Watch your back.

There are four qualities you need to have in order to be good relationship material. They are:

– Agreeability

– Conscientiousness

– Confidence

– Sanity

As my friend RainMan found out the hard way, the woman he was dating lacked one or more of these qualities. Here is his gutwrenching story, in his own words:

“I was sound asleep when my girlfriend came into the room. She climbed on top of me (I sleep on my stomach), waking me up. I figured it was time for the requisite makeup sex. I was very wrong.

We’d had a fight that evening about my decision to move to another town. We hadn’t been dating long enough for it to even be an option that she’d come with me, and the move was essentially ending things.

She, like all the girls I’d dated back then, was very dramatic. We all know a few, the types who turn everything into a major fight. I guess this was too serious of a slight in her eyes to let it go.

To look at her, you’d never think she’d be that crazy. She was average height, build, brunette, had the typical girl-next door look.

She’d grabbed the pocket knife (a folding knife with a 3” blade) sitting next to my wallet and keys when she came into the bedroom, and stabbed me in the upper back. There’s an odd moment right after it happens, when you’re still half-asleep, that you don’t really register what just happened.

Once the pain hit, I jumped out of bed and tried to get to the door, grabbing my keys along the way. She was blocking my exit, still holding the knife. We struggled for a few seconds as I tried to get the knife away from her, ending up with two slashes across my right hand for my efforts.

Eventually I was able to get by and ran out the front door to my car in the parking lot. I swear I must have looked like the Road Runner going across the parking lot, probably with a little dust cloud trailing behind me. I drove to the hospital, still not sure how serious the wound was. I wasn’t bleeding badly, but who knew what was going on internally.

It was a shooting pain, all over my torso. Cold at first, but turned into a strong burning sensation (I’m guessing from the bleeding?). Once the adrenaline hit, the pain wasn’t as noticeable. It came back after the adrenaline wore off, and it was more of a throbbing pain. The weird part is that there was also a sensation of pressure, like the knife was still in the wound.

They checked me out at the ER, ran a bunch of tests and found that I was quite lucky: she hadn’t done any real damage. Between the relatively short blade, her choice of location and the low force she used, she had managed to miss hitting anything vital. I was running purely off adrenaline, so my heart was racing and I was fighting not to go into shock or start panicking. I was all over the map emotionally.

The next couple days I crashed (read: hid) at a friend’s house, and got him to go load my stuff into a moving van. As soon as my place in the new town was ready, I was on the road.

The days immediately after, I was mostly angry at myself. It was that sort of “Wait a minute, I’m a smart guy. How the fuck did I end up like this?” feeling. That I didn’t date at all for almost three years after is a pretty good indicator of how it affected me long-term. And once I did start up again, I was definitely paranoid. Anything even remotely similar to the crazy girls and I’d bail immediately. I’ve gotten much better since, but it was rough at first.

In an odd way, it was actually the reactions of the people who found out that did more damage to my trust of people than the actual attack. My guy friends aren’t exactly the talk-about-your-feelings type (they served their role of kicking my butt whenever I started getting mopey, though), but I told three of my female friends about it. For two of them, gender loyalty trumped friendship, and they tried to pin the attack on me and find something I did that would justify it. Yeah, we haven’t talked since…

That was the end of my crazy-girl phase, and in fact I didn’t date at all for almost three years afterward. I’ve still got the two scars (pretty faint by this point) on my hand, which makes for a very uncomfortable time when any of my current girls want to play the “how’d you get your scars” game. I usually lie and say I cut my hand cleaning up glass from a broken window. Crazy exes are best left in the past.

As for her, she’s in jail. Not from that night, she was never charged with anything. The knife magically disappeared and there were no witnesses. I found out from a friend that she assaulted one of the guys who came after me, earning herself an eight-year sentence after doing some serious damage to him. All in all, I suppose I came out relatively unscathed.

I should have been smart enough not to end up in that situation. Hell, I knew she was a little crazy when I first met her. But like many people, I kept going, figuring I could keep things under control.

Lesson learned.”