Foobonia and Points West.

I think you'll agree that Patterson women aren't big on guts when it comes to menfolk treating them like dirt. Just as Elly is willing to put up with John's bullshit because she needs to be married more than she needs to be treated with respect, Liz and April were willing to tolerate all manner of shitty treatment from oafs and clods who saw them as a commodity because they had a man. As long as they were sure that the twit love interest was loyal to them, they could get behind anything. This leaves us having to deal with

Foob Fact Thirteen: Pattersons are willing to put up with all manner of nasty behaviour from a partner because they know of only one reason that a dysfunctional relationship may be allowed to break up: infidelity.

I think you'll also agree that they also expect that the partner should be willing to do all sorts of things that are totally at odds with their own best interests and certain realities Pattersons would prefer not exist because they get in the way of the Patterswine getting exactly what they want when they want it. Watching Martha and Rhetta and Paul and Warren be told that caring about their own personal needs made them selfish brings us to

Foob Fact Fourteen: Pattersons don't actually care about any obstacles that their needs might present to other people and tend to assume selfish motives and treachery are why said issues are invoked.

This is because of all of the things that a Patterson can think of, loving another person in any way, shape or form is the worst. The Patterson him- or herself in question can be a capricious dolt who isn't obliged to be troubled by what that person might feel or want because it's not about the other person's feelings or what the Pattersaint might demand of them. Also, people who dare to try to justify that person's unforgivable betrayal are also dirt under the Foob's heels because how dare they say that it's not their business to look out for a Foob's interests first, last and always. This leads us to dealing with

Foob Fact Fifteen: There can be no forgiveness of cheaters or those who defend them lest the Patterson be forced to confront the terrible possibility that he/she might be responsible in any way for his/her own misery.

and

Foob Fact Sixteen: The Pattersons have the baffling notion that despite the fact that they are incapable of actually trusting anyone, it's the job of everyone in the God-damned world to look out for their interests.

What you and I and Michael know is that neither the MacRae or Blum family trusted him especially much and tried their damnedest to keep their daughters from too close contact with that goofola the crazy woman with the dog thought she was raising. While he play-acted like he was a lot closer to scandalize Elly, most of the time, stolen moments was pretty much all he got. He never got close to enough time with either longed-for one even by a grown man's standards. The problem is that just as Elly will insist to her dying day that in between husbands, Connie's sad, empty existence of lonely nights and unquiet desperation was a letter to Penthouse, she'll go to her reward convinced that only her vigilance kept her son on the straight and narrow. This is the ninth Foob Fact and is best expressed as:

Fact: Elly's delusion that she's the only person on the planet not engaged in what Alan Moore calls 'donkey bonking' is an unwarranted and unnecessary complication that has the effect of prematurely destroying relationships that would have collapsed on their own less painfully.

Of course, keeping him from 'hurting himself' is not the only thing she's trying to protect him from. We also have to contend with the fact that just as Paul was made of snow and would melt, Rhetta was clearly The Wrong Sort because she would have kept Mike from pursuing the destiny Elly picked out for him. We sort of got a hint of this really meant when she wanted him to write about Farley's death. That would have been a terrible thing because it would have led to a terrible conclusion of hurting Elly and revealing her to be the same oblivious moron parent she was in 1979. Since Rhetta and Martha thought of Elly as being a person instead of a role model, let's just declare a tenth Foob Fact right here and now:

Fact: Her untoward prurience is a smoke-screen because she's really afraid that a love interest might get in the way of her owning Mike's horses.

Now that we've reminded ourselves that Mike is an asshole who thinks that he doesn't have to give anything up when he's in a relationship because that's the love interest's job and that deep down, he's a whining infant that thinks that people don't really love him and just want to torment him for fun because they have needs too, let's remind ourselves of the third and fourth Foob Facts.

Fact Number Three comes into play when describing the collapse of his relationship with Martha. As you will recall, Doofus was too busy focused on getting his learner's permit to give anything like a crap about her feelings. As you will also recall, the jackass blamed his initially failing his driver's test on her out-of-the-blue it-totally-had-nothing-to-do-with-what-he-was-doing betrayal. This recapitulation of Phil's infantile whining about how he let a woman mess up his head and his bleating about the unfairness of his having his fate decided for him lead us nicely to Foob Fact Number Three:

Fact: Despite the fact that he's mostly to blame for the break-up, Mike refuses to accept any sort of responsibility for his actions but shifts all the blame on the person he's with because he's not into being blamed for things.

This leads us to Fact Number Four. Fact Number Four comes into play when he meets Martha a few weeks later and he cannot believe that he had such strong feelings for this persons. He foreshadows the maunderings of his idiot sister Liz when he tells himself that no, he didn't really know what love was when he was around her but now that he's with someone who strokes his ego, he does. This leaves us with one conclusion as to what Foob Fact Number Four is:

Fact: Michael never really loved Martha at all. He was in love with the idea of being in love and the person he's with is simply a means to an end, not a person with feelings he'd be oppressed and shackled by having to respect or consider.

When one fast-forwards to her having to endure his pompous blathering about how it's probably her betrayal that made a misery of her life (which neatly echoes that fucking imbecile Phil's hateful tantrum about how Connie should die in misery because she grew cool to his self-absorption and complacency), it doesn't take a genius to realize that Martha had to remind herself of Foob Fact Number Five:

Fact: You'd have to be some sort of masochist to get in the three-way that is getting into a relationship with Michael and his grossly inflated (and horribly toxic) ego.

As we all know, we are about one year or so away from reminding ourselves that Martha's understanding of her dealings with Michael Patterson would tend to almost always paint him in a rather unflattering light. They might have met cute but, man alive, did they ever break up ugly and it's mostly because Michael is a self-serving, self-absorbed dimwit who, when encountering any sort of frustration, confusion or negative emotions, engages in horrible blubbering about hateful deceit. Let's remind ourselves of a great big sign the Martha of 2016 is telling her children about in order to protect them from the morons of this world.

The one-two punch I had in mind would, of course, be his inability to see her side in the sharing of notes crisis and his pathetic bleating about that stupid-ass gross-out Valentine he brainlessly bought. We remember that she was on the horns of a typical teenaged dilemma because we remember that Janet and Meg were transfixed by the notion that she had to share everything ever to prove she was their friend and not some creep hiding things from them because we remember that kids can think some awfully damned stupid things. We also remember that the stupid fool Mike clearly seems to have thought that she should have been willing to spend most of her junior high years with a target painted on her forehead to Prove Her Love For Him. We also remember that the stupid creep turned right the Hell around and got his arse in an uproar because she didn't like the insulting gross-out Valentine he couldn't buy because people would think he was a pansy or some stupid fucking thing.

This should have reminded her of the Foob Fact Number One about Michael Timothy Patterson:

"Fact One: Michael Patterson is a user who expects that the people around him have to do all the work in a relationship while he gets to sit on his own fat arse because he's not some slave or something."