Crazy Love

Timing is deliberate, not impulsive. Conor's first cruel outburst came the night they moved in together, when Steiner had already surrendered her apartment. His first physical attack, choking her and slamming her head against a wall, came five days before their wedding. The bruises were faint enough to hide during the ceremony.

Entrapment precedes the first blow. The batterer waits until the woman is emotionally or financially committed: engaged, married, pregnant, or having quit her job because he wants to take care of her. Steiner had done all of these. He begins with a threat, like punching a wall, then a controlled shove or a pinch that leaves a bruise, then escalates in force and frequency as her denial and numbness grow. No batterer, the expert notes, hits on a first date.

Distance was the point. Conor abruptly quit his coveted Wall Street job and moved them to rural Vermont, far from Steiner's friends, coworkers, and the New York career she loved. She traded her byline for a lonely ranch house with cigarette-stained walls. He pressured her to give away her beloved Siamese cat, claiming allergy. He seethed whenever she called her best friend Winnie and mocked her family.

Isolation removes witnesses and lifelines. The books she later reads confirm that abusers isolate partners to prevent escape. Cut off from anyone who might notice bruises, question the relationship, or offer a couch to flee to, the victim's world shrinks until the abuser becomes her only reference point, her only family, her only mirror.

Abuse is a childhood inheritance. The researcher Steiner interviews, who runs court-ordered groups for batterers, says every adult batterer he studied was physically abused as a child by someone he loved and depended on. Conor's stepfather Wade beat him, choked him unconscious, and starved him while feeding the other children. His mother was beaten in front of him.

Love and violence become fused. These men do not attack strangers. They batter only intimate partners, because childhood taught them that controlling the people you love through fear is how you stay safe from being hurt. Their vulnerability terrifies them. The expert is blunt: they hit because they love. The paradigm links tenderness and terror so tightly that, for the batterer, they are inseparable.

The rescuer fantasy is the trap. Steiner stayed because she believed she alone could heal Conor, that her unconditional love could undo his brutal past. Every other woman had given up on him; she would not. This conviction, she realizes, kept her in danger for years.

Departure is the only leverage. The expert delivers the verdict she dreads: no batterer he studied ever permanently stopped. They make progress, then regress and beat their partners again. The partner is the last person on earth who can help him, because her staying confirms the violence works. Leaving is the one act that tells him, and society, that what he did is unacceptable and wholly his responsibility. It is also, he warns, the most dangerous moment, since an abandoned batterer has nothing left to lose.

The wrong question blames the victim. Steiner heard endlessly, why would any woman stay. The question implies stupidity or masochism. She reframes it: she left many times, driving off in the middle of the night, only to get a few blocks and realize she had nowhere to go, no money, no coat, and an abuser who lived in her home and shared her car.

Staying is layered, not simple. She stayed because she loved him, because leaving meant abandoning their home, their dreams, and the part of herself capable of unconditional love. She stayed because shame kept her from telling her father, and because she feared his disappointment more than Conor's fists. The obstacle was never weakness. It was logistics, love, shame, and terror braided together.

Perfectionism and craving created the gap. Steiner grew up with an alcoholic mother who called her the Washington Whore and a workaholic father she barely saw. She learned to project a flawless surface while starving for love and approval. That specific hunger, to be told she was good enough, was the chink in her self-esteem that Conor detected and exploited.

She recognized his damage because it mirrored hers. Both had traumatic childhoods they escaped through achievement. When Conor sobbed about his abuse, she saw a fellow survivor and wanted to save him, projecting her own longing to be rescued onto the rescue of another. Understanding her particular vulnerability, not vulnerability in general, was what eventually let her spot and avoid abusive men for good.

She had misjudged both parents. Steiner long saw her father as the trustworthy one and her mother as the flawed drunk. Splitting from Conor forced a reckoning. Her father would not help her find a divorce lawyer, skipped her graduation, and even gave Conor a thousand dollars that funded his legal fight. Her mother, for all her cruelty, flew across the country and answered fifty midnight calls.

Absence can wear a respectable face. Her uncle Jimmy reveals that her father, as a boy, watched his sister Marilyn beaten and starved to death, and survived by sealing off his heart. Like Conor, he paid for his escape with a piece of his soul. Steiner concludes that a mother who showed up imperfectly loved her more than a father who was admired but never there.

Naming it aloud builds the barricade. After Conor nearly strangled her and a neighbor's pounding on the door broke the spell, Steiner called the police, filed a restraining order at 3 a.m., and then phoned everyone she knew. Repeating the story to family, friends, and former colleagues felt like peeling off skin, but each telling was a brick in a wall preventing her from crossing back to him.

Winning the divorce means declining to fight. Her tiny, balding lawyer gave counterintuitive counsel: do not battle Conor in court, where cases drag for years and judges may believe the charming survivor over the privileged Harvard girl. Instead, convince him he has won completely. Give in on money, surrender the assets she could afford to lose, and let him feel victorious so he would leave her alone forever.