It's a strange phenomenon for me to see smart, beautiful, talented women who, time and again, fall for men who are douche bags, addicts, losers, cads, manipulative, controlling, money-grabbing or simply uninspiring. These women should know better, right? And yet they continue to find themselves stripped of their confidence and self-worth because they become ensconced with a man who treats them badly and puts them in second place (or third or fourth).
Just the other day I encountered a man named Luke who described this female behaviour as the "anti-nice-guy" syndrome. A successful entrepreneur hailing from New Zealand, he explained that, when he meets a woman with whom he feels he has a connection, he can't help but being extremely nice to her. And yet it only backfires.
"She immediately becomes uninterested when I act interested. A guy can't win!" Well, actually he sort of can. Because, on the flip side, Luke admits that it's the women whom he acts as if he's hardly interested in, who instantly morph into what he's termed "Clingerellas" ...
"After one or two dates, if I tell a girl I'm too busy or I don't have time to see her, she becomes a Clingerella. She calls, texts and texts again even when I don't reply. What's the deal with modern women?"
It's about this time in every column when I like to whip out the old "bad boy syndrome" cliche to explain the female motivation behind this sort of erratic behaviour. But these days I don't feel I can use this excuse any longer.
Seriously, modern women are smarter than that, right? We know by now (or at least we should) that the bad boy is only out for one thing ... our booty. And we know that when he gets into our pants he's going to throw us out along with last night's used condom and our email address. And we should already know that if we try to contact him again he's only going to laugh at our nagging texts and emails with his mates, musing that we were just another notch on his ever-growing "I've-shagged-her" belt. "Next!" he yells with glee.
Now let's be honest here: what type of woman would want to put herself in that situation? Consciously, none who I know of. Subconsciously, I'm not so sure many are even aware that they are simply repeating these bad habits.
So why do women stick around with these types of men hoping they will one day change? Now that's the eternal question. Because it seems that everyone from Amy Winehouse to Dorothy Parker to Sienna Miller has admitted that, despite their ex-relationship being utterly toxic, they can't help but continually go back. And the rest of us can't understand what the heck goes on inside their heads. (At least we know Winehouse has a viable excuse, but what's up with the rest of them?)
We can pontificate for hours over the psychological analysis of why women do this. We can stem it back to father absentee issues, societal pressures forcing us to "settle" or simply sincere stupidity. But, at the end of the day, do women really want to be unhappy for the rest of their lives? And with so much choice available to us these days with everything from our careers to our men, the question still plagues me: why?
I think Oscar Wilde summed it up best when he said, "I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters all the time."
Regina Barreca explained Wilde's quote in a brilliant article she penned for the Psychology Today magazine with this interesting analogy: "[Wilde] focused on the drive that some women have to find the man who will colonize their emotions, enslave their passions, and rule over their lives - and so in the name of finding love, they find a fascist."
It's extremely upsetting to me that a nice guy like Luke might have to turn into a bona fide "fascist" to keep a woman he likes for more than a second date.
Either way, all this got me thinking of an email I received from a distraught reader a while back. She was about to get married. But instead of walking down the aisle on what was meant to be the happiest day of her life, she found herself at an intervention put together by her family and girlfriends. They didn't want her to marry her fiance. Why? Because they all said that he made her unhappy, leeched off her, took all her money and was never going to amount to anything worthy of her affections.
Her response? "I never even realised there might have been an opportunity for me to actually be happier in my relationship. I just thought that was the way life was supposed to be."
Supposed to be? Let's only hope that the rest of the female population wises up and fast ... before it's too late ...
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