…and you stay with him anyway…why? Or if you left him, what made you leave?
To be clear, I’m not talking about unreasonable families who take offence to innocent parties here- I mean when there’s good reason.
We’ve always been a very close family, three sisters and a single mother. My father was abusive and violent, and left when my younger sister (YS) was very little- there is eight years between YS and my older sister (OS) who is close in age to me. This has made us as a family more sensitive to potentially abusive men, and I also think it has affected YS’s judgment when it comes to men, as she doesn’t really remember how my father treated my mum and always got on fine with him, staying in contact as she grew up, very blind to the side of him we all saw before he left.
For the last two years YS has been dating a guy that none of us like. We liked him fine at first, but there was an ‘incident’ in which he was drunk, abusive and physically aggressive- though not quite to the point of hitting her. She broke up with him over this, but they got back together the next day, causing us all a lot of upset. It then transpired this was not the first such incident.
It’s been a year since that happened, and it’s been a horrible year. At first none of us would talk to him, but my mum is far too soft and caved quickly, letting him stay over again (YS still lives at home). Me and OS stayed firm for as long as we could, but an uneasy truce has been called since the end of last year. He’s apparently been in counselling to deal with ‘how he manages stress’ and YS swears he’s been fine since- although really, who knows as we never heard the extent of it in the first place.
The issue at this stage though is not so much him being unpleasant, more just that they are terrible together. She changes around him and becomes snappy, rude and short. She’s fine on her own- although she has started being more unpleasant to my poor mum. They are also not very nice to each other- I’ve seen some of the texts they send each other, I wouldn’t speak like that to my worst enemy. She is stubbornly obstinate to how we all feel about it, and pushes blindly on, insisting he is invited to group events, trying to get him added to our family group chat… she sulks or gets hysterical if she ever feels we are excluding him, and she will not stop bringing him up in conversations.
I hesitate to call it an abusive relationship, as I know so many suffer very real pain, and they are both early twenties so there is a lot of extra ‘drama’ that clouds the truth, but they are flat out bad together, and she knows none of us like it- so I can’t wrap my head around why she stays? If she was really happy I would keep my nose out, but she’s not, and I can’t understand what she’s getting out of it all! I really just wanted to ask if anyone is in this situation, or has been, what kept you there?
Congrats if you made it to the end!