Name: How They Behave When It Ends
Uploaded: 2025-10-22T18:32:32.000Z
Duration: 3 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

There's a peculiar and paradoxical way in which we can't really tell who our partner is until and unless our relationship with them comes to an end.

Of course, we can know many things about them.

How charming they can be, or how witty and entertaining, what accomplished friends or parents they make.

But we aren't, for that matter, ever being shown the truly complete picture.

They're meant to be with us until death, and therefore they have a reputation to defend.

They have an incentive to maintain affront.

However, once it's evident that things really will come to a close, that the lawyers are being called in the morning, that the removal van is outside, then the bets are off.

Furthermore, there may be fury, a sense of betrayal, a grief, a pent up rage, a terror.

All ingredients that help one to lose command over one's more diplomatic faculties.

It's now, when it no longer matters, that we stand to gain our most telling glimpse of who we've actually been together with all these years.

Sometimes, even often, the news is pretty sobering.

For a long time we took them to be touchingly shy and rather modest.

In the closing scenes, we discover that what they are most of all is appallingly immature when it comes to expressing their needs and willing to cause us immense pain in a bid to evade responsibility.

Or for so long, we imagined that beneath a slightly steely exterior, they surely had deep feelings for us.

They were well defended, but they weren't with a emotion.

And yet, as we discover in the last months, perhaps they truly were.

Without any care, there isn't a single tear.

They seem to be plainly and simply glad to see the back of us.

Maybe we weren't hallucinating during the relationship.

Maybe they just didn't like us very much.

To think that all along this kind of stuff was hidden below the surface and that it took an ending to make it clear.

But the news is not only and always grim.

In some cases we can discover enormous hope inducing decency.

When they have every chance to exact revenge, they don't.

When they no longer need to be nice, they remain so even when it isn't going to change anything.

They work with us to achieve a good ending.

They may also help us with a health issue or give us a loan.

The index of a person's real character is how they behave towards those who are no longer of any use to them.

Hence the wisdom of the saying we should marry the person that we would want to be divorced from.

Or rather, we should want to be together with the person who it would be a heartwarming surprise.

No longer to be with we can learn a lot from being with someone.

We may learn even more when we're no longer so.