This scene borders on the tedious, but only because it's so familiar. We know that this guy is bad for Susan. We've heard that speech before, from our own moms, our own friends. But like anyone in the throes of love with their loser bae, Susan doesn't listen. She forges ahead and marries Edward, and the two pack up and move back to Texas so he can teach while working on his Great American Novel.It's okay — for a while. Until, predictably, Susan rudely awakens to find that she's very, very unhappy. Her husband isn't the great genius she thought he was: He's a pretty mediocre writer who needs constant ego boosting. He sees only the version of her he wants to see, rather than who she actually is. And she's had enough."I really wanted to be this person that you thought I was," Susan tells Edward as she leaves him — in a particularly brutal way. As a couple, they've been stagnant. While focusing on his own career trajectory, he failed to notice that his wife's dreams had evolved beyond fanciful notions of being a starving, fresh-faced artist. And the price of pretending to be what he needs her to be is too high.Ironically, it's Susan's misery that eventually pushes her straight into the arms of another male archetype: rich, cheating asshole. This new relationship allows her to explore another side of herself — the side with a successful career, social connections, and a spouse her mother approves of. Unfortunately, that doesn't ultimately make Susan happy, either.In the end, the only man with any depth to him turns out to be Tony Hastings — the fictional character in Edward's book, a dark and twisted metaphor for his relationship with Susan. There's a kernel of Edward in there. But mostly, Tony represents everything Susan wanted her former husband to be: attentive, strong, dedicated, and impassioned.When Susan agrees to meet Edward for dinner, she's making the same mistake he did all those years ago: She's seeing what she wants to see, not who he really is. The danger of loser bae is that he blinds you to the truth. It's only with some greater perspective that you realise how toxic that person was.That's Edward's revenge. He never shows up to dispel the notion of who he has become, leaving only the dream.It's only fitting. That's what this movie is, really: a beautiful, shattered, fucked-up dream.