She’d been told once that she suffered from a pattern of falling for manipulative and abusive men, and, as women with her syndrome always did, she had balked and hated the one who had told her. But she had never learned, though she’d been through it enough.
Good men did not suddenly appear when it was most opportune for them, and they certainly did not magically grow interest and insert themselves into a grieving process. A good man would have kept his distance for at least a year following something so traumatic. They also did not profess sudden love for someone they didn’t know anymore and hadn’t shown any interest in for a decade or more.
She also hadn’t learned that her crowd did not produce good men, with few exceptions, and that, when her friends pushed her toward one, it was a bad deal from the start. They all had the same mentality, one that she’d already rejected, though she never changed her focus. She seemed incapable of comprehending that real men had faults, and ones that seemed too good to be true were ... and were taking her for a dark ride. And she never figured out that what a man had made no difference, in fact, when he pursued certain possessions, it was a clearer sign of who he was than anything he said.
She’d also failed, again and again, to realize that her penchant for dating men far below her attractiveness level only yielded using curs, who took advantage of her low self-esteem, and would, invariably become controlling and abusive.
But, in this instance, the most stunning oversight on her part, beyond the fact that he had started making moves when she was hurting, that he hadn’t given her any space to make an objective assessment, and that he bore all the same red flags of the men in her past, was that he wasn’t wanted by any other women. Surely, a relatively intelligent woman would have noticed that and noticed that he had been incapable of finding anyone where he was, instead, targeting her from across the country and playing up old acquaintance. Men who could not get a woman could not for a salient reason—there was something wrong with them, something she would not discover until she actual got to know him, when it would already be too late. But there was something wrong with her perception, and he knew it. And he’d taken full advantage of it.
But the worst part of the entire affair was that she had immediately told him about another man, a man she, if she had been honest, would have been nothing but a memory to her, not someone she continued to watch. he was whom she actually wanted, and she admitted as much by telling everyone about him. But the seemingly anodyne snake who had inserted himself into her life, as he new daddy surrogate, was keen to take her part and make himself her protector, when a real man would have seen something wrong with her obsession. Instead, he chose to use that as well.
he was a social loser and fucking slime ball, and he wasn’t capable of hiding it. But, with her, he didn’t have to, because everything that would make an aware woman run for the hills she found to be signs of goodness. She was so lost it hurt. But she would trade her freedom away to this man, who would undoubtedly control her to the hilt once he had her, when she should have tucked tail, run, and thrown herself at the man whom she’d obsessed over for years, who also obsessed over her. She was only cheating herself and reflexively putting herself back into a bad situation.