Women & The Stupid Jerks They Love

There has been a sentiment going around for a number of years now.  I've heard it more times than I can remember.  Something to the affect of: Women like jerks.  Or the occasionally more extreme: Women like only jerks.  Sometimes a guy will say it as a bitter lament about life's unfairness.  Another guy might say it with a sly and brutal cynicism, as though justifying himself for being an asshole.  Either one will usually wait to bring it up in mixed company, as a confrontational challenge to any women who might be present.

On a certain level, I understand where these guys are coming from.  I'd be willing to bet that nearly every man reading this post has known, at some point in his life, at least one guy who was the biggest jerk on the planet and who also had girls lined up left and right.  We're talking about a guy who seems like he had special training to be an asshole, like he went to Douche Bag University or something.  We watch as this guy acts like a complete pig, and treats women like garbage, and if we're really lucky we get to hear these women go on and on about what a sweet guy he is.  After you known a dozen or so guys like this, and you've witnessed this same scenario so many times that your frustrated disgust has faded into a kind of dull nausea, then it's pretty easy to draw the conclusion that women are into that sort of thing.

Naturally, when a guy voices this sort of sentiment, the women are usually quick to respond with their objections.  Women like "nice" guys, they insist, or at least they insist that they personally like nice guys, regardless of what other women do.  But the guy isn't buying it because nearly every guy who says this has also gone through a phase in his dating life where he tried to be the "nice guy", or at least what he conceived of as being a nice guy, which usually involves fawning over the girl like a sycophantic puppy dog.  All that ever got him was watching his heart being ground into a fine paste under some callous girl's heel.  This is what leads to the bitterness and/or cynicism that prompts the statement in the first place.

The sad fact of the matter is that "nice" has little or nothing to do either way with what people find attractive.  Don't get me wrong.  We'd all like to be involved with nice people, especially if we're talking about a relationship, and most especially if we're talking about a marriage.  I doubt that many people would deliberately set out to get involved with a loathsome piece of human garbage that treats them horribly.  However, when it comes to those qualities that really electrify our hormones and get our blood flowing, "nice" is probably way down at the bottom of the list.  What's more likely to happen is that we find ourselves attracted to someone, and then we try to convince ourselves after the fact that we're dealing with a nice person.

Consider for the moment, fellas, that women could just as easily make the same statement.  They could claim that men like bitches.  Certainly we're aware that plenty of "nice" girls get left on the sidelines.  Looking at it from the other side, we see that there's a certain truth to the claim, but not quite.  We don't like "bitches", but we have been known to overlook the severe warning signs of bitchiness if we find the woman to be extraordinarily attractive.  Well, women often do the same thing.  We all allow our hormones to impair our judgment.  In fact, if I were going to make a generalized statement on the matter, I would say that men are probably more prone to overlook obvious red flags then women, but I'd also think that we're probably prone to be more cynical about it too.

And when you couple all this with that fact that jerks of either sex also tend to be manipulative jerks, then is it really any surprise that we've all fallen victim a time or two?  Then we go on hurting each other out of spite because some jerk hurt us.  There's a line that I remember from a song that was out years ago called "Torn."  It went, "You're a little late.  I'm already torn."  I don't really know what the song was about, but that line always sounded to me like the girl was throwing it in the guy's face that he hadn't known her before someone else had broken her heart long ago.  There's something so sad about that, pain needlessly perpetuated.  Life would be easier if niceness were a more attractive quality, if we kept our hearts more open to each other.  But those damn jerks ruin it for everybody.