How to spot a femme fatale

quote:

---

Une liaison passionnée can descend into a fatal attraction if you don't spot the signs of a genuine femme fatale. GQ shows you how to escape a nightmare (or, better still, avoid it in the first place)

A friend of mine is a partner in a City firm. This is relevant because it means he is officially grown-up. Yet he is whispering inaudibly into his iPhone, while squatting in his car, parked outside his home. He cannot make our long-standing annual Christmas lunch with a bunch of close friends, kicking off in a few hours. His girlfriend is "sick". This time, it's earache, but bearing in mind we have only met her once in eight years, sickness always being the excuse, this isn't a medical matter. "Sick" is a euphemism for "a controlling bitch". Not to mention the excuse for her current uninvited tenancy in his house Why can't he still come out to lunch? How long have you got? He hasn't made it for the past four years. If he did, she would get abusive. In fact, she's going to go mental anyway. Hence the car shelter.

Flashback six weeks. She called him saying she'd had a dream that she got drunk in a bar and slept with the guy buying her drinks. Only when my friend asked if it was true did she 'fess up.

---

quote:

---

Roy Sheppard, co-author of That Bitch, immediately recognises his story. "She's psycho bitch from hell. They are always the same." Clearly. His YouTube talk, "Personality Disorders Of A Dangerous Woman", has had 201,000 views. His self-help book, That Bitch, as the title suggests, is best accompanied by a stiff drink. It sold seven times better with this original UK title than the PC American edition, Venus: The Dark Side. It's a Tarantino-style trawl through the low lives of otherwise sorted blokes when they let an über-bitch run amok in their backyard. Sheppard is right. The stories are uncannily similar. Take Sheppard's example of an American professor who fell for an attractive, intelligent girl. She moved in, fleeced him, slept with his friends and, phenomenally, managed to maintain the higher moral ground.

Psycho bitches are, Sheppard insists, "always beautiful - or, crucially, think they are - sexy and often younger". Right. Hooking up with them is, initially at least, an aspirational move. But Sheppard quickly adds, "They are also unstable, toxic, fickle and confused." Not much to handle, then.

Who are the poor bastards who choose these femmes fatales? "The type of man who falls for them is always Mr Nice Guy. The one who feels sorry for someone," insists Sheppard. That's certainly true about my friend. We all know men who want to be saviours, even if their white charger has morphed into a Ferrari. Apparently, making men feel sorry for them is often an early gambit in the psycho bitch's game.

But still. How do apparently sane, successful men get hooked? At least when it starts, scorching sex must seal the deal. Listen to Castle, the star of ABC's eponymous crime drama series, justifying sleeping with his ex-wife: "Let me tell you something about crazy people. The sex is unbelievable."

Relationship therapist David Waters agrees. "The yo-yo 'I hate you'/'I love you' is intensely passionate, with strong sexual energy. It's an addictive and exciting thrill we probably all had in our teenage years. Some of us don't grow out of it. The alternative is too safe and boring."

---

quote:

---

Like any busy Londoner, I wonder how the hell they find the time. According to Waters, the very attraction of PBs is they cause your diary to crash. He gives the example of the man who almost bankrupted himself showering a high-maintenance woman with more and more lavish presents and restaurant meals. After all his efforts, she was still highly dismissive of him. "Weirdly, what kept him going was it took up a great deal of time," he says. "Like any addiction, it uses up your time and a huge amount of psychic energy. It gives you loads to think about and is often a distraction from other relationships, like work ones."

There's plenty of evidence that PBs scratch away at the strongest friendships. A perturbing pre-marriage survey carried out in December 2009 shows 88 per cent of people wouldn't speak out if their friend planned to marry their PB girlfriend. I have to confess, I was shamefully mute when a childhood friend announced his engagement to his crazed now ex-wife. I was afraid of losing him from my life altogether. "One of the warning signs is they stop listening to their true mates when they say, 'Surely you aren't to going to put up with that again?'" confirms Waters.

---