This paper explores young women’s experiences and constructions of love-relationships and intimate partner violence in South Africa, and the role of agency in women’s decisions to remain in or leave violent love-relationships. Understanding why young women stay in or leave violent love-relationships is key to developing nuanced understandings of agency and informing intimate partner violence prevention interventions. Data were collected from 15 young women in informal settlements in eThekwini Municipality, South Africa, via in-depth interviews, photovoice and participant observation, and were analysed inductively. While women’s love-relationships were frequently violent, they often stayed in them for long periods, usually because the relationships met other important aspirations, including the desire for respect and dignity.

Nonetheless, many women left when they no longer felt loved and respected, which they believed was shown by men’s behaviours, specifically: indiscreet affairs; not spending time together; not spending money on her and any child(ren); and public (and humiliating) violence. Emotional and economic support from families also influenced women’s decisions about leaving or staying. These data demonstrate that agency goes beyond definitive acts of leaving violent relationships; rather it is fluid, contested and contextual, with many factors influencing young women’s goals and actions.

The research sheds light on how constructions of love, IPV and agency intersect. Findings suggest that women may be better placed to reflect upon and resist IPV if they are involved in processes that involve reflection on what it means to be a woman in a loverelationship in a context of heightened poverty. Reflecting also on locally prescribed forms of masculinity and femininity and their implications for the form that sexual relationships take would also be helpful, as would be reflection on how best to break the ties of economic dependence on men. Such individual-level interventions need to be complemented by initiatives to transform the broader patriarchal and socio-economic context.

Women’s narratives in this study support the growing body of research calling for a more nuanced understanding of agency that recognises that women who remain in violent love-relationships have often made agentic decisions to do so. Such behaviour questions the dominant orthodoxy that women only show agency in the context of violent relationships when they leave a violent partner or report him to the police. Women’s agency and decisions to remain in, or leave, violent love-relationships are complex and informed by many factors including, as this study has shown, constructions and expectations of love-relationships, the desire for respect and dignity, as well as poverty and patriarchy.