Excerpt: Drama Kings by Dalma Heyn

ByABC News via logo
November 10, 2005, 2:59 PM

Nov. 11, 2005 — -- Ask any woman who's either had a troubled relationship with a man, "drama kings" are out there. But as Dalma Heyn writes in her latest book "Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy," women aren't sitting around and taking it anymore. They are realizing they can have a much more fulfilling life on their own as a single woman. And this type of thinking represents a huge shift in a society that has previously cast women first and foremost in the role of wife and mother, says Heyn, who is also the author of "The Erotic Silence of the American Wife" and "Marriage Shock."

As Heyn describes in the book's preface, the "fatal flaw" of a Drama King is that while he appears to have so many desirable qualities that draw the woman to him in the first place, he can't give her what she wants. For example, his "boyish charm" might really be a "arrested development" or his "refreshing laid-backness" turns out to be "an inability to connect." After leaving these toxic men, women become stronger and realize what they really want in life and how to get it.

Below is the first chapter of "Drama Kings."

Chapter One: All the Kings' Women

Love me in full being.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Love Poems

Maureen Fisher says she has it all.

At thirty-eight, she is healthy, the mother of an adored teenage son, Timothy, and the marketing director of the biggest sports equipment store in Florida. She and Timothy live in a small house forty minutes from Tampa. Timothy's father, Maureen's ex-husband, Christopher, lives close by, popping over several times a week when Maureen works late so Timothy won't be alone. Maureen's relationship with Christopher is good, now that their divorce is well behind them and Timothy's well-being is their only concern. She has three dear, close friends; a Tibetan terrier; and aging parents she is happy to support.

Has it all? Let's see: Did she forget to mention a man?

No, she didn't forget. Maureen knows she doesn't fit the picture of the woman she was supposed to have become at her age, complete with the lifetime husband, or lifetime partner, or a potential one, or at least someone. Yet there is no one on the horizon, and she is as content as can be. She's not even looking.

I only began to recognize that I'm truly happy -- maybe even happiest -- without a guy when I did some serious thinking about what's right for me. I had to deconstruct all the myths about women's happiness; challenge all the assumptions, the promises, the dreams laid out for me by my family, my friends, even the stories I grew up on. I had to learn to read those newspaper items -- "Distraught Woman Can't Find Man!" "Unmarried Woman Shoots Self!" Because not to have a man at thirty-eight means I don't have the one thing I've been told all my life is the only thing. So for that part of me that was taught I'm not a full human being without this "other half," it's like having a missing psychic limb.But that's programming, not my own reaction, and I'm not manipulated anymore.

I've been with a slew of goofy guys, and I didn't want to stay with any of them. Some were appealing, some tyrannical, and some just ridiculous; some were fun and sexy and wild; and some were not so good for Timothy. I went through sadness, weirdness, desperation, until it hit me like a slap: I don't have to try so hard to be in a relationship! I don't have to suffer for a man! I live wonderfully without any of them!

I'm not saying forever on this -- I love men, I love sex. I love being in love. But I've found the notion of one man way more appealing than the reality of being with any of the men I've been out with.

Tracy, at thirty, feels enormous pressure to marry a man she's dated for almost a year but who she nevertheless believes is "clueless" about her. She's a loan officer for a commercial bank in Topeka; he's a musician a few years younger. All her friends are either already married or about to be. She says it takes everything she's got to ward off the onslaught of advice about how best to transform Dan -- the "pretty crazy" guy she "sort of" loves -- into husband material.

I hear about having relationship talks, playing hard to get, giving him ultimatums, dumping him outright -- the thing is, it's all like Republicans talking to Democrats: See, I don't want what they want. I don't want to bludgeon him into understanding me any more than I want him bludgeoning me into understanding him.

I'm in the most conservative business in the world in a very conservative town. I wear little navy suits to work and pumps with clear panty hose. Dan looks like Nick Nolte in one of his drunk-driving mug shots, with the hair, the wild eyes, the dissolute bit. But here's the thing. He calls and says, "Hey! Let's go hiking today," or wakes me up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday after a gig with, "I fixed our bikes. Let's go for a ride." I love that. We don't talk much, except about practical stuff -- the amount of air in the tires, the best conditions for hiking. He expresses his emotions through his guitar and physical activity.

And her emotions?

Tracy enjoys wrestling with her own complicated, contradictory feelings "all by myself" -- another thing that confounds her friends.

I don't need to share my ambivalence or investigate his. I don't need to beat ambiguity and doubt into submission -- I can live with it. I don't require Dan to understand my messy psyche. Who says a man is supposed to understand me? Who says a man and woman can't get enough from each other by having fun together? And who says I have to marry or have children?

Well, she concedes quickly with a grin, pretty much everyone. But that's their problem, she believes. "I love kids, but I may not want one of my own."So when friends ask her when she's going to get serious, she tells them she's very serious -- just not about turning this good-enough-for-the-moment Drama King into Mr. Right. She's done three things that help, she says. "One, I broke out of the mold that says love is forever. Two, I broke out of the mold that says I'm supposed to be pushing marriage on any bachelor I find. And three, I broke out of the mold that says being alone is being lonely."

She wants, these days, to have fun. Her old craving for what she calls a love twin, a soul mate, feels regressive to her now, "like something I hunger for when I'm feeling the weakest and the most needy, a throwback to a time when there was no such thing for women as a life of one's own." Her desire for a soul mate is most intense, in other words, when it's an attempted shortcut to, or substitute for, a soul of her own.

She lives in the moment and has learned to love doing things by herself. She knows she's with a Drama King and accepts it for now.

There are things I can't stand about our relationship, and others that I may never get again: He's sort of a lunatic -- not sort-of; really a lunatic -- and I put up with a lot of unprocessed stuff from him, a lot of narcissism and aggression. But then, sex is great; he's a passionate guy. And unlike every other man I've met, he likes me exactly the way I am -- and I'm a moody, cranky, bossy thing. He doesn't call me selfish for putting myself first in my life, and he doesn't attack me for sounding -- as I often do, I'm told -- like it's my way or the highway.

Tracy sums up what feels new to her about herself. "I'm the real me. I don't do what I'm told; I do what I feel. And my life has taken off. I don't need a man. And not needing Dan has freed me to ... want him."

Anabel has been married and divorced and remarried and divorced -- from the same man. Now, at forty-four, she has gone out with "every conceivable kind of maniac" and continues to do so with gusto, convinced that "that's what's out there." She loved being married, "or else I wouldn't have tried so hard with Frank," her on-again-off-again ex-husband. As for wedlock again, though, she's in no hurry "to get back on that horse. When people say, 'What a pity you're not married; you'd make someone a great wife,' I tell them that my greatness as a wife isn't the point. That 'someone's' greatness as a husband is." She sees no man in her troupe of Drama Kings that qualify. Still, she's always up for a relationship that is --