To ask why woman stay?

[doonnaKay]

My mother stayed in an unhappy marriage. It wasnt bad enough to leave I guess, but now that shes older I'm sad that she tolerated her unhappiness for so long.

I'm in my 40s and have settled into a life where I do not have a partner, but im very content. I'm trying to to understand why she stayed. She would have been financially okay if she had left. Her kids would have been better off not growing up in such an unhappy house.

I'm just wondering why do woman stay? They all have their own reasons, but there must be overlap.

I'm just trying to understand, sorry in advance is my wording or questions offend xx

Because women of our mother’s generation had very little choice. They were dependent on men for financial security so had to put up with the bullshit. We don’t have to. We have legal rights that our mothers didn’t, we don’t need a man to sign off on us opening bank accounts, buying or renting property, we can have our husbands charged with rape, we can get a job and not be fired for getting pregnant. And so on. Add to that the ‘shame’ of divorce that made women feel like they were a failure if they ‘couldn’t keep a man’.

We are free of all these restrictions. So we don’t stay.

Socially excluded as a single mother.
Because the dad having the kids on their own meant the kids aren't safe, whereas by staying mum can protect the kids and ve there for them.
Because we've been told by society up until very recently that single mum's bring up criminal etc. They are never well rounded human beings.
Financial worries- plan was to do it as a pair, the worry of doing it alone is nerve-wracking.
Because if the relationship is abusive the woman has been beaten down over many years, lacks confidence and didn't have the support network we can reach out to now... DA charities,police more aware, etc.
Post separation abuse is waaaaaaay worse. Believe me.
More opportunities for jobs now to work around the kids.
Because ended a marriage you are labelled as beind a failure.
Endless list.
Never mind the emotional side.

Mine because she didn’t want the ‘stigma’ of being divorced (even after infidelity) as she perceived it. Also, because she likes living in a big, expensively furnished house with lots of foreign holidays and no money worries. I will never understand why they didn’t split decades ago. They’d have been so much happier on their own or with someone else.

She would have been financially okay if she had left.

I'd say she was lucky then.

Now, with the cost of living, it often takes two full time salaries to run one house, so many couples stay together because they can't afford two separate houses on one income for each.

I think sometimes because of the sheer upheaval, add financial implications and it can seem too much to deal with. Better the devil you know .

• no money
• no home
• no family/ friend support
• worried about losing kids or kids being alone with dad for extended periods
• terrible mental health/ relationship history so they think they still love the abusive partner
• don’t think the abuse is “that bad” or kid themselves the kids won’t notice
• combination of the above…

Because leaving is the hardest thing a woman will ever do. A woman is killed every 3 days trying to leave. My fight lasted 10 years and only ended when he died.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. My Grandma died recently just short of 100. She got married a kind of arranged marriage (but not religious). Contraception failure resulted in my mother (don’t get me started on the fact they told her that). For various reasons the marriage didn’t work out. Grandma and Grandpa divorced. Grandma worked and got a career. Told me how difficult it was to be a working Mum at this time. They moved away from London and she brought a lovely house. She died a very well off woman. She was the strongest and most independent woman I’ve known.

Have you not asked her why?

Depends what you mean by unhappy.

If it was just the romantic love died and they became essentially housemates, but were fond of one another and got along well, I can see why someone would stick around.

If it was toxic, violent, unpleasant, abusive then it’s less obvious.

Would she have been financially ok?

I'm 41, and I think a lot of single mothers in my mum's generation had it pretty hard.

I also think there's a lot of conditioning there. Marital rape was legal in England and Wales until 1991 - I can't imagine how much that must have got inside people's brains when they were figuring out what a healthy relationship looked like. I certainly remember in the 1990s there was a lot of tutting and whispering about 'broken homes' and divorced women, and a very strong implication that unless you were being beaten black and blue, you really should stay, and if you were, then 'it takes two'.

My dad is presumably similar in age to your dad, and I hope to goodness he's not representative, but as an adult it has shocked me to realise how firmly he believes that divorce is a truly terrible thing and children are always better in homes with two parents. He once told me (and my daughter's other parent and I are not together, FWIW) that he considered splitting up after you've had children to be 'breaking a promise to a child'. He would clearly have made my mother feel like an awful parent if she had considered leaving.

I also think that (some) women in my mum's generation, and yours, were simply not taught to believe that their happiness was very important.

I stayed because i thought that i was doing the right thing for the kids keeping the “ family” together. Biggest mistake i ever made, i was actually allowing our toxic marriage to damage them! I eventually realised this and ended it but staying so long is one of my biggest regrets.

To be fair to the OP, I can't imagine asking my mother this either.

She would simply deny all understanding of the question, or she would 'pull rank' and say how she kept her marriage going.

I think the longer you stay, the harder it is to extricate yourself, and the more things you would be forced to re-evaluate about your life. That's really hard to do. I can't imagine wanting to admit, in my 70s or whatever the OP's mother is, that I knew I'd hurt my children by staying in an unhappy marriage, but I'd done it anyway. It'd take someone quite brave to admit that.

I am an intelligent woman who works in the field of DV and social care. And I truly did not realise leaving my husband was an option until professionals sat me down and talked me through what they perceived the barriers to be in a concerted attempt to help me see my reality. My children and I were in real danger and we lived with abuse from him for years and years. I was so so deeply gaslit. I look back in utter horror. I could not see it while in it.

Thanks for sharing your experience and I am pleased that you are now free.
I totally understand why domestic violence wears you down and you become a shadow of yourself.
I appreciate why some people simply don't understand.

Even now, many people stay cos they don't wish to break up a family

And two adults can live cheaper than one

Social pressure to be married. Shame / stigma of divorce

If the unhappiness isn't linked to something dramatic like cheating or abuse, then it can be hard to justify breaking up the home. It can feel selfish, especially if the DC seem happy. And you only really know if they were happy once they've grown up and can tell you. For every adult that says they wished their parents had split, there'll be one who was deeply affected by their parents divorce.

For that generation it was really hard: the divorce laws didn’t support women leaving in most cases so leaving a bad marriage could leave a woman destitute. There was a huge amount of moral stigma attached to divorce until a few decades ago (and in some branches of some faiths it wasn’t possible at all). A woman who had initiated a divorce would have been regarded as a home wrecker, one on the receiving end would have been pitied.

It took real balls to leave a marriage in my mother’s generation.

Its far far easier now, thankfully, due to legal and social protections but even now its hard: there’s still a likely financial burden and the guilt over “breaking up the family”.

There are still an awful lot of women and children trapped in abusive, neglectful or just sad situations because of the widespread view that keeping a dysfunctional family together is more important than the happiness of the individuals in that family.

On any given day, here on MN you can read posts by women who are reluctant to leave unhappy marriages. They typically give their reasons why.

Women are not a monolith, there is not a single reason, although there are recurring themes.

She would have been financially okay if she had left. Her kids would have been better off not growing up in such an unhappy house.

I think you're being very rose tinted specs about how easy and much better it would have been if she left. It could just as easily have resulted in a different kind of unhappy home.

If your mum had "broken up her family" in the 80s or 90s she absolutely would have been on the receiving end of nasty, judgemental and probably abusive behaviour from the people around her.

Because even when you resent them completely for leaving you to carry 90% of the load, the thought of taking on that extra 10% still feels overwhelming.

My DC have additional needs, so caring for them is hard. I stayed way longer then I should have because I was afraid of doing it alone. And having seen his 'parenting', I knew it would be 100% on me after we separated (which it now is, he sees them for a few hours twice a month, and needs help from his parents to do that).

My parents stayed together too. I think for my dad, he wasn’t going to leave us kids with my mum as she had quite a severe mental illness at the time. For my mum, she couldn’t be bothered with ‘the hassle’ of it. It meant us kids growing up with a lot of arguing, but I guess the alternative could have been worse, or could have been a lot better.

I left father of my DC though as I wasn’t putting my kids through that and have a good relationship with my ex meaning I have to put a lot of hurt in the past, for the kids benefit. They have never known (all young adults now) coming home to an atmosphere or lying in bed with their hands over their ears crying because of the shouting. All they’ve known is a peaceful home. I don’t understand why women stay when it’s at the point that DC are affected. Well I do, because some are worried about children left alone with an abusive parent, or financial reasons. But I still think leaving is the right thing to do most of the time.

Money as in financial stability
Not wanting to have kids upset
Fear of being alone

I understand your frustration op my mum stayed in an abusive marriage until he died.

But as others have said for older generations there were fewer choices, less support - practically socially and financially

There was also a stigma to divorce

Even now as a poster said upthread it is VERY hard to even prevent abusive fathers from having unsupervised access to do inc overnight

I'm 54 this year and became a single mum following divorce this century - still experienced a LOT of stigma and snottiness, socially, from govt/drs/school etc struggled greatly financially. Financially I'm still crawling out from under and my daughter grown and left home.

There's no legal aid for divorce if there's no proven abuse (and abuse can be bloody hard to prove! Even physical let alone emotional/financial) and if you can't afford to divorce that leaves you financially and legally tied to your ex.

There have been several cases in recent years of exes murdering their own kids JUST to hurt their ex.

As a pp said the stats on abuse victims being killed when trying to leave are horrifying - a big reason why my mum stayed (dad was army with serious connections worldwide!) his threats were not empty.

It was drilled into me as a child that divorce was a failure, or character flaw. My parents were a generation older than most and they stayed together because they loved each other and my mam had never worked. They looked down upon any of my older cousins who got divorced. Very vocally.
Most women on here don’t leave when they should. I’m determined to never be in that position again. I won’t marry or share finances with a man, which always gives me options.