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Reading that - Can you define how the women made a bad decision? She felt her biological clock ticking. Is he a drunk but intelligent? Good athleticism? It sounds like she got two kids out of it. I have a person in my family who had two kids with a person with some drug issues at 19. She now has two adult kids with jobs and grandkids. Nothing in your excerpt says this women failed. Plenty of highly intelligent 40 year old cat ladies now exists in the first world. Who really fails the 110 IQ NYT reading cat lady or the 100 IQ who married a semi-fuckup with grandkids?
Drunk who slapped her around, lived off her money while not giving a penny towards upkeep of the house and his kids, isolated her from family and friends and was big dreamer who couldn't follow through. He seems to have had a shallow, facile charm that impressed people on the surface level until they got to know him better.
She should have walked away the first time he hit her, even before they were married, but she didn't. That's what I don't understand, but it seems to happen. Women will put up with shit and explain it away. Maybe it was partly her pride (she didn't want to admit her family were right about him) but that's a very weak excuse when put against "for years he controlled me, hit me, abused me verbally, wasn't a husband and father".
That’s what she says after what sounds like talking to a therapist. Sorry if I’m not a believer in trust every women especially ones who talked to a therapists.
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This is a common enough phenomenon that it's essentially a cliche both in fiction and IRL. I know someone who's living in a household with a man like this right now. The husband stays at home all day watching TV, barely doing any housekeeping while the wife, who needs dialysis 2x a week, is doing manual labor to support the family and their 2 teenage kids. He hits her sometimes (no idea how often) and also hits their housemate's dog sometimes. The kids reportedly often complain to the mother, but the mother is also the biggest defender of him and will apparently never every blame him for anything or put any responsibilities on him.
It's certainly a curious phenomenon, because the biggest cliche is probably that women will put up with a lot of abuse and other negatives from a man if he's rich/high status enough. But this man is neither. One time, they reportedly got into a fight and he was kicked out of the house, and he had to come back begging later than night, because not a single one of his "friends" was willing to lend him a couch or floor space that night. He used to have jobs but kept getting kicked out for insubordination and bad attitude. He reportedly used to have a coke habit that is not fully gone. Status can be hard to ascertain and context-dependent, but for this guy, it's hard to imagine a realistic context in which he is anything but quite low status.
Maybe this cliche comes from the intersection of men who are huge losers like this who are also somehow ridiculously good in bed or something? I honestly have little idea what's going on.
It cuts against the theory of absolute female mate-status-optimization, but sometimes women meet a man in just the right situation and just the right time where he does appear high-status and confident, and they make a real love connection and she locks onto him as worthy and hers despite any evidence of his low status. Falling in love with someone just does that to people.
This seems to happen more often for women from lower-class backgrounds, where, say, a middle class guy who nonetheless sucks might be perceived as higher status in a durable way that’s not amenable to correction based on behavior. I guess what’s in her head is that she got her prince, and now she needs to hold onto him.
But you really can’t eliminate the power of an actual love-connection from this — maybe he’s abusive and doesn’t contribute anything, but when they go on a date he looks her deep in the eyes and tells her she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, or has a sense of humor that lines up perfectly with hers. The lows might be low but the highs might be really high, for reasons beyond just “good in bed.” The guy who hits her might also be the only person who’s ever made her feel truly seen in some particular way, which might be fake and manipulative but might also be strikingly real (because people are complicated messes and evil coexists with good). It’s hard to overstate how powerful that can be.
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I love comments like these that turn the entirety of Judge Judy-style Conservative Inc. on its head. The loudmouth baby mama with four kids by three abusive men who can't hold down a job is the societal winner; that is, in the competition with the childless professional with a good head on her shoulder. She managed to reproduce, did she not? Case closed.
Any woman can manage to reproduce; it is the easiest thing in the world. The hard thing for women is to reproduce with a reliable provider who is willing to commit to her and her children.
Women reproduce by default. Men have to actually work for it.
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Does it? The red state model ("become an adult by marrying and reproducing in your mid-20s while going to church and getting educated and growing into adulthood together with your spouse and orient your life around the creation of families") is quite overtly at odds with the blue state model ("once you've finished all your degrees, postdocs, and residencies, and gotten a house, possibly demonstrate your success as a fully formed adult by marrying and having a child or two, if that's your thing")... and I think it's pretty clear that neither of the two models mentioned in the grandparent comment really align with the red state model (which I'll take to be kind of modal conservative - I read a great public policy using this frame a decade or so ago). However, of the two, I think the common conservative argument would probably be that the person who had kids needed better character formation and community formation (as did the men in her life), and so the outcome was obviously a tragedy, but otherwise parts of the story were directionally correct - in fact, loudly shaming and scolding wrong-headed or trashy behavior, in both men and women, is seen as part of trying to restore the authority of those older community norms and restore public moral discipline. Meanwhile, the 110 IQ NYT reading 40 year old cat lady, by that value system, is much more alien and, worse, is part of an alternate arrogant very powerful system that functionally denies sin / the authority of healthy human tradition (and families as a bedrock of society) in promoting that blue state model.
I recognize that there are also libertarians / business conservatives who, in their heart of hearts, probably think that woman should have been neutered or spayed for the good of society. But, at least from the windows in I see, I think many normy conservatives would be sympathetic to the above analysis.
People that take the long career path in academia should come to grips with the fact that they’re significantly disadvantaging themselves in time, money and effort to make room for developing new, major pursuits in their personal life.
Being conservative (but not Republican) myself I’m a huge believer that happiness in the national community is what matters, far more than it ever does or can for short-term personal satisfaction. In the end people don’t live for theories or programs or organizations; rather all of them must serve the life of a people. That’s why the blue state model has never made any sense to me. Laudable to be sure. Someone needs to be doing that hard but technologically progressive work at the back end while the rest of society continues to move forward just fine. But it’s not reliable a route to happiness that should be encouraged by anyone. It comes only by risking enormous personal sacrifices and trade offs.
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First she’s white and not black. So it’s not ghetto kids running around as wildings. She says she had a job and supported the kids. No welfare kids here.
The article doesn’t even sound like he did anything that bad. One fight over how many years of making two kids and being married? He kicked her a few times while sleeping. Sometimes said mean things to her. He went out drinking with the boys sometimes. No mention of even drugs.
In ten years of marriage (sounds like around that) he had a few faults and probably underemployed. I have seen far worse marriages that produced successful offspring.
No, what he used to do was hit or kick her while she was asleep, then when she woke up panicked and scared, it was all "oh gosh, I had a nightmare". Controlling her and conditioning her that what he did wasn't abusive. Sneaky, nasty stuff.
You do realize that kicking in your sleep is a not-uncommon behavior, and people who have nightmares in which they lash around tend to have lots of them?
Like this guy doesn’t sound like a catch either way, but it’s not like that breaks thé Laws of physics.
?
Humor aside, I wouldn’t imagine it’s exactly all that common, even if it happens more than people think. Plus, abusive people aren’t exactly going to get the benefit of the doubt.
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You're....being sarcastic, right? Because my ex wife claimed exactly this about me as well, and she was completely fucking psycho.
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Do you have very good reason to believe that he was lying? I've obviously not been there, but it is not very uncommon to see parasomnias like REM-sleep where there really is unconscious acting out or uncontrolled muscle movement. All I am saying is that his claims are not prima facie false, if there's more evidence that suggests he genuinely was a sneaky abuser, that's fair (but it is possible for someone to be both a bad person and also physically sick, disease rarely cares about moral valence).
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Yes, the conservative realizes this and wants to change it by changing incentives.
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