Boys Who Hurt Us, Love Us.

On the invisible lessons we teach our daughters about love

Nobody sits a toddler down and explains gravity because you don’t have to. You just fall off enough things and eventually your body learns that down is the direction everything goes. Then it just becomes an invisible rule that regulates your entire existence, and you spend the rest of your life on a planet that is constantly, and aggressively pulling you toward it. And that’s normal, because for you it is. This is how my daughter learned that a boy who hurts her probably loves her.

She is ten. And I have never once looked at my child and said, sweetheart, physical pain is a love language, lean in. But I had to get very honest with myself to admit that I didn’t have to teach her this. Before she ever set foot in fifth grade, before any boy ever laid a hand on her at recess, she had already been living a situation where the man she loved most in the world would tease her, flick her, pinch her, squeeze her neck, and when she asked him why, he looked at her and said, “because I love you.” Said by a grown man to his little girl, teaching her without a single lesson plan, which direction everything falls. Teaching her that love and discomfort belong in that home together. Teaching her that the people who hurt you are often the people who mean it most sincerely. And this is how children learn everything that will shape the rest of their lives, by being shown, over and over, until it starts feeling like gravity.

So when a boy in her class started punching her in the back, pushing her, and hitting her at recess, she shrugged. That’s the part I can’t get over. Not the hitting, though the hitting made me want to commit several felonies. The shrug. The already tired shrug of a girl who had figured out this is how love goes.

Now, before you decide this story is about someone else’s family, I need you to stay with me because I watch parents do this all the time and I did it too. We hear something like this and we think, well, my husband is not like that. He’s just playful. He’s just rough housing, or just teasing…it’s affectionate. Boys are physical, that’s just how he shows love. And maybe that’s true. But I want you to ask your daughter, not your husband, your daughter, whether it feels like love when it happens.

In healthy, innocent play, the child is relaxed, and the laughter is real, not strained or nervous. She knows she can say “stop” or pull away and that boundary will be respected immediately, because the adult is paying close attention to her cues. When it’s over, she doesn’t walk away confused or unsettled. She feels connected, safe, and still fully herself. But there is a version of this in too many houses where a dad is a little rough, a little grabby, a little careless with the small body that trusts him completely. Sometimes it looks like nothing. Until your daughter shrugs at you one day and you realize she’s been building her understanding of love out of it. That’s gravity. And it does not stay in the house. It walks right into marriages, or into fifth grade with her, and it shrugs when a boy puts his hands on her and she thinks, this is probably just how it goes.

So after two weeks of coaching my daughter through every reasonable option; tell him to stop, walk away, ask a teacher, tell a teacher, tell the principal, let’s call the principal—and watching none of it work, I did something unreasonable. The boy showed up at my house one afternoon, wanting my daughter to come play sports, because she can absolutely school anyone in sports. I invited him inside. His dad was in the military. You could see how proud he was of that with his chest out, chin up, the pride of a kid. And I said, “your dad is trained to protect and defend?” “Yes,” he said. “That’s the thing about honorable men,” I told him. “They don’t hurt girls. They protect them. They stop other men who try to cause harm, too.” I watched something shift in him. So I continued speaking with my kids as the audience. “Girls only like boys who are kind to them,” I said. “Boys who hit girls — that’s not a crush. That’s called abuse. And we don’t allow that. Right?”

The next day my daughter came home luminous. He had been kind to her all day. For the last month he has treated her like a queen. When another boy called her a dictator on the playground, this same kid, this recent puncher, stepped in and defended her. She came home looked at me and said, “thank you for telling him, Mom. And teaching him.” She is already doing maintenance on a world she didn’t break.

That boy wasn’t a monster. He was just falling in the only direction of gravity. Because boys are in this too. They get teased for liking girls, and the men in their lives don’t sit them down and tell them what’s what…they mostly worry about the boy’s wins on the field, or grades, or whether they’ve mowed the lawn. And so a fifth grade boy does what fifth grade boys have always done, which is act out the only emotional vocabulary available to him, which is physical. And every adult around him lets it pass with a smirk and a “boys will be boys,” which is a sentence that has done more damage to this country than most natural disasters and should be banned immediately. Nobody rewrites the law of gravity for boys either. And so they just keep falling.

But what enrages me most is the men who most loudly defend badly behaved boys are the exact same men who would go completely feral if anyone treated their daughters that way. The same guy who says “that’s just how boys show they like someone” would also, about his own daughter, say he’d destroy any man who touched her. He holds both of these positions simultaneously and sees no contradiction. He is out here claiming to be a protector of women while raising, and sometimes being, the very thing women need protecting from. And he cannot see it. Because gravity doesn’t feel like a force when you’re the one it’s working for.

I know this type of man, because I was married to him. And where I have a hard time catching my breath—is that I stayed for twelve years. Me. The woman writing this. I stayed, and I want to be honest about why, because I think it matters, especially for the women reading this who are nodding slowly and looking at the floor right now.

The gravity that holds women in place is not just cultural. Sometimes it has scripture behind it. Sometimes it has been given to you by people you love and trust completely, described in the language of covenants and eternal families and divine order. It makes him head of your household. And sounds like, your suffering is sacred, and your willingness to endure, to forgive, to keep the peace is righteousness. And when the God you have prayed to your whole life and the community you were raised in and the eternal promises you made at an altar are all pulling in the same direction, that is not gravity anymore. It’s the ground beneath your feet, and you don’t argue with the ground. You just stand on it and call it solid, because for you, it is. Your God did not put you on this earth to be a soft place for a man to land his worst impulses, and then thank him for it. I believe that. I believe it the way I now believe in choosing which direction I fall.

I had a man say, “I can see why you’re divorced.” Yes, you can. Because I looked at my life and chose differently. And to a certain kind of man, and to certain institutions built by certain kinds of men, a woman who does that is the most unsettling thing in the world. Because I decided my own life was worth choosing. And I was right.

My daughter shrugged because she was already, at ten, subject to a pull she couldn’t see or question. She had learned, from someone who genuinely loved her, that this is just what love feels like sometimes. That it pushes and squeezes and flicks and says because I love you and you just absorb it, you just let it be the law, because what else would you do—argue with gravity?

I tell her now that she can argue with gravity. That she can look at any force that is pulling her somewhere she doesn’t want to go and say, who decided this was okay? Who made this the rule? And, most importantly, why am I the one who has to keep falling?

A boy who is mean is not mysterious or romantic. He is not your assignment. He’s not a boy with big feelings who doesn’t know how to manage them. He’s not someone you should be patient with while he figures it out using your body. And his trajectory is not your responsibility.

And I’ve taught my son that the strongest thing he can do is make a woman feel genuinely safe. Not owned, not protected from other men while you’re the threat. Actually safe. That is the whole job. Practice it until it’s just who you are. Until kindness is just the direction you fall, automatically, without thinking. Because hopefully someone rewrote the law for you early enough that you don’t even remember learning it.

The good men, who are raising sons and daughters on purpose won’t be losing their minds in my comments. They already know. They know that hurting their daughter, even playfully, teaches her something permanent. They know their son’s relationship with women matters more than any stat or grade.

Gravity isn’t a law. It’s a theory. But it’s just what happens when nobody tells you otherwise. So tell them otherwise. Before she shrugs.

With love,

Sarah Steed xx