Here is a clue to why these relationships with "dark and brooding" men always turn sour, why you will always find such a man insufficient to your needs. He is, in a sense, in competition for your darkness. That is, because you are substituting a relationship with him for a relationship with your own dark side, you will soon find that he does not measure up. Not only that, but your own dark avatar will see him as competition. It is not fed by his presence. It needs you! You are expending your energy and attention on him, but your own genuine dark side wishes to have your attention. So you feel empty after being with him. He cannot match the true richness of your own inner demon, your own version of the dark soul, your own hidden knowledge. So you end up resenting him, perhaps hating him, because you expend all this energy on him and do not get what you need.So you have to fall in love with your own dark self. Hear it. Encourage it. Protect it. Give it what it needs.And make sure it is heard. It's not going to be heard by him. It can only be heard by you.At the risk of showing once again that I have no boundaries, and without getting into a lot of detail, let's just say that in my own therapy I do some talking to certain creatures who aren't literally in the room, and perhaps you will hear something you can relate to here.So I'm working on money issues with my therapist. She suggests I take a test that will tell me what "money type" I am. So I take the test and it says I am pretty high on the "victim/martyr" type.Through some role-playing (we actually let these characters speak) I made contact with this victim/martyr avatar within me, this diminutive devil of failure and quitting. I have thereby come to understand that this particular little devil-man, this little martyr fellow, wants me to fail. Why? Failure, for this little man, is exquisite victory. All he wants to do is quit and go home. If I fail, he can quit. He is monumentally unimpressed with my accomplishments. Inasmuch as he views human striving as vain and pointless, he is at once a destructive devil but also a sort of wise and pure presence. It is like having an anarchic personal god who works both for and against you. He is allied with feeling as well as chaos. He is of the soul, of the earth and pain and muck and blood and death. He is the earthy avatar of our animal nature; he does not want to soar, he wants to burrow.