A guy I met on an online dating site said, when I asked what he was passionate about (eharmony is weird that way) that his passion was putting a stop to abuse of women, children, and the elderly.
Nice!
So when we started talking, he asked why I’d gotten divorced, and I told him it was abuse. I asked him what he was doing to end abuse and he said it was a long story he’d tell me later. He didn’t tell me yet. But this morning I had an email from him asking what kinds of things I’d done that made my ex that mad. He said, “Well, I always live by what President David O. McKay said that the only time you ever raise your voice to your wife or kids is to yell “Fire! Get out of the house!”
Cute. 
But for a guy whose passion is ending abuse, he clearly doesn’t get it 
This was my reply…
Interesting that you ask what he’d get mad about. You’re looking to stomp out abuse, right? You need to do your research.
But I don’t blame you for not understanding. It took me ten years to figure out it wasn’t about him losing his temper — not at all. In fact he was all the more cruel when he kept a very even tempered demeanor. Abuse is not getting frustrated. Abuse is not raising your voice. It’s not even losing control. This is abuse:
He would control me
by pretending to lose control over himself
over something I’d done/said/been
in order to make me believe
that I was the only one
who could control his behavior
by doing/saying/being
exactly what he wanted.So, as for the things he claimed to get upset over? Sometimes it was that I’d made the dinner wrong, or didn’t help him the way he wanted. Other times I spent too much on the groceries. Sometimes it was that I simply wasn’t pretty enough, or thin enough. Sometimes (but not for long…) it was that I sang too much. Once it was that I went to the hospital too many times with false labor (that warranted being pushed out onto my mom’s curb, by the way, just a few hours before that baby finally came). Once it was that I was too dang happy about the beautiful morning! Granted, most of these didn’t end in physical violence. He rarely physically hurt me, but he would do whatever it took (even physical violence, as necessary) to _control_ me.
Guess what I did wrong last time he physically hurt me? I flirted too much. With him. On the way home from our Valentine’s Day date. I’d reached over and put my hand on his thigh, and I got slugged, hard, in the arm for it. He knew I’d said I was at my breaking point and that, after all the counseling and therapy, the next time he did something like that, he would lose me. So he knew he was in trouble. So when I said, “WHAT WAS THAT FOR??” (See, yelling after you’ve just been given a dead arm … is that abusive? You tell me.) He looked over and smiled and said, “What was what for?” I said, “YOU JUST HIT MY ARM, HARD!” “No I didn’t. I was just changing gears.”
He denied it over and over again, pretended nothing at all had happened. Didn’t even say “Oh sorry, that must have hurt, but it truly was an accident.” Pretended it was all in my head. When the bruises showed up, he admitted something had happened. Bought me roses. Alternated between stories of it being just an accident and admitting he’d been upset and “lost his temper.” Cried and begged me not to leave. Anyway. I’d go into the details but suffice it to say, he never had any problems “losing his temper” when he was trying to make me stay. I didn’t forgive him immediately this time, which is probably what kept him on good behavior for so long. I really believed that since it’d been more than a month since our last incident, he might have changed. So I gave him another chance and loved him with everything I had left. The very next day he told me, “I had to hit you that night. It’s just the best way to communicate with you.” And at that point I told him to leave.
Does that change your perspective on abuse at all?
