He was so very good-looking, a bit like Chad Everett, with dark brown hair, blue eyes, and impeccable taste in clothes. An employee in the marketing department, he was professional and charming. He once told me that he never tried to sell the company's products: He knew that if he could sell himself to clients, they would buy the products.
He was very successful.
I couldn’t figure out what he saw in me. Or really, why he would even be interested, but he was, and when he turned on that dimpled smile it was very difficult for 20-year-old me to resist. And so began a courtship that introduced me to a world I had only read about. Dinners at Chicago's high-end restaurants where he and our companions would seriously debate the superiority of Piper-Heidsieck over Dom Pérignon Champagne, and insist on ordering a bottle of each to decide. We spent many evenings at the Chicago Yacht Club after days on the lake aboard private yachts.
His charm and humor was legend, and he was in constant demand at dinner parties and sailing trips. As his girlfriend, I usually joined him. He treated me like a queen. In public.
In private, he used humor as a weapon to belittle my appearance, my attire, my abilities, and my intelligence. Since we worked together, he knew what I was working on and who I was working with. Which is probably why I missed some of the clues that were present early in our relationship. Well, that, and the fact that no one talked about intimate partner violence back in the early 1970s. They just did it, or suffered it silently.
We had been seeing each other for three years when he transferred to the West Coast. He began dating other people. So did I. It was during his visit to Chicago in December 1972 that he tried to kill me.
Even while he had his hands around my throat, cutting off my oxygen, it did not occur to me that he wanted to kill me. It was only as I was losing consciousness that I thought I might die. But even then, my thought was not that he might kill me, but that I might die.
A neighbor, pounding on my front door, threatening to call the police, likely saved my life. The noise was just enough to bring him to his senses, out from under the cloud of his murderous rage, and to release his grip on my neck.
I couldn't talk for a few days, I assume my larynx was bruised or inflamed, and laryngitis was the excuse I used. Sweaters covered the bruises left by his fingers. I stayed with a friend he didn't know. He returned to San Francisco when I refused to see him or to even speak to him on the telephone.
Four months later I followed him out to the West Coast.
Today, it is fairly easy for me to see why my younger self made such a seemingly stupid decision. But at the time I only knew that he had sought out professional help, and professed his undying love and his eternal need for my presence in his life, all in writing. Repeatedly. And I loved him. Like so many other misguided women before me, I was sure that my love was all he needed to turn his life around. I thought we were different and that he could change.
Today, I know that most women in their teens and 20s think they will live forever. The thought of their own death is never allowed any reality. And it takes a very long time to believe that anyone who so clearly loves you, who apologizes so totally, who sends cards and flowers for no reason at all, could ever want to kill you.
Today, I also know that three American women will die at the hands of an intimate partner. And three more women will die tomorrow. A woman's risk of death increases by a factor of 70 in the first two weeks after she leaves an abusive partner. In the United States, a woman will be beaten every nine seconds.
But in 1973, all seemed well when I moved to San Francisco. There was no violence. There was no belittling, not even with humor. There was so much to explore and enjoy. But within a year, it seemed that all of our friends were his friends. He did not like the people I met, and became angry when I stopped to have drinks with them after work.
Money seemed to become tight, even though we were both working. He could not stand my family. Contact with them was eventually cut off, and like the frog in the pot of water that slowly comes to a boil, I became isolated from any external support, without even noticing that it was happening. I thought that he was entitled to sex whenever he wanted it, regardless of whether or not I was interested. I never considered it rape, or even coerced sexual intercourse, even though sometimes it was both.
God, my story is so typical. So ordinary and so common.
There was jealousy that, according to him, only proved his love—and I believed it. He controlled who I saw, how long and how often. He maintained absolute financial control, even over money that I earned.
Eventually the violence started again. A slap that shocked me. It was followed a few months later by a beating with closed fists. He had been cheating on me, and could not stand the fact that I learned of his affair. Alcohol was always a part of these episodes, giving him cover, and sobriety brought with it remorse, apology, and a reset of the cycle.
To this day I know I got out relatively unscathed, leaving him to carry on his relationship with the other woman.
I never reported the abuse or the attempted murder. And it was attempted murder. I know that now. If there had been a handgun in my apartment that December night, I may very well have become a statistic that someone else could be writing about today.
A woman is eight times more likely to be murdered if there is a firearm in the home.
When the Violence Policy Center analyzed the 2012 homicide data they found that:
In 2012, there were 1,706 females murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents that were submitted to the FBI for its Supplementary Homicide Report. These key findings from the report ... dispel many of the myths regarding the nature of lethal violence against females.
- For homicides in which the victim to offender relationship could be identified, 93 percent of female victims (1,487 out of 1,594) were murdered by a male they knew.
- Thirteen times as many females were murdered by a male they knew (1,487 victims) than were killed by male strangers (107 victims).
- For victims who knew their offenders, 62 percent (924) of female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.
- There were 267 women shot and killed by either their husband or intimate acquaintance during the course of an argument.
- Nationwide, for homicides in which the weapon could be determined (1,545), more female homicides were committed with firearms (52 percent) than with any other weapon. Knives and other cutting instruments accounted for 22 percent of all female murders, bodily force 13 percent, and murder by blunt object six percent. Of the homicides committed with firearms, 69 percent were committed with handguns.
- In 85 percent of all incidents where the circumstances could be determined, homicides were not related to the commission of any other felony, such as rape or robbery.
According to the
Centre for Children and Families in the Justice System of Ontario:
Control is the "overarching behavioural characteristic" of abusive men, achieved with criticism, verbal abuse, financial control, isolation, cruelty, etc. (see Power & Control Wheel). The need to control may deepen over time or escalate if a woman seeks independence (e.g. going to school).
Entitlement is the "overarching attitudinal characteristic" of abusive men, a belief in having special rights without responsibilities, justifying unreasonable expectations (e.g., family life must centre on his needs). He will feel the wronged party when his needs are not met and may justify violence as self-defence.
The Centre has a list of characteristics of men who are likely to abuse (see above link), and I was unsurprised to recognize how many of those boxes my intimate partner checked off. The problem for me, and for so many others, is that an abusive partner never presents those characteristics early in a relationship. No, early on they are generous, kind and loving.
Until they aren't.