Two teenagers fell for the adults mistreating them, and for the same reason

Natalie Finch fell for a man named Terrance Maxwell when she was thirteen and he was forty-one, a former patient of her father's who eventually became her legal guardian. He called her filthy, gave her a black eye, and it took years, a court case, and a very public break for her to leave him. Augusten Burroughs fell for a man named Neil Bookman when he was thirteen and Bookman was thirty-three, an adopted son of the family psychiatrist. Bookman told him constantly how much he loved him, then vanished onto a train to New York without warning, leaving Burroughs waiting by the phone for months.

Different men, different endings, but Burroughs is honest enough to name the thing the two relationships had in common. Sitting with Natalie one night, both of them smoking in a kitchen with a ceiling too low for either of their moods, he says it directly: he understood exactly why she still missed a man who used to call her dirty, because he understood loving somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have, he writes. Because any attention is better than no attention.

That line does more work than a lot of longer explanations. Both of them had grown up in houses where the adults were consumed by their own chaos, too sick, too self-absorbed, too busy fighting each other to notice a child in the room. Into that gap walked an adult who paid close, focused, flattering attention, and it didn't seem to matter much whether that attention came wrapped in real affection or in control and cruelty, because attention itself was the thing that had been missing. The absence they were both responding to was so large that almost anything that filled it, even something that hurt, registered as love.

Neither Burroughs nor Natalie frames this as something they chose with clear eyes. It's closer to a reflex, the kind that forms early and quietly, long before either of them had the language to ask whether what they were getting was actually good for them.

Look at a relationship in your life where someone gives you a lot of attention, and separate out, on paper if it helps, what you actually get from it versus what it costs you, because those two lists can be very different in length. Notice if your loyalty to that person traces back to a simple, old feeling of at least someone wants me, rather than to anything they've actually earned. Make a point of building or keeping at least one relationship where the attention isn't scarce, where you don't have to work or suffer to get noticed, so you have something to compare the other one against. Catching that grateful, relieved feeling that someone bothered with you at all is the moment to pause, before you mistake it for love.