issues, or whatever.

That’s why I get annoyed when people say they are not interested in “playing games” in relationships any more. Yeah right. Those “games” exist for a reason. They are the many ways in which people navigate the dangerous terrain between being attracted and being intimate. The rules are always the same – drawing closer to the other person while not risking getting hurt – and so the whole complex dance of love is not exactly something you can just get rid of.

You can, however, remove a lot of unnecessary steps.

Anyhow. I guess the main point I wanted to make toiday was that nice guys only finish last when they persist in believing that niceness alone should be enough to get them the girl of their dreams.

It’s a great asset, but it’s not enough on its own. Like a certain cracked.com columnist said. if all you have is niceness to give to the world, you’re like a product whose main selling point is that it’s nontoxic.

Yeah, but what does it actually DO?

Ask yourself the same thing, and you will be enlightened.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.