Psychology Today | 06.05.2026 02:52
At some point in your life, you have been drawn to someone whom you should not have liked, at least on paper. Not the charming rogue of a romantic comedy or the morally complex antihero in a prestige drama. I mean someone whose appeal was less about psychological complexity and more about audacity. Someone who said the thing you'd never say out loud, or who went after people with a kind of gleeful disregard for consequences that made something in you (some quiet, buried part of you) feel a flicker of satisfaction. Someone whose cruelty, even directed at others and clearly wrong, somehow landed on you as a kind of relief.
