The Myth of the "Good Guy"

During my first semester in the U.S. and I was just beginning to be friends with Felicity, she asked me why I didn't date. (She herself had an active dating life here in Columbia.) I told her, "I have a boyfriend back home". She began to ask me what Caye was like, and what I liked about Caye. "He's nice," I said. "And don't think that's a lame answer. That is in fact, the highest of praises," I added. To clarify, I told her that in my experience, nice guys are so very hard to find. It's easy enough to find men who are good looking or rich; but nice guys? They're the holy grail of relationships, as far as I was concerned. I elaborated further. "He's a good person. Most of all, he's kind."

Caye had always been Mr. Nice Guy; he even looked the part. Boyish good looks, a clean-shaven face, dimples, and a smile that would make any mother wish him on her daughter. Because he looked like such a good guy, people would always assume that when we had a fight, it was because of something I had done. If I told a friend that he and I had fought, she would say, "What did you do to Caye?" I remember telling Donna, my makeup artist at ABS-CBN, that Caye and I had had an argument. I shared this information with her after she asked me why my eyes looked like I had been crying. Her response to what I said... "Bakit mo naman inaway si Caye?"

Recent developments have shown that Caye is not the good guy that everyone (including Caye himself) thought he was. And I think this is why so many of my girl friends reacted with such disappointment and anger at how we broke up. Caye made many of us believe that there are nice guys out there that treat women well. Men who are decent; men who are good. I doubt that my friends would have reacted as strongly as they did if they had perceived Caye as a jerk. My friends were therefore not just disappointed for me, per se; they were also disappointed for THEMSELVES. Caye not just broke my heart, he also shattered THEIR belief in good guys. This was a recurring theme in some of my friends' responses to the situation. "He's not a nice guy after all. He fooled all of us." "I've lost some faith in good guys." "I really thought he was a nice guy."

This whole experience has left me and probably some of my friends just a tad more jaded. Maila's P.S. in her email summed up this cynicism in five words... "wala nga atang "good boy".