EU like a controlling marriage partner

[T00ts]

While pondering the current situation vis-à-vis the Brexit talks it occurred to me that it's been like marriage to a controlling partner. First all in the garden is rosy. Your partner couldn't be nicer. They stop everything to listen when you speak, sagely consider your point of view and are constantly warm and accommodating and life rolls along happily.

After a couple of years when there are mutual responsibilities and babies that tie you together you suddenly look around and find that friends outside you two no longer visit, or are actively pushed away. All your finances are somehow bound up to theirs, yet they have excess. Then one day after years of spending all your time trying to please a partner where the rules are always changing, where if you try to strike out on your own there is always a reason it will not work, unless the partner is involved too, you suddenly see that your dependence is totally based on them.

At that moment you suddenly see that you have to get out or get swallowed up for ever. They won't contemplate divorce and insist that you won't survive without them until one day you leap and end up somewhere safe and alone. They seek you out, put barriers up to stop you being free until in the end you snap.

How many times over the years have we been in a controlling relationship with the EU convinced by them that they are our future security and survival? Such a marriage is never healthy. Let's hope that steps we have taken to escape have not been wasted.

Just a daydream? Perhaps, but I can't help but feel that there is a close comparison. I feel so sorry for those still believing the myth.