When They’re Bad For You But You Want Them Anyway

Late last night I made myself ONE and a HALF drinks and wrote the following:

You are a bad idea. And I know it. And you know it too.

Wanting you is walking into the devil’s lair; it is playing with fire. This is what Hades must feel like.

This is wrong,

This is immoral,

This is everything I despise.

And yet here I am, still wanting, waiting, and watchful. You’re all I see, you’re all I imagine; a second moment doesn’t pass without you. You are always one thought away.

I want you to kiss me, to feel me, to caress me, to hold me, to touch me in all the ways you aren’t supposed to admit. You are such a bad idea.

I think of you and my breath escapes me a second at a time. I feel suffocated and violated and beautiful and sexy and stupid and impassioned and hating myself because you are everything that is wrong.

You are the cautionary tale. And the universe looks at us and judges. We are a bad idea.

Your beliefs are contentious,

Your body is imperfect,

Your soul is in danger,

Your thoughts are tedious,

And sometimes mundane and silly.

And yet I hang on every thought and every word. I want to be with them and with you all the time, and in this moment, I think, for all of time.

Maybe it’s the thrill, maybe it’s the never done-before, the ridiculous, the fantasy, the spectacular, the extraordinary. Maybe it’s you existing and me existing and us existing in this one moment in time.

But you are a bad idea. And I don’t need you. But my God, I want you.

Apparently all it takes to bring out the (closet, sort-of) poet in me is one and half drinks. (I do this from time to time.) If you’re wondering, this was/is not about anyone in particular. (I would also rather be burned at the Internet stake before admitting that it was about someone in particular.) I try to keep my romantic relationships out of the Internet’s business. But I have fallen for boys – for men – who were bad for me, and I knew they were bad for me but I wanted them anyway.

I like to think (and hope and pray) that one of the signs of growing up is that you start to fall for the “right” people and hopefully they fall for you back. You know, the kind your parents and friends and good people everywhere tell you that you “deserve.” In my case, the real men. The kind that call you back and ask you out on dates like it’s the 1950s or something. The kind that is thoughtful and kind and caring and make good dads – the kind that you grow old with.

But there are men that you want that you should not want to grow old with. There are men that from your very first introduction, you know they will bring you pain. And not the good kind of pain that comes with an honest love. But with a love that is heartbreaking and heartbroken. A love that makes you bold but not true. A love that is terrific but not adequate. A love that is spectacular but not permanent. I believe they call this a seasonal kind of love.

It is a waste of time to tell any person to not love the person their heart desires – they are going to do it anyway. Love isn’t only blind, it is foolish, and stupid, and unrelenting. Most importantly, it is unstoppable. You can walk away and keep away and stay away for weeks and months and even years, and you can still love them. How awful. How especially awful when they are bad for you.

There is no remedy for this love really, at least not for the feeling. It’s a human weakness that from everything from the half glass of your last drink, to the second slice of cake, to the thoughtless next sentence uttered, to the text after midnight, that we do things that are not in our best interests. What a tragedy of existence.

And especially when it comes to love – even if you are the most disciplined person in every single other area of life, even if you always do what is right or what is best, love makes most of us fall apart entirely. Where are our values and sensibilities and senses in the face of it? This is why people of faith don’t just pray for love – they pray for a love that is good.

But even when you love someone that’s bad for you, it doesn’t mean that the love they have to give is bad. It usually means it’s just not enough; it’s not what you need. And that’s why it will always bring you the bad kind of pain – the pain you suffer for, but with nothing to show for it. There is always brokenness in the end.

That’s okay though. This is life. You’re going to be broken in one way or the other. But when you want and love someone who is bad for you, don’t say you weren’t warned. Usually, you knew it; you know it. They were a bad idea and you were playing with fire. The burns heal though, trust that the burns heal. But the scars remain.

And if you let in too many scars, you’ll forget what your skin looked like before. And you should never forget who you were and how you loved before those scars became a part of you.