The Bad Boy.

Okay, you're pretty, your face is a work of art, your smile could probably light up New York after dark. Okay, you're cover boy pretty, stamped with a beauty mark. But it's such a pity a boy's so pretty with an ugly heart. {G.R.L.~"Ugly Heart"}

Dear Internet,

What is it about bad boys that girls like so much? I don't mean boys that wear leather jackets and ride motorcycles and stay out five minutes past their curfews to get their semi-negative reputations. I mean genuinely bad boys. Those boys who make unwanted sexual advances and make inappropriate, objectifying comments about every woman in their lives. The boys who get reputations for being abusive towards women and they actually are. What's interesting about these boys isn't that they look like hard rocking 90s punks with tongue piercings and a too-fast car, but that they don't look this way at all. Instead, they're clean-cut with perfectly coiffed hair and expensive clothes with cool lines that hug their well-exercised biceps. They seem like the nicest people you could know, until you realizes that they're simply...not. Yet somehow so many women still find them to be attractive and a valid option for a romantic partner...why?

I googled "why girls like bad boys" and got extensive explanations of how girls who are attracted to bad boys had terrible relationships with their fathers and subconsciously hope to recreate that same relationship in their romantic life. While I guess this could make sense--there is a common saying that girls are bound to fall like guys like their fathers--I'm not sure that this is really the reason girls seem come running when a bad boy comes around. There are lots of girls I know that are attracted to this breed of man who have perfectly fine relationships with their fathers. Google also told me that girls like the sense of adventure that comes with dating a bad boy (or even with simply being attracted to one). This may be true, but I feel like there's something more to the psychology of liking a guy that we simply know isn't right for us (or, as Taylor Swift would say, a guy we know is trouble when he walks in). What could it be?

I asked a friend of mine what she thought about this, and she said that she likes bad boys because she thinks that nice guys are too boring. They don't "challenge" her enough emotionally or intellectually, which is something she likes in a relationship. She likes competition, and in a relationship she likes feeling that a guy can meet her at her competitive level and then go one step further--something she says she's only found in "bad" boys. I think she could be on to something--are girls attracted to the bad breed of boy simply because they're more interesting than others? But what is so interesting about a relationship that is bound to end in disaster?

Which leads us to what I think may be the key to answering this question...perhaps what's so alluring to a girl about a date headed for a downfall is the hope that she will be the one to turn the boy around. Perhaps she, out of all of the other girls in the world, can take a bad boy and finally make him good. It may just be the secret desire of nice girls to make others just as nice that motivates the attraction to someone of an entirely opposite demeanor. This seems to be a common intention, but how often does it actually work? I would like to think it works often, but the reality is that the success rate of "making a bad guy good for the weekend" (thanks again, Ms. Swift) is small. Besides, the ratio of girls trying to make bad boys good to the number of actual bad boys is probably 20:1, at least.

With all of this in mind, why do girls still think that they could be the one to make that boy they know that their mother wouldn't approve of the man of their dreams? I blame the media for this--particularly movies. Films like She's All That and John Tucker Must Die show the baddest of boys finding that one girl that turns their world--and their behavior--around, much to the envy of the other girls they know. Suddenly, seeing this happen in a film or hearing about it in a song makes the probability of this happening in one's own life seem to much better than it actually is. Plus, when a situation like this is glorified on the silver screen, it becomes a goal, something to strive for, rather than something to run away from.

So here we have the perfect storm: the bad boy being desirable enough to want to change, the desire to make a bad boy good, and the validation from the surrounding world that, if you follow through with this desire, it could actually work. So what do we do? As girls, with the tendency towards this desire, do we run from it? Do we lean into it? I'm not sure. A part of me says run, but I know that most girls will roll their eyes when I say that and go back to dreaming about Danny with the dark eyes and the darker past. I think that the best way to go about dealing with this kind of fatal attraction is to actually acknowledge it, accept it, and then...let it go. Allow it to float away with all of the other hundreds of thousands of thoughts we have every day, and simply move on. For it is the lingering and the obsession, not the thought itself, that becomes the danger.

Girls need to learn to simply let the bad boy go. It would be such a pity to lose a girl so pretty to an ugly heart.

-mk.