Bad Boys of Romance

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Bad Boys of Romance

بتاريخ 3:32 PM بواسطة Moustafa

Bad Boys often feature as heroes in romance novels, but with an important caveat… by the end of the book, the love of a good woman inevitably changes them into Goodish Guys. However, I must admit that I wonder about this… Do men really change simply because they fall in love? And if a man does put aside his “bad ways”, isn’t it usually because he sees something beneficial in changing his lifestyle (ie. wanting to start a family), rather than changing simply to please a woman?

I personally like to create male characters that actually have good character to start off with. That’s not to say that the hero’s ideals might not have become tarnished somewhere along the way, and it’s always romantic to write about how the love of a good woman can enable a man who has a hardened attitude towards the world to once again see the positive, gentler, more noble aspects of life; but I’m a lot more sceptical about the idea of a Bad Boy becoming angelic simply because he falls in love. If leopards really do change their spots, they’d simply change into black panthers… and there’s nothing tame about that!

In my fourth novel, which is still a work in progress, I write about Bad Boys and how women perceive them. The main character in this book, Emma, writes a blog outlining why women are attracted this type of man, which I have attached below:

Bad Boys

There’s a reason bad boys are called bad boys. It’s because they’re bad. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “bad” as “of poor quality or a low standard; unwelcome and unpleasant.” Yet for some strange and utterly bizarre reason, a lot of women, including myself, find bad boys attractive.

Perhaps it’s not necessarily the unwelcome and unpleasant aspects of bad boys that women find attractive. Rather, it’s the other characteristics that accompany the bad qualities that blind us to the fact that bad boys are essentially not good for us at all.

There’s no denying that bad boys are challenging. They’re also unpredictable, exciting, exhilarating, intriguing, and definitely not boring - all very attractive personal qualities when it comes to dating. However, bad boys are also selfish, inconsiderate, egotistical and downright horrid. In spite of all this, they’re a bad habit that’s very difficult to give up.

The general advice dished out for breaking a bad habit is that you need to stop doing it for two weeks, and then the habit is broken. Unfortunately when it comes to bad boys – the only advice that works is that you mustn’t start doing them in the first place, because it’ll take much longer than two weeks to get over them.

I was unfortunate enough to get involved with a bad boy, and yes he broke my heart. But, in spite of this, bad boys are the most honest serial daters you’re likely to encounter, and you’ll find no matter how much they might hurt you, deep down, in a dark shady corner of your heart, you will, more than likely, maintain a soft spot for them.

Why? Because they never try to be anything they’re not. They’re unapologetically bad, and it’s only the stupid females they attract who believe that somehow they will end up changing them. Bad boys never actually indicate they will change. And that is why, out of all the serial daters, bad boys are the least sinister.

It is the women who are attracted to them who have the real problem.

I’ve come to realise this after a long, painful exploration of my own motives for falling for a bad boy. You see, I was stupid enough to believe the fallacy that I was The One who would change my own particular bad boy; that he would choose me over all the other girls, and that I would heal his dark, wounded, tortured soul. This fallacy is irresistible, as it appeals to the essence of a woman’s femininity. It also appeals to our egos, and our competitive natures. “If he chooses me over all the other girls, what does this say about my power to attract a man?” is the hidden motivation that spurs us on.

So although bad boys only care about themselves, the women they end up attracting also, in a way, only care about themselves. They care about being the queen bee amongst all the other bees who tried unsuccessfully to attract this unavailable drone. They want to be the one who succeeds, where their sister bees failed. But in this case – the queen bee is the one who ends up dying.

Alissa Baxter