Is it abuse if they never hit me?

Yes, it can be. Hitting is one form of abuse and not the most common one. In the UK, the law, the police and every specialist service recognise abuse that never involves a hand being raised. If you are asking this question, something has already happened that you cannot quite file as normal, and that is worth taking seriously.

What abuse without violence looks like

Imagine your freedom as a room. Abuse without violence is anything that makes the room smaller over time, so that you can say less, see fewer people, make fewer choices, and spend more of your energy anticipating someone else's reaction. It tends to arrive as a mixture:

• Monitoring: wanting to know where you are and who you spoke to. Checking your phone, your spending, your mileage.
• Isolation: your friends and family become difficult. Not forbidden, but every visit costs you something afterwards.
• Money: an allowance, no access to accounts, debt in your name, being made to account for small purchases.
• Words: put-downs, corrections, mockery, especially in front of others or the children.
• Threats: to leave, to tell people things, to take the children, to hurt themselves. A threat only has to be made once.
• Rewriting: you are told that things did not happen the way you remember them, until you stop trusting your memory.
• Sex: pressure, sulking or punishment when you say no.

Each one, on its own, can be argued away. Together, over a year or two, they are the thing.

Why the absence of hitting makes it harder

Three reasons. First, you have nothing to point at. No injury, no single event, nothing that would look serious to someone outside. Second, the person doing it will often say exactly that: "I've never laid a finger on you." It becomes the proof that you are the unreasonable one. Third, you adapt. You become skilled at keeping the peace, and skilled people feel like people who are coping.

It is worth knowing that in a large proportion of relationships where violence does eventually happen, this pattern came first. And that the absence of violence does not mean the absence of danger: threats, strangulation "in play", damage to things you love, and controlling behaviour are all taken seriously by the people who assess risk.

What this might mean for you

Recognising items on that list does not settle anything, and nobody here will tell you what your relationship is. But if several of them are true, then the usual advice (talk more, compromise, give it time) is the wrong advice, because one of you is using those tools on the other. Couples counselling is not recommended where control is present.

The free module Is this danger? walks through the risk questions the UK services use, quietly and without asking you to decide anything. When the problem is control goes deeper into the pattern. The assessment starts with safety and will tell you plainly whether what you describe is the kind of thing specialist services take seriously.

If you want to talk to someone trained for this now: National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247 (24 hours), Men's Advice Line 0808 801 0327, Galop (LGBT+) 0800 999 5428. In an emergency, 999. Press 55 if you cannot speak.