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Notes -
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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