English version | The bad boys spell

Man has been to the Moon, is about to reach Mars, but has yet to explain the charm of the bad boys: where, among other things, one apologizes to a nice guy. 

He was not the perfect man, but almost. Vaguely handsome, more or less sexy (this was a difficult quality to attribute him since his exaggerated friendliness turned him into a teddy bear that drowned out any wild side), serene, intelligent, caring, polite, funny (I mean, he was not a party boy, but he liked to have a few drinks with friends, or with anyone, since he was easy to get along with and no one, or at least no one that I knew of, considered him unfriendly). He had good values, a stable job, life goals, a house of his own. He would soon be 32 years old, or maybe it would be 33, since this is Christ's age and, seeing things from this distance, he had some traits similar to the eternal one. The festivities were simple: a dinner/party for “the closest” where I, as his girlfriend, was included. It was this title that made me nervous, uneasy, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It had only been a few weeks since we were together and I could already make an overly long list of everything that drove me out of my mind, in him, namely the “sweet and thoughtful” way he treated me — whether I was being a moron, and I can be that with little effort, or an angel, which also happens. Everything was always fine with him. The days were always beautiful, even if a storm was coming down. No setback was strong enough to drive him out of his mind, so the tone of voice was always the same, the Bambi smile was always there, the good Samaritan body language always beat the caveman. Pretend he was a radio whose sound no one could turn up. Whoever wanted to hear it (him) had to listen in that tone you speak to babies. When D-day came (birthday, that is), my head was about to explode with so much “baby” and “mi mi mi” (and that's also why I know I'm going to hell). A few hours before the celebrations, I “remembered” a supposed dinner I had with my parents that I couldn't miss. Not even then did he lose his mind. He didn't get angry. He didn't get abnormally sad. He didn't put any kind of pressure on me to feel bad. Quite the opposite. He understood. “Family first.” Besides, and as he made a point of emphasizing, “birthday is very relative, we can always celebrate on another date, as long as we are together.” Morally devastated, I accepted my sentence: I was a monster. I stayed at home, my head spinning (there was no family engagement), and the next day I went to meet him. I screwed up, something at which I excelled during my 20s, and told him what no one wants to hear: “It's not you, it's me.” I never saw him again.

Well, if I think about it, I kind of did. Every time I fall madly in love (put a lot of quotation marks on this “fall madly in love”, because passion is inversely proportional to wrinkles, where the strength of one increases, the strength of the other decreases) with a bad boy, he is there, sent by karma, whispering to me: “Here's another one for you to learn. It won't be the last. It's not this one yet. In time you'll eventually realize that it's not this way, but for now, it's going to be this way. This is your lesson.” My pity is simple to explain — and is shared by millions of women who, like me, have an appalling tendency to find misbehaving men more interesting than nice ones, those who, with a bit of flair, could even become prince charming. These bad boys not only take away our peace but also ruin our record. They are indomitable. They have a je ne sais quoi that makes them distinguishable in a crowd. They may not be exemplary beautiful (they often aren’t). They prefer indifference to empathy and confuse narcissism with concern. They are little brats. It's not their fault, of course, they were born that way, enlightened by this aura of coolness that allows them to care about nothing and nobody. Seven out of six are bastards (yes, that's correct) and they will probably need 43 lifetimes to realize it. They have an allure that is difficult to put into words — it would be reductive to summarize them as the biker played by Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), but the leather jacket, the motorcycle, the cigarette, the mysterious look, these are all things that fit the common bad boy imaginary. And then there is the dominant personality, common to all of them. And the (abnormal) doses of confidence and testosterone. And the unpredictability, which does not allow for happy endings (for us), and “forces” him to disappear as quickly as he appeared — ah, but how good those months were, full of adventures (he is not boring). In recent years there have been dozens of investigations that try to explain the attraction to this type of man. Why is it that, when faced with a potentially good, faithful partner, there are women who repeatedly choose the other, who yell “danger” from every pore? What is it about these bad boys that makes them so irresistible?

Let's start with the most elementary: if we knew “what they have”, they would stop being irresistible and become something we wanted to solve. No one can decipher the enigma of the bad boys, and yet any member of the female sex who throws herself at one of them secretly hides the hope of "changing” him — the “bad boy project” seems to me, to date, the best reason to justify the attraction to this type of man. It consists of the belief that, by some miracle, we will be the ones to convert this lost being, who never wanted to be bad. Of course, all this is just a repetition of patterns that comes early, from our childhood, and that can only disappear with the so-called “beating your head against the wall” method, but that's another story. Nor will it be because all women need to get pregnant, as some studies suggest. Yes, as strange as it sounds, there is research that argues that we are attracted to more masculine men in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when we are most fertile — apparently, they have better genes, as Dr. Madeleine A. Fugère, a professor of psychology at a university in Connecticut, USA, claims. This seems very wrong to me. First, not all women have a need to become pregnant. Not all of them do. And of those that do, not all of them think about it all the time. Is it just a matter of stimuli? Since they are synonymous with trouble, do they become more exciting?

“At some point in our lives we realize it's a waste of time”, says Mariana M. What? To like someone or to like bad boys? “Both.” She is not the only one with this opinion. “Attraction to the difficult, yes. It's always been that way. But I've been in therapy for years to focus (laughs). Super nice guys, on track, and too much by the book has always made me nauseous.” Inês B. has no doubts: bad boys yes, but in moderation. What worries her (“super nice guys, on track”), her “turn off”, is basically something common to many women — the overly well-behaved, who never has a hair out of place, who doesn't get nervous, who irons his jeans. “And when they open the car door for us for an entire evening?”, a colleague threw in a few years ago, furious with the prince who took her out to dinner. “We're doomed to the bad guys, Aninhas. But this has to stop. Neither bad, nor boys”, a friend told me a few months ago. Our attraction to the abyss has been accompanied by constant disappointments and repeated stumbles, which, with time, take the form of (unromantic) comedies worthy of a Sunday afternoon. It's funny, because the mistake is always the same, and the red flags are always there: imagine a group of men, all of them gentle, sensible, attractive, whatever. Do you see the man dressed in black in the back, with a suspicious look in his eyes? That's the one my friend and I chose.

Translated from the original on The Fairytale Issue, from Vogue Portugal, published May/June 2022.Full stories and credits on the print issue.