They do not do this out of a need for sexuality, a fear of commitment or a hatred of being treated well. They are sheltered types who have little experience with men and habitually pick the wrong ones, due to their own psychological damage and weaknesses. Their lack of egoism and self-respect are the root causes of their problems.
They seek to fix the damage within themselves and relive the bad experiences of past relationships by drawing in the wrong men and trying to fix them. For example, a woman who is a victim of incest, with a history of experiencing domestic violence in relationships, may seek out a loser who hits women.
Sex is not their primary motivation, as some ‘experts’ and ‘daters’ have claimed that nice men are not sexually exciting. Nice men do not come across as aggressive, masculine and self-confident to them. The bad boys are good actors. They seek to impress these women and like them, since they put up with their bad behavior and serve as punching bags and support systems. These men prefer other women for companionship and sexual encounters, which is why they refuse to come home, hang out with other women, sleep around and spend each night at the bar or the crack dealer’s house. The women are often the docile, domestic type, who doesn’t work and sits around waiting for him to come home. If she does work, she still pays his bills, cleans his house and puts dinner on the table each night in hopes that he will come home, which he doesn’t.
As far as sex goes, these guys may be good-looking and have sex appeal, but it is more their attitude that attracts these women. They may come across as good in bed, since they have bravado and experience. Perhaps, they are good at seduction, and nice men may avoid sexual expression and aggression. There is something chemical going on there, something mysterious that attracts these men to these women. Opposites do attract.
These women tend to defend the men at all costs, claim to love him unconditionally and yet complain of their sorrows. They are on a roller coaster ride with pleasure and pain. They believe that love and pain go together and that masculine control over women is a normal situation to encounter on the dating scene. I suspect they come from communities and backgrounds where domestic violence, verbal abuse, neglect and chauvinism are common practice. They see nothing wrong with these degrading attitudes towards women, unlike most normal men and women, who disparage over the mistreatment of women.
They may have a need for drama and attention. They want to appeal to a bad boy and win him over, out of self-doubt. Some of them may even hide behind an attitude of being special or beautiful, though they are really full of self-doubt. Good treatment and courting are foreign concepts to them. They also think these men are too nice and too available for them. They may feel that they are not getting a reliable and honest man, but someone with a secret agenda or a case of a guy being too-good-to-be-true.
They turn around and choose a man who is totally wrong for a relationship, out of fear of good treatment. They do not trust that they deserve more than the worst man on earth, since there is security in the familiar and a sense of identity in getting what one perceives as what one deserves, ideas reinforced by men who treat them badly and get away with it. They, however, offer them up opportunities to do so on a continuous basis, which works against their best interests.
Women shoot themselves in the foot by actively seeking, responding to and recruiting men who are bad for women. If these women want to be happy, they need to end this pattern of dangerous, emotionally devastating relationships.
Motherly, helping types attempt to save men they see as misunderstood, convinced their love for these men will bring them around. They believe they can change him, that he won’t treat them badly even though he treats everyone else badly, that they are the exception to the rule. They take responsibility for their behavior, which enables them to continue because they excuse their mistreatment and hatred of women. By taking responsibility for these men, they ruin their own lives and opportunities and become part of a vicious cycle of co-dependency and relationship addiction. They are similar to the types of women who stay married to alcoholics and show up at Al-Anon meetings. Their blindness is created by their delusional misunderstanding of the situation, their optimistic evaluation of human nature, and overestimation of their abilities to change men.
They are like drug addicts who cannot give up the drug and will go to any lengths to keep their ‘relationship’ in their lives, even at significant personal cost to themselves. They cannot give up the emotional investment in the relationship, since they are not ‘whole’ without it, and seek to fill themselves up with emotion in order to escape the sense of emptiness and pain. This state exists in and out of the abusive relationship, which is the centerpiece of their existence. Their world revolves around this man, their attempts to save him, and their need to sacrifice all of themselves for them in order to forge a new identity with this man, through a nonexistent bond.
This attitude puts women at risk for verbal abuse, domestic violence, being cheated on chronically by a womanizer, co-dependency, theft, neglect and abandonment. Troubled women seek out troubled mates, because they are seeking to match up with someone with as much personal damage as their own. There is a strange comfort in the familiar.
Women repeat the past in new relationships. They seek out drama and excitement from bad men in their relationships, and then hope to reform them. Women waste time in fruitless relationships with men they see as projects and challenges, in order to escape their own boring lives, low sense of self-esteem, insecurities and loneliness.
Women must stop giving these men free reign over their lives and must get rid of these men from their lives, in order to take care of themselves, which scares them. They have spent too many years in bad, dysfunctional relationships with men who treat them badly, so they do not believe that they can take care of themselves. They may doubt and fear their own independence and personal strength, since it comes across as unfamiliar to them. They will only have successful relationships when they end the cycle of abuse and move on to a new situation, one in which they are treated with respect and kindness. They must learn to take care of themselves.