In search of a dangerous woman

Michelle McGrane

Tim was my first bad boy, my own Jim Morrison, my personal self-destructive obsession, my Mr Wrong. He always said he would die at twenty-seven. I believed him. He's still alive. Our relationship is dead. It ended after four years, during one of which we lived together. It ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, and I was the one doing the whimpering.

Like Jim Morrison (before his descent into the abyss), Tim was beautiful with magnetic brown eyes, long dark hair, high cheekbones, and a toned, tanned body. He wore tight jeans, a leather jacket, and rode a big, noisy motorbike. He smoked, he drank, and he consumed copious quantities of narcotics I had only vaguely heard of before I met him. What else could a girl ask for?

I remember the first night I saw him leaning nonchalantly against the bar counter in a crowded nightclub, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. I was dancing with a group of friends. We were sweating, shouting above the music, getting drunk, and showing off. I saw him. I wanted him.

He stood apart from everyone. He was haughty, aloof, supremely uninterested in what anyone else was doing. He lived in his own world. He had created his own persona. He exuded danger. That was what drew me to him. He was utterly cool. James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. The archetypal rebel. He had a surreal quality that made him seem like a character out of the movies.

Tim never had to try to get people's attention - attention came to him. He didn't give a damn about other people. He never tried to please. His apparent independence, his capacity for detachment, and his refusal to conform to societal standards created a circle of followers. Men and women were drawn to him, to his devil-may-care approach to life. The less he seemed to need other people, the more likely others were drawn to him. He held people in his thrall by refusing to be categorised. He embodied a freedom so many of us want. I believed a relationship with Tim held the adventure and romance I craved, and so … I set off blindly, with high expectations, like The Fool in the Tarot grinning as he steps off the edge of the cliff.

The relationship was, of course, not the grand passion I had anticipated, particularly the last year of cohabitation. Life with Tim was akin to being strapped into a rickety chair on a roller coaster. His moods ran hot and cold and he constantly sent out contradictory signals. He would frequently withdraw emotionally and physically absent himself from my life in order to keep me off balance and insecure. I never knew where I stood with him. I could never rely on him. He would turn up stoned at my parents' house to collect me to take me out to dinner or a party. Or he would forget altogether to pick me up. I forgave him. I forgave him and made excuses for him. He played my emotions like a piano.

Tim's lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll was not as glamorous as it was cracked up to be. My life at Haight Ashbury. Woodstock without the mud and the flowers in my hair. A maelstrom of grass, whiskey, hangers-on, and Jimi Hendrix. It was the nineties, for god's sake! Tim never wanted the party to end. Days rolled into nights, and nights into days. A purple haze. I staggered along growing more ragged - mentally, emotionally, and physically - with each passing day.

It was unsustainable. I woke up and smelt the Jack Daniel's.

I broke off the relationship before it became necessary for me to be admitted to rehab, or alternatively, a mental institution. I escaped with more brain cells intact than I probably deserved. He moved to another city. I moved into a place of my own. Yes, there were tears, other men, and drunken late-night telephone calls across the country. A year later I bought a plane ticket so I could spend Christmas with him. The cliché is true. Bad habits are hard to break, but during that festive season I realised it really was over.

I still had a great deal to learn about what I wanted from a partner, because after Tim there was Mark, and then there was Nick. The Three Musketeers - they were all perfect specimens of narcissism with whom I explored the ever-shifting definitions of dysfunctional relationships. The men I loved were extreme and uncontrollable. They were dangerous to my floundering self-esteem and my increasingly elusive peace of mind.

I had begun to recognise a puzzling pattern in my relationships when, deep in the thrall of yet another dysfunctional love affair, I came across words written by Erica Jong. Erica Jong, the mistress of the "zipless fuck", the author of the uninhibited, sexy novel, Fear of Flying, which caused such an uproar when it was first published in the seventies. Her words were an epiphany for me. They were words I desperately wanted to believe. Erica spoke to me across the pages:

When we look at the lives of women creators like Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Sylvia Plath, Colette, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anna Akhmatova, Mary McCarthy and so many others, we should perhaps not regret that they chronically loved Mr Wrong. Loving the wrong man is sometimes the only thing a woman creator can do when she is young and needs to break away from herself. Loving a bad boy means loving the bad boy in herself, asserting her freedom, the wilderness of her soul. The bad boy is the rebel part of herself that her female upbringing has usually tried to quash. Only when she integrates the bad boy into her own personality can she give up his rough love. If she survives it, she is stronger for it. It is her coming-of-age, her marriage of strength and tenderness, her independence.

I had a defining "aha!" moment. I repeated the words over and over to myself. Finally, here was someone who was at least trying to explain some sort of motivation behind the ruinous pattern of my romantic attachments.

All my life I have been attracted to bad boys - mysterious, elusive men whose priorities are conquest, winning, and fucking. Most of my life I have reluctantly believed the priorities of women are confined to nurturing, creativity, and love; that conquest, winning, and fucking cannot be integrated into our lives independently of men. These men, these lovers I had, represented everything that I had always been unable to act out.

I was once the perfect catch - emotional, pliable, and easily led. Make no mistake, the men I fell in love with could be charming, but charm was a weapon they rarely had to employ, because I did all the work for them. They became My Causes. I became a one-woman Task Force. I was going out into the battlefield to tame the Rebels. I thought I wanted to save them, reform them, get them off the booze and drugs - when actually, truth be told, I wanted to be them. I wanted to thumb my nose at society with elegant disdain. I wanted to be someone who didn't care what people thought, who wasn't consumed by a relentless need to please.

Most of my close women friends have had at least one encounter with a dangerous man. I think most women, if they're honest with themselves, have loved a man who has left them picking up tiny pieces of their heart off the floor, bawling into fistfuls of tissues, and gulping back bottles of cheap plonk during relationship dissections with sympathetic girlfriends a là Bridget Jones.

The thing about these men, these alluring rebels, is that although they are physically present in your life (at least some of the time - when it suits them), they always remain just out of reach emotionally. They are shadow men who keep you at arm's length to prevent you from fathoming out their mystery. They are always just beyond your grasp. By keeping their distance, they let us imagine there is more to them than there is.

It usually works this way: the more emotionally unavailable, distracted, and unresponsive the man is and the less he gives of himself, the more the woman is determined to make an impact on his life, to make him sit up and notice her, dammit!

There is, of course, the added lure of his reputation, the exciting brush with danger, the hint of cruelty. We are trapped within the limited roles the world expects us to play and still as attracted to the forbidden, the taboo, as Eve was when she took the first bite of out of that goddamned apple.

Thankfully, Jong went on to say of her personal experience, "I loved and left the bad boys, but I thank them for helping to make me the strong survivor I am today." Is this what it's about, I wonder? Is this what it boils down to? Coming home to ourselves by breaking free of the restrictions that have been placed on us by society since we were little girls?

I also had to learn my lesson the hard way. I learnt that in order for a relationship to work, both parties have to be committed to making it work. There has to be mutual respect and compromise. If, finally, you are not getting what you require or deserve from a partnership, no amount of hoping things will change - tomorrow, next week, next year, or ever - will make the slightest difference to where you're at. You owe it to yourself to let go of the past and move on. I learnt I had to be responsible for my own happiness.

Do I regret the relationships I have had with men who were toxic for me? No, these experiences have made me who I am, but I am glad that I no longer need them to validate my sense of self worth. I'm glad I am no longer sitting by the telephone waiting for them to call me or staying up all night until they decide to come home. I am grateful I'm now able to focus my energies not on psychological games, but on my desires, my dreams, and my visions. Life is short and there is so much I want to experience.

I am in no way advocating alcohol, drugs, or stepping all over people in order to reach a place of self-fulfilment. Not at all. What I'd like to suggest, though, is that maybe Erica has a point worthy of consideration.

Perhaps we are in search of a dangerous woman, a strong woman, who is courageous enough to flout social expectation and convention. Maybe we are looking for a woman who knows what she needs to do in order to please herself, a woman who is determined to stay true to herself, a woman who knows what she is worth and will not settle for anything less.

I still like Jimi Hendrix and I don't have all the answers, but I'm not going to stop looking for them.

Michelle McGrane lives and writes in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Her work has been published in national and international electronic journals, print journals and anthologies.        Fireflies & Blazing Stars, Michelle's debut poetry collection, was published in December 2002. She was the recipient of the 2003 SAWC Hilde Slinger Poetry Trophy. Michelle's second volume of poetry, Hybrid, was published in December 2003. She was awarded the 2004 SAWC Quill Award for Professional Writer of the Year.

LitNet: 2 February 2005

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