5 Things you should Never say to your Girls

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really tired of being expected to excuse bad behaviour. In general. But mostly, the behaviour of men toward their partners.

I’m coming to realise, as I get older, that I have been slowly conditioned over the course of my life to look for justifications behind poor behaviour.

Being made to feel like it’s ok if someone uses you as their metaphorical (or literal) punching bag because they must have a good reason for it.

This might seem all well and good when you’re trying to instil some feelings of empathy toward the disadvantaged kid at school who bullies as a defence mechanism. But it becomes majorly problematic when that evolves into feeling empathy toward an abuser.

Pop culture plays a MAJOR role in this mentality. For more on that, see my recent article “Its 2021. I’m 30. And I’m still into the bad-boy romance novel redemption arc.”

But there is another, potentially far more damaging source of our tendency to defend abusive behaviour, and it comes from the very people that should be protecting us from it.

We need to take a long, hard look at what we consider acceptable behaviour and how we support each other around that.

Here are 5 things I’ve been told during my 30 years, that I believe we should never say to our girls if they are in potentially abusive situations:

1. He’s always so nice to me/others. Yeah. He is. Because he’s a master at it. It’s a hallmark of an abuser to be charming in public. If one of your girls is telling you that it’s different behind closed doors, do not dismiss it. Chances are it’s taken all her strength to say it out loud, and shutting it down by pointing out how great he seems to everyone else is not what she needs to hear.

2. There’s always two sides to every story. While that may very well be true, if one of your girls is being emotionally, physically or sexually abused, the other side of the story is void. It absolutely does not achieve anything to go looking for the ‘why’ of it. She needs to get out. Help her.

3. You keep going back, so of course he’s not going to change. Never blame the victim! These men are experts at their craft. They wear their victims down until they have no shred of self-esteem left. They make them feel like they will never find by one else who will love them. It’s not as simple as just walking away. Yes, you’ll probably have to watch them repeat their mistakes a few times before they get out for good. They need your support, not your judgement.

4. My partner used to be ‘xyz...’ but he changed for me. Let me be very clear. Your emotionally immature boyfriend who used to drink too much on the weekend and hashtag YTB every Saturday night but eventually grew out of it and settled down with you is not the same as the guy who controls, manipulates, coerces and dictates his partners every move. Your “bad boy” might have redeemed himself when he met the good girl. But the truly bad ones, don’t get the redemption arc.

5. Maybe there’s a reason he acts this way. Maybe. But getting to the bottom of how his troubled childhood contributed to his abusive tendencies as an adult is a job for a professional, and not something that you should encourage someone to wait around for. There’s plenty of people in the world that have been to hell and back and manage to wake up every day and not abuse their partners so, this one doesn’t wash with me.

This list could go on. These are just some examples of things I’ve heard first-hand.

The entire narrative needs an overhaul. We need to stop romanticising the bad-boy redemption arc for a start. Maybe, just maybe women will stop pursuing men they think need ‘fixing’ and become better at avoiding entering these toxic relationships in the first place. But for those that find themselves there, our friends, our sisters, our daughters... they need to be relentlessly built up by us, so that they can regain the power that has been stripped from them.

They need to be unequivocally reminded that they are deserving of better and that they are never alone.

We owe it to our ‘girls’ to draw a line when it comes to what is considered redeemable behaviour and what isn’t.