The logistics of spouse abuse: a primer on asymmetric warfare

How does it go? Here is a rough progression of how it went for me.

I am a large white man. I currently stand 5'11" and weigh approximately 300 lbs.  The smallest I have been in 10 years is 260 lbs.  I was abused by a 5 foot 80 lbs Thai woman.

How <the fuck>?

See, here's the logic. I'm a big guy, and besides being absurdly fat, I'm pretty strong. Therefore, if the police are called, and it comes to light that I have hit a Thai woman, I'm pretty fucked.  Since it's not us, but our annoyed neighbors, who might also call, I don't yell back.  Because I don't have a visa, if this woman calls the cops, I will go to prison. It's no good that I speak Thai, and can probably sweet talk my way to a bribe and a bit of mercy; if you can't pay the bribe, you can't buy the mercy.

And by this point, not only were we in business together, we'd had the first of our two children, and she'd been diagnosed with HIV- and I'd stayed with her, despite the obvious difficulties this caused.

In case it's not clear from the outset, I was and am an idiot, but I try to have good reasons for the things I do.

At the time this decision was first made, I was intensely and stupidly devoted to the Christian cult. When the positive diagnosis was first given, they explained that we had the option of having an abortion, and explained that with treatment, about 80% of the children born under these circumstances are uninfected.  This takes into consideration the administration of antiretroviral drugs, and a special C- section surgery wherein the fetus and placenta are removed without rupturing the placenta, thereby not exposing the baby to any of its mother's infected blood.

<The placenta is a blood barrier, in case you're wondering about that; mother and child don't share blood. This is how a mother can give birth to a baby with a different blood type.>

All this spins in your head when you're doing the math and realizing your kid has a 1:5 chance of being fucked on the first day and living barely a few short miserable years, just the way I'd seen happening in some of the orphanages I'd volunteered at years earlier.

and through all this, my mind centered on the observation that the odds of surviving abortion are 0%, not 80.

And in that moment, my commitment was made. This was the woman I loved, she loved me, we were going to try to save some piece of her, even if she herself couldn't go on. So this is the level of commitment that I entered this asymmetric relationship with.We decided to try for the kid so that she could live on in some sense.

Now, here is the setup for asymmetric warfare. I have no status in the country, no degree (because shortly after the initial diagnosis, I drop out of college to run the wine company she'd started and dragged me into. We do well financially for a little while. Then we have a fight, she insists she's caught me cheating via a conversation I had online with someone else.  We have a big falling out, I resign myself to losing my son and the love of my life (as I still thought of her), and then she takes me back.

So, this is how it begins. I am at her mercy to begin with, and then I am in this position as a result of it. If this were jujitsu, this move would be banned from competition sparring for being too dangerous. it's a neck-breaking choke hold.

and so when the blows started falling, I bore it. When she kicked me out and called the cops- threatening me with prison, for imagined offenses, or over trifles- well, what choice did I have? I could bear this, even though I hated it, because I knew she had loved me, and even if she didn't, well, I loved our son enough to stay and take care of him.  Or failing that, at least see that he was fed and educated.

So this was the cycle I found myself in. We would fight, she would beat me with whatever she had near her, spit on me, scream, destroy my belongings. Anything she could do to inflict pain, she would do, because she thought she deserved to, or that I deserved to experience it.

So this is how you make someone a zombie. You destroy their ability to be happy. You lure them back, and you destroy their ability to believe in happiness. You've fucked yourself, this is how the story ends.

It already can't get worse- and then it does. And if it isn't because they themselves made it worse, then the things that made it worse stay that bad because the other person never moves on. So no sex becomes no touching.

So I threw myself into work, when I could. I made several interrupted attempts at starting my own companies, the last iteration of which I am currently <dec 2015> reconstructing as the "cure for piracy".  Which, yes, is bullshit marketing, but the idea is to make people think, because I think that if this thing were properly used, it might, no matter who made it.  It might even have potential for addressing how to cure poverty, but that may be pushing my luck just to mention.

Which I was learning to make in Django 1.3 <edited 2.11.16 to correct information>. And then it was destroyed in front of me by this woman, because I hadn't immediately responded to her comment when I was reading my email.

Fortunately, I was able to sell the pieces <of the laptop she smashed> for $20 as scrap to pay our electric bill and get our lights turned back on, so we could cook our stolen chicken breast and make our stolen milk formula for the kids. And of COURSE during all of this mother has gotten and lost by pawning two computers, a brand new top-of-the-line ipad 2, a car, and gold coins given to us to keep for the kids by my parents.

At about this time period, she attempted to have an affair, and was sending pictures of herself with our children to the other guy; then she tells me, and I, of course, try to figure out who the fuck this other guy is, and eventually catch her using some black magic stuff I can't talk about (sh!), which mainly involved googling the emails I saw in a shared account and figuring out that it seemed like an OK guy, and I didn't want to be an asshole, and this looked like an exit for me- and so I basically emailed and said "yo, I exist, did you know about this?" and she flipped her shit, dropped him, and we got back together so hard it hurt- something I tend to attribute to borderline personality disorder, but I can't make that diagnosis.

But in the middle of this, at about the time she destroys what I genuinely consider to be the beginnings of my life's work, she kicks me out of the house and gets me fired from my job, roughly a day apart. I stay in a hotel room I can afford for the week, if I don't have food. I return the following day, every day, to bring them <stolen> groceries, she won't let the kids near me. It's about this time, I think, that she starts telling my son to call me "Ken" instead of "dad".

Because it gets worse and then it stays that bad.

Right up until the moment you decide to escape. By then you may be at the bottom of an ocean of fear and doubt, but at least you know which way is up.