You can kind of tell these things

Wife has been spending a lot of time lately on the phone with her friend Leia, because Leia is breaking up with her live-in boyfriend of the last 10 years and is having a rough time of it. More exactly, Leia has been supporting this fellow for the last 10 years, and she is finally throwing him out. But she is having a lot of anxiety and heartbreak over doing so. Leia, like Wife, has serious longterm health issues, and her boyfriend has looked after her through many of her illnesses. Also, Leia is in her 50's by now, and is afraid of living alone the rest of her life. So why throw this man out? Gosh, let's see ....

• He has a difficult relationship with his ex-wife, who sounds psychotic from everything I have heard. (To be fair, I only hear what Wife tells me that Leia has told her, so who really knows?) But Leia gets caught in the crossfire.
• He has a difficult relationship with his children. (I forget how old they are now, but they are all by his ex-wife; if he has been with Leia for 10 years, they can't be exactly kids.)
• He doesn't seem to be able to get or hold a job, notwithstanding an impressive technical background.
• He has a chronic gambling addiction. This has been a problem for Leia for some years now, actually.
• He visits prostitutes. (This one was news to me.)

Real winner, huh? What a great guy ... how could Leia ever think of throwing him out? [insert sarcastic roll of the eyes here]

More seriously, how could he have kept all these facts hidden way back when Leia was first getting involved with him?

If I remember right, he didn't. Oh, the bit about prostitutes was news to me. And the gambling addiction may not have been visible a full 10 years ago, although Leia has been struggling with it (and him) for several years by now. But I'm sure I remember Wife talking to me way back then, after she would get off the phone with Leia or after Leia would drop by to visit us, saying how concerned she was that this "new boyfriend" seemed to have a lot of dangerous flaws and that Leia could end up getting seriously used or badly hurt. Or both. I don't remember all the details of these conversations -- I was only listening with half my attention, and they were (after all) a decade ago -- but I would be reasonably confident in vouching for this much.

So what happened? If all these risks were visible up front, why did Leia let this jerk move into her pants and her house in the first place?

I think she just chose not to see them, or to minimize them. Wife says she didn't want to say anything for fear of alienating her friend, so she didn't actually announce "Leia, you are walking into a field of land mines." But the only way Wife could have known about these problems is if she heard them from Leia -- it's not like she ever met this guy in person. Leia lives several hundred miles from here, but her elderly mother is in the same town where we are. So she comes to visit here several times a year. We've never been there. Wife calls but hasn't flown out. In other words, Leia saw the same warning signs Wife did, registered them consciously enough that she told Wife all about them, and then marched forward anyway. Something -- maybe infatuation, maybe fear of being alone -- overcame any kind of reasonable caution. Yes, it is terrible to see the meltdown of a relationship; but often, even at the beginning, you can kind of tell these things about each other.

And after all, isn't that exactly what I did with Wife? I knew a lot about her before we ever married. (Not before we started fucking, but that's because we started fucking the second time we met.) I knew that she complained a lot, that she could fly into irrational rages about little shit, that she lied casually (at least to her mother), that she said horrible things about her family behind their backs, that she needed a lot of care and maintenance. I knew all these things, and despite them all I stood up and said "I do." I made excuses for her; I told myself she would get better; I believed that somehow -- if only I were strong enough to hang in there and if only I could love her enough -- she would change and we could live happily ever after. It's true I didn't understand how unlikely people are to change the truly fundamental aspects of their characters; but I surely did understand what her character was like. I just ignored what I knew.

I recently heard from yet another friend who just broke up with her lover (a married man this time) after finding out about his other mistress, and his many short flings, and the prostitutes he has frequented, and ... and ... and .... She writes that all the signs were there in front of her long ago, and she can't understand how she ignored them all for so long. What was she thinking?

But I'm not surprised. It happened to Leia, it happened to me, ... why not her too? Why not all of us? The fact is that really, often, you can kind of tell these things right from the beginning. And then you can ignore everything that you see and know. Not too encouraging, is it?