FA+
Shop
Why Women Are Attracted to Abusers
14 years ago
I'm going to have to make this a total nutshell because that's a hell of a lot of ground to cover, but I wanted to expand more from my "Why Do Girls Want Bad Boys?" journal entry and extend further into the "Girls seem to want to date jerks," whine I often hear from Nice Guys ™.
Well first, believing or even saying such a blatantly misogynistic and insulting thing just makes YOU a jerk and not worthy of our time. The second that leaves your lips, you fail miserably at being a nice guy and sit squarely in Unworthy Asshole territory. Period.
That said, I think a lot of people have this misconception about people who end up in abusive relationship after abusive relationship. Obviously, this isn't limited to women. Having ovaries doesn't create a hormonal drive towards idiots. Domestic violence and abuse effects everyone, of any gender, sexual orientation, race, age, you name it.
***FOR THE SAKE OF BREVITY AND TO AVOID CLUTTERING THIS ARTICLE, I WILL BE GOING FROM THE POSITION OF FEMALE VICTIMS. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A CONSTRAINT OF WRITING AND NOT OF INTENT. THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO APPLY TO YOU MEN, TRANSGENDER, AND GENDERQUEER FOLK AS WELL.***
So, lets get started.
First, abusers are master actors. When you meet them, they are not mean. At the beginning, they are usually sweet, kind, and wonderful people. The kind you WANT to date. Believe it or not, that great side is often genuine. Many abusers don't even know they are abusers and being told they are abusers is like saying "You're hair is paisley!"
But little by little, they start showing the flaws in their personality. An off-comment out of temper here. A petulant accusation there. A not-so-funny joke thrown in. You know, stuff you can brush off as being a one-time thing. He's otherwise a great guy. Many abusers don't show off any signs at all until after the wedding!
It usually starts up so gradually, that you may not notice till years later what's happened to yourself. By then, you actually believe what they have to say and your whole life has been invested in them.
That's where it gets hard to leave. It's a lot to ask of someone to leave their homes, lives, money, assets, and security. It's hard to walk out on all that. Plus depression, apathy, and genuinely believing you don't deserve better keeps you from going anywhere. The misery keeps you stuck.
There's also many different kinds of abuse. Not all of it is violent or as obvious as a direct insult. A lot of it is psychological and subtle. Psychological abuse, aka emotional abuse (and this is something I am well acquainted with personally), is often minimized as not being really abuse by outsiders and often by the victim themselves. You are not being hit, so it's not really abuse. Right?
Emotional abusers often make you feel like it's your fault they aren't happy. For example, you tell them you don't want to do something they want to do, and they mope, sulk, slam cupboards, and act like a rain cloud hovering over you until you give in and do what they want just to restore balance. Then they are happy again.
Or they will often self-berate themselves and claim they believe they are horrible people until you switch on your comforting mode and focus your energy on cheering them up.
Using a disability is gold for manipulators. Even if they do truly have a disability, it's great for exaggerating and forcing people's hands so they can get the attention and control that they want because nobody can outright challenge them without automatically being the bad guy picking on the poor disabled person.
These sorts constantly make you feel like you are a bad wife, and if you were just better a better spouse/partner, they would be happy. If the boat rocks, it's YOUR fault. A lot of women are brought up to believe that taking care of the home and the relationship is their job. If things aren't happy, it's their responsibility.
If you constantly feel like you are anxious, depressed, and walking on eggshells all the time to keep them happy or they will go into a passive-aggressive snit and ruin your whole day, then you are probably being emotionally abused.
The insidious thing about all this is that you are so close to the subject that you are literally blind. I remember when I was being abused by my mother. My friends would talk and talk and point out the obvious, but for me, what they were saying didn't make sense. My mind was trying to compensate and block it all out because dealing with my mother was a lot easier and less scary than getting out from under her thumb. When I finally did leave, being forced out of the home that I loved and the security I had there was a painful soul-damaging sacrifice. You have to get a point where the abuse is tearing your soul apart far worse than you give up.
So if you wonder why she doesn't leave the jerk, don't judge to harshly. There is a LOT at stake for her. Tina Turner left Ike Turner with just 39 cents in her pocket. Can you imagine walking out with only that much to take with you?
Well, O.K. then LT, I see your point...but what about the women that leave and then go back or end up in a new relationship that turns out as badly as the old one? They must have really low self-esteem or want to be beaten or something, right?
No. These are common attitudes about domestic violence victims, and they are myths.
The truth is not easy to discern. Low self-esteem may factor into it, but so does fear. Not having a home to go back to, struggling getting your own life set up, or worrying that your spouse will either kill you or themselves if you leave is a big deterrence.
If you do leave for good and end up in the same pattern with another, different guy, there is a lot more going on at work. Girls are still brought up with the mindset that they are the subservient caretakers of everyone, and their lives revolve around that. Often, a lot of them have a "rescuer" complex. They find people they can "fix" attractive. They don't usually know that consciously. The patterns we use in daily life are subconscious and it takes a lot of practice and insight to bring them into the realm of the conscious and work with them. Most people really can't do that.
So, Nice Guys ™, if you've got a crush on a girl that seems to always be in an abusive relationship, take a moment to stop and ask yourself why you want to be with THAT girl. Do you yourself have a rescuer complex? Do you think you can fix her? If she just dated you, then her life would be all right and she'd never have to want for anything, right?
That's a pretty presumptuous and arrogant line of thought, really. It's not you being genuine, it's you wanting to manipulate and control another person's life so it runs to your specifications. As I just pointed out, that can get women into trouble. This applies to you too, NG's. This doesn't have a gender barrier either. It's a fucked up position that needs to be eliminated from our society. There is a difference between caring for others and having a rescuer complex. Caring for people in need is good. Caring for people in need because you think you know better is not.
If you are suffering from abuse please know that there are people out there willing to help you. They know leaving is terrifying and painful, but they will make sure you have the resources you need. Do not give up. A better life IS waiting.
Well first, believing or even saying such a blatantly misogynistic and insulting thing just makes YOU a jerk and not worthy of our time. The second that leaves your lips, you fail miserably at being a nice guy and sit squarely in Unworthy Asshole territory. Period.
That said, I think a lot of people have this misconception about people who end up in abusive relationship after abusive relationship. Obviously, this isn't limited to women. Having ovaries doesn't create a hormonal drive towards idiots. Domestic violence and abuse effects everyone, of any gender, sexual orientation, race, age, you name it.
***FOR THE SAKE OF BREVITY AND TO AVOID CLUTTERING THIS ARTICLE, I WILL BE GOING FROM THE POSITION OF FEMALE VICTIMS. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A CONSTRAINT OF WRITING AND NOT OF INTENT. THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO APPLY TO YOU MEN, TRANSGENDER, AND GENDERQUEER FOLK AS WELL.***
So, lets get started.
First, abusers are master actors. When you meet them, they are not mean. At the beginning, they are usually sweet, kind, and wonderful people. The kind you WANT to date. Believe it or not, that great side is often genuine. Many abusers don't even know they are abusers and being told they are abusers is like saying "You're hair is paisley!"
But little by little, they start showing the flaws in their personality. An off-comment out of temper here. A petulant accusation there. A not-so-funny joke thrown in. You know, stuff you can brush off as being a one-time thing. He's otherwise a great guy. Many abusers don't show off any signs at all until after the wedding!
It usually starts up so gradually, that you may not notice till years later what's happened to yourself. By then, you actually believe what they have to say and your whole life has been invested in them.
That's where it gets hard to leave. It's a lot to ask of someone to leave their homes, lives, money, assets, and security. It's hard to walk out on all that. Plus depression, apathy, and genuinely believing you don't deserve better keeps you from going anywhere. The misery keeps you stuck.
There's also many different kinds of abuse. Not all of it is violent or as obvious as a direct insult. A lot of it is psychological and subtle. Psychological abuse, aka emotional abuse (and this is something I am well acquainted with personally), is often minimized as not being really abuse by outsiders and often by the victim themselves. You are not being hit, so it's not really abuse. Right?
Emotional abusers often make you feel like it's your fault they aren't happy. For example, you tell them you don't want to do something they want to do, and they mope, sulk, slam cupboards, and act like a rain cloud hovering over you until you give in and do what they want just to restore balance. Then they are happy again.
Or they will often self-berate themselves and claim they believe they are horrible people until you switch on your comforting mode and focus your energy on cheering them up.
Using a disability is gold for manipulators. Even if they do truly have a disability, it's great for exaggerating and forcing people's hands so they can get the attention and control that they want because nobody can outright challenge them without automatically being the bad guy picking on the poor disabled person.
These sorts constantly make you feel like you are a bad wife, and if you were just better a better spouse/partner, they would be happy. If the boat rocks, it's YOUR fault. A lot of women are brought up to believe that taking care of the home and the relationship is their job. If things aren't happy, it's their responsibility.
If you constantly feel like you are anxious, depressed, and walking on eggshells all the time to keep them happy or they will go into a passive-aggressive snit and ruin your whole day, then you are probably being emotionally abused.
The insidious thing about all this is that you are so close to the subject that you are literally blind. I remember when I was being abused by my mother. My friends would talk and talk and point out the obvious, but for me, what they were saying didn't make sense. My mind was trying to compensate and block it all out because dealing with my mother was a lot easier and less scary than getting out from under her thumb. When I finally did leave, being forced out of the home that I loved and the security I had there was a painful soul-damaging sacrifice. You have to get a point where the abuse is tearing your soul apart far worse than you give up.
So if you wonder why she doesn't leave the jerk, don't judge to harshly. There is a LOT at stake for her. Tina Turner left Ike Turner with just 39 cents in her pocket. Can you imagine walking out with only that much to take with you?
Well, O.K. then LT, I see your point...but what about the women that leave and then go back or end up in a new relationship that turns out as badly as the old one? They must have really low self-esteem or want to be beaten or something, right?
No. These are common attitudes about domestic violence victims, and they are myths.
The truth is not easy to discern. Low self-esteem may factor into it, but so does fear. Not having a home to go back to, struggling getting your own life set up, or worrying that your spouse will either kill you or themselves if you leave is a big deterrence.
If you do leave for good and end up in the same pattern with another, different guy, there is a lot more going on at work. Girls are still brought up with the mindset that they are the subservient caretakers of everyone, and their lives revolve around that. Often, a lot of them have a "rescuer" complex. They find people they can "fix" attractive. They don't usually know that consciously. The patterns we use in daily life are subconscious and it takes a lot of practice and insight to bring them into the realm of the conscious and work with them. Most people really can't do that.
So, Nice Guys ™, if you've got a crush on a girl that seems to always be in an abusive relationship, take a moment to stop and ask yourself why you want to be with THAT girl. Do you yourself have a rescuer complex? Do you think you can fix her? If she just dated you, then her life would be all right and she'd never have to want for anything, right?
That's a pretty presumptuous and arrogant line of thought, really. It's not you being genuine, it's you wanting to manipulate and control another person's life so it runs to your specifications. As I just pointed out, that can get women into trouble. This applies to you too, NG's. This doesn't have a gender barrier either. It's a fucked up position that needs to be eliminated from our society. There is a difference between caring for others and having a rescuer complex. Caring for people in need is good. Caring for people in need because you think you know better is not.
If you are suffering from abuse please know that there are people out there willing to help you. They know leaving is terrifying and painful, but they will make sure you have the resources you need. Do not give up. A better life IS waiting.
And, honestly, even if they were, they wouldn't deserve it, because I firmly believe that only the bad people deserve bad thing...
On the other side, helping an abused person out of a sick relationship can be very bad and expensive in term of patience and efforts. I have been on both sides (the abused and the helper of abused) and I know well how your mind close when you're living an abusive relation and how far you can get just to say that everything is okay and you're on the right road, even when your animal instinct is trying to tell you hou have both your hindleg in a rusty and poisoned beartrap.
Some abusers aren't really bad people, mostly are narcissistic persons that never developed a true indipendence and need someone that feed their need of importance and consideration. Often, leaving them behind is the best way to give them a chance to grow, too...
Ultimately, us outsiders can't really do anything and it's not up to us either. We can offer help when our abused friends and family need it, but ultimately, the victim has to take it and become a survivor on their own. It's a lot of frustration for the rest of us. I know My friends got pretty exasperated with me and my inertia, even though I knew they were right.
And yes, this goes to both sides. Hell, at my last job (and main reason I left the job....let alone state), I had this "nice girl" who.....well, to put it nicely, just didn't get a clue....despite me yelling the blunt truth in her face. She wants to be pampered, saved, taken cared of. And pretty much be given an environment where she's the center and in control with a beast of burden to beck to her call for both home, money, and pleasure. And WOW, guess what type of guys she always wound up with. And guess who she keeps TRYING to rope in. I do care, but NOT like that. That, and I was going way past my job description to the point I was skating on thin ice of losing it with her blatant talks of her fantasies about me and where they hook her up on the dialysis machine.
NOW, as for women brought up with needing to be rescued. Let alone how hard it is to just get up and leave in general regardless of gender. That is very, VERY true. When my parents divorced, my Mom literally knew NOBODY on a tiny island of Saipan. We only lived there for a year. I won't got into details on who did what. But I will say she was so sick of Dad that she was the one who slapped him with divorce papers. Anyway, for a week, she was staying with people she met at the bar both parents hanged out at (and so did us kids during the day. Kids play free pool and darts). Long story short. She met this guy who seem genuine. Even to us kids. We liked him, he housed her, fed her. And eventually years later, he took her home with him to Arlington, Washington State.
Eventually Dad got a job in Philippines and couldn't afford to send both me and my sister to a boarding school I was ALREADY in. I won't go into details on WHY I was sent to one. But both Mom and her ex invited us kids over to Washington state to go to high school.
So my first year in high school my sister and I started to see a lot of problems. He was emotionally abusive, lazy, didn't work. He just took the money he got from the checks Mom got from our Father from the divorce agreement. And he had a fascination with my sister. Not even 4 months in and already he's tried to sexually approach my sister, berate me into getting a job and school is a joke. And pretty much made us all miserable. Though I know my sister is STILL messed up from that experience today.
Long story short, after we finished that year, our Father pulled my sister out of there and sent her to the boarding school "I" just went to years before. I could have gone too, but I wanted to stay and help my Mother. So another year in that house. And no matter what I did or what I said, I could not convince my Mother to get up and leave. It took one night where we came home from trading in that damn sports car he loved but we hated for a practical car we can use. It was Mom's car. So she can do what ever she wanted with it. Title in her name and she bought it with cash. So he was silent the rest of the day. Only to drink himself into a drunken rage and try to fight ME. Only to have my Mom get in the way and get beat herself. After all that, she refused to call the cops. So I called the cops, got him arrested. Once he was gone for the night. She was saying shit like, "Oh, maybe things will work out. I'll do such and such. And I can always misplace his gun." Hearing talk like that made me say "fuck it" and I told her she can come with me or stay here, I am gone. SO.....she left with me. And as time passed, I still went to high school. And we shared an apartment were we split 50/50.
But in a way, Mom always WANTS to be rescued. She was pissed her friends didn't save her. BUT she never asked them. And IF they knew (all her friends are back on Guam and Saipan), they may had helped a bit, but not save. It's unfair to expect people to give you a new life. And what was unfair was "I" was the one who now had to save both of our asses. And I was only 16, I didn't know better. There's a LOT of doors that close on your face (literally at times. I had one apartment manager close the door on me once when I was asking about a unit). She don't realize a lot of shit I had to go through just to get us that apartment we had. I had to beg teachers at school. The school almost called child protection services more than once but stopped out of my begging not to. I literally had to suck it up and go to a church down a street to ask for help. From there things started to look up. And we had a temporary place to live, which led to an apartment unit that we ended up staying for half a decade till she re-married with her current husband.
Point I am trying to make is, it's so easy to fall into that trap of low-self esteem to the point it just self destructs a person faster than the abuser can. And trying to save this person, regardless if it's cause you care or because you think you can do better isn't going to solve things in the long run. A person can only change IF that person wants to change.
Look at my Mom. She refused to move, refused to budge. I made her budge, I nearly failed high school cause of the whole trying to find a place to sleep that night issue. Yet she was scared to do this, scared to do that. Always said a "Man" needs to take care of this. Or her English isn't good (she's Thai). Or what ever excuse she can come up with under the rainbow. SO many options we could have took to save ourselves. All she had to do was go up and sign paperwork and/or find them. Nope, I had to find them. And I was able to find things to save myself, but not her. So yeah, I found unconventional ways. And I consider a church to be unconventional. If any of you knew how their "help" works, you'll be disgusted.
But a decade later, she tells her husband "I" was the one who was lost while SHE did everything. Then she wonders why I told her right in front of her husband she's full of fucking shit. I mean, hell, with how my sister is, Mom does not realizes how lucky my sis still talks to her and visits once and a rare while. My sister refuses to move anywhere NEAR her.
Sorry, getting personal. There's a lot of factors in this "Nice" epidemic that it's amazing there's no real "help" to work this out of people. Yeah, I'll admit it, Mom's a Nice Girl. And for a long while, I was also a Nice Guy. Spreads like a freaking sickness.
There are genuinely nice people out there. Just they are hard to find cause they are NOT trying to get that "nice" out there in the open. They are just too busy living in their own lives with no need to prove it to anyone.
I am NOT saying everyone must act like an asshole. I am saying that being nice in hopes to gain something is NOT going to get you far. Genuinely nice is a kind act that expects no rewards for it. I think there are too many people too worried about gain instead of just being happy to be alive.