I've suggested people leave relationships. Sometimes I'm suggesting a woman leave her lover. Sometimes, though less often, I'm suggesting a man leave his lover. Sometimes we're talking about leaving parents, or roommate situations. The main issue for me is, "Are you afraid to go home?" If a person is always flinching from physical or emotional bullying, but defines "fear" very narrowly (as in immediate expectation of being murdered), it can be surprisingly hard to recognize being afraid to go home.
I think intimidation is more likely in situations where money is very tight, especially after money has been tight for a long time. Financial dependence makes people dependent in other ways, limits their options. Someone once said to me, "I hate the way my mother treats me, but living with her is the only way I can afford to finish school." With more money, it would have been feasible to move out, or to enforce boundaries (do that again and I'm leaving.) There are also situations that might look like there's intimidation involved, even if there really isn't...a woman with no money, persistantly complaining about how unhappy she is in a relationship, appears to be at high risk, from this distance.
Most folks on my friends list post about their relationships. I can think of three women in particular who post about their husbands (and, if you're not sure if I'm talking about you, feel free to email me and ask), who tend to get comments talking about what bums their husbands are, and how they should just up and leave and get rid of the bum. (And, interestingly, it's only women to whom this happens.)
As I'm sure you can imagine, this does NOT make those women happy.
How sure are you that those women are unhappy about it? Back in 1995-6, maybe as early as 1994, people who cared about me were giving me online advice to leave my partner. That made me confused and troubled. To a first approximation, the more astute the advice, the more it troubled me. It wasn't the advice that was making me unhappy. It was the *relationship* that was making me unhappy.
Now, one of the things which bothers me about this is that I see myself in all three husbands. I do many of the same things that all three of these "bums" do. And yet Lis assures me that she gets very few of those comments to her blog.
There's a big difference between Lis and the sort of person I tend to worry is in a toxic or abusive relationship and needs to be helped out of it -- Lis does not seem to be persistently unhappy. She isn't complaining about you all the time. She complains of you occasionally, and in between times she writes of how happy she is with you. I suspect most readers of her blog are sufficiently regular readers to see that pattern.
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I think intimidation is more likely in situations where money is very tight, especially after money has been tight for a long time. Financial dependence makes people dependent in other ways, limits their options. Someone once said to me, "I hate the way my mother treats me, but living with her is the only way I can afford to finish school." With more money, it would have been feasible to move out, or to enforce boundaries (do that again and I'm leaving.) There are also situations that might look like there's intimidation involved, even if there really isn't...a woman with no money, persistantly complaining about how unhappy she is in a relationship, appears to be at high risk, from this distance.
Most folks on my friends list post about their relationships. I can think of three women in particular who post about their husbands (and, if you're not sure if I'm talking about you, feel free to email me and ask), who tend to get comments talking about what bums their husbands are, and how they should just up and leave and get rid of the bum. (And, interestingly, it's only women to whom this happens.)
As I'm sure you can imagine, this does NOT make those women happy.
How sure are you that those women are unhappy about it? Back in 1995-6, maybe as early as 1994, people who cared about me were giving me online advice to leave my partner. That made me confused and troubled. To a first approximation, the more astute the advice, the more it troubled me. It wasn't the advice that was making me unhappy. It was the *relationship* that was making me unhappy.
Now, one of the things which bothers me about this is that I see myself in all three husbands. I do many of the same things that all three of these "bums" do. And yet Lis assures me that she gets very few of those comments to her blog.
There's a big difference between Lis and the sort of person I tend to worry is in a toxic or abusive relationship and needs to be helped out of it -- Lis does not seem to be persistently unhappy. She isn't complaining about you all the time. She complains of you occasionally, and in between times she writes of how happy she is with you. I suspect most readers of her blog are sufficiently regular readers to see that pattern.