What It’s Like To Date The Nice Guy When There’s No Real Spark

He holds your hand as you walk through your local shopping center. He smiles the moment he sees you in your sweatpants and hair scraped from your face.

He listens intimately as you tell him about your day, smiling and nodding in the right places. He brings you flowers without asking, and cries when he sees you pain.

He is the one you call, he is the one you text, without thinking. He is the one who tells you everything you need to hear.

And somehow, it is not enough.

You are a unit. A team. Best friends united in a tornado of love and affection. Two souls joined at the hip, taking on the adventure together.

You laugh as you make dinner together, and rest your head on his shoulder as you drift off during Saturday night television.

He strokes your hair as you browse on your phone, and doesn’t need to tell you he loves you as you know. You know. It seeps through his pores and into your skin as he caresses you at night.

The love of the nice guy penetrates you as he tries with all his might to get you there. You drown in his affection, gasping for air as you try to regain the mystery you once had.

You miss the coy smiles you would gift the men across the room in the dingy clubs of your past. The lazy looks you’d share with the boy who made the air crackle when you spoke.

You long for the touch of a stranger in the night, a promiscuous dream you harbor as you feel your nice guy loving you. The life you can never have again. The life you don’t know if you would want again. The possibilities snatched from you without you realizing.

The nice guy did not ask for you. He did not ask to fall in love. He was once a stranger too, a soldier in the war field of women, never settling down before he felt the connection in your eyes.

He changed for you. Adapted his world for you. Became a guy that your friends sigh and wish they had too. You smile and act grateful for your luck, but your soul twists as you feel the guilt. The guilt.

The guilt over the dreams you sneak when you know he’s asleep. The guilt over the fantasies you play in your head as you fuck him. The people you imagine you kiss as you play with his lips.

The guilt washes over you once the night ends, and you’re held in his embrace with no way of pretending he is anybody else except the nice guy.

You are the problem. You are the catalyst to a world of heartbreak. And you just can’t help yourself.

The nice guy will cry when you tell him. He’ll beg you to rethink. But as you walk away, into a path of uncertainty and late nights alone, you’ll remember him fondly with a smile. And embrace the regrets as a learning.

Because a nice guy is nice, but a true love is better.