Victim Puking on a Nice Guy

Hello — due to behind-the-scenes database restructuring, Maria’s article missed its pre-scheduled publishing time in the midst of a crash or hiccup of some sort. Since I was away much of the weekend and could not load the blog last night, I’ve only just realized it was missing. Here it is, a little late but none the worse for wear. — Amanda

By Maria Padhila

Ever had one of those moments where you’re clearly and precisely reminded why a former partner is former?

I have two formers (I don’t like to call them exes; “ex” sounds to me like you’re marking the person out) I’m thinking of right now. One I’m still friends with; one I don’t have contact with if I can avoid it. Both of them have a problem with ‘Nice Guy ™’ behavior.

If you don’t know the Nice Guy model, there’s been plenty talked around about it in the past 10 years or so. Short version is nice is not a nice way to be; it’s about someone who is fake-nice just to get something. The version that gets thrown around most often is one where it’s a guy who lacks some social skills who thinks by hanging around, being a ‘good listener’, and ‘helping’ a Cute Girl, he’ll eventually be rewarded by having her declare that she’ll be His Girlfriend forevermore. If this doesn’t happen, he gets hella resentful and sometimes mean or even abusive.

Remember, that’s just the model. I think this dynamic operates in a lot of other situations as well. There are plenty of Nice Girls and Nice Ladies and Nice Mamas out there. She’s the one who is always taking care of people, always ready to listen and break out the ice cream when you’re down, always cooking or cleaning for the extended family, always down to do the school volunteer work.

Of course many people find this genuinely rewarding and fulfilling. But you know when you’re dealing with a Nice — you come out of the encounter feeling drained. Because you always have the feeling, even though they may take elaborate pains to deny it, that they want something in return. And you’re not sure what that thing is. So of course they’re not getting it — because how often does anyone get anything that they’re not clear about wanting? And you’re getting this feeling both that they’re feeding off you somehow, and that they resent you for not giving them what they want, but you can’t figure out what they want, and they keep saying they don’t want anything.

But they do want something. That can range from recognition to friendship to inclusion to everlasting love, but they want something.

I’ve done it. I’ve used my talents and resources to try to get inclusion, and then been disappointed when I’ve offered so much freely and haven’t gotten the kind of welcome and inclusion I wanted in return. So what I did was I checked that shit at the door, and check myself hard for this behavior every chance I start to feel it creeping. For me, it starts with a sense of “gee, that wasn’t very nice.”

Then the question I ask is, “what was it you wanted to happen?” And “were you clear about that going in?” And “did you ask for it?” And then I say “check that shit, NOW. Stop the sneaky vampire stuff. Ask for what you want, or get it yourself.”

I think it happens for women sexually pretty commonly. I know YOU don’t do this, oh no not you, but I see it among younger women and I used to do this kind of thing: you are working it like a porn star because you get a lot of excitement out of making your partner feel good, then you wonder why he or she isn’t doing the same for you. It must be because they don’t really care, right? It couldn’t be because you’re not giving them a clue about what you want (much less showing them).

If you poke around the Nice Guy websites and blogs, you’ll learn a lot about these kinds of relationship habits (but put up your shields; it can get a little icky out there). Names for this dynamic of doing Nice Things, then getting confused, then getting resentful include “covert contracts” and “favorsharking.”

Covert contracts piss off both parties — the one who established the contract, because they see the other as not coming through, and the one who’s had a contract put out on them, because they never knew the terms and here they are getting busted on for not coming through.

This leads to a behavior on the part of the victim of the Nice person called “victim puking,” or VP for short. This is what happened with my former-now-friend — I victim puked on him. You get worn out by all the edging around and unstated obligations, and you blow up: “What do you expect from me? I never said I would do that! I don’t understand you! Give me some space!” etc.

The formers would give me all kinds of advice and assistance, everything from meals bought to a place to work out, all of it not asked for, and in return, they would expect but not state that they expected me to be available at times important to them, or available only to them, or be glued to them at certain events when they wanted to Display Evidence of Girlfriend. It’s only a wonder that I didn’t puke more often!

Back when I was dating the fomer-now-not-friend, he would fashion long responses about how “mean” I was. I was just a plain awful person, and he was a poor misunderstood dupe of my using ways and female wiles. He never used the B or the C words, but I could feel them lurking under there.

He also had a spooky habit of leaving extremely vague but threatening sounding phone messages. Always just vague enough that I couldn’t say anything about them, but creepy enough that anyone who happened to overhear when I hit the answering machine button (this was way back in the day) found them disturbing as well. This is why I don’t talk to him, avoid him if we end up in the same places, and might — MIGHT — have a word with someone I saw potentially hooking up with him.

But here’s where another warning comes in: for my former-now-friend, it’s just some sloppy old relationship habits on both our parts — he almost has the insight to see that he’s playing the victim sometimes, and even that he provokes me into a victim puke because he, umm, maybe actually likes getting yelled at a little bit.

He’s not quite where he can admit that that’s what he really wants, so for now that’s just my suspicion, not my push to make, you understand? My job is to keep the boundaries and keep it from falling into a cycle — and that’s how we can be friends. He has strong relationships and awareness in lots of parts of his life, and hasn’t left a string of angry or scared people behind him. It’s just an occasional bad habit, like my bad habit of tearing my cuticles when I’m super-stressed. Yucky, and not so healthy, but it’s not malicious and it’s not going to kill me.

When I read the advice about Nice Guys, I sometimes get the sense that this notion of there being shaded degrees of bad behavior has been abandoned. Everything is a relationship red flag; every error or social misstep is a marker of a potential abuser. We all know the people who get all Lifetime Movie Network about their relationships. He forgets her birthday, and he’s instantly a sociopathic narcissist. He jerks off to some porn, and he’s a sex addict who fears intimacy. She gets mad about you not texting her when you’re going to be late, and has a glass of wine while she’s waiting, and she’s a bipolar alcoholic.

The way the psychiatric diagnoses get thrown around is particularly alarming. The other N-word — narcissism — seems to be way too popular nowadays. Before you get out the Sharpie to tag someone with something like this, please be aware of a little history. Personality disorders, which include narcissism and borderline personality disorders, are pretty much considered a life sentence, as is sociopathy.

The party line among the less-aware mental health practitioners is that no recovery is possible because being a narcissist, for instance, by definition means that you don’t believe you have any kind of problem. There is little empathy for the suffering of people with personality disorders, because they can be so maddening and destructive. Also, there’s a stereotype that no one in the profession wants to treat people with personality disorders, because these people are so exhausting and manipulative, and besides, they can’t be ‘cured’, right?

These are some serious terms to throw around, terms that even those who have researched and worked in psychology and psychiatry and medicine for years are not too clear about. Borderline personality disorder is pretty much recognized now as having been for years a ‘garbage-can diagnosis’ that was often applied to women being Uppity or Difficult or Hysterical, women no one in institutions or society knew what to do with. (Paging Frances Farmer.)

Of course no one wants to deal with a true sociopath (who are probably more common and less virulent than the Lifetime Movie Network would lead us to believe), but it would be a mercy if the rest of us would take a break from diagnosing one another with such cruelty, when such diagnosis is based on an hour of website reading. I know my own tendency to feel like I’m crawling with every disease from Ebola to antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis after a day spent writing about international health issues for work. It’s just a human tendency, built out of our intelligence and imaginative abilities.

I’m not saying not to listen to your instincts when you sense there’s something hinky about this person. I’m saying listen harder — really listen to yourself. Awareness, then discernment, is how to mark a boundary.

Tangent officially completed. There are a couple of miles of territory between someone who gets on your nerves sometimes and someone who is a mob hit man. And really, there are a lot fewer on the right side of that graph than on the left. Most of us just have some bad relationship habits we’d benefit from working through and out of, so we don’t puke on each other or cement those dynamics into ruts and go through life never really getting what we want in love. And if what you want most is drama, try writing a Lifetime spec script.

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There’s an interesting excerpt from Wyclef Jean’s new memoir, a section that tells how he loved two people at once. (Here is my Wyclef Jean story: we used to live in a city and building where celebrities would tend to show up. We did not really fit in there! Issac was in the elevator, and Wyclef Jean got on. He said “Hello, I like your work,” and Jean said the same. He thought Isaac was actor Michael Rappaport.)

No, of course Wyclef’s way isn’t the way to do ethical non-monogamy, and I’m not putting it out there as such. I’m just using it as an example of how these things actually do happen and have been happening for a really long time.

In a lot of cultures and communities, having two families and two lives is not so unusual. It happened with Irish immigrants, for example. I can’t help thinking of all the pain that might be avoided if people who found themselves in this situation would be honest about it, though. The writing isn’t stellar, but the honesty of the emotion and the confusion (and some self-blame and self-justification) come through. For those who can appreciate someone letting it out, it’s a very interesting read.