What the fuck is wrong with nice people?
Why people who put a lot of effort into presenting as relentless rays of sunshine, make me deeply suspicious.
A friend of mine was suspicious about her mum’s reaction after meeting her new boyfriend.
“He’s so nice” said her mother. This throwaway compliment set off a series of honking great warning sirens in my friend’s head. She narrowed her eyes and glared at her mum, “We’ve been fooled by nice before”.
And she’s not the first person to hear a demeanour described as ‘nice’ and automatically swerve to a place of deep concern. There’s a line in the Stephen Sondheim musical ‘Into The Woods’, which has resonated with me for years. The Witch is trying to explain to the other characters that the terrible times they are experiencing are simply the consequences of their own actions. Needless to say, they don’t respond well to her straight talk. She tries harder to illustrate her point with what I think is one of the shadiest lines ever written in musical theatre:
‘You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice.’
She then goes on to qualify it with some top tier self-awareness.
‘I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right.’
I think I could be mates with The Witch. She knows exactly who she is.
Sometimes when I meet a relentlessly nice, upbeat, sunshiney person I think about this Sondheim lyric and the main question I keep tucked in my mind is this: ‘What are you hiding?’.
Okay, I might be coming over as a bit of a cold, suspicious, joy-killing old boot right now. Fair enough. I am sometimes all of those things. But I can sometimes present as nice too. And that’s my point - the sometimes-ness of it.
I am not suggesting that people who work hard to come across as nice people, optimistic people, happy people, are inherently bad. I mean, it’s lovely to be around folk who fill the room with smiles. My point is that when nice dominates their personality, when nice is all there is, when nice is what drives them, there can be a confusing blur between nice and good. Good isn’t always nice and nice isn’t always good.
To me, being nice means avoiding difficulty, avoiding hard conversations, putting a smiley spin on topics that don’t necessarily benefit from it. Why would anyone in their right mind do that? Hard conversations are far more interesting than papering over the cracks. Nice is decoration, a pretty exterior that isn’t always what it seems and is usually only temporary. Nice is subjective too. I might think I’m being nice and you might think I’m being a massive twat. It’s about perception isn’t it?
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