Bad Boys
Sometimes a Keen client will say to me in a voice that is at once rueful and boastful, "I love Bad Boys."
This always brings to my mind one particular Bad Boy.
Back in the day, when I was a young woman on the scene, we didn't call them Bad Boys. We called them schmucks. In our more dramatic, Martini-fueled moments, they were "bastards."
Most of the time, however, we didn't call them anything. We thought we were uniquely alone in these relationships. They didn't make sense to us - how could we explain them to others?
The false explanation for being in a lousy relationship hadn't yet been invented: "I love Bad Boys!"
In a nutshell, we allowed the guys to define our reality. If they said the sky was blue at midnight, baby - it was blue. If they stood us up and said it was our fault, we apologized.
A Bad Boy in my past fancied himself an intellectual. He was a pretentious new college grad, and I was a well-trained, solidly-employed performer. Although we were the same young age, he saw his role in my life as that of a peer professor. He decided to shoulder the burden of refining me and my "raw" talent. (And I'll tell you, I can go another few lifetimes without hearing the word "raw" again.)
I think that every co-dependent relationship has a perfect equation, and this was ours: Somehow, somewhere, he had allowed himself to feel intellectually inferior.
And me? Like a lot of young women, I had made my way into the world alone. I turned 18 and my simple, unworldly parents expected me to move out and do something. I did, but I never shook off the shock of being turned out, without a word about sex, school or work, without a dime in my pocket, by the people I thought loved me. I found my way to school and a job, of course, but on some level deep enough to bury the pain, I felt abandonded.
Life was downright rugged at times. Late one night, after night school, I stepped into the lobby of a downtown luxury hotel to wait until my bus stopped in front of it. I was ushered out into below-zero temperatures and told, "No unescorted women in the lobby." They thought I was a hooker with an armful of books.
So Bad Boy and I found each other. He was going to show the world that even this competent young entertainer needed his guidance. Conveniently, I had survived by accepting guidance. In my mind, guidance equalled love. My miniature Mr. Chips and I were a match made in co-dependent heaven.
After we were established as a couple in my mind (not his, of course), the games began.
He once told me that when the woman next door asked him if he and I were monogamous, he answered, "In actuality, but not theory." Oy. (It's too bad that I liked pretentious Bad Boys. I would have more fun with an inarticulate guy and his great motorcycle.)
He slept with her (of course), and told me about it (of course), because we had an open relationship. If nothing else, the infidelity served to inform me that I was in an open relationship. I didn't know.
He corrected my grammar, and time and again he proved my theory that people who correct the grammar of others are invariably wrong. "No, no, Rose! You should say, 'He was nice to Mary and I.'" Right. He was nice to I. Okay. The sky is blue.
I didn't correct him because I wanted to be loved. Also, I was beginning to catch on - but I didn't yet trust my own opinion of him.
To him, anything and everything I did was evidence of a personality flaw. Leaving food on my plate was a display of my "sense of entitlement." The pleasure I took in being alone was evidence of my "inability to make friends." My joyful nudity was wrong, but he never concocted a reason why. (I knew why.)
Gang, I swear to you with my hand on my mother's grave, this guy didn't like the way I exhaled. He would scrunch up his face and roll his eyes: "Do you have to do that?" Well, uh, yes. I had to.
My all-time favorite line was this. We were playing a board game, and I gave the answer, "Five hundred thousand." He rolled his eyes, snorted and said, "Jee-suss, no! Half a million!"
As his behavior became more absurd, my flashes of clarity became more frequent. I realized, for example, that the more often I knew something he did not, he called me neurotic. Wow, I thought. It's quite a jump from knowing the name of the Lieutenant Governor to being mentally ill.
I did well at my job and even won two awards at a fancy dinner. I got to make an acceptance speech and everything. It was the kind of schmaltzy scene a starstruck kid could understand. I believed it. I believed I was good. I called my parents to tell them that I had won awards for producing and performing. "Thanks for calling," said my mother, cautiously. She hurried off the phone.
Later, that call reminded me of the kind you make when you have landed somewhere safely.
But in that moment, I understood with a flash of insight why my parents hadn't given me guidance. They hadn't any guidance to give. The world intimidated them. They didn't understand my achievement that night any more than they might have understood a college application.
So I began to grow up, and started to catch on to Professor Bad Boy's nonsense. He saw what was happening, and grew desperate. His need manage me took the form of hilarious attempts at mind control. He tried to enlist me in the cause as my own worst enemy, but it was too late. I had abandonded my post.
He stared at my expert, conservative home manicure and said, "So this is what's important to you. Hands."
He told me to stop picking tobacco off my tongue. I smoked filter tipped cigarettes.
Finally, he played the card I had seen in his reflected in his glasses all along: Cruelty. He stuffed a bracelet into a fancy ring box, watched me open it and said, "Wrong jewelry, huh?"
As I walked into the pawn shop, I looked at my feet. I thought of the old expression, "If you want to know where you used to want to be, look at your feet. You're there."
Apparently, I wanted to break up - and make a few bucks, too.
Years later, my long-held perception of myself as the victim in that romance no longer rang true.
What was my motivation, I wondered. Why had I stayed so long with a man who had registered, from the first, somewhere in my subconscious - as a needy, controlling person who wanted to take me down?
Well, some of it was normal. I wanted to be loved - so shoot me. Then there was the parent/abandonment thing. But mostly, I had mistaken being ignorant, inexperienced and new to life - for being drastically different. Apart. Wrong. Not one of them.
And there it almost was. My reason for being with him. But what was it?
Then I had it: I didn't want to inflict my bad self on a good man.
I thought I was a Bad Girl.
I chose the professor. I chose the loser who deserved the loser I thought I was.
I use this experience in my Keen work. I know that when a woman calls about feeling powerless in her confusing relationship, she could have gone out with the girls to hear the usual admonishments. Or she could have opened a book.
But instead she chose to call me, for something different. So I dive down deep to touch that Titanic old pain of mine, and surface with an intense respect for The Moment, as I call it. The Moment is when my client picked up the phone looking for something beyond the platitudes of popular self help ("Work on your self esteem!") and the simple, loving support of friends ("Just dump him!").
I love that shimmering moment, when I get to offer the healing power of respect - respect for the pain, respect for the courage it took to take a chance on something that felt like love.
Have I thanked Bad Boy for the lesson?
What are you, crazy?