Friday, February 23, 2007

Feeling Nothing for Nice Guys

He's everything you want
He's everything you need
He's everything inside of you
That you wish you could be
He says all the right things
At exactly the right time
But he means nothing to you
And you don't know why.

--Veritcal Horizon, "Everything You Want", Everything You Want

I've seen the kernel of the quoted lyrics above appearing in postings lately.

Depending on which side of the gender gap you lie, the allure of the bad boy and the non-appeal of nice guy are a regret, a lament, or a mystery. The comments on these posts reflect that debate. Indeed, speculation has escalated to a highbrow art within the field of Evolutionary Psychology.

As one of those "nice" guys who felt passed over by members of the opposite sex many years ago, I spent a lot of time cursing the dynamic. With age, reflection, and reading many self-help books, I've come to believe that both men and women are responsible for its propagation.

In Passionate Marriage, Schnarch argues that people pick mates who are at the same level of differentiation. A similar motif may be found in pop psychology bromides like, "Water seeks its own level." If you're dysfunctional, you're probably attracted to dysfunctional people. You may not have the same kind of dysfunctionality as your partner. It may be complimentary like the classical addict/codependent pairing or the jerk/doormat matchup.

The matched dysfunction argument makes sense to me because if one person were to develop a higher level of healthiness over the course of a relationship, it stands to reason that the person would be less inclined to put up with the partner's static level of dysfunction. This is what you see when an abused person finally summons the courage to leave the abuser.

Now, given a person leaves an abusive relationship with an elevated level of healthiness, one might argue that the nice guy would be a more approprate match. Paradoxically enough, this isn't always the case. Dysfunction can be found in seemingly nice guys, too.

The problem lies in the use of "nice" to describe men who are not aggressive. In reality, there are at least two categories of non-aggressive men, passives and assertives.

Passives are really the male version of the Shrinking Woman described on Spill the Beans' blog. Rather than seeking validation from within, they seek it from women. At best, they are martyrs. At worst, they use deception to conceal their shortcomings.

Passive men wind up repressing their true selves, both good and bad. There's nothing genuine to really get excited about because all that passion gets bottled up. They trade the pursuit of happiness for the accumulation of resentment. Real intimacy can't happen because they won't allow themselves to be known.

As I confront my past and own up to my mistakes, I realize how my own passivity has contributed to dissatisfaction with life. I've learned to look upon my job search as an opportunity to tap into my own life energy, doing something I can truly be excited about. It turns out that not only have I sought dysfunction in my marriage. I've also merged it into my choice of workplaces.

As I improve my own healthiness, it's becoming easier to see the dysfunction and to summon the courage to change things in ways that I might never have entertained.

But, most of all, I realize that I shared the blame for the lack of chemistry between other women and myself. In the words of Iron John author Robert Bly, I was life preserving but not life giving. Or to take a line from that Jefferey Gaines song that I blogged on a couple days ago, "They’ve been suppressing their every desire,
They do nothing on a whim."
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