My second big RP experience was seeing a neighbor be drained dry & tossed aside by a predatory wife. As with my uncle's experience I did not understand what had happened until long after but it did provide real-world context for the concepts to come.
My neighbor was a successful engineer who had stewarded his money prudently through the years. He used his money to purchase a nice house on land near us. He had all sorts of cool stuff and we enjoyed playing with the animals and sometimes coming over for dinner.
He married some time before we knew him. I never got a read on his wife one way or the other, young as I was she was officially an old person. I couldn't tell you her name or bring her face to mind if my life depended on it. She was just there in the background.
Eventually they divorced, sold the house, and moved away. We found out that she had milked him for all he had and dumped him.
A common story, though I didn't know it at the time. I didn't learn anything from it at the time either.
He was a romantic, the kind of guy who falls for a woman hard and commits totally. She was a predator, taking him for all he had then cutting him off and walking away. She's probably choking down a glass of cheap wine right now, angry at the world in general and him in particular for not giving her the life she deserved. He's probably stuck in an engineering job he doesn't like trying to cover alimony payments to a woman who never gave him kids.
It's a heck of a thing that people have so much difficulty seeing what is right in front of their noses. We're steeped from birth in fictions about how the world works and most likely carry those fictions out with blind enthusiasm until we crumble.
For all that we excel in science, language, and industry, we often resist learning in general life -- the part that most affects us. We are wind-up toys that rattle along a path determined by our temperaments and the stories we believe.
Why is it so difficult for us to understand these things? A lot of RP theory seeks to answer that and I'm still working on it, but I have an idea.
The stories aren't true but they do work well enough to keep us invested. Few failures are hard failures. The BP has explanations for why it doesn't always work; we need to try harder, we need to listen more, she wasn't the one, etc. The model always offers more epicycles for us to apply if only we would take the time & effort to earn them. Society reinforces this by offering examples of success to look at. How many of those successes are just failures-in-waiting is not examined.
Such a flexible & adaptive false model is effective at retaining those who have reason to question it. Getting up and over the hump is no easy thing.
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