Many women stay in a marriage because of the children, some remain to the extent of endangering their own lives.

My friend is a very intelligent woman.
She is a professional nutritionist at a big hospital in our metropolitan city and has been the sole bread winner of her family, supporting her children and her jobless husband. For years she had been doing that, while the man she married became the househusband.

Lately, I learned from her sister that she had lost her job because she became deaf. When I came to visit her, she wrote me how it happened. They were riding in a car on the way to the mall, when her husband started getting into his "interrogating mood" and started to ask her repeatedly, questions about her previous day's whereabouts.

When his anger turned to rage, he grabbed her by the hair and pounded her
head on the dashboard as he sped the car on the highway. Their two daughters were shocked and numbed with fear at the backseat. He kept pounding her head from the time they were on the highway until they reached the mall.
By then she was bleeding and had lost consciousness. She woke up at home,
her head and ear swollen, and the doctor who treated her was a family practitioner who just did house calls.
There were no medical reports of course.

When she had recovered, she went back to work, but the injury in her ear became infected and later her hearing became totally impaired. That affected her job, though she tried to hide it.
Because of that, she was asked for a forced resignation due to disability.

Her husband was remorseful and temporarily repentant. He was attentive and affectionate to her for a few weeks, until the cycle recurred.
He had caught her talking with a female
friend and had watched her hands motion towards him so he suspected her of relating the incident.

When they got home that night, he went back to his violent moods and started to hit her with a mono bloc plastic chair, and hit her so hard it broke. He also managed to break two of her ribs. Not content with that, he took his handgun and pointed it to her
forehead, all the while screaming insults and verbal abuse. He only stopped when he heard the police siren outside, as the neighbors had called the police.

They were taken to the precinct, but my friend did not press charges and even admitted it was her fault. The police let them go and shrugged it off as just a marital problem.

Right now she is in pain from her broken ribs and need to have an x-ray of her injuries. I asked her if she wanted a lawyer, and if she wanted to leave her abusive and psychologically impaired husband, she said no. She cannot leave him for the sake of her children. She did not want them to grow up in a "broken home", and she still loved her husband, rationalizing that maybe she provoked him and it was HER fault.

I left her house frustrated and perplexed at her decision, and angry at her situation. I was angry too at how our country, being dominantly Catholic, continue to block the passing of divorce laws to end up failed marriages such as these. The Catholic church in my country has declared marriage to be
"until death do us part." Literally.

The absence of heavier protective laws for women in my country has encouraged the rise of domestic violence and abuse. The Catholic Church is a very strong political force in my country and has always influenced the passing of bills in the legislative body.

As a result of this, there are no divorce laws that had ever been passed
or had ever been proposed. Couples who want to get out of failed marriages for valid reasons, just "live-in" with their partners as long as the former husband /wife does not file legal cases
against the union.

The Catholic Church prides itself with the fact that the Philippines "being the only Catholic nation in the Far East, has no divorce", but in reality, we do. That is sheer hypocrisy.

There are millions of cases like that of my friend's in the Philippines.
The last case was of a man who, out of fits of jealousy, hacked his helpless wife to death before the eyes of his screaming children.

I know of a particular case close to home, a husband who was a drug addict
stabbed his wife to death with an ice
pick and his children were also the witnesses. He was not given the life
sentence because his brother was a politician in our city and the court said "he was not rational when he did the crime."

It grieves me to think that God created woman to be a man's "helper, companion, friend" but this is not what we have in the Philippines. A man must treat her with love, respect, and consideration, and provide for her needs. She is a person to cherish and not to be harmed.

My friend loves her husband even if he is a monster, and she still hopes
someday he will see how much she loves him and their children. She is deaf, he is blind.