Contrary to popular belief, chivalry is not dead; it is just hiding really well.

It is not so much hiding, as being blocked out by the dude spouting off cheeseball lines trying every which way to impress a girl at a party. I don’t know whether or not it is ultimately true that nice guys finish last, but it sure seems that way.

How many times have any of you heard a girl say that chivalry is dead following a disastrous encounter with the opposite sex from the night before? It seems as though this is a slap in the face to all of the nice guys left-the ones that get no credit for being there to cheer up the girl of their dreams after that girl has just been played by some jerk.

The plight of the good guy is a gut-wrenching tale in which Joe Somebody enters into a friendship with a girl who he cares enough about to be his significant other. Before Mr. Somebody has the chance to tell her his feelings and try to start something meaningful, he finds himself in the dreaded “friend zone.”

I have visited this “friend zone” so many times that I’ve probably earned enough frequent flier miles to send the entire student body of Villanova on spring break … to the moon. Once inside the friend zone, Joe must endure both the upsides and the hardships of which the latter totally dominates. This is the guy who goes along on shopping trips to the mall, has “lunch-dates” and is allowed into the innermost workings of the female mind. To Ms. Right, Joe has become a non-romantic interest.

No matter how obvious it may seem that Joe would be great for her, she always seems completely blindsided when Joe finally builds up the courage and makes an attempt to escape the friend zone and become “The Guy” in her life. You all know the story.

The fact of the matter is that the nice guys are there to wipe away the tears from the eyes of the girls who matter to them. Unfortunately, for Joe Somebody and his band of lonely compatriots, those girls are crying because of jerks that hurt them, and quite possibly will repeat this over and over.

So let me declare here and now that I salute you, Mr. Nice Guy. You endure such things as multi-hour phone conversations and shopping sprees and dispell the notion that all men are dogs.

However, you do these things not because you have to, but because you are a good guy and you have a general caring for the women around you.

It is inevitable in the sexually-driven society in which we live that the jerk is going to have his way much more often than the nice guy. An unfortunate fact of college is that this is going to happen a lot more than it ever should.

The jerk will play his games, the girl will get hurt and the nice guy will be there to dry the tears and convince her to keep looking because not every guy is like that.

Well, it’s the truth. Not every guy is like that. Start looking out for the nice guys because I guarantee you they are there. More often than not, they have been right there in front of you the whole time.