It's heartening to see that at least a few posters see where I'm coming from - I was a little worried that I'd lost the baby along with the bathwater by letting my stubbornness drag me into a petty tit for tat argument which was never my intention.
To attempt to answer some of the questions, I'm not sure how women can prevent their partners from leaving them tbh. There are so many idiosyncratic situations, each different from the next. I guess my point was a more peripheral one that when women do find themselves in this situation there are still likely many things they can do which may contribute to a better outcome for their sons.
In many instances I think the adolescent male will still have his difficult stage and be an unreasonable little bugger, but this is a lesser problem than him turning into a dangerous adult, especially if be 'turns out ok' before reaching full adulthood.
This was certainly the case with myself. My mother was extremely overbearing and a downright bully to my extremely passive and gentle father. She would frequently lock him out of the house when in a bad mood (forcing him to stay in a hotel) and would do many other spiteful things like hide the router/change the login when he needed to upload his work, hide his car keys in the morning until he 'apologised' (grovelled) for some ridiculous made up infringement, etc. Not on the scale of domestic violence etc but it turned him into a shell of the man he was over a couples of decades and he still seems so heartbreakingly weary. It really affected me growing up in that environment, especially when I had issues which I felt I couldn't discuss for fear of 'adding to the problems'.
It made me grow up with a warped, angry view of the world and I could easily have become a violent individual had I not vented my frustration with drugs/alcohol and taking up thai boxing, which was ultimately one of the most stabilising influences on my life. By my early teens I had already decided that I wasn't going to be a 'pushover' like my father and it led me to have a very confrontational and aggressive attitude.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression at the age of 16 and I used to sit in my bedroom drinking bottles of Jack Daniels and smoking weed out my window whilst my mum spent the entire evening screaming at my dad for some minor transgression downstairs. This then progressed to taking coke, ecstasy, acid and anything else I could get my hands on by the time I was 18, this being funded by me selling weed at college.
Despite all this, I knew that my mum loved me and would do anything for me, even if she wouldn't admit it, and when I grew out of my angry stage I became a fairly decent member of society with a stable career, a close friend group and a loving partner. I just realised that my mum was an imperfect individual like we all are in some ways and our relationship improved dramatically.
But it's easy for me to see how other young men in my situation who weren't as blessed with a good education (or got into the wrong company) and who didn't find an outlet for their anger could become a real problem for society, and I also realise how much an effect one's mother can have on the way they turn out, maybe even more so if they're the sole parent.