You must remember that the perpetrator chooses his victim carefully. However, all couples do not resolve these conflicts through violent means. The actions of abuse victims may indeed trigger the assault but that is different from causing or provoking the assault. Those triggers are common, normal everyday actions on the part of the woman and it is impossible for her to anticipate her partner's reactions. In the early stages of a violent relationship, women try very hard to do whatever their partners want of them in the hope of avoiding the violence.
Men abuse their female partners because they are mentally ill.
The incidence of violence against women in relationships is too high to be explained by mental illness. If this myth were accurate, one in every eight Canadian men could be mentally ill. Studies show that psychopathic personalities or other forms of mental illness among men who batter are rare. Men who batter have not been found to be measurably different from non-battering men except that they usually have adopted a very traditional stereotypical role, which makes it difficult for them to express their emotions. If we label abusive men as having a problem that comes from inside them personally instead of stemming from their socialization, then the weight of responsibility can be shifted from us as a society and from the batterer, and placed entirely on the man's illness.