the most fucked up thing about married straight couples in paranormal reality shows is that the husband is almost always the skeptic and the wife will be like terrified to exist in her own home and she’ll beg her husband to believe her and she’ll be crying every night and he’ll straight up look at the camera and be like “I don’t know I guess I just thought she was imagining things.”
like this is beyond belief in ghosts what it comes down to is one member of these couples was so distressed they were in tears nightly or at least weekly, BEGGING their partner to listen to them, and their partner was like “whatever this’ll blow over.”
how does your relationship survive that?? how are these people still together?? if my wife came into the room crying and told me she’d seen bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, manifest in our kitchen and tell her he didn’t like our wallpaper, I’d like. obviously have some questions. but I’d fucking address her distress and take steps to make her feel better lmao???
these husbands are all garbage and they feel justified bc they weren’t the “crazy one” who believed in ghosts.
they were the good, logical, “sane” spouse who did rational and good things like, completely and purposefully ignore their partners’ growing and life-altering distress for months.
I know this seems like such a niche topic to get into but I grew up in an old town where everyone has one or two ghost stories, and it’s almost always wives telling them while their husbands chuckle and shake their heads throughout the entire story.
It doesn’t matter whether they believe in ghosts or not. What it is is one adult recounting experiences they not only firmly believe to have happened one way, but which have profoundly affected their lives, and the other adult literally publicly laughing at them “hahaha, women and their imaginations, you know?”
Both possibilities shock me but don’t really come as a surprise: the husband literally thinks his wife is such a child that she “imagined” these experiences like a backyard game for elementary schoolers, or the husband believes his wife apparently idk?? hallucinated but it’s not a big deal and we don’t need to have a discussion about her health and whether she feels safe and happy in her home because again. silly women and their apparent hallucinations you know???
Turns out horror tropes aren’t actually Metaphors, that’s really just how it is