The Bad Boy Complex

This article has been a long time coming. It's the product of too much Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a dash of not very relevant personal experience. (My friends Jenni and Kari will particularly understand this.)
You all know I spend way too much time analyzing things (as many women are known to do) and something I've thought about a lot over the years has been why women become addicted to bad men.
I blame TV for getting me started on this train of thought. Between watching Xena being never quite able to turn her most ardent admirer, Ares God of War, away from her, and Buffy finally giving into Spike the Vampire's obsession with her, it was only inevitable that the subject captivate my thoughts and not let up until I wrote about it.
But Xena and Buffy aren't the only ones. I think just about every woman has fallen for at least one bad boy in their lives. I even kinda had one, my ex-boyfriend Jason. He wasn't particularly bad by most standards (he certainly didn't start wars that resulted in massive bloodshed like Ares or suck the life out of people like Spike) but he was the closest I ever got to knowing what Buffy and Xena went through. The reason Jason was a bad boy to me was that I was a strict Christian, and he broke several of the rules I followed. He drank, he smoked, and he had sex with the girls he dated. I did none of these things. He never pressured me to do any of these things myself (he even stopped smoking while he was dating me) but the fact remained that I was dating someone who had very different morals than I did.
I stayed with Jason for about two months and in the process fell more in love with him than I would have liked. He left me quite suddenly, shortly after I told him I loved him. It was hard to get over him, and even harder still to understand why on Earth I had been so crazy about him in the first place.
Fortunately with the help of Buffy and Xena I was eventually able to figure it out. This is nothing new to many women, but it was an epiphany to me.
I knew Jason wasn't husband material. My sisters didn't like him and my friends who had met him all told me he was wrong for me (with the exception of my friend Kim who I don't think has ever inserted her opinion about what I should do into my life) I knew we weren't compatible and had no chance in the long run. And yet I couldn't ever walk away from him entirely, just like Xena never could give up on Ares. And just like Buffy I kept coming back for more. If he hadn't broken things off, I don't know how I ever would have made myself do what was best for both of us, and go our separate ways.
Why is this? Why would I continue to date someone who it made absolutely no sense for me to be with? I knew I wasn't the only one who had found herself in this type of conundrum, and yet I still couldn't make any sense of why I felt the way I did.
The truth I've finally discovered is that bad boys like Ares and Spike and even Jason are addicting. First of all because they're exciting. They're accompanied by intriguing things like risks, sexual tension, and strong (although not always lasting) feelings that are very hard to eschew of your own free will. The exhilaration they provide is very likely to become a dangerous obsession if you let it. (And like many women before me, I sure let it.)
Why as women do we have trouble staying away from men like this? Xena strung Ares along for years, because even though she knew he was bad for her, she still couldn't deny the fact that he was intoxicating to her. She was desperate for the passion he provided and she enjoyed the way it felt to lose control. Buffy befell the same fate. She didn't have entire control of her emotions around Spike, and as a result gave into a damaging and entirely physical relationship with him because she couldn't resist the way he made her feel.
I think most women like to feel out of control sometimes. It's odd because it's often scary but the very thing that makes it frightening also makes it thrilling. I don't think it's anything we're proud of (I'm certainly not) but it would be lying to deny it's a very seductive choice.
Of course I'm not Xena or Buffy. My experiences were nowhere near as dramatic. I never slept with Jason (about a year ago he revealed to me I was the only girl he dated that he had never had sex with.) I didn't compromise my morals while I was with him, and the somewhat risque feeling of our relationship along with his tender side kept me from being able to voluntarily give him up (side note-many bad boys have a tender side that helps women rationalize being with them. For example, Ares and Spike both truly loved their women, Ares giving up his godhood to save Xena's daughter and best friend from death, and Spike giving up his life to save Buffy and the other slayers from the ubervamps.) Not only did being with Jason sometimes feel dangerous and exciting, but he also helped me get out of an abusive relationship with my previous boyfriend and did a lot to help restore my shattered confidence. He may not have loved me the way Xena and Buffy were loved by Ares and Spike, but I still couldn't imagine ever breaking things off while I was with him. This is a deadly combination that is hard to resist.
In the end I think most women make the right choice-whether it is forced upon them sooner than they like or they find their own inner strength to break the addiction-and they often choose reliable men who they are more compatible with and who they don't worry will leave them when things stop being exciting (though I have to say my husband certainly hasn't stopped being exciting since I met him, and is a rare blend of wild euphoria and quiet dependability.) In our heart of hearts, we women know it's not the bad boys we want to be the fathers of our children, but the good men who we can always count on and who love us in a much more substantial way than a crazy fling or a completely physical encounter.
But I have a feeling that as long as we women are on Earth, bad boys will be a part of our lives, tempting, toying with, and teasing us. It's usually unwise to flirt with that danger for too long, but hard to deny that most of us will do it at some point or another. The primal instincts are hard to overcome, but in my experience I've found that as much as the bad boys may excite us, the good men are the ones who win our hearts completely.
I know that's how it worked for me. ;)