In my experience, it is a very difficult thing to get someone else to see a reality like the reality of the situation you describe about your brother. I’m almost 50 years old. A very long time ago, before you and your brother were even born, I was in a similar situation as the one he is in now. Like others here, it’s painfully embarrassing to look back and see some of the things I did.
But hindsight and experience are useful if you set aside the emotion attached to it. Just looking at it objectively, about why I did what I did and what I was thinking at the time, I have been able to learn some things about myself and what it was about me that got me into that situation. If your brother is like me, like I was at that time anyway, he’s an idealist. He believes in fairness, he believes that people are basically good, he believes in the idea of an equal exchange etc. He believes all kinds of great things are possible with adequate effort and sacrifice. He knows the value of those possibilities, and he is willing to make that effort and sacrifice and to do whatever he has to in order to achieve them. He believes deep down somewhere, that there is at least one woman worth all the sacrifice and effort he is able to make.
I can’t say for sure that there is no woman worth as much as I am able to give. I haven’t tested them all. I can say for certain that none of the 3 or 4 women I tested my theory on were worth it. They were not necessarily evil women. They were just mortal and I was prepared to make efforts and sacrifices worthy of super-human fairly tales. I had to do that test myself, and I had to prove to myself that my theory was wrong. You and I already know this girl your brother is chasing ins’t worth it. She knows it too.
It wasn’t because I was stubborn or blind. It was because I NEEDED for the world to contain at least one woman like that. I had a lot invested in that possibility. The hope kept me going. I was capable of making the effort to achieve great things, so I needed great things to at least be possible.
If he’s anything like I was, your brother has a lot riding on that hope as well. I don’t think he picked her out for his best effort because he did a careful background check on her. More likely, he picked her out for this because she was the best available from a local crowd from which she is the best on offer. That in itself is a pretty sad fact.
I can’t criticize your brother too hard for being an idealist. It’s going to cost him greatly and be painful for people like you and others who really do care about him to watch what happens next. But in his defense, it’s people like your brother who invented airplanes and telephones and who put footprints on the moon. In a world where everyone told the Wright brothers that it was impossible to fly (because everyone else had failed), they refused to believe what discouraging things they were told by the people around them. They were only able to do what they did because they believed (instead) that it was possible.
All that being said, this bitch is going to be the worst thing that ever happened to him. If she had any honesty in her at all, she could save him all that pain by just sitting him down and telling him that she’s not what he believes she is, is not going to live up to his hopes no matter how hard he tries, and then just walk away and not agree to see him anymore. Of course, she won’t do this. She’ll hang around and take advantage as much as she can and then blame him at the end for all his own pain. Generations ago, her behavior would have been more constrained by society in such a way that while she would not necessarily have been any closer to being worthy of all that, she would have at least been less able to take advantage of the situation as she is doing.
Hopefully, your brother will someday give up trying to achieve perfection in a relationship with a woman and redirect all that energy to something like curing cancer or solving hunger. May advice: watch for other areas like education or career where he idealizes and tries to achieve something superhuman and be his biggest cheerleader on that when he does. And be silent on this hopeless experiment in effort he is making with this parasitic girl. He’ll see the result for himself soon enough. With any luck, we will lose the target of the failed experiment, and lose the ideal, but kept idealist intact for re-direction to some more worthwhile effort…
Look, it's not my fault that tornado dropped a house on your sister. Now get back on your broom and get your ass out of here... and take your monkeys with you
Badger 3 years, 7 months ago.
