sweettart wrote:I told him to stop playing with me or I would leave. He said I can not afford to leave. [..]
If I need money he tells me I just have to ask him for some and he will give it to me since he keeps cash in his wallet. When I get paid I am told I have to put all of my check in the bank to cover the bills he has paid or something might bounce. Then I am told not to use the debit card because there is just enough to cover the bills. He does give me cash if I need to get gas or buy groceries.
Oh lord - the more you tell, the worse it sounds. Pathologically jealous is one thing. A bad thing, but at least just one thing. Perhaps therapy (for him) could help with that.
But this goes beyond that. He is basically trying to
own you - to exercise complete power over you. He basically forces you to give him all of your earnings and accept that all you will get to have or spend of your own is just whatever
he deems worthwhile.
That alone already means that he has the power to determining most every thing you do or don't. You've also already said that he systematically tries to discourage you from any friendships of your own - cutting off another way for you to have any independence at all. And it's not just about keeping you from being an independent person who has some say in how she lives her life; the friends thing suggests that he's even trying to keep you from getting any personal feedback apart from his, from being able to doublecheck his reasonings with what a third party would say, or to compare what he does with what others consider normal or acceptable.
Well, this is not normal. This is not what loving partners do. A normal, loving partner trusts and respects you. He seems to do neither.
I think the cheating accusations are just another way to tie you down. It's very related with your travelling, you said. Your travelling is pretty much the one way you've got left to be outside his bubble, to live an ordinary life and realise that what he's doing or making you do is not normal. If he could intimidate you into travelling less or no more, he would win a major new degree of control over you.
Even the example of him telling friends (and even your children) about, basically, how bad a woman you are, seems perfectly fitting with the pattern. Not as something to check or impose your fidelity per se, but rather to basically humble (or humiliate you) into someone with as little self-worth, and/or as little outside friends/contacts you could trust, as possible. Because it's then that you'd be submitted to him completely.
If all of this sounds like an overreaction, somehow - I hate it when posters jump to far-reaching conclusions about someone they'd never met and only read the one or two web posts of - it's not wholly just a personal gut reaction. A couple of years ago, JustBrooke, who's worked with abused women,
posted a warning list of behaviors that are seen in people who are potentially abusive.
The list was rightly criticized for being a bit all too far-encompassing. When she wrote that "If the person has several of the behaviors ...(say three or more) there is a strong potential for physical violence," I disagreed, though I did not respond, because Sozobe already explained what I wanted to say. She said that, hell, she'd had boyfriends who never ended up being abusive, with whom she was actually in a good relationship also in retrospect, who'd had far more than three of the traits. However, aside from the counting traits thing, it must definitely be true what Brooke said when she wrote that "the more signs the person has, the more likely the person is a batterer."
Good guys (or girls..), I think, may exhibit a couple of the traits here and there, or more even temporarily in some period of crisis. But if your partner meets the criteria consistently, or ever increasingly, if he exhibits most of the traits, or even almost all of them, then that should be a big flaming warning flag. And I'm guessing that your guy might meet a bunch of 'em. Everything that you've said so far seems to come straight from the list.
