Anonymous wrote:My entire life I have been a victim and/or witness of domestic violence. The male whose sperm joined with my mother’s egg to make me then later tried to beat me out of her womb when I was not yet fully formed. That was the nature of our relationship for 31 years until I ended it altogether. He told me repeatedly over the decades what a worthless POS stupid f***ing c**t I was and how nobody would ever love me or want me and how he wished I’d never been born - but at some point I recognized that since he’d tried killing his first wife by nearly strangling her to death and beat my elder half brother and sister with great frequency, the problem clearly didn’t originate with me.

I grew up into a domestic violence advocate and then an attorney who prosecuted domestic violence crimes and other crimes against women and children. I also grew up with attachment disorder and ran from committed romantic relationships at the first sign of anything remotely dysfunctional because I had seen firsthand in childhood how a woman’s life is crushed out of her by a violent bullying tyrant and how he can also crush the souls of his kids, too.

In my 50+ years of experience NO, domestic abusers don’t change. It is very deeply ingrained behavior, rooted in a toxically misogynistic culture which permeates most everything in the marriage dynamic. In my observation most men are operating somewhere on a continuum of abuse - some are ‘just’ taking advantage of their wives or girlfriends for unpaid labor, childcare, sex work and others give the toxic masculinity free rein and include using their wives and girlfriends as physical punching bags and using their bodies for sex against their wills.

I recognize this is a shocking claim to some but I firmly believe it is true. Someday maybe we will normalize feminist relationships, which will ultimately benefit men as much as women. But we are nowhere near that time in human social development.

Stay far away from any man with a known history of domestic violence. There is enough to be wary of from the ones who don’t yet have an official record of it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My BIL smacked his cheating ex across the cheek the 2nd time he caught her cheating and I don’t think he would abuse his 2nd wife.

This would be the only exception I could easily think of. I slapped my ex during our final fight (he had a history of being violent with me, and I'd just found out he'd been violent with our youngest kid). That's technically "domestic violence", and it was unmistakably a violent act, but there were grounds that explained it, and the problem went away when he did.

Anonymous wrote:My BIL smacked his cheating ex across the cheek the 2nd time he caught her cheating and I don’t think he would abuse his 2nd wife.

Anonymous wrote:I think there are a LOT of men with serious anger management issues and there is occasionally a grey area between something resolvable and someone who is abusive and cannot be in a relationship. My husband was in that grey area but fixed himself when he saw I was ready to leave. If he had truly been a vindictive person on a power trip I don’t think that would have happened. He had a lot of anxiety issues that fed his anger problems.