Deanna, I wouldn’t give his stories much creedence. My fiancee’s late husband gave her the same schtick. He was uneducated, had a GED but did mostly manual labor jobs. He got into pain medication then the anti-depressants, next thing she knows, he’s a lump on the couch and she’s working 50 hours weeks. When she wasn’t home, he would go drain the bank account at strip clubs. Her credit was devastated, and she had had enough.
Strong figurehead households usually generate motivated, well-mannered children. Even having one parent acting as the figurehead yields positive results. Based on your story, I would bet he was either abused as a child or his father was abusive to his mother thus he thought it was acceptable to do so.
See, what happens is that men put on facades to lure in the women. They come off as the innocent aloof jock or the sheltered but attractive bookworm. Once you’re lured into their web, they start to rely on you for more and more. They stop doing the dishes, the laundry, then yardwork, home maintenance, you get the point. The longer you allow them to siphon off of you, the more empowered they become. You did the right thing by leaving him. No one deserves to be abused like that. My step-father did that to my mother, and I learned what NOT to do in a relationship by observation.
These men, deep down, are cowards. Spousal abusers usually control the entire household. They’re imposing, loud, and they’re incredibly rough with the handling of the kids and the wife. They use their size to their advantage. Physically smaller men use more devious means through emotional and mental torture and abuse. They find the low self-esteemed women and feed off of their misery. It’s really sick.
Heterosexual marriages are prone to abuse just as much as homosexual relationships, but I believe the mature adults among us understand conflict resolution and have loving relationships with our spouses. Homosexuals are usually in it for the physical. As soon as that’s gone, they’ve lost access to the focus of their perversion, and they start to see their partner for the pitiful, loathsome human being he or she is.
thank you both. I would have left earlier but I did not really know I could. He had his high school diploma and had spent time in the military and he never once hit me or our girls. And the only “drug” he abused was alcohol, because it was legal. He came straight home from work and planted in front of his computer and then got mad if we made noise and disturbed him. I always told everyone that if he hit me or the girls, cheated on me, or started not coming home that I would leave him. He never did any of that. Even when I was having a mental breakdown, that I got over shortly after I asked him to leave, he made me feel like I was faking it and told me to get back to work.
But the past is the past and I am working on the future, and it is starting to look better all of the time. Thanks again.