Dating, Love »

Okay, so smoking doesn't make you a bastard, but this guy is certainly moody

“Why are bad people so hot?” asked Craig as we left the cinema last week.  We’d spent our first (and last) date watching a doomy Swedish vampire flick, where a bullied adolescent boy falls for the blood-hungry but sweet girl next door.

His remark confused me.  Was he suggesting I was myself bad, for only grudgingly agreeing to a date after “meeting” him online?  Or was he telling me I was too safe to thrill him?  Or could he simply be wondering conventionally why bad people are hot, a reflection in which I played no role at all?

Whatever the answer, my mind soon wandered elsewhere.  After all, I’d recently come back from meeting with an old flame in Paris, a man whose toenail clippings had more charisma than my current date.  Despite his pretty face, Craig’s lifeblood seemed already sucked dry in comparison. I’d only agreed to meet because he was fanciable – and because I’m afraid that if I don’t keep dating, I’ll give up completely and become irredeemably single, probably living alone and unwashed down a pothole somewhere. 

But my heart wasn’t in it – Craig was as flaccid as a teddy bear that’s started leeching stuffing through broken stitches (reading that back, I suppose I am a bad person, albeit not a particularly hot one). 

But while Craig’s comment was simplistic – I find efforts to separate people into neat categories of good and bad generally fail – it still struck a chord.  The ex I’d met up with in France had once indeed proved risky and unreliable – but addictive.  When we’d first met, I’d wilfully ignored the warning signs: his own ex-boyfriend called him “an eater of souls”, he was usually twatted on whatever substance came to hand and was forever escaping from country to country, his arse in flames.  With a whiff of hellfire to him (or was it just grass?), he even once set his jacket alight on a bar’s candle, something he was too pissed to notice until half the sleeve’s imitation leather had shrivelled.

It was the landlord phoning to weep about 8 months rent arrears that finally soured things – that and the crabs he gave me after a weekend away, when I returned to find him comatose in the hallway, hugging a pint glass.  Still wearing a fur coat.  And gloves.  So what happened next?  I secretly left town, taking half his clothes (much more stylish than mine) in hastily stuffed bin bags.  In other words, I did what I thought he’d do to me, stepping over the boundary from poor-me victimhood into hard-boiled insensitivity.  This was partly self-preservation: I’d acquired his bad habits, my brain was melting and I badly needed out.  But I was being cruel nonetheless – that this man (since sobered up) has become a genuinely beloved friend is a mystery to me.  Why does he still like me?  Could it be that too many dates with the Craigs of this world have given him a taste for bastards

?

Popularity: 92% [?]