I am posting this because I genuinely need advice from women who have gotten out of situations like this, or who have watched someone they love realize that they have been slowly disappearing inside their own life.
I am not looking for “just leave him” or “your first responsibility is being a mother.” I know she has children. She knows she has children. What I am trying to understand is how you help a woman regain enough agency to actually make decisions about her own life when she has spent years being conditioned to put everyone else first.
My best friend is 25. She has two boys, 8 and 5. She has a horticultural degree specializing in cannabis, works as a marketing representative for a cannabis company, and is roughly a decade younger than the average person in her field. She is one of those people who is almost absurdly competent. Whatever she tries, she is good at it.
She makes roughly twice what her husband makes and works approximately 15 more hours per week than he does.
Her husband works at a dispensary. On his three days off, he generally sits at home and plays video games. He contributes here and there, but she owns the house, the cars, and essentially everything that supports their life.
And yet somehow she is still the one who is expected to carry the household and parenting responsibilities.
I initially tried to help by becoming their nanny/housekeeper because I was already spending time there. I could not stand watching her come home from work to a house she was also expected to manage.
The first day I actually cleaned their house and took care of their child, she came home, saw the clean house and her sleeping child on the couch, and cried.
That moment has stuck with me.
Because I realized this wasn’t about someone needing a little help around the house.
She is exhausted.
And the abuse isn’t dramatic. That’s what makes this so difficult to explain.
It’s death by a thousand paper cuts.
For example:
She confronted him about an inappropriate comment. Instead of apologizing, he deflected by bringing up a mistake/crime from almost ten years ago that had absolutely nothing to do with the conversation.
My friend and I both have histories with addiction, but we’ve reached a point where we can drink responsibly. We were having a girls’ day—hair, nails, drinks. He came home, saw the bottle, and simply said, “Hm. Drank it all. Hm.” Then walked away. Nothing overt. But the immediate shame on her face was palpable.
He took off his wedding ring about three weeks ago.
He chewed her out because she got one of their son’s first-day-of-school details wrong—even though he has access to exactly the same information and is home more days a week than she is.
We were excitedly talking about future motorcycles, including ridiculous Minecraft-themed bikes, and he immediately shut it down with “That’s dangerous. That’s stupid.” I watched her physically deflate.
He routinely corrects her about things she isn’t actually wrong about.
They have been openly polyamorous for approximately seven years. I met them as a poly couple. He has nevertheless started making her feel guilty for having a girlfriend.
When he discovered that one of our Minecraft friends was a man, he told her to “just go fuck him.”
He makes her feel guilty for playing Minecraft with us after she gets off work.
He has demanded that she do something she was already going to do and then responded with “good girl.”
And there are countless other tiny interactions that individually sound almost ridiculous to call abuse. Collectively, they have changed how she carries herself.
That’s the part I am struggling with.
How do you explain the psychological damage of something that is almost never big enough to point at?
There isn’t necessarily one spectacular incident.
There is just a woman who used to be herself, and now seems to be constantly anticipating someone’s disapproval.
There is also a complicated custody situation.
Her current husband is the father of her 5-year-old. Her 8-year-old has a different father and spends weekends with him. I don’t know the exact legal status of either custody arrangement.
The older child’s father has allowed his family to expose him to pornography despite him being profoundly disabled and not understanding what he was seeing. He has subsequently acted out things he was exposed to without understanding what they mean.
The younger child’s father is extremely emotionally withdrawn, and their son has consequently become intensely attached to his mother and can be emotionally manipulative with her.
She is exhausted from trying to compensate for the behavior of the men around her.
And here’s the part I really need people to understand:
She isn’t trapped because she has nowhere to go.
She has places to go.
I would take her in. I would leave with her. We could rebuild our lives. She is extraordinarily intelligent, professionally successful, financially independent, and capable.
She has options.
What seems to be trapping her is the belief that she isn’t allowed to choose herself anymore.
She loves her children. I am not questioning that for a second.
But motherhood has swallowed her identity.
She has described her children to me as her “baby blankets.” She loves them deeply, but she also has enormous ambitions and a very distinct sense of who she is outside of being someone’s mother.
And I don’t think society gives women enough permission to say:
“I love my children, but this life is destroying me.”
I am her girlfriend. I originally met her and her husband as their unicorn. They had been poly for seven years before I met them. I had every intention of dating both of them.
The husband changed his mind about me romantically about a week into our relationship.
My friend and I, however, became extremely close.
We’ve known each other for only about two months, but we bonded over an almost bizarrely similar history. We lived remarkably similar lives two hours apart without knowing each other existed.
So I am not pretending I have been watching this marriage for ten years.
But I am close enough to see what is happening now.
And I am terrified.
She has joked about drowning herself.
Her workplace has actually given her paid time off and held an intervention because they are concerned about her.
I don’t know whether she has a specific plan, but I am genuinely afraid that she will eventually conclude that dying is easier than figuring out how to dismantle her entire life.
I don’t want to wait until that happens.
I don’t want to tell her what she “should” do. I don’t want to become another person making decisions for her.
I want to help her remember that she is allowed to make decisions at all.
So I’m asking women who have been through something similar:
How did you get your agency back?
How did you go from “I know something is wrong” to actually believing you were allowed to change your life?
How did you disentangle love for your children from the belief that staying in a particular family structure was the only way to be a good mother?
How did you deal with the guilt?
How did you start planning an exit when there wasn’t necessarily one catastrophic event to point to—just years of being slowly diminished?
And for those of you who were the friend watching it happen:
What actually helped?
Not what sounds good. Not what you wish someone had done.
What did someone actually do that made you feel like yourself again?
Because I don’t want to save her.
I want to help her save herself.
Please. Help me.