Ahhh . . . that new, fresh-cookies-from-the-oven love. You all know what I’m talking about. When you are head over heels for your beau. Life is full of kisses, hugs and flushed cheeks from that warm, fuzzy feeling inside you get whenever you see him. Truth is, it should always be this way. You should grow to love your mate unconditionally. We seek relationships to be connected to someone emotionally, physically and spiritually. Unfortunately, that newness wears off like dye from several times washed, dark-colored jeans. But when you start questioning whether or not you should continue to invest your heart, soul and time, you may be in need of a a reality check. Dump the chump and keep it pushing if the following reasons apply to him.

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Physical or Verbal Abuse

If your man ever hits you or verbally attacks you, don’t take it! Leave immediately. This is an assault to your mental and physical well-being and no man  has the right to lay hands on you. Please don’t fall for the ‘Baby I’m sorry, it won’t happen again’ jive either. It can and likely will.

There few things more annoying and hindering than being in a controlling relationship. The funny thing about these relationships is that some women will spot out a controlling man immediately and call him on his mess. Others don’t notice until someone points it out to them or something extreme happens. Then there are others who don’t realize they’re in a controlling relationship until the relationship is over. If you happen to fall into the latter three categories, check out some of these signs that may indicate your man is trying to control you. Alone they may not mean much, but collectively, they mean a whole lot: you’ve found yourself in quite a mess.

He obsessively checks your cellphone 

Whether or not a couple decides to check each other’s cell phones is completely up to them. Many feel that this is a sign that they do not trust one another, but hey, to each it’s own. Do what works for you. What seems a bit off though, is when one party becomes obsessive with it and tries to make a daily routine out of it. If plundering through your text messages and call history is a daily task on his to-do list, it may be a sign that he doesn’t trust you and is trying to control you.

As I made my way down the street today,with a lot on my mind as I headed to a doctor’s appointment, I found myself stopped at one of the many lights that separate me from my train station. While waiting, thinking that I should have checked the weather before I hit the streets in tight black jeans, I heard a mother say the following to one of the two children she was trying to give orders to. I guess he might have been calling himself having an attitude:

“Unfold your damn arms! I don’t know why the f**k you be actin’ like yo a** don’t know how to listen.”

…When I was young, most parents didn’t embarrass their children like that when at home, let alone curse them out like they stole something on the streets. They might put a finger in your face or put some bass in their voice in public, but you got yourself together just in time before they let you know you were going to get tore up when you both got home. In fact, my mother could make me feel just as guilty and bad by simply giving me the “Girl, you had better stop unless you want to see my belt when we get home” face or letting me know that she was truly disappointed in my behavior. But these days, people are talking uglier to their kids, referring to them as even uglier names and just can’t discipline them without calling them something you can find in Urban rather than Webster’s Dictionary.

Not only was this woman’s statement to the little boy embarrassing as people watched him get berated on the street, but it was unnecessarily harsh. I know that children can often be a hardheaded pain, but it always makes me cringe when I hear an adult curse like a sailor at a child who will most likely soak in that language and use it on someone else; Whether that be a classmate or a teacher who gets called everything but a child of God because they tried to keep them in check. People underestimate how much their outbursts or explicit conversations with other adults around their children can influence the language kids use with others. And sadly, using strong and unacceptable language to address children has become all too common.

Need another example? Well, just a few days ago, as I walked with a friend back to her place post-church, I heard a young mother talking to her friend while pushing around her son in a stroller. Out of nowhere, instead of calling him by the name she gave him, she chose to say, “Yeah, that little n***a tryna walk already.” As I watched my friend’s face turn up, I asked her, “Did she just call that little boy a “n***a”? She had, and after the fact, she laughed about it and went on with her day with her friend. I’m sure as the day went on she probably called him a lot more than that.

I don’t know about you, but it seems as though if folks aren’t cursing out their kids like Mo’Nique in Precious, they’re referring to them as everything from little “n***as” to “muthaf****s” and more. And they’re clearly doing it everywhere too: on the streets, in the stores (grocery AND retail), at the parks and at restaurants. A few are older parents, but many I find cursing up a storm are young parents, ones barely out of high school, maybe a few years into college who don’t seem enthusiastic about the responsibility that’s become a constant in their lives. I often wonder if these parents are the same ones who we hear about holding their babies under scalding water because they cried too much and too long, and starving them because they resent them. These stories get people’s blood boiling and remind folks of why not EVERY woman is fit to have children. I guess it’s a testament to the fact that if people aren’t ready to handle their responsibilities, and only find themselves yelling rather than talking to their kids, they might want to rethink their sexual activities and doing what’s putting them in these positions in the first place.

Maybe I’m being too judgmental, but I can’t see how cursing a child does them any kind of real good. All I know is that patience is wearing thin and the results are hurt and confused faces like the little boy I watched on the street today. And if you were wondering, after his mother’s rant, he looked like someone told him that he wasn’t and was never going to be anything. I’m not saying she was is a bad parent, but that behavior would probably rip her out of the running for “Mother of the Year.” Nowadays, both parents and kids are having the tantrums, and it seems as though it’s the parent who could use a time out…

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When I was in college I spent over a year in an abusive relationship.  Why would I stay if it was abusive?  Honestly, I didn’t realize that it was.  So many times when people talk about couple’s abuse it’s very black and white.  The criteria that most people know to indicate these types of relationships is if your mate is putting his/her hands on you, or verbally abusing you.  In my relationship my boyfriend never laid a finger on me, and he never called me out of my name.  However, when I had to go to therapy to help me rebuild the self-damage that he inflicted on me, I realized then that the relationship was very abusive.  So to you, dear readers, even though I don’t know you, know that I love you enough to not want you to go through what I did.  It took many years for me to even be able to look myself in the mirror and like what I saw, not have a panic attack whenever I walked past a reflective surface, or get angry at a guy because he liked me (“How can he like me?  Is it a trick?  Doesn’t he see me?  Is this some type of joke?”).

To give a little bit of background, I’ve always been a very commitment phobic person.  I don’t have a problem with making friends, but I’ve always been very cautious of romantic relationships.  Before I met my husband I had been in three previous relationships. My third relationship was the abusive one, and it took me three years to get over that before I actually started dating again.  So when that third relationship started to get abusive, since I was so inexperienced with relationships, I didn’t know that it was wrong.  I didn’t have any knowledge to go on and my boyfriend was so secretive, he didn’t want me to talk about the relationship to anyone.  So when I wanted to ask my family and friends if this relationship was normal, because I was loyal to him, I didn’t ask and I continued to be in the dark to what a crazy situation I was in.  When I would ask my boyfriend if this stuff was the familiar he would always say:  ”Of course it is.  You haven’t been in a lot of relationships so you don’t know.”

However, there are signs that things are out of whack in your union, and even if your beau is telling you it’s normal.  Please know that it’s not.

He cuts off communication you have with others.  At the time we were dating I didn’t have a cell phone, only a landline in my dorm.  Whenever he was in the room with me he wouldn’t let me answer my phone.  The way I didn’t see it as abusive was that whenever the phone rang he would pull me into him lovingly and say things like:  ”No, be here with me right now.”  Then, he would also want to take all of my time.  Having someone being possessive of you might sound very endearing, but when that person systematically becomes what your life revolves around (with a very small margin of wiggle room for friends, and family), then it’s not a healthy union.

He/She wants to hide the relationship.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with trying to keep the intimate parts of your relationship (either physically intimate or emotionally intimate) between the two of you, but when the person doesn’t want to claim you, then that’s a problem.  My boyfriend’s excuse was that he had gotten out of a very tumultuous relationship that lead rumors to be spread about him.  He wanted to stay under the radar when it came to relationships.  Well, that was fine to me when it came to being on campus, but when he didn’t even want to tell his family about me, and they were steady trying to set him up on dates and he would accept… yeah… something’s not right.  Which leads me to my next thing…

He doesn’t respect you.  During the time that his family was setting him up on dates, they would ask him to take a picture of himself, and send it to them in a text message so they could show his potential suitors.  Why did he ask me to take the pictures for him?  On top of that, WHY DID I TAKE THE PICTURES?!?!  But, to use another less pathetic example, he asked to borrow some money from me.  When he came to pay me back, instead of handing me my money in my outstretched hand, he actually THREW IT AT ME, and sang Fat Joe’s “Make it Rain” while smiling in my face.

Now, no disrespect to any woman who has spent time on a pole, but I’ve never been one, and I certainly wasn’t on one when he threw my money at me.  Someone who doesn’t respect you is someone who doesn’t deserve to be with you.

You’re not allowed to be yourself.  Before we started dating, we were actually friends for like a year.  I had gained the sophomore 30 (I was always an overachiever) and he was helping me to lose weight.  After I lost 40 pounds, he began to put his input on other things that I should change about myself.  Like, throwing away outfits of mine that he hated.  Or not liking how wide my smile was and making me practice my smile in the mirror for twenty minutes a day… as he watched…. Or making me take pictures down on my Facebook of my friends and I making silly faces.  He told me how disproportionate I was for having a small middle and a large bottom, and he would force me to do hundreds of squats… while he watched.  When we would get take out, only  he could eat, and those burgers that I loved so much would become his and I couldn’t even eat the fries.

The things that I began to love about myself all seemed wrong.  I began to hate my smile, my body, and myself for being “not right.”  One day he wanted me to look in the mirror and I started crying because I didn’t want to see myself, he apologized for being so harsh, but the damage had been done.

To this day, I still wonder if he was cognitive of what he was doing.  He swears that he didn’t know, and he was only trying to help me, but it doesn’t change the fact that the relationship definitely fell in that gray area of abuse that no one talks about.  It took three years to finally like myself again, and to trust a relationship.  After having my daughter it’s still very hard sometimes to look at my transitioning body as I try to lose the baby weight I gained and not hear his voice chastising me, but once you move out of the gray, it’s nothing but blue skies from there.

Kendra Koger is finally loving herself for her.  Love yourself too, and love yourself at her twitter, kkoger.  Don’t really love yourself there, but… you know what I mean!!

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You know when it happens. You get that feeling in your gut that says, “There’s no going back from this” but then, out of fear, you do go back. But there is no denying it after reading this list. You might want to rethink your relationship status if any of this happens:

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A “break”

Why do people go on “a break”? Because something really tough comes up in life and the couple decides they should separate until the storm blows over. Guess what? LIFE is full of storms. If your relationship gets instantly shaken by little surprises, chances are, it just won’t last. Not after a break. Not ever. Besides, who knows how people are truly acting and what they’re really up to when they go on break mode. This could possibly just be an excuse to have your cake and eat it too.

It’s easy to say “I’d never stay with a man who hurt me”, but it’s not always that easy to walk away when you find yourself in a situation in which the person you love most has turned violent. For all of us who say we are too ‘strong’ or too ‘informed’ to fall victim, the statistics tell a different story. The Department of Justice estimates that between 600,000 and 6 MILLION American women are the victims of domestic violence each year. The estimated range speaks to just how many cases of abuse go unreported. Some one in four American women has experienced domestic violence in her lifetime; the statistic is one in three for African American women.

While making the decision to seek help is a difficult one, there are many valuable resources available to women who may be in violent relationships.  However, many of us require the guidance of a loved one in breaking the potentially deadly vice grip of abuse. If you know a woman who may not have the presence of mind to seek our her own salvation, here are a few organizations and initiatives that are out there to help. Be she a coworker, a classmate or even a sibling, understand that hesitating to come to her aid can be the difference between a tragic outcome and a happy one.  Here are a few trusted resources that can help you help a sister in need:

Word is that Mel Gibson recently verbally assaulted Oksana Grigorieva, his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his newborn daughter. According to reports, he went off on a expletive-laced rant.

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