My goodness there’s a lot of sound and fury surrounding Nice Guys of OKCupid. These people and these people and these people raise excellent points, and I can even recommend the comments. I’m also mindful of this (admittedly modest) study about the miscommunications, misunderstandings and other social slapstick surrounding platonic friendships. If you don’t know what NGOOKC looks like, it goes a little something like this:
A big part of online dating is triage. Making the connections you want, and avoiding those you don’t. Those who want different things, those who want you for reasons contrary to your interests, those looking to fill a vacancy you don’t have. Given the gender disparities in number of unsolicited messages received, this aspect of online dating disproportionately concerns women, but men consider it as well.
Another big part is self-branding – an online dating resumé to put yourself out there, to sell yourself by emphasising (within the margins of honesty) your finer qualities. And yes, of course “nice” is a minimum standard and nothing to brag about, but this is an application – criteria must be met, boxes must be checked, coffee must be earned.
These purposes inform the composition of most online dating profiles. They’re a trope of the genre. But in the instance of NGOOKC, they clash. They operate at cross-purposes and present a discordant impression. A self at odds with itself. In one breath the author seeks to answer the vague implied criteria for the partner he has not yet identified, and in the next he makes an impassioned plea for understanding in a cold, anonymous online wasteland. The two collide. Also, he is ugly and can’t spell (misspelling being the e-profile equivalent of an unsightly birth defect), and worthy of shame for both of those characteristics. Mustn’t forget that.
The Nice Guys of OKCupid rather reminds me of an application I made to a job which chiefly involved fast-paced proofreading. My resumé accordingly waxed lyrical on the virtues of my attention to detail, and it was only after receiving a reply email that I noticed, in my brief cover letter, a stonking great big typo. The studious, meticulous man of letters I had constructed was undone at a keystroke, and I was by no means above altering history in the copies of the original letter attached to subsequent correspondence in case it hadn’t yet been seen (it worked – I work there today). I’m sure there could be an equally diverting blog compiling typos in eager resumés which boast of “attention to detail”.
In both my application and NGOOKC, the discord comes from cross-purposes. For me, (barring more Freudian interpretations of my mistake) it was my haste to pull myself out of debt, to be employed, juxtaposed with my desire to make a good impression. For the nice guys, it’s the desire to make a good impression juxtaposed with the desire to choose the right match for them.
It’s not that I have a lot of sympathy for the self-professed “nice guy”. The view of sex as something to be earned by levelling up his NGP (Nice Guy Points) is fairly grotesque, whether held by a misguided beta male, a more straightforwardly misogynist twit or indeed a rather mercenary woman (a corresponding blog shaming “nice” women might be a volatile concoction – the pre-emptive “triaging” tends to require a harsher tone to slow the deluge of the often besieged female profile). Sex as currency can be a problem. There’s nothing wrong, however, with wanting sex, with or without friendship (maybe they already have enough IRL, meatverse friends – managing the number of friends you keep is a familiar concept to anyone who has deleted excess Facebook friends). There’s nothing wrong with using an online dating profile to say as much. It’s actually a highly appropriate place – it isn’t the workplace, a dark alley or a subway car. Some of our nice guys don’t want to be “friendzoned”, which is an odious and sexist term and which (so the argument goes) presupposes that our nice guys only befriend women in the eventual hope of sex. No doubt this is sometimes the case. But there’s a friendlier reading. Perhaps they only wish to sleep with people who matter to them, with people they know well. With friends.
Sure it may be more intellectually honest to declare sexual desire at the outset like so much duty-free liquor, but there are 2 problems – firstly, desire can flourish and blossom as the friendship does, and secondly, eliding the references to footwear in “nice shoes, wanna fuck?” has a negative success rate (you actually unhave sex you’ve already had, somehow). Some nice guys are struggling in vain to date online in an intellectually honest way, to enact the lonely highschooler's mantra that It Gets Better.
But then, many of them are just dicks.
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