mzrowan

I've been watching EastEnders for over twenty years. In that time, they've shown many abusive relationships of different types.

They've finally gotten around to portraying one that hits me in the gut, just like this husband just did to his wife. One that mirrors my experience just a bit too closely – although I never got hit physically, thankfully.

Their relationship looks perfect, enviable even, from the outside. But if you look closely, you can see that she's always just a little tense when he's around. She's constantly monitoring his emotional state whenever they're together. She leaps to soothe all his emotional boo-boos, no matter how small.

Is she five minutes late to meet him? Over-the-top apologies. Does the cafe not have the kind of muffin he wanted? Promises to make them at home that night. Someone invites her for a girls' night out? Checks his face for approval before saying yes, and talks a lot about how they'll have their own time together to make up for it. Someone teases him for something minor? Time to go into the song and dance about how wonderful he is.

And then behind closed doors...long diatribes from him about how much he does for her. How little he gets back. How little she appreciates him. How little he means to her. Any kind of pushback from her about how much she does, and he accuses *her* of starting a fight. The only acceptable response is groveling and promises to "do better".

Yeah, this is going to be a tough storyline to watch.

Edit to add more thoughts: Honestly, I wish they hadn't shown him getting physical with her. It'd be nice to have them show someone clearly being abusive, but only with their words. Show that there don't have to be physical blows for a relationship to be abusive.

Here's how I would have liked that scene to play out:
He gets upset that her dad beat him in the local charity run. He's even more upset when they find out that her dad cheated, and she laughs - at him, he assumes. He insists that they go home early from the celebration. (All as it actually happened in the show.)

And then, he doesn't punch her. He just goes on at her, for hours, about how upset he is. He refuses dinner, saying he's too upset to eat. And somehow that means she can't have dinner either, because how heartless would it be for her to sit there eating when he's talking about his feeeeeeelings (or staring blankly at the wall, or curled up in the fetal position in bed).

It goes on and on, late into the night. She's desperate for food, for sleep, but he's still So. Upset. "Never go to bed angry!" they say. And then, finally, she manages to find the right words, perform the right emotions, to satisfy him. He sleeps, while she lies in bed staring at the ceiling.

Yeah, that's what I'd like to see them do someday. Or maybe not, because then I *really* wouldn't be able to watch.

Edit to add even more thoughts: More and more I wish they'd gone with "just" emotional abuse. They've had a ton of rape storylines over the years, and recently they deliberately did one where the rape itself wasn't shown – just the lead-up and aftermath. They carefully constructed a story where both the characters on the show and the general public would be asking themselves – was it really rape? Is the woman lying, exaggerating, or simply mistaken? And in the end, the answer was: yes, that was rape. The men who did it went to prison (a bit of fantasy fulfillment there, I'm afraid).

It would be so powerful for them to do an abuse storyline like that. Is it abuse? Maybe he's just sensitive and has a hard time calming down? Isn't it his wife's duty to drop everything, even things like eating and sleeping, to tend to his emotional needs? How often is too often for that to happen? Does she have the "right" to leave him for this?

And the eventual answer: yes, that is abuse. Or maybe, as Captain Awkward might put it: yes, she has the right to leave, even if she isn't calling it the "a" word (yet?), because everyone has the right to leave situations that make them unhappy; there's no invisible bar of "enough" that you have to meet.