When my son was a baby, his father had responsibility for entertaining him while I cooked dinner. My ex-husband would shake a rattle in my son's face, and that would keep my son interested for about two minutes. Then he would start to cry. My son was crying because he was tired of the rattle. But instead of switching to a new toy or diversion, my ex-husband would just shake the rattle harder. The results were pretty predictable. When my ex-husband shook the rattle harder, my son would simply cry louder. My ex-husband never figured out that he needed to try something new.

Some number of years later, I was living with a guy in an area with a lot of really twisty roads. One day we were taking one of his daughters to a friend's house. The friend lived at the end of one of the twistiest roads in the area. My S.O. was driving about fifteen miles and hour above the speed limit. We hit a hairpin turn and slid all the way over to the other side of the road before we came to a stop. We had narrowly avoided rolling over into a ditch.

So when the van finally came to a stop, and we all had a chance to start breathing again, my S.O. got really red in the face and said, quite angrily, "That stupid sonofabitch road does the same damn thing every single time!"

I asked him if he expected the road to straighten out in between trips out there, or if he thought he might someday try handling the curves differently.