My Experience With A Scary Nice Guy(TM)

So I really ought to be doing something productive, like homework. But as usual, I find myself on Tumblr. Sad but true.

Anyhoodles.

What I’ve been wanting to talk about for some time is something I’m very much afraid of. And that has to do with Nice Guys(TM), who are not to be confused with Good Men.

TW for, well, everything.

There is one specific moment wherein the Nice Guy(TM)’s mask will eventually fall off.

Your cool, fun, caring friend literally disappears before your very eyes. In his place is a being made of pure anger and hate. Who IS this person?

Good guess, Harry, but no.

No, this, sadly, is the true face of the Nice Guy(TM). This is his face, with no artifice, no illusions, no put-upon martyr complex.

(Kinda like this, but not as sexy.)

The moment this comes out is usually when he realizes that you (the object of his affection—and suffer no delusions, you are are only an object in his eyes) do not equate love or sex with a business transaction. That he does not have a right to your body, according to you, you ungrateful bitch. Even though he did all that stuff that rom-coms say you have to do in order to Get The Girl(TM)*

(Scuse me for a sec, everyone…)

The moment he realizes that, all bets are off. And he will get scary.

(This is pretty much what it looks like—though even this is still a bit of an understatement.)

He will insult you, intimidate you, make sure you know on no uncertain terms just what he REALLY thinks of a woman who is not willing to play her part.

And this makes me afraid. Because until that moment arrives, you can’t always tell.

You know those stories people tell about Ted Bundy? There was one told by one of the few women to escape from him with her life. She said that that while his demeanor was all smiles and friendliness initially, the moment she entered his car, his whole demeanor changed. Like a switch had been flipped. And she flung herself out of the car, causing her injury but ultimately saving her life.

With the Nice Guy(TM), once that switch is flipped, the mask drops, and only the sheer anger is left…that is some scary-ass shit right there. Because there’s this incredibly intense FORCE headed straight at you, and it will not stop until it has crushed you, destroyed everything that you are. I wish I could say I was speaking from secondhand experience, but I’m not. This has happened to me, and I know for a fact that I am not alone.

And all I can say is, it is a special kind of fear, especially from someone you once regarded as a friend. You go from being ‘so special’ to ‘you fucking BITCH’ in the space of a nanosecond.

Personal Anecdote:

(note: names have been changed)

Allen and I were classmates, then friends. Then we started going out. It was all hunkydory for the first two weeks, but then other stuff started happening.

He wanted to know me. REALLY know me, he said, not just talking about movies and stuff. He complained of feeling like he didn’t know me. He was saying all this not even a month into the relationship, by the way. I have been in relationships lasting YEARS wherein I was still learning new stuff about my partner—but anyways—I felt like I was in the hot seat, being interrogated for the terrible crime of not trusting him wholeheartedly right away.

I’ll say it right out: I DON’T trust right away.  Especially not to people who think they’re entitled to my trust, and get angry when it’s not given.

Which brings me to my next point. Allen would get angry—really, really angry—whenever we disagreed on something. To the point where he would be yelling at me. This, by the way, was because I did not want to read “The Road”. All I said was, “It’s not my thing. I like fantasy books with dragons and shit.”

Yes, this is why I deserved to be berated for an hour, apparently. (And, he informed me several times during the berating, he was not being mean. He was ‘telling it like it is’.)

To make a long story short, things did not improve from there, and we eventually broke up. It was a mutual thing, and we stayed friends afterward. He even offered to help me in school, since I was having trouble with a particular subject.

This, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, was a HUUUUUGE mistake. We’re talking Ned Stark Mistake proportions here.

Pretty much how it goes. Minus the hardware.

During one of these sessions, he became very irate with me. The kindest thing he called me during that particular tirade was ‘dumb blonde’. Yeah. Eventually he left, and I finished the assignment (quite well, I might add) on my own.

Me:

Cut to the next day, after class. I’m sitting in the lounge, chilling out on one of the benches, when Allen walks by holding a bag containing his lunch from Quiznos. And he begins with an apology, so I’m all ears. Then he sits down next to me.

Laughingly, he starts hitting me (lightly at first) with the sandwich bag. But the blows increase in intensity as he ‘jokes’ with me about the argument we had the day before. It is genuinely beginning to hurt me, but he just laughed it off.

Except I know he wasn’t joking. I saw his eyes. They were NOT laughing, not one bit. And that was a scary experience. Yet I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone—I mean, who gets intimidated by a sandwich bag? It sounded ridiculous even to me.

After that, I ended our tutoring sessions, and made damn sure never to ask for his help on anything, ever again. Being in many of the same classes made things difficult, since for the most part, he acted as though none of the bad things had ever happened, and we were bestest pals.

However, any doubts I had about his true nature were blown to smithereens when he lost his shit completely with another girl in one of our classes. Screaming in her face, getting right up in there to intimidate her. This girl’s crime? ‘Being annoying’. No really. He said this in front of everyone.

Eventually he left, but he still believed that he was 100% in the right, that he was fully justified in his actions. Any rational being would’ve behaved the same.

Even as of last month, I heard him asserting to another classmate that he ‘doesn’t get angry’.

Me:

*Can this phrase just die a horrible, flamey death already? Girls aren’t things to be ‘gotten’, like tokens at Chuck E. Cheese. Enough already.