Boyfriend Gets on Dating Apps When He’s Mad at Her

Dear Lost in the Cycle:

You’re not so lost if you recognize this is a cycle– as in “cycle of abuse.” And you might feel less lost if you understood that you didn’t wander on your own into this state of paralysis but were deliberately, systematically frog-boiled and psychically hog-tied by someone who probably learned his controlling trade (and all the rationales for it) from five or so previous generations of abusers who practiced coercive control until it was polished into a nearly perfect system of entrapment.

In other words, this could have happened to anyone and has nothing to do with anything fundamentally “wrong” with you. But precisely because it can happen to anyone, it’s all the more reason to crank up your defenses and radar to reduce any chance of mistaking a wolf for a sheep again. And the only way you can heal will be to call a spade a spade– i.e., call abuse what it is. At the very least that can help you exonerate yourself for reacting to abuse in understandable ways rather than buying the myth that your some kind of equal instigator (read this for starters: https://dremmakatz.substack.com/p/shes-not-innocent-either-actually?publication_id=1199193&post_id=153673865&isFreemail=true&r=381mk5&triedRedirect=true).

You’ve probably noticed that one of the main premises of Chump Lady and members of this forum is that cheating is abuse. You’ve probably also noticed that this is a politically-fraught concept that gets a lot of flak from cheating apologists, some of whom have a lot of influence in the media and often try to dress it in either sciency-sounding jargon or in progressive “groovy” drag.

Consider that to be another thing that probably helped entrap you in this cycle– because media cheating apologists make their whitewashing bs sound so intimidatingly cutting edge and factual. But as a past advocate for survivors of domestic abuse who had to gain at least functional literacy in social science and read scary stacks of material on domestic violence, coercive control (once known simply as “emotional abuse”), victimology and forensic psych as part of training, I think the facts are all clearly on CL’s side and the apologists come off like psychobabble Java man with bones in their hair, swinging little clubs and speaking in grunts. The progressive drag is just to disguise the fact they’re trying to set the definition of abuse back to the stone ages.

Some of what I learned as an advocate wasn’t even in the literature yet but was just there to be seen by anyone in the trenches. For one, virtually all batterers cheat one way or another and, the more intensely abusive they are, the more they tend to cheat and vice-versa. Though this doesn’t mean all cheaters are violent (though give ’em time), it did create an impression that there’s an intrinsic connection between the two things which science is only beginning to catch up to some 20 years later. But most of the advancements are piecemeal because, again, this has always been a politically fraught issue and exploration of fraught concept that are threatening to dah patriarchy (broligopoly) tend to get less institutional funding.

But at least now there’s a small but interesting study which suggests that enforcement of one-sided monogamy may be one of the major drivers of domestic violence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583221/

And there are statistics showing that married battered women have far higher rates of STD infection: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1877575617300654 ; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3856434/#R2

Even if the correlation isn’t stated in all conclusions, the studies strongly point to an association between violence and infidelity. All the same, the studies aren’t perfect and seem to be almost consciously skirting around obvious issues or avoided asking very obvious questions that could lead clinicians, legal authorities, bystanders and survivors of emotional abuse alike to believe the results didn’t apply to the latter.

First off, the first two– the Bolivian study on DV and infidelity and the study of DV and STDs from Iran– were performed in cultures that have little grasp of much less legislation against coercive control. Since, statistically, anywhere you find DV you’ll find umpty-times more coercive control (most abusers operate on a beat-by-need basis and usually first resort to less athletic and less legally risky modes of control), researchers didn’t even measure correlations between STDs and emotional abuse. The Iranian STD study doesn’t even stress (or mention?) the most obvious potential cause of married battered women developing STDs– adultery– and instead focuses on victimized women’s lack of agency in demanding condom use (as if condom use is even viewed as necessary by most married people. Only 10-20% of married women even use them and, when they do, partners may interpret this as a mark of or accusation of infidelity: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9832812/). The last study bases a lot of its premises on the debunked Straus Conflict Tactic Scale which notoriously overestimates female instigation of intimate partner violence (also by ignoring coercive control).

Also the Bolivian study may have grossly screwed up the order of events (“misapplied contingency”– a big sin in social science) by only recording overt violence in association with cheating if, in fact, domestic abuse (in subviolent forms) preceded the cheating or “mate retention” behaviors of victims. This seems like a strange oversight considering the mountain of current evidence that most abuse victims report that it’s the emotional coercion and control that’s the most paralyzing and devastating aspect of abuse beyond even assault. So rather than the chain of events reported by authors, which was 1) Abusers engage in cheating (and, we are led to assume, no other forms of mistreatment); 2) Mate retention (jealous) efforts by victims; 3) Abuser commits violent assault to thwart mate retention efforts, the chain of events could have been more similar to the cycle that many survivors report if coercive control had been considered:

1) Tension building behavior by abusers (often because they’re thinking about cheating yet fear their partners doing the same and become paranoid, angry and blaming over their own projections); 2) Victims’ stressed reaction to unbearable tension building; 2) Triggered by victims’ understandably stressed reactions, abusers explode in rage and blame victims for it; 3) Victims try to defend themselves, maybe threaten to leave; 4) Abusers go all self-pitying sad sausage, feels “rejected/criticized/insecure”; 5) Abusers love bomb but simultaneously hedge bets against self-fulfilling fear of abandonment by hunting for plan B sexual supply; 6) Abusers become even more callous and emotionally abusive while cheating since they feel assured of having backup and “don’t need that bitch”; 7) Victims try to leave in protest against mistreatment; 8) Fearing abandonment even more, abusers go on a campaign to destroy victims’ security and self esteem and reduce chances they’ll escape and move on to form future relationships themselves; 9) Feeling afraid and entrapped, victims’ intuit that, if their main value to their abusers is as a sexual appliance, then the abuse could escalate even further once victims are sexually replaced and so begin to engage in “mate retention behavior” (i.e., marriage policing) in a fear-driven effort to prevent the escalation because they feel unable to escape (i.e., Stockholm syndrome). 10) Abusers use violence or engage in extreme coercive control (like threats of financial abandonment, threats of reputation-destroying smear campaigns, threatening to harm others or take children away, etc.) to enforce one-sided monogamy.

Or something like that. So just by including instances of coercive control, I think the second speculative chain of events– give or take intensity of abuse or swapping around the order of events– could tell a much different story than authors’ rather simplistic version. The authors’ conclusion might even suggest that the real problem here is victims’ expectations of monogamy (so let’s embrace Esther Perel and all go poly!) and confrontational mate-guarding behaviors (bitches be jealous). Maybe authors had to go all the way to Bolivia to even find victims who didn’t report the emotionally abusive build-up around cheating because the culture doesn’t recognize those behaviors as abuse. Or maybe authors’ had to veil their intentions to show a correlation between abuse and infidelity because they wouldn’t have gotten funding otherwise. But the most dangerous thing that all the studies miss by negating coercive control and not asking the right questions is that the abuse that typically comes with cheating may very well be to ensure victims do not do in kind. It’s meant to paralyze, destroy agency and prevent victims from moving on to better partnerships.

So much for groovy poly arguments if cheaters are, in fact, rigidly, ferociously monogamous but just hypocritically so.

I hope the point I’m trying to make is clear by the above. Not just your fellow chumps but current science itself is arguing that you”re being abused, that it’s really bad, that the agenda is control your agency and independence and block you from a better future, that a your hopefully soon-to-be ex is a patent abuser and this means that any paralysis you’re experiencing, rather than being evidence of your intrinsic doormat status and “low self esteem”– is likely an unconscious survival response (Stockholm syndrome) to a rather well-founded suspicion that the abuse could get worse if you attempted to escape.

Because if this is how he is in the so-called honeymoon stage of a relationship, I can guarantee you it gets worse if you stay. It could also spike if you leave but if you protect yourself and get free, that will be the end of it. And abuse is like a roulette wheel. There’s no way to predict which lovely number it might spin to. Take your pick from the experiences of other chumps: Giving you a dangerous STD when you’re pregnant and causing fetal injury or pregnancy loss? Financially abusing you and your children? Trading you in during a cancer scare? Pulling the plug if you go into a coma? Breaking your jaw? Plotting with a side piece to have you bumped off to get the insurance? Or, if the extreme cases don’t seem possible (yet), how about just garden-variety abusive process of grinding down your self esteem day in and day out until you’re socially isolated, can’t work and develop stress-induced chronic illness or cancer? Or when you finally have had enough and try to leave, weaponizing the court to take custody of your children and terrorizing you in general?

Round and round she goes and where she stops, nobody knows. But one thing is guaranteed with abusers– all the options suck. And please forget about FOMO. It’s laughable. If on the slim unicorn chance this guy ever redeems himself, he’d have to come clean and tell any future dating prospect all about how he treated you, how you never deserved it, how it was all his doing because real redemption is impossible without perfect transparency and even then there’s no guarantee. Anger management and domestic abuser “rehabilitation” programs are packed with individuals who make full weeping disclosures about their behavior within intimate relationships only to repeat everything they confessed to again and again.

And what are the chances he’ll ever come clean with future partners considering how many light years he is away from facing and owning what he’s doing now? Close to zero. That’s actually the official statistic for recidivism for domestic abusers: 98.5%. That means 1.5% might change, though that’s only with therapy and prison time. But I wouldn’t even trust the statistic since it’s 30 years old and only measured recidivism for violence, not coercive control. And here’s the thing– that “prison time” bit is really important because it shows that receiving severe consequences is about the only tiny chance these types will alter their behavior. What this also means is that, if an abuser is “only” coercively controlling and doesn’t live in the UK where this can be criminally punished, chances are they’ll never change because there’s no stiff incentive to.

All a long way of saying you’re not missing out on anything. He will do the same to every partner and, as most abusers do, his own future children if anyone’s unfortunate enough to breed with him. That is, unless he hooks up with a bigger shark than himself and they mutually destroy each other and their children as a team.

As far as the fear that you’ll never love again or that all men are creeps or will reject you because you develop knowledge and good defenses, chalk it up to the nihilistic brainwashing of your abuser. That’s his creepy world view and you’ve merely been temporarily infected with it. There are many men on this forum who can demonstrate that non-abusers exist. And furthermore, good men care about the same things because they sometimes get preyed on.

You’re already using the right term for what you’re enduring– “cycle.” Just complete the phrase (“of abuse”) and you’ve got this. From there I would recommend grabbing hold of that thread of thought and pulling it as hard as you can until you’ve given yourself an unofficial PhD in domestic abuse. If, as they say, the truth sets you free then it follows that lies do the reverse so the first challenge at hand is to rip out any indoctrination and replace it with better information. Read everything you can on coercive control and domestic violence and pretty soon you’ll figure out that it’s no exaggeration to say you’re an abuse survivor and deserve an equivalent level of support. If you seek therapy, make sure the therapist is versed in coercive control, trauma and abuse and isn’t a victim-blaming caveman (or woman).

I wish you strength and peace and I hope you keep coming back to this forum any time you need to reboot your resolve.