Other People's Problems : ’Those Three Little Words: Part II of an intermittent series on Nice Guys*

by Manda Jo

One thing that confuses nice guys is that love doesn’t seen to mean much to a nice girl: “She knows I love her, and look, she’s still going back to that asshole.” It’s a baffling phenomenon, so counter-intuitive and it often seems to be the final, inarguable proof that girls make no sense and prefer assholes. But in clumsy hands, love isn’t a gift, it’s a club, and there’s reason to run from those three little words.

Nice guys are too quick to say “I love you”. Falling in love with someone seems like a nice thing to do. After all, it’s a compliment. And once you are in love with someone, it seems almost dishonest to not tell them: every instinct screams that it’s the worst sort of game playing to hide how you feel, that concealing your love is no way to start an honest and open relationship. Furthermore, how could anyone not want to hear that they are loved? Being loved is a great and glorious thing, and it should be a source of joy to anyone, even if they don’t return the feeling.

All this is very sensible. But it remains a fact that saying “I love you” too soon is not only a mistake, it’s not a nice thing to do.

First, it’s not at all unusual (or significant) for one person in the relationship to take a little longer to know that they were in love than the other: in the context of a sixty year relationship, the fact that one person was sure they were in love six months before the other person is totally meaningless. So if someone is feeling ambiguous about whether or not they are in love, there is nothing to be gained by rushing the issue, and frankly, it’s a asshole thing to do.

Here’s the deal: nice girls don’t like to hurt nice guys, even if they don’t love them. And nice girls know that leading someone on is one of the cruelest things one person can do to another: most nice girls have been led on themselves, and it’s pure hell. So here’s the situation from nice girl’s point of view: she likes, respects, admires this new nice guy. She may or may not be falling in love with him: it’s not that she’s being difficult or coy or playing hard to get, it’s just that she doesn’t know. Then he drops the bomb and tells her “I love you.”

She isn’t ready to make a choice yet, but now she has to. Because if she puts him off, if she says “thanks”, if she continues to give him hope and then decides, a month or two down the line, that she isn’t in love with him and never will be, then, in her own eyes, she’s a grade-A cast iron bitch for leading him on all that time. She doesn’t want to decide right then and there how she feels, but now she’s got to, and whatever she decides, it’s bad for the relationship. She may decide she can’t take the risk of hurting such a sweet, nice guy and dump someone that she might well have fallen in love with. Or, if she wants to stay with him badly enough, she may convince herself that she’s in love with him, even though she isn’t, really, not yet. And then that love is tainted by the knowledge that it was manipulated out of her, that it wasn’t something she chose free and clear.

There are other problems with l saying “I love you” too soon. For one thing, nice guys date clever girls, and clever girls know that this new nice guy doesn’t really know them yet. They know, because they know damn well that they haven’t mentioned their ten gerbils, their secret Backstreet Boys CD collection, their habit of turning into whiney bitches whenever they have a little cold, their deep seated need to have someone else deal with all things culinary, their tendency to never, ever know where their keys are, their plans to live in Europe for at least a year. They know that there are whole sides to themselves that this new nice guy doesn’t know about, not because they are hiding anything or ashamed of anything, but just because there hasn’t been time yet to show everything. The new guy isn’t in love with them: he’s in love with a pale shadow of them, and there’s no flattery in that. If the new guy is in love with the little slice of them that he has seen, it means there are several possibilities, none of them flattering. One is that he is shallow enough to fall in love with the little bit of them. Another is that he really wants to be in love, enough to convince himself that he is feeling love for a little sliver of a whole person. Yet another is that he has fixed on the little sliver he has met as being “the real nice girl” and will regard all those other facets as suspicious “changes” in the woman he loves. In all of these cases the nice girl fears that the love is a fleeting emotion that won’t last.

Finally, there is the problem that “I love you” sometimes sounds like “I need you”, which can sound like “You can’t leave me without being a bitch”. Nice girls don’t like to be bitches, so “I love you” can make them feel awful damn trapped. People don’t react well with they feel trapped, and it manifests itself in strange ways: sometimes they just get cranky. Sometimes they decide they’d as soon be hung for a sheep as for a lamb and turn into real bitches. Sometimes they do whatever they can to get lover boy to stop loving them and set them free. All of these things result in the sort of slow crash and burn that is painful and inexplicable for everyone involved. A guy you know doesn’t love you, you know you can leave whenever you want to, looks pretty attractive after this.

Now then, obviously somebody, eventually, has to be the first to say those three little words. But the nice thing to do, the respectful thing to do, the most effective thing to do, is to give the other person the time and space to discover how they feel on their own timetable, not yours. If things work out, there are years and years to say “I love you”. And if they don’t, you’ve given the person you love the freedom to do (and feel) what they really want to do and feel. And isn’t that what love means?

*and nice girls, who have the same problems and make the same mistakes. I’m sticking to one set of genders here just because it makes the writing simpler.