The Groundwork.

Picture Perfect continues to get better and better as the story goes deeper. This week I've learned a lot about the backstory of both Cassie and Alex, and the two of them together.
Cassie, like Alex, had a traumatic childhood. But she didn't let it get to her. She decided she would be an anthropologist and devoted her whole life to that pursuit. Growing up, she loved playing in the dirt with Connor, her one true love. But too quickly, the morning after their first kiss, he died. From a gunshot wound. To the head. His father ended up shooting Connor, his wife, and then himself on the morning of November 1, 1984. It was all too sudden, and something that Cassie held with her her entire life. Not only did she grow up and love Connor from the very beginning. He was the only one that protected her from her family, and stood up for her in school. He was the only thing that she had. And he was gone.
So naturally, he stayed with her. In her mind, in little bouts of self-doubt or accomplishment. He was there. He was always there.

But as for Alex, his story was somehow even more tragic. He grew up in New Orleans with a dead-beat dad and a drunken mother. He was always searching for someone to love and care for him although no one had since he was born. His dad was such a horrible role model and father figure, that he didn't even bother to pick Alex up when he got arrested for shoplifting. And the worst part of it is that Alex didn't want to be picked up. He didn't want to go home. He felt safer and more loved in a prostitutes arms (in the jail) than at home.
Eventually, his father drove Alex to a point that he couldn't stand. He disrespected his own wife and brought other people into the house to be intimate with. Even when she was passed out on the floor. So Alex took it into his own hands and in a flying rage, beat his father to unconsciousness. And what distressed him the most was that Alex's reaction left his father with a smile on his face. As if Alex had finally become the son he'd always wanted, and Alex was disgusted by that. So he ran away. Made his own life and was discovered accidentally. And since he was so good at acting anyway, as if his life never had existed, he was a natural on set.

Cassie met Alex in Africa, where he was filming a movie about an anthropologist and she was excavating a dig for some of her students. At first she was appalled at the way he treated her, believing that he was some stuck up actor instead of the real man beneath all the hype. But he had a way of intriguing her, so she went to dinner with him. He opened up to her about the truth of his life, something he had never done with anyone, and eventually she began to tell him her truth. About a week later, after they had a fight about a scene he was filming with another woman, he disappeared for three days and came back with a ring. And they would be forever entwined in each other, holding on to something that was real affection for the first time in both of their lives.

So how did it come to a place where he began beating her? Was that his real self or just his father in him? Is she right to run away, or should she try to work through it with him? Where should she draw the line between marriage and devoted love and personal safety?