That tends to happen, yes. And the Maya/Josy situation kind of invites it. To me it seems like DPC is portraying their relationship as something on the edge of falling apart because their fate is meant to be in the hands of the player. They can fix it, but if the player makes certain choices, they won't.
After ep 10 I thought getting the documents would be a deciding factor in Maya and Josy staying together whether you were on their path or not and I only got more confident of that after playing ep 11. How intricate it gets beyond that is something I can't tell. I see a lot of options that would certainly be interesting, but I also kind of hope some of them won't be part of the game as it would just up the branching even further.
Well, whilst she's still somewhat tied to Patrick if you don't get them, he factually has no power over her. They might not find that out if you don't get them, but he's given up trying to control her and threaten her college education as seen at the end of Ep 11 when Maya and Derek go see him. So although it was all a bit of a lame duck in the end, it might not be much of a factor since she doesn't have anything to worry about anymore.
Also, when you think about it, she kind of chose Josy over Patrick in that moment, finally. This whole ultimatum incident was kind of about that; her Dad making her choose between obeying him and dumping Josy, or staying with Josy and risking her college future. She was torn between these 2 things and that certainly could have been a factor in this rift between the girls because Josy would have wanted Maya to just choose her outright but instead she couldn't choose and so it probably made Josy feel less important. But in Ep 11 if you didn't get the papers, she's essentially finally decided that she doesn't care what her Dad may do to her now because she's tired of fighting him and so she choose Josy here, chose not to let her Dad get in their way with his threat. But Josy didn't like it because she still doesn't like the idea of Maya being beholden to him and having some control over her, but Maya's essentially just said, "fuck it", and is choosing not to care what he might do to her anymore, so it's her finally taking a stand against him. It just didn't feel good in that moment for Josy, but once she realises Patrick has relented then maybe they can move past it.
A relationship where both people are capable of cheating is destined to fail, in my opinion.
Not sure I agree with you here. Cheating always is an option. You just have to choose whether or not to do that unless the developer avoids including those choices as an option for you...
There's different degrees of cheating, really, and not all are equal in terms of being at risk of repeating.
For example, you've got the serial/opportunistic ones which we all know about; people who just can't keep it in their pants and cheat because they can and because they can't resist the call of the flesh. They're definitely the worst kind because they have no remorse for what they do. Then you have those who do emotional affairs when they feel a loss of connection, love, and intimacy with their current partner due to a breakdown in the relationship and can be drawn to someone they feel is giving them what they've lost. This is the category Josy and Maya fall into but doesn't mean that people in that category will do that again. Those who have gone through it and given in to that once should be able to recognise the signs if there's a next time and at least make more of an effort to fix the problems before it gets out of hand, and if they can't then they will do the right thing and break it off before moving on to someone else.
