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I’m Tired of People Calling Me “Nice”
In a culture that worships a**holes, nice is a four-letter word
“I hate to tell you this,” my boyfriend’s ex told me on the phone with a dramatic sigh. I was quite sure that she couldn’t wait to tell me “this,” whatever it was. “But he just thinks you’re nice.”
She spat out the word “nice” like it would leave a bitter aftertaste in her mouth if it lingered for too long.
I almost laughed out loud. The worst thing my boyfriend of two months had to say about me was that I was nice?
My boyfriend’s ex was decidedly not nice. Proudly not nice. Like many people I’d interacted with in my adopted home of Rhode Island, she associated niceness with weakness and privilege. People who lived in ivory towers (like me) might be able to get away with being nice, but people who lived down in the real world (like her) couldn’t afford such extravagances.
Ironically, she had already contradicted her own theory of niceness when she initially described my boyfriend, her ex, as a “nice guy.” Of course, the statement was followed by a “but,” which was followed by a laundry list of flaws that were no doubt intended to scare me off.
Yet the fact remained that he was (is still) a nice guy — one of the few things his ex and I agreed on —…
