True Story: Crazy Girls' Allure

She has emotional baggage, a Xanax habit, and daddy issues. Still, no matter how many times you've been burned, you're powerless against her.

For my friend Ben, 29, a graphic-designer from the Midwest, it was Hannah.

Hannah (her name has been changed) was a PR rep for the Air Force in Denver -- tall, model-thin, and briliant.

She also had a dark side.

Hannah was paranoid -- convinced that strangers were plotting her demise. She was prone to random fits of crying. Ben (this name MIGHT be changed as well) remembers pulling into the parking lot of a CVS to buy a toothbrush one day. He returned to find her in his car with the radio set to maxiumum volume, blasting My Chemical Romance and sobbing in great, heaving spasms for no particular reason. None of this made Ben thinking he should be investigating easier romantic prospects. On the contrary, he was hooked.



"It was the sort of thing where you see the wounded bird and you just want to constantly repair it," Ben says. "You never knew when she was going to cry and when she was going to perceive somebody to be after her. It was like the Stockholm syndrome -- you become sympathetic toward your captor instead of realizing, Oh my God -- I'm a hostage!"

You've dated a woman like this. In all likelihood, your friends sounded alarms that you willfully ignored. Looking back, you realize that even you knew it could only end badly. She's the Crazy Girl -- the one who made everyone wonder about your sanity and fear for your future. She may have taken the form of a smoky-eyed goth brooder, the tortured heiress, or the unhinged sorority girl. Whatever her identity, chances are she was intoxicatingly sexy, intense, unstable, mercurial, and impossible to be at ease around in social settings. She was completely and debilitatingly exhausting. So why the hell was she so compelling? And why are you still thinking about her?

[Whenever you're taken by someone who has the potential to lose themselves or to transform in front of you, there's something very attractive to that. It has the ability to transform you. Because someone has just thrown the marbles on the floor and you don't know when they're going to do it again. It's not a relationship based on trust.]

Of course it isn't about trust. This is about lawlessness. Chaos. Escapism and unpredictability -- a balls-out, soul-affirming what's-nextness that is so rare and so powerful that you completely forget to give a crap about consequences and personal sacrifices. That kind of relationship can, as I say [take you down roads]. And whether you drive a Prius or a chopped-out vintage Harley, at some point you can't help taking that ride.

"I think a lot of guys, if you've dated a bit, have the benchmarks," says Blake, 33, an artist and Las Vegas night club owner (and close acquaintance of mine). Blake's came in the form of a savant-smart, busty blonde named Sharon (name changed). Sharon painted abstract watercolors of flowers, played the guitar, drank heavily, and liked to drag Blake on spur-of-the-moment road trips to sleazy motels -- and bring a camera. [This is straight from the horse's mouth...] But her control over her emotions was tenuous at best. When Blake had finally had enough, Sharon decided she'd get him back by showing up at his condo in only her underwear. But it was cold, so she slipped on a pair of lace-trimmed aqua panties over her jeans, and proceeded to walk the mile from her apartment to his doorstep. Blake was mortified.

He immediately took her back.



"We all like danger and spontaneity," Blake says. "She would keep me on my toes -- she would challenge me. I was never bored with her."

Let's be honest here: It's an undeniable fact that if Sharon hadn't borne such an uncanny resemblance to Jenny McCarthy, as Blake claims she did, she would not have had the same currency to expend on her eccentricities. The same phenomenon gets played out on the big screen: Would Zach Braff's character in Garden State have sat through an elaborate hamster funeral if his hostess didn't look like Natalie Portman?

But there's a certain gloss to big-screen depictions that leaves out a key component of the Crazy Girl appeal: The closer to the edge she skates, the more enchanting she becomes. There is a chasm of difference between the quirky (She wears a helmet! She likes the Shins!) and the mad (Oh, eff, oh, eff. She's cutting herself again.) -- a place inhabited by self-damaging time bombs like Amy Winehouse. It's a the rocky outcroppings that we find ourselves contemplating what it might be like to crash at a roadside motel with Lisa Marie Nowak, the diapered astronaut charged with attempted kidnapping. For your average repressed, career-driven shlub, the terra incognita that these women represent seems vaguely ... liberating.

[I think underlying it all is sex. The sexual state seems more present, more up close in that type of woman. There's something in that disheveled personality that says they're going to make that state more available somehow -- deeper and more intense. I'm not trying to gross; Ben has told me that sex is the reason he keeps returning to Hannah. I'm just being blatantly honest.]

Long after Ben has shaken Hannah's spell, and his mom has confessed her secret fear that his muse would have "suffocated the children" had they ever taken things that far, he still can't stop thinking about her.



"[All the girls] I've met since her, in some way or another, have been the most spectacular girls on earth," says Ben. "Before I met Hannah, I would have died for any one of them. I met this girl who was a commentator on cable news -- super-brilliant, very cute. We got into this relationship, and I all of a sudden found myself thinking, Why isn't she doing it? Why isn't she enough for me? I mean, this girl is successful, makes hundreds of thousands of dollars, travels all over the world, has half the U.S. Senate in her Blackberry, and that's not enough. Because she's not crazy."