The cluster B people can be really alluring. I met a gorgeous woman once who was extremely enthusiastic about dating me. She couldn't get enough of me. I was an awkward nerd who had never experienced anything like that before, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. After six months of dating, she asked me to marry her. I foolishly said "yes" - I knew it was crazy but here was this sexy, smart, funny woman literally begging me to accept her as my wife.

Accepting her proposal flipped a switch. She had been high-strung before, but now completely random things would set her off and she would start yelling at me. She would yell at me in front of my family. She would even call me at work to yell at me because she remembered something and it made her angry at me. She was extremely jealous - I stopped talking to any of my female friends because even mentioning them made her flip out, but she still got mad that I wanted to spend time with my grandmother and my dog. She also started sending weird text messages to my relatives. For example, she kept telling my father that she wished she was not married to me.

The thing is, she wasn't always awful or else it would have been easy to leave. In between her angry outbursts she was still as affectionate as she had been before, but now I was constantly afraid that something would set her off. She was tiny and never physically violent but I was scared of her. I decided to divorce her after she yelled at me for wanting to include my family in my birthday celebration; the marriage had lasted six months.

Anyway, where was I going with this... Men have to watch out too. Usually we imagine abuse as something a man does to a woman, but that's not the only form it can take.