Why Good Women Date Bad Men: How To Spot Narcissism, Manipulation and Dark Psychology

By Helen Watson-Jones

Why Good Women Date Bad Men is a book for women who cannot understand why, despite all of their best efforts to the contrary, they always seem to fall for the bad guys. It is a book of light and shade, hilarious dating stories combined with dark warnings and it teaches how to spot Mr Narcissist right from the beginning, saving week

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wobbly Parrot Publishing
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781739907013

Helen Watson-Jones

I am Helen Watson-Jones, Author, Dating Coach, and Good Woman! I haven't always been though...it's been a bumpy and wobbly rollercoaster of a life to get to this point, I can tell you. My story is so similar to many other women who have dated bad men, never finding the love of my life, and always ending up the loser in relationships. But I dragged myself out of the emotional gutter, changed everything about how I was looking for love, and met and married the man of my dreams! After several failed relationships in my life and no nearer to the happy ever after that I wanted, there I was single yet again in my early forties, heartbroken, shocked, and utterly broken inside. I was homeless and jobless again too, for the second time in my life and very, very scared. Once again, I was begrudgingly back on the dating treadmill and for the next three years, I had countless disastrous dates, trying in vain to find the love and happiness that I had always dreamt of. Why did this keep happening to me? What was I doing wrong? Demoralized and bewildered by a dating world that had left me even more lonely and even more lacking in self-esteem than when I had started, I began to realise that it was time for a new plan of action. So, armed with newly learned knowledge and a newly found self-love, I changed EVERYTHING about how I had been looking for love. It worked! Within a very short time, I had found the 'One', we had fallen in love and he had proposed to me on our third date! Now I had a better story to tell and my story was of finding love, not heartbreak anymore! I had experience, I had knowledge and I had advice to share so I began to coach friends on how to find love with my Dating Plan and it worked for them! My book "Why Good Women Date Bad Men" started to take shape in my mind because I realised that not only could I help friends but I could help many other women too, to prevent the heartbreak of dating the wrong men for them and to enable them to find 'Their One' and OH BOY did I want to do that! So that is how I created the life of my dreams and how my book and my Dating Coaching started, a journey from scared, broken little me to empathetic, supporting, and empowering Coach, with a desire to help other Good Women!

Book preview

Introduction

Let us get one thing straight - you are a GOOD WOMAN . We both know that. You’re a good daughter, a good friend, a good colleague and a good mother, so why do you end up dating bad men? Why do you keep choosing guys who then don’t choose you? Let’s jump down into that dark hole together and find the reasons WHY! I am a good woman too and I’ve got hooked into several bad men relationships, men who didn’t want to marry me and who totally messed me up and, boy, do I have the stories! So, let’s go down into that dark sweaty place, arm in arm, expose the dirty undergarments and find out what the hairy balls is going on!!

Now, here’s the thing, the thing that I have been agonising over. I am aware by calling the book Why Good Women Date Bad Men that I am choosing a relationship demographic that leaves out a whole plethora of relationship denominations. I call the Bad Men in this book ‘Players’ as a label and that term, for the purposes of someone who hurts you, sums up perfectly those who manipulate you and play games with you. It can apply to anyone in human form, however they identify. Likewise, with the term ‘Good Women’... that term that I have used identifies a fraction of our now wonderfully diverse and fluid world of identification and is something I’ve thought long and hard about. My experience is that I identify as a woman and the people I have dated have identified as men, so, as a starting point, that is what I have gone with just for the purposes of this book. My hope is that anyone can gain insight from this book, about why they date Players, however they both identify.

Oh and you will see there are some illustrations throughout the book. These are by me, often drawn as wry comments on situations I have found myself in, so I hope you enjoy them. I have been a professional artist for over 20 years and you can find more of my artwork on my website www.helenwatson-jones.co.uk

Twenty reasons

Inside this book, there are twenty ‘reasons why’ good women date bad men - yes TWENTY, but that is by no means an exhaustive list. You may recognise yourself in some of them or if you are reading this book and trying to understand a Bad Men dating relative or friend you may spot some similarities. Some of them are obvious, most of them are not. Some will be head f*ck revelations. Don’t worry, it’s not all Dark Psychology - there are lots of funny bits in this book too because I’m all about funny and if we can’t laugh at the end, and we all know which bell end we are talking about, then what can we do?!

An alphabet of exercises

There is also an alphabet full of exercises within these pages that you can work through. However, please don’t feel you have to do all of them or even any of them if you don’t want to. Exercises, lists and quizzes may be your thing, and if you enjoy relating what we talk about back to you, then these are a great way to help with that. Or they may not be your thing and the idea of delving deeply fills you with dread. If so, don’t stress, just don’t do that part. That’s why everything in this book is divided into sections - you can either devour the whole lot and interact, or you can dip in and take what you need. You’ve probably already been told how you must behave by your Player or Players so no one is telling you what to do with this book. It is entirely up to you. There may also be the Oh, I can’t be arsed with exercises reaction in you, and I totally get that response! My rebellious side applauds you. The exercises are a means to give you a written reference to refer to that will help you move forward to not date bad men. However, even if all you do is simply read through the book, it will still help you tremendously to understand why you are dating bad men.

The playlist

The playlist is there as a little bonus, because I am all about music and many of my bad men dating exploits have been in bars, pubs, clubs and nightclubs, as I am a loud music, nightlife kinda gal. I fulfil that need in me now, not by going out with the bad men that lurk in those places, but through my DJ sets, a little sideline. So, I’m always boogieing on down somewhere, at my desk or in venues and at festivals. The songs on the list are relevant ones to my bad men dating days, so excuse the self-indulgence, but they are relevant to the dating stories in the book. See them, if you like, as a tracks of my dating years. If I were putting together a top-30 favourite tunes list, this would look very different! I like playlists and I highly recommend you getting some together. As I am a qualified Happiness Coach, I do roadshows, and the playlists for those are upbeat happiness-inducing songs. Music can be a huge mood changer! The music we listen to when we are dating Players can be heart-wrenching – we feel the same as the lyrics, wallowing in the emotion in the songs. Great for getting those emotions out and feeling less alone, but not great for breaking the cycle of dating people that hurt you. What you need is a snap-out-of-it playlist! We talk A LOT in the book about YOUR needs being met!

Chapter 1

What a Big Fish You Have And How Not to Get Hooked

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What is with the big fish profile pictures? Why would any man upload a picture of themselves onto a dating site thinking that women will go weak at the knees at the sight of them holding a big, smelly, slimy, dead fish!

I asked this question of one of my bad men, lying in bed on a glorious Sunday morning whilst his batteries were flat (we didn’t talk much when they weren’t flat but that’s another story we’ll get to later) and after he’d finished laughing heartily, he suggested that perhaps they wanted to display that they were good hunters. I offered that perhaps it is an intelligent pun on a ‘catch’ but I strongly doubt they catch any women with those pictures, and I’m darn sure no woman is searching through the endless profile pictures on dating sites with the desire of ‘hooking’ a man (wow, even I can’t escape these fishing metaphors...) who’d be handy around a fish counter! Those men are definitely NOT bad men... so why do we unwittingly choose the ones that are?

That initial contact, the very first time you clap eyes on each other, says A LOT about the kind of man you’re getting. Ding-a-ling alarm bells and billowing red flags can be deafeningly flapping around our ears and eyes but we just don’t hear or see them. Why though? Now, no woman ever gets all dressed up to go out hoping to meet a man that’s going to f*ck with her head and heart and turn her into a psycho- bitch version of herself that she never knew existed, does she?! But we keep doing it. We spot him across the bar, or we spot that cheeky grin picture on our phone, and BOOM, we’re off on a rollercoaster of utter torturous insanity. These men are a particular type - they are narcissistic manipulators, they are bad men, they’re game players, so that is what we shall call them in this book - Players.

But the game never starts out that way... ooooh no, you leave that first encounter, be it in person or by the clicking of keys, on the biggest high you’ve known in weeks, months or even years! He lures you in, he excites you, he thrills you and then he spills you. The Player has grabbed that virtual elastic on the hem of your knickers, and no amount of future pain and degradation, humiliation and lost friendships will untie you from him until he has you dangled, bungee-jump style, over the precipice that once was your rock of a life... and then he cuts the cord. Madness!! But we do it to ourselves and some of us do it over and over again. Why?

1a. Bangles and dangles

Let’s focus on that beginning - why do we not see the real them, especially if we’ve been down to the bottom of that nasty-tasting wine glass before? We really should spot the lipstick around the rim, shouldn’t we?

There is a well-known saying, All that glitters is not gold, and that’s never more true than with Players, but in the beginning that gold is dazzling. They know exactly which trinkets to dangle in front of us to have us hopping after them magpie-like, and we’re not just talking gold jewellery here. They have perfected the art, over numerous previous encounters, of giving their victim exactly what she craves, and they know exactly which buttons to press to get us hooked. Be it physical gifts, attention, promises or illusions, Players are expert manipulators. It is so subtle, that most of the time you won’t even realise it’s happening. So, how DO you spot a Player’s dangly stuff?

Throughout this book I have included some sciencey bits that psychology professionals will define to you as the behavioural traits of manipulators. I am a qualified Happiness Coach, and although I’m not trained in psychology, these notes are taken from research included within my own training programmes, from current research I have read, and from contributions from psychology professionals who have taken part in the compilation of this book.

Sciencey bits that may be of help - a few traits

Someone who is manipulating, in a psychological sense, will create, inhisvictim,asetofbeliefsabouthimself.Tolowertheirdefences, he presents them with the man that they want, not the one he is. When dating, he will give the victim all the correct answers to the questions theyask...yes,he’shadlong-termrelationships,yes,theywereamicable break-ups, yes, he’s a nice guy. If necessary, he will outright lie, and he will always, at the very least, bend the truth. A manipulator will promise you the world, the exact world you want. Words are extremely powerful in the hands of a manipulator but compare their wordswith their actions.They will tell you everything they are going to do, but do they do it?

He will use subliminal influence. He will use his tried and tested facial expressions, body movements and body posture (termed body language).Hewillmaintainclosephysicalproximitytohisvictims, use reassuring low vocal tones, and make a point of displaying an abilitytorelateto youemotionally.Therewillbe extendedeyecontact, designed to make him more alluring, social touching, a hand on the arm, all breaking down any barriers and making his victim want him more. Manipulators are charismatic, which disproportionately draws his victims towards him in comparison to the situation or the amount of contact.

You may have heard of the terms Love Flooding and LoveBombing. A manipulator will shower his victim with compliments and affection, aseeminglyunconditionalandusuallyintenseonslaughtofpositivity in the victim’s direction, all carefully orchestrated to lower the victim’s defencesandcreateasenseofreliance.Hemayshowerthemwithgifts, or shower them with himself, or both, because he has a highly inflated sense of his own worth. The psychological label for this is a narcissist. Even if he is convincing in showing the value that having him in your life will bring to your happiness, you are being sold a fairytale version of love and affection rather than reality.

A manipulator will also expertly control the environment he uses to seduce you in. Pay close attention to his world around you, as it will be subtly staged to entrap you and it will be much more powerful than a good man’s romantic music and low lighting. There will be triggers for you that he will have deliberately introduced into the environment to stimulate feelings of lust and attachment. Without you realising it, he may have elicited information from you about your own triggers, or they may be triggers he has tried and tested on many previousvictims.

For example, if he invites you to his home there may be lilies on the table to fill the dining room with feminine scent and to show you his feminine side. There will be books carefully arranged on the coffee table that just happen to be your favourite subjects or authors, to strike up a conversation on how compatible you both are. There will be certain products in the bathroom that just happen to be the brand that you use or the one you previously mentioned you like the smell of. If you make it to the bedroom, it will be carefully staged for maximum romance, with candles already lit, the bed turned down just the right amount to welcome you into it and his aftershave sprayed on the pillows for maximum seduction effect. There will be a robe ready for you for the morning (if you are allowed to stay that long) and a new toothbrush waiting for you in the bathroom. He wants you to feel that he is totally in tune with you, to make you feel safe, welcomed into his world... for now!

One of my examples of a beginning

Your first Player is always a shock. Mine was, let’s call him Sam The Car Man. I have always liked having affectionate nicknames for my Players, and there have been many, many funny ones over my long dating years. Sam and mine’s beginning was heavenly. He made me feel like the sexiest, most exciting, adventurous girl in the world, something my ‘mum of two’ village life had been missing, without me even realising it. Persuaded by some other playgroup mums to go out for Christmas drinks, I reluctantly donned whatever clothes I had hiding in my puke-stained wardrobe that remotely looked like something passable as a going-out outfit. I had LOVED nightclubs and all things after-dark as a girl, but I had been in mum-land for a good long while and I now loved my Winnie-the-Pooh-style life with my little people. Every sequin and sparkle had been replaced by comfy and casual, so the prospect of a return to a world that I considered myself too old for and too righteous for, now filled me with dread. I told the babysitter I’d be back by 10pm.

So, there