The heartbreaking reason why millennial women thought Adam in Girls was the perfect boyfriend

Picture the perfect boyfriend. Is he almost twice your height? Does he have aggressive tendencies both in and out of the bedroom? Is he emotionally and psychologically unpredictable? Is he noncommittal and averse to wearing condoms? Does he send you d*ck pics only to follow them up with an apology because they were for someone else?

Hopefully, the answer to these questions is “no”. But for a legion of millennial women, it was the opposite, as Lena Dunham reminded us in a recent interview with The New York Times when speaking about the character of Adam (played by Adam Driver), whom she created in her cult HBO series, Girls.

“It’s like the girl in the horror movie where you’re like, ‘Don’t go down the stairs!’ She’s going down the stairs. You know why she’s going down the stairs? Because she’s a slut and she’s going to get killed,” the 39-year-old told the publication.

Dunham continued: “And what was interesting was that those dynamics, which in life were scary and lonely, would be recreated on television, and people thought they were funny and sexy! I didn’t write Adam’s character to be a romantic hero. By the end, everyone was like: I want a boyfriend like that! I want a boyfriend who throws two-by-fours and spanks me. That is not what I was going for.”

I remember this discourse at the time, having devoured Girls when it was on TV, seeing it as a dysfunctional mirror to my twentysomething life in London. Adam was toxic, yes. But he was also the one that Hannah never really stopped yearning for in a way in which viewers like me could relate to. It was because he was horrible to her that we revered him.

Perhaps it’s because so many of us knew an Adam. Or had one that preoccupied our minds, bodies, and souls before we really even knew how they properly worked. Someone capable of doing the most romantic things you could think of, and yet, also the most hurtful.

Among Adam’s most heinous crimes was the fact that he hated Hannah’s friends – and made no attempts at hiding that – until he fell in love with one of them. No, we’re still not over the Adam and Jessa storyline because there’s literally nothing worse than your ex dating your best mate. Then there was the way he controlled and manipulated her, his sporadic tantrums over nothing at all, and his total lack of accountability. At one point, he even steals a dog.

All of this, though, was made worse by the fact that Adam’s cruelty was interrupted by moments of unbridled kindness. He also stays with her while her grandma is in the hospital, and is very happy to be there for her during an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) episode. In one episode, he literally runs to Hannah’s apartment shirtless after she calls him in need. It’s this that renders him so dangerous. Because it keeps Hannah hooked, and the viewer, too.

Even the most abhorrent of partners has a way of sticking around when they’ve become both the hero and the villain of your story. So many of us can relate to this dynamic: clinging to hope whenever a nice moment arises, and using that to excuse any future bad behaviour. It’s Toxic Relationships 101 – but it’s a trap many of us get caught up in, particularly in our twenties, when we’re too young to know better and see a partner’s cruelty for what it is.

No, it’s not a symptom of their unresolved trauma that is your responsibility to fix. And no, it doesn’t make you any more powerful in the relationship if you’re the one they’re leaning on when they’re vulnerable and apologising profusely following a particularly nasty episode. They’ll be cruel again, and the person who suffers the most will once again be you.

Dunham might not have meant for Adam to be held up as a romantic hero, but the fact that he was says a lot about the kind of emotional torture millennial women watching the show had been conditioned to endure, and possibly even romanticise, from their male partners. I’m also convinced it’s this warped hero narrative that helped propel Driver himself into heartthrob status – the actor even earned a namedrop as such in the latest Robyn album: “And then my doctor said/ ‘Now, Robyn, who would be your dream donor?’/ Well, Adam Driver always did kinda give me a boner,” she sings in “Sexistential”.

All this takes an even darker turn when you consider some of the allegations Dunham makes against Driver in her new memoir, Famesick. Calling him “half-man, half-beast”, the actor and writer claims that Driver, now 42, threw a chair at the wall next to her while they were running lines. “When I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer – until finally, Adam screamed, ‘F***ING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE F*** UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE,’” she writes.

Meanwhile, during the filming of sex scenes, Dunham claims that in this pre-intimacy coordinator era, such moments were often created without adequate safeguarding. “Part of me was afraid that when I turned around, I would find I was suddenly in a full-penetration 1970s porno,” she writes after claiming that “careful blocking went out the window” during these scenes. Dunham says she never heard from Driver after the series wrapped in 2016.

Speaking about the alleged behaviour in an interview with The Guardian, Dunham alludes to finding ways to excuse it: “And, at that point in my twenties, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that.”

Driver has not commented on Dunham’s claims, and we may never know what really happened on the set of Girls. But if Dunham herself was willing to excuse such behaviour as a twentysomething, perhaps she subconsciously did the same through her characters. At least, that’s how I interpret it, and it is just one of the reasons why Girls was – and still is – a cultural behemoth for millennial women.

It gave us language for things we didn’t even know we needed a language for. So many of us tolerate pain when we deserve better. It’s only through age, experience (and really good therapy), that we come out the other side, and understand why we are doing it and the manipulation behind it.

So no, Adam in Girls was definitely not the perfect boyfriend. But I’m very sad that for a long time, so many other women and I thought that he was. I’m grateful I know better now. I hope the others do, too.