Thanks for sharing this Jess. It is so hard to be tied to the other parent until your youngest child is 18- despite child support not being paid. I was determined that my children be allowed to make their own minds up about my ex/their Dad and keep their illusions about him for as long as they needed to. I knew that he wouldn’t be able to control himself and would alienate them himself in time.
It’s never what we wanted for our children, but facing that it is a reality and seeking to counterbalance that is so important. Fortunately my children were all very small, 7, 4 and newborn when I escaped but still there are things that I wish that the eldest hadn’t seen and remembered . Accepting that ‘it is what it is’ and acting to protect them and provide a secure base with at least one parent who takes accountability is so important. The reward/payoff is to have healthy, well rounded adult offspring who engage in healthy relationships and are able to build their own strong families xx
I’ve been parenting with an abuser for over 17 years now. Everything you have said makes perfect sense and makes me feel less alone in what I’m experiencing. Thankfully I’m now divorced but the post separation abuse continues. Your words are a great reminder of how to be the best mum to my teens and to keep slogging through this shit storm. Thank you so very much for sharing your experience, it absolutely helps no end.
Thanks for sharing this Jess, it’s so helpful and informative. I’ll definitely be buying your book in the near future. I’m really looking forward to reading it.
I've just come across your substack, thank you so much for speaking to the living hell I have been in! I kicked my girls dad out for DV when I was 8 weeks pregnant with our second daughter (girls are now 6 and 7), and have been copping verbal and emotional abuse since then. He got remarried (he's very charming), and after a few particularly bad months (abuse via text) his new wife is now doing the between the households communicating so I don't have to contact him at all, and I have blocked his number. I'm finally, slowly, starting to realise the magnitude of 7 years of this abuse. Parenting with an abusive ex is absolutely no joke, its emotional torture, and just like the majority of DV its pushed under the rug and women are so expected to just 'be the bigger person'. All while being responsible for raising humans. Thank you
I’ve posted this on other articles and I will post it here:
Women do not ever, ever need to legally marry men.
1. A lot of women like to marry men because they feel it will make them stay. If you need to make someone stay, they aren’t interested, and you won’t have their full commitment, even if their body stays.
2. Sure, there are a lot of perks and benefits from the government for getting married, but this is in order to entrap women and to make it so we cannot live without being stuck to men. Get help from other community members and family, so you don’t need to depend upon the legal marriage.
3. Our social set up, in which a woman is financially and socially abandoned when she breaks up with a man, including by his family and friends, and where partners are expected to never ever see each other again, creates an all or nothing scenario in which there are dire consequences to breaking up.
He can also use the excuse that the consequences are dire for him (never see “his” children again, etc), to force her to choose the other extreme option, which is to be stuck with him, preferably living with him, and with constant service so that he’s not the one who wants to leave.
4. The convention that married partners must live together, in an isolated house, away from other couples, family, friends, etc., is part of this black and white set up, which makes it harder for a person to get rid of a bad partner. Sometimes people do not want a stark, divisive breakup, and would prefer some vague time apart to think things through. Sometimes people work better living apart, even if there are no problems.
It makes it harder for women to leave because they feel the options are to completely lose access to him forever over what may be just suspicions, or go on indefinitely.
Freedom oriented living arrangements would also discourage abusive partners from feeling “shut off” when victims take a step back and triggering them to become violent.
The current set up also encourages hobosexuality, in which people, consciously or not, shack up with people in order to not be homeless. Our society kind of already encourages this, even if most people don’t do it as directly and obviously as actual poor/homeless people do. We encourage children to get married so they can weather the burdens of life, share economic resources, etc.
There are actually laws in some states preventing a certain amount of unrelated adults from living together, even if they’ve paid for the house. Discouraging or making it difficult for people to live with friends, relatives, etc. is a deliberate and contemptible attempt to force women to rely on men upon threat of homelessness and death.
Ditto for being financially tied. Capitalism is set up so that people have to “earn” money and goods. Since babies cannot earn goods, therefore, their mothers rely on capitalism – which usually requires a relationship with a man who has a job– to allow their babies to survive. After a difficult pregnancy, a woman might not be able to work, or work is hard. She must also depend upon the man.
The economy is set up so that tax benefits, financial arrangements, etc., are much easier for couples than for siblings, friends, and whole communities. Capitalism encourages the monogamous, heterosexual relationship, especially one in which the wife does free, unpaid labor, which allows the man to go off and work for a rich boss and discourages him, or the rich boss, or the economy, from reciprocating her labor.
Consider the fact that it is very difficult to leave a marriage without consequences such as financial abandonment, lack of access to the children, a disabled wife not being survive without the husband caretaker, and loss of social ties, and we can see that marriage actually enslaves women.
In the USA, it was illegal for women to have their own credit card or resist marital rape until well within living memory. The people who lived under these types of laws, and perhaps some of those who authored or upheld them, are still alive and it is naive to think their attitudes aren’t still influencing how society runs.
5. The assumption that a married heterosexual couple will be having sex, and that sex always equals PIV (penis and vagina), which has the greatest potential of getting the woman pregnant and therefore even more dependent upon the man, legally, and also physically, if she has a hard pregnancy.
This is a conveyor belt designed to force women into the eventual meat grinder of “sex with a man“, which is encouraged to be as degrading to her and “beneficial” to him as possible. It also focuses as a kind of barrier door; if you want to be loved and cared for, not homeless, successfully have a child and provide for them, not be lonely, etc., you have to vow to service The Dick.
The idea that there even HAS to be a child in the first place, that it is seen as the ultimate or even only fulfilling thing in a woman’s life, also serves the purpose of getting her to bow down before Dick.
6. Monogamy prevents women from comparing and contrasting relationships with different men. Of course, I’m not saying that non-monogamy should include hierarchy, comparing one partner with another, or dumping one partner for a newer one. But it allows someone who is being abused to see that there are other options, and also allows for a wider network of close relationships that can help protect the victim.
Monogamy also encourages men to ignore, mistreat, and cast off everyone but “the chosen woman.” If you have one favorite, then there is an excuse to treat everybody else poorly, while looking like you are a swell guy. You can also provoke other women to chase you by implying that if they were “the favorite woman“, then they would have access to your heart.
You can triangulate women against each other by picking one as the wife and the other as the mistress, and convincing each one that the other is “the favorite,“ and hide the fact that the real favorite is yourself.
Monogamy as it currently is allows men to go on having sexually degrading attitudes toward women, because it is supposedly a plug to limit those attitudes, which would be acted upon the masses of women if not stopped up by the relationship with the one worthy woman. No one questions why those urges should be there in the first place, or why sexuality should, or even can, be mixed with hatred and indifference.
Monogamy does nothing to say that men should not sexually abuse women; it only states that sexual abuse perhaps shouldn’t, but still CAN,
be acted out upon the multitude of “whores“ (unchosen women) who are juxtaposed with the saintly wife. It naturalizes, even if doesn’t overtly encourage, male sexual degradation of women en masse, by saying that a woman’s qualities – this time her NUMBER- justify this abuse, rather than what she was wearing.
It implies that male sexual deviance is so natural that one need only add multiple women to the scene in order to activate it.
Marriage serves as a “stamp“ of approval that allows chosen women to appear “better“ than the multitudes of women who were not chosen, leaving the majority of women feeling like crap and thinking they have to earn the man’s approval somehow, or at least find another man who will approve of them.
A woman who wasn’t officially chosen by a man has a different label (“side piece,“ “other woman,” “mistress“…) than one who was chosen, cementing the idea that a man’s interest, even if it’s secretly just for the women’s sexual and domestic labor, literally changes a woman’s identity. This encourages the unchosen woman to believe she is being shut out from what is otherwise a great man and that she is missing out on all this love and commitment, rather than realizing that a man who treats most women like shit isn’t a great guy, regardless of how well he treats one singular partner.
Monogamy also allows men to turn into social shutoffs and misers, who now have an excuse not to interact with anybody except perhaps the wife and kids- if even them…
7. “Till death do us part,” sounds like it’s about romance and commitment, but what it really means is that she has to die to escape. Married men live the longest and married women die the soonest. I can’t think of a starker and more obvious proof that marriage is not beneficial to women, and that it is set up for men to leech off of us.
Instead of marriage, let us put focus on bonding with community friends, family, and other relationships. Buy a house with a couple of best friends. If you have children, there will be somebody who you know will actually help raise them properly. If the man is interested, and a proper parent, he can always come visit. Even if you do go off to live with him, keep one foot in the original house, so there is always somewhere to escape.
In short, marriage is not beneficial to either sex, but is especially degrading and enslaving toward women, and seems like it was deliberately set up like this.
I wish I’d seen this 10yrs ago! Still struggling to accept the coercion and emotional abuse I’ve experienced but the trauma in my boys is evident ( they are with their dad currently while I employ all the things you suggest and rebuild myself (again)). If it helps I’m a medical doctor who didn’t recognise her own aces and adhd until her 30-40’s and looked fantastic on paper and to the academics. my ex husband eventually worked out I was ‘ a chav in doctors clothing’ his words not mine. I’d say I’m a human journeying through life and there’s been a lot of heartbreak but also a lot of adventure. Would be great to chat if you wanted to reach out. Dr. Liz xx
This is excellent information, thanks for sharing!! I’ll be sharing with my social work clients and friends as this is a great resource, well written and clear advice for difficult situations 🫶🏼
Thanks for sharing this Jess. It is so hard to be tied to the other parent until your youngest child is 18- despite child support not being paid. I was determined that my children be allowed to make their own minds up about my ex/their Dad and keep their illusions about him for as long as they needed to. I knew that he wouldn’t be able to control himself and would alienate them himself in time.
It’s never what we wanted for our children, but facing that it is a reality and seeking to counterbalance that is so important. Fortunately my children were all very small, 7, 4 and newborn when I escaped but still there are things that I wish that the eldest hadn’t seen and remembered . Accepting that ‘it is what it is’ and acting to protect them and provide a secure base with at least one parent who takes accountability is so important. The reward/payoff is to have healthy, well rounded adult offspring who engage in healthy relationships and are able to build their own strong families xx
I’ve been parenting with an abuser for over 17 years now. Everything you have said makes perfect sense and makes me feel less alone in what I’m experiencing. Thankfully I’m now divorced but the post separation abuse continues. Your words are a great reminder of how to be the best mum to my teens and to keep slogging through this shit storm. Thank you so very much for sharing your experience, it absolutely helps no end.
Thanks for sharing this Jess, it’s so helpful and informative. I’ll definitely be buying your book in the near future. I’m really looking forward to reading it.
I've just come across your substack, thank you so much for speaking to the living hell I have been in! I kicked my girls dad out for DV when I was 8 weeks pregnant with our second daughter (girls are now 6 and 7), and have been copping verbal and emotional abuse since then. He got remarried (he's very charming), and after a few particularly bad months (abuse via text) his new wife is now doing the between the households communicating so I don't have to contact him at all, and I have blocked his number. I'm finally, slowly, starting to realise the magnitude of 7 years of this abuse. Parenting with an abusive ex is absolutely no joke, its emotional torture, and just like the majority of DV its pushed under the rug and women are so expected to just 'be the bigger person'. All while being responsible for raising humans. Thank you
I’ve posted this on other articles and I will post it here:
Women do not ever, ever need to legally marry men.
1. A lot of women like to marry men because they feel it will make them stay. If you need to make someone stay, they aren’t interested, and you won’t have their full commitment, even if their body stays.
2. Sure, there are a lot of perks and benefits from the government for getting married, but this is in order to entrap women and to make it so we cannot live without being stuck to men. Get help from other community members and family, so you don’t need to depend upon the legal marriage.
3. Our social set up, in which a woman is financially and socially abandoned when she breaks up with a man, including by his family and friends, and where partners are expected to never ever see each other again, creates an all or nothing scenario in which there are dire consequences to breaking up.
He can also use the excuse that the consequences are dire for him (never see “his” children again, etc), to force her to choose the other extreme option, which is to be stuck with him, preferably living with him, and with constant service so that he’s not the one who wants to leave.
4. The convention that married partners must live together, in an isolated house, away from other couples, family, friends, etc., is part of this black and white set up, which makes it harder for a person to get rid of a bad partner. Sometimes people do not want a stark, divisive breakup, and would prefer some vague time apart to think things through. Sometimes people work better living apart, even if there are no problems.
It makes it harder for women to leave because they feel the options are to completely lose access to him forever over what may be just suspicions, or go on indefinitely.
Freedom oriented living arrangements would also discourage abusive partners from feeling “shut off” when victims take a step back and triggering them to become violent.
The current set up also encourages hobosexuality, in which people, consciously or not, shack up with people in order to not be homeless. Our society kind of already encourages this, even if most people don’t do it as directly and obviously as actual poor/homeless people do. We encourage children to get married so they can weather the burdens of life, share economic resources, etc.
There are actually laws in some states preventing a certain amount of unrelated adults from living together, even if they’ve paid for the house. Discouraging or making it difficult for people to live with friends, relatives, etc. is a deliberate and contemptible attempt to force women to rely on men upon threat of homelessness and death.
Ditto for being financially tied. Capitalism is set up so that people have to “earn” money and goods. Since babies cannot earn goods, therefore, their mothers rely on capitalism – which usually requires a relationship with a man who has a job– to allow their babies to survive. After a difficult pregnancy, a woman might not be able to work, or work is hard. She must also depend upon the man.
The economy is set up so that tax benefits, financial arrangements, etc., are much easier for couples than for siblings, friends, and whole communities. Capitalism encourages the monogamous, heterosexual relationship, especially one in which the wife does free, unpaid labor, which allows the man to go off and work for a rich boss and discourages him, or the rich boss, or the economy, from reciprocating her labor.
Consider the fact that it is very difficult to leave a marriage without consequences such as financial abandonment, lack of access to the children, a disabled wife not being survive without the husband caretaker, and loss of social ties, and we can see that marriage actually enslaves women.
In the USA, it was illegal for women to have their own credit card or resist marital rape until well within living memory. The people who lived under these types of laws, and perhaps some of those who authored or upheld them, are still alive and it is naive to think their attitudes aren’t still influencing how society runs.
5. The assumption that a married heterosexual couple will be having sex, and that sex always equals PIV (penis and vagina), which has the greatest potential of getting the woman pregnant and therefore even more dependent upon the man, legally, and also physically, if she has a hard pregnancy.
This is a conveyor belt designed to force women into the eventual meat grinder of “sex with a man“, which is encouraged to be as degrading to her and “beneficial” to him as possible. It also focuses as a kind of barrier door; if you want to be loved and cared for, not homeless, successfully have a child and provide for them, not be lonely, etc., you have to vow to service The Dick.
The idea that there even HAS to be a child in the first place, that it is seen as the ultimate or even only fulfilling thing in a woman’s life, also serves the purpose of getting her to bow down before Dick.
6. Monogamy prevents women from comparing and contrasting relationships with different men. Of course, I’m not saying that non-monogamy should include hierarchy, comparing one partner with another, or dumping one partner for a newer one. But it allows someone who is being abused to see that there are other options, and also allows for a wider network of close relationships that can help protect the victim.
Monogamy also encourages men to ignore, mistreat, and cast off everyone but “the chosen woman.” If you have one favorite, then there is an excuse to treat everybody else poorly, while looking like you are a swell guy. You can also provoke other women to chase you by implying that if they were “the favorite woman“, then they would have access to your heart.
You can triangulate women against each other by picking one as the wife and the other as the mistress, and convincing each one that the other is “the favorite,“ and hide the fact that the real favorite is yourself.
Monogamy as it currently is allows men to go on having sexually degrading attitudes toward women, because it is supposedly a plug to limit those attitudes, which would be acted upon the masses of women if not stopped up by the relationship with the one worthy woman. No one questions why those urges should be there in the first place, or why sexuality should, or even can, be mixed with hatred and indifference.
Monogamy does nothing to say that men should not sexually abuse women; it only states that sexual abuse perhaps shouldn’t, but still CAN,
be acted out upon the multitude of “whores“ (unchosen women) who are juxtaposed with the saintly wife. It naturalizes, even if doesn’t overtly encourage, male sexual degradation of women en masse, by saying that a woman’s qualities – this time her NUMBER- justify this abuse, rather than what she was wearing.
It implies that male sexual deviance is so natural that one need only add multiple women to the scene in order to activate it.
Marriage serves as a “stamp“ of approval that allows chosen women to appear “better“ than the multitudes of women who were not chosen, leaving the majority of women feeling like crap and thinking they have to earn the man’s approval somehow, or at least find another man who will approve of them.
A woman who wasn’t officially chosen by a man has a different label (“side piece,“ “other woman,” “mistress“…) than one who was chosen, cementing the idea that a man’s interest, even if it’s secretly just for the women’s sexual and domestic labor, literally changes a woman’s identity. This encourages the unchosen woman to believe she is being shut out from what is otherwise a great man and that she is missing out on all this love and commitment, rather than realizing that a man who treats most women like shit isn’t a great guy, regardless of how well he treats one singular partner.
Monogamy also allows men to turn into social shutoffs and misers, who now have an excuse not to interact with anybody except perhaps the wife and kids- if even them…
7. “Till death do us part,” sounds like it’s about romance and commitment, but what it really means is that she has to die to escape. Married men live the longest and married women die the soonest. I can’t think of a starker and more obvious proof that marriage is not beneficial to women, and that it is set up for men to leech off of us.
Instead of marriage, let us put focus on bonding with community friends, family, and other relationships. Buy a house with a couple of best friends. If you have children, there will be somebody who you know will actually help raise them properly. If the man is interested, and a proper parent, he can always come visit. Even if you do go off to live with him, keep one foot in the original house, so there is always somewhere to escape.
In short, marriage is not beneficial to either sex, but is especially degrading and enslaving toward women, and seems like it was deliberately set up like this.
I wish I’d seen this 10yrs ago! Still struggling to accept the coercion and emotional abuse I’ve experienced but the trauma in my boys is evident ( they are with their dad currently while I employ all the things you suggest and rebuild myself (again)). If it helps I’m a medical doctor who didn’t recognise her own aces and adhd until her 30-40’s and looked fantastic on paper and to the academics. my ex husband eventually worked out I was ‘ a chav in doctors clothing’ his words not mine. I’d say I’m a human journeying through life and there’s been a lot of heartbreak but also a lot of adventure. Would be great to chat if you wanted to reach out. Dr. Liz xx
This is excellent information, thanks for sharing!! I’ll be sharing with my social work clients and friends as this is a great resource, well written and clear advice for difficult situations 🫶🏼
i often say these past 8 years of "leaving" the abuser are a nightmare i could have never even known to have.
♥️🕊️♥️