8 Red Flags She’s a Crazy Girl You Should Stay Away From

In my article "Why I Quit Dating Girls Who Club, Party, or Drink", Balla asks the following questions about spotting a crazy girl (so that he might stay far, far away):

“How do you know if a girl is crazy before its too late? What early signs do girls show you?

How do you know you if a girl is lying to you about not being a club girl? Say if you met her during the day?

Don't club girls run around during the day too? How do you know you're not picking up a club girl during the day?”

Now, that's not to say that all girls who head to nightclubs every so often are crazy (although... most of them are at least somewhat more narcissistic women).

What we're talking about here when we say a girl is a "crazy girl" is that she is a woman who's more likely to be unstable in a relationship. That's it. She may function perfectly in every aspect of her life besides romantic / sexual relationships, but that's unimportant to us here for our purposes - this website is about selecting women as lovers and long-term partners, and we're most concerned with how those women are going to serve in those roles, how they'll affect us, and how stable (or not) they're going to be in that position.

To make some of these red flags easier to spot, I'm going to break them down into different red flags across three distinct categories, which may or may not be controversial for some people... and if so, well, them's the ropes. We're simply looking for the most useful tool here for making general predictions about the effects a given woman is going to have on your sanity as a man down the line in a relationship of any variety with her.

I've come to the conclusion over the years that everybody is crazy.

Crazy in different measures and degrees... but crazy nonetheless.

There are open crazies, stealth crazies, and people who've made their peace with their craziness.

There are people who don't know they're crazy (usually the worst ones).

There are people who suspect they might be crazy, but are fighting like crazy to deny it.

"Normal people" only come across as stable most of the time because they inhabit a mental model - a matrix, if you will - and remain in an environment in which everything makes sense, and they don't experience much change and don't find themselves in conflict all that much. Because of this, they're able to avoid the jarring emotional turmoil and its results that more openly "crazy" people exhibit. However, take a normal person out of his or her environment, remove that feeling of control that he is used to having (where he is in full control of his life, and things work the way he expects them to, and if he wants Y he just has to do X), and his emotions and behavior quickly break down into the bizarre and the unpredictable... just like a conventional "crazy" person.

My definition of crazy, therefore, is someone who is living in a world that feels less structured, less predictable, and less in-control than a "normal person"'s world does.

Controllable and Predictable vs. Uncontrollable and Unpredictable

This can be because the crazy person's brain is wired differently, or because the crazy person has had different and less stable life experiences than the normal person, but it's usually both - the brain is very plastic, and quickly rewires itself in response to changing life circumstances, and an individual will change her environment to match her ideas about the world, so there's a feedback loop in place:

• "Normal" people who've grown up in stable environments that give them feelings of control and order will seek these environments out or create them themselves, find a place in them that they can inhabit, and stay there, thus reinforcing their worldviews of the world as an inherently stable, predictable, and controllable place,

• While "crazy" people who've grown up in unstable environments that give them feelings of being out of control and out of order will seek out disorder and chaos, create it where it isn't present, and destroy order and control because they see it as an illusion that hides the "true" state of disorder and lack of control that the world is always truly in (and, better to be able to see the chaos than conceal it until it cannot be concealed and bursts forth at random to damage you yet again)

Like the worlds they inhabit, normal people tend to be more easily steered, directed, and controlled, and are very predictable, while "crazy" people are steered, directed, and controlled only with great difficulty, and never for long, and behave in more unpredictable ways - happy and satisfied with something one moment, and openly rebelling against it and trying to destroy it the next.

Of course, this is all a matter of degrees - few individuals are completely calm, docile sheep, and few are out-of-control raving self-destructive madmen. Like all things, "craziness" is a spectrum, and it's one we all have a place on.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

You may actually enjoy a certain amount of craziness.

I, for one, traditionally liked women who were a bit crazy. A bit of craziness adds fire, personality, passion, and a vital spirit that you simply don't find in "normal" people.

I grew up in a very "normal" environment: don't take risks, fit into the system, everything will work out if you simply do what you're supposed to do. I was not a perfect fit for that environment, but my own mindset is more "normal" than not: the world is a predictable, controllable place where things make sense and, if you keep your nose clean and do the right things, you'll get what you're after.

I've reached a point now where I've absorbed most of the positive traits of my more extreme risk-taking friends, and we've started branching off in different directions, as they continue to take the same risks and make the same mistakes, while I take bold steps into the unknown where needed and with far less trepidation than I would have before, but I know what I need to do and don't need anyone to push me along (most of my risk-taking friends' pushing these days comes across annoying and pushing in the wrong direction - directions I've already gone down repeatedly and don't need to any longer - and has grown a bit old).

My tastes in women have subsequently shifted toward "less crazy" and "more normal" - more toward women with a stable worldview, albeit women with enough of a flavor for risk-taking that they aren't going to be thrown into torturous cognitive dissonance being around me and watching me take the risks that I am (now) so comfortable taking.

Talking in extremes (and most women will fall somewhere between these two camps), the main differences between a "crazy" girl and a "normal" girl are:

1. Sex: crazy girls have crazy sex - the best sex you ever have in your life will be with crazy women. Crazy girls also have sex faster, more easily, with fewer qualms, and much less last minute resistance and reservations than normal girls do.

2. Drama: the more "normal" a girl is, the less drama you'll get from her, provided you keep things relatively stable and don't go punching holes in her view of the world (e.g., she believes in having a good, stable job, to one day buy a nice house and have a traditional family, and you decide to quit your cubicle job with a big corporation and good pay to launch your own record label). With a crazy girl, you're going to have drama no matter what you do - be too stable, and she'll get bored with you much faster than a normal girl will; be too unstable, and she'll crack and fray under the strain of all the uncertainty you're causing for her (although unlike the normal girl, she'll also love this and find this very sexually exciting).
   

3. Support: a normal girl will give you steady support in pursuit of your goals and objectives. A crazy girl will sometimes give you boundless mountains of support and be the kind of true believer in you that a normal girl never can be, making you feel like the king of the world... but other times, she will tear you down, rip your dreams asunder, and tell you you'll never amount to anything, and are holding her back as well, which will almost certainly throw you completely off and wreck your ability to get anything much done until this phase is past.

4. Learning: a normal girl may take some classes and read some books, but overall she's relatively content where she's at, and doesn't see a glaring need to improve herself - life is in her control, she has the things she wants or is in the process of getting them, and the motivation for self-reinvention simply isn't there. Crazy girls will tend to have a variety of different interests, a plethora of skills, and social abilities, charm, and charisma that normal women cannot hold a candle to. If you want to learn a lot from your partner, the crazier a girl is, the more interesting things she's generally going to be into and be able to teach you (to a point).

5. Loyalty: a crazy girl has fluctuating loyalty, and is loyal in different ways and different places. She will fiercely defend you against attackers, for instance - far more so than a normal girl will; she perceives an attack on you as an attack on herself. However, when it comes to something like infidelity, the crazier a woman is, the fewer bones she's going to have about cheating on her man, because she doesn't see how this hurts him or why it would even be his business. A normal girl will muster less fiery defense of her man, and won't cling to him as fiercely as a crazy girl will, but she's also less likely to do the kinds of things that lead to him feeling very hurt or betrayed by her, either.

6. Fun: this is one that goes to the crazy girl... so long as she's happy. If she's happy, you'll have the time of your life with her - though if she's unhappy, nothing you can do will make her be anything other than gloomy, dour, and sour. A normal girl won't be anywhere near as much fun as a crazy girl in her peak, but she doesn't have the valleys a crazy girl has that are total buzz kills either.

When you're selecting a woman to date - especially when you're considering a woman for a long term relationship or a friends-with-benefits relationship (which I'd recommend you use the same criteria for that you'd use in an LTR... since FWBs have a tendency to turn into LTRs even when you hadn't originally planned for them to with surprising frequency) - you want to get the right mix of normal and crazy for whatever your specific needs are.

Too normal, and she may be too boring and unstimulating for you... too crazy, and she may be too distracting and unstable for you.

But how do you know if she's going to fall into a more "normal" category, or more into the Looney Toons funhouse "crazy girl" category?

Well, for that, you need to be able to recognize the signs - the red flags, if you will - of crazy girl behavior... because there are stealth crazies out there, but even they leave breadcrumbs you can follow to figure out how they're liable to behave in a relationship with you.

I'm going to break down our crazy girl red flags into three main categories, for ease of comprehension:

1. Emotions and Behavior
2. Things She Talks About
3. People and Things in Her Life
   

By paying attention to each, you can quickly get an idea about her personality profile, and start to piece together an idea about how she's going to be down the road if she becomes a constant presence in your life.

#1: Emotions and Behavior

Generally speaking, the wilder her emotions are, the crazier she is.

Why is this? Because emotional responses are responses to things an individual feels are outside of her control.

If you're a child and it's Christmas morning, and you have NO IDEA what your parents (or Santa Claus) left for you, and you walk downstairs and find a POOL TABLE... oh wow! It's amazing!

If you're a child and it's Christmas morning, and you already know you're getting a pool table because you snuck downstairs and saw it already and maybe even played with it a bit during the night, you'll be happy to have that pool table... but the emotion's going to be much more muted than had it been a surprise.

For crazy people, life is a constant stream of surprises. This makes life both extremely exciting, and extremely aggravating. You will see them giddy with enthusiasm, and bursting at the seams with frustration and irritation:

• "WOOOOOWWW... my boyfriend surprised me with a trip to this romantic spa. Soooo roMANTic!!!"

• "Whaaaaaaaaaattt??!!! My boyfriend is going on a trip with his male friends and LEAVING me HERE?! He's abandoning me??!!"

Conversely, the more "normal" a person is, the more she has her life under her thumb, and the fewer surprises there are... good or bad. And when surprises do happen, they're still not all that surprising, because she takes them in-stride and fits them into her larger understanding of the world:

• "This is so considerate - my boyfriend's surprised me with a trip to this romantic spa. I was wondering when he would do something to spice things up."

• "Oh, my boyfriend's taking a trip with his male friends. Yeah, I expected that; he mentioned before that this is a tradition they have where every year the three of them go to Australia for a few weeks to experience the outback."

You might think of the difference as a "normal" woman's time orientation is more future-oriented, planning for the future based on what she knows about the things in her life, so nothing is all that surprising.

Conversely, a "crazy" woman is awash in stimulation, stuck in the moment, present-oriented (hedonistic or fatalistic, or, often, both), giving little thought to the future, and everything happening to her is a big surprise... good or bad.

(you might even say that the things that make people "crazy" actually cause them to discount the future as too difficult to predict, so they plunge themselves into the here and now, leaving the future to always surprise them and seem exciting, confusing, and/or distressing, while "normal" people, because they view the future as predictable and controllable, plan for the future, and view events as either matching their plans, or surprising and, thus, reason to tweak their view of the world a bit to better make future predictions to plan around)

Here are the three (3) emotional red flags to look for to spot a crazy girl:

1. She's very emotional. Excitement, enthusiasm, contagious optimism, explosive anger or irritation, being all over the place in any way - all these are signs of a girl who falls more on the "crazy" side of things than the alternative.

2. She's inconsistent. She'll start something, drop it, and move to something else. She'll be talking about one thing, then switch suddenly and talk about something else. She'll branch off on tangents that have little or nothing to do with what she was discussing before. She does not have much "staying power", because as she lives in the moment, there are many different things that capture her attention - and she grows quickly bored with things she's already got a handle on and feels in control over. Her behavior is also inconsistent and flighty - one minute she may be about to peel away from you and leave, and an instant later she's going home with you. The crazier she is, the more inconsistent she is.
   

3. She's highly sociable and charismatic. This one's as dead a giveaway as anything - you only become very sociable and charismatic if you are around people a LOT, and not in too many stable, long-term relationships where it's just you and your partner because that's enough for you. She needs attention, craves it, requires its emotional validation to shore up her emotional uncertainty about herself, and as a result has transformed herself into a social champion. Charismatic, sociable people learn to conceal their emotional swings, to present a more pleasing exterior, but you will still see flashes of high excitement and bristling frustration burst through depending on the circumstance, before a rapid return to her charismatic demeanor (sometimes these outbursts contribute to her charisma, in fact).

A good way of summing up a crazy girl's emotions and behavior is, "Excitable, irritable, engaged with many different ideas, activities, topics, and people, and very winning socially."

Interestingly enough, when you meet a beautiful but otherwise "normal" girl, you'll find that she's a nice person, but rather flat personality-wise... she's just warm and caring, but isn't exactly all that competitive from a sociability / charisma point of view, and isn't terribly excitable (she also won't stroke your ego quite as much, as she'll be more inured to your charms and less awestruck at your accomplishments - though she'll generally be pleasant about them! These things are simply not as important to her).

#2: Things She Talks About

Crazy women are BIG talkers. They have LOTS to talk about, and lots to debate about, because for them, the world is a confusing, maddening place that doesn't make a lot of sense and is surprisingly difficult to control and get a handle on.

Conversely, more "normal" women don't have as much conversation, because they're trying to figure out a lot less - they've got things figured out, or at least, they've got the things they need to have figured out figured out enough that they can live the kind of life they want without enduring much turmoil, heartache, or distress.

You'll notice too that normal women are also more likely to become nervous and self-conscious around you in conversation - they aren't as socially experienced, aren't as talented at dealing with the social pressure and sexual tension you produce as you get better and better with women, and also feel like they don't have as much to be impressive about - thus, you'll have to keep a lid on expressing too much value and walk the line of attainability a little more carefully to avoid sending them into auto-rejection.

A crazy girl will talk about:

4. Controversy. When the original pick up artists burst onto the scene, because they were mostly meeting "hot" girls in nightclubs (that is, women of average looks who've learned to make themselves visually stunning with makeup, hair, clothes, posture, and behavior, mostly in order to get more attention, and who tend to fall primarily on the "crazy" side of the spectrum), they leaned on a number of controversy-generating routines, like asking women if they thought men or women lied more, or telling stories about a friend's girlfriend trying to burn his pictures of ex-girlfriends. Crazy women go nuts for controversy, because they don't understand it, and want to state their views and impose them on the world in a vain attempt to find some order; they will bring up controversial topics, and they jump all over them when you bring them up, too. Normal girls, on the other hand, find these topics draining and insignificant, and don't understand why you need to focus on petty controversies like whatever is being brought up. They may relate a little bit to be nice, but you'll be able to tell their hearts aren't in it... controversy holds no strong appeal for them.
   

5. Other people / gossip. The sister to controversy is gossip, and the crazier a woman is, the more she loves it. Again, gossip is an attempt to make sense of an insane world with impossible-to-understand people; where a normal girl has a mental model in place that allows her to make rapid sense of people's actions (and thus, finds them largely uninteresting as conversation topics), a crazy girl is never able to attain full understanding of why people do what they do, and these things are always shocks and surprises.

A handy metric for discerning how crazy (or not) a girl is from her conversation: just ask yourself, "How drama-filled is her conversation - how much of it is about controversy, gossip, and the craziness of various things in the world?" The more, the "crazier"; the less, the more "normal."

#3: People and Things in Her Life

Crazy women have more of a carousel of people in their lives than normal women do; because their relationships are emotional, explosive, and prone to dramatic outbursts, they also tend to have much shorter lifetimes. Whereas a normal girl may be close friends with different people for long periods of time, a crazy girl's friendships are fleeting and short-lived.

Similarly, her pastimes also change quite frequently. She's a gym nut exercising every day and extolling the virtues of fitness one month; a few months later, she has no time for exercise and tells you it's overblown and a fad, and now she's taking Spanish classes because she met a really sexy Spanish guy and has realized that she wants to travel to Spain (but her reason when asked for why she's taking the class is because Spanish is a useful language and she wants to expand her horizons).

A normal girl will tend to have the same activities in her life, and stick to them for a long time, with little change in what she does and few new things. A crazier girl might consider the normal girl's life "too boring", by comparison.

The red flags denoting a crazy girl stemming from the people and things in her life therefore are:

6. She has a lot of people who think she's AMAZING around her. The more people praising her, the better she feels. Such people give her an unrealistic view of herself - inflating her crazy - but they also help buffer her emotional ups and downs... because they think she's so great, they won't get upset when she's feeling glum, and will instead work to smooth out her emotional busts and help her rebound (at their own emotional expense). Normal girls feel weird around people who give them too much hero worship, realizing that effusive praise is based on seeing someone as a legend or a super star more than it is on seeing her as a real person, and as those people get closer to her and become more familiar with her, those emotions tend to crash, and lead to resentment and bitterness when the hero worshipper realizes that his hero is not so different from himself after all... and perhaps even quite lacking in some ways by comparison.

7. She has frequent fallings out with people, leading to a revolving door of friends in her life. The dramatics of crazy women and their inability to tolerate others' opinions frequently lead to fights and falling outs that ruin their relationships, even with many otherwise very stable people. The only people you'll notice she has in her life over prolonged periods of time are those she doesn't spend a whole lot of time around - the more time she spends with someone, the more likely a blowup is to occur.

8. Her involvement in activities is passionate - and short-lived. When she starts something new, it's very often AMAZING, and she wants everyone to know how awesome it is, and she wants everyone to do it with her... but she doesn't do it for long. Normal girls far less frequently do new things, by comparison; they sing the praises of the things they do less; and they stick with them far more often, and for much longer periods of time. The difference again is mostly time-orientation; crazy women pick things that make them feel good right now, but once the stimulation fades, they get out, while normal women pick things they've decided they ought to learn, or that would be good for them to learn, and they're in it more for the personal development or longer-term gains or, sometimes, for relaxation / getting out of the house than they are for stimulation.

Here, you might define a crazy girl's lifestyle as "new people who love me, new things to do - all the time!" on the bright side, and "falling outs with people who don't love me, dropping old activities" on the dark side.

Signs of a Crazy Girl

Those are our red flags. Not the red flags you expected, were they?

I'm not talking about things like breaking your stuff or insulting you or hurting you or cheating on you or flirting with your friends. Those things are of course clarion calls to realize a woman is off her rocker and your relationship is in need of a stern rethinking.

However, those things won't help you nearly so much at identifying a crazy girl before you get emotionally involved with her... and that is when you need to be able to spot her, not after you've already invested yourself in her emotionally and now it's a struggle to get out even when you know you should.

Again, before you break out your swords (and I'm certain there will be some inclined to), remember we're talking about a spectrum here. My preference is for women a little more on the crazy side of things, honestly - I'll take the extra risk of drama and problems and deal with them when they come up in return for the added interesting things a mildly crazy woman brings into my life. They're more fun.

Personal preferences are going to differ on this one. For men looking for excitement, crazy women can be the best women out there, because they offer this up in spades. I've had many friends tell me they just want a nice, quiet, submissive girl, then end up with a woman who's got more crazy than you can shake a stick at, and they love it and hate it and whatever the emotion, they stick around and keep coming back for more.

Some of that may be because they didn't know what they were getting into, and the crazy girl's way with people hooked them in before they had a chance to fight back - but part of it's also doubtless that that was what they wanted themselves, too.

So don't judge crazy. A crazier girl may be better for you, or a more normal one perhaps - and if it's the latter, keep your eyes out for those signs a girl is crazy at all, and if it's the former, just make sure she isn't TOO extreme in her wildness - but whichever your preference may be, realize that's all that is... just a preference.

And do bear in mind, before you start pointing too many fingers - we're all crazy... some of us are just better at insulating ourselves in predictable, controllable environments and keeping our focus on the future than others are, is all.

Yours,
Chase Amante