Having messed up the formatting of my previous post on this topic, I’ve asked it to be cornfielded and am reposting, hopefully in a readable form. So here goes:
The boyfriend who demands his girlfriend get rid of her cat, her dog, for whatever the given reason: This goes deeper than it at first looks (which to be sure is bad enough).
I reproduce here an essay by Adam-Troy Castro, an author of sci-fi and horror novels and short stories, with whom I’m friends on Facebook. He posted it earlier today and has expressly granted me permission to share the full text:
I just encountered early morning clickbait about a woman about to move in with the guy who has been her boyfriend for a while, who has been saying all along that she needs to get rid of the childhood cat she still has who is now late in life.
Discerning that the bastard is not kidding, she breaks up with him, and both her comments and the reader comments on the article have everything to do with how a pet is part of your family, and so on.
What I wish to say here is a) that it is not uncommon, and b) that it is not at all about the cat.
There is a certain strain of men who are totally nice to the ladies until they move in, at which point they systematically separate the woman from their support system.
And yes, they start with pets. That is just a first-round test. Following that, they find other ways to separate the women from their friends, from their families, from people they care about, from jobs they like, from personal interests that mean anything to them. In extreme cases, from any life outside the home.
And that is frequently where the physical abuse begins.
Because by then the lady has nowhere to go, nobody to ask for help, and critically no perspective outside herself, to dilute the gaslighting.
I recall a video clip of men in prison for domestic abuse, in group therapy, discussing this procedure for turning a strong, intelligent woman into a woman who can be safely terrorized as a lifestyle.
“Two years,” one of the men said.
“Yeah,” they all agreed. “Two years is how long it takes.”
And the redemptive therapy to become better people became all-around agreement that, yes, they could do this with any women they can get past the first date. The trick, one said, is to wait. To do it right.
I wish I remember where I saw the clip. I seem to recall the therapist being seriously shaken, because all the progress the men had been pretending to have was here revealed as role-play.
A guy like that can eventually get to the point where the woman is no longer allowed to see her sister. Or her parents.
Or, as in the case of a woman who was my mother’s lifelong friend, beloved relatives who had come to her wedding. (She was isolated at the end of one year and escaped after two.)
The beloved cat that guy wanted his girlfriend to eject? That was the first salvo. It is not uncommonly the first salvo. It is a danger sign. And the tragic thing – not for the woman who told him to get lost, because she wouldn’t go along with that much – is that this is the agreed-upon technique. The predator’s tactical mistake here was to go after the cat too soon, to not wait until he was living with the lady and making demands inside the home.
So this was not about the cat. This was likely not a story about the love of cats. This was more probably a story about a technique being applied.
