Martha versus Elly's symbol-mindedness.

The interesting thing is that we're about two weeks away from yet another reminder that much like Mike himself, Elly can never allow herself to see Martha as a person. Mike looks at the young girl with the freckles and sees a fantasy that varies from the rustic to the pornographic. Elly looks at her and sees any number of things. She sees an object lesson about how children really don't know what love is. She sees the inevitability of having to console her son when puppy love goes sour. She sees a reminder of the pretty girls who somehow magically stole all the boys by doing odd things like 'speaking to them instead of looking at them passively while wearing an expression that suggests gastrointestinal distress instead of romantic interest', 'not shrieking in offence over every little thing', 'cluing in and realizing that Chinnuts put the run on anyone with the most tepid interest in her' and 'not chasing after people who are already spoken for'. She sees someone eager to allow herself to engage in premarital sex because 'everyone' knows that everyone is having more fun than her. What she doesn't and can't and won't see is a young girl being jerked around by the worst boyfriend ever who's finally starting to question having to waste her life on a moron who doesn't seem to see her as real.

This is why Lynn can never bring herself to allow Martha and her family to meet the Pattersons. It's one thing for Mike to scratch his empty head and wonder why a great gal like her came from a family that's pretty much identical to his own. It would be quite another for people to put Elly on the spot and ask her what the Hell she has against Martha in the first place and why she can never, ever allow herself to get to know her. The danger that I see is that Martha appears to be the same threat Gordon and Ted represent: the danger of getting Mike to finally realize that Elly hasn't got two clues to rub together so shouldn't really be taken seriously no matter how hard she hits. Allowing himself to be the author she didn't have the stamina or brains to be is a pathetic waste of his time so should have been rejected so girls who'd point that out stand as a symbol of something else: getting a vain twit to realize that she's just a wanna-be.