How to Spot An Abusive Jerk

The Introduction

When I was nearly nineteen, I started going out with my first boyfriend.  It was–how do I put this?  A complete and utter fucking disaster.  I’m not a psychiatrist, so I can’t diagnose the ex, but I am a feminist and I’ve read plenty about domestic violence, so I know what to call what he put me through:  emotional abuse.

 

He constantly belittled me.  He found out I’d had an eating disorder, so he made endless comments about how much I liked to eat—even after I begged him to stop because he was triggering me.  He couldn’t stop talking about the size of my ass; he said—and this is a direct quote—“Your ass is so big, my dick would get lost in it.”

 

Not exactly something you forget, even five years later. 

 

We were only involved for a few months (and only “dated” for less than TWO of those months), but the damage he did to me in those months took years to undo.  Through years and years and YEARS of therapy and reading, however, I have finally come to one simple but powerful conclusion:  it was not my fault.  What he did to me was not my fault, and—more importantly–it was real.

 

That’s the problem, you see; when I was nineteen, I didn’t know what emotional violence was, much less that I was a victim of it.  Now that I’m older and have a blackbelt in feminism (otherwise known as an undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies), I know that the damage you can do to someone with your words is both tangible and devastating.  But in a culture where even cases of outright, clear-cut physical abuse can be ignored or diminished (witness the number of people who have said that Rihanna must have “provoked” Chris Brown), it’s easy to believe that emotional violence doesn’t exist or that survivors are just “whiners.” 

 

And you know, on my own behalf?  I don’t really care.  I have loving, supportive friends and family, not to mention a wonderful boyfriend; I have the support I need to make sure that this never, ever, EVER, happens to me again.  But other women are not so lucky.*  Other girls are not so lucky.  We are not taught the signs of an emotionally abusive relationship; all too often, we know that something is wrong, but we can’t put our fingers on what.

 

That’s why I’ve come up with a list of questions you should ask yourself, if you find yourself in a relationship that makes you feel like shit, or if you see a friend in a relationship that is clearly making her unhappy.  I’m not saying that all dysfunctional relationships are abusive; I’m not even saying that all unhappy relationships are dysfunctional (everyone goes through rough spots).  But oftentimes, when we or a friend are in trouble, we know.  We may not be able to name that trouble, but we know that it exists.

 

Hopefully, these questions will help give that trouble a name.

 

Question One:  Hey, Where Did All My Friends Go?

When I was dating my ex, I suddenly found myself spending A LOT of time alone with him. Not just because we were nineteen and liked to make out (excuse me while I go gargle bleach, thanks), but because…well…no one liked him. Actually, that’s not exactly true: plenty of people liked him on a superficial level, but the people who actually spent a significant amount of time with him? Yeah, not so much. His coworkers? Mysteriously never wanted to spend any time with him outside of work. Our classmates? Beyond an occasional lunch, we were on our own. My friends? Were happy to hang out with me solo, but they always managed to find excuses not to be in his company.

 

The most glaring example of this avoidance came when my roommate and I decided that since I have a summer birthday and wouldn’t be seeing anyone from school for it (I lived clear across the state), we should celebrate my “fake birthday.” I picked February 13, because it was a Friday and because I believed that henceforth, Valentine’s Day would never suck, and everyone went all-out. There was cake, there were presents, there was hanging out—and then my boyfriend showed up. He was late for some reason or another, and when he finally moseyed on in, everyone else made themselves scarce. 

 

I would have been annoyed, but by that point? I couldn’t even blame them. Because, on a related note:

 

Question Two:  Wow, Why Is He Constantly Hitting on My Friends?

When pressed, my boyfriend never admitted that he was hitting on my friends—and indeed, he probably wasn’t. None of them ever reported being propositioned, and considering how nastily our relationship ended, I’m pretty sure anyone who had been would have stepped forward. But he was constantly doing “harmless” things like ranking the girls in our classes in order of hotness, and he had no sense of personal space. He was infamous for sitting on girls’ laps if he thought they were sitting in “his” seat—he even sat on my roommate’s lap, without her permission, right in front of me. He just walked up, said, “You’re in my seat,” and sat right down.

 

Um, no.

 

He was also a big one for constantly talking about a woman’s appearance in front of her, in a “complimentary” fashion. And all this may not be as clear-cut as “Hey baby, wanna party?” but behavior like that still sends an obvious message: he can’t keep his hands or his eyes to himself. He may be acting like this because he wants to make you feel insecure, or he may be doing it because he wants to make your friends feel unsettled and uncomfortable—or both. After all, one of the best ways to scare off a woman’s female friends is to make them feel sexually threatened: they don’t want to be around douchebag because they don’t want to get pawed, and if douchebag gets called out on it, he can segue right into the classic “But she came on to me!” excuse.

 

Either way, your friends are out of the way and he has you aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall to himself.

 

Question Three:  Why Do I Always Feel Like I Must Be the Worst Person in the World?

No person is a saint. People make mistakes in relationships all the time—ask my boyfriend, he can tell you what a douche I can be. I have done bad things to nice people, and I haven’t always had very good excuses for my behavior; honestly, there are at least two boys I’d like to tell, “I’m sorry, I can’t believe I treated you that way. It was really wrong.” And I’m not exactly the femme fatale type, y’all.

 

But the thing is, if you are in a steady, committed relationship, then you try to forgive each other. Even if one of you has really, seriously fucked up, you try to work through it. There may be some name-calling and some slammed doors. There may even be words like, “Slut” and “Whore” involved in these initial conversations. That’s normal and human, albeit unpleasant and sexist. What’s not normal? Is someone hanging your misdeed over your head for the rest of your relationship.

 

I don’t care what you did: if your partner can’t forgive you for it, then they need to leave you, not torture you. If you fucked his best friend and he can’t seem to get past that (and who could blame him?), then he needs to suck it up and dump you. No matter how horrible your mistake was, it does not give him a life-long pass to fuck with your head. He does not get to end every subsequent argument with, “But who cares what you think, you whore.” Maybe you are a whore, but what does that have to do with who forgot to do the dishes last night?

 

Mature adults do not think, “Well, X did Y, so the fact that I just lit her cat on fire doesn’t mean anything!” It’s tempting to think this way, because it’s comforting: after all, it means you’ll never be responsible for your own actions ever again. And it’s tempting to buy into, because really, weren’t you a terrible person to him? Shouldn’t you suffer? But ladies and gents, here are two important facts to keep in mind: in the United States, every crime has a statute of limitations, with the lone exception of murder. And no, we’re not talking the murder of his soul, we’re talking the murder of his actual body. Also, when you are on trial, the prosecution is not allowed to introduce prior bad acts unless they have a direct bearing on the case at hand. And let’s face it: in the case of the People vs. the Peanut Butter Leaver-Opener, the fact that the People is a whore has nothing to do with anything.

 

In conclusion, if he can’t let it go, then you need to leave.

 

Question Four:  Why Does He…Bore Me? 

I’m not going to lie to you: at some point, all relationships are boring. I live with my boyfriend, and for the most part, our evenings are not spent tearing it up. I mean, we’re old. We come home, we exercise, we make dinner, we clean the house, we wrestle with the cats, we watch TV, and then we GO TO BED. Not exactly exhilarating. But the thing is, my boyfriend himself does not bore me. He is a constantly hilarious, bizarre person who—and I am not making this up—will do the Worm if I’m on the phone and he wants to get my attention. I may be busy or irritated or just not in the mood to talk, but I never look at him and think, “Damn, I don’t want to talk to him about X because I know his opinion will be worthless.”

 

When I was dating my ex, there were definitely moments where all the drama disappeared and I would just find myself sitting there thinking, “You’re not very smart and you’re not very nice and I don’t really want to hear your opinion on anything, because it’s not worth it.” And then he’d do something crazy and I’d forget all about this crucial, crucial moment of insight because I was too busy doing damage control.

 

Question Five:  Why Is Nothing Ever His Fault?

My ex would have been the first to tell you that nothing was ever his fault—just not in those words, of course. His inability to keep from cheating on his girlfriends? Clearly a result of his father’s disrespect for his first wife! His rejection letter from Chapel Hill? It was because he was white, and they gave “his” spot to a minority! (Guess he never realized that UNC’s student body is about 80 percent white.) The fact that he lost his re-election bid for student council? I’d launched a whisper campaign against him!

 

Dude, if only I’d had that kind of pull. Or been that extroverted.

 

If there was a way to avoid taking responsibility for his own life, the kid would find it. The same situations kept happening over and over again–he’d get fired, he’d get rejected, he’d lose a student council election–and he never learned from it, because he refused to believe it had anything to do with him. The fact that he was loud and abrasive and mean-spirited? Had NOTHING to do with ANYTHING. IT WAS ALL A CONSPIRACY, SERIOUSLY.

 

Question Six:  Why Am I Always So Miserable and Exhausted?

My ex tuckered me the hell out, I tell you. Depression normally keeps me from sleeping—there was that one time I didn’t sleep like a human for two years—but he was so emotionally exhausting that I remember sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. Probably because I don’t think we ever had a conversation that I came out of feeling good about. Being with him did not make me happy: in fact, the entire time we dated, I found myself crying at inopportune times and screaming and throwing things because he made me so mad. Sometimes we had sweet moments, but the vast majority of the time, I felt like someone was putting my soul through a wringer.

 

Question Seven:  Why Is He So Volatile?

The ex was, as they say, fucking nuts. I never witnessed his big blowups—he saved them for more important things than our relationship, thank God—but what I did see was enough. One minute he’d be hitting on me, and the next minute he’d be “subtly” telling me that I was a moron. His need to feel superior was so strong that it overrode his need to be admired, so he’d be smarmily charming for most of the conversation, and then work in a dig just as you were thinking he was actually a pretty nice guy. This is why people who were a little—or a lot—socially inept could deal with him while better-adjusted people could not:  they simply didn’t have the social skills to pick up on the fact that they were being insulted.  Or, like me, they had such low self-esteem that they didn’t care.

 

But it wasn’t just the subtle digs that were the problem:  boyfriend could also be blatantly, weirdly passive-aggressive.  One day, I finished a test before he did and went on ahead to the cafeteria to wait for him.  He refused to eat with me, because I’d “ditched” him.  One time we had an argument, and I went over to his room to talk it over.  He wouldn’t look at me, but wouldn’t tell me to leave.  Instead, he called his parents and conducted a perfectly normal conversation with them, then answered me in monosyllables when I directed questions to him.  He played darts for ten minutes straight without once glancing in my direction.

 

It was really, really weird.

 

The worst things, of course, I only ever heard second-hand.  Abusers are predators, first and foremost, and they tend to be fairly good at reading their prey.  I would not have put up with violent displays of anger on a regular basis.  I have never dealt well with being screamed at, and if he had taken that tack, I would have washed my hands of him pretty quickly.  But I heard things, then and later.  When he was booted off student council, he screamed and threw a chair in front of everyone.  When he lost a soccer game, he took five to go punch the crap out of a tree and yell obscenities at it. 

 

…yeah.

 

Ladies, that shit is not normal.  It is not okay to deal with minor annoyances—like being left after a test—by pitching a huge, passive-aggressive fit.  It is not okay to deal with disappointment by throwing things in public.  If you are dating someone who pulls this shit, you should be unsettled.  Because no rational adult behaves this way.

  

Question Eight:  Does He Seriously Think He’s a Jedi Master or Something?

 

The ex was–how do I put this kindly?  A pathological liar.  He viewed the truth as something that could be dispensed with if it didn’t suit his ends.  And unfortunately, it often didn’t suit his ends.  He was constantly—I mean constantly—telling me that I hadn’t seen something, or that he hadn’t done something, or that what he’d said didn’t mean what I thought it meant.

 

One time, awhile after we’d broken up, he made a fellatio joke in relation to me.  I didn’t feel like that was appropriate anymore, since, you know, WE’D JUST BROKEN UP, and I told him so.  Instead of saying, “Dude, I’m sorry, hey, ain’t it hard to negotiate these new boundaries?” he…tried to tell me that I hadn’t heard what I thought I’d heard.  “I didn’t mean that you liked to eat dick,” he explained.  “I meant that you liked to eat food.”

 

Yes, sweetheart.  Because saying that to someone with compulsive overeating issues is SO MUCH BETTER.

 

For so much of our acquaintanceship, I felt like he was standing in front of me, trying to do a Jedi mind trick.  After we’d made out and he’d left me with a, “I think we should be very good friends,” and I’d found out that he was looking for friends with benefits BECAUSE HE HAD A GIRLFRIEND, he asked me if I was angry.  “Yes,” I said.  “Yes, I am.”

 

“But why are you angry?” he asked, all wide-eyed and innocent.

 

Reader, I still don’t know why I didn’t haul off and punch him right then and there.

 

The ex was a constant re-writer of history; if he didn’t want it to have happened that way, then it hadn’t happened that way.  Even if you distinctly remembered the incident.  Even if you had it on tape.

 

The Conclusion

While I was dating the ex, I found all sorts of ways to excuse his behavior; it wasn’t hard, he was happy to provide me with a list of them.  But I also worked overtime at ignoring the warnings my friends tried to give me.  I always found some flaw in their personalities or their relationships that justified dismissing their words.  “Oh, she’s never really dated anyone,” I’d think, or, “She’s in a really shitty relationship, what does she know?”  For every friend, relative, or acquaintance, I had a way of deflecting criticism of the ex and my involvement with him.

 

There was one girl in particular, a girl who was involved in a relationship that was only marginally better than mine.  It might actually have been worse; we never discussed it.  But anyway, she told me one day that, “Deb, I don’t like the way he treats you.  He does not treat you the way that he should.  And I can’t be around him, because I can’t watch him do this to you.”

 

I dismissed it, because she was in a bad place and I thought that meant that she couldn’t see me clearly.

 

But I was wrong. 

 

It can be hard to see yourself, because self-deception is so easy and, at times, necessary.  But it is not so hard to see other people, particularly not the ones you love.  You don’t have to hold up a mirror; you just have to open your eyes.  Despite her own problems, problems that she was studiously ignoring and/or denying, my friend saw mine, and she saw them clearly.  And I’ve seen it over and over again:  women who are involved with shitty men are often quite good at knowing when their friends are in trouble, even when they refuse to see the wolf at their own door.

 

Do not dismiss what you’re friends are saying.  If you have five friends who tell you that your boyfriend is no good and one who says that he’s fine, listen to the first five.  No matter what their situations are.   Whether they cheated on their taxes or not.  They know.  They’re looking.  And they love you.

 

Keep yourself safe.

 

*I don’t mean to imply that only men are capable of domestic violence, or that domestic violence only occurs in the context of heterosexual relationships.  I’ve written this essay from the point-of-view of a heterosexual female abuse survivor because, well, that’s what I am.  That’s what most of my friends who are survivors are.  That does not mean, however, that what I’ve written only applies to heterosexual women.  If you are a straight man, a lesbian, a transperson—basically, if you are human—and you recognize your relationship in this essay, then please, please, PLEASE do not think that none of this applies to you.  It does.  Please, get help.

ETA:  Follow-up post here.