In a roundabout way, some recent relationship turmoil has provided great substance for my pet theories of interpersonal economics.
I even have good foundations now for one idea I've had about why jerks can persist in society:
People are more than happy to just shirk off the jerks than deal with their heavy demands, so the jerks are likely to only slowly (if at all) learn how to perceive and effectively respond to people's boundaries and the rewards of doing so.
For those interested, I'm thinking of one's limits as a stock while one's boundaries are flows (dimensions over which there's threshold levels of acceptable demands). If the demand level is exceeded (by demands from others), limits are eroded and may fall to zero, at which point the relationship (of any sort) hopefully folds.
