Warning Signs

My abuser exhibited many early wanring signs that our relationship would become a violent one. I'm not saying that every person who exhibits these behviors is in fact an abuser. In my case all of these things came together like an explosive cocktail to create a soul crushingly controlling and physically abusive enviroment. I wish that I could prevent another woman to falling victim to the type of man that I did. My thought is that if I share these things that perhaps just one person will be helped.

1. He was very quick to tell me he loved me. Too quick.

Very early on I felt like I was falling in love with him, but being a relatively normal person I knew that we needed to spend time getting to know one another. Taking time to learn about me was not on his list of important things. He was more concerned with locking me in. He knew that he'd found the type of woman who would put up with just about anything he could dish out and he didn't want to have to go looking for another one.

He proposed marriage within a few weeks of us becoming a couple. Even after we'd set a date for our wedding, he pressured me into moving it back 4 months. He could only maintain the facade of being loving/charming/intelligent for a limited amount of time, so the sooner we got married the better for him.

(I'm sure normal people are sometimes compelled to say I love you quickly when they meet a particularly wonderful person. That's just infatuation, but that isn't what I'm talking about. Saying I love you too quickly under normal circumstances can be rectified. Saying I love you too quickly under normal circumstances doesn't force you into servitude. Under these disfuntional circumstances, it was merely a calculated move to make my next warning sign easier to accomplish.)

2. He isolated me.

He did his very best to isolate me from the people who love me and try to dismantle my strongest relationships. He wasn't interested in meeting my friends or getting to know my family from day one, at first I chalked it up to shyness but later I realized it was because he didn't care at all. My phone calls to those people were limited to my drive home during the week, because evenings and weekends were "our time." Visits were out of the question unless he accompanied me and he rarely agreed to accompany me.

3. His expectations were unrealistic.

He expected me to work full time, cook delicious meals every night and serve them to him, keep an immaculate house and be the sole care provider for his children when they were in our home. And on top of all of that, he expected me to have sex like a porn star, which is kind of hard to do when  your self esteem is in the shitter and you're physically exhausted.

4. He shifted the blame for all of his problems onto others.

I don't think I even need to go into detail here. Anything that happened that had a negative effect on his life could be traced back to some other source. Even I became his reason for a lot of his problems.

5. He was hypersensitive.

In other words, he went off the wall and still does anytime anyone contradicts him or says anything that can be percieved as  criticism.

6. He was cruel to animals.

He laughed his ass off as his black lab attempted to eat my cat one afternoon on our back porch. He told me that was just a dog's nature, and maybe it is, but I still don't think laughing is a  human reaction. He also believes that the only way to make a dog mind is to hit it every time it does wrong.

7. His view of gender roles was intensely rigid. 

 In my abuser's mind, a woman was put on this earth to cook, clean and take care of men. He woudn't have dreamed of doing dishes or wiping a poopy kid's butt because that's women's work.

Also,

Follow the below link to read a very enlightening essay on this very same topic. I wish someone would have shown it to me long long ago, and now I'm sharing it with you.

HOW to Avoid Losers and Abusers  by Joseph M. Carver, Ph.D., Psychologist http://feministjournal.com/loser.html