James Dean, James Bond, Colin Farrell, Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones’s Diary. That high school senior with the leather jacket who’ll probably be a senior again next year. What do they all have in common? They smolder. They smirk. They smoke. They are tragically troubled, fatally flawed. They are physically unable to call when they’re supposed to.

They are bad boys. And goodness, how we love them.

“Our love affairs with bad boys sweep us off our feet time and time again,” says Carole Lieberman, MD, coauthor of “Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How To Live with Them, and When to Leave Them” (Dutton, 1997). “They can be unpredictable, dishonest, or downright mean, but scoundrels have always had an undeniable appeal to many of us – an erotic edge of danger that’s hard to resist.”

Still, in real life and in real relationships, our love for bad boys – and yes, also for the “nice guys” who hate them – is actually quite nuanced. Read this good vs. bad boy guide to debunk some male myths and find out who really does finish first.
Why do girls like “Bad Guys”

The going (and rather creepy) theory – usually advanced by nice guys complaining about the “jerks” who get their girls – is that women must simply like to be mistreated. That’s not a very nice thing to say, is it? There’s actually much more to this seemingly paradoxical pull, such as:

• Low self-esteem. True, some women do think, on some level: “I don’t deserve someone better.” (It comes in other versions, too, such as: “You’re right, drugs are more interesting than I am,” etc.)
• Dear old dad. It’s an Oedipal thing. That is, we have the sense that our fellas should not be like our fathers. As single New Yorker Janet, 30, puts it: “If a guy treats me well he reminds me of my father. I don’t want to date my father.“
• Not so dear old dad. There’s also the opposite scenario. “Did Dad abandon us through divorce? Was he emotionally unavailable? Abusive? Having an affair?” asks Dr. Lieberman. “Those kinds of scenarios drive us to prove we are loveable by making a hard-to-get bad boy love us.“
• Home Improvement. “Women love projects,” says Janet. “Bad boys suggest that alterations can be made.“
• Feeling special. “I used to think that dating someone who snubbed the rest of the population but nuzzled with me was quite a victory,” says single woman Melissa, 25, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Read the rest of the article at Seduction Tutor