Bad Boy Fever

by Julie Robinson

“T hat reminds me of my friend, Whitney,” Adele confesses to me the other night while chomping on some carrots and hummus.  “She had her boyfriend arrested for forging her signature on one of her checks.”

My mouth dropped mid-crunch, “How much was the check for?”

“I’m not sure.  I think around $3,000.  But really, she should have known something was up when six months into their relationship she found out about his second family.”

Gulp. 

This love-gone-wrong-but-(really)-couldn’t-you-see-it-coming conversation was spurred on by other Bad Boy encounters Adele and I had either heard of or lived through at some point.  Pretty much they all came about in the same way:

1.      You meet a man who is either so charming, handsome, or charming AND handsome that you fall for him instantly;

2.     He completely sweeps you off your feet with how attentive and wonderful he is;

3.     The sex is out of this world;

4.     You are overwhelmed with emotion and sucked in by how happy you now are that this amazing guy is in your life;

5.     A couple chinks in the armor surface pretty quickly—and you whisk them away without a second thought;

6.     You both profess that you cannot believe how in love you are with each other and you make plans for the future;

7.     The deceit and inconsistencies lead you to make more and more compromises for this man;

8.     The back stories about time in prison and three MORE kids he didn’t tell you about in the first place start to give you pause;

9.     Life sets in and it just isn’t as fun anymore;

10.  The party is over and you leave him or he leaves you—kind of.

The next stage is where things get a bit tricky.  In my case, I was completely addicted to my Bad Boy and couldn’t shake him out of my life even though I knew he was toxic for me.  After we had broken up but remained lovers, I would give him a few weeks and then casually call him with some lame excuse designed to lure him back to my bed—and he would ignore me until he was good and ready to come over and rock my world on his own terms. Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Because he always did show up at some point, I talked myself into believing that he really did love me but that he had idiosyncrasies (drug and alcohol addiction) and a past (jail time) that led him to behave in a completely unacceptable manner—behavior I accepted.    

Another scenario that can occur happened recently to my friend Shannon.  She found herself in a whirlwind relationship, got caught up in the rush, and surfaced for air wanting the man out of her life.  The problem was—he wouldn’t leave.  Her Bad Boy morphed into a Stalker who left up to twenty messages a day on her voicemail, regularly drove by her house to “check on her,” rang the doorbell for over an hour, tossed fist-sized "pebbles" against her window, made up lies so she would feel guilty and let him into her apartment, and basically made a complete nuisance of himself. 

What’s a girl to do?

In order for me to move on with my life, I left town, took his number out of my phone, burned old phone records so I couldn’t find him when I was feeling weak, and moved on to a new Bad Boy who could distract me from the old one.  Honestly, it hasn’t really worked all that well.  I still think about him often and am pretty sure I could find him if I set my mind to it.  In fact, I have a plan to do just that.  So, while the threat of Man Addiction is a real one, I have set in motion how I’m going to get my fix. 

And Shannon?  What about her situation?  She sent a straight forward I-appreciate-what-we-had-but-it’s-time-to-move-on text to her Bad Boy Stalker and thought that would be the end of it.  Nope.  Her respectful approach—for now anyway—has only fueled the fire.  Hopefully the flame will die down soon.  If she ignores him he should go away . . . . At least for a time . . . until he feels weak and resurfaces suddenly with a divine scheme perfectly designed to win her back and sets it all in motion.