Following on from my posting from yesterday, I wanted to try to explain a bit more about why I don’t think my friend can walk away from this man.

The parallel with this terrifying film (well I think it’s terrifying anyway) seems to be that she has become so numb to emotion and to ‘real life’ that she can’t actually see that for most women life isn’t one long round of verbal and physical abuse. In the same way that the woman in the film spends years enduring torture of the cruellest kind before she finally realises that the only escape is a new life and new identity. The character in the film has what I call a ‘eureka’ moment and then acts by secretly learning to swim to plot her escape.

I can sort of see how that works. I too plotted to leave my ex-husband for many months before I finally did it. In my case, I didn’t have anything to fear from him in as much as he was never violent or abusive.

She, though, craves this man’s love in such a way that she feels she can’t live without him and she’s quite prepared to accept being with him on any terms. She believes, however foolishly, that her life is better with him than it would be without him and this means that when her friends tell her that he’s a nasty piece of work who doesn’t deserve her she rejects their observations by saying ‘but they don’t understand how much I love him’. ‘They don’t understand that I can’t live without him’.

While I sit here and write, she has come in. Thankfully she’s much brighter than she was BUT the latest is that this man has been to her home today, let himself in and walked away with her stereo and her table. What does she say about this? She says ‘he didn’t steal it, he just didn’t have them at his place so he took mine’. That shows how little she’s prepared to consider him in the way others do. I can’t see that I can do more now because until she accepts the situation, she won’t hear a word said against him.

This photo is meant to represent the chilling moment when ‘our heroine’ realises he’s found her because she opens her cupboard and finds all the tins are arranged so the labels face the front. My stomach churned when I saw that in the film. Jo will make that realisation one day but for now I give support as best I can.