Why ‘nice guys’ aren’t as nice as they’d like you to think

It’s time for men to raise the bar when playing the field, because while they’re worried about striking out, women fear time is up.

“Nice guys” really do finish last.

Every woman has met one of them. The guy who insists on paying for your drinks at the bar.

The ones who try to whisk you away from your friends for a “chat’’, hidden from the view of prying eyes.

The ones who so kindly remind you they were “just trying to be nice”, which simultaneously implies you were being rude, when you made a pointed effort of letting them know that their affections were not reciprocated.

Thankfully, these upstanding men take it upon themselves to remind us of how nice they are.

It’s a good thing, too. I was worried one of them would touch me inappropriately without my permission, or lash out when my polite declinations that were ignored became outright rejections out of pure exasperation.

Oh, that’s right. They have.

It seems as though the rules for what constitutes socially acceptable, or even legal behaviour flip as quickly as the lights turn off at a club or party.

One would think that the flashing lights inside a dingy nightclub, or the sun setting over a packed rooftop bar make it more difficult to see our glares, or the “help me” eyes we flash to our friends in a desperate bid to escape clumsy attempts at flirtation. Maybe the thumping music drowns out the sound of someone saying “no”.

A young couple at a bar.

The number of men who suddenly become hard of hearing, or worse, forceful to some degree, when their approach has proven fruitless, is astounding.

Not least because it reveals a wilful ignorance to the idea of consent, not a difficult concept to grasp, masquerading as persistent acts of chivalry.

Most men are not so bad. In fact, the majority are kind, respectful people who can grapple with the emotional complexities tied to rejection with a degree of perception and sensitivity.

But the trouble is, the rate at which men perpetrate domestic and family violence, or are the cause of the violent death of a woman means that we just cannot afford to bank on you being one of the good ones.

We might be two weeks into the new year, but it is never too soon to resolve to be better.

If you are one of the men who has to coax a woman into a conversation with you, or whose only way of feeling the touch of a woman’s body beneath you is without her consent, then maybe you’re not as “nice” as you think you are.

Olivia Jenkins is Herald Sun education reporter