Why Do I Keep Attracting Bad Men?

This short article is inspired by a Burned Haystack community member’s question:

Hi there! I've been reading for a while, and I've not seen this asked, but -- do women have our own rhetorical patterns that mark us out as targets for B2B kind of guys? I feel like I probably do, because once I hit 30 I was like "what am I saying that attracts this same type of guy all the time" and then I stopped dating because I couldn't figure it out.

I’d like to use this post to correct a narrative that’s far too common (this is not a critique of the woman asking this question; it’s a critique of society):

I hear these two statements from women all the time:

1. “I have a bad picker.”

2. “Why do I keep attracting the wrong/same kind of bad guys?”

Let me try to answer those definitively:

It’s not you; it’s them. There are simply a lot of bad men, so straight-up probability dictates that the vast majority of women will spend too much time with too many of them.

I’m going to quote a section from my book right here – this is the section where I include all the ridiculous things dating coaches are telling women and then respond to them:

<beginning of passage>
Dating Coach: “You attract the energy you bring” or “You need to raise your vibrations” or “alter your frequency” or any other line that suggests women are responsible, in a cosmic or electrical way, for the endless stream of
online creeps.

We’re just not going to keep holding women responsible for male toxicity. If any of the above lines were rooted in reality, then we’d have to assume that 100 percent of women are dysfunctional and broken. On top of being ridiculously insulting, that doesn’t hold up in an evolutionary psychology sense: If a major problem preventing human beings from mating is that a critical mass of women are not “vibrating at the right frequency,” we would have died out eons ago. As one Burned Haystack community member put it, “Like it’s my fault that I attract toxic men when toxic men are attracted to everybody!” Yes. Enough said.
<end of passage>

For anyone who keeps encountering bad men: Please stop wasting your time trying to figure out what YOU are doing wrong; you’re not doing anything wrong. Instead, focus on getting super sharp at seeing what’s wrong with THEM so that you can block-to-burn at the first rhetorical pattern and move on to better matches. 🔥

Love, Jennie ❤️