Good / Bad

"He is a sort of steady man in a wild way you know."

Women feel cursed to be attracted to men who are both good and bad, and men think they are doomed to have to be both good and bad for women. But is this truly a contradiction?

No, it’s just that good and bad have very little to do with health. Or, rather, they are poorly defined words, and the semantic space they cover bears almost no relation to your quality as a person.

Is the kid who skips class to hang out with his friends, or pursue his passion, bad? Is he unhealthy? More generally, is flouting the rules bad? You might see where I’m going with this.

A healthy person is autonomous, confident, emotional, creative, and affectionate. He may or may not be virtuous. He may or may not be bad.

But young women often lack the discernment to tell the difference between confidence and narcissism, ambition and lust for power, affection and angst, and so forth. So they end up using the former as proxies for the latter. They mistake the bad kind of bad for the good kind of bad.

This is the dilemma at the core of Far from the Madding Crowd. Bathsheba says: “He is a sort of steady man in a wild way you know. That’s better than to be as some are, wild in a steady way.”

The optimum in terms of attractiveness for men is to be healthy and bad. Skip classes to pursue your passion.