I may add that the reason you feel that way may be because of the way you have been conditioned by the society you grew up in and continue to reside in ;).
But that’s getting too much into another topic entirely…
You would be wrong. Society hasn’t conditioned me to do shit. I love my wife. It’s no more complicated than that.
And I’d argue that your feelings relating to the 'sacred’ness of your own bond or other couples regarding that (ie, treating them with the same respect as you do your own) is societally conditioned as well. And attempting to attribute it to an individualistic determination is something that has arisen out of post-Enlightenment Western ideals on individualism and the society. But we could go round and round on this :D.
Love, of course is biological, but lifetime pair bonds are a combination of biological and social.
This is a case where I can say that my post is my cite. I’m not conditioned by shit.
A big difference between Jim and many self-proclaimed “Nice Guys” is that Jim has things going for him other than mere inoffensiveness. He’s not Mr. Perfect, but he’s reasonably handsome, charming, and intelligent. He’s also confident, outgoing, and doesn’t get nervous around women. Judging from what we’ve seen on the show, Jim has never felt rejected by women in general. He couldn’t snap his fingers and get any woman he wanted, but he also never seems to have difficulty finding a date. His problem was that the particular woman he was interested in was unavailable.
I think Jim did genuinely enjoy spending time with Pam as a friend even though he was also attracted to her. When they were pranking Dwight together he was really having fun, it wasn’t all just a ploy to spend time with Pam (although he definitely enjoyed that part too). Jim also wasn’t suffering from blind infatuation. He always seemed to have a realistic understanding of what she was like as a person rather than seeing her as some Perfect Goddess.
I think the biggest point in Jim’s favor was that he understood the situation he was in and tried to be decent and honorable about it. He respected Pam’s relationship with Roy even though he didn’t like it. He obviously hoped they’d break up, but he didn’t try to sabotage their relationship or seduce Pam. For a long time he kept his feelings to himself, and probably hoped that he’d eventually get over his crush on Pam. When he decided he really could not be happy as “just friends” with her, he made plans to leave Scranton. Then and only then did he tell Pam that he was in love with her. He no doubt would have been thrilled if she’d said “I love you too!”, but he was prepared for the answer he got.
Finally, there were hints early on that Pam thought Jim was attractive. She considered him to be “just a friend”, but “just a friend” who was also kinda hot. I remember her checking him out in the basketball episode, and she seemed a bit jealous of his relationship with the purse saleswoman. This didn’t seem to be a really big deal to her – she wasn’t going to break up with Roy just because she thought her friend was hot. But she didn’t place Jim in the category of “He’s a great guy, but I wouldn’t sleep with him in a million years.” It was more “He’s a great guy, and if I were single…but I’m not.”
Excellent analysis, Lamia. I see nothing to disagree with.
If you think it’s all personal choice, why do you assume that other people expect “the same respect you give to your own”? No more, no less?
I also agree with **Lamia’s **post.
Yes, Jim had romantic feelings for Pam from the beginning…there’s a deleted scene from season two where he describes his worst first date: a lunch date, and things were going great, they really hit it off, etc., and then he found out that it wasn’t even a date, because she was already in love with someone else. He never says Pam’s name, but it’s obvious.
I think, though, that after that point he tried multiple times to make himself not love her, to be happy being just her friend. That’s why he asked Katy out. That’s why he asked Brenda out. The Valentine’s episode in Season Two had him giving Kelly a lecture about “Yeah, it would be great if he liked you, but he doesn’t, so you just have to suck it up and move on. Try to have fun.” He was really talking to himself.
Karen was a bit more complicated…I think he genuinely liked her, and was lying to himself as much as to her. “See? It’s safe for me to go back to Scranton because I’m with Karen now. Man, I am totally over Pam! See? Karen! Isn’t she cool?”
Pam definitely also had feelings for Jim from the beginning. In the very first episode, she giggles and blushes obviously when she finds out Jim knows her favorite type of yogurt. She checks him out in a sexual way in the basketball episode. She’s jealous of Katy. The difference is that she at that time was not a very brave person, she was in this comfortable relationship with Roy, and it was too much of a risk for her to make such a huge change in her life on the chance that things might work out with Jim. She was scared, and in denial to boot.
And I don’t really agree that Jim was way over the line declaring his love for Pam while she was engaged. He was just being honest, letting Pam know the truth. If her relationship with Roy was as strong as it should have been, Jim should have posed no threat no matter what he said. I ask myself how I would feel if some coworker of my husband’s declared love for him, and my reaction is, “meh.” I know he loves me, I trust him completely, and I honestly wouldn’t really care because I know no other woman poses a threat. It’s the two people in the relationship that have obligations to each other–Jim didn’t owe Roy anything. I can understand why people feel differently, but that’s just how I see it.
I don’t assume they expect it. I don’t give it because I think they expect it. I expect it of myself.
I think I agree with all this. Jim really did not fit the profile of a loser hung up on one woman. He still dated other women (one of whom was Amy Adams, so he was doing ok for himself), and he also showed maturity in taking her “no” for an answer and moving on with his life instead of getting stalkerish or depressed about it.
Excellent points. I’m disappointed that some people think that Jim dated other women in order to “kill time” or for other ignoble purposes. Sometimes, men do those things because they feel conflicted. They’re in an untenable situation, and so they choose to make the best of things.
This is just one reason why I cringe when people make the “Nice Guy” out to be some deceptive, nefarious schemer with ill intentions. To paraphrase a cliche, the path of true love doesn’t always run smooth. Even when it’s not true love – even when it’s just romantic desire – a nice guy may be painted into a painful corner.
I mentioned in a recent thread that something I find interesting about Jim’s character is that although he loves playing tricks on people he otherwise seems to place a high value on honesty. He isn’t comfortable deceiving people unless it’s part of a joke. On a couple of occasions (“The Alliance”, “New Boss”) he’s made himself look like an idiot trying to honestly explain a prank he was pulling on Dwight when he could just as easily have invented some plausible excuse for his behavior. In “The Promotion” Jim decides to publicly announce a management decision that he had to know would make most of the office very angry.
For the first two seasons of the show, I think Jim was struggling not just with his desire for Pam but his desire to tell the truth. When I first got into watching the show I remember being impressed by the way this was handled by the writers and John Krasinski. In a lot of comedies I think the Jim character would have been portrayed as either too shy or perhaps too proud to confess his feelings to Pam, and probably would have gotten himself into all kinds of wacky situations trying to conceal the truth from her. But with The Office I felt like Jim was always trying to walk the fine line between two wrongs. He didn’t want to lie to Pam, but he also didn’t want to go too far with a woman who was engaged to someone else. The biggest lie he told to Pam was probably claiming he was “totally over” his crush on her (“The Secret”). That seemed difficult for him to get out, and it came at the end of an otherwise honest account of how he’d become interested in her as soon as they’d met.
By the time of “Casino Night”, Jim must have felt it was unlikely that Pam would leave Roy. Their wedding was fast approaching. Jim had already made plans to move on with his life in a different city, and IIRC was also about to leave on an overseas vacation he’d scheduled to overlap with the wedding. When Jim tells Pam that he’s in love with her, he doesn’t ask her to break up with Roy. He says he just wanted her to know. I don’t think he did anything wrong here, he was being honest and was prepared to deal with the consequences.
One could make a case that Jim went too far when he followed Pam inside and kissed her. Pam didn’t mind, but Roy sure would have (and indeed did when he heard about it much later). But even here I don’t think Jim intended to play the seducer. He had already decided he was leaving Scranton, and I think he figured he had nothing to lose by trying for a good-bye kiss. Pam’s response gave him some hope that she might have changed her mind, but when he tried for a second kiss and she hesitated he stopped. He asked her if she really wanted to marry Roy, and when she said she did then Jim didn’t argue or plead with her. He just said “Okay” and left.
**typoink **makes a fair point, in that at least Jim was being honest. My issue is more with how he acted on it, as **Lamia **mentions. If he wanted to be direct and open, he should have sat her down over lunch and said he felt Roy was wrong for her, and that if she ever finds herself single he would love to go out on a date (or some such wording). Pushing the kiss on her was not cool, and made him look like a jerk who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Of course, it is TV, and questionable behavior by lead characters tends to get brushed under the rug. 
I agree with this. My impression was that it was supposed to be obvious to the audience that Pam was falling in love with Jim from the beginning of the show, only she had not figured that out yet. Part of the torture for Jim was being able to see that Pam was developing these feelings for him, but wasn’t admitting it to herself, and worse yet was proceeding with plans to marry a dimwitted guy she wasn’t in love with. So I didn’t see Jim’s declaration of love as being so innocent, because I thought he was hoping that he could shock Pam to her senses about her feelings for him.
Even this sounds pretty innocent to me, in the sense that it wasn’t malicious or deceptive. Jim was in love with Pam, and if he thought she was perhaps secretly in love with him and that she’d be unhappy with Roy then letting her know that she did have a choice was the right thing to do. (And I think it was clear enough that Jim did not really expect that Pam would leave Roy.) It was certainly tough for Roy when Pam did later break up with him, but it would have been even tougher in the long run for him to be married to a woman who regretted their relationship.
Now, if Jim had said more than he did I’d probably feel differently. I think he was within his rights to tell Pam he loved her and ask if she really wanted to marry Roy. If his response to her affirmative answer had been “But he’s such a jerk” or “I’ll treat you better” or “I love you more than he does” or “You know you love me” then that would have shown a lack of respect not only for Roy but for Pam’s decision. But he was willing to accept Pam’s choice and didn’t get whiny, manipulative, or creepy about it.
Excellent point. You may feel - hell, you may know - that the other person has chosen badly. But the instant you open up to them about it, you’ve crossed the line. You at least want to be controlling, and you should no longer trust your own motives. As hard as it is, you just have to leave that kind of pronouncement to friends who have less self-interest.
Yes, I have personal experience here. Irrelevant? Fuck a lot of irrelevant.
But you’re not in love with them, right? Not even crushing on them. You can talk about their boyfriends without dying a little inside or wondering why they’re torturing you or any of the other complaints we hear from guys who are pining for women they’re “just friends” with. So it’s a totally different ballgame than the Nice Guy scenario.
It sounds like you’re attracted to your friends in the same sort of sense I am–if one or both of you were a rather different person than you are and circumstances were entirely different than they are and you both had different priorities than you do, you could see being with them. That, I think, is pretty normal and healthy; why would you be friends with someone who didn’t have some sort of quality you like, admire, or find attractive, even as that attractiveness is tempered by your knowledge of their less attractive qualities?
But that’s not how Nice Guys are attracted to their female “friends.” They think these women are the pinnacle of perfection, with no bad qualities except their horrible taste in men. They think if they could just be with the Vagina Ex Machina, life would by idyllic, and being reminded that someone else is with the VEM is anathema. Thus the whining and pissing when she dares gripe about her boyfriend–why must she torture them by treating them the same as her other friends? Cue wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments.
The bottom line is that these guys lying to themselves and to their “friends.” If they were honest with themselves, they’d recognize that they have flaws and imperfections, and so do these women. And if they were honest with the women, they’d admit that they’re not okay being treated like any of the rest of their friends. Is it deliberate, pre-planned dishonesty? No, I don’t really think so. But it is dishonesty.
So where does that leave us with Jim? Is he a nice guy or a Nice Guy? Well, it’s hard to really say, but based on the tidbits other people have dug up, I’d say he’s a little of column A and a little of column B. It sounds like he was interested in her and would have made a move if she weren’t already attached, but pursued the friendship for its own sake rather than as a method of worming his way into her affections (and pants.) He did try to undermine her engagement and manipulate her by following her into the building and kissing her, but it was only the once rather than a steady litany of, “omg, I can’t believe you let him treat you like that.” He does seem kind of blind to Pam’s flaws, but then again the show tends not to illustrate many of them so that’s hard to really evaluate. Overall, I’d say about 65/35.
As for the whole “engagement is not a sacred bond” digression, I think it depends a little, but is mostly horseshit. If you get engaged as a sort of “going steady on steroids” without serious plans to marry, it’s not a sacred bond. But if you’re seriously planning to get married, it means you’ve already made your emotional commitment, and that is the sacred bond of marriage–the rest of it is all just frippery by comparison. Disregarding that bond is just plain disrespectful, not of the SO, but of the decision the person you’re chasing has made, and it’s more likely to piss someone off than to drive them into your arms.
(Bolding mine.) It’s rare for me to literally LOL, even when I’m reading something very funny, but this term did it. 
It really amuses me when people think this
FWIW, I think that Jim crossed the line when he kissed Pam. Declaring your loving feelings for someone who about to get married is kinda douchey in my opinion (like I said earlier “My Best Friend’s Wedding” pointed this out fairly well), but not something horrible. I think following the woman inside and kissing her, OTOH…
I’m bumping this thread because it occurred to me last night (while watching The Office in syndication) that the show does have a “stuck in the friend zone” type character: Toby.
By the third season it was obvious that Toby had a crush on Pam, but during the time she was single he could never work up the nerve to ask her out. Pam apparently had no idea that Toby was interested in her as anything more than a friend – and not even a close friend, just a work friend. She’s largely unaware of his various attempts to impress her. She’s shocked when he pats her leg a little too long in “Night Out”, but apparently doesn’t attribute any great significance to this incident because she continues to be friendly with him in later episodes.
Toby has occasionally tried to undermine Jim or the Jim/Pam relationship, although he’s a decent enough (and passive enough) guy that he hasn’t IIRC done anything inappropriate. Although his motives weren’t wholly unselfish, Toby’s criticisms of Jim in his annual performance review were fair enough and it was appropriate as HR rep for him to remind people to keep public displays of affection under control at the office.
Had Toby managed to actually ask Pam on a date in Season Three, I think there’s a good chance she’d have accepted. After his farewell party she tells the camera crew that she thought Toby was cute, and she’s always seemed to like him well enough as a person. However, I think it’s also very likely that if Pam’s first post-Roy date had been with Toby then she’d have seen it as sort of a practice date with someone she liked but wasn’t really attracted to and who (she believed) wasn’t really attracted to her. I don’t think there’s much chance that Pam would have ever gotten involved with Toby long term.