Why Women Stay in Inequitable and Abusive Relationships

Feb 17

For years now, I’ve been telling women that inequitable relationships in which their partners buy free time with the woman’s fatigue and labor are abusive. Household chore inequity is absolutely a tool of domestic abuse—and often the first warning sign that a man will become abusive. Women who can absolutely should begin making a plan to leave. Divorce is the only cure for an abusive relationships.

As with other forms of abuse, though, leaving is not always possible. I’m consistently stunned by how eagerly women who have left (or who are lucky enough to have fair relationships) blame women who stay. Victim-blaming is a tool of patriarchy. It further conditions generations of women to accept unfair treatment, to believe that if their relationships are bad it must be their fault. There is no place for it in feminism. Here are some of the most common reasons women stay in abusive relationships with inequitable labor arrangements. Notice that each of these is the product of a sexist society—not the woman’s fault.

Conditioning

It begins before girls can even talk. We tell them they’re going to be princesses, marry prince charming, and have perfect weddings. We ask them about their boyfriends when they are toddlers. We depict marriage as a fairy tale, and as a necessary prerequisite to full adulthood. No wonder so many women enter into marriage without thinking critically about the institution.

Once a woman is married to a shitty partner, it gets even worse. Despite overwhelming evidence showing how harmful domestic labor inequity is to women, most people still believe it’s just a minor annoyance—perhaps even something to joke about. Many women spend years in abusive marriages before even recognizing them as such. Most can count on little support from friends and family. A lifetime of sexist conditioning has taught women that they deserve to be second class citizens, even in their own homes.

Financial Dependence

Women who quit work to raise children are at an especially significant disadvantage because they become financially dependent on their husbands. Abusive husbands can wield this as a weapon against them, threatening to take the kids, the house, everything. Even when women do work outside of the home, a persistent pay gap means that they earn, on average, less money than men. They also have more household responsibilities. This leaves them in a comparatively worse financial position, and more exhausted, making it difficult to make a plan to leave. This is by design. When a person is so overworked that they can’t think clearly, they also can’t think clearly about shaping a brighter future.

An Unfair Court System

Domestic labor inequity is immoral and wrong. Most courts do not see it as a sign that a man is an unfit parent. Indeed, in many jurisdictions, joint custody is the default. This means that a woman who leaves her lazy husband may be forced to share her children with him. She’ll have to send them to stay with someone whose history indicates he is unwilling to provide basic care. And that’s something many mothers are simply unwilling to tolerate.

Concerns About Child Safety After the Divorce

Divorcing a lazy husband will not make him less lazy. My inbox is flooded with emails from women telling me that, though their lives got better after divorce, they kept having to co-parent with an incompetent manchild. There’s the woman whose child’s bed at her father’s house was filled with worms. The man who refused to wash his child’s clothes. The one who was willing to let his kid fail math because he just couldn’t be troubled to help her with homework. For many women, staying married is the only way they feel they can protect their children from the unsafe, unsanitary, and unnurturing environments they believe place their children in danger.

Hope

Hope can be a potent tool of oppression. When you think something better is just around the corner if only you wait, if only you try harder, if only you’re good enough, you’ll put up with just about anything. Women stay with abusive men because they love them. Love is a powerful force that gives us hope even when it’s unwarranted. And that hope can lead to decades of suffering.

Fear of Further Abuse

The most dangerous time in any abusive relationship is when the victim finally leaves. This isn’t just true of physically violent relationships. Men who take advantage of their partner’s free labor know they’re getting a great deal, and they’re not going to happily give that up. They may escalate campaigns of verbal abuse, try to undermine the woman’s relationship with friends and family, threaten to tie things up in court for years, or become physically abusive. Some men take it out on the children. Concerns about physical and emotional safety are very real when your partner has shown for years that they are willing to sacrifice your well-being so they can get some extra free time.

The problem begins years, and often decades, before a woman marries. It originates in childhood, when we begin indoctrinating little girls into princess culture rather than telling them that the average marriage is bad for the average woman’s health and well-being. It continues into early adulthood, when we encourage women to get swept up in temporary romance rather than critically evaluate a partner’s ability to be a decent husband. And it extends into motherhood and beyond, when virtually every cultural force is all too happy to tell a woman that, unless she is being repeatedly physically brutalized, she is a selfish narcissist if she does anything other than remain a permanent live-in servant.

Stop blaming women for the world patriarchy created and the abuse their partners inflict. If women are responsible for everything, then men are responsible for nothing. Which is, of course, the real goal of shifting blame to abused women.

Zawn Villines