You can love your cancelled boyfriend and still be mad when he acts like an asshole

You can also leave him if that's what you want or need to do

The worst thing for someone experiencing domestic violence or the risk of domestic violence is isolation. The more someone is isolated from community and healthy relationships, the worse the outcome in a domestic violence relationship. Giving people in domestic violence relationships ultimatums or telling them you will withdraw connection until they leave their abuser, actually puts the victim in significantly more danger. She needs external relationships to give her a reality check about what is happening (the abuse will be normalized and downplayed by the abuser), and to offer support as she does the difficult and dangerous work of becoming ready to leave and then leaving if leaving is what she needs to do.

Cancel culture marks people as social contagion, dehumanizes them, and makes it a social crime to recognize their humanity, feel empathy or compassion for them, or remain in their life. The partners of cancelled people are cancelled themselves for refusing to abandon their cancelled partners. Cancellation campaigns are often based on false or overstated accusations, but sometimes the accusations are true. Abusers get cancelled for being abusive, and their partners are cancelled for “abuse apologism.” This is an absolutely insane situation that puts the partners of cancelled abusers at serious risk.

If you believe someone is an abuser, you should be compassionate and concerned about their partner. If you really believe that someone is a repeat offender abuser then you should worry that their current partner is a potential victim. We absolutely should not threaten the partners of people accused of abuse, strip away their resources and community, and publicly shame them on the internet. Just like with anyone else experiencing domestic violence or potentially at risk of domestic violence, we should offer unconditional support, belonging, and community not ultimatums, threats, or coercive control. They get enough of that at home.

I have noticed a troubling phenomenon. Men are cancelled based on accusation of a range of abusive behaviours and poor consent practices, and then their current partners are also cancelled and driven out of community. The partners of cancelled people usually experience the same level of cancellation and are blacklisted and publicly shamed. This creates a situation where the couple feels like it’s “them against the world.” It cements their bond because they feel like they only have each other, and that feeling is based on the reality that they are being exiled from human community.

The partner who is cancelled as an abuser or predator will often have PTSD symptoms related to the cancellation. This is not an exaggeration. Cancellation is literally traumatic and produces symptoms of PTSD: flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, dissociation, panic attacks, suicidal ideation, and extreme nervous system responses. What this means is that anything that reminds them of the cancellation can become a trigger, meaning that they have a nervous system response of extreme danger every time something reminds them of the cancellation. This floods their nervous system and makes it extremely difficult to be present to what is actually happening. They go into fight, flight, or freeze and struggle with learning and being open. Just like with any trigger.

The men who are cancelled as abusers, like the vast majority of men (and people), struggle with relational intelligence, insecure attachment, regulating and safely expressing big emotions, consent skills, and many other important emotional and relational skills. We live at a time when most of us were literally not taught or modelled how to have safe, respectful, responsible, reciprocal relationships. And men are socialized to repress huge aspects of their humanity in order to achieve heternormative patriarchal masculinity, and much of what they are expected to repress is the potential for emotional and relational intelligence. Men, generally, have a lot of work to do to get good at relationships.

This, plus various degrees and types of trauma, leads to emotionally stunted, insecure men who behave in ways that range from not great, to outright dysfunctional, to seriously abusive. Some of these men, if they are willing to be self-reflective and work through things with their partners, can actually become securely attached responsible partners. We do relationship skill building in relationship, so these men actually need to learn these skills in relationships. Some of these men are so traumatized and unskilled that they are not safe partners, and need to access therapy and other types pf relational support before they can safely be in a dating relationship.

Wherever the cancelled man falls on this scale, he will be traumatized by the cancellation and the dehumanization he experiences will result in more denial and dissociation about the behaviours he needs to face and transform. If admitting he has any issues means conceding that he is monster who can never change, he will not be motivated to acknowledge and work on his issues. If any criticism or feedback triggers him into the embodied experience of being dehumanized, shamed, and exiled, he will really struggle to listen to criticism or feedback. Since his partner has been his only ally, showing great loyalty and sticking by him despite great consequences to herself, receiving feedback or criticism from her can feel like abandonment by the last person who sees his humanity. This is a horrible situation that highly increases the likelihood that his behaviours and issues will get worse, not better.

I have only experienced this in a relatively minor way. I was dating a cancelled man who was cancelled for accusations of poor consent practices and sexual misconduct. He is a beautiful person who I still care about a lot even though our relationship ended badly. He does not deserve this insane, high level campaign of dehumanization, exile, and harassment that has followed him for years. In our relationship, I noticed a lack of attunement in the way he was approaching me sexually and I tried to communicate that. I received the standard denial and defensiveness that is common with straight men, heightened by the intensity of him feeling triggered that I was saying things that sounded like his cancellers.

I am not like his cancellers. I loved him and saw his full humanity shining beautifully in his eyes. I defended him and still would. He deserves a full, rich, beautiful life. The world is lucky to have him and he doesn’t need to be perfect to deserve protection from dehumanization, harassment, and stalking. And, I do think he has some work to do to become a more responsible and attuned lover. This is painful and difficult feedback to hear, for anyone, and especially for straight men who usually have less developed emotional and relational skills. But it is profoundly threatening to hear when you are cancelled. The choice for the cancelled person seems to be: Either I am an irredeemable monster or I have done nothing wrong. The truth is: All human beings have learning to do. None of us are irredeemable monsters.

I have witnessed and heard about multiple situations where a woman’s loyalty to her cancelled partner, and the sunk cost of all she’s lost through sticking by him, results in her inability to hear feedback that her partner may be acting in unsafe ways. She too is presented with the false choice: Either he’s an irredeemable monster or he never does anything wrong. The truth is that he does do things that are wrong sometimes, maybe in minor ways, maybe in more serious ways, maybe in very serious ways. The truth is that he’s a full complex person, and a man in a culture that creates emotionally stunted men, and he’s traumatized both from the cancellation, and from whatever other fucked up shit has happened to him in his life. She needs to be able to face this complexity, get honest about it, and talk about it with trust worthy people who aren’t invested in dehumanizing the person she loves.

You can love your cancelled boyfriend and still be mad when he acts like an asshole. You can also leave him if that's what you want or need to do. Cancel culture makes the choice to leave a cancelled partner even more difficult, because you know that this will be experienced as a massive betrayal and abandonment, and will remove perhaps the only existing support that the cancelled person has. You may be scared that he will kill himself, and this is not an unfounded fear given the impact cancellation has on people’s mental health. But it is not your job to “save” him at the expense of your own mental health or safety.

Dehumanizing abusers is bad for survivors. I’ve said it a million times and I will keep saying it. WE LOVE OUR ABUSERS. I don’t know how to tell the world this in a way that they will understand. Most survivors do not want their abuser who they love(d) to suffer. They want to get away from him and be safe. They want their abuser to be able to change and take responsibility. But most survivors actually don’t want their abuser to be exiled from humanity and permanently exempt from compassion and empathy. And yet we are told that if we want the abuse we’ve experienced to be recognized and taken seriously, we must be willing to deny the humanity of the person we love(d).

Cancel culture abandons survivors. Cancel culture puts the current partners of abusive men in significantly more danger. Cancel culture makes it way harder to have important and challenging relationship conversations about consent, attunement, conflict, gender roles, sexism, and other fraught and fundamental relationship conversations. Cancel culture increases our dissociation, denial, and defensiveness. Cancel culture makes it impossible to face the reality that the man you love and the man who scares you are the same person.

We have a collective responsibility to reject and resist all forms of dehumanization, including the dehumanization of abusers or accused abusers, as a necessary part of violence prevention. Abuse flourishes in isolation. Abuse flourishes in a climate of denial and dissociation. Most abused women love their abusive partners, and it literally makes no sense to cancel them and exile them for this fact.

Please, let’s come into reality where no one is an irredeemable monster but most of us have a lot of work to do to become the people we want to be.

(Note: I have used gendered language in this piece because in my experience this is very often a gendered phenomenon and it is necessary to discuss the gendered elements of this. But this can and does play out in queer relationships and other gender configurations.)

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Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.

Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.

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