"Nice guys finish last" is the hopeless, resentful phrase I have heard far too often in the past few months.
With a shrug of his shoulders and a roll of his eyes, my friend recently resigned himself to a fate of "just friends" as he reiterated this cynical theory, much to my annoyance.
As this self-proclaimed "nice guy" fulfills his duty of listening as his girl friends dissect and define all meanings from their boyfriends' latest actions, he determines that his party-of-oneness is the result of his charming smile and winning personality.
Women have had to accept as fact Greg Behrendt's doctrine, "He's just not that into you" - yet, if a man is involuntarily single, it's that he's just too close to godliness (and not enough of a fallen angel) to capture the lovely damsel's heart. It's not that she's just not that into you, it's that she's just too into you, right?
"I think one thing that is true is that with 'nice guys' people come to expect everything they do, it becomes routine after a while," student at Mesa Community College and all-around nice guy Brian Oblinger said. "Girls don't notice it because it's the norm. Then you have some guy that's a total jackass, he does one nice thing, and it's like he moved a planet."
And jealousy rears its ugly head.
"I think another part of the reason [they finish last] is that nice guys just don't get the same exposure to girls," Oblinger added. "I don't go out to clubs to 'hook up' with girls, I don't go to places to pick up girls and I most certainly don't use B.S. lines."
But that's not what it takes. Not all girls can be found grinding at the nightclubs, and believe it or not, girls know the motives behind the slick and oily pickup lines.
Nevertheless, if you're too nice from the beginning and end up conning yourself into believing you should consider your unrequited love's feelings so much that you won't ask her out unless you're 100 percent positive she'll accept, you're running too late. If she turns you down once - this only works if she says it in a polite and courteous manner, mind you - yet you continue to develop your budding friendship and you never request a date again, you deserve to be "just friends."
The "nice guy" myth happens to be a rather popular phenomenon, spurring hundreds of nice guys' articles and blogs on the Internet, belittling the women who spurn them and proclaiming their own righteousness.
Luckily one of your own has found some reasoning for your unexplained chastity:
"All of you 'nice guys' out there ... are nothing more than 'people pleasers,'" Joseph Matthews, author of "Art of Approaching" said in an About.com article. "Somewhere in your life, you found out that pleasing people is a way to get other people to like you and admire you so you can feel good about yourself.
"If you want to have success with women, you need to stop being agreeable and instead be straightforward and honest, especially when you have to go against the wishes of others and disappoint them," Matthews said. "You can do this with kindness and sensitivity, but you must do this nonetheless."
But I don't want all of the nice guys in this world to think their singleness is their doing. "It's either feast or famine," my grandmother used to tell me. "Sometimes you'll have more men than you can stand, and other times you'll feel invisible." So isn't it possible that it's just a period of bad luck?
And my last rant on "Nice guys finish last:" How can one say that nice guys finish last when none of them are even close to the finish line?
Kirsten Keane is a journalism sophomore who enjoys her psychology minor. You can reach hear at: kirsten.keane@asu.edu.
