Une liaison passionnée can descend into a fatal attraction if you don’t spot the signs of a genuine femme fatale. GQ shows you how to escape a nightmare (or, better still, avoid it in the first place)
S TO RY BY SHIREENJILLA
to mention the excuse for her current uninvited tenancy in his house Why can’t he still come out to lunch? How long have you got? He hasn’t made it for the past four years. If he did, she would get abusive.
In fact, she’s going to go mental anyway. Hence the car shelter.
Flashback six weeks. She called him saying she’d had a dream that she got drunk in a bar and slept with the guy buying her drinks. Only when my friend asked if it was true did she ’fess up.
She did what? How many times have you said or heard that kneejerk interjection? Friends, if they are loyal enough to stick it out,
G JANUARY 2016
can only punctuate the latest episode in a never-ending box set of insane stories. All with the same theme tune – your friend is a lackey to a hellishly volatile partner, who invariably tries to ban him from seeing you.
My friend has tried to leave her. But she’s insolvent and regularly jobless and she threatens suicide.
Roy Sheppard, co-author of That Bitch, immediately recognises his story. “She’s psycho bitch from hell. They are always the same.” Clearly.
His YouTube talk, “Personality Disorders Of A Dangerous Woman”, has had 192,000 views. His self-help book, That Bitch, as the title suggests, is best accompanied by a stiff drink. It sold seven times better with this original UK title than the PC American edition, Venus: The Dark Side. It’s a Tarantino-style trawl through the low lives of otherwise sorted blokes when they let an über-bitch run amok in their backyard.
Sheppard is right. The stories are uncannily similar. Take Sheppard’s example of an American professor who fell for an attractive, intel- ligent girl. She moved in, fleeced him, slept with his friends and, phenomenally, managed to maintain the higher moral ground.
Psycho bitches are, Sheppard insists, “always beautiful – or, crucially, think they are – sexy and often younger”. Right. Hooking up with them is, initially at least, an aspirational move. But Sheppard quickly adds, “They are also unstable, toxic, fickle and confused.”
Not much to handle, then.
Who are the poor bastards who choose these femmes fatales? “The type of man who falls for them is always Mr Nice Guy. The one who feels sorry for someone,” insists Sheppard. That’s certainly true about my friend. We all know men who want to be saviours, even if their white charger has morphed into a Ferrari. Apparently, making men feel sorry for them is often an early gambit in the psycho bitch’s game.
But still. How do apparently sane, successful men get hooked? At least when it starts, scorching sex must seal the deal. Listen to Castle, the star of ABC’s eponymous crime drama series, justifying sleeping with his ex-wife: “Let me tell you something about crazy people.
The sex is unbelievable.”
Relationship therapist David Waters agrees. “The yo-yo ‘I hate you’/‘I love you’ is intensely passionate, with strong sexual energy.
It’s an addictive and exciting thrill we probably all had in our teenage years. Some of us don’t grow out of it. The alternative is too safe and boring.”
Like any busy Londoner, I wonder how the hell they find the time. According to Waters, the very attraction of PBs is they cause your diary to crash. He gives the example of the man who almost bankrupted himself showering a high-maintenance woman with more and more lavish presents and restaurant meals. After all his efforts, she was still highly dismissive of him. “Weirdly, what kept him going was it took up a great deal of time,” he says. “Like any addiction, it uses up your time and a huge amount of psychic energy.
It gives you loads to think about and is often a distraction from other relationships, like work ones.”
There’s plenty of evidence that PBs scratch away at the strongest friendships. A perturbing pre-marriage survey carried out in December 2009 shows 88 per cent of people wouldn’t speak out if their friend planned to marry their PB girlfriend. I have to confess, I was shamefully mute when a childhood friend announced his engagement to his crazed now ex-wife. I was afraid of losing him from my life altogether. “One of the warning signs is they stop listening to their true mates when they say, ‘Surely you aren’t to going to put up with that again?’” confirms Waters.
Twenty-two years after Lorena Bobbitt turned her surname into a verb, men worldwide still vividly remember the addictive horror of the dismembered member hurled into a random field in Virginia. Sure, John Wayne Bobbitt was culpable and finally convicted of assaulting his then-fiancée. Still, “to bobbitt” became the symbol for men of what a woman on the warpath is capable of doing.
Hollywood is an equally outrageous reminder. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) lobotomising McMurphy (Jack Nicholson, of all alphas) in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) still makes men wince. Fatal Attraction (1987) and Misery (1990) are as timeless.
Perhaps the most chilling is Betty Blue (1986). Lipstick-smudged Betty (Béatrice Dalle) is properly psycho, but still an enduring sex icon.
Of course, women giving men the run-around is nothing new. Reread Shakespeare’s Antony And Cleopatra. Christ. She was the original psycho bitch. Elizabeth Taylor – seven husbands, eight marriages later – was certainly a match for her. Back in Fifties NYC, newspapers devoted comic strips to the aggression by wives towards their husbands.
And it is on the rise. “Equality can mean being as bad as the boys,” explains consultant clinical psychologist Dr Mair Edwards.
The media doesn’t make it easier. Sheppard tells the story of a man, who was literally stabbed in the back by his wife. “He didn’t even realise what had happened until he saw the blood on his shirt and the tip of the knife pointing out of his chest.” He lost a lung and emerged from a lengthy hospital stay in a wheelchair. His photo ran in a newspaper with the caption “Wife beater”. He did receive an apology, but the assumption was there. He must have been the perpetrator.
There is a certain cultural pressure to be in a relationship – a bad one can seem better than being single. But there is usually a light-bulb moment. Phew. If you have one such relationship, chances are you will emerge intact. Three or more and you’re looking at a habit you need to crack.
Waters has sober advice. “She’s done this, she’s done that... all the blame is on the crazy woman. But in some senses, you are complicit.
It can be a very painful and complicated moment.” Equally, he thinks friends should be honest. “They should say, ‘We’ve been down this road before. This was the silly mess you got into with Amanda.’”
Not surprisingly, Waters is an advocate of therapy. “I would say that, wouldn’t I? But they do need some serious reflection.
What am I doing here? What do I get out of it? You need to change the record.”
It’s not easy for a man to admit that he is no longer in control – his life is in tailspin after some crazed, complicated woman. “It’s about admitting vulnerability and all that icky stuff,” says Waters.
Is there an alternative? Apparently not. Waters is emphatic. “Your rage will eventually leak out in misogynist or self-destructive ways:
you’ll hit the bottle, do drugs or use prostitutes.”
Sane relationships may not give you the same all-night high. Or, indeed, keep you up all night. But Waters insists trust and shared confidences are powerful. “It’s not earth shattering, but it’s really lovely. Eventually, you’ll find it becomes super sexy.”
Then you can stay out late, have a laugh and chew the fat with a friend. And save your high-octane thrills for kite surfing or going to Katmandu. A free agent at last.
The Art Of Unpacking Your Life by Shireen Jilla (Bloomsbury Reader,
£6.99) is out now.
Psycho bitches are always beautiful or, crucially,
think they are. Hooking up with them, initially at least, is an aspirational move
B R E I T L I N G . C O M
In the lead role: John Travolta, movie legend and aviation afi cionado. Guest star: the legendary North American X-15 that smashed all speed and altitude records and opened the gateway to space. Production: Breitling, the privileged partner of aviation thanks to its reliable, accurate and innovative instruments – such as the famous Chronomat, the ultimate chronograph. Welcome to a world of legends, feats and performance.