A friend of mine once told me that some women don’t know what a good relationship feels like. She said it’s when you are NOT under constant stress and fear of what your partner will do next, how he will find another reason to get angry and fight, demean you, or create another situation where you will be forced to deny yourself something you wish for, else he will punish you.
This is important for Indian women to know. Let me give some examples:
A woman tells her mother that her husband is not “allowing” her to meet her friends. Her mother gives her an example of another man who got so angry that his wife went to meet her friends that he did not come home for two days.
A woman’s arranged marriage is fixed. She hardly knows the groom. The groom lives in another city. The groom’s mother mandates that the newlywed wife live with her in-laws for a couple of months before joining her husband in the new city. The woman is hesitant, but her family gives her examples of women who took care of their in-laws all their lives while their husbands worked in another city.
A woman tells her family that her husband slapped her. She is given the example of another aunt who used to get beaten up but is now happy because her husband mellowed down over the years.
In all these examples, these self-proclaimed counsellors, often women, are providing harmful advice because they believe THIS is normal. Physical abuse, denying a woman the freedom to meet friends and family or pursue hobbies, and forcing her to live with her in-laws while her husband won’t even tolerate his own in-laws for a day—these things might happen, but they are not right.
All these self-appointed advisors who measure men by these standards and make women compete over who is more miserable should know this: they do not know what a good relationship is like. They only know what a bad one looks like—one involving threat, lack of safety, lack of respect, and lack of partnership.
It is sad that they went through it or saw others face it. But they stop being victims when they compel or convince another woman to be a victim.
They become enablers.
Break the cycle.