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I’m as nice to people as their behavior will allow me to be. But I’m not a “nice guy.”

All my life, I’ve heard men complain that women don’t like them because they’re too nice. In a few rare cases, this is even true. In my early 20s, I dated a woman a few times and things didn’t work out. Her best friend told me the woman was so accustomed to being abused by men that she didn’t know how to accept the decent way in which I treated her.

But in most of the cases when I hear this, I quietly judge things to be very different. These guys might think they’re “nice,” but I can think of better words.

Weak. Uninteresting. Subservient. Even loser.

I have this on my mind lately because of a situation I’ve watched play out involving a man and a woman. The guy is “nice.” The woman is strong-willed and aggressive. She’s the sort who you would see as a winner in all that she does.

He’s crazy about her. She really wants a good relationship with him. He meets a lot of her objective criteria. But she can’t get past something she has trouble putting her finger on.

He’s weak. He’s a “nice guy.” He’s a loser.

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I wrote over the weekend about the folly of making lists of goals that you’re never willing to actually pursue. The comic strip Pearls Before Swine — which I consider one of the most brilliant and insightful pieces of art today — ran something Monday morning that paired perfectly with that. (See the complete strip here.) Goals are great. Some of our goals are really worth chasing. But we need a sense of priorities — and if we don’t have the love we need, all of our goals are useless, even if we achieve every one of them.

I’m not the same person I was when I was 25. I’m not even the same as I was 15 years ago. And I’m thankful for that.

Every now and then, I meet people who I knew years ago — in college or high school — and I can tell they haven’t changed inside. They’ve coasted through the years getting older — but not getting any wiser, as far as I can tell.

If you’re going to become wiser, it’s typically because you’ve done a lot of work on yourself. For me, therapy with a good psychologist was a catalyst for change. Before that, I’d gone through half a dozen bad therapists, which taught me to appreciate the good one I found. (My experience is that most of them get into it because they’re trying to fix themselves. And that wasn’t helpful for me.)

I’ve realized recently, though, that we rarely seem to learn the lessons we need to learn in time to stop us from stumbling into heartbreak. It seems that only by screwing up in big ways — which we’ll later regret — do we have those epiphanies which give us insight.

I was thinking Sunday afternoon about all the lessons I’ve learned from past relationships — and I realize that I didn’t learn those lessons in time to save myself from heartbreak each time.

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