Everything he says will sound like love

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There is nothing subtle about Andrew Tate. Him stating that women bear responsibility for sexual assault, that they are a man’s property, describing how he’d strangle a woman if she cheated on him: he reads like a textbook domestic abuser. The orgasm ROI man was the same, calculating what he was owed per unit of effort spent.

Nobody has to interpret these men. They have already written it down and spelled it out.

Your daughter will most likely never date one of them. By the time these ideas reach the boy she likes, they will have been translated into a language she has been trained since primary school to hear as devotion.

That is the part that is hard to teach. Coercive control cannot be described afterwards in a single sentence. It is an accumulation of small, reasonable-sounding requests, each of which can be defended on its own. She will not be handed one moment she will feel justified to refuse. She will be handed about four hundred of them, spread across several years, and every one of them will feel like something ordinary that normal couples negotiate.

So this is a list of the sentences themselves. Not the warning signs from a leaflet, but the actual words, in the order they may turn up. If she knows the words, she gets to hear the pattern early, while leaving is still only uncomfortable rather than life-threatening.

It starts warm. “I just want you all to myself.” “I don’t want to share you.” “Do you have to go out?” “I hate it when you’re not here.”

Then it turns into an opinion about the people she loves. “Your friends don’t actually like me.” “Your mum has never given me a chance.” “I’m not saying you can’t go. I’m just saying I’ll be sitting here on my own again.”

It reduces the number of people she sees regularly, and then makes him the person who explains all her other relationships back to her. Isolation doesn’t have to be a locked door. It can be a hundred evenings where going out causes the atmosphere at home to drop a few degrees, until she stops bothering, because the emotional cost is too great. And then a year later nobody is left who knows her well enough to call out that she has changed.

A man who simply misses her says he misses her, and then asks how the night was and is glad she had fun. Missing someone does not come with an invoice.

“Text me when you get there.” “Share your location, it’s a safety thing.” “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why does it bother you?” “I only looked at your phone because I was worried about you.” “Who’s Sam?”

Every one of these sentences puts her on the defensive, needing to prove innocence and set boundaries, which is hard at the best of times and harder at the start of a new relationship. The baseline then moves, in a way that isn't obvious. Location sharing becomes an expectation that she is reachable at all times. Reading her messages becomes an audit.

“Let me handle it, you’re hopeless with money.” “It makes sense for it all to go into my account, mine’s got the better rate.” “Why do you need your own card? We’re a team.” “I earn it, so I decide how it’s spent.”

This is the one that determines how long she stays, and I would put it towards the top of the list. A woman with her own account can leave on a Tuesday afternoon. A woman without money has to plan her escape over six months, and by then the friends who might have lent her a spare room have usually been eroded by everything in the section above.

Combining finances as a couple is fine and normal. Handing over full control is a different arrangement altogether, and far harder to undo. The test is visibility in both directions: can she see every account, and can she move her own money today without asking anybody? If the answer to either is no, she needs her own account before she needs a conversation.

“I only get jealous because I love you so much.” “Any real man would have reacted like that.” “You knew exactly what you were doing when you put that on.” “If you didn’t want me to think something was going on, you shouldn’t have laughed like that.”

Jealousy has been sold to girls as a sign of male affection. She has been taught that the man who does not mind is the man who does not care, so possessiveness gets read as intensity and intensity gets read as love.

She needs to understand that the feeling and the behaviour are two separate things. Most people feel a flare of jealousy occasionally and handle it privately. If she is cancelling plans to avoid him getting jealous, the jealousy is doing its job.

“It’s been three weeks.” “Everyone else’s girlfriend does.” “You’d do it if you actually loved me.” “I’m not going to beg.” “Fine. I’ll just deal with it myself, then.”

He is keeping a sex ledger in his head and is letting her know when she’s running behind. The effect is that she starts saying yes to keep him happy rather than because she wants to. Consent obtained through pressure or threat is not consent at all, and marriage or a two-year relationship makes no difference to that.

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“I wouldn’t have shouted if you hadn’t wound me up.” “You know exactly how to press my buttons.” “I’m like this because of what my ex did to me.” “You’re too sensitive.” “It was a joke, obviously.”

His mood becomes the main thing to manage, and she starts running a full-time job in the background, reading his face when he comes through the door to work out what kind of evening this is going to be.

“I’d have nothing without you.” “I don’t know what I’d do if you left.” “I’d kill myself.” “Nobody else would ever put up with me.” And the inversion, usually arriving a bit later, “nobody else would put up with you.”

It makes her personally responsible for his survival, so that leaving becomes something she would be doing to him. It is the sentence that keeps women in houses for years after they have stopped pretending to be happy.

She should know that a threat of self-harm made in order to stop someone leaving is a threat pointed at her. If the risk is real, he needs a doctor and a crisis service.

“You’re remembering it wrong.” “I never said that, you’re making it up.” “You’re being crazy.” “Ask anyone, they’ll tell you.”

He stops arguing about what she did and starts arguing about whether she can trust her own memory.

Keep a note somewhere he cannot see it, in an app he does not know about, under a boring name, with dates and sentences written down the same day. Not for a courtroom, although it may end up in one, but for her, on the morning eight months from now when he tells her something never happened and she needs to be able to check.

None of this works as a checklist. She can lose years trying to work out whether he means it, so ask about outcomes instead.

How many people did she speak to freely two years ago, and how many now? Can she spend the equivalent of a nice dinner without a conversation about it? When she says something happened, does she then have to defend the fact that it happened? Does she rehearse sentences in the car before she gets home?

A relationship that is good for her expands the number of people who love her, and that test works just as well on a job or a friendship as it does on a boyfriend.

Nobody meets a monster, which is why none of the above is as easy to spot as she thinks. She will meet someone funny and attentive who tells her within three weeks that he has never felt like this about anyone. The speed is typical, because the early part has to be extraordinary for her to tolerate the later part.

This happens in every type of relationship, it happens to men and to people in same-sex couples, and the language barely changes. It is simply that the danger falls most frequently on women, so this is written the way it is.

And the last thing, which I would rather she heard from me at nineteen than from a service at thirty-four. The most dangerous period in a controlling relationship is the leaving, which means she should tell someone long before she is certain. She does not need evidence or to be sure she is not overreacting. She needs one person outside the house who knows what is going on, and a domestic abuse service can talk her through planning even if she has no intention of going anywhere yet, including the version where the money is already gone and the debt is in her name.

If she takes one line from this, make it this one: A person who loves her will not need her to become smaller in order to feel safe.

If any of this is describing your own house:

US: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or text START to 88788

UK: 0808 2000 247

Australia: 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or text 0458 737 732

New Zealand: Women’s Refuge 0800 733 843 and Shine 0508 744 633

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