How to Be a 'Nice Guy' in 3 Easy Steps — THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER
a.k.a the one who pretends to be a girl's friend just to date her
Trigger warning: self-harm, su*c*de, SA
It pains me to say this, but it has to be done. Werther from The Sorrows of Young Werther is the original “nice guy”.
Written by the father of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther follows the character of — yep, you guessed it — Werther, a young and highly-sensitive man who falls irrevocably in love with a beautiful girl called Charlotte. Unfortunately, Charlotte is already engaged to the prim and proper Albert (who also happens to be 11 years her senior but let’s ignore that). Despite this, Werther is relentless in his pursuit of her. He ends up befriending the couple, and, realising he cannot escape the love triangle, eventually commits suicide.
No matter how many times I read this book, I end up shedding a tear or two (or many). It is a depressing love story that deals with themes such as classism and mental health, and will evoke alllll the emotions: anger, sorrow, joy, and everything in between.
BUT! Something that isn’t discussed much is how the main character, Werther, attempts to manipulate Charlotte by posing as her friend, when all he really wants to do is boink her. He was the original ‘Nice Guy” before the Nice Guy was even a thing.
So, while he remains one of my favourite characters, I must — for the sake of the girlies out there who, like me, have had a male friend overstep his boundaries — rip him apart.
Because if there’s one thing I despise more than horny jerks, it’s horny jerks who pretend to be your friend.
The Plague of the Nice Guys™
There are many forms of a ‘Nice Guy’, but here I refer specifically to the particular brand of men who befriend a woman with the hidden intention of pursuing her romantically or having sex with her — ‘hidden’ being the operative word here.
If you’ve never met a Nice Guy™ before, this is their modus operandi: At first, they are gentle, patient, polite, understanding, and empathetic. They listen to your problems, joke around with you, and seem like genuine good pals.
That is, until they aren’t.
The moment the woman turns them down, the façade shatters. They throw a passive-aggressive (or straight-up aggressive) tantrum, call her names, sexually harass her, rape her, murder her — take your pick; the male rage knows no bounds. In Werther’s case, he ends up killing himself.
You see, in Werther’s inchoate understanding of romantic relationships, the only way out of a love triangle is to remove one of the three components. Incapable of murdering either Charlotte or Albert, the only option left is to kill himself. Duh.
Obviously, this isn’t the most rational course of action, but that isn’t the problem I want to talk about today. It is the faux friendship he strikes up with Charlotte during his intense crush.
First, some context.
Sorrows is the novel that sort of kickstarted the ‘Sturm und Drang’ literary movement in Germany, which glorifies extreme emotion, passion, and individuality. It really took off in the late 18th century and was a precursor to the Romantic movement of the 1800s.
If ‘Sturm und Drang’ sounds familiar, that’s probably because you’re thinking of Durmstrang, the Eastern European wizard in school from Harry Potter, the name of which is, in fact, a portmanteau of the term.
In English, it is loosely translated to “storm and stress”. A more accurate translation would be “storm and thrust”, which is more apt since its purpose was to take a stand against the stuffy, rigidness of the Age of Enlightenment.
The entirety of Sorrows is told solely through a compilation of letters from Werther to his friend Wilhelm. The narrative is only occasionally interrupted by the fictional person who put together these letters for us to read. This means we are permanently in Werther’s head, which makes his succession of misadventures all the more visceral and immersive.
All this considered, we must acknowledge that the character of Werther is written purposefully to be extreme. He is also what the Gen Zs might call a “soft boy”. According to Urban Dictionary, this means “a less masculine boy who is described as ‘cute’ based on their soft or gentle characteristics.” Think of them as the antithesis of a GymBro.
He is curious, emotional, and easily moved by art, nature, and poetry. But that also means he is excitable, rash, and has knee-jerk reactions so violent he gives himself whiplash.
Werther does occasionally appear self-aware to some degree (keywords: occasionally, appears), and even unknowingly foretells his fate within the first two pages, telling Wilhelm that “misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness.”
Your first impression might be that this story is a tragedy (or a kind of morbid comedy) of farce and misunderstandings — mine certainly was. However, I’ve since changed my tune. This isn’t really a story of innocent blunders. It is a story of a man who cannot respect a woman’s “no”.
Like, I’m not trying to shit on Werther’s grave here, but if he had just sat his ass down when Charlotte first rejected him, none of this would have happened.
So, if Werther were to give terrible advice on how to become a Nice Guy™, these are what I imagine his top three tips would be.
Nice Guy™ ProTip #1: Weasel yourself into the woman’s life, no matter the cost
Werther’s first red flag flies high before he has even met Charlotte, when he describes to Wilhelm his encounter with a peasant man who was in love with a widow. At first, he is greatly inspired by the man’s devotion, but later finds out that the man, unable to control his lust, had forced himself on the widow and resorted to violence. Instead of being appalled, Werther desires to defend him in court. Which, um, weird behaviour. 🥴
Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and attribute it to his young, ignorant notions of love. Skip to the part where he meets Charlotte.
Okay, these few chapters are undeniably squeeeeee-worthy. He is immediately taken by her beauty and kindness, showering her beloved nieces and nephews with attention, and writing about her in a way that would make even Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones swoon.
“You, who know me, can fancy how steadfastly I gazed upon her rich dark eyes during these remarks, how my very soul gloated over her warm lips and fresh, glowing cheeks, how I became quite lost in the delightful meaning of her words, so much so, that I scarcely heard the actual expressions. In short, I alighted from the carriage like a person in a dream, and was so lost to the dim world around me, that I scarcely heard the music which resounded from the illuminated ballroom.”
This dream is shot to hell when he soon finds out that she’s engaged to Albert. But if you thought this will be a strong deterrent for Werther, you thought wrong. Our buddy meets and BEFRIENDS Albert, who is unaware of his intentions with his fiancée. In fact, the two men become sort of bros. Lol.
All this is rather cute, until Werther becomes increasingly aware that Charlotte isn’t going to leave Albert for him any time soon. This makes him try to assert his feelings for her even more — the first evidence of an ulterior motive.
Since Charlotte is very much in love with Albert, Werther’s attempts to one-up Albert don’t work. At first, he becomes woeful, which is understandable. But his obsession with Charlotte only worsens as the days go by and he starts to lose it.
Thus begins his quick descent into unhinged territory, which Goethe describes in scarily accurate detail.
First, he goes against everything he ever stood for. Before this, he writes to Wilhelm that he is “a happy and contented mortal”. Later, when expressing his love for Charlotte, he hubristically announces:
“I felt myself more than mortal, holding his loveliest of creatures in my arms, flying, with her as rapidly as the wind, till I lost sight of every other object.”
Another example is when he says in an earlier chapter that “nothing distresses [him] more than to see men torment each other”… only for him to TOTALLY distress Albert later on with his constant third-wheeling.
He begins to shed his sense of identity and self, and wilfully becomes consumed by the thought of Charlotte (think: Prince Charles yelling at Diana in The Crown. “MORNING, NOON, AND NIGHT I CARE ABOUT HER!!!”), which is simply not the vibes.
Nice Guy™ ProTip #2: Possess an inordinate amount of audacity
At this point, Werther hasn’t actually hurt anybody yet, apart from being a mildly irritating presence in Charlotte and Albert’s lives. But if there’s one thing Nice Guys™ all have in common, it is the sheer audacity.
Werther begins to blame Charlotte for “leading him on”. Whenever he makes the slightest physical contact with her, he draws back. But then…
“a secret force impels [him] forward again, and my senses become disordered. Her innocent, unconscious heart never knows what agony these little familiarities inflict upon me.”
Deflection of responsibility? Evidence of little to no self-control or ability to keep to boundaries? Check and check.
A romantic at heart, I initially thought this was sweet (ikr, what was I thinking??). Then I realised this story isn’t about star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet. Charlotte loves Albert, and Albert loves Charlotte. He treats her well and is friendly and respectful to her — there should be no contention about their being together.
So why is Werther acting as if Charlotte is toying with him on purpose, when he is the one who has warped the situation in his mind?
This is yet another symptom of a Nice Guy™. The more a woman reciprocates their ‘friendship’, the more they perceive it as romantic interest, which is why most of them think they’ve been duped when they eventually get rejected.
Another instance is when Charlotte innocently feeds her pet bird a seed with her lips. Werther, watching this, says:
“She should not act thus. She ought not to excite my imagination with such displays of heavenly innocence and happiness, nor awaken my heart from its slumbers, in which it dreams of the worthlessness of life! And why not? Because she knows how much I love her.”
At one point, he even states:
“I sometimes cannot understand how she can love another, how she dares love another, when I love nothing in this world so completely, so devotedly, as I love her, when I know only her, and have no other possession.”
His sense of entitlement is confounding. He loves her, and as such, she has to — by his god-given right!!! — return it in the same magnitude. She owes him for the ‘effort’ he has put into loving her.
Barf.
Nice Guy™ ProTip #3: Give the woman an ultimatum. When all else fails, threaten with violence of any sort
I wish I could say the only person Werther hurt with his erratic behaviour is himself. Albert is seemingly unbothered. Other than giving Werther the figurative side-eye and mentally going, “What the fuck, bro?” he doesn’t do much else, which is unfortunate because I’d have paid to see him beat up Werther.
This leaves poor Charlotte to deal with the fallout.
Werther, being the type of guy who says what he thinks with no filter all the time, professes his love to Charlotte freely. He constantly puts her in a spot, and his emotional ramblings make her frequently cry and worry.
That is not to say she is entirely blameless. She has, on one occasion, given Werther one of her ribbons. In those times, that is almost akin to a marriage proposal. Buuuuut it was just the once. Charlotte is generally a friendly and affectionate girl, and is clueless to the extremity of Werther’s feelings for her. She very obviously loves Albert only, and has made this known to Werther many times.
By now, Albert is understandably annoyed with Werther’s unsolicited visits to their house and tells Charlotte to draw some boundaries with him. She does precisely this, pleading with him many times to be sensible and understand her difficult position. Of course, Werther is too selfish to pay any heed and continues his pursuit of her regardless.
At certain points, Werther does acknowledge his own folly, even saying: “I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not?” Yeah, no shit, bozo.
Despite this, he doesn’t let up, because no matter what, none of the blame is or will ever be on him. Charlotte is wrong for not returning his affections, for not seeing that he is 100 times better than old Albert The Lame-O. She is the stupid one, not him.
Now that all his chances have run out, what does Werther, who has proven to be a calm and reliable man of reason, decides to do? Kill himself, of course.
But before he does so, he makes it a point to harass Charlotte one more time by visiting her AGAINST HER EXPLICIT WISHES TO KEEP HIS DISTANCE. He shows up at her house to make one last profession of love, which is a scary and horrifying experience for women.
Talk about infiltration of boundaries and personal space.
Forced into a corner and at her wit’s end, Charlotte finally puts her foot down and rebukes him:
“Do you not see that you are deceiving yourself, that you are seeking your own destruction? Why must you love me, me only, who belong to another? I much fear, that it is only the impossibility of possessing me which makes your desire for me so strong.”
And what does she get for sticking to her guns? She is punished. Werther takes this rejection as the final straw and prepares for his suicide. Even then, he doesn’t release his death grip on Charlotte, saying:
“Then will I fly to meet you. I will claim you, and remain in your eternal embrace, in the presence of the Almighty.”
That’s not romantic. That’s just 1700s speak for “I will have you, one way or another” and “If I can’t have you, nobody can” in the guise of a pitiful, self-victimising final proclamation of love.
Congratulations!!! You have completed the final step and are now officially a Nice Guy™! Give yourself a pat on the back, you deserve it.
Jokes aside, this won’t be a proper Sorrows analysis if I didn’t at least mention the aspect of mental health. Goethe was an author ahead of his time, and humanises his characters by making them as imperfect as can be.
Werther’s mind definitely wasn’t running with a full set of wheels, but at the same time, he is also entirely human, in that he is even capable of feeling strong emotion and thought.
At one point, he messes with Albert by putting one of Alberts’s unloaded pistols to his head. Yes, it is a pretty fucked up thing to do, but it is also behaviour one might expect from a teendult who doesn’t know any better. Here, Werther says:
“I have been more than once intoxicated, my passions have always bordered on extravagance: I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned […] that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever been decried by the world as drunken or insane.”
To which Albert responds:
“This is another of your extravagant humours. You always exaggerate a case, and in this matter you are undoubtedly wrong; for we were speaking of suicide, which you compare with great actions, when it is impossible to regard it as anything but a weakness. It is much easier to die than to bear a life of misery with fortitude.”
That was absolutely savage and very 1700s white-man of Albert. Sure, Werther trying to justify his irresponsible passion is immature and misguided, but Albert is also wrong for shaming Werther for his emotions. And I don’t know about you, but I certainly wouldn’t say something like that to someone who has a literal gun to his head.
To Albert, Werther, instead of losing his temper, which he very much wanted to do, composes himself and says, quite poignantly:
“Human nature has its limits. It is able to endure a certain degree of joy, sorrow, and pain, but becomes annihilated as soon as this measure is exceeded. The question, therefore, is, not whether a man is strong or weak, but whether he is able to endure the measure of his sufferings.”
FELT.
Even the saintly Charlotte has her moments. In the preceding few chapters to Werther’s death, she tries to find a girl for him, but cannot bring herself to follow through.
“Amid all these considerations she felt deeply but indistinctly that her own real but unexpressed wish was to retain him for herself, and her pure and amiable heart felt from this thought a sense of oppression which seemed to forbid a prospect of happiness.”
Part of her wants to keep Werther’s friendship for herself — which is a perfectly human thing to feel! This is a facet you don’t often see in novels from that age.
Towards the end of the novel, Goethe, as the omniscient narrator, also notes how all three of them were caught in an impossible situation:
“[Werther] had often discussed the [suicide] with Albert; and, between the latter and Charlotte. Albert was so opposed to the very idea that […] he doubted the seriousness of his threats, and not only turned them into ridicule, but caused Charlotte to share his feelings of incredulity.
Her heart was thus tranquillised when she felt disposed to view the melancholy subject in a serious point of view, though she never communicated to her husband the apprehensions she sometimes experienced.”
Remember, at the time, people simply didn’t believe in ‘mental health’. There was no such thing as counselling or therapy, and if there was, it was likely conducted under less-than-desirable circumstances. They also called psychiatrists ‘Alienists’, which says all you need to know about the topic.
To this day, people experiencing suicidal thoughts, depression, and/or anxiety still get told to “Just cheer up!” or “Just have a more positive outlook!” But it is not as simple as changing your attitude towards life.
Whether self-induced or caused by external stressors, depression literally changes the chemical in your brain. It takes infinitely more effort to lift yourself out of depression than a state of ‘normal’ sadness.
Here’s a great visual representation of what happens to your brain during depression:
All of Werther’s actions can be attributed to his young age, and the events depicted in this novel are of more extreme circumstances. But “nice guys” like Werther are rampant, some more dangerous than others.
In my review of They Never Learn by Layne Fargo, I discussed some statistics about the sexual assault of women in college. Out of all the different types of relationships the victims had with their attackers, the highest number reported their attackers as someone they called a ‘friend’.
After Werther’s (very slow and painful) death, Charlotte is implied to have died of heartbreak, or at the very least, become permanently emotionally crippled by this.
Therefore, the biggest loser here is neither Werther nor Albert but Charlotte, who is punished with long-lasting trauma when she has done nothing but be her kind, cheerful self.
It’s sad, because Werther failed to understand that the beauty of love lies in its freedom and celebration of autonomy of the self. Just as how he could not control his love for her, Charlotte cannot force herself to reciprocate it.
Love is an amorphous notion that we will probably never be able to understand in our lifetimes. All we can do is embrace the joys and hurts that come with it, for it is a painful but crucial part of our continuous growth as silly little human beings on this great big spinning ball we call Earth.
#justiceforCharlotte #iloveyouWertherbutthisaintit #albertwasthebestcharacter #arguewiththewall
Read my previous Rant: Store-bought Feminism — THEY NEVER LEARN
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I loved this article. My favourite thing about your writing is how you link everyday topics with literature - the topic of 'Nice Guys' is something us women experience in 2022, and it's interesting to know that they've been plaguing society, even ages ago! Haha. Thanks for writing this, and I can't wait to read your next piece! :)