What Bad Behaviour Is Actually About
Mary Gaitskill's "Bad Behaviour" is a short story that follows a young woman named Ruth who gets caught up in a relationship with an older man named George. The story doesn't judge her choices. It just watches what happens when someone makes decisions that look terrible from the outside but feel completely logical in the moment. Gaitskill writes with this kind of clinical attention to interior life that most writers never develop. She isn't interested in moral lessons. She's interested in the moment when Ruth decides to send George money she can't afford, or goes back to him despite knowing better. The reader does most of the work here, filling in the moral gaps Gaitskill deliberately leaves open.
Why Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill Still Gets Discussed
The story has been anthologized endlessly, assigned in college literature courses, and debated because it refuses to give readers an easy position. You're not supposed to sympathize with Ruth or condemn her. You're supposed to notice how thoroughly she rationalizes everything. I remember teaching this story once and a student raised their hand to ask whether Ruth was ultimately responsible for her own situation. I told them that the question itself was the point. Gaitskill wants you to feel the uncomfortable pull of empathy toward someone making clearly self-destructive choices. That discomfort is the mechanism of the story. If you come out of it feeling satisfied that you've "figured out" Ruth, you've missed it.
Themes and What Makes It Work
The central theme revolves around power dynamics in relationships, specifically the way economic dependency warps emotional judgment. Ruth is a college student. George is wealthy. He offers her money, gifts, experiences. She tells herself it's love. The story asks you to sit with the ambiguity of whether she's deluding herself or whether the distinction even matters. Another layer is class. Gaitskill understands something about upward mobility through relationships that most writers treat as scandal. Here it's treated as mundane. Ruth's awareness of her own social positioning is sharp. She knows exactly what she's doing. That knowledge doesn't stop her from doing it. The prose style is almost reportorial. Gaitskill strips away ornamentation. Sentences are straightforward. This matters because the emotional complexity lives entirely in the subtext. The flatness of the narration forces you to read between lines that seem deliberately empty.
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How to Approach Reading It
Don't read this story looking for a plot twist. There isn't one. The story operates on accumulation of small moments rather than dramatic events. Pay attention to what Ruth notices versus what she chooses not to notice. Gaitskill is very specific about this distinction. Read it twice if you can. The first pass gives you the surface narrative. The second pass reveals how every detail is pointing in two directions at once. A description of George's apartment, for example, reads as both genuine appreciation and quiet calculation simultaneously. Both readings are correct. I've found that the story hits differently depending on whether you read it in your early twenties or your late thirties. Younger readers tend to focus on Ruth's choices and judge them harshly. Older readers tend to focus on George's control and the structural forces at play. Neither reading is wrong. The story accommodates both, which is part of why it endures in syllabi.
Common Misreadings to Avoid
The most frequent mistake people make with Bad Behaviour Mary Gaitskill is treating it as a cautionary tale. It isn't. Gaitskill has said in interviews that she resented when editors and teachers framed her work as moral instruction. The story doesn't warn you about what happens to women who date older wealthy men. It examines what happens inside a woman who makes that choice with her eyes open. Another misreading is assuming Ruth is naive. She is not naive. She is clear-eyed and impaired anyway. That distinction is crucial and it's the one most classroom discussions skip over. Sometimes readers also project their own relationship histories onto the story and use it as validation for something they already believe. Gaitskill would find this disappointing. The story is more interesting than any single takeaway.
Where to Find It
The story is available in Gaitskill's 1988 collection Bad Behaviour, published by Pantheon Books. It's widely available in print and ebook formats. It has also appeared in various anthologies including The Best American Short Stories and Love Stories edited by Lorrie Moore. Some university course reserves carry it. If you're looking for the original publication, it first appeared in Esquire magazine in 1983 under the same title before being expanded and collected.
Why This Story Matters Right Now
The conversations around power, money, and romantic relationships have shifted considerably since 1983, but Bad Behaviour remains relevant because it captures something that predates any cultural moment. People still make transactions within relationships and then describe those transactions as purely emotional. Gaitskill saw this coming and wrote about it without the benefit of modern terminology, which is probably why the story hasn't dated. The ending is deliberately unresolved. Ruth leaves George but the final images suggest the pattern will repeat. Gaitskill isn't saying this is inevitable. She's saying it's common enough that recognizing it in yourself would require a level of honesty most people avoid. The story's last lines sit quietly with that observation and offer no comfort.
