That is not a failure of yours.

That is a strategy of his.” She was quiet, and then she said, in a small voice, “I always thought a grown woman my age would be too wise to fall for something like that.” “Abuse doesn’t have an age limit, Mom,” I told her gently.

“And it doesn’t prey on foolish people.

It preys on trusting ones.

Those are not the same thing.” I said it to her that night, and I have thought about it many times since, because it is the single most important thing I learned in the whole ordeal and the thing our culture gets most wrong.

We like to believe that people who end up in situations like my mother’s must have been weak, or naive, or somehow deficient, because believing that lets the rest of us feel safe, lets us think it could never be us.