The Bigger The Issues, The Better The Sex

People who come with the benefit of survival have a far more interesting story to tell.

By Hashim R. Hathaway — Written on Nov 29, 2018

Photo: LightField Studios / Shutterstock

For a time in my life, when it came to dating I would refer to myself as a "Service Station." I saw myself as someone whose mission it was to fix broken women with emotional baggage.

Normal can be boring, and with a damaged woman I never knew what I was going to get. Now, don't get me wrong — I don't look at every woman I date as some sort of project or problem to solve, but I've found that the bigger the issues, the better the sex.

So what is it about damaged women that I find so attractive? And in what ways does it relate to how to have better sex, whether dating or in a relationship? Well, much of it has to do with experience.

If a woman is damaged, that means she's experienced. People who come with the benefit of survival have a far more interesting story to tell.

For them, life has a greater meaning, even if some of those experiences left behind a ton of internal scar tissue. When dealing with damaged women, I'm often reminded of a quote by Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark: "It's not the years, it's the mileage."

By that I mean that women who have been through something are simply more exciting. We end up with more to talk about, even if the topic of discussion is almost always their problematic past.

Sometimes I feel like I treat these women like experiments, largely because I gravitate toward them simply because they have damage, but I find more often than not that I genuinely care for them and it's because they've been through so much that we find common ground.

Does that mean it always works out? Of course not, largely because dating damaged women also brings with it a high rate of failure, mostly depending on their level of damage or how fresh that damage is. Some people simply aren't ready to date — even if they think they are — and you never know when some of those old (and new) problems will seep to the surface at the most inopportune times.

But before I go any further, I should make it clear I don't go out looking for damaged women as one would look for a blonde or someone with great legs. Being damaged or having emotional baggage isn't a personal feature or characteristic — it's simply a circumstance.

I find interacting with damaged women is easier because they just need to talk to someone who isn't the person who put them through hell. And for my part, I tend to be a listener, someone who's truly interested in how they came from point A to point B.

For a number of years, I had an on-and-off relationship with a woman who had no problems — and I couldn't have been more bored. With her, everything was fine and optimism was always right around the corner.

She had no rough edges, no fits of tempestuous behavior brought on from a lifetime of having to be defensive at the necessary time. Because there was no struggle and no strife between us, the sex became undesirable. Where was the fire? Where was the passion?

It just wasn't there. But with someone who brings their fair share of damage to the table, that fire is almost always lit, fueled by things from the past I usually think I can fix, but rarely succeed do.

Another peril to dating someone damaged is that on the rare occasion when you do fix them, they never stick around to let you enjoy the revised version of them. It used to bother me but I later rationalized that no one ever really hangs out with the mechanic that fixes their car, because the purpose of the mechanic is to fix something, and when it's fixed, you move on.