Crazy Girlfriend Praying Mantis
Perhaps you know her, or know someone like her. Or maybe you once were, or currently are, one of this species of insecure, mad women. It’s all right. Confess! You’re among friends here in COSMO Land. Hell, I can’t be the only one who has stooped to the depths described by the scarily accurate Psycho Killer GPM (Girlfriend Praying Mantis) meme.
To explain: a GPM is the kind of girlfriend who has perpetrated any of these felonies (described in pure meme language, of course) against a man: ‘Going to sleep early today, huh? Calls to check if your phone is busy at random hours at night’. And ‘Left you a message. About my other messages,’ and, my personal favourite: ‘I was looking through your texts earlier. Who’s Mom?’
Amour fou? Or just a Crazy Girlfriend Praying Mantis?
My own personal lowest moment of ‘love-induced’ dementia was one of the above: I repeatedly phoned an ominously empty flat throughout the night to convince myself that the object of my ‘love’ was out, up to no good (bouncing up and down in bed with the air hostess of my insecure imaginings), and was not tucked up in his bed, reading his novel, as he had promised he would be. I needed 55 phone calls to prove that he was not my Prince Charming. What was I - temporarily obsessive compulsive?
No. I was just a Crazy Girlfriend Praying Mantis.
I have GPM pals who have done much worse than I have. One once got on a plane to ‘surprise’ a man on a week’s holiday with his friends. Oh how he, she and his other girlfriend laughed when she pitched up at the hotel. And then, the scariest of them all: one friend, in a fit of complete and utter Mantis Madness, hid in the built-in cupboard of a man she had dated only four or five times, to ‘catch him in the act of sleeping with someone else’. He came home near midnight, with someone, of course. My pal’s punishment? She had to stay in that cupboard, contorted and weeping and cringing silently, hearing every grunt, squelch and yelp of their epic shagathon. She could only creep out of her cupboard hideaway when the two lovers finally sank into post-coital slumber. Then she slunk off into the dawn, hobbling past their sprawled and happily snoring, naked forms.
What a result: humiliation! Shame! A broken heart and very sore legs. Ouch. The older, wiser me thinks she deserved all she got, actually.
None of this insanity is okay. We’ve all done it but that doesn’t make it right. (Our youthful exploits are all good for war stories/editor’s letters in years to come, of course, but the behaviour is never right.)
Here’s what I think the Crazy Girlfriend Praying Mantis meme can teach us: I've often said that everything worth having in life is hard to achieve. Well, there’s one exception: love in its early stages should not be.
Should you find yourself either insecure and unhappy, or insecure and weirdly Mantis Mad, then he’s not the man for you. Let’s face it. You may not be the girl for anyone, until you’ve sorted yourself out.