What conversations with thousands of women have taught me about marriage
We're lying to women about marriage. Women aren't openly talking about how hard marriage is. And marriages between men and women are regularly and typically abusive.
We are not being honest about marriage. Women still enter relationships with men almost completely ignorant to the risks these relationships entail.
They all think their relationship will be different, even though they’re doing nothing to ensure it actually will be. We still instruct women to believe that love is enough, that men change, that they should stick with it, and that being married to someone mediocre is always better than being single or divorced.
Then they get married to men who treat them terribly, and they waste years of their lives hoping things will change. Our culture applauds them for putting up with this abuse, because our entire culture is built around men’s comfort.
I tell them to leave. So they tell me the truth.
One of the lovely things about believing women, about centering women’s feelings without caring how that makes men feel, is that it makes women trust you (men: take note). Sometimes, women are so starved for someone who believes and cares about them that they trust me more than anyone else in their entire lives.
Women send me text messages with their husbands. They tell me about abuse they’ve revealed to no one else. They send me documentation of abuse in case something happens to them. They reach out to me in moments of desperation and terror.
This sort of trust is an honor and a privilege, but it’s also a tragedy. Women should have readily accessible support, and they don’t. No matter how many domestic violence shelters and hotlines we have, almost no one believes women about abuse, or cares about their abuse, unless a man is actively and brutally abusing a woman in front of them. And even then, half of the witnesses will assume she did something worse, because we still believe that a person can deserve to be abused.
So I’ve talked to thousands of women about their marriages, and I’ve gathered survey data on thousands more. Here’s what I’ve learned about marriage.
Abuse is normal, and normalized, in relationships between men and women
If you read statistics on abuse, you’ll learn that about a quarter of women have ever been abused. But I’ve spent years hanging out in online mom forums and Facebook groups. I’ve talked to thousands of women. And I have a lot of friends. Almost all of them have experienced at least some form of abuse in their relationships.
The problem is that many don’t recognize the abuse as such, and most don’t tell other people about the abuse. In one survey I did, most women reported at least one instance of sexual, physical, or emotional abuse in their current relationships. But only about a quarter characterized their relationships as abusive.
Part of the problem here is that we tell women they’re exaggerating, or overreacting, or misunderstanding. As if the motive for the abuse could possibly justify it. As if the man’s reason for his behavior matters more than its effects. We treat women as tools for men’s enjoyment by telling them to give him just one more chance.
He deserves no more chances.
Abusive relationships follow a pattern, and steadily get worse
Almost every time I write about marriage, a couple of followers ask me if I could please write about relationships that are problematic but not abusive. And every time I try, it becomes clear that merely problematic behavior—not getting your partner gifts for her birthday even though she wants them, for example, or mansplaining—is always part of a larger pattern of abuse.
Men almost never pick just one toxic behavior and stick with it. If one is present, more will soon follow. This is because the problematic behavior men engage in derives from patriarchal beliefs about women and relationships. Men who internalize these beliefs will become progressively more abusive for as long as they are allowed—and our society will always allow them to become more abusive, and will always tell their victims that maybe they deserve it.
Everyone in an abusive relationship thinks theirs isn’t that bad
Every abuser thinks their victim deserves it.
Every victim thinks maybe that might be true. Dozens of women write me every week and tell me the exact same story. But each of them thinks that their story might somehow be different. Maybe their abuse isn’t that bad. Maybe they deserve it. Maybe the fact that their partner is sometimes nice means they’re not abusive.
Integral to the cycle of abuse is convincing the victim they’re not being abused, and love-bombing them from time to time to make the relationship seem ok.
We want women to gaslight themselves because then society doesn’t have to do it for them.
Almost no one thinks women’s lives and time matter as much as men’s
Household chore inequality is abuse. No asterisks, no exceptions. If a man is getting leisure time or sleep that a woman isn’t getting, then he is abusing her.
There are three reasons this is true:
Men are not stupid. They know when the balance of labor is unequal. They can see that their partners are doing labor they are not. Household labor inequality is therefore a choice men continue to make each and every day.
Household labor is necessary and trivial. Children need food. Someone has to take the kids to school, teach them basic skills, and show up when they’re sick. Pets die without medical care. Cleaning ensures a house is safe, accessible, and not overrun with vermin or cluttered with choking hazards. Celebrating the holidays promotes family togetherness and preserves traditions. Getting up with the baby in the middle of the night keeps them alive. This stuff is not work women create for themselves. Men also know this because they don’t like it when their partners stop doing household labor.
When men don’t do their fair share, women have less time for sleep, for self-care, and to pursue their own dreams. Household labor inequality steals women’s time, exploiting them so men can get more time to themselves. This is abuse. Because women’s time matters as much as men’s.
Yet household inequality remains mostly a joke, even among feminists. Her husband is stealing the one life she has! LOL SO FUNNY! Even the women who write to me complaining about their husbands almost always think that maybe it’s fair for them to do more because of some stupid reason their husband has given them. No one deserves abuse. And chore inequality is abuse.
We struggle to accept this because we just don’t value women’s time. And we don’t value women’s time because we don’t value their lives.
Women treat their abusers as trustworthy authorities
Men have a vested interest in keeping their partners, consequences be damned.
So they lie to them.
They tell them they’ll sue them for child custody when they won’t.
They tell them that, because the house isn’t in her name, she’ll be homeless.
Family courts can be and often are biased against women, but for the love of God, please do not take advice from someone whose sole goal is to exploit you.
Your husband is not a reliable source of information on the law, on what will happen after divorce, on how happy you will or won’t be without him. Yet many people stay with their husbands because of threats that are unlikely to ever come to fruition.
Talk to a lawyer.
Talk to a therapist.
Rally your support network.
Couples counseling is often a weapon of abuse
The data is clear: couples counseling is dangerous when you are in an abusive relationship. It gives your abuser more tools to weaponize against you. And it can convince you that you deserve the abuse.
Abuse doesn’t have to be physical. Emotional abuse, labor exploitation, and financial abuse also count.
Couples counseling is not going to change a man who doesn’t want to change.
Neither is the book Fair Play.
And both can be used to waste time and money, to buy your abuser time, and to further erode your self-esteem.
Family and friends enable abuse
If you tell loved ones you’re being abused, they may ask you whether you’re overreacting. Whether he really means it. Whether your misremembering it.
They’ll continue doing this until something really awful happens. Then they’ll wonder why you didn’t leave.
Believe women the first time. Please.
Women think they’re not allowed to leave
The number of women, and the amount of time, I’ve spent talking to about whether it’s really abuse is staggering.
Women ask themselves the wrong questions:
Could he be a narcissist?
Is it abuse?
Is it neurodivergence?
Does he mean it?
And they waste time trying to find the answers. They treat their partners as damaged flowers they need to fix.
It doesn’t matter if he’s a narcsissist, or if he means it, or if it’s his ADHD.
If he is abusing you, your feelings and suffering are most important.
You can leave if you’re unhappy, even if he’s not abusive.
You can leave for any reason at all.
And if you don’t have kids yet, leaving can protect you from a lifetime of pain.
We’re already indoctrinating the next generation to accept abusive marriages
One of the most frustrating types of letters I get comes from women who have had multiple abusive relationships. But they want to know how to convince their daughters not to fear men, or what they can do to help their daughters have health relationships with men.
The single best thing you can do to protect your daughter is to teach her that heterosexual relationships are extremely risky gambles, and that most people who play with these relationships lose.
It’s not all men.
Maybe not even most.
Just like it’s not all snakes.
But do you really want your daughter to take that risk?
Teach your daughter to value friendship, to become independent, and to leave at the first sign of trouble instead.
Here are some of the many ways we indoctrinate girls to accept abuse.
Most women would leave their husbands if they could
The story women tell me about their marriages—even women who publicly claim to be happily married—is nearly universally one of regret and unhappiness.
The data support this.
In one survey, more than half of women said they regret their marriages, and most had thought about leaving.
My own data suggests that slightly more than half of women regret marrying their partners. Among women in marriages with household labor inequality, the figure is closer to 70%.
Family courts replicate abuse
Divorced women are happier, and almost no one regrets their divorce. So there is hope. But you may have to suffer a lot of abuse on the way out. Over and over, women tell me stories of family courts that replicate and enable abuse, and the data supports the notion that family courts are biased against women, not men.
This is critical information for women contemplating marriage to know. There is no easy escape hatch. And once you have kids with a man, you may be bound to him for life.
Please consider this when weighing how to talk to your daughters about marriage and relationships.
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I would really love it if you did a whole article expanding on the idea of how friends and family enable the abuse. The most infamous recent example is that young couple who went on the road trip and the guy murdered the young woman and then drove back to his parents and had them help him lie to authorities before eventually killing himself. The young couple had apparently lived with his parents for a year, in a different state than where her parents lived. It is so obvious that this guy was abusing his young girlfriend in their house while his own parents witnessed the abuse and probably enabled it by at least participating in the gaslighting and guilt-tripping of the girl to stay whenever it would happen. That's overwhelmingly my own experience as well. Starting when I was a very young teen (14), and some 15-year-old total asshole of a boy decided he liked me one day just because he saw me sitting at a table. We hadn't even met. But I became his target he obsessed over. And he sent all his female teen friends over to groom me and flatter me and love bomb me on his behalf every day at school. I was so naive and not even interested in boys at all at the time as anything more than to have schoolgirl crushes on from afar. But his girlfriends pressured me every single day into going on a date, which occurred at his house, where his mom basically took over the love bomb campaign before she left me alone with this creep. I was way too vulnerable. It sounds stupid, but I basically became that kid's girlfriend for the next year only because I just didn't know how to get out of it. He had a preschool-aged little sister who was also used by him and his parents to guilt me into spending all my time at his house, and his parents set the whole situation up so that I was always stuck alone with him for hours. I dreaded it. But I was convinced I had this duty to not only him, but all his friends and family, and his baby sister that I kept being sternly reminded would spiral into a deep depression if I ever left. They took me on their family vacations too. Now as an adult, I can obviously see this for the grooming it was, but at the time, I had no clue. This asshole kid was abusive (in all ways), and at some point more than a year later when it was about the 20th time I tried to break up with him, I stood my ground on school campus and he started kicking me. His mom- a grown adult woman- would start petty rumors about me after that breakup and gossip even to other teens about how "cold" and "heartless" I was to break her son's heart like that. She literally started a whole smear campaign against me. I was a child. This grown woman was enabling her son's abuse of me. So were all his friends. This has been a constant pattern too. I would like to say that I learned my lesson right then and there at that young age, but unfortunately I did not. I had zero people giving me the words or perspective for what was happening, and so I got myself in the same situation over and over again basically my entire dating life. And I notice this all the time with other women too- family members and friends of the abusive man majorly participate in the love bombing, grooming, and enabling of his abuse. Many of these friends and family members who do so are unfortunately other women. I guess it's more effective that way. So then the woman ends up in this relationship where all of her close female friends over time are actually just the women she met through him when they love bombed her into this relationship with this abusive man and now are providing a big part of the guilt trip against her for thinking about leaving. She often feels beholden to those women who are enabling this abusive man. I really think that's a very specific red flag that more women have to be trained to spot. It's one thing to be trained to spot the love-bombing and gaslighting tactics that the man who is trying to have an abusive relationship with you is doing, but it is probably more subtle to be able to spot those same behaviors in the women who are doing it to you on his behalf. Because they seem so much more genuine, maybe. To the point where they even sometimes pretend to commiserate with you over his "faults". Also, I think that because women are so trained to hold the extended family and friends relationships together, these men take advantage of the fact that women will often feel beholden to other women, even if they are basically done with the man. It's a really effective piece of the enabling of abuse, and too many women who are heavily courted by the female friends and family members of the male abuser just are not trained to spot it or effectively deal with it.
*For. The. Love. Of. God get independent legal advice.* Your lawyer has a professional obligation to be on your side. Your husband, not so much.