Fortune-Cookie Crazy This is the kind of woman who is normal on the outside, but soon reveals one major surprise she keeps carefully hidden: She’s nuts in bed. We’re talking about the librarian type who replaces her glasses with a gag and chain or the girl who meets your mom, prompts her to say, “What a lovely girl,” and then gives you a blow job while Mom’s taking out the garbage.
Thirty-three tear-old Matthew thought the sweet woman he started talking to at the Coffee Bean was the unassuming dental hygienist she seemed to be — only to take her home and be subjected to a full-on assault. “She started biting me, hitting me, and taunting me to hit her back,” he says. “I was completely turned on by how animalistic she was.”
It’s every guy’s fantasy — until the encounters turn nightmarish. Jared, a 33-year-old producer, met a buttoned-up lawyer who started demanding he choke her every time they had sex. “It really started to freak me out,” he says. “I began to think she had some serious, deep-rooted problems. I had to break it off.”
He may have been onto something, according to author and sex educator Jamye Waxman: “Often, when a woman was abandoned, unloved, or had an absentee father, she engages in crazy sexual behavior to get the attention she lacked growing up.” Still, if you can handle the intensity, it may be worth it. As Jared points out, “The crazy ones tend to fuck like the world is going to end the next day.”
Drama Queens You can recognize this type from miles away: Her insanity doesn’t unfold like a piece of origami: it’s out there day and night. She’s bound to be extremely hot (or else you’d never put up with her) but always on the verge of hysterics.
Jack, a 26-year-old ad copywriter, came across a prototypical drama queen online. Megan had “a flat stomach, huge boobs, and perfect pillowy lips” — and on their first date she launched right into dirty talk. “She said, ‘I’m going to suck your cock right now, but you can’t have my pussy until you stop staring at it like it’s dessert,’” Jack recalls. “I should’ve known that wasn’t exactly normal.”
Over the five months they were involved, Megan burst into tears regularly, insisted Jack stop hanging out with a friend of his she didn’t like, and even poured hot coffee on him during a fight. And yet Jack couldn’t step away: “The truth is, I was really attracted to the unstable part of her. It hooked me in and repelled me.”
Gina, a 29-year-old makeup artist, puts herself in this category. “I’ve been told I’m overly dramatic, but I think I’m just very clear about what I want,” says the girl who admits she once let the air out of her boyfriend’s car tires when she didn’t want him to go to Lakers game.
The way to manage this kind of woman is either to develop a superhuman level of tolerance or just leave her to your more patient brethren. As 23-year-old Nikki says, “No matter how difficult people say I am, I always manage to find men who will put up with me.”
Bunny Boilers The final category, immortalized in the classic 1987 movie Fatal Attraction, consists of women who are seriously, dangerously bat-shit crazy. Could-destroy-a-man’s-life crazy. Think a Glenn Close encounter can’t happen in the real world? Think again.
“I dated a girl for three weeks who turned my life into a living hell after I broke up with her,” says Kevin, a 29-year-old editor. “First she started showing up on my doorstep, drunk, to tell me she’d just fucked someone.” Then it got scary: “Periodically, she’d call me at 3 a.m. saying she was going to kill herself if we didn’t get back together. I was always terrified it was more than a threat, so I’d go over to her place — which was exactly what she wanted.”
Perhaps needless to say, these are the women you must avoid at all costs. Disturbingly, they can’t always be identified immediately. “Most of the time, the lunacy is revealed after you’ve taken the plunge,” cautions Mike, a 33-year-old writer who’s dated a series of cuckoo’s nesters, including one woman who came at him with a knife when she suspected him of cheating and another who vandalized his office when he was at lunch. Why Mike kept dating these women is anyone’s guess. But according to Waxman, this kind of relationship “may be easier for some men than actually engaging in real intimacy.”
That diagnosis probably comes too late for guys like 32-year-old Sam, who’s been dating a woman on and off who makes him “more miserable and happier than anyone else.” She berates him in public, calls him up to 30 times a day, and has managed to cut him off from many of his friends and family. “People have said, ‘If you’re going to be around her, I can’t be around you.’ But I can’t help it. She’s under my skin.” In cases like that, I say you get whatever you have coming. But just a word to the wise: Better sleep with one eye open.
