These observations of events from the movies all correct, but I dislike calling it “abuse”. That word has very specific connotations, like physical/sexual/emotional abuse between spouses and significant others.
I choose to see their relationship as enemies fighting a war, not as a weak woman being abused by a man. After all, you wouldn’t say a soldier is being “abused” by another soldier during battle. They are just fighting for their respective sides.
Rey is certainly not a push-over, or even a “victim” in the same way as we see female victims of abuse in a romantic relationship with their abuser. She willingly tries to get a droid back to the resistance, even though the FO attempts to kill her for it on Jakku. She isn’t an innocent bystander, but a warrior standing up for what’s right. She fires blaster shots, Ren knocks her out with the Force hand wave. Ren invades her mind, she deflects/reverses it without a single second of formal training. He tries to kill her and her friends, she returns the favor with a saber cut to the face and excellent marksmanship in the Falcon throughout the movies. Plus, her friends blow up SKB and kill probably thousands, tens of thousands, I don’t know, but a lot of nazis are dead. After the de-throning of Snoke, she telekinetically grabs the saber, he “grabs” it back. It’s not an attack, but a show of how they are equally powerful in the Force when the saber explodes.
She’s a soldier fighting and winning battles, not a victim of abuse by a boyfriend. Should the kiss have happened? Maybe not, yet Disney has had some more troubling things out there for years (true love’s kiss, Stockholm Syndrome). But Rey isn’t a princess stuck in a tower, nor is she a passed out, half-dead woman. She nearly killed Ren, healing him only out of guilt when Leia passed away in the same moment. She didn’t even have to really try to “redeem” him, so the burden on her character is very little. They didn’t speak again until Exegol. By that point, Ben made the decision to turn away from the Dark Side for himself, when on the death star ruins.
Their “relationship” is full of issues (violence), like one would expect from any superhero and supervillain pitted against each other. But to act like Rey is in any way some poor, helpless victim in an abusive relationship is, at the very least, a discredit to the character and, at worst, downright sexist.
Think: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, all of those Marvel (comics, not movies) pairings with villains and heroes, The Bad Batch…hell, even that new Dracula on Netflix that ended with badass extraordinaire Agatha and psychosomatic Dracula boning in the afterlife. But please, don’t think of this as Beauty and the Beast, or the mess of real abusive shit that was 50 Shades.
Is Ren still a (reformed?) nazi? You bet, that’s the closest real world equivalent of the FO. Is he a murderer of potentially thousands? Absolutely. Does he physically injure Rey? Yep, and she dishes it right back. Is he an “abuser”? Those Storm Troopers he takes his anger out on might say yes, but for Rey’s case, I have to go with no.
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