Why are kind people drawn to mean people?

When you're happy sad people make you sad.
When you're sad happy people make you sad.

Happy people make happy people happy, and sad people sad.
...exceptions prove the rule.

But to not answer your question there's a giant, messy pile of oddball, psychological, god-knows-what going on in the situations you describe.
I guess it's a bit being like a missionary. Some people just aren't going to believe in the missionary's god. And maybe they're right.

^^ Dont talk to them?

Recently The Science show on RN had a good program on the dilemma your facing. Sounds like it is a dilemma every woman has to face:

mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2013/07/ssw_20130720_1237.mp3



Rob Brooks: ... do I choose a man who's got great genes and who's great at competing with other men and who's going to really thrive and provide, or do I choose a man who's going to be a nice guy and I'm going to be able to get along with him and he's going to be a good dad. And good dads are much easier to get along with, they tend to be men with more feminised faces.

Jonica Newby: See, I found that a fascinating thing, watching over the years various friends pair up for their long-term mate choices, and it seems that every woman finds herself choosing somewhere along the spectrum of testosterone or male enough to float the boat, have some chemistry, but not so much that they feel unsafe.

Rob Brooks: The bad boy. He can be incredibly attractive, and yet at the same time are you safe with the bad boy? If he's bad with other people, is he going to be bad with me? Is he going to mature? The ideal thing is to get men to mature, to cure them somehow into great dads and great partners. But does a leopard change his spots? There's a little bit of evidence that he does because nearly all men, once they settle down and once they become fathers their testosterone tends to go down, and so that's probably them settling into fatherhood, becoming a good dad, not being as keen on the argy-bargy that settles the business of who gets to mate.

Jonica Newby: Do you find yourself, as an evolutionary biologist, interested in this kind of choice that women have to make along this spectrum?

Rob Brooks: Absolutely. It's quite a delectable tension, isn't it, between the safe guy who is nice but might not perhaps get all the blood rushing, and the bad boy who is all very rock 'n' roll. And I think that's an exquisite dilemma and women really have to find their own way through that dilemma. For guys really you've just got to play the hand that is dealt you. You can't fake it, you can't pretend to be a badder boy than you really are because you will be found out and you will be punished.

Stockholm syndrome ?

You are attracted to another that has qualities you don't have
or qualities you would like to have....thats the 1st attraction!

then years later....you realise thats all it was, lust with no substance..

Wahine. Dump him, find one better.

/end.

Thank you Lots of interesting thoughts and good advice here.

It's sad isn't it? You think you know yourself then your heart runs off and does stupid things completely contrary to your best judgement.

And dumb as above. That even when you can see something is bad, you can't seem to make it stop. Dumb.

Karl Jung said this about "the Shadow" (which is perhaps what is being projected onto the so-called mean or bad person) in one of his books:

"It is as evil as we are positive... the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive... The fact is that if one tries beyond one's capacity to be perfect, the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil. For it is just as sinful from the standpoint of nature and of truth to be above oneself as to be below oneself."

And from David Foster Wallace:

"(la) Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they're naive. (lb) I was, in retrospect, naive."

Along the lines of what Decrepit said above, I read a book once called "The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee" when I was a lot younger and grappling with sexually and why ladies always seem to fall for the pricks. This book explained it. It's by Jarred Diamond. I know this guy comes up with a lot of kooky s*, but I think he's on the money with what he talks about in this book (apart from the UFO chapter).