u/mooglemoose

girls rule

Pockets! The dresses must have pockets! And the pockets must be big enough to fit modern smartphones.

Lol this reminds me of something my ex-boyfriend said. He was an Engineering student at the time and he claimed that all doctors will be replaced by AI and robots within 10 years, therefore all health degrees were pointless because healthcare in general was a dying profession.

He said this in 2008-2009. I’ll let history be the judge here.

He isn’t. Guys like that think caring for babies and children are women’s work. So the men like this will just carry on with their life like they never had a baby, going out with friends, gaming, working late - they don’t pay attention to their own children even if they live in the same house. Go to the parenting subs and you see stories like this depressingly often.

Can be a cultural thing as well. In Chinese culture, families are often considered a unit. So if a coworker or friend helps you then it’s normal for you to repay that with a gift to anyone in the coworker’s family - and by “family” I mean those that live nearby and that your coworker regularly sees and talks about, not limited to nuclear family.

Most often children or grandchildren are the recipients because a) they always need stuff, especially when it’s a first baby, so the items are likely to be useful; and b) it’s assumed that the parent or grandparent will need to spent money to buy this stuff (or effort to make it) anyway, so you making/buying it for them is saving them time and money and is therefore a roundabout gift to them. There’s a cultural expectation for grandparents to help raise grandchildren, so giving a gift to the grandchild via the grandparent is not unusual.

I don’t always agree with this practice because sometimes this roundabout gift-giving can be used for emotional manipulation (my mother does this a lot, like “my friend wouldn’t have given you a gift if it wasn’t for ME, so you need to thank ME and do XYZ to repay me!”). But I can see how it can work culturally, if both the gift giver and receiver are in on it and understand the meaning.

You’re spot on about the narcissism!

Luckily I am far away from him, but not far enough from my mother unfortunately. She’s a narcissist too, and she thought that he was a perfect son-in-law and that’s why she encouraged us to date. His family is very rich, but emotionally pretty distant, so my mother thought she could use our relationship to “adopt” him and to use marriage and children to extract money from his family. So she was super nice to him and supported him over me in every argument we had. Like literally clapped and said him sexually assaulting me was a good thing because I could’ve been pregnant - at only 19!

My mother spent several years after we broke up hoping to get us back together again, or at least hoping I’d find someone just like him. He was never single though, because he always found a new girlfriend before breaking up with the previous one. I think my mother really cared about the money, and also wanting to show how she’s a better mother than his mother (they are friends) if she could get him to love her more. It’d be like the ultimate narcissistic supply to “steal” a rich heir and control him.

Part of the problem was that he also on his best behaviour in front of my mother, because he couldn’t risk his mother finding out what he’s really like or she might cut off financial support or his inheritance. His mother was the one who uncovered evidence of his cheating. She told his next girlfriend about the relationship timeline overlap and that’s why she dumped him. His mother also cut off financial support for a short while but then eventually caved again. Unfortunately his mother feels guilty for not being there for him in his early years (some complicated family history there) so she will probably never cut him off for long. So he’s got no incentive to become a better person.

Yeah I hate that stereotyping too. My experience is that divorce can be traumatising to children, but the parenting and family experience they receive afterwards can do a lot - either to heal, or to cause more damage. My ex and myself were both definitely in the latter category, in different ways. My husband is in the former category - his parents worked hard to co-parent peacefully and to encourage good relationships with both sides of the family. So he turned out pretty well (which is why I married him!).

My ex made fun of people behind their back, but never to their face or in front of anyone who might defend them. He also mocked me and others for the exact same traits that he also had, like being academically inclined, liking video games, etc. In hindsight yeah, that was definitely a red flag! It shows duplicitousness and arrogance.

He also made immature jokes - only amongst friends, admittedly - where the only punch line was the word “gay” or “rape” or “retard”. That by itself wasn’t a red flag, just really immature and a bit uncomfortable for me to witness. But his reaction when people didn’t laugh was to wait until we were alone and then lash out at me, blaming me for “spoiling the mood” and demanding sexual favours to make up for it. That second part was a big red flag.

My mother always defended him and blamed me though. She’d sit me down after every date to interrogate me and always found things that I did wrong, which she’d use to justify what he did and said. She also invited him over for dinner after every fight we had, apologised to him on my behalf, then encouraged him to take me to his place after. She literally laughed and cheered when I had a pregnancy scare (due to coercion, not consensual). But I was only 18 at the time and had been under her control all my life, so my normal meter was totally broken and I was desperate for her approval.

Now that I know more, I can see mother is pretty darn narcissistic… She stereotyped my ex as a “good kid” because he was always super polite towards her (and to all of his mother’s friends - he didn’t dare cross his mother). My mother thought that having me marry him would give her a bonus son who comes with a big inheritance. It would also prove she is a better mother than her friend (ex’s mother), so she loved that idea. That whole ordeal really opened my eyes to how my mother saw me - as a tool to be used and then discarded. Like I said above, I could never trust her again after that.

I hope you’re safe now, internet stranger, and wish you all the best on your healing journey.

Your last paragraph made me think - did this guy choose OOP specifically because of her trauma? Like he thinks PTSD reactions are funny so he specifically chose to continue the relationship with OOP instead of anyone else, as a source of sadistic entertainment. Or maybe he thinks mental health is a scam and that he can “cure” OOP or catch her out somehow by doing all these pranks.

I’m reminded of my mother - she believes that PTSD, depression, and anxiety are all fake, and that people with these conditions need exposure therapy to be cured. This is her home-cooked version of exposure therapy, so she thinks someone who is triggered by loud noises should be exposed to lots of loud noises at unpredictable times to “get over it”. Someone who has social anxiety (like I used to) needs to be frequently dropped into unexpected social events with lots of strangers. And so on.

On a surface level, yes joining in is good for the child/teen/young adult to practice social skills. But I think the sentiment behind the comic comes from exactly how the parents conduct these dinner parties, and how they parent in general.

My mother loved socialising, but I personally always hated these events. BUT I didn’t mind it and even enjoyed conversations when I went with other family members without my mother around. Why? Here are a few reasons:

• My mother thinks the best way to cure social anxiety is to surprise me with social events. So she tries to avoid telling me the details of any events until the last possible minute, and then she’ll yell at me for not being prepared. Like she’ll tell me we’re going to lunch on Saturday, but won’t say where it is or who is going or what the dress code is, until she starts getting ready to leave and she realises I’m not dressed up (because I didn’t know what time we were leaving!).

• Also before these events, my mother would remind me to be on my best behaviour, but she would say it in the worst way possible. Like “I don’t want you to be rude. Everyone already thinks you’re disgusting and rude, so you need to do better. Don’t forget that none of these guests actually like you, they’re only nice to you because they’re MY friends.” She’d periodically remind me of these things during the event by whispering it to me when others aren’t listening.

• During the parties, whether at home or elsewhere, my mother wouldn’t allow me to actually have conversations with anyone, so I couldn’t actually practice social skills even if I tried. If she saw me talking with someone she would jump in and talk over me. She wouldn’t let me finish sentences unless I was praising her.

• She’ll publicly praise me for things that, in private, she says she hated about me. For example, let’s say I got an A+ in a subject - at home in private my mother tells me that grades mean nothing and that this A+ just shows how much of a useless nerd I am and how much time I wasted studying. In front of her friends though she is the proudest mother ever and takes all the credit for my academic success. Then after the party she’ll specifically remind me that grades mean nothing and that all her friends were not impressed and their children are so much better than me.

• After the dinner party, usually the next day or a few days later, my mother would retell stories she heard from her friends and expect me to react with awe/surprise/shock/etc as though I was hearing the story for the first time. And she’d get mad if I point out that I was there the entire time so I heard all the details about her friends’ new job or new house or whatever, and demand that I listen to her story all the way through and react like a rapt audience. It’s like she just forgot that I was there and that I have ears??

So given all of that, it’s no surprise that I had social anxiety! Later in my 20s when I started socialising more independently, without my mother interfering, the anxiety just evaporated, and I actually started enjoying socialising after a few years.

I’ve heard it described as a type of gaslighting. I realise that term gets thrown around a lot, and this isn’t the typical definition of gaslighting, but in this case I think the usage fits. The abuser is pretending to be nice in public to hide their abuse, and their victims are confused/peer pressured/shamed into believing that the abuser is actually a good person. Then the victim is left thinking they must be in the wrong, that they somehow trigger the abuser’s “bad side”, and that they deserve the bad treatment. So then this makes it more difficult for the victim to seek outside help or to break free. In reality the abuser’s public face is fake and the abusive side is the real one.

I see you’ve met my ex.

Yeah I am grateful every day that I got away from him and now have a much healthier relationship with a wonderful man!

My ex-bf was definitely an early-stage abuser back then. He was trying out various tactics but wasn’t proficient at most of them. I was an easy target because I was raised by a narcissistic mother and had negative self-esteem, my family was nowhere near as wealthy as his family, and I already had a crush on him (well, more like his fake public persona) when he asked me out. But even my naive and conflict-avoidant self could feel that there were things not right about that relationship (starting from the love-bombing and throughout). I stayed way too long though!! It didn’t help that my mother supported him over me on every conflict, and would regularly invite him over to dinner at our place, make me wait on him, and apologise to him on my behalf. Even after our messy breakup my mother still insisted that he was the victim and continued to be friendly towards him and berate me for “losing him”. He got emboldened through all this. He wanted to be a master manipulator and told different stories to different groups of friends/family at various points, but somehow didn’t think that his mother (who lived overseas) might talk to his ex-girlfriends or the parents of his friends/exes and realise he was lying.

From rumours I’ve heard since we broke up, I think he has just refined his abuse techniques and learned to hide his actions better from his mother. (His mother is the one who built all the wealth in his family, and he’s still partly financially reliant on her even at 36 years old, so of course he is afraid to offend her.)

Anyway, sorry for the rant. I’ve had literal nightmares about what life would’ve been like if I actually got married to him or got pregnant (from him raping me - I did have a pregnancy scare). But it’s a huge life lesson on what to avoid in a partner and the experience also opened my eyes to how abusive my mother was and how that shaped my responses.

I want to emphasise that the “child driven” part is really crucial too. Giving your child a voice is something that your child will value forever.

I’m an only child raised by a single mum, so we spent a lot of one-on-one time together out of simple necessity (like hours per day). However, my mother almost never let me decide any activity. Even when she asks me to choose something (which is maybe only twice a year), she would change the activity somehow. And I don’t mean common sense logistical stuff like fitting around her schedule, I mean if I ask to go to a particular (not expensive) restaurant for my birthday, she’d insist on a different restaurant or she won’t go, or we’d get to the restaurant I want and she’d force me to order something different from what I wanted by calling me stupid/disgusting for wanting that food. She not only took no interest in my hobbies, but actively opposed them because she wanted every spare moment of my time to be spent on her, so of course she never listened to me if I wanted to talk. And she could really talk. She couldn’t stand silence so would just talk nonstop, often talking over people (not just me). For the first 25 years of my life I literally couldn’t finish sentences in her presence because she’d interrupt and take over (yes even when I was talking to someone else she’d butt in). She’d then get angry at me for “not communicating” and punish me.

My mother thinks that we spent lots of quality time together during those years when I lived at home, but in reality she did all the talking and made all the decisions, and I was miserable. She leaned on me as pseudo-spouse and for emotional support, but dismissed every problem that I had as trivial and not worth her time. She keeps telling me even now that I should be grateful for all the time she spent on me because she could’ve easily chosen to abort me or after the divorce abandon me. But she literally has no idea who I am as a person because she never listened.