I’m asking as a result of the OP’s post and the repliesin this threadwhere the OP paints her SO as a charming polyamorous, manipulative slacker who keeps taking advantage of her willingness to service him sexually and nurture him, but will not reciprocate emotionally, and beyond this excludes her from discussing various other relationships he is engaged in. FTR they lived apart, there were no kids and no marriage in this relationship.
As the thread progressed it became clear that although she professed to be on the border of hating him she was quite ambivalent about leaving him. I’ll confess I got pretty frustrated with the OP’s meowing about what a dick he was in one post, and then what a great personality he was in another. It was almost a parody of the old Mars-Venus cliche of when women complain they are often looking for a sympathetic ear, not fix-it advice.
If someone keeps making excuses for staying in a toxic relationship, how much sympathy do they deserve?
If they are of both of at least average intellect and of sound body, and not finicially bound to the victimizer, next to none. People who allow themselves to be victimized when they’re capable of leaving are not deserving of much sympathy.
It can be a Game, aptly named: “Why don’t you - yes but”
However, in most cases I think the problem is genuine, and deserves patience, certainly as long as there is some progress, however slow. We all have our irrational sides, and there can be reasons why a person can not or will not (yet) see a relationship is bad for them.
Well, to my mind it depends on two factors beyond those mentioned by elfkin:
1.) how toxic is toxic? Staying in a relationship that has obvious problems but isn’t that bad is more of a life choice than objective stupidity. Some people just like to be in relationships and even a bad relationship is a net plus for them.
2.) are they old enough to know better, or were they when they got into the relationship? Younger people have no idea what “normal” is in relationships and are therefore more prone to be both to ready and not ready enough to call things off.
In that particular thread, I think the OP is just trying to say that the guy isn’t actually a monster (as a lot of people have been saying). I just hope she realizes that this in no way implies that she should keep dating him.
I give anyone in a bad relationship tons of sympathy, but in the sense of being sad for them that they’re retarded, not in the sense of being willing to listen to them complain endlessly while still staying in the relationship. I’ve been stupid and stayed in a bad relationship too long, so I understand and try not to get too judgmental, but I don’t feel obligated to help someone else maintain their fantasy.
Depends on my relationship with said person. It is incredibly easy to get frustrated with someone like the OP – hell, in my darkest moments, I’ve wanted to slap victims of domestic abuse for not smartening up while the situation was still somewhat safe – but outsiders have the luxury of both perspective and not having to deal with any direct consequences of their own advice.
Love is complicated, relationships are complicated, duh, duh and duh. But I would hope that anyone bitching to me about a problem relationship would be good enough to lend an ear when I want to do the same. It’s talk therapy, really.
I feel like talking about these relationships from that “they should know better; they’re allowing it to happen” perspective is pretty unfair. It’s not really an accurate portrayal of (what I imagine is) a typical emotionally abusive relationship. It’s very confusing and not at all as obvious for the person being abused. The victim isn’t being stupid, he or she is being abused.
Nobody but the person being abused has to experience the genuine feeling that things are right, except, you know, when they aren’t. Nobody else has to try to make sense of the feeling that, holy shit, things were going so well, if I could have just not said this, or done that, or gone to this place and done this thing with these people, everything would have been fine, what the fuck is wrong with me?
Sure, it seems aggravating that somebody is so invested in something that’s bad for them, but to look down on them for it seems to me to be betraying a real misunderstanding of the phenomenon. They’re not doing anything wrong, and they already think they are.
I’m fairly sympathetic to that OP because, if the story is what it looks like, she’s got zero self-esteem and it can take a long time to figure out that you don’t have to put up with it. So I would say it depends on how bad things are, how long it’s been going on and some other things. But at some undefined point the excuses get tiresome and my sympathy runs out, too.
One issue that hasn’t been discussed here is what’s at stake: if people are making themselves unhappy by refusing to learn and leave, eventually it turns into their own problem. But if other people are involved I have less sympathy. I’ve posted a few times about the relationship of my girlfriend’s parents - it’s awful - but sometimes I think that even if the mother wasn’t obligated to leave for her own sake, she probably WAS obligated to leave so her children wouldn’t experience the fallout, and she never has.
Arguably, he or she is being both stupid and abused. (And FTR, I agree completely with Giraffe.) I don’t think it’s accurate that a person who is in an abusive relationship doesn’t know they are being abused. I think most of them know and either (a) don’t know, or don’t believe, they can get out of it; or (b) don’t actually want to get out of it, at least not badly enough to, you know, leave. I think many of them hope against hope that the abuser will change, and therefore they rationalize the abuse (“I deserved it”) or convince themselves it won’t happen again (“He apologized”).
I have great sympathy for a person who is in an abusive relationship and hasn’t been shown the keys for the cell door. I have great sympathy for those who have been shown the keys but honestly feel they can’t use them – people who literally believe they will be harmed or killed if they try to leave.
I have much less sympathy for people who could leave and choose not to – and that includes virtually everyone in an emotionally abusive relationship, except those very few who are truly brainwashed by the abuser. I think there is a point at which such relationships become sickly co-dependent, and to say the victim doesn’t leave because he or she doesn’t know they are victimized – that’s too simplistic.
This is not to say the abused person “deserves it,” because no one ever deserves to be abused. But yes, there’s a limit to how sympathetic I feel towards people who could leave or who could change but who just choose not to. I don’t think this means I’m “misunderstanding” what’s occurring (to the extent any of us can understand so personal a dynamic when we’re not in it) and I don’t think that means I’m “looking down” on the other person. But I can’t lift you up, I can only show you how to raise yourself. If you just won’t do it – not can’t, but won’t – on what basis should I sympathize further?
And quite frankly, I don’t know what annoys me more, people like that or people who enable these self proclaimed “victims” by listening to their “Whoa as me” crap and then offering advice. (like they’re going to listen to it.)
Jodi, maybe it is too simple, but I didn’t say that an abused person doesn’t know they’re being abused.
I’m saying that to the victim of abuse, the choice looks very different than it looks to the outside observer, and to suggest that that person is just being stupid isn’t speaking to the real problem. The real problem isn’t that their ambivalence and confusion and unwillingness to leave is based on stupidity, but that there are real benefits to that person for staying, but they just won’t be good enough in the long run.
Sure, he or she could choose to leave, and doesn’t choose to leave. That’s true. But why not is the question. It seems to me that what is far too simplistic is to say that they just “won’t do it,” as some kind of personal failing on that person’s part. It’s hard to figure out. It hurts. It doesn’t feel right, or true, or valid, to say that this is totally fucked and the best thing is to get away from it. It often feels like there are things about the other person that are truly irreplaceable, and which will be lost forever. And those are real feelings, not some kind of feebleness of mind. I feel a tremendous amount of sympathy for that, no matter how long it takes for that to click, because that person isn’t doing anything wrong, and yet is suffering tremendously.
Exhibit 1 in the defense’s “Not Understanding” case.
I have some sympathy for people stuck in a harmful relationship. (Most) People who have never been dragged into the slow sucking whirlpool of a bad relationship really can’t understand the dynamics, and the evolution of it. Even (most) people who are in such a relationship can’t really see the forest for the trees until they’ve been out of it for a year or two. For a young inexperienced person, especially if their natal family had fucked-up dynamics, it’s really really hard to know what normal is. Add into that terrible mix the fact that most people in our society do not have any good role models on what a happy, healthy polyamourous relationship looks like, and you get trainwreaks like the OP in that other thread.
It’s frustrating to listen to people in borderline abusive relationships, but all you can do is model what a good relationship is, and hope they “get it”.
Especially if you don’t realize that just about everybody in a bad relationship, at one time, was somebody who “would never be in that position myself.”
Your understanding of it jibes perfectly with my experience. “Confusing” is the perfect description
Unfortunately, it’s not too simplistic at all. I did not know I was being abused. No clue. And you know I’m not stupid.
I did wake up and smell the proverbial coffee in January of 2007 and the divorce papers were filed by the end of the month. I’m not bragging about that. I’m just saying that it is really quite possible to be so oblivious to a level of abuse that, once I realized it was happening, demanded immediate action with no question of reconciliation.
(Which is not to say that I don’t do this :smack: :smack: :smack: an awful lot!)
Well, on behalf of my earlier self, thanks.
As for me, whether I have a lot of sympathy for someone in a bad relationship really depends on the particular case.
My views on the subject come from 40 years of experience with my mother being abused by my father. When I was young, sure I felt sorry for her. He’s a bad man, she’s a good woman, it’s not fair, poor her… but now, even though she’s old, still has to work, is still being treated like shit, I don’t feel sorry for her. We all make decisions for ourselves and our lives- even giving over the control for your decisions to someone else is making a decision. I’ve made many, many decisions in my life, and I’ve lived with the consequences of all of those decisions, and some of them that I made a long time ago, I still live with to this day and I always will. As much as I love and empathize with my mother, I cannot sympathize with her. She made her own decisions, just like I have, and just like me, she will need to live with them. No one is exempt from that.
I think that’s a big part of it. People don’t enter relationships with a clean slate. Everyone is willing to put up with some crap, to differing degrees – some have grown up watching their moms get physically abused and assume that’s the norm, or that if there is no hitting it’s not abuse. Some are lucky enough to have a loving family and wonderful role models and wouldn’t last past date one with a jerk…
Only, as is mentioned in the other thread, jerks and abusers don’t get into relationships by starting off that way, most of the time. They have bright, charming moments that they dole out at will. Sometimes they only offer them to their partner – so his or her friends are all telling them to get out of the relationship and s/he is forced to choose sides and cut them out of his/her life. Sometimes this is the face they present to their partner’s friends and family – so when s/he goes to them for help the friends and family assume s/he’s exaggerating about how bad it is, or just a complainer.
It is always startling when someone (I’m going to just start using she/her/etc. for the victim even though I know this isn’t always the case) strong and rational is on the receiving end of domestic abuse. Sometimes they’re the very same people who lecture and counsel others about this sort of thing. There is often an element of shame, of embarrassment – ‘Women like me don’t get abused. This must not be abuse. I’ve got to prove myself and everyone else wrong.’
Even without abuse, there can be pressure to present the perfect relationship – either to prove others wrong or right.
