1. Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough: within the ultra-Trad communities there are women who buy into the "Don't go to college, don't work outside the home, pray these seven novenas to get a husband" mentality. Obviously if Mr. Right doesn't come...

2...along, that's bad enough if she wants to stay within the community; she will be criticized for "still" being single at 25 (or even younger). But what's even worse is when someone who looks like Mr. Right does come along--but he's Mr. Abusive.

The pressure to marry...

3...at a young age, combined with a lack of real-world experience of people, may make Mr. Abusive seem like Mr. Right, or at least Mr. Good Enough So I Won't Be Embarassingly Single Any More, to the Trad girl who has not gone to college or worked or even taken a...

4...trip without her whole family along. So she takes Mr. Abusive for better or worse in Holy Matrimony, and several children are born in the next few years, and she has been conditioned to believe that any unhappiness of her own or within the home is her fault...

5...because when a girl with no experience of the world marries in her late teens or early 20s a man who is older and who shares with her parents and faith community the idea that marriage is for the begetting of children, and men are ordered by God to be the ruling...

6...heads of families, and women are to be subservient in everything and do whatever their husbands tell them cheerfully and without question or complaint--well, if any of that bothers her than it must be her sinful attitude or modernist desire to be treated like...

7...an equal human being that is the cause. She excuses her husband's bad temper, she excuses his total and imperious control over the finances, she excuses his inability to let her recover fully after childbirth, she accepts his rule over which friends and family...

8...members she is allowed to see or talk to and which must be cut off, until her circle of support is made up only of his own echo chamber, and then one day, he packs a bag and drives away and she finds out he has had another woman for most of their marriage, and is...

9...now leaving her to be with his mistress. She is thirty-six years old, and has seven children. She never went to college. She never worked outside the home. She has no idea that she needs a lawyer and no way to pay one if she does figure that out. He files...

10...for divorce, and she has nothing.

I have personally known former Trad girls who lived this reality. It is more of a pattern than anyone wants to admit. Other patters emerge too: the physical abuser, the spousal rapist, the screaming control freak, all of them...

11...demanding constant and perfect obedience from their wives, none of them willing to give them an ounce of respect. And they know she can't seek help or run away from him because she has no education, no work experience, no marketable skills, and no way to get them.