With a friend who is married to a painter I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands. In his determination to deter visitors, hers has disabled the buzzer and made adjustments to the heavy street door of their house that make it impossible for her to get in, even with her key, without putting down everything she is carrying. Like me, she is expected to run the house, do the shopping and cooking, and keep the home fires burning, all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours. I saw in her face my unhappiness. We did not know whether, or how, we could go on tolerating their regimes, or what we could do to change them. When I was leaving she said, ‘I’m beginning to experience it as violence.’