All Comments on 'Detachment Ch. 01-05'

Seems like a classic NTR but told from the angle of the cheating wife. As it's a story and we know that things can only go one way, the reader is primed to buy into the main characters and accept things on face value. We're drip fed an idea that Marcus is a 'good guy' and Kylie is the hard done to wife of Travis, we're meant to accept that the obvious crumbling of their marriage is down to Travis and I'm expecting that Marcus and Kylie will ride off into the sunset thinking of themselves as the good guys. In reality, Kylie was unable to sustain the marriage through a difficult period of low contact due to work scheduling. Instead of trying to work on the marriage and overcome these temporary difficulties, she started to view her marriage and Travis through the prism of negativity. Almost from the get go I could see that even if Travis tried to do everything 'right' it wasn't going to work because Kylie would have viewed it through an ungenerous light. Once that's happened there really is nothing you can do to save that relationship, because nothing you do actually matters, it will always be discounted and viewed unfavourably because consciously or unconsciously the other has fallen out of love and they're just going through the motions of rationalisation until they can leave without thinking of themselves as the bad guy. I'm not going to condone domestic violence, it's wrong, but it's also undeniable that the best way to make someone the bad guy is to passively aggress, undermine and then ramp up an argument until the others sense of impotence is so triggered that they strike out. Then it's game set and match. The wannabe cheaters cognitive dissonance is resolved and they can now do what they wanted to do (or have been doing) with a clean conscience because they're the good guy and the others the bastard that hit a woman ... of course, we now also have the cute ideas of mental and emotional abuse, so actual violence isn't needed anymore for that resolution.

Throughout this whole ordeal poor Travis is unaware of what's going on, by the time he realises, the love and affection will have been stollen away from him, and it's too late for him to do anything. Classic NTR storyline.

RE: to Anon who said: "Seems like a classic NTR but told from the angle of the cheating wife. As it's a story and we know that things can only go one way..."

Do you feel better after wasting all of your time writing all of that? You can pick any romance story and pretty much predict how it's going to go. Same for mysteries, horror, and thrillers, etc. There's nothing new under the sun, and most stories follow a formula/similar story beats respective to their genre. For you to have gone through and write a mini-essay about your predictions seems like a waste of time that could've been better spent reading something you enjoyed or perhaps writing your own story that's less predictable.

With that said, I'm enjoying this story so far and can't wait to see how it plays out. Because it's refreshing to see a story where characters wrestle with feelings for one another while in relationships. Because it happens more often than we think, and we often don't get to experience working towards being with someone who is taken. Also, there are tons of woman and men in toxic relationships who committed to each other for far too long when they should have split up and sought out different partners.