Tough "love"

Rihanna and Eminem have produced a hit with "Love the Way You Lie."  It's catchy; you can hardly listen to the radio for an hour without hearing it.  And it's driving me crazy to not be able to avoid it.

I'm a little disturbed that America has consumed this song so willingly.  The video portrays a relationship that combines violence with passion, and interestingly, shows both the male and female partner hitting each other, with the female often initiating the violence.   Is this an accurate depiction?  Certainly in public service announcements, there's the implication that the male is the sole perpetrator of violence. But maybe this is not always the case.

What strikes me about the song is that in Eminem's lyrics, a few things ring very true with literature on relationship violence. 

1.  The emotions are intense; even though violence is involved, and likely fear, there may also be strong feelings of love, passion, and desire.  The violence is a piece of a larger, complex relationship.  For example, one verse goes:

Now I know we said things, did things that we didn't mean
And we fall back into the same patterns, same routine
But your temper's just as bad as mine is
You're the same as me
But when it comes to love you're just as blinded
Baby, please come back
It wasn't you, baby it was me
Maybe our relationship isn't as crazy as it seems
Maybe that's what happens when a tornado meets a volcano
All I know is I love you too much to walk away though
Come inside, pick up your bags off the sidewalk
Don't you hear sincerity in my voice when I talk
I told you this is my fault
Look me in the eyeball
Next time I'm pissed, I'll aim my fist at the drywall
Next time. There won't be no next time
I apologize even though I know its lies

2.  The violence isn't consistent.  It may ebb and flow; there may be periods of peace, or lulls between episodes.  BUT,

3.  As he so "eloquently" points out at the end of the song, often the violence escalates, and many perpetrators are blinded by their need to control their partner.
Lyrics (minus the f-word),
If she ever tries to leave me again/I'm going to tie her to the bed and set the house on fire.

Almost half of all murders of women in the U.S. are committed by intimate partners.  Isn't that incredible?  That the person that women should be most afraid of is the man that they are closest to?  And we're doing what to change this?

Why do we not find this song deeply disturbing, where's the moral outrage about these issues?  How can such violent sentiments be included in a top twenty song?  I'm a little disappointed in us for not listening a little more carefully.  Relationship violence remains an "invisible" problem; as in, one that no one wants to take on.  We think that there is a fine line being loving someone so much that you do crazy things to keep the relationship, but in actuality I think that love and violence are pretty different, and anyone who sees that line as blurry probably needs to back off and do some thinking.  Love cannot be about ownership and control; it should be about respect for another person's autonomy and trust.  I don't see how these could be confused.  Of course then I listen to Taylor Swift's "The way I love you" and think that the chorus, though much less graphic, communicates some of the same message that true love should hurt:
I miss screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain/3AM and I'm cursing your name/so in love that I acted insane/and that's the way I loved you.

I was listening to "Love the way you lie" earlier today thinking about Yeardley Love, the UVA lacrosse player who was brutally murdered by her drunk (ex?) boyfriend.  Did her friends see the danger signs?  Did Yeardley?  If so, was there a way that this could have been prevented? I had a good friend who was in a relationship that was emotionally abusive, and it was terrifying to watch how good her boyfriend was at manipulating her.  He managed to isolate her from so many of her good friends and make her dependent on him for just about everything.  When it finally ended, he couldn't handle it.  He started calling her repeatedly, at work when she would answer his cell, and just showing up at her apartment building.  It devastated her and I can still see how she's rebuilding back the confidence that he took away from her.

I've asked myself a lot if I should have done more.  I tried to point out the flaws in his logic, note that a lot of his behavior was included on any list of classic warning signs of relationship abuse, but I felt that I had to walk a fine line to avoid giving him more ammunition to use against me (he was clearly displeased that she remained friends with me).  She recently told me that she was surprised that I didn't say more--I'm not sure if that was a rebuke or just an observation.  But what I did do, and I think was the right strategy (though perhaps I wasn't proactive enough about it), was I tried to create space for her to decide to leave the relationship, and support her throughout the recovery from it, without judgment about her decisions.

Tomorrow I begin leading sexual violence risk reduction workshops for Harvard freshmen, and for the first time relationship violence will be one of the topics we cover.  I'm glad, as women 20-24 are in fact most likely to be victimized in a relationship.  But as to what advice to give these young women, I'm at a loss.  I think about the Rihanna/Eminem hit song, and I think about Yeardley Love, and I just cannot say honestly that I think that victims of relationship violence are supported.  In the absence of fundamental change in the gender dynamics of our society, which I think are needed, what I hope to communicate is that silence, in all cases, enables perpetrators to continue to own their victims, because victims know that others see the violence and don't intervene, thus creating the sense that they implicitly support it.  So any of us that consider ourselves anti-relationship violence should be speaking up whenever we see something that's inappropriate, particularly when it's a good friend who is the victim or the perpetrator (or both, in the case of a relationship that's violent both ways). 

Sorry for the rant--feels better to have it out there vs. inside.