A/N: I've been thinking a lot lately about how Roy really wasn't that bad of a guy. I mean, really, Jim ISN'T perfect.
Okay, so now it's my turn. I get to say what I need to say, without one of those stupid cameras in my face, and without Jim Halpert sitting around making faces. I get to say it and you can criticize, but only after.
Everyone likes Halpert more than me. I get it, okay? I know that I was never the good guy in the scenario, that I "wasn't good enough" for Pam and that Jim was this all-around perfect guy. But it's easy to look perfect in front of a camera when you want to. It's easy to look like you could be the perfect boyfriend when you aren't actually the boyfriend.
Which raises the issue: were all the things I did that bad? Was I really holding Pam back? If Jim had done some of the same things, would you have hated him for it?
Everyone loves to point out how I acted when Pam talked to me about the art internship. I'm a "horrible fiancé", I "didn't care about her dreams", I was "holding her back from a future". But let me tell you: she wanted that wedding. She was so focused on it. We talked about it a lot. She wasn't that opposed to it being postponed, or obviously we wouldn't have. I didn't totally force everything on her. She wanted the wedding and she wanted it to be perfect. She postponed it because she wanted to save up money. I'm the one who set the date that we actually were going to stick to. I was sick of drawing it out even more, and an internship wouldn't help. So when she held that pamphlet out to me, I felt like I could voice my opinion. Is that so wrong? She comes up already looking like she thinks I'm gonna say no and she says it all meekly and... I don't know. By that time, I think that Pam was just lost. And I couldn't do anything. She was already regretting everything she'd ever done.
I was a good guy in all the ways everyone talks about Jim Halpert being good. I laughed with her mom and joked around. Me and Pam, we were happy. Everyone criticizes me for being a meathead jock. Um, have you failed to notice that Halpert was pretty much a huge jock too? Did that ever cross your minds, once? Or is it just so easy to look past all that because they were "meant to be".
I know I didn't handle the break-up well. I know that, okay? I got really deep into the drinking and hit bottom. But I know for a fact that if Jim Halpert was seen moaning over Pam in a bar, everyone would swoon over how "sad" it was, and how "sweet" he was. Nobody would call him out on the drinking, or act like it was a problem. I loved Pam for a solid tens years, and after.
And okay, so it was stupid to try and attack Halpert after I found out about him coming on to Pam. I regret it, and I apologized to him. I even went out to coffee with Pam later and encouraged her to go for him. I'm not that bad of a guy, you know. I flipped out and destroyed a bar when she told me, but it wasn't exactly because I'm a crazy, violent drunk. Geez. The thought of someone else kissing Pam weeks before our wedding kind of killed me. Until then, I didn't think she'd called it off because of another man.
If Jim Halpert, who is now with Pam, heard that she was kissed by another guy and caught off guard, everyone would think he was "noble" for punching the guy out. Seriously. Nobody would sit and whine about how he was an asshole and shouldn't have reacted that way. If Jim attacked someone like I did for the same reasons I did, nobody would even care. They would congratulate him.
But you can say what you want. You can say that I was just a bad guy, no matter the excuses. You can say that the cameras captured it, captured me being myself and I can't blame anyone else.
You can say that. But you know what? I never got to say what I wanted. I never even got an interview from the cameras until the wedding was called off. You can call it fair, but I don't.
In the end, they got married, and lived happily ever after. I'm happy for her. But I just needed people to know - just once - that I'm really not that bad of a guy.