I'm sure in the end it did benefit her to learn to manage without him. I just don't like the attitude in which he did it, that tone of "Don't come crying to me. I don't care that you're afraid." My husband encouraged me to get my driver's license. It took a couple of years even once I started learning, largely because of that fear, but he helped me work through it. Now that we're back home from vacation, my next task is to get a job. As a person with a disability, I'm doing that through Vocational Rehabilitation. My next meeting with them is in two weeks because now my worker is on vacation.

My husband has also been teaching me how he manages the finances, something I've never had occasion to do before (because there have been no finances to manage.) It's all for the same purpose: If something happens to him, I'll be able to maintain the lifestyle he has provided for me instead of having to go back to my previous lifestyle of government assistance and subsidized housing.

But instead of picking me up and throwing me in the river, my husband's technique is to get in the river with me and walk me through it. He knows *why* I'm afraid of the world. He knows the world hasn't been very kind to me so far. He also knows I come from a background of "You just shut up and let me handle this. It's my department." Rigid gender roles. The man works at a job. The woman cooks and cleans, doesn't ask questions, and does what her husband tells her to do. She does NOT work at a job herself, even if he is unemployed or drinking his paycheck away, because her place is in the home. My father was that way, and my first husband was that way.

Even nowadays, I've seen that kind of dependency not only encouraged, but insisted on. At another website, I saw a young girl defending her boyfriend who forbids her to get a job. "He just wants to take care of me, that's all." I told her to change that to "He just wants to control me, that's all," because it's more accurate. But it also happens in reverse. My grandfather was another one of those "rigid gender role" men. Housework was the woman's department. I never saw him so much as make a bed. So when my grandmother sprained her ankle, guess which one of them was helpless around the house?