Women and bad relationships.....what’s up with that???

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A friend of mine (who despite my urging does not belong to Mylot) posted this question on her blog yesterday. I thought I would help her out by posting it here so she would get as many answers as possible. "So after the huge argument between my roommate and her boyfriend last night (big scream-fest, not the first one, mind you) which kept me up until 4:30 in the morning (not good when you need to get up at 6 to teach) I decided to write a blog about my thoughts on women and bad relationships. Seriously, what’s up with that???? I don’t see how a normal, intelligent woman can look at a really bad relationship and think to herself, "well, it’s okay, we can work this out" I mean, COME ON!!!! Sure, we all have rough spots now and then in a relationship, which (hopefully) only makes the relationship that much stronger. But when a few bumps in the road turns into Mount Everest-like obstacles, complete with chasms and a few active volcanoes (whoa, I feel like I’m somewhere in Chile) that should pretty much give anyone with the least bit of common sense a red flag to get out NOW!!!!! However, despite all of the warning signs, despite all of the pleadings from friends and family, and despite that little voice in the back of our head telling us exactly what we should be doing, the majority of women still cling on to that which is the source of their unhappiness. Why is this? In any other situation I come across, this is certainly not the case. If a person finds that eating strawberries gives them hives, that person promptly throws the offending fruit away and selects another food source for their needs. A person trying on shoes generally will not buy a pair that is too small or too large just because they like the style or the color; no, because in both cases the fit is uncomfortable, and a lot of times will cause the person a good deal of pain, so the person forgoes the sleek pair of shoes to search for a pair that fits and that they can be happy with. Why is it, then, that in relationships, women will insist upon the shoe that does NOT fit, rather than give it up and search for the one that does? Is it because they just HAVE to have the only pair of mary janes in the store, even though they’re two sizes too small? My apologies for comparing a human being to a shoe, but I hope that you can understand the analogy I’m trying to make here. Case in point, my aforementioned roommate. Here’s a woman who is beautiful, intelligent, successful, hardworking, and an overall nice person. A woman who, in all likelihood, could have her pick from a string of eligible bachelors. The man she chooses, while good-looking with a great, outgoing personality; is also a drug addict working in a dead-end job and is basically living off of my roommate (doesn’t help with rent, bills, etc.) Rewind to last night; apparently, boyfriend left our house sometime around 11 pm last night, returning around 2 am. His friend Steve was visiting at the time, and my roommate was alone with him while boyfriend was out. This really ticked off my roommate because: a.) boyfriend never told her he was going out nor said where he was going, and b.) apparently this Steve person is a pervert and she was upset to have been left alone with him for so long (true enough, her daughter and myself were in the house too, but it’s doubtful that we could ever take on a 200+ pound adult male) So boyfriend returns, gets into a huge screamfest with my roommate (doors slamming, people crying, cussing one another out, the whole shabang) which lasts for over two hours, the culmination of it being that boyfriend + Steve are kicked out of the house and have to sleep in his truck. Boyfriend was never able to account for where he was for three hours, which led my roommate to suspect that he was shooting up again (she had even asked me, a week previously, if I had caught boyfriend and Steve doing drugs in the garage, which I hadn’t as I’d been out of the house the past week) Mind you, this isn’t the first time she threw him out of the house calling him a "loser", this must be the third time now. What really throws me is the fact that she takes him back at all. Based on the highs and lows of their year-long relationship, the lows have definitely outnumbered the highs by a landslide. She even dumped him at one point, for about a month, only to take him back after he had come to her doorstep begging for forgiveness a few times. The last time she took him back, I honestly thought to myself, "was it really worth it?" I don’t know why I can’t understand where people like my roommate are coming from; either their tolerance for crap is way above the norm or my tolerance for crap is way below the norm. Honestly, if it were me in that situation, I’d toss him out and never look back. So why do women buy the shoe that doesn’t fit? Why do women walk around, suffering from the blisters and bunions that their shoes cause them, only to remove them, swear that they will never wear them again, then proceed to put them on again the following week? Could it be that they feel that they will never find their favorite shoe in their correct size, so they’ll settle for the size that they can get? Or, worse still, that they’ll wind up shoeless, so rather than walk in comfort barefoot they’ll deal with the pain of walking in shoes, just to have shoes to walk in? I’d love to hear anyone’s opinion, male or female, on this issue; and no, you don’t have to go along with the whole shoe analogy"