By whipped I mean people who are in relationships where one partner says jump and the other says how high? You know what I’m talking about, the word usually connotates a man that does everything his girlfriend or wife says for fear of what might happened if he said no. I guess there are plenty of cases of the opposite scenario but usually the term seems to be applied when it is the guy who is the groveling, spineless servant.
I’m a musician and have played in bands all my life. I’ll just say this: in every band I’ve ever been in, there has been at LEAST one dude who had to leave practice early because “his girl” wanted to spend time together. In turn, the bands lasted roughly 4-5 months before they self destruct.
It’s true, ask any other musician on here and I bet they’ve encountered the same thing numerous times.
This is a friend-of-a-friend situation, but I know of a guy whose wife leaves for months at a time to go be with her family in another state. She claims they need her, so she goes off to be with them while he sends money down to help support her and her family.
This isn’t like a joint decision thing where they both decided that her family had to come first for a while. She just left, and she decides when she comes back, when she needs him to send more money, and so on. I don’t think she really wants to be married, but sees him as a source of support and it’s convenient enough to stay in the relationship since there are no real demands on her by him. He just waits and wonders and sends money as ordered. His friends are beside themselves.
Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo
I don’t know the guy specifically, but supposedly a FOAF has been married for a handful of years now. So far he’s given her a green card and they haven’t had sex. Once. Not once.
As for people I knew personally, a roommate I had once (more like a FOAF who fell on hard times and crashed at my place cause my real roomie owed him money–great guy though–not being sarcastic, I love that dude) learned Spanish so that he could fly down to Ecuador and finger this girl. Just finger her. That was before I knew him, so I was skeptical as our common friend had a penchant for exaggeration.
Then I saw the dude meet some chick from Spain over the Internet, and spend months talking to her and saving up lots of money to visit her, only to get dumped right before he was going to fly over there. Which makes me think that his expectations for the “relationship” were far different from hers, but that if she had decided to string him along he would’ve gone as far as she was willing to take him.
I find this thread vaguely misogynistic. Guys, no one does anything they don’t want to do. Your buddies are not being kidnapped and held at gunpoint by their mean-ass girlfriends. Maybe they actually want to spend time with their girlfriends or wives- a bold new concept, huh?
ETA: And if we’re going to start trading stories about bad treatment by one gender to the other, let me tell you about some of the gals down at the domestic violence shelter- oh boy, does it get crazy!
I’m on the girl’s side on this one. I spent almost every Saturday night of my early 20s (and many weekdays) with a heavy metal band in my living room. We were expected to be at home every Saturday and whatever other day (Wednesdays usually). After a string of absences (without calling ahead to let us know they weren’t going to show), my now-husband and I decided to - horror of horrors! - go out for an evening. Naturally that was when the wankers actually decided to show up. And I got called a demanding whore for it.
Y’know, I hear questions like this, and I think of a friend of mine. Nice, honest, hard-working, blue-collar Joe who fell in love with a girl who was studying for a professional degree.
“I think we should live together,” she said one day, and so she moved from her parents’ house into his condo. We (his buddies) said, “He’s whipped.”
Then she said, “I think we should be married,” and so he married her, In a nice big ceremony that he paid for–because he was working and she was still a student. We said, “He’s whipped.”
Then she said, “I think we should buy a house,” which of course he paid for, since he was working and she was still a student. We said, “He’s whipped.” They had no children, because she was still a student and couldn’t take time from school to be pregnant.
Then she finally got her professional degree. And she said, “Thanks, it’s been nice, but I don’t love you and never have.” So he called a lawyer. A good lawyer. Who did a good job.
Then, all she had was her degree.
He wasn’t whipped no more. 
My uncle. His wife works part time, he works long hours, but he’s the one who does all the housework. All his money goes towards paying the bills and all her money goes into her bank account for when she visits family back in Taiwan.
He has over $40,000 in credit card debt from household expenses but she won’t allow him to refinance the mortgage so he’s not paying huge amounts of interest because then it becomes her debt too. She always has her hand out for more money and when he tells her he’s broke she says he’s a bad provider and should work more. He tells his siblings that his life is hell and the only time he’s close to content is when he is at work. He talks about wanting to divorce her, but doesn’t actually do anything, still does everything she asks, and brushes his siblings off when they try to get the ball rolling. My aunt still gets updates but my dad has washed his hands of the whole situation. “Call me when you’re prepared to do something about it,” he said (only, you know … in Chinese).
On a lighter note, my fiance was joking with his little brother. I can’t remember what prompted this exchange - it was something to do with the brother’s ex-girlfriend (Cherie).
Fiance: You are so pussy whipped
Brother: … Cherie doesn’t like me using that word
Either that, or the girlfriends/wives feel entitled to attend closed practices. I thought we were here to work, not play grabass between songs.
I know a guy who found out that his girlfriend and roommate, both of whom he supported through unemployment and partial employment by letting them live in his house, paying all the bills, etc., were sleeping together in the rommate’s bed, in their underwear, when he was at work. She says she and roommate are just friends, and it was platonic cuddling because of Roomie’s romantic woes, so he believes her. But signs continue, until he says to her, “If you really want to be with Roomie, and not me, just go ahead and be with him!”
So she did. Right there in his house, right under his nose. And he doesn’t have the balls to kick them out because “he values them as friends” and doesn’t want to put both of their broke asses literally onto the streets. Also, it’s her bedroom set, so she still sleeps in the master bedroom, despite “being with” Roomie, who is now away at college. This is a totally true story. She is still living there, and for all I know, still sleeping in that same bed while not visiting Roomie. The guy just doesn’t have the balls to throw her out, because he still loves her and doesn’t want to be mean.
Can they grow spines in the lab now? Because this guy needs a transplant, stat.
I know a fellow American over here who has some real problems with this. He has a lot of problems anyway, having been hospitalized at least twice in Bangkok for psychiatric disorders. But he has The Thai Girlfriend From Hell. I could write a book about him, but in a nutshell he is basically her slave. And I do not mean that in a kinky sexual way. It’s very sad and pathetic to watch. He does not belong in Thailand, because the place is just enabling his mental illness, and the girlfriend certainly does not help. A lot of mentally ill Westerners end up in Thailand, but as far as guys who don’t go berserk and commit sensational news-worthy crimes go, his is an extreme case.
But this last one isn’t whipped, Ruby - like you said yourself, it’s a case of general spinelessness.
My parents. My maternal grandparents have spent the 70 years of their marriage yelling, arguing, insulting each other… yeah yeah Grandma, he’s impossible, but you’ve been screwing each other, bodies or minds, for 70 years. Mom wanted the opposite of that, so she never expressed an opinion opposite to Dad’s in front of us kids, not even an opposite fact (say, if we’d asked what time it is and he’d read the clock wrong). Since Dad’s answers were usually faster than hers, we grew up knowing that Dad’s word was the last news from Mount Sinai. But ah, she could have told him later in private, right? Maybe, but they never went back on whatever Mr No had said 
so it didn’t do us much good. There are also many things that she didn’t do for fear of offending him. She’s bilingual Spanish/Catalan; he only spoke Spanish. I learned Catalan when I was in college, he’s been dead for 7 years, and she still can’t bring herself to speak Catalan with me. He once mocked her poetry? No more poetry was written. And so forth.
Middlebro has reproduced the same shit with his wife. I came back just yesterday and at one point he told me “I’m afraid of only a couple things… one if that my wife will be angry at me.” I had to bite my tongue to keep from answering “no shit, and how’s that news?” SiL’s like my mother in many things, but in one detail she reminds me of Dad: when she expresses an opinion, she does it like it was… the latest news from Mount Sinai. She doesn’t say “I don’t like Science Fiction” (but haven’t read any before or after ‘I, Robot’ in 10th grade) - she says “Science Fiction is stupid and people who read it are morons.” She didn’t know that her husband liked SciFi and Fantasy until they’d been married for 2 years… after 7 years dating, for a total of 9. He’s always willing to do anything she proposes, but does never propose anything he doesn’t know she likes (much less anything about which she’s expressed a negative opinion).
Weird thing is, I don’t know about other people, but these two, I think the whipped ones are selling their partners short. If Mom had talked to us in Catalan (which Dad didn’t speak but understood), we would all have had an extra language; Dad might have barked at first but if she’d said “it’s my heritage, therefore theirs,” he would have accepted it and perhaps even encouraged it (he made a point that we should learn Catalan history). When Middlebro opened that LotR calendar and went “oh, WOW!.. realizes his wife is there uhhh…” and after verifying that hey gee, he’s been a LotR fan since he was 7 or so, one of the things SiL said was that she wished she’d known - she then questioned Lilbro and me (the givers of the calendar) about things like taste in movies, on which she’d always had the feeling that there was something being left unsaid (yep, your husband does like action movies - he hasn’t been lying about liking romantic comedies, since he does, but the occasional BOOM SPLAT is good too - he doesn’t like gore).
Shouldn’t a marriage be about giving yourselves to each other? These people keep holding parts of themselves back in order to avoid offending someone… who might not even take offense!
Too Many.
Good friend from high school, right after graduation. He couldn’t do anything without her direct permission. Period. This was pre-cell phone days. One day he was at home doing nothing and I had stopped by and wanted to go to the store. He couldn’t get ahold of her, because she wasn’t at home. Wait a minute! She can go out without informing you, but you can’t go anywhere without her permission? He was freaking out, terrified to go with me, but I finally managed to convince him.
We get to the mall and run straight into her. She lights into him about HOW DARE HE GO TO THE MALL WITHOUT HER!!! I point out that she was there first without him. Did not go over well. Too fucking bad.
Many other stories of these two. It was pathetic. They eventually got married and he went to Germany in the army. They got divorced within a year or two as he grew up and woke up.
Other former good friends. She ran the show. He couldn’t blink without her permission, and she was the most arrogant self-righteous know it all of all time. Glad I don’t know them anymore. Unfortunately, they have kids. I feel sorry for them. I only hope that as they grow up, they realize what a control freak nutjob their mother is. They’ll probably need a lifetime of therapy to undo the damage.
Look, it’s one thing to have a partnership where you need to talk things over with your spouse in order to work out a reasonable arrangement. Or you need to clear outside social engagements so that they don’t infringe on the relationship or with other plans.
It’s something else entirely to demand Right of Approval over every move your spouse makes. That isn’t Love, it’s Control.
I know someone who can’t even visit his family without her say so. She’s easily offended, so if any chance remark ticks her off, or if people don’t cozy up to her enough at a family get together, she just basically vetos all get togethers until Christmas. They also can not move away from the same town her parents live in no matter what. He had a great job at a university that would have given him free tuition. He had to quit because the hour long commute got too costly and too tiring for him. Never mind that they could have, you know, moved 60 miles because they were young and didn’t own a home nor had children in school. Nope. She couldn’t leave her parents.
Did I mention that her parents have lived with them for six months now?
It’s taken him eight years and he still doesn’t have a degree because of all the classes he’s flunked because his wife needed him to help out (more) around the house.
They ended up married in the first place when she was 18 because she had a fight with her parents and couldn’t possible go back to them. So they ran off to Vegas and didn’t tell anyone for three days.
Not sure if “whipped” is the right description, more “had the self esteem totally beaten out of”…and the subject is actually female.
My roommate in college was with his girlfriend for a year before he found another girl he decided he wanted to mess around with.
…his ex continued to do his laundry and even…
:::Wait for it:::
…did the other girl’s laundry too. :rolleyes:
One of my best friends.
I won’t even talk about his divorce, where he just rolled over and played dead.
But, he wound up with his 11-year old daughter. (Wife didn’t want her cramping her new life)
She ordered this guy around like he was a freaking slave with a collar. My wife and I started moving away to more than an arm’s length with him one weekend when we were in Gulfport for a Memphis in May BBQ judging. (I was the judge; it was a chance for all of us to have a nice weekend, get caught up, etc)
He has a bad back. A really bad one. His fucking piece of shit daughter kept jumping from the bed onto his back at various angles, and he goes with this half-hearted, “Baby, don’t do that, it really hurts your Dad’s back.”
And she took that as further encouragement to hurt him further. You should have seen the evil light in her eyes.
And he just KEPT LETTING her DO IT!
It was almost sad, but just didn’t get up to that level. It was pathetic.
No, it was more like pathological.
And, the guy was a trained psychologist! Graduate degree. WTF??
For this guy, you need to redefine “whipped.”
My Aunt dated this guy once for seven years. She told him flat-out that she was not in love with him, and that if she found someone she did love, she would drop him in seconds. He didn’t care, he was madly in love with her, so whenever she was feeling lonely/bored/whatever, she would call him up.
I just remember one morning the two of us woke up, she thought, ‘‘I’m hungry,’’ looked in her empty fridge, then called her boyfriend, and convinced him, at 7am in the morning on a Saturday, to come over, bring food, and cook us both breakfast. And after we ate the breakfast he cooked, she sent him home.
I think the guy is a total douchebag, but I always took that example as a reason why even full-disclosure in those kinds of relationships is not ethical. She could have carved his heart out with a spoon and he would have still loved her.
I do have a healthy amount of skepticism, however, for claims of ‘‘whipped-ness’’ from the POV of a big group of guy friends. When I was dating my husband, we all lived in the same house with 4 of our guy friends. They always teased him about being whipped by myself. And then they would invite him to go hang out with them, go to a party, see a movie, whatever.
He would ask if I minded, and I would say, ‘‘Husband, if you want to do this, go have fun. I will not self-destruct from being away from you a few hours. Your friends want to spend time with you.’’
He almost always chose to stay at home with me, usually because partying and drinking wasn’t his thing.
‘‘See?’’ his friends would insist, ‘‘She’s got him whipped.’’
It always pissed me off because I am a staunch supporter of social independence and individuality within the relationship. I applauded and supported him both times he took the summer away to do some things he’d wanted to, and hell, I paid his fucking rent one of those summers. I only expect he would do the same for me–and he did. I know married couples who won’t even go on a weekend trip without their spouse, and it just baffles me, because I’ve just made plans to take off for 6 months without him. (I’m not implying the 6-month thing is going to be easy, we’ll probably miss one another like hell, but it could make or break my future career, so it’s got to happen.)
I’m just sayin’, before you jump to the conclusion that there’s whippedness happening, consider that you aren’t always seeing the other party’s side of the issue.
A young woman I know. She met someone she thought was Mr. Wonderful. She let him move with her in her mother’s apartment. She borrowed her aunt’s car with the stipulation that only she would drive it. The aunt saw her in the car with Mr. Wonderful driving. Her explanation. “Oh, he was just driving it around the block.”
Mr. Wonderful quit his job and told her to quit school and get a job. She did, waitressing. He sits at home, watches movies on cable all day and eats her food. He is apparently a pothead, and uses her money to buy the stuff. When they ran out of money, he told her to get some more from her friend. When she refused, he beat the shit out of her and pulled out a chunk of her hair. I told her “He is going to say it was your fault. He is going to say he’ll never do it again. He is going to say take me back. If you do, you’re a fool and I don’t want to know you.”
She did, and I don’t keep in touch anymore.
A friend of mine, althought granted this could fall into the ‘spineless’ category (I’m not sure where to draw the line on that one).
Friend dated a mutual friend of ours when Friend and I had a falling out. Friend’s girlfriend has problems in her apartment, gets kicked out, and moves into Friend’s parent’s house :dubious: . Eventually, Friend (who got a nice job right out of High School, pulls 60k+ a year) finds an apartment, and they move in together.
He seems to treat her like a charity case. Every time she gets herself into a mess, he bails her out of it. On two separate occasions she almost got both of them evicted when she got extremely drunk and voilent to the point the police were called. He still let her live with him. Then she started sleeping with an ex boyfriend behind his back, he found out, STILL let her live with him. She barely contributes anything in terms of rent/etc. He’s thrown tens of thousands of dollars her way and she just gets in one disaster after another. When I tell him she’s dead weight, he replies, “She needs my help. I’m the only one in her life that’s helping her.” I told him that is because everybody else KNOWS BETTER than to stick their neck out for her with all she’s done.
Things are less of a disaster now- she has a full-time job and a boyfriend. I got caught up with my friend after a long period of each of us being involved in our own lives. I asked if she is moving out. He says, “Within two years” :smack: Apparently this is when my friend’s current girlfriend graduates college, the two of them plan on finding a place of their own without the ex-girlfriend joining them. “But she has a boyfriend now. Tell her to live with him!” I say. No go, he tells me, the boyfriend “Isn’t ready for that level commitment.”
Without pulling any punches, I tell him “You mean he doesn’t want to get taken for a ride like you have”. This shit has been going on for FIVE YEARS. The best thing he could have done for her is to kick her out so that she learned how to respect other people’s space. Down on your luck money-wise? Understandable in some situations, but you better sure as HELL not ruin your relationship with your sugar daddy. Thank god his current g/f is the polar opposite of this woman.