Why Abuse Feel Like Love?
A couple of days ago a friend of mine posted an excerpt from Penelope Douglas’s Nightfall (Devil’s Night, #4) on her Instagram story that said:
Abuse can feel like love.
Mr. Townsend approached. “Abuse can feel like love…” He repeated “Why?”
Damon remained so still it didn’t look like he was breathing. He looked at the teacher, unwavering. “Starving people will eat anything.”
Ever since I came across this sentence, I continuously kept thinking about it until today when I finally decided to write down my thoughts. But here, I am venturing towards a slightly different question, that, perhaps is more important for me and needs some serious attention. The question is not can abuse feel like love? Rather, the question is Why abuse feel like love?
In our country (predominantly) and in the world generally we have had interactions with people who take abuse for love. Most of the time, in our society we witness people who never complain against abuse because for them it is some sort of affection and love and that is where we see people not reporting harassments cases sometimes in Pakistan. Now this debate requires separate limelight because today I just want to devote my time and energy to this one sentence “Why does abuse feel like love?”
Abuse, in both physical and mental form, is one of the predominant aspects of Pakistan. I would not be wrong to say that abuse is treated as the ideology of Pakistan, as a part of the preamble that you cannot stop from implementing in your lives. It is something you cannot avoid, just like breathing or blinking of your eyes. 90 percent of the time, we are not even aware that our actions are abusive. at this point, abuse is the degree which all of us are graduating from, unknowingly sometimes. This is why it is better to know what is abuse and what is not so that we can see for ourselves to which degree are we abusive.
An important question is why do we make an individual so desperate that they blur the line between abuse and love? What is it that we have done so wrong to these people’s minds that they constantly accept abuse and never complain about it? What are we as individuals (and I say individuals because we, as a society, have failed miserably so let’s just switch to individuality maybe it will work) are doing in this world so wrong that there might be some people who are not ready to see it as anything but love.
Let’s talk about Mental Abuse first, the kind of abuse that gets foreshadowed by the other kind. Which we no longer badge as abuse and which is not identified as wrong. Start with your family. There must be someone (and I am being generous by saying someone because there is no one but many in our family who are the legal guardians of mental abuse) in your extended family who casually likes to degrade either one person or everyone. What according to them falls under the definition of a joke, pun, or whatever is abuse for the person at the receiving end. How many times have the males in our family shown their superiority by generally saying that he certain female is stupid because she is younger than him. That the certain female cannot do a particular thing because she is born weak or whatever. When you constantly feed insecurities and abuse in the form of these mere words. It is abuse when you don’t give space to your child to express his or her opinions and you taught them that their opinions are trashy and therefore they must never voice them out in public. There comes a point when the person starts seeing it as well, forgetting it is just your opinion forced upon him. There comes a time when they will tell others that their opinions don’t matter because what they speak is nonsense. There you go, you have abused a child so much that it has become a part of his personality. Now no matter how many people outside their family tell them that their opinions matter, they won’t agree to it. You stopped their growth, that now every time, they will be looking for your opinions, your words, your thoughts, these things will define them. When you stop a child from expressing their likes and dislikes, it is when you start the chain of the abusive cycle. Because the child grows dependent on you. The child even after 30 years of their life, will still look for your approval for everything. That no matter how much a child loved something, if you tell them no they won’t be looking at it anymore. It is you who have used these words to create a void in the child’s life and no matter how much the child tries to break it, they cannot. So, congratulations you have abused a child and made it part of its personality.
We are often told casually by our friends how we are incompetent and thus we cannot do anything in life. How we are basic, how our choice is pathetic and we need to step up. For them, it might be just a sentence but for us, it is something that starts housing itself inside us and then we depend on it completely. When you constantly make one person the target of your filthy jokes, it is when it starts to convert into abuse and the friend will start seeing themselves as the picture you have painted for them. Abuse is when you start controlling their life when you start to tell them they must do as you say. When you don’t let them breathe in their personal space when you invade their privacy thinking there is no concept of privacy.
There is another form of abuse we know nothing about. It is gesture abuse, and this is a word that I have just coined while thinking of it. It happens mostly in groups when we don’t use our words to describe that we don’t like a particular person rather we show from our gestures. Not talking as soon as the person arrives, not making eye contact with the person, not mentioning them in conversations, rolling your eyes and there is so much that can be counted here.
But I have seen so many people accepting abuse, being the inferior person in a relationship and you know why? Because they don’t get the love they deserve and this is when their lines of love and abuse are blurred. You can be poisonous as a mushroom but the person will still not go away because they feel like they don’t get the attention from anyone else. Because even if you are pointing their flaws out in public, it shows you deeply care for them because no one spares a second glance at you, not even at home. And this is why we need to be more attentive to the people around us. Look after them. Is it too hard to say to a lonely fellow in your class that “Hey you can talk to me whenever you want.” or something like “Hey we can have a cup of tea from the cafeteria sometime.” Is it too hard to stop by your children’s room for five minutes and tell them you are proud of them? Giving them luxuries is not everything they need. When they don’t find someone in their house who will sit and listen to them, they will start looking for people outside the home and that is where it all goes wrong. There are people out there who will do anything to get someone’s attention because they don’t get it from the people who should be giving them. You will stay in an abusive relationship because it is their tongue that sometimes is slipped but they have a heart of gold. No, you don’t need that heart of gold when the tongue stings more bitterly than a Scorpion.
Physical Abuse, not reported most of the time, feels like love to people who are never introduced to the idea of love. Love is not shouting in front of hundreds of people because you saw her talking to some other guy. Love is not raising your hand at her because she is making no sense in the argument. Love is not touching her when she doesn’t want to. Love is not hurting the other person just to get your message installed in their mind. Love is not boycotting him because he speaks what is on his mind. Love is not what you have made it these days. This is not love, this is abuse. Abuse disguised as love is still abuse. Love is nothing that you have made it today. Abuse is what you need to identify first, look around and see how much you abuse the other person and the other person is everyone, your mother, father, son, daughter, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend, friend and the list goes on and on. I hope it makes sense.
2/19/22
M.Jaffar
