You Have To Love A Few Bad Boys Before You Can Appreciate A Good Man

It’s a universally known (and hated) fact that girls always fall for douchebags. 

I’m sure there have been tons of scientific experiments, studies and research done to determine why girls fall in love with guys who don't have good intentions, but there’s no hard evidence that explains this annoying phenomena.

And while I used to turn my nose up to this fact — and was deeply ashamed of myself for falling for their lies — I’ve changed my tune. 

As we grow up and are just starting to understand love and relationships, we make a million mistakes. I mean, nobody really knows what the hell they’re doing.

We’re all just playing it by ear and trying not to get too hurt in the process. 

But getting hurt is just a part of love, and making mistakes is how we grow. I think getting our hearts broken by jerks is more of a rite of passage than an error in judgment. 

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In order to know what you want, you have to know what you don’t want.

In order to understand how you want to be treated, you have to be treated poorly.

In order to figure out the kind of love that will make your insides mushy and world full of sunshine, you have to have the kind of love that zaps your light. It’s the balance of things. 

Don’t hate yourself for loving a bad guy, and don’t hate the bad guy either.

He’s there for a very important purpose, and hurting you was a lesson he had to learn in order to become a better man himself. It’s all an ever-evolving process. 

Because after you’ve recovered from your broken heart, you become stronger. You become more grounded in your values and what you will and will not accept in a relationship. You’re jerk-radar becomes more finely tuned because you don’t want to waste anymore time.

And you become more confident, because you realize the only way to be in a good relationship is to have one with yourself. 

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So thank you to all the assholes, d-bags and jerks who broke us down to what we thought was beyond repair. Without them, we wouldn’t have found our own strength and be able to appreciate a good man when we meet one. 

And once you do have a good man in your life who loves you, you’ll be grateful for those bad relationships.

Because without them, you might have passed that great guy up.