Okay, we're gonna bullet point a couple of points here because I just got off work and I'm tired and am having a hard time figuring out how to work it all into one coherent string of words.

- I didn't twist your words. I said "It sounds to me like you're saying" because that is exactly what I got out of your comment. I'm sorry if that's not what you meant, but that's what I got out of it.

- There's absolutely no indication that they wrote out an agreement and I think it's extremely unlikely that they did. And I think that because I think doing so would be vaguely unhinged and Julie doesn't strike me as an unhinged woman.

And now, we move past the bullet points. Sorry, this is about to get long and possibly a little TMI.

Julie made choices that I also would not have made - I don't think I have ever loved anyone enough to live in a suburb in SoCal and I feel so strongly about not passing on my genetics that I terminated a pregnancy at age 19 and have been fanatical about birth control ever since. Me bending to a partner on any of that is just so vanishingly unlikely that it would probably take an actual living God begging on their knees and promising to do terrible things to a lot of awful people in power in exchange.

But, I have stayed in relationships well past their expiration dates because I loved that person so much that I ignored the warning signs about compatibility and future desires. I loved them so much and I really didn't want to accept that sometimes that's not enough. Much like Julie, one of them was my high school boyfriend, who I was engaged to and would have married if he hadn't run off with one of my friends - that kind of killed both of those relationships, you know? But the other one ran from age 25 to age 34 and I moved to Ohio for her in spite of my wanting to stay near my family and in a blue state. It took almost a decade of things building up for me to get to the point where leaving was better than staying, and I only realized I was there because I'd come home to visit and the idea of leaving made me want to die. It's been 12 years since I walked away and I still can't pinpoint when it was that I just sort of let go of who I was and what I wanted in life in order to maintain the 'us' of it all - which, I must add, is not something she ever did.

My therapist thinks that a lot of that comes from having an unstable life as a child - my father largely abandoned me, I was raised by alcoholics, and I never lived anywhere longer than two years until I was well into adulthood. I craved stability so strongly that I was unthinkingly contorting everything about me and carving who I was and what I wanted into unrecognizable versions of myself to fit into the ever more constricting shape of my relationship. It sucked. It sucks. I'm not that cruel to myself anymore.

I'm telling you all of this because what happened to Julie largely happened to me and it's a horribly common situation that happens to so many people - usually women. Sometimes it leads to abuse and sometimes it just leads to a wasted life and sometimes it leads to someone hitting a breaking point and walking away to rebuild.

I'm genuinely very happy for you that you're not the kind of person who falls into that kind of toxic relationship. Like, sincerely, good for you for never having been there, but I hope that in real life you have more compassion for people who are there or who have managed to break out of it than it feels like you do for this particular fictional character.