My 30 YO DS has been in a relationship with a woman for around 2 years.
It’s always been volatile with big bust ups every 3 - 4 months, followed by forgiveness and getting back together. Luckily, they don’t live together or share any assets.
She’s always been quite high maintenance inasmuch as the relationship seems to have been based on her wants and needs rather than his. He’s willingly driven at all times of the day and night to see her, takes her where she wants and is on a substantially higher salary, but happily subsidised her lifestyle as he wanted to be with her - and entirely his choice.
However, she constantly puts him down, tells him he’s lazy and boring, that she could do so much better, that she could have any other man she wanted. She’s accused him in the past of trying it on with his best mate’s GF, has on several occasions got very drunk and screamed and sworn at him in public, so much so that he’s walked out and left her at different venues as she was being so confrontational and she’s also rung his friends and told them that he’s hit her.
Things came to a head on Sunday night. We received a phone call from him saying she had physically attacked him as he was cleaning up his carpet after she had just thrown her glass of red wine at him following yet another row. She also threw a heavy ornament against a wall causing damage and then tipped a whole tub of food into his fish tank which could have killed them. I know this sounds a bit pathetic, but it’s his hobby and he takes great pleasure in it.
Luckily, he called the police as she had punched him repeatedly in the head and scratched his face. How he didn’t retaliate, I don’t know. The police arrested her, and as she was kicking off, had to be restrained, they kept her overnight, took a statement from him and photos of his face - which is an absolute mess. He won’t press charges and she maintained during questioning that he had done it to himself (he has no marks whatsoever on his knuckles) She isn’t being charged but will have to attend a CARA course (?)
My fear is already he’s questioning whether he should have called the police, that if she gets a caution it may affect her application for citizenship (she is a foreign national with pre settlement status) and that would be his fault and he would feel guilty and that when things were good, they were great! A condition of her bail is that she doesn’t contact him, his family or friends or go to his property, but I’m really not sure about his resolve and I truly fear that she has now crossed a threshold that if they renew this relationship, she might actually kill him next time.
How do I support him and be firm without either alienating him or pushing him back into her clutches? He has a very responsible job in which others lives depend on him and he’s very capable in his professional life, but seems to be under some kind of thrall to this woman and in the past, has forgiven her whenever she ‘promises’ it won’t happen again.