Tags: bad boys

When we were little girls, playing with our Barbies/Cindy’s, Action Men or even guns, I don’t think any of us looked up with our innocent little eyes and said, ‘Mummy, when I grow up, I want to go out with a bad boy’, yet oddly enough, many a woman has dedicated herself to the task of chasing and attempting to tame bad boys with more ferocity than they dedicate to their careers.

The frightening thing is that women chase men that treat them mean and keep them keen, get hurt, but still won’t try a ‘nice’ guy. When they do, the ‘nice’ guy spends a lot of time working on and attempting to repair the damage created by her experiences with ‘bad’ guys. The women that chase the bad guy often penalise the future partners for the bad choices that they’ve made in the past.

Time and time again we witness women that appear to love to be treated badly and it’s bewildering. How is it that some women have managed to be conditioned that love comes in the form of a man that struggles to be good to her in any way, shape or form? Is it possible that we have watched so many movies, read so many books, been impressionable so young, that we have become convinced that there must be a shitload of drama for it to constitute the big love and if there isn’t sparks flying and fireworks shooting out of our bums when we get with a guy, then it can’t be meant to be?

The reason why women chase bad boys is because of the thrill of the chase, the occasional hints of a better character, and the twisted notion that these guys are ‘men’.

As soon as we got old enough to put on trainer bras and put lipstick on behind our parents backs, we rarely paid attention to the guy that was ardently showing his feelings for us, and instead lusted after the elusive guy that every other girl at school wanted. These guys were often built up on a jumped up history where they drank, smoked, were a key player on the sports team (the cool ones), seemed daring, and often had a car to boot. Just as there was a massive thrill to this guy bestowing you with his attention and dating you making you the coolest girl at school, there was a massive thrill to not only getting his attention, but even when you were rejected by him, after all of the tears, we jumped back in the saddle and continued the chase of the bad boys. I think that we were often having an internal contest with ourselves and our peers where we’d ‘show them’ and prove that we could pull a bad boy too. Some of us got wiser after leaving school, others have translated their behaviour into the big wide world where bad boys are ten a penny.
These bad boys can manage to be nice to these women and give them just enough attention to keep them hanging on. The attention may come in the form of sex, gifts, taking them out from time to time, but then they disappear leaving the woman confused. There are bad boys who make the woman the legitimate girlfriend, but their behaviour makes it clear that they have other interests. Sometimes they’re blatant and tell the woman that they are sleeping with other people, often they don’t but his behaviour is a dead giveaway. There are some that have an emotional control over their women and others have gone into very dubious territory with a physical control. Whatever it is that these guys are doing, the women in their lives see something in the behaviour which they take as a sign that they can be the ones to make him be different, they can be the ones to tame him, if only they can do x, y and z.
There is this weird notion that guys seem like more of a man when they treat you like shit. If a guy is really nice, women discard him into the friend pile with the word ‘nice’ cropping up repeatedly. He’s also often completely disregarded as boring and some women will wonder if he’s gay because he’s being so nice. It seems that a guy can be ‘nice’ but not nice to us in a relationship capacity. If we have to work for his attention constantly and we’re never really quite sure of how he feels about us, we want him. It’s as if we have an in-built mechanism where the attraction seems to kick in when they guy is elusive, misbehaves, or just has a general disregard for us. All of this translates to exciting. The ‘nice’ guy is made to feel inferior for having good intentions and the manners and respect he was raised with.
We need to let go of this idea that we can fix and change these bad guys and get some self esteem. It is frightening to think that we would take a guy walking all over us and treating us like shit any day over a man that wants to be nice to us. How much fun can be had with a guy that won’t communicate with us properly, that you suspect is dallying with other women, that disappears for periods of time without explanation or even has the cheek to raise his hand to you? We do thrive on drama but I think we need to adjust the setting and switch our focus to building relationships with men that want to love us properly. If we changed our attitudes and addressed our individual fascinations with men that mistreat us, I think that we’d find that our eyes would open up to guys that aren’t creating a load of drama to keep us in their lives.
Lust, big willies, dependency, and even a misguided need to prove to yourself that you can nab him are just some of the reasons why a woman will keep chasing the drama, but these are not the foundations of solid relationships. It’s no wonder relationships fail, marriages fail because the very basis of our relationships are built on jacked up values. Spend some time getting to know a person properly and build a relationship from there. Try the friends first route and opt out of this soap-opera BS that we’ve been buying into. I think you’ll find that life will take on a whole new perspective.

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