Issue 06 — Nice Guys
Welcome to the 6th issue of WHYRT! When we spoke last I alluded to a malady sweeping the globe and then promptly signed off, because I love nothing more than tossing a proverbial grenade and adroitly fleeing — much like the subjects of this edition's theme.
I’m ushering us back into the unsought exploration of avoidance and ambivalence, aka defining Nice Guys. As mentioned last time, there are two genders: the Nice and the Kind. If something sounds nice, it doesn’t mean that it's kind. The Nice are perception-focused, the Kind are relationship-focused both: with others and themselves.
A Nice Guy is a human bouquet of red flags: emotional avoidance personified. Nice Guys are alarmingly uncommunicative even if they’re in constant communication — or, they say a lot and do absolutely nothing. They are the people in your life whose souls are screaming for a bell hooks book. The people who make you feel like you’re too much. Nice Guys are the people you used to sleep with who now call you by your last name. They are strategically passive and perfect marksmen of weaponizing uncertainty. They quote The Office in their dating profiles and they are most likely a Disney Adult.
They are Ross Gellar, Mr. Rochester, Dr. Toby Fleishman, Jack Burger and his little Post-It (and his terrible trio of friends at club Bed) — they are both Summer and Tom in 500 Days of Summer. They are the people you go on great first dates with and never hear from again. They fundamentally—and sometimes intentionally—misconstrue awareness for accountability.
To quote My Brilliant Friend Hannah, they are maladaptive people pleasers. Straight men with two first names. Those whose political beliefs serve to backfill their aesthetic judgments. They avoid vulnerability at all costs: they do not, as My Brilliant Friend Clare says, risk it for the biscuit. Sometimes they’re malicious—they’ve learned the right politics and surrounded themselves with enough of the right people to vouch for them—and sometimes they’re just chicken shit. They are most likely your ex-boyfriend. And while I would prefer to uh, avoid telling you this, they are most likely, at some point or another, you.
Don’t be mad at me! Avoidance is a sickness we all suffer from, especially in the U.S. where ignoring patterns of history has reigned supreme since its inception, with an emphasis on “civility” that is pathological and harmful. Cognitive dissonance has always been trending, lads!
Overculture is finding more and more ways to justify The Great American Avoidance for the sake of transactional dynamics and stasis: we’re romancing, and commercializing, isolation more than ever before, touting the benefits of a frictionless existence. (That’s capitalism, baby!). This obviously infiltrates our relationships because, to quote the 2nd wave feminists, “the personal is political.”
Nice Guys have a permanent hate-follow in my heart because I have not only been romantically wronged by them, but I have been one of them many a time. The entrenchment of avoidance is all-encompassing. I still fall victim to niceness: I will always choose “no worries!!” over any direct communication of hurt feelings (in my defense, I was raised by two repressed water signs). Cirque du Soleil is shaking over how far I can backbend for the approval of others. I perpetrate the crimes of niceness, and I still frequently mistake it for kindness in myself and in others.
It’s hard not to be a Nice Guy: in a culture with not enough language for the various, nuanced types of relationships, people's expectations can’t always be met, so we ignore the Boundaries Flagbearer Brene Brown and choose—accidentally or otherwise—resentment and avoidance over temporary discomfort. There is a difference between flawed people trying their best and misstepping in the process, and people who hurt you to manage your relationship to their liking. Oftentimes those with bad intentions get away with too much because they've learned the right social cues to cover their tracks. Western overculture is perfectly designed for the Nice Guy population to thrive and somehow, as of press time, there is still no Endangered Species Act for kindness.
Below are some novels that sift through the damage of indifference. We’ve got domestic strife and the ambivalence it creates, men on Facebook wearing 'feminist' t-shirts, and many period pieces (novels set in the early 2000s) full of unhinged characters, good intentions, and advisory warnings for avoidance.
No. 1
Cult Classic
by Sloane Crosley
Lola and her former coworkers at a defunct psychology magazine in NYC still stay (maybe a little too) in touch, and we meet them just as her former editor-in-chief has pivoted fully into Wellness Guru+. After this fateful reunion, Lola immediately starts running into her ex-boyfriends one after another at a rate that even the Angel Number Girlies would find disturbing. Her best friend* reveals that Lola is actually the first lab rat for their ex-boss’s new venture, a high-concept cult that is best described without spoilers as a reverse Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind special. By playing the unwilling tourist in her failed romances, Lola has to discern where she was avoidant and where she was avoided, against an absurdist, acerbically-observed backdrop of wellness, modern dating, and the versions of ourselves we try on to avoid vulnerability.
Sloane Crosely’s Cult Classic is an insane-in-a-good-way genre-defying novel about the myth of closure, avoidance, and the omnipresence of regret when trying to commit to love and to yourself. It’s funny and honest and emotionally resonant and Crosley’s wit and observations about the curse of heterosexuality, beloved in her non-fiction, are on full display. A medicinal rec for anyone with an ex and for all of us exhausted by Instagram infographic therapy and the like.
*Best friends do not subject you to cults, let alone make you join them: this is a WHYRT brand policy!
It’s For You If You’re For...
Russian Doll, lower Manhattan, Susana Baca, the Vanilla Sky 2001 press tour, The New Me by Halle Butler, Gwyneth Paltrow's ski trial, and situationship discourse.
No. 2
Ordinary People
by Diana Evans
Two married couples in 2008-London avoid the realities of their next chapters and the sacrifices required for long-term love in Diana Evans’ Dickensian novel. The four thirtysomethings navigate infidelity, parenthood, bereavement, and not-quite middle-age malaise in their respective relationships with one another and within their own personal identities. Ordinary People is an elegiac examination of what happens when we cling too hard to youth and struggle to redefine commitment.
Evans utilizes domestic life’s intricacies to examine race, class, and gender identity in a story that has just the right amount of daytime television melodrama, and cultural references that will make take you back to Billboard Hot 100 Singles’ glory days. Ordinary People is a great example of how Nice Guys are a genderless phenomenon and how easily a lack of honesty about our lives sets in as we get older.
It’s For You If You’re For...
Chicken Shop Date, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Leon Bridges, Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, J.Lo’s Marc Anthony Years, Hugh Grant’s apartment in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and burning CD mixes.
No. 3
The Rachel Incident
by Caroline O'Donoghue
Now, I love all my recommendations equally but I have to tell you upfront, The Rachel Incident is one of the best books I’ve read this year. This novel begins with thirty-plus Rachel pregnant with her first child, finding out that her old professor, Dr. Bryne, is in a coma. She's instantly overwhelmed by the memories of her college years in Cork, and the entanglement with him, her best friend James, Dr. Bryne’s wife Deenie, and (James) Carey, her sometimes boyfriend.
An epic platonic love story unfolds (Homer wishes) alongside a romantic one (and a horny one!), both against a high-octane setting comprised of a global recession, bookstore chains, Irish identity, the power dynamics of intergenerational relationships and unpaid labor, class divides, the ennui and excitement of your 20s, reproductive rights, coming out, American Apparel skirts and other indie sleaze accouterments, control, ambivalence, and grocery store brand wines.
Avoidance can sometimes appear as a posture of self-possession, and Rachel peddles that fake ID in all of her relationships, mistaking control for care and withholding for warding. A hilarious and thoughtful novel about the messiness of young adulthood and embracing every type of love — The Rachel Incident is a coming-of-age novel that views nostalgia as psychosis but refuses to rebuke its characters for their youth.
It’s For You If You’re For…
Kate Moss for Topshop, Anne Tyler, first apartments, Me Without You, "I Still Remember" by Bloc Party, Luster by Raven Leilani, and flat ironed fringes (bangs to the Americans).
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