Usually most people never find their dream partner and end up settling, but for others its the closest thing to winning the lottery even if they don’t deserve it.
Do you know of relationships where one and/or both parties are being manipulated knowingly or unknowingly?
I think there’s a certain level of manipulation in most relationships, and I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. We all need to be around people who share some of our values and interests, and if there aren’t any it makes sense to “nudge” loved ones in that direction. But normally we draw the line at attempting to overtly transform a person in our own image. That would be pathological.
On the other hand, if you’re a passenger on a near-empty bus and a sluttily dressed young girl boards and takes a seat right next to you and starts chatting you up, she probably wants to get her hands on your money.
Hm, I would think -
We had a friend named “Liadan” who was in our Pennsic household. We camped together and hung out in computer space for about 4 years. Then she suddenly found ‘love’ with a man who was a minister. It was the classic whirlwind affair, a matter of a couple months until they were married, and he whisked her off to Texas from Oklahoma where he supposedly had a brand new job ministering to a church. Where all we had was her old email address and her cell phone number. He restricted her from contacting anybody, including her 19 year old son. Suddenly, she died and was buried. We found out when we called her cell to see if she would be going to Pennsic that summer [the whole whirlwind courtship, marriage and loss of contact took from September until Feb] so we could do the usual planning. We had emailed her several times and finally tried calling her. Her husband answered and told us she had died. So we contacted her son, who told us he had been totally shut out by the new hubby. He finally called the police in the town they had moved to - seems the guy ran one of those odd fundie churches out of a trailer in a trailer park and had used her money to buy the trailer and rent the lot, there had been no congregation waiting, and oddly enough she had been cremated … so this 53 year old diabetic with no history of heart troubles had a heart attack … :dubious:
If that isn’t a totally manipulated relationship, I don’t know what it was. Seems like someone was after Liaden’s insurance money from her husband’s estate, and her insurance pay out … the whole cutting someone off from their friends and family is absolutely a warning sign that something rather odd is going on, and moving them away from everything they had known for their entire life is definitely a flag that something is fishy, and dying suddenly should really be a flag. Unfortunately there is not a body to exhume to check for poison or anything else.
I hate dryer sheets. They’re a waste of money and leave the clothes feeling like they’ve been coated with a thin film of wax. My wife insisted that we needed them.
I fooled my wife into replacing them with some dryer balls that do absolutely nothing. They don’t speed drying, they don’t add fragrance, they don’t reduce static, that’s the beauty of them, they don’t do anything. They paid for themselves in less than a month, and it’s all gravy from there.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty, but I love the feel of the towels without the wax, so I get over it pretty quickly.
My Aunt (by marriage) was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known. I was shocked to find out she’d been married before, in the US to a wealthy man (I want to say a doctor, or lawyer, someone with influence). They had children and when he wanted a divorce, he had her committed and declared an unfit Mom. She never saw her children again. She married my uncle and due to complications from her diabetes was never able to have more children.
I realize there are two sides to every story, but there is no way she deserved never seeing her children again. She died several years ago from brain cancer.