Girls Like Bad Boys

 

I've been pretty into TRON: Legacy lately. The visuals and audio are spectacular, so that's partly why I like it so much. Another big part of the reason though is that unlike most Hollywood movies, its hero (Sam Flynn, played by Garrett Hedlund) isn't a pushover and doesn't get sensitive and emotional about trivial stuff. He's in-control, laid back, and down-to-Earth. He cracks jokes at times other people are stressing out and losing their heads. He wins despite the circumstances. In other words, he's cool. And in other words, he's a bad boy.
Even back when I was awful with girls, I still was never a "nice guy." I spent enough time watching TV and movies to know that being a nice guy didn't work. Girls like bad boys. And nice guys finish last.
Being the nice guy sucks. We talked about it in yesterday's post about the sad tale of Shopping Guy; nice guys end up holding the bag.
It's the bad boys who win; the rogues, the rascals. Guys like Sam Flynn or James Bond. Guys like Wolverine from the X-Men. Men who can't be tamed or taught or tied down. Just... held onto for a while, before the wild calls them away once more.
But, Average Joe might protest, why do women like these guys so much? It doesn't make sense. They aren't safe. They can't be a good provider; they can't take care of a girl. They never promise her the world; even if they do, girls know they can't and won't deliver on that promise. Bad boys are the antithesis of everything the nice, friendly, safe provider-types strive to embody.
And yet, in the competition for women's hearts, they win. Hands down. 99 times out of 100.
Why is this? Why do girls like bad boys so much?

An Ordinary Life

Think of the average gal's day.
She wakes up, pours a bowl of cereal and maybe some milk or orange juice, shuffles into the bathroom in a fog, brushes her teeth, goes back outside. Pulls on her bra and panties; a blouse; slacks. Grabs her handbag.
Double-checks her cell phone to make sure she's got it and she hasn't missed any messages or important calls. Nope. Just one missed call from that nice guy friend of hers who's been calling her incessantly; she's tried to distance herself from him but he doesn't seem to get it.
Goes outside, gets in her car and drives to class or to work. Sits at a desk all day, taking notes or smashing keys on a computer. Hour lunch break in the middle of the day, where she has a soda and a sandwich and maybe some dessert. Back to the grind in the afternoon.
At the end of the day, home again. Her friends want to know if she wants to go see a movie. No, she's got some work she has to do. Okay, they say, they'll tell her if it's any good.
Nice guy calls again; she feels guilty about ignoring his calls, so answers and talks to him for ten minutes or so. The call's a little awkward, but at least she doesn't feel as guilty anymore. They hang up. She turns on the TV and watches one of her usual shows, and throws on a microwave dinner while she does. She eats it.
After her show's over and her dinner's finished, she does that work she meant to do, then hops in the shower. Blow dries her hair when she's done. Puts on her pajamas, sets the alarm for 7:00 AM, goes to bed.
Rinse and repeat tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. Ad infinitum.
Sounds eminently boring and average, right? But do you know why? Ever sit and think about it?
What makes a boring, average, ordinary life so boring, average and ordinary?
Got your answer yet?
Here, I'll tell you what it is:
Lack of new stimuli.
That's all. Expanded upon a bit, that means:

• She isn't encountering anything new, different, confusing, or exciting.
• She isn't learning.
• She isn't going on any adventures.

Her life is the same, every day. And every man she meets is the same, too.
They're all harmless, boring nice guys with nothing exciting or exotic or stimulating about them. They can't teach her anything new, and they aren't introducing her to anything approximating adventure.
They're just... ordinary.
And where's the excitement in an ordinary life filled with ordinary people?
The answer is, of course, that there is none.

Why Girls Like Bad Boys

Now imagine our average gal living an average life happens to meet a man of adventure. A man of mystery and intrigue. A bad boy, if you will. A guy like Sam Flynn.
Maybe she meets him one night at a local bar. Or maybe she meets him out on the street one day. Or while buying groceries. The point is, she meets him.
And something is different about him. Perhaps he has an accent from some exotic land, or perhaps he simply carries himself a little taller and a little prouder and he talks a little differently, with more colorful, expressive language and a clear, impressive voice. Or she notices his casual demeanor and somewhat bored look and general indifference to the things everyone else around her is caught up in and treating with such great importance. Whatever it is she sees in him, there's a fire in his eye that the ordinary men living ordinary lives she meets just don't have.
Instantly, she's intrigued. And she isn't intrigued a little bit more than if she met an ordinary guy. She's a lot more intrigued. Orders of magnitude more.
Because ordinary guys don't make her feel anything. But this guy makes her feel excited. Hopeful, perhaps. Hopeful that he is everything she imagines he could be.
Remember that excitement and hopefulness girls feel when they meet a guy who seems different, because we'll come back to it in a moment. For now, I want to continue fleshing out why exactly women like bad boys.
There is probably a limitless number of reasons why women prefer bad boys to nice guys. Let's go over the main ones here:

• They're different and uncommon. The fact is, the vast majority of men are nice, unassuming, friendly guys totally lacking in any kind of an "edge" with women. And women get familiar with this type of man quickly and know what to expect with him – and they know what they'll get with him is not exciting. It's very calm, normal, and average. Bad boys, though, they're different, and women don't meet a whole lot of them. Bad boys are wildcards. They could be scoundrels with hearts of gold, or they could be merciless hedonists or cold-hearted users and abusers. A girl doesn't know, and that's part of the excitement.

• They're refreshingly emotionally secure. Women are used to having to walk on eggshells, at least somewhat, around nice guys. If they say or do the wrong thing, a nice guy gets upset, or angry, or jealous, or defensive. But bad boys shrug off the things women say with a "girls are silly and cute" mentality that, while it might sound dismissive written down there, women actually tend to really love in men. It lets them be free and let them say and do what they like without the fear of offending or hurting the feelings of the man they're talking to.

• They're honest and confident. Just like women have to walk on eggshells around normal guys, normal guys are typically on eggshells around women, too. They don't want to say the wrong thing and piss a girl off, and they don't want to risk appearing too interested in sex or in women themselves and risk their harmless nice-guy status. Bad boys don't care about any of that. They laugh at girls getting pissed off at them – it's silly and cute when it happens – and they want women to understand they're interested in sex and in women themselves. Because of this, they're very open, honest, and confident in their dealings with women, and women feel this – and love it.

• Expectations are lower with them – from both sides. Nice guys tend to have unrealistic expectations of women: they often expect women to be these virginal, untouched perfect angels on best behavior at all times who always look beautiful and are responsible and mature. Nice guys also tend to expect a woman's full attention more often than not, and panic when they aren't getting it. Finally, they usually want a relationship right away, and will even chase for a relationship themselves, often before even having taken a girl to bed.
  
  Bad boys don't have or do any of this. Their expectations and standards are far more realistic and much closer to the way women actually are – because they're based in real world experience rather than on television and movie portrayals of how women ought to be, like many nice guys' expectations are. They don't worry about not having a woman's full attention at all times, and maybe could even care less if they have it or not. And a relationship is, quite often, the last thing on their minds, instead letting women chase for the relationship – which women will tell you they don't like having to do, but you'll notice they value relationships with the men they have to chase for far more highly than the men they don't.
  
  At the same time, nice guys, if they manage to be attractive in addition to being nice, have the potential to make good boyfriends or husbands, and women put a lot of pressure on themselves not to mess up with them and to portray their best selves at all times. With bad boys, there usually isn't much of a future a girl sees, so she can just relax and be real and honest with them without worrying about positioning herself as the ideal girlfriend or wife candidate.

I guess you could sum it up by saying it's a combination of the newness and unexpectedness of the bad boy with the comfort and ease he puts women in. He's exciting and refreshingly different, and at the same time he isn't heaping women with his expectations of them and getting upset if they don't meet them. Women can both find something new and just be themselves around him – and that's quite a rare thing for women to find in a man.
No wonder girls like bad boys.

How to Be a Bad Boy

Girls don't like nice guys. Girls do like bad boys. That means you ought to go turn yourself into a complete jerk, right?
No, that's not what that means. One of the tragic downfalls of human logic is the tendency to default to black-and-white thinking. "If women don't like nice guys, I should become a total jerk and they'll love me!" That's what most guys who've been nice guys too long tend to think once they start coming to grips with how women actually choose the men they like.
But the truth is, if you want real success with women, you need to go one better than jerk; you need to be a guy who's both cool and charming. Your choices aren't actually only between sweet, harmless nice guy and cold, manipulative jerk.
Look at the movie examples of bad boys we talked about early in this thread. James Bond. Wolverine. Sam Flynn. They're all cool, unconcerned with the stuff regular folks fret about, confident, cracking jokes in the face of danger... but they're not cold, heartless automatons. No, they have hearts – and women can sense that.
You want women to be able to sense you have a heart, but that you don't open it up so easy. That's one of the real secrets of how to be a bad boy.
Recall earlier that we discussed the mixture of excitement and hopefulness a woman feels when she first meets a guy who seems like a bit of a bad boy. There's a very good reason why women feel both excitement and hopefulness when they meet a new guy they think they might like: it's because he seems like he might be what they're looking for, but they don't know for sure yet whether he is or isn't.
It's all too often a girl meets a guy, thinks he has mountains of potential, then realizes as she gets to know him a bit that he doesn't quite meet the expectations she had for him at first meeting.
This realization will help you to understand the two areas you need to focus on as you seek to be the kind of man women find most compelling. Those two areas are:

• Your presence and how you carry yourself and come off, which affects your first impression and how you are perceived subconsciously throughout an interaction and from a distance, and
• Your presentation and how you describe yourself and interact with a woman, which affects your assessment and whether you fit with the impression you make.

Some guys have decent presence but drop the ball when it comes to actually interacting with women and matching their impressive first impressions. Girls get to know them and find out they're actually quite ordinary and unexciting, and these kinds of guys get slotted into "normal guy" territory and judged accordingly.
Some other men have good presentation but are lacking in presence. These are the guys that women say, "I didn't realize when I meet him how charming/sexy/intelligent/cool he was!" They're the guys who are capable of winning women over once women get to know them.
Presence opens more doors, but presentation is what gets you through an open door. With good presence but no presentation, you'll get a lot of open doors, but few successes in getting through those doors. With good presentation but no presence, you'll do great once you've found an open door, but you'll really struggle to get doors open in the first place.
The key then is to focus on developing both your presence and your presentation. You want to become a man who's both visually, viscerally compelling, and compelling once a girl starts actually getting to know him.
To do that, you'll want to focus on a few things:

• Learning  FREE LIFE STYLE TIPS

Getting those four things down goes a long way toward handling both your presence and your presentation. As you handle these areas, you'll increasingly place yourself further along the road to being one of those bad boys that women like so much – and eventually you'll find you start getting considered one outright. Mindsets are important to get down too, but that comes as much from experience as anything else. Check out the post on abundance mentality to get a better understanding of the kind of mentality you should seek to cultivate as you improve with women.
I get called "bad boy" or "bad guy" a lot, and also get told by the same women who call me these things that I'm a "very good guy" and am "very warm." So just keep in mind that "bad boy" doesn't mean bad, per se. Rather, what a girl is talking about when she says a guy is a "bad boy" is just that he's different, exciting, refreshing, and he isn't like all the other ordinary guys she meets in her likely very ordinary life. He's an exceptional individual – and you ought to always want to be a guy like that anyway. Seek excellence in presence and in presentation, and you will become the kind of man women find most thrilling.
Always,