What Does Brady Look Like?

I was doing one of my last sets of rewrites and I realized… I never described Brady!

*gasp!*

How could this happen?!?! I describe what brand of chapstick Tori wears but I don’t describe her ex???

What is wrong with me?

So I went man-shopping again. (What a burden, amirite?)

I went with Charlie Hunnam.

I know, I know. He’s too cute to be a douche like Brady. But we only know he’s a douche because of what Tori went through. He has to be cute and charming enough to have hoodwinked her in the beginning and for her to keep coming back. There has to be a reason WHY she thinks she’s going to end up married to him eventually, despite all the BS he’s put her through.

Part of it is probably that he just wears her down. This has happened to me in the past – I get tired of fighting and I finally just say yes to get them to stop bothering me (which is completely counter-productive, I know). You don’t want to say yes, but there’s only so much energy you have to resist. The issue of course, is the “Give and inch, they take a mile” conundrum. That’s how you end up married to a jerk and going “WTF just happened?” (Thankfully, I’ve never ended up that deep; I just tend to end up on dates with Mr. NeedyClingy, thinking about how a lifetime of singledom is better than this garbage.)

Plus, we’ve all had people in our lives where they’re jerks but when you’re in the relationship, emotionally tied to them, you excuse their jerk behavior. . . It’s OK because [x, y. z].

(The kicker is that if they were a jerk BEFORE you started something with them, you wouldn’t be in this craptastic place to begin with. It never would have gotten this far.)

I think that lends to the irony of the situation. If this happened to a friend or we were watching from the outside, we would warn ourselves away, but, nope, we just accept the crap behavior because. . . feelings.

Sometimes, we even are full-on, well-aware of what a mess we’re in and what BS it is that they’re jerks to us, but we still take it. (The next step is figuring out why we take it and how we break the pattern…).

Tori has figured it out with Brady that he’s a jerk to her, but she knows she’s in danger of going back anyway. She’s had enough experience in the past with him to know that he’ll keep pushing and she’ll get tired of saying no, and then, one day when she’s at a low point, she’ll say yes to the date and then feelings and then she’s suddenly married with 3 kids.

[The trick to not being stuck with bad apples is to not go on dates with them in the first place and/or run-like-the-wind when the red flags appear, but that’s so much freaking easier said than done.]

Anyway, Charlie Hunnam as Brady Boden, ladies and gentlemen: