Signs of dating abuse (content warning)
-Pressuring you for sex (or for a specific type of sex you’re not interested in)
-Going through your messages
-Attempting to control whom you spend time with
-Attempting to control what you wear
-Threatening to out you as LGBT
-Asking for your phone, email, or Facebook passwords
-Accusing you of cheating without evidence
-Getting angry at you for having friends of the opposite sex
-Having sex with you when you are passed out or asleep (this is sexual assault)
-Preventing you from leaving a room during an argument
-Physically intimidating you or calling you names when they’re angry
-Ignoring you for periods of time
-Disclosing intimate information about you to others without permission
-Checking people out while they’re with you/flirting with people in your presence (assuming that you are in a monogamous relationship)
-Fetishizing certain parts of your body (there is a difference between attraction and fetishization—with the latter, you are reduced to that body part and objectified)
-Threatening to hurt themselves if you leave them
-Going from hot to cold/making you confused about where you stand with them
-Trash talking the people who are close to you/attempting to isolate you
-Trying to convince you every time you say no to something
-Never admitting their mistakes and never apologizing (or apologizing disingenuously). If they apologize, they expect what they did to be forgiven and forgotten immediately
-Unsolicited advice, often accompanied by pressure, about decisions that should be yours alone
-A condescending attitude (if your partner is older than you are, they may try to bolster their authority by emphasizing that they have more life experience)
-Having selective amnesia about certain things they’ve done in the past when you bring them up
-Being hyper-critical—always wanting to talk about what everyone else is doing wrong
Feel free to add onto this list
– Controlling behavior like checking the mileage on your car, i.e. “you said you only drove home from work today, but your work is 1.5 miles away and there’s an extra 2.3 miles from this morning last time I checked your mileage”
– Never taking responsibility for their actions, everything is somehow your fault. If you get upset at something they said or did to you, they find a way to make it your fault and make you the bad guy for being upset by their words or actions.
– No respect for boundaries, they don’t stop upsetting behavior such as touching you or teasing you when you ask them to. Might even try to make you seem like the bad guy for trying to establish boundaries and asking them to stop.
– They constantly make you feel like you’re oversensitive or overreacting
– Trying to control anything about the way you dress or present yourself such as hair or makeup
– Don’t forget to look out for “grooming” tactics meant to completely sweep you off your feet, abusers will act like prince charming at first and in the early phases of the relationship to lure you in and make you more emotionally vulnerable. Look out for things like frequently giving extravagant and expensive gifts weirdly early in the relationship. My mom’s last abuser, after only dating her for two weeks, bought her a new washing machine AND bought both me and my mom expensive designer brand name purses. Don’t be fooled, shit like that is actually a red flag, they want you to think they’re perfect and “the one” to make you more emotionally vulnerable, also unfortunately a lot of people tolerable abuse if they think they “owe” their abuser, and if they’re given a lot of really extravagant gifts that might give a feeling of “owing” them.
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