Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This (6 page)

Chapter Nine

Rescuing Normal

In the last chapter, we covered five types of common assholes you want to avoid, in an honest but tongue-in-cheek way. A lot of this book is written in this particular style, since I know a healthy dose of sardonic wit is missing in most (if not all) dating books—thus the wonderful tome you now hold in front of you.

This, however, is the one chapter that won’t be presented in this way. There is very little that’s funny in the next few pages, so if you’re here solely for entertainment value (which is perfectly acceptable), you may want to skip ahead. Before we get to the really heavy stuff, let’s start with a basic truth about men:

The majority of them are okay.

I’m not saying that the majority of men out there will set the world on fire, treat you like a goddess and with absolute care, sensitivity, and compassion. I’m saying that most men, at their core, are decent, kind, and desirous of giving and receiving love. They may not all be right for you, but they don’t warp your desire for future male companionship.

Like anything else in life with a huge sample size (more than 140 million men in North America alone), men generally cleave to an average, a norm. Take, for instance, these national averages for a man in the United States:

The average man is about thirty-four years old.

He earns about thirty-six thousand dollars a year and has about three thousand in savings.

He is about 5’9” tall and weighs about 175 pounds.

He is at the height of his athletic fitness and personal health at about twenty-three.

The majority of men consider themselves to be “physically fit” (69 percent). The actual percentage who are fit, according to standards set by the U.S. government, is 13 percent.

The average male life span is currently about seventy-six years, which means you’ll likely outlive your mate by about five years.
[xxi]

If you’ve had a plentiful dating life up to now, chances are you’ve dated more than a few men that could be described as “average,” according to the norms mentioned above. Unless you’ve been outrageously “unlucky,” you also have a pretty fair idea of what most men are like, at least the single ones. Despite occasional attempts to consign mystery to my gender, most guys don’t require a CIA inquiry in order to determine their values, their motivations, or their character.

Consider the results of the 2009 report by Rutgers University National Marriage Project
[xxii]
, an annual study of men’s attitudes about dating, sex, love, and marriage. Single men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three from all across the country were surveyed, and the results showed strikingly similar responses from men across the spectrum of age and location. Here is what the study discovered about modern single men:

They’re resistant to commitment. (This will likely be a revelation to no more than six of you readers.)

The social pressures to marry that once existed are now largely gone. In the past sixty years, the average male marriage age has risen from about twenty-three (in 1947) to about twenty-eight in 2010. It has gone up almost two years in just the last two decades. To put this striking recent cultural shift in perspective, the average age actually decreased slightly from 1947 to 1967.

Single men believe they can have sex more easily and more often when single. They also believe that the single life is something to be enjoyed as long as possible before getting married. (Marriage kind of sounds like conscripted military service, doesn’t it?)

Single men believe that marriage entails too many changes in their current lifestyles, as well as too many compromises. They also want to delay having children, which most associate as a natural inevitability of marriage. Most even believe that buying a house precedes (and often supersedes) marriage as a life goal.

The greatest cause of hesitation among single men is fear of the financial cost of divorce. For this reason, single men are far more willing to live with a mate than marry her. Fear of financial strain (and changes in lifestyle) also makes single men reluctant to date women who already have children.

Finally, single men believe in the idea of a “soul mate,” just like single women do. However, single men commonly express a need to find the “perfect” soul mate. This attitude, along with easing social pressure to marry, makes it easy to understand why men get married later now than at any point in US history.

Take a look at these conclusions about single men. They aren’t my observations or “guesstimates” about them; they’re the dominant beliefs of a range of single men of varying ages and locations. What these beliefs all have in common is that they’re likely to inspire the following reaction:

Well, no shit. Of course, that’s what men think!

This is one of the rare areas where “common knowledge” actually has the ring of truth. If we did a poll of single women asking them to summarize their male counterparts’ attitudes in this area, their answers would likely be identical to those borne out by research. Ladies: men aren’t complicated, and here is the proof. You understand them implicitly, whether you realize it or not.

Nevertheless, many women profess to have problems “reading” the men in their lives. I think the problem lies not in women being willfully blind to all the available evidence about men. I think their natural understanding becomes perverted by those few experiences with what I’ll label “abnormal” men. These are men who fall so far outside the average that they pervert normal understanding. In modern research language, these “abnormal” men would be considered “outliers,” examples so far off the normative scale that they unduly skew the overall results.

There are two types of men that can logically be considered “outliers” from the normal male population. They’re the evil A’s—the Addict and the Abuser. Their behavior is so far outside of a “normal” male that they could almost be considered a subspecies of man, a malformed version. These two types are wildly divergent in many areas, but they create the same results. To date either type is to be caught in an ever-descending spiral of suffering with no clear end and little hope for recovery.

In both cases, you’ll give and give until you question yourself.

“Why can’t all my love fix what is broken?”

You’ll feel pangs of abject guilt for reasons you can’t explain.

“What did I do to make him this way?”

Your feelings of powerlessness will upend the way you view the world and your place in it. You may even lose yourself completely. No matter what, there will come a time when your friends and family will be dumbfounded about your motivations.

He is so terrible to her. She’s such a bright girl, yet no matter what he does to her, she always stays with him.

In a way, being with these types of men makes you an alien to those who knew you before the relationship. These “outsiders” (many of whom were insiders before this man came along) will privately wonder how the girl who is so level-headed in every other phase of her life could repeatedly make such self-evidently awful decisions when it comes to this man.

There are many examples in this book, especially as we get further along, where the blame for bad relationships is at least partially our own dumb fault. As we discussed, real love is quintessentially rational. Yet among my own friends, I know several who suffered for years at the hands of addicts and abusers.

Without exception, these friends are among the smartest, most successful people I’ve ever known. They’re all, in many ways, models for my own life. At my best, I strive to match their tough-mindedness, their ambition, their positivity, and their fierce self-belief. But they all have a black hole in their past, an endless darkness into which even their brightest lights eventually disappeared.

My friend Beth tells a personal story that describes an archetypal Addict relationship. She was a college student at a large western school and an honor roll achiever who had never tried drugs despite the many opportunities afforded her during her admittedly “wild” school days. She had a series of steady boyfriends that ultimately didn’t last, but most parted amicably enough that they remained friends. Her senior year focus was to find a job at a large marketing firm after college.

She met Tom in her senior year. He was a tall, imposing, square-jawed Bad Boy. He was totally her type, a type eminently familiar in her past—or so she thought.

It was only after many months and declarations of love that she began to question Tom’s increasingly frequent nights out “with the boys.” On many occasions, he didn’t come home until the next day, assuring Beth he’d just needed to sleep off a drunk on a friend couch. When “sleeping it off” began to entail entire weekends with no contact from Tom, Beth went to her friends for advice. Most of them were convinced that Tom must be cheating, but a select few saw the more troubling problem for what it was—a steady descent into terrifying addiction.

Beth stayed with her boyfriend for six more years. In that time, she slowly grew apart from her friends until she was with Tom alone. None of her friends could’ve helped her anyway, as the situation progressed so far beyond her control that she became a shell-shocked onlooker to her own life. Tom was in and out of jail for brief stints on a litany of charges that never stuck—DUI, possession (several times), assault, and petty theft. On three separate occasions, Beth saved Tom’s life after he’d consumed a lethal cocktail of heroin and cocaine by rushing him to the hospital before his heart stopped. He never did drugs in front of her, but he always seemed to show up in time to make sure she shared in every nightmare.

Every time Beth tried to break off the relationship, Tom threatened suicide, and Beth’s (irrational) guilt brought her back. Finally, while Tom was off on a six-day bender, Beth packed up a truck full of her things and moved two thousand miles away to live with her parents. Despite his many attempts to bring her back with initial pleading and eventual threats, Tom never saw Beth again.

This relationship took six years of Beth life—most of them a feedback loop of lies, tears, stalled hopes, and broken dreams. She’s now better five years later, but she still has trouble trusting others and overcoming the residual grime of cynicism (manufactured in abundance during her six years with Tom) that still coats every new relationship.

I described addiction earlier as one of the two “Evil A’s,” but that doesn’t mean every Addict is evil. To the contrary, the thing that often compels women to stay with the Addict is his bruised humanity, the sense that there is goodness and maybe even greatness to salvage. By “evil,” I mean evil for you. Regardless of the Addict’s intent—and his intentions toward you may be entirely noble—the intentions just don’t matter when the result is always destruction.

This brings us to the other Evil A: the Abuser. So many women make the same mistake with the Abuser that they make with the Addict. They give so much time and energy to intentions that the results are obscured.

“Does he mean to hurt me?”

“Does he not love me?”

“What am I doing wrong?”

“What happened to him that made him this way?”

“Am I not understanding enough?”

“What can I do to make him stop, so we can go back to the good times we once shared?”

There may seem to be legitimate answers to some of these questions, but none of them matter. What’s left is
you
, your suffering, your self-doubt, and your heartbreak—over and over and over again. As Lundy Bancroft demonstrates brilliantly in her book about domestic abuse,
Why Does He Do That?
,
at the core of every abuser is a selfish sense of entitlement. Regardless of what caused it, the abuser has fostered a sense that it his anger that matters, his pain, and his feelings. Yours are little more than a footnote to his story. This is what makes it easier for him to hurt you repeatedly without any real sense of regret. His words may express recrimination that seems convincing, but his actions certainly don’t.

In the next chapter, we will analyze the Abuser more closely and glean some lessons to keep you away from terrible men of all stripes.

Chapter Ten

Fighting the Unfair Fight

Among its very helpful pages and links regarding domestic abuse, Helpguide.org offers two sentences that crystallize the problem:

“Domestic abuse, also known as spousal abuse, occurs when one person in an intimate relationship or marriage tries to dominate and control the other person. Domestic abuse that includes physical violence is called domestic violence.”
[xxiii]

Many women may not be aware of this important distinction. Actual physical violence isn’t a prerequisite for abuse. One can be a survivor of sustained, repugnant abuse without the abuser ever lifting a hand.

In the introduction of Lundy Bancroft’s superlative book on domestic abuse,
Why Does He Do That?
, she describes “abusers” in a similar way:

“I have chosen to use the term abusers to refer to men who use a wide range of controlling, devaluing, or intimidating behaviors. In some cases I’m talking about physical batterers and other times men who use or insult their partners, but never frighten or intimidate them.”
[xxiv]

Think about that definition in terms of your own past relationships. How well does it describe some, or maybe all, of them? You may never have considered yourself a victim of abuse because none of your exes ever physically hurt you. But did they belittle or harass you constantly with put downs, sarcasm, and cruel asides? Did they attempt to control your life with an iron fist?

To cite a commonly used but apt analogy, it’s like receiving a million little paper cuts. None of these behaviors in isolation could be considered life-threatening, but they all hurt. Moreover, when they occur en masse (as through sustained verbal abuse) they’re more than an annoyance; they’re torture. If this sounds like a frivolous use of the word, consider its primary textbook definition:

“Torture (noun): 1. The act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.”
[xxv]

Think about the times you’ve stayed with a mean-spirited, extremely petty, or insanely jealous man. The reason you might’ve stayed with him too long is that he didn’t reveal himself immediately. This kind of “man” reveals himself by degrees. He may be fine in those first few months. Hell, he may even look like an angel. However, as soon as things start to go in any direction besides the one he chooses, his true self begins to emerge, and the torture begins.

Though they may occasionally use abusive tactics, not every asshole is an abuser. Yet, for our purposes, we can confidently say that the opposite is definitely true. All of these terrible men have in common an innate belief that their feelings, desires, and motivations are of absolutely primary importance. This belief isn’t flexible. It runs to the core of their being, and it requires more than just simple reformation.

It requires complete rebirth.

What separates the abuser from the mere asshole (merely meaning “somewhat less noxious” in this case) is a question of tactics. The asshole is selfish and will pursue self-interest above all. He’s insensitive, but his insensitivity is largely an act of omission. He doesn’t consider your feelings, he rarely even thinks of them—if he ever even bothered to find out what they are. If you think of your relationship with him as a competition, you aren’t the opposing team; you’re a spectator. Cheer or boo as loud as you want, but you’ll never affect the outcome of the game.

The abuser treats you like the opposition. Any attempts you make to assert your own position will be met with hostility. Wanting what he doesn’t want makes you the enemy, and whether the abuser reveals himself quickly or gradually, he’ll treat you like one. Using the game analogy, the abuser isn’t even a competitor who respects you as an opponent. He views you with such contempt that he sees no need to respect even the basic rules of fair play. He wants to win, yes, but he wants more than that. He wants to humiliate you in victory.

Humiliation is a primary tactic of the abuser, given that it accomplishes a couple of different goals for him. First, it establishes a dynamic of willful hypocrisy that is one of his greatest allies. There are clear rules for behavior, but they’re there for your observance alone. Think of the times you’ve dated someone who, when among a group of your friends, became enraged if you didn’t show him the “proper” attention—i.e., anything other than hanging on his every word.

“Disrespect” was almost assuredly at the core of his anger. You brought him around a group of your friends and then “disrespected” him by “ignoring” him all night. The abuser is a big advocate of “respect.” Respect is so sacred to him that your failure to provide it results in a public scene better suited to a disaster movie—shouting, accusations, and the threat of imminent harm.

Nothing says “respect” better than calling you a cold, evil bitch in private, or in front of everyone you know.

Most self-help literature about abusers characterizes their behavior and tactics as having certain key components—criticism, control, humiliation, hypocrisy, intimidation, jealousy, possessiveness, disrespect, and misogyny. An abuser may mask most of these behaviors at first, but the last one often rears its ugly head without his consent. Some abusers may not even be consciously aware of how deeply their contempt, even hatred, of women goes. Their cycle of abusive behavior has been a constant in their lives for so many years that, to the abuser, it’s the norm, and you (along with many poor women before you) are the one who’s “abnormal.” In the context of our earlier competition analogy, the chronic abuser has built a strategy for “winning” his malignant ongoing campaign. The very fact that he’s not in jail or in perpetual isolation is the depressing proof that his warped mindset “works.”

A very close friend of mine, who we will call Lisa, was engaged to be married a few years ago. Her story sounds like a lurid Lifetime melodrama, but I assure you that every bit of it is true. If the initial back story seems like a digression, I’m sharing it to show just how much this girl suffered both prior to and during her year-long encounter with a sociopath, who I’ll call Matt.

Lisa’s story goes like this:

Lisa was earning six figures working for a highly prestigious west coast PR agency. Over the course of several years in well-paid positions, Lisa had managed, through personal investment and her 401K, to amass enough of a nest egg that retirement at forty-five wasn’t just a potential idea; it looked like a genuine inevitability—the reward for two decades of hard work, great money management, and diligent saving.

Then, on a Friday afternoon, a drunk driver on the freeway took it all away. Cutting across five lanes of speeding traffic, the driver (who was never prosecuted or even identified) caused a fourteen-car, high-speed crash that killed three drivers.

Despite odds heavily against her, Lisa survived. However, the crash left her in a wheelchair, where she was told she’d likely remain. After $240,000 worth of surgery (which her insurance company deemed “experimental” and thus didn’t cover), she began a slow process toward an unlikely recovery. Unable to work, without a car and now destitute, Lisa’s future looked dire as she attempted to put her life back together without any resources and cut off from her family three thousand miles away.

Salvation appeared to come from the unlikeliest of sources: an old high school boyfriend, Matt. She’d dated Matt off and on in her junior and senior years. When she left for college out of state, Lisa had parted with Matt. Then, as if guided by the kind hand of divine providence, Matt reappeared and offered his assistance just when Lisa needed it most.

Matt moved Lisa into his cavernous home in the Pacific Northwest. There she could rest, recuperate, continue her physical therapy, and start to rebuild her shattered existence. In the intervening years since high school, Matt had become a millionaire several times over from the spoils of his deceased father’s trust fund.

“Just rest and get better,” he said. “I will take care of you.”

The next few months demonstrated the extraordinary perseverance that had always been Lisa’s calling card. She would walk again, and far sooner than any of her doctors’ most optimistic predictions. During this time, she and Matt rediscovered the feelings they had shared in high school, and more.

Then, to sum it up in a familiar phrase, the wheels started to come off.

This started when Lisa had almost completed her physical therapy after many months of tireless zeal. She no longer needed crutches and could get in and out of chairs and bed without Matt’s assistance. The pain had lessened considerably, and she no longer needed to take the powerful painkillers her doctors had prescribed to prevent her from writhing in agony all day and nightly when she went to bed. Her whip-smart brain wasn’t a cloudy haze of pharmaceuticals for the first time since the accident, and she could see clearly again.

Lisa couldn’t understand why Matt suddenly seemed so moody. From her perspective, it was senseless that her sudden independence made him more irritable. Who on earth wanted to be beholden to a sad invalid who contributed little more than an extra mouth to feed and a mountain of woe?

But Matt was more irritable since her recovery, unmistakably so. When she asked if she might begin using one of his several cars to get around, he rebuffed her, saying she’d not healed well enough to drive. When Lisa protested, Matt shouted her down, declaring the matter closed. It was the first time since high school that Lisa was reminded of Matt’s occasional flares of temper, and, in that moment, she was afraid of him.

It was only the first of many such moments over the next four months, moments that came with alarming frequency. Lisa was a spitfire with a terrific mind who demanded an equal partnership in their life together, a fair position that nonetheless was met with, in order: surliness, sullenness, self-righteous anger and, finally, seething rage. The last stage didn’t turn violent at first, but it wasn’t long before Matt was consistently breaking objects that had great sentimental meaning to Lisa.

Things came to a head during a visit by one of Lisa’s oldest friends, a girl she knew from high school. One night, while out drinking at a favorite local pub, Lisa and Matt launched into a drunken shouting match over Lisa’s “disrespect,” manifested in her not “paying attention” (there it is again) to him. When Lisa refused to coddle his selfishness and walked away, Matt did something that shocked everyone; he grabbed her by the back of the neck and slammed her head into the bar with such fury that Lisa was knocked out instantly. She awoke to find her girlfriend crying over her as four bouncers and patrons held down a bellowing and crazed Matt.

After spending several nights away, Matt came home a seemingly different man—humble, remorseful, begging forgiveness, and promising his behavior was an ugly aberration that would never happen again. Matt agreed to start couples counseling and to stop drinking. Lisa agreed not to press charges for the incident at the bar.

It was a decision she’d soon regret.

It took about a month for Matt’s earlier regret to dissipate and reveal itself for what it had been all along: the desire to avoid accountability for his monstrous actions. At his core, Matt didn’t think what he’d done was wrong. His sour sense of privilege assured him it wasn’t his fault. He held on to the abuser’s perverse-but-common defense: she made him do it.

Matt started drinking again, heavily. Out together with friends one evening, Lisa and Matt got into another argument that ended with Lisa tossing a drink in his face and storming out. As she walked in the front door of their home alone, Lisa foresaw what awaited her and locked herself in their bedroom. Matt returned within the hour, drunk and in a frenzy. He made quick work of the locked door, kicking it in with such force that the wood tore like tissue paper. When Lisa tried to run, he grabbed her by the hair and, picking up a metal vase on the bed stand, swung it into the back of her head with all the force his 225-pound frame could provide.

Lisa awoke in a hospital bed. In addition to cracking her skull, Matt had stomped on her fingers as she lay helpless, breaking two on each hand. Once again, Lisa had sustained injuries that should’ve proven fatal; and once again, Lisa survived. As soon as she was able to stand, Lisa boarded a plane to her parents’ home in rural Georgia and never saw Matt again.

Leaning on his wealth and family connections, Matt evaded any legal trouble. Occasionally, he calls and leaves messages on Lisa phone. No matter how often she changes her number, Matt always finds it somehow. Sometimes he tries to coax her back, promising he’s not the same man. When the messages go unanswered, Matt promises he’ll finish the job he started and kill her.

The law has advanced somewhat by making physical abusers answer for their crimes against women. The law is less successful at prosecuting the emotional abuser, the one who leaves scars that are internal but nevertheless real. This is an unfortunate but understandable problem. You cannot tangibly demonstrate what the emotional abuser takes from you: your will, your self-respect, your connections to your friends and family, your ability to trust and experience intimacy, and your freedom of self-expression. As horrifying as they are—and I’m by no means suggesting that experiences like Lisa’s are preferable—bruises and broken bones stand as expert testimony to the terror and grotesquery that a battered woman suffers. At least there is a chance for bringing these miserable cowards to account, for some modicum of justice.