Recently, while scrolling through Facebook, I came across a video.
This video showed a girl, holding a knife to her boyfriend/fiance/husbands throat, making him tell the camera that girls needed to stop commenting on his photos on Instagram because they were in love. The man in the video looked visibly terrified, and his voice shook. It was posted with a picture talking about how great jealous girlfriends are. The comments on the post were mostly girls tagging somebody and laughing about how that was "so them."
This narrative is not uncommon on Facebook nowadays, and it's always the same thing: people saying how amazing a jealous significant other is. Some of the "jealous" things people do are in fact possessive, controlling, and downright emotionally abusive.
Things like men not letting their girlfriends go out with their friends, wear certain things, have friends of the opposite sex. Things like women getting mad at their boyfriends for girls commenting on their photos, for what they wear, and for having friends of the opposite sex. These behaviors are not loving or good: they are controlling.
We are telling people to see the emotional abuse and control as healthy. We tell people to accept it as love. We are creating a society of people who are accepting abuse as love instead of recognizing it as abuse. We have got to stop telling this toxic narrative of people in abusive situations who think they are just being treated right.
When are we going to stop teaching people to accept abuse?
