So after three months my dumb ass friend is getting back together with his ex-GF.
I wont bore you guys with the details of their relationship. Let’s just say it was physically abusive. And before anybody starts to flame my guy friend too harshly, you should know, it was physically abusive from BOTH sides. I know because I have witnessed it myself.
I realize this is one of those things that isn’t any of my business, but still, it drives me nuts because I know I’m going to have to listen to my friends sob stories after they break up again.
But maybe I’m being too cynical. I wonder if any of my Doper friends have been in PA’ relationships and then have it NOT be a PA relationship down the road?
Things might be all lovey-dovey and calm at the beginning, but it won’t stay that way.
Your dumb ass friend (and yeah, he IS a dumb ass) and his ex must “feed” off each other. I’m thinking of one of those histronic “I love you/I HATE YOU!” deals because mother of Og WHY would one want to get back together with their abuser? Gender doesn’t matter. I figure, in your dumb ass friend’s context, it’s a combination of:
– navigating with your hormones and not your head
– criminally low self-esteem, like “I deserve this” or “There isn’t anybody else”
– they’re both get off on the fighting/making up cycle, and yeah…the abuse. There are people like that and no, I’ve never understood it.
But as I said, Ive never heard of a PA relationship NOT becoming a PA. Not unless there was a ton of counseling involved. And even then I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I’ve never been in a PA relationship but I do know two couples who were in PA relationships that later turned into non-PA relationships. In both instances, the man was the abuser and he turned into a monster after drinking. In both instances, the woman finally took the kids and left, and that scared the man into sobering up.
In one instance, the couple remained split and are now divorced. His sobriety was too little, too late. The man is now re-married, sober, and by all reports a great husband and father.
In the other instance, the couple reconciled and are still together today. Had my dad not told me that this man used to beat the crap out of his wife, I would not have suspected it. But, acc. to my dad, he turned into the meanest s.o.b. on the planet when he drank.
In both instances, it took a watershed moment, his wife actually leaving him, for the men to realize that they needed to make a huge, life-altering change. Finding sobriety saved their marriages, if not their very lives.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, obviously, see Kalhoun
but it is rare for an abusive relationship to ever become anything else without some serious therapy (or jail time)
Relationships like the one you’ve described are often co-dependent and there’s really not anything YOU can do about it. If neither party is attempting to correct the problem then probably the best thing you can do once you’ve talked to them about it is to stay the hell away from it. When they come crying…tell’em you’ve heard it before.
I’ve got a good friend in a marriage that has been mutually verbally abusive for fifteen years. If they hated each other that much they wouldn’t still be together. Some people just like the make up sex.
There’s a book called Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse about this issue. The author maintains that some PA relationships can be corrected. This is more of a textbook for social workers and other clinicians (as opposed to a self help type book) so a lot of it deals with larger issues about policy and community health models, but it also talks about the dynamics of changing PA relationships.
I’m not even sure I agree with everything the book is promoting, at the very least, I think some PA relationships could benefit from this approach, while the book seems to push many if not most. Even so, the book does say that the type of PA relationships that are best suited for this are those like you described, where both partners are contributing to the violence and there isn’t one clear victim.
I don’t know how helpful it would be to you, but it might make you feel more informed in the event your friend does ask you for advice about his relationship.
My SO was in an abusive relationship with his ex, on and off for years. Neither of them actually beat each other up or anything, but she had pretty much broken almost everything in their house a number of times, carved “asshole” into his wooden computer desk with a knife, keyed his car and a number of things. He was no saint either. The worst part of it is they have a child together, who witnessed many of the more epic fights. All of his friends and family hate her to this day and apparently, his father threatened to disown him when he moved back in with her the last time. It was a horrible, horrible relationship that neither of them should have been in.
There were a few reasons for their continued coupledom. The first being, they had a child together. They still had some warped idea that staying together, even though they were miserable, was better than being apart, for the sake of their daughter. (He’s over that now). Secondly, she had some major issues, which pretty much boiled down to her believing she didn’t really have a family, so she believed he and their daughter were her only family. Thus, she’d stick with it no matter how bad it got. She was so tenacious and he can be so lazy, it was easier a lot of the time to just be with her then to try to fight her off (again, they have a child so it’s not like he could cut all ties). Thirdly, he was, admittedly, thinking with the wrong head a lot of the time.
A good friend of mine’s mother was abused by her husband. Again, she stuck it out because she was raised that your ultimate goal in life is to be married and have a family, and you endure whatever you have to endure in order to have that. They went to counseling and there isn’t any abuse any more.
So, basically, I think a lot of the time it’s a matter of believing you can’t get anything else or a sense of duty to stick out the situation you put yourself in.