My well-considered hypothesis:
The female wants her love to redeem and transform a man. In effect, she wants to become both savior and mother to him, and thus to remain in control of the relationship.
If a man is mature and independent and does not need to be redeemed (in that temporal way), then he is both too little a challenge and too great a one:
Too little: There is no great work to be done to improve him. That makes him boring.
Too great: She cannot control him, and he will require her to be her best person. That makes him threatening.
All are prone to a form of idolatry. This is a feminine form. We do need a spiritual Redeemer, but no romantic/sexual partner can be that.
By the bye, we in the ministry call them Rice Christians, and it is almost always the woman who seduces the man into the church - usually with negative results.
Of course, there is also the factor that the human female instinctively (and incorrectly) equates danger with power and dominance. That makes a Bad Boy seem more virile than a Nice Guy.
We often hear that the human male is ruled by his male organ, but we do not hear often enough that the human female is too readily ruled by hers.
I laugh at the idea that women are more emotionally intelligent than men - at least when it comes to love, sex and men. I have observed that women are very stupid about their choices in men - in and out of the institutionalized church.
Interesting how many opinions there are. I don’t necessarily think a woman wants to redeem a man. I think she wants a man she can respect to begin with, and then “work out” his other “faults,” which is not a good plan ;-)
Just my two cents: I believe that women are attracted to masculinity, but it isn’t that well defined anymore and even maligned, so perhaps women don’t even know what to look for. They just go along with the physical attraction of superficial masculinity. Girls can also be operating from a place of “love hunger.” Maybe their father was absent or paid little attention to them, and they are “seeking love in all the wrong places.”
Boys without fathers may not even know what real masculinity is. I think bad boys need to present themselves as strong and tough, which seems attractive. In nature, the toughest males win the females; they are seen as the better protectors and providers. But bad boys use their strength for negative things and can even turn against those very women and use their strength against them. They really aren’t the best providers and fathers. How many gang bangers are going to end up as Boy Scout leaders?
I suspect there should be more direction for boys as to what it is to be masculine and how to channel their strength into constructive things rather than destructive things, into defending good things rather than bad. They should be encouraged to be brave, strong, resourceful, and adventurous men. And girls should be better guided, perhaps by the example of their fathers, as to what is a real man so they won’t find superficially masculine men attractive.