Why do we have children with bad men?

[Thornhill58]

I got married very young in the early 80's and I had 2 kids very quickly by the age of 20 I was divorced. My marriage was difficult from the start. He was angry, controlling and difficult all round. My questions are why are we still finding ourselves with bad relationships? Why do we have children with bad men? Why are we still in many cases dependent financially on men? Why do we still do just about all domestic chores and child care?
I read in MN everyday about bad relationships. I don't necessarily regret the marriage it was an experience that made me learn what I wanted in a man for the future. What I regret is having children as they suffered so much because of our stupidity.
Why do we bring children to bad relationships?

I don't want to blame women but we have responsibility to accept our bad choices. There are awful mothers out there too of course but if only we were able to make better choices we'll create less victims.
I hate to see what children go thru.
My ex was an angry man. He was abusive verbally and later he would pull my hair or push me.
He would accuse me of infidelity or call me a whore. I was never unfaithful.
Money plays a huge part too. If I were young again I'll concentrate on having a carrier. It's a trap that creates misery all round.

thegullfromhull. I'm thinking you've also been trapped like I was! You also know 'low level' abuse has an equally damaging effect, because there's nothing really low level about it.

Thornhill, I see what you're saying, but many women simply don't have a freedom to leave which doesn't involve significant punishment by both ex and State.

In that sense, leaving is an option, but not a valid choice.

Do women actively choose the men they want though? Or do they just get to say yes or no to the ones that choose them?

I agree about economic choices trapping women.

I will say though that sometimes those choices arent made by women. My example is one of those, my mum made the choice for me at the time, in that she encouraged me (15 at the time) to end my maths education. My teachers encouraged that as well. It was clearly communicated to.me that i would not be supported if i continued maths because "girls can't do maths" and it was a waste of time.

The outcome? I had no maths at the start of uni. This precluded me from any course that included maths. Including statistics.

Which meant I'd effectively been precluded from any professional degree except law. (Thankfully i didnt take that course as I'd have been unable to emigrate from my extremely misogynist country if i had...)

I did a languages degree and was discouraged from going further academically, so off I went with my BA in nothing.

Luckily I ended up in a high paid career path a decade later. I got there on my looks and wit tbh. In the nicest possible way, many women with the same story as mine dont have the looks and wit I have, through dumb luck and nothing else. They end up with a useless degree and student loan debt and the sense that their career is subordinate to others. Where does that leave them? Their choices have become seriously curtailed.

My sister is younger than me and was sent to a different senior school with a less misogynistic culture. She took maths all the way through and ended up in healthcare and now has a comfortable public sector job with an ironclad pension.

I continue in the private sector and I expect my career to wilt along with my looks. I have no profession and I make money based on how much old white men like to have me around. Much of that is dependent on how well manage their misogyny...

Women dont have as many choices as men. We just dont. So I'm suspicious of any worldview that casts women as the ones who need to change their behaviour in order to make the world a better place.

Lots and lots of abusive men are perfectly lovely and wonderful until they've hooked a woman in through marriage or children. Don't underestimate the affects of low-level psychological warfare that's waged in these relationships.

Why are there so many abusive men, is the real question. Why is society geared towards allowing them access to the next generation of children to train up into abusive patterns? Why are women blamed for everything?

Because patriarchy. What @TooTrueToBeGood said.

Many of the posts on this thread are veering dangerously towards blaming women for their choices without considering the context of those choices. Women are conditioned by the society they live in, by their experiences which may include abuse or "just" sexism and all the pressures that go along with it.

I hope we can be compassionate to ourselves and to other women for making "bad" choices.

(Also, a more flippant answer... given the ratio of good:bad men, if women limited themselves to the good ones there would be a sharp decline in the birth rate!)

I agree with PPs who say it economics. Out of my friends it's the ones who wasn't good money who didn't settle for a crappy man. They could house themselves etc independently. I was very single with many dates and flings until I met my DH. But all that time I was financially stable due to my career so I didn't need a man to split the bills with 🤷🏻‍♀️

I just wish we as society were able to raise better individuals. I hear so many abuse stories and I wonder how we can be in 2019 and still experiencing the same things as my mother or I experienced.
Women have more opportunities now I just wish more and more women were empowered to create their own wealth and not fall into the trap of misery and often poverty.

It is difficult to separate all the factors clearly and give a definite I've answer to the OPs question. Overall I blame patriarchy etc and things have improved but we as women eed to free ourselves from the ideas we absorb about marriage and kids etc. Romance and being single and no kids. The value we place on ourselves (or is placed by society) creates that snare and keeps us there. It is down to us to tell men to go fuck themselves and mean it.
The laws need to change drastically to bot leave women worse off in a bad marriage.
So much has to happen but we as women need to be talking about it, finding answers and pushing as hard as we can. I genuinely do not expect any man to support womens rights, not deep down. It means they will lose out. And I dont think they would even countenance some of the more shall we say, extreme ideas.

It isn't always or necessarily frequently economics. I have known attractive women on six figure salaries make bad choices. It was self esteem and not being aware and hence spotting the signs earlier enough to get out before children.

I don't think it is patriarchy. I think it is how we as a society parent our sons. The lovely men out there were (my theory is) taught to be kind and loving and lovely, to think for themselves, to have high self esteem themselves and to understand the benefits and happiness that comes from choosing to love and be loved and that women are equal - either because they had parents like that or because someone took the time to teach them, and love them like that when they were little.

Patriarch is created by something. It is too late to wait to tell men to fuck off when you and they are adults. Things need to change early in their lives when their brains are being wired up and we as women have a role to play there, going forward (while also telling the adult men who behave badly in our lives now to fuck off - both)

Not sure you know what patriarchy means.... the way "we" raise our sons as a society is literally what patriarchy is... duh.

Also not sure you can say that economics isnt usually a factor and then reference choices of women earning 6 figure salaries... those women are the top 1% of earners. 99% of women dont earn at that level. Economics is rarely a non factor for women when it comes to relationships

@Faith50

That's exactly it. I was so grateful for the creeps' attention but I don't know why

Women have more opportunities now

Do we? Are you sure? Women have always worked and even achieved to the highest level - their achievements just weren't celebrated very loudly. Or a man received the credit on paper. 🤔

I just wish more and more women were empowered to create their own wealth and not fall into the trap of misery and often poverty.

Who would need to empower us, though, and would the turkey really vote for Christmas?

Quite often they don't become bad men until after you have a baby.
My ex was lovely until we had our first child. He changed overnight. We had been together years before that point and were in our 30s

He reverted to loveliness just in time to concieve subsequent children. I convinced myself he was suffering from periodic depression. Because I wanted more children and didn't have enough fertile years left to find someone else.

He was, I discovered later, suffering from periodic mistresses, not depression.

I am not convinced that modelling good relationships helps either. Both my parents and exes parents had good strong marriages. His father would never have treated his mother as ex treated me. My father would also never have behaved that way. I don't know why ex thought it acceptable.

Yes, I worry for my own dd. Seeing controlling behaviour from her dh and she has a good career

We think it's normal, don't we? At least I did when I had DS1.

I also think we normalise it too fucking much - especially "low level" shitness like men not bothering to do housework, barely doing any childcare, etc, look at any typical parenting board frequented by women and you find women who are exhausted, run down and burned out from doing the work of two people alone, often struggling along on a pittance as well because "it's his money" - and if you do by some accident end up with a decent man who does pull his weight you're not supposed to mention it in case people get jealous/you're supposed to express mass gratitude for what a rare special flower he is. And I get it, because DH/DS2's dad is phenomenal in comparison to DS1's dad and makes my life an order of magnitude easier/better, but seriously - I want to shout it from the rooftops sometimes because there are STILL millions of women who haven't had children yet, who want them, but are with shit men, and thinking that it's normal or that's just what men are like or they haven't experienced a situation as extreme in terms of workload but also divided roles, inequality, vulnerability, reliance that motherhood turns out to be, so they haven't noticed because until you needed it, it didn't matter.

@PicsInRed women have more opportunities than ever before. They can study what they want and work in any field they choose. I'm not naive to think that we have achieved true equality. I don't think I'll see that in my lifetime but I certainly think many women specially in the develop world are achieving more and more thru education and choosing when and if they want to be mothers. Theresa May and Angela Merkel for example achieved high office and financial independence but chose not to be mothers.
Empowerment can come from teachers, friend, family etc.

I also think we normalise it too fucking much - especially "low level" shitness like men not bothering to do housework, barely doing any childcare, etc, look at any typical parenting board frequented by women and you find women who are exhausted, run down and burned out from doing the work of two people alone, often struggling along on a pittance as well because "it's his money" - and if you do by some accident end up with a decent man who does pull his weight you're not supposed to mention it in case people get jealous/you're supposed to express mass gratitude for what a rare special flower he is.

^^This with all the fucking bells on.

Privileged women have always been educated, always walked the hallways of power and office. Always.

Female scientists, explorers, leaders - it's really a myth that women of yesteryear were huddled in a corner awaiting the next beating or impregnation.

We've had temporary legal respite from some forms of oppression, but most remain in practice. Ok, we can have a bank account in our own name. Brill. But get a mortgage when pregnant, rent privately as a single mother? Get justice for rape not murder if you rape her first? Nah, it's not so different.

Poor women always worked their fingers to the bone to feed their kids, still do and always will.

I’m a man who refuses to accept that everything is entirely the fault of men whilst recognising that both historically, and in this day or age, that women seem to still be on the badder end of the deal.

But people do have to take responsibility and just palm their woes off on the other as if they never participated in the build up. I say this knowing some bloke from the pub who whilst having good chat seems to think all women are evil and you can’t trust anyone of them

@PicsInRed you sound very negative about our prospects as women. Margaret Thatcher was a grocers daughter she didn't come from privilege.
I have highly educated friends some are the main bread winners. That's encouraging.
Some of them are married to awful men or were married. Sadly their children suffered as a result.
My wish is to have less victims so we need to wish better for ourselves and the only way is thru education and financial independence.

I think your dh doesn't always bring out the best in you and you end up in a downward spiral

An abusive childhood.

Even the most abusive ex only 'crossed the line' with me once (by strangling me).

Right up until that point, nothing any of them had done, up to and including nonconsensual sex, was ever as bad as a childhood of never being touched, ignored for days on end, informed indirectly that 'of course I don't love her', knowing that because I was immune to fists or my room being trashed in a rage at 2am, any transgressions would be taken out on this dog with a fucking wooden metre stick, being told I deserved to be bullied at school because I was fat, ugly and stupid (when underweight, not ugly and the brightest kid in the school).

Why weren't they as bad? Because when they weren't being actively awful, they wanted to be with me, they wanted to touch me, they liked me enjoying sex, and they couldn't tilt their head, give a twinkly laugh and say how wonderful I was to the audience whilst telling me clearly through cold, dead eyes that I had better hope the retribution was just a punch to the side of the head and not a month of 2-3am screaming attacks.

And, when it came down to it, they didn't have to like or be kind to me - I didn't expect them to, as even the person society told me should was absolutely clear I wasn't worth either.