Shame Over Abuse by ‘The Weaker Sex’

Question: You have often written about women who remain in relationships with men who treat them like dirt. Well, I am ashamed to say that I am a successful 49-year-old male lawyer who, for the past few years, has been seeing a woman who treats me terribly. She insults me, criticizes everything I do, screams at me, calls me names and is rarely affectionate. Recently, she threw a thoughtfully selected birthday gift that I had given to her in my face because it wasn’t what she wanted. Yet when I try to end the relationship, I miss her so terribly that I call her or go over with flowers and start it again. I feel so humiliated that I won’t even sign this letter. Perhaps you can tell me in your column if I’m the only man in the world who acts like Hedda Nussbaum.

Answer: Hedda’s behavior has certainly made lots of people in abusive relationships aware of how self-destructive they are being. No, you are not the only man who is voluntarily submitting to such abuse. Since I published my book on addictive relationships (“How to Break Your Addiction to a Person,” Bantam), more than 60% of the people who have called for consultations with me about this problem have been men.

Why do abusive relationships seem as though they are strictly a women’s problem? For three reasons:

First, men rarely require shelters because they are rarely physically beaten up and are generally not in danger to life and limb.

Second, men are less likely to be economically dependent on women and forced to stay in bad relationships because of it.

But the main reason is the result of stereotypes associated with traditional sex roles that hold that men are dominant and women submissive. Consequently, men are so deeply ashamed, as you are, of allowing themselves to be abused by the “weaker sex,” that they keep it a deep, dark secret. While a woman often will tell others of the bad time she is receiving at the hands of a man, usually not even the closest friends or relatives of a man in a similar situation know that he is being so “unmanly.” It certainly would not make acceptable locker-room talk.

I see this difference between men and women in how they arrive at my office for a first consultation. A woman will usually carry my book openly, while a man, if he has it at all, keeps it in a “plain brown paper wrapper” to conceal his shameful plight.

It is understandable that some men subject themselves to being abused by women. If the first woman in a man’s life, his mother, did not freely give love and warmth, then he will be more familiar with that kind of relationship. In addition, he can become addicted to the task of trying to make an abusive woman more loving and put up with a lot in the process.

It can be helpful for you to review what there has been in your experience with women, starting in early childhood, that has made you feel you are not deserving of a more loving woman. What made you feel you had to work so hard and put up with so much to get a woman’s love? What would it feel like to be with a woman who loves you and enjoys being with you without you having to take abuse or stand on your head? Can you let yourself feel as passionately about a woman who is nice to you as one who is mean to you?

It will take courage to reject the familiar role of being a victim, but the payoff is well worth it.

Write to Howard Halpern with questions about the single life in care of Special Features, 130 5th Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011. Halpern cannot answer all mail but will select questions of general interest.