This morning, I noticed an article floating around my news feed.

An Open Letter To The Girl Who Let The Nice Guy Go

At first, I rolled my eyes and carried on, but it just kept getting shared.

This is all at once annoying and discouraging, since I had previously assumed these kind of tropes were something relegated to the dark corners of Reddit, things most people laughed at or at least ignored.

But still the article kept getting shared. I could respond, like others have ad nauseum, with the standard responses:

No one is entitled to another person’s affection.

Expecting sex or love based on the minimum standards of being a human in society might mean you’re not nice.

And so on…

But the problem is, these macro points tend to get lost in personal experiences. Everyone’s been hurt at least once. Everyone’s encountered a problem that doesn’t feel like their fault.

So let me try a different approach.

Dear Nice Guy:

Think of a girl you would never want to date. She’s nice, but just not your type.

I know you’re caught up in your “dream girl,” this gorgeous creature who is just not that into you, but indulge me for a moment.

Let’s think about this other girl.

Maybe she’s too tall for you. Maybe she’s a redhead, and you usually like blondes. Maybe she’s too thin, or maybe she’s too heavy.

Maybe she’s loud, or you think she’s too quiet. Maybe her personality is just boring to you, or

*gasp*

You just aren’t attracted to her.

Tell me:

Is there a level of “nice” that she would have to reach for you to consider her?

Maybe she shows up to take care of you when you’re sick. Or maybe she helps tutor you in school. She listens when you’re sad. She’s always there for you.

Are you interested now?

Well, maybe, but chances are, you’re just not attracted to her regardless.

Girls, and guys, often make terrible dating choices. But it’s not a mutually exclusive scale between “assholes” and “nice guys” and the silly girls who tragically choose the former. Real life is more complex.

Don’t get me wrong. The trope exists for a reason.

We all know the stories. The girl who uses a boy for emotional support even knowing he’s in love with her. The woman who goes from one disastrous relationship to another but dumps the first “decent” guy. The gal who wants nothing to do with the guy until he gets a girlfriend and then she proceeds to become a monster. And so on.

Guess what? These girls are probably assholes.

And in an ideal world, guys would be interested in the nice girls, not the jerks.

But as you know, real life doesn’t work that way. Dating and love are messy, complicated, probably disastrous and possibly incredibly awesome things.

So maybe your dream girl “walked out on the best thing that ever happened to her.” Or maybe she just wasn’t into you.

Either way, you probably don’t know or understand all of the details, and you definitely don’t get extra points for being what everyone should be — “nice.”