In my last post I wrote about the (too easily underestimated) role that fear of public embarrassment often plays in keeping a woman mired in a bad relationship. While choosing personal pain over public shame is certainly a human enough choice, it’s one no one should continue to make once the cost of that trade becomes too consistently oppressive. Eventually, it’s just not worth it. If the fire in your house is between you and your clothes, sooner or later you must run out of your house naked. Emergencies prioritize needs, every time.

If you’re a woman who’s beginning to question whether the natural and understandable kinds of fears I wrote about in my last post are worth what it’s costing you to remain in a bad/abusive relationship, consider the following two points:

1. No one cares that much. One of the weirdest things about being human is that we all think we’re starring—or at least have serious supporting roles—in the life of everyone around us. But that’s just a crazy delusion God thought it would be funny to hard-wire into us all. The truth is that we’re each starring in our own show—and there’s just not a lot of room on anyone’s stage for anyone else but them. One of the great things about the intensely focused centrality of everyone in what is to them the ongoing, dazzling production that is their life, is that it means that nobody really cares all that much about what’s happening in the relationships of other people. Sure, they might care for a minute or two; everyone’s always down for a little choice gossip. But, unless they drop dead on the spot, what inevitably happens is that while they’re thinking or talking about you, their life continues—and then they’re right back on their stage again, totally engrossed in the sheer drama of their own life. If everyone around you gets suddenly shocked by your revelation that, instead of being happily married, you’re leaving the man whom you say treated you terribly, they’d totally think and talk about you for about fourteen seconds. And then they’d move on. Think about it: That’s what you always do whenever you learn about some drama in someone else’s life, especially if—as is true with marriages and relationships—that drama was a direct result of what amounts to choices made by the parties involved. If you heard about someone else breaking up with their husband or wife, you’d kind of care. But mostly you wouldn’t. The key is to remember that everyone else is just like you.

2. It’s wonderful to know who your friends are. Let’s say there are some people in your life who condemn you for breaking up with your man. Cool! You want a spotlight on those people, so that you can finally see them for the low-life cretins they are. Think of the money you’ll save by not buying Christmas and birthday presents for those losers! As I said in my last piece: a person not impressed and encouraged by another person radically improving their life is a person wasting away in their own toxicity anyway. One of the great benefits of going through the kind of personal cataclysm that can be breaking up with your man is that all around your life it rattles away the wheat from the chaff. And a big part of what that means is that you really and truly find out who your friends are. And that’s always surprising in two ways: By how destructively useless some of your “friends” turn out to be, and by how many people whom you may have never even considered friends step forward to love and support you. And the latter group always outnumbers the former; for every one “friend” that effectively turns against you, three other people in your life will surprise you by the quality of love they will show you in your time of need. So don’t worry about what other people will think of you if you break up with your man. You want to know how they’ll react, so that you can discover who they really are. You can’t flush out a skunk without beating the bushes. And when the skunk finally does come out, all you can do is hope it doesn’t spray too much on you, and then let it scurry away to stink up someone else’s life.

I have two more huge things I want to say on this on this subject, but this post is already too long. So tomorrow!

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Today we’ll consider as a factor that often contributes to women continuing in relationships they should leave the natural desire not to be publicly embarrassed.

The bottom line is that no one likes having their dirty laundry aired in public. But if you’re a woman who is considering breaking up with your husband (or a man with whom you’ve been in a long-term relationship) because he is emotionally or physically abusive to you, then part of what you’re facing is knowing that carrying through with that break-up means that a lot of  people who know you are going to know a lot more about you than it’s likely you ever wanted them to.

And none of what they learn will be pretty. They’ll learn that as a way of life you allowed yourself to be abused, maligned, shamed. They may learn that for all the time you told them how happy you are in your relationship, you were lying. If there are children involved, they may learn that, to whatever degree, you morally transgressed against your maternal obligation by not sooner getting those children out of that situation.

And if you’re a church-going Christian woman then you may understand that once you initiate a divorce from your husband, some members of your church are going to condemn you for so failing to embody the love of Jesus that your marriage fell apart.

Fear of this kind of public humiliation may not be the primary factor keeping a woman in an abusive relationships, but it can carry significant weight. We are all social creatures, and want few things less than we do our private shame becoming public.

At a zoo I once saw an ape who had to pee turn his back on those of us at the observation rail so that he could secure for himself at least that much privacy.

If an ape so desires to keep his business private, how much more must we? (Relax, creationists: this isn’t the same as saying we come from apes. Though, in truth, looking at the embarrassed expression on that ape’s face as he looked back over his shoulder at us whilst tending to his biological need made it a little difficult to imagine we’re not in some profoundly organic way connected to that particular order of being. I sure never noticed my dog minding who sees him pee.)

So. More Monday on how to overcome the fear of what you must do in private becoming known in public. For now, let me just say to any woman who might be in need of immediate galvanization: [expletive deleted] what other people think. A person not impressed and encouraged by another person radically improving their life is a person wasting away in their own toxicity anyway. Caring what such a person thinks of you is like deciding that dog doo-doo on them enhances the appeal of your new pair of shoes.

More Monday. (Next piece on John tomorrow.) Thanks.

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Please forward this post or any of the others from this series to anyone whom you think it might help. Thank you.

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Yesterday, instead of writing about my third reason women stay in bad relationships (which is that it’s embarrassing to have a relationship to which you’ve been long committed go publicly down in flames), I wrote Women in Bad Relationships: Eve’s Curse Isn’t Yours. At the end of that post I said that today I’d write a bit more on that subject. So here we are!

The additional thing I wanted to say about the fact that oftentimes bad men use the love of their women as tools against their women is that the reason bad men do this is because all men, to a degree lots of women have all kinds of good reasons not to fully appreciate, want power. And men don’t want power in the way they want a great pair of shoes, or a boat someday, or that cool car with the spinning hubcaps, or whatever. Men want power with a sustained, instinctive intensity with which they want little if anything else in their lives. A man’s need for power is a low-level but constant hunger that never leaves him alone, that is never too far off his registering radar.

And men crave power so much they’ll take it in virtually any form they can get it. And they won’t give up an iota of their power that they don’t absolutely have to—and whenever they do have to surrender any of their power, they’ll harbor resentment against that offense like Packo the Wonder Elephant will remember the time Snarko the Clown teased him with a peanut he then ate himself. (Um … forgive the totally made-up metaphor. I’m in a bit of a hurry here: the beans I’m using in my soup for tonight are almost ready! And I still have to prepare the vegetables!)

Yes, we macho men crave power.

And here’s the thing about that: all men, in one way or another, feel, deep in their … well, bones … that they’re macho men. Because it’s about the testosterone—not the height, or the shoulder-spread, or … the belt notches, or whatever.

Every man, by virtue of his gonads and hormones and muscles and all that, feels … manly. And pretty much the descriptor of “manly” is Almost Desperately Craves Power.

A healthy man excercies his drive for power to the benefit of The Good.

An unhealthy man couldn’t care less about what’s good. “Good” is something outside of him—something greater than him, something beyond him. So he hates it—because what’s “good” isn’t about him. An unhealthy man seeks to exert his power in a very personal, focused, one-on-one sort of way (that’s usually done in private because he knows it makes him look weak to the rest of the world). An unhealthy man likes to see those with less power than he squirm beneath him. He gets off putting fear into the eyes of others. He likes to belittle people whom he knows will, for whatever reason, take it. He’s addicted to the little thrill he gets degrading those with less power than he; he loves to keep them guessing, keep them dancing, keep them doubting.

And one of the main things about an unhealthy man of this sort is that he can smell a woman who will succumb to him. It’s manna to him. He knows that smell like he knows … well, the smell of his own mother, usually.

God, I have a feeling I’m never going to blog about anything else. I could write about this stuff until my fingers drop off.

So. More tomorrow. (And I promise I’ll get back on track with this series.)

The point, for now, is that if you are a woman who just can’t seem to extricate yourself from a relationship with a man who is emotionally or physically abusive to you, then you’ve got to understand that what you’re doing is allowing a man who is too lazy to accrue unto himself any real power in the world an opportunity to enjoy the most attractive and terrible kind of power there is: The absolute power of one human being over another.

Do me a favor, and join my Facebook page so I can keep writing this kind of stuff, instead of … having to do other work I’d rather not. Knowing people like you matters to publishers.

Dear Mr. Answers,

Who was Timothy Leary?—Curious and Totally Not Trying to Get You to Do the Homework Assignment From My “History of the 20th Century” Class

Dear CTNTGYDHAFMH2CC,

As it happens, one of Mr. Answers’ online friends is ruby-throated, liberal hippie media mogul Brian Shields (see Do People Get Stoned at Work?). Mr. Shields (who also runs the mega-excellent site Today’s Cool News) does his media moguling for San Francisco’s venerable market lion KRON-TV. As coincidence would have it, Mr. Shields recently aired a piece about Mr. Leary on KRON! You can find that piece here: http://tinyurl.com/annhzh. (Mr. Answers has mixed feelings about revealing this, but the fact is that his very own mother used to party with Mr. Leary—who [in case you know almost nothing about the '60's] is famous for the counterculture phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”)

It’s now time to write about the third reason I listed for why women stay in bad relationships, which is that it can be so embarrassing to have a relationship to which you’ve been long committed go publicly down in flames.

Before getting to that, though, I want to address something that’s come up via some letters I’ve lately received from women in bad relationships.

Many of these letters communicated this: “I know I should get out of the bad relationship I’m in—but right now I’m just not strong enough to make the break. For reasons I’m helpless to understand, I’m still too emotionally tied to this man that I know is no good for me.”

So I want to say this: Bad men thrive on exactly that kind of muddled need. They willfully, purposefully, and methodically create it in their women. They do it by just often enough making sure to be just sweet enough—just thoughtful enough, just kind enough, just boyishly winning enough—to keep their women believing in the possibility that they’ll change.

When in the Bible God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he curses Eve by saying to her: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” The translation of The Message makes the meaning of this quote even clearer:  “You’ll want to please your husband, but he’ll lord it over you.”

Whether you believe in the Bible or not, that line perfectly describes the curse under which so many women spend such wretched lives: for reasons they cannot comprehend or control, they continue, against all reason, trying to please their man.

And if such a woman’s man is bad, he will use this weakness against her, the way a farmer uses a dangling carrot on a stick to entice his beast of burden to service his will.

I’ve got to run just now, so more on this tomorrow. But if you’re a woman “stuck” in a bad relationship, remember: that may have been Eve’s curse, but it doesn’t need to be yours. Think about your man. He knows what he’s doing. He likes making you wriggle on the hook of the hope he teases you with. It gives him power. But do you really think your purpose on earth is to be nothing more than the means by which a weak man pumps himself up?

Please forward this to anyone you think it might help.

Related post o’ mine: Surprise (Or Not)! Men Are Spoiled!

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