Welcome to Love and Abuse, the show about navigating the difficult relationship,

from simple disagreements to emotionally abusive behaviors.

You deserve respecting kindness.

All the information on this show is meant for educational purposes only.

Always seek a professional for your mental health and well-being, and always pick your battles wisely.

I'm your host, Paul Koliani.

This will be a rather unpleasant episode, I'm sorry to say.

Unpleasant in the sense that what I'm talking about is going to sound harsh. It's going to ring true for a lot of people.

If you're listening now and you relate to this, I apologize for what I'm about to say.

I'm just preparing you. I don't normally talk like this when I start the show, but I think about abusive relationships in general, and today I had the thought of how an abusive relationship

is very similar to indentured servitude.

That is going to sound, again, harsh.

It might sound unfair to some people listening.

It might sound completely wrong, but let me just give you my thoughts on this.

Indentured servitude, in case you don't know what that is, is a, I'm going to read this, it's a legal system and a form of labor in which an individual signed a contract to work without wages for a specific number of years.

In an exchange, they received passage to a new country, most notably the American colonies, or payment of a debt.

And while it provided a path for poor Europeans to reach the new world, it was rigorous and often an exploitive system that functioned as a halfway point between free labor and slavery.

Now, bear with me just a little bit more.

The contract, which is a legal document often called an indenture because of the notched

or indented edges used to prevent forgery specified the length of service, which was typically

between four and seven years.

The compensation, servants were not paid a salary. Instead, they received room and board during their

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