by Valentine Logar

Created on: January 12, 2008   Last Updated: January 13, 2012

First, let me say that I am a survivor of an extremely abusive first marriage. The abuse in that marriage covered the gamut including emotional, psychological, physical, and financial. That relationship nearly killed me and certainly left me broken in body and spirit. My survival and eventual recovery was a very long road that caused me to think hard about the reasons behind why I stayed for so long. I was very young at the time of my marriage, fifteen to be exact; I stayed for nearly three years.

Why do women tolerate abuse is a difficult question to answer? The question assumes that all women are the same and their reasons for staying with an abusive partner will always be the same. The question assumes that abuse takes the same form, always. How does one answer a question that cannot be properly formulated because of all the variations of the human condition? How does one begin to answer this broad question with a single response that might make sense? Although the question as posed is why women tolerate abuse from the men in their lives, it should be noted that men can be and are abused.

Others answer with their personal experience, but when any of us do this, we are setting ourselves up for judgment by those who have never found themselves abused. This judgment is one of the reasons many women don't leave their abusive relationships, humiliation, and fear of social embarrassment. If we rely upon experts, those who have studied this phenomenon we might find some of the answers but would still be left wondering, why reasonably intelligent women would allow themselves to be abused. The truth is there are as many answers as there are questions. People who find themselves in an abusive relationship stay for their own reasons but it seems that there are always some consistencies. The truth is that these relationships are symbiotic in nature with each person gaining something from them even while they lose their souls.

Why do those who are abused stay? Why would a woman tolerate abuse? There is a process to the relationship between the abuser and the abused. By the time the first slap happens, the abused woman is so wrapped into the relationship there is nowhere to turn, nowhere to go. They are convinced that the abuser is the only one who loves them, the only one who understands them and most decisive the only one who needs them. Abusers know how to set their hook. They know how to cull the herd for that person who will respond to their attentions in the

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