Tell me if this sounds familiar. Have you ever had someone in your life you just don’t like, but tolerate anyway? A person who annoys you, offends your sensibilities, and for some reason thinks you their best-est friend in the whole wide world, despite your gentle-but-obvious-to-everyone-but-them signals to STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME?

These poor souls I call “the unlikeables.”

Being nice can be awfully harsh. A certain unlikeable—let’s call him “Rich,” for the added anonymity of androgyny—has been a thorn in my side for years. I met this unlikeable three, maybe four years ago. Initially, I thought him a little boisterous, but otherwise harmless. He spoke without considering his words, but being that I’m very often guilty of the same fault, I didn’t think much of it. He was polite and easygoing; I took to hanging out with him on occasion.

But, given time, Rich’s behavior became increasingly erratic. His rants on how women always wanted jerks and never “nice guys” like him wore thin on me. All he seemed to want was a girlfriend that other men could envy him for having. Later, when Rich finally did get a girlfriend, he quickly became disenchanted with her when he realized she wasn’t a buxom blond trophy girl. (It doesn’t help matters that Rich is no Johnny Depp.)

I can’t figure for sure when annoyance became disgust, but I imagine it was probably around the time that Rich remarked that any woman wearing provocative clothing at 3 a.m. is asking to be sexually assaulted. (It doesn’t help matters that Rich is a self-proclaimed feminist.) I know it that was before the time he said that a woman leaving her blinds up is an invitation to watch her change clothes, but it may have been before he said that his ex-girlfriend really needed to lose weight and go to a dentist to fix a gap. Me memory is faulty.

At some point, though, I came to loathe Rich’s company. In my mind, the right course of action was to avoid him. However, whenever I ran into Rich, he wanted to talk like best buds. He thought we were what may have been referred to in the early ’90s as “straight up peeps.” He’d follow me and even my friends around complaining about politics and the superficialities of women. He was incapable of picking up on those polite signals we sent to nice but obnoxious folk. You know the signals: the lack of eye contact, the trailing “Yeaaahhh …”, and the constant looking behind oneself.

I used to think these were part of a universal language, but Rich didn’t speak it. “I need to go run some errands,” we’d say. He’d reply, “Oh, I’ll walk with you!” And he would. Every bloody time.

The presence of an unlikeable in one’s life presents a startling dilemma. What appears to be the polite thing to do—to put up with the undesirable as to avoid making the unlikeable feel bad about themselves—is in fact a piss-poor course of action. I put up with Rich’s insanity for more than two years before I decided that enough was enough.

And now I feel bad anyway, for two conflicting reasons. On one hand, I wish I’d been honest about my feelings a long time ago. On the other, I still feel bad about being so cruel. Having repressed my dislike for so long, I let it come out in spades. He may be ignorant and a pain in the keister, but Rich and his fellow unlikeables are still human beings.

I wasn’t very mature in my handling of the Rich debacle. In the first place, I did the right thing—I sent the message of “Please leave me alone.” However, when it didn’t work, I didn’t press harder. I avoided the situation for years. Coming at an unlikeable someone head-on with your discord is unpleasant, but better in the long run if you can’t get far enough away from the unlikeable.

I’m sure I’ve been someone’s unlikeable at some point. Most of us probably have. Some people just bother other people. Such is life. I guess my problem was that I wanted to avoid being a jerk at all costs, even at the cost of lying and pretending to like someone I didn’t. I don’t care for jerks … those jerks. They bother me lots. But there’s a time and place for everything, and that includes jerkhood. Had I been a jerk from the get-go, I could have avoided all of the fake smiles and nods. Maybe Rich wouldn’t feel so raw about the whole thing had he never had cause to consider us such tight home-boys.

Real life scenarios don’t have easy answers. All those videos the guidance counselors showed us in elementary school were wrong. Sometimes you can’t be nice to people. If you do, they’ll follow you around like stray dogs, oogling girls and making homophobic remarks. (It doesn’t help matters that Rich claimed to be a proponent of gay rights.)

You know that adage “You are the company that you keep?” I don’t buy that any more than “You are what you eat,” but I still don’t want a homophobic, sexist dog following me around. That’s just bad PR.

Charles Smith has been a columnist for the New River Voice from the very beginning. And despite our lack of eye contact and our trailing off “Yeaaahhh …, he still keeps writing for us.