Thanks for your thoughts on this, Keith, and for taking an interest in my situation. Yes, you're absolutely right: there's no excuse for abusive behavior. My situation had its own particularities, and I actually wrote an essay about this a while back (It's titled "When the Red Flags are Financial," if you're curious). But to rehash (and I won't spare the details, because nuance and context matter):

This man had shown red flags of abusive behavior from the beginning, but I was too young when it began (and my self-esteem too low) for me to recognize them for what they were. (Admittedly, I was also trapped in my own gendered conditioning at the time: i.e., that women should always be nurturing, understanding, soft, flexible, accepting, etc.... so I always tried to smooth things over and cool him down.) The abuse was mostly emotional/psychological in nature.

For most of our early relationship, I had only part-time summer jobs (we were students), while he did his part-time work year-round. So he was earning more. But then I was offered a full-time teaching position by my university before I even graduated with my B.A., while he struggled for a while to find something full-time. On top of this, he had lots of debt. We had been cohabiting already, but when we realized he couldn't continue to make the rent, I told him I'd be happy to split the rent a different way: proportional to our earnings. He accepted this because the alternative for him was to go back to his parents' in an economically-depressed coal-mining region. I never once gloated. But it was during this period that he became increasingly nasty toward me and also attempted to become more controlling. He also finally outright told me that he believed the man in a relationship should earn more than the woman. Eventually, we broke up, at which point he admitted that he'd wanted to marry me but was afraid to propose, since he was poor. By that point, I realized how toxic his behavior had been all along though (I'd grown and matured), and I had absolutely no interest anymore.

A few months after the relationship ended, by chance, I entered a Ph.D. program and ended up researching/writing my M.A. thesis on relationship abuse. I learned that it's textbook for an abusive person to become increasingly abusive as the person feels like they're losing "control" of their life circumstances, or of their victim/partner. (Sad truth, but this is why women are most likely to be murdered during pregnancy.... and more likely to be murdered the closer they come to their delivery.) So if a person has abusive tendencies, I suppose it makes sense that feeling "upstaged" by a thriving partner inspires them to crank up their assholery. ;) But the other textbook truth about relationship abuse is simply that it gets worse over time. In his case, it was probably both. But we can definitely say the financial imbalance contributed, since he made cold remarks to me about it.

Another factor: he was raised until his teenage years in a very machista culture. So it was DEEPLY ingrained in him that he was "supposed to" provide. As an immigrant, he also told me that the "American dream" meant acquiring expensive things. It didn't matter how much I tried to reassure him that I didn't care about who earned how much, or that I didn't want to spend money on endless big-ticket items. He was wedded to his patriarchal conditioning. Hopefully he's happy now, wherever he is, and treating his current partner much better than he treated me.

You're right that he might've felt inferior for a lot of other reasons. He had some emotional wounds of perceived rejection from his early life that aren't my business to share. In truth, I think some people's fixation on money comes from stuff like this: money is viewed as such a concrete, measurable sign of "worth" that I think they cling to it as a sign that they themselves have value. Likewise, there's the intoxication of wanting to feel "needed" — if you earn a lot, someone can "depend" on you (financially, if not emotionally), and I think this soothes the subconscious fears of people with low self-esteem who are terrified of being abandoned. Fascinating stuff, all this....