We set up the card table in the living room for an evening of bridge with another young couple we knew. We both had little babies, so we decided to play bridge while the babies slept. The other man began the bidding, and when his partner, his wife, responded, he did not like her bid. They began to argue. It was getting pretty loud, when all of a sudden the man leapt over the table and knocked his wife and her chair to the carpet. Then he started hitting her. Well, to say the least, my husband and I were stunned. My husband quickly pulled the man aside and took him to another room to cool off. I helped the wife get to her feet and comforted her. We finally got things settled down, and the couple went home, completely embarrassed. We could see that the wife had done nothing to deserve such treatment, and we wondered how much worse things must be when no one was watching. It's amazing to me to look back so many years and realize that we did nothing more. We all simply pretended that nothing had happened. Several years later the couple divorced.
In those days, as inconceivable as it is to me now, people just felt that what went on between a husband and wife was their own business. As a result of this horribly misguided notion, we did not attempt to help the wife escape the abuse she was experiencing—the actual danger she was in. The idea of one person totally dominating another was really a new one for us. It all seemed so surreal. I learned much later that when one person continually tries to control another, this constitutes tyranny, and this atmosphere poisons the scene. The person being attacked certainly recognizes the traumatic signs—injustice and oppression. However, when anyone finds they're in an abusive relationship, whether it is verbal abuse, or something far more serious with actual physical danger, we all need to know that this pattern of behavior is never acceptable. We don't have to live in its shadow.
Sometimes it seems that there is no way out, that we are trapped in a no-win situation—or worse yet, that we are somehow responsible for bringing on the abuse. Yet, in that card game, the wife had done nothing to cause the outburst except to make her bid—two hearts. Some ideas in the book Miscellaneous Writings by Mary Baker Eddy clearly illustrate how injust a situation like this is. She says, "That the innocent shall suffer for the guilty, is inhuman" (p. 121).
